Free A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James Page A

you want step off now.
    —Eddie, the man still bothering you at the gate?
    —Him say him magazine is ’bout Lesbian and Elton John.
    —No, Led Zeppelin and—
    —Tell him to move off.
    —How about me making it easy for you.
    The white man takes out his wallet—I only need ten minutes, he says. Damn Americans always thinking we’re like them and that everybody is up for sale. Just once I’m glad the guard is such an asshole. But he’s looking at the money, he’s looking at it long. You can’t help it with American money, getting ’round the fact that this piece of paper is more valuable than everything else in your purse. That if you whip out one you change the behaviour of a whole room. It just doesn’t seem right, a piece of paper with no colour but green. Lord knows pretty money isn’t the only pretty thing that’s worthless. The guard takes one last look at the piling bills and walks away, over to the entrance of the house.
    I chuckled. When you can’t fight temptation, you have to flee, I say. The white man looks at me, annoyed, and I just chuckle more. Doesn’t happen every day, a Jamaican who doesn’t turn into a yes massa I going do it for you now massa, whenever he sees a white man. Danny used to be appalled by it. Until he started to like it. Hell of a thing when white skin is the ultimate passport. I was a little surprised at how good it felt, me and the white man both being kept outside like beggars. On the same level in that regard at least. You’d think I’d never been around white people, or at least Syrians who think they’re white.
    —You fly all the way from America just to do a story on the Singer?
    —Well, yeah. He’s the biggest story right now. The number of stars coming out for this concert, you’d think it was Woodstock.
    —Oh.
    —Woodstock was a—
    —I know what Woodstock was.
    —Oh. Well, Jamaica is all over the news this year. And this concert. New York Times just did a story that the Jamaican opposition leader was shot at. From the Office of Prime Minister, no less.
    —Really? That would be news to the Prime Minister, since theopposition would have no reason to be at his office. Also that’s uptown. On this very road. Nobody firing no bullets here.
    —That’s not what the newspaper said.
    —Then it must be true then. Guess if you write shit, then you have to believe every shit you read.
    —Aw, come on, don’t bust my balls like that. It’s not like I’m some goddamn tourist. I know the real Jamaica.
    —Good for you. I’ve lived here all my life and haven’t found the real Jamaica yet.
    I walk off but the white man is following me. There’s only one bus stop, I guess. Maybe by now Kimmy has paid a visit to her goddamn parents, who have been robbed and her mother possibly raped. Yet as soon as I cross over to the other side I want to stay. I don’t know. I know I have nothing to go home to, but that’s no different from any other day. I only need to remember every headline about some family getting shot, bulletin about the curfew, news report about some woman who get raped or how crime moving like a wave uptown to scare myself stupid. Or my mother and father trying to act as if the gunmen didn’t take something that was always between him and her and them alone. The whole day I was with them they never touched each other once.
    The white man takes the first bus that comes. I don’t and I’m telling myself that it’s because I don’t want to be on the same bus with him. But I know I’ll miss the next one. And the one after that too.

Demus
    S omebody need to listen to me and it might as well be you. Somewhere, somehow, somebody going judge the quick and the dead. Somebody goin’ write about the judgment of the good and wicked, because I am a sick man and a wicked man and nobody ever wickeder and sicker than me. Somebody, maybe forty years later when God come for all of we, leaving not one. Somebody going write about this, sit down at a table on a