by Hannah Lowe
‘Nothing, Dad.’ I said. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
The punch took me completely by surprise. I didn’t know what had happened. Then I saw him standing before me, his first clenched at his side. I felt a sharp pain in my mouth and the taste of blood. ‘Don’t you ever call me stupid!’ My father’s face was up close to mine as he spat the words out. ‘You hear me? Don’t ever call me stupid.’
It took a while for the gravity of the situation to be clear to me. My father had just punched me in the face in front of a boy from school. Christ! I was mortified, and outraged.
‘Just fuck off, Dad!’ I pushed him, both hands on his chest. I was strong, and he was an old man. He fell backwards against the wall, looking winded and shocked. ‘Just get out of my room! Fuck off!’ I was shouting and crying and pushing him. How dare he, how dare he? He let me shove him out of the room, his body slackening under my palms, his face already softened. I slammed the door and looked down at the blood on my hands.
‘Oh God, are you all right?’ said Alan. He looked horrified.
‘Yes,’ I said, but I felt my split lip as I spoke.
‘I’d better go,’ he said, picking up his bag from the floor. ‘Sorry, Hannah. Sorry. See you tomorrow, yeah?’ He was halfway through the door.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ I said to his back. ‘I’ll kill you if you tell anyone.’
He turned, looking sympathetic. ‘I won’t. I promise.’ I heard his feet knocking down the stairs and the slam of the front door.
♠
My father was gone for four days, banished from the house by my mother. The car was in the drive, so he must have gone somewhere on foot. My mouth was sore and swollen. I covered the redness with make-up for school the next day, where Alan Slade was as good as his word, acting as though nothing had happened.
But I had bigger things to worry over – Where was my father? When was he coming home? I knew I didn’t deserve to be punched, I knew that, but I also knew I’d triggered that rage in him by what I’d said – that word, stupid, had struck a raw nerve. I was scared I could make him so angry. My mother was being very nice to me, but I didn’t deserve that either. I felt I’d done something very wrong.
The bell rang at lunchtime on Sunday. I answered the door. My father was standing on the step, looking dishevelled and tired. In his hand, three Topic bars in their shiny red wrappers. He held them out to me, asking to be let back in. My mother came to the door, her mouth fixed in a thin, angry line. She pulled me back inside. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but that evening he was back in the house, sitting in the front room on his own watching television. The Topic bars were in the fridge. ‘Don’t you dare eat them,’ my mother said, pointing her finger at me.
In the morning I bumped into him on the landing, coming out of the spare room in his pyjamas. ‘Hello, Han,’ he said solemnly.
‘Hello, Dad,’ I said.
Later in the day I heard him rustling on the other side of the front-room door as I was practising Scott Joplin. I didn’t pull open the door to catch him as I used to, just played on as though I didn’t know he was there.
The change in sleeping arrangements was not temporary. The spare room became his room after that, with a single bed, a bedside cabinet with his tablets and books, a narrow wardrobe for his clothes – just like a lodger’s room. I was too young to understand my parents’ relationship, its own stresses and strains – all I knew was that my father had been evicted from the marital bed, and the fault, I felt, was mine.
♥
When Sam was a baby, my father used to look after him one night a week when my mother had a course. One night she came home to find my father sitting at the table crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, sitting beside him, her hand on his arm.
‘I don’t think I should look after Sam any more,’ he replied, looking down.
‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘It’s good to have time with him. What’s wrong?’
‘He’s so small. I keep thinking I’ll hit him, or shake him, or worse. What’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me?’ He held his head in his hands.
They went to the family doctor in Seven Kings, where my father confessed his dark thoughts to Dr Goldstein, who diagnosed depression, offering him pills or counselling. ‘I’ll have the pills,’ my father said. He was always a great believer in medicine of any kind, and the thought of counselling, of exploring his past, probably terrified him. He took those pills for months and months – old-fashioned anti-depressants that made him too drowsy to drive, too tired to stay up all night. But the dark thoughts stopped.
They came back when I was born and he went back to the doctor for more.
There are photographs of me sitting on his knee, a fat smiling baby, his hands around my middle, or holding me high, delighted, in the air above his head. I look at them now and search his face for the fear he had of hurting me. It was the way his dad had hurt him, my mother said.
12
1946
The boy walked back onto the island like he owned it. He had good clothes, a swagger in his step and $1,500 lodged with the Jamaican Post Office. He’d been gone for over three long years, working harder than he ever had before. He’d been up and down America and from coast to coast – never imagining landscape and weather so changeable, through the sweltering Florida summers cultivating corn and tomatoes, to the freezing winter he’d spent back in the north, hauling timber onto fuel trucks with raw and bleeding hands. The last four weeks had been spent behind the high fences of Count Murphy, Florida, with five hundred other Jamaicans, waiting for a ship to bring them home.
Sailing back, he remembered the people he’d met – men and women he’d worked alongside from Jamaica, America, Peru, the Bahamas; kind farm managers and ones that barked their orders; folk he’d shared a beer with, a game of cricket, a game of poker. Different people from place to place – good and bad – but none worse than in the South. In Florida, the Jamaicans quickly discovered the marching bands and apple pies were gone. No one gave a damn about their foreign charm or Britishness. A black man was a black man, no matter where he came from. No more barracks, no more hot showers. They lived in tent cities – squalid canvas shelters with bare mattresses, no pillows, filthy shared latrines, supervised by gun-toting white men on horseback who summoned them with whistles to a daily roll call and picked and chose the day’s workers.
The pay was worse than in the North, the hours longer. At first, they had resisted – refused the back seats of buses, the back doors of diners, stared down anyone who affronted them – but the punishments they faced were harsh. White southerners hated them for agitating, for rousing the black Americans to do the same. Troublemakers were sent to jail without trial, to languish until a ship could take them home. Seven hundred Jamaicans were caged in those Florida cells in no time at all. Roy Atley was gone within two weeks. Charles Dee a month later. For every man who left there was another waiting to take his place, a fact the farm leaders exploited. It still haunted the boy, the injustice of it.
Those who hadn’t been repatriated early had to go home when their contracts ended. Demobilised American servicemen wanted their places back on the farms. The boy’s feelings about return were conflicted – he had a daughter in Pensacola, Florida – a two-year-old girl he had seen three times, rarely near enough to visit her, not allowed to take leave. Her name was Gloria and her mother was Kathleen, a kind girl he’d married when she’d said there was a baby coming; he’d stayed with her two weeks before he had to leave again. She didn’t love the boy, and if he told the truth, he didn’t know what love meant, had only done what he thought was the right thing. He sent his daughter money from Atlanta, Wisconsin, Michigan – a card for each birthday, called her mother from downtown phone booths – but neither of them said what needed saying: he wasn’t coming back to the place she called home.
♣
Back in Kingston, the boy walked the streets, looking to see what was the same and what had changed. The city looked
worn out. Rubbish rotted in the gutters, a cloud of pollution hung in the air. The island was scarred by the hurricanes that tore up the earth each year; the worst of them two years before had nearly wiped out the entire coconut crop. Houses and schools in Kingston were still waiting to be rebuilt.
‘Things are bad here, man,’ Felix told him. They were leaning on the wall outside a bar on Temple Street. ‘Got worse when the war broke out. Now it’s over, and things still as bad.’
The club on Barry Street had closed in the last year, putting Felix out of work. Mr Manny was running a smaller place in Chinatown – less rent and no money for servants. Now Felix collected empty bottles, selling them back to the factories for pennies. He looked older. Two of his teeth were missing, his skin dull and marked.
♦
The boy slept on the floor of Felix’s room, waking the next morning alone, dressing without thinking. As though on autopilot, his feet carried him to Half Way Tree and onto the yellow bus to St Thomas. Only as they were waiting to depart did the boy question what he was doing, twice standing to get off, and twice sitting back down. And then they pulled away. Some part of him wanted to see his father, and the bus would take him there, out past Kingston Harbour, along the country roads, rattling over the familiar potholes, crossing the old bridge, the Yallahs River so high it lapped onto the road.
The shop looked as he remembered it – the flat tin roof, the small windows, crates of vegetables outside. He could smell the orange trees at the back. At least his father still had the place, the boy thought – it hadn’t been razed or gambled away. He saw James Lowe through the door, his lean figure behind the counter in his white vest, his head bent over the ledger, a pencil in hand. It was as though time had frozen in the old shop, as if his father had stood there for three years. The boy held him surreptitiously in his gaze a little longer, holding that power for a moment, before walking in.
In the shop’s dimly lit interior, nothing had changed – the high shelves were still muddled with goods, the same smell of salt-fish, the same battered mat lay on the floor. James Lowe looked up and saw the boy, his face moving through his emotions before settling on a frown. The boy looked back, holding his stare. His father looked exactly the same.
‘So you back?’ James Lowe said, as though the boy had been gone a week.
‘Looks like,’ the boy replied, a wind already rising in his body, churning his insides.
He had wanted to see his father, he told himself, he had to see him, and some part of the boy wanted his father to be proud of the money he had earned. He tried to hide the strain in his voice.
‘How are things, Dad?’ Silence. James Lowe just stood looking at the boy for what seemed like for ever. Then abruptly, he shook a cigarette from its packet on the counter, tapped it, lit it.
‘How are things?’ he said, mimicking the boy, exhaling. ‘How are things?’ A look of disgust passed over his face. ‘Things are no good. You read the paper? Eh? No, you’ve been gone in America, making money, when your place is here.’ He jabbed the cigarette in the boy’s direction as he spoke.
The boy knew the ripple of his father’s anger, how it could swell from nothing in seconds, but had told himself all the way here that he wouldn’t take it any more, he couldn’t take it any more.
‘Yes, I read the paper,’ he said. ‘I know what’s happening here. But I make my own choices now.’ His father’s face gave nothing away. ‘I don’t belong to you,’ the boy spat out. But already he was backing towards the door, his body saying what his words did not – he was still terrified of his father.
James Lowe took long drags, blowing the smoke towards the boy, but looking off somewhere else in the room. ‘I raised you,’ he said quietly, the tempo of his speech slower. ‘Put the clothes on your back, fed you, gave you a bed. You owe me,’ he said. ‘If you can’t give the time, you must give the money.’ He met the boy’s eyes. His father was serious. He wanted the boy to pay for the years he’d been away, payment for the loss his absence had incurred. Like the injuries claimed by slave owners. Suddenly he didn’t care for his father’s pride at all.
Behind the counter, the dark curtain moved. There was a cry as a little boy came running through into the shop – two years old perhaps, wearing only a nappy. He had chubby legs, but moved fast. ‘Vic!’ a woman called, coming through the curtain after the baby. She was black and young, the same age as the boy perhaps. Pretty. His father’s type. She grabbed the child and lifted him as he started crying, and her eyes locked with the boy’s, her eyebrows raised in surprise. No one spoke for a second. The woman looked at his father, who tutted at her, flicking his hand in the direction of the curtain. Her face fell – she turned quickly and was gone.
Another woman, the boy thought. Another child, a half-brother. Nothing had changed.
His father said nothing, went back to his ledger. If the boy wanted more from him, he would have to do as he said – pay for it. James Lowe still hated him then, despite the years he’d been away. That’s what he had needed to know. He looked once more at his father, fixed him in his memory. He wouldn’t see him again, he told himself. He turned and walked back through the door.
♠
The boy took a room down by the harbour. At night he lay on the bed reading the paper. The cane cutters were on a sit-in strike over wages. The wharf workers were refusing to unload trucks. The wages were low, lower than when he’d left. It was good the workers were still organising. He wondered about Thomas Reid. Much had changed in the island’s politics in the years he’d been away. The boy wondered if he should get involved again, wondered who Reid supported now. The boy still believed Jamaica needed its independence, but in those years away he’d fallen out of touch, and worse, something inside him had changed – the idealism of three years earlier had gone.
He turned to the jobs section in the newspaper. What could he do? There were jobs for office clerks and accountants that required applicants to have finished school with qualifications. There were positions for curtain fitters and carpet layers, all of them insisting on skills and experience he did not have. He circled a couple of advertisements to look into – door-to-door salesman positions, one selling medicines, the other encyclopaedias. Both provided a bicycle. The boy imagined cycling with a suitcase of encyclopaedias balanced on his handlebars. He thought of his other options. Mr Manny’s club was one. Another was his friend Rufus, who lived in Kingston now and wanted to open a grocery store, and had asked the boy to help him.
He dropped the paper to the floor, and lay on his bed thinking, listening to the dripping tap in the corner. It grew dark outside. The boy checked his watch, swung his feet down onto the floor, splashed his face with water at the sink and left the room.
Down in Chinatown, the noise was the same as ever – traffic and the clatter of hooves, the calls of the street merchants selling sugared ice and fried fish. This place at least hadn’t changed. The laundry hung, ghostlike, on washing lines strung between buildings, fruit in bright piles outside the Chinese shops. The smell of ginseng rose from copper urns. He passed the same laundries, the same hairdressers, recognising faces as he moved between the night-stalls. Some of the Chinese recognised him, nodding quickly at him as he walked.
The door was down the narrow alley where Felix said it would be. The boy pushed it open, went in and stood in darkness. ‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Anyone here?’ He saw a chink of light and could just catch the sound of low voices ahead. He went forward, reaching his hand out to push open another door. And there, behind it, was the low-hanging bulb above the big round table, a pile of money in the middle. Four men sat with fanned hands of cards. Three empty chairs. Felix was right – this was a dingier place. Mr Manny looked up.
‘Chick?’ he said, his eyebrows raised. He stood up, coming forward. ‘Chick! Long time no see!’
‘Yes sir, Mr Manny,’ the boy took Mr Manny’s outstretched hand. ‘I’m just come home. Been gone three years.’ They shook hands hard.
‘Boy
you grow up. Come in, come in. No way, three years,’ said Mr Manny, chuckling. ‘Well you see us fellows been sat here all that time!’ He held his belly laughing. ‘Good to have you back, boy,’ he said, taking his seat again, picking up his cards. The boy took his place at the table.
♥
Three months passed, and the boy had slipped back into the night-time routine of Mr Manny’s and other clubs in Kingston, not dealing for money but playing cards five nights a week, the jobs in the paper forgotten, Rufus’s grocery store forgotten. He played it straight and he played it crooked. In the small room on the harbour he practised and practised, laying down hands to check the probability of combinations. His memory was as sharp as ever. He was practising other skills too, things he’d picked up in America, bent to the room’s lamplight with a razor blade between his thumb and forefinger. He carefully shaved the edge from a playing card, the thinnest sliver, invisible to the eye, but just detectable when he ran his thumb along the long side of the card. Or sometimes he gently punctured the card with a pin, the tiniest bump only he could find. Then he practised dealing the deck, his hands so quick and smooth, no one would ever see a thing amiss, but in truth, those skilful hands were looking for the marked cards, holding them back in his palm, dealing them to himself. His timing was perfect.
He only ever let himself win small, and certainly not every night. In the small room in Chinatown, the same men played again and again – the boy couldn’t risk being caught, and he didn’t want to cheat Mr Manny – he’d been good to him in the time before. But at the other club he took bigger risks.
Three months living nocturnally, sleeping the hot days away in the small room at the harbour. It couldn’t go on. Despite his wins, his savings were half what they had been, the money gone on food, rent, clothes, a loan to Felix that he knew would not be returned. Something had to change.
