He grinned, dragging back the gate and letting me through. ‘Today’s order, sir. Power is down.’ He looked pleased at being so informative.
‘I haven’t seen you before. Are you new?’ I asked.
His gawky face opened again into a broken smile. One of his teeth was missing. ‘Just came, sir.’ He swayed in youthful enthusiasm. The gun slipped off his shoulder. He grabbed at it, but then the chain slithered out of his hand pulling a bag from his belt and spilling its contents around his feet.
I picked up the gun, a crude stripped-down assault rifle, while he scrabbled around for the other bits. I asked him his name.
‘Nirali, sir.’ There was a dimple in his chin that rolled when he moved his lips.
‘I’m glad you can talk, Nirali,’ I said, handing him his gun. ‘Nobody else in this hotel seems to want to.’
‘Yes, sir.’ He grinned again and tucked the weapon under his arm. ‘I like to, sir.’
‘Good.’ I was pleased at the way things were turning out. ‘My name, by the way, is Marc.’
‘Yes, sir. Goodnight, sir. See you tomorrow, sir.’
‘Goodnight, Nirali.’
At the deserted front desk I rang the bell and waited. After a little while a familiar ghoulish figure ambled out of a back room, holding up a lantern. I asked for my key and room service.
‘We can give only sandwich tonight,’ he grumbled. ‘Shrimp paste.’ He turned the wick of his lamp down in obeisance to some malevolent shadow behind him.
‘That’s fine,’ I shrugged. ‘Shrimp paste will do fine.’
In my room I lit a candle and waited for the meagre meal to arrive. I snapped open a beer and tried to reflect on the changes that had taken place. The dreary hotel no longer bothered me. The air was clearing. Nirali, the security guard, reminded me of the picture I had of my father. Something in that uneven enthusiastic smile, an echo perhaps, as in his name.
But her name meant even more. Her name, she had said, was Uva, and I said it again to myself: Uva. I recognised it as the name of my grandfather’s favourite strong black tea, but she told me it was the name of a region of high mountains, the home of venerable old gods and forest folk in perennial rebellion. ‘We have always had to fight for our freedom,’ she had grinned, ‘against waves and waves of your brass-balled colonisers.’
The following afternoon she was there again, just as she had promised. She had her cage with her as before, but she looked different. Dressed up, even though the T-shirt and jeans were the same. I stared, keeping my distance, unsure where we had left off the previous evening; where we stood now. She had scrunched her hair back and wore a necklace that looked like a string of teeth.
‘Fangs?’ I asked.
She looked puzzled.
‘Around your neck? Are those fangs?’
She looked down at her chest and broke into a laugh, making me laugh too, not knowing why nor caring.
‘They’re beads, no? Wooden beads only.’
‘Oh, I see.’ I felt hot, clammy, searching for something else to say. ‘Birds. Those are more birds?’ The words leapt out.
She twirled the beads with her fingers, feeling for their shapes.
I reached for her cage, but she moved it away. ‘No. Wait.’
I waited, remembering herons by a river, spring flowers adrift, the hasty ejaculations of early youth.
She opened the cage and a small brown salaleena whistled. Uva squinted and pursed her lips in reply. The bird stuck its head out, peered one way and then the other, and then flew out. I watched the muscles in her face ripen.
I didn’t know what I wanted to happen next. I was not a youngster any more. If I had seen her on the Twickenham bridge, casting bread, I would have heaved back my shoulders and walked on, assuming our worlds would never even rhyme. But by her green duckweed pond I felt I had entered another universe. I stood there giftless and gormless.
She looked up at me, quizzically. ‘Have you never seen salaleenas before?’
I tried, incoherently, to catch the threads of our failing conversation.
‘Have you?’ she repeated. ‘No?’
Finally, with that last tilted syllable her tongue irrevocably untied mine; the tide in her, and in myself too, released more words then than I thought I knew. Something burst inside me and out. Thrilled, I told her how wonderful it was to see her. How my whole journey, not just into the jungle, but to the island itself, now made sense. How I felt my life and the whole gloomy place had altered since I met her. How limes flowered and birds flew and everything had come alive. How not only salaleenas, but even the security guards were now keen to talk. I told her about Nirali, wondering if he might be one of her flock.
She ran her tongue under her lips. ‘You have any idea of where you really are?’
I felt stung by the accusation.
‘We live in a state of terror. Can’t you see it? It is not that we are just a little shabby here. We have had to adjust our thresholds. Abuse our minds as we do our bodies when we have to control pain.’
Yes, I wanted to say, yes, I know how bad it is. I wanted to say I was sorry that I could not feel her pain, or anybody else’s. It was not my fault that we all have only our own.
‘Your Nirali is a lucky innocent still,’ she continued, ‘but they will bend him, you see, when he is ready to join a squad.’
‘Nirali?’ I shook my head, trying to comprehend what she was suggesting. ‘No, he wouldn’t join. He doesn’t even like to be a guard. He’d rather work inside at the desk, or even as a waiter.’
She half-closed her eyes as though to stop some cerebral pain. I would have stopped it for her, if only I could. Nirali was not the one I wanted to talk about. I wondered what would happen if I kissed her. Would the world change then, at least for us? At that moment all I wanted from my life, from everything around me and before me, coalesced into her. I remember a sort of haze that rippled with her every breath. My father’s ghost, Eldon’s shadow, my disjointed past and all the corruption around us receded from my mind as I gazed at her. I realised that all I had been looking for was there in front of me. I tightened my lips, as though that alone would be enough. Then, unable to stop, I kissed her. I could only think of touching her lips. Supplanting that air warmed by her breath with the lightest brush of my thinnest skin. Nothing else.
She kissed me back.
The hours moved swiftly then. I wanted time to slow down with her; speed up when I was without her. Change its nature to coincide with ours.
The very next evening she took me beyond the ash rocks where the stone-curlews used to nest. She showed me the path of the moon and lit a fire on the beach between three coconut palms and a bunch of lime trees. She threw nutmeg and ola leaves in the flames and let the smoke clothe her. I watched her bow, like a magician, into her own pubis and vanish briefly, singing, into a floating veil. My arms ached as they ache even now; in the small of my back a muscle was stretched taut. Smoke compressed the breath in my lungs, and I choked for the want of her skin around me, her voice inside me, her heart’s beat next to mine, changing mine.
Within just days I felt I had known her for ever; her eyes, her mouth, her arms wide open, encircling, echoed everywhere. ‘Come with me,’ she murmured even in her cloud-warmed sleep. Taking my arm – eager to go, eager to hold – she walked me to the beach under a sky of laughing stars. She drew runes along the edge of the ocean dragging her toes in the warm, wet sand. She talked and talked to me, constructing a citadel of hope. I told her about my grandfather’s Eden and she said that she had heard that there was once a whole region full of butterflies and flowers – Samandia – but nobody went that far into the blighted south any more. ‘You’ll have to find somewhere else,’ she said ‘make your own Eden.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s not his I want, but ours.’
When we made love, my life rocked. She’d trace with her fingers the seams of my legs, the ridges of my back, my deepest wishbone rising like a swallow, and I would touch hers ripp
ling under a skin strained by the notes of a mangled melody.
The next day she held me close and told me, ‘I want you to see what they do to control us.’
We had to walk two kilometres up the coast to get to the place she wanted to show me: a charred shell of a house with the ground around it black and full of cinders.
‘I knew the family that lived here,’ she said. ‘They were meant to grow only bitter gourd and radish for the market, but they had young children and got some sugarcane going. It was against the rules. One day the military came and saw the boy eating sugarcane. They tried to catch him to beat him, but he ran away. The soldiers couldn’t find him so they burnt the whole place down.’ She led me to where some new shoots were growing through. ‘But they can’t win. Look, the cane is coming up again. It will be taller and sweeter and give us all strength.’
‘What happened to the family?’ I asked.
Uva stared down at the ground. ‘The boy got away, I guess.’
Back on the beach, later, she brought out a perfectly shaped mango from a cotton sack. ‘Try this beauty I stole from a District Commander’s garden. From a very old protected tree. Even they – their leaders – know the best comes from what is to be found, no? Not forced.’ She cut the mango into two pools of set sun, running the blade of her butterfly knife – a sharp sliver of steel hidden in twin hinged sticks of black wood and oxidised copper – right up against the swollen seed inside.
I admired her pluck, the hidden strength of what she described as her natural filaments.
‘My genes,’ she smiled. ‘The women in my family have always nurtured our inner wings. My mother, Rosa, became a legend here.’
‘What was she? An eco-warrior?’
‘More a kind of ornithologist. Like you, looking everywhere for the bird of paradise.’ She glanced at me, covertly, to check my reaction, and then broke into a chuckle.
I reached for her, but my fingers barely brushed her tarsus as she rose. Her heels drummed me completely to her song.
‘Would you ever leave this place? Break free from all the hassle,’ I asked her afterwards.
‘That would be impossible,’ she said.
Above the sea-line the light was eroding fast. Uva mopped the fruit juice and our commingled resin off the groundsheet with a piece of silk. She sniffed at it and smiled to herself. She folded up the sheet into a tiny square and buckled it to her bag. Then suddenly she was gone, leaving behind only the scent of her ardour.
The next time I saw her was when she turned up on her tricycle. She came with a big box full of fresh eggs and untainted fruit – rambutan, guava, star-apple – all concealed under a tray of buff envelopes. She rode up to the terrace and rang her bell. I was in a hammock outside. She pushed back her hair and tossed me a clutch of rambutan. ‘Catch.’ The rest of the fruit she handed to the sweeper sprawled by the pool. The eggs she gave to the cook, in the kitchen, to make into an omelette. All their faces seemed to lift each time she came around. She even managed to get the hotel jeep for our use and promised to take me to one of the ancient ruined cities that the military, apparently, no longer bothered with. She chortled when I asked whether it was dangerous for her to bend the rules of the hotel so freely. It worried me even though by then I was pretty much settled in the place.
‘Why? I am allowed to come here. Deliveries is what I do. Your lady mail. It’s just that I am not meant to be a guest here.’ She grinned. ‘But tonight maybe I will stay with you. The people who do the work here like me. I give them fruit whenever I can, no? Tusker, in the bar, is the only spy, and he is much too fond of my sweet sapadillo to report me. Even Nirali, whenever I see him, says he likes to talk only to you.’ She laughed effortlessly and ran her fingers over mine.
She made me rejoice despite the dour surroundings. I wanted to hold her hand for ever. ‘Mutual self-interest, is it?’
Her smile ran amok briefly, before vanishing from her face. Her bright eyes dampened. The light sank as if into a pit. ‘We all lived for each other once, not in need of each other,’ she replied. ‘The world was made out of love. You have to believe that, don’t you?’
Although younger than me, she seemed to have a grasp of the past which reached far beyond the confusion of mine.
I heard the baying of hunting dogs in the distance. ‘What are they hunting?’ I asked her.
Her face darkened, ‘I hope not your Nirali already.’
I felt a chill inside. I hadn’t seen him for two days.
Breakfast came and we ate silently. Then, just as I started to ask her more, we heard a motorbike puttering up the drive. ‘Hide everything. Pretend I was never here,’ she hissed and slipped into the garden. Fortunately we had finished the omelette and the fruit. I chucked my serviette on the table, over her cutlery and glass of juice. There was nothing else I could do. I heard someone march around the reception area and then a man burst out onto the terrace. He was armed: the gun was in its holster and he carried a crash helmet in one hand. He whipped a pair of dark glasses over his eyes and moved hastily around the tables. I looked at him as steadily as I could. He came up to my table and stared at the rumpled serviette. He slid a finger inside the neck of his brown tunic as if to let air into a suffocating chest. ‘Tourist?’
I nodded, not sure whether I should reach for my passport.
‘You see the security guard?’
‘Which one?’ I asked, trying to think of some way to protect Nirali.
‘Young one. Broken tooth.’
I made an empty gesture with my hands. ‘Could be the guy who went out in the dinghy.’
He stared at me, trying to draw out something more. I resisted. After a moment he spun around and headed for the boathouse. A weight dropped from my shoulders; my legs, under the table, felt weak.
Once the man had left on his motorbike, Uva returned, her face animated.
‘He was looking for Nirali. I tried to put him off,’ I said.
‘I know.’ Uva’s eyes hardened. ‘He is an executioner. If he’d seen me, he’d think I was hiding Nirali.’
‘Are you?’ I asked.
‘No. I gave him the name of a friend in the city. I couldn’t risk the farm. I don’t let anyone come near.’
‘Not even me?’
She didn’t reply immediately. She could trust me by now, surely, I thought. ‘Maybe in a day or two. When I can be sure we won’t be tracked.’ She took my hand. ‘I do want you there. I want you to see it.’
She stayed with me that night; she said the hotel was probably the safest place now that the man had made his visit. It was not quite how I expected it to be.
Soon after daybreak we heard a helicopter circling, searching the coast. We kept out of sight. Later, in the afternoon, while I was trying to sleep I thought I heard shots, but I couldn’t be sure.
After dark, we had dinner outside on the terrace again. Tusker, dressed in an old black and white suit, served us; despite the circumstances, I thought he looked quite comic gliding in and out of the shadows. ‘A tropical goth,’ I whispered to Uva, but she didn’t know what I was on about.
The following morning the cook informed Uva that he had heard the executioner had left the area.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked her. I didn’t know how easily they gave up.
‘Can’t say.’
‘Can we go out, you think?’
‘Maybe, but not too far.’
I suggested the small cove I had found when I first explored the ramparts behind the village.
She said that should be OK.
When we got there, the sand looked good. The sea was bright blue. Even the sun seemed a little kinder.
I found a shady spot near the wall. ‘Come, we can lay your mat here,’ I called out.
Uva was down by the water. She was turning over something with her foot. She looked distressed.
‘What’s wrong?’ I went over, thinking she’d found another bird.
She kicked at the wet sand. ‘They must have caught
him,’ she said.
‘Who?’
She showed me the empty shell of a cartridge she had picked up. There were two more in the sand. ‘They do it on the beach. The executions. They must have shot him here last night. The blood just drains away.’ Her voice trembled slightly. ‘This sand here never stains, you know, no matter how much blood is spilled.’
I tried to imagine Nirali’s awkward eager face. I couldn’t. The sea filled my eyes.
The next day she took me to her farm. We had to go through what seemed to me impenetrable jungle. When we finally reached her secret vale, I was amazed. There were clumps of bamboo and banana, tall avocado trees, shrubs full of berries and lantana growing everywhere. She had small nurseries of various crops, chicken runs and animal shelters hidden in between. ‘The aviaries are in those trees.’ She pointed to the jungle behind a small hut made of mud.
‘You did all this?’
‘Why not?’
‘By yourself?’
‘I have a network of friends, but they are not all farmers. We each do our own thing. One day, maybe, we will learn to learn from each other about something more than an ugly war.’
I told her that’s what I wanted too. I told her about my parents, and grandparents, and how their lives had been shaped by wars that were not their own.
She took me into the hut. ‘My father was in the Forestry Commission before our last big war blew everything apart. He hated the politics and bigotry in the service; he dropped out to make an alternative life with my mother. He was an idealist and an artist. He made things. All he ever wanted was to create a sanctuary for us. Evergrowing. You know, the very first sanctuaries on earth were on this island.’ Her eyes misted over. ‘He’d say, “The edicts of the past are what we, in this place, so progressively forget,” you understand?’
Her mother, Uva said, came from a family who had cleared forests and planted imperial crops for three generations. Probably Eldon’s coconut kings: making money; taking, never giving. Uva’s mother had felt compelled to foster all the fruits of the earth in recompense. ‘She taught me to farm in a different way – with real care.’ Uva’s mother had found a place high up in the hills, unspoiled, from where she could reintroduce the natural world into the overexploited cashlands of their denuded province. Her mother wanted these to return to a richer jungle rather than the leached scrubland that retreating global markets and destitute governments left in their wake. ‘My father built with her a home using tiles like in the olden times, and protected the wilderness there as a refuge for the birds, the animals, the insects, the plants that were being destroyed by all those profiteers. My parents believed that the world should be an interdependent living thing. That was their dream.’ She joined her hands together in the shape of a prayer and breathed into the hollow between her palms. ‘But the new warlords and their cronies were the only ones to thrive here. They grew fatter and fatter – feeding on the greed, the mistrust and the endless war. They destroyed everything, no? The ones on this side of the island took the cat’s eye for themselves, in the east they took the toad’s head for their symbol.’
Heaven's Edge Page 3
