Peter Kalu Let Her Go: Reinventing black characters in crime fiction. Ph.D. Creative Writing submission Lancaster University 2018 Volume I: The Novel pages 2-214 Volume 2: Critical-reflective thesis pages 215-301 Volume 1: The Novel Let Her Go 2 St James Infirmary Blues I went down to St. James Infirmary Seen my baby there; She’s stretched out on a long, white table She’s so sweet, so cold, so fair. 3 Preface My daughter died. This is the chronicle of events that occurred when I tried to unravel what happened to her. I could never have guessed then the journeys it would take me on, the situations I’d find myself in. Some things included here – documents, reports, recordings – I discovered outside of those journeys I made, but most of this story is written straight from memory of that time. Looking back, I suppose it could be said I was a fool travelling towards wisdom. Am I now wise? Perhaps wiser. Yet my quest continues. This journey hasn’t ended. 4 Miscellaneous Unreleased Materials Relating to The Death of Ms Tishana Hanley Freedom of Information Decision Pending (Coroner’s Office) 5 Manchester, UK. Southern Cemetery. Arriving early. The river gorged, curling large, sweeping the high banks with menace. Dumped silt. Spilt seed. Here bent thistle bush, swamped wort, grass slime. Now flattened reed stalks. The bloom of leaf rot. Across, flashes brim and rows of stone. Faces up, six below. The ground water high, the soil a bog curing skin flesh bone memories. Crossing municipal grass they parade. Glossed shoes. Sky sliding from foot to foot licked with mud, roots. These guys. Musked, preened. Bracelets. Gold chains. Veils. Let it go. Let the dogs hear the bell. Now the leg train. The box. The songs. The words. The heaped-up spoil pointing proud. Everything poured up into the sky and down into this earth. To the brim now. The ground yielding too easily underfoot. Pooling water six feet down. Boards cast aside. The box lowering. Song. Trampling out the vintage. Tish. – But she’ll drown! She’ll drown! Yasmina. Murmurs. Clocks. The ropes playing out, taking the weight of Tish. The gleaming pine. – She’ll dr... ! The sky jigging. Thisfuckedup day. Dying a second death before my first. Tish. Now she comes to me, easy in her skin. Ha. The flick of it. In her teens, beat-boxing over a lyric, doing those fly rapper twists with her arms: We got it lit. Even if life’s shit got us in the end. We got it lit. Fade the beat. Press Send. She’s nestled in brown water. The ropes hauling off. fuckedupthisday. 6 Pakistan. Landings. I heaved at the pile of buckled metal. Bleached rubber. Chewed plastic. Leaking petrol. As the hairy-armed idiot of a driver turned the ignition again. And again. And again. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Fuck all. – Once more, Saul! The foolfuck. Calling out from his upholstered seat as my shoes slipped on the road. The grease of a thousand maxed-out engines. Lorries went past, cars, mopeds steered by hooligans. I was a gnat’s breadth from splatting my arse onto the airport highway, a spark from a fireball. I set my cheek against the Toyota’s bumper, bit down, pushed against the slope. That scent of eucalyptus coming off the trees in the central reservation. Cough sweets. I’d push-started cars for pennies as a kid and lived to tell the tale. But now. As soon as we got the engine ticking over, I was going to kill that horse-brained fuck of a friend in the driver’s seat. Daalat. He’d promised to pick me up from Islamabad airport, save me a taxi fare. Instead this. The engine never caught. We got the thing onto the verge. Daalat bounced out of the driver’s seat and slapped me between the shoulder blades as I clutched for breath. – Sun’s shining. Welcome to Islamabad! He was a punch away. I found myself nodding. Wheezing. – Good job man but looks like we need a garage. When you’re ready. I’ll give you a hand. We rolled it down a dirt road off the highway and in three turns arrived at a car breaking zone – a square mile of oil slick and car parts. Electric looms dangling like nerve endings out of chassis after stripped down chassis. Oozing coolant. Buckled up panels. Shattered starter motors. Gouged headlight holdings. The stench of it. Everything being beaten and welded to death or back to life. Whatthefuck. Daalat laughed at my face. I had to laugh too. This was a filthed-up, ear-hammering welcome to the land of the pure. My thumbs forcing their way down. His face mottling. Mechanics came at us. I dragged my bags, still with their clingfilm wrapping, out of the car while Daalat talked money. Shouts, mock arm wrestles and walk offs folded into a handshake. The mechanics pushed the vehicle away. – Come on, amigo, let’s eat. – Don’t talk to me. – You hungry? 7 I let him take only the larger of my two bags and we were soon seated in a food shack in the middle of it all. A server spoke in Punjabi, looked at me then back at Daalat. – You want dahl? – Yes. – Roti? – Two. Don’t talk to me. – How about... I held up my hand. Daalat shrugged and ordered. The shack was pallet-wood, a floating island stuffed full of hungry men with deep-stained and scarred arms and hair as black as the oil they handled. The sun poured down through the pallets making oblong hot spots. Ninety seconds later we too were feasting from plastic bowls. – Desi. Not your Manchester Curry Mile stuff. I didn’t reply. I hadn’t eaten on the plane. I finished mine. Daalat watching. – What? I was the one at the back end of that donkey of yours. Pushing. Not steering. By rights I should have your bowl as well. I mimed his minor efforts with the wheel up at the donkey’s front end. – Always complaining. This is a sight. Time shifted. The hammering and drilling and beating were constant, varying from high to low pitch, like unstable tinnitus. There were occasional blue flashes, spark showers from welders. One of the bargaining mechanics approached. Daalat wedged a fold of rupee notes under the roti plate and the two of them headed off. I pulled my bags out from under the table. How did I land here? A woman in orange with a baby on her arm called out to me. Her eyebrows flicked upwards and her nose twitched making her gold nose stud glitter in the sun. I looked over to her. She smoothed the left shoulder of her shalwar then approached, hand outstretched. I put down my bag to find change. – What are you doing? Daalat had returned, trapping my hand. He barked at the woman. She spoke back politely and rapidly. Daalat replied in kind. The conversation between them went to and fro till 8 Daalat’s face broke out into a flummoxed smile. The woman scoffed and turned on her heels. – What? – I said why are you picking on him? She said he’s obviously foreign. I said, how can you tell? You know what she said? She didn’t mention your Rasta dreads. Or your skin. Or your English way of walking. You know what she said? She having spoken purely in Punjabi, obviously I didn’t know what she said. I fed him the line he wanted anyway. – What did she say? – She said because of your bags! Because of your bags! Daalat’s eyes were wet with amusement. – And this is funny because? – She was being polite. The beggar woman was being PC! She didn’t mention the obvious, your hair, your skin. She mentioned your bags instead! – OK, I get it. It was hardly going to bring the house down at the Brixton Albany on a Friday night, but I took his point. In her eyes I was a Rasta in Islamabad and I stuck out, she had been polite about it. – Why couldn’t I give her something? – If you gave even one rupee, every beggar here would be round you before you could blink. I was unconvinced. – Daalat. – What? – I have something with me. – A headache? – No. – What then? – Never mind. Can you get me to this place now. Will this piece of junk make it? I handed him the address. He had it already. He glanced at it. – It’s not far. You still set on this? I nodded. 9 Someone blared a horn at us. We were blocking the exit road. I hauled my bags into the boot again and we got in the car. The unburnt petrol smell had gone, replaced by a pall of freshly spilt engine oil. I strapped myself into the passenger seat. Daalat turned the ignition. The engine caught first time. We slithered up the dirt track incline onto the highway. We went over our story for when we reached, Daalat with more enthusiasm than me, then something stirred in Daalat, his eyes brightened, and he started a running commentary. – On this side, a bit over there is a large park, often used by local workers and it has a vast variety of different birds and a lake where people go to lie down in the shade of the lush trees there, all of Islamabad is full of green. – Daalat, it’s OK. – What? – I’m not a tourist, you don’t need do the guided tour thing.