Away with the Fishes (5 page)

“Nah,” Raoul replied. “What
I
have can’t be fixed with a stiff cup of tea.”

Ms. Lila rushed over to him, concerned, and touched his forehead. “You don’t feel fevered,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Have you seen the house?” he asked her, motioning with his chin towards the out of doors.

“Ooh, I almost forgot!” She clapped her hands together. “I went to the market after the library closed. My hands were so full when I came home, I walked straight in. By the time I thought to go back out and have a look, the rain was coming. Did you get very far?”

“Well,” Raoul began, and he went on to tell her in painstaking detail about everything that had happened. He told her about the first wall he painted and about the message he found, and how after that he went to look for a baker, and how at the bakery he found Bruce, who had
also
found a message, one that happened to involve a bike, and, to conclude, he told her about the hit-and-run.

“And?” she said, when he had finished.

“And what?”

“And what does any of that have to do with anything?”

Raoul was flabbergasted. “Don’t you see? Some hooligan is on the loose and sending secret messages! Now there’s been a hit-and-run besides!”

Ms. Lila, dear heart, was used to the frenzies to which her husband was prone, the random variables he tried to string together into neat equations, and she sometimes heard the flies in his head buzzing even before he did. She was sure she heard one now—one that was going to interfere with the repainting of her cottage—and she meant to put her foot down and squash it.

“Not that this hooligan, assuming he exists, is any business of yours,” she told him, “but let’s go have a look at this nonsense you’re talking about.” She spun on her heel and headed outside, Raoul trailing behind.

After duly admiring the first coat of paint on the one finished wall (she was quite pleased with her choice of color), she turned and looked at the message on the second wall.

“See?” Raoul gushed, feeling vindicated by the strangeness of the writing. “FIND A BAKER. So that’s what I did. I went to Trevor’s Bakery for clues.”

“That doesn’t say FIND A BAKER,” Ms. Lila objected. “This one’s an R,” and she touched the letter in the middle. “And see this? It’s a definite dot. The message isn’t FIND A BAKER, it’s FIND R. BAKER.”

“What’s an
R
. Baker?” Raoul asked her.

“Not
what
,” she a answered impatiently. “
Who
!”

“What does that mean? Who’s R. BAKER? And why should I go looking for him?”

“My point exactly. Unless he’s a housepainter, I suggest you put him right out of your mind, cover up this mess as soon as you get home from work, and get on with it. The rain’s good and broke now. We’ll only have a few more weeks of sun before the wet season, and I’ll not have the house looking like a striped Easter egg for half of the year!”

“But what if this is evidence?” Raoul pleaded.

“Evidence of what?” Ms. Lila asked him sternly.

Raoul of course had no answer to this. He simply stood, mute, looking at his wife.

“I thought so!” she said and went inside to prepare his breakfast. “Hurry now, or you’ll be late to the office.”

At the headquarters of Customs and Excise later that morning, Raoul struggled to focus at his desk. He read and re-read Bruce’s report in the
Crier
, trying to figure out how the bicycle accident might be connected to the lonely-hearted fisherman—if, indeed, it was—and what possible reason the same anonymous fisherman might have for painting strange instructions on the side of Raoul’s cottage. Try though he might, Raoul could read nothing between the printed lines of the paper to help him make sense of the nonsense of the day and night before. On the contrary, the more he reflected and mulled things over, the murkier they became. Still, these were no random events that Raoul could just ignore. They couldn’t be! He would have to do some sleuthing. How else to free the plain and simple truth from the words and letters and messages in which it was so mysteriously entangled?

First, though, official duty called. Raoul folded the newspaper in half and tucked it in his drawer, then he turned back to the work on his desk. There were budget ledgers to review, import (and export) applications to process and approve, and holiday requests to sign off on from at least a dozen members of his staff. As he worked, turning pages and shuffling forms and signing and stamping and stapling, he noticed every letter
in a way he never had before. It seemed that every word spoke directly to him, as sure as if it were standing in front of him wagging its finger at his nose. The entries in his ledgers hissed and twisted, like little black snakes on soft, green grass. The alphabet tabs of his accordion folders sprang to life and whispered to each other. The carbon-copy request forms mocked him, flaunting their layers of pink and yellow that displayed the same words over and over, as permanent as paint. Raoul rattled his head back and forth and repeatedly blinked his eyes, which he focused squarely on a dull and empty grey wall. “What’s going on?” he asked it, irritated.

He put his hand to his ear and listened, but he could hear only the sounds that sneaked in, diluted, from beyond his office door: the muffled conversations of his coworkers, the ring of a phone, the whir of a pencil sharpener. From the window behind his head, he heard the brush of leaf against leaf and the distant tinkling of a windchime. (The breeze hadn’t died down since the night before.) He did not hear a single hiss or whisper. Nor, as near as he could tell, was any slip of a form making fun of him. Reassured, he rattled his head again and returned to his business.

The minute he did, the words were at it again. The A’s and R’s toyed with him, morphing one into the other and back. Signatures disappeared before his eyes, rendering every request and memo an unsigned taunt. And—could it be?—Raoul swore the pale pink pages before him blushed playfully to bright rose.

“Ahh!” Raoul spat, fed up. In one violent move, he stood up and pushed the chair away from his desk with the backs of his knees. There was no getting any work done, not with this fresh pink fly buzzing in his head and his ledgers hissing and spitting. He decided to take an early lunch. Perhaps some sea air would
clear his mind, he thought, and he set out on foot for the harbor in the heart of town.

But though his body worked with the aim of delivering him to the water’s edge, muscle and joint in blissful, ignorant synergy, his mind’s purpose was another entirely. It wandered off, indifferent to the clarity Raoul sought, twisting his nose this way and that and landing his eyes on sniggering consonants and vowels. There seemed to be no escape. Was he going mad? So seemed to indicate the billboard for Mad Mabel’s rum shack. Was he under some kind of magic spell? he wondered, at the sight of the sign for Nut-Magic Nutmeg Tonic and Cure-All, available at Dimwell’s pharmacies island-wide.

“Bite your tongue!” Raoul said out loud to himself. He hated that word—
magic
—and he refused to entertain the notion that it had him in its grasp, or for that matter, that it was capable of grasping so much as a flea on a mutt on a soggy beach!

Lucky for Raoul, his legs, unthinking, continued to carry him to the harbor, for his mind, which had till then played tricks on him, was wholly occupied in a head-on attack on all things magical, supernatural, supernormal, extra-ordinary, and occult.

“Rubbish all of it,” he muttered under his breath. “Don’t know what they see in it!”
They
were the islanders in general, the citizens of Oh, so inured to the pranks and meddlings of the stars and the streams that they tended to see magic—nay, to look for it—where there was none. Ever since Raoul, as a young man, had developed his love for facts and for truths, he had found himself at odds with friends and family members, who refused to deny the island’s magical charms. Charms that, as far as Raoul was concerned, could be explained away to a mathematic certainty, if only one tried hard enough.

For years he had considered this uniquely Oh issue, and though his theories were many, he had yet to determine why exactly his neighbors remained so desperately certain of the island’s sorcery. Did they hope to secure some better fate for themselves by bowing to the ocean breeze? Were they too lazy to take life in hand? Was it simply easier to blame the moon for their misjudgments, the palms for their peccadilloes? To chastise the tide when they fell short? It never crossed Raoul’s mind, as he sat down finally on a bench and looked out to sea from the port in Port-St. Luke, that the islanders might just have it right. That sometimes, no matter how hard you tried to hold on, a swift island wind could blow you right off your feet and out to sea, if it really wanted.

It was precisely because of magic, or, more precisely, “magic talk,” that Raoul went to the harbor to clear his head that day and not to the Belly to spend his early lunch break. The Buddha’s Belly Bar and Lounge, which Raoul frequented almost daily, was tucked into the lower level of the Hotel Sincero, owned and run by one of Raoul’s three best mates, the flashy but practical Cougar Zanne. At the Belly at lunch hour, Raoul was likely to meet not only Cougar, but his other two best mates as well, cab-driver Nat Gentle and the crooning, juggling, musician they all called Bang. Any of them would notice immediately that Raoul had a fly in his head, and when pressed, he would have to tell them about his pink graffiti, and how it must have something to do with the mysterious lonely hearts ad and maybe even the hit-and-run. They would no doubt, like Trevor, attribute all the goings on to the awakening island and the drama it loved to stage. They would tell Raoul to forget about investigating, to save himself the trouble and to let Oh work what magic it wanted—especially if it was working it on the side of Raoul’s own house! Didn’t he realize what forces he was up against?

Raoul rattled his head yet again and admired the sea that glistened in front of him. He saw boats being emptied of cargo and wondered about the places they had been. A ship’s captain caught Raoul’s eye and tipped his cap.

“Now that’s a man who knows real life,” Raoul said, raising his hand to return the captain’s greeting. “The stars above him, the sea below, and his ship and cargo in between. I bet
he
doesn’t fuss over magic.”

A short distance away, a pair of deckhands sipping beer and eating fish-and-chips noticed Raoul talking all alone. They laughed at him and shouted something, but Raoul paid them no mind. When he was lost in thought, or in sleuthing, he didn’t care what anyone had to say about him. His methods were a little unconventional, it was true, but what plain truth wasn’t worth at least a spot of humiliation?

Raoul’s thoughts flitted back to the Belly, and he grew agitated again. “Magic talk! It’s all they do there!” he complained to the ships in front of him. “Ever since the damned place opened up.” Raoul recalled one of his very first visits to the Belly. In those days, forty years before, it wasn’t yet a full-fledged Bar and Lounge, but an overhang Cougar had stuck to the outside of a then-tumbledown Hotel Sincero. Some silly fool had sat and asked Raoul for advice, sure that island magic was keeping him from his one true love. Raoul couldn’t remember who it was, but he remembered keeping their discussion short and sharp.

Resigned to the islanders’ magical obsession, Raoul calmed his mind now and took in the beauty of the silent, simple sea and the massive man-made boats that rested on top of it, like the sugary flowers Ms. Lila put on cakes for special occasions. He saw huge wooden crates unloaded and knew they were headed for Customs,
where his colleagues would clear them and tax them. He watched as the deckhands finished their food and drink and took themselves back on board. The ship’s captain gestured and gave orders and walked the length of the pier, and suddenly Raoul’s memory jerked.

“What do you know about that!” he said, moved to a sorry smile and shaking his head in disbelief. He remembered now. He remembered the man who had asked him about magic all those years ago at the Belly, the man who couldn’t win over his one true love. Dagmore Bowles was his name.
Captain
Dagmore Bowles. (Who, I might add, won over his one true love in the end!)

Well, well. Even amidst the waves, Raoul marveled, Oh’s magic lay in wait. If a wandering and worldly old sea-captain like Dagmore had fallen for its humbuggery, then the still and islandy islanders didn’t stand a ghost of a chance.

8

T
he Captain Dagmore Bowles that I once was, the one Raoul once met at the Belly, was not born a captain, or even a Dagmore. Nor was he born on Oh. He was the fruit of an island neighbor, but from exactly which tree he fell, I couldn’t tell you. Although he was orphaned from a very young age and got off to an unhappy start, the stars had aligned a grand future for him. A future as brilliant as the stars themselves, I always thought. At least for a little while.

Growing up on that same island that gave him life, the boy that would one day be Dagmore knew himself simply as Quick. The islanders had so dubbed him for his quick legs and his quick wit, and, while none had the space or means to take Quick under wing, they all pitched in and saw that he was dressed and fed, with hand-me-downs and leftovers, respectively. In exchange he used his legs and his wit to run the islanders’ errands and to trap their rats. He slept on the beach, which suited him fine, and bathed in the salty sea. Thus cared-for by all and by none, he confronted and conquered the ages of four, five, and six.