Читать книгу Suspended Sentences - Mark McWatt - Страница 6

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.