by R. A. Lang
I looked everywhere, but to no avail. Out of desperation, I called Haitian who admitted to taking the keys so no one, including myself, could open the door. Apparently, her personal belongings were still being stored there.
I demanded she return my keys immediately because I needed to get into my workshop to do some things. She refused until I told her I’d cut my lock off because I needed to get in. She arrived in a remarkably short time with the keys, but she stressed that I must keep my store locked and not allow anyone in.
“What a bloody cheek!” I told her. She was not a friend and not renting the space. I also questioned what the hell was the three thousand dollars for if she didn’t use it to rent a place? As always, she ignored the question and told me not to touch her things or there would be trouble. I knew what that meant.
I opened my workshop, but I couldn’t even get through the door because the entire room was packed full of junk which was no good to anyone. There was a broken old fashioned TV, an old plastic typewriter, dozens of empty washing machine soap bottles, old furred-up aluminium saucepans, and broken bar stools.
I called her and told her she had to collect it all or I would arrange for it to be taken to the island dump. She freaked and threatened me with voodoo if I touched any of it.
With no voodoo and the absence of the smell of garlic and onions being fried five times per day, Inez moved back in. I just wanted to have some company, but I could have chosen better!
On evening I was standing in my living room talking to Inez who was in the bedroom at the time. Without any warning and for no apparent reason, I found myself lying on the floor where I was just standing in terrible pain. My right knee was badly dislocated and already very swollen. I couldn’t understand what could have happened, and neither could Inez. I couldn’t make it to the car so Inez called an ambulance to come and collect me.
Almost half an hour had passed before the ambulance arrived. By that time my knee was like the size of a football. The two paramedics secured me onto a stretcher and put me in the ambulance and proceeded to drive off to the central hospital where I’d be treated.
Once in the hospital I was given morphine for the very obvious pain and left to wait until a doctor was available. Soon after being examined, I was sent for an X-ray. The X-ray clearly showed my dislocated knee had half an inch gap between my bones. I waited a little longer, before two doctors returned, and together put my knee back into place. Next, I had to have a cast wrapped around my knee. Actually, the cast began at my ankle and continued up the entire length of my leg to my hip.
With my new purple cast I couldn’t drive any more. Inez could therefore have full use of my car until my cast could be removed. I was told the cast needed to stay on for at least six weeks, but as I was soon to fly back to Nigeria, the cast had to be removed after just ten days.
I was determined the cast wasn’t going to impair my holiday and managed to keep mobile with the use of crutches and taxis. Getting up and down steps was the most difficult manoeuvre, not to mention getting on a deep sea fishing boat! I had previously charted the boat and invited a good friend who was also a bar owner to accompany me on a deep sea fishing trip. Such trips were certainly not cheap in the Caribbean so I didn’t want to lose my deposit, nor let down the boat owner who I had fished with so many times in the past.
I arrived at the quayside where my thirty-seven foot charter was moored at six o’clock in the morning on a terrible day. With torrential rain and gale force winds I worried whether the trip would be cancelled, and also if my friend would even turn up. At 6.15am the captain arrived together with his son, who was also his deckhand, and five minutes later my friend beeped his car horn as he drove past us to look for a place to leave his car.
With help from the captain and my six foot friend from the Dominican Republic, I was helped to board the vessel and into a soaking wet chair so I wouldn’t risk falling on the very bouncy ride out of the marina. The storm was one of those freak Caribbean types, which soon passed by. Unfortunately, the rough seas had caused the fish to swim into deeper water so we knew we wouldn’t have too much luck until later in the day. The going was very quiet, which was sad for my friend’s first fishing experience. Luckily, the boredom wasn’t to last.
The storm had loosened a large amount of seaweed from somewhere, which was floating all over the ocean. This became a real nuisance as it fouled our fishing lines, which we constantly had to reel in to clear them. Sometimes, a large piece of seaweed would foul a line causing the ratchet on the reel to slip and making us all jump, thinking we had a fish on.
The floating seaweed did have some very good advantages though. Some species of fish liked to shelter beneath it and feed on it at the same time. This was especially the case with dorado, which some people like to call dolphin fish for some unknown reason. They don’t have any resemblance to dolphins.
In the Caribbean, they were mostly referred to as mahi mahi. With mahi mahi you could distinguish the males from the females as the females had smaller, more rounded heads than the male’s larger, squarer heads. Mahi mahi like to jump out of the water once they are hooked as if they are dancing and usually gave a good performance. They are as tasty as they are beautiful with their turquoise appearance.
In the afternoon, my captain noticed a large area of seaweed in the distance and headed in its direction to pass as close as he could alongside it without risking our lines getting fouled again. As we began to pass the weed, the action started.
Suddenly, bang: one of the two rods on the port side was hit and the reel immediately started to spin; a second later, bang again and the second rod on the port side was hooked up too, then again from the rod on the starboard side which was almost bent double. The captain instantly pushed both the turbo diesel engine throttles hard down for a few seconds which hurled the boat forward at a rate of knots to ensure we all had tight lines and firm hook ups.
With the very loud roar from both engines, and a large plume of smoke from both their exhausts, game on, I thought as I was handed the starboard rod by the deckhand. My friend was handed the second from the port side and the deckhand took the third.
I couldn’t assume the normal fighting position, which required both legs to be in a bent position on the footboard sticking out from the base of the revolving chair. Much of the fighting power was gained through the legs and lumbar region to get the necessary leverage to ‘pump’ the fish to retrieve the lost line from the fish’s initial few runs.
It wasn’t possible to simply reel in a fish of sizable proportions, especially all the while the boat was moving forward to keep the lines tight. Instead, I had my damaged right leg’s foot on the deck and my left foot on the footrest, making it rather uncomfortable and difficult to play my fish. My fish was particularly frisky and crossed the deckhand’s line. The deckhand noticed what was going on and crouched down and got under my line and stood up again, the other side of it. A minute later he had to repeat the procedure as my fish retuned back to my side again. My fish was trying everything not to end up on a plate.
Fish have the ability to spit out a hook the moment you allow the line to slacken. It is as if they are waiting for the opportunity, much to the frustration of many game fishermen. I particularly liked my choice of fishing boat, as the captain always flattened the barb on all his hooks to allow the fish to discard them easily if ever the line snapped. That was another reason never to allow the line to slacken.
The boat only used 50lb breaking strain line which meant the fishermen couldn’t tighten the drag setting on their reels too much, to make the fish get tired sooner. I always set the drag setting on my own reels to 25lb. That meant the fish was pulling away from no more than a 25lb load.
It also meant that the fisherman was also pulling against a 25lb load, even if a fish weighed over 100lbs. If a fish pulled more than 25lbs, the clutch inside the reel would slip, enabling the line on the reel to be stripped until the fish grew tired. For the bigger fish, I used a ‘fighting�
� belt. My fighting belt was about 5” wide, which spread the load around my lumbar region.
It had two narrow belts hanging from its front, which were there to clip onto the two lugs on large game fishing reels. It was a great help when I had a big fish hooked. When it was time for a fish to make another run, I could simply release my rod, leaving my belt to hold it, which gave my arms the chance to rest while I waited for my reel to stop getting stripped and again start pumping back the fish to regain my line. The technique was simple, but very effective.
You needed to smoothly pull the rod back towards you as far as it was comfortable, and then wind the line back onto the reel as you allowed the rod to smoothly fall forwards again. Also, with the boat’s continuing forward motion, it was impossible to simply reel the line in normally in any case.
Considering we had had a very poor start to the day, catching nothing by 2.30pm in the afternoon, we returned back to the marina at 4pm with seven mahi mahi, one barracuda and two small tuna fish.
Once back at the marina, the deckhand would skilfully clean the fish and cut them into fillets for me to take what I wanted. I’d always drop some fish off to the seventy-nine year old lady living to the left of my house, and also some for the family living the other side of my house.
I liked to cook mahi mahi by seasoning some flour to cover a piece of fillet and deep fry it for fifteen minutes. If I ever returned with some lunar tailed grouper, I’d always kept them for myself and never gave those away. For me, they are the very best eating fish in the sea. They tasted as though you have cooked them in honey, as they were so sweet. You could identify them by the yellow crescent on the edge of their fins and they would only be a couple of pounds in weight.
While I was enjoying what I could of my time back on the island, it was becoming more and more clear that Inez had very obvious plans for putting my house to good personal use during my four-week trips to Nigeria. She began to receive a constant flow of text messages to her phone, all written in Papiamento so I knew they were from another islander. She used to show me the messages saying they were from the Colombian woman she rented a room from at the north end of the island, who I knew didn’t speak Papiamento. From the delight on her face, they were obviously from another man or men.
I knew exactly what she’d get up to the minute I left. What I could never have imagined was that she’d made arrangements for a local man to move in the very same day that I’d flown off the island. When I was flying to Amsterdam, I suddenly had a strong gut-wrenching feeling that someone was with her in my house. As it turned out, my instincts were right.
She also demanded that I keep my rental car on-hire while I was off the island. It was a pleasant little luxury for her because she could drive down to the red light district just ten minutes from my house, to pick up additional customers when the local guy wasn’t staying the night.
Before flying off the island, I had bought a listening device from a local island conman. All it needed was a mobile telephone SIM card slotted into it and a power supply. I hid it behind the TV in my bedroom thinking she would never find it, but after just a few days, it was unplugged, and after a few more days, its battery had depleted.
It did last long enough for me to listen to what Inez was doing with several different men in my bedroom. All I had to do was call the SIM’s number and listen in. That experience was terribly painful while staying in a trailer in the middle of a West African swamp.
I called Inez just to interrupt her, but she always turned her phone’s ringer off when she was busy. When I did manage to call her, she was always very aggressive and didn’t want to speak. After that, she would hang up on me.
Like a perfect fool, I informed her of my arrival date. In hindsight, it would have been much better if I had given her a date a week later so I could catch her busy. I could have put it in all the local newspapers.
After flying from Nigeria to France, France to the Netherlands, and Netherlands to the island, I needed to wait over an hour at the island’s airport for Inez to finally arrive in my rental car to pick me up.
When she finally arrived, she didn’t say, “Hi, darling,” or, “How are you?” No kiss, no nothing. Inez was angry I had returned because she couldn’t use my house as a whorehouse for another four weeks.
She drove to the Italian clothing shop where she worked and left me to drive myself home. The fuel gauge was lower than empty. I opened the cubbyhole where I always kept some spare cash for parking and petrol, but that had also been emptied.
I got to my place and it was quite a sight. My garden hadn’t been touched even though I’d left money for it to be maintained. I had electricity, water, and cable TV bills that hadn’t been paid, which I’d also left money for, and my air conditioners had all been left on.
She had left plenty of evidence that there had been some wild nights while I was away. Under my sofa, I found the remains of a broken ashtray which I had bought in Amsterdam, and the base of a wine glass. Under my coffee table, I found the remains of another glass.
All my beer, whisky, and every other type of spirit had all been used up, and there was not a single thing left to eat. Inez had certainly been busy milking my house. Like Haitian and Ronnie, the marine and his young Colombian wife, the two young bar girls, and everyone else on the island who had entered my house, Inez had helped herself, together with her clients, to much more than she/they should have.
Why did I think anyone on the damn island would be different? In the middle bedroom of my house, Inez had stored her fifty-seven pairs of shoes. They were all very high heeled; bright, and multi-coloured, just like the ones all the other hookers wore whilst walking the streets looking for business.
When she returned back that evening, she had a very aggressive attitude towards me. Just like in the past, I was not welcome in my own home because it disrupted the lifestyles of those who used and abused it for their own gain.
She demanded I thank her for keeping my place so clean. I couldn’t believe it. I asked her what all the broken glasses were doing under my sofa and coffee table. And then I asked her about the broken ashtray and disgusting sheets left in the washing machine, which I had already carried out and trashed.
Of course, she knew nothing about any of it and denied everything. I told her to get the hell out of my house and my life and go back to the brothels she loved so much. She ignored me because she didn’t want to lose her free, private brothel and free rental car that suited her lifestyle so well.
Instead, she attacked me. She scratched my face and dug her acrylic nails into my chest, adding yet another scar to the ones Antonina had left. Inez wanted me to hit her, it was just like when Antonina threw herself at the kitchen table and chairs in Kazakhstan. History, I thought, is repeating itself.
I crossed my arms and let her get on with it without returning fire so she wouldn’t have any excuses to call the police or anyone else, and then went to bed.
The next morning, I did the gentleman bit and made her some fresh coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice, and sandwiches. Meanwhile, I started the car and turned on the air conditioning while she was getting ready so she would be comfortable before she began working in the menswear shop.
I did my usual shopping to restock what Inez’s sex clients had been encouraged to help themselves to, including my Cuban cigars! I decided that she was going the same night. I picked her up at eight o’clock in the evening from outside the shop where she worked and drove back towards my house.
Inez, as usual, insisted on driving. I moved over and let her take control. When we approached my house, I told her to stop at my favourite Hoi Sing Chinese bar, which she did, to my amazement.
She parked the car in true island style, right across two parking slots, and got out. In the bar, Inez was unusually friendly towards me, as she must have known I was about to kick her out. She even showed interest in my work instead of quizzing me about my salary to try to find out what I actually earned.
I wasn’t being t
aken in by her desperate attempt to make things right this time. I just ignored her, looking across the bar whilst sucking on my Cohiba. After a while, I turned to her and coldly said, “We’re off.”
Of course, Inez asked where we were going next, so I turned, looked her straight in the face, and said, “To help you pack.”
She ignorantly looked dumbstruck at first and then asked if we were going somewhere? I replied, “Me, no; you, yes.” Startled, she asked, “Where am I supposed to go?” I replied, “Anywhere you want so long as it’s the hell out of my life.”
The three minute drive home was quiet … very quiet.
As we entered my house, I went straight to the kitchen and took out a roll of black plastic garbage bags that she could use to fill with all her nightlife clothing and fifty-seven pairs of high-heeled shoes.
Inez still couldn’t believe she was finally being kicked out, but she only had herself to blame, just like Haitian and Ronnie and every other islander who had abused a good thing.
She didn’t start packing anything; instead, she poured herself a whisky and sat next to me on the sofa. She tried to make polite conversation, hoping it would all blow over.
After two years of pure unadulterated hell, I was not going to be seduced into changing my mind. I got up and started packing for her, starting with her shoes from the middle bedroom into the black plastic bags.
She figured there was no going back and started to pack her skimpy little clothes from my bedroom drawers into more bags. Unbeknown to me, she took my five-day-old iPad, wedged it against the floor and the wall, and stamped on it. The screen shattered and the frame broke. After that, she put it back where she had found it.
After she had finished packing her clothes, she called her Colombian friend to come to collect her, and re-joined me back on the sofa.
Money, gold, and diamonds meant more to Inez than loyalty, love, and security.