Waking up to Jamaica with a jerk

John Diamond

IN NEGRIL, when you're thirsty you reach up from your beach lounger, pull a coconut from the palm which shades you from the 90° heat, slice its top off with an old bread knife, stick a straw in, and suck. In Negril, when the sun begins to set, and the heat subsides very slightly, you drag Yourself off the beach lounger, pad across a few yards of the sort of fine, white sand that has made our egg-timer industry what it is today, and warm up in the sea. When You're hungry in Negril you beckon o$er one of the itinerant jerk-chicken sellers who opens his oil-drum barbecue, reaches down into the coals and thrusts half a scrawny Jamaican chicken between two slices of Mother's Pride. And when, as you certainly will be, you're violently sick in Negril, over the fine white sand and in the Warm blue sea, you find the little pharmacy In the tiny shopping mall, where the pharmacist smiles and says, `Yuh bin eatin' Jerk, huh-huh?' and dispenses a giant bottle of Milk of Magnesia. In paradise proper they eat ambrosia; in its Caribbean annex they subsist on a rougher diet. For three days we tried to get a proper meal. Because we were keen to do what all right-on tourists do, we started off by eating what the locals claim to eat Which is, say the guide books, jerk-pork and jerk-chicken. Jerking meat involves steeping in an all manner of tropical herbs and spices, cooking it slowly over a hot fire until it's perfectly tender and the skin has been infused with the mottled colours of the Peppers and the berries, and then leaving it to hang around in the sun for a Couple of days to let the salmonella get up to speed. We tried a hotel which promised an authentic Jamaican haute cuisine, which turned out to be jerk chicken with rice

served by men in white mess jackets. We gave up on ethno-soundness and went to the hotel which advertised 'French gourmet-style cooking', jerk chicken with saute potatoes and a glutinous sauce.

And then we found Rick's. Yes, I know you've been to Negril yourself and you know that everyone knows Rick's, but all I can tell you was that it took us three days of dining off imported American rice crackers in front of 1 Love Lucy on our hotel room cable television before we discovered the place.

Negril is at the very western tip of an island which lies almost precisely along an east-west axis. There is Negril and then there is sea, and each night the sun drops, plonk, into the Caribbean a couple of hundred yards off the Negril coast and, in doing so, does things with the sky the like of which I last saw just before the light show overheated and broke down at a particularly heavy Pink Floyd concert in 1969. At Rick's, which is at the very end of a rocky four mile isthmus which crawls due west into the Caribbean, it does the same but more so.

There was once an actual Rick, an American who found Negril before the highway joined the town to the rest of the island and the tourists moved in, but he sold up a while back leaving behind him precise instructions for the manufacture of the perfect daiquiri. He also left behind a menu targeted at all those Americans who have come here because Negril is beach- bum territory and who want to eat authen- tic Jamaican-American food, but are loth to try a second jerk-chicken.

And so, for the rest of the week we drove our battered Honda sub-compact (air-fan broken, passenger window wedged closed by the massive dent in the door, £50 a day) up the isthmus and sat on Rick's patio watching the solar psychodelia and drinking too many daiquiris and eating fresh snapper steaks.

And each morning after we'd risen and forced a little fresh pineapple and mango down our dehydrated throats, we'd crawl down to the beach and prepare that day's list of un-cappable retorts for that day's crop of peripatetic hash-hawkers. Mari- juana is, of course, totally illegal in Jamaica, but in the way that parking on a yellow line is illegal in Britain. And be- cause Negril fronts the wilderness in which many of the island's 'non-existent' canna- bis fields flourish, everyone you meet hustling cabbies, prim salesgirls, spruce waiters — has a contact who has some really great stuff. So as you lie on the beach a dozen, a score, a hundred narcotic entrepreneurs parade past and wave big sticky wads of dried leaf in your face.

'No thanks,' you say, at first.

'Great stuff this, man. I do you a real good deal.'

'Some other time, maybe.'

But they don't go. You say you don't use

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the stuff; they say you ought to while you're here, as one might suggest a fine wine in Paris or saki in Tokyo. You say you're too hungover at the moment. They say this stuff is a real good cure for hangovers. You say you've only got a few dollars on you, they say, but man, this stuff only costs a few dollars. Eventually we learned to say that we were members of the Romford Brethren, a little-known sect which forbids any narcotic not mentioned in Ecclesiasticus. They took the point and tried to sell us staw hats instead, or shells, or long stiff leaves of aloe-vera which leaks a gelatinous, sunburn-soothing sap.

And as we sat smoothing the aloe into our legs, another hawker would come up, and thrust a wad of hash at us and say, `Sunburn man? Smoke some of this an' you won't feel a thing,' and we'd start all over again.

The haggling filled the day, though, and there's precious little to fill a Negril day, other than playing in the ludicrous sea and on the ridiculous sand and staring into the laughably dense blue of the sky. So we tried shopping.

Negril is billed as connoisseur's Jamaica, which is to say that until recently the hotels weren't up to much and that, unlike Ocho Rios or Montego Bay, there was no local branch of the sad and understocked Wool- worth's or the displaced Burger Kings. What they had, and what every small Jamaican town has, was the local craft market. Jamaica seems to have three crafts: carving knotted wood into repre- sentations of ganja-toking Rastafarians and covering them with treacly varnish; weaving excellent and cheap straw hats and — the most traditional craft this — import- ing 1-shirts from Taiwan and screen- printing them with slogans reading 'Reggae Sunsplash' and 'No Problem!'

Other countries have official birds and national flowers: Jamaica has an official national slogan. 'No Problem!' is the re- sponse to everything from a request for a drink/in the poshest 'bar to a demand for a stamp in the tumbledown post office, and translates as, 'Hold on for an hour and then I'll come and ask you again what it is you wanted, and wheri you tell me I'll say No Problem! and you'll probably get your drink some time next Tuesday.' Having grown up with the British telephone repair system this wasn't much of a problem for us, but the Americans who form most of Negril's small tourist population hate it. Then again, the Jamaicans aren't too keen on the Americans either. Britons in Jamaica have a much better time with the locals, most of whom still talk about The Mother Country, which is pretty generous of them, all things considered.

We finished up buying two No Problem! T-shirts, a couple of pounds of Blue Mountain coffee at the mall, and some rather good 12-year-old rum. The only other shopping we could do was at the fruit stalls by the roundabout where they weigh out sweetsop and soursop on ante-natal- clinic baby scales and, once they'd disco- vered we were British and had actually shopped in Brixton and Ridley Road mar- kets, got advice on the best way of cooking akee.

We also got a wonderful recipe for jerk-pork which one day, when the Negril beach aversion therapy has worn off and when I want to remember the ludicrous sun and the ridiculous sea, I might even try.

'I concede, Plato, that it appears to be a rabbit.'