Genie and Paul

by Natasha Soobramanien

  Compared to Rodrigues, Mauritius was like London. She had not recognised any of it from her childhood. She had thought then that countries were not home – families were. How could she feel at home in herself with Paul missing?

  But, over the course of the afternoon she spent wandering around Port Mathurin, something here struck Genie deeply. It was the slowness of the place, the unguarded manner of the people, the underdeveloped look of it. Rodrigues seemed more foreign to Genie, more far away from London, but it seemed more familiar too: more like how she’d imagined the Mauritius of her childhood to have been. The actual Mauritius she had just left seemed almost as brusque, as wary, as littered and light-polluted and full of noise and agitation as London in comparison. No wonder she hadn’t recognised it as part of her past.

  The centre of Port Mathurin was a few narrow streets laid out in a grid and lined mostly with those painted zinc shacks, low cement buildings and larger, more ornate colonial buildings which were governmental residences or offices. These last were set back from the road behind high walls. Over one wall hung the branches of a frangipani tree. Genie caught a whiff of its scent, so strong it was almost obscene. She disliked the flowers, which were too ripe, too fleshy: they would not fade and die quietly like English flowers, but looked as though they’d go straight from full bloom to rot.

  Why are you trying to find him? Gaetan had asked, as he was driving her back to the home in Vacoas.

  Because he’s lost.

  (vi) Paul

  If Ti Jean was still alive, he might return at some point. He would want his shack back. Paul was squatting the place, after all. But, listening to that wind last night and the waves which seemed to be creeping ever closer, Paul guessed that it might be the island itself which evicted him. This was what he thought, standing on the edge of his rock. This was what he did now, every morning when he awoke. Pulling aside the sheet of zinc which had sung all night in the wind, he would look up at the sky. He would walk out as far as he could on the land until it turned into rock and stand looking out to sea. This morning, something about the light brought back his dream, the one he’d had almost every night since that night. And now he remembered it: him and Genie in Mauritius, taking a trip down to Gris Gris on Jean-Marie’s motorbike. When they’d run out of road, they had left the bike and continued on foot over huge silvery rocks that looked like wads of chewed-up chewing gum (she’d said). Feeling his way back into the memory of the dream and its almost pleasurable sadness, he remembered that nothing much happened. Nobody died. It was just unbearably, beautifully sad. They were climbing over these rocks, him and Genie, down to an amazing stretch of sea, when Genie had stopped to inspect some plants at her feet. She’d asked him what they were. Dunno, he’d said, pinching off a leaf to sniff. Pine! he’d said. They’re little pines. Must be the coastal wind. Stunts ’em. Weird, he’d said, I’ve never seen tiny little pines like these before – and then he’d noticed her giving him this strange look – this very sad look – and he’d said, The blue honey of the Mediterranean. That’s what Fitzgerald said.

  Honey. Just like honey. Eloise, stroking his skin, would sing that to him sometimes. On his way to the snack shack, the song played in his head. He had been to the shack several times now. He liked to listen to the boy’s radio, liked the way the boy was always dancing around, even while seated, and he liked hearing him talk about books. The boy was crazy for them.

  Today, when he saw Paul approaching, he smiled.

  I’ve got a surprise for you!

  Don’t tell me Ti Jean’s turned up?

  This was a running joke of theirs. Jeannot laughed and brought out a flask from under the counter. Soup!

  Soup? For me?

  Lentil soup. You eat the same thing every day. I thought you might like a change. It’s what we had for dinner last night.

  That’s great. Thank you. I’ll give you the flask back tomorrow.

  You can give it to my mum.

  Your mum?

  I’m not going to be here from now on. I’m going back to school tomorrow. I told my mum about you. She asked all sorts of questions. She asked me what you were doing here. I didn’t know what to say. What are you doing here?

  When Paul returned to the shack he looked through his things. He wanted to find something to give Jeannot. But, looking through his suitcase, he found nothing of worth. He had only basics with him – ‘prison possessions’ he called them. Genie had always hated that joke. And the pills, he had those too. An old book that was falling to pieces. And a silly story besides. He could find nothing to give the boy. He was angry and confused by his sudden urge to cry.

  Later that afternoon, he walked back to the snack shack. He had with him the flask, which he’d washed out in the stream. And the newspaper clipping he had found under the mattress. He thought the boy might find it interesting.

  The story concerned a man from – oddly enough – a small village near Benares, in India. This man had suffered with stomach pains all his life. He was too poor to see a doctor. But finally, when he reached his thirties, his stomach had distended to the point where the pain was unbearable. He sought treatment. Cancer was suspected but the results of blood tests proved inconclusive. Finally an X-ray was performed. It was discovered that the cause of the man’s pain was his unborn twin, who had fused with him in the womb and had been growing inside him all these years. An operation to remove the twin revealed that he had adult-sized hands, feet and genitals. His head was covered in thick hair. He had teeth.

  Asked how he felt about the situation, the man said, I am shocked. I have five sisters. I always wanted a brother and he was growing inside me all my life. And now he has been taken out of me I have no pain. But I feel as though I have killed him.

  (vii) Genie

  Today the Mauritius Pride had arrived. Genie stood for a long while on the docks, staring down into the milky green water, breathing in the hot smell of sweat on skin, dead fish, rubbish, salt and rust, wet rope and seawater, watching the flow of people and goods on and off the ship. Boxes of hi-tech hardware and sacks full of rice and sugar, and a Jeep. Wicker cages full of chickens, strings of dried octopus. Genie stood mesmerised by all this activity until it began to slow down. Then she approached a man who seemed to have some official status in connection with the ship. He wore only a pair of orange surf shorts which looked almost fluorescent against his black skin. She tried to get his attention but he did not seem to hear her, instead turning to signal someone, raising his arms and pointing to confirm his instructions.

  Genie tapped him on the arm and felt a slick of sweat. He turned to her, tossing his head coquettishly, a gesture which set his finely plaited hair swinging and one which he carried off quite elegantly, Genie thought, for such a fat man. He made an impatient gesture. Genie realised then that he was deaf.

  She asked as clearly as she could, in French, if he worked there. He looked closely at her mouth but did not seem able to follow her words. After her third attempt at explaining, the man grabbed a colleague and signed to him. This man turned to Genie and asked what the problem was.

  Do either of you work here? she asked.

  Yes, we both do. On the Pride.

  Genie showed them Paul’s photo and asked if they’d seen him. The interpreter shook his head, but his colleague nodded and began to sign. He was on the crossing, two weeks ago, said the interpreter, following his friend’s gestures. He sat on deck with a couple of guys – other passengers – for almost the whole journey.

  Do you know where he is? Did you get what he was saying to those men? Do you know who they are? She turned from one to the other as the interpreter repeated these questions to his colleague, each followed by a businesslike shake of the head.

  He says all he can tell you is that the guys he saw your brother with seemed like bandits if you ask him.

  Genie thanked them and gave them her details. As she turned to go, she stopped in her tracks and called out directly to the man who had seen Paul, forgetting fo
r a moment that he could not hear her: why had he noticed Paul? How was it he remembered seeing him? It was two weeks, after all, since Paul had travelled over.

  This time the interpreter quoted his friend directly.

  He looked foreign. But not like any tourist or even a businessman. I wondered what the hell this guy was doing over here. There is nothing for him here.

  It was half-past four in the afternoon by the time she made her way back to the bus stop. She had been waiting for twenty minutes before a young boy in school uniform walked past and asked her what she was waiting for. A bus, she told him curtly, as though he had been sarcastic. But they stop running at four, he said. Then, with the air of someone used to being disbelieved, he sighed and asked a couple of passing schoolgirls what time the buses stopped. Each girl looked at the other, fingers buried deep in a shared bag of sweets, as though it was a trick question.

  Four, they said, almost in unison, barely able to talk around the bulges in their cheeks. The boy looked at Genie as though to say, You see! and walked off without a word.

  It did not take long after that for night to fall, for the darkness to deepen and the barking of dogs to sound louder, now that the roads were quiet. Walking back through town in search of a taxi, Genie’s heart lurched with the approach of each shadowy figure she passed. It was at times like this that she forgot about Paul completely, thought only of the moment, of immediate dangers – though later it occurred to her that if Paul was in Port Mathurin he might only show himself when the streets were dark and empty, and that perhaps one of those figures she had shrunk from had in fact been him.

  (viii) Paul

  This morning, the sky was pale and complicated with cloud which was the grey of something that had once been white. In the distance the sea, out on the reef, was a tingling blue, the foam so bright, it made the clouds look even dingier. What a triumph of Earth over Heaven, Paul thought, there on his rock, remembering the story Eloise had told him, the one he had once told her, apparently. He was living like a monk. He drank water from the river that failed to meet the sea. He ate food that he bought from the shack: fried fish or dhal pancakes. He wondered what the boy had told his mother: she’d seemed tense, had avoided his gaze. He would buy his food and drink from her and she would push his change towards him on the counter without looking at him. On his last trip there the woman’s eyes had glittered in a funny way, as though she was about to spit on him. He did not feel like going back there again. Besides, this food did not agree with him. His digestion had deteriorated. His gut would go slack and he’d get the runs or else it would knot him up with constipation. One day when he was squatting under a hibiscus bush, straining, he looked up to see two small fair children – he couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls, they were that young – staring at him. He scrambled into the bush as their mother appeared to retrieve them. He heard her scold them in some Scandinavian language. Tourists. He saw a few tourists from time to time on the beach. They arrived in monstrous vehicles which rolled heavily over the landscape. But soon it would be winter and, sweet and mild though it was, the tourists would leave. They were like the drunks who visited curry houses back in England and only wanted it hotter than they could stand it.

  There might have been tourists around, but Paul was alone. And why would you say this except to mitigate the meaning of those words? You could not say them to anyone else, or at least, not to anyone you would expect to understand. If you could, the words would no longer be true. You said them to yourself, in your head, and you heard them echo. You heard the echo and you thought, I am alone.

  Paul thought, how could anyone be alone with so much life around? So much insect life? If that was not a contradiction in terms.

  There were ants in his shack. The cockroach he had heard clatter across the packed earth of the shack’s floor in the night lay dead on its back by morning, the ants feasting on it.

  He remembered a cockroach he’d waged war on at Marie’s place, shortly before moving to the shack. He had seen it two days running, in the shower hut. It sat in the corner with its face (did they have faces?) towards the wall. On the third day, Paul had had enough of it. He took the shower head, switched the water on and aimed the jet of water at the cockroach. His intention was to swill it down the drain. When it began to drift on the water in semi-circles, like a leaf in a storm drain, it panicked, feelers plastered against its head like two wet hairs, scrabbling away from the jet of water, which Paul continued to train on it.

  Paul had looked at this cockroach and its frantic efforts and felt almost a respect for it, or for life, or for its instinctive urge to live. But also disgust: why should it want to live so much? Why should the instinct to live be more developed in a cockroach than a human? The simpler the creature, it seemed, the more urgent its instinct to life. After all, didn’t pandas and lions in the zoo lose the will to live sometimes? And didn’t people? Paul could never imagine a cockroach pining away with loneliness.

  Eventually he had given up on the cockroach, feeling sorry that he had started this, feeling pity for it or respect or annoyance because it was taking so long to die. The minute he switched off the water, the cockroach made a run up the wall and slid off, onto its back, where it shuddered and twitched with a violence that led Paul to think it was finally dying. He let it be and left. When he returned the next morning it had regained consciousness and was upright again in the corner, staring at the wall.

  He would walk to Port Mathurin later. Stock up on food there. Get drunk.

  Out in the street the sky glared like brushed steel. But he could barely see in here. The girls lounging in the doorway of the rum shop had hung back to let him pass into the single dark room. The one window high up in the roof was small and covered in chicken wire, like the door of a rabbit-hutch. He thought back to that night in Sainte Croix and the stacks of rabbit hutches out in the yard. There was nothing but a few rough tables and chairs here, and a poster advertising Guinness. Paul sat down and ordered rum from a boy with a pencil behind his ear. He looked at the girls in the doorway. One of them was quite young, younger than Genie. She was tall and dark with a great cloud of frizzy hair and large, shining eyes and her white dress looked whiter in the gloom of the place and against her skin. She smiled at Paul encouragingly but he turned away. He sipped at his rum, but when he next looked around for her she was sitting at a table in the corner with a man Paul recognised as one of the sailors from the ship. The sailor looked at him and said something to the girl, laughing. He did not have the dreamy look of the fishermen Paul knew in Mauritius.

  Paul ordered another rum from the boy, who after serving him returned to a chessboard he’d set up on the bar. The boy was apparently playing against himself. Paul thought of Eloise – of a visit he’d made to her in some private institution shortly after they’d split up. She had always worn her hair long and wild, stroking at it absently as though pacifying a cat that was trying to get her attention. So when she’d walked into the visitors’ room it had been a shock to see that her hair had been hacked off.

  I get it, Paul had said lightly, realising with a lurch that she’d cut it herself. Self-harming. Is that what you’re in for this time?

  I like it like this. Makes me look thinner.

  Oh, disorderly eating again.

  There had not been much else to talk about then, in that plain room with the high windows, until a pale girl with lilac-coloured skin had come in, followed by two people who were probably her parents. I played chess with her once, Eloise had said, nodding at her. She plays like a fucking kamikaze.

  Paul tossed back the rest of the rum, then signalled to the boy that he’d take another. Until that conversation, he’d never even known Eloise could play chess.

  Several rums later, the sailor left, and the girl in the white dress came to talk to Paul. She wanted to know who he was. What he was doing here. Where he was staying. Her questions annoyed him. I am going to tell you one thing about myself, he said. I am going to tell you about my
sister.

  When he had finished talking, she put her hand over his. He pushed it away, stood up. Staggered out into the metallic light. He stood in the doorway of the rum shop to steady himself. He did not know how long he had been standing there before he heard someone shouting his name.

  A London voice.

  He looked up sharply. There she was, at the end of the street. Genie. She was running towards him. At him.

  He ran.

  (ix) Genie

  Genie wandered back up along the street, ignoring the stares of everyone who’d seen her run screaming after him – the shopkeepers in their doorways, the people at the roadside stalls who had paused, snacks held halfway to their mouths, to watch the chase. She had lost him by the port. Now she was on her way back to the rum shop she’d seen him leave, to ask about him.

  A couple of girls were sitting at the rough wooden counter that passed for a bar.

  A man came in here, Genie said, laying the photo down in front of them. I need to know where he is.

  The two girls looked at one another and laughed.

  He’s my brother, Genie said. Our mum is sick. I need to find him.

  They gave her their full attention then. One of them, the younger one, a tall, goofy-looking girl in a grubby white dress, spoke. I tried to talk to him, but he wasn’t very friendly. I asked where he was staying and he wouldn’t say. I wanted to know what he was doing in Rodrigues and he wouldn’t tell me. But he did tell me about his sister, she said.