that the tall man was drunk practically all the time. He gave off a sickening smell of bad rum, and I was afraid of him. Whenever I saw him I crossed the road.
If his wife, or whoever she was, dressed better than any woman in the street, he dressed worse than any of us. He was even dirtier than George.
He never appeared to do any work.
I asked Hat, ‘How a pretty nice woman like that come to get mix up with a man like that? ’
Hat said, ‘Boy, you wouldn’t understand. If I tell you you wouldn’t believe me.’
Then I saw the dog.
It looked as big as a ram-goat and as vicious as a bull. It had the same sort of thin face its master had. I used to see them together.
Hat said, ‘If that dog ever get away it go have big trouble here in this street.’
A few days later Hat said, ‘You know, it just strike me. I ain’t see those people bring in any furnitures at all. It look like all they have is that radio.’
Eddoes said, ‘It have a lot of things I could sell them.’
I used to think of the man and the dog and the woman in that house, and I felt sorry and afraid for the woman. I liked her, too, for the way she went about trying to make out that everything was all right for her, trying to make out that she was just another woman in the street, with nothing odd for people to notice.
Then the beatings began.
The woman used to run out screaming. We would hear the terrible dog barking and we would hear the man shouting and cursing and using language so coarse that we were all shocked.
Hat said to the bigger men, ‘Is easy to put two and two and see what happening there.’
And Edward and Eddoes laughed.
I said, ‘What happening, Hat?’
Hat laughed.
He said, ‘You too small to know, boy. Wait until you in long pants.’
So I thought the worst.
The woman behaved as though she had suddenly lost all shame. She ran crying to anybody in the street, saying, ‘Help me! Help me! He will kill me if he catches me.’
One day she rushed to our house.
She didn’t make any apology for coming unexpectedly or anything like that. She was too wild and frightened even to cry.
I never saw my mother so anxious to help anyone. She gave the woman tea and biscuits. The woman said, ‘I can’t understand what has come over Toni these days. But it is only in the nights he is like this, you know. He is so kind in the mornings. But about midday something happens and he just goes mad.’
At first my mother was being excessively refined with the woman, bringing out all her fancy words and fancy pronunciations, pronouncing comfortable as cum-fought-able, and making war rhyme with bar, and promising that everything was deffy-nightly going to be all right. Normally my mother referred to males as man, but with this woman she began speaking about the ways of mens and them, citing my dead father as a typical example.
My mother said, ‘The onliest thing with this boy father was that it was the other way round. Whenever I uses to go to the room where he was he uses to jump out of the bed and run away bawling-run away screaming.’
But after the woman had come to us about three or four times my mother relapsed into her normal self, and began treating the woman as though she were like Laura or like Mrs Bhakcu.
My mother would say, ‘Now, tell me, Mrs Hereira, why you don’t leave this good-for-nothing man?’
Mrs Hereira said, ‘It is a stupid thing to say to you or anybody else, but I like Toni. I love him.’
My mother said, ‘Is a damn funny sort of love.’
Mrs Hereira began to speak about Toni as though he were a little boy she liked.
She said, ‘He has many good qualities, you know. His heart is in the right place, really.’
My mother said, ‘I wouldn’t know about heart, but what I know is that he want a good clout on his backside to make him see sense. How you could let a man like that disgrace you so?’
Mrs Hereira said, ‘No, I know Toni. I looked after him when he was sick. It is the war, you know. He was a sailor and they torpedoed him twice.’
My mother said, ‘They shoulda try again.’
‘You mustn’t talk like this,’ Mrs Hereira said.
My