“Where Is Your Light, Yvette Jones?” by Victor Forna

pastel on sanded paper

The girl, Yvette Jones, stands alone. Eastern Police, Freetown, at the rot of day and birth of night. She has a tray of unflayed oranges on her head. She needs the crowd, the monster with a thousand eyes and endless limbs, to see her. Swit ɔrinch de, swit ɔrinch de! Her grandmother awaits. Her two siblings. How else would they eat, if the monster doesn’t stop, and buy? Yu nɔ de bay? The silver tray makes her easier to spot against the cyanide grey cityscape, unlike the nearby beggars with skeleton hands outstretched for change.

Starlight on earth, yet, still, so many, many, pass her by.

Tiredness in her bones, cramps in her calves from her walk eternal. She wants to put her fruits down, her burden and blessing. She wants to sleep, slip away from the world and its pain. Today has been a bad day. Have there been any good ones? She sold less than ten leones. Di grɔn dray. Tin tranga. She starts her way back home.

Then she sees the man.

From afar, she sees him see her. At first, she thinks she is twisting a stranger’s face into his; in the city, in the burnt sunset hours, all faces are almost the same, mournful, tired, puffy, hopeless, lost, and with mouths fused shut.

She sees the metal box he always carries with him.

She had met him before at Water Street and at Lumley, where he had first spoken to her and called himself a friend.

The man moves as things move in dreams, flickering, twitching, and, sometimes, in two places at once. He is at a point on Fourah Bay Road. Blink, and he is face to face with the girl, tick-tock, beside the silent clock tower.

He puts his box down.

He doesn’t ask the price of the oranges, only says, as he eases the tray from the girl’s head, “Na wi de pil fɔ wisɛf tide…” Odour of gold-seal cigarettes and kola nuts and things deep in the sky. “Rest.”

He peels the fruit, and in the outburst of citrus fumes, the world and crowd fade away, become less imposing, repulsing, and the girl is alone with the man dressed all in purple. Two figures against a background of vague humanoid shapes, pastel on sanded paper.

“Na tɛn lion fɔ tu.” Extra charges for his stalking.

The man looks up.

The girl always expects to see strange eyes, dɛbul yay, on him. But, from a bony face, only human eyes peer into hers. Too human.

Voice raspy, from years of smoke, or scream, he begins to speak. His request is the same. “Come with me, yu sta brayt, Yvette Jones.” There is something he wants her to be a part of, but his meanings and words limp into stranger territory the more he says. 

Queasiness shakes the girl, an ache in the bottom of her stomach. Shudders. She picks her tray, leaps out of the citrus world and back into the pulsing swarm of Eastern Police. “Kɔmɔt biyɛn mi!”

She knows of girls who have had to sell their bodies to men like him. Girls she grew up with. Girls she used to beg with on roadsides. Girls pushed by parents, pushed by the disease of capital cities. Girls who lost more than their bodies to men like him.

She runs.

She runs.

Yet the voice drowns the whole country, drowns the girl’s mind, loud against the din, encroaching. No feet fast enough to flee the slashing sound. “Mit wi na Crimson Cave!”

And Yvette Jones hates the world, because with all her running, she knows she will answer the invitation. Maybe tonight. Maybe many many nights from now. When she finds her siblings in their cold pan-bɔdi rum, rattling in zinc, for the millionth time. When she meets her grandmother, crying, again, tin nɔ de fɔ it tide, tin nɔ de fɔ it. Whatever god is out there, swirling, has already turned the wheel, placing her in orbit, toward dank destruction.

oil on black canvas

Her yellow dress droops off her frame like the scabs of a burn. She doesn’t feel like herself in it, too tight, too short. She stands, hugging herself, finding it in her stomach to enter the orifice before her. She takes a deep breath, hellfire into her lungs.

Nauseous, spinning, the girl wants to lay on the ground.

She dreams, against the odds, of making it in life, going to school, getting a job that matters, that pays. But not like this. She feels barbed wires tighten her throat. This city is hard, and harder still for people like her. Maybe, coming was a mistake.

The opening to Crimson Cave, Aberdeen, is a toothless mouth. It sucks and swallows the girl whole, before she even makes up her spiralling mind.

In the cavity, a flood of red silent lightning, blood, flashing.

Great infinite field inside the Cave. A crowd, still predator awaiting prey, stands around a stage made from old wood in the middle of infinity. Uniforms of day jobs, soldiers, nurses, lawyers, shades in hard hats and steel-toed boots.

There is a woman on the stage with a cello leaning against her body: statue piece depicting perpetual sorrow.

She wears a lace attire that appears at certain odd angles to be up in flames, a viscous concoction of orange stars.

Spotlight, from the heavens, eats away the features of her face.

She is yet to play a single note, but all eyes are on her.

Still predator awaiting prey, the crowd, or dark worshippers at the foot of an altar.

The girl has dreamed of stages before, being on them. Her dreams replay in her mind’s eye, as she looks on—Yvette Jones, in neon lights, starlight on earth.

Dried kolanut. Tobacco. 

She smells the man before hearing him. He looms beside her, faceless in the red ambience. He holds his box in one hand, square, rust rising from its base like hungry tongues of lava.

The girl and the man slip into a dimension of their own, where the rest of the world becomes a bleary whisper they spy on.

“You could live her life…”

“Nɔto dis a bin de ɛxpɛkt,” the girl is saying, when music flowers around them. Bow drawn, a chainsaw across a neck of vein-like strings; wails are born on the surface of space and time.

The music is not beautiful, but is sweet to its audience.

They cry, every single person in Crimson Cave, like they have lost close lovers or family, at the constellation of notes that plays on and on and on.

Decay leaves their bodies, white mist rising.

On and on and on…

Hush…

When the performance dies, the people cannot stand upright. Unconscious, limp, bent in strange positions: oil on black canvas, Freetonians high on kush.

The girl doesn’t see the woman put her instrument away, nor dismount the stage. She slinks toward them, something feline about her gait, something ethereal. The people mindlessly part on her approach, like the dreaded sea in the stories. The spotlight follows her, still gnawing at her features.

“Na di nyu wan dis?” she asks the man, studying Yvette Jones as vultures might a corpse. Her voice is emitted by her entire body. “She looks nothing like me…”

The girl is tall, the woman short. The girl has tanned mango skin, the woman as dark as loam. The girl has kɔntriplant, the woman supernova afro hair.

“Yu na aw a stat, mi na aw yu ɛnd…run…” That is all she says to the girl, and walks into the night. Her clothes billow behind her.

The girl watches as the woman steps into a white car, nissan surreal, or a great dragon, wispy at the edges. A mob of beggars and disabled people blur after her vehicle. Wheelchairs chasing. Bare feet beating the Aberdeen tarmac. Di mami, aw yu de lef yu pikin dɛm? Wetin naw? Wetin naw? Wetin naw? Wetin naw? She rolls down a window, but does not halt at the chants. Twenty leone notes trail from her car, smoke from the nostrils of her beast, haze, filling the air.

The girl knows worse could have been asked of her. Nastier horrors of this obscene city; is she not ripe for plucking, fayn pɛkito? Whatever this is, it is a relief from her fears. She is being offered dreams. Why would she run from a better life not only for herself, but for the people she loves? This might not change anything, nothing is certain…but the leap of faith is worth it against the cards she has been dealt…leap…

What if she flies?

Silent, the man puts his metal box on the ground before her. The clank echoes around Crimson Cave and its field. He wedges off the lid. With slender fingers, he gestures for the girl to glimpse into the maw.

A blackness, hypnotic and nebulous, peers back at her.

Winds of loneliness chill her face. Dreamlike, she knows what to do. The man does not need to tell her. She sticks her right hand into the vastness held within the finite metal box. She digs deep into the cold, into the vacuum of space. She grips the unknown.

She pulls at it.

She hurts, head to toes, splitting of a pus-filled boil, but nothing is free in Freetown. With pain, she pays, forever.

When her hand comes out, at last, Yvette Jones is holding on to a violin and a bow of her own.

“Play awake the universe,” says the man, and the girl does not understand his meaning, but, catatonic, her fingers begin to dance on the board, as though she has known the instrument pressed below her chin for all her days. Bow moving side to side. Her fingertips name her greatest pains and the violin weeps and she weeps along with it: her father dying in Rolal; her mother twirling naked beneath a black sun; her grandmother losing her legs to festering diabetic sores; the unkindness of Freetown City.

“So brayt, Yvette Jones…” says the voice within the box, before all its words merge into grunts and groans and clicks, dread-inspiring.

water paint on paper

Heedless, home-bound cars zoom by, rushed strokes of brush and water paint on paper.

Girl. Woman. Man and box.

Middle of Peace Bridge, formerly Congo Cross Bridge.

The woman looks so tired, so drained, emaciated, rag and bone.

The girl wonders about her. 

Another crumbling piece, daring to seek hope, as she trudges across the desolate Freetonian maze and its chained, fixed paths?

Like the nails of the cross, the end pin of her instrument pierces her feet together, one on top the other. It is almost a miracle she stands. The pegbox bursts her chest, with skin and rotted flesh flapping to the sides.

“Death…let me die…”

“Soon, Hawahawa. Pretty soon. Gi wi taym.” The man’s shabby three piece suit is covered in a film of dust, as are his locs and beard. He has no shoes on. He looks at his watch. 

The girl catches the woman’s eyes, her tunnels of dead galaxies.

“Let me die…let me die…let me die…let me die…” 

Playing her violin in the streets, hypnotising the CBD alone, the girl has made enough money to send her siblings to school, give her grandmother the medical care she requires. In six months. Once she starts performing in Crimson Cave, she will buy a house. Is it not worth it? Plummet into abysmal darkness, shattering, if it means the lifting of the people we love?

“Some pains are greater than other pains, Yvette Jones.”

“I dɔn let fɔ mi? How do I save myself?”

“I wish I could tell you the meaning of your hurt.”

“Play awake the universe.” The abrupt words from the man amputate the moment that almost builds between woman and girl, future and past. He opens his box and lifts it toward the dark sky dotted with the burning jewels of distant worlds.

“Play…”

In answer, the woman saws a first note, cutting through skin to find her strings, and igniting a low, dragging tone, sonorous melancholia. Even before the girl begins her own haunted melody, her harmonies never heard before, endless tendrils rise from the box, nebulous dancers reaching for the stars, infernal flames reaching for the cosmos. Smoke. Orbs of Light.

Burning.

Orange to violet to ebony.

The duo plays on and the music swells into a chaotic shriek, shaking the fabric of reality.

The instruments moan, and there are strange shadows and swaying phantoms in the bat and bird filled sky.

Music, like abstract painting.

Does the city hear it?

Yvette Jones begins to glow. She feels herself falling, but never makes ground.

She is in outer space, sta so brayt, she is outer space.

Girl with violin, spinning.

“Nɔ mek ɛnibɔdi tif yu layt, Yvette.” Her grandmother’s voice booms from a black hole mouth.

Before she can answer, the girl begins to fall. Fall without end. Planets and moons and suns and images from her life, memories and dreams and sorrows and joys, pass her by, merging, stretching. She is a star, playing sweet music to crowds. The world is easier. She becomes Hawahawa. There is so much money around her, like fire. She screams, winces. She falls into the giant metal box, freezes, melts, phases through the bottom, and out into further blackness.

The girl watches herself from outside her body, she is a speck in the horizon, confused, powerless, in the movement of the universe, as she had always been in the movement of the city. Nothing to hold, nothing to make her solid in the eye of the earth.

“We became pieces in a motion beyond us, bigger than us, in our search for a little less pain. In our small, broken city, the universe dares to dip us in the ink-blood of darker gods. I wish I could tell you the meaning of your hurt. Hold my hand.”

“It’s unfair, Hawahawa…”

“Play awake the universe!”

She falls higher and higher.

An hour later, or a century, or the age of time, the world clears up into a new dawn, it stills, and the box is closed and held like a newborn in the arms of a bald man dressed all in red.

The girl pays him no mind.

She fingers around her shoulder…the ache almost has a drone of its own…just below her chin, like a putrid limb hurriedly stitched to the body, a violin juts halfway through her neck.

She tries to scream, jerking at the wood, stretching skin, but only silence rises from her throat.

She reaches out for the man.

“Help me…what is this…help…”

The man blazes up a cigarette, gold-seal burning, takes a drag, puff, picks his box, and, no answer, leaps off Peace Bridge into the murky river below.