Excerpt from No Safeguards

Hubert Nigel Thomas, MA 75, was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and is the author of No Safeguards (Guernica Editions Inc.). He’s a graduate of Concordia, McGill University and Université de Montréal. He was a teacher with the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal and later a professor of literature at Université Laval (1988-2006). Thomas is the author of 10 published books that include four novels, three short story collections and a collection of poems. Lives: Whole and Otherwise, a collection of stories, has been translated into French as Des vies cassées and has been shortlisted for the Sanseveria Award. Thomas’s second novel, Behind the Face of Winter, will appear in a French translation next year.

Excerpt from No Safeguards:

In St Vincent there was no chance for me to become an amateur actor, and there was none in Montreal. At seventeen going on eighteen, I’d already completed the first year of community college, so he entered CEGEP when he arrived. Paul was five months short of twelve and had already completed secondary I — always a year ahead of his classmates. Anna didn’t want Paul left alone at home. Someone had sketched for her a nightmare scenario of children left unsupervised from three until their parents got home, children who ended up being petty thieves and drug pushers. So, the first two years, I had to leave CEGEP no later than 2 pm to be home for Paul’s arrival. There was no time for extra-curricular activities. I fumed quietly. It didn’t help that aside from her regular job at the Jewish General where she often accepted overtime, Anna also worked in another hospital on her days off — until one evening when she came up the stairs out of breath and dropped onto the sofa like a bag of stones. She was on two weeks’ vacation then, and had chosen to work at another hospital.

“Ma,” Paul asked, “when last you had a day off?”

She couldn’t remember.

“Ma, I like Michael Jordan sneakers, but I don’t want you like killing yourself so I can wear them.”

“It’s not that. It’s because I want us to have our own house.”

“At the rate you’re going,” I said, “you won’t be around to live in it.”

“Ma, all you do is work, work, work,” Paul said. “Ma, you need a life. Do like Grama. She’s cool: she gets together with friends, and they have a good time on a Saturday night. Every bank holiday she’d take us off somewhere and we’d all enjoy ourselves.”

After that Anna stopped doing double shifts and worked only occasionally on her days off, but she did nothing to enrich her life. Of course, shift work didn’t help.

She forgot Paul’s first birthday here. She’d had a night shift. The day before he’d received a money order for $100 from Grama. The morning after, as Paul was heading off to school, he asked her if she hadn’t forgotten something. She gave him a puzzled look. Tears welled up in his eyes. “Ma, yesterday was my birthday.” When she attempted to hug him, he raised his arms defensively. That evening she gave him a card and $20, and ordered in pizza. But Paul, who was accustomed to having a cake baked specially for him and all the foods he liked — curried goat, oxtail, callaloo . . . — on his birthday or the first day he got back to Havre from Kingstown, was not impressed. When he left for school, Anna told me that she had been counting on him to remind her. She hadn’t forgotten my birthday a month earlier — a fact Paul unendingly reminded her of — but, apart from giving him $30, had been too tired to do anything about.

Now, nine years later, I realize these were crucial mistakes that wounded Paul, mistakes he had no coherent language for. She and Paul didn’t know each other, and she didn’t know she should have spent those first couple of years forging a bond with him. I see it now: Paul’s crying for Grama was his plea for help against the insecurity he’d been thrown into.

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