by Zadie Smith
Five things you didn’t know about JIMMY JOHNSON:1. The first single he bought with his own money was ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’!
2. The uncle of his best friend at school used to play bass with the Starlight Vocal Band!
3. He had a ticket to see the Sex Pistols play at the Screen on the Green in Islington - but he didn’t go!
4. He has an iPod - but his kids have to download the music for him!
5. JOHNSON’S POP MISCELLANY is his eighth book - but the first one to mention Gilbert O’ Sullivan!
BRIAN BRITTEN used to play for Reading, Millwall, Leyton Orient, Southend United, Walsall, Tranmere Rovers and Hartlepool. He was once described as ‘the best defender never to have played in the top two divisions’. He claims to have kicked ‘at least six’ future England internationals.
JIMMY JOHNSON is a professional writer. FOREIGN NANCY BOYS is his twelfth book. He lives in - and supports - Hartlepool.
THANKS TO: THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY (love You, and everything You do for us), Sharon Osbourne (DA BOMB!), Simon Cowell (I’ve nearly forgiven you!), David and Victoria, Wayne and Coleen, Mum and Dad, baby bruvva, everyone in the Barnet Posse except Nicola Braithwaite, everyone at the Pink Coconut in Bushey. And yo Mr Osbourne! I wrote a book! Even after all what you said about me when I left school! A big shout-out to Jim Johnson for his help in putting this together. Top man.
Lélé
Edwidge Danticat
It was so hot in Léogâne that summer that most of the frogs exploded, scaring not just the children who once chased them into the river at dusk or the parents who hastily pried the threadbare carcasses from their fingers, but also my 39-year old sister Lélé, who was four months pregnant with her first child and feared that, should the temperature continue to rise, she too might burst. The frogs had been dying for a while, but we hadn’t noticed, mostly because they’d been doing it quietly. Perhaps for each that had expired, one had taken its place along the river bank, looking exactly the same as the others and fooling us into thinking that a normal cycle was occurring, that young was replacing old and life replacing death, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, just as it was for us.
‘This is surely a sign that something terrible is going to happen,’ Lélé said, as we sat on the top-floor verandah of my parents’ house one particularly sweltering evening. Even though my father, the former justice of the peace of the town of Léogâne, had died more than ten years ago, and my mother five years before that, I’ve never been able to stop thinking of the place that I, and now my sister, called home as theirs. The dollhouse façade of our wooden ginger-bread had been meticulously sketched by Papa, who’d spent his nights after work updating and revising each detail as their home was built from the ground up. He and Maman had driven to the capital to purchase the corrugated metal and bordered jalousies, a journey which at the time, before my sister and I were born, took several agonizing hours in an old pick-up truck that they’d inherited from my half-French grandfather, the previous justice of the peace. The shell of the truck was still out there somewhere among the dozens of almond trees that dotted our three hectares, its once thunderous engine rusting into the earth, like the neglected memorial it was.
The air on my verandah was just slightly cooler than it was in either of the two bedrooms where my sister and I slept, just as we had as children, surrounded by shelves lined with leather-bound notebooks filled with the concerns and complaints that had consumed the days, and sometimes nights, of our father and grandfather. Last year, I decided to read all their notebooks before I moved them to the courthouse archive in town. And now, despite her current condition, my sister, who was in the middle of a separation from her husband, was helping me sort through them.
‘In all of their notes,’ Lélé was saying, ‘I’ve not seen one mention of frogs dying like this.’
Before becoming pregnant, Lélé had been a heavy smoker, and sometimes when she made some pronouncement - for she had one of those voices with an air of always seeming to be making a pronouncement - she sounded a bit out of breath. This was further aggravated by the fact that she now had a baby pressing on her lungs, I’m sure, but, come to think of it, she had spoken that way even when she was a child, sometimes purposefully emphasizing a lisp that strangely enough made her sound even more certain.
‘I’ve talked to a few people about it,’ I told her. ‘I even called some doctor friends in Port-au-Prince.’
‘What would doctors know about dead frogs?’ she promptly cut me off. ‘You need world specialists, people who study the earth.’
Throwing her head back, three long plaits bouncing in the evening air, Lélé tapped her palm for emphasis and said, ‘Mark my words. The summer won’t pass before there’s a catastrophe here.’
Living only a kilometer or so from the river, I thought that the eventual smell of rotting frogs might be at least one potential catastrophe, but, in the days that followed, there was no smell at all. As soon as the burnished skins and tiny organs were exposed to the sun, the shredded frogs dried up, vanishing into the river bed.
This was a lucky thing for Lélé, who at this stage of her pregnancy was still willowy and trim, in part because she didn’t have much of an appetite. The smell of most things sent her retching, except the moldy fragrance of ancient ink and dissolving paper, which she relished so much that I frankly suspected her of nibbling away at small fragments of the town’s judicial legacy.
A week after Lélé made her prediction, the frogs were no longer even a problem. A few inches of rain had fallen somewhere up in the mountains, and the river overflowed, drowning the remaining frog population and depositing a tall layer of sandy loam far beyond the river’s banks, crushing, among other things, the field of vetiver that I, like my father and grandfather before me, had faithfully planted at the beginning of every year. Some years I had actually made a profit from my vetiver, which was not only good for the soil but also very much sought after by perfume-company suppliers. Those years, I’d used the money to plant a few more almond trees near the section of our property that nearly merged with the open road. Lélé loved the almond trees, and before she was pregnant, whenever she and her husband Gaspard came to visit, they’d both spend hours crushing the fibrous fruits with river stones to dig out the kernels.
The morning Gaspard came to see Lélé, I had to run off to court. I was a judicial witness in the case of a former priest who was suing for medical expenses for his psychiatric care. The priest claimed that he’d been forced by the police chief to offer extreme unction to some prisoners whom the police chief had then ordered executed before they could appear before a magistrate. I had been called by the priest’s niece, with whom he was living after being expelled from his parish, to take a statement about her perception of the priest’s mental health, and all I planned to do in court was reiterate what was already obvious: that for one reason or another the priest was now insane. The magistrate, who had no patience for cases in which there were no possibilities for bribes, would probably dismiss the case outright. However, since there were two local radio journalists expected, he had no choice but to put on the charade and pretend to listen to all of us before making up his mind.
I have no formal training in the law. All I know I learned by shadowing my father. His approach had always been the same. We are there only to witness, not participate, he’d say, to grant a piece of paper, an affidavit, a notarized statement, which might be helpful to someone in some later legal proceeding or action. If we are required to speak before a judge, we need state only what we’ve seen. We do not conjecture or make guesses. We speak only when asked.
This is the approach I was taking with Lélé and Gaspard. As Gaspard’s four-wheeler pulled up in front of the house, I purposely accelerated mine in the other direction. I would probably have to be in court at their divorce proceeding. There would be enough time to take sides.
Neither the priest nor his niece showed up, so the magistrate dismissed the case. During the ten y
ears I’d been doing this, I’d found that more people don’t show up than do. Many simply wanted the benefit of the initial hearing, in the field or in my office, where I took most of my notes. The rest already knew the likely outcome of their cases or were too scared to present themselves.
Gaspard’s car was still out front when I returned home for lunch. Gaspard was a small man, shorter even than my sister in her bare feet. He was handsome, though, with a dark-brown elfin face and a wide grin that he seemed unable to restrain even when he was angry. He was from a family of tailors and dressed very well, lately favoring airy white embroidered shirts and loose cotton pants.
Lélé and Gaspard were sitting on opposite sides of the living room when I entered, Gaspard on our sixty-year-old fleur-de-lisprint chaise longue and Lélé in a rocking chair by the louvered doors overlooking the now crushed vetiver field.
Marthe, who had been with us long enough to have delivered both my sister and me, sauntered over with a small shiny tray to collect an empty glass from Gaspard. I had an image in my mind of Gaspard having sat there all morning, sipping a single glass of Marthe’s tasty, vanilla-essence flavored lemonade while staring at Lélé’s expressionless profile. Even though I had hired a younger girl to help her, Marthe still preferred to do most of the light work around the house herself, including receiving our guests. Marthe was in her late sixties, about the age that our mother would have been if she were alive. She also had the same moon-shaped face and stocky frame. Growing up, I thought Marthe and my mother were sisters. I’m still not convinced that they weren’t.
I waited for Marthe to leave the room, then, rubbing my hands together, said, ‘So, les amoureux, have we reconciled?’
Gaspard looked up at me, his uncontrollable grin momentarily menacing. For once, while smiling, he almost appeared to be gritting his teeth.
‘She hasn’t told you?’ he asked.
I raised my shoulders and shrugged, looking over at my sister, whose eyes never wandered from the devastated vetiver field.
‘We have to clean up that field,’ she finally said. ‘And we should do it sooner rather than later. There might still be something worth saving there.’
‘Sometimes, there’s nothing to save,’ Gaspard said.
He stood up and quickly breezed past me, but, as he reached the doorway, where he was closest to my sister, he walked back and laid a hand on my shoulder.
‘Sorry, brother,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have seen that.’
I shook my head, not sure what to say. It seemed like all the cards were in Lélé’s hand. It was her move.
I waited until I heard Gaspard’s car start up. When his tires scratched the driveway gravel, I asked my sister, ‘Are you sure this is the right time for irreconcilable differences?’
She got up from the rocker, pulled the louver doors shut, considerably dimming the room.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, plopping herself down on one of the old divans by the closed fireplace.
‘Is he cheating on you?’ I asked. ‘If he is, I can find some way to have him thrown in jail.’
‘He’s not cheating,’ she said.
‘Are you cheating?’
She popped her eyes real wide in response, then pointed at her belly.
‘Is it his baby?’ I said, sitting down on the floor at her feet.
‘You fool,’ she said.
Placing my head on her knee, I felt like I did when I was a boy and would run home, devastated, after going with my father to record a death.
‘You can’t do this type of work if you cry at the scene,’ my father had said, slapping the back of my head in front of his witnesses. Once, even after I had seen the severed body of a beheaded man. The man’s own brother had taken a machete to his neck during a dispute over a plot of land. That night, Lélé had let me sleep in her bed, but most importantly she’d let me cry.
‘You sure you don’t want to tell me?’ I asked.
‘Maybe in good time,’ she said.
‘Have we ever used this fireplace?’ I said, pointing to the only concrete part of the house, a square cave that Lélé had recently filled with giant decorative candles.
‘Marthe would know better,’ she said, ‘but I only remember us using it once, the night you were born. It filled the whole place with smoke and nearly burned down the house.’
The next day I was taking an affidavit for an actual divorce when it began to rain. I was nervous about the river overflowing again, this time pushing past the vetiver fields and the almond trees. Ours was now the only place that close to the river. The others, newer and shabbier, had been taken downstream in flash floods, many with entire families inside. I had been meaning to tell Lélé that we should do something about the house. I had refrained from discussing it with her only because I hadn’t decided myself what to do. Should we sell it to someone to whom we would be passing on the same problem we now faced? Should we destroy it and rebuild on higher ground? Should I move somewhere else and use it only during the dry season? I was sure Lélé would already have a solution, about which she felt a hundred per cent sure, so I wanted to make up my mind before speaking to her. Still, as it continued to rain and more passers-by sought shelter on the front gallery outside my office, I saw myself becoming more and more walled off from Lélé.
For years now, I had been holding quarterly meetings with the peasants in the villages, especially the villages upriver from us, telling them that the river was raging in response to the lack of trees, land erosion, the dying topsoil.
‘What do you want us to do?’ they’d ask me in return. ‘Give us something to replace the charcoal and we’ll stop.’
Sometimes in my attempts to get them to not cut down young trees, I’d reach for the basest metaphors, the most melodramatic pleas. ‘It’s like killing a child,’ I’d say.
‘If I have to kill a tree child to save my own child, I’ll kill the tree child,’ they’d say.
Now, thanks to their stupidity, or rather the stupidity of their needs, our parents’ house might soon be under water. We might wake up floating above our beds and have to climb on top of a roof to wait for the current to die down. My sister might give birth in a tree.
‘Merde,’ I said to the complainant in front of me. ‘Why do you want to divorce your wife anyway?’
‘Because she’s ugly,’ he said, his face looking as deadly serious, though perhaps not as anxious, as mine.
‘When did she get so ugly?’ I was shouting at him, but he didn’t even seem to notice.
‘After the children,’ he said. ‘She lost some teeth and she’s no longer kind.’
‘What type of kindness are you expecting from her?’ I asked.
‘All kinds,’ he said, winking. ‘You know.
‘How many children do you have?’
‘Ten,’ he said.
I lowered my pen and stopped taking notes. I felt like hitting him the way my father had hit me.
‘Be a man,’ I wanted to say. ‘This is your life.’
I wanted to have with him the talk I might soon need to have with my sister, convince him that, in abandoning his family, he was acting like a coward. However, when I looked up, it was perfectly sunny outside again. Those who had sought shelter from the rain on the front gallery outside my office were now making their way back into the street. The cars were circulating again too, splashing muddy water everywhere.
‘Come back tomorrow,’ I told the unhappy husband. I planned to make him come to see me at least ten times before I would type his statement, as the law required me to do, and file it for him.
It turned out that it had not rained near the house and the river had not overflowed. It was rare that it overflowed in the daytime anyway, which made me all the more anxious. All the deadly flash floods had taken place at night. Perhaps my fear was slightly irrational. Yet, the previous summer, the country’s fourth largest city had been submerged under water for weeks. I could no longer chance it.
When I go
t home, I immediately wanted to approach the question of the house with Lélé. I found her in her old room sitting in the middle of a large mahogany canopy bed that our parents had had constructed for her when she was a teenager. From the house she and Gaspard had shared for the last twenty years, she had brought a large mosquito net, which she’d draped over the canopy, making her appear as though she were trapped in a colorless dream. Our father’s notebooks were spread out, open, all around her. On her lap was her own composition notebook. She was scribbling furiously, flipping through page after page while jotting things down.
I walked out to her terrace, where she kept, among her many potted plants, a wicker chair on which she sat out every morning, draped in one of her bed sheets, watching the sun rise over the mountains. I pulled the chair inside and propped it in front of the armoire across from her. As I sat down, she looked up, momentarily acknowledging me, then turned her attention back to the notebooks.
‘Do you work the same way they did?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
I was speaking to her through a veil, but neither of us made any effort to change that. If anything, it made me feel a bit more comfortable, braver.
‘Do you keep your notes like Grand-père and Papa did?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘They’re all in the archives in town, which is where these should also be. We kept them much too long. They don’t belong only to us. They belong to Léogâne.’
‘They do belong to us,’ she said. ‘Listen.’