Home | Current Issue | King's Council | Books We Love | Books You Love | Archives | Blog 

Who We Are ▪► Submit ▪► Links ▪► E-Mail

Winter 2005 [Issue No. 5]

FICTION

The Fear of Stones  ▪► Kei Miller

[Acrobat PDF] ▪  [Table of Contents]

Here is what I believe: in this world, we are each an equation. For every moment a man lives, he is delivered once again through the short parallel lines of an equal sign. This is the story of Gavin. As such, it can be summed up: stonebirth + harbour + chickenpox-at-5 + St. Richards Primary + Vineyard Town + Darren + Sylvia + the rain + the house behind the cane + cartoons on JBC + Vocational Bible school at Bethlehem Church of Christ + the smell of mosquito destroyer + every goddamned thing that happened in every goddamned moment of his life and then before = Gavin.

That would be the short version. The long version, of course, is his actual life. This is only a telling, and every story is abridged. Who can waste time accounting for each insignificant breath taken? And who would even remember it all? But that fact is also part of this story – because if we each lose large portions of our lives to a kind of amnesia, then Gavin is the exception. His memory is its own universe – always expanding, stretching, inventing new spaces. If you gave him enough time, Gavin would remember everything. He would remember his life from the beginning. He would remember the evening on the Palisadoes Strip:

The man and woman were so in love, she had listened spellbound while he described the boring details of how the Strip was formed. It was evening and the sky was purple, which made the waters on either side look dark and thick like paint. Small crabs were running between the rocks. He parked his white Ford Escort on the sand and explained to her how Hope River emptied onto the sea, not far from where they were, and all the sand particles it brought out built up over thousands of years, and formed this five-mile strip: Kingston Harbour on the inside, the Caribbean Sea on the out.

Gavin would remember how, a little later, the woman was sitting on the bonnet, her hand lifted in a kind of salute to shield her eyes from the setting sun. She was looking up at an Air Jamaica plane coming in for landing. It was so low she could read the writing on its belly. The man’s back was to her by this time, his long hair gathered in a ponytail. He had been skipping stones across the water, but paused also to watch the landing. They were looking up awed, as if the contraption of metal above them was itself a part of surrounding nature – had blossomed into being, along with harbour and sand and palm trees, when God said the word that unfolded creation.

They were not religious people. So it was strange, the shared gaze – the ‘beholding’. Their eyes filled with all the certainty of faith, like wisemen bewitched by a star. But they were in love. So you might as well forgive them their bedazzled eyes, the way they each thought stupidly upon seeing the aircraft: Oh look! A plane! It must be a sign!

Now even a limousine is a better metaphor for the luxury of love; the stretching nature of it – the way ‘hi’ becomes ‘hiiiiiii,’ as if the speaker is willing time to slow down. But a plane? It doesn’t make sense. Yet this is the colonizing way of love – this ability to own everything, to see and transform things in impossible ways. Love will see a pile of cowshit in the middle of Hope Gardens and say, How absolutely beautiful! – not because it has X-ray vision and sees a daisy seed hidden in its center that will burst out in all radiance in another month, but rather because Love is silly, and blind.

When the plane dipped below a copse of trees, they exhaled together. The man, Darren, bent to pick up another stone, and Sylvia, the woman, returned to watching him – his back, slender and elegant in the white merino he had on. He had taken off his long-sleeved shirt soon after they arrived, gave it to her with a kind of chivalry that didn’t suit the landscape, that probably came from watching too many movies. He said to her, "Here, it can get windy." And though the breeze turned out to be a warm one, the kind you opened yourself to, still she held his shirt tightly around her shoulders. Watched him, his back, his hand extending out, poised – she suddenly saw the green and purple glint of the stone under the last of the sun’s light and shouted, "No!"

Sylvia jumped off the car, ran over to him.

"Look on it." She lifted his own hand to his face, showing him the stone his fingers were still curled around. "You can’t throw this away, Darren. Look how it so beautiful."

He turned it around and agreed, "It pretty for true," and slipped it into his pocket. "But now look how you get sand all over my shirt, eeh?"

She looked behind and laughed at the sight of the shirt, crumpled on the ground.

▼▪▲

If you give him enough time, Gavin will remember all of that. He doesn’t right now, and for a very good reason – he has no business remembering it; he wasn’t there. It took place in 1977, the year before he was born, before he was even conceived; the year in which, if he was anything at all, it was only a vague idea never even spoken between Darren and Sylvia. And yet, Gavin remembers everything that happened the next day:

October 1, 1977. On the stroke of midnight, it started to rain – at the exact moment when it stopped being September, officially turned into ‘the wet month’, the clouds on cue began to empty themselves as if they had been waiting, had received their orders and had been counting down, 3... 2…1... thunder, lightning, rain! It was the kind of shower that becomes white noise, lulling you into deep sleep. Night extends way into the morning. The birds are kept away. The sun is behind the clouds. So at 11 am that morning, Sylvia was still in her bed.

Windshield wipers working frantically, Darren’s Ford Escort made its way slowly up the puddle-filled avenue of Vineyard Town. He parked, opened his door and emerged, umbrella first. He had not realized that when the car had stopped, so had the rain. Ironic really, that the one time when the world actually did stop to acknowledge their love, to give Darren and Sylvia a symbol, a sanction – neither of them recognized it.

But it didn’t go completely unnoticed. Sylvia’s mother, Miss Betty, who had been sitting on the patio, saw when the car drove up, saw Darren step out of the car – saw when the rain stopped – and thought to herself with some resignation, "So this is how it is, eh!"

Darren walked up the steps and the old woman stood up to meet him. "Sylvia still sleeping."

He looked disappointed. Miss Betty’s face softened. "Come inside nuh," she said, "while Sylvia get herself ready."

"Th-thank you," Darren stammered. It was the first time Miss Betty had invited him in. He sat in the dimly-lit room while Sylvia got ready, amazed how the inside of every Jamaican house could look so similar: always a portrait of Jesus hanging, hair perfectly permed, hands clasped, his blue eyes looking to heaven; always the same over-polished shelf crowded with cheap porcelain animals; the same vase of plastic flowers in the centre, the same embroidered ‘God Bless Our Home’ on the wall, and the same beaded curtains to separate the living room from the kitchen. But it was the sofa and chairs that got to Darren: no doubt purchased five, maybe ten years ago. A sensible purchase at the time. A sign of domesticity and of moving upwards. A sofa and matching chairs with cushions – bought from a store! Yet, in the scheme of things, no one could have been really confused, could they? The furniture was bought from a store, but it had likely been the cheapest set – the one all the truly advanced people walked past – the one that was put on sale just to get rid of it. In its boring design, its rigid angles, its uncomfortable rectangularity – the sofa set was as much a sign of poverty as it was of advancement. And so it really did get to Darren – how after so many years, the chairs were still in their original plastic covers. The thick yellow of age was now spreading itself across them. He wondered, sitting there, about the things old people will hold on to: gas lighting, red floors that could never be polished, and now, plastic separating them from the softness underneath. And maybe, Darren thought, it was not a holding-on, but an inability to let go of hardness. That perverse love Caribbean people will never admit to, of sunhot and whips.

"Darren?"

He looked up and smiled. It was Sylvia. She had finally stepped out, smelling of carbolic soap and mint. Everything about her was unpretentious and beautiful: her low afro, the small silver studs in her ears, the dashiki dress stopping right before her knees, her long legs, the leather sandals, the absence of nail polish, lipstick or eye shadow. There were times he felt fake beside her – wondered why she dated someone like him. He, who had greased his hair so much that very day that its straightness was exaggerated; its sheen blinding; his hair, so terrific in its Indian-ness that sometimes people doubted he was mixed with anything else. She never questioned this obsession with hair – only laughed when he, out of lifetime habit, hit her hand away whenever she tried to touch it.

There will actually come a day – to be specific, in 405 days, such will be Darren’s grief that he will shave his head bald. With one hand, he will hold the baby he has named Gavin to his chest, and with the other, he will throw the shaven hair on top of the coffin that is being lowered into the earth. Then he will turn away, sobbing, and will not realize that he has dropped the two-week-old baby. He will not miss the weight and he will not hear the child hollering; he will simply walk away. But all of this is to come…in time, in time. Let us concentrate on October 1, 1977: Sylvia was in her dashiki dress, Darren was smiling.

He asked, "So you ready?"

She said yes, turned to her mother. "I’ll be back before dark, Mums."

They walked in single file towards the door – Darren in front, Miss Betty at the back as if ushering them out. Then suddenly, before stepping outside, Darren remembered something. He stopped, turned to Sylvia, reached into his pocket and took out a necklace. It was really a stone pendant hung on a leather string – the stone varnished, wrapped around with wire.

She looked at it and saw that it was the stone she had asked him to save the day before. "Darren Williams! O God, you made this for me?" He hung it around her neck and she beamed, the comfortable weight of stone resting between her breasts, and Miss Betty thought for the second time that day, "So this is how it is, eh?"

They went to Hope Gardens, spread a blanket under the arch of an aqueduct, an aqueduct that was used to water plantations – and excuse the intrusion, but what is so romantic about these vestiges of slavery? Carriage rides; a couple, hand in hand looking over the sprawl of a cane field; getting married in the shadow of Rose Hall Great House; a picnic under the arch of an aqueduct? But perhaps I’m not qualified to comment on history. My Ph.D. is in mathematics. I did a dissertation on complex analyses. And I do not mean to taint this day for Darren or Sylvia. Because it was a beautiful day. They sat on that blanket, the grass beneath it still wet, ate sandwiches, drank apple juice. A vendor passed them, trying to sell peppered shrimps. Darren said, "I will buy a bag if you take a picture of us," and handed the man his camera.

Frozen forever – this window onto October 1, 1977. Darren, his luxurious hair stiff in the afternoon breeze, Sylvia in her brown dashiki dress, a stone glinting purple and green between her breasts. The two of them holding hands on a blanket spread under an arch – smiling an honest smile. Comfortable. In love. This is the picture…

…the picture Gavin’s grandmother, Miss Betty, gave him when he was seven and he asked her how his momma looked. She gave him a shoebox, and in it was the necklace – varnish stripping, the leather warm and moldy. And under the stone pendant, this picture that Gavin cried over after his grandmother left the room. He took it with him to school, to church, to the bath. The picture that after a year was crushed and stained beyond recognition, but by which time was imprinted on his mind.

If children really are the great imaginers, is it possible that this is the seed of Gavin’s memory? That studying that picture day in and day out, he himself invented a whole story around it – an elaborate story with rain and aqueducts and peppered shrimp?

It is possible.

Consider now a fairy tale – Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella and the Prince, Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming. Let us go to the bone of the story, the part they never tell us, the implicit suggestion: boy meets girl; girl is attractive, boy is (or will become) handsome enough but more importantly, he is stable; they are both virgins, the girl has never seen an erect penis; on their wedding night they have sex and on that same night the girl becomes pregnant.

On February 14^th 1978, Valentine’s Day, Sylvia and Darren were married: girl, gorgeous as ever; boy set to inherit his father’s haberdashery store – in other words, stable. That evening, they went into their hotel room, tentative and excited as they peeled off each layer of clothes – the veil, the gloves, the heels; the bowtie, the jacket, the vest. Later on she bled a little, as if this was her gift to him, and he reciprocated by filling up her womb.

The fairytale continues – well what else would you call it? – that at the very moment Sylvia conceived, she knew! The realization was not a comfortable one. It announced itself as a grain of sand swimming somewhere in her centre. Tiny. Darren fell asleep, as men will do, exhausted and thrilled with the loss of his virginity. She turned to her left, to her right, to her left again, trying to get rid of this foreign thing inside her, to shift it, to allow her body to swallow it. Eventually she sat up, swung her feet off the bed, focused on this grain of sand, tried gently to cough it up.

Sylvia smiled for the rest of their honeymoon, determined not to ruin it. She even smiled for her first four weeks back at work, teaching grade 5 students – the other teachers flocking around her, winking, pinching her, asking, How was it? She smiled for them. She smiled for her husband – but after five weeks the grain of sand had not gone anywhere. It had grown into a stone – a very small stone, like a piece of gravel. Now she was lying awake at night, coughing louder, harder, until finally she would sit still, considering this new thing inside her – tried to guess its shape.

The discomfort became painful. So she went to Darren and told him the truth, her voice trembling. "Is like I feel a stone lodged inside me." She touched her navel. "I can’t describe it any better than that. I just don’t feel good."

"What you really saying?" There was concern in his voice, but he didn’t understand.

She was crestfallen. She had secretly hoped he would have the answer. He touched her gently and she started to weep.

The next day, they headed out for the doctor. The nurse, an old woman who didn’t seem to know how to smile, told Darren to wait outside. He read all kinds of women’s magazines, checked his watch every thirty seconds, looked up and followed the cracks that ran like spider veins across the ceiling. Finally, the door opened. The doctor himself stepped out, smiling broadly. Darren allowed himself to hope. Nothing could be wrong—could it? The doctor was still smiling. He walked over, sat down, patted Darren on his knee and delivered the news. "There’s nothing I can see that’s wrong with your wife. And I suspect she is in the very early stages of pregnancy."

Darren’s peal of laughter cut across the office. The unsmiling nurse stumbled backwards behind her desk and almost fell. "Pregnant! Pregnant! We going to have… Pregnant!" Darren ran into the doctor’s office, where Sylvia was still sitting. He grabbed her by the waist and lifted her in the air. "Sylvia. You see! Everything going to be ok! You going to have a baby."

She looked down on him and tried to smile. Failed. She had been smiling for over a month. Her face sagged. He put her down slowly. "Baby, what wrong now? Don’t you see is nothing to be worried about – we going to have a child?"

She wanted to explain it to him – that she knew all this already. She hadn’t come here to find out she was pregnant. She wanted to know why the pregnancy felt so wrong.

▼▪▲

Here is a bit of flawed logic: for everything that exists, there is a word. If there is not a word for something, then it stands to reason – the thing does not exist. For example, what is the opposite of erosion? How does a stone grow? There is no word for such a process – it does not exist. How does a stone grow? It does not. It cannot. Maybe then, we can understand Sylvia’s response to her pregnancy: This can’t be happening!

But Sylvia’s pregnancy did happen. She carried the baby full term. So I will tell you how a stone grows: by geometric progression, a binary sequence – first, it splits in two, then the two pieces split in four, four pieces in eight, then sixteen, thirty-two, and so on and so on. In this sudden congregation of cells, there will soon be a spine, arms and legs, a face, eyes.

Three months into her pregnancy, Sylvia got up too quickly and fell. She had come home early from work that day, taken the bus home and, despite feeling a little sick, decided she’d make dinner for herself and Darren. She put the white rice on to boil, with a spoon of butter on top. She cut up onions and green pepper, seasoned a few chicken parts while she let the curry burn slightly in the oil. She was an excellent cook when she was in the mood, and today she was in that mood. Sylvia then unpacked some of the gift boxes unopened from the wedding – took out what she decided she would henceforth label as her "good plates", white and broad with a silver crest in the middle. She took out wine glasses because, she decided, even though there was no wine, tonight she and Darren would drink lemonade from long stemmed glasses, their pinkie fingers pointed out to mock how real uptown people did it. Sylvia laughed to herself at that image. When she was finished with all the cooking and done dressing the table, she sat down to wait on Darren, who only took a few more minutes before turning his Escort into the driveway of their flat.

Darren opened the door to the hot smell of curry and boiled corn and white rice. He smiled at her. "I see somebody loves me."

"And you never realize that before I married you?" she laughed. "You better hope is not poison I set for you now."

He walked over to where she was sitting by the table, kissed her on the forehead. "Let me just take off these clothes." He went into the bedroom.

She got up to take the lemonade out of the fridge, but she got up too quickly. It was the weight inside her womb that unbalanced her – the thing that now felt as if a fist was tightly clenched inside her stomach – felt like she had swallowed a rock whole, one of those smooth stones you haul up from the bottom of a river, varnish, and leave on your desk as a paperweight. She tried, like any falling person will, to hold on to something, but only managed to grab the tablecloth. Dishes crashed on top of her and Darren ran out to find her slumped on the floor, not even crying or saying anything, stained with hot curry.

"Sylvia? Sylvia?" He lifted her up cooing to her softly, "Sylvia?" and took her to the bedroom, laid her on the bed, and wiped her face. "Sylvia, you ok?"

She still didn’t answer him. Avoided his eyes.

"Sylvia? Sylvia, what you need me to do? You want us to go back to the doctor?"

She finally looked on him. Wanted to say, Take me to one of them clinics so I can get rid of this. Please. Let me have an abortion. We will try this a next time…

"Sylvia, anything. Just tell me."

She considered it but then shook her head and closed her eyes tightly. "Is ok, Darren. I just need to rest."

▼▪▲

The dignity of the Caribbean woman is quite something. How she is, at heart, a chaos theorist – in her very genes it would seem, accepting the Law of Entropy. She expects tomorrow will be harder than today; that the money that bought meat this week will not be able to buy water next week; that things worsen; life is a constant worsening. And how she accepts the defeat of it all, and trudges on – that is something. Not beautiful – because suffering is never beautiful. But perhaps blessed. A lost beatitude: blessed are you when you suffer long, for surely you will see God soon.

In the months while her body was being crushed -- how else would you describe her pregnancy?-- Sylvia learned that pain increases little by little, that a rock can spread itself out and that your insides can be ripped apart slowly. How did she handle it all? With dignity and gritted teeth.

But there is a point at which the strongest woman breaks, will lift up her skirt in front of the news cameras to show the world her cellulite rippled thighs and the pink flowers of her oversized panties – a reporter will be pointing a mike at her, and she will scream into it, Laaaaawdavemercy! Just that, because what else is there to say? Laaaaawdavemercy! Sylvia’s breaking was literal – a sudden contraction that broke the amniotic sac of her womb, causing water to run down against her thighs and a sharp pain to rack her entire body. She opened her mouth and screamed a scream that had been nine months in the making – a terrible scream that came, unfortunately, just after Darren had crept out to buy another ream of white paper.

Is there any greater shame than this – that in her most critical moments, her husband was sneaking into his white Ford Escort, driving happily towards the pharmacy, completely oblivious to the onset of his wife’s labour? Shameful, that all he could think about, while she was at home bawling the life out of her lungs, was the cleanness of white paper – the potential a single sheet holds – how he would labour over it in the evening, because unbeknownst to Sylvia, Darren had discovered poetry.

A woman who is pregnant is slowly being separated from the world. She grows her own country, her own planet, and everyone else is on the outside. Everyone, even the father. He might put his ear against his wife’s tummy; might sing; might read stories – it doesn’t matter, he is on the outside. Add to this the fact of Sylvia’s silent suffering, then imagine what it would do to a husband – to see his wife in pain and to be unable to do anything about it.

So Darren took to staying outside in the living room late at night, the bedroom being too depressing a place. He delayed going to sleep. He would sit at the table, read the books he now enjoyed, look at the walls, study his fingers. Then one night, he scribbled on the empty back page of a James Baldwin novel, his first poem. The next night he wrote another poem, and the night after that another. Poems for his son and his wife, as if these were his maps, a way of finding his way back to them. But consider a fairy tale – Hansel and Gretel, two stupid children wandering off into the woods, sprinkling crumbs behind them. They are not afraid, their confidence lying in a trail of crumbs which even then, they could not know, was being eyed by hungry birds. So isn’t it ironic that the thing meant to lead them home ends up being the thing that takes them further and further away?

▼▪▲

How does a woman give birth to stone? Alone. In sweat and in tribulation. With weeping and the gnashing of teeth. Alone. The vagina must tear at the seams, the body must bleed. Heaving, the sheets drenched in blood and sweat. Screaming. Screaming. In pain. Her own body falling apart. Her nails sunk deep into the mattress, her head flung back, trembling. Crying. Pushing. Choking on the word ‘Laaawwdavemercy!’ Pushing. In pain. In pain, and alone.

And now the stone is at the door – just one last push – one final push. Sylvia summons up her strength, focuses, pushes out the child in one great heave and shouts – for the nine months of discomfort, for the pain, for the hundred days of living on her back, for the stone she never loved, she shouts, "OhLawdhavemercyfuckyou…"

In a few minutes, Darren will return and find the baby, beautiful, breathing on his own, lying between the legs of his mother’s corpse, his eyes already open, not even crying. And imagine that, Darren will never know the first words spoken over the little boy’s life were a curse – a curse delivered by a dying woman – OhLawdhavemercyfuckyou! What a way to enter the world.

The night done; the eye dumb; the stone born. The night done, the eye dumb, the stone is born.

I can remember the first time my father beat me.

But that isn’t the memory I wanted to share. I wanted to say that I remember being in Pennsylvania for the first time one summer, wide-eyed with the wonder of this thing they called America. I was driving in the backseat of my uncle’s car. I remember him shooting through a red light when a man from the other side of the road also broke his red light, and because they were turning in the same direction, my uncle and this man ended up smack in front of each other, and all I could reflect on, as my life was ready to close, were high school physics formulas: force = mass x acceleration. Impact = mass1 x velocity1 added to mass2 x velocity2. These are, of course, stupid thoughts to die on. Both men had to slam on their brakes and the cars came to a skidding stop. The man in the other car stuck his head out the window in righteous indignation as if he hadn’t just broken the law himself, and my uncle did the same. But there was something – something a little too mirrored in the way they each knit their brows, or maybe it was the way they flung out their hands, or maybe it was the shape of their angry mouths – both wrapped around the exact same word – Bumboclawt! Whatever it was, they recognized it in each other, and, instead of cursing, they smiled. One said, "Yes Yardie! Respeck!" and the other, "Yah man. No problem."

Imagine that! What had originally seemed to be another way this bitch of a country was going to push them down turned out to be divine appointment – the meeting of a fellow tribesman – a message from God. Behold, you are not alone.

What I take from that scene is this amazing green and gold pride. This thing of being Jamaican.

I remember the first time my father beat me. I remember the green and gold pride. And I remember the beating, and I remember the pride. And they become mixed up. It becomes mixed up for almost every Jamaican. We remember the parents that beat us; the aunts and uncles that beat us; the grandparents that beat us; the teachers that beat us. We remember shoes flung after us – belts, and electric cords, and stalks of bamboo breaking over our backs, and we are proud. We say, That is what make us who we is! But what is that? A nation of abused people – a country with repressed anger?

We watch the television – it is Christmas, and foreign children are opening their presents. A little girl gets a Barbie doll and her brother gets a truck. We laugh at this and say, We never ever get no Barbie doll. We never get no truck. But we get some serious lick under we skin. And that was good.

Gavin does not need time to remember the way his grandmother would beat him because time freezes around these incidents and we take them with us like photographs. He can retrieve it in an instant: the image of Miss Betty, belt doubled in her hand, shouting at him, "Take off you pants! Take it off." Nakedness, it seemed, was necessary for punishment – a way to shame the boy. After he dropped his pants, she would whip him over his entire body – on his thighs, his hands, his face, his toes. He danced this panicky dance, a desperate attempt to position his hands over the places he anticipated she was about to hit. He always anticipated wrong, so the bitter old woman, out of wind and panting, would continue to beat and beat him regardless, determined to use up her last breath punishing him for some crime or the other.

Backtrack: Gavin at nine years old was beautiful. In fact, it had become obvious his beauty was the kind that was never outgrown – a wonderful and lucky combination of genes – a handsomeness that was not tenuous. That did not have to rely on the absolute squareness and whiteness of his teeth (though they were square and very white, and his smile was charming); that did not rely on his rigid cheekbones (though they were rigid and made his childish face look pretty); that did not rely on the loose curls of his dark brown hair, a shade that matched his skin exactly, or his large eyes, or anything else, because even though his beauty included all of this, it did not depend on any one of them. And it was still there despite his heaviness, for Gavin was a round child. Round and insecure and completely unaware of his beauty.

Miss Betty was a supervisor at a restaurant that served lunch to office workers in a busy section of Downtown Kingston, a job she disliked and resented because it had never been her ambition. When she came home she was always tired – would plop herself down on the plastic-covered sofa and call, "Gavin! Gavin! Is which part you deh?"

Gavin was always in his room by the time she arrived, sometimes in his closet, sometimes under the bed trying hard to disappear, to become unnoticeable.

"Gavin!"

He would finally run out. "Yes Granma?"

One time, the old woman gave the usual command, "Come mi love. Mi tired. Go in de kitchen and make me a cup of mint tea."

"Yes Granma." And he ran outside to break off two stalks of mint. Went in and put on the kettle. Poured the hot water over the leaves. Made it sit. Took out the leaves, added sugar and a few teaspoons of condensed milk, stirred it, took it back out to her and waited in the shadows for her judgment.

Now a strange progression of thoughts happened in Miss Betty’s mind after she took that first sip. First, she thought – Boy! This kinda sweet! And then, But this not good for my diabetes. But is like this little pickney want to kill me, eh? Kill me. Just like how he kill his mother. Just like how he kill my little girl, Sylvia. Sylvia. Sylvia! Sylvia! She opened her mouth and shouted, "Laaawdavemercy!" and Gavin’s heart grew cold.

"Gavin! Don’t I show you by now how to make tea? Is what happen, you dash weh the whola de sugar in this?"

"N-n-no, Grandma." Almost ready to cry right then.

"Go and get me the belt. Go and get me the belt!"

He got it, gave it to her.

"Take off you pants! Take it off!" And then she beat him – the same way she did almost every night. Because if it wasn’t tea, it was some homework he hadn’t finished, some dish that had broken, some out-a-order-ness she had spotted in his demeanor that needed to be corrected – needed to be broken out of him. There was always something – a reason to throw back her head and say, "Lawdavemercy!" and then, "Take off you pants!" then lace the boy’s behind until he was crying hysterically – until he ran to his room to hug his pillow, to tremble, to rock himself and try once more to disappear.

But a child who has just been beaten does not want to hug a pillow. He does not want to fall asleep in the cold flesh of a mattress.

Miss Betty, tired and spent all over again, would be sitting in the sofa, her hand with the belt limp at the side, her huge stomach rising and falling. Then after many minutes, Gavin would creep up to the doorway, sucking his thumb, and peep out at her. She knew he was there, but she always waited a long while before looking up and into his beautiful eyes. Then and only then would a feeling of guilt lodge in her throat; only then might she think, But after all! He lose Sylvia too, and worse he have no father to look up to. Sometimes she would say to herself, But you know he really not all that bad. For I teach him to be mannersable and in truth, he really does have manners more than most. And I teach him to pick up after himself and he do it. And I teach him all these things – like how to move around the kitchen, and I teach him how to hem up clothes, and how to make a simple bread pudding, and you have people would say these is not tings you supposed to teach a little boy – is not so you raise boy pickney. But chu! What them know? Man supposed to able to keep house himself - and Gavin learning all these things I teach him. He really ain’t so bad. Miss Betty would open her arms then and say to the child, "Come here, man." When he ran and jumped into her embrace, she would hold him tight and say, "There, there. You too cry cry. Don’t you know you mustn’t give Grandma so much trouble. There, there. There, there…" until he fell asleep.

But reader, there is abuse and then there is abuse. There is punishment and then there is punishment. I have told you already how at seven Gavin asked his grandmother how his momma looked, and she gave him the shoebox with the picture in it. It took Miss Betty a whole year before she asked him back for it…a whole year in which the picture had been carried everywhere, had been creased and uncreased so many hundreds of times that it had worn into destruction.

"Where is it?" Miss Betty demanded that day, and Gavin dared not show her. "Where is it?" Finally, when she thought of how the boy had now killed his mother twice, she shouted, "Lawwdavemercy!!" It was the worst beating she ever gave him, though it ended as always with Gavin in her lap and she hushing him, "There, there."

But Miss Betty made a decision that night – a spiteful way to punish the boy forever. She decided she would never tell Gavin about his parents. Nothing. Not ever. So in all his growing up, Gavin was never told what kind of person his mother was, what music she liked, the little things she would often say, her peculiarities. He was never told, not by Miss Betty or anyone, of October 1, 1977 – the day Darren Williams drove up to the house in the middle of a soft downpour – how the rain stopped the very instant he stepped out of the car, and how she, Miss Betty, knew in that moment that her daughter and this man were meant to be. She never told Gavin that the stone necklace in the shoebox was what his father hung around Sylvia’s neck like an engagement ring. Miss Betty decided Gavin would never know.

The old woman, of course, would never guess that Gavin’s memory was like the universe – always stretching, expanding, inventing new spaces. Years later, when she and the boy were walking in the plazas buying things for Christmas and they saw an old white Ford Escort, it was Gavin who remarked, "That’s just like the one Dad used to have," causing Miss Betty to stop cold, look at him closely, wondering, How the hell him could know that?

▼▪▲

There is something missing from this story. Why is Gavin growing up without a father? What happened to Darren Williams?

To answer this, we must go way back, past the birth, past the marriage, past the Palisadoes and back to Darren’s own childhood – a period of great uneventfulness, a singularly unspectacular upbringing.

His was not a typical Jamaican household – it was too absent of sound. Darren had no siblings. There were no games to fight over; no extra servings of breadfruit or chicken to be jealous of. There was neither an unmarried aunt living with them, nor an abandoned cousin. There was no grandfather living all day in the country of his armchair, occasionally coughing up phlegm and talking about days before the war.

The Williams family were rooted to the house they lived in – a cool one-storey house in the back of a cane community – ‘community’ perhaps being a little inaccurate, since there weren’t many people who lived there, and the houses were far apart. But Darren’s family never thought of moving – that great act of relocation that forces people to pull back the cabinets and the beds and all the furniture which had seemed permanently fixed. And then they will find, hidden in the dust, mementos of a forgotten time. But this never happened for the Williamses. They stayed where they were and everything stayed in the dust; nothing to be rediscovered or remembered.

And now the strangest thing of all about Darren’s childhood: he never discovered himself. I am speaking of that most profound, guilty and sticky way in which a teenage boy will find out the texture and the sound and the motions of his own sexuality; will discover the use of fingers and lotion; will discover shame and secrecy and pleasure – this was not part of Darren’s growing up.

No siblings, no cousins, no aunts, no grandfather. Never moved houses and never masturbated. How boring! A quiet boy with quiet parents.

Before his mother married, her name was Paulette Cardoza – a slow-witted and stout mulatto woman, proud of her thick black hair and her Spanish last name. How it pained her to marry and change her last name to something so plain and English as ‘Williams’. Double-barelling was not something done in her day. She often said wistfully to Darren, and only to Darren, "My father name Cardoza, and I could have been a school teacher," as if the two things were connected. Poor Paulette – she could never have been a teacher. She never had the brain for it. She spent the great part of her life manning one of the cash registers in her husband’s haberdashery store and her incompetence at that task was matched only by her genuine pleasantness. In the early days, her husband would often draw her aside and say, "Paulette! Paulette you have to do better. We can’t afford to lose money like this. You don’t see how the business growing. We need to be professional." But such warnings only made her more nervous and inefficient, and after a while, Mr. Williams found out that part of the reason the business was growing was that people had been spreading the word that if they were lucky, the cashier would give them back more change than they deserved. And so Mr. Williams reasoned to himself with superb logic, With Paulette it come in like we have a sale all year round. I won’t need to have any other promotion, with her working at the machine!

Mr. Williams was a dark Indian man who, every so often, would say very sternly to Darren, "Come and follow me to the store!" But after uprooting the boy from the sanctuary of his house, he would leave him to sit in the shadows all day, doing nothing but dodging the store clerks, who would ruffle his hair saying, Lawd it pretty eeeh! and so the boy would grow into the habit of hitting people’s hands away from his hair. Mr. Williams had the desire almost every father possesses – the need to pass down a legacy. But he didn’t know how to do it, outside of these excursions to the store. Sometimes, and perhaps too often, he repeated this story to Darren: "I start out in this business selling nails. You realize nails is something everybody need? You realize? Good. Well I walk around everywhere selling them, and nobody would ever guess that nails can be so heavy until you go bout the place with a whole bag of them on your back."

The weight of nails; the dry corners of a store; a grandfather with a Spanish last name; a dream that could never have been. These were the legacies passed down to Darren Williams, legacies which could never move him.

▼▪▲

What does a quiet child do? How does he pass the time? Darren read. He read voraciously, tirelessly. And yet it was strange: he would never lose himself in the books – it wasn’t escapism for him. Simply a thing to do, a puzzle, a race to get from one cover to the next. Most times, he did not remember what he read. Would indeed read the same book again and again without anything being lost. Never tried to comprehend the text, to digest it – just tried to finish. Any kind of book, it was all the same – novels, poetry collections, history books, atlases, encyclopedias, biographies, manuals, biology text books. It didn’t matter.

And then, when Darren was 24, he was introduced to Sylvia Thomas, a school teacher, the very thing his mother had wanted to become. In the place when he should have said his name, should have said, "Hi, I’m Darren," he heard himself saying, "Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."

She smiled. "You like James Baldwin. I read him too."

James Baldwin – James Baldwin. The first time Darren ever heard the name. He had read him of course; just had not remembered. When Darren met Sylvia, it was like a circuit-board turned on inside him. Wires began to crackle, lights started to blink. Everything he had read in his life started to surface and become alive. He suddenly had opinions on life and art and history and humanity, and love. And all these things happening at once caused him to gasp, stumble back. Sylvia reached out, grabbed his hand and asked, "You alright, man?"

"Y-yes. I-I’m ok… I’m…I’m Darren. Darren Williams." And he really was ok – just slightly in love. Slightly found – the realization dawning on him that before that moment, for his whole life, he had been lost.

A year later, he took her to the Palisadoes and soon after, they were married. You know what happened on their wedding night. You also know what happened nine months after. So tell me, how does a man love his first son—his first son borne to him by the woman to whom he gave the gift of his virginity, the woman whom he adores?

He will love that son utterly.

And tell me, how does a man hate the person who killed his first wife, the woman who, in his heart, he would have died for?

He will hate that person utterly.

So what happens when the first son and the wife’s killer are one and the same person? It’s a simple equation: the love and the hate will cancel each other perfectly. The man will look on his son without a trace of emotion. He will not hate him. He will not love him. His apathy will be utter.

On the day of Sylvia’s funeral, Darren went to the barber early and shaved his head completely. He took the hair with him to the graveside, and when the minister said ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Darren threw the cropped hair on top of the coffin and turned around to leave. The ceremony wasn’t over, but he had had enough. And on his way out, the little baby Gavin, whom he had been holding in his arms, slipped from his embrace. Or maybe he did not slip. Maybe Darren just didn’t care to hold him any longer and so let go. The result is the same either way: the child fell and hit his head against a stone. Darren did not stop. He walked all the way out, got into his Ford Escort, and drove off. And that was the last time Darren ever held his son.

The constant voice of Miss Betty that Gavin carries in his head goes something like this:

Gavin at school was always different from the other children – a boy who carried napkins in his bag and spread one in his lap whenever he ate. A boy who would beg you for a candy and once he had received it, would clasp his hands and close his eyes and say a long prayer. Really, he was something of a schizophrenic – a boy who walked around with voices in his head. Another child would hit him, and Gavin would clench his fist but then hear a voice say, Turn the other cheek. Don’t act like a hooligan. The child would hit him again hard, and Gavin would hear, You too cry cry, man! Don’t cry. The children would form a circle around him, would laugh, would tease him, and he would hear, Turn the other cheek don’t act like a hooligan you too cry cry sticks and stones may break your bones but not words – words will never hurt. And a voice, his own voice, which he could not recognize – not then – would ask, Then why this feel so much like hurt? And why it wrong to cry when I feel to cry so bad? But the answer came: You mustn’t. You’re a young man. And so he would stand there impotent, trembling, the most pitiful sight in the world.

In Grade 3, the teacher, Mrs. Cox, wrote the word REMEMBER on the blackboard. "Now that’s a big word," she said to the class. "Anybody know what it is?"

The whole class chorused, "Remember!"

"And can anyone tell me what it means?"

Half a dozen hands shot in the air.

"Yes Jennifer, you give it a go."

"Miss, is like when something happen long long ago and you still see it."

"Yes! Yes, that’s it exactly. Very good, Jennifer. Now anyone remember anything that happened to them they want to share? Like, I remember long long long ago, when I was small just like all of you and my daddy was a fisherman who used to take us on his boat. We would go out when it was dark, dark, dark – because that is the best time to fish. And sometimes, we’d go way out in the sea where you can’t see no land and the water even had sharks in it. But I was never afraid, because I was with my daddy." The children laughed, because Mrs. Cox was quite a plump woman, and of course she seemed ancient to the children, like she was born old and no one could imagine her young and with a daddy. "So now it’s your turn," she said turning to them. "Is there anything you remember that you want to share?"

Almost all the hands shot in the air. "Yes, Robert."

"Miss, I remember when it was my birthday and my father give me a new train set!"

"Wow! That’s lovely. Yes Marcus."

"Miss, I remember flying in a plane and when it lift up off the ground, this woman behind me scream out and my mummy say is cause she too fraidy fraidy and fool."

The children laughed, and then suddenly everyone had a memory of being on a plane, even those who had never traveled.

Gavin alone sat in silence. He remembered his grandmother talking to him the day before. And the day before that. And the day before that. He remembered her shouting, and he remembered her with a belt. And he wondered, How come all these children smile when they remember things? And so he cast his mind far back, and tried to remember a day before the day before the first day he ever knew – and maybe, he thought, if he could do that, he could find a happy memory. And maybe that evening he would go home and he would ask his grandmother how his momma looked, and based on what she said he would try to remember. Give him time.

▼▪▲

In 1951, when Elizabeth Thomas arrived in Kingston from the rural backskirts of Clarendon, she carried with her two pieces of luggage: a green suitcase filled with clothes, and a scandal bag with two large yams that her father had dug up and given to her as a parting gift. In those days, she had wanted to become a nurse. All the men who had left and had made something of themselves in the city came back looking proper and clean, decked out, each one of them in some uniform or the other – army fatigues, police gear, the blue blazers that bank clerks wore. So Elizabeth fancied she’d return one day wearing a white uniform, crisp and starched, matching white shoes, and a little silver watch buttoned onto her breast pocket.

The two yams, by the way, turned out to be so bitter Elizabeth had to throw them away, so it must be said that she came into town having no advantage. The year, as noted, was 1951 – four decades after the earthquake and a few months before the hurricane, so Kingston was all too sure of her strength – of her lights, gridded streets and theatres, getting ready to celebrate her 150^th birthday. Elizabeth took a job at an office where a little man, Mr. Nelson, and his three assistants did accountancy. She swept out the office in the morning and typed letters for him during the day. She was saving her money for school and on her lunch break she would often walk down the road to watch the nurses on their way to and from Kingston Public Hospital.

But Elizabeth soon discovered the night. She discovered the club – how a man on a sweet saxophone could pull notes out from right inside of you. She discovered sweat and closed spaces and the pull of drums, and dancing, O! How she discovered dancing, how everyone took something, some frustration or some joy, and they put it all on the dance floor like an offering, and everybody was one. She loved to dance, she loved holding her body against a man’s, and sometimes later on, when he was undressing her and she him, and they lay on the bed, she saw it as the same dance, because music was still playing in her head, even when she gritted her teeth, bucked her hips, took short breaths and whimpered, Sweet Jeeesus! Sweeet Jeeessus! it was all just one beautiful dance.

The skeptic will say that the possibility of becoming a nurse ended when Elizabeth became pregnant, especially since, to her great consternation, she had no clue who the father was. Word got back to Clarendon about this disastrous state of affairs, and no word came back. It was as if her father had decided she was no longer the kind of daughter who deserved to be sent messages or two pieces of yam.

But whatever is said about Elizabeth Thomas, she was not a woman who could be flattened easily. She continued to sweep out the office and type up letters and save her money little by little. She even went to night class and did a course in First Aid.

The child was born. Elizabeth gave her the name Sylvia and never once found the space to resent her. Of course, she now had to dip into the money she had saved – trips to the doctor, baby clothes and food – but in taking care of a life, Elizabeth’s resolve was strengthened. She was going to be a nurse! She continued to save for five years, mopping the floors of that office, wiping it out, making tea for anyone who asked, and typing letters during the day. She began to wear that small silver watch clipped to her breast, and when the people at work asked, she said proudly, "Is to remind me. I going to be a nurse."

The tragedy happened on a cool day in February. Elizabeth had just finished mopping the floor and so it was wet. But Mr. Nelson, stepping out of the bathroom and walking briskly to his desk as he usually did, managed to lose his balance. When he skidded and cried out, there was a whole second when everyone looked up and saw him in the air. Falling. His head split against the edge of his desk and he crumpled to the floor without a sound. Everyone stood up quickly, everyone too shocked to say anything.

Elizabeth, mop still in her hand, standing a few feet away, looked down on Mr. Nelson and then looked up. She caught the gaze of the other office workers, and it seemed to her for a while that each one was looking at the nurse’s watch buttoned to her chest, looking to her for direction. Elizabeth flung down the mop, remembered the first rule in First Aid, and shouted, "Everybody calm down! Everybody calm down! Everybodyjustcalmdown!" And 14 hours later, she woke up.

It was dark. She was in the hospital. One of the office workers was standing by the side of the bed and smiled when she opened her eyes. "O. I just come from visiting Mr. Nelson. Thought I would see how you was."

"What happen?" Elizabeth asked, still groggy. "What happen to Mr. Nelson?"

The young man smiled. "Him was unconscious for a long time. They say him have a concussion and him get a nasty cut. You need to see him," he laughed. "Them wrap him head up like them Egyptian mummy. Mister Nelson not going to be at work for this week at least…. Like we get a little break."

"Chu man! How you can say a thing like that…"

"I know, I know. I taking bad things make joke."

Elizabeth shook her head. "At least him O.K…. I just feel kinda shame. Imagine, all I could do was scream out like a idiot."

The office worker looked at her curiously. "Scream?"

Elizabeth looked back at him. "When I was shouting at all of you to calm down."

"When that was?"

Elizabeth didn’t understand. "Right after Mr. Nelson drop! Me. Shouting at everybody. You don’t remember?"

The young man frowned. "Nothing like that did happen," he almost whispered. "Look like you take one look at the blood and you faint."

"But…"

"When the ambulance come, they take you and Mr. Nelson up the same time. You never make a sound…well, except the big boof when you hit the ground." He smiled and then it faded into what seemed like an apology. "Is just now you waking back up."

"But…but I don’t remember…." And then she was silent. Elizabeth knew he was telling the truth. She, with her big ambition of wearing a white uniform, white cap and white shoes. Administering injections. Checking people’s blood pressure. Cleaning cuts. Helping out doctors in surgery. She same one who wanted to become big big nurse, had to finally admit what had always been a stumbling block: from she was a little girl, she fainted at the sight of blood.

Draw a Venn diagram – a box, and inside of that box, a few circles, and within those circles, even smaller circles. This is how we learn about sets and subsets; we learn that every group is inside of a larger group – and also the converse, that inside every large group, there are smaller groups. Take for instance food: within that, you have fruits; within that, you have citrus; and within that, you have oranges – all different kinds of oranges.

Or to use another example – Jamaica: within that, you have Kingston; within that, you have Vineyard Town; and within that, you have all different kinds of small communities. The community of old women for instance – those shameless hypocrites who meet each day by their hedges to spread gossip and scandal about each other. The ever-changing community of stray dogs who shit in the roads and who end up being killed by fast cars, leading one madman to declare over one of these roadkills, "Verily, I say unto you, mongrels, if you live by de sword, oonoo will dead by de sword. And if you live by de road, oonoo goi dead by de road too." So yes – there was a ‘community’ of mad people. Only two of them: the aforementioned man who loved to speak biblically, a trait that had earned him the name Elijah, though unlike the Old Testament prophet, this squat little man would prophesy about things that needed no prophesying. The second ‘mad person’ was an elderly woman who had been a receptionist before she lost her mind. She spoke the Queen’s English and had the unsettling ability to remember people’s names. "Good morning, Mrs. Brown, and how are you this morning?" she would ask, approaching a car window. But then there was the rare occasion when someone didn’t give her the money she begged so nicely for; in these instances she would drop the fancy talk, lift up her skirt and shout every expletive she had ever come across in her life – and it seemed that she had come across quite a few. But these two proper-speaking mad people made the residents of Vineyard Town quite proud, and they boasted it to anyone who would listen. "Is we have de most educated mad people in Jamaica!"

There was also in Vineyard Town a community of young women who set out before sunrise each day to become nurses or gas attendants or to sweep out offices or to type letters for their corporate executive bosses. And a community of men who did electrical work and plumbing and construction, who drank white rum by the pubs as they slapped down dominoes. And a community of the idle unemployed, and a small community of college students, and now finally, the most important group – the community of boys. Most important, not because it is their sounds that dominate the street; not because it is their mischief that adds flavour and life; not because it is their names which are always shouted into the evenings: Peter, Jeremy! Get you ass inside now! But rather, because they are the storytellers. They are the ones who walk from house to house and gather from the insides and the outsides and corners of each one its own tale; they laugh over these stories, add on to them, tell them again and again. They are the ones who hide behind light poles whenever Tanya Ellis is stepping out of a taxi, and shout out "Slut!" because they have heard that every boy past the age of sixteen has worn proudly at the base of his penis the moist, red, circular stamp of Tanya’s lipstick. They are the ones who duck by #15 and holler, "Miss Lazarus, mind you wig drop off!" They, the storytellers, are always the ones who have the authority to look on just about any jackman or woman, and tell them exactly who they are.

The boys of Vineyard Town are: Dwight, the unquestioned leader – tall for his thirteen years, long limbs and long fingers that would have looked elegant if your eyes were not drawn away from them and to the scars which sprouted new on his arms and face almost every day. He is as much the leader because of these ‘badges’ as for the authority with which he uses curse words – he alone amongst the boys had learned to say the words ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ with all the naturalness and ease of a grown man at a construction site. Other boys were impressed and tried to imitate him.

There are the twins – Keron and Kwame, both left-handed but the best cricket batters around. Johnny, the most mischievous, famous for his trick of making his eyeballs go in two completely different directions. Fire, a handsome dreadlocks who always ends up being the victim of some mastermind plan that would have him eating pork without knowing it.

And Gavin… is Gavin a part of this community? He is a boy and he is from Vineyard Town – is that qualification enough? We will see. Let us follow all six boys – Dwight, Keron, Kwame, Johnny, Fire and Gavin – to Kingston Harbour.

It is the summer of ’92 – the year it became official that Jamaican Dancehall was serious. Serious and biblical. No longer a place for joking or making fun. Dancehall was for prophecy. Buju Banton began his rise as the voice of Jamaica – fitting really, because he had grown up in Salt Lane, so who else to sing and prophesy on this whole business of sucking salt if not him? Those who went out to party learnt to dance with a terrible face – a screwed-up and angry face, cause if you smiled, it would look all wrong. So now you’d have a man alone, in the middle of the dance floor, Heineken bottle in hand, eyes closed, pennying the Banton’s lyrics about rich people who would perish because they rose against poor people, dancing this serious dance cause these were serious times.

Imagine these six boys, bandanas tied around their heads, sunglasses, walking this stiff, serious kind of walk that they imagine is how a man is supposed to move, walking determinedly down to the waters as if there is no other mission in the world more important.

But boys are boys – and when they reach the water, what else is there to pretend at? Not with the water so near, and its promise of all of what summer should be – not with Johnny, who shouts as soon as they reach the stones that border the water, "Last man in, love suck pussy!" There is only a moment’s hesitation before each boy decides he is actually not too old to play this game. Shoes are kicked off, bandanas and shades tossed to the side, merinos stripped off, then splash! Splash! Splash! They dive in, then come up, wiping the salt water out of their eyes, to look back and laugh at the one boy still sitting on the stones. "Gavin, you love suck pussy! Gavin, you is a bowcat! Hahaaaa." But they had known that already, because he never swam.

The boys splash each other; they play ‘water war’, race, try to dunk each other under. Gavin is comfortable just watching. He likes to sit back under the sun and take it all in – the warm wind, the view. Kingston Harbour is his favourite spot in the world. He once read in a newspaper article the details of how the harbour was formed, and though most would find this kind of information boring, he was completely fascinated – how it was that the Hope River would take with it little particles on its way out to the sea. How the particles built up over thousands of years to form the five miles of the Palisadoes Strip, as if this was Kingston’s long arm reaching out to hug a little piece of the Caribbean sea unto itself. One of the largest natural harbours in the world – that’s what he read.

Gavin loves the waterfront because it is here he can look out and forget the present. And this forgetting is really an act of memory – a time when he can go all the way back. He tries to remember everything – himself as a little boy, himself as a baby. At times he will even try to remember being in his mother’s womb; he will try to remember his parents. And give him time. Give him time and it will all come back.

After almost an hour, Dwight is the first to swim back and lift himself out of the water, his shorts almost dropping off, the white underwear showing, his chest and stomach so smooth in sharp contrast to his scarred hands, and him unaware or perhaps unconcerned with this budding masculinity. Gavin is almost nervous around Dwight. The long-limbed boy sits down on a rock, flashes his hands out playfully so Gavin is sprayed with drops of salt water. Gavin flinches.

Dwight laughs, "Fuck! You fraid o’ water?"

"No."

"So how you always come down here and you never ever swim?"

Gavin tries to smile, "I’m alright."

Dwight laughs again. "My yout, mi never ask if you was alright. Fuck! You think mi love man? Mi ask why you don’t swim."

Gavin feels something like a stone rise up to his throat and is about to stammer out an answer, but is saved because all the other boys emerge from the harbour just then. Fire, his dreadlocks dripping with water, shouts, "Watch dis now!" and sails a pebble across the water; it bounces 4 times before sinking. The display steals Dwight’s attention, who springs to his feet, picks up a pebble and tries to outdo Fire, skipping his own stone across. It only skips three times, so he tries again, and then again. And soon the other boys have picked up stones and joined in the competition.

Listen, there is a physics behind skipping stones – a science that will calculate diameter, mass, tilt, velocity, the angle of attack, the density of the water. Good ‘skippers’ always know this science – perhaps not its numbers or its divisions or its multiplications. But they know it – the action that is necessary to produce good results – how to spread the feet, how to arc the hand, how to flick the wrist in a way that gives the stone spin, when to release and at what general angle.

And there is another kind of person who does not understand this science – neither the theory nor the practical, neither the calculation nor the execution. A kind of person who will watch Dwight or Fire approach the water like a golfer coming to tee, the right arm raised across his chest, the swing, the beautiful arc, the stone released and bouncing creating a kind of grammatical miracle . . . . . ellipses spread across the water; there is a kind of person who, watching all of this, will not see the science but the art, the beauty of it. Gavin was such a person: a flat-footed and overweight boy who could not ride bicycles himself but who would watch – loved the exhibitionism when the other children would take their hands off the handlebars and stand, or when they lifted their front wheels when flying over speed bumps. Gavin was the kind of person who could not skip stones, but was content just watching. So you can imagine the terror when Dwight said meanly, "Hey fat coolie bwoy – your turn!"

"No man. I alright."

"I tell you already – I never ask if you alright. I telling you that is your turn!" The five boys folded their arms and waited, grinning. Gavin was afraid.

A complete list of phobias would probably be a dictionary of its own. Some of them you would never imagine really exist – like the fear of other teenagers (ephebiphobia), or the fear of harbours (limnophobia), and there is even the fear of stones (lithophobia). Defeated, Gavin searched through the rock pile, made his selection barely aware that it was too round, too heavy – but what difference would even the most perfect stone make at that moment? He braced himself, tossed it out, something like a cricket fielder throwing back the ball to the bowler, straight up in the air, before it began its descent. The stone went plonk! into the water and sank.

The five boys behind him could not contain themselves. They slapped their knees, bent over and laughed loud and raucously from their bellies. A new story was recorded. It was Keron, one of the twins, who finally declared as he took a breath and wiped away the tears, "Gavin! You throw like one little gyal!" Shameful that – coming from a leftie who always looked a little strange himself when skipping stones or even when writing. But Dwight corrected Keron, "No, my yout. Gavin don’t throw like a little gyal. Him throw like a big battyman!"

▼▪▲

Draw a Venn diagram – a box, and inside of that box a few circles, and within those circles, even smaller circles. Now fill the spheres with letters – write them in: a, b, c, d … all except for one. Leave the letter ‘z’ in the box, but outside of any of the circles. This is a person like Gavin - a person who grows up, and while the simple fact of existing must mean that he belongs to the universe, which group within that universe is he anchored to? Where is his tribe?

Each life is filled with its own peculiarities. Its own absurdities. Why, for instance, am I, a professor of mathematics through and through, engaged in the literary act of telling you a story? One theory says every tale is the story of the person telling it. That every character is only a mask. I would like to comment on that. I want to object strenuously. I am not Gavin. This is not my story. It is only my telling. Furthermore, I object to the theory of ‘all’ and ‘every’. Hardly anything is ever 100%. The idea that all writing is autobiography is ridiculous. There are similarities of course. But aren’t there always…well not ‘always’, but often?

This is Gavin’s story, and some of the absurdities in his life are as follows: the smell of a lit coil of mosquito destroyer could make him lose an erection. When he was sixteen, he was ready to lose his virginity to a pretty girl from Portmore. Latetia Goldbourne, a bright girl in Lower Six, had told him her parents were away, so the house was free for the night. This was completely true, although she made it seem that on another night soon, the parents would return, which wasn’t true. Latetia never knew her father, and her mother had flown off to New Jersey a year and a half before. The daughter was left in Jamaica to live on her own though her mother did send money and other supplies regularly. Latetia had grown into the habit of inviting boys over, trying to fill the space of the otherwise empty house.

But Latetia’s house was in Portmore. Portmore was a large community surrounded on almost every side by swamp – stagnant water, thick and green and harbouring both crocodiles and mosquitoes. It seemed at times the two species were competing for the title of ‘Most Vicious’. In that year, there was a popular high school joke: How do you keep a mosquito out of a Portmore house? You lock the gate. Portmore mosquitoes really did seem fiercer and larger than others on the island. So that night, when Latetia pulled Gavin into her bedroom, unbuttoning his shirt in the process, he found two lit coils of mosquito destroyer, causing him to fumble, draw his pants back up and excuse himself. Mosquito destroyer = impotence – at least that’s what he told her.

Another absurdity of his life: he liked his hotdogs with peanut butter spread on the buns. And another: he favoured the colour yellow. Would buy bright yellow clothes, jeans and shoes, and wear these proudly. This is one of the reasons I remember the first time I ever met Gavin. It was the semester I started teaching at the university. It was the middle of the term and at least half my students could not grasp how to do a partial differential equation. It didn’t make sense to move on. So I spent the class reviewing the topic. Halfway through the class, the front door of the lecture hall squeaked open. In stepped Gavin, wearing bright yellow jeans, bright yellow sandals. A large knapsack over his back. Growing into his height at the time – more stocky than fat. Fiercely handsome. He looked up at the class, and then he looked at me. Baffled. He looked at the class again, then at me.

"Yes sir, might we be of any assistance?" I said in my most bastardly tone.

The class snickered. Gavin looked at me again, confused.

"Sir, may I help you please?" I repeated. "We are in the middle of a class."

"This isn’t History of the Caribbean," he said. More a statement than a question.

I was tempted to say something harsh again. The two classes had switched lecture theatres from the second week – the ‘History of the Caribbean’ group needing much more room than ‘Introduction to Mathematics.’ The kind of student who only deigns to find out where his class is actually located so late in the semester is the kind of student the university can do without, the kind of student who will drop out in short order in any case. I was annoyed, but still I answered gently. "You’ll find them in the Interfaculty Lecture Theatre."

Gavin nodded and left without another word. He made his way across campus and this time entered the lecture theatre correctly, from the back, easing the door open softly, and sitting down with a minimum of fuss. The class was apparently in the middle of a lively debate. Students were protesting something about Arawaks and Caribs, while the professor waited for quiet. Gavin knew about Arawak Indians and their enemies, the Caribs. It was the history you learned even in primary school. The Arawaks were a peace-loving tribe, while the Caribs were a war-mongering set of Indians. The Caribs were also cannibals, and even before Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards came to finish the deed, these native Indians had already weakened the Arawak people.

The class’ uproar finally subsided, and the lecturer continued his point. "Look, guys. When I say there was no such thing as ‘Arawaks’ and ‘Caribs’, I’m talking about the labels. We’re finding out now that there was no actual difference between the two tribes. It was one set of people. Europeans simply called the ‘Indians’ who surrendered one thing, and the ‘Indians’ who put up a fight another. You do realize how ‘Indian’ is another unfortunate label we carry from that great mistake in history. Anyway, it was all typical European propaganda. Even the bit about Caribs being cannibalistic. ‘Cannibalism’ is one of the single biggest lies Europe used to justify their colonial expansion . Africans were said to be cannibals, and the ‘Arawaks’ who were more aggressive were called cannibals too, and given their own name: Caribs. And to this day we believe that lie. But I tell you something," the professor said, smiling. "I’m glad they named this region after the people who dared to put up a fight."

The class laughed. They were all spellbound. Even Gavin was hanging on to every word. He’d never heard history like this in high school. He never knew history was a thing you could challenge, revise, correct. He was ready to hear more, but the professor looked at his watch and announced, "We will pick up in our next class."

Students immediately started to get up out of their seats, noisily packing up their books and exiting. The professor shouted over the din, "Remember to read Chapter 6 -- and your essays are due next week!" A few choruses of "Yes sir," and in a short time, the room was empty except for the small queue of students lined up before the professor.

Gavin joined the line. The students in front of him wanted to know when the results for the mid-semester exam would be posted. They wanted to know how long the essay had to be, and did it have to be typed, and would they have to count every single word? Typical student questions. Finally, Gavin stepped in front of the professor. Dr. Darren Williams looked down at his son, recognized him, and stood with his mouth open, not making a sound.

Stupidly, instinctively, Darren looked at his watch again. He was trying to account for the time. He was trying to add up the years. Could he really have a son old enough to be in college? Was it that long ago that Sylvia had died? His marriage to Sylvia – now a lonely event in history, like Caribs and Arawaks. She never felt like history to him. And as he stood there, trying to count the years, Gavin ran past him. It was then that Darren tried to reach for him. To finally touch his son again. Missed.

The boy found his way back home. He was only 15. Not a university student. He had skipped school in order to see his father. He lurked in the back of the class and observed the man he had never had the chance to call ‘Dad’. He witnessed the wry smile, the quiet brilliance. Gavin saw how an entire lecture hall could grow quiet without him calling for it, just because the students wanted to hear what he would say next – what new thing would tumble out of his mouth so they could scramble for it and own it for themselves.

When Gavin ran past his father, it was not histrionics. He was only angry with himself. Standing there, he had wondered suddenly if he was the kind of son Darren would approve of, the kind of child Darren could ever be proud of. He realized also that a professor was not the kind of man who had time to waste; yet there he was, standing in front of him with absolutely nothing to say, wasting time, so naturally Darren had to check his watch because, of course, he would have somewhere to go. Gavin felt foolish, wanting once again to fall into the background of his life – become inconspicuous.