Adventures in unhealthy Scepticism

I stared around the small box of a cell from a lumpy mattress, which, despite the lack of evidence, my crawling skin refused to believe was not full of bed bugs. My friend Frank’s gift of the understatement had obviously rubbed off on me because I wryly quipped to my new crustacean bed mates – “this was not part of the plan.”

To be perfectly honest, the entire trip had been rife with twists, culminating rather spectacularly I thought in the first arrest of my life landing in a foreign jail at that.

My first portent of doom, that should have been my warning, was when after the excited greetings of my cousins at Heathrow airport and my proposal of capturing the moment in a photo, I discovered that I had left my precious digital camera in my seat on the plane!

The timing and circumstance of that latest gaffe could not have been more tragic. Imagine painstakingly following every promotion, buying even toilet paper online to accrue enough airline miles for a precious visit to the UK on a student budget only to leave your camera on the aeroplane! A digital camera was still a relative luxury in 2005 before the age of state-of-the-art cameras being on your cell phone.

My absentmindedness, my family noted, had started from I was 4 years old if not before; an exhausting transatlantic flight would exacerbate not diminish that propensity to lose things. I wailed and moaned to my cousins who tried to encourage me by suggesting that the camera might be turned in by a good Samaritan. They added that the latest disposable cameras actually produced decent photos. So it was that my trip to Madame Tussaud’s, taking photos beside famous wax figures from Fidel Castro to Barbara Cartland all had to be captured by disposable camera.

Looking back, I realized that that twist was the first of four. The next two started out deceptively appearing as if they were going to rescue that initial inauspicious start to my holiday. How wrong I was! I had not been in London for too long when I heard that my favourite singer, who had been touring the USA had been invited to the grand opening of a performance arena. My cousin Ryan and I could not contain our excitement. Since, he was also a fan. We had never dreamed that we would have ever been in the same city to experience his performance together. On the day of the concert, we played his songs all day and we checked all the fan message boards and blogs. Gradually, doubt started to creep in. Noone, save that one blogger, had heard of his joining the lineup. We got into huge arguments with some of the meaner commenters who scoffed at us for our naivete. Eventually, we became glum and thought that our initial scepticism had been correct. What would have been the chances that our favourite singer would come to London to coincide with my visit? A free concert to boot. It was just too good to be true. Around the time of the beginning of the concert my cousin said “you know seh if a did really true and we miss it we naah guh live it out” I agreed and so we headed out to the underground. As we exited the station we saw a terrible sight- a slew of Rasta Far I were heading our way. “Who yuh just see pon stage” we asked one of them. “Nuh the Gong youngest son” he answered. The “Gong” referring to none other than Bob Marley. The youngest son being Damian Marley our favourite singer. I saw myself fall to my knees and start to roll on the ground letting out loud unholy caterwauling. I saw myself in my mind’s eye of course. In reality, I turned around and went back inside the station. My cousin followed. Neither of us speaking or even looking at each other. To this day up to the time of the telling of this story we have never spoken about it.

When the next amazing timing of an event came my way, I reacted differently; still smarting from the cynicism that had made me miss the performance of my favourite singer, I did not allow pessimism to win this time. An animal rights group was protesting the use of research animals, a cause close to my heart. I had been careful as an international student in the USA not to join any protests at all. I was excited to join this one, figuring as a tourist in this one, I would be safe enough.

Boy was I wrong.

The presence of television cameras caused me some disquiet. Again, I comforted myself that this type of protest was unlikely to get me into any kind of trouble. In any case, for such a small risk, how could I pass up an opportunity to join with like-minded individuals and act from the strength of my convictions? I ended the day of the protest feeling it had been a highlight of my trip.

With only a few days left in my trip, there were only two things left on my original to- do list: my obligatory run for a new city, which had been thwarted by cold, lung-hostile London air, and a visit to my cousin’s university. My trip continued its trend of finally turning around because the next day was bright, sunny and warm by London standards anyway! My cousin brilliantly suggested we combine the two by running to the university campus. Of course, I brought one of my handy disposable cameras along, zipped safely in my cousin’s running shorts. He took a few shots of me with various buildings of his university behind me.

It was when we arrived home from our run that the fourth twist of this crazy holiday was revealed – I was greeted with the news that my mother’s sister, who lived in London, had received a cancer diagnosis and had been sent to hospice care. Although my mother was devastated when I called and told her the news, she was happy that I had gotten to spend some time with her and that I was representing her since she was unable to travel to the UK. I now knew I had to develop my photos before returning to the USA which would allow me to leave some photos with my aunt. My cousin took me to a photo studio where I developed photos from five disposable cameras- a total of 140 photos. As we looked through them, we came to the ones we had taken that day at his university. “Oh no” my cousin said, “somehow our run with the camera in my pocket must have ruined these photos.” The proprietor came over and said there was a fault in the negative and it was most likely due to poor storage practices from the pharmacy where I had bought the cameras. “Nothing to do with being shaken up in your pocket.” he said. A closer look at the photos made us gasp at the same time -a few of the buildings appeared to be on fire! It was certainly a bizarre coincidence that of all the cameras and of all the photos only the ones of his university were damaged, and the damage had caused fire-looking images.

That night I had a dream that brought back a memory of my uncle’s death the previous year during my qualifying exams. It had been such a stressful time that the dream of a building burning in the next town, had simply signalled to me that stress could trigger nightmare-like dreams. I had told my classmates the dream so imagine our shock when a burning building did make the news; the incident had occurred within hours after I had told them about the dream. I had felt like I could have stopped it by alerting the relevant authorities, my classmates on the other hand felt that I would have been labelled crazy if I had tried. Eventually, I had just put the dream down to falling asleep with my heating pad on my back and pure coincidence.

This time however, I wondered if grief and stress could make me psychic. When I woke up, against the advice of my cousins, I went to the police with the photos. I told them what had happened to me the previous year. The result of this conversation with the police was as everybody had warned me: the officers thought I was crazy; the kinder ones hiding smiles and expressed condolences for the death and sickness in my family. I was to regret not taking the advice of my cousins even more the following day when the police turned up at their doorstep to arrest me for suspected arson.

This brings us back to my present situation in a dank cell on a lumpy most likely bed- bug-infested mattress. The officers did not believe in coincidence. They most definitely did not believe that I had been made temporarily psychic by grief or anything else. They showed me social media photos of myself at the animal rights protest. Some of the photos my cousin had snapped with the ill-fated camera had been in front of biomedical research laboratories at his university. I tried to point out to them that if I had intended to set fire to the buildings, coming to the police would have been the last thing I would have done to call attention to myself. “Lady,” one of them said. “Do you know how many murderers call the emergency line and use that very same line to protest their innocence?”

If it was one thing that I had learned in my short life it was that in the tapestry of your story, the threads woven into the darker patterns could contribute as much beauty as the conventional, conservative ones. “Sooner or later,” I mused. “they’ll find out what caused the fire, and it won’t have been me.”

“I hope these are only phantom bed bugs.”

I leaned back on the lumpy mattress.