The car was old, and had no air-conditioning. They drove with the windows down, Genie carefully shifting in her seat every now and then to detach her bare legs from the hot, sticky plastic.
Where are we going now? she asked.
To see your dad and Jean-Marie.
Genie realised without shock that she had no idea where they were buried. ‘In Mauritius’ had always felt like enough of an answer. As though the island itself were a cemetery.
I’d rather go to the beach, she said.
Gaetan thought she was joking. And, clearly, that the joke was in poor taste. Genie tried to explain.
You know how, she said, if you dream, and you dream you are back at school, say, only it looks like your grandparents’ house, but it’s not your grandparents’ house, it’s your school, and how you know it’s your school even though it doesn’t look anything like your school but it’s your school because it feels like your school?
Your Creole’s not bad, Gaetan said.
I can’t instantly picture my dad or Jean-Marie but I recognise them in dreams. I know when I am in their presence, I know what it feels like to be around them. I know when I’m dreaming about them, even if they’re not there. But if I see those slabs of marble, I will never have that feeling again.
I’ll take you to Flic-en-Flac, said Gaetan. Where the Mauritians go.
The car park smelt of diesel and frying spices from the fast-food vans. It smelt of pineapple too: a man sat peeling and chopping piles of the small local variety, Victoria, the syrupy smell mixing with curry and sea salt on the breeze, the sound of the waves overlaid with the knife’s hack-hacking. Gaetan stopped to buy a few slices, which he shared with Genie. They ate greedily, the fruit intensely sticky and sweet. While they ate, they noticed the pineapple man’s small daughter. She was dressed, quite bizarrely for a day’s work at the beach, in a pink satin frock that looked like a bridesmaid’s dress. It was slightly too big for her. When a friend of the pineapple seller’s then turned up with a tired-looking horse, its eyelashes thick with flies, they watched as the little girl accepted a ride. She was lifted, unsmiling, up into the saddle, wearing a solemn, almost regal expression as the horse plodded on, neck drooping, in a circuit of the car park.
She looks like a little doll, Gaetan said. Gaetan himself looked like an antique grizzled teddy bear, Genie suddenly thought. They walked through the trees, towards the beach. Mauritius seen from the plane had made Genie laugh. It had seemed ridiculous, too like images from the in-flight magazine. But close up, down here, on the west side of the island at least, it was not really like that. The sky was quite full of clouds and not at all the breezy blue you saw in postcards. The sun glared. It was very different from the more touristy beaches in the north. Gaetan was right: this was a beach for Mauritians.
I like it here, said Genie.
Me too. But some people don’t appreciate it. They’d rather live in a place with twenty million people and more shops and bigger cars and an underground railway system and big giant advertising screens flashing everywhere you look. Not me.
They went and sat in the shade at the edge of the beach, near bougainvillaea bushes covered in flowers of every kind of lipstick colour. They were surrounded by families, here for picnics, with their tupperware containers full of curry and their jumbo bottles of pop and towels and even tarpaulins which they had brought from home and stretched out between the filao trees so that the babies and old people could sit in the shade. They had made themselves a home from home. Every now and then one of the older folk, left out of the conversation, would look over at Genie, as though they knew her.
And Genie was beginning to feel she knew them. The landscape had triggered no memories except those implanted by Paul – descriptions of his own memories. But hearing strangers speak Creole no longer made the language strange to her. Instead, it somehow made the speaker more familiar.
You’ll like Rodrigues, Gaetan said. It’s quiet. Small. Like a village. It’s like Mauritius was fifty years ago. That’s what everyone says.
Wouldn’t you like to live there?
No. You can’t go back in time like that.
Genie was watching a family of four wading in the shallows. The mother was white and looked English, the father Mauritian. But it was the two children who caught her attention: a boy of about eight and his much younger sister, both honey-coloured like Paul, with the same blonde-brown hair that had the singed look, Genie always thought, of old flower petals. And on the breeze she caught high-pitched squeals in London accents.
Do you think I’ll find him? she asked, lying back on the sand.
I don’t think he wants to be found. But I don’t know if you are willing to give him that choice.
Genie closed her eyes and wondered why voices on the beach always sounded so far away.
(ii) Paul
He did not sleep well on his first night in the shack, unused to the sound of the sea and the cold from the wind which crept through the cracks. He mummified himself in the blankets the previous occupant had left and sniffed the rough wool pressed to his face. Strange to know them as a smell in the dark. He slept only when dawn broke, daylight somehow calming the sea.
When he awoke, he stood looking out at the edge of the spit, towards the horizon. Not quite on land and not quite at sea. There were times in London when he would get claustrophobic in places where he couldn’t see the entrance or exit, but here he felt free. You could see the entrance or exit – the sea – from everywhere here, on what he was beginning to think of as an island, his island, on the island of Rodrigues. This haunted rock.
(iii) Genie
There were many myths about lost treasure buried on this island, the taxi driver told her. Genie looked out onto the ochre and black landscape, the tough grass, the stones of lava strewn about as though spelling out a message from a lost time. It was wild-looking here, the grass overgrown, broken trees which had not been broken cleanly; the splintering made her wince. The island was still in tatters after Cyclone Kalunde and it made sense, she saw now, that Paul had run here to hide, a broken man among the broken trees. She tried to read in the stones, in the curve of a slope, in the twist of a wind-stunted tree, some sign of Paul.
(iv) Paul
Paul walked up the beach and into the trees, collecting branches that had been torn away in the cyclone. Later, he would make a fire. In between the broken trees others stood whole: palm trees that had yellowed in the heat, a baobab trailing desiccated entrails like streamers. Man, your family tree, it’s like a baobab. Maja had said this, when Jean-Marie had introduced Paul to the others as the brother of his sister. The coconut trees looked faded, tired; they leant towards the ground, heads bent with fatigue. It was the sun. The sun was so hot, even the sea was barely able to lift its head, it seemed.
Reaching a stream, Paul drank from it, splashing water on his face and chest, the ripples of light on clear water like the stretch marks on Eloise’s breasts. She’d got very thin very quickly. He would wash that blanket, he decided, and he returned to the shack. As he pulled aside the zinc covering the entrance, he was reminded of all the times he and Sol had done just that – pulled away boards or unscrewed sheets of Cytex to discover, like hermit crabs, empty shells where they could make a home. Paul had believed then that he and Sol were equal in terms of ambition and prospects. They hung around together, did drugs, rescued broken things from skips, destroyed them in creative ways, living only in the present. But Paul realised now that he and Sol had never really been the same at all. Sol always busy in a way that Paul could never be: he himself was energetic, yes, but nervous and edgy and ultimately directionless, as though, quite literally, he’d never known what to do with himself. Long after they’d fallen out (Eloise had ‘let slip’ exactly what had happened the night of Genie’s fifteenth), he would hear about Sol – going straight-edge, or giving up squatting for renting – and had gradually come to realise over the past year that the lack of any kind of progress in his own life at
this age was actually a kind of regression.
Let me make this a home, he thought, momentarily forgetting the blanket, opening up his suitcase to find that old book and pull out a couple of pictures from the loose binding. A pubescent Virginie, bathing in a secret glade, one hand held to her breasts in a provocative gesture of modesty, some kind of ancient muscle memory of those experimental twelve-year-old’s wanks tugging at Paul. And ‘Paul sur le rocher’, the boy now a man, sitting hunched on a spiteful-looking rock, looking out to an empty horizon. These he propped up against his suitcase by way of making the squatted shack a little more his. Then he turned to the mattress and pulled the blanket from it. As he did so, a yellowed newspaper cutting fluttered out. He read it. Then he folded it carefully and put it in his pocket.
Later, in his search for food, Paul walked along the Baie du Nord. There he came across a snack shack by the side of the road. A boy of about twelve stood behind the counter, reading a book. He was wearing glasses with thick lenses and frames so large they looked as though they’d been stolen from some old man. Paul was surprised by his sudden urge to laugh. When had he last found anything funny? A radio on the counter was playing a seggae and the boy was nodding his head in time to it. Paul had heard the song a lot in Mauritius: ‘Peros Vert’.
Hello.
Paul realised this was the first word he’d spoken aloud since leaving Marie’s place.
What are you after? the boy asked.
A glass case on the counter held dhal pancakes, and slices of aubergine deep-fried in batter. Tins of soft drink were displayed in pyramids behind him on a shelf.
I’ll take a can of Pepsi. And some of those aubergines.
As the boy filled a paper bag, which immediately broke out in greasy patches, Paul asked, That little shack out on the rocks, on the way to Pointe Pistache… He described its exact location.
Yes, I know it.
Who lives there? Paul asked.
The boy shrugged. Nobody, he said, handing Paul the bag.
Any idea how long it’s been there? Who built it?
Ti Jean. After the cyclone.
Where is he now?
Dunno, the boy said. Nobody does. His house got smashed up in the cyclone. He went a bit strange after that. Said he didn’t want to rebuild his house. So he built himself that place on the beach. And then he got worse. Started ranting about God punishing us for our sins. That was why the cyclone came, apparently. To punish us. Then he just disappeared. Maybe he got washed away with his sins.
Paul laughed.
Are you a tourist? the boy asked.
Not really.
The boy asked where Paul was from and Paul said, London. The boy asked lots of questions about London, which he’d never visited, never having left Rodrigues. Then Paul asked about the book the boy was reading. It was called Benares.
Benares is a place in India, said the boy, But it’s also the name of a place in Mauritius. This is about the Mauritian Benares. It’s funny, don’t you think, to have two towns in different countries with the same name? I would like to visit Benares in Mauritius and then Benares in India. And also London. You know there is an East London in England but did you know there is an East London in South Africa? That’s where my grandfather came from.
What’s your name? Paul asked.
Jeannot, said the boy.
Gaetan had liked that song a lot – ‘Peros Vert’. And on Paul’s first night there, when he’d been drunk and they’d been talking about Jean-Marie, it had even made him cry. He liked the words, he’d said to Paul helplessly, wiping away the tears – a lament for the island which the singer’s family had been forced to leave. That was what they called the island: Peros Vert. Green Peros. Did Paul know that was in the same group of islands Maja’s family had come from? It made him wonder, Gaetan said, how Maja would have turned out if he’d had the opportunity to live his whole life on the island where he’d been born. Paul thought of Maja as he was now. Had he come full circle, somehow? Become the person he should always have been? If so, he’d had to kill someone to do it.
Paul carried the branches he’d gathered down to the shack, where he set about building a fire. Crouching by the pile of branches and dried grass, ready to set it alight with matches, he heard Eloise: Like rubbing two damp sticks together. She had said that about failing to orgasm on whatever medication she’d been on at the time. He remembered their goodbye hug. He had held her very tightly and for a long time, until she’d pulled away oh, so gradually, pressing her forehead gently into his chest and levering herself up and off, as though she were unpeeling herself from him. So that was it now. She had changed, and he had not.
Over the last couple of years it had seemed to Paul that a succession of possibilities had one by one become closed to him. A life with Eloise was just one of these. Paul thought then about Jeannot and his plans to visit parallel places and smiled. As he sat staring into the lazy flames, shifting every few seconds to present a different part of his body to the heat now that the sun had suddenly sunk out of sight in a brief blaze, he realised that it did not disturb him to think of his life in this way. Left with fewer options, it was easier to make decisions. He supposed all his remaining options would gradually fall away until he was left with only one: the only decision really worth considering.
(v) Genie
It had been apparent to everyone Genie had met back in Mauritius that she was a foreigner, even before she’d opened her mouth. She’d wondered if it was her clothes, her haircut or the particular quality of her brownness, which glowed in a fresh way (she liked to think, looking closely at her new colour whenever she stepped, dripping, out of the shower), built up from a greyish London base coat with successive layers of tan. When, in Mauritius, people had identified her as foreign, they had commented. And, when they commented and she replied, they heard the accent and seized on it, happy to talk to someone from London, happy to have been proved right.
But not this man. This Rodriguan. This man with the high, narrow shoulders that brought to mind Paul’s had no interest in her at all. And why should he? To him she was just another Western tourist.
She was sitting at the hotel bar drinking coffee, making a plan. She’d hoped to engage the barman in conversation – wore an expression which conveyed this, she thought – but after serving her he’d turned back to his task of chopping up fruit for the evening cocktails. His manner changed when he was joined by a colleague – a pretty girl with eyelashes so thick they looked frilly. The two flirted as they manoeuvred their way around each other in the cramped space behind the bar, so cramped that the waitress knocked over a glass of orangeade and swore, apologising briefly in French to Genie.
That’s OK, Genie replied in Creole. The waitress looked up at her suspiciously, gave a brief, tight smile, took up her tray and sashayed out towards the pool, asking the barman, over her shoulder, to clear up for her. His name was Regis, Genie noted.
Was it very bad here after the cyclone? Genie asked, again in Creole.
Yes. They’re still clearing up now. There are still food shortages. But not here.
Was he trying to reassure her, or was he being sardonic? She hoped not. She felt that his sarcasm – if sarcasm it was – was being used against her, was meant to further the distance between them. More so for being in Creole, which Genie had chosen to converse in for the opposite reason. She guessed that must be his intention: after all, he had not commented on the fact that she had spoken to him in his own language, when she was clearly – with that accent – a foreigner. This man couldn’t care less. His indifference, coupled with the shy dimples that had emerged only in the presence of the waitress and disappeared when she left, annoyed Genie intensely. Suddenly she snapped, I’m not here on holiday you know.
Oh?
I’m looking for my brother. She took out the photo of Paul. Have you seen this guy around?
No.
He’s definitely here.
Plenty of places to hide in Rodrigues, he said. I
f you don’t want to be found.
I suppose.
Genie wanted to say, Your island is not as big as you think it is. It’s tiny. I’ll find him.
But you know, he said, looking straight at her for the first time, everyone on this island has to go to Port Mathurin at some point. And if not your brother, then someone who has seen him, at least.
The bus to Port Mathurin was old and blew out emissions so thick that Genie thought instantly of some hooved animal, stamping up clouds of dust. After she had paid the conductor, a middle-aged woman with rust-coloured hair and rust-coloured eyebrows drawn in with pencil, Genie showed her the photo. She told the conductor about her search for Paul but the conductor said nothing. She had that lost look that tourists always wore when listening to directions you and they both knew they would forget as soon as you walked away. After that, the woman’s gaze turned to rest on Genie, that same look, whenever she was not otherwise occupied with the other passengers – schoolchildren in dazzling white uniforms, scrawny old men in short sleeves and straw hats. You never know, Genie said to herself. The people you see around you. They could all be lost to someone.
Not much of a capital, Genie thought, walking the dirt-packed road that led to the centre, though like any tourist she was delighted by the little painted shacks and the women in woven hats selling lemon pickle and bottles of tiny red chillies. She remembered what Gaetan had said about the island: that it was like Mauritius from an earlier time, nothing more than a village, really.
Gaetan had taken her lack of interest in Mauritius personally, she saw now. But once he had given her all the useful information he had to offer – that Paul was now in Rodrigues, having gone over by ship over a week before – Genie had seen no reason to stay on. Grandmère had no idea who she was. And why wallow in sentiment when she felt nothing about the place? That, to her, would have been dishonest. And anyway, it was not the past that interested her, it was the present, and Paul’s absence from it. That was what she was here for.
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