OPPOSITE the back stairs, about nine feet away, was a wooden fence through which young heart-shaped green eddo leaves had managed to poke themselves.
The fence held back a whole yard of wild  eddo plants about three or four feet high in stagnant swamp water.

Each morning shimmering beads of silver dew were collected in the center of each smooth green leaf.

There was an old canting and abandoned wooden house  with wooden shingle walls at the front of the yard facing the rutted village road which led to the market place about two hundred yards east.

The abandoned house, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and rum, with smashed glass panes and a rotted dangling skylight window  allowing bats to swoop in and out at dusk, was a clubhouse for vagrants who in the daytime squatted on whatever sloping floorboards remained drinking cheap spirits and slapping cards down.

The fence ended about another nine feet to the left of the backstairs where he sat staring in the direction where it made right and left angles with two other fences, one of zinc going east and bordering the wild eddo plants, the other going west and separating the yard he was in from another with a small weather-beaten wooden house, and old oil drums holding rain water  perched on low wooden stands in the yard.

Various medicinal tropical plants surrounded the drums. But this western fence was hardly a fence, since most of its staves were missing, or canting pell-mell with corroded rusty nails sticking out their rotting tops and bottoms, allowing him to pass through this yard to the adjacent street with ease.

He was looking at his mother beside the foot of the steps from time to time picking up a damp shirt or one of his short pants from a wooden washing tub, no different from those he saw in Westerns, hanging each piece on a clothes line that extended from a post holding up one side of the kitchen, to the corner where the three fences met, and where another piece of wood nailed vertically to their junction allowed the line enough height to hold up the wet clothes without sagging too low.

Nevertheless she had to tip-toe a little to hang up the wash. Over their fence, in the yard of wild eddo plants and its fence made of zinc, lay the severed remains of an old coconut tree that had crashed during a storm unto their roof at the north-east corner of the house, at the side of which he sat on the back-steps.

He had lain awake in his small bed listening to heavy wind swaying the branches and leaves of fruit trees whose fruits plopped to the ground off and on, listening to the reverberations of rolling thunder which shook the small two-bedroom house after blue and gold flashes of lightening lit up the creases between the slats of two jalousie bedroom windows, listening to water from the broken corroded eaves splattering into water below where frogs hopped and splashed, indicating that the yard was already flooding.

In the early morning after the storm he was the first to open the back door and walk down this backstairs to gaze at the birds chirping everywhere and flexing their wet wings in the clear cool early sunlight, “Come on Mom,” he said, “it’s only fifteen cents!”

“Fifteen cents for the past three days you went to 1 o’clock matinee adds up to 45 cents so far. Not today.” She used the last clip in her hand and went back to the wash tub, now half-filled with clothes at the foot of the stairs.

For some reason he found himself staring at the next yard’s zinc fence, at the same time hearing a radio announcer’s quiet voice coming from  the living room above saying it was 12.30, encouraging listeners to relax, cock-up their feet and enjoy the Count Basie number that opened at a bouncing pace.

He was thinking he had maybe 30 minutes, no, maybe 25 or less, to convince his Mom to put up his matinee bill, while at the same time the after-lunch program produced a vision of his father catching a nap in the Morris chair beside the radiogram before returning to work….but that had come to a sudden end  -not that anyone he knew was surprised –  when the sirens went off in the middle of the day in the city calling in all members of the colony’s BG Volunteer Force militia, and his father had returned home serious-faced from work, gathered up some clothes and went into barracks due to some national crisis…political and racial violence and terror had erupted and a general strike had been called, and now there was a 6pm curfew, so only cinemas with 1pm matinees and shops with their dwindling items remained open during the day.

Five years before there was nothing like this, and the zinc fence he stared at now had been brand new.

Why was he staring at it now? No answer came, only the fact that it had been silver, shining in the sun back then, and for some mysterious reason a huge circular hole, big enough for his seven-year-old body to crawl through, had been cut in one zinc sheet just above where it was nailed to a cross beam.

He had been taking a short cut through an adjacent yard from a parallel street when he first saw the hole one hot sunny afternoon around 2pm in the August school holidays, and without thinking, as though in a trance, he had climbed up on the beam and carefully began to squeeze through the hole, holding on to the top of the zinc sheet which was searing hot from the sun, realizing too late that the exposed edges of the circle were almost razor sharp as he got his left foot through, and was lifting his right leg through when it jammed into an edge of the circle, slicing the soft fleshy inside of his knee as if it were a piece of cheese…he had tumbled onto the field of young eddo plants and bent over to stare at the cut, which was white, like foam almost to the bone…it was the first time he had seen so deep into his flesh.

When the stinging began to rush through his body he ran through the yard beneath the old house, which had not been abandoned as yet, out to the grassy side of the gutter and around the fence into his yard, he ran up the green and white front stairs of his house into the drawing room shouting as though elated rather than hurt: “Look, look what happened to me!”, while  two of his teenage High School sisters  were trying to convince their Mom to foot the bill to the 4.30pm matinee of ‘Marjorie Morningstar’ with Nathalie Wood, a new film all the young High School and working girls were flocking to, and their mother was saying: “What’s so special about this film? I want to know?”

But what she was saying now was, “What you did with all the quarters your sister said she gave you?’ She had come beneath the house now, to the side of the very step he sat on, at the edge of which rested an old circular ‘COW & GIRL’ butter tin –its design with a cow and girl, of course, in a Dutch pastoral scene painted in blue, maroon, and gold- beginning to darken with rust, in which her clothes pins were kept.

When he couldn’t answer, she answered: “Bought comic books. I hear you burnt up a brand new comic book under this step, now you asking me for money, what exactly going on in your head?”

Her sun-brown freckled hand lifting out a handful of  the  remaining  clothes clips  somehow increased the importance of the old rusty ‘Cow & Girl’  butter tin.

It was one of those products like Moussec and Phospherine and Wincarnis wine and tar-papered Swiss ham, and Barlova and Horlicks, he had overheard his father’s friends discussing while ice rattled in their drinks, arguing how their prices would never be the same when Independence was achi
eved and they came out from under the umbrella (or yoke? One said) of the British Empire, whose products circulated among the colonies at privileged low prices, and how their money’s value was so high, four dollars to one US, because the British had banked all their colonies assets (what they had stolen, one said) as one equity…Yes, it was true what Mom said, he was thinking but not saying, that one of his sisters…the one who decided to become a nurse at the Mercy hospital after seeing ‘A Farewell To Arms’ with Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson, the one who met an English accountant as a patient there…the same pipe-smoking man who knows that gas was scarce, no longer drove his Oxford over to their house but came courting on a big framed Humber bicycle…the same man who, impressed with her looks and joviality no doubt, had asked if she appreciated literature, and she of course said yes…which was a confounded lie.

So the man had brought over three Penguin paperback novels: William Cooper’s ‘Scenes From Provincial Life’, Graham Greene’s ‘The Heart Of The Matter’, and ‘Bhowani Junction’ by John Masters for her pleasure, and she had smiled sweetly and said: “Oh thank you! I just know I’ll enjoy them!”, just like some airhead girl in some cheap trashy romantic novel she had read.

But no sooner had he wheeled his bike out the yard she had dumped the novels giggling in his, her twelve year-old brother’s lap, knowing he had started reading Westerns from the age of seven, and begged him to read them all then inform her on their contents, for which he would be paid a few dollars.

He did, and was paid. That was the money his Mom had referred to, and yes he had bought three comics, a Tonto,  a Toruk, Son Of Stone, and a Maverick.

He had burnt the Maverick in the company of his neighbourhood friend Quentin precisely because it was their favorite comic, and therefore the best choice to prove the point he had picked up from Thoreau, that it’s no good to like things so much you can’t do without them.

But of course he couldn’t tell that to his Mom now! He impatiently drummed his feet in dirty white canvas sneakers on the steps and continued: “Mom, it’s just fifteen cents!”

Now she was walking over to the rusty ‘COW & GIRL’ tin again for the last clips, and said: “Boy don’t  bother me, I told you already, not today.”

For a moment he wanted to give up, go back upstairs, put on his sisters’ Little Richard records and skylark, after-all he had seen both films already ,“Bad Day At Blackrock”, with Spencer Tracy as the one-armed man looking for his Japanese friend in a bigoted post-war small town, and “Reprisal” with Guy Madison as the scapegoat half-breed cowboy persecuted in a racist frontier town;  but he couldn’t let her know that either, or explain how all his village friends would be  at the cinema  because they knew those films were hits right now since they reflected the same bigotries and violence reported on the front pages of their  newspapers everyday.

Beside him, before the old butter tin, she said with a giggle: “Look, at least you have this cent, all you need now is fourteen cents more.’

She was referring to the one black cent that their whole family knew existed through rain and sun for years in that old butter tin. Mom could be cruel sometimes, he knew, staring at the cent left blatantly exposed alone in the empty old butter tin.

He hated it, he had always hated it and resolved never to touch it, and he hated it even more now.  Angrily, but slowly, he picked it up, looked at it closely, carefully, then sprung up from the stairs, rushed to their big  grey  vat behind the house, picked up some sand and began to scrub it under the vat’s cold tap water.

She was staring and sort of smiling at him from the clothes line. He walked up to her as she turned her back, and said “Look Mom.”

In the palm of his hand was  a silver quarter. He never waited to see her face or hear what she would say, just turned and ran out the yard, out the gate, down the road, in a four hundred yard dash to the Hollywood cinema, whose windows by now would be slamming shut.