The Road to McCarthy (38 page)

Oh, God, no. What am I going to say? This is like being a naughty kid. Stop being so soft! Stand up to him.

“I was just, er, just genuinely interested, you know. I didn’t mean to drop you in it.”

“Of course you bloody did.”

He’s right. Good judge of character, then. Just what we need in a governor. I know. I’ll engage him in conversation.

“What do you think’s going to happen in Montserrat? Are we going to be able to keep funding it?”

He doesn’t answer but instead turns and walks off to join his wife in the corner. I’m not holding my breath for a Christmas card.

The world is divided
into places where strangers say hello to you, and places where they don’t. Montserrat is near the top of the league table in the former category, especially on quiet lanes and beaches, and emphatically
so at church on Sunday morning. Though the dinner and the New York Parade took place yesterday, the feast day falls today, and there’s an awful lot of hugging, handshaking, halloing and hallelujahing going on down at the back of the church. I arrived late, sneaked in past the half-dozen n’er-do-wells lurking outside the door and managed to get the last seat in the house as a very old lady in a knitted hat and green sash came up to give me a hug and wish me a happy St. Patrick’s Day.

There’s a band with guitar, congas and percussion, and choir and congregation are clapping and swaying and singing “Ain’t gonna study war no more.” The mood is gleeful, celebratory and welcoming. People have dressed up big-time, and the place is a riot of tropical colors. A two-year-old girl is wandering up and down the aisle in a fluorescent pink satin dress with black velvet trim and matching hair decorations. It’s such a joyful, tumultuous scene that it takes me a while to notice the best detail of all: People are wearing shamrocks made from lime leaves. The singing stops, and we all settle down for the parish announcements. This is usually the dull bit, but the layman reading them out is Cedric Osborne, and he knows how to work a crowd.

“If anyone would like to come along, there’s going to be a discussion group considering such issues as, should the chief minister and the legislative council be given greater powers?”

He pauses just for a beat, then answers the question himself.

“No.”

The church rocks with gales of laughter, interrupted by Cedric asking if anyone’s had a birthday this week. Two hands go up, they’re asked to stand, and the entire congregation sings for them. Any wedding anniversary? A white man and a black woman stand up. We all sing to them, wishing them many more years. Any politicians, or people who work for the government? Eight people stand and we sing to them, and then the band strikes up again and everyone’s clapping, not just on the beat but across the rhythms, marching towards the door except for one woman in the corner on her own, rocking and swaying and shouting, “Thank you Jesus!” as she raises her arms to heaven. Somebody notices me looking, and says, “They asked her
to stop going to the Anglican church for being too noisy, so now she comes here instead.” I don’t remember Mass back home ever being like this.

Sunday is a witheringly hot day
, the warmest so far. Three people in their seventies, two women in whites and a man in a Taoist T-shirt, are playing tennis in direct sun on the court next to Jumping Jack’s. I fear one of them may die before I finish my lunch. Danny Sweeney is recovering from last night in time-honored fashion, by sleeping under a tree. This afternoon I am moving house so I can sample another side of the island. Conveniently situated next to one of my top ten bars and top three volcanoes, the Vue Pointe is now established as a favorite hotel, and I know I will keep returning. I won’t be able to get in, though, if people hear how good it is and start booking it out, so it’s probably best if you take what I’ve said with a pinch of salt. It’s not everything I’ve cracked it up to be.

At four o’clock Lou comes and collects me and takes me to the little house he shares with his wife Shirley. It’s surrounded by dense tropical foliage, and has a small pool and a view of the sea. There are two old-style rooms for guests, with ceiling fan and fridge and shower, and a dust mask reassuringly placed in the top drawer in case it all kicks off again. Lou is from Wisconsin and Shirley is Trinidadian. He has a beard, and she sings opera arias in the shower. They are talkative and hospitable and a little eccentric, and I’m glad I’ve come. I explain that I’ve had a late lunch and anyway I don’t have much appetite in this heat, then Lou barbecues some huge steaks. As we eat looking out over the Caribbean, Shirley explains how to fight back against someone who’s doing you wrong, like the person who keeps stealing from her. “Write their name in red ink on the inside of your shoe. That way, you walk on them all day. Soon they’ll feel the pressure.”

I’ve been wondering how to get to the Junior Calypso Competition, but haven’t put a lot of energy into organizing anything. As we finish dinner, Shirley says, “I’m a judge at the calypso competition tonight. Would you like to come?”

They’ve built a stage in the parking lot at the back of the Tropical Mansions,
and the whole island seems to have turned out. Cecil who does the voice-overs and works for the government is also in the band.

The contestants are aged from seven to fifteen, with names like Calypso Tina and Prince Andrew, and perform with ecstatic support from the crowd, and their mums. Whenever any of them attempts a particularly adult mannerism or a knowing bump-and-grind, the women all shriek with laughter, then burst into applause. With the backing of the very pro-sounding band, they each have to perform two songs that they’ve written, one on an ecological theme, one making some other kind of social comment. The standard is astonishingly high, especially for such a tiny island:

“Free at last” sings seven-year-old Prince Andrew, getting big cheers every time he smiles. I’m presuming it’s a liberation politics song until his backing singer produces a placard bearing a picture of a sheep and the slogan “Keep Out That Nasty Tick,” and I realize he’s celebrating Montserrats tick-free status. As he finishes, the leg on my fragile plastic chair collapses and I crash to the ground in a flurry of arms, legs and Carib beer, to the massive amusement of everyone sitting nearby, to whom I represent the continuation of the centuries-old tradition of colonials drinking until they fall over.

It’s clearly going to be a close-run thing between two of the girls, both hugely confident performers who move like stars and look the audience in the eye. I’m much taken with “Just Like Me Daddy,” in which the girl dreams of growing up to be like her dad.

It’s sung to a jaunty, catchy beat. She’s strutting with a beer bottle, thrusting her hips, and some of the men at the back have gone a bit quiet.

Even harder-hitting is “Bring ’em In,” an upbeat song about domestic violence, child abuse and pornography. Dressed as a magistrate, with an onstage cast of law enforcement officers and low-life criminals, the singer strides the stage in tremendous style, extolling a policy of zero tolerance for all abuse and violence in the home.

The judges have been deliberating for almost three-quarters of an hour when Lou appears at my side. “C’mon,” he says, “we gotta go right now.”

But we won’t know who’s won, I say. We have to know the winner.

“That’s the whole point,” he says. “Shirley has to get out of here before they announce the winner. Some of these parents get very angry when their kid don’t win. They like to blame the judges.”

We slip through a side gate, and make our escape down a road as dark as the inside of two cows.

Back at the house I sit up for a while with Shirley. She’s an articulate, vivacious woman, and has me enthralled as she speaks of one of the theories circulating on the island about the cause of the volcanic devastation.

In 1995 archaeologists discovered the remains of a Native American
settlement more than 2,000 years old, not far from Montserrat’s airport. Tools, ceramics and human skeletons were found, rare evidence of an ancient Caribbean society that could be crucial to understanding the history of these islands. Samples of the artefacts, including skeletons, were sent to the United States for analysis. Three weeks later the volcano erupted for the first time since Montserrat was settled by the British.

“For many people, the connection is clear,” says Shirley. “A Native American chief came over from the States and stayed with us. He sat at this table and spoke of the natural world’s connection to the spirit world. He said that the mountain would not sleep until the bones had been returned.”

And have they?

“They were supposed to come back, but they never did. And of course the mountain is still angry.”

To get to my room I have to walk across their veranda and go down half a dozen steps near the pool. It’s lucky that I’ve been looking out for toads at night, otherwise I might have put my bare foot down on the land crab that is guarding the top step like a sentry. It’s heavily armored, and bigger than a dinner plate, but my confrontations with macaques and endangered geese have given me a newfound inner strength. I will walk briskly by without giving it another thought. As I attempt to pass, it rears up on its hind legs—claws, nippers, whatever the horrible things are—and starts flailing its front ones in my direction like a drunk with a broken bottle. If it could hiss, it would. My inner strength evaporates, and I leap backwards faster than a step dancer on hot coals. Lou and Shirley come out to see what the commotion’s about.

“My God,” says Lou, “it’s enormous,” clattering it down the steps and into the dense bush with a couple of deft swings of an old-fashioned broomstick. “Hell, maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe I should have kept it for lunch.”

Do they get them every night?

“First one I’ve seen in three years here,” he says, as I tiptoe to my room to check under the pillow and the toilet seat.

Next morning at breakfast all the songs from the calypso competition are playing on the radio. They got the kids into the studio a couple of weeks
ago to record the CD, and now the whole island is moving to their music. “Bring ’em In” was the winner. The news carries no reports of parental rioting.

Today is Monday, and because St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Sunday, it’s also a public holiday, and there’s a definite scent of carnival in the air. Before going to the Festival Village where the Slave Feast will take place I head to the north of the island, beyond Morgan’s Spot Light Bar. When Plymouth still existed and was the focal point of island life the north was poor and sparsely populated—“where the barefoot people lived,” according to my taxi driver. Now people from the south have been rehoused up here and it’s a bit more mainstream, though still not very.

the quiet spot, says a sign on a shack that looks like it’s about to collapse. licensed to sell liquor by retail plus groceries etc.—m. roacher. Cricket stumps are painted on a wall opposite. A man in a knitted cap is opening young green coconuts in the street with a machete. An old man in a trilby is leaning in the doorway talking to an imaginary friend. I go in for a cold beer, and am made to feel as welcome as if I were returning to the place where I was born. The bar is tiny, the size of a large garden shed, a random jumble of vegetables, groceries, sacks, cardboard boxes and alcohol. Apart from the mangoes, it looks much as I imagine a bar in a poor part of the west of Ireland might have looked a century or two ago. “Brother” Roacher, as he’s known, is eighty-eight years old and a convivial host, and my beer is soon augmented by the Paddy’s Day special, rum with coconut milk straight from the shell. There are three other customers, so the place is packed. I talk about accents and influences with a Rasta in his fifties. His name is Joseph Ryan, and he says his great-grandfather was from Ireland.

Primed by my lunchtime livener—after all, it is a bank holiday, so I don’t need to go to the office—I head down to Festival Village. It turns out to be rows of food and drink stalls on three sides of a coconut grove next to the beach, with a temporary stage on the fourth. Sound systems are throbbing, but the place is only just starting to fill up. It’s fiercely hot, so I find a seat in the shade. “Ah, begorra,” says a stage-ham Irish brogue, “and are ya having a marvelous holiday at all at all?” I look up and see a black man in his sixties
wearing knee-length shorts and a T-shirt that says antigua. “You from Ireland or UK?” he asks, so I tell him. He lives in Streatham, and is a ticket inspector on the London-Brighton line. “We come back every year for a holiday,” he says. “Building a house for when I retire.”

He introduces me to Charles, a West Indian man of similar age dressed in long trousers, a floral-patterned flat cap and a paisley shirt. In Ireland, I tell him, a paisley shirt is one that has no written all over it. He tells me his grandfather was from County Cork. In fact, he does more than that. He rolls the
r
in Cork, pronouncing it
Corrrk
, exactly as Cork people do. I tell him this, and he says, “County Corrrk, so. That’s the only way I know how to say it.” The word
so
is often found at the end of a Corkman’s sentence.

I meet more people in the course of the afternoon and evening than I’ve met in the last year. This seems to be a culture where anyone can talk to anyone else without any prior connection. A man who was born in London with one black and one white parent tells me he feels more comfortable living here than anywhere he’s been. “In England, they’d shout ‘Black man’ at me. In Jamaica they shouted ‘White man.’” I ask him what they shout on Montserrat. “Hey, English!”