In World City (2 page)

Miranda Whitlam, looking for something to do, picked her way past the packing cases and went into her father's study. Since her mother died, Miranda had not dared speak to her father while he was working, but she had dared go in and be with him and had found her intrusions unresisted. As usual, he was seated at his desk, staring into his computer screen. She hovered around for a while, picking things up from the desk and putting them down again: a personal organiser, a battered leather-bound book, a pen with ‘Rio Sheraton' written on it, some Chinese coins. She let her finger track the luminous coloured inlay that cascaded down the dark-grey casing of the computer screen.

She took a breath and asked, “Daddy, what are you doing?”

She waited, aware that he had not lifted his eyes when she came in and that he was not lifting them to her now. At least he had not ordered her to be quiet or leave the room – although that might have been more interesting than this pointed disregard.

She waited a little longer but there was still not the slightest flicker of acknowledgement. Holding back her impulse to repeat the question, she set off on the round of the study that had been her original intention. It had been enough that she had dared speak to him in there. Trying to force the issue might result in summary dismissal.

Her first stop was the stone fireplace. Its lintel had carved crests that were now hardly visible, so worn had they been by the generations of cold men who had warmed themselves there. But Miranda could run her fingers across the shallow indentations and still make out the patterns. She had drawn them once and pinned the pictures up in her room, where her tutor, Lissel, had seen them and said they dated back to the sixteenth century. Miranda liked Lissel and had told her father so, thus ending the steady turnover, which Miranda had understood to be the natural consequence of the dislike she had expressed for her previous tutors. Lissel could catch on to Miranda's interests and change the course of her teaching accordingly. So, Miranda's fireplace pictures had set in train a series of lessons on what Europe had been like in the olden days, when there were still great forests of wildwood covering the land and men hunted bears.

In winter, her father would sometimes burn logs in the fireplace and Miranda could sit, feeling the tingling heat of real fire on her face while gazing into the glowing chasms between the logs. In the morning, instead of the fiery landscapes, there was a waste of ashes with charred stumps of unburned log protruding and only the smell of wood smoke still lingering to remind her of the warmth of the night before. In summer, there were no fires, only a basket with dried flowers. She stared at the flowers, but remembered the ashes. “This is the Land of Ashes,” she said. She still hoped Lissel might be coming with her when they left.

Miranda approved of the Land of Ashes. It was what she would make of the wildwood that she could see from the window of her room at the back of the house. Her father called it the forest when she asked him to cut it down and talked about the value of the old hardwoods growing there. But Miranda knew it was really the wildwood, the same wildwood Lissel had told her had once stretched all the way across Europe and had still been vast when the manor was first granted to some favoured commander back in the Middle Ages.

Lissel came from Germany and gave Miranda stories to read set in the old times of the great forests of her native country. Miranda had read them all and wished she hadn't. They had made her imagine the wildwood and the things that lived in the shadows beneath the trees and now the images wouldn't leave her. Even imagining her room as a royal castle from which she could command the forests to be cut down didn't push away those images. Once, trying to force back the shadows, she had managed to lose herself on the edge of her father's wildwood so one of the dogs had to come to find her.

Her father said it was a miracle the forest had been preserved the way it had and talked about the return the naturally-grown wood might now bring him. On the other side of the house, away from the wildwood, there was a small farm with some old-fashioned sheep and pigs. Miranda enjoyed going to see the sheep and pigs. As princess in her royal castle, she still tried to imagine the farm multiplied a hundredfold, so that it would obliterate all traces of the wildwood.

The track to the next land was normally along the perimeter of the Persian carpet that covered all but a three-foot border of the polished oak floor. But the floor was now so cluttered with boxes and packing that Miranda had to take a more meandering track. This was the way it was through most of the house now. For the past two weeks, people she didn't know had been arriving and putting things in boxes; then, when the boxes were full, they had loaded them into vans and driven away. Other strangers had come with clipboards and tape measures and yet others had come to clean and rearrange the furniture. Miranda had watched as the last traces of her mother's imprint on the house had been obliterated. Her mother had been Japanese and had brought to the house a clarity and space Miranda had noticed and liked. A car crash had been a stupidly messy way for her to die.

The next land was the settee, above which towered the stone-framed window. Miranda climbed up on the cushions and looked out on sunlit gardens, which were bounded by the farm she so liked. Steps led away from a broad terrace, down through carefully-cut box hedges to the lawns beyond. The head gardener was working on one of the beds. On the few occasions he had spoken to her he had been gruff and dismissive and Miranda was rather afraid of him. In contrast to tutors, Miranda's expressions of dislike led to no turnover of gardeners. Now, standing at the window, she pretended she owned him and imagined telling him to pack his bags immediately. “This is the Land of the Princess,” she said. She could see her cat stretched out in the afternoon sun on the warm stones of the terrace, giving himself an occasional lick.

Miranda had asked Donnell what the people were doing, putting things in boxes, measuring the house, cleaning and rearranging. Asking her father, she wasn't sure she would get a reply she could trust, but asking his chief bodyguard would result in some kind of truth.

“They're fitting the place out in case your father decides to let it,” Donnell had said.

“What's letting?”

“When we move out, other people can live here and pay your father for the privilege.”

That, at least, had made sense. But just to make sure, Miranda had put the same question to Lissel. Lissel had replied, “A lot of it is being sold. Mostly they are the things that your mother bought for the house. I think that the rest of your family's personal things are being put into store or are going with you. Not much is going with you, I think. The place you are going to is much smaller.”

“Will where we're going be big enough for all of us?”

“Oh, I expect so,” Lissel said without conviction and Miranda had known then that it would be just herself, her father and perhaps Donnell who would be going.

Miranda moved on round the perimeter of her father's study to arrive beneath bookshelves that climbed up the wall facing the fireplace. She peered for a while into the eye-level gaps where books were propped against each other. Sometimes she could see little insects scurrying around, or spiders sitting waiting. There was nothing there today, so she stared up at the baleful immensity of books above her. “This is the Land of the Daddies,” she said darkly, and looked around quickly to catch the slight compression in her father's lips as he stared into his computer screen, pretending not to have heard.

At the beginning of the great upheaval, she had asked him, ‘Is there something wrong?' At first he had said there wasn't; then he had said they needed a change and he had decided they should go abroad for a while. He said he had identified a new business opportunity he wanted to supervise personally. He said he needed some new horizons. She listened to him saying the same things to others, the kinds of people he had talked cheerfully and casually to in the past, the kind of people who might have been his friends. But to the kind of people he talked to on his mobile phone, he said things like, ‘What do you mean – he'll tell the Commissioners?' ‘Get me Mancewicz on the line immediately. What do you mean – I can only talk to his lawyer?' ‘I tell you, I've got nothing to fear from him. What does he want, anyway?' ‘The hell those bastards can have the institute. I set it up and I say what goes there.'

Miranda moved on round to her last and favourite land. Its wall was covered in a tapestry. In the foreground of the tapestry picture were a few trees framing men with axes shouldered and dogs about their feet. A long time ago she had asked her mother who the men were and her mother had said they were woodsmen. ‘In the old days they used to cut down trees for timber and keep the forest paths clear.'

Miranda liked the woodsmen and their dogs. She imagined the wildwood filled with them, the men clearing great open spaces and the dogs chasing out all the dark things that lived deep amongst the trees. Beyond the woodsmen and their dogs, the picture opened out onto a forest-free landscape of rolling fields and tiny villages with church spires and thatched cottages. In the early evening, in summer, the light shone through the stone-framed window directly onto the tapestry landscape. Shortly after her mother was killed, Miranda had sneaked into the study one summer evening without her father knowing. She had stared at the picture and the light falling on it until the image had come alive and she had felt herself able to walk into that clear, open, pastoral land. It had been more real than looking through the window opposite and it was a world without end. She had been ready to believe that if she entered that world she might find her mother in there, her mother whose body she had not been allowed to see, who had simply disappeared one day.

Miranda had been about to step into the tapestry but then her father had come in and broken the spell and the scene had never come alive like that again. Yet she still believed her mother was in there and that one day, when the evening light was on the picture and her father was out of the room, she might be able to step into the picture once more and they would be reunited. “This is the Land of Forever and Ever Amen,” she announced. She gazed into the distances of the tapestry, willing the land to open up before her. Then, after a while, she returned to the Land of Ashes to complete the circuit.

“Daddy, what are you doing?”

Surprisingly, he turned and beckoned her over. “Come here, I'll show you,” adopting the tone he used when he knew she wouldn't understand but he would tell her anyway.

“You see that?” he said, pointing at the image on the screen.

A gorgeous and intricate filigree of glittering lines and lights radiated from a starburst in the centre of the screen.

“It's lovely. What is it?”

“That star in the centre is my hand.” He looked into her eyes, placing his hand next to the violet starburst, raising his eyebrows as if to say, “Would you believe it?”

“Are those all the things you can reach?” she asked, pointing to a few of the scattered stars.

Her father looked mildly surprised. “Yes, they're my businesses, and other businesses I have an interest in. The stars are the core businesses, the light points are more peripheral concerns and the lines that join them together are the credit, materials and information flowing between the different cores. To make changes in the relationships between my different business interests I simply change the lines.”

Miranda stared into the screen. As usual, her father had started talking to her in a way that made sense but then had lost her. Perhaps sensing her uncertainty, he asked more familiarly, “How's your geography?”

“It's okay.”

“You see that one?” pointing to a pinpoint of brilliant red. “That's a ceramics factory outside Rio de Janeiro. And that one there's a shipping line that specialises in Pacific cargo, and the little lights around it are the ships. That green light is two days out from Shanghai heading for Valparaiso. That star is a hotel chain, and the lights around it are the individual hotels – the orange one is a new one I'm building in Berlin. And that's the island in the Caribbean that we're going to visit. I'm planning to develop it into a major tourist site. I have an agent there now and we're starting with a golf course and holiday complex.”

Miranda looked more deeply into the screen. It was a bit like the tapestry, only there were no woodsmen with dogs or wide, open landscapes. Yet you could reach in, grasp the glittering strands and change the pattern of the fabric. Then you could walk out into the world and find that something had changed as a consequence, changed in a way that you had willed. She gazed deeper still into the filigree pattern. Nothing dark could lurk in there. In there, you could shine a light in every corner, rearrange things so all was visible and you could make the world like the forest-free tapestry landscape of fields and villages.

Later, Miranda lay on the warm stones of the terrace next to her cat and watched the high clouds as the sun set. It had been a wonderfully clear, early summer day with hot sun and a fresh wind. The clouds contained an open ocean of blue she could imagine herself looking down on, with ships sailing across to visit the different cloud ports that were dotted across the sky. She imagined reaching out and, with godlike hand, moving the ships along and waving the clouds away if they got too dark.

Dion swam out to the centre of the Boeri Lake as the sun slipped down behind the surrounding lip of the lake's containing extinct volcano. There had been no eruption there for ten thousand years, plenty of time for the waters to gather in the crater. On the little information board close by, it said the lake was 134 feet deep. Dion trod water then lay back on the surface, feeling the depth beneath him. It was weird to think of all that depth – like floating in space. He watched the blue of the sky deepen. A bird somewhere in the surrounding jungle whistled a thin, high note. He felt at ease, away from school, away from his parents. He thought about his grandmother.

When he had asked her, she said she didn't turn herself into a dog, or a donkey, or a coffin; ‘Damn fockin' stupid thing to do. You want to scare people, you say boo.'

It had been hardly conceivable to him that his grandmother was a part of the popular traditions. He had just wanted to check before telling her what had happened to him after she killed the cock. But she had come back at him so severely he had felt too frightened to say any more.

So instead, he had gone off on his own to see if he could find for himself the valley where he could live forever. His place, he thought of it as – Dion's Place – the valley where he was completely himself and could live forever. It had felt high up and a long way from anywhere and he reasoned the flanks of Morne Diablotin would be a good place to start. He had set out on one of the plantation roads, which eventually dwindled into a track and then into nothing but a blank wall of jungle. Dion headed in and up and became completely lost. He was lost for a day and a night. It was his grandmother who eventually found him.

“What you thinking of, young Dion?” she asked, more curious than angry.

When he didn't answer, she said, “Anyway, whatever, you due for one hell of a hiding when you get back.”

Further down the mountainside she asked him again, “What you thinking of, Dion? You never done nothin' like that before.”

In replying, Dion was afraid he might overstep the mark again. After all, who was he to go finding places where he could live forever? But he said resolutely, “When you killed that cock up on the Cabrits, I saw the whole island and then I saw this place where I could live forever. I was looking for it.”

His grandmother inclined her head in acknowledgement of having heard then continued on down the track, humming lightly. After about five minutes, she stopped and turned back to face him. “What place is that, Dion? What place is that where you can live forever?”

There was that same severity as when he'd asked if she turned herself into a coffin and he was sure he had gone too far. But he described carefully what he had experienced: his sudden growing awareness of the entirety of the island and how that awareness had come to rest on a high, deserted valley where there was a waterfall, tumbled rocks, thick, untouched jungle and an overwhelming feeling that there he could live forever.

His grandmother was silent for some moments, then turned and carried on down the track, resuming her soft humming. After another five minutes, she again stopped to face him. “You find it then? This place where you could live forever?” inclining her head back up the jungle-clad mountainside. The question was matter-of-fact, without a trace of severity or sarcasm.

Dion shook his head. He hadn't found his place. He had found several places that looked like it – clefts in the rocks, water running over boulders, tree ferns – but none of them had felt anything like his place. His feeling of desperation had been less about being lost than finding himself so far from where he wanted to be. The places he had found had just seemed ordinary; the water much like what came out of the tap, the boulders mere lumps of rock.

His grandmother looked at him and saw his disappointment. She nodded slowly then said, “Maybe I help you find that place, Dion. You see ‘im up on the Cabrits when I call ‘im. Maybe I teach you some things.”

When they got back, his father was predictably furious. He had been distracted and inconvenienced. Dion's mother had been made anxious. After the upset subsided, Dion's grandmother said to his father, “This boy needs to explore, son. I found him for you. I'll take him in hand – get him back when you want him.”

She had begun by taking him for long walks, saying little, except to point out some tree or flower; where it was growing, how the other plants grew in relation to it, its shades of colour, the pattern of stones around its base. Sometimes she would rearrange things slightly, as if adding a brush stroke to some unfinished picture. Dion followed and watched, uncharacteristically obedient. He had seen the world change when she killed the cock up on the Cabrits and now she was showing him things that seemed somehow close to that changed world. He was interested in those things. It seemed important he get to know them better.

Edward Charles had returned to school a month after the cock was killed. He looked fit, happy and well. There was a special assembly of thanksgiving for his recovery, which most people ascribed to prayer. The headmaster announced, “It is an established fact that prayer can make all the difference in cases of serious illness. Thus each one of us can contribute to the well-being of the others in our community. You will remember that special prayers were requested for Edward when medicine was unable to help. I know that many of you prayed, and now you can see the result.” The biology teacher remarked, within Dion's hearing, that it was more likely to have been the new cytokines that had just arrived at the general hospital in Roseau.

Dion knew the world had changed when his grandmother had worked magic on Edward's behalf and did not doubt she had been responsible. He asked Edward what he thought about getting better and Edward had replied, “My mum and dad think it was God done it.”

“What do you think?”

“I don't know. I just woke up one morning about a month back and I felt this kind of warm feeling all over me. It was funny. But it didn't feel like God or angels or any of that good stuff.” Edward paused, unsure how to continue. Then he grinned and said, “It felt kind of bad really.” Dion grinned back – he knew what kind of bad Edward was talking about.

But Dion told no one about what he had seen his grandmother do, unaware she had said nothing about staying silent, unaware he could already be trusted.

For all his truancy, Dion was top of his class in technology and he used its words to try and describe to himself what had happened when his grandmother killed the cock: ‘If you think that everything we see is like some kind of video disk. Like everything – all the trees, rocks, houses – people even. You imagine they're all like the patterns of dots on the disk. But you put that disk into the disk player and what those patterns turn into is colours and sounds and films and things. What I saw up on the Cabrits was like the disk being played.'

He imagined telling this to his grandmother, but the opportunity to say the words was somehow never quite there – or he felt they would sound clumsy or awkward. She seemed to pass through the world like some natural thing, wind or water, capable of great force, but ungraspable. She knew in advance when things were going to happen: when a flight of birds would turn, when the rain would come, whose the next baby would be. She would be there when a baby was born before anyone had even thought to go and tell the priest. People expected it of her. They liked to hedge their bets and have her grant the child her own kind of blessing. Dion would stand by like an acolyte as she muttered away, invoking a host of entities with names no one could ever quite make out. The babies seemed pleased to see her though, and Dion soon gave up trying to listen to the words, concentrating instead on the extraordinary sight of a new life just arrived, perfect in itself, as much a part of his grandmother's world as anything in the forests or rivers.

People believed Dion's grandmother actually made the things she foretold happen, and Dion, growing more confident with her, asked if this was true. She nodded her head from side to side, neither affirming nor denying.

After some moments, she said, “People think what I do is like what they teach in that school you go to... sometimes.” – a pause and a smile, then, “Listen, they think I work like you work with a spanner or one of those computers – just make the right moves and everything work okay. It not like that, Dion. Spanners is a way of doing things that don't cost you nothin' – nothin' personal. You just make the right moves, apply the right muscle and you get what you want. What I do is different. What I do is like going on your knees to the bank manager. Ask nicely and maybe you get that loan you want. You watch me, Dion, and you see I deal with the plants and things round here same as your dad deals with his business people. But there's plenty know how to talk to business people but not many know how to talk to what's on this island. They think it just in the way – all that jungle, all those rocks and stuff.

“But you know all this, Dion. You don't need me tellin' you. You saw it all one time. Stick around me and you see how I do it.”

Dion watched carefully and came to realise his grandmother could see the future because she was living so closely with the world that she felt its intentions in ways that others – who saw that world as an obstacle – could not. He remembered best one evening when they were sitting quietly on the veranda together, his grandmother's gaze settled on some distance beyond seeing and Dion watching the deep lines that framed her expression ease and flex as she pulled on a clay pipe that had in it something that certainly wasn't tobacco.

Abruptly, she took the pipe from her mouth and pointed with its stem. “You see that dog, young Dion? You watch ‘im.”

A mangy stray was nosing excitedly along their street. The dog cocked its leg against the corner of their veranda, releasing a yellow splash of urine. “Him pissin' now,” Dion's grandmother said. “You watch ‘im piss.”

Dion felt her delight at the spectacle – a dog doing what dogs do. “Him sniffin' now. Him sniffin' where that big black bugger that hangs around with Jackson's boy done pissin.”

They both watched intently and Dion felt a momentary shift inside himself. For a moment, just a moment, he was on the inside of the dog. He could almost smell what Jackson's boy's dog smelt like. “Now you see ‘im go,” Dion's grandmother urged in a sudden whisper, and the dog pricked up his ears and shot off around the far corner, leaving them laughing, entirely unknowing as to what had set the animal running. Then she pointed to the thin crescent that had just resolved itself in the gathering twilight above Morne Diablotin. “Moon comin' up now,” she said.

*

Dion got to be confident enough with his grandmother to ask what he had seen up on the Cabrits that time when she killed the cock. What had it been that had wheeled across the clearing between the ruined blockhouses?

“Nothing you need to know the name of, young Dion,” his grandmother warned.

Dion persisted. “Suppose I wanted to call him. Would he come if I did the same things you did?”

“Dion Lefevre, I tell you what happen if you try that kind of thing,” his grandmother said, staring him straight in the face, more severe even than when he had asked if she turned herself into a coffin. “What happen to a kid like you that try that shit is he get noticed by a lot of bad stuff that roamin' around and he get eaten alive. I told you, Dion – what put Edward Charles right is not just something you turn on ‘n off. Not like machines in hospital. I tell you, Dion, what put Edward Charles right is like the King of America.”

Dropping her severity, she said, “Listen, suppose you go up to his door – this King of America – an' you go up to his door the way you are right now, young Dion, an' you say, I want to see the King of America. You know what happen? If you lucky, the guards laugh at you. More likely they lock you up and give you a hard time, call up a psychiatrist, that kind of stuff. No, if you want to go see the King of America you got to work at it a long time. You got to get to know the right people and you got to get to know how to talk to them. And you got to get to be someone of some consequence, so the King of America might be interested in spending a few minutes with you. All this take time, Dion – lots and lots of time it takes before you ready to call on the King of America and get him to do favours for you. So you got a lot to do and a long path to take if you want to call up the one I called up on the Cabrits. And you start by learning to see the world properly. And that why you follow me about and see what I see. Long path to the King of America, Dion, but I make sure you start on the right track.”

She was indeed teaching him a different kind of attention to the one they taught in school. When the class planted seeds and charted the growth of the seedlings, Dion found it made no sense. It was entirely arbitrary compared with the growing world his grandmother had shown him. How could you understand seedlings when they had only the unchanging object of the container and its little charge of compost? What his teachers showed him in class was what you could do with isolation. He felt that isolation in the classroom and in all he was being taught. His truancy increased.

The school punished him with detentions and additional work, and complained to his father about his son's absences. His father said it was their problem if they couldn't keep an eye on the boy while he was in their care. Dion's father was taken up with other things. He was busy. Dion's mother would wring her hands and half-heartedly scold her wayward son, with half an eye on his father as she tried to judge the proper line to take. He got bad reports, there was talk of expulsion, but his technology was considered exceptionally good. All his grandmother would say was, ‘There's different ways of knowing your way around, Dion. You listen to me and you maybe get to know one way.'

Dion's parents didn't much like his grandmother, although they tolerated her occupying a small room in the corner of their house. She was his father's mother. She said to Dion, “Your father's father, French white from Martinique. Can't remember his name. He quit like they all do, but he treat me okay – leave me provided for because of his kid. No more than that, mind you. Your father got no time for you, I know. All he want is to get rich. That why he make up to that Trinidad Asian and marry his daughter. That all right. Your father, he want to be a proper man. He stick with your ma and he make the kind of husband her father want for his daughter. But you, young Dion – I don't know about you. You real mix. Bet you got some damned Arawak in there somewhere. But you certainly got a lot of me in you – black ‘n black. You want to get rich? You listen to your daddy. But if you want to live so when Death come for you, you good and ready, you listen to me. You live so you learn how to die – that's all. Must be that way, else how come everyone who ever lived finish up dead?”