The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (47 page)

Lucy and Venus watched, wordless. They’d agreed to stay at the house until Irit and John arrived. Freddie came over. Everything happened slowly, quietly. The sun blossomed, spilling warm liquid nectar onto us. I began to perspire, dabbing my face with a tissue. Pascale was in a daze. She hugged and kissed Venus and Lucy but didn’t say much. George hugged them, too, unable to look either of them in the eye. He hugged Freddie briefly. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even look at Venus and Lucy.

 

I returned to check the house for the last time, wandering through the rooms, ensuring we hadn’t left anything behind. What wasn’t in our suitcases was stuffed into high cupboards. We were in the act of vanishing, taking our lives away. All the wrong feelings marched forward. Guilt over Pascale and George. A sense of loss. Yes, loss. I’d never see that mother hill again; observe the swell of her fertile hips, her wild hair. I spoke to her.

Goodbye, my friend.

Goodbye.

I’ll never see you again.

No.

Time for me to go. We should have departed long ago. Now it’s time.

Keep well.

I’ll think of you.

The keskidees squabbled. I was leaving them, too. George had built himself a dream out here, a false dream. The saplings he’d planted had grown luscious. Pink grapefruits so heavy they exploded on the branch, smashing heavily to the ground. Avocados had arrived in their hundreds, dark and bell-shaped, wanton and lascivious up there in the mottled boughs. They bombed the grass for weeks. We gave them away in bags, mashed them up and froze them. The lime trees spat yellow globes. The coconut palms were tall, lustrous, occasionally playing up, hurling a green nut at the dogs. The hibiscus hedge, a row of red trumpets heralding the sun. I wasn’t leaving, I was retreating. Beaten by it all.

 

The others sat in the taxi, waiting for me. Lucy and Venus stood beside the cars. I came out with my sunglasses on, a knife twisting in my gut, twisting. Tears fell freely, blinding me behind the huge lenses.

‘I’m so sorry . . .’ I hugged Lucy. ‘I’ll write, I promise.’ But my words were meaningless.

Lucy nodded, stepping away from me. She bowed, looking at the ground, holding herself in. Lucy, my saviour. I came forward again, wrapping my arms around her tightly. ‘Thank you, Lucy. For all your help,’ I whispered. I pressed my nose to her skin, inhaled her warm reassuring scent of coconut oil and Lux soap.

Venus stood straight and tall, quivering, dabbing her eyes with a hanky. I went to hug her but we dissolved, clasping each other. We held each other tight, shaking.

‘Venus, Venus,’ I choked.

‘Madam, don’t go.’

‘Listen to me. Listen. I want you to have something of mine.’

‘Yes, Miss.’

‘I want you to have my bicycle.’

‘Oh gorsh, Miss.’

‘I know you’ve always liked it. I want you to have it.’

She nodded, shivering, shaking into her hanky. ‘Yes, Miss.’

‘Think of me when you ride it.’

‘Yes.’

We separated, bleeding tears. I blew my nose. I kissed her cheek one last time ‒ her skin was hot and wet against mine. Blind, I got into the car. Freddie opened the gate and waved. George squeezed my hand. We drove through the gate and Freddie waved us off. I didn’t look back through the window.

We drove in convoy towards the dock, the guards trailing us. Pascale sat between us in the back seat. Trouble still festered. A few people had ventured out to look around. They stared at the ex-police car.

‘I need the toilet,’ Pascale announced.

‘You’ll have to hold on, it’s not too far,’ I told her.

‘I need to go!’

I looked at George. He grimaced.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before, darling?’

Pascale began to cry with nerves.

‘Oh God,’ George groaned. ‘Can’t she hold on?’

‘No!’ Pascale wailed.

We were passing the Country Club.

‘Can you turn into the Club for a moment?’ I asked the driver. He turned and the guards followed. I leapt out of the car, pulling Pascale up the steps, racing across the wide polished floors to the veranda.

‘Hello, hello,’ I called. But the place was closed, no one there. We ran across the fountain courtyard, coming upon the bar area, where I had met with Williams, then down the steps to the changing rooms. Toilet cubicles there. Pascale went inside one. She peed for what felt like minutes.

‘
Pascale, dépêches-toi
,’ I urged.

When she’d finished I dragged her back up the stairs, hurrying her across the courtyard, back across those wide polished floors where we had danced on Saturday nights. The mute black waiters. Mute black slaves had never danced across this floor, never attended the grand fêtes held by Poleska. A shiver. I stopped to look behind me.

‘Who’s there?’ I called out.

No one called back.

I ran, pulling Pascale along, Poleska de Boissière chasing me, one bony finger reaching out to poke me between the shoulders.
Get out, get out of my house
, she whispered.
You skinny white bitch, you traitor. Go, get on that boat, you weakling. Run away. Like the white cockroach that you are. Take your white Creole girl with you. Run away.

I jumped into the car, heart thudding. Pascale was frightened, too.

‘What took you so long?’ George was sweating.

‘I couldn’t exactly make her pee faster, could I?’

The taxi driver stepped on the gas. We swung round the immense statue of the Samaan tree.

I peered backwards.

The figure of the dowager Poleska stood there, dressed in mourning black. Eliza Williams stood next to her, a younger, darker version, equally severe. They waved me off.

 

We drove on, past the half-burnt-down army barracks in St James, past lines of police. The sun blazed onto the car roof. I began to feel it at last, gentle waves of relief breaking over me. I was leaving Trinidad. I imagined scones stuffed with clotted cream and damson jam. Harvey Nicks. The coolness of an English spring, the chaste pastels and pinks of apple and cherry blossom on the trees. Red buses and red post-boxes. Bobbies on the beat. Everything around us glimmered silver in the heat. Everything blurred. Port of Spain had disintegrated in the sun’s rays. I was in the very act of escape. We floated along Tragarete Road, then into Woodbrook, past bewildered black faces, past more police, then out, finally, onto Wrightson Road, the road which ran along the seafront.

‘Shit,’ said George.

A roadblock up ahead. Military vehicles across the road, barring our route.

‘What on earth can they be doing?’

George scrambled for our passports and papers. ‘They must want to know who’s heading for the ship.’

‘Oh God!’

‘Or it could be anything. They might be looking for someone.’

‘Oh Jesus, George. We’ll miss it!’

‘No, we won’t.’

I began to sweat. Pascale curled up tight in a ball.

‘We could take a short cut.’

George nodded. ‘Go
left,
’ he urged the driver.

The taxi swerved up, again, into Woodbrook, the squad car following. The driver tracked along parallel to Wrightson Road and then stopped dead. A traffic jam. George got out and ran up to see what had caused it. He came back panicked.

‘A car’s broken down, further up.’

The driver beeped his horn.

‘Go right!’ I shouted.

The taxi veered right and shot down the narrow street, joining the foreshore again.

‘Thank God.’

George looked behind us. ‘We’ve lost our guards.’

‘And half our luggage,’ I groaned.

‘It doesn’t matter. Not now.’ George was just as nervous as me. I believed, then, I was minutes from freedom. I imagined separating him from the island. George on deck, with his arms around me, just like when we arrived. We were leaving those bushy rocks, those carrion birds on high.

The squad car appeared behind us.

We rattled along.

George looked at his watch and cursed.

I wasn’t scared. A warm breeze fluttered off the salt sea, the sea heavy with thick scents of mudflats and swampland. River silt. My breath tangled in my chest. The dock appeared, the cranes, the custom houses, the usual chaos somehow arrested in mid-flow. Police vehicles and dusty army vehicles were parked up on either side of the road. Armed police stood guard. I looked out, into the Gulf of Paria.

‘The
ship
!’ I screamed, but no sound emerged.

George gazed out to sea.

We craned our necks.

Out there, in the calm black sea, some way off, exiting via the First Boca, the
Southern Cross
was under sail.

‘It’s
gone
! It went, George! It left without us.’

The ship’s decks glistened, its funnel trailed smoke. We watched as its beak disappeared, then its body, too, as the swan slipped past the green tree-crowded walls of Monus Island and the tip of Trinidad. The ship left behind a heaving wake which slapped itself and flattened out, rippling across the harbour, lapping to the dock, and then breaching the sea walls, lapping up as far as our car, wetting us, dousing us down.

 

Lucy drugged me up good. George hid my Valium. We missed the boat. It departed ten minutes before we arrived at the dock. I saw it slipping past those bushy rocks again and again. I saw myself on my green bicycle, riding after it. I fell into a profound sleep: unconscious for days. I didn’t want to be awake. I refused to eat. In my dreams I smashed myself to pieces and threw the pieces into the waves. The sky went dark, dark with a million birds. Far out to sea, the winds picked up. Everything would be different. Everything in Trinidad would be different now; the winds would see to that. I saw a hurricane in the harbour. Boats thrown onto the dock. A pall of smoke, the shape of Trinidad. Men in tin hats. The government at the Hilton Hotel up on the hill above the slum; the government up on high, keeping watch. Eric Williams in his flashy American car, nodding at me, gliding past. Eric Williams collapsed and sitting on a white metal chair
. Repudiate colonialism
. I saw myself holding a gun, arm outstretched. I saw myself shooting a man dead. Holding a gun and shooting bullets into a man’s chest. I saw another man being beaten half to death up in those mother-hills. A butterfly of bruises on his young face. My letters, my letters all burnt and floating, drifting on the sea. George dancing backwards, his shins covered in flakes of ash. George in a pot, a small urn. George and my letters, all turned to ash, floating away, across a sea as clear as gin.

 

One day, I decided to wake up. I took a pen and paper and began to write:
Dear Mr Williams
. I found I had so much to say. I wrote for an hour at least. I kept writing to Eric Williams until he died, eleven years later. Hundreds of thousand of citizens filed past his casket in the Red House to pay their respects. Granny Seraphina, long dead herself by then, couldn’t be among them. The letters helped me to understand what was happening in Trinidad. George never found out about them. And he never went back to work. He developed the land that he had bought and that was occupation enough. Discreetly, he unpacked the bags. We bought new dogs. I was back in my old life and yet something had eternally shifted between me and George.

 

Not long after we missed the boat, Venus was in the kitchen making dumplings for corn soup. Pascale was helping her. Both chattered away. They looked up when I entered, their hands covered in flour.

‘Mummyuh!’ Pascale squealed.

Venus smiled.

‘What day is it?’ I asked and hugged my daughter.

‘Tuesday. You been sleepin’ for some time, a week or so,’ Venus informed me.

I wandered into the garden with Pascale.

‘We stayin’ here, Mummy?’ Pascale asked. ‘We stayin’ wid Venus?’

I nodded.

The shapely green hill looked down on me, silent. I scowled and felt sorry for my sins, whatever they were.

Hello again, she said.

Go away.

I’m glad you stayed.

You knew. You’ve got him back.

Is it so bad being here?

I’m not sure any more.

You’re part of things now.

Maybe I am.

You might get used to the way things are in Trinidad.

I’ll keep trying to understand.

You might even get used to the heat.

No. Not that. Never.

Many people helped to make this book. I’d like to thank Adrian Camps-Campins for unlimited access to his personal library and photographic archives; also Dr Hamid Ghany, for arranging access to the West Indiana Collection at University of the West Indies in St Augustine, Trinidad, and for his enlightening conversations about politics in Trinidad. Thanks also to Dr Selwyn Ryan for keeping our eleven o’clock appointment at UWI. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr Jo Baker and Dr Lindsey Moore at Lancaster University for their meticulous guidance while writing this novel. I would like to thank my friend Katie Sampson and also Gilly Stern for their critical editorial feedback; also my editor, Francesca Main at Simon & Schuster UK, for her forensic editorial skills. Thanks to Steve Cook and the Royal Literary Fund for its generous financial support, likewise the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Linda Anderson, once again, provided instrumental support early on. The Black Sheep Housing Co-op, though now defunct, must be thanked for sheltering me, this time in the aftermath of a hurricane. I’d like to thank Sarah McCloughry for her advice and wise counsel at a most critical juncture; also Stephanie Anderson for cutting me free. Thanks also to my lovely agent Isobel Dixon at Blake Friedmann, always full of ideas and inspiration. Thank you, John and Antoinette Moat and the late John Fairfax, for giving me the Arvon Foundation, a place I have returned to again and again over the last ten years. Lastly, I would like to thank my mother and muse, Yvette Roffey, for a place to write and call home.