Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     Wayne left College feeling miserable - the lecturer had talked so quickly that he had been difficult to understand, but there’d been that pretty white girl sitting not far away - freckles and fair hair.  ‘Real nice, dat girl’, Wayne said to himself as he walked along by the river.  And she’d smiled back at him, once or twice, when he’d looked at her.  In the college cafe, however, the other West Indian boys hadn’t been too friendly.  When he had said, as he would back home, ‘Me wan nyam somtink nice!’, a big boy had said - ‘Dat’s bungo talk, man!’  And the others, mostly from Jamaica and Barbados or born here, in Britain, had laughed.

     It was makin’ cold by the river and he shivered despite his overcoat as an east wind bit into him.  It was only a week since he’d arrived at London Airport - ‘I’ll be wearin’ a big red hat, Wayne.  Jes so as you knows me - cos it’s bin a long time ....’  That’s what his mother had written.  Fourteen years before, she had gone to ‘H’Inglan’ leaving him behind on the Company Plantation - in a little village, in a valley, with Gran-Mammy and Gran-Pappy.

     Once, like some of the other Plantation boys, he’d stolen a few bunches of Company bananas and had sat at the roadside selling them to American tourists - but Gran-Mammy had found out and wham!  Had she hit him with the copper stick - ‘A tief now, is you Wayne!’

     Having crossed the stone bridge, Wayne came to the market - one was held each Wednesday in Holmbridge - what they called a provision market at home.  Crinkling in his pocket the five-pound note his mother had given him, Wayne walked among the stalls.  On one of them were bunches and bunches of bananas .... bananas!  Yellow bananas with the Company’s little blue sticky label on them.  Perhaps Gran-Pappy picked that very bunch, Wayne thought, as the stallholder broke a banana off a bunch for him.  Pocketing his change, Wayne peeled back the yellow skin and bit into the sweet, dry pulp ....

     Suddenly, he could feel the sun on his face again and see bananas, yellow bananas everywhere.  Not that they ever ate them much at home - too expensive.  No - but he could smell the savoury odour of beans cooking over Gran-Mammy’s wood-fire.  Then the almond scent of the frangipani trees floated in his nostrils and he could see again the tiger-beard orchids in the shadowy undergrowth - white as eggs.  And the macaws shrieking in and out of the tamarind trees.  Then - the blue sea and the white, white sand between your toes.  Everywhere you looks is green palm trees - and man, if you is in Castries, that is life!  Sitting in the grog-shop drinking rum - rum sweetened with molasses.  And the black girls, in their brief swimsuits, laughing in the corner and making eyes at the rich white tourists - them buckras got everything - lounging at the bar, their snorkel masks slung around their necks, big chrome-shiny cars just outside.  But, as Gran-Mammy used to say, one thing they could never get - ‘Doan matter how long dem buckras lay in de sunlight - dey ain’t never going to get a black skin like us - never’.  And you heard plenty mauvais langue about the black girls in them bars there - drinking whisky bought by the buckras.  But a day in Castries - man, that was heaven!

     ‘You ought to be more careful - dropping banana skins on the pavement like that.  Someone might slip on them and break a leg’.

     The fat, old white woman face, with its pink-framed spectacles, was there in front of him - her cold blue eyes didn’t like him - not one bit.  She was looking at him as though he was garbage.  With her walking stick, she was pointing at the banana skin he had dropped.  Around him, people had stopped moving and talking - he sensed all these buckras looking at him - their cold eyes boring into his black skin like icicles - so he just stuck his tongue out at the old woman.

     ‘Why, you rude boy!  You’re all the same - you come here -’.

     He pushed past her and kept on up the narrow passage between the stalls, some of which were piled with fruit and vegetables while others were festooned with clothes or displayed bright, cheap jewellery.

     The flagstones were wet and black from the snowflakes that had been falling, falling for the last half hour.  Already, on the roofs of the buildings surrounding the square, there was a layer of white, luminous snow like the icing on a birthday cake.

     Wayne eyed a bunch of bananas on a nearby stall, but he didn’t want to spend any more of the five pounds his Mammy had given him that morning - ‘Jes’ you does whatever you likes with that, Wayne.  But doan come home too early - I’ll be out at work till nine and I doan want no trouble dis night’.  He had known what she meant.  When Mammy wasn’t there, his two younger brothers and their sister threw things at him - hairbrushes, cushions, things like that.  And their Pappy wasn’t his Pappy either.  ‘I doan know where your Daddy is, Wayne.  One day, him does up and does go off to Lunnon.  And I doan see him no more.  Dat was ten years ago.  And he ain’t never sent me a single bit for you’.

     Wayne watched the stallkeeper, a big man with ginger hair and a freckled face.  His bare arms were covered with little ginger hairs and his big, red hands were reaching out like crabs to pick up some apples for a customer.  While the stallkeeper’s eyes were on the scale, Wayne grabbed a small bunch of blue-labelled bananas and hid them under his half-open overcoat.  Suddenly, the gingery man’s blue eyes were stabbing at him.  Then the man was moving fast - fast - to get out of the canvas booth and shouting:

     ‘Hey!  Grab hold of that coloured lad, somebody!  He’s just whipped a bunch of bananas!’

     Wayne ran as if a Company dog had been chasing him!

     He dodged through the few people ahead of him and darted down another gangway between different stalls.  He ran dreading to feel that heavy gingery hand on his shoulder, afraid of being pinioned in those hairy gingery arms - cos man, buckra like him do smell bad!  Dodging between hooting cars, he jived across the slippery road.  Just ahead of him was a big green bus moving off - he could see the slatted wooden platform and the chrome handrail.  Clasping the cold metal, he just managed to jump on.

     ‘Break a leg you will ,one day, sonny, doing that’, the conductor said.

     Emerging at the top of the clanging iron steps, Wayne could see the irate stallkeeper standing on the other side of the road and waving his gingery arms.  As the bus crossed the hump of the stone bridge, he noticed the College block all lit up in the afternoon darkness and wished he was back there in a classroom with the other students. He sat down at the front and watched the people moving along under their red, blue or yellow umbrellas.  Snowflakes were drifting down more thickly now and beginning to settle in untrodden places.  The town began to look like those Christmas cards that his Mammy used to send them.  Wayne began to eat a banana.

     ‘H’Inglan’s a fine country, Wayne.  But it do rain dere and snow.  Does you know, Wayne, in de winter, is so cold there dat de black people do all turn grey!  And dat’s de gospel truth!’

     Thus the old man, his chin covered with grey stubble, would talk of H’Inglan as he sat on the veranda of an evening smoking his corn-cob pipe.  He’d been there in the war and had had work in a factory making tanks.  And Gran-Mammy would rock back and forth in her chair singing to herself as she picked rice in a bowl on her knees.

     ‘And you works like a feyah dere, Silas’, she would say.  ‘And de money you was a-sending home was like gold-dust from heaven - cos tings was so brown here, den.  And still is, still is ....’

     The bus had left the town and was moving slowly through dusky countryside.  In places, patches of settled snow shimmered in the darkness like tiger-beard orchids in the gloomy rainforest.  Wayne heard the conductor’s feet clanging towards him.

     ‘Where to, sonny?’

     Wayne proffered the conductor a pound piece.

     ‘Single or return?’

     ‘Return’.

     ‘Dead Man’s Hill you want, then’.  Taking the coin, he whirred his machine and gave Wayne a ticket.  ‘I’ll give you a call when we get there’.

     Wayne snapped another banana off the bunch and began to eat, watching the white snowflakes drifting down through the gloom.  He ate two more, dropping their skins on the metal floor.  Suddenly there was a banging on the stairs and the conductor called out:

     ‘Dead Man’s Hill!’

     As he got off the bus, the snowflakes pattered wetly on to his hair and face.

     ‘Remember, sonny’, said the conductor pointing to a bus stop on the other side of the road, ‘buses back to town go from there - at twenty-five to the hour.  I shouldn’t stay out here long if I was you!’

     When the illumined bus had moved away, Wayne felt cold and lonesome - as lonesome as he’d felt when the rattling charabanc had been leaving the plantation village and he’d looked back to see Gran-Pappy waving his straw hat ....

     ‘Your Mammy done send for you, Wayne’, the old man had said, holding a letter with a blue airmail sticker.  ‘Doan know why, but she has.  She want for you to go to Lunnon - right soon -’

     Within a few weeks it had all been fixed up and there he was waving goodbye.  Soon, he’d been on the big silver aeroplane looking at the green palm trees and the Pitons were so close he could see the black emptiness at the summits of those extinct volcanoes.  Before, he’d only seen them from a distance, every day the same, a pair of bluish mountains - like giant kraals in Africa - rising up out of the green forest ....

     The forest in front of him was a dark mass of blurred spear-head shapes in the wet winter afternoon.  An animal body crashed through the branches and he heard birds rustling in the trees.  A lorry, laden with sawn logs, lumbered out of the forest and paused near him before turning on to the main road on which lit-up cars and lorries rushed this way and that. The tang of petrol fumes stung his nostrils.  Far away, he could see the lights of Holmbridge aglow in the darkness.  He walked up and down stamping his feet as the wet, invisible snowflakes kept dripping on to his face and hair.  He daren’t leave the stop in case he should miss the bus back to town.  He ate another banana and then another - the last.  A double-decker bus came growling slowly up the hill;  it was a boxful of light in the sombre countryside.

     Man!  Was he glad to get on the bus and be away from that cold and wet!  He had felt his skin beginning to turn grey out there just like his Gran-Pappy had said it did.  Soon, the bus was droning along the streets of Holmbridge again.

     Wayne got off at the market square, where men were packing away their unsold wares in little vans and estate cars.  The gingery man was nowhere around - but he jumped off that bus real quick, while it was still moving, and dodged across to the other side of the High Street through the hooting traffic.  Safe on the pavement, he looked back at the bustling figures on the half-lit, wet market square but he couldn’t see the stallkeeper.  When he thought of the hirsute, freckled arms, the eyes cold as marbles, and the grubby, sweaty shirt, he shuddered.

     For a moment, Wayne studied the menu in the window of McDonald’s and wondered what he was going to do until nine o’ clock when Mammy would be home.  Then, he saw the freckled, fair-haired girl from his class.  She was sitting at a table, by herself, looking bored.  He pushed open the door and felt the warmth comfort him, take away some of the grey .....