by Hannah Lowe
When after an hour a sign flashed by for Discovery Bay, we began to climb a steep, bumpy hill. ‘Oh Lord, is this safe?’ my mother asked as we curled around the hairpin bends, my father focusing hard on the road in front, lit brightly in the headlights. I couldn’t see how high the hill stood in the darkness, only a yellow light shining above us, so far up it looked like a star. ‘I hope his place isn’t up there,’ she said, and of course it was. The house on top of the hill – grand and white behind iron gates. The light I’d seen below was a lantern hung from the veranda, swinging in the breeze above a sheer drop.
Inside, Ken showed us round. ‘He’s not a talker,’ my dad had said, and he was right. ‘You sleep here,’ Ken said opening a door for Sam. ‘And you sleep here,’ he said, opening a different door for me. It was a big room – turquoise walls, a stone floor, a huge bed. But for a long time that first night I couldn’t sleep – overwhelmed by the change in time, tiredness, the strangeness of everything – a gecko running on the wall, mosquito nets rising ghost-like above me where I lay. The moon in the window was bigger than the Ilford moon.
♣
The world was colourful in the morning, the sun already high when I woke. I could see orange trees and lemon trees outside. Ken had gone to work; my father and Sam were still asleep. Slurping on a mango, I followed my mother around the garden as she admired what grew there – tall, spiky plants, vines of purple flowers, green-orange mangos drooping in clusters from the trees.
But at the front of the house, a low, ramshackle kennel of nailed-together tin and wood stood in the scorching sun. Inside, two Alsatian puppies whimpered and panted. I had woken in the night to their cries, not knowing where they were or what to do. They were being ‘broken in’, my father said nonchalantly when he finally awoke. The dogs’ suffering would make them tough. In Ilford, he fawned over Chloe, tearful when a thorn stuck in her paw had turned septic and made her whimper. Here he was unsympathetic to the dogs. ‘But they’re crying,’ I said. ‘It’s torture.’
‘Things are different in Jamaica,’ he said. ‘No point in getting upset.’
Miss Rose arrived as I was standing on the veranda, taking in the view of the bay in the bright morning haze. She was Ken’s girlfriend, a large woman in a billowing white dress, flapping an enormous white fan. She was to be our host when he worked. ‘Greetings, darlin’,’ she said, wrapping me in her chunky arms. ‘Welcome home.’ Home? My father’s home perhaps, but perched on the hilltop in the burning sun, this place felt a million miles from Ilford. ‘Follow me,’ she said, climbing into her car, and we retraced the route from last night, a half-hour drive down the stony hill past other houses tucked away behind iron gates, still others unfinished, their skeleton frames abandoned in the overgrowth. Old goats chewed rubbish at the roadside, and now and then men tending land stood to watch our shiny procession.
On the corner of the main street downtown was Miss Rose’s restaurant and bar. It was opposite the beach – ‘Beach! Can I swim after, Mum? Plea-se.’ Inside, it was a simple room of red-check-clothed tables, a kitchen at the back, a whirring ceiling fan. The cook, another plump woman in white overalls and a white hat, sat on a table by the counter, while a few men tucked into their lunches. They looked up as we came in.
‘Everyone,’ Miss Rose announced grandly, ‘this is Honey’s brother, all the way from England. And this is Miss Bet, his wife, and these are his children.’
I shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot as the diners nodded to acknowledge us in turn. ‘This is Cook,’ Miss Rose continued, and then, pointing to each of the men, ‘Linton, Lowell, Ronny and Walksy.’
‘Welcome home,’ Cook said, smiling, coming forward to take my father’s hand. On the table by the door, a feast was laid out for us: plate after plate of food.
‘There’s lobster here,’ Miss Rose said, lifting the fly covers. ‘Red snapper. Shrimp curry. Crab. Eat, eat, eat!’
My father stared round, looking at the spread. I could tell he was surprised, and proud.
♦
I’d never swum in sea like that. Perfect white sand and coral shells, warm water. Tiny coloured fishes dashed around my feet. I swam to a wooden launch moored half a mile from the shore, and back again, the sea empty except for me and a black man floating on his back, singing ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ to the sky.
I trod water, trying not to look at him. ‘I love Bette Midler,’ he announced, as he floated past.
‘So does my mum,’ I said.
‘What about you?’ he asked, making a circle around me. He was young, a year or two older than Sam, I guessed.
‘I like Kylie Minogue,’ I said, flicking the water with my hands. ‘I don’t suppose you have her in Jamaica?’
‘Kylie Minogue?’ he said. ‘I don’t know her. Any good?’
‘Not bad.’
His name was Owen. My new friend. Or our new friend, I should say, since he followed me out of the water to meet us all. Owen was a flatterer. ‘Miss Bet,’ he said later, sprawled on the sand next to her, beads of sweat glittering on his skin, ‘you are a schoolteacher. What a noble job. Do the children love you?’ and, ‘Mr Ralph, I can’t believe you are sixty-five. Is it true?’ He and Sam wandered off up the beach together, returning with bags of chopped pineapple. ‘You are beautiful, Miss Hannah,’ he declared to me as I ate. ‘I wonder if your mummy will let me marry you?’ I laughed too loudly, conscious of my thin body in my new swimsuit, which turned see-through when wet; aware that my body was changing, that I was changing, and ever since the incident with the jogger in the station waiting room, wary of the way men looked at me. I didn’t want to be taken advantage of again, although I didn’t know how to stop it.
But there was something innocent about Owen. A sadness hung over him, even as we lay there laughing and talking in the bright sun. His own parents were dead, he told us. He lived on his own, working evenings as a hotel waiter at Runaway Bay. I think he was lonely on the beach that day, intrigued by the look of us – there weren’t many tourists at Discovery Bay. Maybe he thought we were rich, but I don’t think it was that. Every time we came to the beach, he was there, floating on his back in the turquoise sea, singing to the sky.
♠
No one would tell me why Ken was called Honey, a name too sweet for my silent uncle. He was friendly but inscrutable. He had built his house himself, high up, away from everyone – Miss Rose had her own house – and this was his palace, the big rooms with their grandiose touches – marble floors and chandeliers, a sunken bath with gold taps. He worked hard, six or seven days of the week, then came home to drink beer on his settee. ‘He did all right, Honey,’ my father said one morning over breakfast. ‘When you think where he came from.’
‘Where did he come from?’ I asked.
‘From the same place as me,’ my father said. ‘When Honey’s mother died, he lived with my dad for a time, after I had left. But my father liked a woman who didn’t like Honey. So when he was twelve, he gave him a dollar and sent him off.’
‘What a bastard,’ my mother said.
‘Where did he send him?’ I said.
‘Off,’ he repeated. ‘Who knows? He went to the army at some point. Never saw my father again. And look at Honey now, eh?’
That night, Ken’s daughter, Cora, arrived from New York, where she lived with her mother. I didn’t know the history surrounding this arrangement and no one thought to enlighten me. With my family in residence, she and I had to share a bed, an idea everyone seemed to think a good one. ‘It’ll be nice to have a friend your own age,’ my mother said, but alone in the bedroom Cora ignored me, keeping to her side, rubbing coconut oil into her skin, painting her nails. She was very pretty. ‘How long are you staying for?’ she finally asked.
‘Three weeks,’ I said, pretending to read my book, ignoring her dirty looks. I was unfazed. Thirteen-year-old girls are not nice. I was one, and I knew. At worst, they are a nasty combination of insecurity, self-obsession and spite. Forced together and expect
ed to be friends, Cora and I bucked. That night and for more nights to come, she claimed the territory of the bed, wriggling stealthily across the moonlit sheets until I teetered on the edge. I put up little resistance.
In the morning, she greeted my parents like they were long-lost friends. And if Sam – who had suddenly become handsome – was in the room, she transformed absolutely, laughing gusty laughs and clapping her hands, finding secret ways to touch him.
♥
Despite Owen’s feigned amazement, my father was sixty-five, and worried about his health for good reason. He must have known this would be his last trip home, if Jamaica still meant home to him. He wanted to show us where he came from, and he wanted to search for his past. His mother and father were dead, but there were places and family he wanted to see again – people I couldn’t remember him ever mentioning before. He had an itinerary that took us all over the island, and as we drove it was apparent something strange had happened: he was in control. This was his world to navigate, and away from Ilford my mother deferred to him as our driver and guide as we criss-crossed the island, over mountains, along dust tracks, down the winding coast roads. He introduced us to people all over the place, and I could tell my mother was proud to be with him. I was almost proud too.
Jamaica was beautiful and poor. I knew the country was more than picture-postcard beaches and coconut palms, but I hadn’t expected poverty so extreme. The north coast’s beaches were tourist idylls – long stretches lined with shiny palm trees and gleaming hotels. But ramshackle shanty towns gripped the hills outside Kingston and Montego Bay, whole neighbourhoods of plywood and corrugated metal, like the kennel Ken had nailed together for his poor puppies. I couldn’t believe people lived beneath those metal roofs in the burning sun. As our car sped past, I saw old women struggling with pots and plastic bags in the alleyways, skinny children chasing dogs along the tin boundary fence. Even from the car I could hear the noise, smell the stench of human waste, feel the heat and pressure of overcrowding. ‘It was the same when I was young,’ my father said. ‘But worse now, you know. There’s more of it, and it looks worse.’
We were wealthy by Jamaican standards then, and my father was a rich man returning – that’s what people thought, though it was a strange notion since things were so often tight at home. But I could see poverty was relative. ‘The right thing here is to spend money,’ my father said, and spend is what we did, stopping at roadside stalls for sugar cane and pineapple and the amazing guineps, their tangy pulp hidden in a thin skin you broke with your teeth; buying small carvings of painted parrots and kissing fish from the beach higglers who wandered the shore, and in the market, haggling for lignum vitae busts of Rastafarians, so heavy it took my father and Sam to carry them. We would bring a little of Jamaica back to Ilford – their gleaming faces and polished dreadlocks sat for years in our home.
That first week our car climbed Old Stony Hill Road, twisting and turning past wide ravines that ran down to a spring, past Long Coconut Tree, where the parish of St Catherine’s begins, to find Above Rocks and Golden River, the small place where my father came as a boy to stay with his aunt. ‘Nothing’s changed here,’ he said. Up in the cool hills, the trees bent ominously over the road and creepers hung from their branches, making a green, eerie canopy like something from a fairy tale. And it was like a fairy tale, the way we found his Auntie Fay – the old woman in the woods – living by herself in a one-room shack. But Auntie Fay wasn’t a witch, just an old, old lady with hollow cheeks and deep lines in her face. She was child-size, her small hand in my father’s as they sat on the bed in her room, the bed in one corner, a stove in the other. It had been years and years since they’d seen each other. Perhaps to come without warning was too much – Auntie Fay didn’t speak, just laid her head against my father’s shoulder and smiled for a photograph it seemed garish to take. As we were leaving she took my hand too, her fingers like tiny, gnarled twigs.
‘Were you close when you were young, then?’ I asked in the car as we pulled away.
‘Yes,’ my father answered. ‘My mother brought me here when I was small, and again when I was a teenager. My last years in Jamaica, I used to come up here to escape my dad.’
Auntie Fay. My great-aunt. I knew I’d never see her again. In the front, my mother passed my father a tissue. I could see his tears on his face in the mirror as we drove back through the green shadows.
♣
Next was Aretha. Perhaps I did know my father had a sister in Jamaica. I can’t remember. My father’s recollections of family were always hazy or evasive. Was it six brothers and sisters he had, or seven? And none of them siblings like I was to Sam, not people he’d fought and played and grown up with. They were names I heard fluttered through conversation – Aretha, Vic, Rhona. Sister Louise in Peckham, whom my middle name is for. All had the same father, some shared a mother. Now they were flung across continents – Canada, America, Europe – a Jamaican story, families scattered to the wind.
‘Welcome to Jamaica,’ Aretha said, kissing us all at the driveway to her house. ‘Welcome home,’ she said to my father, her thin arms reaching around him. This was Red Hill, a wealthy hill suburb of Kingston, Aretha’s house built into the side of a cliff among sculpted gardens. Not everyone in Jamaica was poor, then. It seemed to me there was a clear divide – the big gated houses like Ken’s and Aretha’s, and the shanty towns. We followed her inside where Albert, her husband, laid a table for lunch. He was white with a shock of white hair and white rimmed glasses. In a thick Jamaican accent he told us he’d been born in Red Hill and lived there all his life. I must have looked surprised at the way he spoke.
‘Wha’, you think everyone in Jamaica is black?’ he said, turning his palms up. ‘We have Lebanese here, you know. Syrians, Indians, Chinese, Jews. My grandfather was Syrian. Scandalously married an English woman, had three children, my father the youngest. He married a French woman from Trinidad, my mother. Brought her to Red Hill.’ He pointed to himself. ‘And here I am!’ Everyone laughed. I suppose I had believed Jamaica was an island of black people. Even my Chinese grandfather I’d thought of as the only Chinese man in Jamaica – lost on his way to somewhere else or washed up in a shipwreck. But in the week we’d been there, I’d seen Chinese restaurants and laundries. I’d seen people of all shades and mixes, so I knew Albert must be right.
We ate on the terrace, watching a storm come in from the west, heading east. Twenty minutes of torrential rain that shook and battered the plants and trees, splashing up onto the marble floor, the damp smell rising from their shaded garden. Side by side, my father and Aretha were very alike in both looks and manner, reminding me again that this was a place he fitted in. ‘When I was a child, I knew I had a brother named Ralph,’ Aretha told us all. ‘But I never met him. Never knew him until he come back here in 1962.’ She lit a white-tipped cigarette. ‘My mother was Bernella, but that’s a sad story. I never knew my father, only he was Chinese. My grandmother brought me up. Mary McCormack. She was a good woman.’
My father crossed his legs in the chair, inhabiting his storytelling role. ‘I knew I had another sister too,’ he said. ‘But didn’t know where. You were a baby when I was grown.’ He turned to Aretha. ‘I was already leaving and you were still in nappies.’
Aretha laughed. ‘My grandmother used to sing hymns to me. That’s my earliest memory. The only time I ever heard of my father was when Mr Ho Choy would come to our house and give us a little money. He used to shame my father into paying something for me. And I thought to myself, what sort of man is this, that needs to be shamed into providing? I never had a thing to do with him.’ Aretha exhaled smoke. ‘It’s true. Then when Ralph came back my sister Cherry phoned me up and said you have to meet our brother. I said, what brother? She said, our brother Ralph. All the way from England. Same daddy as us.’
‘I tried to see them all,’ my father said. ‘Cherry, Vic and Rhona. All my father’s children, or the ones I knew about.’ He laughed and shook his head
.
‘How many of them did you meet?’ I asked.
‘Well, Cherry was here already. So was Honey. But Vic was living in America by then. Or was he in Canada? I can’t remember.’ He rubbed his head.
‘And what about Rhona?’ I asked.
Aretha spoke. ‘Well, Rhona went to New York when she was young. Sixteen or so. She was married, then divorced, then married again.’
My father sighed. ‘She always had a bad time of it. All those different men. She had a bad thing for men.’ They were silent.
‘Rhona killed herself in 1975,’ Aretha said. ‘They found her in her garage in New York. She’d suffocated on her car exhaust. Our poor sister, eh?’ She looked at my father, who shook his head as though he still didn’t believe it.
♦
Back at Ken’s house, a drama was unfolding, since Ken had mysteriously disappeared on a business trip and reappeared with another pretty daughter. She was Sharon, the same age as me and Cora, another cousin I didn’t know I had. ‘I gon’ kill that man,’ Miss Rose said to my mother. ‘Six years together and he never mention the girl!’ It wasn’t hard to work out what had gone on, and Honey’s name began to make sense. It struck me that family was an amorphous thing in Jamaica, thinking of my father’s scattered siblings, his own scattered children, Aretha’s story, Ken’s children. Sharon was funny and friendly, much more so than Cora, but that didn’t mean I wanted her to join us in the big bed in the turquoise room where more territorial conflict would ensue. Cora was surely more threatened by her than me.
That night, uncertain of where her loyalties lay, Cora took the middle of the bed and spread herself like a starfish, kicking her legs and arms throughout the night. There was little sleep on the outposts, and after hours of small retaliations, Sharon stood, grabbed Cora’s leg and dragged her to the floor, where they wrestled and brawled. ‘Don’t vex me, huh?’ Sharon whispered menacingly, as she held Cora to the ground.
‘Get off me! Get off me!’ Cora cried. She looked at me for help. No way, I thought. I went to the sofa in the lounge, returning only when it fell quiet in the bedroom. On one side of the bed, Cora was curled and snoring, on the other Sharon lay peacefully on her back, one arm flung above her head. Half-sisters asleep, beautiful in the moonlight.
