“What a t’ing.” One of the performers’ favorite expressions. The Queen was out of words to threaten everybody with. She had gone to the semifinals stage with a costume, she knew, wasn’t near done. But the waiting fans and judges didn’t have a clue. When she swept up there with her bare white wings, wands, and long-long dress, headtie instead of headpiece, “Amen” resounded, as if people were in a church. Queen rippled and soaked in the praise with the soft rhythm of the song, until every bit of vex blood and anxiousness flew out of the very tips of her sails. She became pure and shining, and beamed that angel form at them with her biggest smile. Waltzed off easy into the finals. Tomorrow. Dimanche Gras, the Kings and Queens and Calypso Monarch competition. The beginning of the end, of this mas camp life.
The artist-girl pulls out one of the feather-wings from the backpack frame, lays it on the long table nearby, and considers it carefully.
The manager comes up behind her and stares at it like mad. The way this man would be worrying and growing beard and losing weight every year — Ata doesn’t know how he doesn’t just break down like the financial figures he could never balance. The actors were always ready to tell her why a foreign nobody like him could take it, but they weren’t here tonight.
The manager and the girl keep glancing nervously at the small sketch on the wall. Then, in a flurry, the girl opens a set of paints. She splatters plain water onto the wing and the others move closer to the table now.
Gently, Zenly, she picks up a brush, dips it in red, and touches the fabric.
The one paint stroke spreads quickly through watery threads, running red edges to palest pink.
The girl poises again like a praying mantis, a god-horse. She reaches out and places a spot of yellow. Then violet. Tangerine.
Ata goes over to look closer as the colors seep into each other.
They formed paintings of their own, the colors. As another wing was laid down for her, and another, the girl wet them and studied them, then touched a particular spot. The paintings float like a dream, lifting slowly. Off the walls of a gallery in London, Toronto, New York. Begonias, close up, and irises. Georgia O’Keeffe curling up to high cool ceilings, soothing Ata. She inhales the still, timeless air. And sits for a moment in that room, in the Tate Modern, opposite the painting. Noiseless, pale, and scentless strangers pass circuitously, pausing to pray or feed on each image. Stations of an invisible cross. The transparent people look through the ghost of Ata — she is glad for that. Alone alone, she enters the artist’s flowers and Palmer-flecked English, and blue French fields; slashed bodies, nightmare portraits; or a line, a square, a streak of contemporary freedom.
This girl, painting here, has gone through scholarship training in the best cold-weather kingdoms, for years. There she was among select international students and teachers, like God of Design. In that strange creativity of warped time, these artists grew inside-out things and ways, to show for it. Ata had tried to appreciate the white skinhead girls, plain-naked, twisting up and contorting themselves on a silent stage, sometimes in a sheet. They skinned-up their faces, stretched-out pierced tongues at people, and kept doing alien sign language for bowel movement, over and over again. When that didn’t work, they tried to fling off their heads, or get rid of their own arms. The music or noises they chose for performances — which willing people like Ata paid good pounds to attend — was even more curious. A twang here, a holler there. Recycled garbage as instruments. Borrowed ethnic recordings and sometimes a real person from Borneo, the Amazon, a Hutu tribe — some equally underused sound.
The thing Ata noticed is that this honing and training of creativity had become the traditional art of these places. The products that came out of these unique fiefdoms were the artists. Institutional cultural industries. What about such schools in a place like Cuba? How does the third world choose what to use from the first world? Or are the means of study so adopted that there is no choice anyway? Writers, poets, scholarships, still going out …
Ata watches the morpho butterflies, the delicate poui, hearts of bromeliads and hummingbirds, slide and samba together as they appear from the trained, skinny hand of the god-horse.
* * *
When Ata crawls into bed next to Pierre at dawn, she keeps some of the quiet paintings in her chest. She covers them up in the sheets and sticks some of the large petals under her pillow. She would need them soon enough, when Pierre was gone to the North Coast till Wednesday. She would need them to carry her through the dingolay. She finds it helps, to bring something like the undersides of island hills into herself, for when she couldn’t see them. She would miss him, Pierre. They should talk instead of ignoring the growing distance.
* * *
Fraser turns in Alan’s arms and the nurses change shifts discreetly. He snores ever so softly. The perfect nurse had found two young nurses whom she supervised. They had come together, early, and Vernon had let them in. They make suitable noises outside the bedroom, prepping to enter for his morning ritual. As Fraser lets them in with a grunt, they do their best not to look directly at Alan. Perfect had said they work best as one.
One nurse touches Fraser’s arm with warm fingers before putting on her gloves, the other whispers, “Morning, it’s time.”
He groans, but rolls flat onto his back and whispers in return, “Morning,” without opening his eyes.
Dark could be day, dialysis filters light into night. Alan stirs, opens his eyes, and sees latex hands swabbing metal and stomach skin. He rises and goes out onto the veranda and lights up, still in the rumpled clothes he arrived in. Fraser listens to Alan’s racking cough and catches a brief whiff of smoke. He breathes in deeply. The four-handed caregiver is connecting, hooking, smoothing. Cool, the chilling fluids flowing, turning dark into day clear as a glass night. Vanishing dreams and floating memories, the detail of a motmot tail feather, star sharp.
* * *
Fan and spread. “A ‘Light in the Dark.’ All things pure and beautiful — uplifting! Make a joyful noise for … Heaven, Qu-e-e-n … of the band … Ay-e-men!” The MC’s ringmaster voice echoes her up into the thundering arena. He doesn’t need to point and raise the audience to their feet. As the colored tips of her wings ramp into the sky, people clamor like children at a circus pushing to peep.
The gaudiness gone before her had crackled and popped on-stage, and left its litter floating restlessly between the stands. Queens covered in tinsel, beads, and feathers had dragged stiff frames on wheels along to overbearing explanations by the MC. The kings to follow would include some imitation of Slinger’s massive creations, fireworks, smoke bombs, bodybuilder power, and more shine. But now, the sparkler-waving children sigh as heaven billows before them. They stay still, sticky faces and eyes glued, as the field of flowers on wings floats their candy-floss hearts up into the cooling sky.
David Rudder and Charlie’s Roots truck, the manager, the artists, performers, Slingerites, and Ata, creep apace alongside the stage. Some people sing for moments, or stop mid-clap, to sail with heaven. Freedom flighting. In the night. Into the night. In her arms, his arms. Fan and spread. Souls flutter petals taller. Tail of a kite in the clouds, tall. Fall. Womb-shrinking ovation, heart-shaking elation. Dilation … dialyzing river, coursing past organs. Washing poisoned bones and liver-bed clear.
* * *
Jab-jab devils, crawling out from homes, from ghetto holes and inky air, gather on street corners with biscuit tins. Mothers wake their young ones, teenagers out already and drunk, armed with black oil and whistles. Jouvert morning is here.