Jenkins De Rightest Place

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-84523-448-5
Verlag: Peepal Tree Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten

Indira Gabriel, recently abandoned by her lover, Solomon, embarks on a project to reinvigorate a dilapidated bar into something special. In this funny, sexy, sometimes painful and bittersweet novel, Barbara Jenkins draws together a richly-drawn cast of characters, like a Trinidadian Cheers. Meet Bostic, Solomon's boyhood friend, who is determined to keep the bar as a shrine; I Cynthia, the tale-telling Belmont maco ; KarlLee, the painter with a very complicated love-life; fatherless Jah-Son; and Fritzie, single mum and Indira's loyal right-hand woman. At the book's centre is the unforgettable Indira, with her ebullience and sadness, her sharpness and honesty, obsession with the daily horoscope and addiction to increasingly absurd self-help books. In this warm, funny, sexy, and bittersweet novel, Barbara Jenkins hears, like Sam Selvon, the melancholy behind 'the kiff-kiff laughter', as darkness from Indira's past threatens her drive to make a new beginning.

Barbara Jenkins was born in Trinidad. She began writing in her seventies, and is the author of a novel and a collection of short stories. She has won awards including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Caribbean Region), the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, The Canute Brodhurst Prize, the Small Axe short story competition, My African Diaspora Short Story Contest and a Guyana Prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jenkins, Barbara

Leseproben

1. FLOAT TO LOFTIER ALTITUDES Is fifteen months to the day that Solomon Warner gone to Caribana and not come back. See y’girl Indira prop up on a heap of pillows on her side of the bed. But she can’t stop her eyes slanting over to the picture on his bedside table. Opening night party of De Rightest Place. The two of them hugging-up, smiling for the camera. A stray blue streamer draped over his right shoulder. Her left hand caught in the act of reaching for it. She stretch over and pick up the picture. She looking at it hard-hard. She say, Solo man, the time has come for me to accept that it’s all over. Because, while it’s true they wasn’t married in any legal sense, it looking like not in any other sense neither, since he could pick up himself, take off to Toronto with the steelband, and not come back with the others. Was only Skeete, the iron man, who tell her that Solomon say he going solo. It really eat her up how Solo himself not even once try to get in touch with her. Not even a little Dear John, oh how I hate to write letter. She telling the picture, Solo man, how could you not send even one word, one paltry word, to say whether you’re dead or alive? After all we’ve been through together? Seven and a half years. She rest back down the picture. She close her eyes. She say, If I don’t recognise this is it, that I’ve been bit, this could drag on and on and I’m left here, lingering in limbo. Chuts, I’m vex with Solo, but I’m also sad. Regretful, but not bitter. Abandoned yes, but I’m not destitute. At least that is what Indira trying to talk up herself into believing this Sunday morning. She figuring, too, how she going to move on. She open back her eyes. From whence cometh my guiding light? Y’girl bring to mind a TV show where an expert was giving advice, brandishing his book, Everyday Economics for the Financially Fraught, like if is some kind of Bible. It really rankle her that advice about how to use stale bread in forty different ways always coming from people who don’t even eat bread – bagels and croissants are much more to their taste. But anyway, the TV expert say that first you make a list of your assets and, while she suspicious of such advice, because of where it’s coming from, at least it’s a start. So Indira find paper and pencil and she quick-quick begin to make a list. A List of My Assets. First asset, she say, is herself, so she write down: ME. After all, yourself is all you have when everything is gone and, although everything is not gone, it’s good to look at yourself and see what you have that could work for you when the chips are down. It’s not as if it’s the first time she’s down on her uppers and has to start from ME. So saying, y’girl sit up a bit straighter and glance across at the big oval mirror facing the bed. She lift an appraising eyebrow, then she add: young, good-looking, nice body. She look at her hands. Nails nicely done, sure. French-cut, white tips. But the hands are rough and red, scored and blotchy. Calluses on the palms. Was a time when she used to wear gloves when she’d be seen in public – though she’d turned that to her advantage in the retro playboy-bunny years when those long, above-elbow, black gloves was the signature nightclub hostess costume. She never fool herself as to the real reason. She look at her hands again. Battle-scarred. She slump down on the pillows, close her eyes a good while. She sit up, shaking her head. She look at what she’s written – young, good-looking, nice body. What next? Bright. Though how bright you could be when your man standing in front of you packing for Caribana in August and putting sweater-gloves-snowboots-coat in his suitcase, telling you the internet say it cold no arse in Canada, and you only asking him if he have his creditcards-passport-cash-phone? If you can’t read the writing on the wall… But she still leave bright on the list. Another asset pop like fireworks in her head. Blink, blink, blink go the eyes. She bite the pencil, chew on it a bit, and, after a little weighing-up, she write down: White. There. She’s committed it to paper. But she still feeling she must debate with herself what she can’t say aloud. The asset value of white. C’mon, she saying to herself. Don’t be coy. Admit that white is the default skin colour for global acceptability. It is the get-outa-jail pass, the win an extra-throw-of-the-dice. Yes. It’s true. Take her, for example. Living in Europe, no one questioned her right to be there. To have been born in India was interesting; her singsong accent was charming; even her name, so foreign, was unusual. But she could blend in, go anywhere without alarms going off. And though here, in this country, she stand out, it was in a good way. People look at her and immediately assume she’s well-off, has access, is deserving of deference. Blonde, blue-eyed, white. A veritable Holy Trinity of Privilege. Can’t deny. Security guards bow and say, Ma’am, and open gates. It certainly gives you the edge, whether with barman or banker, police or politician, lunatic or lover. Not at all bad for someone who is marginally poor and lives in less-than-desirable Belmont, who lived with a black, pub-owning Rastaman musician. But, hang on; waitwaitwait a minute, she think. Whose labelling am I adopting? I’m fooling only myself to call Solo black in this country. That’s Europe; not how it is here. In this place, Solo red, up the scale by several notches, just below white and feel-they-white, somewhere in that jostling, fluid middle space along with light Indian, wealthy dark Indian and educated brown. That whole If yuh white yuh right situation wasn’t always so with her. There was a time, long ago, when her being white, its very desirability, wasn’t good for her at all. When she was young. Too young. Defenceless. She hasn’t forgotten, but she doesn’t want to remember. Not now. She’s not going there. Right now, right here, in this country, white is an asset. It has currency. She can’t say it aloud. But she can write it down. White. She tell herself, she should add honest to the list, because whitepeople in this place never want to admit they have privilege. No, no, no. In fact, they like to make out that they’re hard done by. True. Take her friend, Suzanne. The one who says her family is French aristocracy, who came here with the Cédula de Población. The family tree hangs on her living-room wall. You look at it and is only French names and cousins marrying cousins and Compte de this and Compte de that. When Suzanne and her family get together for brunch on Sunday after Mass, the talk is all about the good old days, growing up on the fifteen hundred acre cocoa estate, Qui Rit Bien, that the ancestors bought with the Emancipation compensation they got from Westminster. What does the name mean? I ask her. She laughed. It means Who laughs last laughs best. Yes. Well, one day, just last week, Suzanne is doing one hundred and twenty in her Mercedes, zooming past the Beetham on one side, the stink La Basse on the other, when a traffic policeman overtakes and flashes her down. Madam winds down her window, tells him that he should bear in mind that they, that is whitepeople, is an endangered discriminated-against minority in this island. And he, the stout, ebony policeman, so flabbergasted, he stands like a statue next to his motorbike while Suzanne winds up her window and speeds off. But y’girl Indira is saying to herself that she’s too smart to get suckered into that kind of mindset, because she, Indira, proud to declare to any and every body that she is not from here. And furthermore, though she and the local whitepeople share the same skin colour, she doesn’t share with them their burden of selectively misremembered history, and so she writes down honest. What else is there? Hmmm… maybe it’s time to move on from the ME-myself-and-I concerns to more material things. She’s looking around the bedroom. There’s the clothes, the shoes, the handbags that filling up wardrobes in every room, but she’s not about to do an inventory, so she just write Plenty Clothes etc. Solo left a whole heap of things behind, and, since it’s looking like he managing quite well without them, she supposes they must be her assets now – but she’s not business with such foolishness. One of these days she will ask Bostic to pack up Solo’s personal effects and put them in the storeroom. Give her some breathing space. Next: Car. A twin cab pick-up that Solo use to transport goods for the pub. The pub of course! The PUB! De Rightest Place. It’s running on autopilot under Bostic since Solo gone. The few neighbourhood hardcore customers still there – you could even say they’re living there – but from her vantage point, the upstairs bedroom window, she’s seeing fewer and fewer people dropping in. It’s like the spark to attract people gone. So, she has the pub, but it needs attention. And direction. Looks like Bostic is happy for it to tick over, but that’s not good enough. She will have to nudge him or seize the reins herself. What else? Yes, right here, right where she is, the apartment upstairs the pub, that she and Solo call home for years before he gone. Two more – Apartment, PUB! This building is the...