A Thousand Miles from Anywhere

by Sandra Clayton

  Unfortunately, the chain of islands on a chart that was once so familiar to us has now disappeared into the miasma that used to be our brains before three weeks of broken sleep, undreamed dreams, unrelieved motion and a one-legged homicidal maniac laid waste to them.

  After a long inner struggle David cries triumphantly, ‘Barbuda!’ Against all the odds he has dredged up a name from the depths of his exhausted mind to pacify this large, hostile uniform in front of us. He has that hopeful sort of look you see on the faces of schoolboys under pressure to pacify a relentless tutor which in the circumstances, and drooping helplessly as I am beside him, I find quite heart-rending.

  ‘That’s ours,’ says the man behind the counter, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling and exhaling heavily through his nose. ‘Think of somewhere else.’ After another long struggle we do, after which we are required to write down exactly how long we want to stay on Antigua which we also haven’t thought about because nobody has ever wanted to know that before either.

  With the formalities finally completed we totter out of the building, follow an arrow attached to the word Bakery and climb a flight of stairs to the upper storey of a beautifully-restored wooden building. The baker has a surprisingly young face given that his thick curls are liberally sprinkled with grey. He has perfect white teeth and a very pleasant expression.

  ‘Just arrived,’ he says to David. A statement rather than a question.

  David nods, his energy exhausted by the clearing-in process. Keen to engage with the locals, however, after our first two abysmal encounters, I say, ‘The squalls were amazing, this great long line of them night after…’

  But I don’t finish. His previously warm eyes cool as they turn slowly from David to me, like I was something the cat just brought in and dropped onto his newly-washed floor.

  ‘I know, Lady,’ he says, with a heavy emphasis on the last word. ‘I used to be a sailor.’

  I suppose it does get pretty boring for the people here, hundreds of us turning up every year banging on about our once-in-a-lifetime experience. But, conversationally, there is nowhere to go now, so we pay the baker quite a lot more than seems reasonable and descend the stairs. On the other hand, might they not make a small allowance for the fact that they already live in Paradise? Whereas quite a few of us have not had that privilege and have gone to considerable lengths to get here. And give them our money. Lots of it, as it turns out.

  Apart from clearing in and the bakery we cannot do anything more today as it is a public holiday and everywhere else is closed, so we set off back towards Falmouth Harbour and Voyager. On the way we are confronted by an open air, harbour-side bar and decide to stop, mainly because the barman looks up at us and smiles. Although by the time we have ordered it is apparent that it wasn’t a smile. The man has a mouthful of very large teeth and a nervous tic.

  ‘A local beer,’ he says, uncapping two bottles. ‘You’ll like it.’

  We have barely got it to our lips when his two other customers, an average sort of couple who have been sitting on bar stools talking quietly together, finish their drinks and amble away still deep in conversation.

  The barman stares at their backs with a look of intense loathing and expresses quietly but forcefully through the gritted tombstones of his unnervingly exposed teeth his disgust at having to tolerate that kind of trash. We watch them walk down the quay. They are undoubtedly off one of the yachts here. They are probably a decade younger than we are but in all other respects they could be us. Another visitor arrives and receives a beer. I wonder if this newcomer, watching David and I walking away down the same stretch of quay in a few minutes’ time, will ask the barman what we have done to inspire such revulsion or whether, like us, he will simply drink up quickly and leave.

  As we make our way back to Voyager we observe the various yachts, tied up and at anchor. We hadn’t felt particularly at risk at any stage of the journey here, but looking at some of the boats which have also made the crossing we think how small and vulnerable they seem. One of them is the dismasted sloop towed so valiantly by Don and Sally. And yachts do disappear. As well as the one which failed to arrive at Martinique and is currently being sought by the Dutch Air Force, the US Coastguard is asking for sightings of another which left the Canaries mid-December, reported engine trouble soon after, and has not been heard from since.

  27

  Just Another Day in Paradise

  There are squalls overnight. Next morning the water in Falmouth Harbour is still very rough and we decide to forswear our small dinghy in favour of the local water taxi. We have both enjoyed a long and spectacularly sound night’s sleep, and I admit that I am not as alert as I should have been when calling up the water taxi on the VHF. As a result I commit the cardinal sin of VHF etiquette: I forget to ask the man who answers my call to nominate a working channel and instead begin giving him the name of our yacht and our location over Channel 16. I am immediately made aware of my error by a fellow countryman – albeit with an accent noticeably winched up a class or two – shouting at me to clear off and ranting about people and all the crap you get on this channel nowadays.

  When we do finally board the water taxi my next cardinal error of the day is to repeat yesterday’s. As an inveterate chatterer to strangers I begin a conversation with the water taxi man as we head for the shore. I am barely halfway through my first sentence when he looks into the distance over my right shoulder and says, ‘Yes, Lady,’ with just the same inflection on the second word that the baker used yesterday. Women, it seems, should be seen and not heard. We continue the rest of the journey in silence.

  At the marina we spot a bird we have never seen before. We have books on European birdlife aboard but nothing for the Caribbean so we go into the bookshop. A late-middle-aged man is just leaving. Wearing an air of entitlement and a linen suit reminiscent of Somerset Maugham, he sweeps impressively between us as if we don’t exist while calling back to someone within that he’ll only be an hour or so. It is the voice of the incandescent man on the VHF earlier. He also fancies himself as a broadcaster apparently, and will be heard maundering endlessly on ‘Harbour Radio’, a channel he monopolises daily with the racing news and weather forecasts as dodgy as his accent.

  In a distant corner of the shop a late-middle-aged woman with peroxide hair, and English skin too long exposed to a Caribbean sun, is reclining on a long, low chair with a telephone receiver to one ear. David immediately becomes absorbed in a search for charts of the local waters while I seek out the shelf with the bird books on it. I soon find what I want. The price sticker is exorbitant, even for a stripped pine and rocking chair place like this one, but it is a very nice book and I am tempted.

  David can’t find what he’s looking for but, still browsing, begins making his way towards me. I turn to look at the woman lying back luxuriantly in the reclining chair on the far side of the shop and wonder if it might be better to call in on the way back to buy the book as we have a lot to do today. She eyes me fixedly while saying down the telephone, with an affected upper-middle-class drawl not heard in England, in public at least, these thirty years, ‘It wouldn’t be so baad if it weren’t for these bladdy castomers.’

  I assume she is making a joke, albeit a clumsy one. Nobody in the real world treats customers like this anymore apart from Harrods. But no, she repeats the sentence even louder, in case I missed it the first time, prefaced with, ‘I said...’

  I still have the book open at the page with this morning’s mystery bird on it. I hand it over to David, settle myself into a rocking chair and ponder as he reads. It seems to me that if you aspire to some outdated notion of social elevation then you should encompass all of it, including noblesse oblige, not just the snobby bits you fancy. And one of the obligations of rank is being civil to everybody, not just those you consider your equals or above. Alternatively, if being a shopkeeper is beneath you, go and do something else.

  As David finishes reading, the woman ends her telephone call, rises from her
chair and makes her way with very bad grace to the till by the door to relieve us of money. I take the book from David and put it back on the shelf.

  ‘Don’t you want to buy it?’ he asks.

  Not if my life depended on it.

  I nod a gracious good-day in her direction as we leave, empty-handed, with her furious eyes burning into our backs.

  Apart from our VHF, all our communication systems have now disappeared. We can no longer access e-mails via our computer. When we try, a message appears telling us that the server has remodelled its system and to get in touch with them by the telephone number provided. One can only assume they gave some sort of notice to their customers but we were crossing the Atlantic at the time and our European mobile phone doesn’t work here. The only way to contact family and friends is via the local branch of an American telephone company.

  Because of the weekend and holiday Monday, this is the first day since our arrival that it has been open for business so after leaving the bookshop we seek out the phone company. We are the only customers and although there are two women behind the counter it still takes longer than it might to book three phone calls to England because the older woman is making an unseemly fuss to her placatory younger colleague whom she is accusing of making free with her ballpoint pen, despite having been warned repeatedly against using it.

  We are finally allocated a booth and call David’s brother Tony to say that we have arrived safely and give him the address of Falmouth Harbour Marina so that he can forward our mail. We also notify our yacht insurers where we are, and leave a message to be relayed to Ian on the Spirit of Diana saying that we are sorry to have missed him in Trinidad.

  Our priority now is to find a dentist for David. Given our experiences so far, we approach the Visitors Office with trepidation. The charming young woman inside, little more than a girl really, tells us there isn’t a dental practice here and that we shall have to go into the island’s capital, St John’s.

  We ask her if we can consult her Yellow Pages to get an address. She doesn’t have one but goes cheerfully across the open area shared with the National Park Office to borrow theirs. An older woman behind the counter there denies having a Yellow Pages, and even when a copy is spotted on the shelf behind her ample figure she shows great reluctance to let any of us look in it. With a lot of coaxing from the Visitors Office clerk, however, it is ultimately yielded up for a couple of minutes. I feel as if we’ve stumbled onto the film set of a Carry On movie, where all the characters are abominably rude to the hapless hero except the ingénue.

  With the dentist’s address written on a piece of paper and the Yellow Pages restored to its glowering owner, the Visitors Office clerk consults her watch and tells us that we can catch a bus into St John’s outside her office shortly. Several other yachtsmen arrive and wait for it, too.

  Initially there is some confusion about whether the unmarked silver-grey mini-bus that screeches to a halt beside us is in fact a bus or one of the very expensive taxis which the other yachtsmen say they have been warned to avoid. The dreadlocked driver insists his vehicle is a bus, but no-one boards until finally the ingénue is fetched from the Visitors Office, nods her assent and we all get in.

  28

  A Different Antigua

  The road out of the harbour has traffic-calming bumps across it but, despite their inherent purpose, our driver clearly sees each bump as a launch pad for some kind of personal land speed record across the spaces in between. The heads of his passengers, meanwhile, maintain a perilous relationship with the vehicle’s roof. A sustaining thought throughout the journey is that at least it is a right-hand-drive vehicle in Antigua’s left-hand-side road system.

  It is a mysterious bus route. For a start, there are no discernible bus stops, and people do not appear to be waiting for a bus, or even wanting to go anywhere especially. But the driver honks his horn, swoops to a stop beside them, they climb in, give him a dollar and off he goes.

  It gets pretty crowded, with the later passengers half-sitting on the original ones, and you can’t help noticing that the spacious bench seat in the front has been taken up by the driver’s non-paying friend. Halfway into town the driver brakes and honks at a somnolent young woman on the opposite side of the street. She has very elaborate hair weaving and is very stylishly dressed.

  Another honk of the horn and she undulates very slowly across the road in front of the bus, as if she hasn’t actually noticed its being there and is simply passing. When she reaches the pavement, the driver’s friend gets out, holds the door open and she slides in between him and the driver. She doesn’t pay either, so it’s assumed she is the driver’s girlfriend. Or the friend’s. She doesn’t acknowledge either of them at any stage so it is hard to tell. The journey into St John’s bus station takes forty minutes.

  Compared with the affluence of English and Falmouth Harbours, the people on the streets of St John’s do not appear to have very much materially, yet the place throbs with life and good humour. Like the laughing young men in battered old cars, flirting with young women pedestrians who pretend to ignore them, although the men look delighted anyway.

  If English Harbour is picture-postcard-perfect with its fresh white paint and beautifully-restored historic buildings, St John’s is a sprawling, dusty town with scarcely an architectural gem to call its own. Its dominant building material appears to be concrete and its wide main road is edged with gaping storm drains so big you fear that a turn of the ankle will result in your being swallowed up, never to be seen again.

  If the former is touchy and snobbish with a profound sense of grievance, the people of St John’s are relaxed, kindly and helpful, giving the place a vibrancy that is positively infectious. You feel energised by it. And it is all about attitude.

  Like the slender little assistant in the vast hardware shop, a recent school-leaver by the look of her, sorting cheerfully and unasked through her scattered stock to provide the biggest possible range for us; all the time apologising for the lack of choice although we assure her the first fish slice she puts on the counter is more than adequate. (The handle fell off ours during the crossing.)

  Like the 30-something male motorist, trapped in traffic, cheerfully passing the time of day with us as his car crawls alongside; a boon to sociability, the left-hand-drive car in a clogged left-hand-side road system. The policeman who gives us directions to the dentist. The dentist himself, overstretched, with three patients already supine in three separate rooms and a malfunctioning generator, but sympathetic and determined to fit David in. Bryson’s, the big cheerful supermarket. The big cheerful lady in its doorway, with a smile like Mammy in Gone with the Wind when Clark Gable gives her that red petticoat, her round face suddenly beaming at our approach as if she has just encountered friends unexpectedly.

  ‘Come into the shade,’ she says, moving aside to make room for us, it’s hot today.’

  It is a different bus driver on the return journey. He leaps into his seat, slams the door, starts the engine, hurtles forward and is out of the bus station and making a right-hand turn across two opposing lanes of traffic in what seems to be a single fluid movement.

  It sets the tone for the entire journey which takes a mere nineteen minutes compared with the outward trip’s forty. He never drives at less than full speed even when, to avoid a red light at a T-junction he shoots off to the right, through a service station forecourt, and back out onto the road through oncoming traffic from both directions. My abiding memory is of the resentful eyes of the garage proprietor sitting in a rocking chair between his two petrol pumps observing our bus hurtle past his knees.

  David needs a number of visits to the dentist and, along with the opportunity to buy our food from Bryson’s, our trips into St John’s provide snapshots of Antiguan life. Not least the bus journey itself. For instance, on a near-empty bus the mature ladies in their go-into-town dresses and straw hats could all sit together and gossip if they wanted to. Instead they sit one to a bench seat and converse wit
h each other along the length of the bus without turning their heads. This can only happen on dry days. When it rains the bus is packed, and very hot as everybody with a seat beside a window closes it rather than get wet.

  Each bench seat on the bus has a folding jump seat at its aisle end. When the vehicle is full, the people on the jump seats have to get up, raise their seat and hang vulture-like over their neighbours every time someone wants to get off or on. This results in a number of people shuffling about, or bent up double, usually while the bus is moving at speed.

  An expatriate with bright green hair complains loudly about overloading, justifying her right to complain by having lived on Antigua for 27 years. The driver ignores her, but an Antiguan man who has just stood up so that someone else can get on – and thereby prompted the woman’s complaint – explains patiently and tactfully that he lived thirty years in Britain and six in the USA and that ‘When in Rome…’ Nevertheless she goes on and on and in the end the man tells the driver to stop. He gets off and, head down into the driving rain, finishes his journey on foot rather than continue listening to her. It is something you become very aware of, over time: this intrusion of incomers into small communities, whether as long-term fixtures such as the woman with green hair or continuous waves of temporary interlopers like us.

  The school children on the bus are always silent. Neither the voluptuous high school girls with their exotic hair weaving and long curling eyelashes, nor the shy little primary school boys, ever say a word, not even to one another. Perhaps, like women here, children are required to be seen and not heard. Or maybe it has something to do with their workload since they are all weighed down with massive school bags. Nor do I ever hear anyone swear. If they do, it is in patois and passes me by.

  On one trip into town we pass two men at the side of the road with the carcass of a cow strung up to a tree. By the time we return it has been cut up into joints and a couple of trestle tables are being used as a makeshift butcher’s counter.