Free The Meeting Point by Austin Clarke Page B

gave it to the officer, she took her time closing the valise (some of her underclothes were visible) … All these blasted white men’s eyes looking at my panties! … and re-tied the knots.
    “This is my passport, please.”
    The immigration officer opened it, flicked the pages without actually reading anything on them; and then gave it back to her. Estelle thought: I could have done without the damn passport, if that is the way you read, my man!
    “Name?”
    She deliberately refused to answer at first; but she thought better of it, and said, almost shouting at him, “Estelle!”
    “Last name, or the first?”
    “Shepherd!”
    “Is Shepherd the first, or the last?” He too was deliberately obstinate.
    “Estelle Shepherd!” and to herself, she wondered, You can’t read? But he must have heard, or read her thoughts. He ordered the immigration officer nearest him to attend to the minister and the other passengers (his line had been served by this time); and in a rage, his face full of blood and cherries of anger, fumbling with his ball-point pen, taking three attempts to get it clipped into his breast pocket, he himself snatched up her valises and the parcel, and said, “Come with me, lady!” He went in the direction of the cubicles, glassed-round and penned-off, and on fire with an even stronger bulb of electricity. When he moved off, he did not even look back. He was confident that she would obey and follow. The black family held down its head in shame and embarrassment; the black woman sitting on the other side of the ocean from the white woman, averted her eyes; the man of God was now busy talking to the other immigration officer, and Estelle suddenly felt cold and lonely. Once more, she saw the pink face of the small boy on the aeroplane; and it was close to hers, peering into her eyes; and she could do nothing now, for the face was suspended in mid-air, and it had no neck and no body. She felt she was in the plane again, and the Chinese lady was not there. And the plane was spinning. A moment before she entered the glass cell, she looked back; but the black woman and the black family had already anticipated her gesture for sympathy, and they had already started to count the lakes of the melting overshoes, in the floor patterns. Estelle then looked up, and noticed the round electric clock on the wall, which said it was nine o’clock. She wondered what time it was back in Barbados.
    All the way to the airport, Bernice was grumbling about Mrs. Burrmann, to Dots and her husband, Boysie. Boysie wasmaking the 1942 Chevrolet compete with Cadillacs and Corvairs on the highway. Before Bernice could leave the house, she had to settle the children in bed; she had to bathe them; she had to cook their dinner of boiled potatoes, boiled carrots, boiled lamb, and warm milk. She’d turned her back to run upstairs and make up their beds, and when she returned, their plates were clean, except for swishes and curves of gravy where the forks had passed swiftly over, as the boiled potatoes, boiled carrots, boiled lamb had skidded into the garbage pail.
But God blind you, kids! You-all don’t know they is thousands o’ children all over this world tonight starving like hell? and you two, you-you-you
… Bernice was in a rage. “Mrs. Burrmann!” she shouted. But when Mrs. Burrmann came into the kitchen (where the children regularly ate their dinner), Bernice decided not to inform on them. “I was, I was wondering if you need more firewood in the fireplace, or something, ma’am.” Mrs. Burrmann looked puzzled; stared at Bernice for a while, and went back to the sitting-room where she was lighting small cones of incense. (The party was on again: but it was being called a sherry party now.) The children sniggered. They were not hungry, they said; they wanted wiener-sausages and potato chips, which Bernice gave them. They ate it, bathing it in tomato ketchup, and washed it down with Coca-Cola. And they were happy as angels.