Noises Malam Deaf-and-Dumb-Man-at-the-Queens, Malam Noises, Malam Namelessness, Malam Not-Even-a-Word-or-Even-Pronoun, Not-Even-‘You’, you who sit beside me at the iron table here, my close associate. Week after week we meet. Our hands swing in the air and splash. Oh Mr Shaking-Hands-and-Shaking-Hands- and-Smiling, and with your tie-pin on, and trying to make those noises mean the simple civil things like Hello and Have a beer, that they never can: too long colonised already. From however deep down in your throat they come They don’t belong to you, and can‘t be sincere. They’re like jagged balloons of ARGHHHH across the silent pages of a monster comic. Pan or Tarzan, is it? or Caliban? Within that nameless outer inner space the holds are opened and they stagger forward with printed cries, and paper agony. Like primal self-expression in a verse. Like the drinkers now that jerk their chins up at you and grin: Greetings, Mother-Swiver! Hi there, Grand Baboon! insults that make that fear of being a beast articulate, and without knowing it you know, and turn away, and then reggae comes up through those plastic sandals filling all the hollows of your bones. And it’s the skeleton that knows how to dance perfectly, and it’s the skull alone that can hear music, and yes, as if there might indeed somehow there could exist that other island dialect somewhere in patterns of wet bark and squiggling ponds that might some- how reply. Another myth. Another bit of theatre with the burnt-cork cheeks, and steel tipped toes and white shuddering gloves.

And do the ancestors sit in the stalls to watch? What kind of tears run down their faces then? Malam Mime, Malam Clown, how many years is it since you‘ve been fixing me with that ham comic actor‘s gaze to get a beer? Eyebrows lifted, and motionless wrinkles piling up the forehead to the hair? ‘A Star?’ I hold the bottle up. Single head shake. ’Double Crown?’ Fast nodding then. I mouth and point and when I talk towards your face, I’m talking to myself, nor are the words I use my own. And yet, as happens when you hold somebody’s eyes a moment and as you smile together are remembering all the other times, I’m thinking of that first time, when I heard those noises, out by the suya sellers in the road, and how they came in through these mud walls then and through walls and through walls, as if, somewhere, the eyelids of a child had suddenly flicked open in the dark, What I thought of were the terrifying sounds of human love.

JOHN HAYNES