Jean-Marie said, So where are we going?
Tamarin, said Maja. Let’s go find some ganja.
Yes, said Jean-Marie. Gaetan will be there.
They all piled in and Chauffeur floored the accelerator. He slammed the horn whenever they passed a group of girls. They barely glimpsed faces, he drove that fast. Paul was glad to be sitting by the window, so he could lose himself in the view.
Paul had been out there almost four months already, but still he took delight in all the snack shacks, the lovingly hand-painted signs, the bushes of bougainvillaea like squashed-up boxy Chinese lanterns, the mixed look of the people, the mixture of races, which was so new, so fresh still, that you could if you wished disentangle them – the Creole from the Chinese, the European from the Indian. But sometimes you could stare for a long time without really being able to tell until the last minute, until a face turned, an expression formed, and from the corner of your eye some Indian or African or Portuguese or French or Dutch turned and slithered away as suddenly as it had been glimpsed. The way all of it was a mixture of half-familiar from childhood, and foreign after London.
Paul felt as though what rolled past his window were a film, with the car stereo as a soundtrack. They were listening to The Clash and the music seemed just right to Paul: nostalgic music for the others, who were reminded of a time when they had been as young as Paul was now, ten days shy of his seventeenth birthday. It was so English, that sound, so London, pulling him in another direction, which was the way Paul thought he liked things best then, being slightly between two worlds. But every now and again his eyes would go unfocused and he would not see Mauritius: these were the times when he was thinking of Genie, and of how much he wanted her to be here with him. It was as though he could not hold them both – Genie and Mauritius – in his mind at the same time.
The marsan was a rich blan, his father a lawyer for one of the big sugar companies. He looked up at them and nodded as Paul and Jean-Marie walked into the bar. Paul saw him draw back a little, saw him notice that Paul wasn’t Mauritian, the way everyone seemed to know, though how, Paul couldn’t tell. And perhaps that was the position of the foreigner, Paul thought: never quite understanding what it was about him that marked him out as foreign.
Jean-Marie greeted him and introduced Paul.
You French? the marsan asked him, in French.
I’m English, Paul replied, in Creole.
And so they chatted in Creole for a bit about England, its football teams, its weather. Marcel – that was his name – asked if Paul was a student. Paul replied that he was not. He’d left school, he said, and now wanted to make a life for himself here.
And you? Paul asked.
I’m a fisherman.
Paul must have given him a funny look – Marcel must have seen him take in the white-gold skin, the designer surf T-shirt and slack unmuscled arms – because he added, A planter too. Also, I make things out of shells.
Nice life, Paul said.
Yeah, Marcel said. It would kill him to work in an office. Wearing a suit and tie and all that. Every time he put on a tie – for weddings or funerals or whatever – he thought he was going to choke.
On their way back to the beach to hook up with the others, Paul said, That bloke. He didn’t seem like a fisherman to me.
Fisherman? said Jean-Marie. All that guy fishes for is money from his mother’s handbag. He’s not doing anything with his life except waiting for his parents to die. You’ll meet Gaetan. He’s the real deal.
It’s still odd to me, Paul said, hearing a white guy speak Creole.
Well, he’s Mauritian. But his first language would be French. That’s what he’d speak at home. Guys like that, they’re the first to pick up all the new slang in Creole. Guys like that say mari and bugla a lot. He’s a cunt. Him and his brother. They’re always having run-ins with Gaetan’s lot. Surf business – don’t ask me. Turf wars over this place. His ganja is good, though.
And sure enough Gaetan was there that night at Tamarin, with his surfer friends. He had built up a fire and sat tending it, sitting apart from the rest of them, smiling shyly at Paul now and then.
You see how different these country people are from you and me? Maja whispered. Even then Paul had felt uncomfortable with the conspiratorial way in which he spoke. He did not like Maja implying that he and Paul thought the same way. After Jean-Marie’s death, Paul would come to learn that Gaetan’s silence and distant smile were typical of the fishermen here – as though they spent too long staring out to sea.
Gaetan picked up his guitar and started to play, his friend accompanying him on a jerry can filled with sand. They sang a sega, ‘Roseda’, Maja explaining the lyrics to Paul. A man imploring his beautiful young wife to stop the drinking that was destroying her. Maja, so fond of sneering, seemed to be genuinely moved.
And there, on the beach, through a rain so fine it looked like smoke, the moonlight was almost blue. You saw the sea stretch out to the west but then – how could Paul explain this? – it just stopped. There must have been a mist down but you couldn’t tell, you couldn’t see anything. It looked like the end of the world, Paul said.
Like an apocalypse? Jean-Marie asked, passing him the coconut bong.
Paul took another warm, fragrant lungful.
No, he said, almost sighing as he exhaled. Like the world ends here.
(xii) Rodrigues
It took a day and a night for Paul to reach Rodrigues. He took a seat on deck near two men – a heavily freckled Chinese man and his gaunt Creole friend – who were passing a bottle of rum between them. He heard them talking about the Muslim girl who had poisoned herself, the one who’d been mentioned on the news at Gaetan’s. Paul learnt that she had died after a long and painful struggle. Noticing that he was listening, the men passed the bottle to Paul. There were a lot of suicides in Mauritius, they said. Nearly every week there was a story of a poisoning, a hanging, a leap into the void or sometimes a drowning, possibly not accidental. The reasons given never seemed reason enough, they said: debt, divorce, unemployment, bereavement. What reason do you need? Paul asked. In order to consider taking that step it was enough just to be ambivalent about life. The Creole man told him with no bitterness that without money, without education, without talent, without somehow managing to stow away – on someone else’s passport, say – if you were poor and likely to stay that way, suicide really was the only way of getting off this island, if you weren’t prepared to wait around for death.
The two men were Mauritians. At first they described themselves as businessmen. They had been detained in Mauritius because of the cyclone, they said, but were now happy to be able to return to their business in Rodrigues. Paul thought better of asking for further details. But once they were drunk they confided in him the nature of their enterprise. Prospecting, they said. There was treasure on that island. Pirate treasure. It had never been found. It was the cyclone that had drawn them. The devastation wreaked might well have unearthed what had lain buried. They were like those people who combed the rocks after shipwrecks, Paul thought.
They brought out a pack of cards and invited him to play. He shared the rest of their rum and lost most of his spare change to them. Eventually the two men fell asleep, but Paul was too disturbed by the clanking of serious machinery, the bloody tang of rust, and so opened the book he had taken from Mam’s. He had started reading it at Gaetan’s. The damp there had swollen and buckled its pages and there were translucent spots where drops of his sweat had fallen. Paul liked the idea of the book breathing in the air around it. He was not really reading it – he had trouble with the antique French and the pious tone. He was looking at the engravings instead, remembering how Genie used to make up stories around them. But some of the pages were missing. The book was falling apart.
They docked at Port Mathurin late the next morning. Paul did not walk around the centre but instead headed straight to the terminus, where he took the first bus that came. His intention was to ride to the end o
f the line. The bus was heading towards the southwest of the island, which Paul was hoping would be wilder and less inhabited.
Rodrigues was like rural Greece but with a slightly fantastic feel, he thought, as they drove towards the centre of the island, through a landscape more dramatically moutainous than Mauritius. Like Greece but in the time of Legends, when the world was new – it was in the mineral glitter of the light, the grass so lush it looked wet and everywhere, cabri – small mountain goats – feeding on terraces fenced in by black rock. But, where the cyclone had passed, the earth had turned to mud and flowers broken off from bushes were strewn about like litter. Men were working hard to rebuild the place; Paul saw the sweat glittering on their skin, their muscles rippling like wind on water and all of them shouting out to one another, the inevitable chaos that came whenever desperate people tried to restore order. If you kept rebuilding parts of the island laid to waste after each cyclone, he thought, eventually the original Rodrigues would disappear altogether.
His thoughts wheeled along steadily at the same pace as the bus, but then it swerved suddenly and the brakes screeched and Paul was jolted – a dog had run out into the road. It looked back at him, affronted, and continued to jog along, its colouring that of an overripe banana, its tail the shape of one too. The fruit on the trees and the dogs in the street – that was what he’d loved best about Mauritius, Paul thought. Rodrigues was just like Mauritius used to be, the men on the boat had told him sadly. Before Mauritius got corrupted. And what about them? Paul thought. Were those men corrupt? Were they going to corrupt Rodrigues?
Somewhere outside the village of La Ferme the bus got a flat. Paul broke off from the other passengers, who were strangely uncomplaining, and walked towards the village, where he stopped at the nearest house, a square cement block painted pink. A middle-aged woman in a housecoat answered the door, which opened directly onto the front room. Behind her, two young boys in Liverpool strips lay on the sofa, watching cartoons in the way children did, deep in concentration, unsmiling.
Do you know of any rooms to rent around here? Just for a few nights?
Are you a tourist?
I suppose so, Paul replied. I’m just travelling around.
The woman shrugged. You could stay here.
Marie was a prostitute, Paul soon realised. Her customers dropped in at all times of the day and disappeared into a back room with her. They would stop off on their way out to pat the boys on the head or fix something which Marie pointed out – a leaky tap, a wobbling chair. At no point did she proposition Paul. He was half offended, half relieved. She later told him that the two boys, who never seemed to wear anything but their Liverpool strips, were her grandsons. Their mother was in Mauritius, working in a hotel. He’d been given her room.
He did not feel comfortable here, in some strange woman’s room. Her dressing table was crowded with personal things. He thought of Mam’s at 40 St George’s Avenue. He thought of the woman at Sainte Croix, and her little shrine of cosmetics and plastic religious statuary. The window was so high here that his room seemed almost windowless, like a cell, and it was lit by fluorescent strip-lighting which buzzed like a bluebottle even after it had been switched off. Whenever he turned the light on, the little lizards which constantly scaled the walls froze – as though immobility somehow rendered them invisible – then scattered in a second. Everywhere you stepped there were insects, but you only caught a glimpse from the corner of your eye before they slithered or scuttled away. Their constant presence put Paul on edge – he did not like the unexpectedness of insects – but the lizards he liked. Their eyes shone with a beady, benign intelligence. And they ate mosquitoes.
One evening, as Paul lay in his room trying to read, he heard the boys come in late from playing outside. He heard Marie slapping their backsides, demanding to know where they’d been. Tearfully, they told her about an abandoned shack they had found, whereupon more bottom-slapping was heard, Marie punctuating each slap with strict orders not to explore such places – had they not stopped to consider why it had been abandoned? There could be scorpions in there, she said, or ghosts. The boys howled with retrospective terror.
The next afternoon, when Marie was busy with a client, Paul found the two boys in the yard. He asked for directions to the shack. They had lied to their grandmother about how far into the wilderness they had strayed. The shack lay somewhere between Pointe Pistache and Baie du Nord. Paul headed north and then west of La Ferme, for the coast, as directed, then walked southwest along the beach, heading down the coast. He came to a stretch of shoreline where the grass bordering it was silvered with salt, and fell upon a shallow river that didn’t quite meet the sea. Perhaps it had run out of energy, although when the rains were up perhaps it swelled and flowed out into the sea and perhaps there was a point then at which the fresh water and the sea water mingled. Paul had heard that sharks liked to gather where rivers fed into the sea, because fish were plentiful there.
He walked until eventually he spotted a spit of land, where perched at its tip he could see a small bamboo shack, overlooking rocks and the open sea, exactly as the boys had described. It had a straw portal and a zinc roof. A piece of zinc pulled across the entrance served as a door. Paul peered around it. There was no one inside. He looked back at the beach. It was deserted. He pulled aside the zinc and went in. He found only a pile of old blankets. What would it be like to live there? he wondered. How lonely would it feel? The surrounding grass was littered with smashed-up bits of shell – the land must recently have been underwater, probably during the cyclone. The shack must have been built after that. He wondered who had built it and if they still lived there. Years ago in Mauritius, on a trip down to Le Morne to see Gaetan, he and the gang had passed an abandoned cabin. Paul had wanted to go inside but Jean-Marie would not let him: just setting foot in the place would send you mad, he’d said, there were so many bad spirits inside. When Paul had asked for the story Gaetan couldn’t tell him anything. Only that runaway slaves had sheltered there; that something terrible had happened.
Every morning for the next few days, Paul walked to the shack to check that it was still abandoned. When, after a week, he found that the place was still empty, he decided to move in. On his way back to Marie’s to collect his things, he wondered if there was a myth about that place, as there had been with the shack in Le Morne. He decided he didn’t care. He was not superstitious.
But, that night, he dreamt about the shack.
(xiii) The Story of the Shack
A man lived in a shack by the sea. This man had been a slave, but had been freed. Feeling himself disgusted by the human race – by the capacity for man to enslave man, for the enslaved man to turn on his equally unfortunate brother – the former slave decided that true freedom lay in a world where he could live alone. So he did not follow his newly freed brothers and sisters who formed communities, nor did he follow those who had ambitions to travel beyond the island of their enslavement, freedom for them being the opportunity to see new worlds. Instead, when the day of his liberation came, he walked for two days in the opposite direction from everyone else, away from all signs of human habitation, to the other side of the island. The wilder side. No one wanted to live here, where the sea was too rough to bathe or swim in. But the insolent power of the sea here pleased the man, since the boom of the waves on the shore sounded like cannons, warning off others. The brutality of life on the wild side did not scare him. As a former slave, he was inured to hardship. So he camped in a forest by the sea, and there, over many days and nights, the man set about clearing a plot of land where eventually, over the course of many more days and nights, he built a shack. Having made a home for himself, he tilled the land around it. He kept no animals: he could not bring himself to fence in any living thing. He spent his days tending to the garden, or fishing in the river. He would take walks in the forest and examine any new plants he found for signs of possible use, or of beauty. His nights were spent by the fire, singing songs he half remembered
, or staring into the flames where strange visions appeared to those who dared look long enough. The man lived in peace like this for many months. But one day, when he awoke, the man felt uneasy for the first time since he had been set free. The shack was filled with a strange sort of light and an unnatural silence. At first, he thought an angel had come to him. He had heard that angels emitted a terrible light and that their presence stilled the very air and, with it, all sound. But no angel appeared. Setting off into the forest to investigate further, he noticed that the wind had assumed a higher pitch, like the whine of an injured animal. This was all that could be heard. The man felt that creatures who normally inhabited the forest with their myriad sounds were all watching him silently from their hiding places. And when he reached the beach he saw that a malevolent yellow light had descended on the world like a fever and that the waves were as tall as trees. On seeing this, the man understood and was filled with a sense of great joy and exhilaration. He had lived through many cyclones during his time on the island, but he had never before witnessed one. The master had always hidden his slaves in the basement of the big house whenever a cyclone was predicted, for fear of losing them. So to witness a cyclone – indeed, to have his house – his home, his labour of many months – destroyed by one, and perhaps even to die in a cyclone – why, now he was truly free!
(xiv) 1974–81
A plane in the sky: a trail of white for a wake – the world had turned upside down and for a second the sky became sea, and the plane, a faraway boat.
London, Mam said.
What’s London? Paul asked.
Where that plane is probably going.
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