by Hannah Lowe
‘That’s right,’ said Reid. ‘Any of the workers’ groups would welcome help. How old are you?’
‘Sixteen,’ said the boy.
‘The party has a youth commission,’ said Reid. ‘You should join. There’s a big membership already and it’s growing. The party depends on our young members.’
Another of the men held out a leaflet. ‘Read this,’ he said. ‘This is the way we want to get people thinking.’ The boy took the leaflet. ‘There are classes, too.’ He had an intensity about him, accentuated by his close-cropped hair and glasses. ‘At one of our houses on Monday nights. You should come. We’re reading Karl Marx. There’s a lot to learn.’
That had been six months ago and since then the boy had attended meetings as regularly as he could. He went to rallies where Bustamante and the PNP leader, Norman Manley, spoke. He talked to everyone he could about what was happening – back in Yallahs, and in Kingston. So many of the village folk had been driven to the city for work, living in squalid tenement yards, toiling long hours to send money back to the country. The boy urged them to support the party.
He went to the reading groups of the Youth Commission and saw other young people had found their way there as well. There was a feeling that change could happen, a hopeful atmosphere in rooms made hot by the close bodies and the energy of the debate. The boy was reading books about revolutions, and every day the newspapers told of a Caribbean on strike. Not just in Jamaica, but across the islands, dockers and miners and factory workers were rising up in protest, demanding better pay and better conditions. They discussed these events, and the boy loved to be part of the discussions, loved the way the focus moved from the whole crowd to small groups talking about change. Often it was past midnight when he stepped away, strolling the mile back to Barry Street to deal the late-night game.
The boy dealt five nights a week now and had a little money saved. The men at the card table left him tips when they won, and Mr Manny paid him two shillings a night. It was something. And early evenings on the hot cement of the Kingston waterfront, in the shadow of the tall warships, he rolled out the felt for Crown and Anchor, playing banker to the RAF fellows and the soldiers milling around, waiting for the ships to take them off. It was fool’s odds: the boy won nine times out of ten, and the one time a fellow won against the boy was always enough to make him roll the dice again. Crown. Anchor. Heart. Spade, Diamond, Club. Again, again. He was making money.
And he was playing cards himself, in the small clubs or back rooms of laundries on Barry Street. He and Felix, betting their wages on kalooki and poker and rummy, the boy’s favourite. He had a photographic memory, his mind’s eye remembering every card discarded. And every now and then, not often, but here and there, he’d swap a card in from his pocket, hold it curved into his palm then slip it into play, swinging the game the way he wanted. Yes, he was making money.
♦
‘You want to stay in my room tonight?’ Felix asked. They were standing in the early light on Barry Street, the game finished, the players dawdling home. It was eerily quiet. Felix had a place in the district above a liquor store. The strange boy Felix, with his one blind eye nearly shut, giving his face a lopsided look. He had a losing streak at cards but couldn’t stop playing. The boy lent him money, gave it when he could.
‘No, I need to go home,’ he answered. Most nights now they played until the sun appeared in the sky, then the boy ran for the trucks that lit out from Kingston at dawn, arriving back in Yallahs to open the shop.
They parted, the boy heading for the trucks. In truth, he didn’t know why he always rode home. His father had Rhona. He didn’t care what the boy did now, but the boy was like a trained dog, always running back to his master.
♠
The next time he saw Hermione he followed her home, speaking to her back as she put her key in the front door of the whitewashed duplex. ‘Ma?’ he said. She spun round. This time she recognised him.
‘So you found me,’ she said. ‘Well, well.’ A smile of pretty teeth. The boy couldn’t think what to say, standing silently, racking his brain until she spoke again. ‘You coming in?’ she said. ‘Can’t stand here all day.’
He came up the steps and looked down at her. She was small, bird-like. Suddenly she reached her arms up around him, a quick, fierce hug. The boy smelt oranges and frangipani, those scents lodged deep in his memory. Hermione held him away from her to look up at his face. ‘What a handsome boy,’ she said. ‘I knew you gon’ come find me one day.’ She smiled again, took the boy’s hand and led him inside.
The house was neat and dainty. Two rooms on two floors and everything in its place. The boy looked around at the glass figurines on the mantelpiece, the peach satin cushions placed upright at each end of the cream settee, lace portières moving in the breeze at the window. Hermione did not stop moving, back and forth to the kitchen, bringing more tea, then cake, wiping the surface of the end tables, shifting doilies. The boy felt big and clumsy perched on the narrow armchair, balancing a porcelain cup on a floral saucer. She chattered constantly. ‘I live on this street for three years, and next door is Mr Simmons. His wife has passed, but he has a daughter name of Pamela, and she live at the end of this street, where it crosses with Tide Street. Opposite the Baptist church. You know it?’ She didn’t let him answer. ‘She’s very educated. A teacher of English. But she can’t find a job. Can you believe it? All that training and education and then no job?’
On and on she went about neighbours, who did what, who had married whom. She was not the girl he remembered from Hearts Ease. The same sweet face, yes, the wide eyes, but something had shifted in her – the sorrow was gone, replaced by a self-styled lightness. She smiled at everything, talked on and on, not pausing to let the boy speak, not asking a question. Then suddenly she stopped, looking dramatically at the slender gold watch on her wrist. ‘Oh dear! I have to go. I have an appointment. At the hairdresser’s. I mustn’t miss it!’ She stood. ‘Could you come again another time? Would you mind?’
‘Yes, Ma,’ the boy said awkwardly, handing her his empty cup. He couldn’t believe he was standing in his mother’s house. Would he see her again? Of course he would, he told himself.
‘And best not to call me Ma,’ she said, her hand on his arm at the screen door. ‘It makes me feel so old, you know?’ She hesitated, her face serious. ‘And nobody knows I have a son, you see?’ She couldn’t meet his eye. ‘You do see, don’t you?’ Her grip tightened. But you could call me Ida. That’s what they call me around here. Call me Auntie Ida, if you want?’
The boy had no time to reply as she kissed him lightly on the cheek, stepped backwards and disappeared behind the gauze screen. The boy’s feet carried him back down the road, the way he had come, past the Baptist church. Ida. Hermione. She wasn’t the same, but walking back to Barry Street, he felt happy and dazed. Ida. Auntie Ida. Ma.
♥
The next week they sat on the little porch at the back of her house. There were shells arranged on the rim of the white railings, the neat garden blooming with pink and purple bougainvillea. Hermione carried a jug of home-made lemonade from the kitchen, filling the boy’s glass. ‘I’m an independent woman,’ she told him. ‘I don’t rely on anyone, and nobody relies on me.’ She had lived alone since leaving St Thomas. There was no husband, no gentlemen friend. ‘Everything I have I pay for myself,’ she said, sitting down. She wore a flowing peach-coloured dress, her bare feet resting on a stool, and in one hand an ornate Chinese fan to cool herself.
The boy remembered the first time he’d seen her on Barry Street, laughing with the Chinese shopkeeper, her head thrown back, a coquettish hand on hip. He wondered where she got her money, but he didn’t ask. Instead, he told her about the Chiney shop in Yallahs, how they were losing business, so many people leaving, crops failing, prices slashed so low people couldn’t live. There were families starving in Yallahs. His father had stopped giving credit, knowing it couldn’t be paid back. ‘Oh it’s a sad story,’ H
ermione said, sipping her lemonade, as though it were only a story. She said nothing about the boy’s father. Then she announced an appointment at the dressmaker, and as she had before, asked the boy to leave, making him promise to come again soon.
The next time, Hermione had just returned from a trip to the shops. She unwrapped the packages on the table, lifting her purchases to show the boy – a chiffon blouse held up against herself admiringly, stockings he blushed to look at, sweet soaps she insisted he smell. ‘Lovely, aren’t they?’ she said, holding a bar to her nose. The boy thought how the island poverty had not affected her. ‘They’re gifts,’ she said, slightly defensively, as though she could read his mind. ‘What, you think all these things are for me?’ She laughed. ‘No, gifts. I’m going to Golden River by Above Rocks to see my sister, your Auntie Fay. She just had another baby. Dolores. You remember her other children? This is for Angela.’ She held up the blouse, then a handful of coloured ribbons. ‘These are for Laura.’
The boy searched his mind, but had no recollection. ‘Oh yes,’ said Hermione. ‘You used to love to play with Angela when you were a baby. You don’t remember?’ She looked surprised, and the boy thought, how can I remember a lifetime ago?
‘Do you want to come with me?’ she said suddenly. ‘I can show off my handsome grown-up son.’ The tinkle of her laugh. ‘We can stay a night, come back the next morning. They’d like to see you. Will you?’
And so the boy came back the next morning, and carried his mother’s white valise to the bus station, and the two of them caught the yellow bus high up into the hills.
♣
Rhona disappeared. As quickly as she had arrived, she had gone. Gone back to her mother, his father said, but the boy felt uneasy about her. He walked through the village, where old men sat on their porches and the women carried baskets of laundry down to the river. He asked if anyone had seen Rhona, but no one had.
Down on the beach he found his old friend Rufus wandering along the shore, a bucket in his hand. ‘Long time no see, Rufus,’ the boy said, and the two of them sat in one of the old blue fishing boats, catching up. Things were hard for Rufus – he hadn’t been home in a few days, avoiding the drunken rage of his father. ‘I keep thinking to go to Kingston,’ he said. ‘Think I’d be better on my own. If I can find work.’
‘Maybe,’ said the boy. ‘But things are tough there, man. A lot of people without jobs. The war makes everything expensive.’
‘I know, I know. But I can’t let my dad beat me once more, you know? Once more and I might kill him.’
‘I know what you mean,’ the boy said. ‘I know.’
♦
Back at the shop, it was quiet. The boy read the newspaper in between serving customers. The government had announced that any man convicted of stealing fruit or vegetables would be punished by public flogging. It was cruel and wrong, the boy thought. What next? There were mounds of rotting bananas by the roadside at Yallahs. Clouds of flies juddered in the air above them. The boy could smell them from the shop, a sweet reek. The war had stopped all commercial shipping. No export, no money coming in for produce. People couldn’t afford food, but there were fields of rotting bananas. It was madness.
Later that evening, his father caught him by the arm in the back room. ‘Don’t think I don’t see you,’ he hissed. ‘I see you with the scales!’ Earlier the boy had served customers, making sure the measurements were accurate, sometimes giving a little over. He knew his father mixed new flour with old, scooped extra salt onto cod-fish to raise its weight. The boy hated this.
‘You don’t need to take from them,’ he said. There was so little to go round. ‘You shouldn’t do it, Dad.’
He felt his father’s hand swing into his face before he saw it. ‘You do as I say!’
The boy’s eyes smarted. Suddenly he flung himself at his father, threw both arms around his neck and dragged him down to the floor. The two of them rolled back and forth, the boy closing his hands tighter on his father’s throat. He raised himself and brought his fist down on the side of his head. But James Lowe was stronger than the boy and, in truth, the boy was always, always scared of him. He pushed the boy off and came to his knees, then onto his feet, landing a kick in the boy’s ribs that knocked the breath from him and made him retch. Then he lay there, retching again and again with every kick, curled in the shadows of the counter, retching and sobbing as his father kicked, and kicked again.
♠
It was midnight, the blue light of the moon filling the room where James Lowe lay sleeping, his face pale and solemn as the boy limped around, slipping his clothes into a cloth bag. He didn’t have much. Bile filled his mouth. The pain in his ribs was excruciating.
How he hated his father. How he wished him dead. The sight of the peaceful face enraged the boy – a black anger he felt in his chest, in his feet and hands. He moved silently round the bed to the cabinet by his father’s bedside, slipped open the bottom drawer.
Was it a minute or an hour he stood there? In his hand was a gun and the gun was pointed at his father’s head. He willed him to wake and see the black eye of the barrel looking straight at him, the bullet waiting for him. The boy’s finger resting on the trigger – cold metal on his skin. His tears ran a salt trail onto his tongue, dropping from his jaw.
He could do it. He couldn’t do it. He could do it. He couldn’t.
He laid the gun down on the bed, picked up his bag. Out of the door into the hot night – stumbling, running.
♥
Dawn on Barry Street. He’d hitched a ride from Yallahs, holding his battered body to the back of a truck as it bumped and swerved along the road to Kingston. ‘Felix?’ the boy knocked on the peeling door. His voice was weak. ‘Felix? You there?’
There was a ruffling behind the door and Felix appeared, rubbing his face. ‘Chick!’ It was a name he had given the boy. ‘Come in, man, come in.’ And the boy went in and asked could he sleep there. He lifted his shirt to show his bruises. Felix sucked in his teeth.
‘Your daddy a sadist, so?’ he asked. Then, ‘Sleep in my bed. I’m on the floor, Chick, I’m on the floor.’
The first light shone through the slats of the room’s window, a pale beam across the dusty boards. The boy lay under the thin sheet, Felix curled down at the wall. Noises from the street rose up – the clattering of hooves from the coal man’s horse, the vendors wheeling their barrows to market. The boy was exhausted, on the verge of sleep when he felt a movement, a body coming into the bed. A slow shuffling towards him. Then nothing. Then warmth on the back of his neck. Felix’s lips? Not kissing, but lips resting on his skin. ‘No, Felix,’ the boy said softly. He shrugged him off. ‘That’s not for me, man.’
Felix said nothing, only stopped in his movements, his body gone rigid. Then a moment later, he softened and reached a tentative arm over the boy’s body, let it rest lightly on his shoulder. Paused. Shuffled a little closer. The boy lay with his eyes open. Felix’s chest on his back felt like a warm blanket.
The pink sun rose up over Kingston. It was beautiful. He slept.
9
Discovery Bay
This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since toil begun I may sail on many a sea Her shores will always be home to me
– Harry Belafonte and Irving Burgie, Island in the Sun
My father hadn’t been back to Jamaica since 1973, and before that, not since 1962, when Ray the Pilot suggested flying his brand-new two-man aircraft from Oklahoma to Kingston. The new plane needed to be picked up from Oklahoma City, so the pair of them had flown there together and taken a cab to the airfield, where Ray had handed over a briefcase of cash. They fuelled up and took off, flying east over Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, refuelling in Florida and then continuing out across the ocean to Jamaica, landing at Port Antonio. The plane was shaken and rocked by the wind the whole way and, shortly after landing, Ray took a photo of my father at the airfield to evidence that he had turned white with fear during the flight.
In the picture, my father is hunched a few feet away from the little plane looking pale and shocked, his hair standing on end. Ray was used to the bumpy conditions, but my father hadn’t been prepared. He phoned me from the airport, my mother said. His voice was shaking. He thought he was going to die. That experience gave my father a lifelong fear of flying. On our way to Jamaica he sat in the smoking section of the plane and smoked the whole way there.
It was my first time in an aeroplane and I was excited. I remember watching the shelves of cloud from the window, miles below, and an island my mother said was Cuba swirling in the turquoise sea. We landed in Montego Bay, where my father’s half-brother Ken – or Honey, as they called him – waited at the arrival gates. He and my father hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. ‘Long time no see,’ Ken said, smiling as they shook hands then hugged then shook again. Suddenly, standing side by side with Ken to introduce us, my father shifted position in my perception – from outsider, marked visibly by his racial difference from us, to insider. Ken and my father were a pair – two black men who strongly resembled each other – and then, looking around the airport at the travellers, the airport staff, the cab drivers, it dawned on me that in Jamaica, my father fitted in, and it was we, my mother and Sam and I, who stood out. I wondered what Ken made of my father’s shiny white family.
We knew only that Ken had a house in Discovery Bay, and that it was big enough for us all to stay. Years ago, I’d seen his letter. Dear Ralph, it said, Your family is welcome with me. Come anytime. Come home. Now we were on our way, following Ken in the hire car he’d arranged for us. I rolled down the window. So this was Jamaica, my father’s island. My memory holds some details so strongly – I can still smell the humid air that night – sweet and heavy, and the sea flashing in the black night.
