Following is an excerpt from Carol A.N. Dunn's novel, The Mountain of Inheritance, a gold medal-winning book in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission Writing Competition. The series continues tomorrow.

Lois' earliest memory was that of being taken out of the bed she shared with her mother, and being placed on covered sponges on the floor of the kitchen to continue her slumber. Night after night with the scraping noise the bougainvillea plant made against the kitchen window humming in her ear, Lois would stare up at the dark, smoke-stained ceiling until she fell into a wretched and fitful sleep.

But not before the other overtures that made up the 'Symphony of the Dark' had been played yet again as they did in her head for years afterwards: the clicking of the front door as the latch opened, a man's voice, footsteps across the floorboards, occasionally laughter, and always the dull, rhythmic creaking of the metal bed.

Her first day at primary school, Lois got into a fight. She was not sure what the boy had meant by the word he called her mother, but he had stuck out his tongue and said it nastily to her after she had beaten him at a game of marbles. Then he pushed out his fat, ugly lips, and repeated it over and over again like a nursery rhyme, giving it form and rhythm as the taunting grew. Lois went wild and attacked him.

Often absent

In that first year of school, she was often absent. There were times when her mother's illness - the one that made dark spots appear around her eyes and on her arms - forced Lois to stay home and take care of her. And sometimes she had to stay with Mark when her mother went out. One such day, Mark began to shake and foam at the mouth. When the nurse at the clinic took him, it was the last time Lois saw him alive.

The next year when Lois moved into grade two, her brother J.J. started school. Lois often wished guiltily that she, too, could live in the same house as J.J. It was a big house, clean and well kept, with nice smells and an inside toilet, one of the few of its kind in Riley's Mount. She often wondered how it was that her father had taken J.J. to live with him and not her, and why it was that she could visit J.J. at his home but he wasn't allowed to come to her house and play with her there.

She attempted to ask her mother these questions once and was dryly dismissed for being "too botheration".

Sometimes she would see her father on the road or in a shop and she would call to him, and he would answer her politely and ask how she was doing. But he never seemed excited to see her, never lifted her up or tugged her ear like the other fathers did with their children. It was Lois' greatest dream that one day her father would send for her and take her up to the house to live with him, and every day she would try to think of things she could do to earn his love.

Crowd

On her way home from school one Friday, on reaching the clearing that opened into the narrow footpath leading up to her home, Lois became aware of a crowd: dozens of men and women standing in front of the house, their voices buzzing. She burrowed her way through the pack, brushing past pairs of tall legs, large bottoms and sinewy arms. And then she saw her mother. She was lying belly-down in the high grass, still wearing the same nightgown Lois had left her in that morning, only the light green was now streaked with red. Her head was twisted to the side and her eyes stuck out of them in bullfrog fashion. Her lips were a curious bluish black.

And so Lois began her life where she had always wanted to be, in the house where her brother lived.

But it would be a very long time before the picture of her mother faded from her mind and every night before she fell asleep, it was the last thing that ushered her into the darkness. And she would rock herself to slumber but would always wake up not long after, expecting to hear the scratching of the bougainvillea bush against the kitchen window or the persistent sounds that filtered through the thin walls of the little house where she and her mother and brother Mark had once lived, that stood at the side of that hill overlooking the sea in Riley's Mount.