Heaven's Edge (2 page)

‘What about the jeep?' I asked the boy one morning, having seen him drive it into a garage. ‘Can't I hire it?'

‘Not possible, sir. Special approval required.' He put the keys in his little brown box and banged down the lid.

Nobody was able to tell me who gave ‘special approval'. Even the barman at the cocktail hut pruned his lips and withdrew into his shell when I tried to question him. Perhaps I should have learned one of the local languages before I came, but I don't think it would have helped. It seemed I was in a place where conformity, or silence, was the only safe strategy for survival, and ignorance a kind of haven.

I was so disgruntled I spent the rest of the day trashing the decrepit minibar in my room. This could not be the same island that Eldon had talked about, that my father had loved,
that I had read so much about. I had seen no animals, no birds, hardly any life. The trees, the plants, the buildings, the land, everything was drab. That evening, when I emerged, I banged into the drinks trolley parked at the poolside and knocked over an ice bucket. I ordered more lotus-brew and a packet of mouldy buns and derided the barman. I was too sozzled to care what he thought of me.

I felt thoroughly ashamed the next day and wanted to apologise to him. I looked all over the hotel; I couldn't find him. There was nobody around to say sorry to.

I decided then it was time to pull myself together and do whatever I could on my own. Six days had passed since I had landed. There was no point in hanging around. I thought I'd go into the scrub, at least, and see what I could find there. Explore as far as I could by foot, if nothing else. It was midday. The heat was searing, but I felt it had to be now or never. Walking, at least, was not forbidden. Any restricted area, I reckoned, would be fenced off or something. The rules would become clear, if there was a danger of violation; that seemed to be the way programmes ran everywhere.

I headed for the outer ramparts of the village. A dusty dog, stretched out in the shade, roused itself briefly; there was no other sign of life. A hundred metres beyond the old walls and piles of rubble, I came to a path that led down to a small sandy cove. A simple stretch of sand, sea and sky with the remains of the old fort on one side and a small stream trickling down into the sea on the other.

The freshwater at the mouth of the stream seemed cooler than the sea by the hotel and I was tempted to stay there until the sun eased, but I didn't want to lose the momentum I had built up. I wanted to get further, while I could. Much as I liked the cove, I decided to leave it for another day.

Near the stream a much wider path – more of a cart track – continued, leading I assumed to the next village, perhaps one more hospitable. I walked along it for about an hour, passing on the way a small boarded-up factory and a waste pit. Then I came to a turnoff where the mud between the hard, sharp ridges was still soft.

I saw pug marks. Big ones. They were made by the paws of a large animal, maybe from one of Eldon's celebrated game parks. Anything was possible: that was the point, I told myself, about an island of dreams.

I followed the prints until the track itself dwindled to a thin groove barely visible in the long grass. Then the vegetation grew thicker and thornier. The path disappeared. Scrub turned to jungle, wildwood and dung bramble. I carried on, feeling a little apprehensive but also quite chuffed at having come close to a jungle habitat. I didn't mind missing the next village. Picking my way through a tangle of trees and bushes I reached the edge of a small pond, no bigger than a playground paddling pool; a layer of green and brown duckweed covered most of the surface. Near the crust a few blanched flowers soaked in the sun. Sharp, thin leaves hung motionless from the trees. It seemed a scene out of the ancient chronicles Eldon used to try to interest me in when I was young. The heat, even with the water close by, was intense; the skin on my top lip burned as I exhaled. I tried to remember what I had once learned about stilling the mind and cooling the body. I felt a little dizzy. Perhaps it was a premonition. I wiped the perspiration around my eyes and tried to contemplate life after death. Then I noticed a movement in the bushes on the other side of the pond. I held my breath, hardly daring to hope I might observe some real wildlife: a langur or a hoopoe, perhaps a loris, or even the leopard whose tracks I was convinced I had
seen. I felt a thrill I had never felt before, the promise of a glimpse into the primeval, but what emerged instead was a young woman in a yellow T-shirt and patchwork jeans.

At the water's edge she crouched down over a small bamboo cage and quickly released a catch. The speed and sureness with which she moved in the heat was hard to believe. I stepped forward to see what she had with her, and snapped a twig by accident. She looked up startled. Hastily she shook the cage, poised to run.

‘Wait.' I bared my hands to show I meant her no harm. It could have been merely animal instinct, but I felt drawn to her. I went over. She shook back her long black hair. Her face was brimming with light. I couldn't stop staring.

A pair of green doves peeked out of the open cage. ‘Shoo!' Her fingers danced in the air and the birds flew up in a clumsy flurry of brilliant feathers. They took refuge in one of the trees behind her, dislodging a small red fruit.

She kept her eyes on me while she bent down to pick it up. Her arm was trembling, but she looked more annoyed than frightened at being found out. Her face tightened; she seemed to suck in the air around her. The breeze turned the leaves above her head and I heard the flapping of wings again. The birds cooed.

‘Emerald doves?' I asked, for some absurd reason expecting the words to placate her. I recognised the birds and was glad that they conformed to the jewelled picture I had from my boyhood bird books. The way she held herself without moving reminded me of something in myself. It was not desire but a kind of energy that absorbed as much as it gave out. I took a step closer.

The nerves straining inside her loosened, freeing her face briefly from irritation into surprise. ‘You know emerald doves?' She brushed her hair back from her eyes, knotting
it and pulling at the strands. Her nails were short but shaped and shiny; a thin metal bracelet slipped down one wrist. Streaks of sweat marked her face making her look flustered. The puffs under her eyes were wet and thin rings glistened around her slightly swollen neck. A few drops trickled to the seam of her top creating a small damp pattern in the cloth.

‘You speak English?'

She nodded, perplexed. Then suspicion seemed to contract the muscles around her eyes again. ‘Everyone can, no?'

That was what I had been led to believe too. ‘But no one in this place talks,' I said and immediately regretted the tone I had used. At the same time I resented the implication that the surliness I had encountered everywhere was, in some way, my fault. Blood rushed to my face.

She saw that and suppressed a smile. The skin, stretched thin, trembled. ‘You must be the tourist at Palm Beach?'

I thought I detected a note of disdain in her tone and, for a minute, I was the one without words. I was not a tourist. At least that was not how I saw myself. Neither was I a native. My categories were different and seemed too difficult to explain to her. I was a man in search of a father, or perhaps in search of himself. The same as everybody else, but on a journey that seemed longer. I told her instead that her doves were the first birds I'd seen since I had landed, even though I had heard there were birds everywhere on the island.

She picked up the empty cage and shook her head, turning glum. ‘That was before war changed our nature here.' Her eyes darted around, away from the pond, as if to show me the consequences: the sparse scattering of etiolated flowers under the stooped grey trees. ‘Now you have to search hard to find anything beautiful.'

I remember feeling some serious misgivings then about what my father might have been involved in and the true nature of my peculiar inheritance. But what could I do? Despite what she said, I thought the glow in her face was beautiful. I watched dewdrops form on the skin around her mouth and on the slopes of her nose. Sunlight turned them into gems. She was unlike anybody else I had ever seen. Slim and small, she seemed to possess all the space around her. Her face drew everything into it. I didn't want her to move. I wanted to see the shape of the smile she had hidden; to retrieve it for myself.

I can think of a thousand things to say now but then, stammering over every other word, I floundered. I tried to explain that I had come looking for something. My lost soul perhaps, I said, half-jokingly, trying to mask my confusion.

She cheered up at that and almost laughed. ‘I can see that.'

I smiled, wanting to encourage her. Wanting more. For a moment it seemed possible, and that everything would work out right. Then the surface of the pond darkened. I looked up at the clouds that had appeared above us. When I turned back to say something to her, she had gone.

The trees and the bushes around seemed undisturbed. I felt depleted. I didn't know what I had done wrong; perhaps I shouldn't have tried to joke about the soul, things spiritual. For some this was, once, an island of the devout. I searched for some mark – a footprint, crushed grass, anything – but it was as though she had never been there.

In the end I returned the way I had come, trudging slower and slower.

By the time I got to the hotel the sun's last beads had seeped out of the sky. I found an old deckchair and
took it out to the Sundowner Hut overlooking the pier where the boat had docked a week earlier. The sea rolled from dark burgundy to a lunar blue, erasing the crossing I had made and nudging me back to the reasons that lay behind it.

My father died somewhere in this jungle when I was still a child. My mother took her own life, far from home, not long after. I felt I had never really known either of them; they had hardly ever been around and I had to make do. I grew up with my grandparents, believing I should stay close to home. From an early age I learned to be ultra-cautious. My grandparents themselves had breathed the air of diverse places, but when they spoke of their itinerants' history, I saw only trails of migration that seemed either cruel or futile: the pointless effects of a wayward gene.

My grandfather had been an instructor in a small Chertsey flying school on the edge of London but he had retired long before I was born and was, for me, always an old man with silver hair lining a cloudy brown face; his gentle hands constantly tending his garden, slowing the frenzy of the encroaching city and patiently calming my earliest fears. He passed away when I was twelve. That was harder to take than my parents' desertions. Cleo, my grandmother, was the only one who stayed to see me through. She would make pancakes and bake me banana bread, or ginger cake, every Sunday; once a month re-create Eldon's special fried pork curry. Delicacies to remind me of my antecedents in the wider world beyond the windswept shale and shingle of our South Downs coast. She was a strong, quiet woman with clear beliefs. ‘You have them with you, inside you, for always, child,' she would say to console me. ‘You
will find you have all you need.' Not long after I left school, she died. I drifted a little, trying to ease the hurt, looking for companionship; someone, or something, to hold close.

By my early twenties, I decided the life of a recluse would comfort me more; release me from the recurrence of loss, the delusions of communal life. My strength, I believed in those days, lay in my reticence. I sold the old house and moved into a cheap flat, far from any airport, beyond the crowded flight paths I had lived under as a child. It had no garden, not even a window-box. I wanted things to stand still. I didn't have to do any work and indulged only in secluded, solitary recreations. Like many of my dispirited, isolated neighbours I lived a life of junk, grease and sloth.

Then, about nine months ago – a lifetime ago it seems now – there was an infestation of mice in my cramped bachelor kitchen. A cold snap must have brought them in. I found a trail of droppings by the bread bin and more around the toaster. I had to get rid of the pests but I didn't want to use poison; I didn't want bloated carcasses rotting in some damp corner like those by the bottle-bank outside the municipal library. I decided to drive them away instead, unharmed. I had a go with a broom and brush, clearing out every cupboard in the flat.

That was when I found my lodestar: an antiquated video cassette with my father's name printed on the label followed by the year, 1998. It was in a cardboard box in which I had dumped the few remaining mementoes from my grandparents' house, my childhood props: a bird-watcher's guidebook, a couple of young ornithologists' annuals, a collection of cult CDs and dub poetry, geek software. Things I had not been able to look at for years.

Inside the video case I discovered a note addressed to my mother but written, it seemed, as much for me then as now. Three decades late, in the cold winter light of my scoured London flat, I read the letter, the numbness inside me thawing to its irresistible call. In the days that followed I read it so many times, the neat, precise writing became inscribed in me.

Darling,

I am sorry I have to delay my return again, but there is a lot to be done following the attack last month. As usual everyone is galvanised here only after a bomb explodes. It lasts for a couple of weeks, and then everything sinks back into the same old morass it had been before. But by the summer I should be able to leave the island. So do book that gite. It won't be like here, but it will be good to be all together again, wherever.

Until then I am glad Marc is happily settled with the Grands, and that you can join your team. As you say, it is only for two weeks this time and then nothing again until the Palermo conference in May. Marc will be fine. He has to learn.

Guess what I bought last weekend? A video-camera! I thought it was a good chance to make some clips for you to see what it is really like here now.