KAMARANG…Dancing with the dead

Jul 08, 2019 News

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By Michael Jordan

Lionel Jones was dancing with a bloody, stiff, and long-dead Loretta Hamilton, when his wife shook him. He woke to see her staring at him, her hand still on his shoulder.
“You alright?”
Stiff arms around him…
“You okay?” she asked again.
He blinked the image away…
“Yes,” he croaked.
“You were groaning.”
“I’m alright.”
He was glad the light was off, so she couldn’t see the fear, and the naked guilt, that he felt were printed on his face.
She looked at him a moment, then turned and went back to sleep.
He stared at the top of the mosquito net, then turned to look at the radio-clock. Three-fifteen.
He had a meeting at ten…lodge gathering at five. He should sleep…
Instead, he clambered over his wife, went outside. Passing his son’s room, the need to go in, to see if Michael was alright, seized him.
Relax, man…. It was just a dream…
Nevertheless, he pushed the door open. Michael lay fast asleep under his mosquito net. Shirtless and only in underwear. As he watched, Michael muttered something, then turned on his side and was still.
Now Lionel Jones seemed to detect a faint, feminine odour.
Suddenly embarrassed, he retreated, pulling the door behind him.
The faint scent, real or imagined, seemed to follow him.
Loretta Hamilton’s smell…
Stop this nonsense, chap. He pondered going back to bed, but headed down the inner stairs that led to the bottom flat. The linoleum was cool beneath his feet. The glass door to the patio was covered with mist, a deceptive prelude to another miserably hot day. Outside, he could hear the grating cry of one of the black, long-billed birds that came from the South Ruimveldt cane-fields, to forage in the Tucville trenches.
He went to the toilet, relieved himself, rinsed his mouth at the bathroom sink, then sat in one of the chairs near the patio.
Where the heck had that dream come from?
He would have been around twenty-five back then. That would make it… eighteen years, and he still remembered the smell of her; the way she kissed him.
“Loretta Hamilton…” He murmured the name guiltily, thinking of his wife upstairs.
He really ought to go back to bed, but the memories of the woman he had killed kept him there.
Loretta Hamilton … a name that sounded like a movie star’s. There was an air of maturity about her, even at thirteen, when her breasts hadn’t quite filled out… hair pressed…wearing perfume.
If I had only listened to Mother back then…
Her parents had a house in the street facing his home at Vergenoegen, where he lived with his father and four brothers. Her father was a seaman, his was the village carpenter. Dad…even now, the smell of sawdust got to him…
His mother, Katharina Jones, was a stern, churchgoing housewife, who, her sons joked behind her back, feared only God and stray dogs; and who had such a strange dread of lightning that she covered every mirror in the house at the mere hint of a thunderstorm.
Loretta’s mother was the seamstress and hairdresser. It seemed that women were always going to or leaving her home. Not Katharina Jones, though, with her reddish-brown hair, which she boasted came from some Scottish ancestor.
She constantly warned her boys about Loretta Hamilton.
“Keep away from that Hamilton girl, she is trouble!” she would say.
He wasn’t that interested in girls back then. He was just an eleven-year-old boy… fishing, going to school…pitching marbles in the yard…
And then Father had dropped dead from a heart attack in his tool shed.
Suddenly, all the little luxuries he had taken for granted were gone. They couldn’t afford clothes for school. He had one school shirt… ‘one-shirt-Lionel’, some had teased him.
At twelve, Mother had taken him out of school, so he could work as a post-boy to bring in extra money.
He was seventeen, but that didn’t mean that he was a man, and could stroll down the road courting a ‘common’ little thing like Loretta.
He’d just come from the post office, and there was Loretta Hamilton, heading down the street, head up, with that pouting half-smile that seemed to say: look at me, I am sooo glamourous. And he, a working man, with his wages in his pocket, dismounted the Big Ben bike the post master had loaned him, and he was walking with Loretta Hamilton!
That was when someone had slapped him so hard, he had literally seen stars. When his head cleared, he saw his mother, Katharina Jones, her lips pressed together, glaring at him.
“You are no big man, Lionel Jones!” she had said.
All he could have done was to slink off home.
It had seemed that the entire village knew of that episode. His brothers teased him that people all the way to Bartica had heard that thump.
He wondered if Mother would have reacted that way if he had been walking with one of the light-skinned Da Silva girls. But Loretta was too dark….Just as his wife was dark.
She was from Bartica; this girl with the prettiest, oriental-looking eyes that he had ever seen. She was training to be a teacher.
Knowing that he wanted to marry her, he had pushed himself, calculating that she would be earning more than he, a mere postman. He had returned to school, taken correspondence courses, and become a postal clerk.
And then I really messed things up…
It was after their second son was born, that trouble found him.
By then he was living in Suddie, Essequibo. He had returned to Vergenoegen to look over the house and pay the rates. He had felt depressed, because the old house was collapsing and empty, the red water-tank now rusted, Mother now ailing and in a home for the elderly. He was standing and staring at the house, with a tightness in his throat, when someone called out to him.
It was Loretta. He had not seen her in years. He watched her look at him in open admiration, and he knew she was remembering the skinny boy who only had one school shirt, and comparing that memory with this new Lionel Jones, with the wide shoulders and the big forearms.
She invited him to her home for a drink; not to the family house, but to a house closer to the main road…
I shouldn’t have gone. I should not have gone…
She told him she was now Loretta Levans, married to a surveyor, Hector Levans. That surprised him. The Hector Levans he had known back then didn’t dance, wasn’t flashy…had a foul temper when he drank…some even said a strain of insanity ran in the family, but he knew that was probably just malicious gossip. He saw a little scar on her forehead that he knew had not been there when she was a teen. And what was she still doing in Vergenoegen? He had always thought that she would have migrated to England…maybe even America.
He told her he had two sons, and a look of sadness came into her eyes. She told him she had no children…not yet, she added hastily.
She’d always had an air of confidence that seemed to say that the world only owed her good things. Now, he sensed an uncertainty in her.
But as they sat, some of that lightness returned, and the sun was going down, and he was reluctant to leave, and she laughed at a joke he had made and touched him…just touched him by the wrist, those long, elegant fingers clasping him lightly, and some pent-up emotion in that touch made him feel more drunk than the wine had made him…
Maybe everything would have been alright, if one person hadn’t seen him leave. That person was Winslow Oudkerk, a small, sly, limping bushman with a malicious tongue. Something about him—maybe his large head and hunched shoulders and spindly arms—had always reminded Lionel of drawings of Brer Anansi.
“Eh eh, you visiting, Lionel Jones,” Oudkerk said, looking at him, then at Loretta, who had stopped short at the top of the stairs.
Then Oudkerk smiled the way Brer Anansi must have smiled, after outsmarting his family to claim the largest share of plantains; the guilt on their faces, Lionel sensed, telling him all he needed to know…
Her smell lingered in his head for days. He was amazed that his wife hadn’t smelt it on him. Lingering with him, too, was a heaviness of spirit, a sense, which he could not shake, that something terrible would come of this tryst.
Four months later, Loretta Hamilton was dead.
One of the versions that he heard was that her husband, Hector Levans, was in Bartica having a drink with some friends, including Winslow Oudkerk. The drinks were on Levans, who was going home in a few days and was finally going to be a father. And as the liquor flowed, the teasing had started among them; rough, bush-man teasing. Hector had said something to Oudkerk, and Oudkerk had said, chuckling knowingly, “Boy, you is the first surveyor I know that can’t calculate. How come you only went home to yuh woman a month ago, and she got done got a three-month belly?” And he had looked at Hector in a way that seemed to say that he was sharing a nasty little secret with the surveyor.
The laughter had dried up at the table. Hector had given Oudkerk a long stare, then stormed off.
That very day, the postman at Vergenoegen delivered a telegram to Loretta Hamilton’s house. Hector had sent it. He was coming home. She must meet him at a guest house in Georgetown.
She booked a room.
Two days later, one of the maids realised that the couple in room thirty-four hadn’t booked out. When no one answered, she used the spare key to enter.
She found Loretta Hamilton on the bed, her belly sliced open. Hector Levans had scooped out the tiny, three-month-old foetus and placed it on her chest, in a mocking semblance of a mother cradling her child. Levans, dressed in blood-smeared suit, dangled from a rope he’d tied to a rafter just above the bed. They found a note in one of his pockets. He was leaving everything he owned to his mother. He wanted music from Eddie Hooper’s new album at his wake and funeral.
Lionel Jones was at his desk at the Suddie Post Office when he got the news. He got up, went to the toilet, and wept.
For a week, he tried to put it behind him. But he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t study. In the end, he confided in Jasper, his eldest brother.
Jasper looked at him in a way that said: So, it was you, little brother….
“Let it lie,” he eventually said. “What good it would do for you to tell Laura?”
But I didn’t have to tell Laura. Somehow she sensed…somehow she knew. Maybe she just remembered that I had gone to Vergenoegen and knew…maybe it was that intuition she has, like her grandmother…
She had been rather quiet that night, and when she woke the next morning, before they came out of bed she said: “It was you who was with Loretta Hamilton.”
It was so unexpected, said with such certainty, and she was looking at him; looking into him, it seemed, with those slanting eyes, that all he could do was stare back and say nothing.
Then he tried to explain, but it was all coming out wrong. He went to work without breakfast, and when he returned, she was gone to Bartica.
He didn’t know what Mother Hazel, God rest her soul, had told Laura, but she had returned readily to Suddie when he went after her.
Michael was born a year later.
Loretta Hamilton came to him in a dream that night.
She stood by Michael’s crib, her stomach a gaping, flapping, empty red. She held out a bloody thing, severed head in one hand, the rest of its unformed body in another. She smiled a ghastly smile, looked at him and mouthed: Our baby.
He had looked beyond her and seen that Michael’s crib was empty.
The same dream came to him twice more.
But I put all of that behind me a long time ago. The dreams stopped. They stopped…
Until last night…
He’s in an empty dance-hall, and one of the Eddie Hooper songs that they had pounded at Hector’s wake is playing, but it’s playing at a faster pace, at a higher pitch, and there is something sinister and mocking in its tone.
He’s waltzing with this thing with vacant, yet sad and accusing eyes, her limbs rigid as boards, her empty, flapping womb pressing against him.
She leads him across the floor, to a mirror that is suddenly there, and he sees that he is no longer Lionel Jones, with the spectacles and dashiki and receding hair, but a boy with a huge afro and high-waist bell bottoms and platform shoes, and the thing that is Loretta Hamilton, and yet not Loretta, looks in the mirror and smiles sadly….
He felt the hairs on his arms prickle as he remembered.
What had brought it on?
Go to bed, Lionel…Look at you, the man who jokes with his wife about being able to sleep anywhere, because of your clear conscience.
No, he couldn’t sleep; not with the sad memories of these two women he had hurt; not with this dread in the pit of his stomach that payment for that mistake, eighteen years ago, was finally due.
(Taken from the Guyanese supernatural novel, KAMARANG by Michael Jordan. Cover design by Harold Bascom.)
KAMARANG IS NOW ON AMAZON.
You can also purchase a copy from Austin’s Book Store, or Gordon’s Copy Centre in New Amsterdam, Berbice.
You can also contact Michael Jordan for an autographed copy on +592 645 2447, or on email address [email protected]

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