The nightwatchman's occurrence book_ and other comic inventions - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,196

is life. Let us leave the vice outside, let us leave the vice outside. A lot of these girls work in stores. Any time I want a shirt, I just pass around these stores, and these girls give me shirts. We have to help one another.’

I said, ‘You must have a lot of shirts.’

‘Yes, I have a lot of shirts. Look, I will tell you. Selma and one or two of the other people you see here, we call wabeen.’

‘Wabeen?’

‘One of our freshwater fish. A lil loose. A lil. Not for any and everybody. You understand? Wabeen is not spote.’

‘Spote?’

‘Spote is—don’t make me use obscene language, man, Frank. Spote is what you see.’ He waved his hands about the yard.

The steel-bands sounded nearer, and then through a gate in the corrugated iron fence at the back of the lot the musicians came in. Their instruments were made out of old dustbins, and on these instruments they played a coarse music I had never heard before.

‘They have to hide, you know,’ Henry told me. ‘It’s illegal. The war and so on. Helping the war effort.’

There was a little open shed at the back. It had a blackboard. I had noticed that blackboard and wondered about it. In this shed two or three people now began to dance. They drew watchers to them; they converted watchers into participants. From rooms in the houses on Henry’s lot, from rooms in other back-yards, and from the sewerage trace at the back, people drifted in steadily to watch. Each dancer was on his own. Each dancer lived with a private frenzy. Women among the watchers tore twigs from the hibiscus hedges and from time to time, as though offering benediction and reward, beat the dancer’s dusty feet with green leaves.

Henry put his arm over my shoulder and led me to where Selma was standing. He kept one hand on my shoulder; he put the other on her shoulder. We stood silently together, watching. His hands healed us, bound us.

A whistle blew. There were cries of ‘Police!’ and in an instant the yard was transformed. Dustbins appeared upright here and there; liquor bottles disappeared inside some; the dancers and the audience sat in neat rows under the shed and one man stood at the blackboard, writing. Many of Henry’s girls put on spectacles. One or two carried pieces of embroidery.

It seemed to me that the police were a long time in entering. When they did, the Inspector shook Henry by the hand and said, ‘The old Adult Education class, eh?’

‘As you see,’ Henry said. ‘Each one teach one.’

The Inspector closed his fingers when he took away his hand from Henry’s. He became chatty. ‘I don’t know, boy,’ he said. ‘We just have to do this. Old Blackwhite really on your tail. And that Mrs Lambert, she too lodge a complaint.’

*

I wonder, though, whether I would have become involved with Selma and the others, if, during that first evening after I had undressed and was lying with Selma, I hadn’t seen my clothes dancing out of the window. They danced; it was as though they had taken on a life of their own.

I called out to Selma.

She didn’t seem surprised. She said, ‘I think they are fishing tonight.’

‘Fishing?’ I ran to the window after my disappearing clothes.

‘Yes, you know, fishing through the windows. Lifting a shirt here, a pair of trousers there. It is no good chasing them. Carnival coming, you know, and everybody wants a pretty costume.’

She was right. In the morning I woke up and remembered that I had no clothes except for my pants and vest. I threw open the back window and saw naked Americans hanging out of windows. We looked at one another. We exchanged no words. The evening was past; this was the morning.

Boys and girls were going to Mr Blackwhite’s college. Some stopped to examine contraceptives thrown into the gutters. Selma herself was fully dressed when I saw her. She said she was going to work. So it seemed after all that Henry’s story about some of his girls working in stores was right. Henry himself brought me a cup of coffee.

‘You can have one of my shirts. I just pass around and ask them for one, you know.’

The morning life of Henry’s yard was different from the evening life. There was a subdued workaday bustle everywhere. A tall thin man was doing limbering-up exercises. He wore a vest and a pair of shorts, and from time to time he