One People by Guy Kennaway

Author:Guy Kennaway [Kennaway, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2022-03-30T22:00:00+00:00

SANDRA

Sandra was as pretty as Jackie, but because she was shorter, plumper and had a bumpa batty, covered in cellulite, she was considered much sexier than Jackie by those who declared themselves experts on the matter, i.e. every man in Cousins Cove. She had none of Jackie’s elegance, and in the place of her sister’s intelligence was a short-sighted, even stupid, cunning, but she had courage, and few people or things scared her.

She was a shining example of someone with no conscience, and keenly followed her siblings into the family trades: petty crime and prostitution, but didn’t have their determination or brains to be a success. It wasn’t easy to follow the high achievements of Jackie – at one point Negril’s highest-paid whore – and two elder brothers, both of whom were serving impressively long stretches in Spanish Town Jail for robbery and murder. Sandra managed little more than stealing towels on the beach, and diluting the pure orange juice she sold in Negril with squash and water.

Although essentially a failure in the world of crime, Sandra felt big and bad in Cousins Cove, which was a peculiarly forgiving and encouraging community for low achievers. You could be the best, or at the very least brilliant, in your chosen field, without achieving a thing. It was enough simply to talk about it. Dreams were as highly regarded as actions; words were as valued as deeds. Everyone had a money-making scheme in the planning stage, and no-one felt any pressure to get it off the ground.

Those who did actually do something, as opposed to talk about it, were assured of success – though it must be pointed out that the threshold for success in Cousins Cove was low and wide. The football team, which won only one game the season after the famous match against the Police, was still ‘de best inna de island. Serious’. The top athlete, a star of track and field, was Vinton, with his knock knees and immense flat feet which looked like batter poured into a deep frying pan, who each successive year left Cove for the interparish trials in Lucea, full of hope, with many slaps on the back, firm shakes of the hand, and injunctions to ‘lick dem down’, and ‘mash dem up’, and was knocked out in the first, or very occasionally, second, heat of every event he entered. He was knocked out, in fact, as often as Cove’s other great sporting champion, Boydie the boxer, who at twenty-five had trouble finding his words after so many blows to his head.

Cove’s top tourist operator was Jo, whose newly built bar stood on rocks beside the seashore, not far from the shed he built with Ione, his old business partner whom he had parted from acrimoniously after an argument about Ione’s tendency to long change customers. Jo’s new shed was about twelve foot square, with bamboo walls, a pitched zinc roof, and a concrete floor on which was built a mahoe wood bar. Behind

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.