This was Paul’s first ever memory. He was three years old. He and Mam were with her new husband Serge. He had taken them to the beach. It was Serge who had pointed out the aeroplane.
Paul did not like the beach, which was never as nice as it looked from a distance. The sand was soft, but littered with pieces of bleached coral, hard as bone, some shaped liked the skulls of small mammals. And half buried in the sand were sharp bits of shell, smashed up by the sea, and the spiny needles and tiny cone-like seeds shed by the filao trees which bordered the beach. They hurt his feet. Paul preferred the garden at Serge’s house, where they now lived. He liked to rub his hands on the squat palms, whose trunks felt as though they had been knitted from some thick yarn. He liked the citrus colours of the hibiscus flowers, the steaming early morning grass. But what Paul liked best about the garden was the fruit on the trees. Lemons or mangoes or lychees. It was like something out of a cartoon, something magical. And then it turned into a kind of mania for him, so that every time he passed a tree or a bush he would peer into its foliage, try to look beyond the shadows and the leaves to see what fruits were hanging there. He was always convinced there would be fruit, though he was too small to reach, so he would ask Jean-Marie to help. Jean-Marie was Serge’s son. His sort-of brother. But Jean-Marie was older than Paul. Almost a man. Jean-Marie would part the leaves for him and pick whatever he found. Jean-Marie would cut them open just in case – thrillingly – there were bebete, or insects inside, holding out a slice on the blade of his pocket-knife. Sometimes the fruit was surprisingly sweet or creamy-tasting, sometimes musty and complicated. Sometimes, there was no fruit at all.
Jean-Marie, like Serge, was dark, blue-black dark like a prune. His hair stood out from his head in wild curls. The whole of him was a gravitational force. He made the world spin for Paul, the way he picked him up and swung him around, hoisting Paul onto his shoulders or tipping him upside down until he was screaming and red-faced, with excitement or fear he didn’t know, until Jean-Marie set him upright, the world still turning and churning with the pull of water being sucked down a plughole.
Paul spent a lot of time in the garden, playing alone. And then, one day, he was called into the house. Mam was cradling a baby. Its tiny fingers waggled randomly like the antennae of an insect.
Bebete, Paul said.
Serge laughed. No. Virginie. Like the girl in the story. Paul et Virginie.
Genie, said Paul.
Life changed when Genie was born. Now that she was in the world, Paul felt strangely more alone in it. Before, he had had no sense of himself as being separate from the universe. Playing in the garden, he had felt no difference between himself and, say, one of the trees. But with Genie’s existence Paul had acquired a small, persistent shadow. It was your shadow that gave you a sense of the limits of your body. It was Genie that made him Paul.
Other things changed when Genie came. Mam was unhappier. Angrier. The first time Paul noticed this was the day he found a snake in the garden. He ran screaming into the house. But when Serge came out to see for himself, he whisked Paul up and swung him around and laughed because it was not a snake, it was a kulev, which meant good luck. He was going to the races that day. So he took Paul with him, heaving him up onto his shoulders so he could see the horses better. Paul screamed and screamed for their horses to win but none of them did. After the races were over, everyone drifted away and Paul helped Serge to pick through all the discarded betting slips which littered the ground, looking for winners that might have been dropped by mistake. Paul was doing important work here and he confided this to Serge. Genie would have been no help to them and Serge agreed.
Yes, he said. This is men’s work. This is no place for a little girl.
When they came home, Mam seemed to know as soon as they walked in that Serge hadn’t won. She said in a sharp voice that the kulev was not lucky after all and Serge tried to laugh and said, Why, maybe it was. Maybe he would have lost more if Paul hadn’t seen the kulev. But Mam didn’t laugh. She said, Gambling is the opposite of work, and Serge swore and threw some coins at her. Paul rushed to pick them up, anxiously, not wanting things to be all over the place like that, worried that Genie – asleep in her basket in the corner – might wake up.
But sometimes, Serge won. Then he would buy things. One time he bought chickens, and a cockerel, Milord, which would wake them with his crowing. Milord was fiercely territorial. Whenever Paul was out in the garden and passed Milord’s patch of yard the cockerel would run for them (Genie, now walking, followed Paul everywhere), his sharp beak pecking at the air, hoping to strike. Once he caught Paul. Serge dismissed the injury, saying that Paul should leave the poor bird alone. Paul got angry then, and later that night he had a nightmare about Milord. As he thrashed and screamed, Mam came rushing to the bed and shook him out of it. He and Genie now slept in a bed together in a curtained-off area of the front room, and the next day when Genie woke up her face was covered in bruises. Paul was shocked and ashamed that he had hurt his sister. It’s all Milord’s fault, he muttered, but Serge did not agree and punished Paul.
Jean-Marie did not intervene, but later that day, when they went out into the yard, Milord was gone. For dinner that night they ate kari kok. Paul refused to eat it. That meant Genie refused to eat her food too. So Serge sent Genie down from the table. Then he tipped her food onto Paul’s plate, telling him he would stay there until it was cleared. Mam got angry then and had a row with Serge which only ended when Paul bent his head to his plate, gagging slightly as he ate, the tears rolling fast, plopping from his chin into his food.
Jean-Marie was not there that evening. He was like a dog that could feel a cyclone coming. He had a talent for disappearing at times like these. You only knew he was gone when you heard the sound of his motorcycle starting up, then it faded away, and that always sounded sad to Paul, like someone saying goodbye. Sometimes Paul would run down the road after him.
Whenever Mam and Serge fought, Paul would run out into the garden. There was a hole in the garden wall. He put his eye to it. He saw the street dogs and the street children; he saw goats being herded past. He saw Jean-Marie’s friend, Maja. Maja came towards the wall, unzipping his pants, and poked his gogot through it.
Touch it! he ordered.
Paul put his finger out and touched him. Then Maja laughed and ran away.
And once Paul saw a funeral procession, the mourners in black, wailing, eyes rolled into their heads.
When Paul was older, he would stay out in the street long after his schoolfriends had gone home. Or he would go down to the garage where Jean-Marie worked, and if Bossman wasn’t around Paul would hang out there. On such occasions, Jean-Marie let Paul help him when he worked on his motorcycle, teaching him the names of all the parts and tools. Paul loved the way Jean-Marie spoke to him when they were working together, asking him to pass this or that in a businesslike manner, like an adult, an equal – as though he really was of use. Not like Maja, who always treated Paul as though he was in the way, and gave him a nasty nickname, Caca Tibaba – Little Baby Shit.
Sometimes Jean-Marie would bring Genie to work with him too. He would capitulate to her demands to be hoisted onto his shoulders – normal walking was far too pedestrian for little Genie – and she would sway happily there as he led the way down the alley to the garage, an infant empress in her palanquin, Jean-Marie as solid as an elephant as she slapped her fat little hands against his head with excitement.
Eventually the fighting got so bad at home that Jean-Marie left. He went to live in a room above the garage where he worked. One day, Paul came back from school to find that Jean-Marie’s bed had gone from the lean-to. Paul regretted bitterly that he had not at least been asked to help with the move, but Jean-Marie laughed.
I have hardly anything to move, he said.
Then he told Paul that next time Bossman wasn’t around he should come to the garage and check out his new pad. And that was what Paul did after Mam and Serge had had their last ever
fight.
Mme Blondel next door had given Genie a bag of Neapolitans – little buttery cakes, covered with pink icing and sandwiched together with jam, made for weddings or christenings. When Genie took the bag home and showed Mam, Mam got angry and took it from her. Mam didn’t like the neighbours, she said. They didn’t like her. And then, when Serge came home and Genie told him that Mam had taken her cakes, Serge got angry. He slapped Mam and left the house, slamming the door in an echo of that slap and leaving Mam to slide down the wall, the way shadows did, weeping bitterly, the cakes rolling about her on the floor.
We are going to London, she told Paul and Genie, as they gathered up the cakes. Just the three of us.
London, Paul said to himself, and the name tasted of cold metal.
He slipped out of the house and made his way to the garage. The doors were open and Jean-Marie was on his back, working on a taxi-cab. There was no sign of Bossman.
Jean-Marie, have you ever been to London? Paul asked.
Wait a minute, said Jean-Marie, getting to his feet and rubbing his greasy hands on his overalls. London?
Paul repeated what had happened earlier, and what Mam had told them. Jean-Marie was quiet. No, Little Brother, he said. I have never been to London.
Has Serge ever been to London?
No, said Jean-Marie. Serge has never been to London.
Do you know anyone who has ever been to London? Paul asked.
Jean-Marie looked at him for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to tell him a secret.
Yes, he said finally, I do know someone who has been to London. In fact, I know someone who is in London right now.
Who? said Paul, and Jean-Marie said, My girlfriend.
Paul did not know that Jean-Marie had a girlfriend. But yes, he did, and she lived in London. Jean-Marie had kept her a secret from them all.
Come, he told Paul. Let me show you.
He climbed the ladder which led from the garage up to his room under the eaves, and Paul scrambled up after him. It was a slant-ceilinged room accessed via a hatch in the floor, and it was covered in posters of girls in bikinis, and motorbikes and bare-chested Kung Fu fighters. Paul was filled instantly with admiration and envy. In the corner was Jean-Marie’s camp bed, covered in a bedspread Paul recognised from home, the one with a yellow and green and brown diamond pattern which made Genie think of snakes.
Jean-Marie sat down on the bed and reached under it, pulling out an old cigar box. He opened it and took out a cassette tape. The track listings were handwritten in purple ink, in English.
This is from my girlfriend, Jean-Marie said. She gave it to me before she went back to London.
Then he took from the box a photo, which he handed to Paul. It was of a girl – a blonde girl – in a bright blue bikini. Jean-Marie told him the photo had been taken at Grand Baie, where she had been on holiday with her family. Jean-Marie had met her at a disco there. Paul stared at the photo while Jean-Marie told him about the girl, whose name was Annabel, and all that she had told him about London: the trains which ran underground, the lady prime minister with her handbag, and people called punks, like Annabel’s brother, who had dyed his hair green and pushed a safety pin through his nose and spat on people at parties.
Jean-Marie played the tape and told Paul about his plan to go over to London and see Annabel again. The tape finished playing and Jean-Marie put it on again.
If you are in London, I will come and see you too, he said.
By the time Jean-Marie had sent him home for dinner, Paul could sing along with the chorus to ‘London Calling’.
In London, Mam insisted they spoke only English. So they wouldn’t get confused, she said. Paul soon forgot his Creole. But, for a long time after that, he still dreamt in it.
(i) Genie
…Rodrigues.
Does he know whereabouts? How was Paul? Did Gaetan say?
I told you, Mam – he didn’t say much at all. All he said is that Paul left for Rodrigues over a week ago.
What language were you speaking in?
Creole. Well, sort of. I know all the words, I can hear them in my head but I have to think really carefully before I open my mouth. Like people who have to point to the words when they read.
So – are you going, then? To Rodrigues?
Yes. I’ve come all this way. I go the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow Gaetan is going to show me around the island. He’s borrowed a car.
Ah. I wonder if it will come back to you at all?
What?
Mauritius. Your memories of it.
I keep telling you, Mam. There’s nothing.
Genie returned to the day room where Grandmère was watching the soap she liked to follow. Mam’s phone call had annoyed her, specifically her questions about Mauritius, about Genie’s experience of being ‘back’, as she called it. Why not come out herself if she was so curious to know what it felt like to be here?
And how did Genie feel? She couldn’t tell yet. She’d only just arrived. There had certainly been no shock of recognition on her journey from the airport the day before. There was… nothing. The same blankness Grandmère experienced when faced with Genie herself, it seemed. Oddly enough, Mam seemed more interested in Genie’s having forgotten Mauritius than she was in Grandmère’s not remembering Genie: surely that was the tragedy here? But Genie was grateful that, stranger though she was to Grandmère, she did not seem to mind Genie taking her hand. The heliotrope cologne with its smell of Madeira cake that Genie had loved so much as a child now made her quite helpless with nostalgia, as they sat together watching Secrets de la famille.
She was amazed that Grandmère could follow its convoluted plot when just that morning she had greeted herself in the mirror as her own dead sister while Genie was helping to do her hair. Every character in the soap seemed to present a different story to everyone they encountered, so corrupt were they.
That man, Genie asked, nodding at the television. Who is he again?
He is the secret bastard brother of that woman who is in love with him, said Grandmère with a confidence that suddenly aroused suspicion in Genie. It occurred to her then that Grandmère probably had no idea who these people were and that she most likely made up new identities and associations for them each time she watched.
When the programme ended, a nurse Genie had not yet met came in to call them to dinner. Her tightly curled hair was so uniform in appearance, Genie wondered if it was a wig. Genie introduced herself and explained that she had come to stay for a couple of days, that her mother in London had arranged it.
Well now, said the nurse. She gets no visitors for years and then you and your brother come to see her one after the other.
It was as though Genie had just glimpsed Paul from the corner of her eye.
The home where Grandmère lived was in Vacoas. It rained a lot there and the building – this guest room – smelt permanently of damp. Genie’s skin too was permanently damp. In fact she found it hard to tell where her skin ended and the damp air around her began. She kicked off the sheets and lay naked, looking up at a reproduction of an antique map of Mauritius – Isle de France as it was then. It did not show where she was now. Genie had no interest in seeing the island. She was going on the trip tomorrow out of politeness to Gaetan, who seemed so keen to please her.
When she’d asked Grandmère to tell her more about Paul’s visit, what she’d got instead was an account of another time Paul had been to see her: years ago in London, when he’d asked for the money which he’d used to run away. Genie had realised that it was not so much that Grandmère did not remember her – more that she did not seem to see Genie. In her company, Genie felt spooked, but, oddly, she herself was the ghost – Grandmère talked in the present tense of a Genie from the past. And she had done the same when she talked of Paul.
Had Grandmère, so absent from the present, re-enacted that same meeting with Paul when he’d come here almost four weeks ago? Would he not have felt haunted then himself by the ghost o
f his younger self? And how deflating, that déjà vu, when he was reminded he had once again – at twice the age he’d been the first time round – run away to Mauritius.
If anything, it was not recognition or connection with the island that Genie felt, but alienation – it was odd to hear the language of home and family in the mouths of strangers. But perhaps, Genie thought, drifting to sleep in this small whitewashed room that made her think of a nun’s cell, it wasn’t quite true to say she remembered nothing about the island. Hadn’t she had a strong sense of déjà vu herself earlier that day? When she’d got off the bus at La Gaulette and walked to Gaetan’s village – a place she’d never been to before – it had all been exactly as she’d imagined it: the cement-shop with the faded Pepsi mural, the tamarind tree and the old guys drinking under it. That was to say, it was all exactly as Paul had described it to her.
Dimun isi sovaz. The people here are savages.
She was not sure if Gaetan meant ‘savages’ or ‘wild’, or if this word had a slightly different meaning in Creole.
I don’t need a bodyguard. I was born here.
Gaetan shrugged and got back into the car. He had wanted to bring Genie to the house where Jean-Marie and her father had lived, forgetting, if he’d ever known, that Genie had spent the first five years of her life there. The road was called Sparrow Street. All the streets had English names. She couldn’t remember ever having known this address, though perhaps she had done, once. Of course the house was much smaller and poorer-looking than she’d remembered, one storey high, its blistered yellow paint revealing patches of cement underneath. The wrought ironwork over the windows was almost ornamental, but there was no disguising its function, Genie felt. She couldn’t see the hole in the wall that Paul used to look through, the one she could never reach herself. But she could see over the wall now. She recognised some of the trees in the garden, and the bush in the corner where Paul had once seen a snake.
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