Black Marina (18 page)

But it was no good. The girl was pulling at me so hard I was reminded of poor crazy Pandora. We’re to go back into the jungle and see where she dropped the torch, then? I said to myself because I was too furious to speak. That’s a good way to spend Christmas Eve, Holly. Congratulations. And I saw Sanjay lying on top of her again and I could swear I heard the echo of her groans when she pulled me back into the trees,. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ I said and I stumbled after her. We’ll have to go back to the house to get a light without being seen, I thought, but the very idea of seeing Sanjay covered in that swamp mud from his lie with the girl under the roots of the tree, made me cold all over.

I should have seen there’d be no sending off of signals then. I followed Mari, and I saw her go down the newly hacked pathway to the creek, and I saw her kneel. It was a horrible thing, it could have been Pandora there. Her words … it was like two halves of a splintered mind coming together and the pieces fit and make a picture … and the picture is different for each of them and yet it’s the same. That mark … that white mark on Marina’s neck, showing up
there under that horrible great white moon … that red blotch on Pandora make her look like she cry all the time … the sudden rain that come down through the manchineel trees and bring poison-burn the day of the picnic at the lagoon.

Fear – and father – that was the part of the puzzle where the poor mad girl and Marina were joined. Fragments of fear, of envy and rage, of a mast sticking up in the creek’s muddy water, and the sails of the new ship that Sanjay their father had made.

ISLAND LANDOWNER SHOT DEAD IN US TROOPS’ INVASION OF
ST JAMES, GRENADINES

Sunday
Times
,
27 December 1983

James Allard, part-owner of the island of St James,
Grenadines
, is one of eight men reported to have been shot dead when US Marines made a surprise landing on the island. The landing took place at 1.30 a.m. on Christmas morning, sources in Barbados confirmed last night.

Information, understood to be reliable, of an expected invasion by members of Grenada’s Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement suppressed by US forces in October, proved to be without foundation. Inhabitants of St James claim, however, that a small fleet of unlit fishing craft was sighted off the southern tip of the island and that the fleet turned back for lack of an expected signal. In the event, the arrival later of US Marines caused an exodus from the village to the lagoon in the extreme south. It is not known whether the villagers took the American troops for Grenadians when they saw the boats approach or whether the singing, dancing St Jamesians were simply celebrating the holiday in the
traditional
manner.

In the ensuing confusion, the Marines shot and mortally wounded eight men before the fact that their supposed opponents were unarmed could be brought home to them.

James Allard, forty-eight, had lived on St James for
seventeen
years. His lease on the southern half of the island was due to expire in the New Year.