Fire rush, p.14
Fire Rush, page 14
Monassa arrives at six in the morning. I see his car from the window. I take the lift down. The light’s broken and I descend in darkness.
When I get into the car, his hair is braided in fresh tight cane rows, the ends twisted like little fish tails. His oiled face is shiny as a river. He looks at me in my purple velvet tracksuit with red satin down the sides, navy suede trainers, black rabbit-skin jacket, cropped hair and gold pirate hoop earrings.
‘Baby, you’re carrying the swing rightabout now. Something different ’bout your face.’
‘Yuh full of it this morning. Sweet.’ I want to say, It’s called pain.
I catch a glimpse of Oraca’s flat as we pass. There’s a light on in her bedroom window. I turn back as we drive further away. Maybe I should have stayed with her, for a while at least. Paid my dues. But something tells me that Oraca will always be there, immortal in the stronghold of her kitchen, waiting for Asase to come home.
One last look at the ghost-white tower blocks, squat three-storey buildings, terraced houses – dissonant chords playing the morning darkness. Sadness welling up in my throat for Irving, Oraca, Lego – the ones left behind. Bitter-sweet sadness for the only home I’ve known.
12
Version Excursion: Reverb and Delay
B-SIDE/DUBPLATE, 45 RPM
Slack Time
Listen hard, gyal: this place is a version excursion. A dubplate special.
The B-side of your spinning world.
Keep working the controls. A little more balance! Rise on the air treble. Tek time with the subterranean bass.
Are those your bruck-up vocals? Or memories played out to eight-bar reggae beats?
Simmer down, gyal. Nuh bother asking yourself: how the raas yuh get here? Inna this world of sonic dust and analogue delay. No buildings. Some place sparked into life from acoustic storms and oceanic spray.
Yamaye, you’re far from tombstone estates, blackout dance halls and false trails.
This world of ghost-ridden sounds is familiar-strange.
Check it, gyal: you once danced in an underground world of Echoplex screams, rimshot thunder, sirens reverberating voices of the dead. Sound rebels dropping moves: bucking, flexing and cotching. Driving themselves backwards and forwards. Skanking until that grinding exhalation, when the spark in all of you was ignited.
You’re charged on sonic intelligence.
The ravers are busting moves to your Sonix Dominatrix sound system. They’re likking drums cut from driftwood, shaking sand calabashes. Sounds are discordant space. Those midnights of long ago when you danced yourself into other worlds, trying to find your voice.
But you got lost inna smoke.
Gwaan: try and forget Moose. See if you can. All the things he told you about the rebels of his rainforest, their skeletons six hundred feet below ground. Maroon and Taino voices in Cockpit Country sinkholes. Their warrior dance moves frozen in time. Petrified in coral, mollusc and red mud.
This place is no safe house. No hideaway. Listen, nuh! Your ancestors are here. Bustin’ tunes inside crypts of swirling mists that roll in from the sea.
Check it, gyal: those mountain peaks in the distance are wavebands of time.
Only, time don’t exist on the B-side.
Book Two
Safe House
November 1980–November 1981
Dub draws the listener into a labyrinth, where there are false signposts and ‘mercurial’ trails that can lead to the future, the past . . . or to nowhere at all.
Paul Sullivan, Remixology: Tracing the Dub Diaspora
13
Slipstream
We drive for an hour before Monassa stops at an old market town. It’s cold but the sun’s shining. A medieval-like bazaar, shops and stalls selling everything from blue shimmering Chinese silk to yellow yams and orange kumquats. It’s eight in the morning and there are hunched elderly women leaning on tartan shopping trolleys, drowsy, sweaty men coming off late shifts. We go to a Turkish cafe and Monassa orders black coffee, lamb and onion sandwiches. We sit at a small wooden table. His eyes are red, puffy. He unzips his brown leather bomber and leans against the wall. A jiggy-jiggy pop song’s playing. He shakes his head as if he can shake the sound outta it, says, ‘Baby, those songs are full of linguistics I can’t fucking decode.’
‘It’s people that are hard to work out,’ I say. ‘Music doesn’t lie.’
Two large, bearded men nod at Monassa as they walk by and he raises his hand to them before leaning across and taking my hands in his. ‘Do your thing from the Safe House. No one will trouble you,’ he says.
‘Your crew?’ I ask. Worried his friends won’t want a woman on their scene.
‘No one enters or leaves unless I say,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Lockdown. That’s how the place must run.’ He lets go of my hands and cuts his eye on me, and I’m afraid he’s going to say he’s changed his mind.
‘I can pay my way,’ I say.
He laughs. ‘Lie low on some dark tracks for a while, baby. I don’t need your donzai. Didn’t we have fun in the boneyard? Eat your food.’ He bites down on his sandwich, knocks back the tiny glass of coffee in one gulp.
After breakfast, we’re on the road for half an hour before it starts to snow, a light slushy downpour that gets heavier. We drive through towns of patchy white. He winds down the window and sniffs the chalky air.
‘Rising revelations, snow’s dropping hard. Me and you in a storm, baby. Just the two of us.’ He says this like he does sometimes, switching between song and speech. Like American bluesologists who sing-talk about the coming revolution.
I tell him about Cockpit Country and say I hope to go one day and find Moose’s grandmother. He says he didn’t grow up with his father, but he heard that his father’s people were descendants of Maroons who lived and fought in Cockpit Country hundreds of years ago. Says they’re buried in the sinkholes, and that’s probably where he would have ended up if he were back in that time, because he’s never taken shit from anyone, least of all the police. Rebellion is in his blood. This is the kinda protection I need.
* * *
*
An hour later we drive into Bristol, cruise by the Floating Harbour where the water doesn’t ebb and flow and ships are always afloat. He shows me the caves, Georgian squares, cathedrals, bombed-out churches, castles and sugar houses. He parks by a small lane of Georgian houses with red and blue doors. We go down a ramp and walk along the river. A green bridge connects to the other side. Barges and boats moored on both banks.
He talks in detail about the slave-trade ships that left from this port. The kinds of chains they made to shackle slaves. ‘They didn’t just uproot our bodies,’ he says. ‘They uprooted our forests, our rivers, our seas and seeds. Reparation is needed so we can replant ourselves.’
Translucent snow falls in the grey air like stars. I look into the dark river, a melted universe of star leaves, froth clouds and black waves. Hear the gasping breath of multitudes caught between sea and sky.
‘Come, the temperature’s dropping and we ain’t dressed right,’ he says.
We get in the car and drive down side streets, where men with cigarette-thin legs and scarred faces stand in shady corners, striking matches like flints. Fifteen minutes beyond the city, surrounded by fields, a ghost town of deserted industrial estates and scrub. He stops outside an abandoned estate that’s fenced by barbed wire and has a padlocked gate with long, heavy chains. A network of ugly glass and concrete buildings and corrugated-iron sheds. Bricked-up doors and windows, pipework and cables snaking on the walls.
I tell myself that a refuge is a refuge, no matter how dark it is.
We go through the black cantilever gate and he locks it. I follow him to a five-storey, brownstone tobacco warehouse with faded signage. Wide-arched entrances, steel-framed windows – four up and four across; grime and dust blur the windows that aren’t broken. On the far right of the building is a blue metal shutter. Monassa presses a bell on the side and after a few minutes the shutter rises and we step into cave darkness. The door is on a timer and it closes. A low light comes on.
‘Racer is my co-pee,’ Monassa says. ‘Man’s tongue can be sharp, but he’s on a level.’
‘That a warning?’
He sings the reggae song ‘There Are More Questions Than Answers’. I leave it at that.
We’re on the first floor of the warehouse, in a large echoing space with cathedral-high ceilings, rusting metal beams crossing from one side to the other. Smoke-blackened walls. The bones of old train tracks piled in the corners, sawn-off railway sleepers. The woody smell of musty tobacco. A shaft of grey-white snow light beaming from an arched skylight. Graffiti and scrawls on the wall like prehistoric cave paintings. A tremor in my ribs, a strange feeling pushing against my chest. I follow Monassa through a small rusting door and down two floors of a black-bricked stairwell. In the basement, there are no windows, no natural light. We walk through rambling wings laid out in a staggered formation. Pipes as big as logs run along the walls; green, vine-like cables hang from the ceiling and trail on the floor. He points out dimly lit corridors. Identical rows, each with one large storage room and three small adjoining office spaces. Dusty upturned desks, broken-down chairs, a battered filing cabinet in one of them. Toilet cubicles and a doorless room with stained urinals at the end of each one.
The men have their own corridor, with their bedroom in one of the offices. Old strip lights in the corridors give off more shadow than light. At the far end are passageways that slope downwards into darkness. I try not to breathe in the smell of mould and sulphur. Try not to let the shadows in.
‘Off limits,’ Monassa says of the men’s areas. He points out the kitchen and bathroom. He says Dungle is an electrician – used to be a stringer for a sound system – and he’s rewired the basement, so it has everything they need. There’s a workout room with bars and weights, a tan leather punchbag hanging from the ceiling on a chain, two rusty training benches.
I follow him down the corridors clogged with dust and time. We come to a pale-grey-painted room that is one of the office spaces. This is where the men are. They’re sitting at opposite ends of a great hulk of a table made of metal railway lines stacked on wooden sleepers, toughened glass on top, everything secured with sling-shot-sized bolts. They’re playing dominoes and don’t look up straight away. Railway-signal light shining above them, pulsing red, yellow, green. Monassa says who’s who.
Dungle, a bulletproof hulk of a man in his late forties. Plump, cushiony lips, pouchy eyes. He’s wearing narrow-legged, black jogging pants, purple silk T, Jerry Curl hair hanging just so. Racer, a short, maaga fidget; smoke-ring eyes, nose thin as a crack. Carved, wooden pipe-snake coming outta his mouth.
Black sheepskin rugs on the concrete floor; two wrinkled burgundy leather sofas; framed drawings of futuristic buildings on the walls, which Monassa says are his. A silver stereo. Electric heaters with twisting rods of red heat and light plugged into the four corners. Roots riddims on the down-low.
‘Welcome,’ Dungle says. ‘I’ll make souse. What the body needs in weather like this. Yard’s cold enough to freeze bassline mid-air.’
‘W’happen,’ Racer says.
I’m not sure if it’s him or the snake talking.
Monassa sits at the table that’s piled with Rizlas, dominoes, beer cans. Air thick with black hashish.
I smile at them, say, ‘Respect.’ I get a sense of who they are by their hair and teeth. Dungle with his curly-perm and one solid gold tooth seems to be the friendly one. Racer’s blond hair is razored to within a millimetre of his scalp; two front teeth framed in gold. Looks like this man don’t skin-up with no one. Monassa has cane rows, a small ruby in the centre of his front tooth. True seh, I’m still working him out.
‘Babes, sit you raas down,’ Monassa says. ‘No rewinds here. Seen?’
God knows I’m tired as hell and cold. I drop on to the sofa and cover myself with a grey cashmere blanket that smells of perfume.
Racer leans back in the swivel chair, eyes me with a poker face, his legs twitching faster.
We eat the souse, smoke hash that’s as potent as volcanic dust and makes my head spin. Slowed-down dub saturated with wet reverb fills up the cave room. Sound effects whirl like bats. The red bars of the heater twist. I drift inside my body.
Muma’s in the underworld of my belly. In a sac of blood-drums. An acoustic ghost. I dream that the Dead Water canal is seeping into Dub Steppaz record shop, into the sinkhole and the Tombstone Estate. Into my mouth. Suffocating me.
* * *
*
I wake in the middle of the night, disorientated. My jaw clenched, I’m twisting my mahogany ring round and round my finger. For a second, I think I’m in Moose’s bedroom and he’s in the kitchen making cocoa. Then I remember. I switch on a lamp on the floor. I’m in a strange room on a double mattress on the grey office carpet. A desk, and on top of it my bag, case of vinyl and cassettes. A small blow-heater fans dusty warmth into the freezing room. It’s ten past midnight. I get up and open a large grey metal locker; my clothes are inside on a rail with someone’s navy Farahs, navy duffel coat with gold buttons, dresses, leather skirts and shoes. There’s a side shelf with quilts, pillows. I wonder who the garments belonged to, but it’s too soon to start asking questions.
I hear the muffled voices of the men from further along one of the corridors, smell the moss and sage scents of their cologne. Their footsteps going up the stairway. I leave and wander up and down the corridors before I find the kitchen, a small airless room with a cooker, a fridge, a worktop made from railway sleepers, a rusting stainless-steel sink and a green-painted mahogany cupboard. A tin of condensed milk, a litter of sodden teabags and takeaway boxes with yellow grease stains on the draining board. I bite down on a cold rib, razor my teeth against a layer of fat. Tip the contents of the can into my mouth. When I put the empty can down, red cockroaches scuttle towards it, their feelers out. I retch into the sink. I go back to the freezing room and take three quilts out of the cupboard, get into bed. Push down thoughts of Moose; can’t handle the low-toned vibrations of grief in my chest.
Muma’s somewhere in the shadows now. She’s not singing. Gotta be as gentle with ghosts as with newborns. Sing them songs in return for their truths.
I try to sing, but my voice is dry. ‘Stay,’ I say.
Nothing.
I’m remembering her voice, the outline of a face in the slow, white drift of memory.
‘Sing,’ I say.
The cold air stirs; she’s close to my face. Singing about children killed in their dancing time.
14
Static
The next day I get up and put on the duffel coat, pull on the hood. I want to go to the river, but none of the men are about and they’ve explained that for now they’ll let me in and out. I understand that the house has to be secure but there are no windows, no air. I feel locked in. I walk up and down the freezing corridors. The walls seem to be moving, small tremors. I place my hands on the peeling paint and realise it’s me that’s shaking.
I hurry back to the main room. The electric heaters are on full blast. The concrete walls are wet with condensation; rust drips hang from the ceiling like stalactites.
I play tunes with the volume low. Scribble lyrics. Sing until the tremor in my ribs stops. Something like a heavy liquid draining off my chest. I’ve made it out of Norwood. I’ve got backup. A chance to get inna music.
The men appear at midday dressed in sweats, red-eyed, loose-jawed, sour-skinned. They grab cold leftovers from the kitchen and bring the food to the table: meat patties, spare ribs, fried chicken. They stuff whatever they can between wedges of hard-dough bread; chase everything down with pint glasses of rum mixed with tomato juice and chilli sauce.
I don’t say a word because their minds are still wherever they’ve been in the strange hours after midnight.
‘Baby, this is man time. You best check out,’ Racer says to me. His smoke-ring eyes are half-closed; his wooden pipe-snake seems more alert.
I look at Monassa and he laughs, tells me I should explore the area, get to know my way around. He’ll introduce me to some clubs and music people soon enough. Won’t be long before everyone knows I’m with him. No one will trouble me. Dungle walks me out of the building, says I best be back at six – he’ll be waiting by the gate to let me in.
* * *
*
I walk through the time-capsule brownstone city and the hyper-tuned tremors in my legs slow down. I need to dance, let off moves. I go inside the fourteenth-century church built into the city walls and listen to the waves of silence. It’s been a sanctuary for hundreds of years. It reminds me of the Crypt, and I think about Asase and Rumer. If they were here now, Rumer would be cracking jokes about Bongo Natty and man dem. Asase would be screwing up her face at someone. We’d be tight. Here, on my own, it feels like I’m moving outta sync. I want to go back to the dry days before Moose, before love and pain.
I step-bounce-swing in the crisp cold November day, bare beech trees swaying like dancers in the shrouded vocals of the wind. I check out museums and castles, visit the Floating Harbour. I find Footprints Record Shop on a side street off one of the leafy squares where paths cut through rows of trees. The shop has a blue door with a bell that jangles as I go in; a small corridor leads into two large rooms. Rows of wooden cases of tightly packed records and cassettes. Dub, reggae, jazz, pop, classical. Two young men with long, stringy hair at the two counters, one in each room. Packets of vinyl polishers and styluses hanging on wall racks behind them. I try not to think of Eustace, but I see him at the counter, the sharp edge of a black vinyl balanced between finger and thumb, basslines pumping his chest up and down. I buy four records and go back to the Safe House.
