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than one. In this place the ghosts walked openly and brazenly in the streets. The blue eyes of a Dutch planter looked enquiringly out of the black face of the local midwife; the wrists of an Indian indentured labourer who had died a hundred years earlier were the same wrists that twisted brown paper round the peanuts Millie bought at the stall. Mr Chan’s face had skipped down the centuries, travelling through Demerara and all the way to Panama and back before arriving to peer anxiously from the doorway of his restaurant on this, the main thoroughfare of New Amsterdam. With each decade the genetic kaleidoscope shifted and a greater variety of ghosts appeared, sometimes as many as four or five mischievously occupying one body. Jumbie people. That is the best way of describing the population of New Amsterdam, capital of Berbice county. Jumbie people.
    There had been no electricity for four weeks. Apart from Mr Chan’s restaurant which had its own generator, the only illumination in the street came from the pots of fire on the vendors’ tables, an unstable flickering light that cast weird shadows on the moving faces. Millie was trying to dislodge the crunched peanuts from the cavities in her back teeth when Selma whispered in her ear:
    ‘See Mrs Singh over there?’ Millie glanced at the full bosomed Indian woman examining sandals at a stall. Selma continued:
    ‘She can’t get children.’ Selma’s eyes were small, hard and black as ackee seeds. ‘They say that after she marry, her pussy stop being sweet and creamy an’ it start to spout ammonia and acids. Then it start to talk an’ say rude tings an’ her husband too frighten to go near her.’
    At that moment, Mrs Singh looked up straight into Millie’s eyes. Millie felt herself flushing.
    ‘Good evening, Millie.’ She called across. ‘Say hello to your mother for me.’
    ‘Yes, tank you, Mrs Singh.’
    Selma continued relentlessly:
    ‘Anyway, her husband send her to see an Indian obeah man and he tell her she must take an image of Mother Cathari – that’s the evil one of seven Indian sisters – and keep it under her pillow and then her pussy will stop talkin’ and spittin’ poisons and she can get children.’
    ‘Shhhhhh. Selma you wicked.’ Millie looked troubled. Her mother had tried to stop her seeing too much of Selma but as she lived next door, it was impossible. When Millie asked why, her mother had replied grimly:
    ‘Because that girl don’ give satisfaction, that’s why.’
    Millie and Selma walked in silence to New Street where they lived.
    ‘Bye, Selma.’ Selma climbed gingerly the disintegrating wooden steps of the one-storey house on stilts. When she reached the top she turned and waved like a film star on the steps of an airplane, before vanishing into the dark, rotting timber jaws of the house.
    Millie hung around on the steps of her own house. How could she tell her mother that she needed one hundred and fifty dollars to save her teeth? She went in. Her mother bent over the sewing machine working by the light of the kerosene lamp. Granny slept in one of the threadbare armchairs, her bad leg thick and swollen like a turtle’s leg resting on a stool.
    ‘Millie, quick, come watch this rice for me while I fetch the washing.’ Christine, her sister, stood by the stove in a loose blue tee-shirt and brown corduroy pants. She sniffed under her arm:
    ‘Phew! I’m rank,’ she said. Her four-year-old daughter, Joanne, chattered at her side. Christine bent over to fasten the child’s ribbon:
    ‘If you lose this ribbon you can’t get another and it’s no more party time. Understand?’
    Millie poked at the rice to stop it catching at the bottom of the pan. She turned to tell Christine what the dentist had said about her teeth but Christine had already disappeared down the back steps into the yard. A minute or two later she returned, arms full of washing, prattling in her shrill voice:
    ‘Well, Millie girl, they tell me at work today