She rested her forehead against the mirror; it had the cold, invasive touch of a speculum. Her face was pale, but jammy around the mouth with lipstick. What a mess, she thought.
A girl filling a bottle with water at the sink beside her asked if she was alright. Genie explained that she had never taken one of these things before. The girl, who on closer inspection was actually a lot older than Genie first supposed, went soft-eyed.
Lucky you. Your first time. What did you take?
A pill.
I know that. I mean what kind?
A speckled one.
Never mind. Your first time, eh? Mine were doves.
Genie was pleased with the image: a speckled dove. The girl herself was soft and smoky-looking, plump-breasted like a wood pigeon.
Have you been sick, love? Do you feel OK now?
Genie nodded and closed her eyes tight as though inhaling deeply.
Ah, cooed the pigeon, that’ll be the smack in it.
Genie thought in a detached way that the pill must have started to work: the idea that she had ingested smack was not as alarming as it should have been. And she was proved right when she finally left the toilets and a wave of clubbers broke around her and she was carried along the corridor and down the stairs, moving without resistance through the crowd, flowing down the stairs and to the basement dance floor, where she found Paul. He was dancing.
Genie tugged at his sleeve and he opened his eyes.
Genie! He grinned down at her, ruffling her hair.
Coming up is an elegant way to describe it, Genie thought, the nausea quite gone now and her blood turning to something like honey as she locked onto the bass line, tripping up on the sneaky breakbeats, feeling for the spaces in between. It’s like skipping with two ropes, she thought, the way she used to do at school. She tugged at Paul’s shirt, wanting to tell him she felt great, but the words burst like bubbles in her mouth and Paul had his eyes closed, lost in it.
After a while, almost telepathically, they both edged towards the side of the dance floor, to some sofas in the corner. Genie quite liked the idea of a cigarette. She asked Paul for one and he offered her his crushed packet.
It’s your last one.
We can share it, he said.
He lit up and passed it to her. She took a drag, the ashiness in her mouth almost savoury. Once, when she’d been trying to give up, she had switched from Silk Cut to Marlboro Reds. Instead of being repulsed for life as planned, she had simply got used to the stronger taste. A residue of the repulsion factor remained and, if she thought about it, had probably become part of the pleasure of smoking for her now. But now the ashiness turned to cinders which left a burning in her throat. She passed Paul the remainder of the cigarette and swallowed some water from a small bottle in her bag.
Feeling better? he asked.
Yeah. I was sick. But I’m OK now. It wasn’t really like being sick. It felt quite nice actually.
The word she thought of was ‘rinse’. It had felt as fresh and cleansing as rinsing her hair. The word ‘rinse’ led Genie to register a vague thirstiness she realised had been building up in her before she’d even lit that cigarette. She downed the rest of the water.
Paul sighed contentendly and emitted a lazy smoke ring. He squeezed her arm; Paul, who had been so silent and moody lately. Now all that bad feeling had melted away. It felt right to talk to him.
You’ve seemed really distant lately –
But Paul was staring at something behind her.
Two ice sculptures sat on the bar, a male and female torso. The club was launching its own brand of water and the bar staff were pouring bottles of it into the apparently hollow sculptures as clubbers queued to drink through the genitals. He was watching a girl with long red hair going down on the ice cock, giving it plenty of tongue.
I thought that was Eloise.
He shook his head, as though trying to rid himself of the image.
Sort of thing she’d do.
They both laughed.
Just let me know if I’m cramping your style at any point, she said. You’re a single man, remember.
What’s the matter? Don’t you like hanging out with your big brother?
It wasn’t like Paul to be so sociable on pills. Not since the early days, anyway. She’d gone along with him to a couple of squat parties in recent years and after leaving him to go and dance would often return to find him sitting alone in the corner. He seemed to like the experience of overloading himself and just sitting on his own, breathing. Absorbing himself in the pleasure of breathing in and out. If you thought too hard about breathing you might forget how to do it at all, like saying a word over and over again until it lost its meaning. But this was like her fifteenth birthday all over again. How he had been that night. The warmth, the lightness. Taking this pill was like opening up a time capsule. Swallowing a time capsule. She’d taken it because she wanted to talk to Paul, to feel close to him, to have him open up to her. She remembered a film they had watched together once: about a man’s search for his girlfriend who’d disappeared suddenly when they’d stopped at a garage for petrol. After years of searching, her abductor contacted him and agreed to meet up. On meeting, the abductor said, If you want to know what happened to your girlfriend, take this. He held out a pill, which the boyfriend took. When he came to, he found himself in a coffin.
Her thirst was more persistent than she’d supposed, Genie realised, feeling now as though she had a mouthful of sawdust. As if she were that character in the film and had maybe tried to chew her way out through the coffin. She reached for Paul’s water bottle, and emptied it in three swallows. It had obviously been refilled several times, and was creased with tiny white scars where the plastic had been stressed. Handing it back to him, Genie realised that her hand was damp – that the bottle was starting to leak. Or had she broken out in a sweat without realising it? Her throat seemed drier than ever.
Genie?
She realised, as she caught him sneaking glances at her, that she probably looked uneasy. How long had she been drifting off like that? He was trying not to look concerned, she could see that, she could see he didn’t want to trigger anxiety in her but he’d seen her looking upset. Walking past the school chapel at night with Eloise had been like that too, past the two candles lit in perpetual vigil by the chapel doors, their flames rocking in a draught that threatened to blow them out, heralding the presence of the devil, flames that threw huge shadows which licked the walls and followed them along the corridor, Genie and Eloise not daring to look one another in the eye because of the fear that would spark up between them.
Genie wanted to get away so that Paul wouldn’t mirror and distort her mood into paranoia as he seemed to be doing now. Suddenly she felt sick again. She had drunk too much water too quickly. And yet her thirst, if anything, had intensified.
I’m just going to be sick now.
She said this in completely the wrong tone, it sounded to her – too bright or too casual, like I’m just going to buy some more cigarettes, but then she thought wildly, What would be the right way to say it? She couldn’t remember how she would normally say it.
Shall I come with you?
Oh, no – no – I’ll be fine.
I’ll just see you back here, then.
She couldn’t get away fast enough, pushing her way through the dancers, who didn’t melt aside this time but stood solid as pillars, blocking her way as she stumbled past the ice torsos on the bar, the ice cock sucked to a stump, leaking sadly.
The pigeon girl was still there, standing sentry beside the sinks, a bottle held under the tap; she was reassuring a freaked-out teenager with eyes like glitterballs. Genie watched her jaws working mechanically like an insect’s.
Don’t worry, love, just stay with me, here have some of this water. This is your first one, isn’t it, love? Don’t worry, you just have some of this water. It’s coming on strong now but when it calms down you’ll have the time of your fucking life, love. Just go wit
h it. Go with it…
She didn’t seem to recognise Genie.
Genie ran to a sink and stuck her mouth to the tap, drinking in prolonged swallows. And now the nausea was quite violent, each gag washing her mouth full of thin, bitter bile that burnt her throat and dried it out. It was getting harder and harder to hold back.
In the cubicle, she sat on the floor, cradling the toilet bowl. She wished Paul were there to hold her hair back.
She didn’t know how long afterwards it was that she left the toilets, but when she managed to find the place where she’d been with Paul, not daring to look into the faces of all these sweat-dripping freaks with eyes that wouldn’t blink, staring at her as she pushed past, he had gone.
That was the last thing she remembered.
(xv) The Letter
It took Genie several minutes to realise where she was. The curtains were open, the bed made, the room iced over with moonlight. Paul’s room. Dimly she became aware that she had been sleepwalking. She collapsed onto Paul’s bed, pulled back the covers and crawled in. The sheets still smelt of him.
She awoke before Mam. In the kitchen, she made coffee and opened the dresser drawer where she found a packet of Paul’s cigarettes and a lighter. Genie went onto the balcony. Out here all you saw was a grid of other balconies, each filled with their individual combinations of washing and plants, toys and junk. But if you looked up you saw a stretch of skyline that took in Canary Wharf, St Paul’s Cathedral, the BT Tower and, if it was clear like today, the skeletal O of the London Eye. She took a cigarette from the packet and lit it. After a couple of puffs she stubbed it out in the dry earth of one of the potted geraniums Mam had put out there, hoping to create a Parisian-style balcony. But the plants were dusty and stunted: the place was permanently covered in a fine grey soot, a kind of light ash that might have been sucked up from some volcano on another island and scattered in the wind to fall here, in Hackney. Pigeons nibbled through the netting which Mam had hung up to keep them out and, finding nothing of interest to them, expressed disgust by shitting all over the place like vandals or occupying soldiers. Mam had given up on the balcony now and tried instead to cultivate plants indoors: fake-looking things with waxy leaves; their soil spiked with plastic care-instructions like medical charts at the end of a hospital bed. Water sparingly. Needs constant attention.
Mam knocked on the balcony door. She was holding up a letter. It’s just come, Mam said. Mauritius.
Genie thought back to the letter Paul had sent half a lifetime ago. The address on this envelope was also handwritten, but the handwriting was unfamiliar. Along with a short letter written on thin, lined paper was a page from a book. It was a plate from Paul et Virginie. Genie recognised the image. The letter, which gave an address in La Gaulette, was from Gaetan, a friend Paul had mentioned before.
Paul
I found this on the floor after you left. I do not know if you will come back to Mauritius, and, if you do, whether you will visit me again. So I am returning this to your address in London. It looks valuable. If you are reading this then I am happy, because you are safe at home, where you belong. I think it is a mistake to go to Rodrigues.
Gaetan
Virginie on the prow of a ship, her eyes looking to Heaven, her hands clasped in prayer, her long fair hair whipped around her by a violent wind. The ship caught on a reef; a tempest raging. Paul, on the shore – stripped to the waist, his face contorted in agony, unable to reach her, restrained by two men on either side of him, one old and white, one black and middle-aged, both struggling to hold him back from the waves.
Mam did not like the idea at first.
Why should you go maxing out your credit cards chasing him halfway around the world? He left you on your own that night, Genie.
Because he is my brother and I love him more than he loves himself.
Genie told Mam all that she had learnt about Paul those past three weeks. Mam went quiet. Then she agreed that it would not be impossible for Genie to find him. Rodrigues was tiny, after all. But after the cyclone it might well be chaos there. And it was not possible to go directly from London. You could only reach it via Mauritius. Genie would have to fly there first.
Come with me, Genie said. Time you went back. We could make it a bit of a holiday. We could go and visit Grandmère.
She doesn’t even know who I am, said Mam.
No, but you know who she is.
I won’t go. Someone once said that to love your country you must leave it, and I did. But I will hate it if I go back. In a strange way I can understand why Paul would want to. He seems to have some unfinished business there. But I don’t know why he’s gone running off to Rodrigues.
Troubled souls seek the wilderness, said Genie.
(i) Mauritius
Ten days after Cyclone Kalunde had reached a peak over the Indian Ocean, Paul, in a plane to Mauritius, was retracing its path. Up here, with only an indifferent sea below him, Paul felt free of everything he had left behind in London. He wondered if it would be possible to live on a plane, forever in international airspace. He thought of Grandmère, cut loose from the present tense. ‘International airspace’ was a less painful way to think about dementia.
Paul was drunk. But it was a reserved, self-contained kind of drunkenness – the only kind you could smuggle past the cabin crew. Paul had got drunk because of his fear of flying. That, and shame at his fear of flying, which to him signified a failure of imagination. Not fear of flying, Paul corrected himself. Fear of crashing. Then he thought ‘smuggle’ and bit his lip to stop himself from laughing, thinking of the pills in his suitcase. It was strange to think of them all the way down there in the hold, but still with a hold on him. He had meant to flush them before boarding but had been too paranoid. After Genie’s collapse Paul had determined to hang onto them. While he still had the pills, they could not harm anyone else. So he’d not wanted to let them out of his sight, out of his control. And then, after a while, he had begun to feel as though they wouldn’t let him go.
After Genie’s collapse Paul had run home to Mam’s. Then he had run around his room, yanking at drawers, grabbing armfuls of clothes, groping for the tub of pills he kept behind the wardrobe, stuffing everything blindly into the small suitcase he’d taken from Mam’s room, Mam’s suitcase, the small cardboard one she’d carried through Heathrow in 1981 when they first came to London, the one he’d used now and again these past thirteen years, shuttling from squat to squat. The broken suitcase he’d had to tie a belt around to stop everything from falling out.
Hotel Europe, he’d thought, running to the bus stop. He could hide there.
As kids he and Genie had walked past it every Sunday on their way to Grandmère’s. He had wondered even then about the kind of tourists who found themselves there, in run-down Hackney, on a major road where lorries thundered past heading for the docks and warehouses of Essex. The guests at Hotel Europe were Bangladeshis and Somalis and pinch-faced white people. They always seemed bewildered. They had never looked much like tourists to him. Then, when Paul was older, he would catch his breath as he walked past the place, thinking of the blonde girls in suspenders who wandered the rooms inside: it was a whorehouse, he told himself. It was the gauzy curtains drawn across open windows; something teasing about the lazy way they stirred in the breeze, at once inviting and secretive.
For a cheap hotel it wasn’t so cheap, Paul discovered, though he suspected there were special rates for long-term guests. He thought he could guess who these were – they seemed defeated, no longer surprised to find themselves there. Paul unlocked the door to his room and, trembling, got into bed. It was already dawn. He pulled the covers up to his chin and lay there waiting for sleep. He lay there for several hours. He needed dark – unplugged dark – for sleep. Even when night eventually fell, it was hard to drift off with the fizzy street-light spilling through the curtains, soaking into the carpet; car beams tracked like searchlights across the ceiling, narrowly missing him in their sweep. Paul trie
d hard to think about Genie, about what might have become of her after she’d been stretchered away – but his thoughts evaporated almost as soon as he’d struggled to formulate them. Like blowing soap bubbles. But the memories – these came without effort. Was this how Grandmère felt? Today was his birthday, he remembered. His birthday, and the anniversary of Jean-Marie’s death.
As he got older, Paul thought, sipping at another whisky, he felt he was hauling himself up through life in much the same way as this plane was climbing through the clouds. He would reach successive peaks of self-awareness from which he would look back down on his recent past and think, I didn’t have a fucking clue then. And every so often he’d look back on the last time he’d thought that and think, God, I didn’t have a fucking clue then… And so on, each step in this process of realisation corresponding to the increase in altitude, in age, in distance between himself and London, as confirmed by the blip-blip-blipping of the image on the little screen in the back of the seat in front of him. Paul wondered where all this enlightenment would end: possibly with his death, at the point of which he’d think, Fuck, I never had a fucking clue… He would reach death and the scales would fall away from his eyes as he crouched (his arms across his face in surrender) cowering and naked in the hot white light of absolute truth. He would feel like a baby. That’s what we all are, Paul thought, looking at the sleeping bodies curled up in rows around him like the occupants of a neonatal ward: old babies.
But two women sitting near Paul were still awake. He heard snatches of their conversation: two Mauritian matrons who did not know one another, trying to work out how they were – knowing that they would be – connected. Perhaps they were somehow connected to him. Paul had heard many similar conversations throughout the flight. Creole, he thought, a Masonic handshake. That bastard language, formed from the cacophony of a hundred enslaved languages to confuse the oppressors, to hide things from them. Ironic, Paul used to think whenever Mam shouted at him in it, that it was the language of his oppressor. And it was still a secret language when it was spoken in London where few people knew it, as well as being a language for taking the piss out of people in, for swearing in, for being mad in, for cutting someone down in, for joking in, for being affectionate and playful in, for expressing love in. For Paul it was the language of love. It hurt to admit as much, because he spoke it, as Mam said, kom si to ena patat so dan labus (as though he had hot potatoes in his mouth); it hurt because Paul knew he would never speak it fluently, although in his dreams Creole came to him as naturally as dream-flight did. And when he dreamt of the two of them, him and Genie, as he had done constantly since leaving her that night – that same dream, the sad dream on the rocks that looked like chewing gum (she said) – the dream that he could never quite remember on waking – oddly and naturally enough, in the dream, when they spoke to one another, it was in Creole.
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