Kingston Noir (12 page)

For all Dad’s assertiveness, though, Mom was the one who held the whip hand. Ever since they had met at a disco in Manhattan some thirty years ago, she had wanted to know how and exactly
where
he spent his evenings. In the end Dad had looked elsewhere for his pleasures; and Mom had retaliated with infidelities of her own. For much of their married life they showed each other a terrible disloyalty. The memory of finding my mother with another man on the kitchen floor, along with others less lurid, continued to distress me.

Mom took a swallow of her drink, sighed, and raised her eyebrows expressively. “You know the police have interviewed that woman? The one with the ankle chain? Turns out she works at a nightclub—The Gemini or someplace—on Half Way Tree Road, I think they said.” She added with bitter indignation: “Can you imagine? A
prostitute
? A common prostitute?” Foul play had been ruled out. Dad had not been unduly prevailed upon, lured, or in any way been the victim of a trap. Heart attack remained the likely verdict.

I sipped my scotch. (It was good enough to sip.) How long had we been talking for? Daylight was beginning to fade from the room.

“I feel like death myself, you know,” Mom said.

What she needed was a good long, uninterrupted nap. “You ought to be asleep,” I told her. “You need your sleep.” Blearyeyed, she got up and threw herself on the bed next door and lay awhile staring at the ceiling. Before long she was snoring faintly. I took half an antidepressant (trademark Celexa), got undressed, and lay down alongside her. In a strange way, my mother had become more of an individual now that Dad was so ill; I almost felt sorry for her.

Early the next morning, bewildered by the turn of events, we took a cab to Kingston Public Hospital. I knew that Jamaica was going to be hot: I’d had a sense of the heat when I arrived yesterday afternoon. The strong hot breath of Kingston had seemed to rub against my skin and make the air positively hum. But I had not imagined this sort of heat: solid, soupy, without a breeze. Amid the hazy mass of traffic on Knutsford Boulevard we crawled agonizingly along. Kingston during rush hour was a hectic interchange of cars and buses. The heat was blistering, with exhaust fumes coming in.

Downtown, near the intersection of North Street with Orange Street, we stalled in a four-lane tangle; I could feel the sweat running warm between my shoulder blades. Rastafarians sped enviably past us on their bone-shakers (they at least had the right idea). Mom raised her head doglike in the backseat and sniffed. “What’s that smell?” It was the bonfire whiff of burning collie weed. Surely she knew that?

“The traffic really is awful,” I said, avoiding her question.

“You don’t know what Kingston traffic is,” she laughed uneasily.

But my mind was elsewhere; the fact kept repeating itself to me:
Dad might die
.
Dad might die
.

An hour later, from the gasoline-fumed depths of the morning gridlock, we came to a five-story ochre building with bluepainted balconies: Kingston Public Hospital.

The lobby was filled with people waiting, leaning against walls, tired of waiting, tired of life. (Tired, I thought, just tired.) In post-cardiac intensive care it was awhile before anyone turned up to see us. “The surgeon soon come,” a nurse kept telling us.
Soon come.
I had read about this expression in my phrase book. It is, they say, an expression which “haunts” Jamaican life and, to outsiders, “epitomizes” the Jamaican soul. You can fuss and fume all you like, but
soon come
usually means a very long time indeed.

At long last, a man of about forty with high cheekbones and skin the color of cork came to introduce himself: “I’m Dr. Kong—the cardiac surgeon.”

His face did not seem to bear a very hopeful expression.

“These are critical days,” he said. “Mr. Ruff has survived the bypass and may regain consciousness, but I’m afraid his kidneys have gone into shock and are not dealing sufficiently with the body’s toxins.”

Saying this, he showed us into the cramped ward where my father lay, artificially vitalized, on a ventilator. It was very hot when we came in. Most of the windows were shut and the blinds were down. A faint ammonia tang of urine mingled with disinfectant pervaded the air. Patients lay motionless on their wheeled beds; surgical polyethylene bags full of urine hung like udders below their beds. An occasional beep sounded from a heart monitor.

Though Dad was the only white man in the ward, I could barely recognize him. Drips were hooked to his right arm and a tube protruded from his mouth. He was sedated and his eyes were closed. He had the battered look of someone just arrived from a bad journey; he looked like a damned vagrant.

Dr. Kong gestured Mom to a bedside chair; she sat down on it and leaned toward Dad. “Hello, Jimmy, dear heart. It’s Fanny. You’re in good hands here.” She took his left hand in her right. “A good rest will fix you up fine. Yes, things will be right again.” Already my mother was picking up bad habits of hope: Dad looked
beyond
hope, even I could see that. Today was December 9, a Monday; Dad had been dead to the world, effectively, for two days. His condition was critical; we were just waiting for the chandelier to fall.

From time to time the door opened and a nurse walked in behind a trolley-load of rattling serum bottles. No noise could wake my father and I wondered what thoughts pulsed in his head. “He may or may not be aware of your presence,” a nurse offered gently, “but there’s some weak electrical activity in the brain. So, please, you can try to talk to him.”

I put my face close to Dad’s. His chin, doubled and unshaven, still had that goatee, and his breath reeked. “Dad? You’ve got yourself in a nice fix. But you’re not really dying, are you? We won’t let you die.” No answer. I may as well have been talking to the dead. The sedative—some sort of anaesthetic—had left him stupid in his sheets. Did he not hear my words to him through his hospital sleep? The question was like a challenge to life itself.

For a few hopeful days we trusted that things might get better and waited anxiously in the Pegasus for the phone to ring. Outside, the sun was burning hot and the sky a bright burning blue, yet each time we visited my father he was less recognizably himself. Downtown Kingston, meanwhile, had begun to confuse and frustrate me; crowded, infernally noisy, it left me jittery with unaccountable bad moods and loss of appetite. The moods were a part of my anxiety, but they were a part, too, of the senseless, contrary place I found myself in. If Kingston was going to affect me in this way, I had better get used to it.

On December 13, a Friday, came distressing news that my father’s blood pressure had dropped so low that cardiac massage had to be administered.
Down, down, the compass needle pointing dead on death
. Dreadfully, late on the evening of the next day, he died. Cause of death:
Acute myocardial infarction
. The autopsy revealed diabetes, kidney stones, and an “occluded” artery to the heart. So my father had been going down the long slide to death for years. He was fifty-four and I had assumed he would live to a grand old age. But his wretched heart just would not let him live.

All that night at the Pegasus, my mother kept thinking that Dad was in the next room or moving down the corridor. But the nurses were no longer watching him; he was in a mortuary. “Oh, but he’s not
really
dead,” Mom insisted one night. “He’s passed to spirit, what others call heaven.” She said she wanted to get in touch with Dad through a spiritualist medium she had located in Kingston. “Don’t worry, we’ll have him back on board.”
Back on board
? What did that mean? This talk of mediums and moonshine was beginning to fray my nerves.

As far as I was concerned, the dead were dead and they could stay that way.

With Kingston basking in a hot bright light the next morning, I pulled on my clothes and brushed my teeth. Mom emerged from the shower in a towel-turban and stood before the mirror. She did not look at me. She had never showed more than a polite interest in my life. Why should she now? This morning we had work to do. We had to collect Dad’s belongings from the hospital.

On the way there, I took in the bombardment of impressions. Dancehall music, a numbingly insistent rap, blared from the shops along North Street, as the cab jounced drunkenly over potholes. At one point we were overtaken by a hearse; it was big, black, and expensive, and it honked loudly as it surged (or tried to surge) through the traffic. I felt ready to drop from fatigue.

On the second floor, Dr. Kong touched my mother’s arm. “Please accept my condolences.” Had her husband survived, he went on solemnly, he would have been an invalid “drifting in and out of consciousness” on a kidney machine. So it seemed this was a merciful death. “Look after your mother,” the surgeon told me as a parting shot. Now at last I understood where my place was: with the fatherless.

Presently a porter arrived with a tagged black plastic bag for us to inspect. The bag disclosed bright red underwear (very risqué), a key ring, and a sum of Jamaican currency. These little things tugged at me, but my father’s wrist watch made me gasp. The mechanism relied on the wearer’s wrist movement but, locked away, the hands had stopped ticking at 12:46 a.m. on December 9, two days after the heart attack. Now, as I tapped the watch, the hands began to move again as if propelled to do so by a ghost. Mom said it might indicate a message from the Beyond. “You don’t know what nonsense you’re talking,” I said.

I had already forgiven her so much.

Later that awful day, back in room 508, I struggled to make sense of Kingston and what had happened. The onslaught of bright lights, harsh colors, and unrelenting noise made me want to retreat into myself and shut down. I continued to take Celexa and tried to listen to Jamaican music on my iPod (King Tubby. Yabby You: old-school dub). The reggae echoed soothingly through the darkness of the hotel room. Still, I sometimes had the sensation that I was living, but without being alive. The paperwork involved in getting my father’s body home was oppressive enough. Certificates had to be rubber-stamped and tied in metaphorical red tape. Pathologists, notaries, and coroners: all were to be involved.

Meanwhile, my father’s death certificate was due for collection from the hospital mortuary. This time we decided to go to the hospital on foot. Apparently, tourists rarely venture downtown unaccompanied. (“People are very grudgeful down there,” the hotel reception clerk had warned us. “You have to know what you’re doing.”) Yet, so far, we had found only friendliness downtown and, in Kingston Public Hospital anyway, a sociable atmosphere. The problem was the heat; the heat was stovelike in its ferocity.

It was midmorning when we got to the hospital. A heat haze hung over the building in gauzy, thinning clouds, with the morning sun breaking in. Groups of dogs, cowed-looking, slunk through a roadside litter of plastic bottles and discarded KFC boxes. Amid the heat and narrow lanes round the hospital, rap, ragga, and reggae boomed from giant loudspeaker cabinets.

The mortuary was situated in the same drab complex as the hospital on North Road. Outside the mortuary office, a couple of mandrill-faced youths were speaking into their cell phones. (“We do a nice bashy package deal on your dead,” I overheard one of them say.) Later I understood who they were; they were among the “dead hustlers” or unlicensed morticians of Kingston, who make a killing out of the unsuspecting bereaved. Few of them own a hearse or even a cold room; cynically they fleece the poor. A hardness about their eyes suggested a difficult home life (or no home life at all).

We gave them a wide berth and knocked on the door which had
MANAGEMENT
lettered on a glass panel. Within sat a middle-aged woman in a white blouse and black skirt. “Don’t talk to those dutty bad youth outside,” she said to us, as she rose from her chair and gave a little bob of greeting. “Respecters of nothing.” The office was stuffy, and in the sticky air mosquitoes began to whine thinly and bite us. I looked up at a picture on the wall of Jesus walking on the water.
At least He looks cool.

Professionally doleful, the woman started by asking Mom whether she would like her husband “dressed up” and explained that relatives often prefer to see their loved ones returned to a semblance of life before they “vanish forever.” This was the Jamaican manner, I thought. We must follow the ritual. To my surprise (and I must say relief), Mom objected that fussing over a corpse in this way was “uncivilized.” She said she did not want her man “done up like Lenin or James Brown” in a suit and tie. A plain white shroud would do, thank you very much. The woman narrowed her eyes a little at this. Then she said she understood.

With infinite care, she began to draft a preliminary death certificate. The certificate, on its completion, was stamped with the hopeful Jamaican motto:
Out of Many, One People
. I again felt an acute need to clear my mind of the fog of doubts and fears that had been plaguing me since I left New York. The consequences of Dad’s death seemed to drag bewilderingly on.

As we left, the woman told us where we could buy a coffin: the House of Comfort Funeral Home Ltd. at 162 Hagley Park Road. “They stock a wide range of casket merchandise, and”—she looked at us sympathetically—“they should satisfy all your mortuary requirements.”

Kingston continued to confound and amaze me. The beep and brake of the traffic outside our hotel was deafening. Market women yelled like harridans from their shack-shanty stalls downtown. At times the noise grew so loud that I had an impulse to cover my ears. Certain types of fabric had begun to make my nerves jump and my skin itch. I could no longer wear my jeans. It was not just the heat. It was my anxious disposition at work.

In all this difficulty, Mom was no help to me at all. While the paperwork swelled, all she did was sit by the pool drinking tumblers of white rum and Coke, apparently indifferent to my distress and to what had happened to us. In the mornings she gave off a flowery, powerful chemical smell of the hairdresser. She was what she was: self-absorbed.

Though I am not usually given to analyzing my states of mind, certain things had become clear. Dad’s death had not only brought me to the edge of a new period of my life, it had opened up an unexplored territory in myself through which I was going to have to pass. Mom, though, seemed to display no such understanding (let alone self-analysis). She was not even entertainingly self-absorbed; she was a blank.