PRELUDE

Someone calls my name and I come back from my reverie. People are leaving, a mourning throng in funereal black, lined like ants on the narrow track that leads away from the graveyard to the road. Someone urges me out of the cemetery yard with a hand between my shoulders. I go, dry leaves crunching under my feet. I should have said something, mentioned some small kindness, made some pithy pronouncement - no long speech to tempt the listeners' patience, no tearful tribute, no theatrical flourish of showy grief. The thing had to be simple and plain.

Even in the church, we shied from the mic when called to the rostrum. The silence became unbearably taut. Finally, an old man rose and wobbled forward to mumble something indecipherable. Then another and another stepped forward. Their brevity elicited applause. In all, perhaps ten minutes passed. Even the preacher, sweating hard, made quick work of his sermon. It was about divine love, about loving the loveless. I was drawn to the scar on the preacher's otherwise handsome face.

Outside the church, four pallbearers lifted the coffin onto the bier, and wheeled it out, feet first, to the hearse, for the short, slow ride to the graveyard. We on foot processed to the cemetery, singing old hymns I remembered from childhood: "Shall We Gather at the River", "Rock of Ages", "Blessed Assurance", and, most plangent, "In the Sweet By and By", where we sang of our hopes to meet on that beautiful shore.

In the cemetery, no one called on me to say anything and I stood apart and watched. What could I have said? That I knew the boy who became the dead man, that he was so, and he was so. Perhaps no one remembered who I was. For an earlier generation, my name and face would have meant something. There were no faces I recognised among those who were clumped thick around the hole in the ground, peering down at the burnished, old-fashioned coffin, at the little window in the top through which the tenant would not see the last ritual of his passing. The earth reclaimed its lump of clay. There was no crying, no show of grief or sadness. This seemed fitting.

I knew the boy but not the man. That I was there at all was an accident - as, too, was his reason for being here. A week earlier, on a misty foreday morning, driving east on the Rupert Craig out of the capital, he had fallen asleep at the wheel of his brand-new RAV 4 near Non Pariel, swerved right, crossed into westbound traffic and was broadsided by a speeding padi truck. That was it. He was fifty-nine, three years older than me. I might have said to the people here that the dead man was a childhood friend - but just an acquaintance when we were men. But they knew his age and they knew more about the man than could be said at such a moment. Little was said and most of it was lies. I said nothing. I did not want to lie.

Out on the road, I stood on newly mown grass plunging down to a trench reeking of new spawn and pollywogs among the hyacinths and regia. It was the season when, as boys, we would have waded in and, with our arms plunged up to the elbows in mud, culled wriggling hoori, hassa, sunfish, even alligators and snakes from the murk. Most of us had fled the country, some like me to the snow countries up north, others to the islands. In ten years, the country had been emptied of its bright and beautiful, drained of our talents and brains. Now, some were returning home to visit. Things were changing.

There were bright streetlights along the road, once a two-lane blacktop where the tar bubbled in high sun. Open cowpasture of tawny sawgrass had made way for houses; jhandees flailed behind whitewashed palings and there was a car in every yard. As if by magic, some witch's wand was turning spiffy and new all that had been old and decayed.

I had imagined the place different, but not as different as it was. It was twenty-five years since my last visit, and I saw the results of the recent economic boom. New buildings were going up everywhere; skeletal frames and scaffolding towered in the sky. In the street near my hotel, a thousand foreign tongues were raised in the cadence of commerce. Those of us returning, coming in from the cold, saw that, with oil, everything Guyanese was in vogue. They had even resurrected me from the dustbin of history, so that I might say wise and foolish things on their television shows. I was now a guest speaker and lecturer, invited into the private homes of important people who remembered that once, a long time ago, I had run marathons and won medals in important races. And here I was, a guest in my own country. I had changed, too, but though glad to see all this new prosperity, I did not feel renewed.

Standing in the road I felt dazed and vague. Images of men and women slid across my retinas without being fully apprehended. A riot of words struck my ears. They signified nothing. I hear an insistent chorus of waves from the sea, and a small voice, sounding like my own, with a child's lilting timbre, soft and adolescent. It spoke the Creole of courtesy and good manners; it said, Open your eyes. I did and recalled myself to the present. Somewhere nearby a televised cricket game blared. The wind, reeking of crab and kelp, rode into Abary. A flock of ibises, brilliantly pink, passed overhead in a chevron, making for the marshes. I stood with my hands folded across my chest and waited for Audibey to come with the car that would take us back to Central.

I watched the departing crowd, strangers to me, studying the faces, trying to link a new generation to my own. They were heading for the rumshop and I imagined the ready banter of reminiscence once the rum was on the table, the drumming, the music, the mean talk, then, near false dawn, the descent of drunken joviality into fisticuffs and sometimes knife play.

I could not remember what the new buildings had replaced, except the church had once doubled as a dance hall. In its stead was a bond warehouse, square with a curved roof, on which a rooster weathervane half-turned in the wind. It seemed incongruous. I began to doubt what I knew.

The cemetery itself was larger, more populous. Where once the proliferating green had been left to grow riotous and wayward, meticulous order now reigned. The neem and samans had been delimbed or made to canopy over the path that divided the plot. The narrow tracks between the tombs were kept weeded and the closely mown lawn had been edged with a fierce accuracy. Its green was so green it seemed artificial, like astroturf. The tombs, lined up just so on a grid, were newly whitened, save where lichen grew at their bases. The vanity of the living impinged upon the careless dead.

Coming into the village earlier that day, riding shotgun while Audibey drove, I'd asked her to stop so I could walk into it. She walked alongside me, tall, thin, and pretty. Her face was more our father's than my own, with an Indian hint of her mother in the long straight nose and the luxuriant, anthracite-dark hair harnessed behind with a little girl's red ribbon. She was thirty, twenty-six years my junior, the late late child of our father, who had been thought long past his seeding time. She'd been a surprise for him and me, but not her mother, who was young enough to be my father's daughter and my sister. Perhaps there is hope for me, yet.

The lights through the trees dappled the tombs below. I tried to remember who was buried where, but time had weathered away epitaph and date on the shale and concrete. Once, long ago, I had slept on the tombs in the mora's shade and shied down mangoes from a tree that was no longer there, eating the fruit nourished by my ancestors and slurping its juice from my fingers.

As we walked on, I recognised names on the newer tombs. Here was Mary Abna, a childhood sweetheart who died of leukaemia while I was at the university, and there, Dado Narine, and next to him, his wife, Two Panty, whose real name, blurred on the basalt headstone, I could not recall. Over there in the bamboo shade was Ma Tussette, the obeah woman, and her beloved brother, Uncle Percy, the old sluice watchman. There were many many more.

So much death. I felt weary and turned back to the road.

"Which one is he, the dead man?" Audibey asked.

I was puzzled and looked at her uncomprehending.

"What do you mean?"

"In your book," she said. "The one you wrote in the exercise books in Dad's library. Which boy is the dead man?"

"You read the book?"

"Yes. It is good. I like it. Dad read it too."

"Really?"

"We talked about it. He said you could have been a novelist."

"Really?"

"Yes! So, who was the man?"

I told her.

She nodded calmly. "Are the rest of them alive, your friends in the book?"

"Some are. Where are the books now? I haven't seen them in thirty years."

"They're where they always were, on a shelf in Dad's library. He put them in plastic covering."

"He did?"

"You can read it over now that you are here. When did you write it?"

"I was sixteen when I finished the first draft. Then I worked on it when I was twenty or so. I was at the university then."

"Here?"

"Yes, at UG. I was twenty-two when I went to the States."

"I wasn't even born then," she said, smiling. "You are...