Genie and Paul (8 page)

The one place Genie had not yet looked for Paul was the club where she’d lost him in the first place. But she was back here now. Looking for Paul. For her lost hours. Looking for her missing three hours. And now she had found those hours: standing on the balcony, looking down at the dancers, taut and twangy and sharp as piano-wire, the bass like a cathode ray oscillator marking the peaks and troughs of her heart and brain waves oh! and that was when she realised she’d found them, her missing three hours.
This
was where – this was
how
– she’d lost her three hours the night Paul had gone. She had lost those missing three hours being lost! But it was Paul who was really lost. Wasn’t it always this way for him? Wasn’t he always losing hours here and there on nights like these? Wasn’t he always losing nights? And didn’t those nights add up over time? How was it to be Paul, wondered Genie, always waking up to feel as if he’d lost something the night before? Would there be a point at which what you’d lost outweighed what you had or what you remembered?

As the numbers thinned out, Genie saw more dance floor than dancers. Mam had always liked to crowd her flowerbeds – she couldn’t stand to see patches of earth around the plants. It looked skimpy, she always said. That was what a half-empty dance floor looked like – a skimpily planted flowerbed. Paul had once gone to a club and lost his watch, the one she and Mam had given him for his
twenty-first
. He’d waited until the end of the night, until the dance floor had cleared, and then searched the floor. Not only had
he found his watch, he told Genie later, he had found
many
watches.

The lights came up. The few remaining dancers stood blinking, as though they had just been shaken awake.

Genie found herself in a cab on the way to Sol’s place. Minicab drivers were always less interested in where she was going than in where she was from, Genie thought. Their first guess was usually the place where
they
came from. They were usually wrong. And as the driver continued to list possible countries, Genie stared out at the dark streets, absently tracing a finger along the edge of the stains on the back seat, which formed a map of a world, great oceans lapping at the edges of continents.

Then, as they passed along a road she suddenly recognised, she stopped the driver.

I’m from right here.

The house had been repainted since they had lived there as kids, and there were thick, expensive-looking curtains pulled across the windows. The garden had been cleared of shrubs and was now covered in designer gravel, but the old black and white path remained the same, though it was more worn than she remembered it. There in the corner, by the bay window, was where she had seen the daffodils. It was beginning to rain. Soon the rain was flattening the streets in ranks like an invading army. Genie ran until she reached Sol’s place, raindrops sliding down her hair, dripping into her face. She rang the bell several times but there was no answer. She had just given up and was walking away when the door opened behind her.

Sol called out, rubbing his eyes.

Genie? What are you doing here? It’s late.

She was surprised then to find tears mixing in with the raindrops. As they slid, hot and oily, down her face she
remembered how she would always confuse the two verbs in French.
I rain. It cries
.

He looked more closely at her. Christ, you’re fucked. It’s pouring. Come in. I’ll call you a cab.

She’d been looking for Paul, she told him, as he led her down to the kitchen.

As she followed Sol through the hallway and down the stairs, Genie felt uneasy. The shape of the house was at once familiar and not. And now, looking around the kitchen, she realised: this was the mirror image of 40 St George’s Avenue. Everything here was on the wrong side. She took in her surroundings: the slick blond floor, the shiny surfaces. She told him that their kitchen had been nothing like this. She told him about the heavy furniture, the grease-stained walls, the divan in the corner where Grandpère had slept. Genie told Sol about the time she’d been left with him, when Mam and Paul had gone to the launderette. Grandpère had switched off the television. The room had fallen quiet. Outside she could see the yard darken. Moss glowed on the dripping walls. Grandpère took up his drumsticks and tapped out a rhythm on the table.
Mu-mee da-dee, mu-mee da-dee
.

I felt really shy. I always did when he spoke to me in English. Then he played again. He handed me his sticks. They were the right size for him – they called him a
longay
(long, high) – but I was a five-year-old kid. I bashed the table. The sticks slipped out of my fingers. Grandpère snatched the sticks up from the floor and shouted at me. He played again.
Mu-mee da-dee, mu-mee da-dee
. He held the sticks so loosely that when he played they looked rubbery in his hands, but when he gave them to me I just held them rigid. Every time he shouted at me I held them tighter. He kept saying,
To pa pe ekut mwa, ta!
You’re not listening to me. When Grandpère died, Grandmère said,
Li pa em
ena
dan li po twi limem.
He didn’t even have the courage to kill himself.

Sol was watching Genie drink her tea, like a doctor watching a patient taking medicine. She drank it quickly, so that it burnt then numbed her mouth.

Genie, what are you doing here?

She put down her cup. She took Sol’s face in her hands and kissed him. He kissed her back at first in a slightly puzzled way, as though she were saying something he didn’t quite understand, then pulled away.

I don’t think –

She kissed him again.

Your mouth is hot, he said, whispering into it. And he kissed her back, as if, now, he understood.

She lay looking at him. He opened his eyes and smiled.

You look very white in the moonlight, she said.

Yeah. Horrible. Not like you.

She got off on him being different from her, she said. Angled where she was curved, hard where she was soft. Pale to her dark. She could never have slept with a brown man. It would be like…

She laughed. He stroked her hair.

I think you’re right, she said. Paul’s in Mauritius. He must be. Eloise says she gave him money. That must have been what he wanted it for.

Maybe he needed it for something else, said Sol. Then he said quickly, He always wanted to go back. Life’s too complicated for him here. Don’t you ever want to go back?

I don’t feel like I was ever really
there
. I remember hardly any of it. No, it’s not my country at all. This is.

Then Sol told Genie about his friend, his friend who was always strange: he’d been strange as a child, he was strange at school, he was strange to his family and, even when he grew
up and his friends and family had all become used to him, he was still a stranger to them. But then he went to Japan, and in Japan he was not strange. They understood him there. He fell in love with a Japanese girl and married her and never left. Japan had been his home all along and he’d never known until he went there. Then again, Sol said, he knew some people from outside London who lived here and loved the feeling of never feeling quite at home in the city.

I would love to go to Mauritius, said Sol. What’s it like?

I can tell you a story about it, if you like. The story of how me and Paul got our names.

Yes, said Sol. Tell me.

A long time ago in Mauritius, when the island was still owned by the French, some sixty years or so before the Revolution and a hundred years or so before the British claimed the island, there lived a young boy called Paul and a girl called Virginie. Raised as brother and sister, they fell in love, but, alas, their love was doomed. Dunno if it’s a true story or not. It’s written as if it’s true and something that happens in it – a shipwreck – is true. It’s kind of considered half-true in the same way that
Romeo and Juliet
is. You can go to Verona and see Juliet’s house and her balcony. So this is what happens. Virginie’s mother, pregnant with Virginie, leaves France with her new husband to start a life in Mauritius. Her noble family have rejected her for marrying a commoner so the young couple head out for the colonies where such things don’t matter. They want to set up a plantation. The husband travels to Madagascar to buy slaves but while he’s there he gets a fever and dies. So Virginie’s mum, pregnant and alone apart from her slave Marie, unable to return home now her family has abandoned her, goes to hide herself away in a remote corner of the island. Troubled souls often seek out the wilderness. There’s a lot of expressions like that in the book. A lot of stuff about nature and solitude, and how it can soothe us. But in this wilderness she comes across another young woman who has also shunned society. Or rather, society has shunned her. Paul’s mother, a simple peasant girl, had been cast aside by a rakish nobleman after she fell pregnant. He never
intended marrying her, as he’d promised. So, ashamed, she too has sought out the wilderness and now she lives there, cultivating a piece of land she staked a claim to with the help of her slave, Domingue. The two women become friends and live in adjoining huts, raising their children together, befriended by an old guy who lives nearby. In fact it’s this old guy who tells the story. The story begins with someone out walking in the Mauritian wilderness, who comes across the ruins of two small cottages. He wants to know what the story is, so he asks this old guy who happens to be passing by. And the old guy says, I know the story. It’s very sad. It concerns two young people and their mothers… so then he pretty much tells the young guy what I’ve just told you so far. Anyway, this old guy was a hermit, having moved away from society for reasons of his own. He lived near the two women and befriended them. So the little community living in their self-imposed exile was poor but contented, happy to let their lives follow the rhythms of nature. The two slaves married one another and they grew such wonderful things on their plantation! Coconut trees and maize and tobacco and sweet potatoes and coffee and sugar cane and banana trees and cotton and pumpkins and cucumbers and custard apples and mangoes and guavas and runner beans. And the children flourished too. They shared the same crib, their fat little arms entwined, their fat little cheeks pressed together. They bathed in the same pool, drank milk from the breast of the other’s mother. If Paul was crying, Virginie was brought over to him to cheer him up. If Virginie was sad, Paul would try his best to make her smile again. Paul became a strong, handsome boy, responsible, brave and loyal, while Genie was beautiful, modest, demure, obedient, soft-hearted and hardworking. The two mothers dreamed of the day when their children would get married, and look after them in their old age. The families were only too happy to live outside a
society which had rejected them, but of course they went to church, and on Sundays they did lots of good deeds for those who were less fortunate than they were: visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and so on. One day, as Virginie was making the family lunch, a runaway slave-girl appeared at the doorway of her cottage. She had been hiding in the forest nearby and was starving. Virginie gave her the food she’d been preparing then volunteered to return with the girl to her cruel master. I will intercede for you, Virginie said. He will forgive you for running away and will not punish you. When Paul returned from chopping wood he escorted the two young girls through the forest, back to the plantation the slave had escaped from. The master, a big ugly white man, was enraged on seeing the slave-girl and was all set to punish her when Virginie interceded. The master took one look at this vision of angelic beauty and suddenly begged for forgiveness, granting it also to his runaway slave. Whereupon Paul and Virginie ran away, into the forest, and headed for home. But they got lost. They wandered for miles, getting cut by brambles, tripping over tree roots and fighting their way through thick undergrowth. They came to a river which was so turbulent, Virginie was afraid to cross it. Paul carried her across on his back, not in the slightest bit afraid to negotiate the slippery rocks, so dedicated was he to the task of keeping Genie safe. They spent the night in the forest, but the next day they were found by Fidèle the family dog, who had accompanied Domingue on his search for the pair. But Virginie was in a state of collapse. Luckily, a band of
marrons
, or runaway slaves, who had witnessed Virginie’s kindness to the
slave-girl
, emerged from the bushes and helped to carry her home. There was much celebration and joy at their return. But after this event things changed. Virginie changed. She became secretive and miserable where once she’d been happy and
carefree. Paul’s presence, which was once a source of joy to her, now became troubling. Virginie had fallen in love with Paul, it seemed. But her mother considered that she and Paul were too young to marry. And too poor. Marriage would bring children and, with them, greater hardship. Then a solution presented itself. An old aunt of Virginie’s mother, bitter and alone but filthy rich, decided that she would make Virginie her heir. But Virginie must come to France to be educated and inducted in the ways of fine French society. Virginie’s mother decided to send her to France in the hope of securing for her daughter some of the family money. This was a terrible decision. Virginie was desperately unhappy and homesick, and Paul was filled with unbearable loneliness and rage and jealousy, wondering how Virginie could possibly remain uncorrupted in the metropole, having read about Paris and all the decadence of high society – after a childhood of blissful ignorance, he had begged the old hermit to teach him how to read so that he might learn more about Virginie’s new world, but the knowledge only pained him. Finally the old aunt had enough of Virginie, who was clearly pining for her island, her family and Paul, and in a fit of bitterness decided to pack her off back home. But out of spite she insisted on Virginie’s travelling straight away, during the cyclone season – a very uncomfortable time to travel by ship, and a dangerous one too. When Virginie’s ship weighed anchor just off the coast of Mauritius, Paul was beside himself with joy. But, alas, the ship was caught in a storm and thrown onto the reef. Paul had to watch from the beach, powerless to help, while the ship was wrecked. Domingue and the old man were forced to restrain Paul from throwing himself into the sea to save Virginie, who could be seen on the prow, praying. A sailor insisted she remove her heavy clothes to save herself from drowning, but she refused, out of the unnatural modesty learnt at her
expensive convent school. She drowned. Pretty soon after that, they all died of heartbreak – Virginie’s mother, Paul, Paul’s mother. Even the dog. But not the slaves, for some reason.