Free Collected Short Fiction by V. S. Naipaul

and sat on his knees.
    He looked into my eyes, and he said, ‘Oh, you can see it, too. I always knew you had the poet’s eye.’
    He didn’t even look sad, and that made me burst out crying loudly.
    He pulled me to his thin chest and said, ‘Do you want me to tell you a funny story?’ and he smiled encouragingly at me.
    But I couldn’t reply.
    He said, ‘When I have finished this story, I want you to promise that you will go away and never come back to see me. Do you promise?’
    I nodded.
    He said, ‘Good. Well, listen. That story I told you about the boy poet and the girl poet, do you remember that? That wasn’ttrue. It was something I just made up. All this talk about poetry and the greatest poem in the world, that wasn’t true, either. Isn’t that the funniest thing you have heard?’
    But his voice broke.
    I left the house and ran home crying, like a poet, for everything I saw.
    I walked along Alberto Street a year later, but I could find no sign of the poet’s house. It hadn’t vanished, just like that. It had been pulled down, and a big, two-storeyed building had taken its place. The mango tree and the plum tree and the coconut tree had all been cut down, and there was brick and concrete everywhere.
    It was just as though B. Wordsworth had never existed.

7 THE COWARD
    BIG FOOT WAS really big and really black, and everybody in Miguel Street was afraid of him. It wasn’t his bigness or his blackness that people feared, for there were blacker and bigger people about. People were afraid of him because he was so silent and sulky; he
looked
dangerous, like those terrible dogs that never bark but just look at you from the corner of their eyes.
    Hat used to say, ‘Is only a form of showing off, you know, all this quietness he does give us. He quiet just because he ain’t have anything to say, that’s all.’
    Yet you could hear Hat telling all sorts of people at the races and cricket, ‘Big Foot and me? We is bosom pals, man. We grow up together.’
    And at school I myself used to say, ‘Big Foot does live in my street, you hear. I know him good good, and if any one of all you touch me, I go tell Big Foot.’
    At that time I had never spoken a single word to Big Foot.
    We in Miguel Street were proud to claim him because he was something of a character in Port of Spain, and had quite a reputation. It was Big Foot who flung the stone at the Radio Trinidad building one day and broke a window. When the magistrate asked why he did it, Big Foot just said, ‘To wake them up.’
    A well-wisher paid the fine for him.
    Then there was the time he got a job driving one of the diesel-buses. He drove the bus out of the city to Carenage, five miles away, and told the passengers to get out and bathe. He stood by to see that they did.
    After that he got a job as a postman, and he had a great time misplacing people’s letters. They found him at Docksite, with the bag half full of letters, soaking his big feet in the Gulf of Paria.
    He said, ‘Is hard work, walking all over the place, delivering people letters. You come like a postage stamp, man.’
    All Trinidad thought of him as a comedian, but we who knew him thought otherwise.
    It was people like Big Foot who gave the steel-bands a bad name. Big Foot was always ready to start a fight with anotherband, but he looked so big and dangerous that he himself was never involved in any fight, and he never went to jail for more than three months or so at a time.
    Hat, especially, was afraid of Big Foot. Hat often said, ‘I don’t know why they don’t lose Big Foot in jail, you know.’
    You would have thought that when he was beating his pans and dancing in the street at Carnival, Big Foot would at least smile and look happy. But no. It was on occasions like this that he prepared his sulkiest and grimmest face; and when you saw him beating a pan, you felt, to judge by his earnestness, that he was doing some sacred act.
    One day a big crowd of us – Hat, Edward, Eddoes, Boyee,