She looked at the wood strips of the wall beneath the window. Behind them was the attaché case, with all the money still in it, every bill. She’d never even counted it, had merely brought it home that day and pulled out the wood strips, shoved the attaché case in, put the wood strips back in place, and gone on with her life exactly as before, hooking for the European Johns, making just enough to exist, living in this “residential hotel” that was filled with other whores, with their pimps, and with a few strong-arm robbers as well. Nothing had changed, except for the dreams.
It has to stop, she thought, and she hated it that every time she took in breath the air still smelled like that hotel room, dark and repulsive with spilled blood. She had to sleep, but she couldn’t sleep. I can’t stay in this room any more, she thought.
Her few clothes were in the top drawer of the dresser. She chose a dress — she’d long since thrown out the pale green one from that day — and stepped into her boots, and then got the hammer from under the bed. To protect herself against unwanted invaders at night, she did what many of the residents of this “residence” did: every night, before going to bed, she nailed a block of wood to the floor against the door, so it couldn’t be pushed open from outside. Now she used the hammer to pry that block up, put block and hammer together under the cot, and went out to the dark hall, which smelled more familiarly of urine and bad food. Pulling the door closed behind herself — it would neither latch nor lock — she made her way down the hall toward the stairwell, where faint light came up from the entranceway. She’d meant to go down the stairs and outside, but at the last second changed her mind and went up the stairs instead, the four steep creaking flights to the top floor and then the metal ladder bolted to the wall the final flight up to the roof.
The trapdoor up at the top was often left open, and that’s the way it was tonight. Pami climbed out, resting her palm on the tarpaper roof as she emerged, feeling how the sun’s heat was still husbanded there. She walked slowly to the front of the building, sat on the knee-high brick wall at the edge, and looked far down at the lane, through the trees. The packed dirt of the lane looked almost soft in the darkness way down there, almost like a pillow.
I wonder why I killed the Danish man, she thought. I wonder what I wanted. All I really want is to sleep, not go through this shit any more. Not any of this shit. Not all these Johns that look like the Danish man, not this shitty building where you got to nail yourself in, not this sickness I got in my blood. What happens when the sores start to show? Nobody gonna give me twenty shillings then. Nobody fuck me for free then. What did I want that time! What do I want?
Pami looked up, wishing there were stars. Moisture was on her eyes, and she looked at the sky, wishing there were stars tonight. She let herself relax, looking upward, just relax, not pay any attention at all...
“You gonna jump?”
Startled, Pami stared around the roof, blinking tears out of her eyes. “Where you? Who you?” It had been a woman’s voice, but from where?
“Sittin over here,” said the woman, and when she waved her arm over her head Pami could see that she was a person sitting in the front corner of the roof, her back against the L of the low wall. “But if you gonna jump,” the woman went on, “lemme go downstairs first.”
“I’m not gonna jump,” Pami said. She got up from the wall, tottering a little, losing her balance and then catching it again before she fell over the wall. “Never meant to jump,” she said, feeling sullen and spied on.
“You wouldn’t be the first, if you did. From this roof.”
“Well, I didn’t. Just came up for some air is all.”
“Me, too.”
Pami approached the woman, and now she could see it was just another whore like herself, another skinny young dark woman with nowhere to go. Pami sat on the wall again, nearer the woman, but this time on the side wall, where there was no more than a seven-or eight-foot drop to the roof of the next building.
“I come up here at night when I can’t sleep,” the woman said, “and dream.”
“I don’t like to dream,” Pami said.
“I like to dream when I’m awake,” the woman told her. “I come up here and I dream what Pd do if I had a lot of money.”
Pami suddenly felt alert. A lot of money? Was this some sort of sign, some sort of omen? She said, “What would you do? If you had a lot of money, what would you do?”
“Well, I’d get away from here, to start,” the woman said, and laughed.
Pami laughed with her, thinking about the money in the wall. She hadn’t gone away from here, to start. She hadn’t done anything at all to start. She said, “Where would you go?”
“America,” the woman said.
Pami looked at her in surprise. “America? Why?”
“Why not? That’s where the rich people are, isn’t it? If I had a lot of money, I’d want to be with the rich people.”
What could I do in America? Pami asked herself, and the question made her feel strange.
The woman was going on, soothing herself with her voice, like a lullaby: “Oh, I’d go to America, and I’d go where the black people are in America, and then everybody think I’m American, too. I got English, just like them. I’d have water all the time, wash in, drink, wash my clothes. Well, I’d have lots of clothes.”
“Sure you would,” Pami said, making fun of her.
“No, but I mean for the police,” the woman said.
Pami frowned, leaning toward the woman, saying, “Clothes for the police! What are you talking about?”
“Well, I wouldn’t want them to send me back,” the woman said. “See, let’s say I’ve got all this money.”
“Okay.”
“Just like I am,” the woman went on, “I go by the ticket office, I put down thirty thousand shillins, say, ‘Gimme a ticket to New York.’ You know what they think?”
“They think you’re rich,” Pami said.
“Not me, they don’t,” the woman said, with bitter self-knowledge. “Me, they think, drugs. Here’s this little girl, she got no suitcases, she payin cash for her airplane ticket, she’s just a little up-country girl never been anywhere before, just got a brand-new passport last week, they call the police in New York, they say, ‘Keep an eye on this girl, she gets off the airplane. Take a look in her twat, you likely find some balloons fulla cocaine.’”
“But there ain’t any cocaine,” Pami said, and absently patted herself, as though in approval of her innocence.
“No, but they’re lookin at you,” the woman told her. “You don’t ever want the police lookin at you, because then they say you’re undesirable and they make you turn around and take the next plane back, and you don’t want to come back. Not here.”
“No, I don’t,” Pami agreed.
“I got it all planned,” the woman said. “First I go buy a couple better-lookin dresses than what I got. Then I buy a suitcase. Then I get my passport. Then I go to a travel place and say my rich boyfriend in the government just died and left me all this cash money, and I buy a round-trip ticket and I pay the travel people right here in Nairobi to get me a room in a hotel in New York, a regular tourist hotel so I look like a regular tourist, so then when I get on the plane nobody got any reason to look at me.”
“Round trip? Why spend that money?”