Long Time No See

by Hannah Lowe

  ♠

  The storms came in across the sky at Discovery Bay like a set change, the blue sky dissolving into dark grey, the clouds churning ominously. One fat drop of rain hit the ground, then another. The sky drummed with thunder, throwing down a sheet of rain. From Ken’s living room, only the veranda was visible in these tropical storms. Beyond, the landscape disappeared, replaced by grey haze and rain so loud you had to shout to be heard. Wind dragged at the trees as insects piled up against the veranda doors – big spiders and moths the size of small birds that Ken would sweep away with a broom. My father and I played cards through these storms – a new game he taught me there, a variant of rummy with two decks and both jokers in play. I can’t remember the name, only that it hurt my brain to think out each move – it had more of the strategy of chess than any card game I’d played before. We lost hours to it, while my mother napped and Sam read. ‘Oh no! You beat me again, Han!’ my father laughed, each time I won. We were having a good time, but even as I enjoyed it, it felt strangely intimate, uncomfortable even, to be alone with my father like that. We didn’t do this in Ilford.

  Then, in the evenings, we drove to Miss Rose’s to eat – thick, earthy Jamaican food: chicken and stewed peas, curried goat, red pea soup – the same food I ate in England. After dinner, Sam would slip outside, where the younger men hung against the wall, reggae crackling loudly from a battered speaker. He wanted to go to the sound system parties in Kingston, but my mother wouldn’t let him. My father joined the men in the bar for heated political discussions, a game of cards, or both. ‘Listen here, me friend,’ he’d say in his best Jamaican accent, launching into a polemic about the power of the old labour movements in Jamaica. Michael Manley had just been elected again, and my father, like many Jamaicans, was disappointed that the socialist reforms he’d introduced when he was leader in the 1970s were no longer part of his agenda. Those discussions went on for half the night, while we sat in the restaurant with Miss Rose and the other locals. ‘Family from Englan’,’ Miss Rose would say again, by way of explanation anytime anyone wondered who we were – ‘Honey’s brother’s children.’ But her answer sometimes prompted more quizzical looks, echoing the way of things at home – people wondering if we really were my father’s children.

  ♥

  One day we drove east from Discovery Bay towards Port Antonio. We stopped for lunch in a restaurant on a busy road by the port and sat upstairs overlooking the street as a quick, heavy storm broke. The shoppers and street vendors scattered, but a moment later two men with long dreadlocks came jogging down the road in their shorts, bare-chested, bottles in their hands, stopping opposite, where two storm pipes overflowed. In the gush of rainwater, they shampooed and rinsed the ropes of their dreadlocks, a spectacle for the diners above. One looked up and waved at his audience. I waved back.

  I was intrigued by Rastafarians. I saw them all over Jamaica, often wandering alone on the roadside, their dreadlocks swaying down their backs or bulging in their tam hats. I didn’t know what they believed in, but they seemed like peaceful people to me, and I had liked the Rastafarian boy at Cotton Lane – Malachi Paul, whose little sister had dreadlocks too, and whose mother looked serene at the school gates in a white headdress. We’d visited a museum in Kingston where photographs of Rastafarians lined the walls – one from the 1960s showed a thousand Rastafarians on the asphalt of Kingston airport, waiting for Haile Selassie to disembark from his plane. In another, Rasta men and women lined a railway track as his train went past, holding their babies in the air to be blessed. Now I wondered aloud about the hair-washing we had witnessed – did Rastas only wash their hair in rainwater? None of us knew.

  We drove on. We were looking for Mr Picketts – a Jamaican man my father had played cards with in England, who’d moved back five years ago. He’d been to the house in Ilford once or twice, smelling of rum or beer. It didn’t take us long to find his house. A private gate marked ‘Picketts’ led down a long gravel drive towards the sea. At the end, a wide white villa faced the ocean, surrounded by a grove of orange trees, bright bougainvillea spilling down the walls. ‘I never guessed Mr Picketts had money,’ my father said, taking in the house. ‘In England, he lived in a bedsit at Clapton Pond. He must have been saving.’ He climbed out of the car and went to knock on the door. ‘You never guess it,’ he said, returning a minute later. ‘The maid says Mr Picketts went to England for a holiday this morning. This morning! What bad timing. He’ll be in Corals by tonight, I bet.’ Mr Picketts had lived in Clapton for thirty-five years, my father told us – married, had children, divorced, played cards. ‘But Jamaica was in his heart,’ he said. ‘He spent thirty-five years waiting to come home.’

  We carried on, towards St Thomas, for hours it seemed, the sky darkening as my father told a story about Mr Picketts’s mad English wife, and a long tale about his childhood friends Luther Bogle and Haggai Tucker. He’d told stories about those two when I was small, so many I doubted they could all be true – but the characters of Luther and Haggai were always real to me, alive in the Jamaica of my mind. Haggai was thin and lithe and stupid, while Luther made up for his heavy body with a quick wit.

  Outside, the landscape changed, becoming more mountainous and rural, much less built-up than the north coast. My father continued this particular story, which involved a catapult, a robbery and an improbable near death by falling mangos. ‘There’s a reason I told you this tale,’ he said when he’d finished. ‘Because we’re just pulling into Morant Bay, which is where the Morant Bay Uprising took place. You know what that was?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I expect you’re going to tell us.’ Jamaica had made my father garrulous in a way he’d never been before.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said. ‘It was the uprising of former slaves against their white oppressors, led by Paul Bogle. Courageous man! Caused the English to quake in their boots! In Jamaica and England. No one could believe we could stand up for ourselves.’

  ‘Ourselves?’ I questioned.

  ‘If I’d been alive then, I’d have been on the front line,’ he said, lighting a cigarette from the car lighter. ‘Anyway, the English came down hard on the revolutionaries. They caught Paul Bogle. Hanged him outside the courthouse. Let him swing. But his name lives on.’ He flicked his ash from the window. ‘There he is,’ he nodded in the direction of an iron statue, lit up outside the Morant Bay courthouse. We all turned to see. ‘One of my friends from boyhood was Luther Bogle, Paul Bogle’s grandson,’ he continued. ‘So I was keeping good company back then, you understand.’

  ‘What went wrong?’ my mother said as we rolled on out of town. We drove into a dark, green valley where the yellow moon hung in the sky. St Thomas didn’t look like anywhere else we’d been in Jamaica. They called it ‘the forgotten parish’, because industry and the tourist trade had largely passed it by, and more people had migrated from St Thomas, escaping its poverty, than from anywhere else on the island. I heard Ken called St Thomas ‘the balm yard’, and my father explained that the name referred to the spiritual practices that still went on there – Kumina, Revivalism, even Obeah. In the museum in Kingston I’d seen a black and white photograph of the Revivalists dancing at the river at Hearts Ease, dressed in long robes and headdresses, a man’s hand frozen over a big drum. St Thomas had the ‘rebel spirit’, everyone said, keeping Africa alive, resisting the imposition of the British and the Anglican church. The Kumina followers believed in duppies – malevolent ghosts haunting the towns and roads at night. I knew that word well – it was another of my father’s jokey threats: ‘Be good or the duppy will get you!’ Now he laughed, ‘Look out for the Rolling Calf!’ as we followed the winding country road, the shadowy foliage bent over the road, lit ominously in our headlights.

  I knew about the Rolling Calf from a poem my father would recite when I was a child. It was a red-eyed beast – cow, dog or even a cat – roaming the rural roads at night to do the devil’s work:

  Me deh pon has’e me kean tap now<
br />
  For Tahta John a-dead

  De oda nite one rollin’-calf

  Lick him eena him head

  For all my father’s claims of atheism, growing up in St Thomas must have touched him. As a young boy he’d been given a ‘bush bath’ by local women when he’d fallen very ill. They bathed him and rubbed strange oils into his skin, dressed him in red flannels and put him to bed for three days – a ritual he believed had cured him. And years later, I found his writing on notepaper, tucked into a book of Caribbean verse. He’d copied out the lines of the Rollin’ Calf poem and hidden them. Be warned, he’d written in big letters at the bottom.

  At last, we pulled up at the Whispering Bamboo hotel, but it was so late all the rooms were gone. Only the Honeymoon Suite was available, the manager assuring us it would comfortably accommodate us all. And so it was that we spent the night in an enormous floral love-nest, my parents sleeping on a padded peach circular bed below a mirrored ceiling, Sam and I on children’s put-up beds. Outside the window, the palm trees swayed dramatically in the wind. I lay awake listening for duppies, the cry of the Rolling Calf.

  ♣

  In the morning we drove on to Yallahs. It was strange to finally see the town, after having known its name so long. The main street was lined with battered duplexes, jerk shacks and shabby shops, behind which lay a narrow beach lined with peeling fishing boats, silvery waves crashing on the shore. A stench hung over the town that made me wince. ‘It’s the salt ponds,’ my father said. ‘You get used to it.’ We traipsed behind him in the blistering midday sun – down one street and up another, all tired from the surreal night in the Honeymoon Suite, where the air conditioner rattled loudly and couldn’t be turned off.

  Yallahs was a scrappy place, I thought, but my father strode through the town as though he couldn’t see the rubbish on the ground, the half-finished houses, weeds growing between the grey breeze blocks. ‘The police station was here,’ he said, standing on the corner by a plot of rubble and long grass. ‘Spring Pass was here. It ran down to Catholic Lane.’ He stopped and turned, walking back in the direction we had come from. ‘Ah, I know where we are now,’ he said. ‘This is where they had the market.’ We had emerged in a square of sorts, eerily quiet. He stood silently, staring around as though he could see something we couldn’t. ‘Nothing looks the same,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look like Yallahs any more.’ Men sat on a low wall on the other side of the road watching us – an old black man leading his white family, looking for ghost streets, a ghost market, ghost people. Whatever Yallahs was, it was far from the tourist trail, and we looked out of place.

  ‘You people lost?’ called a young man from a car workshop. He came towards us, dressed in mechanic’s overalls, wiping his hands on a rag.

  ‘Good afternoon to you, sir,’ my father said. ‘I used to live near here, many years ago. I’m just showing my family around. But everything seems to have moved.’

  ‘A little history tour?’ the man said, smiling to show a row of gold teeth. ‘Everything changed, huh? You’re right about that, man. My granny says the same.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of the city. ‘A lot of people leave, you know. A lot of people scared. We have murders around here, you know.’

  ‘I read about them,’ my father said distractedly, still looking around. ‘It seems to have grown here, though, since I was a boy. Is there still a market here?’

  ‘Listen to me, old man,’ the mechanic said softly, ignoring his question, suddenly serious. ‘You should get going. It’s not safe here.’ He looked at the men on the wall then back at us. ‘The way you people carrying on, you looking to get robbed.’

  ‘Oh, let’s go, Ralph,’ said my mother. ‘I don’t like it round here.’

  ‘Thanks for the advice, my friend,’ my father told him, ‘but we’re OK, I know where we are.’

  ‘OK, man, have it your way.’ The mechanic shielded his eyes from the sun. ‘But if I were you, I’d see what you need from inside your car.’ He went back into the shop.

  ‘I don’t want to get robbed,’ I said.

  And so we walked back to the car. I remember my father stopping every now and again as though something he recognised had flashed to mind. We drove out onto the highway around the town. ‘See that road?’ he said, pointing to a junction where a dirt track split from the highway. ‘That road takes you to the village where my dad’s shop was.’

  ‘Are we going there?’ Sam asked from the back seat.

  ‘No, no,’ my father said. ‘We haven’t got time. Remember how long it took to drive yesterday. We need to get back by tonight.’

  ‘No time to look?’ my mother asked. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Not this time,’ he said. ‘Not this time.’

  ♦

  Our last day in Jamaica was Independence Day, a celebration my father had to explain to me. I knew Jamaica had been a British colony once, but not much more. The Jamaican flag hung in rows of bunting along the beach above stalls selling sugar cane, fresh fruit, ice cream. A big sound system blared music from a stack of speakers piled precariously. They wheeled the oil-drum grill over from the restaurant, and cooked up chicken and pork in a cloud of spicy smoke, the cook dramatically chopping the meat with his machete. We sat on the beach among all the other families, eating, chatting, children playing in the sand and sea. This was the only day my father came to the beach – he hated the sun, even the Jamaican one. Now he sat in his polyester swimming trunks with his newspaper, his scrawny legs on show, his moles visible to all. But I’d seen other men and women in Jamaica with moles like his, and somehow they’d lost their potency. They were just moles, after all.

  After a month in Jamaica, my skin had turned a dark nut brown. Sam was the same colour. ‘Nice touch of the tar-brush,’ my father said on the beach, pretending to rub at my skin with his finger to see if the tan would come off.

  ‘Oh, stop it, Dad!’ I moaned, clambering up and away from him, towards the shore. I saw Owen, singing in the water. ‘Big celebration today, Miss Hannah,’ he said, sitting down beside me when he emerged. ‘How you good people enjoying the island?’

  My father told him about our travels to see Auntie Fay, Aretha, Yallahs Bay. ‘Family is important to you, is so, Mr Ralph?’ Owen said. ‘You a family man for sure.’ He told us he had to work soon, and said goodbye, but later I saw him further along the beach, lying on the sand, staring out to sea.

  When we came home to Ilford, a letter arrived from Owen, thanking us for our friendship, saying he missed us. ‘Poor boy,’ my mother said. ‘We must write back.’ She wrote him a letter, but we didn’t ever hear from him again.

  That final night, before bed, my mother gathered the ‘children’ together for photographs – my brother and my new cousins – knowing we’d not see each other again for years, if at all. Cora was heading back to New York the next week, Sharon back to her home and school in Negril. Dressed already in their nightshirts, my pretty cousins flirted with Sam, slipping their arm through his as we smiled for the camera, laughing too hard at his jokes. ‘Say “cheese”,’ my mother instructed, and we posed, but I look foolish in these photographs, wearing a rainbow-coloured T-shirt saying Irie, Cora sticking her fingers up behind my head.

  Later, I slipped from the crowded bed to feel the warm night breeze on the veranda, but my father and Ken were out there, talking. I stood in the dark and listened. ‘You can get land here,’ Ken said. ‘Not difficult now. Not expensive either. You buy the plot, make sure it’s plumbed for water and the electricity laid first. I can help you with that, and with someone to build your house for you. Same man who design this one can design you a house.’

  ‘How much you think you need?’ my father said. I could see the red glint of his cigarette.

  ‘Maybe fifty thousand dollars US. Maybe less. I can find out for you. You have money free? I can help you.’

  ‘We have the house in England.’ He paused. ‘But no way Bet will go for it. And the children are still at school. How can they
adapt to it here?’

  I stayed in the shadows, holding my breath. How could we adapt to it here? I liked Jamaica, but I didn’t want to live there. It didn’t matter, though. I already knew it was just talk, dream talk. Jamaica had got to my father. He was two people here – the man who belonged, and the man who was lost – of and not of this place. I remembered Mr Picketts. Perhaps my father thought coming home would resolve his crisis of identity.

  ‘Maybe they’ll be fine you know,’ Ken said. ‘People come back, bring their people.’ Like Mr Picketts, I thought again, waiting his whole life to return, but missing England enough to go back on holiday there.

  ‘Perhaps,’ my father said. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ll mention it. I left so long ago, but I miss it, you know. I dream about it here.’

  He stood up, stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray. I stepped silently across the floor, down the hall, back into the bedroom where my cousins slept. I could hear the puppies whining in the night.

  10

  1943

  There was a crush on the dock as the men strode forward, clutching their suitcases and permits. They were well dressed for America in smart slacks with braces, trilby hats and two-tone shoes. The boy was among them in his best clothes too, nudging his way along the dock, the gangplank almost in sight.

  Four thousand were climbing aboard the SS Shank that day, although the capacity of the ship was less than half that number. No women were allowed, so sweethearts and mothers waved the men off from the dock. Hundreds of people were waving, but not one among them had come for the boy. He’d sent word to his father he was leaving, but nothing came back. He had been to see his Auntie Fay again to say goodbye, and he had told Hermione. She told him she would come to see him off, but he couldn’t find her in the crowd.