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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 whitejust 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