Heaven's Edge (20 page)

In the centre of the house there was enough light from a small spiral staircase to see a cane settee, a dresser and two wooden trunks. In a corner, a small glass-fronted case held some old almanacs and magazines. There was a yellowed newspaper clipping tacked to the side: a picture of a small padded batsman leaping up, both feet off the ground, hitting a cricket ball high into the sky.

The big trunks were like treasure chests: packed with sheets, towels, sarongs, cotton quilts. To me they all seemed pristine despite being threadbare.

The orderliness with which everything had been packed
away, except for the football, suggested a house that was never permanently occupied. Every item was storable, kept for periodic not constant use. The place had not been abandoned in a hurry; the family it belonged to seemed to have closed up the house at the end of one weekend, and gone away never to come back.

Some people are able to do that, I guess; perhaps have to do that: close the door and never look back, never return. Perhaps it is what everyone wants to do. After Eldon died, I remember his old friend Anton's refrain: ‘Leave the past behind, Cleo. Pack your bags. I'll help you move somewhere new.' But she wouldn't. She said she wanted to stay while Eldon's beloved roses continued to bloom, and she still had the strength to tend to their neat suburban beds.

Exploring the house I felt I too might be able to keep some faith here.

There were two rooms, one on either side of the stairway, each with two beds. The smaller one, stencilled with birds and fish, had a toy cupboard crammed full of jigsaws, board games and crumpled inflatables for the pool. It felt safe despite what had happened to the rest of the region. Perhaps Samandia was the preserve of the gods. I was ready to believe it.

The upper floor turned out to be a large open arena where the slanted roof had been extended to form the only wall. The other sides were shielded by nylon tats which dropped below the edge of a wooden balustrade. From the front I could see a riot of pinks and oranges. Colours that seemed profoundly familiar. Beyond the flowers, where the sand gave way to tough wild grass, coconut palms reached up towards the sky, and beyond them tall jungle trees sprouted
small red flames. Just to look at the jumble of blossom, the shimmering herringbone fronds, was to revel in life that seemed amaranthine. I could live here, I told myself then as Jaz might have. There was even an enclosed crop garden and several fruit trees, including mango.

As I surveyed my new domain two ring-neck parakeets screeched past, their short wings furiously beating the warm thick air. They shot between the trees – fast, hard, green bullets – and headed towards the lake I had come from. Their screeches echoed the glee of similar parakeets arriving in Eldon's garden one summer. I had been the first to notice the new migrants on the Victoria plum tree that spread its long, arching branches over the rose bushes. There were three of them, startlingly green, seeming to climb out of my jungle book then, ripping into the soft mildewed fruit with their bright red beaks. I dragged Eldon out to look at them because the old man had not believed me. ‘There are no parakeets in this country, my dear boy.' But I was right; they were parakeets, and they thrived in his garden, the botanical gardens nearby, and all the fruit orchards of southern England, adding vivid colours, loud songs and unexpected eating habits to the jetscuffed end of his brittle British century.

Marooned on this hallucinogenic island, I felt I had finally reached the original home of those chance migrants and the other brightly coloured birds that had fascinated me all my boyhood. I was convinced that this, not the Palm Beach coast, was my actual haven – my real destination. Hers and mine.

In a storeroom I discovered mattresses wrapped in plastic, charcoal, paraffin, candles, a carton of matchboxes and a
case of arrack. Right at the back a vintage rifle, protected by an oilcloth, and a box of bullets. The rifle had a brass name-plate pinned to its wooden stock: Lee-Enfield. I was delighted.

I wanted to explore the other sheds and huts to see what else I might recognise, but I was ravenous by then. From the walled enclosure I collected a gourd, some okra, various wild fruit and a handful of speckled beans and brought them back to the house. The flesh of the gourd was hard and needed to be boiled. Using some twigs from the garden I set about making a fire in the stone stove outside. It took several attempts. Eldon would have been appalled: ‘You must learn the basics of survival. How to make a fire, walk without water, control your sphincter. You have to be prepared for anything, my boy, and be completely self-sufficient.' I remembered him telling me how on their famous trip together, he and Lee had trekked for hours through the last remaining rainforest of the island in search of a smoking waterfall and a leopard without spots. ‘I couldn't keep up,' Eldon confessed stifling a guffaw. ‘Your father could trek all day without even stopping for a pee. He learned to survive, you see, on nothing but his wits and a bit of self-control.'

Finally I had discovered, it was exactly what I needed to learn too.

That night, watching the candlelight, I couldn't stop the final images of Jaz and Kris from returning. I tried to recall our earlier moments together instead. Especially Jaz presenting his elegant vegetarian dishes, chatting in his easy way, wheedling persistently whenever his curiosity was aroused; giving the few precious days we had in Farindola a rare charm.

I remembered how one evening he had flourished a kitchen knife and done his little Torvill dance, using a tea-towel as a mask. ‘Look at this. It's so sharp you could split a lentil with it.'

Something in the way he held it spun me back.

‘What's wrong?'

‘Nothing. You just remind me of someone.'

‘A real devil?'

‘My mother, actually,' I blurted out.

His eyes widened, tickled by the thought. ‘Really. Tell me about her. What was she like? I bet she was gorgeous.'

‘It's just the knife you were waving about. I remember her with a knife.' A fragment of a memory from the last time I had seen my mother and my father together surfaced.

‘Like Uva's?' Jaz asked surprised.

‘No.' I shook my head. ‘No, it was a kitchen knife. Like that one. She had it in her hand.' My father was back from one of his journeys abroad. My mother was in the kitchen.

‘What did she do?' Jaz asked.

I didn't know. I still don't know. ‘That is all I remember,' I said. ‘He left after that, I think. He came here for ever.'

‘Why?'

I had asked my grandmother Cleo the same question when I was older. Why did he leave? Why did he never come back? Was there an argument? I remember Cleo placing her hand over mine and speaking in a slightly husky voice. ‘You see, my dear, Lee was always fascinated by the prospect of adventure. That's why he joined the RAF. The uniform seemed so much more glamorous to him than your grandfather's flying school kit. And Lee so loved those fast fighter planes. He wanted to go faster, you know, than his dad in his little Cessna. Faster and further. But after that Gulf effort, he said he needed to believe in something that made
more sense. He seemed to think his father's old home could give him that. I told him life grows from the inside, but I guess we all need a little prompting to start us off. He spent a whole year on the island. He met your mother there. He fell in love and wanted to make it their home one day. So a few years later, when he was asked if he would go back and do some work there, he felt he couldn't refuse. I think they needed someone to help with air supplies for refugees, or something, but Eldon could never believe that the plane he was in that day was not military. He wouldn't listen to anyone. Not even me. He never forgave Lee for getting into a uniform in the first place. But I'm sure Lee wanted to show us what else he could do. You see, your father always thought he could do everything, handle anything. He wasn't really leaving you, or your mother, you know. He went because he believed he was needed there. He always said he was just going ahead, to sort a few things out. He wanted us all to be able to join him one day.'

If only that was true. If only there was a place where we would be reunited for ever with the ones that we lose. If only this was such a place. Perhaps it is. Perhaps that is what the earth is. Our world. A place where we look for those we had lost elsewhere in our previous, less evolved, lives. Could it be? But I have found nothing of his actual life here, or of any of those whom I have missed.

I didn't want to dwell on him any more that night. I thought I would try to settle down in the smaller bedroom – the child's room. The sky was visible through the window in there. I lay down looking out for the stars I knew must still be sparking somewhere. I fell asleep dreaming of fathers again; this time not mine.

*    *    *

I dreamed of a big man, sturdily built, with a large broad chest and an impressive mane of thick black hair. He wore an orange sarong and a copper armband. He carried a scythe with one hand and held a bronze spear in the other. He was standing barefoot on a beach. At his feet a peacock struggled with a silver arrow in its throat. The sky was pitch-black and there was water, impending water, everywhere. He spoke, but his words were in a language I did not understand. He knelt down and tried to remove the arrow from the bird. The arrowhead was caught in the cords of its throat. Each time he pulled the shaft, the bird would rise trying to cry but the only sound came from its flapping feathers. Beneath them the barbed wings of a steel warplane glinted. He put his foot on the bird's thin blue neck and yanked the arrow once more. The moment it came out, another arrow rushed through the air. This one pierced his own throat. Both arrows looked as though they had once belonged in his leather quiver. As he fell, he seemed to change shape into a leopard. I heard Uva cry out, calling him father. I looked around and saw her bathing in a stream. She had a cloth wrapped around her and knotted above her breasts. The cloth was wet and clung to her skin. With each bowlful of water that she poured, she seemed to dissolve. I shouted out to her but my voice couldn't reach her. The air thickened with a curtain of rain between us. The river-bank I stood on began to erode. The dotted pattern in the cloth washed away, then the cloth itself melted, leaving her naked in the brief light before her figure too went. The rain, like the waters of the river, turned red; a familiar contaminated waterhole-red. I kept calling to her. I could hear her murmuring; I floated on the contours of the sound. From the shore I entered my cell in the compound outside Maravil and tripped over a polythene bag. Inside it
were her remains: a silk skin. In my ear her voice echoed singing the praises of a cocoon.

‘Where are you?' I shouted, knowing that her presence could not have been only in that discarded shape. Her life was not just breath, but an incarnation surely of a soul wishing; wishing still to share our temporary illumination.

I heard her cry out again. The sound woke me.

I was in a sweat: my face and hands had been bitten all over. Warnings about maladies and fatal infections, the rows upon rows of repellents and prophylactics I had ignored at the chemist back at the terminal before I set off, whizzed around mocking me. My arms ached; my head was swollen. The insides of my thighs hurt. All my muscles seemed to have been twisted in the night. As I tried to unstretch, the sole of my left foot curled in a spasm. It was unbearable. I wanted to pull it apart; turn my body inside out and tear it to shreds. My skin was burning, itching, retreating. I flung off the sheet and saw my body had erupted. I tried to bend my toes but they were like stumps. I could see horns protruding, yellowed and ridged. My bones being extruded. The journey from life to death, I realised then, was an unpeeling. The converting of an inner life into an outer.

Where was the boatman who stripped back the layers?

I felt sure Uva was dead. I wanted to plunge into her darkest, thickest jungle to die too and rot; fertilise her wretched earth if nothing else.

Then an excruciating, gut-wrenching cramp wrung every tube in the pit of my body. I wanted to scream to do something to ease the pain.

I staggered out of the house into the trees, trying to keep moving. As I blundered about the jungle, punching at leaves, the sounds that had plagued me slowly receded,
the gripe eased. But even there it seemed Eldon had to have the last word. I don't know why, or how, he came to be the arbiter of my whole life. I couldn't stop him. ‘We all have a vision of the world as it should be, and our place in it.' He launched into another of his little sermons. ‘But for most of us it takes a lifetime to discover it.' Good, I was exhausted. My life was over. I wanted no more of his dodgy homilies. I wanted everything to be over. There seemed no point in drawing it out. Stop breathing, I told myself, and soon it would end. But then, a little further on, I heard the sound of another breath: a lung exhaling, inhaling. Slow, deliberate, difficult breathing. There was nothing to be seen that could be making the sound until, in a clump of overgrown roots, I spied a small brown huddle. A foot clawed the air as if trying to get a hold of something to push it further into the centre. The creature tired quickly and lay with its eyes half closed. I made a soothing, clucking sound and pushed some leaves towards it. There was no reaction. I touched it. The fur was warm. It still did not react. I thought it must have died, sapped by its last effort to escape, and touched it again, feeling warm meat underneath. This time it did move, revealing a wound on its arm. I tried to shift the awkward limb and the monkey whimpered. It is sometimes kinder to kill, I remembered.

I couldn't. I felt a bond. Evolution was not the survival of the fittest. Our evolution must come from the survival of the weak, retrieved against the odds, I realised. It must matter, otherwise why would we care about anyone? How could I have felt anything meaningful for Uva, if we were only the random firing of some scattered neurones; the accidental binding of chemicals in a pointless law of cosmic efficiency? I could see then why I had to value life over death. Any life, including mine.