Fire rush, p.20
Fire Rush, page 20
‘Moose,’ she whispers. ‘The one Babylon killed.’
I put the flat of my hand on her shoulder blade and push her into the small cloakroom to the side of the kitchen, just beyond the booths. I give the ticket assistant some notes and tell her to go buy herself a drink and come back in ten. She looks from me to Charmaine, ducks under the counter and leaves.
‘The fuck you going on with?’ I ask. ‘How do you know about Moose?’
Charmaine twirls a plait around her little finger and the 400-year-old child in her resurfaces with big, sad eyes.
‘We’re women,’ I say. ‘You help me. I help you. Seen?’
Just then one of the women who was sitting with the Heartist comes in looking for her coat. Charmaine tells her we’re covering while the attendant gets herself a drink, but we’re talking about heartbreak and losing men if she wants to join in. The woman looks at her, unsure, then leaves.
‘Charmaine, is there something else I need to know?’
‘There’s always more,’ she says. She tells me that one of the Heartist’s contacts is a police informer who moves from place to place, changing identities. Infiltrating Black Power groups and campaigns for justice. Born in this city, the man comes back every few months to rest up. She describes him.
‘Crab Man!’ I say.
‘No other.’
‘What’s that fucker got to do with Moose?’ I ask.
‘Crab Man was on your tail for the police. Trying to dig dirt on you so they could mess up the investigation of your man Moose. Your barrister man is on to something big. They’re watching you both.’
I lean against the counter. The furs, suede and leather coats on the rail look inhabited. The arms in mid-motion. I close my eyes, trying to get rid of the images of Moose’s body in the morgue.
‘I know what went on in this city,’ Charmaine says. ‘Old-time things jangling in my head like glass eyes.’
She goes on to say that it was also Crab Man who told the police that Lego was hiding out in the Crypt, and that Asase might be there too.
‘Crab Man was vex the police didn’t find him. Made his intel look bad.’
I don’t say anything about Lego’s secret place. I ask, ‘Why didn’t Crab Man inform on Lego before then?’
‘Lego was crab bait,’ she says. ‘Where one runaway finds safety, others follow.’
I think about the night Crab Man hassled me and Asase by the canal. He must have been following me.
‘He’s doing what he wants on the streets,’ Charmaine says. ‘Long as he’s doing Babylon’s dirty work, they let him get away with it. Power’s gone to his head.’ She says he grew up in a care home and he doesn’t have an attachment to anyone or anything.
‘Is he your friend?’ I ask.
‘There are friends you chat your business with and friends you do business with. Nuh so?’
She smiles, her startled child-eyes glistening. Something don’t look right. I see what it is, the thing I recognise in myself in the too-bright pupils. The translucency that could be timelessness, or something out of its depth.
The cloakroom woman returns, her arms folded across her chest. She says she’ll get in trouble with Mr Chen if she doesn’t get back to work.
Charmaine pulls the thick coat tight and buttons the collar around her throat. We go out and stand in the passageway outside the kitchen. Cook is by herself, hunched over a steaming pot.
‘You need to get your raas out.’
‘I’m scared—’
‘We need reparation for our minds and bodies,’ she says. ‘We won’t get far without money. Now I done told you all this I gotta leave too.’
‘I’ve got you,’ I say. ‘We’re in the same fire. Just need to think how much to take and where to go.’
‘Time’s running out,’ she says. She turns to go and then shouts, ‘Don’t call me no Charmaine Brown. I’m Princess. Daughter of an African Queen. Shhhhh.’
She’s wired. Disconnected. Weak. Strong. Sad. Hopeful. On her way. Long gone. But she’s live and direct with herself and me about the blues and blips that trouble her soul. And right now, this makes me trust her. We’re inna this together. A fundamental frequency. Connected in a way I never could be to Asase because of that defensive wall around her feelings.
I feel something like the beginnings of love for Charmaine. Or maybe it’s the first sign of softening towards myself.
I go back to the decks and watch as she dances. Flashing her braids. She’s in the centre of the dance floor, a dim bulb swinging on the end of a long chain light fitting hanging just above her.
I want to join her, spill my guts, talk in tongues with her, claw at my bruises, bail out from my mind, let her and the water in. Sink. But the Heartist is watching me again.
I take my mic from the youth.
‘shock-out, shock-out
become supernatural
tek over the control tower
push the chillum pipe
to the back of dem
throat
smoke them out
smoke them out’
And with each word that I fire out to the crowd, I feel sound growing in me. My future, the treble, below the rising bass of Moose, the alto of Muma. All of them becoming one voice, telling me to take the money and run.
* * *
*
Cold winter air rises like a low transmission. I sit on the bench by the Floating Harbour, waiting for Charmaine. After that night at Shackles Shebeen, we agreed to meet every week to coordinate our separate plans, check in on each other before we leave.
The sky is the tanzanite blue of lost, empty towns. White-haired, old people, stiff as statues, stare at the ground, walking as if the earth is about to swallow them up. Memories bubble up from trenches of sound in my belly. Moose, Asase, Rumer, Lego and me crushed in the dance hall, sweating, buoyed by the swell of floating bodies.
It’s one o’clock and I’ve been waiting for an hour. I’m worried that the Heartist has found out that Charmaine passed information to me. Or that her mind has cut free again.
I drive back to the Safe House and call her at two, then at three. She doesn’t pick up.
An hour later, the phone rings.
The strange dragging, cracking sound of someone trying to breathe.
‘Charmaine?’
A few more breaths. Then a man’s voice.
‘Can’t . . . can’t catch me breath . . . can’t see.’ It’s Irving.
‘Easy, deep breaths,’ I say. I try to stay calm, but I’m wondering if it’s the thing I’ve been waiting for, his life-or-death moment to help me decide what I feel for this man, to get me beyond the misfired jolts that feel like love trying to take off, but grounded in fear.
‘Hold tight,’ I say. ‘I’ll call an ambulance.’
‘No . . . no sah.’ The sound of rasping as he tries to get his breath. ‘Not going to no . . . no . . . hospital fe dead. Me going dead inna me yard.’
I tell him I’ll drive, be with him by early evening.
Green and blue signs of towns and villages with ancient names whizz past, consumed by speed and fading light. Always more tarmac road ahead, a black horizon. I’m scared he’ll die before I get there. I don’t wanna see another dead body as long as I live. It’s two and a half years since I had to look at Moose’s and it feels like yesterday. Does life play out in sound or numbers? If Irving dies there’ll be another kind of silence – all the things he knows about Muma, but holds on to for himself, maybe the things that will help me find myself.
It’s the first time I’ve known him to be sick. The man’s always been tough. Still working in his old age, manipulating spools of fire with his welding torch. His body has been shrinking and bending out of shape like a rusting coil spring from one of his cars, yet he was still walking with a crocodile’s slow, dragging steps and heavy-eyed watchfulness. Still sitting at the dining table at weekends, wordless, polishing small car parts like sherds. Listening to the weather forecast, making notes about low-pressure systems as if he’s waiting for a hurricane and the snakes that’ll come crawling out of the earth. Maybe thinking his Taino blood will be an offering to any storm. Turning it from its path.
I reach Norwood just after seven. Mulchy darkness, silver frost on cars and trees. Men leaving Lionel’s Liquor Mart holding large bottles of spirits like fire extinguishers.
I drive into the recurring dream of the Tombstone Estate and its morass of shadows. Look all around in case Babylon or Crab Man are following me. I should have asked Charmaine whether Crab Man was still in Norwood.
I let myself into the flat. The curtains in the front room are closed. The bulb blows when I switch on the light. The furniture looks misshapen, unfamiliar in the darkness. What will happen to the flat and Muma’s spirit if Irving dies?
I go into Irving’s room. He’s lying on his back in bed, his lips cracked and red.
‘Irving?’ I lean my ear to his face. A sweet, rancid smell coming from his open mouth. I touch his shoulder. He doesn’t move. ‘Wake up!’ I shake him harder.
‘Yamaye, is you?’ He opens his eyes, stares up at the ceiling, attuned to something I can’t see.
‘Take it easy,’ I say.
‘Sugar in me eyes. I can’t see properly.’
‘I’ll call the doctor.’
‘Undertaker breeze,’ he says. ‘Throw rum in the room, I beg you!’
The window is wide open and the greyed net curtain billows outwards as if someone’s just jumped. I shut it. Call Dr Shepherd. Give Irving tea and wipe his burning face with a flannel soaked in Bay Rum. My chest is burning, I’m choked with confusion and pain. I need to either love or hate.
‘Doctor’s on his way,’ I say.
‘When me eyes close I see your muma,’ he says. ‘She must be dead.’
My skin feels hot and sticky like magnetic tape, overloaded with data, peeling away from white bone.
‘Must be dead?’
‘See her there,’ he says, looking at the ceiling above the bed. ‘Woman is vex.’
I look at the empty space. Refracting basslines drag my thoughts where I don’t want them to go.
‘She’s been dead for twenty years,’ I say. I’m above him, looking down at him the way he used to tower over me before a beating. But there’s no satisfaction, just a recoiling feeling of pity. ‘Isn’t she?’ I ask.
‘Can’t feel my feet and hands,’ he says. ‘I’m dying. Retribution.’ All the bass has gone from his voice; he’s nothing but treble. A look on his face I’ve never seen before. Shame? Vulnerability?
He tries to sit up, but collapses back on to the pillow, moaning. ‘All them clubs in London wanted her. Couldn’t let no woman of mine go to dem places to be taken advantage of. I met her on the ship. The sea was rough. I thought I’d saved her. Then she slipped away like the tide.’ He starts crying. The burning in my chest hardens.
‘I’m not asking again,’ I say in that tone he’d used on me when I was a child.
‘Your muma . . . disappeared,’ he says, his voice cracked and strained.
‘She’s not dead?’ I ask again. ‘No cremation?’
I’m pacing the room now, afraid to look at him, still not believing. And when he won’t answer, I take the radio off the bedside table and crack it against the wall, throw the bottle of Bay Rum against the dressing-table mirror on the other side of the room, shattering the glass.
‘Disappeared where? Did you report it to the police? Did you search for her?’
‘She wasn’t happy. God forgive me. I . . .’ He looks at his hands as if he’s afraid of them, as if they’re prehistoric tools, lost to history. ‘She went to Guyana to nurse women and pickney.’ The slow drawl of his words sounds like dub spooling backwards on a cassette tape. ‘Six months. That’s all it was supposed to be. Some charity paid her danger money.’
‘Why danger money? Where in Guyana?’
‘In the bush, snakes and things all about. Some strange name. Can’t remember.’
I slump into his armchair and look at the ceiling above him, anywhere but his face.
He tries to sit up again and slides back on to his pillow.
‘She wrote and said she wasn’t coming back to me,’ he said. ‘Said she would send for you. Three months, four months, five months, a year – nothing. The charity went bust. Them was stealing money, sending people to these places without the things they needed. No one answered my letters. It was shameful, my woman gone like that.’ He says that Muma was a countrywoman at heart, born near the Blue Mountains, close to Maroons in that part of Jamaica. She liked the privacy of the countryside. He says she was put into a children’s home in Kingston when her parents died. She was six. It’s the most he’s ever spoken about Muma. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted, but I still don’t trust what he’s telling me.
‘She might be alive?’ I’m on my feet again, shaking his arm. His head rolls from side to side and he puts his hand on mine, tries to push me off. I let go.
‘I used to think so. But now . . . all these years.’ He moans. ‘She never came back. I tried to find her. She would’ve come back for you – if she could. She loved you.’
I’m speechless.
‘Me see her last night, in spirit. She must be dead.’
I replay what he’s said in my mind. Hold my breath, withdraw inside myself, press my ear to the silence to hear truth. I come back for air. Look at him again.
‘Fuckeries!’ I shout. ‘Lies! You’ve been lying my whole life.’
His eyes are misty lenses. I see nothing of myself in him. The limestone-pocked, olive-brown skin, the sloping eyes, slick-straight hair. Man’s as distant as the echo at the bottom of a well.
‘Yamaye, nuh look ’pon me like that. I was raised hard.’
‘So was I!’
He’s crying without tears, his chest rising, catching, falling.
‘What kind of man are you?’
‘I thought she musta gone back to Jamaica. But no one who returned my letters ever said they’d seen her. I didn’t think she was coming back.’ He heaves, his breath ragged. ‘Me tell everyone she was dead.’
He says that he didn’t go to the police because he was afraid they might take me, his child, away, put me in a home. Keeps saying he looked for her for years, wrote to the orphanage where she had grown up. Homes of Hope, it was called. Says he remembers because she always said the nuns gave her hope. But they gave him none. The nuns couldn’t tell him anything.
I ask for their names, their letters. He says he threw them away.
I ask if there’s anything he kept that might be important but he’s mumbling, moaning, crying. The strangest noise I’ve heard. A burbling turbulence.
His words are footfalls leading nowhere.
I switch off the light and go to the balcony to wait for the doctor to come. I look out beyond the tower blocks at the wastelands and the brickfields where hidden trenches and defensive walls were dug up along with the graves of ancient people, weighed down with lead weights and gold.
You can’t keep the past down, I say to myself. I turn and look at the front-room wall and Muma’s paintings of blue-mist mountains in Jamaica, shaped like the sound waves of a song, calling me.
Now I know where I’ve got to go.
I say, ‘Muma, we’re going home.’
20
Understorey
The next morning, I call Charmaine and she answers. Says she’s had some tuff n’raas days, heaviness in her head, she couldn’t get out of bed for three days. I tell her where I am, say I’ve got a plan. We agree to meet when I get back.
I walk to the other side of the estate, on my way to get Irving’s prescription. Dr Shepherd told me last night that Irving’s sodium level is low. He said something about early signs of dementia and that Irving was crying a lot and showing signs of agitation. As he was leaving, told me that the sinkhole had gone; the council backfilled it with rubbish to stop everything collapsing. That’s what Irving’s done with my life, filled it with lies so his wouldn’t fall apart.
I look up at the sky beyond the towers and imagine Muma looking up at the sky in a moment of need. All these years of sensing her, feeling her thoughts around me. Could a spirit be that strong? I think of all the things that could have happened: she was kidnapped, injured, had a breakdown, decided to stay with the villagers in Guyana, start a new life. Maybe there are things the women at the orphanage wouldn’t tell Irving, but they might open up to me. My throat tightens and I cry.
On the high street people look at me twice, unsure if they recognise me. The last time I was here was the day of the riot. In a way, nothing has changed. Same shops. Same townspeople. The smell of cattle from the market in the air. The street shaking as trains go by.
Did Muma take one of those trains on her way to the airport? Did she walk where I’m walking now, wondering where to go?
Did she go into the church to pray? I stand outside the church and look at the stone saint at the front of the building. I’m afraid of Muma’s physical presence, although it’s the thing I’ve wanted the most. Her electro-acoustic spirit is all I’ve known. I’m afraid of the bottlenecked words that could come out of her alive mouth that might have nothing to do with wanting or missing me.
I’ve been listening so hard for her that I’ve disappeared into her songs. I’ve been missing, too. If I can find her, she could bring me back to life.
I think of all the soundscapes I’ve travelled through in my dancing nights at the Crypt. The spatial manipulation of dub music where I’ve been lost and then found. Muma has to be somewhere. Dead or alive. I’ve got to find her.
I get Irving’s medicine. Then go to the bank and take out all my money, eight years’ savings from Bonemedica and the sessions at Shackles Shebeen. Three thousand pounds. I put a thousand into a brown envelope and write the telephone number of the Safe House on the back.
