Excerpt from “Alvin’s Ilk Rides the Subway” from Two Days in Mayaro by Pamela Mordecai
Alvin’s Ilk Rides the Subway
Alvin swaying to left and right under bright fluorescent light, thinking about his ilk, how it now gone and get him into trouble in this new school, in this new country, and he not even here two month yet. Alvin have the ilk from he know himself. For most of that time, he never even know what it is. It vex him still to think that when he find out, it was not from Miss Mirrie, his guardian, now gone to her Lord, neither Mr. Hector, the best headmaster in the world, neither Old Papa Chin, from Chin’s Self-Serve, that he rescue when he fall down the hillside, nor even Young Chin that supply him with Chinese butterfly biscuit.
He would much prefer if it was one of them that give him the name for this thing forever jumping around inside him, can’t settle down, always driving him to upset things. It rile him up when he recall the day Mrs. DaSilva Meredith-Jones put the whole school to stand outside in the sun because she couldn’t find out who break into the school storeroom, take out every roll of toilet paper and use it to decorate tree-oh, bush-oh, prickly pear and dildo cactus-oh, down to the smallest flowers-bearing plant in the schoolyard.
It was of course Alvin himself, and even now, a long time after, he proud of how he plan and strategize and manage to accomplish that feat. And even now eye-water trouble his eye when he remember how the penny drop, clunk, in his head as soon as he hear the wicked witch say she calling the police to “find the criminal and incarcerate him in a jail cell where persons of his ilk belong.” It is in that moment that Alvin discover the thing plaguing him is a ilk.
Mark you, as Miss Lyn, his teacher say in his first science class in Canada, “the effects of a substance or interaction are not sufficient to identify or explain its root cause.” Alvin put up his hand straight away, for Miss Lyn start the class by saying that the most foolish thing any student, or in fact anybody can do, when they don’t understand something, is “fail to ask”. That is “the biggest failure of all”. Alvin like Miss Lyn for saying that, and Alvin make up his mind he not going to fail.
“Please, miss,” Alvin say, “what is a root cause?”
“I’m glad you asked that question, Alvin. Perhaps some examples might help me to explain.” Then she tell a story about two people with fever, sore throat, headache and rash on their body. She say those are effects showing the two people have some kind of sickness, but that don’t mean the sickness, which is the root cause, is the same. One could have mumps and the other one could have scarlet fever.
Alvin smile and say thanks, for he see what she meanstraight off. He know people that have mumps, and his friend Cheroot did have scarlet fever one time — so people say. They say is that make him a little slow...
When, after two weeks of school in Canada, he end up in the headmaster’s office because his form teacher report that he can’t keep still, can’t stay in his seat, can’t fix his attention on anything for long, he figure these for the effects Miss Lyn was talking about and the ilk as the root cause. He not sure how to explain to anybody about the ilk, all the same. For one thing, though he meet plenty troublesome, can’t-keep-themselves-quiet people, he never hear one of them say they have a ilk. When he look in the dictionary, the meaning he see don’t help him neither: “a type of people or things similar to those already referred to.” Alvin don’t see how he could have “a type of people or things,” much less “a type similar to those already referred to.” A person could have people, like friends, or they could have things, like clothes and a bike, but how you could have a type of people or a type of things, much less those already referred to? And anyway, now he finally understand what this mad, disruptive can’t-settle-down feeling is, he not letting go of that for a type of anything.
—
“Alvin’s Ilk Rides the Subway” appears in the short story collection Two Days in Mayaro copyright © 2026 by Pamela Mordecai. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions. For more information, please visit www.gooselane.com.
Pamela Mordecai
About Two Days in Mayaro by Pamela Mordecai (Goose Lane Editions):
Only two months in Toronto, a young man gets in trouble at school for being restless and disruptive. A stone-throwing duppy smashes an elderly couple’s car window as they drive past a graveyard. An 80-year-old woman goes to great lengths to get the sugar needed to bake a cake for a soon-to-be-arriving visitor.
Two Days in Mayaro brings together a new collection of stories that showcases the astonishing range and depth of Pamela Mordecai’s writing. Set largely in the Jamaican diaspora, Mordecai’s stories are alive with sound and often driven by dazzling yet subtle reimaginings of lore, ancestry, and history.
Mordecai’s characters cope with the universal experiences of birth and death, joy and betrayal, reckoning with both their present and past. In this multidimensional universe, Mordecai mixes Jamaican Patwa with standard English and profanity with reverence, making her characters all the more real by introducing uncanny detail at just the right moment or by turning confusion on its head to make us laugh.
Pamela Mordecai has published poetry, fiction, plays, anthologies and textbooks for children and adults. The Guardian’s Tony Mitton said her "Caribbean Counting Poem" was one of the "Top Ten [children’s] Poems to Remember and Recite," alongside poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson E. V. Rieu, Charles Causley and Walter de la Mere. This child's sensibility infuses her writing with what Jim Bartley of the Globe and Mail called "an unexpected yet highly fluid mix of picaresque humour and unsparing human observation." The jury for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for which she was shortlisted in 2015, described her novel, Red Jacket, as "a bawdy meditation on storytelling and the art of writing.” Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she often writes in Jamaican Patwa or Patwa-inflected English. Pamela lives in Toronto.