by Simon Ings
The TV is on but the sound is down. Mo wheeled it in from the sitting room so that they could enjoy the bed together and still not miss the moment: man’s first steps on the Moon. Plus if Harry her dad comes home early, being in here rather than the sitting room gives Mo precious seconds in which to leap out the window into the shrubbery.
Mo closes his hand around Deborah’s throat, playful but firm, choking her softly to her climax.
He turns her over then, or she turns over for him – they are developing a rhythm now, a mutuality of response, impossible to say who gives, who takes – when events overtake them: on the TV, the news studio has been replaced by grainy grey static.
‘Shit.’ Mo slides out of her.
‘Mo.’
‘I need the john,’ he says. ‘Sorry. Shit.’ He scampers out the room and across the hall.
‘Hurry,’ she calls after him, needlessly.
On the TV, Armstrong’s boot appears, feeling for the rung of the ladder…
And Deborah Conroy wakes from her evening with Mo into a blast of pain, trapped in the hollow metal dark with the certainty of having been touched.
She is eight years old and she is seventeen years old and she knows exactly what is happening to her.
Beyond the confines of her hot coffin, the scream of gulls. And Mo’s voice from the toilet, telling her some joke or other, something from the day, about his dad.
The uselessness of her limbs; paralysed, she cannot even lift her hands to beat against the tight metal lid, inches above her face. And at the same time, the press of pillows at her back, and the draught of the air-con unit.
The taste of Mo’s cigarettes; and in the self-same moment, her mouth is stuffed with her own underwear.
Opening her mouth to scream, eight-year-old Deborah discovers what her seventeen-year-old self knows already from memory and regular repetition: that all her consonants have disappeared, that she can make only idiot sounds so unlike the sounds of distress, neither of her selves will be heard. Mo does not hear her, though he is zipping up his fly only feet away; and it is dark and freezing cold before passers-by, a tow-truck driver and his mate, twig to the truth and pop the boot to reveal eight-year-old abductee Deborah, shivering and spasming in Felixstowe’s night air.
Even as Neil Armstrong’s boot settles into the lunar dust, she is falling.
Mo enters the bedroom, zipping up his fly, in time to see Deborah topple off the side of the bed, headfirst into her baby’s cot. Mo’s funny story dies on his lips. The baby, pinned beneath her mother, is silent, little hands spinning as she struggles to inhale. Even the TV is silent, in the split-second before Neil Armstrong delivers his famous line. Yet the room is full of sound. Later, sat with Harry in the emergency room, their ritual hostilities suspended while the doctors fight to reinflate little Stacey’s lung, Mo presses his hands to his ears against the memory of that sound: the idiot gurgle in his lover’s throat; the spastic thump-thump-thump of her head against the floor.
It is the summer of 1974.
They set sail from the Keys last night, around 9 p.m.: Mo, Deborah, little Stacey; Mo’s new business partner is alternating watch. Also onboard is Father Turi, a priest Mo’s father knew, himself an escapee from the old country and game for a voyage as charged as this one: dropping old Anastasio’s urn into the warm waters of his commandeered home.
It is not a usual thing: to burn a body once washed in baptism, anointed with the oil of salvation, and fed with the bread of life. It is not – the first priest Mo approached made this obnoxiously clear – a practice approved of by the Church. But better old Anastasio returns home as ash than he keeps his flesh to moulder in a foreign grave.
So he is ash now, and free to return home. Here is the water, and Father Turi says, ‘Lord God, by the power of your Word you stilled the chaos of the primaeval seas, you made the raging waters of the Flood subside and calmed the storm on the sea of Galilee.’
It is five years since Mo Chavez married Deborah and took baby Stacey for his own. A good and happy time, but also a painful one, because his father naturally did not understand why his son, so full of life and wit and blood, should saddle himself with another man’s bastard child. Never mind that the girl he was marrying was sick in the head.
This last objection melted over time as Deborah’s seizures tailed away, vanishing as mysteriously as they appeared. But it wasn’t until little Stacey started to talk that Anastasio allowed the possibility that he might be charmed. Then, of course, he saw what Mo had seen all along: that there is something wonderful in the electric field humming between mother and daughter that overrides the imperatives of pride and blood.
The last two years of Anastasio’s life were good ones, reconciling father and son; bringing a new family into being. Though he never spoke of his own deterioration, perhaps Anastasio knew there was no time left for him to nurse his disapproval, only a headlong rush into a future that would not contain him. Accepting this, how could he not accept the love and games of a little child?
Stacey loves her grandfather. ‘Grandpa’s an angel now,’ Mo told Stacey, the day he came to the hotel and found his father dead, the TV on, and Jackie Gleason cracking weak jokes into his open eyes. Stacey blinked. ‘Funny,’ she said.
The terrible iconoclasm of children.
‘How funny?’
‘Funny he didn’t say anything,’ she said. The abruptness meant more to her than the death. ‘Where is he, then?’ Looking around.
Ill-health barely grazed Anastasio’s final months. Whatever was the matter with his heart erupted, decisive and muscular as the man it killed.
‘As we commit the earthly remains of our brother Anastasio to the deep, grant him peace and tranquillity until that day when he and all who believe in you will be raised to the glory of new life promised in the waters of baptism.’
Deborah squeezes Mo’s hand. Stacey leans in to him. Mo’s business partner appreciates that this is a family occasion and has made himself scarce during the committal. Mo is dimly aware of him straddling the bowsprit, book in hand, as Father Turi draws to a close.
‘We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.’
Mo steps forward and drops the urn containing his father’s ashes into Cuban water.
It was a risky thing to do perhaps, to sail into these waters in broad daylight; with his wife and kid, too, a real provocation to fate. But he owed the old man, and he could not have borne the day without Deborah beside him and five-year-old Stacey hugging his knee. (She is trying to look solemn, but she really doesn’t know how; she keeps scowling and wrinkling up her nose. Grandpa’s an angel now, and because she believes this, she cannot feel grief.)
Afterwards, hands trembling, the urn still sensate in his fingertips, he takes the wheel and pulls them out of there as quickly as he can, breezing up the Santaren Channel like any other clueless Bahamian tourist, taking the long way home. Deborah sweetens the priest’s delay with glasses of home-squeezed guayabana juice and Stacey goes below, playing a private game. His business partner joins him by the wheel, tosses his book – Fuentes, Cambio de Piel – onto the wheel housing and, after a little rigmarole of handshakes and commiserations, distracts Mo, as he knows Mo likes to be distracted, with tales of April 1961.
‘Seaweed! Some fuckwit Yank pilot looked out the window of his U2 and saw seaweed…’
Wednesday, 7 August 1974: for five years Mo has been running his boat charter, running ulcer-making surveillance in the teeth of Castro’s shore batteries and trying to believe, against all evidence and logic, that another Bay of Pigs is possible. Now, as of today, he is on his own, the very last shreds of Operation Mongoose thrown away, the corporaçion disbanded, its handlers gone without goodbye, exiled to desk-jobs in Langley or to moribund research libraries on the Washington outskirts. Some are retired; some plain thrown out. Mo sees them mumbling their way along Collins Avenue, big men with wet, disappointed eyes.
Two days ago Nixon released three of the transcripts and
admitted he had tried to halt the FBI’s inquiry into the Watergate break-in. Is this really the same Dick Nixon Mo cheered at the Republican Nomination, all those years ago? The news is full of conspiracy and cover-up but Mo Chavez, blooded in the hot disorder of Little Havana with its three hundred front companies, its six hundred veterans’ groups, knows a cheap fantastist when he sees one. There’s no conspiracy here: just Dickie leaving others to wipe his drool off the furniture. He will surely not outlast the week.
This is old news. The real damage occurred when it turned out the campaign office burglars were Cubans. This news has hurt Miami past all hope of healing. Five years Mo has spent in the Agency’s service, paying back in effort and in peril the debt he owed his father. There will be no second invasion, no bigger, better Bay of Pigs. It has all been for nothing.
Or if not for nothing then – this is the bitterest pill – merely for this lumbering money-pit of a boat. This little perk by way of the Agency’s pursuit of plausible denial. (If he’d been running a print shop, they would have given him the shop.) This boat bought for him by the Melmar Corporation, the CIA’s Miami front. This boat which is now his, to do with as he likes.
What does he want with a boat? Where will he sail to, now Fidel has been left to lord it over his home?
‘We never stood a fucking chance,’ the business partner sighs, in conclusion, and lights up a cigar.
Mo’s gut responds as always to the old and much-repeated tale. This first-hand account of the Bay of Pigs fiasco makes a hollow space within him for a cocktail of conflicting emotions: regret, envy, incredulity, admiration. There are just two years between them, but this man fought on the beaches; Mo did not. This man served twenty-two months in La Cabaña, within earshot of daily executions, ‘and Gagarin laughed and told me, “You too wear the Order of Playa Girón!”’
Mo has the boat, but he has no idea what to do with it. An image looms: season after season spent helping lobster-faced tourists fish marlin; not a life so much as an afterlife.
This man knows what to do with his boat. They met two years ago, a Thursday in December, the night the last Apollo rose, plangent, a broken promise, through the star-white skies of Cocoa Beach. They reeled together, drunk, along the boardwalks and watched the lift-off, watched as this little bubble of broken hope became another star. Seventeen. The last men on the moon.
‘I thought I’d missed them all,’ Nick sighed as they wove from one side of the beach to the other through quiet, manicured streets, from the Banana River to the ocean and back again. Nick was newly arrived from east Africa, an experienced merchant marine. ‘I dreamed of seeing this.’
When the rocket had vanished from sight they went and found a bar, but even here, in this resort town where old NASA men come to die in the sun, the patrons were glued to a sports channel.
They threw beer tins into the quay and talked about Apollo, what of it they had seen; they played where-were-you-when. They talked Kennedy and Nixon, about history and the way things end and what if anything comes next.
They talked about the Straits of Florida.
Mo has the seamanship, the CIA training and the boat; Jessup has the contacts and the experience. Watergate has laid waste to Miami, and Jessup knows what comes next. Jessup knows what to do with his boat.
Nick Jessup. This is what he calls himself.
Mo understands, of course, that this is not his real name.
RENAMO MOTO
1
It was towards the end of 1984, the aftermath of Mozambique’s droughts, and I was leaving Maputo and heading north to the town of Goliata on the Mozambique–Malawi border.
Were God in His heaven, Mozambique, a thousand-mile-long beach state on the eastern seaboard of southern Africa, would be a paradise. Instead the country has laboured for five hundred years under whimsical Portuguese ‘government’. Finally, in 1969, even as they mourned Jorge Katalayo, their assassinated leader, and just in time to tweak everyone’s Cold War paranoias, Mozambique’s socialist liberators, the Frente de Libertaçao de Moçambique or FRELIMO, declared their country’s independence. The sovereign state of Mozambique, they said, would align itself neither with the Warsaw Pact nor with the West.
In choosing this difficult and perilous path, FRELIMO’s leaders also chose to disregard certain glaring realities. For instance, the fact that they had land borders with Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. Or that the sea corridors that passed through their territory were crucial to the economies of their landlocked (and, for that reason, increasingly paranoid) neighbours. If I could see the seeds of disaster in all this, why didn’t they? In 1969 I was still in London, far from the action, reading newspapers behind the library counter of my dear little philosophical society. How could they have missed what was so obvious to people like me?
The staff of FRELIMO were, like their fallen comrades, all honourable Western-educated blacks who had spent their formative years in countries like America and Sweden. They imagined post-colonial Africa would submit to the rules of fair play. And they were wrong: retribution for their daring stab at self-government was long and terrible. In 1977, Apartheid-backed RENAMO contras launched a war of terror against the civilian population of Mozambique. The campaign lasted fifteen years, aided first by Rhodesia, then South Africa, then by the two severest droughts in living memory.
When I heard the army had wrested Goliata back from the contras, I thought: Now at least I can get there by plane. But RENAMO still controlled the surrounding countryside and the airstrip was too badly damaged to risk a landing. ‘Goliata is free,’ a well-meaning apparatchik in the ministry of education told me, ‘only that you cannot go in or out.’
I thought about travelling steerage on a cacao boat as far as Beira, taking pot luck after that – only RENAMO’s piracy had reached a pitch where anything moving outside Beira’s mothballed harbour, regardless of flag, ran a risk of being shelled by nervous government batteries scattered along the shore.
All the big roads in Mozambique were built by the Portuguese to speed up their looting, and they all ran east–west, connecting the coast to the interior. Naively I traced out a course which mazed laboriously northward over dirt tracks and seasonal roads. When I showed it to the officer in charge of the car pool, he nearly fell off his chair laughing. Had I not heard of land mines?
A week or so later, a team of Italian engineers managed to hand-wave their way past the border checkpoint on the Malawian side of the Shire river. They mended the airstrip, and finally I was able to piggy-back a government charter.
The only other passenger – Joseph Lichenya, the new district administrator – met me an hour before dawn on a military airstrip just outside Maputo’s city limits, by the tailplane of the ancient pre-war Dakota.
Clean-shaven and in his thirties, wearing sunglasses even in the pre-dawn dark, Captain Lichenya was typical of the careful young men the socialist FRELIMO government turned out of Maputo these days. A few years ago he would have been overseeing Operation Production – the government’s catastrophic experiment in collectivized agriculture. These days it was all that men like him could do to gather Mozambique’s scattered rural population into temporary villages, safe from RENAMO’s predations and in reach of the international aid agencies. The irony, that these safe havens were often built on the foundations of aldeamentos – Portuguese work-camps – escaped no one.
I asked Lichenya where he hailed from.
‘Oh,’ he said, shrugging. ‘That’s a difficult question. I’m from all over.’
Ah, a man of mystery. I elected to dislike him.
The pilot and his mate – two boisterous Soviet airforcemen – turned up to inspect our aircraft with incredulous fascination, as though it were some sort of exhibit. After some persuasion, the engines turned. There were no seats in the Dakota. The captain and I settled opposite each other on sacks of pinto beans.
‘Sit on two sacks,’ Lichenya said.
‘I’m fine.’ At forty-two I was older than him by
at least fifteen years, and an experienced traveller. I didn’t need him to nanny me.
He turned his hand into a make-believe pistol and pointed it into the air; he pulled the trigger. ‘Two sacks will stop a bullet.’
I moved to higher ground. This put me closer to the doorway than I wanted, given the plane had no doors.
We swung a lazy arc over Beira’s harbour. The curl prolonged itself, turned full-circle, repeated… The pilots were wasting fuel, and it was not hard to see why. At the horizon the sea was a vivid bluish green, as distant waves caught and refracted light from a sun that had yet to rise. The green spread as though a lush prairie were unfolding itself across the ocean. A couple of seconds later, as the sun’s first arc came into view, the prairie burst into flames of red and gold.
Nice to know that even Russian pilots have the souls of poets. Content, they changed course and hurled us inland and up, out of range of RENAMO’s heat-seeking missiles, and into the strange, marble world of thunderheads and cloud columns that awaited us, five thousand feet above my adopted country.
Jorge Katalayo’s assassination had not fractured the liberation movement, nor did it delay the colonists’ inevitable defeat. Victory over the colonial power had been achieved by 1974 – much sooner than expected – when a coup in Lisbon cut the Portuguese imperial project off at the root.
So FRELIMO had found itself in the disconcerting position of a dog that’s been chasing after a speeding car: once it’s caught it, what on earth is it supposed to do with it?
With tiny resources, few personnel and next to no education, FRELIMO found itself with a country to run. Worse, a Portuguese country. Even then, the situation might have been saved, had it not been for the exodus.
Boats arrived from Lisbon and carried whole harvests away. What the settlers couldn’t carry, they destroyed. These were acts of pure spite. Tractors were driven into the sea. Job-loads of concrete were poured down the lift-shafts of half-finished beachfront hotels.