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It’s Easter and Jamaica is in a state of emergency.
A woman looks out from her veranda. Like most verandas on the island, this one has recently been enclosed in iron grillwork, and this grillwork also covers every window of the house. It’s a hot, bright afternoon without breeze. Inside, a transistor radio is playing, and now and then she hears the dogs bark at a stray goat wandering past the garden gate. She wears a faded red housedress and diamond earrings. Her eyes are light brown, an unusual colour for someone of such dark complexion (Where dis black pickney come from?’ her own mother asked, examining her at birth)
She lives on Bonnieview Terrace in the suburban highlands of Kingston. To her east are the Blue Mountains, air-blue at the horizon.
But that isn’t where she looks now.
Spread out before her, between the broken circle of mountains and the sea, is the capital: corrugated tin roofs, leaning shacks, high-rise hotels, flamboyants she can name from this distance by their colours, the irregular geometry of city houses and lawns, swimming pools, great bushy treetops, animal and vehicle pausing and proceeding, and the corrugated tin roofs repeating themselves all the way out to the corrugated water of the harbour.
Since morning she has counted six fires. They continue blazing, barely luminous on such a bright day, adding no noticeable heat to the already insufferable air.
She telephoned her mother earlier, having heard about a fire on Molynes Road not far from the family business. The moment the secretary answered Jean regretted making the call. Her mother was busy. ‘She talkin’ long distance. Hol’ awn a minute---- ‘ Her mother’s assistant, Miss Wong, shouted across the room to a delivery man, something about Easter buns. ‘Jean, you cawl back later?’ ‘It’s all right,’ Jean said, feeling pointless, realising it was all business as usual at Island Bakery. Still, she fumbled on, saying she had heard on the radio about the fire across the road at Mr Mahfood’s shop and ----
Monica Landing got the phone:
‘What happen? You ‘fraid?’
Monica has never been afraid of anything and is openly contemptuous of anyone who shows fear. She considers her daughter weak-minded, like her late husband, Roy Landing.
Roy died when Jean was seven. But memories of him surface so often that he continues to live with her in a bright, episodic way. One of his paintings ---- one of the few he ever finished ---- hangs in the National Gallery, and a story of his, published posthumously, turns up now and then in anthologies.
Another fire now blazes, near the university, just a few miles away. The firemen won’t come. They’ve been on strike since the King Street fire, when they were shot at by men with machine guns.
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