Come Let Us Sing Anyway Read online

  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.

  *

  She must walk well in eight minutes. She still rolls her hips; all Jamaican models do. It is something they hear when they go abroad. You have to walk runway with your legs and shoulders; only Naomi Campbell can get away with a hip-sway, and everyone knows she’s old-school anyway. Once, in New York, a stage manager screamed at her.

  ‘I told you not to walk like a whore, bitch! How many times?’

  She thinks that Parker is a visionary. That is what they call him in the newspapers. But so many people here misunderstand him. They say he’s weird and wacky and that the heavy jewellery he wears would look better on a woman.

  People are stupid.

  *

  ‘I going make you famous, sweet gyal,’ Parker said, under the poui tree. At her first runway show he dressed them all in exquisitely tailored black dresses and masks like fly eyes and gave them small, sharp machetes to carry. He said they were mosquitos, the kind that gave you dengue fever.

  She understood his concept immediately.

  ‘Walk like your back is broken,’ he said. ‘You know how mosquitos crouch on your arm before they bite you? He made a claw with his hand to demonstrate.

  She wasn’t thinking much when she corrected him:

  ‘Mosquitos don’t bite, they push in a tube thing’. She was too busy struggling to remember the word proboscis, which was one of those words that danced across the page and slipped off into the grass, when his backhand pitched her over a table. She landed before she had a chance to think about falling and lay bent at three different angles, too incredulous to be frightened. Here was a P by her throbbing
head and there a golden R by her broken fingernail – ‘I never tell you, cut your nails?’ And she thought: You lie, no, is not so it go. He never just. He never.

  And the jealous eyes.

  ‘Him beat her because him love her.’

  Was that true?

  Picked her, sweating in Hope Gardens, like a poui blossom.

  *

  Seconds are long, bare things. She experiences them as if she is walking through a rainforest, thin green branches sticking into her flesh. She shifts her bare feet, catches the eye of another girl waiting to go onstage. The girl smiles, sharp incisors poking over her lips. She is a river mumma, her dress made of silver-green fish scales, but she is also like fruit, a knobbled soursop.

  ‘Smile. Let them see your teeth,’ Parker had instructed. ‘And when you reach the front, cry. A river mumma is a wet thing.’

  The woman wonders whether the girl will bring it off.

  *

  She recalls her mother telling her duppy stories at night, she face down in her bed, the weals on her back and shoulders too fresh to lie any other way: stories about the man who picked up a stranger in his car and the stranger had long, jagged teeth and the driver jumped out of his car and ran and ran and ran, gasping, sweating, begging shelter from a woman fishing by the riverbank.

  ‘Lady, help me, I just pick up a duppy wid long teeth,’ and the river mumma turned around and smiled.

  ‘Teeth like these?’

  *

  Even the most ignorant people can read the ingredients on a box juice and the words on a billboard and she likes watching matinees on Sunday television because she doesn’t have to read, although Parker’s mother likes foreign movies with subtitles and when they visit she’s glad she’s already picked up a little parley vous Francais on her travels and can say something when Parker’s mother asks her what she thinks about the movie.

  The dundus girl comes back through the curtain in her wedding dress, happy face like a peeled egg. She can rest now; there’s no other work for her tonight and the woman wonders: Now that she’s been Parker’s White Witch, will she ever get work again? She watches the yellow girl walk away, sees her reach down and pluck one of the raw silk roses from the train and slip it in her mouth. They are so succulent; no wonder she’s moved to stealing. She has stood at her own front door, dressed in Parker’s beautiful clothing, which is always so light and expensive, and underneath the trappings of his imagination, so kind to a woman’s body. Has felt the maid passing, sweeping, admiring.