Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

— Funny. I’m not having a fight with you. I’m just reminding you that a year is twelve months and this is month twelve.

— The kids will miss their friends.

— The kids don’t have any friends. Barry?

— Yes, sweetheart.

— Don’t overestimate how many choices you think you have.

— You have no idea how fucking tired I am of that goddamn word.

She’s not going to ask what I mean, preferring to let her sentence hang like that. Work? Marriage? She’s not being specific because if she were, it would reduce the threat. I could ask what she means and then she’ll (1) explain it to me like I’m some retard, slow on the uptake, and (2) use it as a way to start a fight. I don’t know how she thought her life was going to turn out, but I’m sick and tired of explaining it to her like I’m on some fucking TV show that has to bring the audience up to speed every week. In the preceding stooooooory, our erstwhile hero, Barry Diflorio, the intrepid, dashing, charming and hung hero, took his wife to the concrete Jungle of Jamaica, on a mission of sun, sea, sex and secrets. Barry Diflorio was on the job but his wife—

— Stop that.

— Stop what?

— Humming the words that you’re thinking. You don’t even realize when you do it.

— What am I thinking now?

— Oh for Pete’s sake. It was bad enough raising three children in Vermont.

Takes a while for me to realize she said three. — You’re so pretty when you’re angry, I say, anticipating the look before I get it. Except I don’t get it. She doesn’t even look at me, right beside her, trying to grab her hand. I think about repeating it, but don’t.

B us 42 drove past and didn’t even stop, trying to get home before turning back into a pumpkin, I suppose. Except it was six o’clock. The curfew started at seven, but this was uptown so there wasn’t any police around to enforce it. Can’t imagine them stopping a Mercedes-Benz, the man might turn out to be in the Prime Minister’s Cabinet. The last bus was a minibus with Irie Ites painted on the side in blue, not red, green and gold. Bigger buses passed too, the green public JOS bus run by the government, small buses that I have to crouch to get into (and stay crouched the whole ride), most of them on their way to Bull Bay or Buff Bay or some other bay, meaning coastline, meaning country. Irie Ites left me behind at six p.m. I heard the last bass note at ten forty-five. It’s now eleven-fifteen.

The buses kept passing and I kept not taking them. Two cars pulled up too. Illegal taxis both of them, both with two in the front seat and four in the back, including a man with dollar bills between his fingers shouting, You want reach Spanish Town, baby? At first I thought it was the same car. I stepped back and looked away, long enough for the car to drive off, then did it again.

I have finally gone mad. Must be, waiting outside the gate in the hope that some man will remember having sex with me and hoping I was most memorable out of all the women he has had sex with, maybe even having sex with this minute. And if he remembered the sex maybe he would pull some strings and get me and my family out of this country and hopefully pay for it too. It made so much more sense at seven in the morning after I saw my father trying to act like younger men didn’t just make him feel like the oldest man in the world. Maybe they didn’t rape my mother, maybe they just hit her, or use something to mess with her pussy and then have him watch them do it. Maybe they said no bitch you too old fi fuck, that deh pussy for Jesus now. Or maybe this is just me at near midnight, standing here in stupid high heels, my feet killing me because I spent all day killing my feet. And all I can do is listen to my mind go crazy. The son of a bitch didn’t come out once. Not even once. Maybe I have it wrong. Maybe I was memorable, too memorable, and he saw me from a window and sent a message not to let that girl in. Maybe I was a lousy lay or too good a lay, something about me that said to him, Boy, you better stay inside and don’t get involved with that one, that Nina Burgess. Maybe he even remembered my name. Or maybe not. My heels and my feet are covered in dust.

By around two or three the pain in my feet moved up to my shins then my knees, which felt better only because the ache was being shared. At some point you lose all ache until you realize, maybe an hour later, that you didn’t lose the ache at all. It had just spread all over until your whole body becomes ache. Maybe I’m not a madwoman, but I am something. The two women who passed me an hour ago knew something. I saw them from who knows, a mile up the road, when they were moving white dots, until they were barely twenty feet from me, two dark women in white church dresses and hats.

— But that is what me telling you, Mavis. No weapon formed against almighty Jesus shall prosper, the one on the left said.

They both looked at me at the same time and went quiet. They didn’t even wait until they were past me before one whispered to the other. It’s ten p.m. I know what they were whispering.

— Me just fuck your man for twenty dollar, I say.

They speed up their walk trying so hard to get away that the left one nearly trips. Nobody has walked past me since. It’s not that Hope Road goes to sleep. Behind me are apartments and in front is his house. Lights are on everywhere. The people don’t go to sleep, they shut themselves off from the road. It’s like an entire city turning its back to you, the way those church women did. I think about it, being a hooker, jumping in the last Benz or Volvo heading way up Hope Road, to Irish Town maybe. A businessman or a diplomat who lives in New Kingston who’ll rape me because he’ll get away with it. If I just stand here under the orange streetlight and lift up my skirt so that the light hits my bush, maybe somebody would stop. I’m hungry and I need to piss. The light in the top room of his house just went out.

The night that Kimmy took me here and then left, I didn’t plan on sleeping with him. I did want to see him naked but not like that. I heard he got up every morning at five and drove to Bull Bay and bathed in the waterfall. Something about it sounded so holy and so sexy at once. I’ve been imagining him rising out of the falls, naked because it was early enough. I’ve been imagining river water being the saddest thing in the world because sooner or later it had to slide off his body. When I saw him out on his balcony naked eating fruit I thought the moon must be sad too, knowing he would soon go inside. Thought is stretching it. I didn’t think. Thinking would have stopped me from going out on the balcony. Thinking would have stopped me from taking off my clothes just in case me clothed and him naked would have made him self-conscious, as if he had a self-conscious bone in his entire body. He said Me know you , which might have been true. A woman likes being remembered, I guess. Or maybe he just knows how to make a woman feel like she was missed.

After the music stopped a few people left. It was the first time that gate opened. Couple cars, one jeep, not his truck. He was still there, him and probably half the band too. I thought about running in, taking off the heels and sprinting fast enough that the guards wouldn’t have caught me until I was inside. By the time they grabbed me they would see that I was brown and leave me alone and I would shout his name and he would come downstairs. But I stayed on my side of the road, by the streetlight and bus stop. A light from a room on the right just went out. My father keeps saying that nobody is going to drive him out of his own country, but some months before the attack he sat me down in the kitchen and read me an article in the Gleaner . I was visiting and didn’t plan to stay long. He wouldn’t let me read it myself, he had to hear himself tell me. The article was called “If He Fails,” he being the Prime Minister. Daddy, that article was from January. You hold on to it all this time? I said. My mother then told me he reads it every week. That would be forty-seven times so far. The light in a room downstairs left goes off. There’s a curfew and I’m not supposed to be out here. I have no explanation for the police should a car pass by. I have no explanation for myself.