Heaven's Edge (3 page)

I find it so much easier to talk into the camera than to write, but there hasn't been enough time to use it much. I am sending you this first cassette, as a starter.

Someday, when this business is all over, I really want to bring Marc here with me. I want to show him this place the way Dad did with me on that wonderful trip I had with him all those years ago. I found something then, locked inside myself, although it took a journey of love, years later, to release it. I want Marc to understand why I had to come
back, and what I found on this island, because I hope, one day, that he will too.

My love to you both,
Lee.

He had found a dream, even though Eldon had always insisted his – ours – was an island where dreamers often have to destroy their dreams, if they are not to be destroyed by them.

I had never been shown the video by my mother or by my grandmother. Perhaps they couldn't bear to. Perhaps they both feared the effect it would have on me. But all alone in my flat I watched it over and over with a mounting desire to break out.
Marc, you would love it
… he promised from every fugitive frame. Listening to the voice of my father calling me from the emerald island that had once been his father's home, the place of my parents' conjugal romance, I realised I too had to go to find something more. There was nothing for me in London.

I handed my flat over to a management agency and put my few remaining possessions into long-term storage. All my other assets I converted into cash deposits. The man at the bank warned me, ‘Global access does not include bunkers in war-zones, you realise, don't you?' I explained that the island I was going to was not an actual war zone any more and that, in any case, I could easily carry enough dollars to last me six months or more out there. My young banker did not look convinced. ‘Nobody knows what goes on in those trouble spots.'

I said that was precisely why I wanted to go. Within three weeks I was on my way.

That evening, rocking on my Palm Beach Hotel deckchair, close to the pulse of a warm sea, I thought about my
encounter in the jungle. She was not what I had come looking for, but her appearance made me feel I might discover something of what I had been missing.

The next day I was impatient to get back to the duckweed pond. I wanted to hear what else she could tell me. Or already, perhaps, I just wanted to be with her. I couldn't be sure she'd return; my only hope was to be there at the same time as before.

After the usual bland lunch at the hotel, I set off back into a world of field glasses and feathers. The sun was piercing, but I didn't care.

When I reached the pond, I noticed the water was rimmed with scum. A small lily had opened near where we had stood the day before. It had some colour: a tinge of red on the lower petals. The weeds on the bank also seemed a little darker. I tried to locate the tree that her birds had flown to, but there were no fruits to be seen anywhere.

There were no clouds, no wind. The heat seemed more severe than before. I sat in the shade to wait. I had a flask of drinking water with me this time, but it didn't help. There was not much I could do to relieve the burning I felt inside.

I tried again to meditate; to balance the heat inside and outside my body. I was close to a kind of equilibrium, when the thrashing of wings startled me. I twisted around. She stood there just as I had remembered her. A radiant face, her whole body held taut. Only her hair seemed a little more tousled. She had the same cage open; another dove was flapping in her hand. This time she was not surprised to see me.

‘You disappeared,' I complained, rising up to my feet.

She lifted the bird up to her face and came close to me. ‘So? You are back, no?'

I wanted her to talk some more, yet I could say nothing to encourage her. I was worried I might blurt out something stupid again. I felt she was looking at me, assessing me, even while she soothed the bird. In her hair I noticed a scrap of yellow. As I reached to remove the leaf, it unfolded into a small butterfly and fluttered towards the water.

She shrank back. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘I thought there was something stuck.' My hand felt detached. It floated between us. A stick in limbo. I pictured my father meeting my mother somewhere on the coast of this same island. What did he say standing in sand?

‘Why have you come?' she asked.

I couldn't tell her it was because of some old home video. I couldn't even say that it was because I wanted to see her again.

‘There's nothing left here, you know?'

‘What about those?' I nodded at her cage.

She sighed and seemed to relax a little. ‘The birds?'

‘Where are they from?'

‘My ashram.' She paused.

I told her that there were ashrams where I came from too, but they were meant for people stressed out by city life.

‘Your city?'

‘London.' I hesitated.

She nodded with a small grimace as though I had said enough for her to imagine the rest. She then told me how her mother had wanted to create an ashram for all the birds of the air because she believed they were the souls of us all. Emerald doves were her favourites. ‘Come, I'll show you a nest.' She took my hand in hers and led me towards
the trees as though it was the most natural thing in the world to do.

I had never felt a touch like hers. Her skin was soft, yet the grip firm. I looked at her small hand; her fingers wrapped around the ends of mine. The knuckles were smooth. A greenish vein swelled on the back of her hand; her wrist was chafed where her bracelet had rubbed it. I could feel the life in her.

I curled my fingers to let the blood in them flow closer to hers.

All along the forest path dark ferns genuflected as she brushed past. Noli-me-tangere, she said they were called. By an old mudbank she pointed out a litter of pigs she said she had released to the wild and, in the distance, her favourite trees. ‘Over there, in the older jungle where nobody goes, is my farm.' She pressed her finger to my lips leaving me a crystalline trace to savour from the giddy whorls on her skin. ‘Illegal. Nobody knows.' She nearly smiled again.

I was intrigued. She didn't say any more about it; I could see she wasn't ready to take me there yet.

She let go of me and used both her hands to clear a way through the bushes. I smothered her small sandal marks with my larger treads, watching the curve of her neck as she bent her head to go under some branches. I had to stoop lower to follow her. Her bare foot straightened, ahead of me, as she stood on tiptoe to climb over a fallen tree trunk. The bone of her brown ankle peeped from under the denim as she lifted her leg over. ‘Come on, this way,' she urged.

Then, in a clump of straw saplings, she uncovered a secret woven nest for me. ‘This is one of the halfway houses.' She blew a small blue fluffy feather up into the air; there was nothing else in it. She explained that it was where she nursed the birds who were slow to regain their foraging instincts.
Pulling the branches back over the nest, she concealed it as before. Further on, underneath the ironwood tree, she found the corpse of one which had come to grief. She picked up the little sunbird and folded in its wings. Her face dipped, solemn but not tearful. ‘Oh-oh,' she clucked like someone who had grown too fast into the world. ‘It is not easy for them, you know, to learn to be free.'

I felt a tingle run down my spine. I had come to learn too. Perhaps the eroded coast I had reached was, after all, the right place to start on this island. Watching her bury the bird under a small mound of leaves I wondered, was this the person who could show me what I really needed to know?

She covered our tracks and dusted her hands, looking around thoughtfully. Then she turned to me and said it was time to take me back. ‘The path can be tricky, you know, when it gets dark. Sometimes the night patrols are trigger-happy.'

I wasn't sure whether I should hold her hand again. I swung mine close as we sauntered out into the open, but she seemed too busy thinking about military manoeuvres to notice.

When we reached the edge of the village, she said, ‘I must go now.'

‘When can I see you again?' I asked.

‘Tomorrow. Same place, the same time again. I have lots more birds to bring.' She looked up at the darkened sky above me, filling it with wings. A nervous quiver ran down her throat. In my mind I turned it to that laugh from the previous day, still hovering inside her, waiting to break free.

I felt hollow after she had gone, emptier than before. The
breeze was warm, but there was something cold under my skin as if I carried winter in my bones. I felt I had crossed a line that split the world and me; I was both lost and found at the same time. ‘Sindbad was the bugger', my grandfather used to say tapping his head with his finger, ‘who showed us how we forget what we should remember – the dangers of the voyage – and remember what we should forget: the place we must leave behind.' Eldon always had some dictum or other to fix every moment in its place. I had none of my own and, at that moment, I couldn't even tell the sea from the shore.

I made my way, reluctantly, to the entrance of the hotel. The building seemed to have sunk further into the ground. The lights were low. The gates which were usually open had been locked. It didn't worry me. I was too absorbed with what was happening inside me. I clanked the chain several times and, finally, a young security guard appeared. I didn't recognise him but he smiled shyly when he saw me. He too seemed to know who I was. He slung his short-barrelled gun over his shoulder and fumbled with the padlock.

‘Late, sir,' he remarked with a surreptitious eagerness.

‘I was out walking,' I replied, surprised to find yet another person keen to speak. What was going on? ‘Why is it locked so early?' There had been no curfew as such before.

He grinned, dragging back the gate and letting me through. ‘Today's order, sir. Power is down.' He looked pleased at being so informative.

‘I haven't seen you before. Are you new?' I asked.

His gawky face opened again into a broken smile. One of his teeth was missing. ‘Just came, sir.' He swayed in youthful enthusiasm. The gun slipped off his shoulder. He grabbed at it, but then the chain slithered out of his hand pulling a bag from his belt and spilling its contents around his feet.

I picked up the gun, a crude stripped-down assault rifle, while he scrabbled around for the other bits. I asked him his name.

‘Nirali, sir.' There was a dimple in his chin that rolled when he moved his lips.

‘I'm glad you can talk, Nirali,' I said, handing him his gun. ‘Nobody else in this hotel seems to want to.'

‘Yes, sir.' He grinned again and tucked the weapon under his arm. ‘I like to, sir.'

‘Good.' I was pleased at the way things were turning out. ‘My name, by the way, is Marc.'

‘Yes, sir. Goodnight, sir. See you tomorrow, sir.'

‘Goodnight, Nirali.'

At the deserted front desk I rang the bell and waited. After a little while a familiar ghoulish figure ambled out of a back room, holding up a lantern. I asked for my key and room service.

‘We can give only sandwich tonight,' he grumbled. ‘Shrimp paste.' He turned the wick of his lamp down in obeisance to some malevolent shadow behind him.

‘That's fine,' I shrugged. ‘Shrimp paste will do fine.'

In my room I lit a candle and waited for the meagre meal to arrive. I snapped open a beer and tried to reflect on the changes that had taken place. The dreary hotel no longer bothered me. The air was clearing. Nirali, the security guard, reminded me of the picture I had of my father. Something in that uneven enthusiastic smile, an echo perhaps, as in his name.

But her name meant even more. Her name, she had said, was Uva, and I said it again to myself: Uva. I recognised it as the name of my grandfather's favourite strong black tea, but she told me it was the name of a region of high mountains, the home of venerable old gods and forest folk in perennial
rebellion. ‘We have always had to fight for our freedom,' she had grinned, ‘against waves and waves of your brass-balled colonisers.'

The following afternoon she was there again, just as she had promised. She had her cage with her as before, but she looked different. Dressed up, even though the T-shirt and jeans were the same. I stared, keeping my distance, unsure where we had left off the previous evening; where we stood now. She had scrunched her hair back and wore a necklace that looked like a string of teeth.

‘Fangs?' I asked.

She looked puzzled.

‘Around your neck? Are those fangs?'

She looked down at her chest and broke into a laugh, making me laugh too, not knowing why nor caring.

‘They're beads, no? Wooden beads only.'

‘Oh, I see.' I felt hot, clammy, searching for something else to say. ‘Birds. Those are more birds?' The words leapt out.

She twirled the beads with her fingers, feeling for their shapes.

I reached for her cage, but she moved it away. ‘No. Wait.'

I waited, remembering herons by a river, spring flowers adrift, the hasty ejaculations of early youth.

She opened the cage and a small brown salaleena whistled. Uva squinted and pursed her lips in reply. The bird stuck its head out, peered one way and then the other, and then flew out. I watched the muscles in her face ripen.

I didn't know what I wanted to happen next. I was not a youngster any more. If I had seen her on the
Twickenham bridge, casting bread, I would have heaved back my shoulders and walked on, assuming our worlds would never even rhyme. But by her green duckweed pond I felt I had entered another universe. I stood there giftless and gormless.

She looked up at me, quizzically. ‘Have you never seen salaleenas before?'

I tried, incoherently, to catch the threads of our failing conversation.

‘Have you?' she repeated. ‘No?'