The Bigger Light by Austin Clarke Page A

to be their waists; and the men, some of them thin and emaciated, some fat in a way that a woman is usually fat low around the hips, and their complexion like, like like what, Boysie? “Like what, Boysie? Goddamn, you never see one o’ them bastards down by you on Parliament Street with their skin the colour o’ putty?” Yes, their skin is like putty, and they always seem to be in a small hurry if they are not too slowed down with wine. He thought he must soon leave this area: for this was not the place to live when he was striving so hard for appearances, and grappling with a new language. (“If a king was living in a fucking pig-sty, what would you call him? A king, or a pig?” He and Henry were drinking one Saturday afternoon in their favourite bar, the Paramount Tavern, when Henry asked him this question; for Boysie hadjust described the area in which Dots had signed the lease for the apartment. Boysie did not know the city in those days; and to be living in the Parliament Street area or the Ontario Street area did not mean anything significant to him, except that “the rent is blasted reasonable. You are talking a lotta shite ’bout pigpens and kings, but I’s a fucking unemployed man!”)
    He must prevent himself from getting mired in this pigpen area with the women and the men who all looked as if they had misused their bodies for the first twenty-five years of their lives. He was waiting for the light at the corner of Sherbourne (this woman from the subway must walk along here every morning: perhaps I should park here and watch her like a private eye, Ai-yiii-yiiiii!) and Wellesley, where the nurses are mostly West Indian and Filipinos, “I never had a ’Pino yet! Uh never had a white beef yet! A ’Pino beef is the sweetest beef in the whole ranch o’ Wellesley Horsepittance!” Who said that? Not Henry again! Sheee-it! “Three Filipinos travelling through Afri-ka!” Who said that? The Mighty Sparrow, Calypso King of the World! “Three sweet ’Pinos travelling through Africa …” Why did he burn
all
his calypsoes? He should have kept “The Congoman,” by the Mighty Sparrow, about the three white women travelling through Africa: he liked that one. He had burned all his music that had rhythm, and only three were left. The Judy Collins album about clouds and floes and floes,
floes and floes of angel’s hair and ice cream castles in the air!
“
I like those words, though
. No matter what Dots say. I like floes and floes of ice cream hair …”
    The snow was coming down, he hadn’t noticed it before, and he was humming the song to himself, and his mood picked up and he was happy, and then he heard the blowing of car horns behind him, and he realized that he had been standing a long time after the light had turned green.
    “What the fuck is wrong with you niggers, eh?” The man in the Oldsmobile thundered away before Boysie could get his window rolled down to call him a bastard.
    The other two albums which he had kept were “I better check their names when I get back, you know I can’t even remember the jackets!” He should have swerved into the middle of the road and ram the man, or take down his licence or follow him; but it was such a nice day with the sun shining. “I’m becoming like a real Canadian, saying ‘It’s a nice day today,’ when it is cold as hell!” He knew what he was doing talking in Barbadian dialect; he knew what he was doing. He was driving slowly, looking around enjoying the day, and didn’t know that he had reached his barber’s. Nobody was with him so he could talk as he liked, and that was why he spoke Barbadian.
    “Hey! Mister Boysie! What you doing?”
    Alfredo Cammillio,
Specialists in Scissors Clipping, Parking across the Street in the Esso Gas Statione
, greeted Boysie this way, with the same exuberance, as if Boysie was a long lost customer, every time he appeared in the barbershop. The barbershop was not special, and it was not an exclusive one. It was