The boy walked back onto the island like he owned it. He had good clothes, a swagger in his step and $1,500 lodged with the Jamaican Post Office. He’d been gone for over three long years, working harder than he ever had before. He’d been up and down America and from coast to coast – never imagining landscape and weather so changeable, through the sweltering Florida summers cultivating corn and tomatoes, to the freezing winter he’d spent back in the north, hauling timber onto fuel trucks with raw and bleeding hands. The last four weeks had been spent behind the high fences of Count Murphy, Florida, with five hundred other Jamaicans, waiting for a ship to bring them home.
Sailing back, he remembered the people he’d met – men and women he’d worked alongside from Jamaica, America, Peru, the Bahamas; kind farm managers and ones that barked their orders; folk he’d shared a beer with, a game of cricket, a game of poker. Different people from place to place – good and bad – but none worse than in the South. In Florida, the Jamaicans quickly discovered the marching bands and apple pies were gone. No one gave a damn about their foreign charm or Britishness. A black man was a black man, no matter where he came from. No more barracks, no more hot showers. They lived in tent cities – squalid canvas shelters with bare mattresses, no pillows, filthy shared latrines, supervised by gun-toting white men on horseback who summoned them with whistles to a daily roll call and picked and chose the day’s workers.
The pay was worse than in the North, the hours longer. At first, they had resisted – refused the back seats of buses, the back doors of diners, stared down anyone who affronted them – but the punishments they faced were harsh. White southerners hated them for agitating, for rousing the black Americans to do the same. Troublemakers were sent to jail without trial, to languish until a ship could take them home. Seven hundred Jamaicans were caged in those Florida cells in no time at all. Roy Atley was gone within two weeks. Charles Dee a month later. For every man who left there was another waiting to take his place, a fact the farm leaders exploited. It still haunted the boy, the injustice of it.
Those who hadn’t been repatriated early had to go home when their contracts ended. Demobilised American servicemen wanted their places back on the farms. The boy’s feelings about return were conflicted – he had a daughter in Pensacola, Florida – a two-year-old girl he had seen three times, rarely near enough to visit her, not allowed to take leave. Her name was Gloria and her mother was Kathleen, a kind girl he’d married when she’d said there was a baby coming; he’d stayed with her two weeks before he had to leave again. She didn’t love the boy, and if he told the truth, he didn’t know what love meant, had only done what he thought was the right thing. He sent his daughter money from Atlanta, Wisconsin, Michigan – a card for each birthday, called her mother from downtown phone booths – but neither of them said what needed saying: he wasn’t coming back to the place she called home.
♣
Back in Kingston, the boy walked the streets, looking to see what was the same and what had changed. The city looked worn out. Rubbish rotted in the gutters, a cloud of pollution hung in the air. The island was scarred by the hurricanes that tore up the earth each year; the worst of them two years before had nearly wiped out the entire coconut crop. Houses and schools in Kingston were still waiting to be rebuilt.
‘Things are bad here, man,’ Felix told him. They were leaning on the wall outside a bar on Temple Street. ‘Got worse when the war broke out. Now it’s over, and things still as bad.’
The club on Barry Street had closed in the last year, putting Felix out of work. Mr Manny was running a smaller place in Chinatown – less rent and no money for servants. Now Felix collected empty bottles, selling them back to the factories for pennies. He looked older. Two of his teeth were missing, his skin dull and marked.
♦
The boy slept on the floor of Felix’s room, waking the next morning alone, dressing without thinking. As though on autopilot, his feet carried him to Half Way Tree and onto the yellow bus to St Thomas. Only as they were waiting to depart did the boy question what he was doing, twice standing to get off, and twice sitting back down. And then they pulled away. Some part of him wanted to see his father, and the bus would take him there, out past Kingston Harbour, along the country roads, rattling over the familiar potholes, crossing the old bridge, the Yallahs River so high it lapped onto the road.
The shop looked as he remembered it – the flat tin roof, the small windows, crates of vegetables outside. He could smell the orange trees at the back. At least his father still had the place, the boy thought – it hadn’t been razed or gambled away. He saw James Lowe through the door, his lean figure behind the counter in his white vest, his head bent over the ledger, a pencil in hand. It was as though time had frozen in the old shop, as if his father had stood there for three years. The boy held him surreptitiously in his gaze a little longer, holding that power for a moment, before walking in.
In the shop’s dimly lit interior, nothing had changed – the high shelves were still muddled with goods, the same smell of salt-fish, the same battered mat lay on the floor. James Lowe looked up and saw the boy, his face moving through his emotions before settling on a frown. The boy looked back, holding his stare. His father looked exactly the same.
‘So you back?’ James Lowe said, as though the boy had been gone a week.
‘Looks like,’ the boy replied, a wind already rising in his body, churning his insides.
He had wanted to see his father, he told himself, he had to see him, and some part of the boy wanted his father to be proud of the money he had earned. He tried to hide the strain in his voice.
‘How are things, Dad?’ Silence. James Lowe just stood looking at the boy for what seemed like for ever. Then abruptly, he shook a cigarette from its packet on the counter, tapped it, lit it.
‘How are things?’ he said, mimicking the boy, exhaling. ‘How are things?’ A look of disgust passed over his face. ‘Things are no good. You read the paper? Eh? No, you’ve been gone in America, making money, when your place is here.’ He jabbed the cigarette in the boy’s direction as he spoke.
The boy knew the ripple of his father’s anger, how it could swell from nothing in seconds, but had told himself all the way here that he wouldn’t take it any more, he couldn’t take it any more.
‘Yes, I read the paper,’ he said. ‘I know what’s happening here. But I make my own choices now.’ His father’s face gave nothing away. ‘I don’t belong to you,’ the boy spat out. But already he was backing towards the door, his body saying what his words did not – he was still terrified of his father.
James Lowe took long drags, blowing the smoke towards the boy, but looking off somewhere else in the room. ‘I raised you,’ he said quietly, the tempo of his speech slower. ‘Put the clothes on your back, fed you, gave you a bed. You owe me,’ he said. ‘If you can’t give the time, you must give the money.’ He met the boy’s eyes. His father was serious. He wanted the boy to pay for the years he’d been away, payment for the loss his absence had incurred. Like the injuries claimed by slave owners. Suddenly he didn’t care for his father’s pride at all.
Behind the counter, the dark curtain moved. There was a cry as a little boy came running through into the shop – two years old perhaps, wearing only a nappy. He had chubby legs, but moved fast. ‘Vic!’ a woman called, coming through the curtain after the baby. She was black and young, the same age as the boy perhaps. Pretty. His father’s type. She grabbed the child and lifted him as he started crying, and her eyes locked with the boy’s, her eyebrows raised in surprise. No one spoke for a second. The woman looked at his father, who tutted at her, flicking his hand in the direction of the curtain. Her face fell – she turned quickly and was gone.
Another woman, the boy thought. Another child, a half-brother. Nothing had changed.
His father said nothing, went back to his ledger. If the boy wanted more from him, he would have to do as he said – pay for it. James Lowe still hated him then, despite the years he’d been away. That’s what he had needed to know. He looked once more at his father, fixed him in his memory. He wouldn’t see him again, he told himself. He turned and walked back through the door.
♠
The boy took a room down by the harbour. At night he lay on the bed reading the paper. The cane cutters were on a sit-in strike over wages. The wharf workers were refusing to unload trucks. The wages were low, lower than when he’d left. It was good the workers were still organising. He wondered about Thomas Reid. Much had changed in the island’s politics in the years he’d been away. The boy wondered if he should get involved again, wondered who Reid supported now. The boy still believed Jamaica needed its independence, but in those years away he’d fallen out of touch, and worse, something inside him had changed – the idealism of three years earlier had gone.
He turned to the jobs section in the newspaper. What could he do? There were jobs for office clerks and accountants that required applicants to have finished school with qualifications. There were positions for curtain fitters and carpet layers, all of them insisting on skills and experience he did not have. He circled a couple of advertisements to look into – door-to-door salesman positions, one selling medicines, the other encyclopaedias. Both provided a bicycle. The boy imagined cycling with a suitcase of encyclopaedias balanced on his handlebars. He thought of his other options. Mr Manny’s club was one. Another was his friend Rufus, who lived in Kingston now and wanted to open a grocery store, and had asked the boy to help him.
He dropped the paper to the floor, and lay on his bed thinking, listening to the dripping tap in the corner. It grew dark outside. The boy checked his watch, swung his feet down onto the floor, splashed his face with water at the sink and left the room.
Down in Chinatown, the noise was the same as ever – traffic and the clatter of hooves, the calls of the street merchants selling sugared ice and fried fish. This place at least hadn’t changed. The laundry hung, ghostlike, on washing lines strung between buildings, fruit in bright piles outside the Chinese shops. The smell of ginseng rose from copper urns. He passed the same laundries, the same hairdressers, recognising faces as he moved between the night-stalls. Some of the Chinese recognised him, nodding quickly at him as he walked.
The door was down the narrow alley where Felix said it would be. The boy pushed it open, went in and stood in darkness. ‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Anyone here?’ He saw a chink of light and could just catch the sound of low voices ahead. He went forward, reaching his hand out to push open another door. And there, behind it, was the low-hanging bulb above the big round table, a pile of money in the middle. Four men sat with fanned hands of cards. Three empty chairs. Felix was right – this was a dingier place. Mr Manny looked up.
‘Chick?’ he said, his eyebrows raised. He stood up, coming forward. ‘Chick! Long time no see!’
‘Yes sir, Mr Manny,’ the boy took Mr Manny’s outstretched hand. ‘I’m just come home. Been gone three years.’ They shook hands hard.
‘Boy you grow up. Come in, come in. No way, three years,’ said Mr Manny, chuckling. ‘Well you see us fellows been sat here all that time!’ He held his belly laughing. ‘Good to have you back, boy,’ he said, taking his seat again, picking up his cards. The boy took his place at the table.
♥
Three months passed, and the boy had slipped back into the night-time routine of Mr Manny’s and other clubs in Kingston, not dealing for money but playing cards five nights a week, the jobs in the paper forgotten, Rufus’s grocery store forgotten. He played it straight and he played it crooked. In the small room on the harbour he practised and practised, laying down hands to check the probability of combinations. His memory was as sharp as ever. He was practising other skills too, things he’d picked up in America, bent to the room’s lamplight with a razor blade between his thumb and forefinger. He carefully shaved the edge from a playing card, the thinnest sliver, invisible to the eye, but just detectable when he ran his thumb along the long side of the card. Or sometimes he gently punctured the card with a pin, the tiniest bump only he could find. Then he practised dealing the deck, his hands so quick and smooth, no one would ever see a thing amiss, but in truth, those skilful hands were looking for the marked cards, holding them back in his palm, dealing them to himself. His timing was perfect.
He only ever let himself win small, and certainly not every night. In the small room in Chinatown, the same men played again and again – the boy couldn’t risk being caught, and he didn’t want to cheat Mr Manny – he’d been good to him in the time before. But at the other club he took bigger risks.
Three months living nocturnally, sleeping the hot days away in the small room at the harbour. It couldn’t go on. Despite his wins, his savings were half what they had been, the money gone on food, rent, clothes, a loan to Felix that he knew would not be returned. Something had to change.
♣
‘Oh, you’re back,’ was all Hermione had said when he’d called to her through the screen door of the little house. She’d put on weight since he’d last seen her, her clothes tight around her body. He followed her through the kitchen into the living room. She carried a jug of iced tea and poured it into two glasses. ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘I wondered when I’d see you again.’
They sat on the veranda, where she lit a white-tipped cigarette, the first time he’d seen her smoke. He told her about his time in America, making her laugh with his stories, her eyes widening when he told her about the South.
‘You didn’t get my letters?’ he asked. Hermione looked straight at him, paused, shook her head.
‘No,’ she said, ‘but the mail here is bad, you know. Always bad. Letters get lost, turn up a year later at the wrong address.’ She blew a long tongue of cigarette smoke, and the boy knew she was lying. She’d received the letters but hadn’t been bothered to reply.
‘But I received the money,’ she said, as though she just remembered. ‘Thank you for that. You must have made a lot in America?’
‘I did all right,’ the boy said, thinking of his dwindling stash. ‘Put a little away.’
‘Things sure have been tough while you’ve been gone. Half of Kingston is out of work, you know.’
‘It’s worse for sure,’ the boy said. ‘We need to rule the island ourselves, you think?’ Hermione said nothing, uncharacteristically quiet. ‘It’s about time,’ the boy pushed it. Nothing again. ‘Did you vote in the election?’ He wanted to know.
‘Oh, let’s not talk about politics,’ she said. ‘Do you mind? It’s so depressing.’ He knew she hadn’t voted.
‘How about you?’ he asked, changing subject. ‘How you been keeping? How’s Fay and Angela and Laura?’
‘So-so, you know. I don’t see them so often now. Not so much time to be visiting family. I’ve been working. Taking in clothes, sewing, repairs. Washing sometimes.’ She held her hands out and turned the palms up then down. ‘My poor hands are ruined from the soap!’ The boy thought Hermione’s hands looked as pretty as ever. Long graceful fingers, the nails neatly painted coral pink, but like Felix, she looked older, the skin on her face no longer as supple.
They chatted some more until Hermione looked at her watch. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise the time. I have a visitor coming in just a minute. Can you come back another day? I’m sorry to throw you out.’ It was just like old times.
‘No problem,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll come next week.’ He wanted to ask who her visitor was, wondered why she didn’t tell him. At the door, she pecked him on the cheek, closing the screen quickly behind him, in a hurry for him to be gone.
The boy went down the steps and walked half the length of the road before stopping and turning back. The sun was hot in the sky and he cast a long shadow on the pavement. Who was the visitor? He really did want to know, walking slowly back towards her house, his eyes searching the street. He felt conspicuous, standing on the street corner. No one appeared, and after five minutes had passed the boy suddenly felt ridiculous. What was he doing, spying on her? He turned on his heel, ready to walk back towards the bus, and nearly crashed into a man coming in the other direction. ‘Oh excuse me,’ the boy said. He stepped back. The man was holding a brown paper bag under his arm and a thin bunch of flowers in his hand. He was Chinese. ‘Hope I didn’t crush them,’ the boy said, looking at the flowers.
‘Oh no, they look fine to me,’ the man answered, turning the bunch round. ‘Don’t worry. But mind how you go now.’ He continued up the street and the boy walked on, turning half a minute later to see the man climbing the steps to Hermione’s porch. He knew his face. It was the Chinese shopkeeper from Barry Street. The boy had seen him last week in the shop. He and his wife serving behind the counter.
♦
‘You see the notice in the paper?’ Felix asked the next time they met at the bar near the harbour. ‘Boy, I wish I had that sort of money. I’d take myself to England in a second.’
‘What notice?’ the boy asked. ‘I didn’t see anything.’
Felix pulled the crumpled page from his trouser pocket. ‘I don’t know why I’m carrying it around,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ He smoothed the paper on the table and the boy bent over to read it. It was a notice advertising passage to England on the SS Ormonde, a returning troopship. It said the ticket would be in the region of £48, should it be possible for the vessel to call at Jamaica. There were two hundred berths.
‘They don’t even know if this ship is coming,’ the boy said. ‘Either it’s coming or it’s not.’
‘I think it’ll come,’ Felix said. ‘Because enough Jamaican boys would sell their mothers to be on that boat and be away. But forty-eight pounds is a lot of money, man. And forty-eight times two hundred is a whole lot more.’
They lifted their bottles and drank.