“Yuh fraid?”

Apparently, I have set up residence in a dead woman’s room. Mr Freddie has gleefully informed me that his, and Sister Betty’s, and the ailing Cotton’s mother passed on within the very four walls in which I spend my nights.

“No man, me nevah fraid fi nuttin.” Which isn’t quite true, I’m afraid of lots of things. Not being accepted into the masters program of my dreams. Never seeing more of India then the 32 hours I’ve spent waiting out layovers in Indira Ghandi International. But not ghosts.

On my mothers side of the family, spirits are accepted as a matter of course, so this is nothing new. As for me, staunch agnostic that I am, I am enough of a reader to know that once you give something a name, god or ghost, it is so. And perhaps it explains why only my overhead light turns on and off, seemingly under its own whimsical power.

Jamaicans look death, like life, square in the eye and meet it head on, and most are possessed of a deep, strong, almost organic faith. They carry God with them out of the church yard and instead of hanging Him up with their Sunday best till the next week, carry their Saviour to business meetings and market, He is in taxis and cookshops. It makes good sense that loved ones would also be eternally just around around the corner. In a manner of speaking.

I would have thought nothing of Mr Freddie’s jibe, but in the past 18 hours, Mr Cotton has transformed from a man silently awaiting the inevitable to a man possessed. He shouts, he murmurs, he grunts. Not even Sister Betty, his exhausted nurse, can make sense of him. Sometimes, it sounds as if he’s greeting invisible guests, at other times Cotton is seeking to evade some form of painful torment.

I am twenty four years old, and I am afraid to turn off my light. I am afraid of the strange company Mr Cotton is keeping in the dark down the hall.

It’s the cancer. Left unchecked to rampage through his tissues like the hostile invader it is, it’s pillaging organs and nerves, convincing Cotton’s body to destroy itself, and his brain is the last stronghold. It’s failing fast in a fevered hysteria. Disease is the most cunning devil of all, and it’s playing cruel tricks on his mind. We are in the worst of it, and surely, it can’t be long now. Cotton is already on the path to some new strange world, and he’s calling out for a hand to hold, or pull him back, but those of us firmly anchored in this one can’t help.

Instead, I go to the living to sit with Sister Betty. There will be little sleep tonight in the grey house here at the top of Coultart Grove. We are all haunted by a duppy who has yet to die.