"'Od's Balls!" Duckbury yelled. "It's the Zulu Nation!"
"Now, now," Mrs. O'Grady chimed in from behind us as she opened the front door, "you keep a civil tongue in your head, Mr. Duckbury." She hurried down the steps, quick as her fat little legs would carry her, and spoke to the blacks. "'Tis the door at the top of the stairs. I've unlocked it, and you may go right up." Most of the men grabbed cartons out of the boot of the Cortina and started in.
"Mrs. O'Grady!" Duckbury roared, "I've put up with Pakis and Chineese and Lord knows what else you've seen fit to bring in, but if you think I'll live in a house full of nig-nogs"
I had to admire her; she tapped her slippered foot, pursed her lips, and shot Duckbury a glare that would've peeled paint, but when the words came out they were soft and sweet. "This is our new boarder, Mr. Twist. He'll be taking the attic flat. You'll be nice to him, won't you, Mr. Duckbury?"
As she spoke, the driver of the car stepped 'round to the kerb, and I saw with some surprise that he was the Jamaican I'd encountered on the ferry.
"I'm giving notice! I swear it!" Duckbury stood, grabbed the half-finished Guiness out of my hand, and stormed into the house.
"Pay him no mind," she said to Twist. "Ducky's loud but harmless." Then she turned to me. "Mr. Twist, I'd like to introduce you to another of our tenants. Mister " she paused, wrestling with it a moment. "Stig," she said at last. She never could bring herself to calling me "Mr. Bollock."
"H'lo," I said, "I believe we've met." All this got me was a blank look, so I elaborated. "The ferry to Sheerness?" After another blank look, I shrugged, said, "Sorry, must be mistaken," and tried another subject. "If it's any consolation, Duckbury gives notice every time anyone moves in.
You should have heard the fuss when I first came 'round!" I laughed and felt profoundly stupid, for I was laughing alone.
After an excruciating moment of silence, Twist said, "Ah, I see. He thinks you and I be alike." He laughed politely and then turned to Mrs. O'Grady.
"Excuse me." He flashed me a quick, condescending smile as he started up the stairs.
And that is how Mr. Twist came to live over my head. He was an odd sort of neighbour; that is, I had some degree of rapport with every other tenant in Mrs. O'Grady's house. Even the bank clerk on the first floor knew me, to the extent that he lifted his nose and looked disgusted whenever we passed in the hall. But the one time I met Twist on the stairs he was just sitting there, chanting softly in some strange language and seeming not to see me. If the smell hanging like a cloud about him was ganja, it was the most potent pot I'd ever caught a noseful of: I got dizzy just walking by.
That meeting on the stairs turned out to be quite unique in another way as well, for as the hot weeks wore on, Twist came down from the attic less and less often, until at last he never came out at all. Instead, small groups of strange black men popped by to see him at odd hours and stayed in his flat, conversing in low, dark voices. Occasionally I caught bits of words piercing through with sudden clarity rasta, jah, burning, death but nothing that ever made real sense.
In time, I began to notice the music as welclass="underline" a primal, throbbing, savage sort of music I more felt than heard through the ceiling. A pulsing, driving rhythm that stirred strange passions within me; God, I wished I could play like that! Between that funky beat and my blond good looks I could make a fortune!
Duckbury, however, grew restive as July melted into August. "He's not to be trusted," I once heard him shouting at Mrs. O'Grady. "I fought against the Mau Mau. I know their primitive ways!"
"Oh, shut up!" she'd yelled back. "If the music bothers you so, turn your telly up!"
Another time, when I joined Duckbury on the front stoop for a cold German lager (he may've been excrutiatingly British, but even he wasn't fool enough to drink warm beer in August), he said, "You know, Stig, I wonder whether we were wise to open the empire. It's a small island, after all, scarcely room enough for we Englishmen."
I smiled it'd taken a month for Duckbury to include me in "we Englishmen" then said, "I take it you're still upset about our Jamaican neighbour."
"I don't believe Twist is Jamaican, not for a minute. He looks Haitian to me," he said, worrying his mustache.
"So?" I asked.
"SO?!" he thundered back at me. "Where do you think voodoo comes from, you twit? That man has opened a voodoo temple a hounfour right over our heads! Every night they're doing their darkie rituals; I can hear the music!"
"I rather like the music," I said softly.
"Do you? That's the whole problem! They seduce you young people with their jungle music, drive our young English girls sex crazy with their animal beat, and " I set the beer down and stood to leave. The strong aftertaste of bigotry was proving quite unpalatable. "You mark my words!"
Duckbury's voice followed me. "Those nig-nogs only want to slit your throat and dance on the ruins of white civilization!"
I went up to my room, got out my Fender, and thrashed through a few chords. Truth to tell, I was starting to feel a bit obsessed with Twist's music. It seemed so driving, so hypnotic, so much better than the head-banging punk rock I was playing. With a twinge of nerves, I suddenly realised I was feeling drawn no, compelled up the stairs to Twist's apartment.
I fought it off, and thrashed my Fender some more.
A few nights later my band did a club gig, a freebie but a gig nonetheless, and so about three A.M. I found myself lying in my bed, in the bloody hot August night, quite unable to sleep. Tossing, turning, exhausted from playing but still wired up; listening to the music filtering down from the attic again; it seemed louder this time, more insistent, as if it were calling me, teasing me, tugging at my soul strings I sat up straight in bed. I had to know.
I leapt out of bed, raced up the dark stairs (the bulb had burned out some weeks before), and began pounding on the door. To my surprise it was not latched, but swung right open. The room was lit by a single, flickering candle in the middle of the floor, and a group of black men sat in a circle about it, their gleaming eyes turned toward the doorway as if expecting me.
"I, uh…." I said. Their hostility was a palpable thing in the air, tugging at the hair on the nape of my neck. Twist's eyes, his intense eyes, bored into me like hot skewers. "I really dig the music you're playing," I said quickly.
"Close the door. Sit yourself down," Twist commanded as the men moved aside to make room for me in the circle.
I did as I was told, and when I was sitting, I tried again. "Y'see, I'm a musician, Mr. Twist "
"Do not call me by that name," he said. "That is only the name of the shape I now work through. My spirit-name is Rasham Rasta Jah Afrika."
Spirit-name? Uh oh, I'd walked in on a l-o-o-n-e-y!
"So, Mister Stig," he continued, "you like the music of the people of Jah?" I nodded cautiously. "You wish you could play music like that?" I nodded again. He leaned forward, closer to the candle, his face a goatlike, bearded shadow-mask of ebony and red, and his voice sank to a hiss. "To make music like that you would have to be black. You want to lose your skin, it going to cost you, mon."
"Oh, hell," I said, as my little white testicles crawled up and hid.
I spent the rest of that night listening to Rasham and his friends talk in an island dialect I understood only slightly, and in the morning he started me running the first of many odd little errands: out to Knightsbridge to find a Jaguar Mark IX and steal its hubcaps, down to Hammersmith to pawn said hubcaps and buy food, over to Islington to feed a toothless old madwoman living in a dustbin. That night he sent me out to one of my favorite clubs, not to drink or dance or pick up birds but merely to watch and listen.