There was another thing, too. If I heard too much, I couldn’t remember it.
But of course, Johnson had thought of that. Raymond suddenly was beside me.
He didn’t speak: we were too close to the window. But in the glimmer of light through the curtains, I could see him pointing.
I looked.
He was showing me the grating. The small netted grating, now dark, in the kitchen wall. Through which nothing, of course, could be heard. But which, when the door to the main room was open, might just give a glimpse of the people inside.
It was quite low. I could see it without climbing. I carried across a tub of portentias, and stood behind it, and watched.
I watched for quite a long time. I could still hear the murmur of voices, but not what they said. Once, Raymond shifted his position a little under the window and I saw the creeper shake, and go still.
There was no sign of Johnson. The security man strolled round the corner, flashing his light, then putting it out, took up his favourite position at the end of the porch rail, and began to roll a cigarette.
I crouched behind the tub. At the other end of the porch, the creeper was motionless.
Inside the sitting-room, the way they were speaking became different, and jerky. The passage beyond the end of the chalet suddenly became striped with light, as someone in the chalet moved out and into the bathroom.
Above my head, the light went on in the kitchen.
As before, it only showed in the cracks between louvres. But the ventilator had become a square of pure light. A little window into the kitchen. A little window which might let me look through the kitchen door, if it happened to open. Which might give me a glimpse, if the angle was right, of four men and one woman without their masks on.
Except that, with the guard standing in front of me, I couldn’t rise to my feet and have a look.
Above my head, a fridge door slammed, and a voice said, ‘There ain’t nothin’ here. Ice or soda. I’ll try the godammed shelves.’
A tap ran, and I could hear other cupboard doors rattling. Someone had got bored, or thirsty, or both, and was searching the kitchen.
The meeting was very likely over. Soon the man with the thirst would give up, and switch off the light, and open the door to the sitting-room and I wouldn’t see who was there, because I was squatting here like a dummy on the floor of the porch.
After which they would come out, one by one, and fall over us.
To hell with it.
The guard had his back to me. He was licking his cigarette paper, and feeling in his hip pocket for something.
I stood up, in full view if he turned, and fixed my eye to the ventilator.
I was just in time. I saw a hand turn off the tap above a full jug. I saw a tummy in a flowery shirt cross the kitchen and put a hand on the door and shove it open. I saw the man, full length now, carry the jug into the sitting-room. And as the door started to close, I saw the other three men and one woman, sitting round a littered table with two bottles of rum and some glasses on it.
One of them was Roger van Diemen, his dark brown hair curling wetly round his broad, reddened face.
The other four were the folk who had summoned him there, including the woman in heels, and the man who had come in from the kitchen.
The dope runners, according to Johnson. Whose boss had strong-armed or sweet-talked the Financial Director of Coombe’s into distributing their goodies for them, along with his bananas.
It would have been a great moment, if I had recognised them.
I didn’t, because everyone except Roger van Diemen was still wearing a mask.
The security man struck a match, and I slid down to a furious crouch, as above me the grating went dark again.
All that bloody trouble for nothing. And until the security man decided to wander away, I was trapped where I was, and so was Raymond. Easy meat for the five when they decided to leave, and the light from their open door floodlit his creeper and my bougainvillea.
I remembered the girls in the bedroom, and hoped the gents in the masks had as well. If they were supposed to be there for an orgy, then the more artistic they made it, the better.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be the fastest lay outside A.I.D., and in five minutes, flat or not, it was over.
The guard stayed where he was, looking about him and enjoying his cigarette. Inside the apartment, there was a sudden banging of doors, and a lot of high-pitched giggling and clinking of glasses.
A girl shrieked with excitement and the security man, his cigarette glowing under his folded arms, turned his head and gazed at the chalet, a dirty grin on his face.
And that was it. As he looked, the door half-opened on a crowd of masked heads and hookers, and a flood of light beamed out to within a couple of inches of where I was crouching.
I was bloody trapped.
Given half a chance, I might have managed to do something, such as clocking the guard with the tub and rushing past him into the garden.
I didn’t get to do anything, because of this digital watch.
Anyone who likes going in crowds, such as to church or the flicks, knows that when the wee hand gets to twelve, everybody’s digital pips.
This is called human error, there being a knob to push to stop it pipping in company.
After a lot of early advice from sound engineers, I always silence my watch on a film job.
I had silenced it. It wasn’t my fault that at that moment it started to cry because its batteries had bloody expired.
A digital dying would make a great Disney serial.
There are these quacking noises, while the display has a serious fit. Then it starts to go blind. That is, a sort of mist creeps over its face and you think it’s gone, and it was one great, gallant guy to leave the tent in this weather.
But you’re wrong. It’s not beaten yet. A quack, and there is its face, staring at you like a cat in a well, and shrieking, goddammit.
A digital can take half an hour to expire.
At the first quack, the security guard turned round.
At the second, I stopped trying to bash the watch on the tub without making a movement, and ripping it off, hurled it into the darkness, where it fell and lay sobbing.
The crowd of flowered shirts and masks in the doorway stopped dead. The security man, getting me into focus behind the portentias, put his hand to what was undoubtedly a gun at his belt.
He never touched it. A furious, and familiar, voice roared from the garden.
‘You, Cordelia girl? Is you a walkin’ duppy? You come right here. What yuh Ma say, yuh societ wid dis guy, he a guard? Evahbody do agree. Evahbody en show up here wid me, tek you home. You chase after men, soul, you get dirty like sin. You get throw in hell. I en cay wuh nobody say, you en come here!’
He didn’t have to yell. I was there already, dashing past the guard and across the grass to the steps down to the beach, where there stood not only this indignant Rastafarian with Johnson’s voice, but a whole crowd of other blacks, jumping up and down and adding their voices to his.
And out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sudden shiver of creeper and a dark form leaping the porch fence behind the guard’s surprised back, that meant Raymond was away as well.
The black figures swallowed me up, laughing and shouting. Through them, I could see the guard hesitate, and look behind him. For a moment, one man stepped forward from the crowd on the threshold, urgently, as if he meant to lead a rush after us.
The man in the cockerel mask, who had arrived first.
Then he stopped, and turned back, and said something to the others.
The guard looked at him, and said a few words, and the cockerel mask replied with a snap.
No one blew whistles, or raised the alarm, or summoned help. The guard made no effort, after the first moment, to touch his revolver. Instead, he began to walk towards us, waving his arms and telling us to clear out to the beach, with his eyes straining, trying to pick me out again after that
one flying glimpse.
With Johnson and myself unseen in the middle, the mob retreated good-humouredly to the shore. In the middle of the noise I could hear Johnson’s voice, still happily scolding.
‘Yuh goin’ get one load of licks, girl. Yuh a fret on yuh folks. You lose out bad, you muchin’ dat man. Lukie, you ever hear anyt’ing so yet as dat guard an’ dis li’l girl? No, soul. I so dam fed up. I don’ tek um easy. This girl like um so bad, I has to get she a husband. You, girl. You, Cordelia . . .’
The guard stood on the beach steps, looking at us. The light from the chalet porch abruptly went out, as the party on the threshold went back inside and closed the door. The twenty or thirty blacks round about us continued to move along the beach, as the shore wall of the Brighton gave way to the shore wall of the hotel next door, talking, singing and dancing on the smooth sand among the crabs.
The one turning cartwheels in a bowler hat, sleeveless T-shirt and tasselled garters was Raymond, I was pleased to see, with his wax nose and all-over No. 11 Mulatto still intact.
On the other side, in a swirl of laughter and cross-talk, I saw Johnson coming towards me, his round black glasses glittering under the brim of his stiff knitted hat.
His nose was his own, but covered like the rest of him with Egyptian No. 2. His eyebrows were pasted down with mortuary wax, and a scrub of crepe hair thoroughly altered the shape of his jaw and his lips. I was as proud of him as I had been of Natalie.
My own make-up was everyday Bajan, with a wig of short black fuzz to cover my hair, and a prosthetic mask I’d brought from England.
I had had the mask made because he had asked me. I had also brought a box of wigs. Among them was the one I wore every day, of orange spikes.
He hadn’t asked me to do that. He had only said, speaking in Lady Emerson’s comfortable room, that I had already proved a splendid target because of my hair, and it might be quite a nice idea if there were two of me.
Wigs on top of spiked hair are not easy. I had the wig made, and thought about it. Then before I left England, I went and had my hair bleached and cropped, and put the wig on it.
Johnson had admired it earlier this very evening in the Bridgetown headquarters of the Hackney Carifesta delegation. I’d no idea then that I’d ruin everything.
I stood on the beach and said, ‘I blew it. I’m sorry. I didn’t know the watch would do that. And they kept wearing their masks. It was a bloody disaster. Now they’ll change their plans.’ ‘So they might,’ Johnson said. ‘I shouldn’t worry. Worse things happen at sea.’
He didn’t sound wild, or fed up or anything. He sounded breathless, and a bit high.
Raymond came up, all over sand and out of breath, and said, ‘Sir, may I shake by the hand the greatest living Bajan-speaking Englishman? You’re a genius.’
‘I know,’ said Johnson.
‘You had me sweating blood when that thing went off.’
‘I know,’ said Johnson.
‘They could have caught her,’ said Raymond.
I stood there like a shrimp plant, with them talking over my head.
‘Not before so many witnesses,’ Johnson said. ‘But once the top brass are safe, they’ll come after us.’
‘Well, you’d better look after Rita,’ said Raymond. ‘There’s a truck out front for this lot. They’ve a concert to go to. I’ll go in that; I wasn’t spotted. And there’s someone round front, on the off chance they can follow the masks as they leave.’
I said, ‘Then you might see who they are after all?’
Johnson said, ‘A faint hope. They’ll be jumpy, and we mustn’t push it too far. We need proof, remember. We want them to go ahead with their plans. Don’t worry. Next time is the biggy, and no one will blow it . . .
‘Right,’ said Johnson. ‘Rita. They’re going to search that truck in a moment. And this beach. Let’s get on with it.’
Under his knitted hat was this fearful Rasta wig. Under his fringed satin shift was an even more awful red frilly shirt, and a locket.
‘Meet,’ said Johnson, ‘a member of the Trinidad Collapso Band, playing this evening in the hotel beach patio right there next door. Who’s got a turban?’
Someone, giggling, came up and reversing Johnson’s satin, slipped it over my blouse and skirt. It came to my ankles.
Someone else, delving into a pocket, dragged out a matching pink turban and tied it over my Afro.
‘Now. It’s a silly question,’ said Johnson, ‘but tell de troot, doh. If put to it, can you play a steel drum, my gel Rita-Cordelia?’
Chapter 17
Johnson didn’t fool me that time.
He wasn’t frowning. He meant it.
The Trinidad Collapso Band all wore red frilly shirts and seemed to be expecting him.
He went straight to an oil drum at the back, picked up the sticks, and when I refused politely, took a grip and threw himself into the next number. And whatever else, he’d done that before.
I watched him ripple his way cheerfully through three bits of reggae, including a rendition of House on Fire with solo bits in it, and then found a pair of congos looking lonely, and had a bash on my own.
I didn’t do so badly at that. With all those rows and rows of oil drums murmuring musically away you could hardly hear me, but I heard myself, and it was great. It was like having six daisies. Or three Bajan monkeys. Or drinking your way, like Ferdy, down the whole daiquiri list.
After a while, they got Johnson out to the front of the stand and he sang a whole long collapso in the same accent he’d used at the Brighton Beach, getting screams and applause between verses; and at the end, a fat black woman climbed up and kissed him.
Soon after that the band took a break, and he came over with two plates of barbecued chicken legs and these drinks made of rum and cane juice and lime, and said, ‘Big Lou says if you play mainstream clarinet as well, you’re on any time. Enjoy it?’
‘You’re bananas,’ I said. Joke. I took the plate. I was starving.
‘Had to put off a little time. Let’s talk,’ said Johnson. He returned the wave of the bandleader, took a swig of his drink and walked me round the back, through the dark part of the patio.
‘Raymond’s got a car waiting outside. You’ll change in it, and he’ll drop you near Natalie’s, and slip your case to you later. Ferdy says you wanted to see a plantation?’
I’d wanted to track down Roger van Diemen. I’d now seen Roger van Diemen, and much good it had done me. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said, with my mouth full.
‘Right. Because as a banana expert, Dr Thomassen is visiting one in the morning, and will take anyone who wants to go. Such as Maggie or Ferdy or Natalie plus or minus lawyer, plus or minus Fred Gluttermacher Moneybags.’
‘And Roger van Diemen?’ I said. ‘Without the monkey head? What did Raymond overhear in that chalet? Or doesn’t it matter now?’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ Johnson said. ‘But it was useful. Don’t worry. Raymond picked up your watch, because it and you may be worthy of many pale blossoms yet. It told us what not to expect.’
‘Such as?’ I said. I had nearly finished the drink. It was great.
On the beach, the sea was still whispering in long ghostly rollers, and overhead the stars looked like large-grain sugar in a black bowl, and all round us in the shadows, big fancy flowers were puffing out different scents like the ground floor in Harrods.
Where Johnson and I were standing, you could just smell sweat and spirit gum and rum and barbecued chicken.
He put his empty glass down, and his plate, and straightened slowly.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Prediction. A general move out of Barbados. The Paramount Princess is going on to Miami anyway. Natalie’s backer, accountant and lawyer all leave tomorrow afternoon, and Natalie will have fixed her Josephine details with Ferdy and be keen to get away, and let Roger stew in his own banana puree.
‘Ferdy and Thomassen expect to finish by latish tomorrow, and are talking about taking their stuff b
ack to London, via St Lucia. If they do, Maggie threatens to stay on with me.’
‘And you? And Dolly?’ I said.
Johnson took his dark glasses off and clenched one of their legs thoughtfully in his teeth.
‘I rather felt,’ he said, ‘that Dolly ought to hang about, and go wherever Roger van Diemen was going.’
I said, ‘I want to come with you. But what do I do if Natalie leaves?’
‘Well,’ Johnson said, ‘that’s the last item, as you might say, on the birthday chart. Would it ruin your life if Natalie were to sack you tomorrow?’
I gazed at him. ‘Because I won’t cut my hair?’
‘Partly,’ he said.
‘Because she’s converted Fred Moneybags to the idea of handing the film to the Curtises?’
‘Partly,’ he agreed. ‘And maybe one or two other things you haven’t heard about. All in a good cause. You don’t need the money. And Natalie really occupies the only prime slot in Natalie’s life. And that way, no questions asked, you can come on Dolly with Lenny and Raymond and me.’
‘And Maggie,’ I said. Absently. I was thinking of what he’d just been saying.
And maybe one or two things you haven’t heard about.
He had put his glasses back on, but I had seen the gleam. I said, ‘Wait a minute.’
‘You said I could,’ Johnson said defensively. ‘Borrow your orange wig. Divert attention from the target.’
I began to raise my voice, and dropped it again. ‘I was the bloody target,’ I hissed. ‘In a bloody black Afro wig. Who was wearing mine and what was she doing?’
‘He,’ said Johnson. ‘Lead trumpet-player with the Brixton West Indian Band. Four feet eleven, and smashing legs. We borrowed that feathered thing you’ve got, with the bloomers.’
It was new. I’d never even worn it yet. I was keeping it for a good thing.
My feathers. My bloomers. My wig.
‘And what did he do?’ I said. In spite of myself, my voice went up at the end.
‘Nothing much,’ said Johnson soothingly. ‘You were jet-skiing in somebody’s swimming pool. No one got close enough to see anything but the hair.’
The Tropical Issue: Dolly and the Bird of Paradise Page 25