"But you said it was black magic!" I argued, more from embarrassment than disappointment.
"Foolish mon!" he laughed, shaking his head. "You think with the color of your skin! You think white be good, black be evil!
"But to the people of Jah, we think: the sick man's face be pale. The dead man's face be pasty and white. The face of the oppressor and the oppressed! be white. Have you learned nothing from Duckbury?"
They talk about ideas crystallising. At that moment I finally understood the expression, for I felt a nebulous idea suddenly become a vivid truth.
Duckbury was not evil. His sin was that he had served both the wicked and the righteous without question. Centuries of heritage and tradition weighed upon him, obscuring his sense of right and wrong, and every time he'd fought for justice he'd also fought for racism, for condescension, for the "white man's burden"…
And in the end, the masters he served had sucked him dry and cast away the bitter husk of an old man. That was why he sat on the front stoop, refighting his wars of oppression: he was desperately trying to convince himself that he was not oppressed.
"The fertile earth be black," Rasham continued. "The healthy, the beautiful, the free be black." He paused and composed his face into a stern mask. "So, are you ready for to lose your skin? Or will you keep thinking with it?"
Old Duckbury had let the cultural rubbish of his skin muffle the voice of his soul. As had I. "I'm ready," I said without hesitation.
Oh, that my gift were words and I could describe that night! The ritual was beautiful, and joyous, and I wish I could pop over to Canterbury and say, "Look here, lads, I've found something you've lost," but I wouldn't know what to tell them next. That my ears still ring with song and laughter, and a music so glorious it caught me up and carried me away?
That Rasham, with a touch, made me part of the music, and it was so moving and true it fulfilled everything I'd ever dared to hope or dream?
Would they just smile condescendingly if I told them that the bass and I had melted, flowed together, become as lovers and then closer? We synergised; my fingers flew across the strings without effort, and every note I played was in time, in tune, and simply right. There were no longer any barriers between my heart and the music of my instrument, just as there were no barriers between my soul and the hand that played me. I too had become an instrument, playing in the great dance that moves earth and sky. Rasham had shown me the groove.
Praise Bountiful Jah, I had found the groove!
When next I was aware, a sweet bright dawn was breaking over London and I was in my room, still naked, but relaxed, confident, and blazing away on my bass. Somewhere in the old, sad parts of my heart, the crippled thing that was Stig Bollock awoke, listened to my playing, and was stunned by what he heard.
No, I had not suddenly and magically become a great musician. I was playing with the same measure of skill and talent I'd had the day before.
But now I played without some things: without fear, without confusion, without Stig's cynical appraisal of the music's market value. Moreover, I was playing with one very new and wonderful thing: the simple knowledge, deep at the core of my being, that I had been blessed. I had always been blessed. Blessing is funny, that way; it's not a reward at all. It's a challenge. At birth I'd been given the gift of music, and the Lord had waited all this time to see what I would make of it. Rasham was exaggerating when he'd said he was giving me a soul. Rather, he had awakened the one I'd always had, and freed it from a centuries-old tradition of self-repression.
I had shed my guilty skin.
When the sun was fairly up, I pulled on my trousers and went down to see Duckbury. It was the elation of the moment, I suppose; I had this queer idea I could heal him with a touch, if only I could see him while the night was still fresh in my mind.
In bathrobe and slippers, he answered the door. Though his hair and moustache were neatly brushed, his face was even more pinched and sour than usual, as I'd caught him with his teeth out. "Duckbury!" I shouted, grabbing him by the sleeves. "Stop punishing yourself! You are forgiven!"
For a moment he stared at me as if I were quite mad, then an odd mixture of sternness and pity flooded into his face. "I see," he said quietly.
"They've won." He gently prized my hands off his sleeves and began easing me back into the hall. "What did they do?" he continued, still quietly.
"Convince you that black is white? Show you the Devil and tell you he's God? I've seen a lot of good men fall to that one. It's an old darky trick."
"No, you've got it wrong!" I protested.
"I'm sorry," he said with surgical compassion, "but you need more help than I can give now." Flashing a tight, clipped smile, he slammed the door. Stig Bollock surfaced for a moment to suggest, with a snarl, that Duckbury'd missed a great career in mortgage banking.
Then my new inner calm took over. Duckbury could wait; there would be a time to help him later. All that was meant to happen would happen in Jah's own good time. I decided to pop upstairs and have a chat with Twist about my future.
His door was locked.
I watched for a week, but there was no sign of comings or goings. Within a few days, I was uncomfortable; within the same few days, there was also no mistaking the growing smell of decay emanating from Twist's room, or the odd, moist, spot on my ceiling. By week's end, it had grown into a large patch of slippery ooze that spread down my walls, peeling the wallpaper and blackening the paint. Stig Bollock surfaced again, more strongly, to batter and rail against his confines and tell me what an enormously gullible idiot my true soul was a calm and beatific idiot, perhaps, but an idiot nonetheless.
I began to feel worried.
Sunday morning, on Mrs. O'Grady's insistence, Duckbury, I, and the bank clerk broke down the door. The first breath of corruption that wafted out of the room drove us back (drove the clerk all the way back to his room, in fact, where he booted his breakfast all over the carpet), but Duckbury and I held kerchiefs over our noses and, fighting our gag reflexes, forced ourselves back into the room again.
Twist had skipped out, owing two months' rent and leaving several bags of rubbish in the kitchen. The week-old chicken leftovers were exceptionally vile. We traced the moisture to a leaky gasket on the loo.
Shortly after Twist moved on, another black man stopped by to drop off a package Rasham had meant to leave me. Unwrapping it, I found a final message from Rasham and a remarkable collection of records: Toots and the Maytals, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Jimmy Cliff… Suddenly, I realised what I'd been listening to all along.
I had to change my name and hair again, of course. Stig was too well known for his callow cynicism; his old mates would not have believed his change of heart was genuine. That winter, I formed a new band. Within a year, between the reggae beat and my blond good looks, I did make a fortune. A sizable fortune.
I own an estate in Coventry now, with a massive marble fireplace, over which hangs the neck of a certain much-beloved Gibson guitar. I spend a fair amount of time there, what with all the publicity bashes, record company parties, and whatnot. I do have an image to maintain, after all.
Or rather, I have Duckbury to maintain it. He makes a marvelous, if overpaid, majordomo. Under his command the gardener has done wonders with the roses. Of course, Duckbury still thinks I'm quite mad, and now and again he tries to talk me into behaving the way a proper lord of the manor is expected to behave.
There will be a time to heal Duckbury. Perhaps next summer, when his beloved roses bloom again…
Mrs. O'Grady couldn't refuse my solicitor's offer to buy her boarding house for twice its appraised value. She's moved back to County Sligo and is spending her sunset years with her family, telling them marvelous stories of the odd folk in London. Buying her out felt so good I decided to buy a few more boardinghouses in Finsbury Park, and a whole string of row houses in Brixton. That's where I live, when I'm not on tour or obliged to be at the estate. The squatters who fill my houses think I'm just another chap trying to cultivate a vague resemblance to a famous rock star, even when I show up with a lorry full of groceries and feed the neighbourhood.