Heaven's Edge (6 page)

‘You'll be taken to your quarters now,' the doctor said, scribbling some more on a pad. He went on to explain that I was not a prisoner, but only temporarily restricted. ‘You'll get what you need, until a decision is made. You see, you were an unfortunate obstruction in an incident yesterday.' My dollars and my watch had been confiscated, but he assured me that I would be given a ration of tokens to use in due course. He discharged me into the custody of two soldiers who were lounging outside. ‘Your suitcase is in the van already.'

The back of the vehicle had no windows. I couldn't see where we were going. When we stopped and I was let out, I didn't recognise the area at all. It was bleaker and dryer than anywhere I'd been. There was no hint of the sea.

I was led into a compound of concrete cells. Each with one barred window and a metal door. There were about a dozen of them; none of them looked occupied.

A soldier pointed mine out and also showed me the standpipe and the latrine. The other informed me that food
would be brought once a day to the sentry-point on the main road at the end of the lane. He used his gun to indicate the direction I should take. ‘Come at first whistle.'

‘I can walk there?' I asked.

He nodded. ‘But fences are electric,' he warned.

After the soldiers left, I saw some dark figures scuttling in and out of another compound, across the way. I tried make some contact, wondering if Uva might be among them, but no one responded. I gave up. I couldn't see any women there, and the men looked as though they belonged to some religious sect. We may not have been in prison but each area was fenced in; theirs did not seem to have a gate opening on to the same dusty lane that mine did. I guessed the only entrance was via the main road, and presumably restricted.

I was still in a state of shock, I suppose, and went to sleep before dark.

The military whistle in the morning was a siren designed to oppress as much as awake. With each passing minute heat rose and the vibrating air thickened. I got myself ready as quickly as I could, but when I stepped out into the lane I felt the sun had already warped the earth. In the phosphorus dust by the gate a big black beetle lay upside-down, its thorax chewed into a crater. I stuck to the edge, walking beneath the trees, a shade or two less in temperature. The border bristled with brittle weeds, clumps of spearheads. In places I could see nests of red termites devouring the earth.

At the sentry-point I found I was the only one there to collect provisions. The soldier on guard pointed some device at my head, presumably to check my ID against his register.

There wasn't much to eat; only bread and a coconut mix –
no fruit, no vegetables, no meat – but I knew it would have to do for the whole day.

On the other side of the main road, I could see the boundary of an army camp. I thought I could feel the ground shudder all morning to the ritual stomp of boots there.

Some time later, the whistle blew again – two blasts – to denote midday, I guessed.

When the sun finally began to drop, I walked down the lane going in the opposite direction to the main road. I found a wood-apple rotting on a barbed wire, and then, at the end of the lane, a shrunken waterhole that reminded me of where I had first seen Uva.

Each day, thereafter, I would go to the waterhole and watch it shrink another crimped ripline, imagining it was her duckweed pond in mourning. Each day, using my pair of ruby binoculars, I would search the trees before the pulping of the sun, looking for an ash dove or another green imperial pigeon, but there were none of her feathered souls anywhere to be seen. I wanted to believe they would reappear, re-adorned, singing for a greener world, as she must, but all I ever saw was the erratic dive of a single mutilated tree-frog, or a stray fox-bat riding a heatwave. I had to accept the compound was much further inland than I had ever been with her.

Every evening I would wait by the mudrim for seepal-flares to light and only then retrace my steps to the concrete compound, dreaming sometimes that I might find myself returning to the safe suburb where I had been born.

On my tenth evening at the waterhole, watching the sun sink, I saw a pair of stretched leather wings collapse midway to nowhere; a fox snout swung. A sharp explosion echoed
and the creature back-flapped, stalled, fell two cubits before regaining the lift needed to glide in on a lower warmstream to the dry scrub and ghost trees of the jungle. A few minutes later, a jeep came careering through the dark blaring announcements in English and several other languages that I couldn't quite make out. There was to be a market day in Maravil. Everyone in the area was allowed to go on the morning bus. I could hardly believe it: a chance to go into the city where Uva had friends. A chance to find out if she, at least, had managed to get away. All evening I watched small deformed geckos twitch their plasma tails to the beat of crippled, brainless gnats hoping, like them, for a change in tempo.

I was up before the whistle blew the next morning. I had time to prepare – to squat, to rinse, to breakfast on stale bread – before setting out.

On the way to the main road, I caught sight of two buffaloes. One was trying to mount the other. The cow stumbled and the two beasts crashed into the trees. Then, behind the animals, a troop of soldiers appeared, jeering. They fired a few shots into the huddle. The male keeled over and the cow bolted, ripping the skin of her belly.

I have never been one easily angered, but my blood began to rise. If I had a gun, I suppose I might have used it. Then I remembered my grandfather piously quoting a pundit of his youth, ‘Violence can only condemn you to more violence.' I understood that, but in my head I also heard my dead father, Lee, retort, ‘Sometimes doing nothing condemns you more.'

The soldiers fired again, and went after the cow.

*    *    *

The bus appeared as a small yellow shimmering glob shaking itself out of a mirage pool. At the checkpoint a soldier ran a stick instrument under the vehicle. After he completed the inspection, one of his colleagues got on and the bus shuddered forward to the loading point. I was the only person waiting; my neighbours were at their own stop. The soldier checked me and allowed me to climb in.

Small fluorescent dots flashed on a screen by the steering wheel. The driver took no notice. He shoved another cud into his mouth and revved the engine. That morning there were no signs of any provisions. Only a few silent, weary people glued to rough vinyl benches. I sat by a window which had been smeared with oil and dust and stared out as if to carve my own route through the hot air.

A solitary drongo dropped from the sky and settled on the road ahead, its Y-tail sweeping a small arc in the dust. From Uva I thought, trying hard to contain my excitement. A messenger like the swallows I used to watch in my childhood; couriers from afar who had seemed to bear on each feather a signal for me from my absent father. It waited, without a sound, and took off when we began to move.

After picking up more silent passengers at the next stop, we rumbled down through a grove of stripped jacaranda trees and, eventually, reached an iron bridge built over a river of slow-moving green goo. The geometric shapes of the metal girders and the slabs of rock and mud were like the images in the glossy, chromatic photos I used to slip out of my father's envelopes as a child. He must have been here, I remember thinking, before this entire area degenerated.

On the other side of the river were the remains of an oil-palm plantation. I hadn't seen any before, but Uva had said that there were vast tracts of these inland. Each tree had been puffed to a regulation height before being allowed to wither either as a result of mismanagement, or by being junked as a project of an earlier regime.

I reckoned we travelled about twenty-five kilometres before reaching the coast where the plantation reverted back to coconut and lime. The sand was white with pulverised sea skeletons. There were white flecks in the sea too; small sodium pennants gathering together to rush the shore.

We came to a lagoon and I felt a hint of the optimism of my sea-crossing seep back into me. Uva had told me about a lagoon. Wrinkling up her face in distaste, she had explained that between the hotel and Maravil was a lagoon with a factory fish farm. Despite her disapproval, I felt a little less lost; but when I breathed in, the stink of prawns simmering made me want to retch. The land ahead was bent into a finger that seemed to reach right into my throat.

A little later the bus took another turn. Ahead of us the white cupolas of Maravil rose out of the scrag. High above another drongo circled, crying for its mate.

Most of Maravil had been built quickly after the older cities of the province had been destroyed. Therefore the main buildings were all formed out of identical cheap concrete blocks. The only distinguishing feature I could see were the domed roofs that a few of the taller ones had. According to Uva, the market square and the underground mall, originally a tourist project, were all that remained of the old town.

The bus slowed down. There were several vehicles on the road: we passed a lorry full of onions, a motor-cart
heaped with coconuts, a sweaty refrigerated prawn truck, all gibbering towards the centre.

At a massive monument of a soldier, the bus turned left and ran alongside a canal until it reached the depot. About half a dozen other run-down buses had been crammed in, and more people than I had ever seen on the island. I climbed down from the bus and went over to a display board: a simplified map of the city and its surroundings with large areas to the north and the south blanked out. The canal and the market hall were outlined in red. I worked out our route. The compound, I figured, was in the shaded circle at the eastern end of the road. The Palm Beach Hotel and the village, therefore, had to be one of the settlements in the green stretch north of the lagoon. I stepped back to take in more of the map at a glance.

‘You need pass?' A small, plump man peered from behind the board. ‘Night pass, valid sundown-sunup. For Carnival Mall.'

I remembered Uva explaining that the mall was where her Jaz worked. ‘Let's see?' I asked the tout.

The man's mouth shifted into a crude hook. ‘Come, now.'

‘What?'

‘Come.' The man pulled out a round metal clam and prised it open. He checked the time. ‘You do for me my asking for this much.' He indicated the passing of an illicit hour.

‘Do what?'

‘First agree.'

I shook my head, even though I was tempted.

‘No hard work,' the man leered. ‘Only pig stick.'

I didn't know what he meant. All I could think of was the barbaric pastime where hunters on horseback stuck
spears into squealing hogs. I couldn't see this man doing that.

‘Maybe later,' I said.

The little man's nose twitched as the wind broke behind him. ‘Later may be too late. Passes go fast. This be the rub-rub night. But do what you like. No problem for me.'

I felt a small flutter of uncertainty inside, but I crushed it and moved on.

I could hear the market before I reached it. A low drone of electricity and the flapping of tarpaulins punctuated by the occasional sharp cry of a hawker. The street that led down to it was strewn with garbage and litter. A Roman arch framed the entrance and there was a soldier on duty outside it. He watched me pass through without stopping me.

The square inside was lined with small handcarts selling dubious-looking snacks and beverages: burnt gram, yeasty juices, dried molasses, wrinkled sausage sticks. Throngs of dishevelled people mooched about, looking rather than buying. The first vendor I passed sparked out of his mouth, ‘Fizz, fizz, fizz.' Others near him then began to ululate softly, swaying from side to side. They looked as malnourished as the people milling around, especially compared to the young soldiers stationed on the steps.

The main hall was a type of structure I recognised from Eldon's history books, favoured in the past for recurrent displays of collective hubris: a large rectangular plinth with a series of columns supporting an angular roof. Under it, the area seemed to be divided into blocks. I could see vegetable stalls in the first row. Flesh, I noticed, was sold in a separate shed, where I supposed the smell of blood would not cloud the minds of the new recruits patrolling outside.

An old woman tipped a wicker basket containing a couple of deformed moon radishes towards me and waved her fingers in the air. ‘Two one, two one.' Her loose breasts wobbled perilously in a cradle of dirty lace. Her face was streaked with a bitter, dark stain. I ignored her. I wanted information, not vegetables: something to help me find Uva, or her friends, or a consul.

Skirting a scattering of blemished aubergines and a few convoluted runner beans, I headed for the centre of the hall. There was no fruit anywhere to be seen. I remembered how Uva had explained to me that the authorities stipulated what could be grown and at what price it could be sold. She could not, however, explain to me why they didn't allow fruit. Why were her fruits and eggs and birds such a threat? When I said it made no sense to me she replied, ‘Sense is not what they are about.'

The layout inside the hall was familiar. Markets have not changed, Eldon liked to say, in three thousand years; not in design, purpose or ethics.

Right in the middle I found a stall with a sign in English: Zengporium. An owlish man wearing spectacles was serving two elderly men. Uva had spoken about a trader called Zeng, but I couldn't be sure this was the same man. I took my time and sauntered up to the counter, hoping to hear something. The transaction was completed with hardly a word and the two customers shuffled away. The trader seemed very cool. I examined the small cellophane packets of arrowroot he had in front and then decided to take a chance. ‘Uva says you have passes for the Carnival.'

He didn't move a muscle.

‘Do you?'

His face contracted a little. ‘Where'd she go?'