Guerrillas (23 page)

Roche said, “I think I should go. It must be terrible in that house now.”

There were not many cars on the road. The factories were closed. Far away, deep in the brown fields, there was a scattering of parked cars. The trunks of these cars were open, and the drivers could be seen, tiny, isolated, intent figures, cutting grass for the animals they kept at home. In open spaces in the little concrete-and-tin settlements children played, kicking up dust.

“Meredith
knew
,” Roche said. “They stopped me on Friday, you know, and they searched the car.”

He was half addressing Jane now, but she acknowledged nothing.

Past the junked cars in the sunken fields, past the factories, past more country settlements, the suburbs, they approached the city, the rubbish dump smoking yellow-gray, the smoke uncoiling slowly in the still afternoon, rising high and spreading far, becoming mingled with the pink pall from the bauxite loading station, the whole shot through with the rays of the declining sun. Sunlight gilded the stilted shacks that seemed to scaffold the red hillsides. The land began to feel choked. But the shantytown redevelopments were subdued; those repetitive avenues of red earth showed little of their usual human overspill. There were few trucks amid the smoke and the miniature multicolored hills and valleys of the rubbish dump, and not many scavengers. On each fence post a black carrion corbeau sat undisturbed; others on the ground hopped about awkwardly, two feet at a time.

Jane rolled up her window, to keep out the oily smoke and the deep dead smell.

Roche said, “Picking the carcass clean. They’ll pick the carcass clean.”

Fixed in the posture of alertness, though no longer driving slowly, still concentrating on the road as though watching for obstructions there, he did not sufficiently notice that the line of traffic he had been following had thinned out; and it was some time before he saw that he was entering a quiet city. They crossed the concrete canal that drained the ever rising swamp over which this part of the city had spread. But there had been no Sunday-afternoon “swagger” groups on the bridge, no plump young women in plastic curlers, no men with shirts out of their trousers and open all the way down.

No refrigerated trailers were unloading at the market. There were no groups of vendors and porters preparing, in an atmosphere of the caravanserai, for the long night and the early-morning market. Instead, half a dozen police vans were drawn up in the dusty market yard, and policemen stood in groups close to their vehicles.

Roche said, “I know that something is being prepared for me. They searched me on Friday. They saw me at the house.”

Jane said, “I want to go home.”

She rolled down her window. Fresher air blew in.

Abruptly he turned into a cross street, one of those that cut through the center of the city.

He said, “I must go. They’ll believe that I knew.”

He came to the main square and he saw it as he had never seen it before, empty, without people or cars, the wooden stalls in the center roughly shuttered. Between the square modern buildings, he saw tiled mansard roofs, corrugated-iron roofs in faded stripes of red and white, stylish finials, decorated wrought-iron balconies: domestic features of the upper parts of older buildings that normally didn’t draw attention to themselves but were now thrown into relief by the emptiness below. No restaurant vans or coconut carts, no queues at the bus stops, no crowds waiting for route taxis at corners: a stripped, sunlit square, with a spread of litter in the open gutters and little dust eddies on the wide intersections. He saw police trucks in the shadowed streets leading out of the square. He saw groups of policemen. He saw rifles and tin helmets.

He stopped. A policeman with a helmet and a rifle broke from a group and came running out into the sunlight and across the intersection to the car, his boots pounding on the asphalt. He was shouting; his words were indistinct. Even with his rifle he looked vulnerable and a little absurd, with his short serge trousers, his exposed thighs, his truncheon, his puttees.

He shouted, “What the hell you doing here?”

And when the policeman came to the car Roche saw that he was young and nervous. He had shaved closely; every pore was distinct, and he was sweating on his scored top lip.

He said, “Where you think you going?”

He spoke with exasperation rather than authority. His gray shirt was sweated under the arms; an inch or so of white undershirt showed beyond the short sleeves.

Few of the other policemen looked at the car. Most were looking up the empty shadowed streets.

Roche said, “I’m sorry. We didn’t know about this. Is it bad?”

“Trouble, I don’t know. Big trouble. You live near here? Where you live?”

“The Ridge.”

“Man, you drive there fast. Take the Circular Road and drive. Don’t stop. Drive.”

He turned and began to run back across the empty square to the group he had left.

And Roche drove as he had been ordered. He drove out of the square and took the road that skirted the center of the city, and he drove fast. It was a wide road of low shops and palings, cafes and rum shops, old timber houses squeezed into small plots, occasionally a more spacious, and now stranded, old-fashioned house with fern baskets hanging in the veranda, intermittent concrete developments. The road, usually lively, was now almost empty, and the slogans and posters on walls and palings stood out. Roche saw, again and again,
Birth Control Is a Plot Against the Negro Race;
he saw
Don’t Vote
. He saw the posters for Doctor Andy Byam, “America’s Gift to God.” He saw
After Israel Africa
. He saw
After Israel
. He saw, and he realized he had been seeing it for weeks past,
AIA
, the letters written one below the other, reduced sometimes—a mystery simultaneously discovered and solved—to the hieroglyph of a two-headed arrow. And through the calm of the lower Ridge, where nurses still sat on brown lawns and children still played, he continued to drive fast. The shopping plaza was closed. Climbing higher, he passed the house labeled
Taylor
; he turned at
Chez Wen
; he passed
The Mortons
. And when at last, in their own yard, they got out of the car, to silence, it was as though they had both yielded to a private lunacy during that fast drive.

They separated without speaking. The house, with closed doors, was stuffy. Jane opened the folding doors at the back and went out on the porch. It was quiet and cool.

The shadow of the house reached halfway down the sloping back garden. Sunlight still caught the children’s house, whose door was open. Sunlight fell on the brown vegetation of the hills. The city on the flat land below was only just beginning to grow hazy.
It was quiet. The radios all around and below had ceased to play: the reggae party was at last over. Far away, the airport, fading into haze, showed two white planes.

Jane thought: I’ve left it too late.

ADELA WAS in, but Sunday was her day off; and it had been established that on Sundays she was not to be spoken to. Jane and Roche could speak to her only if she spoke to them first. On Sundays Adela did her own chores. She hung her mattress out of her window to catch the sun, beat her mattress; did her washing. She also did a lot of cooking: on Sundays she was at home to her friends and relations. She had her own front entrance, at the side of the garage; and she had a back entrance, with a flight of concrete steps, useful as seating.

A wall of concrete blocks, about ten feet long, screened off Adela’s little back yard from the rest of the back garden. The previous tenants had tried to cover this wall with a flowering vine and with the local ivy. In the drought the vine had shriveled; the ivy had lost its leaves and the brown stems had begun to come away from the wall. Where they were loose, the stems looked like dead millipedes, with hundreds of little hanging feet; where they were still fixed to the wall, the stems looked like encrustations of mud, the nest of some kind of wasp or ant. The concrete wall was a concrete wall; it couldn’t pass as a decorative architectural feature. And behind it was Adela and her private life.

It was a life that on Sundays emphasized the neutrality of the rest of the house, with its solid company furniture and no pictures on the clean walls. The house needed Adela. Without her—or with
her on the other side of the wall—the house felt empty and unwelcoming. And now, at dusk, it was the end even of Adela’s day: her washing taken in, her visitors, if she had had any, gone.

Night fell. Lights came on in the city and isolated lights showed here and there on the hills. The great silence continued. It became chilly on the porch. Inside, table lights or wall lights made the large rooms gloomy; ceiling lights showed up the bareness. And there was no water.

Jane was unwilling to move about the house or to do anything that might make a noise. She was exhausted; she became more exhausted. She heard Roche moving lightly about: he too seemed affected by the silence. Before, she had always been reassured by his presence, had almost needed it, needed to feel him reacting to her. But now, though she listened for his noises—she heard him trying the taps, opening and closing the refrigerator door, rustling the newspaper—she began to hide from him; and he too seemed to be staying away from her. She went at last to the unlighted front room of the house, where it was still warm; and she stayed there until, out of exhaustion, darkness, silence, she became, to her surprise, quite calm.

They met later in the kitchen, where the fluorescent light fell hard on white formica surfaces. They ate sardines, cheese, bread; and drank lager and coffee. Roche’s manner was as light as his movements; he too was recovering from strain. But there was no connected conversation between them.

They heard Adela’s radio. It was nearly half past seven by the kitchen clock, nearly time for the Sunday evening program of hymns sponsored by one of the Southern American churches. And soon there came the tune that, for Jane, marked the deadest hour of Sunday on the Ridge, the deadest hour of the week. Adela turned the volume down, but the words were still distinct.

Roche said, “Adela isn’t worried. I wonder if she knows.”

Jane looked at him and didn’t reply. She thought: I should
have left that day when he dreamt about being tortured, the day I saw the wild man in the children’s house.

Such a straight new road led to the airport. More than once, during her first few weeks on the island, they had driven in the late afternoon to the airport, for the sake of the drive, and to sit in the glass-walled lounge and drink rum punch and watch the planes, the flat expanse of asphalt and grass that seemed to stretch to the hills, the late sunlight on the hills. The hills had been green then; and the sugar cane fields through which the airport road ran had also been green, the sugar cane tall and in arrow, gray-blue plumes above the green; and sometimes on the way back they had stopped at the basketwork and raffiawork stands beside the airport road, tourist enticements. But then, almost as soon as she had got used to the sugar cane and the arrows, the fields had been fired, the canes reaped; and what had been green and enclosed had become charred and flat and open. Then the drought had set in, and those excursions had stopped. On the highway that afternoon they had passed the airport road; she hadn’t given it a thought.

For so long she had held herself ready to leave. She had her return air ticket; in London she had been told she needed one to enter the island. Her passport was in order. It was a new one and—she had been born in Ottawa during the war—it was endorsed
Holder has right of abode in the United Kingdom
. A virgin passport still: it had not been stamped when she had arrived. No official had asked to see her passport, or her return ticket, when the bauxite Americans had taken her past the immigration desk. She had eluded the controls; there was no record of her arrival. She remembered it as part of the dislocation of that first morning when, exhausted by the night-long journey, unslept, the airplane noise still in her head, the airplane smell still on her, she had, coming out of the customs hall and seeing Roche, had a feeling of disappointment and wrongness. She had always been ready to leave.

Looking at Roche in the hard light in the white kitchen, Jane thought: Now it’s out of my hands. I am in this house, with this man.

On Adela’s radio, between passages of grave, deep, indistinct
speech, the hymns continued. The hymns held more than the melancholy of Sunday evening. For Jane now they held the melancholy, the incompleteness, of all her time here; and the Ridge felt far from everywhere.

In the dead fluorescent light she considered Roche’s face, which once had seemed to her so fine, so ascetic and full of depth. Now, seeing the face attempt easiness, even jollity, she saw it as worn and weak; and she wondered that she had ever been puzzled by him. She had, long ago, seen him as a man of action, a doer. Later, she had seen him as an intellectual, infinitely understanding, saint-like in the calm brought him by his knowledge. Now she saw that he was like herself, yielding and yielding, at the mercy of those events which he analyzed away into his system. His intellectualisaism was a sham, a misuse of the mind, a series of expedients. She understood now why, when he was at his most analytical and intelligent, he irritated her most. Ordinary: the word came to her as she watched him. It surprised her and she resisted it: it seemed vindictive and untrue. But she held onto the word. She looked at him and thought: In spite of everything he’s done he’s really quite ordinary.