Genie and Paul (16 page)

It took a day and a night for Paul to reach Rodrigues. He took a seat on deck near two men – a heavily freckled Chinese man and his gaunt Creole friend – who were passing a bottle of rum between them. He heard them talking about the Muslim girl who had poisoned herself, the one who’d been mentioned on the news at Gaetan’s. Paul learnt that she had died after a long and painful struggle. Noticing that he was listening, the men passed the bottle to Paul. There were a lot of suicides in Mauritius, they said. Nearly every week there was a story of a poisoning, a hanging, a leap into the void or sometimes a drowning, possibly not accidental. The reasons given never seemed reason enough, they said: debt, divorce, unemployment, bereavement. What reason do you need? Paul asked. In order to consider taking that step it was enough just to be ambivalent about life. The Creole man told him with no bitterness that without money, without education, without talent, without somehow managing to stow away – on someone else’s passport, say – if you were poor and likely to stay that way, suicide really was the only way of getting off this island, if you weren’t prepared to wait around for death.

The two men were Mauritians. At first they described themselves as businessmen. They had been detained in Mauritius because of the cyclone, they said, but were now happy to be able to return to their business in Rodrigues. Paul thought better of asking for further details. But once they were drunk they confided in him the nature of their
enterprise. Prospecting, they said. There was treasure on that island. Pirate treasure. It had never been found. It was the cyclone that had drawn them. The devastation wreaked might well have unearthed what had lain buried. They were like those people who combed the rocks after shipwrecks, Paul thought.

They brought out a pack of cards and invited him to play. He shared the rest of their rum and lost most of his spare change to them. Eventually the two men fell asleep, but Paul was too disturbed by the clanking of serious machinery, the bloody tang of rust, and so opened the book he had taken from Mam’s. He had started reading it at Gaetan’s. The damp there had swollen and buckled its pages and there were translucent spots where drops of his sweat had fallen. Paul liked the idea of the book breathing in the air around it. He was not really reading it – he had trouble with the antique French and the pious tone. He was looking at the engravings instead, remembering how Genie used to make up stories around them. But some of the pages were missing. The book was falling apart.

They docked at Port Mathurin late the next morning. Paul did not walk around the centre but instead headed straight to the terminus, where he took the first bus that came. His intention was to ride to the end of the line. The bus was heading towards the southwest of the island, which Paul was hoping would be wilder and less inhabited.

Rodrigues was like rural Greece but with a slightly fantastic feel, he thought, as they drove towards the centre of the island, through a landscape more dramatically moutainous than Mauritius. Like Greece but in the time of Legends, when the world was new – it was in the mineral glitter of the light, the grass so lush it looked wet and everywhere,
cabri
– small mountain goats – feeding on terraces fenced in by black rock. But, where the cyclone had passed, the earth
had turned to mud and flowers broken off from bushes were strewn about like litter. Men were working hard to rebuild the place; Paul saw the sweat glittering on their skin, their muscles rippling like wind on water and all of them shouting out to one another, the inevitable chaos that came whenever desperate people tried to restore order. If you kept rebuilding parts of the island laid to waste after each cyclone, he thought, eventually the original Rodrigues would disappear altogether.

His thoughts wheeled along steadily at the same pace as the bus, but then it swerved suddenly and the brakes screeched and Paul was jolted – a dog had run out into the road. It looked back at him, affronted, and continued to jog along, its colouring that of an overripe banana, its tail the shape of one too. The fruit on the trees and the dogs in the street – that was what he’d loved best about Mauritius, Paul thought. Rodrigues was just like Mauritius used to be, the men on the boat had told him sadly. Before Mauritius got corrupted. And what about them? Paul thought. Were those men corrupt? Were they going to corrupt Rodrigues?

Somewhere outside the village of La Ferme the bus got a flat. Paul broke off from the other passengers, who were strangely uncomplaining, and walked towards the village, where he stopped at the nearest house, a square cement block painted pink. A middle-aged woman in a housecoat answered the door, which opened directly onto the front room. Behind her, two young boys in Liverpool strips lay on the sofa, watching cartoons in the way children did, deep in concentration, unsmiling.

Do you know of any rooms to rent around here? Just for a few nights?

Are you a tourist?

I suppose so, Paul replied. I’m just travelling around.

The woman shrugged. You could stay here.

Marie was a prostitute, Paul soon realised. Her customers dropped in at all times of the day and disappeared into a back room with her. They would stop off on their way out to pat the boys on the head or fix something which Marie pointed out – a leaky tap, a wobbling chair. At no point did she proposition Paul. He was half offended, half relieved. She later told him that the two boys, who never seemed to wear anything but their Liverpool strips, were her grandsons. Their mother was in Mauritius, working in a hotel. He’d been given her room.

He did not feel comfortable here, in some strange woman’s room. Her dressing table was crowded with personal things. He thought of Mam’s at 40 St George’s Avenue. He thought of the woman at Sainte Croix, and her little shrine of cosmetics and plastic religious statuary. The window was so high here that his room seemed almost windowless, like a cell, and it was lit by fluorescent strip-lighting which buzzed like a bluebottle even after it had been switched off. Whenever he turned the light on, the little lizards which constantly scaled the walls froze – as though immobility somehow rendered them invisible – then scattered in a second. Everywhere you stepped there were insects, but you only caught a glimpse from the corner of your eye before they slithered or scuttled away. Their constant presence put Paul on edge – he did not like the unexpectedness of insects – but the lizards he liked. Their eyes shone with a beady, benign intelligence. And they ate mosquitoes.

One evening, as Paul lay in his room trying to read, he heard the boys come in late from playing outside. He heard Marie slapping their backsides, demanding to know where they’d been. Tearfully, they told her about an abandoned shack they had found, whereupon more bottom-slapping was heard, Marie punctuating each slap with strict orders not to explore
such places – had they not stopped to consider why it had been abandoned? There could be scorpions in there, she said, or ghosts. The boys howled with retrospective terror.

The next afternoon, when Marie was busy with a client, Paul found the two boys in the yard. He asked for directions to the shack. They had lied to their grandmother about how far into the wilderness they had strayed. The shack lay somewhere between Pointe Pistache and Baie du Nord. Paul headed north and then west of La Ferme, for the coast, as directed, then walked southwest along the beach, heading down the coast. He came to a stretch of shoreline where the grass bordering it was silvered with salt, and fell upon a shallow river that didn’t quite meet the sea. Perhaps it had run out of energy, although when the rains were up perhaps it swelled and flowed out into the sea and perhaps there was a point then at which the fresh water and the sea water mingled. Paul had heard that sharks liked to gather where rivers fed into the sea, because fish were plentiful there.

He walked until eventually he spotted a spit of land, where perched at its tip he could see a small bamboo shack, overlooking rocks and the open sea, exactly as the boys had described. It had a straw portal and a zinc roof. A piece of zinc pulled across the entrance served as a door. Paul peered around it. There was no one inside. He looked back at the beach. It was deserted. He pulled aside the zinc and went in. He found only a pile of old blankets. What would it be like to live there? he wondered. How lonely would it feel? The surrounding grass was littered with smashed-up bits of shell – the land must recently have been underwater, probably during the cyclone. The shack must have been built after that. He wondered who had built it and if they still lived there. Years ago in Mauritius, on a trip down to Le Morne to see Gaetan, he and the gang had passed an abandoned cabin. Paul had wanted to go inside but Jean-Marie would not let
him: just setting foot in the place would send you mad, he’d said, there were so many bad spirits inside. When Paul had asked for the story Gaetan couldn’t tell him anything. Only that runaway slaves had sheltered there; that something terrible had happened.

Every morning for the next few days, Paul walked to the shack to check that it was still abandoned. When, after a week, he found that the place was still empty, he decided to move in. On his way back to Marie’s to collect his things, he wondered if there was a myth about that place, as there had been with the shack in Le Morne. He decided he didn’t care. He was not superstitious.

But, that night, he dreamt about the shack.

A man lived in a shack by the sea. This man had been a slave, but had been freed. Feeling himself disgusted by the human race – by the capacity for man to enslave man, for the enslaved man to turn on his equally unfortunate brother – the former slave decided that true freedom lay in a world where he could live alone. So he did not follow his newly freed brothers and sisters who formed communities, nor did he follow those who had ambitions to travel beyond the island of their enslavement, freedom for them being the opportunity to see new worlds. Instead, when the day of his liberation came, he walked for two days in the opposite direction from everyone else, away from all signs of human habitation, to the other side of the island. The wilder side. No one wanted to live here, where the sea was too rough to bathe or swim in. But the insolent power of the sea here pleased the man, since the boom of the waves on the shore sounded like cannons, warning off others. The brutality of life on the wild side did not scare him. As a former slave, he was inured to hardship. So he camped in a forest by the sea, and there, over many days and nights, the man set about clearing a plot of land where eventually, over the course of many more days and nights, he built a shack. Having made a home for himself, he tilled the land around it. He kept no animals: he could not bring himself to fence in any living thing. He spent his days tending to the garden, or fishing in the river. He would take walks in the forest and examine any new plants he found for signs of possible use, or of
beauty. His nights were spent by the fire, singing songs he half remembered, or staring into the flames where strange visions appeared to those who dared look long enough. The man lived in peace like this for many months. But one day, when he awoke, the man felt uneasy for the first time since he had been set free. The shack was filled with a strange sort of light and an unnatural silence. At first, he thought an angel had come to him. He had heard that angels emitted a terrible light and that their presence stilled the very air and, with it, all sound. But no angel appeared. Setting off into the forest to investigate further, he noticed that the wind had assumed a higher pitch, like the whine of an injured animal. This was all that could be heard. The man felt that creatures who normally inhabited the forest with their myriad sounds were all watching him silently from their hiding places. And when he reached the beach he saw that a malevolent yellow light had descended on the world like a fever and that the waves were as tall as trees. On seeing this, the man understood and was filled with a sense of great joy and exhilaration. He had lived through many cyclones during his time on the island, but he had never before witnessed one. The master had always hidden his slaves in the basement of the big house whenever a cyclone was predicted, for fear of losing them. So to witness a cyclone – indeed, to have his house – his home, his labour of many months – destroyed by one, and perhaps even to
die
in a cyclone – why, now he was truly free!

A plane in the sky: a trail of white for a wake – the world had turned upside down and for a second the sky became sea, and the plane, a faraway boat.

London, Mam said.

What’s London? Paul asked.

Where that plane is probably going.

This was Paul’s first ever memory. He was three years old. He and Mam were with her new husband Serge. He had taken them to the beach. It was Serge who had pointed out the aeroplane.

Paul did not like the beach, which was never as nice as it looked from a distance. The sand was soft, but littered with pieces of bleached coral, hard as bone, some shaped liked the skulls of small mammals. And half buried in the sand were sharp bits of shell, smashed up by the sea, and the spiny needles and tiny cone-like seeds shed by the filao trees which bordered the beach. They hurt his feet. Paul preferred the garden at Serge’s house, where they now lived. He liked to rub his hands on the squat palms, whose trunks felt as though they had been knitted from some thick yarn. He liked the citrus colours of the hibiscus flowers, the steaming early morning grass. But what Paul liked best about the garden was the fruit on the trees. Lemons or mangoes or lychees. It was like something out of a cartoon, something magical. And then it turned into a kind of mania for him, so that every time he passed a tree or a bush he would peer into its foliage, try to look beyond the shadows
and the leaves to see what fruits were hanging there. He was always convinced there
would
be fruit, though he was too small to reach, so he would ask Jean-Marie to help. Jean-Marie was Serge’s son. His sort-of brother. But
Jean-Marie
was older than Paul. Almost a man. Jean-Marie would part the leaves for him and pick whatever he found. Jean-Marie would cut them open just in case – thrillingly – there were
bebete
, or insects inside, holding out a slice on the blade of his pocket-knife. Sometimes the fruit was surprisingly sweet or creamy-tasting, sometimes musty and complicated. Sometimes, there was no fruit at all.

Jean-Marie, like Serge, was dark, blue-black dark like a prune. His hair stood out from his head in wild curls. The whole of him was a gravitational force. He made the world spin for Paul, the way he picked him up and swung him around, hoisting Paul onto his shoulders or tipping him upside down until he was screaming and red-faced, with excitement or fear he didn’t know, until Jean-Marie set him upright, the world still turning and churning with the pull of water being sucked down a plughole.

Paul spent a lot of time in the garden, playing alone. And then, one day, he was called into the house. Mam was cradling a baby. Its tiny fingers waggled randomly like the antennae of an insect.

Bebete
, Paul said.

Serge laughed. No. Virginie. Like the girl in the story.
Paul et Virginie
.

Genie, said Paul.

Life changed when Genie was born. Now that she was in the world, Paul felt strangely more alone in it. Before, he had had no sense of himself as being separate from the universe. Playing in the garden, he had felt no difference between himself and, say, one of the trees. But with Genie’s existence Paul had acquired a small, persistent shadow. It was your
shadow that gave you a sense of the limits of your body. It was Genie that made him Paul.

Other things changed when Genie came. Mam was unhappier. Angrier. The first time Paul noticed this was the day he found a snake in the garden. He ran screaming into the house. But when Serge came out to see for himself, he whisked Paul up and swung him around and laughed because it was not a snake, it was a
kulev
, which meant good luck. He was going to the races that day. So he took Paul with him, heaving him up onto his shoulders so he could see the horses better. Paul screamed and screamed for their horses to win but none of them did. After the races were over, everyone drifted away and Paul helped Serge to pick through all the discarded betting slips which littered the ground, looking for winners that might have been dropped by mistake. Paul was doing important work here and he confided this to Serge. Genie would have been no help to them and Serge agreed.

Yes, he said. This is men’s work. This is no place for a little girl.

When they came home, Mam seemed to know as soon as they walked in that Serge hadn’t won. She said in a sharp voice that the
kulev
was not lucky after all and Serge tried to laugh and said, Why, maybe it was. Maybe he would have lost more if Paul hadn’t seen the
kulev
. But Mam didn’t laugh. She said, Gambling is the opposite of work, and Serge swore and threw some coins at her. Paul rushed to pick them up, anxiously, not wanting things to be all over the place like that, worried that Genie – asleep in her basket in the corner – might wake up.

But sometimes, Serge won. Then he would buy things. One time he bought chickens, and a cockerel, Milord, which would wake them with his crowing. Milord was fiercely
territorial. Whenever Paul was out in the garden and passed Milord’s patch of yard the cockerel would run for them (Genie, now walking, followed Paul everywhere), his sharp beak pecking at the air, hoping to strike. Once he caught Paul. Serge dismissed the injury, saying that Paul should leave the poor bird alone. Paul got angry then, and later that night he had a nightmare about Milord. As he thrashed and screamed, Mam came rushing to the bed and shook him out of it. He and Genie now slept in a bed together in a curtained-off area of the front room, and the next day when Genie woke up her face was covered in bruises. Paul was shocked and ashamed that he had hurt his sister. It’s all Milord’s fault, he muttered, but Serge did not agree and punished Paul.

Jean-Marie did not intervene, but later that day, when they went out into the yard, Milord was gone. For dinner that night they ate
kari kok
. Paul refused to eat it. That meant Genie refused to eat her food too. So Serge sent Genie down from the table. Then he tipped her food onto Paul’s plate, telling him he would stay there until it was cleared. Mam got angry then and had a row with Serge which only ended when Paul bent his head to his plate, gagging slightly as he ate, the tears rolling fast, plopping from his chin into his food.

Jean-Marie was not there that evening. He was like a dog that could feel a cyclone coming. He had a talent for disappearing at times like these. You only knew he was gone when you heard the sound of his motorcycle starting up, then it faded away, and that always sounded sad to Paul, like someone saying goodbye. Sometimes Paul would run down the road after him.

Whenever Mam and Serge fought, Paul would run out into the garden. There was a hole in the garden wall. He put his eye to it. He saw the street dogs and the street children; he
saw goats being herded past. He saw Jean-Marie’s friend, Maja. Maja came towards the wall, unzipping his pants, and poked his
gogot
through it.

Touch it! he ordered.

Paul put his finger out and touched him. Then Maja laughed and ran away.

And once Paul saw a funeral procession, the mourners in black, wailing, eyes rolled into their heads.

When Paul was older, he would stay out in the street long after his schoolfriends had gone home. Or he would go down to the garage where Jean-Marie worked, and if Bossman wasn’t around Paul would hang out there. On such occasions, Jean-Marie let Paul help him when he worked on his motorcycle, teaching him the names of all the parts and tools. Paul loved the way Jean-Marie spoke to him when they were working together, asking him to pass this or that in a businesslike manner, like an adult, an equal – as though he really was of use. Not like Maja, who always treated Paul as though he was in the way, and gave him a nasty nickname,
Caca Tibaba
– Little Baby Shit.

Sometimes Jean-Marie would bring Genie to work with him too. He would capitulate to her demands to be hoisted onto his shoulders – normal walking was far too pedestrian for little Genie – and she would sway happily there as he led the way down the alley to the garage, an infant empress in her palanquin, Jean-Marie as solid as an elephant as she slapped her fat little hands against his head with excitement.

Eventually the fighting got so bad at home that
Jean-Marie
left. He went to live in a room above the garage where he worked. One day, Paul came back from school to find that Jean-Marie’s bed had gone from the lean-to. Paul regretted bitterly that he had not at least been asked to help with the move, but Jean-Marie laughed.

I have hardly anything to move, he said.

Then he told Paul that next time Bossman wasn’t around he should come to the garage and check out his new pad. And that was what Paul did after Mam and Serge had had their last ever fight.

Mme Blondel next door had given Genie a bag of Neapolitans – little buttery cakes, covered with pink icing and sandwiched together with jam, made for weddings or christenings. When Genie took the bag home and showed Mam, Mam got angry and took it from her. Mam didn’t like the neighbours, she said. They didn’t like her. And then, when Serge came home and Genie told him that Mam had taken her cakes, Serge got angry. He slapped Mam and left the house, slamming the door in an echo of that slap and leaving Mam to slide down the wall, the way shadows did, weeping bitterly, the cakes rolling about her on the floor.

We are going to London, she told Paul and Genie, as they gathered up the cakes. Just the three of us.

London, Paul said to himself, and the name tasted of cold metal.

He slipped out of the house and made his way to the garage. The doors were open and Jean-Marie was on his back, working on a taxi-cab. There was no sign of Bossman.

Jean-Marie, have you ever been to London? Paul asked.

Wait a minute, said Jean-Marie, getting to his feet and rubbing his greasy hands on his overalls. London?

Paul repeated what had happened earlier, and what Mam had told them. Jean-Marie was quiet. No, Little Brother, he said. I have never been to London.

Has Serge ever been to London?

No, said Jean-Marie. Serge has never been to London.

Do you know anyone who has ever been to London? Paul asked.

Jean-Marie looked at him for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to tell him a secret.

Yes, he said finally, I do know someone who has been to London. In fact, I know someone who is
in
London
right
now
.

Who? said Paul, and Jean-Marie said, My girlfriend.

Paul did not know that Jean-Marie had a girlfriend. But yes, he did, and she lived in London. Jean-Marie had kept her a secret from them all.

Come, he told Paul. Let me show you.

He climbed the ladder which led from the garage up to his room under the eaves, and Paul scrambled up after him. It was a slant-ceilinged room accessed via a hatch in the floor, and it was covered in posters of girls in bikinis, and motorbikes and bare-chested Kung Fu fighters. Paul was filled instantly with admiration and envy. In the corner was Jean-Marie’s camp bed, covered in a bedspread Paul recognised from home, the one with a yellow and green and brown diamond pattern which made Genie think of snakes.

Jean-Marie sat down on the bed and reached under it, pulling out an old cigar box. He opened it and took out a cassette tape. The track listings were handwritten in purple ink, in English.

This is from my girlfriend, Jean-Marie said. She gave it to me before she went back to London.

Then he took from the box a photo, which he handed to Paul. It was of a girl – a
blonde
girl – in a bright blue bikini. Jean-Marie told him the photo had been taken at Grand Baie, where she had been on holiday with her family. Jean-Marie had met her at a disco there. Paul stared at the photo while Jean-Marie told him about the girl, whose name was Annabel, and all that she had told him about London: the trains which ran underground, the lady prime minister with her handbag, and people called punks, like Annabel’s brother, who had dyed his hair green and pushed a safety pin through his nose and spat on people at parties.

Jean-Marie played the tape and told Paul about his plan to go over to London and see Annabel again. The tape finished playing and Jean-Marie put it on again.

If you are in London, I will come and see you too, he said.

By the time Jean-Marie had sent him home for dinner, Paul could sing along with the chorus to ‘London Calling’.

In London, Mam insisted they spoke only English. So they wouldn’t get confused, she said. Paul soon forgot his Creole. But, for a long time after that, he still dreamt in it.