The cover illustration of Kei Miller’s first novel shows its heroine, Imelda Richardson, dragging along the single suitcase, as she leaves behind her flooded house and village of Watersgate, Jamaica. The polka-dot panties of Tessa Walcott (the disappearance of which is to blame for Imelda’s troubles) are flying in the air... Once you start reading it, you won’t stop till you come to the end — but it is not there. You are left to wonder what happens next to Imelda and her friends. A beautiful writing.
‘Miss Johnson, I was tryna be reasonable, but I see a person can’t with your sort. Well then, I wasn’t born yesterday. I know what you’ve got growing inside your house. Blooming pothead is what you are! I’m tempting to call the coppers on you. Yeah. How’s that?’
‘The coppers?’
‘The police, Miss Johnson!’
‘Police?’ Purletta giggled. ‘You think me ’fraid of police? But is what wrong with this wrinkle-up old woman who come to disturb mi peace, eeh? Think say big woman like me ’fraid of police?’
Purletta slammed the door on Mrs Farquason, and then, to make her point abundantly clear, she proceeded to call the police on herself.
From across the road the old woman watched in alarm as sirens approached. Purletta ushered two uniformed men into her living room. She sat the officers down and poured two mugs of ganja tea for them. The tea had been brewed with peppermint, cinnamon leaves and then sweetened with condensed milk and the two young policemen sipped it all the way to the dregs, commending Purletta for the soothing exotic blend of ‘island tea’. They inspected her house, saw the marijuana plant on the balcony but dismissed it as something else. She wouldn’t have called them and left something like that out in the open. They left as confused as they had come, a little more mellow, however, and happier, and that evening three teenaged boys who would normally have been looked up for public mischief (they had been caught spray-painting graffiti on the side of a building) got off with a light reprimand, and even a ‘Cheers, mate’.
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