In a dazzling display of masterful storytelling, Marlon James explores the extraordinary backstory to the attempted assassination of reggae star Bob Marley
Jamaica, 1976. Seven gunmen storm Bob Marley’s house, machine guns blazing. The reggae superstar survives, but the gunmen are never caught. Marlon James investigates the story behind this near-mythical event. The result is a mesmerising, continent-crossing tale that spans three decades, with a shadowy cast of street kids, drug lords, journalists, prostitutes, gunmen and secret service agents.
Published in the UK by Oneworld.
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.
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By around two or three the pain in my feet moved up to my shins, then my knees, which felt better only because the ache was being shared. At some point you lose all ache until you realize, maybe a hour later, that you didn’t lose the ache at all. It had just spread all over until your whole body becomes ache. Maybe I’m not a mad woman, but I am something. The two women who passed me an hour ago knew something. I saw them from who knows, a mile up the road, when they were moving white dots until they were barely 20 feet from me, two dark women in white church dresses and hats.
—But that is what me telling you, Mavis, no weapon formed against almighty Jesus shall prosper, the one on the left said.
They both looked at me the same time and went quiet. They didn’t even wait until they were past me before one whispered to the other. It’s 10 p.m. I know what they were whispering.
—Me just fuck your man for twenty dollar, I say.
They speed up their walk trying so hard to get away that the left one nearly trips. Nobody has walked past me since. It’s not that Hope Road goes to sleep. Behind me are apartments and in front is his house. Lights are on everywhere. The people don’t go to sleep, they shut themselves off from the road. It’s like an entire city turning its back to you, the way those church women did. I think about it, being a hooker, jumping in the last Benz or Volvo heading way up Hope Road, to Irish Town maybe. A businessman or a diplomat who lives in New Kingston who’ll rape me because he’ll get away with it. If I just stand here under the orange streetlight, maybe somebody would stop. I’m hungry and I need to piss. The light in the top room of his house just went out.
The night that Kimmy took me here and then left, I didn’t plan on sleeping with him. I did want to see him naked but not like that. I heard he got up every morning at 5 and drove to Bull Bay and bathed in the waterfall. Something about it sounded so holy and so sexy at once. I’ve been imagining him rising out of the falls, naked because it was early enough. I’ve been imagining river water being the saddest thing in the world because it had to sooner or later slide off his body. When I saw him out on his balcony naked eating fruit I thought the moon must be sad too, knowing he would soon go inside.
Marlon James. © Jeffrey Skemp
I heard he got up every morning at 5 and drove to Bull Bay and bathed in the waterfall. Something about it sounded so holy and so sexy at once
“Thought” is stretching it. I didn’t think. Thinking would have stopped me from going out on the balcony. Thinking would have stopped me from taking off my clothes just in case me clothed and him naked would have made him self-conscious, as if he had a self-conscious bone in his entire body. He said me know you, which might have been true. A woman likes being remembered, I guess. Or maybe he just knows how to make a woman felt like she was missed.
After the music stopped a few people left. It was the first time that gate opened. Couple cars, one jeep, not his truck. He was still there, him and probably half the band too. I thought about running in, taking off the heels and sprinting fast enough that the guards wouldn’t have caught me until I was inside. By the time they grabbed me they would see that I was brown and leave me alone and I would shout his name and he would come downstairs. But I stayed on my side of the road, by the street light and bus stop. A light from a room on the right just went out. My father keeps saying that nobody is going to drive him out of his own country, but some months before the attack he sat me down in the kitchen and read me an article in the Gleaner. I was visiting and didn’t plan to stay long. He wouldn’t let me read it myself, he had to hear himself tell me. The article was called, “If He Fails,” he being the Prime Minister. Daddy, that article was from January. You hold on to it all this time? I said. My mother then told me he reads it every week. That would be forty-seven times so far.
The light in a room downstairs left goes off. There’s a curfew and I’m not supposed to be out here. I have no explanation for the police should a car pass by. I have no explanation for myself.
Winner The Booker Prize 2015
