The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel Read Free Page B

accustomed to, was to be hungry for the world one saw. Every face, every bureaucrat, every office held in it a code to be cracked.
    I followed due process. I wrote to the Ministry of Home Affairs expressing cultural and topographical interest which would take a year to satiate. They asked me to prove my medical credentials. I went to the hospital, supplied stool, underwent a chest examination, took the doctor’s certificate to the Port Health Office.
    This vividly colonial-sounding entity stood bang on the Demerara, by Stabroek Market, or big market as it was known. Big church and big market: in a short town of white and rust, big church and big market were supreme, the cathedral looming white, wooden and airy as a large dollhouse, and big market, a heat-shimmered expanse of red and silver-grey, built half on land, half on river. Its four steel gables were like industrial tents, crowned by a clock tower that made a mockery of my little Kitty’s. Guyana converged and diverged from here via bombish minibuses. The streets sold everything. The sense of movement, the mood of hot shifting trades, the hustle in the air, Rick Ross declaring it from the music carts: it was the closest GT came to the ambition-cloud that is a city.
    One could give up on the world with ease at the Port Health Office. The brown river drifted by your feet like molasses, the air thick with river. The wooden torpor, it seeped through every sweating plank. The ceiling was high and beamed. On the first floor there was construction on – not true, it was not active in any way, but something had been taken apart with a view to perhaps one day rebuild. I walked through the wooden skeletal frames of the thing being contemplated. In a room a man sat with his legs up on a chair, one Mr Rose. In one corner an ancient knobby boombox, a machine from its original days. In another corner a flat groaning freezer of similar vintage the size of a single bed.
    Across the port health officer I took a seat without being asked and pondered things with indecent laze. There was a blackout. The table fan clunked to a halt. Mr Rose spread a kerchief on his dome, undid two buttons of his shirt jac. We sweated gently in the warm river breeze, doing nothing with the air of people who had congregated there for that precise purpose. At last, when I was least expecting it, Mr Rose said he was tripping. What was he tripping on, I asked. He said he was dripping. He added that if he was tripping he wouldn’t know if he was dripping, and thereafter leapt forward to render signatures with a burst of vigour that one sensed would require hours of recovery.
    I went back down and had beef stew and rice in a cinnamon-coloured shop. It was the Ocean View Snackette, wrong on every count. It didn’t view the ocean and it was actually a roaring cookshop. It had pink walls, burgundy panelling and mesh windows. People were dripping here too. They were slaying Ivanoff vodka with coconut water and telling jokes. A man burst into the room with an awfully promising line – ‘Seven men get a divorce last night’ – but was drowned out by a commotion surrounding a knocked-over bottle. A row broke out. Somebody threatened to send somebody to hospital, ‘but me ain’t sure if they would accept an ugliness like you.’ There was supreme disinterest from the ladies running the shop. Every now and then they sent out large chunks of ice in a sad pink plastic bowl. Flies settled on their dresses, their cheeks.
    It was another hot wasting day downtown for the wasted. And coming out of the snackette after the inadequate stew, turning a corner, I saw Baby. We both realised this was a moment. His mouth gleamed with a gold tooth-cap and he was wearing a red beret, striking for how new it was in contrast to the rest of him.
    ‘What you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I not give you fare to go back?’
    I gone and I come back too, soldier, he said. There was more hardtime waiting for him. His ole man had been shot by