Black Marina (14 page)

And Maldwin had bought a bottle at the off-licence and come back, and Mari had gone out with friends, and he had said to the woman as they drank at the kitchen table, ‘I do think you could tell me more about Mari’s … expectations … when she arrives in St James. And your friend Holly Baker, do you ever hear from her? Surely she would tell you if Ford
had gone out to the island and been involved in some insurrection or other and then been killed? That’s what they’re thinking in England, you know.’

‘But who’s “they”?’ was all Lore would say in reply.

*

Now Holly Baker had crossed the room and opened the door of what seemed to be a cupboard but showed in the gloom to be a chipped bath, a shower fixture with a sagging plastic curtain and a cooker. From the cooker she pulled out a bottle of rum. Mugs followed. Maldwin Carr noted that Ms Baker moved with quiet satisfaction, as if preparing a bombshell – in the way of information at least. How many years in London had she missed? Maldwin Carr thought that it was likely Holly Baker had reached a stage in her life where she was ready to believe any of the mixed-up stories she invented for herself.

There was more than a hint of melodrama in the air. Maldwin Carr was aware, as Holly poured the rum and the girl looked up at her from the floor, of being set up as a spectator at a hackneyed but still powerful piece of theatre. ‘Yes,’ Holly was saying as she poured from a can of flat Coca Cola into the mugs of rum, ‘I certainly can remember who was shot on the hill and came down in the sea. Why do you suggest that this feat of memory is beyond me?’

He didn’t, of course. Maldwin Carr spoke quickly and nervously to show his acceptance of having been a little too arrogant with Holly Baker, that he was now on her territory, and that he would be happy, furthermore, to accept a warm and positively nauseating drink from her. ‘Cuba Libre,’ Holly murmured as she sipped at her mug, which was scorched dark brown with a succession of unwashed-up powdered coffees. ‘I snitch a bottle of rum from the bar from time to time, when the big boss isn’t looking.’

‘And who’s the big boss?’ said Maldwin Carr gently. It
was, as he wrote in his pad at the end of the following day, as if he could feel Holly veering and leaning with the wind, racing in full sail, tacking between truth and fantasy, the longed-for and the true.

‘The boss,’ said Holly, giving a little dance step as she recrossed the room, but this time to sit on her bed, so Mari had to swivel round to stare up at her like an acolyte at the priestess of some mysterious, under-funded cult. ‘The boss is still Sanjay, of course. For a little while longer only, it’s true.’ Holly looked down derisively at the girl. ‘Hey, drink up, you,’ she said. ‘You gotta get gay for the evening, you go all Christmas, eh?’ And she threw back her head and laughed, so Maldwin Carr wondered if Holly Baker had not been drinking all afternoon in the stifling prison of the store. Then again it occurred to him that she might be acting – hamming it up, in fact – to conceal her own deep uncertainty.

*

On the day Ford came and I went down to the lagoon and I saw Sanjay, that’s when I made my mistake. I should have left this damn place then. Now this man sits in my room with a pad on his knee and the poor girl crouches on the floor like she’s expecting bad news and she’s digging herself into a hole getting ready for it. Of course, I should have seen that meeting when I walked back over the lumpy sand. Those feathers in my path meant Tanty Grace was at work, that she was pushing Sanjay out of the way as if he wasn’t worth more than a pile of the bulky-tail shirts she’s washed for him all these years. And seeing Mighty Barby running through the trees on my way back, I also saw that our days were suddenly numbered. For Ford must have sent Mighty Barby down to the lagoon with those bags of guns. The guns and the white feathers. St James isn’t our home any more. But I didn’t know it then. I just walked on up to the old wooden house. Beyond the verandah, door swinging open, stood the
decrepit museum of Sanjay’s eccentric taste. Pandora had left the verandah and gone to roam around there – it was one of the few places she was allowed because she was quiet in there for hours on end. No doubt the exhibits, with their roots in the realm of ignorance and fantasy – a merman’s tail, a thunderstruck hair, an embalmed piglet with a dappled, translucent skin and aquamarines for eyes – no doubt these matched the bizarre assortment of images in her head. And there was no door out the back: Tanty Grace could sit on the verandah with her darning and still look out and see the girl, wandering in her father’s strange collection.

That day Pandora had paused by the replica of the Pompeian Slave and his Mistress and was looking up with a kind of innocent longing at the frozen embrace. I went into the museum and came up behind her in silence, so when I said her name she did a jump, and her eyes stared at me like great bowls of blue water while she tried to pull herself back from the act of love she’d never known and could only imagine aloud – in those sad, desperate waitings – with her father. I told Pandora I wanted to take her for a little walk. And Tanty Grace, hearing me from the verandah, nodded her head in sleepy approval. No one can think what to do with Pandora since she’s been bombed out of her asylum. Sanjay just stands looking at her with his face stony in grief, frozen like the love-makers, only in tragedy.

‘I’ll take you down to the creek at the lagoon,’ I said to Pandora, although I knew she couldn’t understand. She nodded happily and put her hand in mine. If she hadn’t been quite a few inches taller than me, it would have been just like the old days, when Dora used to get me to take the child for a walk so she could try to get Sanjay interested in her again on those long, hot afternoons when even her milky blood came to the boil and she began to sway about as if she had a pain up in her arse. Don’t forget, Holly, I’d say to myself as I set off with that little gold-and-white cherub down to the beach (‘I
don’t want Millie around, she gets on my nerves,’ Dora would say in those days), don’t forget the saying, ‘Grenada is south of Paradise and north of Frustration.’ And I’d think, If this is Paradise, I can’t wait for a trip to Frustration. But I took the kid all the same, although I didn’t like her, and that feeling was reciprocated, I’m afraid.

Now all is forgotten. The clouds of madness have come down and wiped out the past. I set a straw hat on Pandora’s head and went back on the track to the lagoon. The sun – Pandora says sometimes she sees a black sun and that day I almost knew what she meant – came down on us like a burned, frayed egg, and no white around it, in the sky. Pandora’s hand soon sweated terribly, but she didn’t let go. As we reached the first trees, Mighty Barby darted out towards us, and for a moment I thought how strange it was, a white woman who’d gone out of her mind and an albino Negro who’d been driven mad because he was a freak of nature, meeting on that hot track and turning their eyes from each other, which is what they did. Mighty Barby’s eyes were small and red and fringed with wheat-coloured lashes. He was excited and burbling something impossible to
understand
. If I hadn’t had that uneasy feeling of being with two outcasts somehow, and sensing the sadness of it and all that, I’d have tried to make out what Mighty Barby said. I’m one of the few people who can decipher him when I want. And he would’ve told me he wasn’t going down to the southern tip of the island just for the fun of it either. If I’d stopped twice to think, I’d have got him to tell me why he was there. Because, of course, when I came to think of it, he was fetching and carrying for Ford.

*

How it takes you back, sitting and thinking and drinking here, as if The Heights was the other side of the world from the trouble. The girl – you could call her an invasion of
trouble – moves restlessly on the floor and then goes to stand against the window. She looks guilty, terrified – and so she should, I say, like a hornet that’s seen its own sting trail after it, under innocent skin. She looks black against the light. She stares at me like Pandora did when she was a little girl, a few days after Ford and Teza went off in the boat, when I went down to find Sanjay again and Millie was sent out to tell me he wasn’t there. ‘Very well, I’ll take Pandora out for a walk,’ I said, and I could hear the child’s mother moving behind the slatted blinds in the old bedroom that leads out on the verandah.

‘Sanjay,’ she murmured, ‘get that silly fool of a woman out of here for good.’ (Dora must have come through the trees after all, I thought then, and seen Sanjay and me together in the house under the palm fronds, with the small lopsided window looking out. She must have stared in at us. And now she was tormenting Sanjay again, threatening him with the ending of her own life and his conscience burdened with that ending for the rest of his.) ‘Get that bitch out,’ she said as I walked. I remember my feet were heavy and I couldn’t pick them up, and I called to little Pandora and took her to the creek where we’d all been so happy picnicking just a short time before. It seemed like years. Teza (practical,
knows-what
-she-wants Teza) had climbed into a fisherman’s boat of all things and gone off with a boy who would become a poet and a political force and a poet and a singer again before changing his name to an African name, and then back again – and then, for what?

‘Let’s go and see the boats, darling,’ I said to little Pandora. I remember, as we passed the mouth of the creek and pushed up through what was still then primary jungle in Sanjay’s forgotten and preserved tip of the lagoon, that Pandora tried to pull back. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘The lovely boats your Daddy made – come and see the boats.’

I really couldn’t do anything with the child. As I said
before, it may have been the day at the picnic that had frightened her. How can you tell? She was unbalanced
anyway
, I think to myself. Well, she was whining before we even got to the little harbour. The water had gone down quite a bit in the last few days. It’s these strange tides you get out here, which drain right away from the reef at the edge of the lagoon, and it’s at these times the great pots show up, sticking up in the sand like humps under bedclothes.

Now there was an abandoned look about the little port, and the ships stood with the masts half-collapsed – ‘In case there’s a hurricane,’ Sanjay used to say, to frighten the children and make them laugh. There was a bloody great snake drooped over the mud walls the children had built. But I don’t honestly think it was this that sent Pandora into such fits of screaming. Oddly enough, what seemed to send her off was the child who wandered about there too – quite
absorbed
in her game of shifting sand from one pile to another and pushing and pulling Sanjay’s model ships at the end of a length of string. It was the child from the village, the child in the pink dress who’d been cheated of her play with the ship before the picnic when Duchess Dora was there, not the snake, which slithered off quickly into the undergrowth. But Pandora had started up, and she wouldn’t stop.

I went back to the Bar. As I said, that was the first time those screams came right up the beach and I thought to myself, well, either the child’s mother or Millie is going to have to break into the siesta hour now and go and smooth things over. She was jealous, I suppose, poor little half-spoilt, half-neglected thing – and there’d been some tussle on the picnic day at the harbour with the village kids. She wanted Sanjay for herself, which is a silly wish at the best of times. (I have to admit, I sometimes wonder if, on that day of the picnic, she didn’t walk along the jungle path with her mother and they both looked in at us. But it’s most unlikely, as Dora never took her daughter anywhere.)

*

‘It’s too late now to make it up to Pandora,’ I said on the day Ford came and I went down to the lagoon to find Sanjay. ‘And you know she’ll very likely never get well.’ But he just shook his head. I looked down at his hands and they were hanging loose – big, sensitive hands – in a way that used to drive me mad with irritation. It was like saying, ‘I’m
powerless
.’ He had a thick gold wedding band on his fourth finger. I could have cut it off him after Dora died. He used to sit in the Bar and tap his glass of rum against the gold. And Pandora wears the little gold ring he gave her as a child. It would be sent back from the asylum in Grenada to Sanjay when it grew too small for her, and Sanjay sent it to Barbados to be made bigger, and it was sent back again, and so on. She still wears it now.

‘I can’t leave the island, I can’t leave Pandora,’ Sanjay says. And yet he sits with his head bowed on the verandah night after night as Pandora screams for him and Tanty Grace has to give her herb medicines to calm her down.

*

If it’s a question of telling this man, with his smug face and his pre-packed knowledge of women – label ‘older woman’, label ‘moderately attractive’, label ‘shrew’ or ‘nag’ – then I’ll tell him what I want and when I want to. Get your American friends in, darling, I’ll say, the revolution is starting. My pal what you met in a basement in London – another recipient of Mother Teza’s charity, you might say – tells me in a letter that our girl Mari here will walk to the southern point of the island tonight and shine a light and let the reds in under our beds. Keep ever so strict an eye on her, but she’ll still steal away from you like a shadow, leaving just a white husk behind. Or maybe you like that, Mr Stiff Upper Lip Man, with your public school need to conceal and betray. Maybe you’re a bloody spy like the rest of them. And you’re here to welcome the Austin faction with open arms. Who knows, or cares, for that matter? What difference does it make which pigs get into power and run the world?

It does bring a smile, though, to think of Mari – Marina, that is, the lost darling – walking all unknowing past the wooden house where Sanjay sits and Pandora lies a few feet away, moaning for him. Marina, carrying her revolutionary ideals, her dreams, her love of her vanished father and her ancestry on this cruel island, where her forebears slaved and kept silent under the eye of the old Allards and then, when night fell, danced and sang till sun-up, kings of the
imaginings
of the night. Let her dreams come true! They’ve as much chance of that happening as the dreams and stories the slaves had of staying hard and bright when the sun came over the sea to melt them. But that’s not right, of course. Her dreams have every chance of coming true now. Her revolutionary heroes will come, dressed up as Fairy Godmother in the carnival. The only trouble is, it’s the Fairy Godmother in this case who so often turns into a pumpkin – and, worst of all, a pumpkin that doesn’t roll away with the dawn.