The Hanging Girl

5

Wanda Phinn had married an English cricket player who’d come to Jamaica to teach black people what he was best at: playing and winning innings. This Chris McCullum was steadier on his feet than most of the guys in whites, and armed with these skills had been tasked for six months with one mission: to get the Jamaican national team to score 10 percent better on their runs.

For that reason, McCullum stood on parched grass in the baking sun from March to September sweating buckets more than ever before.

During a training match he saw Wanda out of the corner of his eye running around the cinder track with long muscular legs, skin glistening, and thought he was seeing things.

Wanda was very aware of what people thought they were witnessing. She’d had it banged into her since her figure had developed and she’d learned to move around the track like a leaping gazelle.

“Are you Merlene Ottey?” McCullum asked her outright after the match.

Wanda bared her white teeth and dark gums in a smile. It wasn’t the first time she’d been asked and it was flattering, even though Merlene Ottey was at least twenty years her senior, because Merlene Ottey, Jamaica’s top track sprinter for many years, was as beautiful as a goddess.

She flirted a little and nudged McCullum cheekily on the shoulder for the compliment. And then he took her with him to England.

Wanda loved white men. Not because they were particularly sensual. A man from Jamaica had the fire of many races in him, which the white just couldn’t live up to, but on the other hand, white men knew who they were and, more important still, what they wanted to do with their lives. You could find security and a future with them, which was far from certain in Tivoli Gardens, the poor slum quarter in West Kingston where Wanda had grown up. For someone whose daily life consisted of shootings and cocaine in backyards, Chris McCullum’s proposal was a fairy tale that required no more than a millisecond to think over.

He installed them in Romford on the outskirts of London in a tiny terraced house where she was about to die of boredom until the day when McCullum broke his ankle and was forced not only to sell the house but also to get a divorce from her. If he was going to continue living in the style to which he felt he was entitled, he was going to have to find a woman who was in a position to provide for him.

And so after two years of security, Wanda was back to square one and a situation where she had only her own limited resources to keep her head above water.

Wanda was uneducated, without hope of obtaining any kind of support, no special talents to speak of other than being a fast runner, and that wouldn’t take you far, as her father always used to tease. So the job as a security guard at the rear entrance of a large company on the Strand in London was not only her salvation but also the only viable alternative to Jamaica’s tin huts and bodily degradation before one hit forty, which would otherwise have been her destiny.

And like a lion in a cage she stood and facilitated those more important than her to come in and out of the glass doors of the large building, nodding to them as they went over to a better-dressed woman who had the privilege to take their ID and press the button that enabled them to continue in the system.

Here she was, alone in an empty room between freedom and riches, watching like a custodian over the secrets of the building without knowing what they were about.

And while time went by, she had nothing else to think about other than that it was there—outside—that life ruled. It all happened out there while she stood here.

Day in, day out, she stared through the glass doors looking out over Savoy Place directly to the wall that surrounded Victoria Embankment Gardens.

There, behind that wall, is adventure, she thought. And the laughter from people who soaked up the rays of the sun in striped deck chairs or licked ice cream bought with money they’d never miss, tortured her in silence and, what’s more, without anyone worrying about it.

And so her new identity was born.

She was just the woman who looked at walls.

In those hours stolen from her by routine, the clouds of the past gathered over her. Wanda knew that all the serendipities and meetings of fate that had taken place before she came into the world must have had higher expectations than to simply create a person with an utterly subordinate security guard job on the Strand. As her Rastafarian father said with pride, through Wanda’s veins flowed equal measures of Dominican Arawak Indians, Nigerians, and Christians, washed down with a dash of Rastafarian gunpowder. And Wanda’s mother had laughed and said that she should just forget all about it and keep a cool head, then everything would be all right.

Keep a cool head! That was what seemed so especially hard in her grey and inconsequential existence. Was it really meant to be that all the advantages and history should end with an unflattering grey uniform and hair hidden under a cap?

But despite the hopelessness of the situation and the bad prospects, Wanda stood up straight when the better-off guests of the park and building sauntered by, and tried to rediscover that part of her that could get her away from the wall.

As fate would have it, Shirley—the only friend she had and who lived in the room two doors down—invited her to come along to something she called Nature Absorption Intro.

Shirley was into the occult and as such very open on her views and expectations of life. She listened to heavenly inspired music, had an interest in Polynesian kahuna fortune-telling, and used playing cards or the tarot before making decisions. Through all these changeable guides she’d encountered in her life, she’d gained insight, as she called it. Wanda never knew exactly into what, but Shirley could make her smile like no one else.

And now she wanted to introduce Wanda to Atu Abanshamash, who, according to the website, was the beautiful radiant spirit who’d come from the Scandinavian dream world to London with his new teaching that could sweep everything else to one side and create a complete understanding of the energy and connections of all humanity.

Shirley was ecstatic and the price was reasonable, so if Wanda wanted to come along she would pay. It could be so much fun if they had something to share together.

* * *

Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi was not like the gurus Wanda had seen in Shirley’s myriad of brochures and on the TV. He didn’t sit in the lotus position or in a carved chair in elevated serenity. He wasn’t preachy, and he was neither fat nor ascetic. Atu Abanshamash was a real man of flesh and blood, who with a smile and a twinkle in his eye showed them the path to how the study of nature absorption could renew a person to such a miraculous degree that you finally felt as if each and every cell in your body could suddenly resist any sort of attack, and that your body in its entirety melted together with the universe that surrounded it.

The universe and the energy of the sun were Atu Abanshamash’s mantra. And there, in that simple light Bayswater apartment, where the Nature Absorption Academy London branch was housed, he walked around those sitting on the floor and regarded them with magical eyes, making their throats blush and shoulders sink while they in rhythm to his words inhaled well-being deep down in their lungs.

“Abanshamash, Abanshamash, Abanshamash,” he chanted slowly in a deep voice, and asked them to follow him in chorus.

When they’d sat for a while with their eyes shut repeating the mantra, Wanda noticed her sense of orientation and desire to return to reality disappear.

“Open your eyes now and look at me,” Atu said to his followers. “Abanshamash, Abanshamash,” he whispered, stretching his arms, causing his light yellow coat sleeves to fan like angel wings. “I see you,” he whispered. “I see you now for the first time, and you are beautiful. Your souls are beckoning to me. You are ready.”

“You are as beautiful as the sun itself,” he said afterward to each man and woman as he walked in between them.

When he came to Wanda he stood very still for a moment and let his eyes disappear into the abyss of her own. “You are as beautiful as the sun itself. You are as beautiful as the sun itself,” he said twice this time. “But do not listen to anyone! Do not even listen to me! Listen only to your own Atman, your own soul, and surrender yourself.”

As if she was under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, these words penetrated Wanda like a long-awaited recognition and clarity. Of their own accord, her eyes opened, her skin burned, and her hands twitched with the sort of cramp she knew only from her orgasms.

With lowered head, he caressed her cheek, returning ten minutes later to stretch out his palms toward her a few centimeters from her forehead.

“Let yourself relax, my flower. You have been through the first journey toward the rapture and rebirth of the empty moments, and now you are ready,” he finished.

Then she fainted.