The Road to McCarthy (35 page)

I pour a tumbler of Barbados rum and switch on the TV before I go to bed, to try and take my mind off my embarrassing diplomatic faux pas. That actress who used to be in
The Golden Girls
is on screen, saying, “Clean your
closet and your conscience by donating your fur to the needy.” I switch channels, and find a news story claiming that Muhammad Ali’s grandfather was an Irishman.

I go to sleep with the windows open and the mosquito screens down. When I wake halfway through the night the wind is blowing the curtains horizontally into the room, as if Dracula is about to come sliding down the wall at any moment.

Or the governor.

“Good morning
. Would you care to join me? My name is Cedric.” In a deliciously warm breeze, over tea, poached eggs and homemade lime marmalade—Montserrat was the source of the limes that earned English sailors the nickname “limeys”—I make the acquaintance of Cedric Os-borne. Though his surname is Irish, he’s a sixth-generation Montserratian whose father built the Vue Pointe in 1961, which explains the Flemingesque ambience. Until that year, he says, there were hardly any hotels, even in Barbados and Antigua; then Castro made a hostile takeover of Batista’s tourism assets, and the Cuban overspill started to look for new destinations. He’s a warm, genial man in his sixties, clearly besotted with his island. He says a friend of his, who like many of the islanders emigrated to the UK in the early sixties, came back recently and couldn’t believe that people still parked their cars with the keys in the ignition. “The only time anything bad happened was when someone banged my car one night, left bits of their brake light in the ground. There were only three repair shops on the island, so I just phoned round and found out who did it.”

We’re joined by his wife Carol, who looks as if she could be one of my aunties. Perhaps she is. Her grandparents came from Skibbereen, a West Cork village seven miles from my mother’s home, before emigrating to Boston, Massachusetts. Her grandfather was in the IRA: “You know, the old IRA. The good IRA!” Every generation says that about the previous IRA. Her accent is a hybrid of Irish, American and Caribbean, and the chat just flows. It’s like sitting in the kitchen of a bed and breakfast in Mayo, apart from the pool. And the palm trees. And the volcano. Cedric says he’s been
to Ireland many times. On his first visit he went to a Rotary Club meeting in Limerick. His arrival caused quite a stir. “Everybody wanted to know what part of Africa I was from. So I told them I was from an Irish colony.

“‘An Irish colony?’ they said, amazed.

“‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Just comin’ back to claim what’s mine.’”

He has fond memories of a combined sweetshop, funeral parlor and bar in Skibereen. “Everybody’s interested in you, wants to talk. Just like bein’ in Montserrat.”

After breakfast I sit in the shade for a while, because you really don’t want to go rushing at the day in a place like this. I’m reading the story in the
Montserrat Reporter
(“Montserrat Distorter,” someone told me yesterday)—prostitution in montserrat becoming a fun activity—when Cordela, the bar manager, comes across. “Look,” she says. A huge, vertical jet of sunlit, dense brown ash is shooting upwards from the top of the volcano with tremendous power. Clouds of lethal white smoke are jetting out horizontally from lower down the peak, as if it’s sprung a leak. “A good puff, eh?” says Cordela, with a relaxed smile.

“Yes,” I say. “Very good puff.” Best since I’ve been here, actually.

Hope the puffs don’t get any better.

If you were solar-powered
, the drive up the island from the Vue Pointe would charge you up for a month. Two fluffy white clouds have been artfully arranged against the royal-blue sky to stop it from looking monotonous. At every bend new, more startling vistas of the Caribbean are revealed. Bright blooms of frangipani illuminate the bush. Chickens run into the road. Goats for whom stew time is looming scrabble up hillsides. Like everyone else, Bob the taxi driver hoots his horn whenever he sees someone he knows. So horns hoot constantly, because everyone knows everybody else. Bob is pointing at houses. “That one, George Martin’s house. That one, where Paul McCartney stayed when he came to record. Air Studios. Many rock stars come here. Boy George. Sting. Rolling Stones. Other one. With rehab clinic on Antigua. Yeah, Clapton. Nobody knows who they are, nobody cares. Not like they Bob Marley.”

I ask what the rock stars did to relax.

“Drink rum. In Plymouth one night, my friend says, you wanna come to the rum shop? Stevie Wonder playing piano in there. He came here to record
Ebony and Ivory.”

I suppose we’ll just have to try and forgive Montserrat for that one.

Bob is a big, big man who was a security guard at the airport, and had to run for his life when the sky started falling in. His two colleagues were among the seventeen dead. All his family have gone to live in England, even his mum and dad. I ask him where. “Kilburn. Mum and Dad both sick. I don’t think they like the winter. Can’t get used to that dark.” Neither can most of the rest of us, Bob.

Down at the jetty cars are parked with the windows open and the keys in. The boat for the round-the-island trip is the ferry that brought us over from Antigua. The deck is packed with local people, some resident expats, and a handful of day trippers from Antigua. The island is so small that I’m already recognizing faces. We head south out of port, counterclockwise around the island, passing the new police and fire stations on the clifftop. I have no real notion of what to expect. I also have no cold beer, and there is no bar. Many of the locals anticipated this and have brought their own chilled bottles, which they are openly consuming in front of me. Later in the trip we’ve been promised “refreshments,” a euphemism the world over for drab sandwiches, a chocolate-style biscuit and a resolutely nonintoxicating beverage. Can’t wait.

The sea’s calm as we head down the west coast. We pass Vue Pointe and gawk at the ex-golf course, but nothing’s prepared me for what lies in wait as we round the next headland and see the remains of Plymouth. It’s a scene of biblical devastation, a monochrome swathe of ash and rubble sweeping down the mountainside, entombing the town and stifling its once bright colors. Roofs and top-story balconies crane their necks to look out over the devastation. Farther south the villages of Kinsale and St. Patrick’s, once the hub of the saint’s day festivities, have disappeared from the face of the earth. The Tar River valley, which still experiences daily rock and mud flows, is a postapocalyptic moonscape. When the pyroclastic flow hit the sea here, the
waters boiled. It’s hard to reconcile these otherworldly sights with the mangoes and flowers, the churches and rum shops, just four or five miles away.

As we round the island’s southern tip the sea is crashing into itself from half a dozen directions, and rises suddenly in a frightening swell. No one can stand without clutching a rail. Eyes are averted stoically towards the deck, their owner’s mouths set in tense concentration. This is a very good time not to have been drinking beer. A voice announces that refreshments are now being served on the lower deck, then adds, “However, as nobody can get downstairs at the moment, we’ll stop and serve them just before we get back to harbor.”

As we head north up the east side, past the fragment of control tower where the airport used to be, the waters start to calm and people are talking again. A Rasta-looking guy tells me he ran away that day, even though he knew that if you were in its path no person or vehicle could outrun it: the pyroclastic flow moved at hundreds of miles an hour, and went from mountaintop to water’s edge in fifty-five seconds. “Me house is gone, but me still gat four years to pay mi mortgage.” He could have taken the rescue package and gone to Britain, but chose to stay where his heart is, trapped in a post-disaster, postcolonial world. We go down for our refreshments, which are marginally more depressing than expected. Neither of us can face them, and we settle for a bottle of water each instead. It’s very good. I must try it more often.

Back on bone-dry land I’ve got wind of an event that wasn’t on the official program, and scrounge a lift with Richard and Jennifer, who are not tourists even though they come from Doncaster. Jennifer is a tall, slender nineteen-year-old who has been out here almost seven months, accumulating proposals of marriage and offers to convert her to multiple denominations of Christianity while she works as a volunteer in one of the island’s three primary schools. Richard is her dad, a lifelong primary school teacher who jacked it in a couple of years ago, jaded by the new management and logo and mission-statement culture. He’s here to spend a couple of weeks with his daughter, for whom I am full of admiration. In a culture where taking a year out of college to travel the world has come to mean going off with
your boyfriend or girlfriend to meet up with a bunch of your other mates and do drugs and get dysentery on a beach where the locals get no financial or cultural benefit from your presence, her altruistic choice is heartwarming. We arrive at the cricket pitch just up the hill from the Vue Pointe, and she is besieged by small children, still eager to stroke her long straight hair and touch her skin in fascination after all these months.

If you ever have a choice of when to visit a small tropical island, try and go when the primary school sports are on. The whole culture of the place is laid out before you. In Fiji I once saw twelve schools from twelve villages build twelve palm-frond pavilions for the elders, then run themselves to a standstill under a jungle-covered mountain. One barefoot little boy wore a yellow T-shirt that said all australians look the same. Today the smoky smell of fried chicken hangs heavy on the reggae that booms around the playing field where not so long ago, according to a man in a rude boy trilby, the touring Springboks, from South Africa, played a West Indian XI at cricket, and the players were reacquainted with their breakfasts on the boat back to Antigua. A tiny concrete grandstand is packed with mums and toddlers sheltering from the late afternoon sun, and echoes with laughter and a shrill of hyperanimated conversation. Other parents stand round the perimeter of the field under colorful sun umbrellas, or squat in the shadow of the sightscreens. A lady cop swings a giant Mag-Lite like a cheerleader’s baton. Trousers are flared, headscarves vivid, halter tops spangly, hats unrestrained and polka dots large. The girls’ under-eleven 800 meters in 85° of sun is so brutal it gives me chest cramps just watching it. Ryan won the last race, and O’Garro the one before. “Fathers’ race next,” announces the island’s top DJ. “Then mothers’ race, umbrella race, and politicians’ race. Take your places now for small boys’ relay.” It is happily, gleefully, sociably competitive.

Afterwards Richard and Jennifer drive me to the Vue Pointe and we walk down the hill to Jumping Jack’s, a ramshackle beach bar on the edge of the devastated golf course. It’s run by Margaret from Sunderland and her husband, Danny Sweeney, a Montserratian fisherman. The beer is ferociously cold, the grilled tuna and waloo have been caught by Danny and the
mood is marginally more relaxed than falling asleep in a hammock. Within minutes I have mentally elevated it to the top ten of world bars.

Richard keeps me entertained with terrifying tales of life as a primary teacher once management mania and its theories and jargons and best practice bollocks descended on that profession. He was drinking a bottle of whisky a week, and gave up the day he left teaching. I tell him of the old-style professorial grammar-school English teacher I once knew, who kept a bottle in the drawer of his classroom desk. “It never came to that,” he says, “but in the final months I did need a miniature of vodka in my orange juice to get through a staff meeting.” He shudders at the recollection. “They were awful events. Like something out of Kafka.”

This glimpse into the pedagogic abyss is profoundly depressing, and a nightcap seems a good idea when Jack’s closes and the two of them head back to the family home where Jennifer is lodging. Up at the Vue Pointe bar I sit under a ceiling fan and gaze out at the orange glow of the volcano in the night sky. A dozen elderly Canadians, Americans and Brits are playing a board game in the far corner.

“Expats,” says the waiter as he puts my beer down on a shamrock beermat. “They have villas on the hill.” He points in what appears to be the direction of the volcano. “Others go away, but they stay. Every week they come here one evening.”

I ask what they are playing.

“Tribute.”

Tribute?

“Yes. Tribute pursuit.”

Next morning
I go up a dusty lane to the little house that’s all that’s left of the University of the West Indies in Montserrat. The warm, expansive Dr. Fergus I saw in the church the other night has been replaced by a tight-lipped, defensive academic who doesn’t seem that pleased to see me. Perhaps he has had his fill of halfwits who’ve come looking for black leprechauns. But he relaxes as we talk, particularly after I’ve mentioned five
or six times how much I like his poetry, and speaks passionately about the commemoration of the St. Patrick’s Day rebellion on what used to be the white man’s feast day.

“We secularized it, Africanized it, or at least indigenized it. In an attempt to build a counterculture in the face of still being a colony, we are seizing on an event that gives some measure of pride or self-respect. Emancipation didn’t come about without resistance.”

I ask if he believes Fergus to be an Irish name.

“It is,” he says. “But please remember there was really no comparison between the horrors of black slavery and the discrimination against the Irish.”

Afterwards I put in a good session at my office under the mango tree. I’d never have thought I was suited to an office job, but I’m starting to come round to the idea. Being able to have a swim and a beer whenever you feel like it is a big plus, and in the interests of productivity and job satisfaction should be introduced to all industries as soon as possible if we are to continue to compete in global markets.

I’m winding down from the stress by taking a short power nap at my desk when I’m woken by voices. “Oi have a shuvil up dere a’ready An’ a pick.” It’s the West Indian gardener talking to his assistant on the lawn below the pool. Maybe it’s because I’ve been dreaming, but for a moment there he sounded just like Danny Dean who used to work on my Uncle Jack’s farm in West Cork.