Carnival Tuesday Buss Up

[searingedrock]

The girls had been preparing from the night before, going to bed early to assemble in the Queen’s Park Savannah for eight o’clock on Carnival Tuesday morning. Slowly each girl applied tops, bottoms, fastened and snapped, clasped and adjusted. Gentle rustling as feathers and beads brushed each other. Jillian turned to Mia, asking her to help her with her headpiece. It was then, behind the crust of rhinestones around Mia’s neck, Jillian noticed them. “Mia! You have a man now?! Your neck all mark up with hickeys girl, and you didn’t tell me!” Mia moved away quickly, adjusting her neck piece, smiling. They stepped out into street, not themselves now; the sun made them glitter.

The road was hot already, at eight o’clock the sun was peeling back the little morning breeze and causing fresh skin to film slightly in the creases. It would be a hot day. The crowd poured out in a sea of jewel colours all into the arena; women sculpted in the likeness of themselves, sleek curves and lines, prowling like goddesses in sparkles and feathers, skins cream and gold and bronze and chocolate. Just so Mia said as Jillian adjusted her headpiece for the fifth time that morning, “Jilly I love you eh, just so you know.” Jillian stopped and smiled, and her mother had always said ‘Jill when you smile it doh have nobody who could tell you no boy’, and she swooped on Mia and crushed her and a few sparkles fell, and yelled “I love you too yuh sket! Leh we play mas!” And the music started up and they started to move with the thousands, the short and fat and tall and slender and young and old and black, white, blue, green, yellow. In rainbows.

It is sometime after lunch in Adam Smith Square, a small park bordered by dull red railings, that the band rests for a short while before continuing on; the mas will continue into the night. Jillian was prone on the grass, almost sleeping in the lazy heat and murmur of others; beads tarnished a little, feet sore a little. She doesn’t see Mia and gets up, walking through the crowds, bantering with friends she sees; they all know her. She hasn’t seen Luke yet but that’s because he’s with another band and they like to do that; meet together in a crowd and feel themselves set apart and move together in slow motion, like those Indian movies. She knows they agreed to meet in the park and she searches, walking past the crowds to the railings on the far end.

Sometimes a thing is simply that, separate; no connection to the cosmos within and the gum you are chewing. My gum was growing stale and I saw Mia there by the railing, I saw her purple-green feathers, and she was smiling the way she smiles at boys we laugh at between ourselves later, after parties. She was smiling at Luke and he was smiling back and it was the way he smiled at me and I didn’t feel anything but nausea and suddenly sick, sick. I wasn’t aware of my fist or that I’d walked over but suddenly the rhinestones she’d stuck in delicate patterns on her face were cutting her; I’d punched them into her cheek. Kaleidoscope of colours and above me sunlight as hot as death and then suddenly, slowly, darkness.