by Jacob Ross
JACOB ROSS
THE BONE READERS
First published in Great Britain in 2016
Peepal Tree Press Ltd
17 King’s Avenue
Leeds LS6 1QS
England
www.peepaltreepress.com
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© 2016 Jacob Ross
ISBN 13 (Epub): 9781845233389
ISBN 13 (Mobi): 9781845233389
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form
without permission
ALSO BY JACOB ROSS
Fiction
Song for Simone and Other Stories.
A Way to Catch the Dust and Other Stories.
Pynter Bender.
Non-fiction
Behind the Masquerade, the Story of Notting Hill Carnival
(with Kwesi Owusu).
Edited
Voice, Memory, Ashes: Lest We Forget
(co-edited with Joan Anim-Addo).
Ridin’ n Risin: Short Stories by New Black Writers.
Turf (co-edited with Andrea Enisuoh).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe the realisation of The Bone Readers to Jeremy Poynting, who promptly pointed out the potential of a short story I sent him, and whose positive interest in the development of the novel triggered me to deliver.
Many of the final-draft refinements were due to Jeremy’s, Dave Martin’s and Lindsay Waller-Wilkinson’s incredibly useful feedback, which made for a more satisfying novel.
An anecdote from Chris De Riggs sowed the seed of the story which became The Bone Readers.
Yvonne Malcolm facilitated a short conversation with Officer Findlay which informed several elements in the novel.
From a list of proposed titles, Rod Duncan had no doubt that The Bone Readers had to be it.
Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name.
— Tony Judt, ‘Night’, New York Review of Books (Jan 2010)
For Maurice
For the disappeared…
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
About The Author
1
I’d left school with no job to go to and exam results that my teachers said could get me to any university anywhere in the world. If I had the money.
I mentioned the sum to my father and he laughed. The bank managers I went to didn’t laugh – at least not in my face. They asked for equity, then my family name. I gave them my mother’s. They pointed out how generous they were by giving me their time, then nodded at the door.
I went south to the Drylands where the hotels were. For two tourist seasons, I peeled back my lips and exposed my teeth, served drinks barefoot in a rainbow-coloured synthetic shirt, wide-brimmed straw hat and pantaloons which no Camaho man would be seen dead in outside of Beach Bum Bar. Then a half-drunk old bull from Germany, red like a barbecued lobster, closed his hand around my crotch and I punched him in the face.
The Englishman who owned the place leaned in close and demanded I apologise, else he fire me without pay. I told him to haul his arse and walked.
I took to the sidewalk of San Andrews watching the tourists, the pretty cars, the office girls stepping in heels that raised their arses almost as high as their ears, and young men shuffling bowlegged in waistless trousers with rappers’ caps and speaking in made-up American accents. I watched, especially, the bright open faces of the little boys in school uniform heading home every afternoon to parents who might someday laugh at them. I didn’t doubt that they would end up like me with their shoulders propping up a storefront in San Andrews.
Then one Wednesday afternoon it happened right in front of me: a huddle of youth-men arguing over something. I paid them little mind. They were wharf-rats who made a living begging money off the tourists. When the ocean liners weren’t in, they drifted around the town pulling at the skirts of schoolgirls and pushing their pelvises against them. Many parents waited at the school gates and escorted their daughters home.
A single protesting voice rose up from their midst, pitched high and desperate. Heads turned, followed by a patter of fast-approaching feet. Market people loved a fight.
There came a flare of voices from the knot of hooligans. I heard the word ‘respect’, then ‘fuck’, then ‘fuck-up’, then ‘fucker’, then a thud like a fist sinking into a pillow. A gasp, followed by the rapid scattering of feet as the young men fanned out, adjusted their hoods over their heads and sprinted off.
A boy lay on the sidewalk in the same uniform I wore to school for seven years. He was laid out on his side, right arm curled in front of his stomach; the other, bent at the elbow, was under his head as if he were asleep.
I followed the red trickle that seeped from under his hand, its abrupt change of course as it met the invisible incline of the concrete gutter and flowed into it. I thought I knew the boy. I felt I ought to.
An office girl with a tight, high bun of expensive Indian hair, nails glinting gold in the sun, brought her phone to her ear, her arm making a delicate stylish curve just before she spoke into it. I watched her crimson lips moving.
I walked across the road, knelt and touched the boy’s forehead. I stood up, ignoring the shock on all those faces fixed on me. They were reading me, I knew, studying my expression, waiting perhaps for the howl that would confirm for them that this dead boy was family.
I did none of that. I simply stood over him.
When the police came they rushed me. The largest one slammed my back against the wall, jammed a knee into my stomach and pressed an elbow against my throat. I choked on my breath and held his eyes. He did not like that. He threw me on the pavement, dropped his weight on my spine, then dragged my hands behind my back and handcuffed me.
A little car arrived. It stopped in the middle of the road. An apparition got out: a white head of hair; eyes like two knobs of flaming coals; lips that would look perfect on a battered leather purse.
White Hair shouted something. The words came out of him like gravel on a grater.
The weight came off my back. I was lifted to my feet, the handcuffs removed. Rough hands bundled me into the little car.
All the while, people were out there protesting at my arrest. All women. The men remained silent. They were, no doubt, less interested in my fate than in the way injustice takes its course. It made for better rumshop conversation.
They took me to an old brick building backing the bus terminal, which stood over the sea. Above the entrance in big white type: San Andrews Police Central. Inside, I caught the faint smell of tar from the island schooners berthed against the jetty. Partitioned rooms retreated all the way to the back of the building. From them came the shuf
fling of paper and, occasionally, the boom of men’s voices. Outside, the blasts of horns, the rise and fall of market women’s voices, the penetrating bray of the coconut seller we called Cocoman.
Amid the thunder of vehicles arriving in the concrete courtyard, White Hair sat me down in a chair by an untidy desk. He pressed a sandwich into my hand and a glass of orange juice. He lowered himself in front of me and jabbed a finger at his chest. ‘Detective Superintendent Chilman. You?’
‘Digger.’
‘That’s the name on your birth certificate?’
‘Michael Digson.’
‘How long you been out there?’
‘Out where?’
‘On the street.’
‘I have a home.’
‘How long?’
‘Eighteen months three days.’
‘You been counting?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Why?’
‘Keep my sanity.’
He looked me in the eye. ‘You still got it?’
‘You got no basis for arresting me.’
‘Calm down, youngfella, you not under arrest. Now talk to me. What happm?’
I pushed aside the sandwich and sipped the juice. ‘Monkeys demanding respect from humans,’ I said. ‘They killed the human.’
Detective Superintendent Chilman leaned forward and squinted as if he were examining a speck in my eye. ‘You upset. That’s good. You could point them out?’
‘They hide their faces from the start, before the argument. Is obvious they plan it.’
Chilman rubbed his chin and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Right,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘Come with me.’ He stopped at the door and raised his voice. ‘Okay fellas, bring them out.’
Twenty-three young men – all in rapper’s hoods rolled back from their heads – filed out of three vans into the yard. Some looked nervous, some angry, most of them relaxed. A few were so terrified they could barely walk. A couple of them didn’t drop the monkey swagger.
The officers lined them up against the wall of the building.
Chilman prodded me. ‘Recognise any?’
I shook my head.
‘Let’s try something else then.’
On his word, Chilman’s officers pulled the hoods over the young men’s heads and ordered them to run across the yard.
Chilman looked at me. ‘Anything?’
A few of the youths threw threatening glares in my direction. I squared my shoulders and glared back.
‘Make them talk,’ I said. ‘Let each one ov ’em say something.’
An officer grumbled under his breath and sucked his teeth – the same one who’d flattened me on the sidewalk.
Chilman leaned into my face. I caught a whiff of rum. ‘Listen, youngfella, I’ll make them lil sonuvabitch across there skin kuffum and walk upside-down on one finger if I have to, because I want a result, unnerstan? I want a result right now. So don’t play the arse with me. If that is what you doing.’
Beneath that tired old face he was seething. He was so full of fury I felt myself leaning away from him. I had never seen such rage in another human.
Still, when he turned to address the young men his tone was conversational. ‘This is the way I see it, genlemen. I could let everyone of y’all walk out of here scott-free. I could do that right now and turn my back. But y’all won’t get far. People out there know who been arrested. That’s why I order these officers to stand y’all together in the market square and give the whole damn town a good look at y’all face. I know for sure that word already reach the brothers and the uncles and the cousins. They don’t know which of you just murder their boychile. They won’t want to know. All they’ll want is blood. Your blood! As much of it as they can get until they satisfy. They’ll come after every one of you. My job is to prevent that. So… one-by-one, you say your names and where you live exactly. Youngfella, you ready?’
I nodded and pressed my back against the old white vehicle. I closed my eyes while the boys shouted their names and coordinates. I relived the heat of the afternoon, the sound of oncoming vehicles, and the heavy fruit-and-earth smell of the marketplace; the hot pitch of words, the exact timbre and inflections of the voices. I have that kind of memory.
I picked out every one of them. Eight. One was missing.
It was easy afterwards. They betrayed themselves by pointing at each other.
When it was over, Chilman’s hot eyes were on my face. The old fella was smiling. He pointed at the sandwich. ‘I know you hungry. Eat.’
He lowered his voice, his eyes still probing. ‘Ever been arrested before today or charged for anything?’
He must have seen the irritation on my face. ‘Sorry, youngfella, I have to ask them questions.’
I got up to leave.
He pushed out a stiff hand. ‘You not leaving right now.’
DS Chilman led me back to his office and sat me on a chair in the corner nearest the door. Officers in plain clothes criss-crossed the uneven wooden floor. From time to time, one of them stopped and placed his mouth against Chilman’s ear. The old fella’s lips barely moved when he replied. All I could hear was the throaty rattle of his voice.
Occasionally, I caught his eyes on me – a steady, coal-fire gaze. I pretended not to notice. He said something to an elderly woman who sat in the middle of the room under a big white ceiling fan. Two girls in swivel chairs, on either side of her desk, were stapling papers and slipping them into light-green folders. When the old man straightened up, the woman’s eyes took me in briefly, then slipped away. Because of that look, I felt my heartbeat quicken. She had a detached, almost dreamy face, thick, charcoal-black hair swept back in a bun with a single streak of white following the curve of her head all the way from the hairline of her forehead.
Chilman came over to me. ‘You want to know?’
‘Know what?’ I said.
‘The lil fella name is Ryan Weekes. His mother working she arse off in the nutmeg pool in St Johns to give him an education. Only child – you unnerstand what that mean?’
I stood up. ‘You finish with me?’
‘You telling me it don’t concern you?’
‘I don’t have nothing to do with this.’ I’d raised my voice. The office fell silent. A slow turning of heads in my direction. Expressionless faces.
Chilman showed me a row of yellow teeth. ‘That’s not the way I see it, youngman: y’was there, like all them other citizens who stannup like jackass in the middle of the govment road and watch eight harden-back ram goat gang-up on a lil child and murder him. That make you a witness. At least! Prime! I could make it worse. I could say you were handling the body when we got there. That’s tampering with evidence. And if that don’t stick, I could get you for loitering.’ He patted my arm and winked. ‘I will let you go home, but not before you tell me where you live.’
‘Nuh.’
His forehead bunched in a sudden frown. The old man raised his hand and curled a finger. A young officer in a crisp white shirt and impossibly pressed trousers rose from his desk in the far corner of the room and strolled over. He had the darkest eyes I’d ever seen and a tight unsmiling face. We locked eyes, his nostrils flared and something in him stiffened.
‘DC Malan, this is Michael Digson. The youngfella refusing to cooperate. I want you to handcuff the gentleman and escort him through San Andrews market in the hot sun. I want you to take your time so everybody could see you frogmarching the sonuvabitch round town.’
DC Malan gave me a long, dark-eyed look. I squared my shoulders and held his gaze.
‘No probs,’ he said, slammed open his drawer and straightened up with a pair of handcuffs in his hands.
I dropped back in the chair and told Chilman where I lived.
‘Thank you, Sirr! Now you free to go.’
I marched through the door, my ears burning with the chuckles of the people in Chilman’s office. His voice – coarse as rock-salt – followed me outside. ‘Don’t try to run away. I not done with you
. Y’hear me?’
When Chilman released me, I went to Grand Anse Valley to visit a girl who’d made promises to me. She wasn’t there, or maybe she was, but decided not to answer my calls from the road. I hung around in the yard of a little roadside shop named Grace’s Place, watching four men and a woman with bottles of Carib lager at their elbows, slamming dominoes on a rickety table.
2
Daylight was already draining out of Old Hope when I got home. The air was heavy with the threat of rain. In the distance, the peaks of the Mardi Gras mountains caught the last of the dying sun.
My grandmother left me a two-roomed storm house on the side of Old Hope valley, a gift from the colonial government of her time after a hurricane named Janet flattened everything and left the island destitute. In the days when she worked in cane, she’d added another bedroom.
On lucky days, a bowl of something boiled or stewed or steamed would be on my step, anchored there with a hefty stone to keep away the chickens and the dogs. Weekends, I repaid the women’s kindness by sitting with their children and helping with their homework.
Nothing today.
I had not eaten anything apart from the sandwich the DS gave me earlier. I wasn’t feeling hungry but I decided to force myself to eat.
I lit the two-burner kerosene stove and warmed the pot of vegetables I’d cooked the night before, sat on my steps with the bowl in my lap and stared out at the evening.
A lump had settled in my chest and my head was throbbing. The murdered boy was on my mind. I couldn’t get rid of the image of his crumpled body on the edge of the drain. Killing looked too easy, the taking of that child’s life so sudden and so casual, the whole thing felt unreal.
I chewed on the tasteless food while staring down at Old Hope Valley where concrete roads cut white winding ribbons toward unfinished houses on the foothills. My grandmother used to tell me that this valley was filled with sugarcane. Now bamboo, dandakayo trees and flaming love vines had taken over. I didn’t mind this place. Most days, it was full of wind and light and bird cries, and always cool in the shadows of the Mont Airy hills.
Fuckim, I thought. Fuckalladem.