by Jacob Ross
I walked through rows of concrete bungalows, so drastically modified over the years it was impossible to tell that they used to be identical.
I knew by now that Boko’s was a blue house and the veranda was painted deep red.
The rusty wrought-iron gate leaned away from its top hinge. The pole that supported it was covered in creeping vines.
I climbed the four steps and tapped the side of the open door. There came the abrupt clang of metal against metal. The smell of stewed chicken and steamed provisions. The slow shuffle of feet.
A woman with a crumpled face and round, indolent eyes leaned out the door, wiping wet hands on a flowered cotton apron. Behind her was a little colour television, flickering with the red and blue of the CNN Newsroom.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m DC Digson. I’m looking for Boko.’
The hands paused from drying themselves.
‘You could tell me what it about?’
‘A coupla questions – that’s all.’
I saw the hesitation – as if she were debating with herself. ‘I don’ think Boko could have no conversation with nobody, you know.’
‘How come?’
She wiped her hands and shrugged. ‘Okay, lemme see if I could make him get up.’
Inside, I heard soft words – the woman’s growing louder from time to time, then dropping.
She was holding his hand when she came back. He could barely walk. The old body was curved forward from the waist, his mouth partly open. The woman drew a rusting iron chair and sat him at the door-mouth.
I stared into a grey face. Flared nostrils sprouting wiry hairs. His stare was focused on nothing in particular.
‘See what I mean?’ she said. I glanced at the sagging blinds, the old wooden chairs inside, the uneven partition with nothing on it but a calendar dating back ten years.
‘Y’all family?’ I said.
‘Famly don’t know nothing ’bout him now.’ I detected a mild defensiveness in her tone.
‘You got children?’
‘I got children, but I won’t bring them here now.’ She turned back to the kitchen.
Fair enough, I thought. She would not bring her children here until he died, but as repayment for looking after him, she would keep the house.
‘Boko,’ I leaned forward. ‘My name is Michael Digson. Coupla questions I want to ask you. You hearing me? My mother’ name was Lorna Digson. On Monday 3rd May 1999, twenty-eight officers including yourself went down to the Carenage to break up a demonstration. It ended up with y’all shooting nine people, six bodies were recovered, three disappeared, including my mother.’ I drew breath and leaned back. ‘All I want to know is what y’all do with the bodies. And why y’all left the rest and took those three?’
His hands remained curled in his lap like the feet of a dead bird. The dark lips moved. He tried to speak, or I thought he did. What came out were little puffs of air.
I sat with him for half an hour – me leaning so close to his face, I could smell the sourness of his breath.
‘Chalk,’ I whispered. ‘Why you call them chalk?’
Boko kept on staring. Talking to a stone would have been better, I would know at least that the stone was dead.
‘You won’t find nothing in there. Doctor Spence at the hospital tell me the name for it. Start with a Zed or something.’
‘Alzheimer’s,’ I said. I did not realise the woman had returned.
She shrugged. ‘I don’ remember; I could offer you some lime juice?’
‘Nuh,’ I said to her retreating back. I leaned forward, placed my mouth against his ear. ‘Boko, lemme tell you about the worm you got in your brain and the best way to get rid ov it.’
Back on the path I looked back at him. ‘Best way,’ I said.
I thought I saw the limp hands twitch.
I stepped onto the sidewalk – a narrow strip of grass that petered out at the junction. I strode past my car, walked the two miles to Grand Beach. A regiment of hotels bordered it. Blinding white by day, the beach was now a stretch of muted beige and silver in the twilight, empty but for a pair of footprints along the wet edge of the shore.
I sat and faced the ocean; scooped up handfuls of sand, watched the pale grit slip between my fingers.
Who had I been fooling? Chilman’s words returned and settled in my brain. What make you change your mind – desperation or the temptation to find out what happen to your mother? I said nothing then. Perhaps I did not want to face it. But even then, something in me must have known that this chasing after my mother’s ghost was, in Chilman’s words, a dead dead-end.
A couple of children appeared at the southern end of the beach, picking their way along the stone jetty with the exaggerated steps of egrets, their shapes like stick-drawings against the sky. A tussle, shrieks, the rapid flail of limbs before their feet left the stones and their naked bodies hit the water.
I stripped down to my underwear, folded my clothes around my watch and shoes and took to the water running. Allowed myself to float and drift until I’d emptied my head of thoughts, and told myself that I felt nothing.
That night, I wrestled with dreams of rifles bleeding into dirty drains. Limp hands scrawling the part-written names of women on the road, then wiping them away.
I got up to a cool grey morning, hushed trees in the valley down below, the musk of rotting vegetation and drying concrete.
Chalk. I bought some in San Andrews. I held a stick in the palm of my hand and closed my fingers around it. It crumbled so easily.
20
Miss Stanislaus called the day after I saw Boko Hurd. Malan tried to press his ear against my phone. I pushed him off.
‘What she up to, Digger?’
‘Getting baptised,’ I told him. ‘Day after tomorrow.’
‘Easter Sunday? Lord ha Mercy, is like she fall in deep. That’s all she say?’
‘More or less,’ I said, and busied myself doing nothing useful.
Lisa and Pet complained that the office felt half-dead.
‘Feels rather off-colour, doesn’t it?’ I said in my best pretend English accent. They fell about the office laughing because Malan didn’t get the joke.
‘Digger,’ he said. ‘I want to know why that woman phoning you to tell you that she gettin baptised this Sunday when she so dam vex with you an me.’
‘She more vex with you than with me,’ I said. ‘She just say she makin progress there.’
‘Vex is vex,’ Malan threw back. He snapped up his keys and strode out of the office.
‘I don’t give a damn,’ I shouted at his back. ‘She’s your headache, not mine.’
I couldn’t get Malan’s question out of my mind. In the dimming evening, I sat on my step, closed my eyes and tried to shut out the grate and shout of boys scootering on the road below.
I recalled Miss Stanislaus’s words. ‘Hello, is me.’
‘I know,’ I’d said.
‘Keep yuh phone charge-up tomorrow cuz I gettin baptise.’ I heard the background hum of women and children in the yard, then The Mother’s bass-drum voice urging Miss Stanislaus to join them. Miss Stanislaus had muttered something and hung up.
I phoned Malan. ‘You know that call Miss Stanislaus made to me in the office?’
‘Yeh?’
‘She didn say my name.’
I heard Malan chuckle. ‘Digger, I not interested in you and that woman love life. That’s what you call me for?’
‘Malan, I serious. Tell me one time you hear Miss Stanislaus address me and not say ‘Missa Digger’, first sentence.’
‘Digger, hear this…’
‘Lissen, Malan! I believe she didn’t want people around her to know who sh’was talking to. Then she instruct me to keep my phone charged tomorrow because she getting baptised. Conversation didn’t even finish before she cut me off.’
‘Eh-heh, and besides she didn call you, doo-doo darlin.’
Malan was silent for a while. When he spoke again, his tone had cha
nged. ‘Is clear, Digger. The woman want you on standby. I told you something was funny ’bout that call, not so? Phone she now; then call me back.’ Malan hung up.
I phoned Miss Stanislaus. After my ninth attempt, I gave up and left a message.
Easter Sunday morning I found myself heading for the office. My standard issue, which I only took out of its case to heft and polish from time to time, was strapped under my armpit.
I wasn’t surprised to find Malan at the office either. He barely looked at me when I walked in.
He pushed himself back in his chair, clasped his hands over his stomach and closed his eyes.
The town was quiet. I heard footsteps on the road outside, closed my eyes and tried to work out whether it was a man or woman by the drag of their feet on the asphalt and the pace at which they walked. I decided it was a woman. That done, I tried to work out her age.
The clock towers on Church Street sounded seven-thirty. They struck again at eight and with every stroke of the bells, Malan cocked his head.
I almost missed the call. My phone was on vibrate.
I snatched the handset, glanced at the screen, and brought it to my ear. ‘Miss Stanislaus?’
‘Come! Come now, Missa Digger.’ Something flipped inside my guts. The voice sounded terrified. It was the kind of voice you heard once and never forgot. It brought me to my feet.
‘Mother Bello! Where you callin from?’
‘I have ter… Co…ome… Missa…’ Her voice rose to a shriek. Then the phone went dead.
‘What’s happenin.’ I felt Malan’s breath on my neck.
I fiddled with the keypad, calmed myself and called back. The call went straight to voicemail.
‘Bello wife,’ I shouted. ‘Calling from Miss Stanislaus phone. Sound like serious trouble.’
I bolted out the door and headed for my car.
Malan’s voice was a whiplash in my ears. ‘Leave that tortoise, Digger. We taking mine!’
I swung towards his jeep, pulled open the door and slipped in behind the wheel. Malan dragged me out.
I barely managed to get in on the other side before he was off.
‘Where!’ he shouted, above the snarling engine.
‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘She didn have time to tell me. She sound frighten like hell.’
Malan slammed on the brake. The vehicle bucked and swerved. His mouth twisted in a snarl. ‘Where, Digger?’
‘She didn say, man!’
‘Digger where the hell we going!’ The ferocity in his voice jolted something in my head. A memory. It arrived with my grandmother’s voice. Where the Sweet meet the Salt. Like in John-de-Baptist time. Ain got no other place for baptisin in de Spirit.
‘Where the river meet the sea,’ I said. ‘That’s all I know.’
Malan revved the engine and brought a fist down on the steering wheel. ‘Make sense, Digger. You wastin time.’
This was Malan at his worst: dangerous, murderous, and unreasonable. This was Malan the nightmare of every small-time crook and criminal on the island.
In my mind, I scrolled through the rivers that ended in the sea. There were seven of them. Five were at the far north of the island. I ruled them out. The nearest was at the busy western exit of San Andrews – dirty, smelly and slow-flowing with the detritus from settlements in Temple valley, and in full view of the public. I ruled that out too. The seventh was ten miles east.
‘Sadie Bay,’ I shouted. ‘Take the Eastern Main.’
‘Belt up!’ he snapped. The vehicle shot forward. ‘You better be sure. You send me on the wrong road, is hell to pay.’
The Eastern Main Road wound itself around the edges of the island like the reckless scrawl of a child. Malan drove with the seat pushed back forty-five degrees; the only animation was in his rapid footwork on the pedals and his spinning hands. We were all horns and screeching tyres. I caught flashes of alarmed faces outside, the smeared colours of houses, vehicles and streaming vegetation.
I willed the Mitsubishi on, counting the bends as we took them in a howl of tires under Malan’s lightning hands. With his foot still flat down on the pedal we swung into the sandy side-road to Sadie Bay.
Malan reached into the glove compartment, took out his SIG-Sauer and laid it in his lap. He threw a sideways glance at me. ‘You got your piece?’
I nodded.
‘Take it out.’
‘Might not be necessary.’
He slammed on the brake. The jeep skidded and humped till it was sideways on the road. ‘What you say?’
I raised my chin at the row of coconut trees in the distance.
‘You wasting time. We don’t have time. Drive the vehicle!’
We arrived in a cloud of sand and blaring horn. Then we were out and running along the river bank towards the sea.
There was a huddle of women under a large sea-grape tree halfway up the beach. Malan went straight for them, the gun pointed at their faces.
‘Where she is?’ he shouted. ‘Y’all don’t tell me now, I shoot every one ov you! Where she is?’
I swerved onto the sand, sprinting over three pairs of footprints that led to the far end of the bay. Then I saw them, crouched beneath an overhang of elephant grass.
I bore down on them gun in hand, my head hot with hate. The Mother – her whole body heaving with sobs – was sitting on the sand beside Miss Stanislaus. The two women, like the rest of the group further up the beach, were dressed in loose white gowns.
A ceremonial headwrap was bobbing on the water.
Miss Stanislaus lifted her head and coughed. Her face was swollen. Traces of blood patterned the torn fabric of her gown. I lowered myself beside her and tried to ease her to her feet as gently as I could, but she wouldn’t let me. I wanted to pull her to my chest and hug her. I wanted to cry.
‘Where’s Bello? If Malan find him first, he’ll shoot him on the spot.’ I said.
Miss Stanislaus raised her head. ‘He try to drown me.’ She broke out in a fit of coughing, then drew in a lungful of air. ‘It take all ov dem to get im off me. Tell me I bring trouble to his church. I corrupt his congregation and he goin to make me pay.’
Miss Stanislaus stopped abruptly and looked into my face with streaming eyes.
The Mother was weeping too. She kept fluttering her hands and making those heavy, deep-chested grunts.
I took off my shirt and laid it across Miss Stanislaus’s shoulders.
Malan came running; he threw a fire-and-brimstone look at The Mother then at the overhang of vegetation at the end of the bay. He glared at me. ‘You let im get away?’
‘He didn,’ Miss Stanislaus said. She raised her head at the mounds of sand directly behind us.
Malan and I locked gazes. His mouth was half-open, his brows pulled together. I followed him up the sandy incline and there was Bello, white-robed, his great body splayed face-down in a sand-trough.
‘How?’ Malan said, his voice hushed. ‘Digger, how?’
‘She shot im,’ I said. ‘She… woy, Man! She shot the fella.’
Malan rolled his eyes towards Miss Stanislaus and The Mother. His lips were working. He shook his head. ‘How?’
I lifted my shoulders and dropped them. ‘The gun you give her – what else?’
Malan looked lost for a long while. Then he drew a breath and snapped himself out of his daze. ‘We got some tidying up to do. Make the necessary calls, Digger. Lemme instruct them people cross there what to say and if them cross my word, I implicate their arse too – right down to de chilren.’
‘Ain got no children here,’ I said.
I stood there staring down at the body, hollow-headed, my mouth dried out. Aware of the heaviness of my own heartbeat.
Malan loped off towards the group under the grape tree. I watched the muzzle of his gun taking them all in together, then each one in turn.
When he returned, I had finished making my call to the Ambulance Unit in San Andrews.
‘Malan, I need to check this out,’ I said, pointing at
the body. ‘Before the ambulance get here.’
‘You not blind; you done see what go down arready.’
‘Is procedure.’
‘Fuck procedure; we ain got time. What you lookin at is trouble and right now I tryin to fix it, y’unnerstan?’
He was glaring at me, his chest heaving. Malan swung around and levelled a finger at Mother Bello. ‘Go join your people. Let them tell you what I tell them. And make sure every one ov y’all go along with what I say. This is not no cover-up, y’unnerstan? Is a proper orderin of de facts of this incident–’ he stabbed a finger in the direction of Bello’s body – ‘as me, in my capacity as Chief Officer of San Andrews CID, decide to order them; y’hear me?’
He turned to Miss Stanislaus, reached down and eased her to her feet.
‘The weapon,’ he said. ‘Where it is?’
Miss Stanislaus pointed at her bag on the sand. Malan got out the Ruger, reached under his shirt and tucked it in his waist.
We took Miss Stanislaus’s weight on our shoulders and guided her to the jeep.
Malan still looked stricken. He glanced at me, moved his lips around the words before he spoke. ‘Hospital.’ He threw me the keys. ‘I goin sit in the back with her.’
In a quiet voice, to no-one in particular, he said, ‘This thing not finish yet. It not finish becuz I not satisfy. I not!’
21
Miss Stanislaus’s body was a plump curve against the door. She’d pressed her head on the glass of the window, her fists closed tight on my shirt, which was around her shoulders.
‘Tell me how it happen, again.’
It was the third time Malan had asked the question on the way back to San Andrews.
Miss Stanislaus repeated the sequence of events on the beach: Bello dragging her into the sea to drown her, his wife and the others fighting to hold him back, she leaving the water in a panic with Bello chasing after her.
‘That is when you say you shoot im?’ Malan queried.
Miss Stanislaus gazed out of the window and said nothing.
Malan tried to catch my eyes in the rear-view mirror. I pretended not to notice.