The world seems a small thing compared with my life these days. It took only a few seconds for Jessie’s last email to reach me, but the decision to come was still more instant and the trip itself was arranged in less than a week. Of course, Jessie and I never stopped seeing each other the way everyone else did. Even the month Mum had to spend with me in hospital, right after the blast (which was what saved me, me being thrown from the platform), when I was under psychiatric observation and the police were poking around and she was fighting like hell not to go to pieces in front of them – out of some weird, misplaced loyalty to Dad or to Jack or someone, or some middleclass resistance to outside interference: a determination that we could drive our own wedges between each other, pass sentence ourselves on the freaks and sinners in our midst – even then, Jessica managed to engineer a couple of meetings when Mum was gone and I was mobile enough to hobble down to the hospital chapel or the toilets to tell her what a hopeless bitch she is.
It’s funny but this trip now – standing here, holding the side of this lurching, beat-up old ferryboat, halfway across the world from everything I know – has the inevitability that drives some things in life, like a short circuit leapfrogging time, distance. She didn’t so much invite me as order me to come (‘You’ll be a prick if you don’t, this is the best time of the year. And, yes, I miss you – there’s no one to pry into my personal life, and I’ve a friend I think you’d like.’), but I know there’s more to it than that.
Dad has cut off her money because of the setup she’s fallen into: a threesome built around an ageing Kraut architect and his fuck – or other fuck, I suppose. I don’t think Dad’s anger has anything to do with age, race or the risk of physical violence Jessie might run if passions get aroused on a remote island. It’s more a question of professional rivalry – even if all this Nazi has achieved in the past three years is to rebuild some strange Wagnerian-style folly that was already there on the island.
Dad has done some sterling work himself in accepting that Jessie sleeps with other men (she claims, though I’m not sure if I believe her, that he now finds this a relief: he’s lost the taste for his own flesh) – but another architect, as old or older than himself, is asking too much.
I think he was happy for me to come out here because I might bring her back. I’m happy to be here because, without Jessie, there’s no pain. I am definitely addicted to her, and as this tub draws closer to where she is, I can see her, only in my mind as yet, I can smell her breath, her skin – and I’m ready for her, for it to start again.
▪
She picks me up in a clapped-out jeep at Port Elizabeth, waiting on the quay with what looks like a markedly less aggressive assortment of the harbor life that hassled me and hustled me in Kingstown: porters ready to help unload the baskets and crates and trunks, townsfolk waiting to greet their relatives and friends from other islands, passersby just excited by the ferry’s arrival, a Rasta selling fruit from a stand right in front of the tiny police station, children running everywhere in faded cockatoo colors, shouting and giggling and – unlike the St Vincent waterfront brats – not demanding money from every foreigner.
‘So what do you think?’ Jessie asks after we’ve hugged a welcome that feels only slightly forced, false. She looks like she was born here: more tanned than ever, wearing a bikini top and a loose, flowery skirt which she hauls up around her brown thighs to drive the jeep.
‘You couldn’t pick an island with an airport?’ She turns by the police station, shouts something in French at the Rasta, who laughs, and heads us up a road past scattered shacks and bungalow-type buildings, the whole hillside covered with huge banana palms and God knows what else.
‘They’re talking about building one,’ she says. ‘It will ruin this place. What’s home like – hot, cold?’
‘Awful. I can take the weird weather but not what we’ve become. No one gives a shit about anything and meanwhile we’re practically a police state. More security cameras per square foot than any other country on the planet. We’re a real banana republic!’ I look at her. ‘But you never did care about those things.’
‘And you only said you did.’
We’ve left behind us a Barclays Bank – little more than a concrete hut, presumably where Jessie would collect the wire transfers from the Prick when they were still coming.
‘How’s Dad?’ she asks.
‘He should stand for Parliament. He’d fit right in.’
‘What’s he working on?’
I look at her seriously for a moment. ‘Christ, Jessie, don’t ask me. I don’t care what he’s doing, I don’t want to talk about him. Doesn’t he email you?’
‘An occasional lecture about the diseases carried by decaying German architects. I must have them all by now. He told me he’d seen Sonia—’
‘Mum.’ Jessie won’t call her that any more, as if somehow Mum can be shafted with some of the blame. They don’t communicate, Jessie and Mum, not even at birthdays or during the drunken sentiment of Christmas/New Year.
‘He wants to see Jack.’
‘Well, he can’t.’
‘Ever? What’s she telling the child?’
Child? He’s her brother. It really is as if she’s severed some biological cord. ‘I don’t know. Mum can be every bit as ruthless as you, you know.’
She keeps her eyes on the road as we reach the top of the hill, and I get some idea of how small the island is – you could walk across it in a couple of hours. We drop down into a patchy forest of tall, feathery trees, and I watch Jessie drive, grateful for the silence and shade.
She seems different. Her hair is longer, her face finer than when I last saw her – though the rest of her has gained weight and form. She looks healthy, but there’s something else. She seems vulnerable, I realize, in a way she never was before. Breakable. In place – in the sense that she really does seem at home here – but as if something’s missing.
‘Are you happy?’ I ask.
She looks at me, driving the jeep fast over the bumps and ruts of what is now a dried-mud track. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Somehow this doesn’t seem enough.’
She laughs. ‘It’s more than enough! I was thinking – before you came – I can see myself here, a crazy old bint, running a bar on the beach when I’m eighty.’
‘They’re all Seventh-Day Adventists, aren’t they? Do they drink?’
‘There are always yachts in Port Elizabeth—’
Suddenly the jeep hits a rock and she slams against me, her head butting into my ear, dizzying me momentarily. She touches my cheek with her knuckles, driving with one hand.
‘But you’re right, it’s not enough.’
32
They’re not living in the Wagnerian thing yet, which apparently is cut right out of the hillside, and which I notice Jessie doesn’t take me to see straight away. They’re in a house in Industry Bay,
a clapboard box on the water’s edge with a wooden jetty and a bluepainted verandah that looks as if the waves wash right under it.
▪
There is no sign of Wolfgang, but Magda is there, who is Wolf’s girlfriend and Jessie’s too, I presume. Compared to Magda, Sonny was like a sister to me. Magda cuts me dead. She’s sitting inside the house in virtual darkness when we arrive, on the floor, back against a vast, low armchair, pasty white knees angled up out of a pair of long baggy shorts and a shirt that swamps her.
‘This is Tom,’ Jessie says and Magda’s eyes flicker up from the book she’s reading, glance at me, then fix on Jessica as if the words mean nothing to her. My eyes adjust to the gloom and I see just how white she is – startlingly so for someone living here, with a ponytail of bleached blonde hair which seems totally out of place, far too arch for the instant dismissal meted out to me. It’s as if she’s decided I’m an arsehole from the moment I walked in and doesn’t give a fuck who knows it; though she’s the type, I try and comfort myself, who doesn’t give a fuck about anything. Maybe Jessie has fed her too m
uch information about me? Or maybe I am just a prick – if Jessie tells me I’ll like her, what else should I expect but a hard time? They’ve probably got some subtle humiliation lined up for me later.
‘We’ll eat early,’ Jessie says – for my benefit? Magda’s? ‘Dinner is always early here. Life stops when the light goes, but we’re up at dawn mostly. It’s impossible to sleep past six o’clock.’
She seems uncomfortable for a moment – more uncomfortable than I’m used to Jessie being – working overtime to make me feel like a welcome guest. But then Sister Midnight puts her book down on the floor, pages open, and gets up, her legs unfolding with Swiss finishing school finesse. She goes out, one hand brushing Jessie’s arm on the way in a gesture that may mean something and may not, I’m starting to feel so paranoid. We’re alone.
‘Fuck that,’ I mutter.
‘Oh, Tom—’ Jessie seems to think the whole thing’s a huge joke; she’s laughing. ‘It’s so good to see you! You’re here!’ She hugs me again, tighter than on the dock, and I think maybe I’m overreacting, why should I care what Magda thinks? ‘What do you want to do? Rest a while? Your room’s ready.’
Jessie is close, I can smell a deep flowery oil on her and her hand keeps snaking around my back, giving me a playful squeeze. Through the open French windows leading to the verandah, I can hear birdsong and the waves breaking and see a rectangle of dazzling blue sky, but the room is dark and despite the bag at my feet and the colors and buzz of two days of traveling, I know where I am: I’m back in Devon, back in the cottage, with the unwashed dishes in the kitchen and the shithole shelter up the hill and the presence of the Prick near at hand.
Only he isn’t here, and I’ve yet to meet his substitute, his island-life doppelganger – the fat bearded Biermeister grinning inanely from the deck of a fishing boat in the framed photograph on the bleached-wood drinks trolley (it has to be Wolf, I know it, and the certainty numbs me in some strange way – that Jessie will let him fuck her).
Magda is Sonny and this is Brixton, too, and I understand still more that the world is a small place, you take it with you wherever you go, you can’t escape it – your own particular heaven and hell is ground into the meat you drag behind you from your umbilical cord when you crawl out of the womb.
‘I’d like a swim,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll just dump my bag and then I’d like a swim.’
▪
A maid shows me my room – Jessie is cut off from all income, to the best of my knowledge, yet she’s living like this, with a maid. It must be Wolf’s room, or a room he uses often, because there are old suits hanging in the wardrobe and a big, crumpled hat up on top, and there’s a shaving brush and a tube of soap on the chest of drawers and a thin, minty scent in the air, which I take to be his smell: his territory, marked like a dog’s.
There’s another photograph of him on the wall, no fishing boat this time and he looks years younger, this must be how he remembers himself
– unbearded, still all of his hair on top, a wide, mobile mouth pulled back in a jokey grimace, but already a vaguely anguished look in his eyes, as if there’s guilt there or an anticipation of some horror to come.
But there’s no Wolf. He’s not here and I feel puzzled by his absence, though why he should go out of his way to meet me as soon as I arrive, I don’t know.
I stash my bag unopened at the bottom of the wardrobe and sit a moment on the bed, feeling weird, high on the heat and the unfamiliar bird calls and insect hum through the window, but confused too: pissed off with Magda, despite my attempts to ignore her, and somehow disappointed that this is all Jessie has managed, however exotic and nutty it may be – but, above all, thrilled to see her.
I feel like I have a role here: there’s a reason for me coming, she wants me here. I have a sort of knight errant fantasy of myself rescuing her from all this – but to what? And does she want to be rescued?
▪
I go downstairs and out onto the verandah looking for her, but instead find Magda, kneeling on all fours on the wooden slats, still in her baggy shorts and loose shirt, working out. I’m behind her and she doesn’t hear me – or doesn’t want to – and I watch a moment as she raises one leg off the floor and extends it, pointing her toes in a white line against the brilliant Picasso blue of the painted wood. She does this several times, then switches to the other leg, aware by now that I’m watching but buggered if she’s going to acknowledge me in any way at all. I find myself tempted to kick her off balance, to hook my foot under her straightened leg and dump her down on the boards, but I resist, instead taking a nectarine from a bowl on the table and biting into it – the first food I’ve had since a lukewarm bowl of cereal on St Vincent this morning.
One triangle of the verandah is in sunlight, fat bees hovering there at a large trough of violent red flowers. I cross toward it, scuffing my sandals on the wood deliberately to announce myself.
‘Do you know where Jessie went?’ I ask, feeling like an intruder, feeling momentarily that what Magda clearly thinks is right – I shouldn’t be here.
She looks around, a little breathless, pouting in that Polish way I’ve seen my mother do (but not so much Jessica), her face lined with sweat but whiter than ever. The stare is a practiced one – everything about Magda is practiced – but the annoyance seems real enough, and I take it as a small personal triumph that I’ve got something out of her more than plain boredom.
I take another bite of the nectarine, which is disappointingly dry and grainy, and turn away, finding my way down some wooden steps to the sea.
▪
Then we’re swimming, Jessie and me, just the two of us, bare-arsed in the water, out in the bay away from the house. ‘Where’s Adolf, then?’ I ask, schoolboy-stupid again with Jessie. She still has this effect on me – I feel about nine years old and want to throw myself on her and fight. ‘When am I going to meet him?’
She rises up on a wave, a little above me, her eyes shining down, her tits refracted weirdly in the clear blue-green water.
‘You’ll meet him,’ she says, poking me with a toe. ‘He’s working hard on his castle. He’s so committed to it, it’s an obsession with him, yet it’s nothing much.’
She sounds almost sad for a moment, her voice small in the expanse of the bay. I watch her swaying up and down with the pull of the tide, but I ought to remember that this is when she’s at her most dangerous.
She fixes me with a smile and says: ‘I call it his pillbox, it’s not much bigger than one of those wartime fortifications, really. You remember the shelter, don’t you?’ And I don’t know what she expects – a prize for dragging my thoughts back to the shithole between us?
There are several small boats moored in the bay and we swim across to them, acting like brother and sister almost – pulling on their mooring ropes and diving beneath their hulls. I catch my back on one, which rakes my sunburned flesh, stinging like hell in the salt water and more sensitive to the harsh late afternoon sun when I surface.
‘These are all built here,’ Jessie shouts, swimming out in a wide arc around a tiny sailing vessel painted a soft white. ‘There are only two main livelihoods locally, other than tourism – boat-building and whaling.’
I cut across to her, then float, out of breath, on my back, half-listening to the words and wondering what she’s trying to convince me of.
‘The kind of whaling they do here is preMoby Dick.’ She turns onto her back also and I glance at her, naked in the water, tanned and curved and beautiful. I shut my eyes on the image, trying to shut my mind, too. ‘They go out, eight or twelve of them in a boat, and practically throw spears at the creature – if they find one. Last time they caught a whale was nearly two years ago. But when they do, it’s a feast, it’s a carnival, the whole island turns out . . .’
‘You weren’t here two years ago.’ I keep my eyes shut, drifting, water knocking at my ears, feeling the orange light through my eyelids pulse inside my head. I’ve known moments like this: this is too perfec
t.
‘You’re right—’ Jessie is inside there too, unscrewing my brain. ‘There are drawbacks. Some nights I go crazy, wanting just to get zonked and go out, go somewhere new. There’s very little outside stimulus, all the drinking water has to be imported, and if you want to eat, you’d better like fish because meat is hard to get – it’s fish for dinner tonight, okay?’ I hear her kick her feet and splash or do something in the water. ‘But the rest of the time, it’s brilliant.’
That one word does it. I hear her voice, that Chelsea cool, drawn out even further by God knows what influences here, and I know she wants something.
I open my eyes and turn over to find I’m facing the house, the bluepainted verandah like a matchstick model at the base of the dry, wooded hills behind it, seemingly alone in the water some considerable distance from the shore. Just for a moment, I panic, then I spot Jessica’s head as it breaks through a wave, farther from me than I would have thought possible in the time since she spoke, and I start swimming hard to follow her, follow her arse as it dips beneath the surface once more.
She’s laughing when I finally catch up with her. I think I actually resent the fact that she seems to be having a good time; I know I resent that she always leads and I always follow. But she’s broke, I tell myself, and in many ways she’s trapped on the island. ‘Why did you ask me here?’ I try, wondering if she expects me magically to unlock the Prick’s bank account.
The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition Page 24