Kingston Noir (33 page)
“I had a sense like I was in the country somewhere, because the only sounds I heard for two days was wind. No cars. No children. The whole time I think I heard one animal—a goat. And as much as I bawl out, nobody didn’t hear me and come.
“After three days or so passed now, one evening as the sun was going down I heard a car. I got nervous because I had gotten accustomed to being by myself and I never know who it was. But I was hungry and thirsty. Is not easy to go so long without water and food.
“As I listened, I heard doors opening and closing and footsteps coming toward me down a passageway. Before they got to me they stopped and entered an adjoining room. I heard them leave, drive away, but something had been left in there. For the next two days and nights I heard this thing moving around in there. Something of a good size. Breathing. Scratching itself. Sometimes in the night I would hear this
Uuh-uuh
sound, and I kept thinking to myself,
Jesus, what is that?
“Well, I eventually found out. Two evenings later the car returned again. The footsteps—sounded like the same ones—came down the passageway again. By this time I am hungry and weak. The door opened slightly. I could see into the passage a little bit. What light existed was coming from another room somewhere, so all I could see was shadows, but everything was really dark. I smelled food and saw someone bend down and slide a plate across the concrete floor. Then someone put what I found out was a bucket of water and a cup and a towel and a rag. I asked the man who he was and where he was but he didn’t answer me.
“It wasn’t much. Just some fish and bread. I was so thirsty I nearly drink the bucket of water, but I was thinking that maybe they give me the towel and all that so I could get cleaned up before they let me out. Like maybe someone had paid ransom or whatever for me.
“I took my time to wash myself. It was like I didn’t know if I was going backward or forward in time. What I mean is that I didn’t want the life I had for the last few days but I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen ahead. I mean, why all of a sudden they were being nice to me? Feed me, and all that? Allow me to bathe?
“But it felt good to clean all the muck off me. For my skin to not feel sticky. To lose that sour smell. To smell good.
“Now, while I was eating, the room next door had been quiet for some time, but then some movement again. My skin right away just fill with cold bumps. I put my ears to the wall to listen. Through my other ear I heard footsteps coming. They stopped next door.
“I heard one man say,
Watch it, it will bite.
Another one say,
What a damn thing big.
Then a third one say,
So what they plan to do with this
’
rangutang though, eeh?
Now, I knew what a ’rangutang was. It was a like a cousin to gorilla. The two of them is ape.
“I started to get a little nervous because I started to imagine this thing getting away. But then I heard a fourth voice, and this one sounded like it had some knowledge, so although I was tense, I kind of start calm down. This voice say,
Look, all you louts need to do is move the damn thing to the other room. This thing has been brought into the country illegally and if anything happens to it at all, it is going to be hell to pay.
And when he said that I heard a big commotion and a
Uuh uuh uuh uuh.
“Then I heard them open the door over there and like a chain dragging, and like fighting and flailing and
uuh uuh uuh uuh
and like something big and heavy and thick bouncing off the walls and people running away and falling down, and I began to imagine them leading this thing outside, but I began to get really frightened when instead of going back the way they came, they move toward my door.
“Miss, when my door open and I saw the shadow of this big everlasting hairy thing, I ran to the back of the room and bawl out,
Lord God, Jesus Christ, deliver me from evil,
and they slam the door and is pure darkness again. And I could hear heavy, dragging footsteps inside, just feet away from me.
“I said to myself that if I just keep quiet it maybe wouldn’t bother me. I heard like sniffing. And scratching. Then nothing at all. My heart was beating hard. Then it began to beat harder when I hear one of the man them say,
So this ’rangutang thing will really sex a human being for true?
and another one say,
I hear them have nature for woman just like man.
Then the first one say,
No, me can’t believe that,
and the other one say,
So what the bloodclaat you think we leggo him inside there for?
“Then all of a sudden I heard one loud noise and something charging toward me. And I start to kick and punch before I felt the grab.
“The two of us now start to tussle on the floor. I hadn’t really eaten for a while, as I said, and it was bigger than me and stronger than me too, and as I was fighting with it I feel like it was trying to get me on my back and between my legs. And lemme tell the truth. Before that I was thinking it just wanted to eat me or kill me. I wasn’t no kind of animal expert or whatever. It was just survival I was dealing with. But when this thing had me on my back in the corner and I realize what was going to happen, I really start to fight now. Cause I heard when the man say this thing will fuck a human being and the other one say it have nature, and I put the two of them together and say that, well, they say monkey is second to man and that this monkey now, maybe his nature tell him to take me as a wife, and you know what? Nobody was going to help me.
“And I knew this but I was still shouting out. And I’m getting shaken. And I’m getting hit. My head lick against the wall a dozen times. And you know what? After a while I just give myself over to what’s going to happen. I just accept that this is what was going to happen to me. And I felt something inside me in that place for the first and only time. It was painful. It was strange. And I tighten up to lock it out. But there was so much force. So much pressure.
“And you know what I did? I just put my mind to it. Thinking like this would make it stop. I don’t even know why this came to mind. But that is what it came to my mind to do. To not fight, to just give in so it would end quickly. Oh God. You don’t know what I went through.”
I didn’t know what to say at this point. I mean—would you? There was something spectacular in the violence, in the cycle of revenge, that I didn’t want to acknowledge. And there were also questions I wanted to ask. Like how she got out of there and did she see a doctor or call the police. And then I realized that these were questions of a normal kind and that what I’d just heard about was—for want of a better expression—something else.
I had to go. I had to go. And I said this: “I really have to go.”
She looked down at the floor and replied, “Go on.”
When I got to the door I turned back to say goodbye and she held her hand up for me to wait, then she came over. We hugged again. And something happened in that moment that had never happened before. While holding a woman, I wanted a kiss.
I led her down the short hall to the room from which she’d rescued me, lay on my back in my white dress, and took her in my arms and used my fingers to massage her scalp and took the weight of her frail body—which was not too much to bear.
She cried. In the pitch of a little girl, she cried.
“And you know what was the worst part?” she said when she’d composed herself.
“Oh, my sweetie,” I said, “do tell,” while thinking,
This can’t possibly get worse.
“It wasn’t a ’rangutang. It was just that fucker in a monkey suit!”
A few years later, while traveling through Heathrow airport, I picked up the
Guardian
and saw a small obituary. Seminal reggae producer Joe Haddad had died. Yes, he’d worked with everyone he’d mentioned and more. Yes, he’d built a lot of the original equipment that gave the industry its start. But he wasn’t credited as inventing dub. However, he got partial credit for something else: the possible inspiration for a hit released in 1969 by Toots and the Maytals and a bigger hit for the Specials ten years later:
I see no sign of you
I only heard of you
Hugging up the big monkey man.
C
HRIS
A
BANI
is a Nigerian poet and novelist and the author of
Song for Night
(a
New York Times
Editors’ Choice),
The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail
(a PEN/Beyond Margins Award finalist), and
GraceLand
(a selection of the
Today Show
Book Club; winner of the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). His other prizes include a PEN Freedom-to-Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He lives and teaches in California.
C
OLIN
C
HANNER
is the father of two children, Addis and Makonnen. He is also a fiction writer, occasional essayist, and university professor. His fiction includes the national bestselling novel
Waiting in Vain
(a Critic’s Choice selection of the
Washington Post)
and the novella
The Girl with the Golden Shoes
. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963. He founded the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust in 2001, and received the Silver Musgrave Medal in Literature in 2010.
K
WAME
D
AWES
is an award-winning Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet. He is author of sixteen books of poetry and numerous books of fiction, nonfiction, criticism, and drama, and has edited nine anthologies. Dawes is the Glenna Luschei editor of
Prairie Schooner
, a chancellor’s professor of English at the University of Nebraska, and associate poetry editor for Peepal Tree Press in the UK. He is also the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival.
M
ARCIA
D
OUGLAS
grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. She is the author of the novels
Madam Fate
and
Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells,
as well as the poetry collection
Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom.
Her one-woman show,
Natural Herstory,
is based on her fiction and features the voices of seven Jamaican women. She teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder.