Kingston Noir (14 page)
On our last day in Kingston, if against my will, we called on the psychic medium whom my mother had heard about from the hotel masseuse. The Reverend Dr. Mavis Campbell Grimstick (apparently her real name) lived in the cool, rhododendronrich heights above Kingston in a suburb called Stony Hill. She boasted an ability to hear the dead—“clairaudience”—and advertised herself (humorously, I guess) as the “top-ranking conduit from the Beyond.” As we set off, I resisted making a joke about striking a happy medium.
Twenty minutes later, we rang the bell to a house signposted
Bon Accord
and waited. By now the sun was well up; children’s voices were raised in playful chatter somewhere.
The door opened and an elderly black woman said to us in a poised contralto voice: “I am the Reverend Dr. Mavis Campbell Grimstick, whom nothing does baffle,” adding (I think with a smile): “You are cordially welcome.” She had neatly set gray hair and not much of it.
We went into her lounge and sat down on a sofa.
“You have a nice place,” said Mom.
“Thank you.”
In fact the room was small, mean, and tawdry. The drapes at the single window were torn; marks had been left on a wall from swatted flies. Here, too, Christmas was on its way. A cluster of colored balls dangled over a cocktail cabinet; fairy lights on a small silver tree enhanced the festive cheer.
I noticed that my mother was pointing to a picture on the wall; after a hesitation she asked the medium: “Is that what I think it is?”
The medium smiled mysteriously, and said, “It is.” The picture (Mom later told me) showed the Fox sisters’ house in Hydesville, New York, which in 1848 had unaccountably produced a series of “rapping noises” and given birth, they say, to the modern spiritualist movement.
The session was a snip at U.S. $150.
“Have you been meditating of late?” the Reverend Grimstick asked my mother outright. “No? Because I’m getting a lovely pinkish light off of you, oh
yes,
man. Nuff-nuff light I’m getting—and you will be bathed in this light until the time you get cured.” The medium fluttered her hands. “Yes, I like the psychic aura that you have, Mrs. Ruff, but I do want you to drink more milk. Oh, I know it can be fattening, but you could do with healing, my dear.”
I broke in quietly: “Mom doesn’t drink milk. Scotch, yes; milk, never.”
“I see,” said the medium. “Spirits should be taken in moderation—above all, rum.” Her accent sounded a little too strenuously clipped, like a fake Queen’s English; though sometimes it was more Jamaican in its lilt. Beaming ambiguously, the medium continued: “Now why do I see Stonehenge? You are familiar with Stonehenge, Fanny? I may call you Fanny? Are you the sort that reaches out for the ancient understanding, I wonder?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. Reach out for it.”
“That’s lovely.” The medium gave Mom a distant look, and went on: “All right now. Does the name Willie mean anything to you? Because I’m linking up with a Willie Ruff here from New York. And as I link up with this Ruff or Roff or Ralph, I’m getting a lot of tension in my abdominal zones, like he ate too much when he was on the earth plane. Do you understand me?”
“I do understand you,” said Mom.
If memory served, Willie Ruff was a jazz musician who played alongside Miles Davis back in the 1960s. Why had a jazzman beamed into the room? Was he even dead? Willie Ruff, disconcertingly, was a homonymous near-miss to Jimmy Ruff, my father’s name. Were the two related? I felt a chill down my neck.
The medium wiped her face with a hand towel, threw back her head to the ceiling, and began to speak in a deep low voice that sounded eerily like Dad’s. “How are you, Fanny? Me? I am sitting in God’s house in comfort, since you ask. That’s right, you’ve guessed it.
I am no longer alive
. Sure, I would have liked to have lived a bit longer. But, since God has willed otherwise, do not grieve too much. After all, being dead’s not so bad once you’ve gotten the knack of it, is it, Fanny?”
The voice stopped as abruptly as it had started.
Far from showing delight at this speech from the Beyond, Mom remonstrated angrily with the medium: “I didn’t want my husband on earth, and I don’t want him now. Take him back!” The unexpected self-disclosure even after all the disdain she had showed for Dad came as a shock.
“Mom!”
“Don’t
Mom
me!”
“Relax yourself, Mrs. Ruff.” The Reverend Grimstick looked quite affronted.
“Relax myself? How can I? You must tell me. Was that really my husband? Was that Jimmy Ruff talking?” Jimmy Ruff
resur-rectus
: I almost laughed at the image the idea evoked.
The medium seemed mildly surprised at Mom’s insistence. Unfortunately, the roar of an airplane coming in to land over Kingston muted what she had to say. She was silent now; even her face said nothing.
“It’s no good, my dear,” she said eventually, now with a heavier Jamaican accent. “When I was a likkle child in Kingston, we didn’t have all these low-flying aircraft come roaring over us, nuh? It make it very hard to concentrate.” She went on to say that she was lonely. All her relatives had “gone home” (meaning they had died?). “Yes, all of them dead out. I don’t even have my grandsons here now, all of them done away with and dead out.”
The medium was possibly mad as well as, surely, a mountebank. Yet when she accurately divined not only the date of Mom’s birth but her mother’s maiden name, I was not so sure. We had no intention of hanging round for her offer of “mortuary information”: namely, the dates of our deaths. So we left the Reverend Dr. Mavis Campbell Grimstick to her spook-dabbling, and returned to the Pegasus Hotel, even more confused than before.
At last, on the afternoon of December 23, my father was flown “HUM” in the cargo hold of Air Jamaica flight JA285. Documents signed by the U.S. vice-consul in Kingston confirmed that “
only the remains of Mr. Jimmy Ruff and nothing else”
were contained in the coffin; no cocaine, no Kalashnikov rifles. Dressed in his white shroud, Dad arrived punctually at JFK at nine thirty p.m. local time and passed swiftly through immigration (the dead have no need of passports). My father’s long supine journey home was finally at an end. Or so I thought.
Dreadfully,
unbelievably
, the wrong body had been repatriated. The body belonged to a vacationing American named Coleman Goodman. “Coleman
who
?” my mother asked in disbelief from the kitchen. (She had just sent out the invites for Dad’s funeral.) “Coleman Goodman,” I repeated, numb with shock. Apparently, a carelessness in cargo stowage was to blame. Trust Dad’s rotten luck. Trust
our
rotten luck.
A week has gone by, and still no sign of my father. Wherever he is now, an abyss separates me from him; yes, we move in very different circles these days, my father and I. Maybe Dad did get repatriated to Africa after all. Maybe he has become a duppy, and is making mischief now among the living, just as he did in life. Foul play? Oh, we have talked about the possibility of foul play, my mother and I. It is now the New Year. I have just turned twenty-eight. Decca stirs slightly and begins to purr. I open a tin of Happy Heart cat food for her. Then I look out over the East River. There is no sun at the windows. Everything is more complicated and more serious than we had supposed.
Man, look at Kingston, it so pretty from here, all them light right out to the sea.
1
T
his is what Ruth Stenton was wearing when she went to the Central Police Station/Criminal Intelligence Branch on East Queen Street in downtown Kingston: a sapphire halter top that pulled her breasts up from her chest but exposed sagging fat ripples on her back; white Dolce &Gabbana jeans with the logo slashed across the backside in red; a white Fendi bag that she wore like an afterthought, constantly pulling it up on her shoulder after it slipped down her arm.
The big station was busy with squaddies rushing in and out, sometimes with boys in handcuffs, papers shuffling up and down, the click-click of one-finger typing, the laughter of tired constables, and the thick cloud of cigarette smoke.
At reception, a policeman pointed left to a glass door with words printed in reverse. She stepped in and waited by the door until a uniformed constable called her over with his finger. He had just dripped ketchup on his shirt and was scowling into a box of fries from Burger King.
—Can I help you, ma’am? he said, looking from his snack to his calendar, where
Friday, October 22
jumped out in bold type.
—You don’t have air-conditioning in here? she said.
—Can I help you, ma’am?
—Me is here to report a missing.
—A missing what? Cow, donkey, or goat?
—Don’t get fresh with somebody who could be your mother.
—My mother don’t look like she work New Kingston every night.
—But you fresh!
—What you want to report, ma’am?
—A missing. A missing girl. Me did call and somebody tell me to come in and make a statement.
—When you call?
—This morning. Boy, me could use a Rothmans.
—This look like Chiney shop? How long the girl missing?
—From Wednesday.
—Friday October 22, young girl reported missing. Who the girl?
—Janet Stenton.
—Relationship.
—What? Me look like no sodomite? A—
—Mother? Daughter? Church Sister?
—Oh, she is me daughter. Born 1979.
—Your daughter missing three day and you just coming to report it?
—She always a take off like she name kite. But never for so long. Plus she take me two good ears-ring. Not thiefing that? Grand larceny you call it.
—Then you is here to report a larceny or a missing?
—A larceny
and
a missing. Me ears-ring missing and she larcen it. That gal just buss ’way like kite. She is a little dutty gyal, that one. Never take no instruction from her mother. From she born, me say, this little one, this little one going turn slut like her auntie. Sometime me wonder if is fi her own or fi me. Anyway, she gone from Wednesday morning. Leave out before the sun even rise and is not the first time neither. But this time she take me ears-ring and me Julia of Paris shoes. Me no business bout the shoes. Imagine, she take off to go school from four in the morning? I mean to say, who love school so much that they leave four hour early? Me can smoke in here?
—No. Where you think she gone?
—How you mean? Where else schoolgirl going if she leave her house too early by herself? You no know the song?
Send the gal Nicky go a school, Nicky gone turn and gone a man yard
—
—No singing in here, ma’am.
—Me did hear things bout this new teacher. Him pants did too tight so me did think him was a battyman. But is so the devil deceive, praise Jesus. Anyway, you need to find that damn girl so me can discipline her.
—Discipline her, eeh?
—You going discipline her youself? Make sure take out me ears-ring cause is three hundred dollar that cost. She just like her father. One minute she here, next minute … That damn gyal a take man, you hear me? You going to the school to check bout the teacher?
—Which school?
—Immaculate.
This is how buses used to run in downtown Kingston in 1993. Because public buses were shut down by the government in the late ’80s, Japanese sixteen-seaters with names like
Terminator 2
and
Smooth Operator
painted on the sides hit the road by five in the morning, sometimes already overstuffed with students feeling up each others’ parts on their way to classes that began at seven thirty or eight.
The girls all loved one bus,
Prince Machoperi
, because the driver played Buju Banton, Snow, and Mariah Carey, and the conductor really knew how to balance on the door ledge off the heaving, swerving HiAce like he was practicing to surf.
At six thirty on the morning Ruth Stenton went to Central,
Machoperi
was bustling north from downtown toward Constant Spring, like a runaway carnival float with all those uniforms flashing by. Gray and red for Queens. Blue and cream for Holy Childhood. White for Immaculate Conception High.
As it neared Dunrobin Avenue, five miles north of downtown, the conductor, a boy barely eighteen, dressed in baggy pants, four gold-plated rings, and a T-shirt saying
Damn Yankees World Tour ’91
, asked a Queens girl when last she saw Jacqueline.
—Who?
—The Immaculate girl?
—Not since Tuesday. Don’t she take this bus every day? Nuh she always up front with the driver?
This is what a gaggle of Immaculate girls were doing at the school gate at 7:50 on the Friday morning that the ’ductor asked the Queens girl about Jacqueline, and Ruth Stenton was going to Central to make a missing persons report.
—Anna-Kaye Frater daddy drop her off in him jalopy yet?
—But Anna-Kaye always walk down from Manor Park.
—No, idiot. Mr. Frater drop her off in Manor Park. She walk down so that nobody would see her come out of a Ford Escort. My boyfriend Patrick say that is what his Hortense drive.
—Hortense?
—The helper, ninny.
—Jennifer Innis father driving a new Volvo.
—That’s not the only thing him driving. And another … Oh my God, Kenisha, how you sneak that hairdo into this school? It ah take life.
—Yes, my girl, it is the lick.
—Well, all you need is a crimping iron and you set.
—You see Jennifer Innis father playing golf last week? He always standing by the fence like him searching for a ball.
—The way him old, that’s not the only ball him have to search for.
—Oh my God,
Prince Machoperi
coming up the street! Wave, girls.
—Me don’t wave at lower-class boy in minibus.
—Rashid Shatani take that bus.
—Lie you lie. Rashid Shatani have three car.