A Kind of Eden (28 page)

‘Marjorie,' he says. ‘how are you?'

She calls out behind her, unlocks the gate and stands to one side to let him in. He glances around the yard; along the path are blue glass bottles. It is orderly and simple: the potted plants, the hanging baskets, a bicycle leans against the wall. They have a visitor. He has not been here much in the daytime—just briefly, when dropping Safiya off after the beach in the early days. Back then, she didn't have a car. She took taxis
everywhere. He never liked the idea of her in a shared cab, bunched up with people she did not know. It was Martin who encouraged her to learn to drive, and went with her to buy her first car, the Mazda 626. The seller had thought Martin was her father. He'd felt awkward, embarrassed.

Safiya appears in the doorway, her hair is wet; she is wearing shorts, a vest top. Her home clothes.

‘Martin,' she says, and to her mother, ‘Go inside, I'll talk to him out here.'

She walks quickly down the path towards him, and leads him just beyond the gate. She's taken aback, he thinks; she doesn't want him in the house. The sky is pale blue. Gold falls on the pavement; there is a lick of gold on the wall. She leaves the gate open, and they stand together, awkwardly.

Safiya says, ‘Don't worry, no one can hear us.'

He says, ‘I want to know what's going on.'

‘There's nothing going on, Martin.'

‘You haven't replied to my message since I saw you at the Hilton.'

She stares at him; her green eyes are lighter in the sun, with tiny copper flecks. She looks about eighteen years old; a college girl, barely out of school.

‘Well?'

She says, ‘I'm sorry. I told you how I felt at the Hilton. I'm sorry.'

He leans heavily against his car, feels its heat. He takes out a cigarette.

‘Are you, really?' he says, lighting up. ‘You don't seem sorry—you seem quite jolly.'

‘That's such an English thing to say.'

She has her thumbs hooked in the loops on her shorts, her head is cocked to one side, and he knows with every fibre of his being that he has lost her; her mind is made up. There is no point in trying to persuade her. Their relationship is over. Like the ground below, the sky above, it is a fact. He looks away at the road where two young boys are playing cricket at the far end. The batsman hits the ball down the street towards them. It rolls along the centre of the road, drops down towards the drain.

Safiya says, and he can see that she is uncomfortable, ‘I just can't do it anymore. I think you need to be with your family. They need you. Your daughter needs you. We both need to be free now. It's gone on too long.'

‘I am free,' he says. ‘Since yesterday. I told Miriam everything. She's gone back to England; she left this afternoon.'

Safiya looks surprised.

He says, ‘She knows your name, she knows what you do. I've told her all about you.'

He pulls hard on his cigarette, puffs the smoke out of the corner of his mouth.

Safiya says, ‘Why did you tell her when you knew it was over? I told you at the Hilton how I felt.'

He stares at her mouth; her beautiful
rude
mouth.

Then she says, ‘We can't build a relationship on someone else's pain.'

For some reason, perhaps because it sounds like it came straight out of a self-help book, this makes him laugh.

He says, ‘It's not like we're starting from scratch. We've
already built a lot. Now you want to knock it down. Why?'

‘It's not about knocking anything down, it's about moving on.'

‘I've moved on. I'm a free man.'

Safiya stares at him. Then she says, ‘What about Georgia? Is she okay with it?'

Georgia. She shouldn't bring Georgia into this.

There is a voice from the house. A male voice. And a young blond man appears at the gate. He is handsome, sun-kissed, an Adonis.

The visitor
.

He says, ‘Is everything okay, Safi?'

Safi? Safi?

‘Yes,' Safiya says, her face is flushed; she is embarrassed, and he realises without a doubt that this man with a Canadian accent is Pete Blanc. He stands in front of Martin.

‘Pete's here for a few days from Vancouver. He got in on the weekend. He's here for a wedding.'

‘Okay,' Martin says. ‘I see.'

He is nodding, and he can't help himself. Everything is coming together in his mind. It is forming a shape. A shape he doesn't like.

Pete Blanc is standing with his arms folded, his head upright, back straight.

‘I think you should probably leave,' Pete Blanc says. His teeth are even and white. ‘Safiya doesn't want to see you again. You should get the message.'

‘Fuck you,' Martin says, and he waves his hand as if shooing Pete Blanc away, as if he wants to hit him. ‘Fuck you both.'

Pete Blanc takes a step towards him.

Suddenly Martin rushes at him, his hands open to grab him around the throat. Safiya tries to stop him but Pete Blanc pushes him back, and then he punches him. It is not a good hit—though the knuckles strike Martin's cheekbone where the flesh is still tender, and he falls back against the wall. He is like an old man, stumbling and falling on the ground.

To Pete Blanc, Safiya says, ‘Just give me a minute with him.'

Pete Blanc looks at his hand and waves it in the air; then he looks at Martin. ‘Loser,' he says, half-smiling. ‘You're a fucking loser.'

He trots up the steps to the house.

Safiya helps Martin stand, and she pats his clothes where the wall has marked them with white paint. At the window, he sees Marjorie.

‘Don't bother,' Martin says, checking himself for blood, and he backs away towards his car. It all seems bizarre, childish.

Safiya says, ‘Please, Martin; it's not how it looks.'

He decides that he will get there by boat; that way he can take his car. No need for a taxi at the other end. It is an eight-hour journey, and he will travel overnight. He can rest, arrive at sunrise unnoticed when it is quiet. He packs a small bag; he does not need much. Just the essentials. He has arranged it well. Sherry will come tomorrow; she has her keys, she can let herself in. Before he leaves, he will take Fanta to the TSPCA in Port of Spain. Fanta needs his rabies injection; there is a thirty-day wait before he can be shipped to England.

He spoke briefly to Jeanne and said that he might go up to Blanchieusse, to stay at the German hotel. He doesn't know why he lied but he found himself doing so, and it felt okay. She had brought him a pot of lasagne, garlic bread. ‘We're here if you need company,' she said. ‘You look tired, you should get some rest.' She didn't know that he had just come from Safiya's house, that he was in a kind of shock.

Before he left, Georgia called to say they had got home safely. The weather is spring-like, primroses and daffodils are out in the garden; there is a fox nesting in the hedge at the back. There are baby foxes, Georgia said.

‘Mum says we have to call environmental health but I don't want them to take them away.'

He imagined it all, the little creamy flowers, the bright daffodils, the clear spring skies, and it looked in his mind like heaven. She tells him the roses made it through the snow.

Georgia will be feeling better for a day or so, but then she will hit a wall. Miriam needs to keep an eye. He wanted to talk to Miriam, but Georgia insisted her mother was busy. For the first time since they were married, he senses Miriam's absence. He feels exposed, vulnerable.

Miriam, his good wife
.

It is dark when he gets to the port. There is a long line of cars, large crates stacked, small trucks, lorries, people on foot, and he remembers, there is a public holiday tomorrow. By the time he drives on board, parks up, it is almost ten and the boat is heaving. He leaves his car, and makes his way up the narrow metal stairs to the air-conditioned bar. It is lively, the television is on showing CNN news, and the volume is turned up loud. People sit around the bar, mostly men, smoking. He buys a beer, and takes it upstairs to the top deck. He steps out into the warm night air and the wind is blowing hard, flattening his hair, his shirt. He finds a seat on a bench near the front of the boat. The sea is black, the sky is black. There are lights behind him, but ahead there are no lights.

Up here, he feels alone; as if he is the only person on the boat. Today he has hardly spoken to anyone, and he feels disconnected from the world around him. He feels as if he is invisible. How is it that, one day, he can have so much, and on another day, nothing. Safiya, Miriam, Georgia, Beth—they
have all gone. Strangely, last night, for the first time, he dreamt of Beth; she was riding her horse along the road to the villa in Tobago. Seeing her like this, somehow, gave him strength to do what he needed to do.

This morning when he woke, he erased Safiya's messages and contact details from his phone. Then he built a fire in the far corner of the yard; onto it he threw her clothes, books, sandals, make-up; anything he could find that reminded him of her. He stood and watched the little flames flutter about and clouds of smoke drift into the sky. Fanta sat on the veranda wall, mesmerised. At one point Jeanne came outside, and he waved as if to say, everything is okay. Yes, he'd thought, this is a season for fires.

He has had his life; he has been lucky. Twice he had found love. Safiya didn't know what they had. She is too young to realise. One day she will look back on her life, as he is doing now, and she will remember him. With regrets? He hopes not. Today he is full of regret. It is pointless, he knows; as pointless as digging up old bones.

The boat arrives into Scarborough just after sunrise. The delicate light is pale and the sky is clear. The atmosphere is subdued, everyone starts getting ready to make their way from the boat. He is surprised by the number of passengers spilling out onto the walkway. Where are they going? Who have they come to see?

He takes a slow drive along the sea front, looking at the waves unfolding on the beach. This is where he came with Stephen Josephs that night. He no longer feels angry towards Stephen. He feels only pity. He is living a life without meaning. What is the point in that?

The night he came back from Safiya's, his life had felt utterly meaningless. He had wondered if he was better off dead, if the boys had killed him. Better for him, better for everyone.

There is a broken-down bus on the side of the road, the wheels have gone, the body of the bus is rusting. He seems to remember this from before. They should take it away, not leave it to rot. But this is typical, he thinks. He keeps driving, heading along the highway now, until he reaches the turning which leads to the ATM machine.

It looks different; the blue front, the yellow lettering, its glass door. A safe, harmless place. He wonders about the woman he saw that night. Did she see him? Did she mention it to her friends, ‘There was something not right about that boy.' We all have instincts and hunches about things. Quite often, he would hear from a victim:
there was something about X that didn't seem right. I didn't get a good feeling. I sensed someone behind me
. And so it goes. If people followed their gut, there would be a lot less crime to report. At La Vie de France café, he orders a white coffee and scrambled eggs; he finds a table near the back. He is hungry; the eggs are cooked with pepper; they are delicious. The café starts to fill up; airport staff, children on their way home from school. No one seems to notice him. He sits and watches. In his mind, he feels a strange sense of calm. It is the first time he has felt like this in a long while. He doesn't understand it; only that perhaps he has discovered his decision, and there is peace in that.

Along the golf course, the light is silvery, the grass is dewy, the trees are still. He wonders about Terence; Terence is a good man. He wishes him well. ‘Good luck,' he says, aloud.

He drives down the path to the beach with the manchineel
trees. It is empty. Not a soul in sight. Under the trees he takes off his shirt and trousers; he folds them and leaves them on the black rocks. Then he walks across the warm sand. In the distance, the village houses look as if, with a gust of wind, they could fall away.

The sea is cool, and it rushes around his feet. He walks in up to his waist, feeling the water lick around his calves, thighs, groin, belly, and then he dives down to the sand bed. The blast of water on his face and the pressure against his chest is exhilarating. He holds his breath, pushes out his arms and presses the water back, kicks out his legs.

There is nothing you can't do
.

He swims along the bay, stopping to look out at the beach, and take a breath. He feels like the only man on earth. A castaway. Yes, he has had his life. But he wants more of it. He knows that now. It is not over yet. Perhaps he can love again. Yes, the only remedy for love is to love more. He has been a fool.

Now he drives through the village where the man in a pork-pie hat sits outside his little hut, selling fruit which hangs from the eaves. The man waves at him, as if they are friends. A witness, he thinks. But he doesn't care. He has it all worked out.
Get in, get it done, get out
. He heads past the hotel where the turtles lay their eggs; the '70s hotel is tatty and in need of paint. Safiya once told him that she stayed here when she was a child; when it was glamorous. Safiya, he thinks. Safiya. He mustn't think of her again. Safiya is dead, dead, dead. He will never see her again.

He remembers it now, the curve of the road, the rise of the
hill, the place where the woman was bathing. He keeps driving until he reaches the church, and he drives slowly down the hill, looking around the open grass, the tall trees, the graveyard. He sees the Spiderman figure, and takes the turning on the right. He pulls in, puts his car into neutral and switches off the engine.