No, my mother didn’t go to Immaculate.
G’way, I don’t talk too much. You talk too much.
Well, if you want me talk less, stop giving me screwdrivers.
Wait … wait. You hear that? You hear that? Sound like the Saab. But is not it alone. Hear there. Is more than one car. I putting on my fucking clothes.
Go deal with him. Go. You don’t hear him calling you? Go. Tell him I not here. Tell him I gone already.
I don’t know. Just tell him that.
How you mean you can’t hear me? I don’t want him to know I’m here. What you want me do? Bawl it out? Sometimes you just go on like you don’t have no fucking sense.
Don’t lick me. Leggo off o’ me. You see, is only me you have strength for. You no have no strength for your brother, though.
Them coming upstairs. Them coming upstairs. Sorry. Sorry. Go lock the door. Go lock the door. Let me go. Let me go. You no bloodclaat hear me bomboclaat say leggo me pussyclaat, boy.
Me naah make no man rape me! Me naah make no man rape me! Go suck you mother.
Do … beg you …
Look what me come to, dear Jesus. Look how you make the man them come open the door. The Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd.
Mewantmemothermewantmemothermewantmemother.
5
This is the phone call Grace McDonald received at one a.m. on Wednesday, November 3, hours after going up to Norbrook Road searching for a smell.
—Grace.
—Somebody better be pregnant or dead.
—First thing you should learn is some manners.
—Who the fuck is this?
—Richardson.
—Well, it sounds like you, but it couldn’t be you at this time of the night. Plus, what the fuck is this attitude about? Listen, it’s way too early for me to tell you I’m tired of you and your shit. And I way too sleepy to tell you to stop going on like say I owe you something or I do you something.
—You done talk, my girl?
—You know what? Me tired of every fucking man in this profession thinking me is his girl.
—Tell it to somebody who care, sweetheart, cause me no give a rass. Two thing this phone call bout, you listening? First thing: learn some manners. Second thing: leave things that too big for you.
—Richardson? Don’t take any step with me.
—You already take enough step for the both of we. What a fucking idiot. You blind or you fool?
—I’m hanging up right now.
—Why you mess with my report?
—You call that a report? And what you mean mess with? It was incompetent. It was fucking incomplete. You don’t just come across a dead girl with her panties half off and don’t check for anything. Is so UWI teach forensics?
—You think you know everything, don’t it? You go to your little poppy-show med school in America feel say you is any big thing. Well, everybody know that if it wasn’t for your DPP boyfriend who promote you, you wouldn’t have position over me. Who the fuck are you to go behind my back and check up and change up what I do? Did I ask your fucking opinion? Did anybody ask your fucking opinion?
—Do your job.
—Who the fuck you think you talking to, girl? I am doing my job. Which country you live in? Cause is sure not this one. Me no understand how the fuck you get promotion and don’t know shit about how this world work.
—Your report stopped at the part where it shouldn’t have stopped.
—No fool. It end where it should end. There’s a big difference between stop and end. You figure it out.
—You know they set a dog on her?
—What you want me to do with that information?
—You know I figured out who did it?
—Yes, little girl. And him already know you know. Why you think me calling you at one in the morning, cause me want to swap recipe? They know, Grace. What the fuck you think you doing? Why you think it come back to me? The fuckers called me three times, Grace. Three fucking times. The last call came ten minutes ago. The bloodclaat people know.
6
Ruth Stenton still has the memory of how she felt when she got the second registered letter containing seventeen thousand dollars. You start to forget. You start to realize that hard as it may be, some little girl do ask for it.
Grace McDonald still has the memory of what it felt like when she got to work early on the morning after the one a.m. phone call.
You pick up the phone to call the police, then you put it down because the police might be in on it too. You remember a song that you have no reason to remember because you too old for loud American music despite all those years at Georgetown, but it said, just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you. You close the door to your office and pull a chair behind your door and a credenza behind the chair and you wait. You try to think but all you can do is wait. You touch your shoulder and wince because the pain is still raw. You try to think, to remember if you saw this Land Rover before Marescaux Road. No, not when you left your home on Lady Musgrave Road. Not when you turned left on Old Hope Road, then right, heading south to downtown. Not when you turned right again on Marescaux Road to bypass Crossroads congestion. The white Land Rover seemed to come out of a childhood fear of blackheart man, it just appeared, fully formed and ready. It rammed into the back of your car first and you cussed, slowed down for a stop to get out and swap insurance docs or something. You stopped but the Land Rover did not. It kept coming and when it rammed into you the second time your head clobbered the steering wheel. It pulled back and you stomped the gas pedal and drove off, but it followed, came up to the side, you saw schoolgirls crossing further down the road and hoped they run fast, but they’re not running, they’re not running, move! Two dove to the side of the road. The Land Rover swung into yours, shoving you into the sidewalk. It came again and you swerved out of the way, almost hitting a stop sign. The vehicle dogged you all the way around National Heroes Circle and swerved into you again on the driver’s side and you screamed. Then, as you drove out of Heroes Circle to head south, to the police station near South Parade, the Land Rover turned and headed north.
You parked you car in two spots at the Kingston Public Hospital and ran five flights up the stairs to your office. You locked the door and you waited. The phone rang. You waited. It rang seven times and stopped. You turned away but it rang again. It sounded insistent. It would not be denied, bitch.
—Hello.
—You want to know a joke about dogs?
—Who is this?
—You want to know a joke about dogs?
—Who is this?
—Did I utter, mutter, or stutter? I said if you want to know one bomboclaat joke bout dog.
—No.
—Most times they have more empathy than humans. The son of a bitch was actually trying to help her. Can you imagine that? Only one person in the room behaving like a decent human being and it was the bomboclaat dog.
—Why you telling me this?
—You seem like you were looking for an answer so I thought I should just save you the trouble and give it to you. Baby—
—Not your fucking baby.
—Rass, baby have one serious potty mouth, though. You mother didn’t wash it out with soap? Should I send somebody over to her house to ask her? You want to know, don’t it?
—I want to know what, son of a bitch.
—You want to know if I send in Caesar pre or post mortem?
—You think you’re scaring me?
—Not at all. If I wanted to scare you I would tell you bout the part of Jamaica that is always night, that you don’t know fuck about. I would have pulled that Sandals Negril T-shirt you were wearing to bed last night over your head and make you choose which one of your nipples I bite off. If I wanted to scare you I’d say look out your window right now, north a few parking spots then center. I’d say wait until you see me wave back at you. If I wanted to scare you I would tell you how many times I
have to change the lining of that car trunk. You know how hard it is to find parts for a Saab 900 Ruby? Only 600 made, 599 of them in the UK. If I wanted to scare you I would remind you that is not even me that come after you just awhile ago. Couldn’t, too busy waiting on you right here. And is not me that would come after you again. You know, we used to just set up in the next room when him or me dealing with a bitch. I mean, how else the little boy going to learn? But man, since hidden camera, I can be anywhere and still see everything. You know the other thing about video? You can see what you do wrong and correct it. Now every man in uptown can do the work and is all cause of me. Pity things get out of hand. So you going to thank me?
—Thank you for what, you son of a bitch.
—I don’t know. For starters, that I’m not coming after you.
—What you want?
—I already get it, baby.
—Fuck you.
—In good time, maybe?
You hung up. You wished a phone slam had an echo.
This is what Alicia Mowatt wore to Jacqueline Stenton’s funeral: her school uniform. White blouse, white skirt below the knee, and a royal-blue tie.
The Sisters insisted that Immaculate girls represent the school at so somber an occasion. Jacqueline was buried at Dove-cot Cemetery, an expensive burial grounds usually reserved for the rich and their chidren.
The prime minister had business, but the ministers of education and national security were there.
Rain threatened to but did not fall. The cemetery was packed with people who never knew Jacqueline, most in black, gray, and white, including seven old women from miles away who bawled throughout the whole service despite asking for the poor girl’s name twice.
Alicia didn’t notice any of this, her eyes were so fixed on one thing, refusing to blink until they burned. Far off, maybe two hundred feet, the red Saab pulled up and paused. She wondered if she was the only one who saw. Nobody else seem to be looking west, only south to the hole in the ground and Jacqueline’s pink box sinking. The red Saab did not stay.
Melissa Leo smoothed out her white skirt and straightened her tie when she got out.
ROL IT
BY LEONE ROSS
Mona
The woman has fifteen minutes before she dies on the catwalk.
She stands behind the cheap black curtain that separates backstage from runway, peeping out at the audience as they clap and su-su behind their hands.
It’s so dark, she thinks.
The open-air runway loops through the botanical garden and the murmuring spectators. No one in Jamaica has seen a fashion show like this before. Strobe lights and naked torches blend, mottling the faces of the barefooted models as they negotiate hundreds of golden candles scattered across the stage.
They are all dressed as monsters.
A hot gust of wind bursts through the palms and banana trees, pushing against the curtain where the woman is waiting to die. She watches as one of the models onstage stumbles, steps on a candle, and stretches her long neck up to the sky: a wordless screaming, like eating the air. The audience laugh and gasp and admire the vivid blue dress clinging to her body and the thick blood on her arms and clumped in her long, processed hair. She is dressed as a vampire, what country people call Old Higue.
—Gimme more blood, nuh. That was what Parker said at rehearsal last week and he was surprised when the stage manager explained it was vegetable dye. —So where is the artistic integrity? Parker: her husband. Not handsome. His father broke his nose before he was fourteen and it always seemed on the brink of splintering again. At school they’d called him battyman and so his eyes are watchful.
He’d walked over to her and bent down so close his eyelashes touched her cheek, not caring about the jealous glances around them.
—You all right, baby? When we go home, I rub your … feet.
The other models watched, and thought of his voice, poured over their wrists; of adjusted hems and skillfully placed pins and the hold-breath moment when his quick fingers brushed their bare skin.
The woman moaned quietly against his shoulder and he’d laughed, whirling to face the rest of them, fierce and happy.
—You are all my beautiful ghosts.
Fourteen minutes: the woman sweats. Behind her and the black curtain, a white passage looms, ending in a makeshift tent, where the models go to change. Girls run to and fro, on and off stage, or stand and wait in the passage, like her. She can hear the clapping each time the curtain opens, like the ticking of a clock. It is midsummer and Kingston seems hotter than ever, despite the whirring, upright fans around her, that only stir the heavy air. Sweat trickles down her neck-back and between her thighs. Moisture beads on her top lip. She’s used to being the hottest person in the room. She hopes her makeup won’t run. At home she cranks the air-conditioning high until Parker arrives and always slips a hand-fan in her purse for the walk between the car park and the supermarket.
The waiting girls sigh and murmur, strung along the passage, cutting shadowed eyes at her. She’s used to the way their dangling thighs and backbones remind her of an abattoir. She’s seen many of them come and go through the years, so beautiful, but never friendly. Chandelier silver earrings tangle in shop-bought hair; golden creole earrings pull at piercings, fall and are scooped up again, teeth sucked in irritation; bells and beads tinkle and clack; they pull at hems and wrists and feathered details; crochet and hand embroidery.
“Anybody have a nail clipper?” The girl asking looks anxious. Parker doesn’t allow long fingernails. The woman looks at the ground, littered with tiny white nail crescents. No one else sees these things.
She watches as the girls climb the six steps up to the stage; disappear through the curtain slit and return minutes later, triumphant. Some pant and pump the air with their fists, others are silent and professional; they dash back up the passage and into the tent for the next costume.
She will only walk one dress tonight.
Thirteen minutes. Maybe twelve, now.
Two girls slink past.
“She get the best dress again?”
“Weh yuh expec?”
Years of people saying things faraway that she shouldn’t be able to hear, but does. The sweat prickles. She pulls the soft fabric away from her chest, blows down her cleavage gently, rocking.
Another girl comes back through the curtain: her transparent black lace dress exposes flat, dark breasts and a g-string that is scarlet and wet, like wearing a wound. Red contact lenses, flaming red hair. In the countryside, the old men who work as ghost hunters give girls red underwear to fend off the succubus at night.
The woman shudders.
“Move, nuh,” says the red girl, and runs up the passage.
The hot woman watches her go, then turns back to the curtain.
Parker gave all the models ghost stories to read, even before he began to sketch and cut and sew.
—This is not just duppy story. I want you to embody them.
One girl looked confused. Later, the woman took her aside to explain what embody meant.
Twelve, oh twelve minutes. She could sing eleven. The air stinks of the blood Parker mixed in with the vegetable dye and body paint. Each time a girl slithers through the curtain the woman thinks of a goat giving birth, legs first, a glut of liquid.
Slip in, slip out.
The albino girl up next is new. She wears a cream wedding dress the exact color of her skin and a tattered veil over the yellow dreadlocks weaved into her yellow hair. Hundreds of cream silk roses fall from the bodice, pour down the back of her, and weep into the ground.
Parker heard about her: a tall dundus girl, living near Matilda’s Corner who wanted to be a model. He paraded her through their living room, with her hair the color of straw and her golden eyes.
—Now that is my white witch of Rose Hall. Later he told the woman how angry he was about the way the dundus was treated. —Ignorant rassclaat dem. You can call a girl like that ugly?
The woman watch
es the dundus and her wide, nervous eyes and thinks of the legend of the white witch: a young English bride, brought over to the Rose Hall slave plantation to live like the Queen. She had children whipped in the front yard of her great house and disemboweled one of her maids just after breakfast. And when the slaves rose to kill her, her ghost returned to slaughter them in their dreams.
What could have made her cruel, so?
The dundus hoists herself up the steps: two-three, another girl lifting the bans o’ roses train so she doesn’t trip.
Parker was happy when things went to plan. And sometimes, when he was happy and sleeping, she slipped out and walked the cooling Kingston roads, too late even for gunman. Found her way in pitch blackness: she’d never needed lamp or torch. People driving home late caught her in the headlights: whizzed past her, open-mouthed.
When she was tired, she clanked home.
—Aaaah, say the fashionista crowd, out under the stars and in the green expanse of Hope Gardens.
She came here for the first time as a girl: on a school trip to the funfair, where there were American things like bumper cars and whirl-a-gigs and a train and the older girls laughed at her barely hidden delight. They would rather be in the plaza, eating banana chips, and what you wearing to the party up Norbrook tonight, who driving? But she remembered the whoosh and creak of the rides and the pink bouffant candyfloss. It all seemed magical, this fairground in the middle of a place called Hope.
Nine minutes: who can she say these things to?
Parker found her sitting under a bougainvillea tree, far away from the funfair, when the teasing from the girls got bad. Fifteen years old, long bare legs, and trying to do her homework. She was already a year behind, ’sake of stupid, her mother said, and how she couldn’t bother beat her anymore because if you beat even a mule too much, it back bow and the only chance she had for a life was her looks. Even though men said she was too maaga and tall, and what a way she black, they took great pleasure in her oval face and the way she moved down the street.
Kingston Noir Page 15
