For Ruth and Ian
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Maps
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
About the Author
Copyright
ONE
Sidony Redruth. Caliban’s Fast Food Diner. May 8th, 1997.
Notes for Undiscovered Islands (working title).
I WOULD HATE to have to choose, but I think I’d rather have travelling than sex. This probably goes back to an early confusion about trespass. I was taught to say ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ but this never stopped me from climbing through the hole in the paling fence into the woods next to the churchyard, right under the notice which said that Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. I thought that prosecuted was something to do with hell, but even so the risk, in relation to exploring new territory, was worth it to me.
When I came here a couple of my friends said that this place would be their idea of hell. So many people seem to associate hell with cool weather, but I learned in Sunday School that hell is hot. The mid-Atlantic is chilly and wet in winter, and often foggy the rest of the year. Winds of Force 5 and upwards are statistically normal. The temperature of the sea averages 53°F. There are good places to swim all the year round because of the hot springs. This afternoon I’ll try the pool in St Brandons, which is outdoors and always warm, Olympic-sized with jacuzzis and natural hot tubs as well. Hell, if that’s what sulphur, brimstone and a burning mountain amount to, has certain advantages. Another reason why early explorers thought this was either hell or the promised land is that the compass swings madly as soon as it comes within a thirty-mile radius of the place, which is either due to magic or mineral deposits, depending on your point of view. It also accounts for the inordinate length of time it took to get the islands fixed on the map.
I’m sitting in a café which could belong in any run-down fishing port between Maine and Aberdeen. The rain-streaked windows are fugged up on the inside; the stuffy dampness seems distilled from a brew of stewed tea and wet socks. It isn’t quite twelve o’clock (2 p.m. at Greenwich) and a spotty boy in a striped apron is writing on the blackboard in green chalk:
dinner 12–2
deep fried fish (haddock, saithe or plaice) £4.10.6
steak mince £4.19.6
burgers £3.17.6
all served with chips and baked beans or mushy peas
Two fat raindrops wander slowly down the glass beside me. From where I sit I can read the neon notice that hangs in the window:
CALIBAN’S FAST FOOD DINER
This whole project began in a café. I want to say it was in Lyon’s Corner House – that feels right – but the truth is that I was nowhere near Charing Cross, and I believe Lyon’s Corner House only exists now in Golden Age detective stories. It was actually an anonymous café in Islington. It was raining then too, not in the fierce and salty way it’s doing here, but in a thin London way, as if the weather was something the city couldn’t quite be bothered with.
‘A new list.’ I was finding it hard to listen, as if none of this quite related to me. ‘A series of travel books. Something that combines a guidebook – practical information and so forth – with a narrative. First-hand experience.’
This was my commissioning editor speaking. I’d never owned an editor of any kind before, and I was intimidated, and also mesmerised by the way she stirred her coffee round and round with the wrong end of a red biro.
I’m not sure about first-hand experience. Wherever I go I take myself with me, and that’s the experience. This would seem to disqualify me from writing a good guidebook. I’d find it impossible even to describe this first twenty-four hours objectively. I could try, like this:
When we landed it was not quite daylight and not yet night. Through the plane window I saw grey, and as we landed there were streaks of raindrops. I couldn’t tell if the grey was dark or fog. Below lay a strip of tarmac with a crack in it where grass had pushed through, and a flattened dandelion. A truck loomed up and vanished under our tail. I felt as though we would be here for ever; the steps would never come, the door would never open and we would sit here till we died. Meanwhile I read and re-read the one stamp in my passport as if I’d never seen it before in my life.
Kidd’s Hotel is the main hotel in St Brandons. It’s a depressing building, peeling stucco on the outside, and red plush wallpaper and acres of threadbare carpet on the inside, on which vast pieces of mahogany furniture float like jetsam from a Victorian steamship becalmed for ever in the doldrums. I seemed to be the only guest. My bedroom was grubby and smelt of damp. I managed to heave the broken sash window up a couple of inches and wedge it open with a roll of toilet paper. The smell of fog began to filter in. (And so is my own opinion, I notice, as I write.) I thought of having a bath but there was no plug, and when I tried to turn on the shower a vast cast-iron handle arrangement came off in my hand. This morning I ate a greasy breakfast in a huge dining room lined with spotted mirrors, so that the white empty tables receded into infinity like sheets of polar pack ice.
The receptionist accepted with phlegmatic resignation that I was checking out after only one night, and she let me leave my luggage in a cupboard full of dried-out tins of paint and the imposing prototype of all vacuum cleaners.
Outside it was the kind of thick fog which keeps trying to turn into rain, and soaks one through in a moment. I pulled my hood over my head, and walked slowly down the High Street. It’s a narrow paved street which is supposed to be pedestrianised, but cars kept creeping out of the mist behind me, hooting mournfully. A foghorn chimed in from what must be the direction of the harbour. My eye was caught by a splash of colour in a window. I went to look. There’d been a wedding, in some faraway time and place where the sun still shone. A path wound across a hillside of terraced orchards where a fiddler walked ahead of the bride and groom. The bride was in white, the groom wore the traditional blue braided jacket I’d already seen on a couple of older men in St Brandons. The wedding party followed, over a pass and down to a small white church beside a sparkling sea. The bridal party stood in the church door smiling among a host of apple blossom. Then they were in a hall festooned with streamers, cutting a monumental cake, while little girls with flowers in their hair shoved their way in to get the first slices.
I read the sign over the door. KIRWAN: PHOTOGRAPHER. I wandered on, past a butcher and a stationer, and a massive flowering cherry tree dripping rain and pink blossom in a slippery mass on the wet paving stones. I wondered who’d planned to have it grow right in the middle of the street, the tree or the Town Council. Either way, I was glad to see that the one had been able to accommodate the other. Just beyond it there was a pleasing Georgian building with a big bow window. I peered into the dim interior. It was one of those curious shops you only get in small towns, which sell things like rolls of tweed, fishermen’s socks and obsolete forms of underwear. There was a big woven bedspread in the window, woven in dark blues and sea greens, with a crescent island in the middle of it pierced by a lance, or possibly a sce
ptre. Or it might have been a ship with a bare mast, or a Celtic brooch with a pin, or even a cooking pot with a long thin spoon. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be anything, but I loved the shape of it. I looked at the label. ‘PENELOPE’, it said, ‘£950’. I sighed. The reason I don’t possess much is that everything I fall in love with is light years out of my price range. I must just have terribly good taste.
The tourist office was a little way further down. I went in and picked up a pile of leaflets and a street map of St Brandons. I looked over the cards offering bed and breakfast, but I didn’t have the energy for phone calls just then. I was more interested in a flier that said:
ISHMAEL’S TOURS
WHALE WATCHING DESPAIR
ASCENTS PROSPER AILBE BRASIL
VOLCANO WEATHER PERMITTING
Phone Lyonsness 204
I wandered over to the counter where a young man wearing a label that said PETERKIN answered my questions. He was in no hurry. No one here is, as far as I can make out. He said yes, Ishmael was definitely the man if I wanted to get into the mountains; it would be dangerous to go by myself. Ishmael also had the best boat on the north side and if there were whales there he’d find them. What’s more, if you didn’t see any he’d give you your money back or take you again for free. Ishmael was a thoroughly decent chap, said Peterkin. I resisted the impulse to ask him to say that again. I daresay I’ll soon get used to a vocabulary that makes me feel as if I’ve strayed into a black-and-white film. If I wanted to get out of St Brandons Peterkin recommended Lyonsness, and his aunt did the best bed and breakfasts there, if I didn’t mind him saying so.
Peterkin asked me things about myself that I didn’t really want to tell him, but I think that’s just the way they are here, as if curiosity were a virtue. I found myself listening to his accent more than to what he said. So far I’ve had no trouble understanding people. To me they sound half familiar, as if at some distant date they’d imported their voices from my own country, and half Irish – the whole mixture being heavily spiced with a trans-Atlantic twang. Already I’ve heard turns of phrase that make me understand why this is an etymologist’s heaven. In fact, Peterkin assumed at first that I must be here to study the language. He said my own accent sounds to him like the way they speak at Lyonsness. Surely this place is too small to have regional dialects? When he said Dorrado was ‘fair’ it took me a moment to realise he meant beautiful, and not so-so. And he calls the open sea ‘the deep’, which sounds quite Biblical to me. He was talking about the failure of the fishing out in ‘the deep’. He said even on the Grand Banks there are no cod left, and to the north there are always problems with Icelandic fishing limits as well. He thought the European Union was excellent for any nation that was not in it, but even so there were huge problems in this country, as I’d find out. Terrible unemployment, terrible changes. I should have come ten years ago.
‘Ten years ago I was still at school.’
‘Ten years ago my dad had his own fishing boat. He put five of us through college. Not me,’ said Peterkin. ‘I’m the last one. We can’t afford college now. So here I am.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘To hell with it. There’re no jobs anyway. It used to be the ones with any guts got out. But now there’s nowhere to go. Not in all the world. So I stay. It’s home, anyway.’
I didn’t tell him what I was doing here. I felt bad about that, as he’d been so open with me. Another thing I learned at Sunday School was guilt. I feel it often, and I felt it now, almost the way I’d felt it back in that café in Islington where this whole adventure started.
* * *
At that stage I was overcome by the very idea of a commissioning editor. I expected her to be omniscient, though she turned out not to be, and I was terrified of being found out. I looked down at my hands, which were twisting themselves together in an anxious sort of way. I made them keep still, and decided that I’d have to tell her the truth.
‘That piece I wrote …’ I ventured.
‘We loved it. Original and well written, and above all,’ she beamed at me encouragingly, ‘authentic. So much travel writing now has that second-hand feel. Pastiche. And so many places written to death, from Provence to Antarctica. Most people take the well trodden path. Now what we noticed about your piece was that freshness of approach, that genuine feel for the place, that willingness to go somewhere unusual and look at it differently when you got there.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘That’s what Eileen said. She said it was appalling having to judge. You know there were twelve hundred entries? She said yours leapt out at her at once. A genuine account of a real adventure, just what they were looking for.’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t …’
‘So as we were putting this new list together, she mentioned you. We’ll need one or two names to start us off, but we want to get hold of some young writers. And some unusual places. Get off the map. That’s what you can do for us. I mean, if you can get yourself to St Helena, South Georgia and Ascension Island, with no backing at all, you’ll know just how to tackle this place.’
‘Yes, only I didn’t …’
‘Now don’t be diffident. You won the competition, didn’t you? We know what we’re looking for.’
‘But …’
‘You could do it in a summer. Couldn’t you get leave for that long?’
‘I’m not employed. It isn’t that …’
‘Well, then, isn’t this just what you’ve been waiting for?’
Of course it was, but I was feeling awful. When I was young I thought my conscience was a little man who lived inside me who had an unpleasant barbed weapon, something between a trident and a toasting fork, with which he would prick me in the ribs from inside whenever I did anything untoward. I could feel him very plainly now. Of course she was right, I had not only waited for something like this but prayed for it, cast spells to create it, asked runes and the tarot and the stars to prophesy about it, looked up reference books in the library in pursuit of it, and written endless letters of application for it. My mother says you should take care what you ask for because you’ll probably end up getting it.
‘Listen,’ I said desperately. ‘Do you know what I did with the prize money?’
She was hardly listening. ‘No.’
‘I went to Venice. It was Christmas. I should have been with my family. My father’s a vicar. Christmas is important. My brother’s been ill. My mother has an underactive thyroid, and is always tired. They needed me. There’s a lot to do – Midnight Mass and plum pudding and “Adeste Fideles” and the church wardens coming to drinks before dinner, and all sorts of things like that. I didn’t go. I took a package tour to Venice. It rained all the time. On Christmas Day I splashed around St Mark’s Square in my wellies, and then I stood on the quay and tried to remember that bit out of Browning where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings. I was happy, except for the guilt. But the point is – listen, please – that was the furthest south I’d ever been. Ever.’
I waited for her to understand.
‘But you’re giving me a splendid example of what we want. The unusual angle. The willingness to be self-sufficient, and to describe what you experience. This is exactly what we’re after.’
‘But what if it’s not true?’
‘You don’t have an agent, of course. I’ll take you through our standard contract back at the office. The advance is nominal, you must understand that, because your expenses will have to come out of it. But you’re used to travelling on a budget.’
Conscience got in one last painful dig, and curled up in exhaustion. I had tried. If she utterly refused to hear that my whole prizewinning narrative was a fabrication from beginning to end, and that my principal means of travel had been interlibrary loan (£1.30 per request) then that was her problem. I knew as much about Ascension Island as anybody by now, I reckoned, and I must have done something right because they’d given me a prize for it. I grew up with the sea and the rain, and now that
I’d discovered that there is sea and rain in Venice just like there is in Cornwall, and, so my sources tell me, in the South Atlantic too, I supposed I could write about these things anywhere, if pushed. I certainly would, if paid. I have very seldom been paid by anybody to do anything.
So here I am, in Caliban’s Fast Food Diner, doing something real, or so it seems to me. I push away my coffee mug and pick up my pen again:
This place is famous for its fog, and from that first glimpse I have seen nothing but fog. Fog all the way from the airport, fog in the streets of the town, fog outside my hotel window. Was it merely a literary coincidence that brought me, at the top end of the High Street, to the steps of the law courts? Neo-classical pillars rose into the fog. The oak door was shut. Government House hung beyond like a wraith while the mist swirled round it. At home a gale would blow away the fog, but here it just brings more of it. A volley of raindrops hit me in the face. They tasted of the sea. I decided I’d tackle Government later.
In front of Government House there was a huge bronze statue of what looked, through the foggy distance, like a sea monster with its young. I had to go right up to it to see it properly. It wasn’t a monster; it was a horse, about three times life-size, and emerging improbably from its belly were four attenuated warriors in Homeric costume. The bronze was rough-cast, and through my uneducated eyes the figures looked starved and agonised. Perhaps they were unaccustomed to Atlantic weather; they certainly weren’t dressed for it. There was a plaque set into the podium of the statue. It said:
αἶσα γὰρ ἦν ἀπоλέσθαɩ, ἐπὴν πόλɩς ἀμφɩκαλύψῃ
δoυράτɛoν μέγαν ἵππoν, ὅθ ’ ἥατo πάντɛς ἄρɩστoɩ
’ Aργɛίων Tρώɛσσɩ φóνoν καὶ κῆρα φέρoντɛς.
Th’unaltered law
Of Fate presaging; that Troy then should end,
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