Miguel Street Read Free Page A

papers. Hat always read the papers. He read them from about ten in the morning until about six in the evening.
    Hat shouted out, ‘But what is this I seeing?’ and he showed us the headlines: CALYPSO CARPENTER JAILED.
    It was a fantastic story. Popo had been stealing things left and right. All the new furnitures, as Hat called them, hadn’t been made by Popo. He had stolen things and simply remodelled them. He had stolen too much, as a matter of fact, and had had to sell the things he didn’t want. That was how he had been caught. And we understand now why the vans were always outside Popo’s house. Even the paint and the brushes with which he had redecorated the house had been stolen.
    Hat spoke for all of us when he said, ‘That man too foolish. Why he had to sell what he thief? Just tell me that. Why?’
    We agreed it was a stupid thing to do. But we felt deep inside ourselves that Popo was really a man, perhaps a bigger man than any of us.
    And as for my auntie …
    Hat said, ‘How much jail he get? A year? With three months off for good behaviour, that’s nine months in all. And I give she three months good behaviour too. And after that, it ain’t going have no more Emelda in Miguel Street, you hear.’
    But Emelda never left Miguel Street. She not only kept her job as cook, but she started taking in washing and ironing as well. No one in the street felt sorry that Popo had gone to jail because of the shame; after all, that was a thing that could happen to any of us. They felt sorry only that Emelda was going to be left alone for so long.
    He came back as a hero. He was one of the boys. He was a better man than either Hat or Bogart.
    But for me, he had changed. And the change made me sad.
    For Popo began working.
    He began making Morris chairs and tables and wardrobes for people.
    And when I asked him, ‘Mr Popo, when you going start making the thing without a name again?’ he growled at me.
    ‘You too troublesome,’ he said. ‘Go away quick, before I lay my hand on you.’

III
GEORGE AND THE PINK HOUSE
    I was much more afraid of George than I was of Big Foot, although Big Foot was the biggest and the strongest man in the street. George was short and fat. He had a grey-moustache and a big belly. He looked harmless enough but he was always muttering to himself and cursing and I never tried to become friendly with him.
    He was like the donkey he had tied in the front of his yard, grey and old and silent except when it brayed loudly. You felt that George was never really in touch with what was going on around him all the time, and I found it strange that no one should have said that George was mad, while everybody said that Man-man, whom I liked, was mad.
    George’s house also made me feel afraid. It was a broken-down wooden building, painted pink on the outside, and the galvanised-iron roof was brown from rust. One door, the one to the right, was always left open. The inside walls had never been painted, and were grey and black with age. There was a dirty bed in one corner and in another there was a table and a stool. That was all. No curtains, no pictures on the wall. And even Bogart had a picture of Lauren Bacali in his room.
    I found it hard to believe that George had a wife and a son and a daughter.
    Like Popo, George was happy to let his wife do all the work in the house and the yard. They kept cows, and again I hated George for that. Because the water from his pens made the gutters stink, and when we were playing cricket on the pavement the ball often got wet in the gutter. Boyee and Errol used to wet the ball deliberately in the stinking gutter. They wanted to make it shoot.
    George’s wife was never a proper person. I always thought of her just as George’s wife, and that was all. And I always thought, too, that George’s wife was nearly always in the cow-pen.
    And while George sat on the front concrete step outside the open door of his house, his wife was busy.
    George never became one of the