Genie and Paul (20 page)

Something was squatting on his chest. Or that was how it felt, anyway, when his struggle for breath shook him. Something was squatting on his chest, breathing in his face.

Oh God.

He felt the panic start to form over him like skin on boiling milk. He didn’t know what to do when it got him here, right here in bed, in the only place he felt he could escape it. There was nowhere left to go. He had to fight his way out of it. He had to think of something so that he didn’t start thinking too hard about breathing and thinking that if he stopped thinking about breathing he would stop breathing for good, and when he got to the point where he thought he was about to stop breathing he started scrabbling at the dark with his fingers, as though trying to slit his way through it, as though he were in mourning and rending his clothes.

He lay on the mattress, squinting at a black stain on the floor. It appeared to be dissolving, then intensifying. The ants. They were moving in the purposeful way of commuters. They could have been people observed from a satellite. He lay there for some time watching it spread and contract, pulse of its own accord. This unnameable pain which he still carried – the name of it always on the tip of his tongue – had long since broken up and the bits floated free around his body now like clots. He watched the stain dissolving. He stared at the ants, trying to distract himself from the sound of the sea, from the fact that he remembered too much. He remembered the time he had brought Mam
the daffodils. He’d looked out into the weed-choked beds of the gardens and seen them, almost hidden by the overgrown hedge. So bright they were! So yellow against the dark wet green! And he’d run out and tugged them all up, and made a great glorious pile of them which he’d gathered, running back into the flat, into Mam’s room and she’d slapped him round the head, for pulling them all up, for dropping them on the floor, for running into her room without knocking where he had surprised her, standing naked, looking at herself in the mirror.

There were the memories. There were the ants. And then, Paul thought dully, there were the pills. He leant over to his suitcase and pulled it open, reaching for his washbag. He pulled out the tub of pills and twisted it open. Then he shook out one of the pills, and swallowed it.

Genie lay by the pool in her bikini, blindly groping from time to time for the cocktail set down next to her lounger. She felt the sun trail red shadows across her closed lids, and was gradually succumbing to the rum that thickened and slurred her thoughts. Tomorrow she would leave. She would fly back to Mauritius, and, from there, home to London.

Her Mauritius, she realised, was imaginary, cobbled together from a few patchy memories and the stories she’d heard from Paul and from Mam. But Genie was more Mauritian than Paul, technically (this was only ever half the story, Mauritius, half his story, and funny how the white half was the dark half, she thought). You could also argue that Paul was more Mauritian than her: he’d spent more time there. And, unlike him, Genie had never felt the desire to return. Perhaps she was afraid it would disappoint her. Or perhaps she saw Mauritius as more his than hers. It was like childhood, she thought, looking at a little girl playing in the pool. You can’t ever go back. Every morning this little girl waved to Genie, and Genie always offered her a small smile in return. She knew the little girl read it as sad, lonely. But in fact she was simply tired: tired out by the heat, the salt air, the silence, the long hours spent alone, the effort not to think of Paul, the rainbow of cocktails she worked her way through each afternoon by the pool. She had written Paul a letter and left it with the girl in the rum shack. He would know where to find her if he wanted to see her. But she would no longer be looking for him.

She took another sip of her drink. It was layered, red and yellow. She took her swizzle stick and swirled it around. Mauritian could just be another word for ‘mixed’. Their mixes were just different, that was all. Everyone was a bastard there, on that bastard island – the bastard of England and France left to grow up wild in the tropics.

She heard squeals and splashing and opened one eye to see the little girl paddling erratically towards a beach-ball her father had thrown into the pool. And now, having reached the ball, she was shrieking with delight and frustration, struggling to cling to it in the water.

The further away you were from a past hurt, Genie thought, a self who got hurt in the past, the more you felt as though that self wasn’t you. It was more like your child, an innocent whom you, as an adult, with your advanced perspective, your advantage of hindsight, should be in a position to protect.

Genie had become more and more angry with Paul. So what? What could she do about it now? All she knew now was, how could he? How could he do that to her? How could he leave her like that? Like this? She and Mam always used to say to Paul, You think too much. Now Genie would have added to that – of yourself.

Mademoiselle
? There were dimples now whenever Regis said this to her in public. She looked up into his face and thought groggily, Dark skin kind of concentrates you, makes you occupy a more sharply delineated space. If you were white here, in this blinding light, you’d kind of melt into the whiteness of the sand or the sky.

He handed her a piece of paper. She sat up, unfolded it. It was a hand-drawn map. She looked at him, puzzled.

My sister has a small snack place near Baie du Nord, he said. Your brother’s been seen there a few times. He’s living nearby, on the beach.

Look at me, bringing poison into Paradise! Paul thought, reaching for another pill. There was a time when he’d debased his coinage: he cut his drugs, crushed them to dust, sold them as space dust. Dust from space was radioactive. And people who took this stuff glowed in the dark. They emitted heat. There was an expression in Creole,
pa koze
: don’t talk. It implied absolute agreement with what someone had just said: I know what you mean. No need to explain.

The first time he and Sol had taken an E together – Paul’s first ever time – out in that field, the grass brushing his ankles like Eloise’s hair on his bare skin, the sky frosted with stars, they had looked at one other and said nothing. And then he in turn had introduced El to Es in another wordless but eloquent encounter. To think they had ever called that stuff Ecstasy, he laughed. How naive they’d been. These days it was more Mild Excitability. Not even that, he thought, thinking about the increasingly frequent waves of paranoia that licked the edges of his consciousness whenever he took pills in London. There had once been an innocence about it (or had it been about them?) that had been cut with something cruder, over the years. When had that happened exactly?

Now, as he took another, he didn’t talk. But the sea would not shut up. The sound of it was beginning to engulf him. It was ceaseless. For variety he imagined that the noise outside was rain. Rain or the constant sound of cars on a distant motorway. It could have been the wind in the
coconut trees, the flapping of ragged banana leaves or the faint roaring sound when he put a shell to his ear or when he couldn’t sleep at night. Like tonight. Like every night. Anything but the sea.

There was a bush by his shack. Paul had no idea what it was, but the needles were spiny, as spiteful-looking as the black railings he used to see everywhere in London. When it rained heavily, the sound of the drops on its whip-like branches was like a large animal drinking, lapping something up, or like the sound of fire. And the wind sometimes sounded as if it was drumming at his door (the piece of zinc he had to drag open or closed), demanding to be let in. But he swallowed it. Paul realised that, when it came down to hardships you couldn’t change, mistakes you couldn’t undo, you just had to swallow them.

She had taken him for a tree at first – one which might have escaped the cyclone, it was so slight. And then, as she walked further along the beach, she saw it was a man, and then she saw in this figure a much thinner, darker version of Paul, his profile smudged by the grown-out hair, the beard. He was standing on a ledge of land which stuck out over the sea, just looking out, as though scanning the horizon for a ship, as though watching the sun set, but now all that could be seen of it was a bar of hot light at the horizon, and the sky, fast deepening.

Paul!

Running as she was screaming, hoarsely, out of breath, over the sand which was packed hard and cold where the sea had rolled over it, her bare feet slapping flat on it, flip-flops in hand, like running on rain-wettened London pavements. He did not turn around immediately, as though the sound of her cry took a long while to reach him.

Paul!

He saw her and moved slowly down towards the beach where she was running to meet him. Without a word he stepped forward, and when she folded him into her arms she was shocked to discover how little of him there was left.

He dreamt she’d come to see him. He’d been standing on his rock, watching the setting sun bloody the sea, and he’d turned to see her on the beach, approaching him. He could see her mouth open, knowing that she was calling to him, but could hear nothing for a while, and then he’d heard his name. It had seemed ages since he’d heard his own name from someone else’s lips.

And when she’d thrown her arms around him she had felt more solid than she’d ever felt in real life. She was sobbing, and when finally she’d stopped crying she’d asked him to go back with her. Told him it would be better for him that way, that if he was sorry about what he’d done to her, if he wanted things to change, then this was his chance. He could not remember much of what he’d said in turn, only that he could not go back, and then she’d looked at him, quite closely, and asked what was wrong. And, when she asked, he couldn’t tell her. That was the ultimate wrong, that he should have to say what was wrong with him. Come with me, she’d said. And he’d said,
The blue honey of the Mediteranean
, that’s what Fitzgerald said.

And she’d looked at him as though finally she understood, and then she had started crying again.

There were more and more tourists around. Paul saw them walking along the beach and they looked up and saw him, with his beard, standing against the lilac sky, under the roiling, boiling, biblical clouds. They never approached. Paul
shook his fist and thought, What a triumph of Heaven over Earth! The sky was electric! All glare and clouds; the sky frowned with clouds.

He felt like one of the desert fathers. The desert fathers were not fathers, they were as barren as the desert itself. Oh, yes, in another life, they might have had children, wives, livestock, unpaid taxes, unsupportable debts… but here, in the desert, they were free.

He couldn’t be sure but he thought he’d been here for some time now. It could have been weeks. Perhaps months. Had he come here to lose himself or to find something? God, perhaps? If so, Paul had not found him. Not in the empty, endless sky, the stony, sparsely seeded ground that stretched red and cracked as a washerwoman’s hands. It was not as lonely as you’d think, he thought, the desert. So far he had encountered other men, hermits like himself, stripped to the waist, their scrubby beards hanging down their chests. They did not acknowledge him as they passed, respectful of his solitude; they scuttled across his horizon, anxious not to disturb his view or block his light. But he wanted to stop them as they passed, wanted to stay them with his scrawny grip, tight as an old man’s or a newborn’s or a madman’s, and tell them, Don’t go. The devil appeared to him at noon, shimmering in the heat haze, his eyes the size and colour of gooseberries. The world was a desert full of men wanting to be alone.

Here in the desert, water was scarce so he didn’t wash. And washing off this red dirt which had settled on his skin like brick dust after a demolition would distance him from his environment, his purpose: would make him less of an element of his surroundings and more like an intruder. His own smell made him feel less alone. His body was a forest of smells. But the memories: these made him feel more
alone. When a man was shipwrecked, even in the desert, all his memories returned to him. His memory became as
pin-sharp
as the desert island sun and nothing escaped its glare.

And it was like that when you drowned, of course – your life flashed before your eyes. Once was enough! you thought, as you lived through it all again, drowning in memory, a wine-dark sea, and they crowded in on you, breathlessly, the memories – once was enough! But then, wading into the black sea, wading into the night, gasping with cold, watching the dust melt away and your skin come up glittery with salt, slippery as a newborn’s – as you waded out to the point where your feet floated free and you lost touch with the earth, like walking on water, like dreams of flying, as you gradually found yourself out of your depth and the water closed over your head, stinging your eyes, like crying in reverse, and you started to swallow your tears, the thoughts burst like bubbles in your mouth and filled your lungs and it all flashed before you – once was enough – but then you were glad to know at last, after a whole life of searching, the moment when everything had gone wrong.

This book would not have been written without the love and support of my first and best reader, Luke Williams. He’s the greatest friend known to woman, man or dog.

Thank you also to Candida Lacey, Corinne Pearlman and the team at Myriad, particularly Vicky Blunden, for her sensitive and intelligent editing, and Linda McQueen for her heroic copy-editing.

Thank you to Cathryn Summerhayes, for her unfailing enthusiasm, warmth, good humour and tenacity.

Thanks to Andrew Cowan for the encouragement and brilliant editorial advice.

Thank you to those who read the book closely and offered much support during its writing: Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Richard Misek, Chris Power, Stan Roche, Natalie Soobramanien, Hilery Williams, Caroline Woodley.

Thank you to Amit Chaudhuri, Maureen Freely, Ali Smith and Christos Tsiolkas for generous encouragement.

Thank you to Barlen Pyamootoo for the conversations.

My family have been great. I owe thanks to Arlette Ta-Min for taking the time to read the book and comment on it, and to Harry and Mona Ramasawmy for their hospitality, and for showing me around Mauritius. While there I also stayed with Gaby and Doris, who spoilt me rotten, and got to know my cousins Shane and Rudi and Kevin and Kenny, who showed me the island. Thanks to you all, and also to Armio and Jacqueline.

Thanks to Gom for taking me to Rodrigues, and to Sarojini Ramasawmy for accompanying us. And thanks to Mum and Dad for the writer’s retreat in Brittany.

Two of the stories in the book were written while on a residency at Cove Park. Thank you to Polly Clark and Julian Forrester for inviting me there.

Thank you to everyone who read the book or chapters of it in its early stages: Eleanor Birne, Jon Cook, Sara De Bondt, Oliver Emanuel, Jon Evans, Sara Heitlinger, David Lambert, Robert McGill, Belinda Moore, Andrew Motion, Tiffany Murray, Sarah Ridgard, Iain Robinson, Kathryn Simmonds, Peter Straus, John Thieme, Simon Trewin, Zoe Waldie, Yair Wallach, Jason Warren, Saul Williams and Jo Wroe.

And finally, thank you to my dearest Rob, for all the love and support, for the beautiful first edition of
Paul et Virginie,
and for crying at the end.