For my mother and father
‘Apparently, there has been only one prominent event in the history of Mauritius, and that one didn’t happen. I refer to the romantic sojourn of Paul and Virginia here.’
– Mark Twain, Following the Equator
‘All the previous editions have been disfigured by interpolations, and mutilated by numerous omissions and alterations, which have had the effect of reducing it from the rank of a Philosophical Tale, to the level of a mere story for children.’
– Publisher’s note for Paul and Virginia, by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, English translation, c.1851
‘I have seen Europe from Mauritius, now I will see Mauritius from Europe.’
– Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Journey to Mauritius
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
GENIE
PAUL
PAUL AND GENIE
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
On the afternoon of Saturday 3rd May 2003, twelve-year-old Jeannot Gaspard set out from home on his bike to visit a new friend. He did not tell his mother where he was going. Jeannot’s friend lived in a shack at the end of a spit of land on the west coast of Rodrigues – the wilder side of the island – a few kilometres away from the village of La Ferme, where Jeannot lived. The journey took longer than it might have done: the destruction caused by Cyclone Kalunde which had brushed past the island two months previously was still being cleared, parts of the road impassable due to reconstruction work, and, once Jeannot had turned off onto a track down to the beach, much of it was blocked by fallen trees. When he arrived at what he guessed was his friend’s shack, his friend was not there.
Jeannot’s visit was prompted by a conversation he’d overheard between his mother and uncle. Jeannot had come to warn his friend, and to ask him some questions. He waited, but his friend did not appear. The following day, Jeannot returned to the shack and again waited, without luck. Having noted on his first visit the exact state of disarray in which a heap of blankets had been left, Jeannot concluded that his friend had not slept there for two nights. When, on Monday (Jeannot having skipped school), there was still no sign of him, Jeannot finally allowed himself to investigate the contents of the small cardboard suitcase left in a corner of the shack, seeking some possible clue to his friend’s fate or whereabouts. The unlocked suitcase, on which was painted in pink pearly nail polish a girlishly curly ‘G.L.’, contained, along with a bundle of clothing, the following items of interest:
– a washbag containing various men’s toilet articles, including a razor, a jumbo tub of chewable vitamin C tablets which felt half-full when shaken, plus, rather excitingly, some condoms;
– a passport bearing a photo of his friend with a shaved head, looking some five years younger, giving his date of birth as 9th March 1971 and his place of birth as Mauritius;
– a wallet containing a 500-rupee note, a map hand-drawn on the back of a blank betting slip on which was marked a cross and the name ‘Maja’, and a strip of photos showing two teenage girls pulling stupid faces – the younger one dark-skinned with curly blue-black hair, the older pale, with heavy-looking dark red hair;
– an overwashed T-shirt bearing a faded, screen-printed tropical island in blue silhouette, superimposed over an orange sunset – much like the ‘Rodrigues’ T-shirts for sale in the tourist shops in Port Mathurin, except on this one was written ‘The something Band’;
– an old-looking edition of Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, in poor condition, with pages missing.
Four days later, the owner of these items was found washed up on the shore by Pointe du Diable, several kilometres down the coast from where he had spent the last two weeks of his life. When his suitcase was discovered in the abandoned shack soon afterwards, it contained all the above-mentioned items – except for the book, which Jeannot Gaspard still has in his possession.
(i) The Cyclone
On Saturday 8th March 2003, Intense Tropical Cyclone Kalunde peaked to a Category Five in the middle of the Indian Ocean, southeast of the island of Diego Garcia, reaching sustained winds of a hundred and forty miles per hour. At that same time, almost six thousand miles away in the middle of London, twenty-six-year-old part-time postgraduate student in housing studies Genie Lallan was being rushed into hospital.
While Genie lay unconscious in intensive care, Kalunde travelled eastwards, sideswiping Rodrigues – little sister island of Mauritius, which narrowly escaped – wreaking destruction but claiming no lives, before veering southwards four days later towards the colder latitudes of the southern Indian Ocean, and oblivion.
At which point Genie Lallan, still in London and still in hospital, opened her eyes.
This was not the first time Genie had woken up without knowing where she was. Or even the first time she’d woken up in hospital, if being born was a waking-up of sorts. But it was the first time she’d died and come back to life again.
She’d only died technically. You could say the same about her resurrection: Mam took photos of her hooked up to the wires and drips, and some of the fat pipe forcing breath down her throat, a mechanical umbilical cord. Mam took the photos to show Paul, Genie’s big brother, who had been with her the night she’d almost died.
Where is he? Genie mumbled, not yet properly awake.
Mam said nothing, only smoothed the hair away from Genie’s forehead.
She was discharged and taken back to Mam’s. Her room had not changed since she’d left at eighteen. Walls the same colour. A flaky pink like dried calamine lotion – no, like the pink of something else which she could not quite recall, she thought, resurfacing between naps – with picked-off scabs where there had once been posters. Hazy from medication, Genie turned her attention to a picture on the wall by her bed. A plate taken from an old book. Paul et Virginie. A book with engravings she’d liked so much as a kid, she’d surreptitiously bent back the spine to precipitate its gradual falling apart so she could release that picture. ‘Le Passage du torrent’. Against a background of black mountains, a muscular youth stripped to the waist, trousers rolled up to his knees, was standing on a rock in the middle of a swollen river, poised to continue his treacherous crossing. A girl, about the same age, on his back, clinging to him, arms around his neck, had her face half buried in his hair. On the riverbank were banana trees whose broad serrated leaves flapped in the wind – the same wind which was whipping the river into a frenzy of white froth; the same wind which had unfurled the girl’s hair from the scarf she had used to tie it back. The girl looked afraid but the boy, smiling up at her, looked happy to be carrying this load, which seemed to give him the strength to carry on.
Genie studied its cross-hatchings minutely for the rest of the afternoon, in between sleep, until Mam entered with a tray. When she drew the curtains, the sunlight was sharp and watery.
There’s been a cyclone, Mam said. She had rung the home where Grandmère lived for her regular update and they’d told her. Mauritius was fine, they said, but Rodrigues was devastated. Absolutely devastated.
Genie squeezed lemon into her bowl of chicken noodle soup. Its velvety steam swabbed her nostrils. Devastated, she thought. Shellshocked. Crying. In bits. She asked again about Paul. Where was he?
Mam shrugged. Are you going to eat that soup or just blow on it?
On her bed were the same sheets she’d had as a child. Deep-sea divers in old-style diving bells waded heavily through a faded violet sea, parting weeds to find chests spilling treasure. When Genie had first started her periods, she’d bled on them and the stains had looked like rusted coins. She hadn�
�t seen these sheets in a while, she realised, as she manoeuvred herself out of bed. It was the same bed she’d always had. She had little strength to negotiate its sagging and felt tempted to let herself be swallowed up in its peaks and troughs. Being back at home was a bit like that. But she was here only temporarily. She couldn’t imagine how it must feel for Paul, who had no foreseeable way of finding anywhere else to live. After his last eviction he had told her that he was done with squatting, that he no longer had the energy to make himself anew. A quote from something, Genie supposed, palm against the wall as she struggled to her feet. Weak as she was, she had to go to his room; she had to see for herself.
Genie knew as soon as she pushed open his door, as soon as she saw how he’d left his room. How he had left: drawers pulled from their sockets, gutted; shelves cleared in one swipe – all of it gone, even the stupid photos of her and Eloise he’d stuck into a corner of the wardrobe mirror. Just the basics. ‘Prison possessions’, he called them. He was not lying low at all. He’d gone.
Genie opened the wardrobe; sunlight slithered the length of the mirror and fingered the wire hangers inside. They’d been picked clean.
Mam appeared in the doorway.
I couldn’t tell you while you were in hospital.
No, said Genie, I guess you couldn’t. Where is he?
But Mam said nothing, only walked to the wardrobe door and clicked it shut. Her reflection looked into Genie’s and Genie understood.
He never came to the hospital, did he?
No. His things were gone when I came home from my shift in the morning.
He’d taken Mam’s suitcase. The one they’d come to London with. But Mam told Genie not to worry, he would surely be back soon. If only because he’d run out of money.
(ii) 1981–82
Genie was five and Paul ten when Mam took them to live in London. They had never travelled on a plane before. They flew for hours over an empty grey desert. When Genie asked if this was London, Paul laughed.
You idiot. That’s the wing of the plane.
Some hours later, the captain announced their imminent landing.
That’s London, said Paul, sounding almost awestruck, forgetting for a moment how angry he was to be leaving Mauritius. His cheek was pressed to Genie’s at the window as the plane banked steeply. He pointed out the sticky webs of light below. Looks like God’s been gobbing.
Mam would normally have snapped at him for that malpropte, but she seemed not to be aware of anything around her. When the plane began to buck and shudder in anticipation of its landing, Mam seemed equally apprehensive, leaning further back into her seat, hands gripping the armrests, as though trying to resist the inevitable descent.
They were going to live with Mam’s family – Grandpère and Grandmère and Tonton Daniel. Genie and Paul had never met them before. They were leaving behind Genie’s dad, and Genie’s half-brother Jean-Marie, neither of whom had ever been to London. They were leaving behind Mauritius, the only place Genie and Paul had ever known.
Everything they brought with them had fitted in Mam’s suitcase. She kept it on top of the wardrobe in her new room. Mam’s was a gloomy room with only a narrow window, the curtains always half-drawn. It had been Grandpère’s until they arrived and it was still cluttered with his things: the back issues of Titbits magazine; the Teasmaid on the bedside table which Grandmère and Tonton Daniel had bought him for his birthday but which, to their knowledge, he had never used (No wonder, Paul had said, earning himself a slap around the ear, he only drinks rum and he never has to get up for work); the boxes and bottles of old medicines which crowded the ugly putty-coloured mantelpiece; and a stack of old books. Paul would spend hours absorbed in Titbits, but if he was feeling restless he would flick through Grandpère’s Teach Yourself English, reading aloud.
Hello, Mrs Baker. Is Susan there? (Paul’s voice posh and mincing, with a heavy Mauritian accent.) Yes, Roger. Please come in. Susan! Roger is here to see you! Would you like a cup of tea, Roger? Yes, please, Mrs Baker, you old bag. You have a very nice home. But you stink of shit.
Or, if he was in a good mood and wanted to please Genie, he would adopt the voices of characters from the TV programme Bagpuss, which she loved. But again, some trace of Creole inflected his imitations of Professor Yaffle or the mouse organ mice, rendering his impressions satirical despite his sincere intentions. In return, to console Paul who seemed to miss Mauritius so much, Genie would ‘read’ aloud to him from Mam’s old copy of Paul et Virginie, making up stories around the beautiful engravings. And, since it was the book for which the two of them had been named, Genie would cast them both in the title roles. I can’t swim, said Genie, so you are carrying me across the river. We are running away from home. And my hair is very lovely.
There was Mam’s dressing table, too, crowded with things that Genie liked to look at, particularly the framed photo of Mam with Genie’s dad Serge outside their old house in Mauritius. Genie would marvel at the difference in their looks: Mam’s more various, the Indian skin, the Chinese bones, the Creole eyes and mouth, while Papa – Serge – was so dark-skinned that you could barely make out his features. Papa was hard to see in the photo in the way that he was getting harder and harder for Genie to see in her head. There were so many new things – new people – around her. Genie looked like Papa and Paul like Mam but also different – his hair and his skin and his eyes that same colour, but with maybe more of a glow. Like honey, Mam would say, almost proudly.
Once Genie asked where the photo of Paul’s dad was.
You can’t take photos of a ghost, Paul said.
Is he dead, then? Genie was impressed.
He is to me.
They lived in three rooms on the ground floor and basement of 40 St George’s Avenue, a narrow Victorian terraced house in Tufnell Park. The flat was not self-contained: to walk from one room to another involved stepping out into the corridor used by the other residents. Genie was shy of these strangers in their home, but Paul would try to engage them all in conversation – the young angle in the squirrel-coloured duffel coat who lived right at the top, or the old Chinese man (bonom sinwa, Grandmère called him). But these men seemed as timid as Genie was.
Genie and Paul’s play was shaped by the movements of the other members of their household: while Daniel was at poly or Grandmère was in the kitchen they would play in the front room, where the four of them slept; if Mam was at work they played in hers. And sometimes, if Grandpère was out, they would go down to the kitchen to watch television, or out into the garden. But Grandpère rarely went out. He sat at home all day in his chair in the kitchen, where he also slept, watching the horse-racing or the news and drinking rum. Grandpère, they thought, was gradually flaking away. His skin was grey-brown, dusty with a light white scurf like the bloom on old chocolate. Seeing him sober made him as foreign to Genie and Paul as hearing him speak in English. When he stood up he had the grand proportions of a monument, but when he walked he staggered like a man caught in a gale. The unpredictability of his movements frightened them.
So they spent a lot of time in that draughty hallway where once they had played in a garden in Mauritius. They would crunch into dust the dead leaves that had drifted in through the door, or play post office with the pile of mail for ex-tenants who had left no forwarding address. The hallway smelt of damp newspapers, the muddied doormat and the cold air from outside, spiked with the smell of Grandmère’s cooking drifting up from the kitchen.
Every morning, when the sun rose to a point where it set the orange walls on fire, Genie would leave the sofabed she shared with Grandmère and Paul and cross the prickly carpet to climb in with Daniel. They would lie there staring up at the ceiling as though contemplating the night sky and her heart would rise like a balloon. They had long, aimless conversations: she would ask him how thunderstorms happened, or why a chair was called a chair or what colour Paul’s dad was. Daniel would try to answer but Paul would shout, from the other side of the room, Because it looks
like a chair.
Or, Don’t you talk about my dad.
Genie was sure for a long time that Daniel was Jesus with his long hair, his odd beauty (a different configuration from Mam’s: Chinese bones, Creole skin, Indian eyes – green eyes) and the righteous anger never directed at her but often used to protect her. In that way, Paul was like Daniel. As she and Daniel lay there, she stroked his smooth brown skin and tugged lightly at the hairs in his armpits, which were tough and silky like the fibres from the corn cobs Grandmère would strip and boil for them. She asked him if he would ever get married.
Oh, I don’t think so, he said. Maybe when I’m ninety.
She would have preferred him to say Never, but ninety seemed quite far away.
How old are you now? she asked.
Twenty-two. It takes a long time to count from twenty-two to ninety.
And then Genie offered to marry Daniel and he cordially accepted. Paul laughed nastily. He chucked aside his pillow and ran across the room, now barred with sunlight. He kicked Daniel’s bed and called Daniel a pervert. That was how it usually ended: with Paul getting angry and calling Daniel names. And then Daniel would say something like, Shut up, you little shit. And then Paul would go running to Mam’s room next door saying, Mam! Daniel said shut up you little shit. Then they would hear Mam sigh and rise heavily out of bed and come into the room and tell Genie to go down and ask Grandmère to make the porridge.
But Daniel had lied to Genie. Three months after they came to stay, he told them he was getting married.
It was his day off from the poly. He was taking them to the park.
Let’s go popom, Daniel said, rubbing his hands, Paul screwing up his face at this babyish expression. But still he raced to pull on his shoes. They walked past the knuckly, pollarded elms along St George’s Avenue, the pavement wet from recent rain but still crusted here and there with stubborn lumps of dog-shit. Swinging from Daniel’s hand, Genie pointed these out to him.
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