Kingston Noir by Colin Channer

don’t know that Soft-Paw’s question could have been put to her in a hard and dangerous way. She never piss herself or nothing. She just say to him, “I am here for one week to take … photographs.” She touch the camera when she say “photographs” as if she did need to touch it to remember the word. She had a funny way of talking, an accent none of us could place. She say to Soft-Paw, “I think you have a really, how do you say, lovely place here.” And she lift up her head and look all around and smile a smile that would make you think she was standing in the middle of fucking paradise—and mind you, Jamaica can be paradise when it want, like those times when you standing on a white beach looking at the moon sinking below the coconut trees. But this white gyal wasn’t on no beach. She was in August Town. She was in the heart of the ghetto, but she was smiling.
    “You don’t work for no police or nothing like that?” Soft-Paw ask.
    She look at him with the most serious look she have all night. She touch herself on her chest. “I work for me. For myself alone. What I do is—it is art. I am not, how do you say, informer. No. That is not me.”
    Soft-Paw nod. “All right then,” he say. “Do what you doing, but protection going to cost you. Hundred dollars a day. Hundred U.S. dollars. And a next thing: before you leave, you will have to show me all the pictures that you take. Is me who run this place. You understand? Me is the community leader, and I don’t want you take no picture that we wouldn’t like. You get me?”
    She agree to this and so Soft-Paw send out word that if anybody see “the white gyal with the camera,” they was not to trouble her. They was to leave her alone. The next morning when we get this word we all start to wonder: who the hell is this white gyal with this damn camera?
    All day next day we was wondering so till we start to make joke that this so-called white gyal with her so-called camera must be some sort of vampire. What other kind of person would sleep during the entire day like she fraid of sun? Not a squeak nor a squawk from her during morning, midday, or afternoon.
    In the evening when we all gather in the square as we always do, it was that time when Miss Tina tell us she actually set eyes on the white gyal with the camera, and that she was staying in the student room in her own yard. Miss Tina tell us how the white gyal did wake her up late the night before, and she herself couldn’t believe that the white gyal did go out after that and meet up with Soft-Paw and the bwoy-dem.
    One of the fellows start run joke and ask Miss Tina, “So you rent out you room to a vampire?”
    Miss Tina, who at times could be a real jokified woman, smile and tell us that actually, just now as she was leaving the yard, she did in fact see a soft and unearthly light coming from under the door of the white gyal room.
    Sister Doris, who go to the Bedward church, whisper, “Sweet Jesus!” when she hear that, though we who have more sense did know that it was probably just light from a computer. I would have said as much but when Miss Tina done her story, Bongo Collie arrive with another.
    Bongo Collie report and say that just just now as him was walking to the square, he walk by Miss Tina house and see the white gyal there himself! And that she did frighten him bad—big horse-steering rastaman though he was. He say at first he never see her sitting there on the veranda, she was so quiet, but then a small fire from nowhere light up her face. Poor Sister Doris almost faint that time.
    Bongo Collie explain that this did make him nearly jump out of him skin, but he soon realize it was just a matches stick the white gyal did strike. She was lighting herself a cigarette. She look straight at Bongo Collie, and nod to him, very familiarlike, and he nod back but he say he couldn’t help but think to himself—this white gyal is more than she appear.
    And it was the kind of evening where you expect