Thompson Death Register

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-84523-408-9
Verlag: Peepal Tree Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Set during the politically turbulent times of 90s Jamaica, Death Register is a challenging and moving coming of age story. It uncovers the extreme nature of Jamaican homophobia and explores its devastating effects on a group of high school boys in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

Dwight Thompson is a Jamaican working in Japan as an English teacher. His work has appeared in the Montego Bay Western Mirror and Caribbean Writer, where he won the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize. One of his stories was also short-listed for a prize in the 2012 Small Axe Literary Competition.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thompson, Dwight

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1 – MONTEGO BAY PASTORAL

In Jamaica there are three things you don’t do on a Sunday: you don’t cook rice and peas without coconut milk, you don’t beat your children, and you don’t – not as a self-respecting, God-fearing woman – go to church without wearing a hat, or at least a decent wig. The first and third rules taken care of, my grandmother was an expert at flouting the second. Took to breaking it with more resourcefulness than congregants breaking bread at Holy Communion. With her right hand she would slap and pinch and pull till your skin was sore and puffy, and with the left hand upraised, as if swearing an oath, she warned you to keep quiet, else your punishment would double. But this was a ruse. Whether you protested or not she kept on hitting you until she felt satisfied.

This morning’s punishment was special. I had defied her, had opened my mouth to speak in a strange tongue, had said no when I should have said yes. I felt that righteousness was on my side; it was how I imagined Deacon Sharpe must have felt on that great Christmas morning of the 1831 slave rebellion. But my courage hadn’t lasted long, and my palms felt slippery as I imagined the hangman’s noose around the Deacon’s neck as he stood on the gallows in his Sunday best. Unlike him, I wouldn’t have the solace of even a great parting sound bite to seal my place in history.

“Phyllis, why you don’t let the bwoy do it half and half. Go to summer school for a month, then go to work with Mackie for a month.” This was Papa, sitting across from me at the kitchen table.

“Clarence, don’t draw me tongue!” Mama snapped. “This don’t concern you.”

Papa shrugged and sipped his tea. He didn’t have the strength to argue. He was going through another of his spells when he’d wake up in the morning with his insides scrubbed raw, and hard food was off limits. Such moments came after his dream when the gift of prophecy was sealed inside him, barred from ever coming out, his belly a mouth sewn shut with cords of fire.

“An’ is not even summer school,” I mumbled, spooning my porridge listlessly, my elbow propped defiantly on the table and my palm pressed against my ear, “is a writing workshop… an’ it’s free.”

Mama glared at me. “A writing wha’?” She rolled her eyes in her mocking way. “What a piece o’ fanciness. Look here, mister man. The only workshop you goin’ is Mackie woodwork shop, bright and early tomorrow morning. Get that in your head! You coulda pout some more…”

1. The Jesus Carpenter and the Jacket Man Crisis

The matter of contention was that I’d already signed up for a three-week writing workshop at the parish library. The library people had come to school in April promoting the event, handing out flimsy, puke-green pencil cases and Reading Maketh a Full Man lapel pins.

Now here I was, two months later, gainfully employed and woefully depressed, conditioning my mind to face the rigours of hard labour. My grandmother had got me a job with none other than Herbert Macintyre, aka Brother Mac, aka the Jesus Carpenter, an eloquent preacher and deacon at the Burchell Baptist Church (the church of the great Sam Sharpe) and a carpenter of not inconsiderable repute, though more famous for delivering promises than actual furniture. He had even been charged once with defrauding his renters by tampering with an electricity meter. I had also witnessed his depravity four years before, the incident that had changed my life.

To start with, Brother Mac’s Woodwork Shop, as the legend outside the shop declared, wasn’t really his. It was one of many rented units at the Bogue Industrial Estate in Montego Bay, just across the street from the sewage plant whose aluminium covers shimmered like a sea of glass in the sun. The estate was owned by Fitz-George Henry, aka the Jacket Man, a former drug lord and gangster of the 1970s political scene who’d been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, and who, like a good many people with a wall to their backs and time on their hands, had searched for God, found him and got early release.

Henry’s history with the Baptist church was short-lived but lively. He became a member soon after leaving prison in 1990, but his forays into public life soon brought him into conflict with the church. The last straw was when he bought a license from the Gaming Commission to build several casinos. The Baptist Council of Churches came down like a scourge on his head. He was disfellowshipped, cast out from the flock, banished to roam the wilderness of the spiritually slothful. Three years later, with the acquisition of the Fletcher’s Land property, he had rubbed salt into the church’s wound. They had planned to acquire the site for their new western conference centre. Henry was intending to build a permanent home for the world’s largest reggae festival: Reggae Jammin’ Jamfest Jamboree.

The Church, not wanting to appear bitter, had extended an olive branch. At a parochial prayer breakfast, to which Henry was invited, the Archbishop had tried to broker a peace with their wayward son, wishing him success with his new venture. Henry, in return, had offered to allow the church to play a role in the development of his new property.

This was where Brother Mac came in. The Church commissioned him to build seven hundred foldout chairs for the VIP section of the venue, over a period of three months.

When I started working with him, Brother Mac was already into his second month, having started in May, the chairs due for the end of July. The festival would start in August and run for a week.

Brother Mac had worked for Henry before, so you had to think that Henry, with his knowledge of Brother Mac’s highly individual work ethic, must have trusted his reputation to keep Mac in order – particularly the stories of the licensed firearm he allegedly toted below his coat, and the legend that he’d killed his wife and buried her beneath the tiles of his pool at his Plantation Heights mansion, then reported her missing. This had earned him the nickname, Stonewall Henry. You’d hear idling estate workers singing under their breaths:

One two three four Jacketman a come

One two three four, Jacketman a come

Wid de moneybag a knock him belly bam bam bam

Wid de gunstrap a knock him belly bam bam bam…

This was when they saw the blue Mercedes pull up by the gate the last Friday of every fortnight, when Henry personally doled out brown envelopes of cash and checked on the general status of things. Then they’d take flight like zinc sheets in a hurricane across the grounds.

But despite all this notoriety, we were fixing the Jacket Man’s business, swindling him. From Day One. What we were doing was this: since completing the first three hundred chairs, we started renting them out to various church groups for weeks at a time. They needed the chairs for their summer tent crusades. We’d rent a hundred or so chairs to a particular church for one or two weeks. And since we had completed Jacket Man’s quota a month early, by working sometimes up to nine p.m., we had the full complement of chairs at our disposal. We could rent to three or more clients at a time, depending on demand.

When the chairs came back, all we had to do was a little refurbishing, scraping off globs of candle-fat or gum, then applying a light coat of varnish, depending on the state of disrepair, before sending them out again. For the rest of the day, with no more chairs to be made, we had time to ourselves.

I passed most of the time reading. I’d gone back to the library, following the row with Mama, to borrow a few books on the workshop’s reading list. My confidence had sunk when I saw it was the portly, overly dramatic librarian on duty. I’d never had a good relationship with this man, even as a child borrowing books from the Young Readers section. I had selected Naipaul’s A Flag on the Island and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and brought them to the counter. He scowled at Naipaul’s author portrait and leaned towards me confidentially, “This one, I have it on good word that his greatest desire is to be buried at Westminster Abbey, hmph!” Then he looked at the Fitzgerald book affectionately and pressed it to his breast, and looked at it again, his face sad, his lips quivering. “What a wasted life,” he crooned (and the fraud was actually dabbing tears!). “A genius should never marry. A talented man maybe, but a genius no.” Then he stamped my card and held the books out to me, though I had to wrench them from his fat fingers.

Gatsby I’d read before so I skimmed through it and loaned it to Renee (Brother Mac’s secretary and mistress) telling her that it wasn’t one of those stuffy classics that would leave you comatose before lunch, but the story of a great romance – not unlike the Mills and Boon paperbacks she devoured daily. I took my time enjoying the Naipaul stories.

All was bliss. (And I was making so much money!) My summer couldn’t have been going any better.

But with time we got complacent. It was our greed that did for us, because we weren’t just renting to tent crusades anymore, but had started taking commercial orders. The money was better, the engagements shorter, and we liked to think there was less risk involved, since most of the...