Neighborhood Watch

June 2025

Crime was getting bad, and Rat had nothing to do since Toolum left, so he joined the neighborhood watch.

Vernon Mac was the one who came up with the idea, and Rat thought that he was a bit too happy to organize the watch. He remembered how his father told him that Mr. Mac gave his life to the oil company, only to be unceremoniously sacked along with everyone else a couple years before his retirement. So when Mr. Mac looked around during that first meeting, on the outskirts of the village in the near-empty community center that smelled of the river outside, and said, “It appears as though nobody else care about this community. Back in my day you had people . . . ,” Rat tried to listen with sympathy. 

Glen and Langley, the only other bodies in the center, hadn’t bothered with civilities. Mr. Mac was an ornery, lumbering, and unsleeping man who indented his sentences with a tap on his clipboard, and when Glen and Langley started whispering and laughing to each other while he was talking, Mr. Mac raised his voice even more, until they had no choice but to look at him. Not that Glen and Langley, who were equally too eager to laugh, minded. Like Rat, they absented themselves from cause; they were there because there was nothing better to do.

Mr. Mac walked around with his clipboard, sterner now.

“We not carrying no badmind when we going around the village. We following proper protocol and procedure. Mr. Rambharat—I not calling nobody son ‘Rat’—you will assume the secretary duty?”

The meeting ended in this way, and with the understanding of meeting in the empty lot by Mr. Mac’s house at eight o’clock the next night. 

Mr. Mac arrived at eight, Rat at quarter past, and Glen and Langley at quarter-to-nine. After half an hour of wrangling themselves into some order, during which Mr. Mac decided to retain his clipboard and take notes, they set off.

Besetting themselves upon the village was no easy task. The pavement cut off this way and that, and they had to tiptoe between thin slab of pavement and the worn road, in between a slick dark and the little light of the street. Mr. Mac hacked his throat and moved forward in front of everyone else, his head up and sliding his glasses back into the ridge of his nose. As they carried on, his glasses slid back down as he watched the road, trying to steer them into what remained of pavement from potholes. 

When they passed by the Chinese grocery that got robbed five times that year, Langley said, though everyone already knew, “They rob he again last week.”

“And they rob down by the vendor by the junction,” Glen said.

“And they rob down by Tantie Leena when she leave to go market,” Mr. Mac said, yawning.

Whoever “they” were, nobody ever asked, as if nobody really wanted to find out.

They passed along shuttered, austere houses, with stylized wrought-iron burglar proof their only ornamentation. Their shadows preyed along the gates, stretching into spaces in the yards. 

Such severe security almost made Rat laugh. What good it did, Rat didn’t know. Down by Gobin, on the other side of Claxton Bay, they used bolt-cutters to snap the wrought iron apart. By Bim, just further down, in the bypass of a dirt-road, they caught him just when he opened his gate. In Rat’s own home, his father locked the doors, but Rat never worried about crime. He never read the papers or watched the news, and what he heard from around the village didn’t seem to concern him. In his mind he rationalized that if they were going to rob them, they would’ve done it already. 

If he were to say that aloud, Mr. Mac would’ve talked his head off for the rest of the night—already, without instigation, Mr. Mac spoke of some obscure time before it all went wrong. 

“All now, back in my time, everything woulda be open. Watch nah.” He pointed around. “Is only eight o’clock and not a man jack in sight. My time the bars was full, people was out and about. Now what it have here for anybody?”

“People still out and about, Mr. Mac. Singer’s Bar go have some people, I sure.”

Mr. Mac shook his head. “Your friend Toolum was right to leave. It have nothing here anymore.”

Glen and Langley peeped up their heads. Toolum was a sore spot for Rat. It had only been a few weeks since Toolum had left, permanently it seemed, to go to America. He left without any notice, but the last time they saw each other Rat felt as if Toolum had ended things between them. Toolum had always been taken by the desire for more; he had looked over the hills and the plains with contempt that he could not see beyond. He lived like one who leapt through life without knowing if they’re going to land. But for his whole life Rat had strayed behind Toolum, the boy he had climbed trees with, with whom he had set fire to the plains behind their houses—who he chased, like a shadow, throughout the village—all for him to leave without him. 

Rankled by these thoughts, Rat kept quiet. He would not let them see him so unnerved. 

“You know why Toolum leave, Rat?” Glen asked. 

“He ever get in touch yet?” Langley tried.

He said no, and would say no more to their gentle prodding. 

They lurched on, silent in the shadows, for some time before Mr. Mac broke the silence.

“Back when I was in Petrotrin,” Mr. Mac said, somewhat gruffly, “I knew a man who used to say every day that he was going to leave that place. He hated it. He hated driving into work, smelling the oil, knowing it was going into his lungs. He was always ’fraid it woulda give he cancer. He spend more than twenty years there. Like he couldn’t leave, couldn’t get enough of it. He started off too young there. You know how people does just end up getting stuck? The problem with here is that people can’t get out. And if they don’t want to or can’t get out, they stay and they complain. They stay and complain. And they end up doing nothing.”

“What end up happening to him, Mr. Mac?” Rat asked.

“He get laid off like everyone else in the end. I don’t know what he doing now.” He paused. 

“You never hear from Toolum yet?”

He spoke softly in reply. “No. Not since he left.” 

“It does happen sometimes. People have to move on.”

Rat bore himself in silence for a while, until they began to hear muffled noises by the entrance of Singer’s Bar, where they made out the shapes of a few familiar faces. Singh and the boys, at their regular places outside the Bar, at their regular time. A beer dangled from Singh’s hands as he spoke loudly to his friends. He wasn’t drunk. Singh liked to pretend a little bit, to make it easier for one to talk. 

He held the hand that dangled the beer up in greeting.

“What going on here tonight? We got the neighborhood watch with we in Singer Bar!”

They all shrank back a little, except Mr. Mac, who carried a benign smile, and said, “Mr. Singh, you coulda be a part of it. Why you don’t join us tonight?”

“Doh worry, Mr. Mac. I doing my own watch here. I watching this street whole night,” he laughed, gesturing to the others by the bar.

Mr. Mac was going to move off and wave them away, but Singh carried on. “Too bad about Toolum, eh?” he asked Rat. “I didn’t see you by Singer Bar for a while. Like you lapsing since your partner in crime dust it. He coulda be here with you.” 

Rat dawdled on the spot a bit, as if contemplating saying something to Singh, but looked as if he decided against it.

Singh chewed on a cigarette. “So where allyuh headed tonight? Just making the rounds?” He laughed again. 

Glen deferred and laughed too. So did Langley. But then Singh suddenly became sincere.

“You know, them fellas was telling me it have a strange car moving about. Went somewhere near the Trace, down on that side.”

“Where?” Rat asked.

“Down by the Trace, nah, over so.”

“What kind of car?” Mr. Mac asked.

“It look like one of them old-old model Tiida, so the boys say. You not going and check it out?”

Mr. Mac’s eyes glinted in the dimmed blue lights of Singer’s Bar. Glen and Langley looked faux-serious, pondering what Singh said. Rat for his part could not believe a word, but he said nothing. He saw a vacancy in Singh that other people filled with themselves. 

Mr. Mac, sterner and uncertain, looked Singh dead in the eyes when he asked, “It really looking suspicious?” 

“Well, if I was the head of the neighborhood security,” Singh said, “I woulda go and check it out. But that’s just me, I eh know what plan you have tonight.”

He looked at the boys behind and chuckled. “But if it was me, I woulda go and check it out.”

As they walked away Singh wished them good luck, and it was decided that they would go down to the Trace when Mr. Mac, in the lead, wordlessly guided them down by the bridge that would take them there. Nobody protested. They had little else to do.

There were no working streetlights by the Trace, so they crossed the bridge in darkness. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and it was too quiet, save the sound of the crickets hitting against the grass, as if one hears a clock ticking but everything was at standstill, like time was moving but not them. 

Somewhat soothed by the blank darkness that carried no expectancy—for Rat would never have believed Singh—Rat let himself think about Toolum. For days, he remembered, he did not even believe that Toolum had really gone. For those first few nights, he went every night to Singer’s Bar expecting to see Toolum stride in with the angry pretense of having never left in the first place.  It was unfathomable that Toolum should not appear; it was then unfathomable that he could maintain his disappearance.

It seemed, suddenly to Rat, that all the luck had gone with him. For, not long after, hadn’t Mr. Mac been fired? And hadn’t they robbed down by Tantie Leena not long after?  But no, he thought, he was losing track of time. When had Toolum left? When had things changed? 

“Ey,” he said to Glen, “When they did rob down by Tantie Leena?”

“Meen know. Sometime last month, ent?”

“Nah, ent it was just two weeks ago?” Langley chimed in. 

“No, crime get bad long before that,” Mr. Mac said definitively. “Long before.”

“How long now, Mr. Mac?” Rat asked.

Mr. Mac seemed perturbed before assuming his stern look and repeated, “Long before,” in such a firmer manner that Rat did not ask again.

Just then Langley stopped and appeared to tap Glen’s shoulder, as if needing him to speak. He pointed to a glint in the dark, near the bushes. Glen stopped too, and asked, “What it have there?”

They had only to walk a few steps before seeing a car of indistinct color alongside the road, almost hidden by the trees and overgrown grass. It appeared tucked into the shadows, too blurred in between bush and darkness to discern much. 

Mr. Mac raised his glasses, but they came down again just as he put out his index finger to talk to them.

“Here’s what we going to do,” Mr. Mac told them, huddling them together in a circle. “We going and catch them by surprise.” Rat wanted to tell him that that was the stupidest plan he had ever heard, until he saw the look on Mr. Mac’s face. Desperation, trickling through an embarrassed relief like sweat from skin. And he was sweaty; his shirt stuck to his back in the thick heat inside the dark Trace. And even in the dark, Rat could see Glen’s and Langley’s minds turning, turning, until they decided, for their own sake, to turn the thing into a joke. 

So they stooped among the overgrown grass and, snickering on their haunches, Glen and Langley set forth behind Mr. Mac, followed by Rat, who was torn between pity and absurdity. Mr. Mac shushed them all too loudly for Rat’s comfort. But they became quiet, approaching that darkness. Mr. Mac took the lead, making hand-signals that the boys ignored. Yet somehow Rat felt, for once, as if they were in time, and as if they were real. They lay listening to each other’s breaths, and Rat thought of Toolum’s breath, uneasy and real. On Mr. Mac’s signal they leaped, and in that moment, they were beyond description; they set forth blank and blind.

Until their feet hit the ground, and the blurred light of the car turned on like a staggered disappointment, capturing them in disbelief at seeing two police officers come out of the car to ask them what they thought they were doing. 

They stared at the officers for a few seconds before one of the officers asked, “Like allyuh get stupid? What you feel you doing here?”

The boys stuttered and laughed, looking at Mr. Mac while he tried to explain to them that it was a neighborhood watch, how it was good for community and they were helping out because crime get so bad, but one of the officers stood with his hands to his hips, disbelieving. And Mr. Mac kept going, stuttering, raising his voice trying to get out what he wanted to say: that he was doing something because nobody else was. 

One of the officers wrestled the clipboard from Mr. Mac’s hands and threw it on the ground.

“It didn’t use to be like this,” Mr. Mac sputtered out. 

“Wasting people time,” the officer said, and sucked his teeth. 

The officers got back into their car, turned off their lights, and left them in the dark.

Rat knew that by the end of the next day that Glen and Langley would turn it into a joke. Tantie Leena would ask what happened, and Glen and Langley would say, If you see what happen the other day in the Trace, and Singh would try to belatedly take credit or offer some mocking apology, and Rat would find himself, again with the boys, in Singer’s Bar, drinking. 

The thought came to him that he should follow Toolum once more, to wherever he went. But then Rat couldn’t help but think about the night that Toolum left, when Toolum came to him in Singer’s Bar, frantic and mad, asking him what he was doing here. What do you mean? he asked. Toolum said nothing at first. Then he asked Rat what he was going to do with his life. And because Rat knew that Toolum had begun to hate this place, and had begun to hate him, Rat tried to make him laugh, hoping that he would forget that old quarrel. And Toolum looked at him with pity, as if seeing him for the first time. 

But it was deeper than pity, Rat remembered now. Toolum looked at him as if he were watching a passing phantom, as if he were looking at a shadow but could find no body, nothing to hold him in place. 

Rat thought that perhaps he made his peace; Toolum did not yet make his. 

He would not follow him.

After the police left, Mr. Mac, straightening a little, cleared his throat, took up the clipboard from the ground, and said, “Carry on, fellas,” as they made their way back to the empty lot that welcomed mild grass. 

Kirese Narinesingh is from Trinidad and Tobago. She is pursuing an MPhil in modern and contemporary literature at Trinity College Dublin.