The Sea Grape Tree (21 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

G
rimacing, Eric put the receiver back in the cradle to cool down. He couldn't think of anything he couldn't stand more than a telephone hot with someone else's conversation. Behind him, Shad was counting the liquor bottles under the sink, doing the monthly inventory.

“We going to need another case of red wine, boss.”

“Make it a half case this time.”

Eric picked up his ginger ale and walked away, still irked by the phone call Shad had just ended. The bartender had jumped up from doing inventory when the phone rang. His greeting had been followed by a hunched back over the receiver, ten minutes of mumbled sentences, and the frenzied waving of one hand. After he hung up, Shad had bent to look at the bottles right away.

“Who was it?” Eric had asked.

“Danny. He want me to do him a favor.”

With no intention of asking what the favor was, and a burning curiosity about what his possible future partners would want to talk about that didn't include him (coming quickly to the phrase
two against one
), Eric had poured himself a ginger ale. If they wanted to have their secrets, that was their business. He'd have to trust Shad, who'd always had his back, had to trust that he was keeping Danny engaged and the hotel venture in mind.

There'd been little on Eric's mind but Simone for the last few days. Snapshots of their time together had kept popping into his head. Earlier that morning, after doing a few side bends on his verandah, he'd remembered exercising when she was on the island, and how embarrassed he'd been to think she might be watching him in his old boxers with his paunch flopping around. In mid-bend, he'd straightened and swept a lock of white hair away from his face. By the time he got to the third and last squat, perspiration trickling down the groove of his spine, he decided that he couldn't avoid the truth anymore. He wanted to see her and hold her and make love to her, even if she had to pay her own ticket down.

He leaned on a post facing Simone's island, the name the Parish Council woman had rejected.

“It can't be
Simone's Island,
” she'd protested, disdain in her wide eyes. “It have to be Simone Island. It don't belong to her; it belong to
you
. And we can't have no apostrophe, the computer don't like it.”

The island sparkled in the midmorning sunshine, a light wind twirling the flat leaves of the almond tree. It was going to rain later, the weatherman had said, the beginning of the springtime rainy season.

“Have the buckets ready?” Eric called to Shad.

“The new roof not leaking too bad, boss,” the muffled answer came from under the counter.

It had taken Eric five years or more to get used to the Caribbean seasons, to the dry seasons and the wet, but now he couldn't imagine anything resembling four seasons. That very morning, while taking the cold shower he endured since he'd cut off the hot water, he'd created another of his little ditties to remind himself why he stayed in this godforsaken place. Strumming his imaginary guitar with the bar of soap, he'd rumbled the verse.

Give me a cloud of rain
(his voice trembling like Elvis's),

A little sun,

My old flip-flops,

And I'm ready for fun.

He'd sung to Simone once. She'd invited him to sit down on her writing bench because she was lonely, and she'd asked him to sing one of the songs he used to sing when he played lead guitar. When he finished, she'd told him he was good, and he'd known she was being kind.

Today he was going to tell her casually that he'd finally gotten Horace to come to an agreement about the infrastructure on the island. Actually, he and Lambert had gone together to see the lawyer and Lambert had talked him into it. Horace had admitted that he'd liked what he'd seen on the island the week before. He and his partner were still interested in the campsite. Sensing victory, Lambert had gotten him to agree that it would be best for them to install the steps, walkways, cistern, and solar panels themselves, and build them just the way they'd like them. He'd taken out his calculator and showed him how cost effective it would be to take out a building loan and deduct it from the rent for at least five years, enough for a good head start on the project.

“Shad is definitely going to be a partner,” an emboldened Eric had added. “And the share split stays the same.”

“Please yourself,” Horace had said, then he'd sucked on a back tooth and gone back to talking about the campsite.

The phone had cooled down when he punched in the numbers later. “Do you have a minute?” he asked Simone.

“I'm in a meeting,” she said, sounding confident and businesslike, like she was trying to impress someone nearby. “Can I call you later?”

Walking the phone to its holder on the counter, Eric did his version of sucking his teeth, causing his bartender to mimic him.

“Boss,” Shad said after he'd finished laughing, “I was thinking, why we don't connect the laptop to the Internet, like what Rickia was saying? It going to cost us a little extra, but we would be saving money because you wouldn't have to make so many long-distance calls. Joella say you can telephone people on the Internet.”

“You could have something there,” Eric replied, a lackluster answer.

“We can't move forward unless we put one foot first, right, like how Joshua learning to walk.”

“And like how you're learning to read better, you mean, and want to learn the computer yourself.”

“Exactly, and what we don't know, we can ask the children. They always know these things. Rickia say she sending emails to some girl in Australia now who live on a sheep farm. You ever hear anything like that—a child in Jamaica talking to another child in Australia, on a sheep farm?”

Shad raised his shoulders up as he talked and dropped them suddenly. “If we don't keep up, the next generation going to pass us out, even control up the hotel business and the tourists. We have to keep up with them, keep learning, right?”

Eric sighed. “No peace for the weary.”

“Plenty time for peace when you dead, boss.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Y
ou think it look like me?” The young man straightened his head to look more like the sketch he was holding.

“I think so,” Sarah said, walking toward him with her paintbrush.

Square Jaw raised his eyes. “I really look so serious?”

“That's how you look.”

“I can have it?”

“Let me see it first.”

He handed her the drawing and she looked at it, pursing her lips, as if she was trying to make up her mind. “I don't know. You'd have to tell me your name first.”

“Why?”

“Drawings and paintings have to have a name, and I can't just make up a name and pretend you're somebody else. Clementine's has her name.”

The man frowned and ran his hand over his head. He'd been lured into the room by news that Sarah had drawn his portrait. The maid had clasped her hands against her gingham chest when she first saw it that morning. Clementine had already been given her own portrait the day before, to thank her, Sarah had said, for the top sheet she'd added to the fitted sheet. The Walrus had tried hard not to smile when she saw the drawing, but she'd puffed up her top lip more than usual and announced she was going to take the drawing home to show her grandchildren.

The two portraits, both a bold six inches square, had been drawn with care, each on its own large sheet, the edges cleanly marked with a ruler, the spacious white margins emphasizing the drawings' charcoal lines and shadows. Her subjects looked handsome and proud, almost heroic. Clementine with a curve of the lips, her kidnapper looking straight at the viewer. Sarah had worked on them from memory, late into the last two nights, finding the end results just as good as those of the Bayswater sidewalk artists. While she was bent over the drawing of Square Jaw, she'd thought that maybe she should substitute her restaurant work for tourist portraits, once she got out.

She'd laid the drawing of Square Jaw on the bed to await the maid's breakfast arrival.

“It look like him, for true,” the woman had said. “You even get the way his hair shave close to his head,” she'd added, sweeping her finger across her forehead. “I going to tell him.”

Square Jaw had arrived an hour later. He was wearing light blue running shoes with a navy blue swoosh on the sides, probably new by the way he was walking, with his feet sticking out like Charlie Chaplin, and he'd asked in a few gruff words to see the drawing she'd made of him.

He hadn't visited the room in the last three days, his voice absent from the voices rising and falling in the living room, and she'd found herself almost relieved to hear him outside the day before. She had the impression that he respected her more than the driver did, that he saw her as more than a job. He'd entered the room once to search through her bags. When she stood behind him, asking why she was still being held here, he'd told her to sit down and said something about asking too many questions.

“What are you looking for?” she'd demanded, when he'd finished tossing her clothes out of the bag.

“You have any scissors or knife?”

“Of course not. You can't take them on an airplane.”

He'd stood up and brushed off his knees. “We don't want you trying to—”

“I don't deserve this, you know,” she'd called after him while he left the room mumbling to himself, irritated with somebody.

She'd returned to her work with a vengeance after that, keeping at bay the anxiety that lived with her day and night. Nothing would come from giving in to fear, she knew. Her only salvation would be to clear her mind of clutter and find out as much as she could from the people around her.
Better the evil that you know.
Her mother's words had come back to her after she'd made her seventh scratch at the foot of the wall. Evil or not, the square-jawed fellow was someone she wanted to know better.

The young man looked up from the drawing. “Me can have it?” he asked her in broad patois, waving the drawing in his hand.

“You still haven't given me your name.”

He scratched the back of one hand. “Batsman,” he mumbled.

“Batsman, then.” She dug around in a bag and found a pen. “Played cricket, did you?”

The man shook his head, wiping his laugh away with his hand. “No, Batsman, like Batsman and Robin, the guys in the movie.”

After writing the name at the foot of the page, she handed it back to him. “Has anyone ever drawn your picture before?”

“No, but ah have plenty camera pictures.”

His description of his older brother's photography tumbled out, something about his brother having a camera and taking family photographs. She grabbed on to the few words she could understand, stringing them together to create a chain of visuals of a family and a celebration when someone visited from overseas.

What had at first seemed impossible, that she could understand the harsh language around her, had turned into a challenge to learn what her captors were saying, to learn patois. As soon as she heard voices outside, she'd stand at the door and press her ear to the gap, separating out the words she understood from the ones she never would. The cadence had been a struggle at first, with the forceful upward swings and quick descents, the staccato intervals and abrupt endings. She'd practiced saying a few phrases to get the hang of it, thinking of her uncle, a linguistics professor at the University of Kent, who would have learned it by now.

After Batsman had gone, Sarah settled in front of her easel and her work of the last couple days. With her watercolor pad now completely filled, each page slightly warped, and her sketch pad unable to take paint, she'd started in on the one large sheet left of the five she'd originally brought from London. Today she was painting another sea grape leaf. It had started to age, one brown edge curling in death, a nice contrast to the two other paintings of healthy green leaves on the page.

She leaned her head to one side and squinted. Three rectangles were scattered around the page already, each four by six inches, two horizontal and one vertical, each a different leaf, one with a lizard sitting on its stem. If she continued like this, filling the page with squares, inserting boxes between the boxes, she'd fill up the entire sheet—to create one large painting. She allowed herself a tiny smile to think that she'd be able to fulfill Roper's challenge in the most ironic of ways. It would be a jigsaw of miniature boxes.

While she continued painting, she thought about her dream the night before. It had awakened her, her chest constricted, and she hadn't been able to get back to sleep. She'd lain afterward with listening eyes wide, thinking of the dream in all its detail. She'd been back in Maidstone and she was young, an adolescent changing out of her choir robe. Penny Clutterbuck was there and had giggled something about Peter inviting her to the cinema.

“But he's too fat,” she'd whispered, so the others behind wouldn't hear.

Penny and the nameless others had disappeared and she was suddenly alone under a streetlight on the Old Edgecombe Road. Traffic was sparse, a Sunday evening, she knew. It was dark already, cold, and she hadn't brought gloves. She'd known somehow that the day had been overcast, making the colors on the leaves look dull all day until they faded into autumn darkness. She'd turned up her collar and dug her hands into her coat pockets. It was a coat she'd actually worn and loved at that age, a dark blue cloth one with padded shoulders, but under the streetlight it seemed bleached yellow and her shadow had circled her like a black ball.

Her mother was to fetch her after church, but she was late. She'd looked up the road. A bicyclist and one car passed. The church grounds were dark behind her and she didn't know where else to go. A man and a woman walked by holding hands, the woman pregnant in a bright red coat. They were talking as they passed.

“She did no such thing!” the woman said to the man, then looked at Sarah questioningly. They'd turned the corner beside the church and disappeared, leaving the young girl alone and Sarah wide awake.