Fire rush, p.17
Fire Rush, page 17
‘Bad blood runs through some people,’ he says. ‘Not you.’ He strokes his chin, raises his top lip from his teeth. ‘What were you and Charmaine talking about the other night?’
‘Getting to know each other.’
‘Had my fill of bad gyal.’ He leans forward, takes a short curl, coils it between his fingers and pulls me towards him. ‘Yeah, safe,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t touch a woman like Charmaine. Worse, a woman like Asase. Fit but dange-er-ous.’
‘You didn’t know her. You think you know me.’
‘Give me some overstanding, baby. Asase had rep. I saw the three of you at the Crypt couple times. She was the one cutting her eyes, skanking, spreading out like a man. Trouble was always heading her way.’
‘Sure her style didn’t come-over for you?’
He grabs my hand and whispers, ‘Bad blood in that family, probably the mother.’ Then shouts, ‘It’s always the mother.’
There’s more smoke than blood in me. It’s me walking with the dead, not him.
‘Asase’s mother is a good woman,’ I say. ‘The father gave them a hard time.’
‘Ah so it go,’ he says.
‘And your mother?’
‘The mask of mothers is a skank.’
It makes me think of Muma. I’m afraid that I’ll never get to be who she wanted me to be. Not in a place like this. In my mind, I call her. But her voice is carbonating inside my ribs.
Monassa slips under the water and stays there unmoving for one, two, three minutes. He rises like a sea monster, tributaries running through his cane rows, sliding into his open mouth.
‘It was just me and my mother in that cramped council house,’ he says. ‘Damp, dutty, haunted. Rising revelations. That woman was the blueprint for beauty. Most nights I came down to find the front door swinging on its hinges, wide open on to the fucking streets. I was six! Anybody coulda come breezing in. She was hustling men. Fools bought into her looks. I won’t make that mistake. I check for the quiet ones. Like you.’
The water is cooling now, the smoke and steam gone; the stone walls are damp as a cave. He pulls a cord hanging from the ceiling and the light goes out.
‘How old were you when you started skanking people?’ I ask.
‘Nine, maybe ten. There were plenty like me on the streets. Bruck-up homes, shit like that. Only education I had was from hustlers. Swim or sink.’
‘And now?’
‘Babylon is no joke. Superstructure slave ship. I ain’t jumping inna the sea. Best to start a mutiny.’
I’m fired up when he talks like this. We’re fighting the same war. But the bath’s turned cold; my skin wrinkles and I know what’s to come.
We put on black towelling bathrobes with hoods, shove our feet into our trainers, our heels hanging off the back. We shuffle like monks along the winding corridors. Arched ceilings, lights dangling on rotting cables, mangled as seaweed. Ochre-coloured walls with large pores, sea sponges.
‘You’re safe from Babylon,’ he says. ‘There are tunnels beneath Racer’s apartment. An escape route from the police if they ever come. Links to old passageways used by enslaved runaways and pirates. One of them goes to the sea. We’ll go as deep as we need for freedom.’
‘Can I see where they are? In case—’
‘Nah, nah. Only we know the way to those.’ He walks faster.
I pull the robe tighter around my body as the air penetrates.
I think of the sea flowing past the tunnels. Upturned world of kelp forests, dragnets of coloured fish, trapping the smoke of disturbed silt.
We walk back a different way, cutting through a door in one of the storage areas, going into narrow passageways that go under. Repeat like harmonic patterns. Scratching sounds of rats and who knows what else. Falling plaster, waterfalls of white dust.
‘Wouldn’t know how to get to the main room from here,’ I say, thinking but I’d find my way to the sea somehow.
‘That’s how it’s supposed to be,’ he says and strides ahead.
At the end of a passageway, I hear the monomaniacal growling of the generator, a peeling, red iron carcass that Racer restored; the monster that keeps us off-grid. We get back to the row of corridors and go back to my room.
‘Come, let me dry you.’ He pulls the robe off me and rubs my back, chest and legs, moving from ankles to the tops of my inner thigh.
We lie on the mattress; he straddles me. Darkness in his eyes and a small gap of light, the glow of obeah men who make people drift into dead-flesh sleeps.
‘I want your obsession,’ he says. ‘Nuth’n less.’
It’s not gonna be me, not after what he’s done to me, but I can see why a woman would be obsessed with him, possessed by him. Eyes dark-rimmed, remote. I recognise the hard set of the mouth, a clamp holding in soundless pain from the long-gone past. Seen the same thing in Irving and Crab Man. The pain’s in me too, but in a different way.
‘Maybe I was afraid of Asase,’ I say. ‘Jealous. I thought every man bought into her beauty and power.’
‘Darkness is power. Let’s see how Asase moves in prison. She’ll be up against some hard-backed women.’
‘Don’t want that image in my head,’ I say. I want to forget Asase, because thinking of her has a pull-push effect on me. Missing her, wanting her protection, hating her ways. This isn’t the time for confusion. I need to tune in to riddims to stay focused on what I’m gonna do to handle this man.
‘You’re with me now,’ he says. ‘Women leave when we say. Best remember that.’
He pushes himself into me and I sink into the midnight zone where Black sea-slimed bodies float slow-mo in surge and sludge.
16
Channels
By the end of April, I’m running things at Shackles Shebeen. My weekly session, ‘Sonix Dominatrix’, is fiyah. I’m the controller, selector, toaster. On the decks all night. No mic sharks. Hip cocked, in my gold snakeskin shoes with six-inch heels, skin-tight black leather trousers, silver-sequinned butterfly top. Charmaine two-stepping by my side, blowing her whistle when the dutty bassline rips through her nervy body.
True seh, this is when I come alive. Blown out of my thoughts by high-frequency vibe. Outside the music, I feel wrong in this yah time. Monassa’s words all over my body. Here in the outtasphere is the only place where death of the body is the birth of voice. The only place I feel no shame.
After the session, we’re in the car and Racer’s driving by the Floating Harbour, a psychic wasteland, low-frequency horns on the back end of the wind.
Eight in the morning and I’m still under the influence of the sacraments of dub music, fader-controlled distortion of my mind. My nerves and cells aroused. I’m flexing on this yah dread routine: three nights a week hustling the duppy-hour streets, Tuesday my Sonix Dominatrix night. Two hours’ disturbed sleep most nights with Monassa putting on a performance of ganja blow-backs, drinking black rum from my pum-pum before fucking me.
Here in the daylight, in the car with the men, I’ve got no voltage to draw on. Sunlight casts strange shapes on the river where barges and rusting ships are moored. White shrouds hang from the cross-trees of masts, flapping. I’m bleached, high, manic, hyper-vigilant, my heartbeat pounding in my ears. I don’t tell Monassa that I live for my Sonix Dominatrix nights when I’m on the mic, blazing fire. Raising hope.
The men talk about reparation, why they only steal from galleries, museums, antique shops, places they say have been built on the wealth of Africa. They talk about their visions for the future. Racer wants a boat to live lawlessly on the seas. Dungle wants to do right by his two boys. Monassa wants to save his people and for them to love-him-off. After each night on the streets, when he’s slipped alone into the shadows of museums filled with our stolen past, a little more of him is missing.
Racer and Monassa are communicating with glances, nods, a kind of telepathy like me and Muma. I wonder which one of them is the ghost.
‘We’re dropping you at Christina’s,’ Monassa says. ‘Give her the goods, stay with her.’
‘Don’t wanna skin-up with her,’ I say. ‘Drop me at the Safe House.’
Racer says, ‘Go chat women’s business.’
We drive with the windows down, the air is cool and smells of spring flowers and earth and leaves. Along winding riverside roads, through a forest under green canopy and then out into open countryside. Racer pulls on to the gravel forecourt of Christina’s place and Monassa gets out the car and I walk with him to the back of the house. He gives me a small, red velvet pouch to hand over to Christina.
‘Go chill with her. Keep her sweet.’ He slaps my arse. ‘You’ll get your reward later.’
I hear them laughing as they drive off.
* * *
*
I sit on a stool around a bar in Christina’s conservatory of wicker furniture, floral print coverings and flowers. She stands next to me. The place smells like a dried-out summer. She pours champagne and orange juice into long black glasses. She’s decked out in coffee-coloured silk shorts and matching low-cut waistcoat, cream sling-backs. Vine-like veins all over her legs. She says her husband is in the Cayman Islands for a week, the children at boarding school. She’s vex that the men didn’t come in, but she sprinkles sugared rose petals on top of the drink like she don’t business. Raises her glass, ‘To the men and their midnight moves. Long may they rule the shadows, if not the waves.’
‘You been with the men a long time?’ I ask.
‘Sweetheart, don’t pussyfoot around me. You want to know about Monassa. We all do.’
She’s gotta be charged on something more than champagne. Coke, maybe. There’s a light in her eyes, like she’s seeing God or paradise. She opens the red velvet pouch, empties it on to the bar.
A gold ring with a sapphire the size of an eye and the colour of the sea.
‘African, antique, fifty K,’ she says. She leans towards me, strokes my hair. Her hand moves near my breast. ‘Nice body,’ she says.
I put my hand on hers, move it away.
Her lips are on mine. I turn my face and her mouth is on my ear.
‘Yeah, make me work for it,’ she says.
‘Nah.’ I push her aside.
‘Let me taste you. Feel what I can do,’ she says.
‘I said no!’
She inches back, cocks her head. ‘Let me know if you change your mind. A year or two with those guys and your type are off men for good.’ She laughs.
‘And you?’ I ask.
‘I’m not doing this because I need to,’ she says. ‘I’m doing it because I can.’ She picks up the glass bowl of sugared petals and throws it on the ground. ‘Fucking flowers!’ She looks at the broken glass on the floor, her nose flaring.
I down the champagne, refill her glass and hand it to her. She kicks the glass splinters aside.
‘Don’t let Monassa in your head,’ she says. She shakes glass off her shoe. ‘You’ve lasted longer than the others. Must be gold in your fanny.’
‘Or poison,’ I say.
She laughs.
‘Who is he?’ I ask.
‘Monassa? Last year he said he grew up in a care home. Three years back he said he lived with his psychotic mother and her boyfriend.’
‘And the others?’
She tells me that Monassa and Racer go way back, went to school together. They used to fight older boys on the estates where they grew up. Other pupils paid them to protect them from gangs. They’ve always had each other’s backs. And years later, Monassa skanked his way into a private club where Dungle sometimes worked as a bouncer. Time and time again, he found a way into the screw-tight building until Dungle just waved him in.
Christina uncorks a bottle of wine and drinks a large glass of it. She throws open the French doors to the garden – a massive lawn with a raised, polished deck at the rear, more wicker chairs and tables.
She strips off her clothes, pads across the grass and lies down on the decking.
‘Get naked,’ she shouts. ‘Sun therapy. It’ll be gone soon. Nothing lasts.’
I stand at the threshold of the doorway looking at her white-blue skin, the green bruises on her shins and arms, her small triangle of pubic hair, and I wonder what would happen if I went into the garden and lay under sedative sunlight with her, put my head to her darkness. Would I be trapped and choked in the hold of her body?
She falls asleep. I go inside and sweep up the broken glass.
* * *
*
The men pick me up early in the evening. They’ve been gone for ten hours. Christina slept through most of it. They’re charged on hash and the smell of perfume and different body odours.
Back at the Safe House I go to my room. It’s freezing underground despite the spring sunshine outside. There’s a story Oraca often told me about Queen Nanny, how she jumped ship just off the coast of Jamaica and with the help of spirits made it to a Maroon settlement, safe from British soldiers. I’m dreaming it’s me in the ocean, voices calling out to me:
Swim, don’t go under. Swim!
Hours later, the door opens and Monassa slips in. He strips, gets into bed. He smells of earth, freshly sprayed cologne and ganja, but he looks exhausted.
‘Dungle’s brother, Jammy, is locked up for a robbery he didn’t do,’ he says. ‘Cock-eyed witnesses. Every Black man looks the same to them.’
He puts his arms around me and falls into a fitful sleep.
I move my ear close to his half-open mouth, listen to his breath. If I’m gonna understand this man, it won’t be from the words that come outta his lips.
17
Midnight Moves
Summer nights and our living is easy.
Too easy.
We all have our roles.
Racer goes out by himself on foot, scouting the city and beyond for antique jewellery shops, colonial museums with anything from Africa or the Caribbean. The men spend weeks scouring maps, planning and plotting before making their midnight moves.
We all go out two or three times a week, middle of the night. Sometimes Monassa does a break-in alone. Most times they go together and leave me in the car for hours as lookout. I’m in too deep but the frequencies of pain and pleasure are reverb and delay, mixed up, disorientating me. Three seasons in the Safe House and I’m not sure what I’ve become.
A hot Friday night in August and we’re parked outside a street of gilded houses, chandeliers in gleaming windows strung together like charms. We dropped Monassa inna darkness two hours ago.
Dungle is in the back seat leaning forward, his face between me and Racer up front. He paws his goatee. ‘Man’s been gone way too long. Something’s wrong.’
Racer’s hands are on the steering wheel, turning it left and right. His grey skull looks as misshapen as the stones that get washed up on beaches. He lights another cigarette, drops ash out the open window.
I know enough about how they move, the things they steal, to imagine Monassa now. He’s gliding through the grave-dust darkness like the obeah men who leave their bodies and travel across oceans at night. He’s got a sixth sense for vulnerable people and buildings, ribcages that can be prised apart, hearts and minds snatched out. His shadow flits and pools outside an ochre-bricked antique jewellery shop. He deactivates the alarm. Slides the lock with his device. Three minutes and he’s in. Welcomed by faces from centuries ago, smiling out from gold frames. Rifles slung over their shoulders, their feet on the neck of a lion they’ve just shot. Monassa picks the lock of the safe. A cluster of blood-red gems.
‘He’s never been this long,’ Dungle says. ‘I’m going in.’
‘Stick to the plan,’ Racer says.
‘He should go,’ I say.
Racer looks at me. The muscle in his throat contracts. ‘Monassa’s put a gold necklace on you and you think you’re Queen Nefertiti, huh?’
‘And you’re Aten, the sun god!’
Dungle is laughing, but a blue light tints the darkness behind us and Racer is shouting, ‘The bull.’
Racer starts the car.
‘Spin round,’ Dungle says. ‘We don’t leave him.’
Racer cracks inna first, turning the wheel in short, sharp bursts like a hill-and-gully rider, his arms straight as drumsticks. Speedometer lickin’ fifty as he turns a corner, the car almost on its side.
‘There he is,’ Dungle shouts.
Racer pulls alongside a Georgian-house museum, slows. Monassa jumps in. Racer takes off, speeding along the river. Waves of blue lights behind us, a tide coming in.
‘Fuckers are on our backsides,’ says Dungle.
Racer switches off the headlights and we explode into deep darkness. Wet air streaming through the open windows. Trees, benches, bollards flash into sight and drop away as Racer steers the car clear at the last second each time.
Lights off. Speed hypnosis. White road markings spin off the road, fly at the windscreen like arrows.
‘You’re gonna kill us!’ Dungle shouts.
Police sirens blaring somewhere in the distance now.
‘Can you drive?’ Racer asks me.
‘My poopa taught me—’
‘Take the wheel. We’re bailing.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Tek the wheel! No headlights or they’ll see you.’
‘Meet us in Shackles, baby,’ Monassa says. He’s calm, almost serene.
Racer leaves the engine running and they jump out. I slide across to the driver’s seat and crack it into first, second. Stall. Skid-start. Accelerate.
I force myself to breathe deep. I’m at the control tower. I spin the wheel. And it comes back, everything Irving taught me on those country roads. J-turns; Y-turns. Blood pumping, I feel the whiteness of my bones, my heart a flashing alarm.
