Midland

by James Flint

  ‘We could just ignore it. We’re only going for a walk. If there even is anyone down here they’re hardly going to care.’

  Bea wrinkled her nose and peered through the undergrowth at the sea, which was close enough to be visible through the foliage. ‘Let’s just go along the beach. That way if anyone stops us we can just say we didn’t see the sign.’

  This seemed like a plan. Whoever owned the propiedad privada had not stretched to erecting any kind of fence to accompany their gate, so it was a simple matter to thread a path through the undergrowth to the shoreline and follow that south instead, even where it narrowed in places into less than a metre of driftwood-littered strand caught between the encroaching curtains of green and aquamarine.

  By late morning the two of them had covered a good distance around the headland with little to mark the passing of the hours beyond the sun’s slow climb into the sky, Yves Klein blue beyond a delicate comb of alto cirrus, and the appearance of a couple of wooden buildings. The first was a smart hunting lodge complete with a small jetty to which were moored two skiffs and an expensive-looking sports fishing launch, its tall flybridge bristling with outriggers and aerials; the second, some way further on, was a large but derelict triple-gabled shack, built on stilts, that looked like some kind of old-time way station.

  Bea and Luggie had steered clear of the lodge, but this second building they explored, peering into dim rooms lit by the sunlight that streamed in through holes in the rotten roofs. They ate their picnic on what was left of the veranda while watching dove-grey gulls with long black beaks mine the waves for fish.

  The day was baking hot, but by the time they resumed their walk the sun had passed its zenith and the narrow beach was now in shade, offering some respite from the glare. Not that they had far to go – after about half-an-hour more walking the beach widened to a final clearing in which a concrete lighthouse stood fenced around with chain-link. Beyond it, spreading right across what remained of the headland and blurring the boundaries between land and sea, lay an impenetrable mass of mangrove swamp.

  ‘So this is why it’s private,’ said Bea, a little disappointed. ‘It must all be owned by the government.’

  Luggie pointed to the far side of the clearing. ‘The track comes in over there,’ he said. ‘At least going back will be easy.’

  ‘What a shame. I was hoping to see some kind of great panorama down the coast.’

  ‘I wonder if we can get up it?’ Luggie said, craning his neck at the lighthouse. A stone cylinder supported by four triangular flanges like vanes on a Futurist rocket, it stood a good seven storeys high. They couldn’t see the entrance, but several small windows in the shaft marked the position of an internal staircase, and at the apex a circular balcony surrounded the lantern room. ‘The view from the top must be awesome.’

  ‘It’s bound to be locked,’ Bea said, with less enthusiasm. ‘It’s clearly in use.’ She was peering at the small complex of blockhouses at the tower’s base and had noticed that a set of solar panels, their newness in stark contrast to the greying paint of the buildings themselves, had been installed on the roof of one of them. Its door had been replaced and was fastened with a heavy-duty padlock. ‘That must be where they keep the batteries for the light.’

  ‘Why don’t I just climb over the fence and take a look? It’s not very high.’

  ‘No, Lugs, I don’t think you should.’

  ‘Oh come on. When did you get so timid? There’s no one here!’

  ‘It just makes me nervous.’

  Luggie ignored her, put his hands on the chain-link, and tested it with his weight.

  ‘Luggie! Don’t!’

  And then another voice, quiet, but embossed with the unmistakable imprint of the English Midlands, spoke out. ‘She’s right mate, it’s all locked up. You can’t get up it.’

  Bea yelped and turned; Luggie leapt down from the fence. Behind them stood a scrawny man, dirty and deeply tanned but clearly European, dressed in a pair of stained and patched hiking trousers and a hippy waistcoat, his hair and beard straggly and unkempt. The most remarkable thing about him, however, apart from his having apparently materialised out of nowhere, was that in his hands he appeared to be holding a live seagull.

  ‘I didn’t mean to make you jump,’ he said. ‘But you wouldn’t happen to have any tape you could spare, would you?’

  ‘Tape?’ Bea said, disarmed by the sheer banality of the request. She slipped her backpack from her shoulder and started to unzip it. ‘I might. What do you want it for?’

  The man raised the seagull slightly. ‘It’s got a broken wing. I’ve made a splint but I haven’t got anything that’ll keep it in place.’

  Bea dug out the little medical pouch she carried with her and retrieved a grimy roll of Micropore.

  ‘Here,’ she said, holding it out. ‘Will this work?’

  The stranger looked at them but didn’t take his hands from the bird. ‘Wow. Perfect. You don’t want to help hold her while I do it, do you? We could go to my shack.’ He nodded his head in the direction of the beach.

  Bea looked at Luggie, who had come over and was standing beside her protectively. He shrugged.

  ‘Okay then.’ She zipped up her pack and slipped it back onto her shoulders. ‘If it’s close.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s just over there.’

  The shack was indeed only a couple of minutes from where they stood, hidden so well in the palm-strewn jungle that the couple had walked right past it without even noticing. It had been a proper building once, probably from the same era as the one on whose stoop they’d eaten their picnic. Since then the walls had been patched with driftwood and the roof repaired with palm thatch held in place by a meshwork of salvaged fishing nets. Out front there was a well-used fire pit, set about with stones on which lay a griddle and a couple of blackened cooking pots; nearby a row of curling, metallic fish carcasses hung from a makeshift smoke line. There was also a large pile of discarded coconut husks, a couple of palm trunks for sitting on, and a clear plastic drum filled with what looked like clean water. But that was everything.

  ‘Where do you get that?’ Luggie asked, indicating the water.

  ‘Oh, it’s safe to drink. There’s a tap at the lighthouse. It’s piped down from the resort. Have some – there’s some cups by the side of it.’

  He went inside the shack, and while he was gone Luggie located a scarred plastic child’s tumbler that looked like it had been found washed up on the beach and a glass adorned with the logo of the hotel in Punta Allen and filled them with water from the drum. ‘Tastes okay,’ he said, sipping from the cup. He passed the glass to Bea. ‘Here, you get the posh one.’

  Bea grinned. ‘Ooh, fancy. I’m all class, I am.’ She took a cautious sip. ‘Do you think he’s actually living here then?’

  ‘I don’t know. If he’s got water he might be.’

  Still holding the gull their host reappeared and manoeuvred an empty red and black plastic beer crate out of the doorway and onto the sand. He got it over to where Bea was sitting and then dropped to his knees.

  ‘Okay, so if you take her from me,’ he said, holding out the bird. ‘She’s stronger than she looks, so you need to hold her firmly and keep her wings pressed to her body – if she gets them free she’ll try to get away. Once you’ve got her I’ll hold the damaged wing and bind it up.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Bea, feeling nervous now. The gull’s rigid neck and black, hemispherical eyes clearly signalled defiance. Bea had never held a wild animal before, but she’d grown up with dogs and cats and knew how powerfully they could struggle when they didn’t want to be held. Her hands were sweating, she realised.

  Taking a breath, she put down her glass and wiped her palms on her shorts before reaching out to take the creature, working her fingers beneath the stranger’s as he slowly released his grip. The bird, though young, was still impressively large, and Bea’s hands only scarcely reached around it. But it seemed docile enough, right up until the last moment of
the transfer when, sensing a chance for escape, it tried to spasm away, raking Bea’s wrists with its feet as it scrabbled for purchase. She nearly dropped it in surprise, but the stranger was close and clamped his hands back around it, restraining and calming the animal until she could re-establish her grip.

  ‘Okay?’ he said, when the gull was still again.

  Bea nodded. ‘Yep. I’ve got it now.’

  ‘As long as you hold it firmly it should stay calm.’

  ‘Right.’

  She focused on the bird, now encased in her grip like a doll and staring at her as unblinkingly. It was warm, hot even, its belly soft and vulnerable, the carapace of its rachises ribbed like a cage, its motionless frame animated by the incessant vibrations of its heart, so short in phase as to feel almost electric.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Let’s do this then. I need you to release the wing. This one.’ He tapped on the back of her right hand. ‘Just ease your fingers back really slowly.’

  Bea did so, and as soon as it was able the bird jabbed out its wing, attempted a couple of flaps, and then held it open, stiff with pain. The stranger wound lengths of tape between the splayed feathers until they bound the wooden splint he’d fashioned to the damaged humerus. Then, taking the gull back from Bea, he placed it in the beer crate he’d kicked out from the shack and put a ragged sheet of broken plywood on top, which he weighted down with a rock.

  Bea crouched in the sand and peered at the bird through the holes in the plastic. It lay prone, panting, its damaged wing struck out, its beak half open. ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ she asked the stranger.

  ‘I didn’t. I just found it this morning on the beach. It was either try to help it or just leave it to die.’

  ‘Do you think it’s going to work?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll give it some water and fish a bit later. I want to let it chill out a while first. After that we’ll have to see.’

  Bea got up and went back over to her seat and glass of water. ‘So are you, like, living here?’ she asked, taking a drink.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said the stranger.

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘Not sure, exactly. A few months maybe.’

  ‘On just fish and coconuts?’ Luggie asked.

  ‘Pretty much. I go up to the resort sometimes, to get other things. Rice and stuff. Biscuits. Beer.’

  ‘Where are you from? I mean originally? You’re English, right?’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’

  ‘How d’you end up out here?’

  ‘Oh, you know. I thought it would be cool to live on a desert island. This is as close as I’ve been able to get. Hey, I haven’t given you anything in return for the tape.’

  Bea shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  But the stranger had already jumped up and disappeared back into his shack. When he emerged he was clutching a green plastic bag, which he brought over and set down on one of the logs.

  ‘I don’t know if you’re into this,’ he said, peeling the bag open until the contents were exposed, ‘but if you are, help yourselves.’

  Luggie and Bea came over to investigate. Splayed out for them to view was what looked like a handful of cat litter.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ Luggie said.

  ‘Yep. Have as much as you want. I’ve got a whole bale of it stashed back in the jungle. I found it on the beach one night. The smugglers float it in.’

  ‘We heard about that in Tulum,’ Bea said. ‘I didn’t know they came this far south.’

  ‘Oh yeah. They operate all down the coast. There’s a kind of triangle that stretches from here out to the Cayman Islands and down to Colombia. Look – it’s the real thing. Very pure. You only need a little hit.’ The stranger reached into the bag and picked a small granule of the cocaine, ground it into dust in his palm then pinched it up and sniffed it like snuff. ‘See? It’s fine. I swap a few rocks now and then with one of the guys who works at the hotel in Punta Allen in return for the beer and the food.’

  Eager to sample this unexpected bounty, Luggie leant in and did as their host had done. Bea, more circumspect, held back.

  ‘Why are you telling us this?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘But why us?’

  ‘You seem like nice people. You helped with the gull.’

  ‘But we could just steal your bale and run off.’

  The stranger laughed. ‘You don’t know where it’s buried. And even if you did, what would you do with it? It’s more coke than you could put up your nose in a lifetime.’

  ‘We could sell it.’

  ‘Who to? If you sold to locals and word got back to the smugglers they’d probably track you down and kill you. And if the police caught you selling to tourists, well, the stories I’ve heard about Mexican jails, that might be worse than the smugglers. It’s not so easy.’

  ‘So what are you going to do with it?’

  ‘Well some of it I’m going to share with you. If you want.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘Bea,’ said Luggie, ‘go easy.’

  ‘Sorry, but I want to know where we stand on this.’

  ‘Okay,’ the stranger said. ‘Then the question is, can you sail?’

  Bea looked blank. ‘Er, no.’

  ‘I can,’ Luggie said.

  ‘Can you?’ Bea said, surprised.

  ‘Yeah, a bit. I was in a club back home in Pembroke Dock when I was a teenager.’

  ‘Good,’ said the stranger. ‘Because I can’t. And I’m about to swap the bale for a boat. So it would be good if there was someone around to teach me which end is the front.’ He looked from Bea to Luggie and back again, and then stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Jamie, by the way.’

  —————

  Jamie had taken the gull as a sign. The universe, it seemed, was fairly determined that he should try to fix whatever within him was broken, these two people who had appeared right on cue with their own unsatisfied yearnings and half a roll of Micropore were surely somehow meant to be part of the cure.

  Because the timing was perfect. Only a few days before they’d showed up at the lighthouse Jamie had heard from Guillermo, his contact in the hotel, that he’d met someone who was prepared to trade the bale for a yacht.

  The someone was Russian, one of a party of businessmen that had rented the larger of the two fly-fishing lodges in Punta Allen for a month – not the one that Luggie and Bea had passed but another one, a little further up the beach in the opposite direction. He and his friends had sailed up from Honduras in three boats, the smallest a four-berth gaff-rigged sloop called the Chiriquí that had seen better days. According to Guillermo he was more than happy to swap it for what amounted to a lifetime supply of high-quality cocaine with a street price many times that of the Chiriquí’s resale value.

  With a sample in his pocket Jamie travelled out to inspect the yacht with his Mexican go-between. He knew nothing at all about boats, but this one was floating, had electronics and communications that appeared to work, had a sail locker with sails in it and a functioning engine, and had just made the trip from La Ceiba, so was presumably more or less seaworthy. He chopped out some lines on the table while the Russian served vodka and showed them the logbook and the registration documentation, all of which looked reasonably plausible. There was a bit of a wrangle when Jamie insisted on some cash on top of the yacht to cover his set-up and running costs and the Russian complained he didn’t have that much money to hand. But eventually a sum was agreed and a deal was struck, with Guillermo agreeing to play middleman in return for a small share of the coke.

  The Russian wanted the use of the Chiriquí for the remainder of his fishing trip, and it was during this period, before the deal was concluded, that Jamie had met Luggie and Bea. It had felt quite strange after being alone for such a long time to open himself to them so readily, but he needed help with the boat and he also needed reinforcements: it n
o longer felt particularly sensible to be living down by the lighthouse on his own.

  Fortunately for him, hanging out on a deserted beach with a self-styled hermit and an unlimited supply of fine drugs was exactly the kind of offbeat travel adventure Bea and Luggie had been searching for. Within a couple of days they had moved out of the guesthouse, slung their hammocks in the trees next to Jamie’s shack, and slipped into a kind of glorious castaway reverie, a desert island life with all the harsh edges smoothed away.

  At the centre of their focus was the gull. She had started drinking water and eating scraps of dried fish, but kept moving her damaged wing, so they’d bound it to her body with a strip of bandage to give it a better chance to heal. They’d named her Esperanza, a statement of their faith in her capacity for survival, and soon indeed she was hopping about their camp and taking titbits from their fingers, apparently unbothered by the loss of her ability to fly.

  And then one morning Guillermo bounced down the track in the hotel jeep to tell Jamie that the Russian was ready and the deal was on. He sent Bea and Luggie back to Punta Allen with instructions to have a conspicuous lunch in the hotel, then went back into the jungle to retrieve the bale from its hiding place.

  His hands were shaking as he dug it up. Until now the cocaine had been a weaver of dreams, a font of pure possibility from which all kinds of different futures could emerge, some of them pleasant, many of them not. But the act of digging it up and giving it to Guillermo was like opening Schrödinger’s box to have a peek at its cat: the waveforms of fantasy were now all collapsing into a very concrete and defined channel of reality down which Jamie was being sluiced with little choice or control. At any moment he could fall through a trap or hit a solid wall, and there would be little or nothing he could do about it. For the first time since he’d left the Midlands he was really, truly, scared. Which was perhaps why he’d done this. Because it was also the moment he felt the return of an active desire to stay alive.

  But on that day, it seemed, the universe was in a benevolent mood. Everyone behaved, the exchange was made, and within an hour Jamie had taken possession of the Chiriquí. With his survival instinct functioning again, however, he had no wish to hang around to wait for the Russians to change their minds or for tales of his encounter with them to spread. By nightfall he, Bea and Luggie had loaded up their stuff along with a couple of crates filled with supplies and, of course, Esperanza, who was delighted to once again be surrounded by water and hopped around the bows like the whole affair had been organised for her benefit. Then they headed south round the point, using the diesel engine and staying within sight of land until they had a chance to experiment with the sails.