Come Let Us Sing Anyway Read online

  The train hissed, slowing.

  Maybe Uncle Barney’s wife would think she was trouble too.

  ‘No devil came out of the train then,’ said President Daisy.

  ‘No,’ she said. But she could feel the tamarinds in her tummy, making her sick.

  ‘Montego Bay, final stop, final stop!’ sang out the ticket master.

  Silver nails folded themselves over her small hands.

  *

  Uncle Barney was smaller than she thought he would be, although he did have coolie hair and big eyes. He also had a sign with her name in big letters: WELCOME! MARY! BROWN! He was smiling wide.

  ‘Welcome,’ said Uncle Barney. He pulled her into his arms and hugged her. He smelt comforting. Like lady’s perfume. He was telling her how brave she was to come on the train by herself, such a pretty, brave little girl. She looked around. No sign of a scary wife. She looked up at President Daisy, who was standing above them both. The cotton wool look was back, so soft and nice.

  ‘This is my friend, President Daisy,’ she said to her uncle. ‘He tickled a bad man on the train.’

  ‘Did he now?’

  Most of the people who got off the train were gone and the platform was nearly empty. The air smelled like mango. She watched a bright green parrot rustle in a tree nearby, then fly to another, squawking excitedly. She looked back at the men. They were standing, watching her, smiling.

  They were holding hands.

  ‘Her name isn’t Mary. It’s Ezmereleena,’ said President Daisy.

  She looked at the sign with her old name. It was red, and heart-shaped, and covered with little American daisies.

  MINTY MINTY

  Jeannie Smith bought the baby from the smiling woman for everything in her purse: twenty-three pounds, one hundred and seven US dollars, and a photo of her mother, posing under a blurry Christmas tree. She liked the picture because her mother looked peaceful, which was rare.

  The smiling woman handing over the baby said she was pleased to see that Jeannie’s mother was an African woman. ‘You look like toubab,’ she said, grinning so wide her teeth fought, using the local name for a white person, gesturing at Jeannie’s pale skin.

  Jeannie was used to the confusion. She’d come out of her mother’s belly pale – prize to her father’s Irish heritage. So she was Arabic in the Middle East, Hispanic on New York streets, black to white people. She’d hoped that on her first visit to an African nation, they’d recognize her pedigree. Notice that her hair was a bit too bad, too fluffy. That they’d see her Mamma-Africa roots in the twist of her hip, but no. Since she’d arrived a week ago, she’d been toubab along with all the other British tourists, despite their blondness and freckles, and she’d burned under the stern sun with the rest of them.

  The baby in her arms was unmistakably black. Jeannie had never seen a baby with pronounced cheekbones, but this one had them, along with a beach-ball belly and thin arms. She looked like a live version of those charity ads you saw on TV. She was the tiniest little person, just perfect. The smiling woman gestured: ‘She good, strong baby. Make you happy in London, toubab.’

  *

  The woman had spotted them arriving in the village after a three-hour journey. Jeannie’s ass was stuck to the hot seat, her hair stood up at mad angles, her stomach and arms hurt from clinging to the hurtling van and she was the dirtiest she’d ever been in her life. A thick red layer of dust had made them all the same colour. The only creatures unencumbered by the dust were the black flies whizzing around her face, arms and ankles. But she was OK. Hadn’t Leonardo diCaprio said it in that movie, Blood Diamond? TIA, darling. This Is Africa. This was a poor country; people didn’t do things the way she was used to. She was sure they would be appalled at Londoners: falling out of clubs, shrieking and vomiting; lack of sunshine; tube dirt in your nostrils and off the newspaper print. TIL, darling. This Is London.

  *

  The baby girl blinked and squirmed. Jeannie traced a finger over her face, smelled the curved head, a protective surge in her chest visceral and surprising. She dipped forward, kissed the damp brow. Who says she can’t? Who says? She was aware this was mad. There would be questions, officials, investigation, surely?

  The smiling woman mimed the most intimate of motions: she wanted something else. Jeannie stared. The woman repeated the movement. My knickers, thought Jeannie. Dreamily, she turned away, hiked up the material, hooked her thumbs into the French knickers from Marks and Spencer’s. She’d given up g-strings three years ago, after another transient lover said that her stomach was peeking out around the edges. French knickers, they would do. They were grownup underwear.

  Her head spun as she handed over the creamy lace, embarrassed at its dampness and flavour.

  The smiling woman took the bounty, examined. Sniffed. Jeannie turned away. The hut was a single room, dirt floor, taken up with the tat she’s seen all over the country: oddly porcine tigers; tie-dyed cloth that reminded her of her Jamaican grandmother; cheap beads and bracelets she could get for a pound in south London.

  She wanted none of it.

  She wanted this little girl.

  *

  She told everyone she was going to Africa for her birthday. Alone, they asked. Alone! But it would be such a spiritual journey! They fluttered over the brochures. It was important to have luxury. She was turning forty, after all. Five-star, but there would be excursions. This was the one she’d looked forward to most: a cruise down the golden river, the booklet said. Then through the village to meet the elders, the museum, and onto the island, one of the outposts where they’d sent her ancestors as slaves into the Middle Passage. She’d wanted to cry, just thinking about it. She imagined standing on the island, cool breeze at her head, then plunging, horrified, into echoing dungeons.

  It hadn’t been like that. The package deal was a rip-off. Instead of a cruise they were loaded onto a ferry so bursting with vehicles that every rock and murmur threatened a watery grave, where people squatted and pissed in front of each other. Then onto a rickety, open-air jeep. They bounced past a stinking abattoir, complete with a vulture council, pecking strips off suppurating carcasses of goats and sheep. She couldn’t smell anything, realised she’d been mouth-breathing for hours. The knowledge embarrassed her, as if she’d looked at her African brothers and sisters and automatically held her nose.

  And the island. She was appalled to feel nothing much at all. One of the tourists kept up a stream of questions throughout the inarticulate tour: ‘This was where they brought them?’ ‘Whipped them?’ ‘Held the rebels?’ ‘Do you Africans still feel angry? When you think of what we did to you?’

  ‘No boss, no boss,’ said the tour guide, bobbing and weaving. ‘Now we live in harmony together, black and white. Like Michael Jackson.’

  Frustrated, Jeannie had turned her face up to the sky, hoping for a rush of spiritual fervour. But she was too hot and her head was pounding and she could feel her forehead burning in the sun.

  She hadn’t put on sun tan lotion. Too black for that.

  I’m an idiot, she thought.

  Later, when she asked for a toilet, the second guide, a boy of no more than seventeen, pushed a curl off her sweaty cheek back behind her ear, said it was silky, and invited himself back to her hotel. Bring back a man, her girlfriends said. Or have some fun.

  ‘I could be your mother,’ she scolded him.

  He smiled, shrugged.

  *

  The smiling woman took out a surprisingly fat breast and offered it to the baby, who fastened on. It’s her last meal, Jeannie thought. The feeding woman fanned away a fly.

  *

  The hotel was beautiful. Entering reception, she could see the ocean through the huge window in front of her; it was as if she could walk straight from her life into the belly of the Atlantic. She snapped hundreds of photos of the flowers just outside her door. Each day began with a beach walk, marvelling at the rich rubbish coughed up by the sea: squid, huge fish, beige and cream shells, jellyfi
sh; once, a grand, hulking dead turtle. Plastic bags, a flip-flop encrusted with tiny sea creatures. The gulls were fat and men took white cows for walks. The sea was angrier than she’d expected – no azure Greek perfection, this; it was grey-blue, like a Southampton sky, and full of seaweed shadows. Beyond that, clean, clear water. If only she could swim past the crap.

  *

  ‘I’m not supposed to think like this,’ she murmured. The smiling woman blinked at her, jerked the baby awake from its milk-drugged stupor. She gasped, whimpered, began to suckle again. Fill your belly, Jeannie thought. She’d given the woman all the cash she had. A credit card would have to do the rest. She did sums in her head. Money to the driver of the jeep, money to the concierge. Money got everything here, right?

  ‘You know I’m forty today?’ she said to the mother, who gazed at her. ‘Forty,’ she says, pointing to herself. ‘Today.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the woman. She looked bored. Jeannie felt a prickle of annoyance. Perhaps she didn’t understand.

  All year she’d been saying to colleagues and strangers, casually, nearly forty this year, the big one, it’s coming. No, they all said. Even one of the tourists, today: ‘God, you look good on it.’ A teenage couple in the jeep had blinked, confused. Too young.

  The baby’s nose was running, which didn’t detract from its cuteness. Surely that was love. The mother shifted the little girl to her second breast and waved at her bric-a-brac. ‘You buy, lady? All for you. Mix blood toubab price.’ Necklaces. A broken shell and a sculpture of Bob Marley. Why was she looking? Her money was gone. The guide outside was calling her name. They were coming back from the “Journey of No Return” exhibition. She’d balked at the front steps, at the large sculpture of a slave couple, chained together, at awkward angles. It looked as if the man was beating the woman. That was when the smiling woman came up to her. ‘You buy baby, lady? Special price.’

  *

  She felt sweat between her bare thighs as she took the child, swiftly, cradled her, moving towards the jeep. She’d sit in the front. This Is Africa, and this baby was strong. She’d manage the bumping journey. She, Jeannie would protect her.

  *

  When the guide explained there was no luxury river cruise – the guidebook old, old – he’d offered them bulging packs of cheap sweets, instead. Lollipops, bubblegum, indeterminate suckable things: brightly coloured sugar. ‘There will be hundreds of children calling out to you,’ he explained. ‘Give them this.’

  The other tourists took them easily; Jeannie didn’t know why she refused. It was only later she understood. In the first village, the children ran screaming towards them, hands outstretched, resplendent rags, little knees pumping frantically. ‘Helloooo, helloooo,’ they cried, like the sound of high-pitched birds, palms up and pleading. ‘Minty, minty,’ they called. The tourists threw the sweets out, into hands, bouncing off heads, and the children scrabbled in the dirt. Jeannie recoiled. It was like feeding animals at the zoo. She wanted to scream, stop! Tears in her eyes. She turned to the woman beside her – ‘Do you?’ – but the woman was throwing out yellow and blue and red lollipops. Only the teenage couple seemed to understand her distress. The boy kissed his teeth, dropped his sweets into his lap and crossed his arms.

  There were nine villages and through each one, the same macabre ritual. Helloooo-helloooo, minty minty, and the laughing British and Americans and the shame at her temples.

  ‘Don’t know why you’re moaning,’ said one woman, even though Jeannie hadn’t said anything. ‘All kiddies like sweets. Like Halloween, innit?’

  *

  Jeannie strode towards the jeep. Her bare thighs felt strong. One arm cradled her baby, the other waved in the air, keeping the flies at bay. They were all staring at her, but she ignored them. She knew she looked good for forty, she didn’t need their approval.

  ‘Give me the front seat,’ she murmured to the younger guide, the one who wanted to sell himself to her. His face cracked open, his eyes and mouth round, but he opened the door. She settled, shifted the baby, felt warm wetness against her chest. No nappies. There’d be time for that. ‘Back to the ferry!’ she called, through the sliding glass window. ‘Everyone ready?’ She was aware that they were staring very hard, but that wasn’t her concern. The baby was smiling and she smelled very good, smelled like earth and ancestors.

  A woman she didn’t recognise broke through the small and gathering crowd. She was speaking rapidly in Wolof, gesticulating and screaming, pointing at Jeannie. ‘Toubab!’ she said over and over. ‘Toubab takes my baby!’

  *

  Jeannie cried all the way back to the hotel, through the reception, down the steps to the beach, under the cooling sky. She sat among the squid and the gorging gulls and eventually slipped into the ocean water and swam past the seaweed.

  ‘Minty minty,’ she whispered. ‘Helloooo, helloooo.’

  BREATHING

  On Tuesday the world went mad.

  Or perhaps it was me. Whatever the case, that was the day my dead wife came back. It was a normal morning, if normal is the word for the seventy-sixth day after your wife gets hit by a large, moving vehicle and is suddenly dead.

  DEAD.

  I played with the word in my head until it bounced there permanently, in letters made of yellow rose petals, like the flowers on her grave. I was doing that the morning Val came back. It was about 3 am. She knew I’d be awake. I was already an insomniac. It didn’t get worse after she died – not like in books where the protagonist drips his agony into beer bottles and develops bags under his eyes. I looked pretty much the same. It was just that the nights seemed longer and I hadn’t cried yet and the word kept bouncing.

  *

  I was sitting in bed, reading The National Enquirer – my choice of reading material verged between Kafka, old Alice Walkers and shit magazines these days – when the doorbell rang. Bing. Bong. I thought about how Val had hated that sound and how I’d come home one day and she’d been trying to change it to some kind of wimpy wind-chime, but all she’d managed to do was rip out bits of the door, and I thought, hey-ho, I should be fixing that door, and any day now I will, just as soon as someone tells me my wife isn’t D-E-A-D. Then I went and opened the door.

  At first I couldn’t see her because the yellow letters were in the way, but eventually my eyes cleared. There she was. Val. Looking very calm, with her hair in two kid’s plaits like she wore in bed at night. Val never did like weaves.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. Someone had picked me up and put me in the freezer. I clung to the door jam.

  ‘You haven’t fixed the door, bwoy,’ she said. Val always called me ‘bwoy’ in her pretty Jamaican accent.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I closed my eyes and watched the yellow letters pop and dissolve. I opened them and she was still there. Two plaits, the black dress I buried her in, and that slow smile.

  ‘I’m kinda thirsty…’ she murmured.

  I took her to bed. I had to, you see. It was a private joke, between us – what Val said when she wanted sex. ‘I’m kinda thirsty,’ she’d say, and there was the smell of woman in that tiny sentence. So I took her to bed, fresh from the grave. I heard a lot of men did that when the world went mad and the dead came back to us. I wonder what that means.

  After I took my wife – every tiny piece and pore of her – spread her over my body and mewed inside her ear, I let her hold me as I cried. I couldn’t stop. She was breathing, steadily. It was the sweetest sound.

  ‘It’s weird for me too,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. The tears were at the back of my eyes, roaring like a river. I couldn’t look at her.

  She grabbed my face. ‘Cut out the damn shock, Jeff. I think I’m OK, but if you freak out, I’m gonna freak out –’ Her lips trembled. ‘Please. I need you.’

  The roaring sound stopped. How long did I have – to talk to her, to touch her? Maybe this was a one-shot deal, a twenty-four hour Return of the Zombie Lover. I had to be
present as long as it lasted. And she needed me. Of course she did. After all, it was she who was dead.

  ‘Val, what the fuck?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ she said.

  ‘I saw you dead!’

  ‘I know, right?’ she said. ‘The last time I saw you was March 22nd. You wouldn’t go out for the bloodclaaht milk and I thought about why I ever married you.’ She laughed, shakily.

  I laced my fingers between her plaits and her scalp: so warm, so alive. ‘You’re not hurt, I mean, there aren’t any…’

  ‘…wounds.’ She finished it for me. ‘Was it bad?’

  Yeah, Val. It was bad. They covered you and treated you, but I looked. At the raw edges of your stomach. Your insides, out. It was as if the truck rolled over you, tore you in half, then came back for more. But I didn’t say that.

  ‘Not too bad, baby,’ I said.

  She knew I was lying. Passed my hand over her tummy. Like a chalkboard going soft, unmarked, but not new. Like before she left. I grabbed an inch, fiercely. Pinch her, you’ll wake up, I thought. It didn’t work. She giggled, then she was serious. ‘The last thing I remember… you trying to grab me. I didn’t see the truck and you tried so hard –’

  I put my hand up to her mouth, letting her breath stir the tips of my fingers.

  ‘Where did you go, Val?’

  ‘Hell,’ she said, simply.

  Outside, we could hear the sound of sirens, wailing into the morning. There were a lot of them.

  *

  We watched the morning news. It was frightening. Shots of people running around the streets. Burning vans. (‘Why would you burn vans?’ asked Val). Interviews with several teenagers. (‘Yeah man, we think it’s coo-wul our dad’s back!’) But you could see the nervous tics on everybody. It was happening all over the world. At approximately 3 am, everybody’s dead had come back, as simple as that. There only seemed to be one corpse per family, but who knew what was going to happen next? The God-botherers beseeched Him for help in the pulpits, beamed out by FOX. Shrinks had a field day. Pretty soon CNN was interviewing corpses at the rate of one every 9.3 seconds. We timed it.