Come Let Us Sing Anyway E-Book

Leone Ross

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 280

Beschreibung

A brave, exciting and adult collection that entertains with wit, shocks with frankness, and engages both intellect and emotion. Richly varied, it ranges from extended stories to intense pieces of flash fiction. Stories may be set in realistic settings – but develop magical narrative twists that make us see all afresh. Others begin in fantasy – returnees from the dead, a man who finds discarded hymens – but are so skilfully realist we can only believe in their actuality.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY LEONE ROSS

All The Blood Is Red

Orange Laughter

COME LET US SING ANYWAY

A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES

LEONE ROSS

PEEPAL TREE

First published in Great Britain in 2017

Peepal Tree Press Ltd

17 King’s Avenue

Leeds LS6 1QS

England

© 2017 Leone Ross

ISBN13 Print: 9781845233341

ISBN13 Epub: 9781845233440

ISBN13 Mobi: 9781845233457

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may bereproduced or transmitted in any formwithout permission

CONTENTS

Love Silk Food

Echo

Roll It

Drag

Breakfast Time

Pals

President Daisy

Minty Minty

Breathing

Phonecall to a London Rape Crisis Centre

Velvet Man

Art, For Fuck’s Sake

The Woman Who Lived in a Restaurant

Smile

Covenant

The Mullerian Eminence

Love Letters

What He Is

Fix

The Heart Has No Bones

Mudman

And You Know This

Maski-mon-gwe-zo-os (The Toad Woman)

For Soroya and Carol, the keepers of the stories

LOVE SILK FOOD

Mrs Neecy Brown’s husband is falling in love. She can tell, because the love is stuck to the walls of house, making the wallpaper sticky, and it has seeped into the calendar in her kitchen, so bad she can’t see what the date is, and the love keeps ruining the food – whatever she does or however hard she concentrates, everything turns to mush. The dumplings lack squelch and bite – they come out doughy and stupid, like grey belches, in her carefully salted water. Her famed liver and green banana is mush too; everything has become too-soft and falling apart, like food made for babies. Silk food, her mother used to call it.

Mrs Neecy Brown’s husband is falling in love. Not with her, no.

She gets away from the love by visiting Wood Green Shopping City on a Saturday afternoon. She sits in the foyer on a bench for nearly two hours, between Evans and Shoe Mart. She doesn’t like the shoes there; the heels make too much noise, and why are the clothes that Evans makes for heavy ladies always sleeveless? No decorum, she thinks, all that flesh out-of-doors. She likes that word: decorum. It sounds like a lady’s word, which suits her just fine.

There are three days left to Christmas and the ceiling of the shopping mall is a forest of cheap gold tinsel and dusty red cartridge paper. People walk past in fake fur hoods and boots. A woman stands by the escalator, her hand slipped into the front of her coat; she seems calm but also she looks like she’s holding her heart, below the fat tartan-print scarf around her neck. Then Mrs Neecy Brown sees that the woman by the escalator is her, standing outside her own skin, looking at herself, something her Jamaican granny taught her to do when the world don’t feel right. People are staring, so she slips back inside her body and heads home, past a man dragging a flat-faced mop across the mall floor, like he’s taking it for a walk.

She trudges through Saturday crowds that are smelly and noisy. The young people have fat bottom lips and won’t pick up their feet; she has a moment of pride, thinking of her girls. Normal teenagers they’d been, with their moods, but one word from her or one face-twist from Mr Brown, and there was a stop to that! She had all six daughters between 1961 and 1970: a cube, a seven-sided polygon, a rectangle that came out just bigger than the size of her fist and the twin triangles, oh! The two of them so prickly that she locked up shop on Mr Brown for nearly seven months. He was so careful when he finally got back in that their last daughter was a perfectly satisfactory and smooth-sided sphere.

All grown now, scattered across North London, descending on the house every Sunday and also other days in the week, looking for babysitting; pardner-throwing; domino games; approval; advice about underwear and aerated water; argument; looking for Mamma’s rub-belly hand during that time of the month; to curse men and girlfriends; to leave pets even though she’d never liked animals in the house; to talk in striated, incorrect patois and to hug-up with their daddy. Then Melba, the sphere, who had grown even rounder in adulthood, came to live upstairs with her baby’s father and their two children. The three-year-old sucked the sofa so much he swallowed the pink off the right-hand cushions. The eight-month-old had inherited his father’s mosquito face, long limbs and delicate stomach, which meant everyone had to wade through baby sick. Then Lara, Melba’s best friend from middle school, arrived in a bomber jacket with a newly-pierced and bleeding lip so long ago that Mrs Neecy Brown didn’t even remember when, but regarded her with fond absent-mindedness, not unlike a Christmas decoration you’ve had so long you don’t know where it came from. And the noise. Oh dear, oh Lord.

In between all of this, her husband’s bouts of lovesickness.

He’d proved no good at marriage: the repetition, the crying babies, the same good mornings, the perfectly decent night-dresses she bought – Lord woman, you couldn’t try a little harder? – but there was nothing wrong with her pretty Marks and Spencer cotton shifts, lace at the décolletage, and little cream and brown and yellow and red flowers. He seemed to crave what she privately called The Excitement Girls. She thought of them as wet things: oiled spines, sweating lips, damp laps. She saw one of them once, kissing him goodbye no more than fifteen minutes from their home. She’d scuttled behind a stone pillar to peep. The girl turned away after the kiss. She looked happy. Her chest was jiggling, bra-less, the nipples like bullets.

So that’s what they look like then, thought Mrs Neecy Brown.

*

She paused at the entrance to Wood Green tube station. One turn to the left and she’d be on her street. No, she wouldn’t go home, not yet. He’d be there for his tea, pirouetting through the house with his broad grins and smacking her bottom, his voice too loud. How stupid he thought she was; didn’t he know she could see, that she knew him? In love he was alternately lascivious and servile and too easily tempted into things – brawls, TV shows, games of poker for too much money. Gone for too long and out too often, and when he came back he would lunge at the family: Come, let’s go to Chessington Park next Sunday, or-we-could or-we-could, and he’d get his grandchildren excited, and she’d fry chicken and make potato salad and buy Sainsbury’s sausage rolls, 39 pence the packet of ten and pack tomatoes like a proper English family, in a proper hamper basket with thermoses of tea. Then, when all is ready, the greatest of apologies he comes up with. Once he even squeezed out tears: Can’t come, Mrs Brown, he calls her, or Mummy on affectionate days, Can’t come, my dears. They working me like a bitch dog, you know.Errol, she murmurs, language! Then he’s heading out the house, tripping up on his own sunshine, free, free. Make sure you come back in time, Errol boy, she always thinks, in time to wash that woman’s nipples off your neck-back.

After all.

*

She loves the London underground; it still seems a treat, an adventure, paying your fare, riding the escalator, choosing a seat, settling back to watch the people. So many different kinds, from all over the world! She settles into a corner and watches a Chinese boy struggling with a huge backpack. The straps are caught in his long hair. She’ll ride with him all the way to Heathrow, she thinks, see if he untangles the hair before Green Park. Then ride the way back. She leans her head on the glass partition and steps outside of her body.

Last night, Mr Brown did something he’d never done in all these years of his lying, stinking cheating.

Walking in, midnight or thereabouts, easing himself onto the edge of the mattress – she pretending to be asleep as usual, groaning a little, turned on her side – he rolled into the bed, after casting one shoe hither and the other thither and his tongue was in her ear, digging and rooting. Snuffle, snuffle, like a pig. Then she became aware of the smells. Vicks Vapour Rub. Someone else’s perfume, and… Mrs Neecy Brown lay trembling and affronted and frozen in the first rage she’d let herself feel for a long time – not since the first time he’d cheated, and repented and wept so much and talked to Pastor for weeks and then just went out and did it again, and she’d realised that it was a habit, this love-falling, and that she could never stop it, only fold her own self into a little twist of paper and stuff herself near the mops and brooms in the downstairs cupboard. No not since then had she let herself cry.

He’d come to her bed unwashed, with the smell of another woman’s underneath all over him.

She’d felt as if her head was rising; would never have expected to recognise such an odour so immediately when it assailed her. But it was just like the smell of her own underneath, the one that she made sure to clean and dress, like a gleaming, newly-caught fish, lest it flop from between her thighs and swim upriver.

She clapped a hand over her mouth as he snuggled into her, so she didn’t leap up and scream it at him: Is so all woman underneath smell the same, Errol?

If they were all the same, why turn from her and seek another?

No, she wouldn’t cook for him. Let him eat what bits he could find in the fridge for tea, and vex with her. Let him use it as an excuse to storm off to she.

*

The Chinese boy has sagged next to the centre pole, holding on for dear life. There are empty seats, but perhaps getting the mammoth backpack off and on makes the option too tiresome. There’s another young man sitting to her right. He’s wearing a creased blue shirt and stained navy-blue pants. His black socks are covered in fluff, like a carpet that hasn’t been hoovered in days. He has a dry, occasional cough and he sits with one hand akimbo, the other on his jaw. His eyes dart around. He’s a man in need of a good woman, if ever she’s seen one. Then she looks closer and sees she’s wrong – someone has creamed his skin and it gleams amongst the other imperfections.

Furthest away are a mother and daughter, stamps of each other, but even if they hadn’t been, she would have known. Mothers and daughters sit together in particular ways. Mother is shorter, more vibrant. She rubs her temples, manipulating her whole face like it’s ginger dough. Daughter has a face like a steamed pudding, two plaits that begin above her ears and slop straight down over them. Her hand’s a wedge of flesh, rubbing her eyes. She smiles at Mrs Neecy Brown, who finds she can’t smile back. She can’t take the chance. She presumes that Mr Brown finds his girls in north London. He’s lazy. This latest one is near, she can feel it; she could even be this young woman. She wonders whether they know her face, if they’ve ever followed her.

The train stops, empties, fills, whizzes past stations: Turnpike Lane, Manor House, Finsbury Park, Arsenal, Holloway Road. Where was she, this latest one, casually breaking off bits of her husband and keeping them for herself? She’d had to feed breakfast to a limbless man at least twice; can’t forget the week he didn’t smile at all because some selfish woman had stolen his lips.

*

She doesn’t realise that she’s been asleep until she wakes up.

‘Hello, ma’am?’

Balding head and a large beauty mark on his left jowl. He hunches forward in the seat; he’s been sitting like that for years; she knows the type – bad habits you couldn’t break by the time your fifties set in. There’s something young about his chin: it’s smooth and plump and might quiver when he cries. He’s wearing a horrible, mustard-yellow jacket and red trousers.

The man is bending forward, gesticulating, and Mrs Neecy Brown sees that her tartan scarf has fallen to the floor. She leans forward, feeling creaky, bleary, feeling her breasts hang, glimmers at the man who’s smiling at her and beats her to it, scooping up the scarf and placing it delicately on her knee, like a present.

‘Thank you.’

‘You welcome.’

She looks around; they’ve reached Heathrow. She must have fallen asleep soon after Green Park, half an hour at least! The train hisses. People come in slowly. They’ll be heading back soon. She’d like to be a movie star, she thinks – to pack a perfect set of matching luggage and leave the house, a crescent, golden moon above her. She would come to Heathrow and… what? She sighs. The fantasy won’t hold. She doesn’t have a good suitcase any more, because triangle number one borrowed it and still hasn’t given it back, and she knows what that means. Last time she asked for it, the triangle brought her three packs of heavy-duty black garbage bags from Sainsbury’s, where she works.

The train jerks and the scarf jolts forward again and spews onto the floor. The man picks it up again, before she can move.

‘Look like that scarf don’t want to stay with you.’

Sudden rage floods her.

‘What you know about me or anything? Mind you bloody business.’

‘Oh my,’ says the man. He touches a hand to his forehead. ‘I’m very sorry, lady.’ His voice is slow and wet, like a leaf in autumn. A crushed, gleaming leaf, in shades of gold and red and yellow.

She grunts, an apology of sorts. He recognises the timbre, inclines his head.

She thinks of her girls. If any of them is a cheater, it’s the second triangle – with her vaguely cast-eye and that pretty pair of legs. Never could stop needing attention. She sighs. Anger will help nothing.

‘You alright, sis?’ The autumn man looks concerned.

‘What business of yours?’

‘Just…’ he gestures. ‘You look like something important on you mind.’

‘Nobody don’t tell you that you mustn’t talk to strangers on the underground?’

He hoots. ‘That is the rule? Well, them tell me England people shy.’

Silence. The train doors close and it starts back home. The man has a suitcase. Marked and scrawled. She remembers arriving in London, so long ago, and how it seemed everything was in boxes: the houses, the gardens, the children and how big and cold the air was and how the colour red snuck in everywhere: double-decker buses and phone boxes and lipstick. Mounds of dog doo on the street, and you could smoke in public places those days. She, a youngish bride, Errol like a cock, waving his large behind and his rock-hard stomach. He’d kicked up dirt in the backyard that he would eventually make her garden and crowed at the neighbours. Mrs Smith, from two doors down, came to see what the racket was; she brought a home-made trifle and was always in and out after that, helping with the girls, her blonde, cotton-wool head juddering in heartfelt kindness. She’d needed Mrs Smith.

‘So you come from Jamaica?’ she offers.

‘St Elizabeth. Real country.’

‘Where you headed?’

The man consults a slip of paper from his lapel pocket. ‘32 Bruce Grove, Wood Green.’

‘Well, that’s just near where I am, I can show you.’

They regard each other for some seconds.

‘You come to –?’

‘You live near –?’

Laughing and the softening of throats, and her hands dance at her neck, tying up the scarf. He has a grin perched on the left hand side of his face.

‘Ladies first,’ he says.

‘You come to see family for Christmas?’

He nods. ‘My daughter married an English husband and her child is English. So I come to see them.’ He seems to let himself and his excitement loose, slapping his hands on his thighs and humming. ‘Yes boy, my first grandchild.’

She smiles. ‘I know you have a picture.’

He scrabbles in his wallet and passes it over. His daughter is dark black, big-boned and big-haired, her husband tall and beaming, the child surprisingly anaemic and small-eyed. She has a snotty nose. Mrs Neecy Brown thinks that an English person must have taken the photograph, for anyone else would have wiped it. But they look very happy. Grubby but happy, Mrs Smith would have said. Dead now a year or so. She hands the picture back.

‘Pretty.’

He nods vigorously, slaps his thighs again, stows the photo carefully back inside the dreadful coat, blows on his clenched fists. He must be cold, she thinks.

*

Night lies down on Wood Green station as they puff their way up the escalator and stand gazing at the road. My, how they’ve talked! Not easy; she can’t remember the last time she spoke to a man who was listening. The sound of her voice was like a tin, she thought, rattling money. But he’d opened his mouth and made sounds, and so had she, all the way home. The smell of vinegar and chips from a nearby shop; three boys play-wrestle in front of the cinema across the road – some wag had named it Hollywood Green. She doesn’t know whether she thinks it’s clever or stupid. She points.

‘What you think of that name?’

He reads, shakes his head. He doesn’t have an opinion. She smiles. That’s just fine, with her.

A cat tromps by, meowing. Lord, the noise.

Mrs Neecy Brown drops her handbag and grabs the autumn man’s arm, and reaches up to his shoulder, fingers scrabbling, her wedding ring golden against his terrible jacket. She hates cats. They don’t seem to care. He puts his suitcase down and pats her hand. They stand like that, arms interlinked, her hand on his shoulder, his hand patting. She is aware of happiness.

Eventually she moves away and he picks up the suitcase. Her fingers tingle from the shape of his shoulder. She waves towards the darkened roads. ‘I show you where.’

*

There’s mist between them when they find number 32, mist where he’s breathing hard from carrying the suitcase. She can see fairy lights in the window of the house and hear the sound of Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ coming from somewhere.

The autumn man rifles in his suitcase. He holds something out to her.

‘Some of my wife Christmas cake. She make a good cake, rich. You will like it.’

The tips of her fingers explode as she touches the foil paper. She’s aware that her mouth is slightly open. Wife, well. Of course. Wife. He is a big man.

‘I must be going now,’ she says.

He smiles at her, she smiles back, at this orange man standing in front of a dull wall. A light has come on in the front room; perhaps they’ve been watching for him.

‘Daddy!’

The young woman flings herself forward and he hugs her close.

‘Andy, bring Precious! Bring her! Oh no, don’t bring her – cold out here. Andy, don’t bring her, you hear? We coming in! Come, Daddy!’

Then she sees Mrs Neecy Brown.

‘Good evening?’ she says. The vowels have slowed and lengthened.

‘Good evening,’ says Mrs Neecy Brown. There is something moving up and down her back, some unknown discomfort. What is it? The husband has come out of the house now, thinner and better looking than his photograph and he’s disobeyed his wife, has a shy child on his hip and the autumn man who has a wife, of course he does, is tousling the child’s plaits and the men are pumping hands. I don’t know his name, thinks Mrs Neecy Brown. She feels absurdly forgotten. Shuffles. The daughter is like a piece of tall, sharp glass. She has thrust the moonlight in the front yard between them.

Oh, glaring.

‘Well…’ says Mrs Neecy Brown. She shivers; her coat is too thin for this time of the year.

‘Well?’ says the daughter. The suggestion in her tone is unmistakeable. Move from my yard and my father, you woman. You Excitement Girl. She wants to laugh. Could she be that dangerous? Could she be that pulsing sun?

‘I – no, no –’ she struggles. She tries again. ‘You – I –’

‘Goodnight, goodnight –’ calls the autumn man, who doesn’t know her name either and gleams less now. The unknown names might have been romantic in a movie, but, suddenly, Mrs Neecy Brown can only see it as the daughter does: sordid, undignified. Shamed, she lifts her hand to wave, so that it will all be finished, but the men have already turned their backs, heading inside, making the sounds of cockerels at each other, the formerly shy child trilling ‘Granddaddy, Granddaddy!’

They are gone.

The daughter growls, like an angry cat.

Mrs Neecy Brown draws herself up and flattens her stomach against her backbone. For after all. Presumption gone too far now.

‘I am a good woman,’ she says, calmly.

The house door clicks shut.

There are Christmas lights and gleaming trees in people’s front rooms. She walks slowly, savouring the cold whipping her shoulders. Under the streetlight you can see she’s eating another woman’s Christmas cake, licking the black, rum-soaked softness off her tingling fingers. Like silk food, her mother used to say.

ECHO

The young black man dies like a flower. Crumples in red dew. His bloom fades, hand falling to his side, like under rain, his mouth a puzzled ‘o’ shape. The bullets hover around his head, bees and hummingbirds. He sags. Petals fall. The weight of his body tilts him forward and off the stem.

The little girl standing in the store, watching, will refuse flowers for the rest of her life: balk at buttonholes, sigh at Christmas wreaths, reject a wedding bouquet.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ the wedding planner will say.

*

The horticulturist appreciated his asthma. It got him out of gym class; he wielded his inhaler like a wand. The pretty girl he dated in high school called him her wounded prince, then left him, a little bored by his lack of athleticism. Sometimes she ran through his mind on a hot Wednesday afternoon.

He lost his job with the Parks department because of his chest; his wife said he needed patience. So he sold cigarettes some days, three for a buck, and stepped patiently between two young bloods fighting over a pretty woman on the street.

They’re slow to stop; their angry cries shatter the concrete. The policemen who come are fools, and the chokehold that brings the horticulturist down is more illegal than cigarettes.

I have asthma, thought the horticulturist. Don’t you know?

*

Phyllis Wilson went to the store to buy bread. When she got back with a Battenburg cake and a hot saveloy from the chippy, her sixteen-year-old son was lying handcuffed on her living room floor, with his cheek against the TV Guide.

Sleeping, Phyllis thought, stepping in and contemplating her son’s other cheek, sitting across the way on her clean kitchen table.

The police buzz around her apartment, apologising.

*

Imagine, dem jus’ kill di gyal fi no good reason. Say dem t’ink she know one a dem gunman who operate through Port Antonio. All di gyal do is stand up deh next to di gunman bwoy and police come open fire pon di two a dem like she name calataral damage.

Miss Doris down di road tell mi seh dem couldn’t see neider of dem face after corpie done. Bradap-brap-brap-brrrrrrr. You know ’bout M16.

*

My father believed in Heaven all my life.

Every Sunday, in church. Hands up in the air: amazing grace.

At the funeral.

Here to tell you there ain’t no Heaven, Papa.

Ain’t no Heaven here.

RIP Tamir Rice, Sheku Bayoh, Joy Gardner, Michael Brown, John Charles de Menezes, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Kajieme Powell, Kimani Gray, Phillip White, Kendrec McDade, Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Ousmane Zongo, Timothy Stansbury, Sandra Bland, Sean Bell, Korryn Gaines, Orlando Barlow, John Crawford III, Aaron Campbell, Sarah Reed, Victor Steen, Tanisha Anderson, Freddie Gray, Alonzo Ashley. And those to come.

ROLL IT

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. 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 other models 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 fake 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. 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 a batty-man and so his eyes are watchful.

He walked over to her and bent down so close his eyelashes touched her cheek, ignoring the jealous glances around them.

‘You alright, baby? When we go home, I rub your… feet.’

The woman moaned quietly against his shoulder. The other models thought of his voice poured over their wrists; of adjusted hems and skilfully placed pins and the hold-breath moment when his quick fingers brushed their bare skin.

Parker laughed and turned from her, 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 change. Girls run to and fro, on and off stage, or stand and wait, like her. She can hear the clapping each time the curtain rises, like the ticking of a clock. It is midsummer and Kingston seems hotter than ever; the whirring upright fans around her 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 make-up won’t run. At home she cranks the air conditioning high until Parker arrives. She 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; heavy golden creole earrings pull at piercings, fall and are scooped up again, tsk-ing irritation; bells and beads tinkle and clack; jerked-straight 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 waiting to die 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 this one dress tonight.

Thirteen minutes. Maybe twelve, now.

Two whispering women slink past.

‘She get di best dress again?’

‘Weh yuh expec’?’

Years of people saying things so faraway and low 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 a wound. Red contact lenses, flaming red wig. 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.

*

Before he began to sketch and cut and sew, Parker gave the models ghost stories to read.

‘This is not just some 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 colour 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 her back and weep into the ground. Parker heard the gossips talking about her: a tall dundus girl, living near Matilda’s Corner. He paraded her through their living room, with her hair the colour of straw and her golden eyes. He waved the book of ghost stories.

‘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 watches 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 a queen. She had children whipped in the front yard of her great-house and disembowelled one of her maids just after breakfast. 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. 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. The occasional driver 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 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 poui tree, far away from the funfair when the teasing from the other 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 liked her oval face and the way she moved down the street.

The woman didn’t care what she looked like, because what she really wanted more than anything else was to get three A’s and go to the law school at UWI. She’d been up there to watch the student mock trials and the black robes. But every day she picked up her books, the letters jittered like Kumina dancers and slid away – now why did that B have to move its way back behind the H? It was the misbehaving letters standing between she and UWI and a chance to come and sit here in Hope Gardens and read law books. Her mother said she was lazy but it wasn’t true. Eventually she’d put on a black robe and say, I’m a lawyer, Mama, and what you think about that?

One day, her mother would burn.

Parker saved her.

*