Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

E vening catch me. I’ve been walking for hours. Yes buses pass me up and down and some of them even stopped, but I’ve been walking for hours. I’ve been walking from Duhaney Park where my parents live, call it northwest from His house, if you call His house the center. Kimmy thought I was coming after her so she ran. She thought I was coming at her with the belt held wrong, strap in my hand, buckle hanging waiting to whip an eye out of one of her fucking sockets. She ran like she was the bitch in Black Christmas who dies first. She even stumbled over the vacuum that Mummy forgot to pack up because she was just so distraught over how her oldest daughter turn into some stinking pum-pum, Rasta-loving slut.

But I wasn’t going after Kimmy. Just like her to want to be the screaming girl in an evil movie, it makes her the center of attention again. I’ll bet she probably thinks this thing backfired, not because my father was on the floor catching his breath and my mother was screaming for me to get out with me ignoring her, and not even because this didn’t play out anywhere near she was hoping. It was because she couldn’t find a way to make all this about her. I should have ran after her and dropped at least two solid welts on her back. But when your mother keeps screaming about how you’re a demon from the black pit of Gehenna and it must have been because she didn’t give up anything for Lent why the devil slipped inside her and replaced her sweet baby with a devil, you can either tell her that she needs to watch better movies or you just leave. And that is what I was doing. Kimmy just happened to be in the way of the door. She kept screaming all the way to her bedroom, sorry, former bedroom, and shut the door.

I dropped the belt and went outside. As soon as the sunset touch me I started to run. Six o’clock already come and gone. When Mummy called it sounded like an emergency, so I pulled on green track shoes that I hadn’t worn since Danny, who bought them because track shoes is foolishness after all. I haven’t run track since high school so why would I need them? At some point I stopped running from my parents’ house, maybe when I ran out in the road and that first car slammed the brakes and told me about me bombocloth. Or maybe when I kept running in the middle of the road and another car slammed the brakes and said that bitch mad as shad. Or maybe when I got on the bus that took me to Crossroads even though I didn’t want to go to Crossroads and couldn’t remember when I got on the bus.

The visa is a ticket. That is all it is. I don’t know why I am the only one who sees that. The visa is a ticket out of the hell that this fucking PNP going bring on the country. You have to watch news to know. You don’t have to wait till one of Mummy’s horsemen of apocalypse shows up or whatever the r’asscloth that means. She who love to go to church to hear about signs and wonders and how we’re living in the last days. Ungrateful wretches the two of them, don’t they see this is the… this is the… shit, I don’t know what this is, or why I’m in Crossroads when I need to be at Hope Road. Shouldn’t talk, I should just show. I should just get the visa and the plane tickets and shove it to them before they have time to talk or have fucking Kimmy convince them out of it, like her parents are supposed to wait and see for when the shitstem supposedly right itself. I get off the fucking bus.

I left before I heard my father catch a breath. Serve him right. Serve everybody right. I’m getting just a little sick and tired of every man including now my damn father feeling that as soon as they see me, they get license to be on their worst behaviour. Great, now I sound like me mother and kiss my r’ass if that’s who I want to turn out like. My daddy beat me like I was a little girl. Like me was a bloodcloth pickney and is Kimmy fault. No is not her fault. She is just a damn jackass who worth whatever man tell her she worth, including Daddy. No, is the Singer fault. If he didn’t fuck me, me wouldn’t have anything to do with him and if the embassy did just give me the bombopussy r’asscloth visa and don’t tell me no fucking shit ’bout me don’t have no bombocloth ties like me would want to run away to the fucking country where Son of Sam shooting people in the head and big man raping little boys and white people still calling people nigger and trying to stab them with a flagpole in Boston and not caring who take a photo, they have another fucking thing coming.

Jesus bloodcloth Christ I hate when I chat bad. I also realize that for the entire little rant I was also chatting it aloud and the school girl who just happened to be walking right beside me take foot and run across the street. Pity car never lick you down, I want to say. It reach the tip of my tongue but I don’t say it. Instead I walk east of Crossroad and all the buses and people and school girls in blue uniforms and green uniforms and boys in khaki uniforms growing up too quick, and head for Marescaux Road.

On the bus my heart is pumping hard again, harder than before when I hit Daddy. And it won’t stop. I’m on the bus with suitcases, handbags, knapsacks, shiny oxford shoes and modest heels. Everybody leaving school and work to go home, but not me. I don’t even have a job. And my damn feet are scratching me because of these damn track shoes. I catch a woman on the left, four seats to the back, looking at me and wonder if something is wrong with me. My hair doesn’t look too mad, I think. And my t-shirt is back in my jeans and I certainly don’t look like I begged a free ride from the bus conductor. I wait for her to look up again from her newspaper and when she does I glare at her. She looks away quick. But the damn woman made me miss my stop. I come off when the bus stops and realize that I was wrong. The woman made me miss plenty stops, at least five or six. That’s when I started walking. I didn’t even think about it, or how long it would take or just how far off I was. Lady Musgrave is one long road.

My legs must know why I’m doing this because my head doesn’t have a clue. Maybe there’s nothing else to do, maybe there’s nothing else but it. Is this what a job is supposed to do, fill this space that I think I’m feeling now that I need to fill with an it? Such bullshit. I don’t know what I’m talking about. My parents don’t even want to be my parents anymore. Maybe I’ll just stand there, outside his gate, until something moves me or I find something to do. Maybe whether they want to move is beside the point and all that matters is that I get these fucking visas and they can do whatever they want with them. I tried, yes their disgusting Rasta fucking daughter. Maybe I should have asked what irked them more, the Rasta part or the fucking.

At the intersection I stop. I want to lie down in the grass on the sidewalk and I want to run and keep running. I open my handbag and pull out my compact, but I swear to God I can’t remember when I had a handbag. I know for some woman it’s like an eleventh finger and you don’t even think about it, even if you change every day. But I can’t remember the handbag either. Who can run with a handbag? I must be going crazy. I’m going to the Singer’s house to get money for something for people who don’t want it or me, but I’m going anyway. Because, well because. Somehow I feel as if this is the first time I’m looking at myself today. Seems I’ve been lying to myself about my hair, which is a madwoman mess. It looks like I pulled the rollers out but did nothing after that. One big curl is jutting out of the top left of my head and another big curl is down past my right brow. My lipstick looks like it was put on by a blind baby. Shit. I would run from me.

I choke up. Damn r’asscloth, I’m not crying right now. You hear me Nina Burgess, I’m not crying right now. But the grass looks so good, I want to just stoop down and bawl, loud enough that people will know to leave the madwoman alone. What kind of a wretched woman I must be, just like my mother thinks. Maybe it’s the walking that’s driving me mad. Who else would be walking anywhere right now? Last night I actually thought I was going to walk home all the way to Havendale, like an idiot. Does any woman my age, any woman I went to school with, have any purpose? Why don’t I have a man? What was I thinking, hoping to move back to America with Danny? He was here to score some local pussy, so mission complete. This message will self-destruct in three years. I really should have beat the shit out of Kimmy. Or at least given her one kick.