Jenkins Sic Transit Wagon & Other Stories

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84523-323-5
Verlag: Peepal Tree Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 180 Seiten

The stories in Sic Transit Wagon bring together a rich, evocative and authentic tapestry of Trinidad life, from the 1940s to the present day. We move from the all-seeing naivety of a child narrator trying to make sense of the adult world, through the consciousness of the child-become-mother, to the mature perceptions of the older woman taking stock on all that has gone before. In the title story - a playful pun on the Latin phrase on the glory of worldly things coming to an end - the need to part with a beloved station wagon becomes a moving and humorous image for other kinds of loss. Barbara Jenkins was born in Trinidad. She studied at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at the University College, Cardiff. She married a fellow student, and they continued to live in Wales through the whole decade of the 1960s, before returning to Trinidad. Her stories have won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Caribbean Region) in 2010 and 2011, for 'Something for Nothing' and 'Head Not Made for Hat Alone' respectively; the Wasafiri New Writing Prize; the Canute Brodhurst Prize for short fiction from the Caribbean Writer; the Small Axe short story competition, 2011; and the Romance Category, My African Diaspora Short Story Contest.

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

CURTAINS That day the breeze was blowing more strongly than usual, or perhaps it was blowing at its usual strength, but I had no reason to notice it before. The long, white curtains that hung from the top of the doorframes had shaken themselves loose of the ribbons that restrained them and were swelling with breeze in and out, lifting over and flapping with soft slaps against the chairs and tables in the gallery, filling the spaces of the wide-open doorways – doorways so wide, so high, that Uncle would have me, just three years old, sitting astride his shoulders, clinging hard to the reins of his hair, while he galloped me, wildly shrieking with fear and excitement, from bedroom to gallery to another bedroom to gallery to living room to kitchen. In and out the dusty bluebells, he would sing, dancing me from one room to the next, through the encircling gallery of my grandmother’s home that was my home too, with my mother and her brothers. The curtain, full of wind, billowed over my bed that day, brushing a feathery tickle across my face, waking me earlier than usual. I opened my eyes and looked around for my mother but she was not in our bedroom. I did not call for her because, when I listened to the world I had just woken up to, I could hear her voice and my grandmother’s voice coming from the gallery, just outside our bedroom. There was something slow and serious about the voices, one after the other, which made my own voice stay quiet while pulling me towards theirs. I slid down off the big bed and stood behind one of the curtains. That hard, strong breeze bellied the curtain. It wrapped itself round me, hiding me in its long folds as I stood in the doorway, watching and listening. The thin, pale day drew only faint broken lines of light through the waving branches and leaves of the big chenette tree outside, but I could see the back of my grandmother’s dress with its printed yellow flowers on leafy green vines peeping through the woven cane of her rocking chair, her long grey plait swinging from side to side over the back of the chair as she rocked back and forth, back and forth. The rockers went squeak, bump, squeak, bump, against the hard mahogany floor with a rhythm so regular that, even if I closed my eyes, I could tell when the next squeak, the next bump, was coming. My mother was standing in front of the rocking chair, facing my grandmother and facing me too, but she couldn’t see me where I was hiding. She was wearing her white housedress with pink and blue flowers sprinkled all over it and big pockets and a big round collar edged with white lace. Through the blurriness of the curtain, I could see her head bent down and I could see her arms only down to her elbows. I imagined her holding her hands together behind her back, her fingers twisting round and round the ring she wore on her right hand, the ring with the blue stone she said was her birthstone. She always did that ring twisting when her hands were behind her back. I wanted to go out to the gallery, to stand near my mother, but there was something strange about the way they held their bodies, apart and stiff, the way they spoke to each other, as if they were not the same mother, the same grandmother that I had left when I fell asleep the night before, and it held me back, made me silent and secretive. My grandmother was speaking. She spoke for a long time. Her voice was not loud but it came out solid and hard like a plank of wood – a plank of wood with knotholes and rough patches. I understood only some of what she said… not again… shame… make your own bed and lie in it. I wondered why she was talking so seriously about making a bed. I knew my mother hadn’t made our bed yet – I had been asleep there until a little while before. Why should that make my grandmother so vexed as to quarrel with my mother? My mother spoke softly and only for a little time, not interrupting but taking her turn. I could hear none of her words. Her voice did not have its usual up and down curves. It was just flat and soft and down. She was not looking at my grandmother – she was looking down at her feet and that made her words fall to the floor. Was not making your bed and lying on it such a naughty thing to do? I felt a strong urge to go out to the gallery and stand with my mother and hold on to the tail of her housedress to show that I too was sorry about the not making of the bed, but, at the same time, I sensed that the talking was somehow about important big people business and I should not interrupt. I was afraid that if I went out there to them they would be angry with me and I would be scolded and sent off to Cooksy in the kitchen. When I got tired of standing I sat on the floor, near to one of the giant hooks in the wall that held open the big glass-paned doors. I ran my hand along the cold, hard hook. I pushed my fingers alongside the head of the hook, into the round metal circle screwed into the door. I wanted to pull out the head of the hook and free the door. My grandmother, uncles and mother had all warned me, from the time I could crawl about, that I was not to unhook the doors or they would slam shut in the breeze, breaking the glass, sending splinters flying everywhere, especially into my eyes and I would go blind. I used to walk about the gallery with my eyes shut, stumbling into furniture, practising how I would get around if one day I disobeyed, the glass shattered and I went blind. I wanted to unhook the door, so that the door would slam shut, and then they would stop the talking, because I didn’t like how I felt when I heard my mother’s voice, so soft and having no tune in it. But I did not lift the hook out of the metal circle, even though I wanted to. Instead I stood up and paid attention to the talking again which had got so soft I couldn’t make out any words at all. My mother looked up at my grandmother and said something that must have been a question because her voice rose up at the end. The rocking chair stopped. The soles of my grandmother’s slippers made a slap on the floor as she leaned forward and put her feet down. She shook her head from side to side. My mother looked down at her own feet again. She slowly turned away and walked towards our bedroom, but she didn’t see me because I was still wrapped in the curtain and standing very still and quiet. I saw her look at the bed, at where I usually slept. Maybe she was looking for me. Then she went and sat at the foot of the bed. She sat with her chin resting on her hand, her elbow propped on her knee. She looked down at her lap, glanced back at the bed, then turned around again. Maybe she thought I was at breakfast in the kitchen with Cooksy. Her back to me, she looked straight ahead, right into the mirror of the dressing table that she was facing. She could not have been really looking into the mirror or she would’ve seen me, the lumpy ghost in the curtain I saw reflected in the mirror’s wide silver face. She stared and stared ahead and then she dropped her face into her hands. I could see her shoulders shaking and I could hear her going… huhhh… huhhhhn… huhhh… huhnnn, as if she was squeezing her voice inside, trying to hold it back, but some of it pushed its way out anyway. I felt an ache in my chest. I didn’t understand what was going on. I wanted to hug her and make it all right, but I didn’t know how to let her know that I was hiding in the curtain for she would realise I had been looking on and listening all along, and I thought she wouldn’t like that, so I just stayed quiet where I was. After a long while, she leaned forward, pulled open a drawer, took out a handkerchief and blew her nose in it. She looked again into the drawer and started taking things out of it and throwing them over her shoulders on to the bed. In a great hurry, she pulled open all the drawers, one by one, and did the same thing, flinging everything on our bed behind her, not seeming to care where they landed. Sheer stockings and the grey elastic rings that held them up, her panties and brassieres and girdle, her yellow nightie and the white one, her flesh-coloured silky petticoats and half-slips flew out, undoing their soft, careful folds and piling up in an untidy heap. My clothes came out too – white vests and panties and socks, flowery seersucker pyjamas. When she was done with the drawers, she pushed them shut and sat a while doing nothing. Then, she stood and walked slowly to the wardrobe and, from it she lifted out clothes on hangers, looking at each item – the blue silk dress with smocking at the front that I loved to look at, trying to work out how the stitching was done; the green taffeta one that made wavy patterns of light and shade running up and down it when she walked in it, that made me think of dragonflies tipping their heads to ripple the mossy pond at the Botanic Gardens; her slippery blouse with long see-through sleeves, and the floppy polka-dot one with a floppy bow at the front; a grey pleated skirt and a stiff narrow black one with slits on the sides. Then she lifted out my dresses – the plaid dress with the wide red sash for going for walks, and the yellow organdie one for church. All of these she touched – a collar of one, a lacy edge of another, a sash, a bow, then placed them with slow care on the bed. She looked at the bed, her eyes moving over the heaps and the piles of things there, and turning away abruptly, she walked through the door that connected our room to Uncle’s bedroom. I could hear her talking with Uncle and a little while after she came back with a big brown grip that she put on the bed. When she lifted some little gold catches, the grip popped open in two halves. One by one she...