Hand Me down World : A Novel

Book by Lloyd Jones

One
The supervisor
 
 
I was with her at the first hotel on the Arabian Sea. That was for two years. Then at the hotel in Tunisia for three years. At the first hotel we slept in the same room. I knew her name, but that is all. I did not know when her birthday was. I did not know how old she was. I did not know where she came from in Africa. When we spoke of home we spoke of somewhere in the past. We might be from different countries but the world we came into contained the same clutter and dazzling light. All the same traps were set for us. Later I found God, but that is a story for another day.
 
If I tell you of my beginning you will know hers. I can actually remember the moment I was born. When I say this to people they look away or they smile privately. I know they are inclined not to believe. So I don’t say this often or loudly. But I will tell you now so that perhaps you will understand her better. I can tell you this. The air was cool to start with, but soon all that disappeared. The air broke up and darted away. Black faces with red eye strain dropped from a great height. My first taste of the world was a finger of another stuck inside my mouth. The first feeling is of my lips being stretched. I am being made right for the world, you see. My first sense of other is when I am picked up and examined like a roll of cloth for rips and spots. Then as time passes I am able to look back at this world I have been born into. It appears I have been born beneath a mountain of rubbish. I am forever climbing through and over that clutter, first to get to school, and later to the beauty contest at the depot, careful not to get filth on me. I win that contest and then the district and the regional. That last contest won me a place in the Four Seasons Hotel staff training program on the Arabian Sea. That is where I met her.
 
There, instead of refuse, I discover an air-conditioned lobby. There are palms. These trees are different from the ones I am used to. These palms I am talking about. They look less like trees than things placed in order to please the eye. Even the sea with all its blue ease appears to lack a reason to exist other than to be pleasing to the eye. It is fun to play in. That much is clear from the European guests and those blacks who can afford it.
 
We shared a room. We slept a few feet away from one another. She became like a sister to me, but I cannot tell you her middle name or her last name, or the name of the place she was born. Her father’s name was Justice. Her mother’s name was Mary. I cannot tell you anything else about where she came from. At the Four Seasons it did not matter. To show you were from somewhere was no good. You have to leave your past in order to become hotel staff. To be good staff you had to be like the palms and the sea, pleasing to the eye. We must not take up space but be there whenever a guest needed us. At the Four Seasons we learned how to scrub the bowl, how to make a rosette out of the last square of toilet paper and to tie over the seat a paper band that declared in English that the toilet was of approved hygiene standard. We learned how to turn back a bed, and how to revive a guest who had drunk too much or nearly drowned. We learned how to sit a guest upright and thump his back with the might of Jesus when a crisp or a peanut had gone down the wrong way.
 
What else? I can tell you about the new appetite that came over her like a disease of the mind. She forgot she was staff. Yes. Sometimes I thought she was under a spell. There she was, staff, and in her uniform, standing in the area reserved for guests, beneath the palms, taking up the precious shade, watching a tall white man enter the sea. She watches the sea rise all the way up his body until he disappears. The tear in the ocean smooths over. She waits. And she waits some more. She wonders if she should call the bell captain. All this time she is holding her own breath. She didn’t know that until the missing person emerges—and in a different place. He burst up through another tear in the world and all of his own making. This is the moment, she told me so, she decided she would like to learn to swim. Yes. This is the first time that idea comes to her.
 
After eighteen months—I am aware I said two years. That is wrong. I remember now. It was after eighteen months we were moved to a larger hotel. This was in Tunisia. The tear in the world has just grown bigger. This hotel is also on the sea. For the first time in our lives it was possible to look in the direction of Europe. Not that there was anything to see. That didn’t matter. No. You can still find your way to a place you cannot see.
 
For the first time we had money. A salary, plus tips. More money than either of us had ever earned. On our day off we would walk to the market. Once she bought a red-and-green parrot. It had belonged to an Italian engineer found dead in the rubbish alley behind the prostitutes’ bar. The engineer had taught the parrot to say over and over Benvenuto in Italia. Thanks to a parrot that is all the Italian I know. Benvenuto in Italia. Benvenuto in Italia. We had our own rooms now but I could hear that parrot through the wall. Benvenuto in Italia. All through the night. It was impossible to sleep. Another girl told her to throw a wrap over the cage. She did and it worked. The parrot was silent. After a shower, after dressing, after brushing teeth, after making her bed, then, she lifts the wrap, the parrot opens one eye, then the other, then its beak—Benvenuto in Italia.
 
On our next day off I went with her to the market. We took it in turns to carry the parrot back to where she had bought it. The man pretends he’s never seen the parrot and carries on placing his merchandise over a wooden bench. She tried to give the parrot to a small boy. His eyes grew big. I thought his head would explode. He ran off. The parrot looked up through the bars, silent for once, looking so pitiful I was worried she was about to forgive it. But no. In a tea house the owner flirted with her but when she tried to gift the parrot he backed off with his hands in the air. In the street a man stopped to poke his finger through the bars. He and the parrot were getting on. But it was the same thing. They were happy to look, to admire, but no one wanted sole charge of that parrot. She began to think she would be stuck with that parrot forever.
 
I took the cage off her and we boarded a bus. The passengers were waiting for the driver to return with his cigarettes. I walked down the aisle dangling the cage over the heads of the passengers. Some fell against the window and folded their arms and closed their eyes. One after another they shook their heads. Back in the market people talked to the parrot, they stuck a finger through the bars for the parrot to nibble, they cooed back at the parrot. It turned its head on its side and gave them an odd look which made everyone laugh. But no one wanted to own a parrot. She asked me if I thought there was something wrong with her. Because how was it that she was the only one who had thought to own a parrot?
 
We returned to the hotel. It wasn’t quite dark. We could hear some splashing from the pool. Some children. People were sitting around the outside bars. She took the parrot from me and set off to the unvisited end of the beach. I followed because I had come this far, and the whole time I had been following, so that now, just then, I did not know what else to do with myself. Down on the sand she kicked off her sandals. She placed the cage down and dragged one of the skiffs to the water. Had she asked for my advice I would have told her not to do this thing. Now I regret not saying anything. I was tired. I was sick of sharing the problem. I wanted only for the task to be over with. As she pushed the skiff out the parrot rolled its eye up at her, to look as though it possibly understood her decision and had decided it would choose dignity over fear.
 
In the night the wind blew up. I stayed in bed. But I can say what happened next because she told me. She also woke to the waves slapping on the beach but dozed off again without a thought for the parrot. The second time she woke it was still early. No one was up when she walked across the hotel grounds. She found the skiff hauled up on the beach. The cage was gone. Further up the beach she found the damp corpse of the parrot on top of the smouldering palm leaves. The groundsman was raking the sand. When she asked him about the cage he looked away. She thought she was going to hear a lie. Instead he told her to follow him. They go to the shed. He pulls back the beaded curtain. On the bench she sees the thin bars of the cage. The cage itself no longer exists. The bars have been cut off. She picks up one—holds it by its wooden handle, presses the sharpened point into the soft fleshy part of her hand. Well, she took the sticking knife as payment for the cage. That’s the story about the knife.
 
 
She told me once that as soon as you know you are smart you just keep getting smarter. For me it hasn’t happened yet. That’s not to say it won’t. When the Bible speaks of eternity I see one long line of surprises. It’s not to say that that particular surprise won’t come my way. I’m just saying I’m still waiting. But she got there first when she was promoted to staff supervisor. Now it was her turn to tell the new recruits that they smelt as fresh as daisies. You should see her now. The way she moved through the hotel. She would change the fruit bowl in reception without waiting to be asked. She says ‘Have a nice day’, as she has been taught, at the rear of the heavy white people waddling across the lobby for the pool. When a guest thanks her for picking up a towel from the floor she will smile and say ‘You’re welcome’, and when told she sounds just like an American she wil...