Fire Rush - Hardcover

Crooks, Jacqueline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059330053X ISBN 13: 9780593300534

Verlag: Viking Pr, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

FINALIST FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2023

“[A] powerful debut.” —The Washington Post

“An exceptional and stunningly original novel by a major new writer.” —Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

Set amid the Jamaican diaspora in London at the dawn of 1980s, a mesmerizing story of love, loss, and self-discovery that vibrates with the liberating power of music

Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she goes raving with her friends, the “Tombstone Estate gyals,” at The Crypt, an underground dub reggae club in their industrial town on the outskirts of London. Raised by her distant father after her mother’s disappearance when she was a girl, Yamaye craves the oblivion of sound - a chance to escape into the rhythms of those smoke-filled nights, to discover who she really is in the dance-hall darkness.

When Yamaye meets Moose, a soulful carpenter who shares her Jamaican heritage, a path toward a different kind of future seems to open. But then, Babylon rushes in. In a devastating cascade of violence that pits state power against her loved ones and her community, Yamaye loses everything. Friendless and adrift, she embarks on a dramatic journey of transformation that takes her to the Bristol underworld and, finally, to Jamaica, where past and present collide with explosive consequences.

The unforgettable story of one young woman’s search for home, animated by a ferocity of vision, electrifying music, and the Jamaican spiritual imagination, Fire Rush is a blazing achievement from a brilliant voice in contemporary fiction.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jacqueline Crooks is a Jamaican-born British writer. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award. Her story collection, The Ice Migration, was longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Fire Rush is her first novel.

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1

Follow the Smoke

One o'clock in the morning. Hotfoot, all three of us. Stepping where we had no business.

Tombstone Estate gyals - Caribbean, Irish. No one expects better. We ain't IT. But we sure ain't shit. All we need is a likkle bit of riddim. So we go inna it, deep, into the dance-hall Crypt.

'Come, nuh,' Asase calls. Pushing her way down the stairs. High-priestess glow. Red Ankara cloth wound round her hair like a towering inferno.

Asase is the oldest, twenty-five, a year older than me and Rumer.

Rumer is nothing like her red-haired Irish family. My gyal is dance-taut, tall with a rubber-ribbed belly - androgynous. Blonde, she dyes her hair Obsidian Black, stuffs it underneath a knitted red-gold-green Rasta cap.

We squeeze past chirpsing men. Stand in front of the arched wooden door. Suck in the last of the O2.

I follow Asase inside. My gyal follows the smoke. Beneath barrel-vaulted arches. Dance-hall darkness. Pile-up bodies. Ganja clouds. We lean against flesh-eating limestone walls near two coffin-sized speaker boxes that vibrate us into the underworld.

Runnings: the scene goes the usual way; a Rasta pulls Rumer which is good because that's the only kinda man she'll dance with. 'They're respectful, they're my bredren,' she says. A sweet bwoy pulls Asase.

Testing, testing: one, two, three. Lights go on for a few seconds.

Only one type of man left for me.

A tall, light-skinned man, face the colour of wet sand, stalked green eyes, standing in his silence. Man pulls me with not so much as a 'What's up. Wanna dance?' Nuth'n.

Watchya: there're only three kinda man-pulls - usually from behind.

Pull 1: grip above elbow; pull-back-bend-ram-hard-rubbing.

Options: forget it!

Pull 2: hand-grip-spin-face-to-face-body-check-ram-rub.

Options: none. Best give up your body for one tune - at the very least.

Pull 3: soft bwoy tap on shoulder.

Options: nuff.

This man's trouble. I can tell by his use of Pull 1 and the size of his belt and the way he jooks himself into my centre of gravity. His body's not tuned for riddims; it's flexed for the war zones of history, the battles of the streets.

I tip my arse, inch my pubic bone away from his hard-on.

He puts his mouth to my ear, warm breath: 'Simmer down.' Flattens his palms against my batty, pulls me back in.

Version after B-side instrumental version, he grips me. Wordless. We're in a crypt in the thick of duppy dust; lost rivers, streams and sewers bubbling beneath us.

Smoke's taken over, thickening, choking me. And I wonder why I attract these kinda men, who are just like my father. Men who strike fear in people just by the way they stand. Skewering the silence with their stares.

Four dances in before I make my soft-gyal excuse, mouth 'Gotta go. Toilet.'

Man nods. I exhale. One floor up, I sit in the toilet cubicle. Smell candles and incense and old wood from the church. Light my spliff, suck more smoke into my lungs, feel Muma shoot into my veins.

I hear her song, her voice, treble, reed and flute. She cuts inna me with soundwaves, singing: 'Daughter, I-and-I is tune.'

Spirit or not, Muma's all I've got. The only one I trust.

'Stay,' I whisper. But she's gone.

I imagine my ganja smoke snaking around my dance partner, dragging him into the afterworld beneath the Crypt. But the man's waiting for me downstairs, to raas. One hand clipped on his belt like he's toting a gun.

'Inna it, baby,' he says, and pulls me into the dance hall, positions me against the wall, wedges himself into my body.

I hold my breath, and pray for a rootsy liberation track to put him off his slow-winding moves. But I'm locked in. Tune after tune after tune.

Three o'clock in the morning. We're ten feet below and the town's weighing down on us. Stench of sweat, stale gases and lead.

'Soon come,' man shouts in my ear. 'Need a light.' He takes a cigarette out.

I mek my move quick-time, slip into the mass of closed-eyed skankers, sucked into the slipstream of rippling spines. Try to get as close as I can to the decks, watch the MC, see how he handles the mic and the controls. We're dancing in darkness, skinning up with the dead. I feel them twisting around me, round and round, rattles on their wrists and ankles, broken-beat bodies of sound. The Dub Master spinning versions of delayed time. Slack-jawed, slicking-up words from tongue root. I wanna take the mic from his hand, blaze fire on Babylon. In my head, I'm chatting lyrics:

set it

set it

come mek we hear it from the uptown posse

get down

get down

every posse drive forward

fire!

Bodies rippling like seagrass. Synthesising air and bass.

Inna caves of sound, we skank low, spirits high. Drop moves as offerings to the soundboxes, wooden deities full of fading voices.

The regulars are scattered around the square, pillared vault. Rocked by storm sounds, swaying under the shelter of arches, some pressed tight against the walls. Others bubbling in the epicentre, below low-hovering smoke clouds. Strangers pass through, hold position on the edges. There's Eustace, the owner of Dub Steppaz Records, skanking next to the decks, one hand behind his back, the other steering the air. There's Cynthia, the lovers-rock queen with a bronze-sprayed Afro, who cradles her sagging womb when she sings, rocking from side to side to reggae love songs. And Lego in the middle of the dance floor, two-stepping best he can with his artificial leg. Skanking hard-hard, using his walking stick like a spear, firing it inna the air, shouting, 'Mash down Babylon.' Nobody knows if he's lost his mind or found a higher consciousness, like our men who lead the marches and rallies, chanting 'Black Power' over the heads of the sistren.

Lovers-rock time and our bodies are ships rolling through smoke and heat, under pressure from treble and bass. I sway in the broiling centre, far from the walls where men move with mute biological urgency, stabilising themselves with the weight of women.

The MC calls out over the mic, a voice in the darkness, shouting above the waves of sound. The deck's where I've always wanted to be. Changing the sonic direction. I'd fling down a rootsy dub track of the ancients chanting stories about the divinity of our emperors. Tek it to the outtasphere.

Someone takes my hand. Eases me around.

I wipe sweat from my eyes, look up. Dim lights from the decks flash on and off and I make out a face that's a smile resting on rocks. He's looking down at me as if he's known me from beyond time, cables of blue smoke twisting above his head.

He puts his mouth to my ear, says his name is Moose.

'OK for this dance?' he asks.

I see a wide-bridged nose, thick lips scrunched like he's chewing his thoughts. Yeah, he's one of dem men whose beauty is a throwback from the past.

'I'm Yamaye,' I say and give him the nod.

He positions a thigh between my legs. Puts his arms on my shoulders, keeps his crotch a polite distance away from my pubic bone. Electric guitars riffing. Groaning vocals. We dance, rub-a-dub-squatting, and his cheek grazes mine. Drifting scents of vanilla, cocoa beans and pine trees waft off his neck. I tremble as we sway under the limewashed roof.

With my body pressed against his, I feel the ancient songs vibrating beneath his ribs: Tambu, Sa Leone, Jawbone. This man's different. From the electricity running through me, I feel like my ending is gonna be charged inna his fate.

Everyone's in their power. The room's a furnace, sweating bodies. Moose takes my hand, pushes his way out of the Crypt.

'Let's get air,' he says.

We go up the metal stairway and the man's still holding my hand. When was the last time anybody...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Viking Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059330053X
• ISBN 13: 9780593300534
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 338
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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