Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘Emerald doves?’ I asked, for some absurd reason expecting the words to placate her. I recognised the birds and was glad that they conformed to the jewelled picture I had from my boyhood bird books. The way she held herself without moving reminded me of something in myself. It was not desire but a kind of energy that absorbed as much as it gave out. I took a step closer.

  The nerves straining inside her loosened, freeing her face briefly from irritation into surprise. ‘You know emerald doves?’ She brushed her hair back from her eyes, knotting it and pulling at the strands. Her nails were short but shaped and shiny; a thin metal bracelet slipped down one wrist. Streaks of sweat marked her face making her look flustered. The puffs under her eyes were wet and thin rings glistened around her slightly swollen neck. A few drops trickled to the seam of her top creating a small damp pattern in the cloth.

  ‘You speak English?’

  She nodded, perplexed. Then suspicion seemed to contract the muscles around her eyes again. ‘Everyone can, no?’

  That was what I had been led to believe too. ‘But no one in this place talks,’ I said and immediately regretted the tone I had used. At the same time I resented the implication that the surliness I had encountered everywhere was, in some way, my fault. Blood rushed to my face.

  She saw that and suppressed a smile. The skin, stretched thin, trembled. ‘You must be the tourist at Palm Beach?’

  I thought I detected a note of disdain in her tone and, for a minute, I was the one without words. I was not a tourist. At least that was not how I saw myself. Neither was I a native. My categories were different and seemed too difficult to explain to her. I was a man in search of a father, or perhaps in search of himself. The same as everybody else, but on a journey that seemed longer. I told her instead that her doves were the first birds I’d seen since I had landed, even though I had heard there were birds everywhere on the island.

  She picked up the empty cage and shook her head, turning glum. ‘That was before war changed our nature here.’ Her eyes darted around, away from the pond, as if to show me the consequences: the sparse scattering of etiolated flowers under the stooped grey trees. ‘Now you have to search hard to find anything beautiful.’

  I remember feeling some serious misgivings then about what my father might have been involved in and the true nature of my peculiar inheritance. But what could I do? Despite what she said, I thought the glow in her face was beautiful. I watched dewdrops form on the skin around her mouth and on the slopes of her nose. Sunlight turned them into gems. She was unlike anybody else I had ever seen. Slim and small, she seemed to possess all the space around her. Her face drew everything into it. I didn’t want her to move. I wanted to see the shape of the smile she had hidden; to retrieve it for myself.

  I can think of a thousand things to say now but then, stammering over every other word, I floundered. I tried to explain that I had come looking for something. My lost soul perhaps, I said, half-jokingly, trying to mask my confusion.

  She cheered up at that and almost laughed. ‘I can see that.’

  I smiled, wanting to encourage her. Wanting more. For a moment it seemed possible, and that everything would work out right. Then the surface of the pond darkened. I looked up at the clouds that had appeared above us. When I turned back to say something to her, she had gone.

  The trees and the bushes around seemed undisturbed. I felt depleted. I didn’t know what I had done wrong; perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to joke about the soul, things spiritual. For some this was, once, an island of the devout. I searched for some mark – a footprint, crushed grass, anything – but it was as though she had never been there.

  In the end I returned the way I had come, trudging slower and slower.

  By the time I got to the hotel the sun’s last beads had seeped out of the sky. I found an old deckchair and took it out to the Sundowner Hut overlooking the pier where the boat had docked a week earlier. The sea rolled from dark burgundy to a lunar blue, erasing the crossing I had made and nudging me back to the reasons that lay behind it.

  My father died somewhere in this jungle when I was still a child. My mother took her own life, far from home, not long after. I felt I had never really known either of them; they had hardly ever been around and I had to make do. I grew up with my grandparents, believing I should stay close to home. From an early age I learned to be ultra-cautious. My grandparents themselves had breathed the air of diverse places, but when they spoke of their itinerants’ history, I saw only trails of migration that seemed either cruel or futile: the pointless effects of a wayward gene.

  My grandfather had been an instructor in a small Chertsey flying school on the edge of London but he had retired long before I was born and was, for me, always an old man with silver hair lining a cloudy brown face; his gentle hands constantly tending his garden, slowing the frenzy of the encroaching city and patiently calming my earliest fears. He passed away when I was twelve. That was harder to take than my parents’ desertions. Cleo, my grandmother, was the only one who stayed to see me through. She would make pancakes and bake me banana bread, or ginger cake, every Sunday; once a month re-create Eldon’s special fried pork curry. Delicacies to remind me of my antecedents in the wider world beyond the windswept shale and shingle of our South Downs coast. She was a strong, quiet woman with clear beliefs. ‘You have them with you, inside you, for always, child,’ she would say to console me. ‘You will find you have all you need.’ Not long after I left school, she died. I drifted a little, trying to ease the hurt, looking for companionship; someone, or something, to hold close.

  By my early twenties, I decided the life of a recluse would comfort me more; release me from the recurrence of loss, the delusions of communal life. My strength, I believed in those days, lay in my reticence. I sold the old house and moved into a cheap flat, far from any airport, beyond the crowded flight paths I had lived under as a child. It had no garden, not even a window-box. I wanted things to stand still. I didn’t have to do any work and indulged only in secluded, solitary recreations. Like many of my dispirited, isolated neighbours I lived a life of junk, grease and sloth.

  Then, about nine months ago – a lifetime ago it seems now – there was an infestation of mice in my cramped bachelor kitchen. A cold snap must have brought them in. I found a trail of droppings by the bread bin and more around the toaster. I had to get rid of the pests but I didn’t want to use poison; I didn’t want bloated carcasses rotting in some damp corner like those by the bottle-bank outside the municipal library. I decided to drive them away instead, unharmed. I had a go with a broom and brush, clearing out every cupboard in the flat.

  That was when I found my lodestar: an antiquated video cassette with my father’s name printed on the label followed by the year, 1998. It was in a cardboard box in which I had dumped the few remaining mementoes from my grandparents’ house, my childhood props: a bird-watcher’s guidebook, a couple of young ornithologists’ annuals, a collection of cult CDs and dub poetry, geek software. Things I had not been able to look at for years.

  Inside the video case I discovered a note addressed to my mother but written, it seemed, as much for me then as now. Three decades late, in the cold winter light of my scoured London flat, I read the letter, the numbness inside me thawing to its irresistible call. In the days that followed I read it so many times, the neat, precise writing became inscribed in me.

  Darling,

  I am sorry I have to delay my return again, but there is a lot to be done following the attack last month. As usual everyone is galvanised here only after a bomb explodes. It lasts for a couple of weeks, and then everything sinks back into the same old morass it had been before. But by the summer I should be able to leave the island. So do book that gite. It won’t be like here, but it will be good to be all together again, wherever.

  Until then I am glad Marc is happily settled with the Grands, and that you can join your team. As you say, it is only for two weeks this time and then nothing again until the Palermo con
ference in May. Marc will be fine. He has to learn.

  Guess what I bought last weekend? A video-camera! I thought it was a good chance to make some clips for you to see what it is really like here now.

  I find it so much easier to talk into the camera than to write, but there hasn’t been enough time to use it much. I am sending you this first cassette, as a starter.

  Someday, when this business is all over, I really want to bring Marc here with me. I want to show him this place the way Dad did with me on that wonderful trip I had with him all those years ago. I found something then, locked inside myself, although it took a journey of love, years later, to release it. I want Marc to understand why I had to come back, and what I found on this island, because I hope, one day, that he will too.

  My love to you both,

  Lee.

  He had found a dream, even though Eldon had always insisted his – ours – was an island where dreamers often have to destroy their dreams, if they are not to be destroyed by them.

  I had never been shown the video by my mother or by my grandmother. Perhaps they couldn’t bear to. Perhaps they both feared the effect it would have on me. But all alone in my flat I watched it over and over with a mounting desire to break out. Marc, you would love it… he promised from every fugitive frame. Listening to the voice of my father calling me from the emerald island that had once been his father’s home, the place of my parents’ conjugal romance, I realised I too had to go to find something more. There was nothing for me in London.

  I handed my flat over to a management agency and put my few remaining possessions into long-term storage. All my other assets I converted into cash deposits. The man at the bank warned me, ‘Global access does not include bunkers in war-zones, you realise, don’t you?’ I explained that the island I was going to was not an actual war zone any more and that, in any case, I could easily carry enough dollars to last me six months or more out there. My young banker did not look convinced. ‘Nobody knows what goes on in those trouble spots.’

  I said that was precisely why I wanted to go. Within three weeks I was on my way.

  That evening, rocking on my Palm Beach Hotel deckchair, close to the pulse of a warm sea, I thought about my encounter in the jungle. She was not what I had come looking for, but her appearance made me feel I might discover something of what I had been missing.

  The next day I was impatient to get back to the duckweed pond. I wanted to hear what else she could tell me. Or already, perhaps, I just wanted to be with her. I couldn’t be sure she’d return; my only hope was to be there at the same time as before.

  After the usual bland lunch at the hotel, I set off back into a world of field glasses and feathers. The sun was piercing, but I didn’t care.

  When I reached the pond, I noticed the water was rimmed with scum. A small lily had opened near where we had stood the day before. It had some colour: a tinge of red on the lower petals. The weeds on the bank also seemed a little darker. I tried to locate the tree that her birds had flown to, but there were no fruits to be seen anywhere.

  There were no clouds, no wind. The heat seemed more severe than before. I sat in the shade to wait. I had a flask of drinking water with me this time, but it didn’t help. There was not much I could do to relieve the burning I felt inside.

  I tried again to meditate; to balance the heat inside and outside my body. I was close to a kind of equilibrium, when the thrashing of wings startled me. I twisted around. She stood there just as I had remembered her. A radiant face, her whole body held taut. Only her hair seemed a little more tousled. She had the same cage open; another dove was flapping in her hand. This time she was not surprised to see me.

  ‘You disappeared,’ I complained, rising up to my feet.

  She lifted the bird up to her face and came close to me. ‘So? You are back, no?’

  I wanted her to talk some more, yet I could say nothing to encourage her. I was worried I might blurt out something stupid again. I felt she was looking at me, assessing me, even while she soothed the bird. In her hair I noticed a scrap of yellow. As I reached to remove the leaf, it unfolded into a small butterfly and fluttered towards the water.

  She shrank back. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I thought there was something stuck.’ My hand felt detached. It floated between us. A stick in limbo. I pictured my father meeting my mother somewhere on the coast of this same island. What did he say standing in sand?

  ‘Why have you come?’ she asked.

  I couldn’t tell her it was because of some old home video. I couldn’t even say that it was because I wanted to see her again.

  ‘There’s nothing left here, you know?’

  ‘What about those?’ I nodded at her cage.

  She sighed and seemed to relax a little. ‘The birds?’

  ‘Where are they from?’

  ‘My ashram.’ She paused.

  I told her that there were ashrams where I came from too, but they were meant for people stressed out by city life.

  ‘Your city?’

  ‘London.’ I hesitated.

  She nodded with a small grimace as though I had said enough for her to imagine the rest. She then told me how her mother had wanted to create an ashram for all the birds of the air because she believed they were the souls of us all. Emerald doves were her favourites. ‘Come, I’ll show you a nest.’ She took my hand in hers and led me towards the trees as though it was the most natural thing in the world to do.

  I had never felt a touch like hers. Her skin was soft, yet the grip firm. I looked at her small hand; her fingers wrapped around the ends of mine. The knuckles were smooth. A greenish vein swelled on the back of her hand; her wrist was chafed where her bracelet had rubbed it. I could feel the life in her.

  I curled my fingers to let the blood in them flow closer to hers.

  All along the forest path dark ferns genuflected as she brushed past. Noli-me-tangere, she said they were called. By an old mudbank she pointed out a litter of pigs she said she had released to the wild and, in the distance, her favourite trees. ‘Over there, in the older jungle where nobody goes, is my farm.’ She pressed her finger to my lips leaving me a crystalline trace to savour from the giddy whorls on her skin. ‘Illegal. Nobody knows.’ She nearly smiled again.

  I was intrigued. She didn’t say any more about it; I could see she wasn’t ready to take me there yet.

  She let go of me and used both her hands to clear a way through the bushes. I smothered her small sandal marks with my larger treads, watching the curve of her neck as she bent her head to go under some branches. I had to stoop lower to follow her. Her bare foot straightened, ahead of me, as she stood on tiptoe to climb over a fallen tree trunk. The bone of her brown ankle peeped from under the denim as she lifted her leg over. ‘Come on, this way,’ she urged.

  Then, in a clump of straw saplings, she uncovered a secret woven nest for me. ‘This is one of the halfway houses.’ She blew a small blue fluffy feather up into the air; there was nothing else in it. She explained that it was where she nursed the birds who were slow to regain their foraging instincts. Pulling the branches back over the nest, she concealed it as before. Further on, underneath the ironwood tree, she found the corpse of one which had come to grief. She picked up the little sunbird and folded in its wings. Her face dipped, solemn but not tearful. ‘Oh-oh,’ she clucked like someone who had grown too fast into the world. ‘It is not easy for them, you know, to learn to be free.’

  I felt a tingle run down my spine. I had come to learn too. Perhaps the eroded coast I had reached was, after all, the right place to start on this island. Watching her bury the bird under a small mound of leaves I wondered, was this the person who could show me what I really needed to know?

  She covered our tracks and dusted her hands, looking around thoughtfully. Then she turned to me and said it was time to take me back. ‘The path can be tricky, you know, when it gets dark. Sometimes the night patrols are trigger-happy.’

/>   I wasn’t sure whether I should hold her hand again. I swung mine close as we sauntered out into the open, but she seemed too busy thinking about military manoeuvres to notice.

  When we reached the edge of the village, she said, ‘I must go now.’

  ‘When can I see you again?’ I asked.

  ‘Tomorrow. Same place, the same time again. I have lots more birds to bring.’ She looked up at the darkened sky above me, filling it with wings. A nervous quiver ran down her throat. In my mind I turned it to that laugh from the previous day, still hovering inside her, waiting to break free.

  I felt hollow after she had gone, emptier than before. The breeze was warm, but there was something cold under my skin as if I carried winter in my bones. I felt I had crossed a line that split the world and me; I was both lost and found at the same time. ‘Sindbad was the bugger’, my grandfather used to say tapping his head with his finger, ‘who showed us how we forget what we should remember – the dangers of the voyage – and remember what we should forget: the place we must leave behind.’ Eldon always had some dictum or other to fix every moment in its place. I had none of my own and, at that moment, I couldn’t even tell the sea from the shore.

  I made my way, reluctantly, to the entrance of the hotel. The building seemed to have sunk further into the ground. The lights were low. The gates which were usually open had been locked. It didn’t worry me. I was too absorbed with what was happening inside me. I clanked the chain several times and, finally, a young security guard appeared. I didn’t recognise him but he smiled shyly when he saw me. He too seemed to know who I was. He slung his short-barrelled gun over his shoulder and fumbled with the padlock.

  ‘Late, sir,’ he remarked with a surreptitious eagerness.

  ‘I was out walking,’ I replied, surprised to find yet another person keen to speak. What was going on? ‘Why is it locked so early?’ There had been no curfew as such before.