Veronica Carnegie, Fiction Writer 
Veronica Carnegie
'I,' SAID the Fly, 'with my little eye I saw him die.' And I was about to say the Cock Robin poem for the third time when my cousin Leroy stopped me.
'Honest to God, Ray, if you don't try to control yourself I'm going to leave you right here.' He handed me a tablet. 'You think I like to have people staring at me?'
'OK, OK.' I was very nervous and agitated and did some spot running. Leroy reminded me that I was at the Norman Manley Airport, not at a gym. He handed me another tablet. 'You want me to walk, Leroy, or what? It's every four hours. You don't have to overdose me.'
A little ahead of us was a woman and her uniformed nurse.
'She gone bad,' a voice behind us said. The lady, I swear to you, was reciting the three demonic recordings of J.P.S., C&W and N.W.C.
Heavenly Father, somebody was worse than me. We learnt that she became like that shortly after Hurricane Ivan, when she was told to hold by all three companies. She waited waited until she snapped, having neither water, light nor telephone.
'Thank you for calling National Water Commission. Please select from the following options: For your balance press 1. For payments using Tele Scotia or Tele Midas, press 2. To report a problem, press 3. To enter your meter reading, press 4. Otherwise, press 6. Option 3: please hold while I connect you to an agent.
All our agents are currently assisting other customers. Please continue to hold; we will be with you shortly.
But shortly never came.
Holy God. How many times I've phoned the so-called essential services and been tortured with 'Please continue to hold'! How many times I've wanted to crack the phone, and the neck of that voice that sometimes became devilishly human! Around me I heard mutterings from that kind of stress. One after the other, the lady with the stiff face, empty eyes and painful expression, recited the recordings. They led her through Immigration muttering: 'We will be right with you, please continue to hold.'
Leroy and I read and waited. The departure was delayed. Some of us fussed. 'Oonu shut up. Mek dem delay de plane. Not one o' wi plane crash yet. Air Indies safe,' an elderly passenger said.
'What the hell,' Leroy said under his breath. 'Don't look now, but that joker, Jack Hylton, in the plaid shirt, borrowed money from me yesterday. Said his wife had to have emergency surgery.'
I looked back to see the woman laughing in the plaid-shirt man's face. I recognized him, not as Hylton, but as Mr. Trevor Dillon. He was a big man at the Tax Office.
'Yu sure 'im name Dillon?' Leroy asked me.
'Sure as I'm sitting here. He's the man who dealt with Nurse and her new car. Where you know him from?'
'Better Fathers Fellowship.'
I was annoyed. The man was about to leave Nurse the victim of a scam. Car stolen, colour changed, a number impressed, and title with new chassis, I.D., V.I.N., registration numbers imprinted for a goodly fee. Nurse paid. She thought it was to expedite what could have been a tedious process. One day the owner recognised his car and called the police. On the ramp they saw his initials and special mark. The seized car remains with the investigators. Nurse walks.
I went to the men's room, used my phone, washed my face and returned to wait.
I have to stop here and tell you about my cousin Leroy, and why I had doubts about asking him to accompany me to the Samaritan Clinic in New York. I am not schizophrenic. I'm bi-polar - or, as my uncle said, bi-polio. Whichever one it is, I have to check this urge to run and recite. I have to deal with the thing that propels me to get up and run, even in the middle of the night. I have to get better. So, today, I wait in the airport and remember how my parents tried to keep me away from Leroy.
My parents were teachers, so we had to have good manners and set example. The Yes-thank-you-please-kindly words rolled off our tongues from infancy, and at the snap of a finger we paid attention to whatever big people were saying. So when our neighbour Mrs. Kyte wiggled herself over to our house to make a complaint - and, as a matter of fact, that's all she ever did - we gathered around our parents. In those days we stayed home, mostly.
'Teacher?' she addressed my father as if questioning his occupation.
'Teacher?' she repeated, ignoring my mother. 'The boy ran past me and slap me on my boh-boh-bottom.' She stammered the word as if she were too proper to have one. 'Imagine my embarrassment,' she whined.
My mother, who hated the way Mrs. Kyte played up to my father, spun on her. 'Not my children. Not one of my four children would do that. No, ma'am, I defend my children,' she said in her attack voice.
'Which one of the children, Mrs. Kyte? Point out the one,' my father said. He was sick and tired of her complaints and this time he showed it. He did not smile. 'Point out the one, Mrs. Kyte. He was getting very black. He got black when he was angry.
'That's the one,' she shook her whole hand. 'That little ugly, black one.'
'You are a black woman. Mrs. Kyte. Everybody in this area is black.'
'No, I'm not. My grandmother was Irish.'
'Anyway, Mrs. Kyte', my mother said, 'that child you pointed to is my husband's nephew. He's not my child. Since he's our guest, he will apologise for his behaviour. Say you're sorry, Leroy.'
'I'm sorry, Mrs. Kyte.'
'That's not good enough. And keep that ugly child from me.'
'Den you pretty, ma'am?'
An adult cuffed my mouth, an infuriated Mrs. Kyte huffed away, and Leroy's bottom felt the strap, later.
Leroy and I were the same age. I gravitated to him, not to my older brother, because Leroy wasn't afraid of anybody and was always in trouble. He stoned the neighbours' mango trees, while we watched. He sneaked out to buy Bustamante Backbone sweetie at the shop, two miles away, and nobody missed him. When we were teenagers, he showed us how to go to bed, get up in the night, sneak out of the house, turn up at a party, come back home up the back steps (missing the creaking one), get into bed, and be awakened by our mother the following morning.
Leroy was sent back to his home and the four of us to boarding school. He chose to be a communications consultant; I, a teacher.
Now I continued to wait on the 'on-time' flight and remember the many times my parents had tried to keep us apart. It never worked.
It was Leroy who made the arrangement to meet the twin sisters, Sharleen and Charleen Fuller. He was sure they would walk with us into the town and look in the store windows. Leroy would hold Sharleen's hand and tickle the middle of it when it was appropriate. He would nudge me when it was time to hold Charleen's hand. I was not too bright when it came to girls.
We got to their gate. Sharleen and Charleen saw us. We met them on the verandah, and even though we had seen them often in church, Mr. and Mrs. Fuller were there to see us and remind us to come back before dusk. But Mr. Fuller saw Leroy. Leroy's dress shirt was out of his pants, he had on no socks, his shoes were without laces. He had just begun to grow locks, and I had no idea he had slipped my mother's earring in his ear. Mr. Fuller was not an accountant for nothing. He saw details. Mrs. Fuller ushered the girls inside and Mr. Fuller ordered us to leave. Leroy asked why. Mr. Fuller told him not to argue with him and stormed out to the back of the yard. The girls screamed for us to run. Leroy asked why.
The man set the dogs on us. We rushed through the gate, slamming it behind us. 'Thank God!' I remember saying. But one dog had squeezed itself through the fence and was silently coming for us. We did not wait, we ran through the short cut. We ran! The dog chased us to the end of the long track. It snarled. Leroy stopped and picked up a stone. The dog froze. As it turned the stone landed in its head. The dog fell and bared its teeth.
We were exhausted and I did not feel like talking to Leroy. He had lied again. He had never been to the Fullers' house.
'Yu know this place?'
'No'.
'Yu ever come here before?'
'No. Let's go back the same way.'
'No. This place is a jungle.'
Burr, cowitch, dildo makka lurked in the gully behind the dandelion and shame-o-lady shrubs. Thick brown mud-like water vomited heavily downstream, dragging the cultivators' land with it and
dumping silt in front of a little wattle-an'-daub house. It was raining heavily in the hills where sad dark clouds hovered. The gully bank and its short thin trees were fire-razed brown and the fallen sticks and pieces of driftwood lay limp and black. The white limestone entrance of the cave and the powdered columns near the opening were streaked in shades of pink and green where a little light from the sun reached them. Inside, some of the cream-coloured pillars were stained with damp droppings; rat bats darkened the upper walls, hanging upside down. It was night-dark within the cave and groping cautiously was the only way to get over the stumbling blocks, to the other side. I bumped into one rock, touched another, moved around an overhanging bulk of limestone, squeezed through two tilting columns, inched under a stubborn stalagmite, and crept on hands and knees towards the exit light. Light. Exit.
My eyes took seconds to adjust to the sun's glare. Then came the sounds of water. The thick muddy water in the gully behind made a different sound from the small waterfall cascading down the big rock into the wide open sea, with its unique music. Pale yellow butterflies stuffed themselves into the branches of the dark-green Lignum Vitae trees. A few circled. Flies flew in and out of sea grapes' branches or perched furtively on their purple-green clusters.
The view to the sea was multi-colored; the sky blue.
'Wake up! Wake up, Ray.'
'What? What!'
'Hey, man. Yu have to do better than that. Yu snoring. Yu shouting out yu name.'
I turned away from him and went back to sleep.
'Raayman! Raayman!'
Neighbours were shouting my name. They were looking for us, calling 'Raayman! Raayman!' I learnt later that the twins had got word to my parents that the dogs had chased me and Leroy to West Guava Gully. Night should never have caught us there; people were known to have mysteriously disappeared.
We turned down an elbow road and shouted back.
'Yow! Hello! Over here! Hey!'
The voices came nearer and I saw my father and my brother at the front of a search party.
Leroy was sent back to his house. He was told to keep away from us. But he didn't and we didn't.
In the airport now, nobody rushed to help the young man in the jeans suit. The police took him out of the women's toilet. We saw the activity. The police unzipped the young man's travel bag; it showed shirts and jackets hung over fat, ganja-wrapped clothes hangers. The bag, too, was lined with the stuff, with transparent plastic pasted over it.
'Somebody tell on him,' Leroy said. Then, after the man was mysteriously released: 'Mek 'im walk with you to the plane. I'll explain later.'
I had looked around and seen the policeman's back. He had moved away from the waiting area through the exit with the man's travel bag. Leroy hurried towards us. He tried to explain something about the young man but I was groggy. I wondered if another tablet had been slipped in my drink. I remembered being lost.
The next thing I knew, the ganja trafficker was walking beside me, step for step. I didn't want to be walking with any weed exporter I didn't even know, but the fellow stuck close to me up the steps and into the aisle. He was obviously a frequent flyer for he had found his seat and settled by a window before a hostess helped me to mine. I was sure Leroy had organised something with the officer.
On board, a baby bawled. It never stopped till a hostess took off the little black velvet dress the child was wearing. It sighed, took the feeding bottle and slept. Beside us were a woman and a little girl. The woman kept telling the child to hold on to the stuffed stocking doll with its shirt-button eyes, pimento nose and backstitched mouth. The child put the doll on the seat and rushed off to the rest room. 'Ah soon come' she said, 'ah 'ave to goh bachroom.'
I was about to take up the doll when the woman's swift hand grabbed it and put it in her handbag.
I read and slept for most of the journey, except for meal time. Leroy showed me the two women across the aisle who would neither eat nor drink anything. 'Let's see what happens when they come off the plane. They have things in their stomachs.'
'I'm not interested.'
'Well, I am'.
We heard the woman loud and clear. Everything rushed to her tired mouth. 'Thank you for calling J.P.S. Supermarket and C&W Games Arcade.'
From the R.G.D. to the blasted fish shops, automated attendants were installed as terrorists to destroy our self-control and mental balance. The irritating telephone menus were enough to drive anybody stark, staring mad. I felt for the lady.
'Your call is important to us. All our agents are currently assisting other customers. We will be right with you. Please continue holding. If you know your party's extension, dial the four digits followed by the number sign. If you know your party's name, press one, one, then spell the last name, followed by the first name. You can dial zero for the operator. We will be right with you. Please continue holding, holding.'
At JFK, her wheelchair was pushed quickly through.
We went towards Immigration. The damn immigration dog sniffed us and our bags. Most of us resented being smelled by the dog. We talked loudly about Americans and how they believed we Jamaicans were clowns, but lowered our voices when the police took some people out of the line. The dog sniffed the doll, then in the little girl's hand, and they took her out. The child bawled.
'I'm gonna tell mah Dahdee! Dahdee! Dahdee!' she yelled.
A stocky man stepped out. 'Where did you get the doll, Honey?' The immigration officer asked her.
'I dunno. On the seat. I waan mah Dahddee!'
The little girl's 'daddy' was waiting, just inside the exit. The child was loud. 'Ah dunno. Ah waan mah Dahdee!' That's all she hollered, like a repeating tape. Still crying, she was allowed to leave. Her 'father' wiped her wet face and they walked away.
The Immigration Officer asked me how long I intended to stay in the United States. I told him I didn't know. He opened his eyes at me. I took this as an invitation to ask him why they were harassing the man at the next window. I felt agitated.
'Do you know,' I told him, 'the man you're picking on is a great teacher and writer and you all can't walk in his shoes? 'I,' said the sparrow, 'with my bow and arrow.'
I fastened my eyes on him. 'You're spiting him because he writes about the atrocities in and the occupation of Iraq. 'I, said the fly with my little eye ...' I began to shout. 'Take it easy with the man and read his new book, The Rise and Fall of a Once Great Nation.'
'Sorry, sir,' Leroy told the immigration man. 'He's going to the Samaritan Clinic for treatment. I'm his brother.'
The man stamped us through.
Doubts about Leroy vanished. I began to run out. The police threw me to the ground by the first escalator and the word 'terrorist' echoed in the airport. Leroy rescued me again and we walked to the final station.
They asked me if I had anything to declare. I said my poem for them, while Leroy explained and they looked through our bags.
'Did he tell you that we're going to a black Samaritan Clinic?' I asked them. 'I hope you gave me time to visit a black church, a black school, a black hospital, a black community, meet a black mayor, a black star, and accept a black Saviour!'
'Cool it, Ray.' Leroy pushed me outside. I was overwhelmed.
Like us, the mad woman and her nurse, and the little girl and her 'daddy', did not have to wait to clear luggage. The child's ride came first. The woman and the driver hugged. Then they turned to the girl. 'Karla, yu gwaan good. We proud o' yu'. She was good. Yu should ah 'ear ar call for har Dahdee.' They laughed.
Just then Jack Hylton\\Trevor Dillon came out. Leroy confronted him. 'I didn't know you were leaving the country.'
'Sorry, I forget to tell you.'
'Sorry, I want my money. I thought your wife was to have surgery?'
'Can I mail it to you?'
'No. I want it right now,' Leroy said.
Jack Hylton fished in his briefcase and handed Leroy money. Leroy pushed it in his pocket. He didn't count it. But two policemen identified themselves and asked Mr. Dillon to accompany them inside.
Dr. Allan Bedford, Mr. Altamont Bedford's son, from Bedford Hill, introduced himself to the four of us who were scheduled for testing and treatment and drove us directly to the Samaritan clinic. The mad lady and her nurse sat next to me and Leroy, and two men, who might have been in First Class, sat behind in the small bus. We remained quiet but for you know who.
'Please continue holding. Continue holding. Holding!'
You have to hear what happened at the clinic.
