When I first met Miss Bobby I took her for a Trini. But when she opened her mouth I decided she was a Nowherian. We started going around and, under the Caribbean lilt, I noticed traces of a South London accent. I was right. She was a Nowherian, born in London with a Guyanese dad and a Trini mummy who’d been shuttled across the Atlantic for Caribbean “broughtupcy”: all tamarind rod, ribbons and convent chat.
Being a London-bred Nowherian myself, I was delighted. We went round some more: a few trips to the Savannah, an ice cream parlour in Princes Town, and then back to my mud house for Billie Holiday, coffee and a view of dawn rising out of the swamp. I think Miss Bobby found this tropical romance as exciting as I did, but it’s hard to tell.
Romance is fine, but, even in the Caribbean, it doesn’t pay the rent. So every few weeks, while Miss Bobby wrote short stories of village life in the swamp or profiled rapso stars and pastors for the papers, I also clocked in to the mundane world of work: I’d be off island-hopping, interviewing lace makers in Saba, voodoo priests in Haiti or covering the ox-cart races in Guadeloupe. The normal boring routine.
I couldn’t understand why she complained. After all, it was only work: another day, another island, another dollar. But Miss Bobby was adamant. She didn’t see why I had to suffer the boring routine alone and, besides, she needed a break from the fast lane of life in the swamp. As a reasonable Nowherian I saw her point. “Let’s go Guyana,” I suggested. I had an appointment on the Pomeroon River to meet some Caribs from Dominica who’d sailed in a traditional dugout back to their ancestral homelands.
Miss Bobby graciously agreed, so we took our supplies and a night flight to Timehri. We sported and gaffed with her Uncle Jerry in Georgetown and then headed for the Pomeroon. A mad maxi taxi, packed to the gills, bounced us over the Demerara pontoon bridge, depositing us on the banks of the mighty Essequibo in Parika.
We gazed toward the river mouth where sky and sea merged, like a gap in the universe, or even the end of the world where the ancient mariners used to fall off. We took a break-neck “ballyhoo” boat ride over the great smooth river then crawled up the slow road through somnolent Adventure and Anna Regina to Charity. After lunching on labba wild meat, I went to look for the Caribs.
Sultan, the man with the fastest boat on the Pomeroon, laughed when I asked him where I would find them. “You need a helicopter, not a boat,” he said calmly, “they left for Venezuela yesterday.”
So there we were, stranded up the Pomeroon without a paddle, and no Caribs, staring at a high-speed “ballyhoo”. This was altogether too exciting; I had to think fast. “No problem, Miss Bobby, we’ll go see the Arawaks instead, they live down-river in the Wakapoa.”
Sultan skimmed us over the black water, past Amerindians who waved from their mini-dugout “corials”. We lay back, watching sunset slide into the river ahead, darkness caressing the surrounding forest. In the humming night Sultan cut the engine as we glided beneath the branches into Akawini Creek and Adel’s Rain Forest Resort. Our room was in a warhiqua, a wooden house on stilts, thatched with palm leaves. Delightful; I could see Miss Bobby approved.
We sat in the messroom with Errol, the piratical-looking Portuguese-and-Arawak resort manager and his Arawak wife, Victoria, listening to messages on the radio, by the light of a kerosene lamp. Miss Bobby went into a trance: she loved the river, the forest was much better than the smelly old swamp we lived in, why didn’t we move here? No electricity, no cable TV, no money, no hassle . . .
Victoria was explaining how to make casareep from cassava, while Miss Bobby drifted on her forest fantasy. In the half light, I saw a furry ball next to her hand on the table. Then I saw her levitating toward the trooli leaf roof above. I think she would have screamed but she seemed to be having a respiratory problem. Errol leant across the table grinning, and brushed the tarantula into the bush. “Don’t warry wit dat,” he reassured, adding with another grin “Jus’ look out for de snakes in the roof when you go to bed!”
When I woke next morning, Miss Bobby was still sitting up under the mosquito net, neck craned toward the roof. She said she’d changed her mind about relocating. Life wasn’t that bad in the swamp. When we returned to Trinidad, we moved to the mountains.
