The Tropical Issue (30 page)

So I looked above the towel.

The forensic people always gave me a cup of coffee when I’d been studying something, and joked with me because I never really got much upset.

It’s not that I’m funny. But to imitate wounds, you’ve got to know what you’re doing, and when you’re thinking and drawing, the reality of it all doesn’t get to you.

I’m not a doctor. I couldn’t diagnose what all the operation scars were, or what the bumps and hollows meant. Except that this wasn’t a matter of a few broken bones from a seatbelt, or a cracked rib or shoulder blade.

These injuries were internal. I thought of the wheelchair, bumping down the cobbles on Madeira, then didn’t think of it.

Sole survivor of a plane crash.

Sole survivor, perhaps.

Plane crash, my arse.

I covered him with the blanket, to spare the breakfast steward, and got myself out of the room.

An open book and a cripple.

Rita, you’re on your own, girl.

The captain woke in time to get us into Carlisle Bay, Barbados, later that morning, and I drove with Natalie to the St James district, the classy bit of the west coast where she had rented this beach house from Ferdy.

We drove on the left. Barbados is the Oldest Democracy in the Western World. Barbados is half Martinique’s size, and so British it isn’t even volcanic. I felt deprived.

I had left without seeing Johnson. Natalie had been waved off by a small bunch of Curtises, whom she was meeting anyway later at the Governor-General’s gig, to which, no surprise, she was also now going.

I had done the civil bit too, because I probably wouldn’t see them again. After the party, said Clive, they might take themselves north to Florida. Old Joseph didn’t care much for the West Indies in mixed weather.

My brochure said that the temperature stayed at a steady eighty all the year round in Barbados, and the way the sun was shining didn’t look very mixed to me. But maybe the dice or the girls needed changing.

Ferdy’s villa was casual, like Ferdy, and you could tell by the way Dodo stood waiting to greet us, like a Total Pole, that the daily help had been a shambles, but she’d licked them into shape all right.

She and I exchanged naked glares and I went off to my room to sort myself out and unpack. I’d locked all my boxes this time, before I left for Martinique. I took my cat out and put it beside the air-conditioning unit, and it grinned back.

Then Natalie made fifteen telephone calls and went off to the Coral Reef Club with a hard hat and her hair tied back, to pick up her backer Fred Glitterbags who had actually flown in that morning. They were going riding together.

Her lawyer, I found out from Dodo, was arriving on the next plane, with her accountant. In the early days of a film, this is a good sign. Number-crunching was about to begin.

I told Ferdy when he called an hour later, needing some help with a few Bachelors’ Buttons, twenty quid all in. Dr Thomassen was there, with a sheepish expression and a car and a driver.

According to Ferdy, Natalie could hang about and wait for her meeting until he was good and ready.

In fact, as I found out pretty quickly, he knew all about it, and didn’t have to parade until Kazimierz did, which was in a room at the Coral Reef Club at four.

I was free anyway until that meeting ended. Then I had to make over Natalie for carnival time at Government House, leaving some time in hand to do the same for one or two of her friends in the neighbourhood.

So she had ordained, tick. It was fair enough. A few extra faces, since I wasn’t, in any way, being her secretary. It would do her relationships a world of good, and it didn’t harm me. Rita, Interfacial.

I considered Ferdy’s offer. I was free. Until
Dolly
arrived, Johnson was stuck on the
Princess
anyway. And meanwhile, as Ferdy’s camera-loader, I could get to see the island. The flowers. The banana plantations.

I slammed on my French pom-pom berry and climbed into the car. Then I took it off again, because Ferdy had brought me a Nelson straw boater to wear instead.

The place they were taking most of the photographs was just off the east coast, near the Atlantic shore. But Barbados is only fourteen miles across, and that was no problem.

To please me, Ferdy told the driver to go from Speightstown by way of the Scotland district, but I didn’t meet anyone I knew, and it looked tropical, like everything else. There were some little hills in the middle.

I asked Ferdy where the banana plantations were, but he said we weren’t passing them, and Barbados was mostly sugar cane anyway: where did I think all the Bajan monkeys came from?

It turned out that Bajan meant Barbadian, and Bajan monkeys were drinks made from rum, and that if I was dead keen to see bananas, there was a new plantation somewhere I could get shown over tomorrow.

I was dead keen. Dr Thomassen, his eyes like oysters in his pink suntan, said he’d arrange it.

Ferdy, remembering his duty as a resident, pointed out as we passed it, the ruined half-plaster plantation house built by 20th Century Fox for
Island in the Sun.
He’d found stills from the film in the Curtis home. Harry Belafonte. James Mason. Dorothy Dandridge.

Lovely make-up job, he said.

I didn’t listen to what he went on to say. I’d heard about it already that morning.

From Old Joe Curtis.

It was the only conversation I’d had with Kim-Jim’s father, from the moment when he’d looked up and said, ‘
You’ve brought the punk girl.’

There was no special reason, I suppose, why we hadn’t talked. We never sat together at table , and he was off playing cards the rest of the time. Or if he wasn’t, Sharon and Clive were on either side of him, like a bath with grab handles.

But after that visit to Johnson’s cabin on
Paramount Princess,
I’d felt a bit dim with no company, and padding through the Grand Salon tumble-twist carpet, had found and sat down at the piano.

Halfway through
Bop Till You Drop,
Old Joe had come in.

I didn’t know I had an audience until my toes slipped off the loud pedal and I spun round on the stool, massaging them.

He was there, sunk in one of the stuffed brocade chairs, with his weedy ankles crossed under his bathrobe, and his cigar sending up smoke past his crew-cut grey hair. ‘Ry Cooder. You sure are no great piano player,’ he said. ‘You see my
Dorian Grey
?’

I hadn’t thought he would remember who I was, but he had.

‘We didn’t have what you’ve got,’ he added. ‘Your foam latex and Old Age Stipple and Scar-Em and contact lenses. Lon Chaney used chicken membrane for his blind eye. If an actor couldn’t cry, he sniffed ammonia. If we wanted to make an old man, we used Pan-Stik and pencils and acting. If we wanted to make a monster, we used imagination. You know what that is?’

‘You taught us all,’ I said.

‘They know my work over in England?’ he said.

I didn’t say I came from Scotland. I said, ‘The film libraries are full of it. They teach it in film school and make-up classes. Why do you never come over?’

He puffed at his cigar for a long time. Then he took it out.

‘Europe?’ he said. ‘Europe’s for losers. They know me here. America’s been good to me. This is where I belong. Do you know, on this island we’re going to . . .’

And he’d told me about 20th Century Fox, and the film, while I shut down the lid of the piano.

To hell, oh to hell with growing old.

Ferdy said, ‘Rita? Short of sleep, darling?’ And I was back, being driven down past Farley Hill and down to worn mushroom-shaped coral rocks and mounds of sea-grapes and the big waves of the Atlantic coast, and the park that Barclay’s Bank had laid out free for the islanders, out of their spare Bee-Wees and, no doubt, Natalie’s.

The hotel Ferdy took us to was serving fried dolphin and pickled banana and egg-plant slices and soused bread-fruit and pumpkin fritters and breaded flying-fish and coconut bread.

I was quite sorry when Ferdy, suddenly remembering why we were there, came bounding back with the driver to drag us off to this tropical garden.

But actually, that was great, too. It had humming-birds and monkeys and doctor birds in it, and birds like sparrows with yellow stomachs, and flowers like lobsters and snails and shrimps and candles with red wax curled round them.

Dr Thomassen stood quite still with his forehead bulging, making suggestions, while Ferdy skipped and twirled and leaped and climbed like Neurosis. Narcotics. Nureyev.

We had the most trouble with a powder-puff tree. Then Ferdy had to pack it in to get back for his Coral Reef meeting, but said O.K., if I insisted, he’d take me through Bridgetown.

Bridgetown is the capital of Barbados. Bridgetown is very like Troon, except filled with black people in the shades you get in a natural Icelandic sweater, and the policemen have pith helmets on. The Barbadian national colours, I was sorry to see, are blue and yellow.

Bridgetown is so busy anyway, that driving through during Carifesta you hardly noticed the visiting nationals from all the other Caribbean countries at first.

The ordinary Bajans didn’t seem to mind the Carifesta jamming the halls and the streets, but just stood about talking, and going in and out of bars and department stores.

I was interested, of course, but that wasn’t why I wanted to go through Bridgetown. I wanted to go through Bridgetown to see what was in Carlisle Bay since we left it.

Being in the grip of his post-photographer’s tension, Ferdy had given up being a guide in favour of asking me for the third time whether I’d seen him change the exposure for the hibiscus, which I had.

It was Dr Thomassen who noticed and pointed out our late floating hotel, the
Paramount Princess,
still at anchor and hardly swaying in spite of all the athletics going on in the cabins.

And there was the
Dolly,
also in from St Lucia, which made Ferdy stop knotting his whiskers and sit up, his mind switched from exposures to Maggie, the perfect photographer’s cure, to be taken as often as necessary.

I was glad for them both. I wasn’t sure whether or not I was glad for myself.

Because beside them, large and solid and powerful, and flying her blue and yellow beastly house-flag, was the
Coombe Caroline,
in for bananas and bunkers and mayday.

Mayhem, Johnson says.

We were both right.

Because the first person I saw, when Ferdy dropped me off at his own house, was Roger van Diemen.

Thank God, before I went in, I went round the back of the house and looked through the window, because I thought Natalie might be with her lawyer, or even horsing about still with Fred Moneybags. It wasn’t four yet, and she wasn’t expecting me.

Instead, the shutters to the back sitting-room were half open, and inside was Natalie, changed for her meeting into a pastel dress and jacket with a puritan collar, walking about twirling her rings, which was much the same as Rome burning down.

The person she was angry with I couldn’t quite see at first, then he shifted edgily into view.

Roger the Damned One. Wearing a well-pressed cotton safari suit, instead of the trousers I’d spilled drink all over at the airport, but with the same hot, light eyes and brick skin and hair crinkling up over his ears with the heat.

The scars of our little tussle in the Mercedes had gone, but otherwise he looked just as beastly.

He didn’t like what Natalie was saying, either. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t accept that.’

‘My dear man,’ said Natalie. They were both speaking quite softly, and it was a strain, actually, to hear, although I was inside the croton hedge right under the window.

‘My dear man, I’m not trying to make a living out of you. You can have your jewellery back. If you can’t bring yourself to remain friendly to me without climbing into my bed, then I’m sorry. But for your sake as well as mine, it really has got to stop.’

He said, ‘You didn’t say that before.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Natalie. ‘But that was on Madeira, where you were very silly indeed. You were lucky not to find yourself in prison on a murder charge. But for me, you would have been. I really don’t feel I owe you anything, Roger.’

She stood still and faced him. He had never moved, since he walked where I could see him.

He said, ‘You don’t, do you? If it hadn’t exposed you, you would have seen me go to prison quite happily. You might even have put me there. How long do you think you can get away with it, Natalie? How long before someone turns the tables and sells you out? One of these days, that girl with the orange hair will make a killing out of you.’

Natalie abruptly crossed her arms and, hugging her elbows, paced to the other side of the room and back. The lines I took such good care to fix for her had broken through all over her face. She said, ‘She doesn’t know anything. My God, look at her. I feel like St Lazarus.’

‘Do you think the Curtises are to be any more trusted?’ said Roger. ‘Or that photographer? Or this Gluttenmacher you’re so friendly with all of a sudden? What do you think I could do, if I wanted revenge? I’ve never told anyone. Anyone. I’m the only person who won’t let you down.’

He looked as if he really meant what he was saying. He was a nutter all right, but Natalie wasn’t afraid of him.

She laughed, and unfurling her hands, smoothly picked up one of his arms and pushed the tailored sleeve back.

I could see the needle tracks from the window.

She let his arm fall. She said, ‘Roger, I wouldn’t trust you to do my laundry.’

He had gone absolutely white under his tan. She was a bitch. If I didn’t know what a bastard he was, I would have felt a pang for him.

He said, ‘And if I talk? I could, you know.’

‘I’m sure you could,’ Natalie said. ‘Your word against mine. I’ll come and visit you in the home they put you into.’

They stared at one another, then her eyes went past him to the clock.

She said, ‘So shall we leave it at that? Rita will be back, and I have to get to my meeting. I’m sorry, Roger. It’s been a ridiculous conversation, but you forced it on me. We had a nice time, but it’s over. Go and take a cure somewhere, and make another start. In another job, away from the tropics.’