The Road to McCarthy (39 page)

Paul the Policeman is an exuberant Mancunian on assignment from the Met. He’s been here over two years, and his eyes have the happy gleam of a man who may never return to Europe. I noticed him at church on Sunday. He’s a charismatic figure on the island, constantly mobbed by kids and hugged by adults. He runs youth clubs and fitness classes, and has started a women’s football team. I’ve been told he’s the only white man in the island’s famous vocal group, the Emerald Singers, and is renowned for his on-stage impression of a white guy trying to dance like a black guy. He also coaches the Montserrat men’s football team, which is ranked 245
^th
out of 245 in the FIFA world rankings. “Bhutan is ranked 244
^th
. We’re playing them away on the same day as the World Cup Final.” I’ve rarely met a man who exudes such contentment with his life.

Someone spots me talking to him and tells me about the policewoman who took out a mortgage on a new house two months before the volcano hit. She’ll be paying it off for the next twenty years, even though it no longer
exists. “It’s a government mortgage, so they stop it from her paycheck. Not much left.”

But couldn’t the government just wipe out such debts?

“She had two medals, one for long service, both buried by the volcano. They asked her to pay for them, cos they been lost through negligence.”

I overhear a British expat say he went to Gibraltar last summer, and my ears prick up. What was it like?

“It was nice. But my God—those Barbary apes. Vicious bastards they are. There was this couple, walking up the Rock”—yep, I can just picture it—“and apparently she had some peanuts in her backpack. But the apes seemed to know this. Surrounded her, started grabbing at her and scratching her, so her boyfriend jumped in, and they bit lumps out of him. Had to go to hospital.”

I feel strangely vindicated.

So the afternoon is spent consuming cold beer and jerk pork and yams, and gradually the heat starts to fade from the sun. The high spot of the day is a series of promenade performances by the Masquerade Dancers. Dressed in masks, tall hats and brightly colored ribbons and carrying whips, they perform a strange and rather eerie hybrid of Morris, Irish and African tribal dance. It’s a satire on slave owners. The masks are pink, to represent a white face. The ribbons represent the flowing tailcoats of the plantation owners. The hat is a cross between a gentleman’s and a bishop’s. The slave-driver’s whip is cracked repeatedly, ferociously. And the music is played on a whistle or fife, very Celtic sounding, with supporting percussion and drums. At one point in late afternoon I look across the festival site and through the billowing clouds of dust glimpse Simon Sweeney, the only Irishman on the island, dancing like a maniac in the middle of the Masqueraders. He’s wearing a green, white and orange Viking fur hat.

I get back late. The crab is there again, poised, waiting, looking at its watch and thinking, What time do you call this then? It looks very angry. Lou appears from nowhere, and whacks it with the broom one more time. “Don’t understand it,” he says. “Never usually see ’em. Maybe you got some strange aura for wildlife.” Maybe.

As I walk down the steps I step on something crunchy. One of the crab’s legs has become detached in the mêlée. It may try and limp back tomorrow night with some of its mates to sort me out, but by then I’ll be gone.

On my last morning
I visit the Volcanic Observatory. It’s staffed by four British geologists and seismologists who are monitoring the mountain’s every move, of which there are plenty. They show me pictures taken the morning after it grew a new three-hundred-foot pinnacle during the night. “What we’re seeing here is a new mountain being formed.” It is their job to give daily safety reports, and they have to respond to every threatening blip of activity, day and night. They look exhausted, as if they all have newly born triplets at home. The British government is trying to cut costs, and may even discontinue their work later in the year if they can contract it out to someone who will do it cheaper. “They think we should be raising revenue. Making money. You know, volcano tours and souvenirs. We had to come up with a business plan. We’re bloody seismologists.”

I’m down at the harbor
waiting for the evening ferry to Antigua. Moose’s Bar is hosting its regular afternoon game of dominoes. Moose’s wife Idabella is serving drinks and food. She is also the Minister for Education and the Environment. I get chatting to Eddie, a Montserratian who has lived in Ipswich for the last thirty years and is here on a day trip from his resort holiday in Antigua. He’s a truck driver, and also a coach to the British junior sprint team. His wife is from Suffolk, and Eddie can speak Suffolk or Caribbean, as the company requires. We’re chatting away when a man creeps up behind Eddie and covers his eyes. There are howls of laughter, and massive hugs. They used to share a flat together in Ipswich, and haven’t seen each other for fourteen years. We have a couple of convivial rounds, and the guys chat about friends who’ve died early, as men of a certain age will.

A man in a dark corner of the bar is beckoning me over. It’s Moose. He asks me to sit down, then takes a silver ring off his finger. He pushes it onto
the third finger of my right hand, and says, “In the name of St. Peter, name of St. Paul,” followed by something I can’t quite make out. Then he repeats the prayer. “This is my old grandfather’s ring. Kind of a voodoo type of thing, you know?” And then he tells me about something that’s going to happen to me, but that I can’t share with anyone for two or three years.

The last person I speak to before I leave is one of the British civil servants I’ve gotten to know. There aren’t very many of them, and I’ve been impressed by their commitment and the compassion they clearly feel for the island and its people. They are, however, implementing a series of budget cuts imposed in Westminster that will drastically reduce British spending here over the next three years. But surely, I say, with empire comes responsibility.

“Of course. But we can’t go on subsidizing them ad infinitum. Apart from anything else, how would we justify it to the British taxpayer?”

“I’m a British taxpayer,” I say. “I think we should give them as much as they need.”

“Coming up next:
a veterinarian will be here to give us some tips on dog toy safety. Is your dog playing with toys that could be dangerous for him? Could be. So stick around and learn how to perform the Heimlich maneuver on your pooch, after these messages.”

American daytime TV is distressing enough at the best of times; but when you’ve just woken up in a $38 hotel room in Butte, Montana, feeling like a patient with a chronic personality disorder whose medication should have been topped up three hours ago, it is almost too much to bear. Outside my window the snow is still cascading down, unless I’m imagining it and it’s a mental blizzard causing white-out in my brain, in which case it won’t be long before I start to hear the voices. Hang on. I’m hearing them already.

“Gratitude! Pass it on. Just say thank you.” Two old ladies are on screen, helping a Hell’s Angel across the road to a soundtrack of Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild.” “A message from the Foundation for a Better Life,” says an oleaginous Hollywood voice. If the nurse doesn’t come soon with the chemical cosh, I may start chewing my pillow.

This morning I am without any shadow of a doubt the most jet-lagged person in Montana. This is partly because there are hardly any people in Montana, a state that judging from the map is about the size of China and Australia combined, yet has a population of just 800,000; but mainly because of yesterday’s journey. As I shave in the bathroom mirror—a haphazard, casually violent process, during which I cut my nose twice—I try and remind myself that I’ve only been traveling since yesterday morning. My brain rejects this information, and tells me that the trip began many years ago, possibly when I was still at primary school. This is exactly the kind of ordeal the nuns would have put us through to build our character and purge our sins. I ought to rest up today, but instead I am due to have lunch with a priest. Perhaps there’s a psychology department at the local university that will give me twenty dollars if I let them attach wires to my forehead while I tell them about my day.

The ten-hour journey from Heathrow to Seattle wasn’t a problem. A flight of that length gives you an exhausted yet somehow euphoric lead-in-the-veins feeling that can be turned to your advantage once you realize it is a form of natural high. Lots of people would have no scruples about stealing the Christmas money their children got from the grandparents and spending it on Dutch superskunk or Taiwanese greyhound tranquilizers, if they thought it would make them feel like this. There’s no point fighting it; just embrace the dislocation and enjoy the fact that the little things that surround you are suddenly different—look, there’s a 350-pound woman over there ordering a low-fat latte and a muffin as big as her head—while trying to stay awake until the local bedtime. My tried and tested method of passive acceptance, however, was rendered ineffective by the cruel five-hour wait for a connection from Seattle to Butte, a place two and a half hours and one time zone back in the direction from which I’d already come. I thought that two or three pints of Mac and Jack’s African Ale in the airport bar would help, but they didn’t. They just made me bitter. How can a Seattle-Butte round trip cost nearly twice as much as London to Seattle and back? Is Butte so desirable it merits a surcharge? Apparently not, according to the guy at immigration. “Why would you wanna go there?” he asked. “And hey,
if you’re going, you should know we pronounce it
Butte
.” That’s how I pronounced it, didn’t I? Am I going mad? “Little tip, buddy. You go to a place, then you better know how to say it.” I’ll bear that in mind, I thought, in case I ever bump into you in Warwick, or Worcestershire.

Seattle airport is everything you hope it might be. There’s a meditation room, a stall where you can get a massage for nineteen dollars a quarter-hour and an easy-listening Muzak version of “Living in the Past” by Jethro Tull with the flute part played on a trombone. I sat in the bar until I was repulsed by the thought of more beer, then went out into the concourse to check departures. medford, said the board. yakima. pullman. kelowna. pasco. bellingham. It was like reading Esperanto. I lived in this country for a year. How can there be so many flights to places I’ve never heard of? Then: bozeman butte. weather advisory.

“Yeah,” said the woman at the check-in desk. “It’s snowing down there in Butte.”

That’s as may be, I thought, but what does
Bozeman
mean?

“I been there once already today, got sent all the way back. Six hours round trip,” said a badly rattled Harry Dean Stanton lookalike behind me, who probably looked like Brad Pitt when he got up that morning.

“We’re gonna go to Butte, and if it’s still snowing and we can’t land, we’ll come back to Seattle,” said the check-in woman.

Harry Dean whimpered at the prospect of spending another six hours of his life flying around in hazardous conditions without actually going anywhere, and I believe we all felt a little older.

There were twenty-six of us on a seventy-seater twin-propeller plane. Before we left, the stewardess walked up and down the aisle, asking people to move seats. “It’s for the aircraft’s stability,” she said comfortingly.

“Is this, like, when everyone on a bus jumps at the same time, and turns it over?” asked Harry Dean, who by now was on the brink of hysteria.

I passed the time until they served drinks watching the propellers go round and imagining them getting clogged up with snow. Then I read for a while—
The Falls
by Ian Rankin—until I fell asleep and
The Falls
fell on my gin and tonic, which fell on my leg, and made me wake up shouting like a
mad person. “Daytime drinking is special,” began the paragraph I’d been reading, but as I no longer knew whether it was day or night, there was no way of telling whether I agreed.