Genie and Paul (3 page)

Grandpère had never taken them out before. They trailed behind him, apprehensive about where he could be taking them. They crossed Junction Road to Tufnell Park tube station, descending in the lift and emerging onto the platform of the tube, which terrified Genie and seemed to her like being in the belly of a giant hoover.

They got out at Embankment and walked alongside the Thames, Paul leaning over every now and then to look down at the water while Grandpère swaggered some way in front, his long legs incapable of taking smaller steps to accommodate them. Eventually they saw him stop, and they caught up with him. Genie thought of Grandpère’s skin when she saw how the bark of the plane trees, which lined the river, flaked away.

Look, he said. Look at that. Grandpère was pointing to a great concrete column. Cleopatra’s Needle.

He read the plaque aloud in his stiff, heavily accented English but Genie understood little of what he was saying. She did not know who Cleopatra was. She did not know why she had left her needle here. She did not think it looked much like a needle. Genie looked at Paul but his face was turned in the opposite direction and she followed his gaze to a hot-dog stand across the road. Paul stared at it meaningfully, willing Grandpère to notice, his nose lifted to the breeze, sniffing it.

They might have been passing en route to somewhere else but the memory ended there, on the banks of the
grey-brown
Thames, the water churned up by the autumn wind, with Grandpère lurching around, his arms thrown wide,
laughing.
Ala en kuyonad kado, la!
What kind of a bloody stupid gift is that?

Soon afterwards, he went into hospital.

The night Grandpère died, Genie and Paul lay awake in the dark for a long time. Then Genie felt a fierce little kiss planted on her cheek. It was more like a bite.

They were not afraid to go into the kitchen and watch television, after that. 

Genie had no memory of the accident, as Mam called it. That part of the night had been edited out so that, when she looked back, it cut straight from her losing Paul in the club to waking up in hospital. Mam said that he must have just left her and run.

But it was not just Paul who was missing. Half of that night had disappeared too. Genie had not been taken into hospital until four am. It couldn’t have been later than one am when she’d lost him. What had happened in between? Had she in fact found Paul again? Had they argued? Had she said something to make him leave her?

Over the days that followed, Mam refused to discuss Paul and his ‘running away’, claiming Genie was too weak and should not upset herself. But if she thought Genie well enough to bring her all the way out here, to her allotment – or
potager
, as Mam called it – well enough to travel out to the fag end of Hackney by bus on a weekday afternoon, to be jostled by shoppers and mothers with buggies and dogged old ladies with trollies, to sit out in the unkind light and the cold and the sour smell of river, surrounded by wasteland and tower blocks, then Genie was certainly well enough to talk about Paul.

Look at my ladies in their Easter bonnets!

They’re called daffodils, Mam. Genie was not in the mood for whimsy.

Mam was wearing one of Paul’s old T-shirts. A Smiley face in a bandana rippled over her stomach, and it was
spotted with tiny holes. Hot from digging, she stopped and leant on her spade. It was the patch where her apple tree had once stood. Mam had lost it in the great storm of ’87. She had talked about that tree ever since. She talked about its lost future as someone might speak of a child who had died.

This reminds me of when you were tiny, Mam said. When we were in Mauritius. You used to share a bed with Paul. He hit you in his sleep once and bruised your face. I wouldn’t let you play out in the street in case the neighbours thought I had been beating you.

I don’t remember any of that.

I made you stay in the garden. You and me in the garden, like this. They didn’t like me, those women.

I only remember London.

You were always a Londoner. Not like Paul. He never felt at home here.

A low-flying aeroplane bound for City airport thundered overhead. Genie followed its passage across the white and blinding sky.

I’m worried about him, Mam. Why would he leave me like that unless there was something wrong?

Well, he’s not worried about
you
. No word from him since it happened. You could have died. When the hospital rang I was in shock. I couldn’t believe you’d done such a stupid thing. As though you’d gone onto the motorway and stood in front of a juggernaut heading straight for you. I went there by taxi. I told myself, If the doctor comes out to see me when I ask for you at reception, she’s dead. But they took me straight through. I asked who had brought you in. They said no one. No one, Genie.

Aren’t you worried about him?

Of course I am. I have
always
been worried about him. When you have a baby it’s not your
baby
lying there in a little blue towelling outfit, you know. It’s your heart. The
most precious part of you out in the world. Think about when Paul ran away to Mauritius. Wasn’t I worried then? And look what happened to Jean-Marie. That could have happened to Paul. I had to stop worrying after that. It was him or me, Genie.

Genie, bundled up in blankets on a deckchair, closed her eyes against the cold March sun. She found herself thinking about apple blossom, the first time she’d ever seen it. Some months after arriving in London, Mam had taken them to the scrubby little park round the corner from Grandmère’s. Genie had been shocked to see thick fistfuls of creamy, foamy blossom spilling from the trees. She had felt as though she would explode, as though she didn’t know what to do with herself, it was so beautiful and surprising. She had run towards the little stand of trees and Paul followed her, clambering up into one of them. From where she stood, looking up at him, the sky seemed full of the stuff. Paul wrenched off handfuls and scattered the crushed petals over her. Then, seeing how badly she wanted to possess these blossoms, he broke off what seemed like a huge branch and jumped down to hand it to her, he and Mam laughing at her reverential expression.

I want to find him, said Genie.

It’s been over a week. Where would you start?

I could try Eloise.

Li pa em kone kot li ete, sanla
. She doesn’t even know where
she
is, that one.

That was true. The last they’d heard, Eloise had been staying at a rest home for the rich and fatigued. Mam asked about Sol. Weren’t he and Paul practically like boyfriend and boyfriend at one time? But Paul hadn’t mentioned him for years now. What had happened there?

Genie claimed not to know. She didn’t know where he was now.

His best friend! Mam said. How he can just drop people like this.

Maybe Sol dropped him.

Maybe, said Mam. But this sudden disappearing. Just like his dad.

Whoever he is.

Well, I could never have said anything before. It would not have been fair to Paul. He never wanted to know and he didn’t want me to talk about it. He thought his father didn’t want to know him. That’s not true. Paul’s father never even knew about him! I tried to explain that. But Paul didn’t want to hear.

Tell me, said Genie.

Grandmère and Grandpère came to London from Mauritius in 1964, before Independence. They brought Daniel, but I was left behind. I was the same age Paul was when we came to London. I had the right to live in the UK but there was no money for my fare. Grandpère had borrowed the money from his sister to come over. She seemed to think that with this debt she owned our whole family: she worked Grandmère like a slave and even Daniel had to go round to help with chores after school. After that Grandpère refused to borrow more from her. So I stayed with Ma Tante Rose in Bambous and continued my studies. I thought that eventually after I finished school I would get a job, maybe with the Government. I would save the money to join Grandmère and Grandpère and Daniel. But then Independence came and suddenly it was not so easy. I used to have a recurring dream at this time. I was on the dock, waving off the boat that my family were on. It seemed to be moving away, but it didn’t seem to get any smaller and it never seemed to reach the horizon. Around this time the Ilois came to live in Mauritius. People from the Chagos Islands. I heard stories of some Ilois who had come to Mauritius in the usual course of their business, but when they tried to go home they were stopped from boarding the boat. Their island had been sold to the Americans. I felt a bit left behind like that too, with my family in England and England no longer having anything to do with Mauritius. It was not just me that was left behind. The whole country was. The mother ship had cut us adrift.
When I left school in 1970, there were no jobs. Mauritians getting jobs in other countries made the front pages of the newspaper. We were always hungry. I remember feeling always a bit faint. A bit dizzy. I got terrible headaches. It was a very depressing time. Very gradually, in a quiet sort of way, we were all starving. It was like we were waiting for something but nobody knew what. There was nothing to do, really. When you went to visit your friends there was nothing new to say, because nobody did anything, nobody went anywhere. Grandpère and Grandmère would send us some money every now and then. But Grandpère was desperate to get his sister off his back so most of his wages went to her. And we never told them how it was for us. We spent our days trying to pass the time. Just for something to do. We patched up our clothes. Went walking in the countryside looking for things to eat. We lived like this for some time. Then one day a friend wrote to me and invited me to visit, she said she had a dress she wanted to give me. So I went to visit her. She was living in Tamarin with her brother and his wife. She was looking after their baby. It was a pathetic little thing that cried all the time. After a while this crying got on my nerves, and so did my friend: there was no dress at all. She had invited me to her house to recruit me for the political party she had just joined – the Mouvement d’Etudiants Mauricien. But mainly she just talked about the man who had founded the party. He was very charismatic, very handsome. He had studied in the UK. He had been inspired by the events in Paris in 1968 to set up the party. I was suspicious of him. I don’t know why. Because he was French, I suppose.
En blan
. Because he had brought these foreign ideas to our island when what we needed was to find our own way. I was too listless and my friend’s hysteria was draining me. In the end I was sorry I had come all this way to see her. I told her I had to go home and so that I would
not have had a wasted journey I asked, before I left, if I could borrow a book. In the bookcase, among the old civil service textbooks in Government English on sugar cane pests, the pamphlets on education, the books of essays by politicians, I found a copy of
Paul et Virginie
. I had read it a long time ago, at school. I had always liked the book. And I liked this edition, which was old. I liked the illustrations. My friend was very scornful. Nostalgic and sentimental bourgeois rubbish which patronises the proletariat and sanctions slavery! Take it, she said. So I set off for the long walk home with the book under my arm. Then I thought to myself that I would go and sit on the beach for a while. We were always warned not to go to the beach alone. The beach could be a dangerous place. Men who have no jobs and do nothing but drink – well, you want to stay out of their way. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to be by myself. So I lay on the sands of Tamarin, reading. My friend was quite right about the book. But she neglected to say that it was beautiful, and charming and moving too. As I was reading, a shadow fell across the page and I looked up. It was a white boy. This golden white boy with eyes like light on water. He was carrying a surf board. I had never seen one before. He asked, in English, and in an accent I had never heard before, what I was reading. That’s
my
name, he smiled, when I told him. Paul. He had never read the book. As he walked towards the water I stopped reading and watched him. Sometimes staring out to sea can be like looking at a fourth wall if you’re on an island: the sea reminds you of how trapped you are. But that afternoon, watching this boy surf, I felt the opposite. I had never seen anyone surf before. It looked so joyful, so free. Like watching a bird on the wind. I stayed for an hour just watching him. When he had finished, he came strolling back up the beach and sat down next to me. The beads of water on his skin caught the sun and made him shimmer. I could
hardly bear to look at him. He asked me to tell him the story of
Paul et Virginie
. Then he asked about me. There wasn’t so much to say. And what about you? I asked. He came from a place called East London. A place in South Africa! I asked him what it was like. I don’t feel at home there, he said. Look at us here on the beach. Where I come from, we’d get arrested for being here together. He scrutinised me. You’re so mixed, they wouldn’t know how to classify you. And he laughed to himself. Can you believe in my country they classify people! It’s worse than slavery, what’s going on there. When I looked at him I had the strange feeling that he had holes instead of eyes and that somehow I was looking straight through him, to the sea. That night when I went home, Ma Tante Rose asked if I had a fever. Your eyes look bright, she said. But I felt unnaturally calm, a disturbed sort of calm, as though the eye of a cyclone were passing over me. I said I’d had a good time with my friend. That I would go to visit her again. And so I went to Tamarin the next day, and watched the boy on the beach surfing and spent the afternoon talking to him. This happened a few times. On one of them, he took a chain from his neck and fastened it around mine. It was warm from his skin. The Patron Saint of Hermits, he said. He told me the story of the young man who went to live in the desert. Who was fed by a raven and whose grave was dug by desert lions that guarded his tomb. It was this medal I gave to Paul when he turned sixteen. The one you are wearing now. Soon after he had given me this gift I went to the beach as usual and I sat all day looking out to sea as though waiting for a ship to appear over the horizon. He never showed up and I was left alone there, watching those waves which I had never before thought of as empty.