Popo’s workshop no longer sounded with hammering and sawing. The sawdust no longer smelled fresh, and became black, almost like dirt. Popo began drinking a lot, and I didn’t like him when he was drunk. He smelled of rum, and he used to cry and then grow angry and want to beat up everybody. That made him an accepted member of the gang.
Hat said, ‘We was wrong about Popo. He is a man, like any of we.’
Popo liked the new companionship. He was at heart a loquacious man, and always wanted to be friendly with the men of the street and he was always surprised that he was not liked. So it looked as though he had got what he wanted. But Popo was not really happy. The friendship had come a little too late, and he found he didn’t like it as much as he’d expected. Hat tried to get Popo interested in other women, but Popo wasn’t interested.
Popo didn’t think I was too young to be told anything.
‘Boy, when you grow old as me,’ he said once, ‘you find that you don’t care for the things you thought you woulda like if you coulda afford them.’
That was his way of talking, in riddles.
Then one day Popo left us.
Hat said, ‘He don’t have to tell me where he gone. He gone looking for he wife.’
Edward said, ‘Think she going come back with he?’
Hat said, ‘Let we wait and see.’
We didn’t have to wait long. It came out in the papers. Hat said it was just what he expected. Popo had beaten up a man in Arima, the man had taken his wife away. It was the gardener who used to give me bags of grass.
Nothing much happened to Popo. He had to pay a fine, but they let him off otherwise. The magistrate said that Popo had better not molest his wife again.
They made a calypso about Popo that was the rage that year. It was the road-march for the Carnival, and the Andrews Sisters sang it for an American recording company:
A certain carpenter feller went to Arima
Looking for a mopsy called Emelda.
It was a great thing for the street.
At school, I used to say, ‘The carpenter feller was a good, good friend of mine.’
And, at cricket matches, and at the races, Hat used to say, ‘Know him? God, I used to drink with that man night and day. Boy, he could carry his liquor.’
Popo wasn’t the same man when he came back to us. He growled at me when I tried to talk to him, and he drove out Hat and the others when they brought a bottle of rum to the workshop.
Hat said, ‘Woman send that man mad, you hear.’
But the old noises began to be heard once more from Popo’s workshop. He was working hard, and I wondered whether he was still making the thing without a name. But I was too afraid to ask.
He ran an electric light to the workshop and began working in the night-time. Vans stopped outside his house and were always depositing and taking away things. Then Popo began painting his house. He used a bright green, and he painted the roof a bright red. Hat said, ‘The man really mad.’
And added, ‘Like he getting married again.’
Hat wasn’t too far wrong. One day, about two weeks later, Popo returned, and he brought a woman with him. It was his wife. My auntie.
‘You see the sort of thing woman is,’ Hat commented. ‘You see the sort of thing they like. Not the man. But the new house paint up, and all the new furniture inside it. I bet you if the man in Arima had a new house and new furnitures, she wouldnta come back with Popo.’
But I didn’t mind. I was glad. It was good to see Popo standing outside with his glass of rum in the mornings and dipping his finger into the rum and waving at his friends; and it was good to ask him again, ‘What you making, Mr Popo?’ and to get the old answer, ‘Ha, boy! That’s the question. I making the thing without a name.’
Popo returned very quickly to his old way of living, and he was still devoting his time to making the thing without a name. He had stopped working, and his wife got her job with the same people near my school.
People in the street were almost angry with Popo when his wife came back. They felt that all their sympathy had been mocked and wasted. And again Hat was saying, ‘That blasted Popo too conceited, you hear.’
But this time Popo didn’t mind.
He used to tell me, ‘Boy, go home and pray tonight that you get happy like me.’
What happened afterwards happened so suddenly that we didn’t even know it had happened. Even Hat didn’t know about it until he read it in the papers. Hat always read the papers. He read them from about ten in the morning until about six in the evening.
Hat shouted out, ‘But what is this I seeing?’ and he showed us the headlines: CALYPSO CARPENTER JAILED.
It was a fantastic story. Popo had been stealing things left and right. All the new furnitures, as Hat called them, hadn’t been made by Popo. He had stolen things and simply remodelled them. He had stolen too much, as a matter of fact, and had had to sell the things he didn’t want. That was how he had been caught. And we understand now why the vans were always outside Popo’s house. Even the paint and the brushes with which he had redecorated the house had been stolen.
Hat spoke for all of us when he said, ‘That man too foolish. Why he had to sell what he thief? Just tell me that. Why?’
We agreed it was a stupid thing to do. But we felt deep inside ourselves that Popo was really a man, perhaps a bigger man than any of us.
And as for my auntie …
Hat said, ‘How much jail he get? A year? With three months off for good behaviour, that’s nine months in all. And I give she three months good behaviour too. And after that, it ain’t going have no more Emelda in Miguel Street, you hear.’
But Emelda never left Miguel Street. She not only kept her job as cook, but she started taking in washing and ironing as well. No one in the street felt sorry that Popo had gone to jail because of the shame; after all, that was a thing that could happen to any of us. They felt sorry only that Emelda was going to be left alone for so long.
He came back as a hero. He was one of the boys. He was a better man than either Hat or Bogart.
But for me, he had changed. And the change made me sad.
For Popo began working.
He began making Morris chairs and tables and wardrobes for people.
And when I asked him, ‘Mr Popo, when you going start making the thing without a name again?’ he growled at me.
‘You too troublesome,’ he said. ‘Go away quick, before I lay my hand on you.’
3. GEORGE AND THE PINK HOUSE
I was much more afraid of George than I was of Big Foot, although Big Foot was the biggest and the strongest man in the street. George was short and fat. He had a grey-moustache and a big belly. He looked harmless enough but he was always muttering to himself and cursing and I never tried to become friendly with him.
He was like the donkey he had tied in the front of his yard, grey and old and silent except when it brayed loudly. You felt that George was never really in touch with what was going on around him all the time, and I found it strange that no one should have said that George was mad, while everybody said that Man-man, whom I liked, was mad.
George’s house also made me feel afraid. It was a broken-down wooden building, painted pink on the outside, and the galvanised-iron roof was brown from rust. One door, the one to the right, was always left open. The inside walls had never been painted, and were grey and black with age. There was a dirty bed in one corner and in another there was a table and a stool. That was all. No curtains, no pictures on the wall. And even Bogart had a picture of Lauren Bacali in his room.