England’s funny mood

We leave shortly after and my friend says to me — her words visible puffs that rise above our heads — “I’m surprised they let those girls in. Normally when those sort of girls try to get in the club they brace them by the door and say, ‘nah, not tonight.”

She giggles; everyone likes the idea of exclusivity. I ask her why they don’t usually get in. “They’re too ghetto,” she explains. “They look like they’re from Chapel Town. That’s where all the poor black people are up here. Sometimes they act up and they don’t even want to let me in. That’s when they’re in their funny mood.”

I look at her with her delicate features and her light brown skin made even lighter by several years of English winter. She looks like money, mainly because she is, financially, quite comfortable.

I am a bit disturbed by this easy confession. It’s stuff I’d heard of back home; clubs that hide racial discrimination behind false pretences of members’ only night, but it’s something I’ve never experienced first hand.

She goes on to tell me of another club where she holds exclusive membership and where, for her birthday, she was denied entrance. “We were told it was members only then when we showed them our cards we were told there was no space inside. Same time he said that a group of white boys came up on the side of him and entered the club. It’s only because the manager came down and saw us that we got in. Too many black people.”

I’m shocked by the casual, matter of fact way she tells me this - no anger, no resentment. “Do you still go back there?” I ask, incredulous. She replies not really but mainly because she’s not much of a night person. Her boyfriend and his friends go all the time. “There are tables in there where, to sit there, you have to spend a minimum of ?200. That’s the table they usually take.” If they’re allowed to go in to be relieved of their ?200 that is.

I muse over this as we make our way home. In the club we’ve just come from there were East Indians, Asians. How many of them had dressed carefully, expensively, hoping to distance themselves from the stereotypes that would have denied them entrance.

I think also of the five black girls who had entered the club, clad in the confidence of ghetto glam, their walks a challenge to the other people in the club. The black lipstick, hair of varying levels of syntheticness. We had left shortly after they had arrived and stood in front of us, either as a veiled threat or because out of the people there, we were the closest to what they knew and were comfortable with, although in truth there would have been little similarity between their group and ours.

I wonder how much of life in Trinidad, with its obsession with colour and hair texture and hierarchy of races had prepared my friend for this matter of fact acceptance of judgment. A German girl of mixed desent didn’t know what we were talking about. There were no black people in Germany she said, especially where she was from, further more for poor black people.

She had no idea what a ghetto was, far less for recognising what it looked like. Asking why their arrival had made us leave we replied that they looked like trouble, the way they stood, the angle of the cigarettes in their mouths, the hands on the hips and folded under their breasts. If we had only made a mistake and stepped on their feet we would have seen the ghetto beasts in them unleashed, we’d joked. She had smiled but replied, “But how do you know that that’s the way they would have reacted?”

How indeed?