Life's Fare Read online

  Even with all this variety, She really still wasn’t one hundred percent happy.

  “Maybe it just needs a little something to shake things up a bit,” She mused. “Maybe something that might be a bit sparky, something that might be capable of tremendous things. Possibly they might not all work out, but it would be fun to see how things might develop – probably win a few, lose a few.”

  Then it came to Her. “How about I put something there in the image of Me?” She thought. “At least an image of what I think I should look like. I could tone it down a bit, maybe even put a couple of Me down there with different lumpy bits here and there, and see which one of them gets on the best. A sort of competition, though I’m sure that they won’t see it like that at all. Who knows, they may even be able to work out this funny jerky movement thing,” and with that, the last addition was put in place.

  She looked down on what She and Her team had created, and She saw that it was good.

  “Shit hot,” She said smugly to Herself. “Do you know what, I’ve been working damned hard for six days on the trot now, sod it, I’m bloody well going to have Soonday off.”

  Umhlabathi 1.1 Feb 5th 1921; Castries

  The twin peaks of Les Pitons on the beautiful island of St Lucia towered over the sleepy town of Castries. It was a warm, sultry night, typical for this time of the year, and in the maternity ward of the Castries General Hospital a new infant was brought into the world amidst much wailing, pushing, swearing and sweating – and that was just from his father. The father, an able-bodied seaman from Pontypridd with over fifteen years’ experience in the Merchant Navy had never been considered as a prime example of one of life’s steady supportive types but he did have one hell of a baritone voice, often used to good effect come the usual singing at the end of the night’s heavy drinking sessions. He had taken one look at the blood-smeared, hairy, newly born baby boy still attached to Mrs. Marley by the fragile cord of life, gulped a swift set of four healthy glugs from the bottle of Jamaican Old Navy rum he had purchased for this auspicious occasion, kissed the new mother fleetingly on her sweat-flattened hair, then dashed out of the hospital never to be seen again.

  Mrs Marley hurled the rum bottle cap at the door with an angry shout. “You Welsh bastard! Don’t you rush to come back!”

  The top had hit the edge of the door handle with such ferocity that it dented slightly, then had fallen silently to the floor. The duty matron on shift had come into the delivery room to see what all the shouting was about, and she proceeded to put her over-sized foot which was attached to her proportionally over-sized body right on top of the now prostrate bottle cap. In spite of its best efforts, the top gave way to the unstoppable force that was now bearing down on it, and consequently, what had been a perfect threaded circle picked up a sharp crease and for all the world to see, took on the resemblance of a slightly squashed heart. “Hmmmph,” snorted Mrs Marley, “that just about sums it all up, a squashed heart,” and she bent over to pick up the misshapen top that the matron had angrily kicked across the room after having cursed under her breath and hopped about for much longer than was really necessary. The only thing which appeared to be unaffected by the whole scene was the crowing cockerel on the top of the cap, which had remained unflustered in spite of its sudden meeting with either the solid door handle or the sole of the matron’s size 10 left shoe.

  “You’d better not grow up like your father, boy,” she muttered to the squirming, crying baby, “and don’t you go around crushing hearts like this here top, you hear me?” and she pulled the baby close to her, almost squashing the breath out of him, kissing the top of his soft head – such was Stanley’s welcome to the world.

  Life in St Lucia was good; very good; some might say too good. Everyone on the island agreed that the Gods had certainly smiled down from on high as they crafted the lush Caribbean island with its beautiful sandy beaches and its verdant forests crammed with exotic creatures. With Les Pitons seductively nestled between Soufriere and Choiseul on the western side of the island, local belief was that there was no doubt that that Gods had indeed been partaking of a spot of Ganja at the time the island was created. This being so, it confirmed the average St Lucian’s belief that not only was this “God’s Island,” it was also one’s religious duty to pay homage to God every now and then (and every Sunday of course) by having the occasional splif.

  Umhlabathi 1.2 Apr 1932; Castries

  Some people are born lucky in life; some people make their own luck. Stanley Nelson Marley made his own luck, though he did like to keep his lucky cockerel bottle top close to hand in case, as he saw it, a little help was required.

  He was not one of life’s big winners. To be fair, neither was he one of life’s big losers. He was, in effect, just one of life’s partakers – though his mother often accused him of not even being that at times.

  “Stanley!” she could be heard to cry in frustration, “If you don’t never get off your lazy backside, how you ever going to be able to look after your poor defenceless mother in her old age?” and she would set about him with great vigour, flapping an old tea towel with Kung Fu proficiency as he tried to dodge the faded linen with the frayed edges, usually with only limited success.

  She looked at her son with a love etched with frustration, and wondered how things were going to turn out for him. Being of a superstitious nature and a firm believer in Obeah, she had decided that Stanley might do better with something to help ward off the ‘mal de ojo’, or the evil eye.

  “You gonna need all the help you can get, boy. Good job you’ve got my lucky bottle top – best luck I ever had was when that so-called father of yours buggered off. And if the mal de ojo comes looking, you just stick that right to him.”

  Stanley had grown up as a member of the minority of the island-dwellers who spoke only English rather than the more commonly used Antillean Creole. This Creole had been blended over time with the languages from various African tribesmen descended from the dark days of slavery. In his own biased and somewhat naïve way, Stanley had always thought of himself as somewhat superior to the majority of his fellow St Lucians because of this language difference, and this had given him hope as he drifted through his early school days, wondering what on earth he would ultimately do with his life.

  School was not easy in Castries. Stanley was one of seventeen lucky enough to attend the somewhat ramshackle building that passed as the “local education establishment” for those who lived in the neighbourhood, but most of his education came from the school of hard knocks and the University of Life. Stanley was good at maths. It was this ability that enabled him to engage with his friends in his class on certain exchange deals, deals which often lead to several confused class mates and several extra dollars in Stanley’s pocket. This was partly helped by the dual existence of both Sterling and the Caribbean Dollar in St Lucia at the time.

  “Stanley, how d’you do that, man?” his perplexed friends would often ask once they’d worked out that they had been relieved of certain amounts of cash when they had started off believing that they were “…on to a good thing…”

  “Ah, just me and my lucky Cockerel,” Stanley would say with a wry smile, caressing his misshapen bottle top.

  As Stanley was later to find out, life’s successes were so often down to a mixture of ability plus being in the right place at the right time – and being with dumb people.

  Stanley’s main love as a child was horses. He would often go down to the local stable yard and help groom the beautiful beasts that snorted and harrumphed their distaste at the daily routines that were requested of them. Often Stanley would build up a trust with the equine entourage that would enable him not only to get the best out of the animals, but would actually put him on a similar plane to them to allow him to understand what they were going through. This skill would come back to Stanley in years to come, both to his future delight and his future wife’s eternal dismay – William Hill was still a decade off from establishing his betting empor
ium, but both William and Stanley were destined to have many years of cut and thrust ahead of them; more cut than thrust as far as Stanley was concerned.

  It was a clear, crisp morning for a change; not typical. A good type of day for a major decision. The young boy took a deep breath and straightened himself up to his full four feet and one-inch height.

  “Mama,” said Stanley to the back of his mother’s head as she was washing up the breakfast dishes, “I is going to go to England.”

  Mrs Marley turned around from the sink, brush dripping small globules of dirty dishwater onto the hard, tiled floor.

  “What you talking about, you crazy boy? England is far away and no place where any decent St Lucia boy would ever want to go. Who have been putting these ideas into your young head?” His mother turned back to the sink with a shake of her head and continued to rub the brush vigorously against the stubborn egg remains clinging resolutely to the ornately patterned, though by now slightly faded, large china plates. “And anyway,” she continued, “you is eleven years old, how is you going to get to England? You can’t ride them horses you is always hanging around with all the way there.” Stanley looked thoughtful, then purposeful. He looked at his mother with steely conviction.

  “I is going to England,” he said again, this time with a fiery glint in his grey-blue eyes. “One day, I will go.”

  Umhlabathi 1.3 July 1936; Castries

  Stanley continued to study hard at school, continued to do well in maths, and continued to be bored with just about everything else. Like most people in his area, he stuck school until the last day of summer term, that being not too long after his 15th birthday. Along with his fellow classmates, at the falling-out party, as it was traditionally known, he burnt his old school bag in a symbolic gesture of defiance then drank two thirds of a bottle of Jamaican Old Navy rum. There ensued a diabolical ritual that included a semi-naked dance around the camp fire on the beach; much to the amusement of all present, it was his lower half that was naked. This was followed by escorting two young sisters back to their mother’s house. After respectfully saying goodnight with as much dignity as a fifteen-year-old could muster just wearing a ragged tee-shirt and a pair of flip-flops, Stanley attempted to do a limbo under a particularly low hanging branch of a nearby fig tree to impress the ladies one last time before disappearing. Just as Stanley was at optimum limbo angle to the ground, the girls’ mother opened the door to see what all the giggling was about, only to be greeted head-on by Stanley’s genitalia swinging rhythmically as they preceded the rest of him under the fig branch. In St Lucia, it was a well-known fact that most of the men had been blessed with what one might call a generous allocation of manhood – in Stanley’s case, one might say more than generous.

  Mrs Doombar let out a horrified cry as the girls ran inside shrieking with delight. Stanley collapsed to the floor in a well-mixed tangle of embarrassment and ecstasy, the sudden change of situation injecting a momentary infusion of sobriety. He struggled to his feet as quickly as his displaced flip-flops would allow him, then he dashed for the safety of the trees in the night darkness, whooping with uninhibited enjoyment.

  “Stanley Marley, is that you?” shouted the girls’ mother at the back of the rapidly disappearing Stanley as he bolted for freedom. “I know that’s you, Stanley Marley. Stanley Marley, you come back here! You wait till I tell your mama what bad nonsense you been up to with my girls. Stanley Marley, you come back here!” But Stanley was gone, running into the fresh night air with a big grin on his face that would last well into the night. “Don’t worry,” he told himself, “Be happy.”

  It was a great feeling to be rid of the strictures of school, but deep inside, Stanley felt more than a little bit vulnerable, being armed only with a somewhat scathing report in general from all his years of study. On the positive side, it did at least outline Stanley’s potential in maths.

  His teacher had written, “Unfortunately no doubt his great maths skills will come to nothing, due much to his inability to keep focused on anything longer than an eight-furlong horse race. However, we do wish him well for the future.”

  Now he was no longer attending “the establishment,” he realized that at some stage he would have to start to think about something to do with his time. After spending the first ten days after the falling-out party in a rather befuddled state hovering precariously between being drunk, being asleep, being hungover, being stoned and being asleep again, Stanley eventually realized that he would have to do something to earn some money. “Stanley,” his mother would chide, “is you ever going to get yourself something decent to do for to earn some money?” and she would look at him with such a mixture of desperation and disappointment that he would feel the fickle finger of guilt tweak at his slipped humanity.

  “Mama,” he replied, “ I will get some work here and make sure you is okay before I go off to England to become rich and famous.” His mother looked at her son with an expression that only a mother could give, a look which somehow mixed a deep everlasting love with deep everlasting exasperation.

  “Ah, Stanley, Stanley,” she said, shaking her tired head, “you is indeed a good boy, even if you is a lazy layabout and a dreamer.”

  Stanley’s response was a big grin which split his face from ear to ear – but he knew that he had to do something to bring some much-needed cash into the Marley household. He went outside to sit under his favourite Lansan tree which he had discovered years ago at the edge of the nearby beach. It stood tall and proud, and one of the things that Stanley liked most about it was the beautiful aromatic odours that its resin gave off when they cut into the bark with their pocket knives; that and its delicious fleshy fruit that he and his friends would shake down, then devour with great delight whilst their hands became ever more sticky as they pushed the ripped pieces into their eager mouths.

  Stanley would often come here to think things through, rolling his lucky bottle top back and forth in his hands as dozens of ideas and half-thought-through plans came and went inside his head. Well, maybe if not England there may be other places he could journey to; one thing was for sure, he would not be staying for ever on his beloved St Lucia island, no matter how beautiful it was.

  Umhlabathi 1.4 September 1936; Castries

  Stanley walked into the stables where he used to help groom the horses when he was much younger. He was greeted by a smiling, heavily tanned Rastafarian with leathery skin and a deep, drawn-out delivery.

  “Hey, Stanley, how’s it hanging?”

  “Doing just fine, Leroy, doing just fine. But I do need some work, my man.” Stanley sounded more downbeat than his lifelong friend had ever heard him before. Stanley explained about his great plan to go to England and to start a new life there, but that first it was imperative that he ensured his mother was going to be okay, being as she would be left alone as he set out on his great adventure.

  “What you talking about, bro? Your mama ain’t never going to be alone whilst we all got our shacks here. She’s part of all our families too.” Stanley looked at his friend as he sat back with the rolled cigarette hanging limply from his lips, a big grin on his face. Leroy’s infectious smile was famous across Castries, and even his yellowing teeth had somehow gained more than a hint of respectability, as Leroy’s persistently optimistic grin could be counted on to win over the hearts and minds of many an unsuspecting adversary, as well as the occasional unsuspecting lady.

  “Yeah man, more likely I know that she’ll be safe here, even with you guys around!” Stanley countered with a smile almost as alluring as Leroy’s, “but I still need to earn some money first to give to her, so I can make sure she’s got what she needs. So, Leroy, I is looking for a job.” Leroy sat and looked at his friend; he took a long and slow draw on his cigarette as he thought about what he could do. A persistent fly landed on Leroy’s face and started to examine the corners of Leroy’s mouth; he raised a weary hand to shoo the fly away. The fly easily avoided the casual brush-off, and instantly returned to check
out Leroy’s left nostril. This time Leroy intensified his attempts to repulse the fly by combining the waving of his hand with a vigorous shake of his head. The fly got the message this time and decided that it would be better to leave this unstable position with things thrashing all around, and return to the warmth and serenity of the dog faeces that it had just been investigating with relish, just immediately before landing on Leroy’s face.

  “I tell you what, Stanley,” he said after careful thought, “you know what it is that I think you’d be good for?” Stanley looked at Leroy with a cagey expression, expecting some sort of witty reprise or clever put down. “Bookies Runner!” exclaimed Leroy with another of his yellow-toothed infectious smiles; this made Stanley mirror the expression and rush over to shake his good friend’s unwashed hand.

  “Hey, Leroy, you is the man. Bookies Runner – that’s perfect! Might even be able to get a bit of inside info going, especially with the help of my lucky top; that’ll build up the savings for sure.”

  The next few years saw Stanley developing from a fine, strapping youth with plenty of confidence into a fine, strapping young man with plenty of confidence. Stanley managed to save a tidy amount for his mother, which was dutifully banked at the First National Bank of St Lucia, more commonly known as “The Penny Bank.” Not only did he manage to save money for his mother, but with his detailed knowledge of the local course and his talent for gauging the betting odds alongside the history of the horses that he was so familiar with, he also managed to make a little for himself and indeed advise some of the local dignitaries as to where it may be worthwhile to have a small flutter. Life was good for Stanley in the suburbs of Castries, and all the while the sun shone and the breezes gently blew, the beers were thirstily drunk, and the Ganja was eagerly smoked, provoking many a philosophical debate late into the night about why anyone should want to leave this idyll to “… go to some place far away where it’s always raining and factories belch out crap for everyone to breathe in. Man, you is crazy after all.”