I walked about, tried to look purposeful. I chatted a while with a Rasta, who’d just chided somebody for photographing him from behind. ‘Rasta nah believe in backside business.’ He added after a few seconds, ‘Whatever done in darkness soon come to light.’ As a fee for having chatted with me, I think, for having let me hear the proverb, he asked for a raise. I gave him some useless bolivars.
I joined the queue, coming around to believe that mechanical activity was the most sensible option. And indeed, never had a queue felt so therapeutic. All I had to do was look at the shapes of the heads and necks before me, occasionally watch Simon skitter about, hear Admiral Rambo call out numbers, followed by the slow recitation of a Guyanese name.
Half an hour passed this way.
‘Weh the mistress deh?’ Admiral Rambo asked as I ascended to the bathroom scales.
‘She coming.’
Security was next. People threw open their bags on the grass as the chief, the man who’d been chewing Simon’s ass, beat his fist against his palm and let his eyes run over the contents. Occasionally he directed a constable to hand him something which he examined with a variety of pokes, thumps and sniffs. He was a big black man, with laughing red eyes and a thick, loud voice. He looked like a fun man who enjoyed playing the part of a menacing cop. My stuff was searched.
I proceeded to the next queue, at the bottom of the stairs. It led up to an accounts register in the station. Immigration. I filled in the columns. That too finished.
I stepped back out into the light. And down the stairs, under
the mango tree in the distance, bronzed and superior with her man in tow, Jankey Ramsaywack, twenty-one.
Secretly I was hoping I’d emerge from these procedures haloed with a golden new clarity. I would know precisely what to say, how to seize back, if not the girl, then at least some great lasting beauty from our thing. No such dawn.
GRADUALLY the people who’d been liming beneath the mango tree began to queue up, and those who’d been processed took their place. I resolved not to look at her. The sky was blue, the blue of a flame. Beneath it the police station dazzled white.
Eventually two little Islanders pecked through the sky like a pair of storks. This cued more classic Guyana scenes. One plane began dipping towards the turf, then curved back up, drawing murmurs of interest from the mango tree. The two planes made long, wide circles; the first descended again, before swooping back up. Heckles and suck-teeth rose from the assembled. Shortly after, a bunch of sleepy soldiers emerged from the bush in half-buttoned fatigues, rubbing their eyes with exclamations of ‘o skunt, bai!’ They sprinted out, buttoning up as they ran. They cleared a set of barrels from the turf and lined them up along the sides. The airstrip. The planes circled one more time, low over the Guyanese forest, and landed.
As soon as the second aircraft hit the earth people rushed towards them, to the great alarm of Simon the agent. ‘Is not the buspark, ya’al hear, that is
plane
there, not minibus, this ain’t big market.’
Fifteen minutes later three more Islanders arrived. They pulled up beside their companions. In the distance they looked like toy planes. It felt that at any moment the pilots, wearing dark glasses, leaning casually against their crafts, might pull out a remote control from their pockets and send them soaring up.
The planes formed a large triangle with the mango tree and the station, where the procedures were continuing. Simon, under
dreadful pressure to dispatch the first flight, made frantic dashes between the three points.
The entire drastic possibility only struck me now. It occurred to me that I could be ushered on to one of these planes by Simon the agent at any moment, and we might be forever cleaved as though by a knife. In lovers’ hurtsmanship one precludes such possibilities, assuming always that the other party will come to their senses before it is too late. Simon’s frenzied scuttling was eroding my confidence in this matter. She could not tell, how could she, she was in the middle of procedure. To her the point of ultimate reckoning was far. Out here beneath the mango tree it was getting precarious.
I considered going up to her and asking courteously, directly, ‘Are you coming?’ On deliberation it didn’t seem like anything at all. All it did was lob the ball in her court. Perhaps it was what I wanted, to not be saddled with the act of abandonment.
Nevertheless I tried to rouse myself into making the approach. I would be firm, look straight into her lovely, fearsome eyes, disdaining the male beside her. Perhaps it would be attractive.
About then a young constable sought my attention.
‘Me?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, you.’
He confirmed with the chief, some fifty yards away, who pointed at me with his baton, holding it like a sten gun.
We walked over to the chief.
The constable took guard beside him with a smirk. ‘The man make innocent face, though.’
The chief too was grinning. He had a scar on one cheek; it turned into a crater when he grinned.
‘Whoa, boy, is the Indian national,’ he remarked.
He lingered on the statement. Addressing the constable, he added: ‘You right, the man pull innocent face for true.’
‘What going on, chief?’ I asked, myself grinning.
‘Who permitted you to ask a question?’ he shot back in a raised voice.
It startled me.
He turned to the constable.
‘You hear me grant permission?’
‘Negative, bossman. I ain’t hear that at all.’
The chief grinned once more; then took it off as if it were a sticker.
‘It is
I
conducting the investigation, do you understand?’
‘What investigation?’
‘Sir,’ he said very deliberately, ‘I don’t think you heard me.
I
ask the questions.
You
give me answers.’
He returned his baton to his waist. I noticed he had no eyebrows.
‘You know the girl?’ he asked, with sudden belligerence.
He pointed to the side of the station, beyond the stairs, another fifty yards away. She stood with the man, both appearing to be in conversation with a constable.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘How so?’
‘She was my—I was with her.’
‘How do you mean you were with her? You fuck she?’
The constable blurted out a short, snorting laugh. The chief glanced at her.
‘She look like she give sweet pum-pum, though. You ketch the meat fresh? Like it getting stale already.’
The constable gurgled. ‘Go easy, bossman. Man be from India.’ The chief fixed me with an eyebrowless stare.
‘Explain to me, sir, how you know the lady.’
‘We travelled together through Venezuela.’
‘What for?’
‘Just so,’ I shrugged. ‘We were travelling.’
‘
Just so?
What kind of jackarse travels through Venezuela
just so
?’ He left his mouth open. I could see his tongue, white, thick, rising up to wet his palate.
‘Sir, I strongly suggest you submit a reasonable answer.’
‘It’s the truth, chief. It was just … tourism.’
‘Tourism!’ He involved the constable.
‘Look where the man tourism take he. Eteringbang! How much tourist you see here?’ The depth of his boom, the deliberated certainty of his delivery, they had a mesmerising quality.
‘Let me start from the start,’ he said, rolling the thick syllables out slowly. ‘What were you doing in Guyana?’
‘I came just’ – I was about to say ‘just so’ and reconsidered – ‘for a holiday.’
He looked at me with a mix of incredulity and contempt.
‘It’s a very interesting place. I came to look at the culture.’
He sighed. He looked at the constable.
‘Dis bai deh pun serious skunt, bai.’
Turning to me he said as if handing back a term paper: ‘You are not doing well, Mr India. Not well at all.’
He paused for a response. I didn’t give him any; I felt I was going to snap. I stared at his cratered face in silence.
‘Let me ask you again: what are your exact relations with the lady?’
I tried to catch a glimpse of her. But he stood like a wall between us. I tried to subtly peer around him. He shifted to block my sight.
‘She is, she was my girlfriend, I guess.’
‘How long you know her?’
‘A couple of months.’
‘And in that time, you go with her to travel around Venezuela.’
‘Yes.’
‘And come back from Eteringbang.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where you enter from?’
‘Enter where?’
‘Not she. Me en wan know dah.’
The constable giggled.
‘Venezuela,’ the chief clarified.
‘From Guiria.’
‘Where is that?’
‘The ferry from Trinidad. It runs to—’
‘So you enter by boat from Trinidad, and you exit overland from Eteringbang?’
‘Yes.’
‘For tourism? With your new girlfriend?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at the constable. ‘I seen a lot of joke, boy, but I ain’t seen such a joke in a long long time.’
‘You know the man?’
He pointed with his baton.
‘No.’
‘If you say the girl is your girlfriend what the arse she doing with him?’
‘I told you she
was
my girl—’
‘Don’t tell me what you already told me.’
‘We split up. I think she met him only this morning. I don’t know, maybe they know each other. I’m not sure. Why don’t you ask them?’
He shouted so loud the forest shook.
‘WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU CAN TELL ME WHAT I SHOULD DO?’
I could feel every pair of eyes in the clearing searing into me. Out of sheer embarrassment I kept quiet.
‘Why you split up with her?’ the chief asked, his tone acquiring a momentum of aggression now.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘What the arse does that mean?’
‘You know how it is, chief. We start to fight. Deliberately …’ I paused.
‘What the arse the man talking!’ He shouted: ‘Tell that skunt Simon to release the flight before I rearrange he goolies. And bring back this gentleman’s bags.
‘Sir,’ he turned to me and said, ‘you are being detained.’
‘What do you mean?’
His laughing red eyes were merely red now, devoid of expression.
‘You tell me one set of stupidness. Girlfriend, tourism, culture. O
rass
, boy. The things a man must hear on this job. Every day a next kunumunu must come along.’
As the constable went to retrieve my bags, I felt a genuine nervousness, and with that a genuine anger.
‘You can’t bloody detain me,’ I said.
The chief stopped pounding his fist into his hand. He raised his non-eyebrows, to make deep crevices in his glistening forehead.
‘You want to repeat that?’
I remained silent.
‘Would you like to utter that sentence once more?’
‘I said you can’t detain me, it’s simple.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ he said, his voice deep. ‘You want me to check the book? Is going to make it worse for you.
‘So I ask again, would you like to repeat that sentence one more time?’
I looked away, into the trees.
‘Good,’ he said at last. ‘You should be glad you get that right.’
‘Look, chief. I don’t mean to tell you what to do. It’s just that I have a flight to India day after. It’s the last day on my ticket and my visa. I’m just anxious about that.’
He appeared interested in this piece of information.
‘You plan to carry the stuff up to India?’ He began convulsing with laughter. The constable returned with my bag.
‘The man want to carry the shit till India,’ he told the constable amid booming laughs.
The constable began to laugh too, little squirting laughs, and those too built up to something like a convulsion.
‘The man should glad you ketch him out here, bossman. The man would land in Gwantanamo.’
‘Please tell me what’s going on,’ I said in the calmest, firmest manner I could.
The chief and the constable were in a proper gyaff.
‘ … Smalltime fool like that,’ he said, flicking his thumb over his shoulder, referring, I assumed, to the man with Jan. ‘He can get past
me
?’