We going to Germany, girl

It started from the Wednesday night, my brother calling me while I was on the 19.00 train home, feet aching and toes thawing out in the heat provided by dozens of tired bodies bundled into various layers of clothes. "I just calling to tell you we win the match girl, we in Germany next year. And you know Trinis, tomorrow is a public holiday." My father, when he called, was less contained. "Susz girl, you could hear me? You hearing me?" In the background soca blared with cars in the road apparently providing the horn section. "I’m calling you from Tobago. We going to Germany, we make it to the World Cup! Madness in Tobago — you hearing me? Only feting, people like they gone mad. We going to Germany girl!" The woman opposite me on the train almost imperceptibly raised a quizzical eyebrow at the racket blaring from my cell.

Then it was Thursday morning. Public holiday back home in Trinidad but life the same as always up here in jolly old England. Eight in the morning I’m leaving home to go to work. It’s four o’clock in Trinidad and Tobago and I know there are Trinis back home still feting, still drinking, still wining, still liming. The sun is in the sky shining but it cold like dog nose. I’m wearing more clothes than I’ve ever had in my life and I’m still cold. The weatherman — never leave home in big city without listening to the news first, just to find out if everything is normal — says to expect a high of five degrees.

All day Thursday, all day Friday my heart is back home. Smokey’s and Bunty’s calls me — the lime would have definitely been there, despite the crackheads and the bombing, everyone talking over the highlights of the game, watching the man stacking the various bottles one on top the other by the light of the flambeaux he has burning on the pavement. And don’t forget the added incentive of Bobby’s jerk next door to make the alcohol taste even better.

I’m fine on Thursday but it’s Friday when I check my mail and my congested inbox that the homesickness hits. I call my friend. "Girl, I just calling to hear a Trini voice, I thinking about home."

"Oh God! Like you read my mind girl. I thinking about home whole morning. It took two hours and forty five minutes to get to work and the entire time I was thinking about how the whole of Trinidad celebrating."

All day Friday we work out the lime on the phone, talk about what we would have been doing if we were back home faced with this unexpected four day weekend — because, of course, Thursday would not have been enough, in true Trini fashion we would have taken an inch and made it a mile, making it a four day weekend of unprecedented merriment.

We think about great limes in the past — Carnival Saturday making my way home from a Carnival Friday lime that went all night until morning, deciding to go to the beach and turning back around, spending the day sleeping on the sand and eating grape Hola Kola lollies.

Drinking beers — well, in my case, one beer and make it last — with a dozen shrimp wantons that nobody wants and yet they don’t last ten minutes on the plate that the waitress in the tight pants and the convoluted hairstyle brought, the guy on the next table making sweet eye and you focussing all your energy on bussing style.

I remember the excitement of big trucks driving through the streets of Port-of-Spain blasting soca and the excuse to wine it provides. Add to that the knowledge, the deep satisfaction of finally qualifying for a World Cup and I can imagine the result. But I know the imagination cannot compare with the reality in this instance. And I know it’s an experience that will never be repeated, a major chapter in my country’s history that I’ve missed and words can’t describe how deeply I feel my absence from this collective, cumulative celebration. The most I can hope for is that somebody, anyone took a wine for me.

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