Walcott-Hackshaw Mrs. B

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84523-289-4
Verlag: Peepal Tree Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 236 Seiten

This novel, loosely inspired by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, focuses on the life of an upper middle class family in modern day Trinidad. The island, independent since 1962, still struggles with its multiethnic and multicultural complexities, and is fraught with corruption and violence. The heroine, Mrs. B (Marie Elena Butcher), is fast approaching 50. In her mid-life she is forced to admit that neither Ruthie, her daughter, nor her marriage to Charles Butcher, has met her expectations of being both a mother and a wife. Haunted by an affair with her husband's best friend, above all Mrs. B knows that she has disappointed herself. Much like Flaubert's heroine, Mrs. B's life is based on longing for what can never be realized and by an inability to adapt to the pressures of her own bourgeois society. Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Literatures, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. She has published various academic titles and her first collection of short stories was published in 2007. This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw was born in Trinidad and is Professor of French Literature and Creative Writing at the University of the West Indies. Her first collection of short stories, Four Taxis Facing North, was published in 2007 and translated into Italian and French. Her first novel, Mrs. B was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2014. Mrs B, was shortlisted for the 'Best Book Fiction' in The Guyana Prize for Literature Award for 2014. Walcott-Hackshaw presently lives in the Santa Cruz Valley with her family; she has recently completed another collection of short stories and is working on a book of essays on trauma in Caribbean fiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO
HOME SWEET HOME

Mrs. B had spent a lot of time, energy and money refurbishing the guest room for Ruthie’s arrival. She wanted Ruthie to have more space, more privacy and the guest room downstairs had a private bathroom. She knew that Ruthie didn’t like their new home in a gated community, the San Pedro Villas. In fact neither Mrs. B nor Charles had really become used to it; there were too many neighbours, too much gossip. They had never wanted to leave their five-acre home in the valley. Mrs. B still missed the white egrets on the lawn in the morning, the parrots flying home to the bamboo trees in the evening and their mini estate of oranges, grapefruits, avocados, mangoes and lime trees. In their last years in the valley, Mrs. B and her longtime gardener, Sammy, had grown a healthy kitchen garden of basil, thyme, rosemary and mint just off the kitchen porch. Only the herb garden had been transplanted, but now clay pots held the plants and the roots were no longer in the earth.

Their house in the valley had a verandah built to imitate the old colonial style; it wrapped around most of the ground floor and allowed an easy flow onto the soft Bermuda grass. Before Charles and Mrs. B built the house she had wanted to buy one of the older colonial estate homes, like the ones her family owned when she was a child, but Charles said this was impractical since restoring the homes she liked would have cost as much as constructing a new one. But she had managed, with Charles and their architect, to build a home with all the nostalgic details of her childhood: high wooden ceilings, tall doors, and wooden latticework along the edges of the roof.

During her first few months in San Pedro she had enjoyed the company of her neighbours – many of whom they knew from high school days – and the ability to see her close friends, who all lived nearby. But after a while she began to miss the things she had taken for granted in her old home; here in San Pedro the constant need to meet, greet and give daily updates on anything and everything began to irritate. A face seemed to appear the moment she stepped out of her townhouse door, or out of her car, or even when she sought some peace in her small backyard garden. In San Pedro, the custom of phoning before a visit seemed unnecessary especially since the neighbour lived only minutes away; walking in to someone’s front door and simply calling out “Hello” was the norm. After four years Mrs. B had grown tired of the place; she longed for the simple pleasure of walking to the edge of her old property and sitting on her favourite bench under the sprawling samaan tree just above the path that led down to the river.

Originally San Pedro seemed the best option: good location in the west, excellent neighbourhood, mall and grocery minutes away, with a view of the sea. Each unit had three bedrooms, three bathrooms and a powder room, a living area to the back that opened onto a small but thoughtfully landscaped garden with neat beds of ginger lilies, alamandas, and exotic ground cover. There were some tall, carefully pruned ficus and a few weeping willows at the edge of the compound. Separating side A from side B of the compound were nine royal palms that gave it an air of grandeur. It was the palms that had drawn Mrs. B and Charles to San Pedro.

But she couldn’t help making comparisons with the valley. On mornings in San Pedro, young twenty-something housewives left their babies with housekeepers who arrived in droves at the crack of dawn as their young employers went to work or the gym in their shiny new cars. In the afternoons Mrs. B would see the mothers once again, walking their little cherubs in fancy carriages around the compound. The fathers would come home in the evening, suited and tired. The sight of the young families affected Mrs. B with envy, nostalgia and an indescribable numbness. Besides the young couples, there were many like Mrs. B and Charles, a group of forty-somethings to fifty-somethings who had left much larger properties partly for the convenience but primarily for the security. San Pedro boasted the best guarded gated community in the west; whether this was true or not, it didn’t hurt that the family of one of the young Lebanese couples living there owned the security firm that guarded the compound. At night, guards patrolled with pit bulls; they were without them during the day, but always carried concealed weapons. Curled barbed wire atop the compound walls bordering the main street mostly deterred bandits from jumping over, though the previous Carnival season, two crackheads, or pipers, hazarded a jump, only to be welcomed by pit bulls, guns, batons and cricket bats.

At first, Mrs. B and Charles resisted the temptation to spend their early evenings discussing the crime situation with their neighbours. They thought they had left fear behind in the valley, along with the surplus goods donated to Goodwill, the Red Cross and Salvation Army, or given to the local valley poor, but even in the guarded compound the wives spoke about robberies, rapes, murders and kidnappings all the time, and Mrs. B and Charles soon discovered that fear was not something you left behind or gave away, like an old pair of shoes.

Still, in spite of the nostalgia she felt, Mrs. B had to admit that her valley, like everything else on the island, had changed. In recent years those who had made Coco Valley their home had built towering walls that locked them in, making sure that the villagers who walked past had no chance of seeing anything inside their palaces. But with each robbery that took place in the valley, each kidnapping, each shooting, Mrs. B and Charles felt the enemy was getting too close. At night every pop became a gunshot. Then there was the body dumped in the canal by the main road that snaked through the valley, bloating in the sun like a dead dog. Life in Coco Valley had ceased to exist in the way they wanted to remember it. There was no one to call on to protect and serve them. “Not one jackass,” Charles would say in his diatribes against the corrupt police force and even more corrupt politicians – many of whom, as he claimed, enjoyed the profits of a healthy drug trade. It was better for witnesses to pretend to know nothing, because witnesses were shot all the time, even on the steps of the Hall of Justice.

When they first moved into Coco Valley things were different. There were more trees, more bush, more shades of green; there were fewer houses, more cocoa plantations, fewer cars, more villagers on bikes; it was less town and more country, and that was what Mrs. B and Charles had loved. Although they were not born in the valley, they felt that the almost two decades they spent there earned them the right to feel that they belonged. Ruthie had grown up in the valley; she knew no other home.

When the horrors began, Mrs. B and Charles pretended not to notice. They were not unique to Coco Valley; evil things were taking place all over the island. Like many of their friends, Mrs. B and Charles went about their daily routines trying hard not to think about the way things were falling apart. They busied themselves with shopping at the malls, doing their groceries on a Saturday morning, movies on a Sunday evening, dinners with friends, lunches, brunches – avoiding restaurants that had been held up by bandits; they had self-imposed curfews and travelled in numbers at night, never going into the city after dark, or never going into the city at all. When they got into their cars, day or night, they locked their doors, kept their windows up, air conditioners on; looked closely as their electric gates opened and closed behind them; let their dogs out at night and hired security to patrol their neighbourhood. That was the way they survived, skimming the surface of a deep red sea, never looking down to see what was below.

But then there was the incident with Mary, their neighbour in the valley. She lived with her handsome husband and her ten-year-old twin boys. The day began like any other: husband off to work, twins off to school, housekeeper housekeeping, gardener gardening. They arrived quietly, through the back gate that led to the river (they never found out who left it unlocked). The men knew the Rottweilers were tied up, and they found Mary where she spent every sunny morning in the valley, in her garden weeding, cleaning up a bed next to the tall African tulip. That was where they ripped her apart. Worse than raging pit bulls, they bit, tore, straddled, paddled, and broke Mary like a dry twig in her own garden. They ate the lunch the housekeeper had cooked for the family (she said she was kicked around before they locked her in the powder room at the bottom of the stairs, but compared to Miss Mary, she knew she had been spared). Before they left, they shat on the kitchen floor and used their excrement to write FOCK YOU across the white kitchen walls, and then they packed the laptops, the Wiis, the Xbox, the cell phones and the shoebox with Mary’s jewellery and five thousand US into Mary’s Mercedes and drove off into the bright valley light. The gardener, who had hidden in the shed outside, swore they had guns, swore that they threatened to kill him if he said anything to the police. Mary’s husband Joey and their two young sons had to clean up the entire mess, not just the house but Mary herself, who never again felt clean.

After this, Mrs. B and Charles realized they had to leave.

*

Mrs. B was busy preparing the guest room for Ruthie. The idea that pleased her most was the motif of shells; she had chosen a shell-pattern curtain fabric at the ever popular “Jeanelle’s” and gathered several conch shells that she had found with...