The Road to McCarthy (36 page)

At the end of the day
, I take a walk along the volcanic beach to watch the sunset. Two ladies in 1950s Christian bathing suits with those funny little skirt fronts are about to go in for a dip, and a man is fishing with his son from the end of the jetty. Two enormous cows are rooting around in the lava by the eleventh hole, a sight that will be replicated all over the world when nature finally reasserts herself and deals once and for all with the golf problem. As the sun sinks rapidly into the sea, I’m watching as closely as I can without melting my retinas. I’m hoping to see the Green Flash, a burst of emerald on the horizon that is said to occur on clear evenings right after
sunset and is unique to Montserrat, unless they’ve made it up because I seem like a gullible fool and they’re all hiding behind bushes pointing and laughing. The sun disappears, and then there’s …. it sort of…. I’m pretty sure …. yeah, definitely, unless I imagined it …. I think it did. I’m as certain as I was about the gardener’s accent.

Over at Jumping Jack’s the power is off and the light is fading fast. If it doesn’t come back on soon they’ll have to close. Within minutes word arrives of what’s gone wrong. This is a small island thing. Bob has told Cecil has told Paddy has told Maria has told Cordela has told Cedric who calls Danny who tells us that a truck driver delivering pylon parts to the electricity generating plant has parked on a hill, the brakes have failed and the truck has gone crashing into the most crucial bit of equipment on the site, blacking out the whole island. In fridges all over Montserrat, the beers that are an essential part of the psychological battle against volcanic ash are already beginning to go warm. And there’s worse to come.

The storytelling evening has been canceled because it needs lights and a PA.

This is calamitous news that poses a serious threat to my mental stability. There is so little actually to do on Montserrat that anything in any way resembling an event takes on disproportionate significance. Don’t get me wrong here. The lack of things to do is one of the island’s greatest charms; it enables you just to be. In particular the lack of things for tourists to do—casinoey, water-ski and shopping-type things, I mean, as opposed to sitting under mango trees, or going to lectures in the Pentecostal church—has been crucial in keeping the place like itself, rather than making it like everywhere else. But when something is scheduled to happen, like the storytelling, it becomes the center of your mental landscape.

I feel like a fifteen-year-old standing outside the youth club staring at his watch and realizing that the hot date he’s been looking forward to all week isn’t going to turn up because she’s gone to a pop festival for the weekend with a lad that’s left school and has got his own car. What am I meant to do for the next six hours till bedtime? Sit in the dark and remember stuff? Why do they need a PA and lights anyway? Why can’t they shout, and hold up lighters? I think Margaret must have noticed me sobbing and banging my
head on the counter because she just gave me a sympathetic look and said, “They’ve got their own generator up at Vue Pointe, you know.”

Seconds later I’m heading up the grassy hill in the direction of the bar, picking my way through the nocturnal wildlife. A marvelous thing happens each evening just after the Green Flash. The hotel gardens are suddenly festooned with toads the size of handbags. I make it to the pool without standing on one, thinking all the time about what happened at primary school the day someone put a toad down the back of Margaret Houghton’s dress and slapped her and the nuns found out.

The Vue Pointe bar is a classically shaped beauty in polished hardwood, with a brass footrail and a row of swivel-top wicker-backed bar stools. On the wall behind the bar are two large cabinets in the same polished wood, in which an impressive collection of liquor is secured. I arrive just in time to see Mr. Wilson opening the bar. Like Louis XIV getting up in the morning, this is the kind of ceremony to which people would feel privileged to be invited.

Mr. Wilson is a tall, slim, dark-skinned man of conspicuous happiness, who is employed to do every job known to the hotel industry. At various times of day and night you’ll see him in singlet and shorts pushing a wheelbarrow, in a business shirt answering the phone at reception or as he is now, in a short-sleeved tropical-island shirt that means he’s a cocktail barman. He is also standing on top of the bar holding a rope. Throwing it like a gaucho, he deftly lassoes a hook on the bar cabinet, yanks the rope as if he’s hoisting a mainsail, and a flap door rises to reveal the booze within. Lashing the rope to an overhead beam he moves along the bartop, lassoes the second door and repeats the operation. I have witnessed the opening of many bars in my time, but nothing to compare with this. For the rest of my life cupboards with doors that you open by hand will look like a soft option.

Four of last night’s Tribute Pursuiters have come back for a game of bridge. I spend the evening chatting with the only other people to have ventured out in search of light, a charming couple from Scunthorpe. I remember them from the boat trip. They had their own beers. One is a civil engineer, the other an ex-policewoman turned gardener. The engineer has been coming to Montserrat since she was a child, staying in her parents’ holiday
villa. One night in the eighties, when Air Studios was in full swing, her mum came back from a restaurant and said, “There was a man playing the piano in the restaurant tonight, love. Quite good. John somebody, he said his name was.” “Not Elton?”

“Yes, that’s him. John Elton. He seemed quite lively.” There are thirty-eight satellite channels on my TV, but by far the most compelling is number 3, which brings you the picture from one channel, but the sound from another. It’s fuzzier than the other stations, but it’s worth it for the excitement generated by the random juxtaposition of sound and vision. Tonight, like men in cafés all over Tangier, I’m watching an old episode of
Cheers
, the one where Sammy starts dating a glamorous local politician. Over these classic comic images I can hear Henry Kissinger trying to explain why he isn’t a war criminal. This is a tremendous idea, with unlimited potential.

At brea.kfa.st
Mr. Wilson is busy with the decorations for tomorrow night’s St. Patrick’s Day dinner. The centerpiece is a display of palms he has cut with a machete from the trees in the garden. In he middle hangs a banner saying céad míle fáilte—a hundred thousand welcomes. The words are flanked by two huge shamrocks. The shamrocks are flanked by the palms. I am eating coconut, and the volcano is erupting. The Chieftains are on the stereo, and Mr. Wilson is dancing a jig.

The national dish alleged to be descended from Irish stew is called goat water, and its most celebrated exponent is Mrs. Morgan. Her goat water emporium is at the northern end of the island. “But she does not always have goat water,” somebody tells me. “First you must phone. But Friday is a good day. Pay day. Probably she will have it.” So I phone Mrs. Morgan, and yes she does have it. She may also have it tomorrow, she says, but then again she may not, and anyway she hasn’t decided yet whether or not she’ll open tomorrow, so it would be better if I came today, then I can be certain. Unless she changes her mind before I get there.

welcome to morgan’s spot light bar and restaurant, says a hyperbolic
sign on a pastel-blue wooden hut with a corrugated roof. There are two stools at a tiny counter just inside the door, one of them occupied by a shaven-headed builder drinking a cold bottle of Guinness 7.5 percent overseas overstrength stout. Round the corner is a small room with three tables, plastic floral tablecloths and bare wooden benches. A cockerel is crowing stridently just outside the unglassed window, through which I can see goats and donkeys. Four local laborers and a handful of expat retirees are eating from bowls of dark brown lumpy liquid that looks like the curries we used to get in the front rooms of converted terraced houses in Bradford. There is no menu, just an elderly West Indian woman in a yellow polo shirt and knee-length yellow combat shorts who comes across and says, “Goat water?” It seems a good system. I suppose if you didn’t want any you wouldn’t be there in the first place. In seconds she’s back with my bowl, a beer, some bread and a mysterious plate covered in tinfoil that I don’t remember ordering. Maybe it had been implied in her original enquiry.

The goat water is full of chunks of goat meat cooked on the bone. It looks and tastes dark brown, and brings to mind the mutton stew I remember eating as a kid. Whatever happened to mutton? Perhaps they phased it out along with pound notes and asbestos roofs, because you don’t see a lot of it these days.

As I eat, a Canadian lady tells me their daughter phoned to say they’d had to cut the grass in Ontario in February, and we agree that this is conclusive proof of, well, any climate theory you care to mention really.

Though I’ve only known them for three minutes, some posh English ladies invite me round for drinks on Monday night. There’s something in the air on this island that makes it easier to talk to strangers than anywhere I’ve ever been.

“What are you doing over here?” asks one of the PELs.

Very little, I tell her.

“Oh, but I am so curious, because hardly anybody comes here any more. Feel free to tell me if I’m being nosy.”

“You’re being nosy,” I say, and she seems delighted.

Everyone’s left by the time I unveil the tinfoil to reveal coconut pie and ice cream. The pie is excellent but the ice cream is the consistency of gravy,
having been languishing under tinfoil in a hot room for three-quarters of an hour. As I’m finishing the pie, and pretending the ice cream is sauce, a tall, distinguished-looking lady with her head wrapped in a beautiful white, pink and lilac headscarf comes out from the kitchen. This is Ann Morgan, proprietor of the Spot Light Bar and purveyor of goat water to all social classes. “It’s nice havin’ you,” she says, shaking my hand and seeming to mean it. Montserrat seems to encourage warmth and spontaneity. My two previous experiences of the Caribbean were disappointingly negative encounters with voracious tourist industries. Almost drowning didn’t help, nor did the arrival three weeks later at my home of a minibar bill for the alleged consumption of a Toblerone and three non-alcoholic lagers, a ridiculous charge that would never have stood up in court. This island, though, is restoring my faith. If they can keep the jet skis out they might just be all right.

The building next door is called Pete’s Bakery and Mini Mart. I’m about to go in when a car stops, a big four-wheel drive. “I’m just going down the hill,” says the driver. “Hello, Peter.” It’s Cecil, who I met at the Pentecostal church the other night, the one who asked whether the slaves had been influenced by the rebellious Irish. He’s just telling me how he works for the government, something to do with the environment, I think, except that I don’t quite catch it because he’s turned the radio up so loud it’s shaking the foundations of the house on the corner. “Hear that?” It’s the Irish-stylee St. Patrick’s Day ad. “That’s me. The voice-over.”

So he’s a radio artiste as well as a civil servant?

“Yeah. And some other things too.”

He drops me outside the Tropical Mansions, the only other hotel on the island. I stick my thumb out, and the first car stops. The driver is Chedmond Brown. “Oh, hello,” I say. “I was at your lecture the other night.”

He shows no sign of remembering me, even though I ganged up on the governor for him; and then he says, “You know what they do? They give these governorships out like a prize. You want to find out the truth about these islands? Check out my website.”

He gives me a card, and I don’t like to tell him I haven’t got a computer.

Mr. Brown takes me a mile or so, which is as far as he’s going, then pops into a crowded roadside rum shop to find me a taxi. A man emerges carrying
a bottle of beer, and we get into his car. He’s clearly very safety-conscious, because he wedges the beer between his thighs before driving off. As we head south, honking the horn at his friends and relatives every five or six seconds, he tells me how most of his friends and relatives emigrated after the eruption. He must have done a tremendous amount of honking when they were still around. There wasn’t time to feel afraid the day the ash came and they had to run away, he says; but when he went back by boat to look for his things three days later, and realized everything was either buried or vaporized, “I started shaking, and felt afraid for mi life.” As he drops me at the Vue Pointe he leans out of the window and says, “You tell them we down, but we not out.”

There’s another clap
of thunder in the darkness, and the rain rattles the bar’s corrugated roof like a tropical marching band. We edge farther under the shelter of the veranda, and Bob the ex-lawyer makes his contribution to our discussion of places that are so small everybody knows everybody else’s business.

“Listen, I’ll tell you how small this place is. I was in Ram’s supermarket one afternoon, checking out with a cartful of groceries. Ram’s checking some of the stuff through the till for payment, but he’s putting other stuff in a separate pile. When he’s finished, he just asks me to pay for the things he’s been ringing up. So what about the other stuff? I said.

“‘Oh,’ he said, ‘your wife was in this morning, and she already bought those things.’”

This evening I’d been planning to go to the intriguing-sounding Freedom Jam and Bingo up at the cricket ground where they held the school sports, but I’ve been trapped in Jumping Jack’s by some serious rain. I could make a long list of less pleasant places to be trapped. Haywards Heath station on a Sunday night while you’re waiting for the bus that will take you round the engineering works, for one. Every now and then the rain stops and the sound system comes through on the breeze just long enough for me to think I’ll finish this beer and then wander up; but then it rains again, someone buys another round, and you try and persuade yourself that
bingo might not be very interesting, even in somewhere as off-the-wall as Montserrat. “I think you’ll enjoy it,” says Bob. “Everybody likes to play bingo here. This must be the only place in the world where guys in trainers and gold chains who really want to be cool just love to play bingo.”