The Master of Chaos Read online

  THE MASTER OF CHAOS

  and Other Fables

  ALSO BY PAULINE MELVILLE

  Eating Air

  The Migration of Ghosts

  The Ventriloquist’s Tale

  Shape-Shifter

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  PO Box 41

  Muir of Ord

  IV6 7YX

  Scotland

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © Pauline Melville 2021

  Editor: Moira Forsyth

  The moral right of Pauline Melville to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Singing in the Dark Times was first published by Unbound, 2018; Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary Discuss their Suicides was first published by Electric Literature, 2021.

  ISBNe: 978-1-913207-55-7

  Cover design by Jason Anscomb

  Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

  For Angus

  And for the Melville tribe in and out of Guyana

  CONTENTS

  The Master of Chaos

  Fable of a Laureate

  Reason has its Limits

  Fable of a God Forgotten

  The Dostoyevsky House

  Fable of a Missing Word

  The Dream of Ocalan: A Fable

  Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary Discuss Their Suicides

  The Dark Photon

  A Fable of Tales Untold

  Let Me Out

  Morne Jaloux

  A Bright Yellow Bag

  Singing in the Dark Times

  THE MASTER OF CHAOS

  We arrived late at night in Georgetown, capital city of Guyana, and stood outside my grandmother’s enormous white wooden house with its latticed verandas and galleries. My father rang the bell.

  ‘Mohammed. Lock up de dogs,’ a voice commanded from an upper window.

  We waited until the night watchman had rounded up the dogs which were slavering behind the fence. My grandmother came down to unlock the gate. She walked towards us, a handsome, mahogany-skinned woman, slender and well-proportioned with a baggy dramatic face and permanent dark circles under her eyes. She wore a simple blouse and elegant calf-length cotton pants. The glowing tip of her cigarette traced red hieroglyphics in the black night air as she beckoned us in:

  ‘Come in quickly. I hear thunder.’

  My mother and father went in first. I followed them. I had not met my grandmother before. At fifteen I was proud of the first few wispy hairs of my moustache. I stepped forward to shake her hand but she had already turned and dashed back inside to cover the TV with a pillow-slip in case lightning struck. We waited in the entrance lobby with our bags while she disappeared upstairs, going from room to room around the house covering various electrical appliances with cloths and hanging towels over the mirrors.

  ‘If lightning strikes a mirror – you dead,’ she announced as she came down and ushered us into the spacious front room where she moved from window to window, cigarette between her lips, closing the jalousies.

  ‘So you’re Guilford are you? My only grandson.’ She scrutinised me for a moment or two with an air of disappointment before turning to my parents. ‘I hate thunder. I can’t stand it.’ As she spoke the lights dipped and the house sank into darkness. ‘Look at that. The voltage. Low voltage. The lights are going. I hate this country. This country is a mess. Mess? It’s a toilet bowl. Oh God, why did you have to give us this government?’

  There was a magnificent humour in her theatrical depression as she threw herself back onto the sofa and crossed her legs. The lights gained strength again.

  My father addressed her with affection. ‘Well, you’all voted them in, Mother.’

  ‘I have never met anyone in this country who is sane,’ she proclaimed with a mixture of pride and scorn, dismissing my father’s comment with a gesture. She drew on her cigarette. ‘They are all crazy. Someone should take all de politicians and put them on an island in the Corentyne. No water. No electricity. No food. Let them survive. “Prosperity is round de corner”, they say. It always round de blasted corner.’ She paused and then: ‘How did he die?’

  We had brought my grandfather’s body back from England for him to be buried in his homeland. According to legend, men of African descent fly back to Africa after their death. Typically, he had flown in the wrong direction.

  ‘A heart attack,’ said my father.

  She looked momentarily saddened. Then she moved towards the window, pulled the jalousie slats apart and threw the cigarette stub into the garden.

  ‘Pansy my cook doesn’t like me to smoke in de house.’

  My grandfather was a gambler. He came from that generation of men in the old British Guiana who were graceful simulacra of the British gentleman, a charming, mocking shadow of the real thing. In that part of the world the past sometimes succeeds in pushing the present out of the way. My grandfather was tall, slim with a pale brown complexion the colour of agate. He liked to wear dark glasses even when it was raining and kept a black silk opera hat that folded down into his suitcase. He smoked cigars and of all the rum in the world he preferred El Dorado along with his favourite snack of grilled peanuts.

  He used to visit us in England but never stayed long. Sometimes when he took off his sunglasses I would catch his eye and the twinkle in it confirmed an affinity between us. People observed that, as I grew taller, I looked more and more like him. Occasionally, he took me with him when he gambled. I remember a damp room in Tottenham where I looked on as his long-fingered brown hand unfurled like the wing of an archangel to cast the dice on the cheap veneer coffee table.

  His dice were unusual. They were the Crown and Anchor dice, popular with eighteenth-century seamen. Instead of being marked with one to six pips they had the card suits, spade, club, heart and diamond carved on four sides and then a red crown and a black anchor on the other two. Players use a special board marked with pictures of each suit and the crown and anchor. My grandfather’s dice were light, knuckle-bone weight and yellow ivory in colour. He told me they were made from the bones of a gambling friend, an Amerindian man who had died in the swampy interior of the Mazaruni River. He thought they brought him luck. As did a constellation to the upper left of Orion when it rose in the night sky. He pointed it out to me one night. The constellation of twins Castor and Pollux represented his birth sign, Gemini, but he told me that the Aztecs knew it as the constellation of the Frog. The two bright stars that represented the twins’ heads in Western mythology became the two eyes of the Frog for the Aztecs. He preferred the Aztec version.

  ‘Are you superstitious, Grandpa?’ I asked.

  ‘Only on Tuesdays,’ he replied.

  Another time, when he was having a run of luck, he smuggled me into the Chandos Club in Mayfair. As a twelve-year-old boy I was not allowed into the main area of the casino so I stayed in the cloakroom nestling amongst alpaca overcoats that smelled faintly of tobacco and expensive aftershave. From there I could see everything. At the gaming table my grandfather had a monkish austerity. He was an ascetic of the casino. The subdued glow of soft lighting caught his high cheekbones. His dark glasses hung on a thin gold chain around his neck. His eyes were bright and watchful. Each win was a glimpse of heaven through the laws of mathematics, as if the roof of some giant astronomical observatory had rolled back to reveal the vastness of a star-studded night sky and the eternal order of the universe. He had a dislike of the everyday world outside. It boiled with emotions and daylight and dist
ress. Once inside he gave himself over to the calm atmosphere of the casino with its satanically polite croupiers, those servants of the infinite reach of fate.

  He talked to me once about chance and fate as we waited in the rain for a bus to Lewisham.

  ‘Chance is random. Fate is not. Fate has a plan and fate wins in the end,’ he said while the rain drummed on his umbrella. ‘But chance allows you to think you can escape fate for a little while. Look. Here come de bus. We in luck.’

  And that was what he enjoyed. Bucking fate.

  For a light-skinned ‘red’ man in British Guiana, barriers presented themselves. He worked first as a clerk for Sandbach Parker and then for Booker. Despite his remarkable accounting skills and his gift for mathematics, the top posts eluded him. They were available only to white Englishmen. There seemed to be no way of escaping this particular fate and he felt eviscerated, unmanned by it – until, that is, he discovered gambling.

  Gambling, contrary to public perception, was for my grandfather a way of controlling his own destiny. The decisions were his and his alone. Gambling does not care about the past. No game depends or builds on the previous one. Losing is bad but there is always another opportunity, that fresh start, the optimist’s clean sheet, the new dawn and undiscovered Eden. When he lost everything and only had one twenty dollar bill left, he did not see his decision to stake that last sum as an act of desperation or foolhardiness. He saw it as a test of courage. It was the act of a brave man. Did he have the nerve to risk everything? Yes, he did. He was the captain going down with the ship. He was the commander sacrificing his own life for those of his troops. And the inevitable financial loss? Well, it was an acceptable martyrdom. It was worth it to become a man again.

  Newly married, he grasped his young wife’s hands as they stood under the jacaranda tree outside the white latticed fence of their house and he swore that she would eventually be prosperous beyond her wildest dreams.

  ‘Oh yes, indeed,’ sighed my grandmother, rolling her eyes. But she adored him and fished in her purse once again to push a few thousand dollars into his hand.

  In the end, with a confetti shower of promises, he left his wife and two children – my father and my aunt Selma – to travel the world as a professional gambler. He was gone for years at a time. At irregular intervals he would turn up or sometimes various amounts of money would appear in Grandmother’s bank account. Fortunately, the house had belonged to her family. She kept tight hold of the deeds and she was shrewd enough not to let him gamble them away. But the household gradually went into decline. Furniture was sold. School fees went unpaid. Fewer staff were employed.

  Meanwhile, Grandfather’s success at cards – and he had some successes – was a way of putting order on chaos and becoming, briefly, Master of Chaos, as he termed it. But the mastery only lasted for a while. Chaos and disorder disrupted his life outside the casino. Rents were forfeited. Mistresses were abandoned. For a while his consort was a red-haired French woman, obscene and erotic, who wore purple and had a dread of fire. She deserted him because he left his cigar stubs burning in the house. In Port O’Spain he lived on his wits, eating sardines from a tin in a room that consisted entirely of bare boards. When things were going well, he took up residence on the third floor of Claridge’s Hotel in London and started every evening with a chilled Italian white wine. In Lagos he was forced to live on the street. But that did not trouble him. He travelled further and gambled more. He brushed all domestic stuff aside and devoted himself to the requirements of order, the sublime pattern of infinity and fate itself.

  At the end of his life I accompanied Grandfather to the seedy Oasis and Stars gambling den in Peckham. He was already dancing on the edge of extinction. That night he lost heavily and left the table. He was exhausted. Tiny red capillaries showed up in the yellowish whites of his eyes. But even as he lost on the last throw, he stood up smiling. For on defeat the slate is wiped clean. He went to the bar and ordered his favourite El Dorado rum. Within seconds, as the liquor hit the back of his gullet it was all to play for again. Cleansed and absolved, he could start afresh. The whole world was ahead of him.

  People at the bar had not noticed, until he keeled over, that he wore no shoes.

  Waking on that first morning in Georgetown I found myself in a bedroom full of light and air in a city built of space. The house was like a box kite anchored to the ground. Demerara shutters opened to welcome the soft trade winds. Gauzy curtains tossed in the window. Mosquito netting ballooned like a ship’s sails in the breeze. Later in the morning the same nets were transformed by a maid who twisted them into white tornados and left them hanging over the frame. Unlike London, weighed down with stone and concrete, the houses in this city seemed poised to fly upwards as if the whole city could take flight and alight elsewhere. To me, everything felt ethereal and insubstantial. A phantom city.

  I left my bed to look out of the window. A paved backyard was lined with anthurium and dragon-tongue shrubs. Two giant Victoria Regina lily pads, like green flan cases, floated on the surface of a stagnant pond. And then an unexpected sight made me catch my breath. On the inside window sill just in front of me sat a tiny exquisite frog, pale gold in colour and not more than an inch long. Black eyes, disproportionately large, protruded from either side of its head. I could just detect a pulse in its throat. I held my breath as I watched. Quite without warning it gave a staggering leap, its back legs stretching out behind it and landed on grandfather’s Crown and Anchor board which I’d left on the bedside table. It squatted there delicate and motionless on the red ‘hearts’ sign. Not wanting to disturb it I crept away into the bathroom to dress. When I came out it had gone.

  Downstairs in the kitchen my grandmother stood by the open window with a telephone to each ear. She was talking to the bank on one phone and ordering a coffin on the other:

  ‘I will need two hundred thousand dollars in cash. What do you mean I don’t have it?’ She rolled her eyes and turned to me as I came down the stairs: ‘What is wrong with these banking people?’ She put her hand over one phone and spoke down the other: ‘Not de most expensive coffin and not too cheap. I will come and inspect it this afternoon.’

  My father appeared.

  ‘Mother, we can use the coffin he was shipped down in. It’s very grand. You don’t need to buy another.’

  Outside the sky began to boil with grey clouds and there was a tropical downpour. A maid went running out to snatch washing off the line at the back. Grandmother finished her argument with the bank, slammed down the phone and glared through the window at the inclement weather. Then she turned to Pansy the cook who was scouring pans at the sink.

  ‘Don’t serve us any of that hard-arsed meat at the funeral tea, Pansy.’

  Pansy the cook was squat and surly. Her plaited hair had the texture of a scouring pad and she wore something akin to a nurse’s uniform with a striped pinafore.

  ‘And not too much chow mein.’ Grandmother talked as she busied herself putting some crockery back in the cupboard. ‘I don’t like the Chinese. As soon as Chinese came to this neighbourhood all the stray dogs disappeared off de road. And the rats too. Four were found in a jar in the Chinese restaurant. I’ll wait till the rain stops and then I’m going to take a taxi and see Father Gordon. Would you bring us coffee in the front room just now, Pansy?’

  In the front room my mother was peering through the open jalousies at the torrential rain. The sound of an ambulance siren swept past on the road outside.

  A worried expression passed over my mother’s face. ‘Sounds like an accident or something.’

  ‘Not at all. Nothing of the sort.’ Grandmother sat down on the sofa and fanned herself with the newspaper. ‘That is an ambulance that drives up and down the road all day. There is nobody in it. The man just likes transporting himself up and down de road sounding his siren. Go and fetch my glasses, Guilford dear. They are upstairs by my bed. I want to read the paper.’

  I made my way through a maze of galleries and p
assageways upstairs until I found the bedroom with the glasses. From another part of the house where she had separate quarters I could hear the trilling laugh of my Aunt Selma who was on the telephone. I had met her the night before. She was fifty-six years old, hugely fat with pouchy cheeks, and wore her crinkly hair in two grey plaits that came down in front of her ears. She had come stomping towards me with open arms crooning as she spoke:

  ‘Oh this is my little nephew. Hello my darling, my little sweetie-pie. Come and sit by me.’ She patted the seat next to her and to my annoyance cooed over me as if I were a small child. However, within minutes she exhibited a fit of bad temper and stood up and shouted through the open window at the night watchman because the dogs were barking. The outburst was followed by an apologetic titter. My mother told me that Aunt Selma had never married, fearing that any children might inherit the rogue gambling gene which had destroyed their family life. She occupied herself with organizing cultural activities and charity events.

  I came back downstairs with the glasses. My grandmother had an irritated expression on her face as she listened to Selma’s laughter.

  ‘That girl never stops talking. She always on de phone,’ complained Grandmother. Then she yelled:

  ‘Selma. Come down and play snakes and ladders with your nephew. He’s bored.’

  ‘Mother.’ Selma screamed from upstairs and her foot could be heard stamping on the floor above. ‘Can’t you hear that I am on de phone. I am talking.’

  Grandmother ignored the tantrum and turned her irritation on me:

  ‘These glasses you gave me don’t work. They are trick ones.’

  Then she put down the paper with a sigh and sipped her coffee.

  ‘Our life used to be so different. Oh, how I miss those early days. Everything was elegant. Your grandfather sat at the head of the table. Your great-aunt Albertha made all the lace for the edging on the tablecloths. To clean the table we had a tiny silver dustpan and a brush with a silver top to sweep away the crumbs. But your grandfather, bless him, was a renegade and disappeared.’ She sighed. ‘Then everything went to pot. My family helped but the money’s finished now and everything’s gone to the dogs. We livin’ like . . . ghosts.’ Her voice trailed off.