by M. P. Wright
My digs were on the second floor of a two-storey Victorian red-brick corner house on Gwyn Street, with the living room situated at the rear of building. It had none of the comforts of a real home, but, in truth, I didn’t know what a real home was like any more. A beaten up armchair and a rectangular coffee table, both left when the previous owner had done a runner after not paying the rent, were the only pieces of furniture in the room. Sat on an old tea chest was a Dansette record player. A stack of LPs stood against the side of the chest. I turned on the player and searched through the record sleeves until I found my favourite album. I carefully placed it on the turntable, gently dropped the needle onto the revolving black disc, then turned up the volume and let Etta James do her thing.
The scrapbook and Manila envelope I’d taken from Stella Hopkins’ house stared back at me from the coffee table, where I had dropped them when I’d got in last night. I picked up the envelope and took out the black and white photograph. It was creased down its centre and dog-eared, with no writing on the back of it. There was no developer’s stamp either.
In the picture, taken in what looked like a garden or perhaps a park, was a child, a little black girl, no more than six or seven years old, hair tied in braids and pinned across the top of her head. She wore a candy-striped dress, little white socks and patent-leather shoes. She smiled happily while sitting on the knee of a well-dressed black man. In one hand she held a small cloth toy rabbit while the other clasped his palm. He was in his early forties and well built, with strong features. He had a real presence to him, something I couldn’t put my finger on at first. Perhaps it was the dark, hard eyes that unsettled me, or the awkwardness in his unsmiling face. He was a man who looked uncomfortable having his photograph taken. He was a man who looked a lot like a young Earl Linney.
*
It was just after one thirty on Monday afternoon and I was sitting in the Star and Garter in a booth at the furthest end of the pub. My pint of Dragon Stout was already half drunk. Lunchtime drinkers stood at the bar laughing and chatting while The Kinks’ ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ played on the jukebox. The events of the previous night while checking out Stella’s home had dragged up more questions than answers for me. If the police had searched the house, they hadn’t gone over the place very thoroughly. There were things that didn’t sit right in there. Surely alarm bells were gonna ring when the whole place stank like a washed-down morgue.
But I had found something other than the photograph and empty scrapbook. Something I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was the one thing the law would not have picked up on, even in the most disciplined and determined of searches. Not unless, like me, you knew what a duppy was and its connection to an open Bible by a bed.
My mama had been a dignified and proud woman with strong religious beliefs and a determination to teach her son about the customs and traditions of our people. Juju stories were part of that tradition, as was the legacy of our servitude and bondage. The slave routes from West Africa brought my ancestors to the island of Barbados in the mid 1600s. They brought with them a vast cultural history, and their strength and skills put to use in the hard labour that the rich Dutch settlers demanded of them on the sugar plantations on the island.
Through locust plague and hurricanes, famine and bloodshed, my forefathers, many of whom died before reaching their destination, continued to suffer the deprivations of cruel slavery until its abolishment in 1834. Those who survived and found freedom continued to work and live hard, oppressive lives. The struggles faced in their pasts long ago had created the resilient Bajans who now populate the island today. But my people also brought something to those islands unheard of before.
Travelling with them was our folklore, and with it an altogether darker side to our lineage. They brought with them the duppy.
A duppy is the manifestation of the soul of a dead person. It is a malevolent spirit that can appear in either human or animal form. It is said that a duppy can be heard in the dog howling in the night or be found in the buttress roots of silk cotton trees, patiently waiting for the moment that its evil intent can be released upon the innocent. It is believed that babies and children are susceptible to these ghouls. An open Bible is often placed in a newborn’s crib or bed to protect it and ward off evil. The Bible is usually left open at a Psalm. Just like the one I’d found next to Stella Hopkins’ bed.
My cousin Vic, even as a child, had referred to the supernatural superstitions of our descendants and elders as a “pile of mule shit”.
“Why you worryin’ ’bout some claptrap? It means nuttin’ except to some stupid old fool who tellin’ you tales at the foot o’ your bed at night,” he would say to me.
As kids, Vic and I would sit and talk at night in the ruins of the old sugar mill close to our homes. Our conversations were often dictated by my fascination for the stories that would be told to me by my grandmother.
Her yarns of ghosts, or duppies, as she called them, would frighten my sister and me before going to bed, keeping us awake long into the night. My need to recite those old wives’ tales to my cousin would always fall on deaf ears.
Then, as now, Vic feared very little other than the back of my uncle Gabe’s hand. His attitude to such things remained undiminished as he grew older. I, on the other hand, was not so sure. Perhaps the incubus I feared as a child still held me in its grip all these years later.
Something told me that Stella had left her Bible open for a good reason. But I didn’t know what that was. What kind of duppy had she feared so much that it made her clean down that house as if it were a hospital ward and then finally run out on the place and not be seen again?
I took the last few sips of my pint before getting up to the bar and ordering another. The landlord, Eric Coles, was a bad-tempered bastard at the best of times. He allowed “coloured people”, as he called us, to drink in his establishment not out of any sense of moral responsibility but because St Pauls was becoming something of a black ghetto and he knew we liked a drink. Coles took advantage of that, knowing that our money was as good as any white fellow’s. You’d just never hear Eric say that. He tipped my glass slightly to the side in his huge blue-veined hand and poured the bottle of stout into it, a caramel-coloured head forming as it filled, then stood it with some force onto a beer-soaked mat close to where I stood.
“That’ll be one and ten,” he said in a deep Somerset accent, holding out his palm towards me.
I leant over for the drink and pulled it towards me, reached into my wallet, picked out the change and handed it to him.
“You got a phone I could pay to make a call on, Eric?”
Coles stared at me for a moment, his head tilted to one side, the look on his face a mixture of dismay and curiosity as to why I would need to use his phone. I watched him as he thought for a moment before he turned around and picked up a green table telephone on a large lead from behind the counter and dropped it down in front of me.
“Leave the bleedin’ money on the bar when you’re done,” he mumbled gruffly as he walked away.
I took a small piece of paper out of my jacket pocket. On it was written the number I needed to call. Lifting the receiver, I dialled and waited. After it rang a couple of times, a woman with a voice that sounded as if the entire British Empire’s integrity rested upon it, answered.
“Bristol City Council, how can I help you?” she asked.
“Can I have Alderman Linney’s office, please?”
The line went quiet as I waited to be connected.
7
By the time Linney had picked up his phone I’d been hangin’ on the end of the damn line for the better part of five minutes. When he finally answered, he greeted me with all the disdain of an elderly schoolmaster who was about to give one of his pupils several sharp belts of his cane.
“Mr Ellington. You have something to tell me, I trust?”
Even though I couldn’t see him, I got the feeling he was looking down his nose at me, like some rich uncle having to put
up with an unwanted nephew who had snot on his sleeve.
“We need to talk. I got some more questions fo’ you.”
I heard him take a deep breath before he spoke again.
“Questions . . . What kind of questions, Mr Ellington?” His speech was calculated and precise.
“Like why Stella Hopkins’ house smelt like an abattoir after a spring clean.”
There was silence for a moment before he spoke again.
“Meet me at the old observatory on Clifton Down at 4 p.m.; don’t keep me waiting, Mr Ellington.”
I didn’t get the chance to reply. The burring tone in my ear was Linney’s parting gift to me.
It was getting dark by the time Earl Linney arrived. I stood watching him get out of his car on the road below. He made his way up the pathway to the observatory that looked out across the well-heeled community of Clifton and the Avon Gorge. He was dressed for the cold weather in a heavy winter wool coat, navy silk scarf and a felt trilby hat that was pulled down low over his face. An icy wind blew across the down as I waited for him, stamping my feet on the snowy ground, my toes turning to ice in my shoes.
“You sure do know how to pick a meeting place.”
Linney gave no reply to my sardonic remark; he was maintaining his appearance of superiority. The straightness of his spine and the determination of his gait left me in no doubt of his mood. He looked me up and down, drawing the lapels of his coat across his chest before speaking.
“Let’s walk, Mr Ellington, keep the blood flowing. You look cold.” He smiled at me. It was the kind of smile that makes me want to smack somebody in the mouth. “You have questions for me? Let’s have them.”
He’d caught me off guard with his abruptness and he knew it. He was clearly unhappy with me after finding out that I’d broken into Stella’s home. I steadied myself for a moment, mentally, before coming back at him.
“Did the law search the girl’s house?” I asked, my tone now as point-blank as his own.
“They did.”
“So, did they speak to you ’bout her house when they searched it?”
“Briefly, yes.”
He was giving nothing away. It was like playing a game of verbal chess with the man. Perhaps it was his own sense of self-importance that made him so guarded, or perhaps he just didn’t like the way I spoke to him. I pressed on and was unable to disguise the irritation in my voice.
“Police officers go into a house like that, they’re gonna have someting to say.”
“What was there to say? I explained to the police about Stella’s somewhat unusual lifestyle, and that she had her own ways of coping. They were happy that nothing was unduly amiss in there. The girl simply liked the house to be clean.” His retorts were both clinical and concise.
“Brother, there is clean, and then there’s that kinda clean. That shack had been through one big shakedown: the walls were scrubbed and floors I coulda eaten food off of. It was sterile. There was hardly a scrap of furniture in the house, no food, not even a picture of her dead mama.”
I’d touched a raw nerve. He stopped walking and turned to face me square on. His eyes bore into me, the anger in them barely held back by a hard-pressed self-control. They were very similar to those that I had viewed earlier that day. Only this time they weren’t in some old picture and no child was holding his hand to keep him on the level.
“What the hell does it matter to you if the child owned few belongings, or that she was neat, orderly? Tell me, what did you actually achieve or find by illegally forcing your way into the house? I asked you to tactfully make a number of enquiries for me. Not to commit an act of breaking and entering.”
It was at the moment when he said the word “find” that I chose not to inform him about the photograph or the scrapbook that I had found in Stella’s bedroom. It was a decision that I was going to regret.
“Where is this line of questioning taking you, Mr Ellington?” he asked.
He was calm again and his composed demeanour had returned, but inside of the man, I knew something was stirring him up.
“Well, I ain’t too sure, Mr Linney. But you got a missing girl you got me looking fo’, and the way I see it, it don’t look like she wants finding. Now from what I can tell, there was only a handful o’ people who knew her; they’ve been questioned by the police, who have come up with nuttin’. So maybe I’m thinking I ain’t getting the whole picture here?”
I stood, my arms folded across my chest, shivering, waiting for him to answer me.
“You don’t often come up to this part of town do you, Mr Ellington?” His question was loaded and he took some pleasure in asking me it.
“Ain’t much reason fo’ a man like me to be wandering round Clifton in the cold.”
“On the contrary, it’s exactly the sort of place you should be wandering around, as you say. In fact I would wholeheartedly encourage it. Do you believe that the colour of your skin prevents you from living where you wish or from achieving what others, such as our white brothers and sisters, perhaps take for granted?”
“Let’s just say I didn’t feel too welcome when I last walked through the doors of the Berkeley Square Hotel. You know what I mean?”
Linney gave a wry smile at my remark.
“Oh, I know just what you mean. But I believe that I belong anywhere I choose to go. I also believe that the future prosperity for black people is this country is restricted by that same narrow-minded Uncle Tom thinking that you currently possess, and there’s no room for that kind of thinking any more. We need to be looking towards the future, Mr Ellington, and how we mould that future to our own good. Now, as far as I am concerned, you have the whole picture regarding Miss Hopkins. You didn’t think your five pounds a day would be such easy money, did you? Now, just keep searching for the girl and apprise me of your findings, and promptly, please.”
He turned and began to walk away from me before stopping in his tracks and returning to where I still stood.
“I’m sure this will be of some use to you? Goodnight, Mr Ellington.”
He held his hand out to me and casually waved in front of my face the same kind of envelope he had given to me before. I took what he offered and opened it up. Inside, there was money: a lot more money.
Out on the downs, the winter evening twilight had an almost mystical feel to it. I looked out towards the city, then across to the suspension bridge, before I began to make my way back towards Clifton village. The lights of the houses flickered, their collective illumination casting an air of prosperity and security around them. It was only then that the alderman’s words of achieving greater things and wanting more out of my life suddenly resonated within me, and in that moment I felt cheap and foolish for what I had said to him in defence of my status and colour.
I walked back down into St Pauls as if I’d achieved nothing. But that couldn’t be said for the guy who’d been following me since I’d left my meeting with Linney.
8
At first I thought the guy following me was hired muscle, perhaps somebody to watch Linney’s back while we were having our little chat out on the downs. But I was wrong. He’d stood in what he thought was good cover, obscured by the trees, but I’d spotted him soon after the alderman had turned up. He kept a healthy distance between us as he shadowed me on the opposite side of Cotham Road as I headed back towards my digs.
After about a mile and a half, my new buddy was still with me, and he didn’t appear to be bothered that I knew it. I turned to get a better look at him, and from the orange glare of a street light could see he was white, powerfully built and over six feet tall, with his dark hair kept neat in a military-style crew cut. There was a confidence in his swagger that told me this guy could handle himself.
Anyone who was prepared to follow me this far either wanted to know what I was up to or where I lived. But I didn’t want him knowing either. I wasn’t going to lose the guy unless I tried to outrun him. But I got the feeling the bastard behind me was gonna be real persis
tent. I needed to put some more distance between the two of us while I thought through the best thing to do. Adrenaline pumped through my body as I quickened my pace.
Heavy sleet had begun to fall as I entered the Kingsdown district, closer to my home turf. I began to walk a little quicker, and when I got the chance took myself off into a side street and kept moving, increasing my speed as I turned into each new road before reaching the steep incline of Marlborough Hill, my tail still hanging in there behind me. I began to climb the slippery cobbled road. I pulled my hat further down over my brow to protect my face from the freezing rain.
Reaching the top, I took a left and pushed myself as close as I could against the red-brick wall of a Georgian house and waited for the guy to catch up. The sleet bounced off of the pavement as I listened for his heavy footsteps, giving me an idea of how close he was. With my heart pounding in my chest, my muscles tightened and I slowed my breathing while I steeled myself for what was to come.
He turned into me with real force as he reached the top of the hill: he had already pre-empted my attack. I lunged from the wall to grab him with my outstretched left arm, my right fist clenched tight, but he was already a couple of steps ahead of me. I felt a sharp, burning pain across my shoulder blade as his first blow made contact, but it wasn’t flesh and bone that had struck me. I caught sight of a slapjack in his hand. I raised my left arm low and tried to connect a solid punch to his ribs, but failed as the big man followed with two more vicious blows to my body.
I fell onto my ass and immediately began to push myself backwards across the slushy ground and towards the kerbside, trying to create some distance between myself and my assailant.