The girl sits in shadows

Sep 06, 2015 News

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Kaieteur News celebrates Indigenous Heritage Month with works of fiction that focus on the myths of our First People. This excerpt is from a supernatural novel, Kamarang, by Michael Jordan, to be published next year

EVEN BEFORE HE TOLD HER, he sensed that she knew that he was going out. He sensed, even as she sat in the living room, that she had followed his restless fidgeting in the chair. He had sensed her eyes on him when he moved to the front step to smoke a cigarette. Sealey sighed, stabbed the cigarette out, then re-entered the house. He put the stub in the ash-tray on the coffee table, then moved over to Brenda. Standing behind her chair, he put his hands on her shoulders.
“Going out for a little while.”
He felt her shoulders stiffen. “Something got to be bothering a man for him to be mumbling in his sleep, or leaving his bed to go and lie in a hammock.”
He sighed, feeling guilt, but feeling flattered that she had missed him. Now she turned around to face him, dark-brown eyes large with worry. “Is the girl, right?”
“Brenda—-”
She shook her head. “You still looking for that woman? Even though they find nothing strange in the post mortem?” She sighed. “Vibert, I know how you feel. But you got to forget what happened at Kamarang.”
He thought of telling her that he had found the girl. But then he’d have to tell her the crazy part—that she was somehow different. Then he’d end up telling her about the other boy, and of his fears that didn’t make sense. He wasn’t ready to talk about that.
A cough from the bedroom behind them, then a cracking voice said: “Bren-dah?”
Brenda slipped out of Sealey’s arms. “Going and see what Uncle Jocelyn want.”
Sealey watched her enter the bedroom. He heard her speak to the old porknocker inside. He stared at the bedroom for a moment, then headed for the bathroom.
Afterwards, he went to Joscelyn Walker’s room. The old porknocker was asleep. Saliva had trickled from the twisted mouth to the white pillow-case. His right arm, on the side where he’d suffered the stroke, was bent at the elbow, the fingers curled in like a useless claw. The room smelt of Jeyes Fluid. It was a smell Sealey hated because it always made him think of his dying mother.
A memory, sudden and surprisingly clear, came to him, of a younger Jocelyn Walker at a night-spot at First Avenue, Bartica, hugging a whore and singing Eddie Hooper’s Where are your friends now.
And where are your friends now, Jocelyn Walker? The scroungers? The relatives? The women…especially the women? And where did all that flipping money go?
He leaned to the bed and gently squeezed the old man’s shoulder.   He could feel one of his headaches coming on. But damn, he was going to the Ritz tonight to check on that strange girl.
A power failure had hit the area. In the gloom, the Ritz looked like the old abandoned shell that it sometimes appeared to be in his dreams. But the door was open and he could see a light flickering at one of the windows. His footsteps echoed as he climbed the stairs. The brothel was empty, save for the tall, fair skinned chap who seemed to be always bumming a drink.  The barman was there, too, sitting near to a sooty kerosene lamp. He smiled as he saw Sealey. “Well, at least one customer ain’t desert me tonight.”
“What about me?” asked the fair-skinned chap.
The barman laughed. “You is a customer? I talking about people who does come up hay and buy.” He stood as Sealey came closer. “What you getting, mister?”
“Beer.”
“It gun be warm, you know.”
“Is okay.”
Behind Sealey, the red-skinned youth said: “Hay Desmond, I pushing off now,” and headed down the stairs.
The barman returned from the freezer with two bottles. He watched Sealey grimace at the taste of the warm beer.  ”Since morning,” he said. “Since morning the lights gone off. Doan know why they doan dump the whole Electricity Corporation in the flippin Atlantic.”
Sealey tried to smile at the barman’s good-natured grumbling. But the man’s voice, echoing in the empty brothel, added to his unease. He glanced at the corridor. He wondered if the girl would show herself tonight. Or maybe she wouldn’t because of the blackout. Maybe the blackout was a blessing, and now maybe he could go home to Brenda and stop poking his nose into other people’s business…
“Like yuh girls desert you tonight.” The words were out before he could stop them.
The barman shrugged. “Well, they got to go where the customers deh.” He took a long drink from his beer, then placed the bottle next to a cluster of other bottles nearby.
“This is your business?”
The barman wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Nah. Running it for an old bush woman who buy it last year. Get it cheap because nobody want it for business. Say it blight.” He smiled. “But I think business gun pick up.”
“Especially if you could get girls like that good-looking one I see here sometimes.” Again, the words were out before he knew he was going to say them. He felt a bitterness at himself, and yet an excitement that now he’d have to stay and see things out.
The barman shrugged. “I wouldn’t really say she is one of my girls.” He seemed to hesitate, then added: “She different. She renting she own room.” He glanced down at the counter. “And I know she could do better, but I guess is not my business. I ain’t worrying as long as she paying.”
But he was worried, Sealey thought, and he wanted to confide in someone. Sealey removed his cap, placed it on the counter. “She coming hay long?”
The barman frowned. “She start coming up hay around May…no…June. She come up hay, keeping to sheself, making styles on every man that rush she. And then, just like that, this baby-face boy come and the first night—-”He shook his head. “You know, I doan even think he paying?”
And why did he feel that he had heard this same conversation recently? ”Maybe he know her before.” Sealey’s voice seemed to come from far away, and he wasn’t sure that he had actually spoken.
“You mean they had something going before? Don’t think so. Hope he doan get too tied up with she. Between you and me, they got something strange about that girl…”
Someone smashed a bottle in the street nearby.  A woman cursed shrilly, adding some normality to the night. The sounds reminded Sealey that there was a saner world outside that he could return to anytime he chose to. He looked at the barman. The man’s bearded, shadowed face; his voice, which had dropped to a low, almost conspiratorial mumble, reminded him of his grandfather, telling jumbie stories on a moonlit back-step.
“You know where she from?”
The barman shook his head. “The people who might know ‘bout she is the boy…or that old woman she claim is she auntie.”
“What woman?”
The barman pulled at his beer. “A cripple-foot old lady she rent a room for near she own.”
“Cripple…how?”  But he already knew. It hadn’t been a crippled woman at Kamarang, but a crippled, broad-shouldered man who’d done the girl’s chores; a man with one of his feet turned backwards…
“…that girl is a really strange one, now that you mention it,” the barman said. “I remember the morning when she first come up hay. She was more thin…skin more white. She looked around, smile, and give me four pennyweight and say “I want the room at the top.” I follow she upstairs, and again she smile, and look around the room, almost as if she been here before, which is impossible because—”
He broke off suddenly and stiffened in his seat. His eyes shifted, and Sealey felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise as he smelt the familiar, musky perfume, and before he could help himself he’d turned, and there she was, within touching distance, face yellow-shadowed in the lamplight.
He watched, frozen in place, as she floated past him like he wasn’t there and stopped at the bar. A rustle of paper as she dipped into her handbag. “Cider,” she said in that quick, lilting speech, and it seemed to Sealey that the barman was darting to the freezer before the girl had finished speaking. She took the bottle and her change, then moved to the table nearest to the punch-box; her black hair, her black dress, swallowed up in the semi-darkness.
“…move like a cat,” the barman muttered. He glanced over at the girl. “What the hell she doing sitting in the dark?” He sucked his teeth, then moved to the freezer; returning with another beer. He drank, grumbling about the blackout and pretending to ignore the girl.
Sealey wished he could see her face clearly.  Was she watching him? Had she overheard their conversation? Had she been listening in the corridor? But so what if she had? What he should do is go over to her and demand the truth from her; shake it out of her if necessary—
Something in the girl’s posture had changed. Without moving, the figure in the darkness seemed to have shifted forward. And it had to be his imagination, because there was no light in the corner, but for a second he’d seemed to see her eyes, and had seen that they were fixed on him.
He shifted back against the step-rail; and though he hadn’t seen it do so, it seemed to him that the figure in the chair had also shifted back into the shadows.
He expelled a long breath. No sense going over now. She’d only deny, or cause a scene, which would make him do something stupid.  He raised the bottle to his lips….empty. He put the bottle on the counter, told the barman he was leaving, then headed for the stairs. He cursed himself for chickening out, but yet he wondered again whether she’d overheard him and the barman.
He was edgy, alert to every sound and shadow, and somehow he wasn’t surprised when, half-way down the stairs, he saw a tiny woman coming up. She came up the stairs quickly, silently, and he continued down the stairs, because, after all, she was just a flipping old woman. But yet he was thinking that there was something wrong about the way she moved, because she wasn’t limping at all. He did not want to look at her feet, but he looked, anyway, and he guessed that it was too dark, because why couldn’t he see them?
Quarter-way up the stairs she stopped abruptly. She stared at Sealey; her face a white blob in the murky light. She made a strange, sniffing sound; loud in the silence and the darkness. After a moment she continued up the stairs, now gripping the rail to her right, and now she was limping, and now he could see the instep of her good leg. He shifted aside, praying that she wouldn’t brush him. She looked straight ahead, but she made the strange, sniffing sound again as she passed.
He continued down the stairs, feeling a tingling at the nape of his neck as if someone was watching him. He forced himself not to look back; hurrying down the stairs, hurrying away from the brothel, hurrying past two women sitting on a stack of lumber near the White Coconut Tree brothel in Lombard Street.
It was while he was approaching Stabroek Market that he realised that he had forgotten his cap. He cursed softly. He’d had that cap for years. It was almost like a part of him now.
He sighed. No sense turning back. Hopefully, the barman would see it. He could collect it when he returned.
But even as he entered a taxi, he thought of his cap; feeling now a vague unease at the thought of leaving a part of himself in the brothel, with its two women who seemed to prefer shadows to light…
(Michael Jordan can be reached at his email address mjdragon@hotmail.com)

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