A Lesser Dependency

by Peter Benson

  She was shaken out of her memories when the girl moaned from her belly and let the sound build through her body to a yell that shocked the chicken off the bed, out of the door and into the sunlight.

  ‘Steady,’ said Maude.

  The midwife said, ‘It’s coming now; don’t push… push… wait…’ Maude said, ‘Listen to her,’ when the girl shook her head. ‘Do as she says.’

  The baby was born as Leonard and Odette, bored at home and curious to know what their mother was doing, came and stood by the door to watch.

  ‘He looks like a fish,’ said Leonard.

  ‘He’s a girl, fool,’ said Odette, and ‘it’s only because she’s slimy.’ She shook her head. Her brother related everything to fishing, and didn’t stay long enough for anyone to ask what he was doing there. He went and sat on the beach to count boats as they tacked across the lagoon; the evening was cool. When Maude was thanked, she said, ‘Fetch him,’ to Odette, and the three walked home as the sky ripened like a fruit and spat last pips of light into the night.

  Raphael was waiting for them at home. He had been in the plantations late and, tired, stretched across the veranda to doze. Work had been hard… he wished he could fish all day. Generations of Ilois had bred absolute knowledge of the lagoons and waters around the island; every reef and headland was traced into his genes. The strength of the currents there, the depth of water here. He was thinking, as he dozed, about a reef in the north, beyond Simpson Point.

  Maude tapped him in the side with her foot and said, ‘Elaine had a little girl.’

  He opened his eyes. ‘It wouldn’t have been a big one…’

  ‘It could have been. Look at the boy.’ Maude pointed at Leonard. ‘He was big; long. Remember?’

  Raphael thought about that. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, and went to fetch a bottle his friend Georges had given him.

  Georges was a massive man with massive biceps and a broken nose. He could split a coconut with a light tap, and stare birds to death. He lived with his mother. She was old and mumbled about spirits from Madagascar, but was happy when she was sat in a chair with a whisk to keep flies off and a piece of string. She’d fiddle with the string and let Georges drink at crossroads or passing places along the tracks.

  ‘We should ask him to eat,’ said Raphael. ‘And his mother. She never gets out.’

  ‘She doesn’t eat.’

  ‘She must!’

  ‘Raw eggs. That’s all.’

  ‘She could come anyway. Georges can carry the chair over. She’d like the change. All she ever does is sit and stare at the same thing every day.’

  ‘She’s old.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Good. Then catch something different. There’s ripe aubergines; we’ll eat something special.’

  Raphael laughed. ‘Different? What you mean? I catch different every day!’

  ‘I know,’ she said, and touched his knee.

  Georges came to eat on a Saturday. He carried his mother over and then her chair, and set her up on Maude’s veranda. She was amazed to see the lagoon from a different angle, and complained that spirits had come and were spreading salt in everyone’s eyes, when everyone knew spirits avoided salt. They were deceiving them before something happened.

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen, Mother,’ said Georges. ‘Look; here’s eggs, and in a bowl. You don’t normally get a bowl, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It makes a change, doesn’t it?’

  She didn’t like a change. She shook her head, ate the eggs and dropped the bowl. He stuck his broken nose close to her face and smiled. He had three teeth and patted her head. If anyone hurt her he would strangle them.

  He said, ‘I’ll be over there,’ and pointed to a fire on the beach. ‘I’ll watch you.’

  ‘Good.’

  He had brought a bottle of calou, a dangerous drink made from the sap of coconut trees; he poured cups and played with Leonard and Odette. He let them hit him but they couldn’t hurt him. They punched his chest, his legs and his arms but he just roared with laughter and wouldn’t fall over. He picked them up and tossed them into the lagoon.

  ‘There!’ he shouted. ‘That’s what I do to children.’ They laughed. He let them have a sip of calou.

  Maude cooked aubergines in a sauce of coconut juice, onion, chillies and tomatoes, and served them with lobsters. Georges told a story about a broken tractor, Raphael threw a rock at a rat, and after the food had been eaten and the children put to bed, the adults lay on the beach, poked the cooking fire and drank. The moon rose and veined the lagoon with phantom, still light.

  Georges’ mother grunted.

  ‘I’ll fetch some more,’ Georges said, went to his hut and came back with two bottles of wine. ‘You’ll like this,’ he said. ‘It’s fresh.’

  ‘Fill mine,’ said Raphael.

  ‘Women first. Maude?’

  ‘Go on.’

  Georges drank fast, lit a cigarette and slurred, ‘You know… I have a secret.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Georges looked at his mother. She was asleep but he whispered when he said, ‘Something no one else knows. Only her and me. We kept it from everyone.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘So if I tell you, you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone. It’s very…’

  ‘Promise,’ said Raphael.

  ‘And me,’ said Maude.

  ‘Good,’ Georges whispered. He belched and swayed in his seat. ‘Good. Then I’ll tell you…’

  ‘What?’

  He lowered his head and mouthed the words first before saying, ‘I’m a German,’ and drinking some more wine.

  Maude laughed. Georges looked at her. Her eyes reflected the moonlight on the ocean, and when she brushed a fly away he felt an unusual quiver in his stomach.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just that you’re…’

  ‘German. At least half.’ And he amazed Raphael and Maude with a story that was a lie. They knew it, but he’d told it to himself so many times that he didn’t doubt a word of it. He spilt some drink and said, ‘But don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘You said that.’

  Georges claimed that his father had been a sailor on a German warship that visited Diego Garcia ‘a long time ago’. Raphael didn’t laugh. It was true about the warship. Sailors had come ashore and mended some Ilois boats, but everyone knew Georges’ father had gone to Peros Banhos and not come back. Georges trying to convince people with stories didn’t do him any good.

  ‘German,’ said Maude, when he’d finished. ‘Maybe I should tell you a secret.’

  Raphael sat up. He didn’t know his wife had secrets.

  ‘What is it?’ said Georges.

  ‘Me and him are British.’

  ‘But not real Britons,’ said Georges. ‘There’s real German blood in here.’ He tapped his arm. ‘Pints.’

  ‘Yes!’ said Maude and she reminded him about the doctors, teachers, policemen and administrators who called on the island. She had a paper Union Jack to wave at administrators and could yell, ‘Long live the Queen!’

  Raphael watched the tide and only half listened to the argument. Instead, he thought about fish he’d surprised in past nights. Night fishing was often more successful than day fishing – he turned this thought over, looked at it from all angles and stood up when Georges said, ‘And you can’t make oil from books…’

  ‘I’m going fishing,’ he said, and clapped. The fire died down. ‘I’ll take a lamp. You can help push out.’

  ‘Me?’ Georges finished a bottle and squinted.

  ‘You can do it.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Georges had had enough to drink. He wouldn’t bother to work in the morning.

  ‘I can’t do it on my own,’ said Raphael, and he carried a lamp to the boat, tied it in the stern and coiled some lines into a bag.

  Georges nodded. ‘Right,’ he said, put his shoulder to the stern of the boat and pushed.

&
nbsp; ‘Harder, German!’

  ‘It’s stuck!’

  ‘No, it’s not. Nothing’s ever stuck! You’re not trying!’

  When the boat was floating, Georges gave Raphael a shot of wine, waved him over the lagoon and watched until the stern lamp was a pin-prick. Then he walked back to the fire and sat next to Maude.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  On Diego Garcia, other men sometimes took the place of absent husbands at night. Not Maude’s bed. She had enough to do, and when he tried to kiss her she said ‘Take her home,’ and pointed to his mother. She had slumped back in her chair, and was snoring. ‘Go on.’

  He shrugged and said ‘One day, Maude.’

  ‘One day never!’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he whispered.

  She heard that but didn’t say anything else. He staggered around and moaned about ‘a headache now’. It was his fault. If he was always going to be stupid she would treat him like a child. ‘Go home now, German,’ she said, and pinned a canvas sheet across the door of her hut. ‘Good night.’

  ‌4

  Raphael sat in his boat in the dark with a slack line. A few late lights burned along the shore, the only buildings he could see were the copra sheds at East Point, shadowed against the palms.

  They were owned by a company called Chagos Agalega: the buildings, yards, plantations beyond and the railway. Raphael and Georges’ work for them involved cutting coconuts, planting young palms and clearing undergrowth with hoes and machetes (owned by the company). They were paid in food, medical expenses and a small cash sum, banked for them by the company.

  As Raphael ran a finger down his line he didn’t want to think about work. He envied old men who could fish all day like his father had done in the last years of his life. Too old to be useful in the jungle he had taken to the lagoon and hardly come ashore. Insisting that one day his son would overtake his footsteps and fish all day without needing to work for Chagos Agalega, he had taught the boy to swim.

  Raphael had taken to the water like a bucket. He had no coordination, and it took him months to swim a yard. He couldn’t tell his legs to kick without the rest of his body thinking it was time to sink. His father almost lost patience with him many times, but was a drinking man and, in the end, didn’t care if his son couldn’t sort himself out. But Raphael had been stubborn early, and swore at his father inside. He would prove he could swim. He practised secretly and then bet him he could swim from a jetty to some rocks.

  ‘You’ve got nothing to bet with!’

  ‘I have.’ Raphael showed his father a collection of shells.

  ‘I could pick things like that up any time. Look! There’s some here.’

  ‘But these are mine!’

  Raphael’s father had stared at his boy. He narrowed his eyes and farted. He took a coin out of his pocket and put it on a rock. ‘That,’ he said, ‘against the shells. Go!’

  Raphael swam the distance and bought a cake with his winnings. He carried it hidden up his shirt with his head down, and ate it all alone, in a glade outside Marianne.

  Raphael was shaken out of his thoughts by a bite. Something small grabbed the bait and he took the strain. It wriggled free then, and the line went slack.

  ‌5

  Two weeks later, Raphael smiled sweetly when Georges said, ‘You couldn’t catch a sweat!’ Another fishing trip had ended in tangled lines and an empty bag.

  ‘At least I try. All you do is nothing!’

  ‘I’ve got my mother to watch!’

  ‘Her and a bottle.’ Raphael smelt his friend’s breath and waved his hands. ‘I know.’

  Georges needed a drink at eleven in the morning to set him even. He had persuaded his boss to give him wine instead of cooking oil. He smoked too much and kept apart from most of his work-mates. They weren’t involved or insulted. He scared them. His (company) machete was always kept sharp. He wrapped it in an oiled cloth each evening, and walked home slowly with a filled screw-top bottle he’d owned for five years. This fitted in his pocket and was his prize possession. It had GILBEYS written in raised letters around its neck. He topped it up twice a day.

  His mother was waiting for him. She hadn’t noticed him leaving in the morning, and wondered if it was him coming home. She had lost her mind in 1959, when a lorry had demolished her previous hut. She’d been cooking and smelt oil ever since the accident. The lorry had been coming at speed from Simpson Point, where it had been overloaded by a group of six irresponsible men. She had cut her hair and embarrassed Georges for months by not staying at home.

  He said, ‘I’m back!’ and propped his machete against a bucket. He kicked a dog off the veranda and sat down. ‘Mother?’

  She hadn’t remembered answering a question for six years. All she could remember was a man flying through the windscreen of his truck, through her hut and into a stack of brooms.

  Georges laughed and shook his head. For all his behaviour he wanted to look after his mother until she died. She died in the spring. He had been in the shop.

  ‘I’ll take the usual, and a bottle of that.’

  ‘I kept one back for you. It came in yesterday.’

  ‘I knew it would.’ It was cane spirit. ‘Keep another.’

  The shopkeeper tapped his own head. ‘Don’t worry. There’s plenty more.’

  ‘Mind there is.’ Georges pulled himself up and pointed a finger. His head touched the roof.

  He walked home for his lunch. Other workers sat under trees in the plantation while the sun rose directly overhead and peeled the skin off rocks. Dogs lay by taps; the only things that bothered were flies. The day ripped itself open and sighed to a dead and solid halt. Even Maude gave up working in her garden. Her hoe had made clouds of dust that drifted across the road and settled on neighbours’ washing. A jeep over-heated and blew up.

  Georges found his mother dead in her chair. She had a surprised expression on her face and a streak of bird shit in her hair. Georges prodded her and yelled, ‘Mother!’

  Maude ran to see. She couldn’t understand how she’d missed realising the woman was dead. Death affected her in the strangest ways. ‘She must have died when that lorry crashed,’ she said, to explain herself, and helped Georges lay his mother out in the hut.

  Maude stayed with the body while Georges walked back to East Point. ‘My mother is dead,’ he said to himself. He took out his bottle and had a drink. ‘My mother is dead,’ he said at a house that overlooked the green.

  ‘You’ve got some money?’ said a man.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Wait at home. We’ll come in half an hour.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Georges walked to the shop. The man he’d spoken to was a mourner; when the shopkeeper saw him again he said, ‘Back again?’

  ‘My mother is dead.’

  ‘Oh, Georges. Georges…’

  ‘I just found her. She looked like she was about to say something.’

  ‘Oh…’

  ‘She didn’t.’

  ‘No…’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  A woman came to buy some soap but the shopkeeper waved her away. He put his hand on Georges’ shoulder. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘More drink. And some tea. Coffee?’

  ‘Here…’

  ‘Can I pay tomorrow? I haven’t got any…’

  ‘Next week, any time.’

  ‘Come tonight.’

  ‘I’ll bring some more.’ He tapped some bottles and smiled. ‘No charge.’

  When Georges got home, Maude had swept the hut and left the rubbish in a pile beneath the shelf. She’d ringed it with shells and laid a clean sheet of her own over the body. The mourners came, wailed, and in the evening people came from every village on the island and remembered the corpse as a walker.

  Maude knelt Odette beside her and prayed for the spirit to find itself a solid boat, warm winds and calm seas home. She fingered the shroud and when she’d finished said, ‘Open a bottle for Georges.
’ He was sitting in a corner.

  ‘Come on, Georges!’

  A man from Balisage began a song about graves opening and spirits flying to Africa. He had a deep voice and no one joined him in the first verse. Another man sang the chorus and waited for a drum in the second verse.

  Raphael passed Georges a jug as the mysterious ‘spirit-seeker’ stood up and began to dance. He was from Marianne, carried a switch of coconut leaves and held his eyes wide open. He looked around the crowd and whispered for the spirit to come out. He flicked at anything that moved. Children stood back. He kicked his legs, crouched down and leapt up again. The singing grew louder. Bottles were tossed into the sea. A ‘story-teller’ appeared and began to bother the mourners.

  He pretended to be an insect and told a story about five gods and a ship that flew across the ocean with captured spirits. They laughed at people on earth – the mourners jeered. The ‘spirit-seeker’ waved his switch at the man and shouted. Georges covered his ears and yelled ‘Mother!’ over the din, but no one heard him. Maude took Odette and Leonard home, and came back with more wine. She passed the bottles around and took one to Georges.

  ‘Here!’

  When the story-teller had reached a point in his tale where the gods caught a goat, the mourners threw corks at him and chased him away. They left him on the beach and went back to play dice and cards on Georges’ veranda.

  The body was carried to Minni-Minni and buried there the next day. For seven nights following, a cup of tea was left out for the spirit, on the eighth a plate of unsalted food. On the ninth day, the spirit was taken away in the pile of rubbish Maude had swept under the shelf. The rubbish was carried to a distant spot by the women from the twelve huts by Georges’, dumped, and in fear of the spirit of his mother haunting them no one looked back as they walked away. Ilois watched death carefully, and didn’t want too much spread over so many small islands in the Indian Ocean.