Kingston Noir by Colin Channer Read Free Book Online Page A

something you tell yourself to feel wise when you looking back at a moment when you were clearly a fool.
    There wasn’t anybody in the place. I knew this right away. But it took maybe half a second to accept say Cynthia and her daughter never just gone down the road to the shop. The place vacate. The curtain them was gone. I knock on the grill with a stone.
    Then I saw a envelope pushed between the bars. It had my name on it, and I couldn’t miss her handwriting—just like a little child.
    I opened it quick-quick. One sheet of paper. The note was short and simple:
Thank you, My Lord. I knew you would do this for us. I knew it when I asked you to help me, I knew it when you hold my body that you would do anything for me. So I don’t have to ask. I just have to say thank you. I am only telling you that we left Jamaica and we’re not coming back, so you know we are fine. Thank you for everything. Take care.
    Sincerely,
    Cynthia
    p.s. Your finder’s fee is at Western Union.
    Strange, to me at least, I didn’t think of being abandoned or that I’d messed up my life. What came to me was the first time I’d seen Cynthia in my office. When she was standing just inside the door and she noticed me looking at her, she gave me a soft tired smile, and I could see the full white perfection of her teeth, and a deep dimple in her right cheek.
    That strong body. Those legs—long and firm and black and shine with lotion. The dress hem up above her knee. Her shoe heel was scrape down to almost nothing on one side though, and the perm in her hair was soon going gone.
    A lot of feelings come with this memory—some of it bitterbitter, some of it regretful, but the feeling that always wash over me, despite everything else, is a sweetness. It is the kinda sweetness you keep in your pocket, and when things start to get bad, you pull it out like a kerchief, and take a deep breath from it, and it send you back to a place where, just for a little moment, the world could never be sweeter. Nobody can’t take that from me, that is the truth.
    My Lord …

THE WHITE GYAL WITH THE CAMERA
    BY K EI M ILLER
August Town
    I t was when the papers come out with the gyal’s picture print big and broad on the front page that August Town people did find out her rightful name. Marilyn Fairweather. It sounded right. It sounded like a white woman’s name. But for the six days she had been in August Town we had just called her “the white gyal with the camera.” Or “the white gyal” for short.
    She get the name because whatever Soft-Paw say we take it as gospel, and is Soft-Paw did send out word that if anybody see “the white gyal with the camera” we was not to trouble her; we was to leave her alone. But is like the white gyal with the camera never know or understand this—that she was living on grace—that if Soft-Paw never send out such a word she woulda dead from day one.
    You had to give it to the white gyal though—is like she never have a coward bone in her body. She take a plane to Jamaica and in my books that alone count as bravery. Pretty blond girl on her own in the heart of Jamdown? Who ever hear of such a thing? But this white gyal take it further. Instead of staying at one of them hotels in New Kingston where she could order rum and Coke all day and listen to jazz in the gardens, or in a nice little apartment in Barbican or Liguanea, she did decide to rent a room right here in August Town.
    It was one of them little rooms with its own kitchen and everything. Miss Tina usually rent it out to university students, for UWI was just a ten-minute walk up the road. But it was July so the room was empty.
    The white gyal did knock on Miss Tina gate after midnight, which of course did upset Miss Tina who was fast asleep, but she confess that she was glad for the chance to rent out the room, even for just a week, and seeing that the gyal was white, Miss Tina make sure to charge what she would usually charge for the whole month. You know how