Black Marina (12 page)

‘We’ll go up to the village first,’ Maldwin Carr said to Mari, ‘and then on to visit Mr Allard before dinner at the hotel. We’ll borrow the car.’

‘You can give me a lift,’ Holly Baker said.

Maldwin Carr said he’d be delighted. Holly said she didn’t live in affluent circumstances. Her place was laughingly called The Heights and was down the other side of the hill beyond the village. Where they didn’t manage to clear all the mosquitoes. Wrong side of the tracks. But she’d pick up her things from the store and be waiting for them in the road. It was time she told them a few things, she said, as it looks like they are getting their facts just a tiny bit wrong.

*

Out of here, out of the store, for a few days at least. Even at St James they don’t expect you to stand behind the counter Christmas and Boxing Day. And out of the store – what for? The grey room with the cockroaches down at The Heights. The patchwork counterpane where I lie with my hand up inside my legs and it’s hot and dry there, like July, waiting
for the hurricanes and the rain and you think they’ll never come – and when they do, the hot mud and the sad skies and Millie walking from the village to the hotel with her head down and rain running in her breasts like it was a drainpipe there. What for? But I’ll go back one more time. With the posh gentleman who needs a good kick up the arse, and that silly girl who wants her hair pulling out by the screws. Then I’ll be off. Late tonight, when they’re all drunk in the Bar and the guests at Carib’s Rest have gone back to their
gingerbread
cottages. And while they stand undressing by the window in the moon and look out at the merriment still going on in the long cottonhouse room. And when there’s that sickening smell in the air of the old slave plantations. Then – then I’ll take one of the fishermen’s boats and I’ll go. I might get as far as Carriacou. They’ll pick me up. My photo’ll be in all the papers, and not before time.

*

Late October, when Ford came, I still believed I meant something here. When he’d left the store, and I walked down to the lagoon in that incredible heat, I thought I could make Sanjay understand. ‘This place is over for you – and for me,’ I said. ‘All we have to do is go.’

But he just stood staring at me by the side of the lagoon. He’d found one of those pieces of driftwood that look as if some animal’s turned to wood and lived underwater, to come washing up hundreds of years later through a hole in the reef. He held it up at me. ‘Squirrel, Holly?’ he said. ‘Or racoon?’

I wasn’t having any, though. ‘Ford’s here,’ I said. ‘He’s come to get his friends over from Grenada. They’ll blow up the place. Just thought you might like to know.’

Sanjay looked at me as if I was something even odder that had washed in to the stewpot of the lagoon. ‘Ford?’ he said. ‘After all these years?’ He looked pleased and excited. ‘I’d
really love to see Ford,’ he said, but he sounded wistful, as if he knew already that there wasn’t a chance. ‘How is he looking?’ Sanjay said. ‘I’d like to tell him I admire his poetry.’

‘Forget his poetry,’ I said. ‘Ford has been through the poetry stage. And he’s not writing soul cookbooks like the Black Panthers these days either. He’s in with revolution. And you’re the target.’

Sanjay’s innocence was pitiful to see. Boy, won’t he get what’s coming to him. I’ll be the survivor, pick up me cutlass an go. Or the gun. Didn’t Jim Davy say he’d bring me back a Colt .22 from the States? And where’s Jim Davy now, just when he’s needed, I’d like to know?

‘Me?’ said Sanjay.

‘Yes, you,’ I said. ‘Ford wants to take over the whole island with his friends.’

‘His friends?’ said Sanjay in a pained tone, as if a party by a naughty child was threatening to get out of control.

‘He’s brought arms,’ I said. ‘Whoever’s not in gaol of the Marxist-Leninist group in Grenada, they’re the ones he’ll supply with arms when they land tonight. Julian Byrne put him up to it.’

Sanjay threw back his head and laughed aloud. ‘Julian Byrne? But that’s ridiculous. The man of letters?’

‘Now the man of left-wing takeovers,’ I said. ‘Look, Sanjay, your lease runs out in the New Year. Why don’t you just walk away from all this, I mean, start again … somewhere?’

Sanjay put his hands up in the air as if he was practising for being put up against the wall and shot. The piece of grey driftwood dropped tail-first into the sea.

‘I can’t, Holly!’ he said.

‘You can’t,’ I said after him. We stood there by the side of the lagoon. There was a bit of shade, not much, from the manchineel trees. Quite a lot of them had been cut down already to make an approach to the new runway.

‘I can’t leave Pandora,’ Sanjay said.

I don’t know, but my patience just ran out. For God’s sake, he could take her too. But I didn’t even bother to say it. I knew it wasn’t just Pandora. It was the whole part of his life that she stood for: his life on the island when she was a little child, which was all she could know, as her mind had been cloudy so long. And so that time was always present for Sanjay in her. He couldn’t leave. He was as much chained to the place as an indentured labourer.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll go. But keep safe in your bed tonight.’

And I did go, as far as the plantation of palms and past the pile of feathers that looked as if they’d been disarranged since I’d come down to the lagoon, and on to the emerald lawn, which in the sun had already stopped exhaling vapour. That was as far as I went – although I did get back to The Heights in the end and waited till the next day to hear the complaints about the sudden closing of the store. I mean, I didn’t have it in me to step into a boat – not then.

*

Lore had a postscript on her last letter.

I feel really sorry for Mari now [she scrawled]. Listen, Holly, you better do something about this. I’ve seen the girl grow more and more pale and agitated over the past few days – and so I decided to follow her – yesterday, that is. It’s bitterly cold, right? Teza’s just sent a Christmas card – it isn’t a real one like Mari would secretly have wanted, with
reindeer
and snow and all that. No, it’s a card from Cuba with Fidel’s picture and a long speech in Spanish on the back – and the card coming means Teza won’t be home for Christmas because she says so in so many words. ‘Oh never mind,’ I say, ‘why don’t we have a nice little party here together in the basement? You invite some of your friends. Then we’ll go to Covent Garden and see the break-dancing.’ I can tell you, it was the last thing I wanted to do. Mari’s friends she was at
Holland Park with, are quite nice kids and all that, but it makes me feel pretty old and dreary when I haven’t seen a man in God knows how long. It must be something to do with being a surrogate mother, I suppose. It puts them off.

Anyway, Mari said she didn’t want a party. ‘Come on, girl,’ I said. ‘Cheer up. Teza wouldn’t have organized
anything
better for you anyway.’

As soon as I said that, of course, I could have bitten my tongue out. Tears started to roll. Then, when she’d quietened down a bit, Mari said: ‘Neither of my parents loves me. And that’s good.’

‘What the hell d’you mean?’ I said.

‘The family,’ Mari said. ‘It’s the nucleus of evil.’

‘Oh come on,’ I said. ‘And where do you get all that from?’ But of course I know by now that this stuff has been current jargon practically since Mari was born. R. D. Laing elaborates on that well-known Larkin line, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, and next thing you’ve got a lot of loonies wandering about free on the streets. ‘Who’ve you been seeing?’ I said. Mari just ‘brickwalled’, as I’ve heard
desperate
parents of teenagers describe the process, as they queue for veg in the market.

Mari stayed quiet all of that day (the day before yesterday) and next morning she thought she’d slipped out of the house without being seen because I heard the front door shut ever so quietly. It took me a minute or two to get dressed. Then I went after her.

Blow me if it hadn’t snowed in the night. I’ve no good boots and no money to afford a proper pair. (You must’ve saved a pile by now, Holly. Life’d be much cheaper if you came over and we shared a flat.) At least the snow helped me to follow Mari – that’s the funny part – it was like a fairy story. She’s got pretty big feet and she’d left a trail down the street. No one else was up yet. I caught her up on the corner of Portobello Road, buying hot chestnuts off a man with a
pile of embers. ‘Go away, Lore,’ she said. ‘Mind your own business. Please!’

‘No, I won’t,’ I said. ‘You’re up to no good and I know it.’ It’s funny how you turn into your own grandmother, once you have dealings with a young girl like her. ‘I’m coming with you,’ I said, ‘or I’m sending a cable to Teza to say I can’t cope with the scene here and she’s got to come home.’

Mari hesitated: I knew that would count all right.

In the middle of a conference, I said weightily. ‘Just think of it, Mari.’

It worked, of course. Mari strode off in her babyish
snow-boots
and I followed. The crescents round Ladbroke Grove were all sparkling with fresh snow, and in the communal gardens behind Julian Byrne’s flat there were children in red scarves and leg warmers making a great nest of snow and falling about in it. We turned into the hallway and Mari walked up without looking back, as if she’d decided I simply wasn’t there. And, sure enough, when she rang the doorbell and Julian Byrne came out in a silk-patterned dressing gown like that man in
Private
Lives
,
he seemed to consider I was invisible too. I haven’t often had the door slammed in my face (except the time I went to the all-gay party by mistake and they said hang on a minute when they thought I was a drag queen and then when they saw I wasn’t they shoved me out and banged the door shut) and when Julian Byrne
slammed
on me I was so shocked I couldn’t believe it for a good few seconds, I can tell you. I mean, Holly, you and me and Byrne used to exchange jokes, ‘bad-to-worsinage’, d’you remember, at the Green Velveteen? And then he’s been hanging about our street and I’ve seen him whisk round the corner into the market several times in the past few weeks – and I know he’s seen me too. What the hell is he up to? I thought often enough. You know, it crossed my mind that Byrne planted that photo of Ford and the ring and all that in Teza’s drawer for Mari to find. He’s using her, no doubt
about that. But I can’t say anything to Mari, she’d blow up in my face. And I’ve no proof. But Byrne is a fox – and he’s planning to eat her. And the worst part of it is that poor Mari is the silly duck – or goose, if you like – and doesn’t know it.

I took up my position by the door. It was freezing cold on the stone landing, and I almost thought I’d go home and to hell with it when I had my first stroke of luck. A cleaning woman, a friendly type, came up the stairs. ‘Poor dear, are you locked out?’ she says, and before I knew where I was I had gained admittance to the great man’s abode! And while the cleaner went into the kitchen and started crashing round with the remains of our revolutionary Mr Byrne’s Dover sole dinner (I saw the remains in the waste bucket by the larder), I was able to stand right up against the door of the sitting room and hear everything, or nearly, that was going on!

There were two men in there as well as Julian Byrne and Mari. One sounded young and – probably – Australian. He kept saying, ‘That’s great, Mari, really great.’ But I couldn’t make out what ‘that’ was. Another man had a more muted, precise voice. He sounded a bit, well, frightening to me. The first thing he said was, ‘We’re not able to give any guarantees, as I’m sure you must realize. It’s what Ford would have wanted.’ And Mari said, ‘Yes, yes,’ as if she was giving responses at the marriage altar or something. Then Julian Byrne spoke up. You can’t miss
his
voice anyway! It’s like an actor sending up a camp voice and then getting tired of it halfway through and going straight. Anyway, you
remember
, Holly. Somehow everything he says sounds funny. I had to stifle a giggle all right.

‘Mari, you mustn’t get even
faintly
over-excited,’ Julian said, ‘but there’s a very strong possibility that your father may still be alive.’

You could hear poor Mari gasp. At that very moment the cleaner dropped a water jug in the kitchen and the King Charles spaniel went off into a volley of barks, so I missed
what came next – but Julian Byrne was ending with
something
like, ‘That woman who came here with you, Mari, that dreadful woman – she didn’t get in here, did she?’ And his voice was much sharper than usual.

‘No no, she’ll have gone home,’ Mari said. And she must have reached out and stopped Julian from going and flinging open the door and exposing me there because she said in an urgent tone, ‘Please, Julian, please, for God’s sake, tell me if Ford is alive in St James.’

‘He’s not in St James right now,’ said the Australian voice. ‘He wants to go back there, though.’

‘You can let him in,’ said the muted voice. It was a voice used to giving quiet instructions, and I had to lean right down to the keyhole to hear. Needless to say, the keyhole had a bloody great key in it, and I couldn’t hear better at all.

‘Let him in?’ poor Mari was saying as I straightened up again. ‘But how?’

Byrne was a little less patient this time. He said to Mari that she must have been surprised and pleased, to say the very
least
,
when a charming gentleman turns up just at the time he’s needed and offers to take her to the island of her origins. ‘It was no accident,’ Julian said. ‘I put him on to you, Mari, my dear. He considers you to be very useful to him in his search for your father. He believes you will lead him straight to the spot marked X, if you know what I mean.’

‘But why should this Mr Carr man want to find Ford?’ says Mari.

And the Australian pipes up now with, ‘Where have
you
been all your life?’

And Julian Byrne says, ‘Rex, please, restrain yourself,’ or something of the sort.

‘Mr Carr is employed by a certain Sunday newspaper. The proprietor has interests in that part of the world,’ Byrne went on, enjoying himself again. ‘They’ve heard trouble may be brewing in a few … er … neighbouring islands, and they
want to stop it before it gets under way. They want to find Ford …’