(no subject)

[searingedrock]

The dark-skinned girl stood on Frederick street talking to her friends. The three girls who stood around her listening wore the same school uniform-red and white striped tie, navy skirt, white blouse tucked into skirt, navy socks and black shoes-they stood with bravado and hitched their skirts shorter so that the men who passed would not help looking. 

On Frederick street in the middle of Port of Spain after school there was barely room to walk because of the people in their work clothes hurrying to get the bus (there was always a stampede), vagrants sitting, walking, peeing, eating rubbish, old fat women selling lottery tickets, old fat women with big market bags full of carrots and potatoes and ground provisions and maybe cheap panties for their youngest granddaughter, the men who stood around watching the schoolgirls, and lastly the schoolboys who also wanted the schoolgirls. 

The dark skinned girl and her friends trooped leisurely down the street, sucking their teeth if someone nudged by the group, although they traversed the width of the pavement arm in arm.  From a distance a dark-skinned tall boy came up to the group, smiling lazily, one foot slouching before the other.  The girls stopped, still tightly linked, and the pretty dark-skinned girl broke off from them and walked on with the boy.  The girls sucked their teeth and walked on toward the bus station.


The boy walked her to the bus stop when it became dark.  At the bus stop it was very quiet and she waited until there was a red-and-white striped maxi because that would take her to her house.  Her backpack was almost empty but that was because she did all her homework on loose sheets of paper and took them home to carefully file them under subject and semester.  Her marks were the highest in the class but she was very careful that no one should know. 

Later that year in August they would find out that she had received a scholarship, her A' level results being one of the highest in the island.

She got into the maxi and sat at the front.  There was one other passenger; a man, sitting at the back.  The driver was not one she had seen before.  In the dark of the station she saw him look at her and she looked away.  "Arima?" 

"Yeah."  He nodded and the pulled out of the station.  When he made a wrong turn at first she thought he was taking another route and then she sat rigid with fear and thought about how to escape.  The bus continued into the darkness and soon there were only fields of bush as high as your shoulder around them.


I am one of her friends who saw her leave that day.  I went to her house later and saw her face, bruised like an overripe fig.  She didn't tell anyone because it is a small island; the man has friends, maybe some in the police service, and maybe they will punish her for telling.  It is like that.

I saw him today, the driver, he was sitting in his maxi at the bus station and reading a newspaper, and he looked at me and smiled.