Kingston Noir (20 page)
The prime minister had business, but the ministers of education and national security were there.
Rain threatened to but did not fall. The cemetery was packed with people who never knew Jacqueline, most in black, gray, and white, including seven old women from miles away who bawled throughout the whole service despite asking for the poor girl’s name twice.
Alicia didn’t notice any of this, her eyes were so fixed on one thing, refusing to blink until they burned. Far off, maybe two hundred feet, the red Saab pulled up and paused. She wondered if she was the only one who saw. Nobody else seem to be looking west, only south to the hole in the ground and Jacqueline’s pink box sinking. The red Saab did not stay.
Melissa Leo smoothed out her white skirt and straightened her tie when she got out.
T
he woman has fifteen minutes before she dies on the catwalk.
She stands behind the cheap black curtain that separates backstage from runway, peeping out at the audience as they clap and su-su behind their hands.
It’s so dark, she thinks.
The open-air runway loops through the botanical garden and the murmuring spectators. No one in Jamaica has seen a fashion show like this before. Strobe lights and naked torches blend, mottling the faces of the barefooted models as they negotiate hundreds of golden candles scattered across the stage.
They are all dressed as monsters.
A hot gust of wind bursts through the palms and banana trees, pushing against the curtain where the woman is waiting to die. She watches as one of the models onstage stumbles, steps on a candle, and stretches her long neck up to the sky: a wordless screaming, like eating the air. The audience laugh and gasp and admire the vivid blue dress clinging to her body and the thick blood on her arms and clumped in her long, processed hair. She is dressed as a vampire, what country people call Old Higue.
—
Gimme more blood, nuh
. That was what Parker said at rehearsal last week and he was surprised when the stage manager explained it was vegetable dye. —
So where is the artistic integrity
? Parker: her husband. Not handsome. His father broke his nose before he was fourteen and it always seemed on the brink of splintering again. At school they’d called him battyman and so his eyes are watchful.
He’d walked over to her and bent down so close his eyelashes touched her cheek, not caring about the jealous glances around them.
—
You all right, baby
?
When we go home, I rub your … feet.
The other models watched, and thought of his voice, poured over their wrists; of adjusted hems and skillfully placed pins and the hold-breath moment when his quick fingers brushed their bare skin.
The woman moaned quietly against his shoulder and he’d laughed, whirling to face the rest of them, fierce and happy.
—
You are all my beautiful ghosts
.
Fourteen minutes: the woman sweats. Behind her and the black curtain, a white passage looms, ending in a makeshift tent, where the models go to change. Girls run to and fro, on and off stage, or stand and wait in the passage, like her. She can hear the clapping each time the curtain opens, like the ticking of a clock. It is midsummer and Kingston seems hotter than ever, despite the whirring, upright fans around her, that only stir the heavy air. Sweat trickles down her neck-back and between her thighs. Moisture beads on her top lip. She’s used to being the hottest person in the room. She hopes her makeup won’t run. At home she cranks the air-conditioning high until Parker arrives and always slips a hand-fan in her purse for the walk between the car park and the supermarket.
The waiting girls sigh and murmur, strung along the passage, cutting shadowed eyes at her. She’s used to the way their dangling thighs and backbones remind her of an abattoir. She’s seen many of them come and go through the years, so beautiful, but never friendly. Chandelier silver earrings tangle in shop-bought hair; golden creole earrings pull at piercings, fall and are scooped up again, teeth sucked in irritation; bells and beads tinkle and clack; they pull at hems and wrists and feathered details; crochet and hand embroidery.
“Anybody have a nail clipper?” The girl asking looks anxious. Parker doesn’t allow long fingernails. The woman looks at the ground, littered with tiny white nail crescents. No one else sees these things.
She watches as the girls climb the six steps up to the stage; disappear through the curtain slit and return minutes later, triumphant. Some pant and pump the air with their fists, others are silent and professional; they dash back up the passage and into the tent for the next costume.
She will only walk one dress tonight.
Thirteen minutes. Maybe twelve, now.
Two girls slink past.
“She get the best dress again?”
“Weh yuh expec?”
Years of people saying things faraway that she shouldn’t be able to hear, but does. The sweat prickles. She pulls the soft fabric away from her chest, blows down her cleavage gently, rocking.
Another girl comes back through the curtain: her transparent black lace dress exposes flat, dark breasts and a g-string that is scarlet and wet, like wearing a wound. Red contact lenses, flaming red hair. In the countryside, the old men who work as ghost hunters give girls red underwear to fend off the succubus at night.
The woman shudders.
“Move, nuh,” says the red girl, and runs up the passage.
The hot woman watches her go, then turns back to the curtain.
Parker gave all the models ghost stories to read, even before he began to sketch and cut and sew.
—This is not just duppy story. I want you to
embody
them.
One girl looked confused. Later, the woman took her aside to explain what
embody
meant.
Twelve, oh twelve minutes. She could sing eleven. The air stinks of the blood Parker mixed in with the vegetable dye and body paint. Each time a girl slithers through the curtain the woman thinks of a goat giving birth, legs first, a glut of liquid.
Slip in, slip out.
The albino girl up next is new. She wears a cream wedding dress the exact color of her skin and a tattered veil over the yellow dreadlocks weaved into her yellow hair. Hundreds of cream silk roses fall from the bodice, pour down the back of her, and weep into the ground.
Parker heard about her: a tall dundus girl, living near Matilda’s Corner who wanted to be a model. He paraded her through their living room, with her hair the color of straw and her golden eyes.
—
Now that is my white witch of Rose Hall
. Later he told the woman how angry he was about the way the dundus was treated. —
Ignorant rassclaat dem. You can call a girl like that ugly?
The woman watches the dundus and her wide, nervous eyes and thinks of the legend of the white witch: a young English bride, brought over to the Rose Hall slave plantation to live like the Queen. She had children whipped in the front yard of her great house and disemboweled one of her maids just after breakfast. And when the slaves rose to kill her, her ghost returned to slaughter them in their dreams.
What could have made her cruel, so?
The dundus hoists herself up the steps: two-three, another girl lifting the bans o’ roses train so she doesn’t trip.
Parker was happy when things went to plan. And sometimes, when he was happy and sleeping, she slipped out and walked the cooling Kingston roads, too late even for gunman. Found her way in pitch blackness: she’d never needed lamp or torch. People driving home late caught her in the headlights: whizzed past her, open-mouthed.
When she was tired, she clanked home.
—
Aaaah
, say the fashionista crowd, out under the stars and in the green expanse of Hope Gardens.
She came here for the first time as a girl: on a school trip to the funfair, where there were American things like bumper cars and whirl-a-gigs and a train and the older girls laughed at her barely hidden delight. They would rather be in the plaza, eating banana chips, and what you wearing to the party up Norbrook tonight, who driving? But she remembered the whoosh and creak of the rides and the pink bouffant candyfloss. It all seemed magical, this fairground in the middle of a place called Hope.
Nine minutes: who can she say these things to?
Parker found her sitting under a bougainvillea tree, far away from the funfair, when the teasing from the girls got bad. Fifteen years old, long bare legs, and trying to do her homework. She was already a year behind, ’sake of stupid, her mother said, and how she couldn’t bother beat her anymore because if you beat even a mule too much, it back bow and the only chance she had for a life was her looks. Even though men said she was too maaga and tall, and what a way she
black
, they took great pleasure in her oval face and the way she moved down the street.
The woman didn’t care what she looked like because what she really wanted, more than anything else, was to get three A’s and go to the law school at UWI. She’d been up there to watch the student mock trials and the black robes. But what happened to her every day was that she picked up the history book and the letters jittered like kumina dancers and slid away—now why did that
B
have to move its way back behind the
H
? It was the misbehaving letters standing between she and UWI and her mother’s belt and a chance to come and sit here in Hope Gardens and read law books; her mother said she was lazy but it wasn’t true, and eventually she’d put on a black robe and say, I’m a lawyer, Mama, and what you think about that?
One day, her mother would burn.
Parker saved her.
She must walk well in eight minutes. She still walks from her hips; all Jamaican models do. It is something they hear when they go abroad. You have to walk runway with your legs and shoulders; only Naomi Campbell can get away with a hip-sway, and everyone knows she’s old school anyway.
Once in New York, the stage manager screamed at her: —
I told you not to walk like a whore, bitch. How many times?
She thinks that Parker is a visionary. That is what they call him in the newspapers. But so many people here misunderstand him. They say he’s weird and wacky and that the heavy jewelry he wears would look better on a woman.
People are stupid.
She must remember her walk, yes, when she gets on the stage to die.
—
I going make you famous, sweet gyal
, Parker said, under the bougainvillea tree. And he did. At her first runway show he dressed them all in exquisitely tailored black dresses and masks like fly eyes and gave them small, sharp machetes to carry. He said they were mosquitos, the kind that gave you dengue fever.
She understood him immediately.
—
Walk like your back is broken
, he said. —
You know how mosquitos crouch on your arm before they bite you?
He made a claw with his hand to demonstrate.
She wasn’t thinking much when she corrected him: —
Mosquitos don’t bite, they push in a tube thing
, and she was struggling to remember the word
proboscis
, one of those words that danced across the page and slipped off into the grass, when his backhand pitched her over a table and she landed before she had a chance to think about falling and lay bent in three different shapes, too incredulous to be frightened, and here was a
P
by her throbbing head and was there a golden
R
by her broken fingernail—
I never tell you, cut your nails?
—and she thought: You lie; no, is not so it go. He never just. He never.
And the jealous eyes.
—
Him beat her because him love her.
Was that true? He’d picked her, sweating in Hope Gardens like a red hibiscus.
Seconds are precious, long, bare things. She experiences them as if she were walking through a rainforest, thin green branches sticking into her flesh. She shifts her bare feet, catches the eye of another girl waiting to go onstage. The girl smiles and sharp molars poke over her lips. She is a river mumma, her dress made of silvergreen fish scales, but she is also like fruit, a nobbled soursop.
The woman recalls her mother telling duppy stories at night, she facedown in her bed, the wheals on her back and shoulders too fresh to lie any other way: stories about the man who picked up a stranger in his car, and the stranger had long, jagged teeth, and the driver jumped out of his car and ran and ran and ran; gasping, sweating, begged shelter from a woman fishing by the riverbank.
—
Sistren, I just pick up a duppy wid long teeth,
and the river mumma turned around and smiled.
—
Teeth like these
?
—
Smile, let them see your teeth
, Parker instructed. —
And when you reach the front, cry. A river mumma is a wet thing.
Even now, she can’t read like everybody else. Even the most ignorant people can read the ingredients on a juice box and the words on a billboard, and she likes the matinees on Sunday television because she doesn’t have to read, although Parker’s mother likes foreign movies with subtitles and when they visit she’s glad she’s picked up a little
parley vous français
and can say something when Parker’s mother asks her what she thinks.
The dundus girl is back through the curtain in her wedding dress, happy face like a peeled egg: she can rest now, there’s no other work for her tonight, and the woman wonders, now that she’s been his white witch will there be work ever again?
She watches the yellow girl walk away, sees her reach down and pluck one of the cream raw-silk roses from the train and slip it in her mouth. They are so succulent; no wonder she’s moved to stealing.
The woman has stood in her own front door, dressed in Parker’s beautiful clothing, which is always so light and expensive, so kind to a woman’s body. Has felt the maid passing, sweeping, looking.
—
You going out, miss … ?
—
No.