My mother’s face fell.
I said, ‘Is a bad sign?’
She didn’t answer.
Bhakcu was blowing the horn.
We got into the van and Bhakcu drove away, down Miguel Street and up Wrightson Road to South Quay. I didn’t look out of the windows.
My mother was crying. She said, ‘I know I not going to ever see you in Miguel Street again.’
I said, ‘Why? Because I knock the milk down?’
She didn’t reply, still crying for the spilt milk.
Only when we had left Port of Spain and the suburbs I looked outside. It was a clear, hot day. Men and women were working in rice-fields. Some children were bathing under a stand-pipe at the side of the road.
We got to Piarco in good time, and at this stage I began wishing I had never got the scholarship. The airport lounge frightened me. Fat Americans were drinking strange drinks at the bar. American women, wearing haughty sun-glasses, raised their voices whenever they spoke. They all looked too rich, too comfortable.
Then the news came, in Spanish and English. Flight 206 had been delayed for six hours.
I said to my mother, ‘Let we go back to Port of Spain.’
I had to be with those people in the lounge soon anyway, and I wanted to put off the moment.
And back in Miguel Street the first person I saw was Hat. He was strolling flat-footedly back from the Café, with a paper under his arm. I waved and shouted at him.
All he said was, ‘I thought you was in the air by this time.’
I was disappointed. Not only by Hat’s cool reception. Disappointed because although I had been away, destined to be gone for good, everything was going on just as before, with nothing to indicate my absence.
I looked at the overturned brass jar in the gateway and I said to my mother, ‘So this mean I was never going to come back here, eh?’
She laughed and looked happy.
So I had my last lunch at home, with my mother and Uncle Bhakcu and his wife. Then back along the hot road to Piarco where the plane was waiting. I recognised one of the customs’ officers, and he didn’t check my baggage.
The announcement came, a cold, casual thing.
I embraced my mother.
I said to Bhakcu, ‘Uncle Bhak, I didn’t want to tell you before, but I think I hear your tappet knocking.’
His eyes shone.
I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.