Bus forty-two drove past and didn’t even stop, trying to get home before turning back into a pumpkin, I suppose. Except it was six o’clock. The curfew starts at seven, but this was uptown so there isn’t any police around to enforce it. Can’t imagine them stopping a Mercedes-Benz, the man might turn out to be in the Prime Minister’s Cabinet. The last bus was a minibus with “Irie Ites” painted on the side in blue, not red green and gold. Bigger buses passed, too, the green public JOS bus run by the government, small buses that I have to crouch to get into (and stay crouched the whole ride), most of them on their way to Bull Bay or Buff bay or some other bay, meaning coastline, meaning country. Irie Ites left me behind at 6 p.m. I heard the last bass note at 10:45. It’s now 11:15.
The buses kept passing and I kept not taking them. Two cars pulled up, too. Illegal taxis both of them, both with two in the front seat and four in the back, including a man with dollar bills between his fingers shouting, “You wan’t reach Spanish Town, baby?” At first I thought it was the same car. I stepped back and looked away, long enough for the car to drive off, then did it again.
I have finally gone mad. Must be, waiting outside the gate in the hope that some man will remember having sex with me and hoping I was most memorable out of all the women he has had sex with, maybe even having sex with this minute. And if he remembered the sex maybe he would pull some strings and get me and my family out of this country and hopefully pay for it, too. It made so much more sense at 7 in the morning after I saw my father trying to act like younger men didn’t just make him feel like the oldest man in the world. Maybe they didn’t rape my mother, maybe they just hit her, or use something to mess with her pussy and then have him watch them do it. Maybe they said no bitch, you too old fi fuck, that deh pussy for Jesus now. Or maybe this is just me at near midnight standing here in stupid high heels, my feet killing me because I spent all day killing my feet. And all I can do is listen to my mind go crazy. The son of a bitch didn’t come out once. Not even once. Maybe I have it wrong. Maybe I was memorable, too memorable, and he saw me from a window and sent a message not to let that girl in. Maybe I was a lousy lay or too good a lay, something about me that said to him, boy, you better stay inside and don’t get involved with that one, that Nina Burgess. Maybe he even remembered my name. Or maybe not. My heels and my feet are covered in dust.