Suspended Sentences. Mark McWatt

      PREFACE

      The idea of writing a book of short stories, purportedly by different authors and within a narrative frame, first occurred to me in 1989, when I remember discussing it briefly with David Dabydeen, who thought that it would prove too difficult to maintain distinctions between the styles/voices of the story-tellers. He was (is) probably right, but I wasn’t concerned too much with that, I just wanted to try it if/when I got the chance. A brief (and very immature) version of one of the stories existed since 1969, but the writing of the collection really began in the summer of 1999 in Toronto, when I wrote the first draft of ‘Uncle Umberto’s Slippers’. That story and two others, plus a draft of a fourth, were completed during the month of June, 2000, which I spent as a guest in the small Benedictine Monastery overlooking the Mazaruni river in Guyana. It rained incessantly and I am eternally grateful to Brother Paschal and the other monks for providing me with the time and atmosphere (and that wonderful room looking out on the river) perfect for writing. Over the next two years the plan of the collection was worked out in detail, including the names and personalities of the story-tellers (many modelled loosely on my own college classmates from the mid-sixties) but, although I tinkered a bit with the stories already written, I could not find enough time to write the rest of them until I took sabbatical leave in 2002-03. Two more stories were completed in Toronto before Christmas of 2002 and all the others were written (and the whole book revised) in a little staff flat at the University of Warwick, where I was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Caribbean Studies from January to July, 2003. I’m very grateful to the Centre and the University for the opportunity to work on several writing projects, prominently including this one.

      I was told by a literary agent in London (to whom I had sent the typescript) that, although he personally enjoyed the book of stories, collections of short fiction were not at the time commercially marketable, and I would have to try a small publisher somewhere. I’m not so sure about ‘small’, but Peepal Tree Press – in the person of Jeremy Poynting – agreed to read the book and decided to publish it. For this I am very grateful.

      I should thank Joanne Davis, whose delight with the stories she read and whose e-mailed demands for more helped me to keep working on them in the little flat at Warwick. My wife Amparo and my children Ana and Philip also read many of the stories as I finished them, and offered valuable – and sometimes mischievous – comments. I must mention too Margaret McWatt, Wayne McWatt, Ronnie Ramsay, Paschal Jordan, Al Creighton, Hazel Simmons-McDonald and, especially, Gloria Lyn, who all commented usefully on some or all of the stories. David Dabydeen was kind enough to read the completed typescript at a time when he was busy with the finishing touches to his own latest novel. To all these, and any whom I have omitted, I am extremely grateful for the time you took to read my work, for your kind encouragement and your valuable critical comments.

      Mark McWatt

      INTRODUCTION

      This collection of stories is a project I inherited from my cousin Victor Nunes, who disappeared somewhere in the Pomeroon in 1991. His mother, my aunt Margot, sent a message to me to come and see her urgently about something important when I visited Guyana in 1994, and she handed me a battered grey box-file which contained versions of six of the stories and several pages of Victor’s notes and drafts; she told me that he had considered it an important project and a serious obligation, although several of ‘the others’ (and she gave me an accusing look), didn’t seem to share his concern... It was true that I had put off the business of finishing my own story for the collection, in part because I was not convinced that there was ever any legal obligation to do so, but also because Victor had always insisted that mine be the last story in the collection, and that it must tell the tale of what happened on the night of the ‘celebration’ which had resulted in the ‘court case’ and the imposed sentence of writing stories for and about our (at the time) newly independent Guyana. On the other hand, I’d always considered it a good pretext for getting a collection of short stories published, and had never entirely abandoned my part in the project.

      I told Aunt Margot – in fact she made me promise solemnly – that I would take over and complete the business of collecting, editing and publishing the stories, if only that they might serve, as she put it, as a fitting memorial to her son who had disappeared overboard in the Pomeroon river and was presumed drowned. The more I read of the material in the box-file (and the more stories and revisions I was able to wring out of the scattered members of the gang), the more enthusiastic I became about seeing the project concluded, but I have not really had the time both to pester the delinquent contributors and to work steadily at the editing, and it is only now, in the third year of a new millennium that I’ve managed to complete the task – some two years after, I might add, the demise of my aunt Margot.

      For the rest of this introduction I make use of Victor Nunes’ drafts and jottings (in italics – as opposed to my own interpolations, which are in normal script, and between square brackets). The stories themselves are roughly in the order he had devised, although four of the six stories that he would have read have been revised by their authors at my invitation.

      THE GANG

      [written in August, 1966]

      The authors of these stories were members of a gang of sixth-formers at St. Stanislaus College, most of whom completed their A-level exams in 1966, a month after Guyana achieved independence. It was not a gang in the sense that we had a specific purpose or aim, but rather a group people thrown together by time and circumstance who chose to spend their spare time together, whether it be to study or to lime. I suppose I was leader of the gang by default, as it were, and because I took the trouble to do what minimal organizing was necessary for our various study and other sessions... St. Stanislaus [was in those days] of course a boys’ school, but there were a couple of convent girls eagerly conscripted into our gang, since they attended

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