When the rain finally eased, we collected the seat-pads from the cruiser, and some coverings, and brought them into the cave. I sat up on a ledge, watching over the other two, as they settled in a huddle like children.
I was exhausted but my body would not unwind. I remember thinking one of us ought to stay up on guard, even though I wasn’t sure what good it would do. I stared out as though by looking I could make Uva appear. I wanted to pray for her and wished I knew how. I wish I knew now, remembering.
The air seemed to cool as the storm moved further away. I reached over and adjusted the blanket that had slipped off Jaz’s bare round shoulder. He was sound asleep.
III
Moon Plains
I woke up remembering my grandfather crying. It was the last spring before the years of our evergrowing shadows, more unsettled than anyone had expected.
On that late May day, in the gardens along the Thames, everybody’s roses were in bloom. The sun was bright, but the sky hazy and the roar of jet planes coming in to land seemed louder for their invisibility. I was spending a few days with my grandparents while my mother was away at one of her innumerable conferences. Blackbirds were chi-chi-ing incessantly and the maroon roses on the straggly branches, too high up the neighbour’s wall for my grandfather to reach, blossomed where the sun had warmed the buds into heavy blooms with ball gown pleats and voluminous petals. My grandfather was resting on his rustic oak bench, feasting his eyes on the butterfly florescence of a deliciously yellow laburnum tree. It was mid-afternoon. The garden was a riot of colour. Eldon, nearly eighty years old, seemed completely at peace.
‘Granda, are you going?’ I asked.
‘Where?’
‘To the show.’
He had been looking at a newspaper article on the Chelsea flower show. ‘I don’t think so. It’s not for people like me. Anyway, the crowds will tire me out.’ He sighed, as he often did, and lit another cigarette. He turned the page to the cricket which was his other restorative. His team – the old home team – was on a roll.
‘You want to play with the hosepipe?’ He pointed a crumpled cigarette at a spool of green plastic tubing by the fence. ‘Those roses need water.’ His tone suggested that the sight of the spray would revive him too: a gushing pipe in warm, still air. ‘Pull it out.’
On my way over, I spotted a mound of crumbly brown earth at the border of the lawn. I plucked a dandelion and poked at it with the furry stem.
‘What have you found?’ Eldon called out. ‘Don’t you want the hose?’
I reluctantly left the colony of alarmed ants and got hold of the pipe.
‘Turn the tap on,’ he instructed from his resting place. ‘There is a control on the nozzle.’
The tap squeaked in my hand and bubbled. Stepping over a line of seedling cabbage, I unwound the hosepipe. A dribble from where the crosshatched plastic was locked into the red ring wet my feet. ‘It’s coming, Granda,’ I shouted holding down the trigger with both hands and tracing a silver line to the edge of his oval lawn. Water poured into the dry earth of the flower bed like a river. A muddy puddle quickly formed and a rich gurgle filled the garden.
‘Turn it some more so you get a proper spray.’
I wanted to run the water to the ants. A little trench quickly filled; a dark foaming head slithered towards the nest.
‘Do the roses, Marc. The roses. Give each bush a good minute and a half. Count to a hundred, then move to the next.’
All of a sudden my arms went limp. I wanted to cry. ‘Granda, do ants drown?’
For a moment he looked blank, as though he was trying to work out whether ants breathed. Whether they had noses and nostrils. Lungs that might fill with water. Whether their tiny legs would flail, splashing about, before they sank down beneath the surface. He gazed at me as though I was somebody else. ‘Yes, son. Yes, I suppose they do.’
‘Have you ever killed an ant, Granda?’ I wanted his hand to give mine the strength I could not find.
‘You mean deliberately?’ He hunched his shoulders as though he was in a fighter plane, like my father, swooping down, with the gun muzzles on the wing blades jabbering neat lines of dust-puffs to match the spasms of a dying column. ‘I never flew even the Hurricanes,’ he muttered.
I didn’t understand. ‘What hurry cranes?’ I asked.
‘I mean not into combat,’ he added absently. ‘But what did you ask?’
‘If you ever killed an ant.’
‘No, never. Never deliberately.’
I was wondering about accidents when Grandma Cleo called out, ‘Eldon, telephone.’
He heard her, but it took him some time to return from his reverie.
‘Eldon, telephone for you.’
‘Right.’
I watched him stub his cigarette out on the side of the garden bench and slowly struggle to his feet. I followed him into the house.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
Cleo shrugged, spooning sugar. ‘Markee, you see nobody pass here …’ she sang to me instead, weaving the lilt of her childhood into mine.
Eldon waved a hand dismissively and picked up the telephone. ‘Hello. Yes. Speaking.’ I could see him press the receiver hard against his ear. ‘Can you repeat that, please.’ He shifted the receiver to his other side. Then I saw his whole body shrink until there seemed to be nothing left inside.
Beyond the French windows a robin hopped around the ivy and opened its beak; the spring in its throat uncoiled in a shrill insistent song. I looked back at my grandfather; he was clutching the back of a chair. ‘Are you sure it was his plane?’ He waited for the crackle in the receiver to cease. Then he put the phone down.
I ran up to him and grabbed his hand. ‘Why you crying, Granda?’
I received no answer at the time.
With fire we live, with fire we die. There is no going back. In the crematorium my grandfather’s coffin, my mother’s and my grandmother’s vanished behind a motorised curtain in a succession of heartbreak, suicide and old age; the flames of my father’s aircraft, falling, flaring behind each of them, again and again.
The cave – our refuge – slowly filled with the light of a different star. I felt the sun’s rays had burnt ulcers in my dream, but my two companions were still asleep. I carried my shoes in one hand and crept over to the entrance. Outside, the dawn was silent. The silence of aftermath: the emptiness of a spent storm. Climbing around to the other side of the rock, I found myself above a great reservoir with a view that dissolved in the morning’s marrow mist. The air was moist and chilly. Something in my brain slipped, like a wheel on wet grass. Pictures of my father, and of my grandfather standing against the same landscape, materialised. I imagined the two of them with me, at last finding a place where we might all be close together again, free of discord. ‘Look, can you see what I can?’
Eldon always said freedom did not come easy. ‘I remember the lyrebird’s call to be free of the past,’ he would complain. ‘But everyone seemed, even in those days, to want to replace one kind of past with another, cabbage with bortsch. I wanted to be an artist of the air not just a Fitzrovian intellectual, you know. An eagle soaring, not a damn peacock strutting.’
From my vantage point I could just make out the jade rim of the jungle on the other side. The flat, calm water was as still as paint, cleansed by the storm that had melded the lake and the sky into one. Clumps of trees, like steep islands, stood in shallow water; the platinum trunks of those struck by lightning bared, with not even an egret to ruffle the slowly evaporating shrouds. The morning light was turning the sky blue. Into my head flew the remnants of an illustration from Eldon’s boyhood: grebes, sandpipers, red-shanks, green-shanks, golden plovers, scarlet minivets and high above, a cloud of whistling teal watched by fish eagles, marsh-harriers and brahminy kites. He used to tell me a story of a lakeland ghost who carried a dead child whom she offered to any man she encountered. If the man touched the child he would die, but if he refused to take the child the ghost would turn him
into a swine. Eldon said that this was the avenging ghost of the original queen of the island spurned by her cross-water lover for a pedigree mate from the mainland. ‘She was our Circe,’ he would say drawing a link, like Uva’s father, to his other world, ‘too often completely misunderstood, demonised for her natural heart.’ I wondered if she still lurked there.
Then two gunshots reverberated around the rock.
I dashed back to the enclosure. Kris was outside with a gun in one hand, and a brace of dead bats in the other. ‘Yakitori.’ He grinned at me and slouched over to a stone slab where he had placed a basin of rainwater. He squatted down and started to skin the bats with his knife, rocking back and forth on his haunches, humming softly to himself.
‘They might have heard you.’
Kris carefully peeled back the fur to expose the slimy, stringy flesh of the animal. ‘There’s nobody here.’
I went inside the cave.
‘What happened?’ Jaz was hunched up, on the far ledge.
‘Kris has been hunting.’
‘Hunting what?’
‘Breakfast.’ I collected the seat-pads and took them outside. ‘So you won’t starve,’ I added.
Jaz sighed, immensely relieved. ‘But, darling, doesn’t he know? I’m a vegetarian.’
Further along from where we had slept, Kris discovered a shrine room. Jaz claimed that he could smell oranges, or was it passion fruit? Kris lit a white flowlux that spread everywhere. The rock walls had plaster on them; the passion was sublimated into frescoes.
I had seen photographs of similar paintings in the outdated guidebooks I had studied before coming, but in the cave the images seemed much older than any I had read about. The pale russets, burnt ochres and delicate lilacs hovered in space like early holograms refashioning the contours of the most ancient gods. The figures seemed to shift with every movement of the eye, reviving stories of long-lost times. I imagined old candlelight, flickering; our shadows moving among the protean pigment. These were the memories I had wanted to trace: history, myth, legend all defined in one supple line marrying the seen to the unseen, the spirit to the bone.
‘How come this place has not been zapped?’ Jaz clung to me. ‘I was told all these icons, all the olden-day stuff, got completely destroyed.’
‘This cave must not have been known about at the time. Or was forgotten. This whole area was abandoned by everybody.’
Kris intervened. ‘We should go now.’
‘And where, Kris, are we going?’ Jaz detached himself from me. ‘Do you even know where to go?’
‘Kris will take us to the hills, like he promised. From there I want to get to this place called Samandia. Uva will be waiting there.’ I glanced at Kris, but he didn’t react. ‘We go down south, yes?’
Jaz patted my hand, bemused. ‘You shouldn’t say that, Marc … unless you really mean it?’
‘Why? Is it like going down into the underworld?’
Jaz pinched his lips together with his fingers to stop from laughing at another of his Carnival gags.
Near Samandia was the place, Uva said, where the first inhabitants of the island had been awakened by butterflies splashing dew at the dawn of time. The dew formed a lake and their wings a floating stairway spiralling up to heaven. It was here that the first human drowned and ascended to become a god or, according to others, where the first couple – Adam and Eve – were expelled to become real lovers, descending on steps of mortal confetti; their loins swollen, their fingers entwined, their lives ignited. Once a realm of pilgrimage and veneration, it was forsaken after the neutering of the south-west, the devastation of the lower rainforests by rogue missiles and botched nuclear deterrents.
Uva claimed it is purely a matter of chemical balance in the body that makes us feel that the best may be behind us, or even yet to come. Touching my head with her fingertips, she added, ‘Or here, if the serotonin is spurting. Right?’
My scalp prickled. ‘Yes.’
That was the evening she showed me where the turtles were said to have laid their eggs in the old days.
‘Are you sure?’ I had assumed it was on the other coast. In the south where the sand was easier to dig and the sea free for thousands of miles.
‘There is no other beach,’ she said. ‘They must have migrated.’
I didn’t think so. But then the butterflies migrated. We all did. From one world to another, sometime.
The road plunged through thick, pulpwood scrub. In some places it deteriorated into bomb craters and potholes but the big billowing wheels of the cruiser rolled over them all, flattening brushwood, scattering rocks. Jaz, bouncing in the back, bawled out, ‘Why on earth did you ever come to a hole like this, Marc?’
How could I explain to Jaz how much I wanted from this island? How much it represented of a world I had once believed I could never reach. ‘My father’s father was born here. My father died here. I thought I might find some remains. Something, maybe, about who he was and who I am. I came to learn what my life is all about.’
He leant forward, greedy for more. ‘And got enchanted?’
‘There seemed no point in going back until I found something, and when I did – how could I?’
‘Once you met Uva, huh?’
I looked up at my rear-view mirror and saw Jaz’s eyes gleam with vicarious pleasure.
My father’s decision to come here, flying east on his own – over the Alps, the deserts of Arabia, the Indian Ocean, over camel humps, golden dhows, catamarans and shoals of singing fish, to a place where sealost sailors believed they would see the springs of heaven rise – began to make sense to me only after I followed him.
Grandma Cleo knew I would do so, long before I did. Whenever I said I wanted to be still, she would rock her head and say it is in my blood to move. ‘You’ll find child, one day, there’ll be a journey you’ll have to make. We all have little Argos of our own, dear, you jus’ like me.’ She too had travelled east, as far, to meet her Eldon in an overcast Britain – an island halfway between their own two warmer ones, hers in the Caribbean Sea and his in the Indian Ocean.
I used to wonder how she and Eldon could have found anything in common: she had come from what she always called the West Indies to support a war of an unknown, and unloving, motherland; whereas he, Eldon, made no secret of his distrust of stories of hope and glory. Once when I came back from a school visit to an exhibition about nations at war, he got quite upset. ‘There is nothing to learn from war except the colossal stupidity of men,’ he exclaimed. ‘Museums these days sanitise the past to make it shine more interestingly – educatively – than it ever should be remembered.’
‘But if not for war you wouldn’t have met Grandma,’ I pointed out, too young to understand the deeper logic of life as it has to be lived.
Eldon had been a well-heeled student when he had first come to England. ‘Those days, the poor of the Empire only travelled out of this country, not into it,’ he’d explain, drawing for me a picture of a whimsical young man indulging in lazy punts and preposterous motoring jaunts. ‘I was the first to get the new super-fast Alvis, you know. Glorious car. Even at the height of austerity I’d happily blow a month’s petrol ration on a single afternoon’s romp in that magnificent machine.’ He’d chuckle at my consternation and flap a hand in the air. ‘To get to my age, dear boy, you have to have had some pranks to laugh about.’ That was why, he said, he learnt to fly. ‘I thought I might one day write a sonnet in the sky.’
In the end though, he admitted, he had never even finished his degree. ‘I decided that there was more to life than posturing in a cap and gown. I came to London and learnt to see the history of our times in a different way …’ He said he had met people who made him rethink everything he had taken for granted before. ‘Over warm beer and cigarette smoke they exposed the injustice of the whole colonial enterprise. The Empire they said was an occupying force, a greedy enslaver. Firebrands like Satish and Vernon were ready to punch the lion right on the nose. Independence, revolut
ion, had to be now or never, they claimed. Out of the rubble of Europe they wanted to build the road to our freedom.’
Eldon told me he was never very sure about the metaphors they used, but London did seem then to be a cauldron of cabals. ‘Quite a different thing from the collection of villages that the natives imagined,’ he added with a slight smirk. ‘In those days the Indians here knew even each other’s bellybuttons, and the West Indians I met all seemed familiar with every inch of each other’s backyards. Even our fellows in town got on well enough for a regular monthly bunfight, you know.’
Then came the war. ‘I was called for an interview in some musty office off the Kingsway. “We need you,” a big oaf from the Air Ministry announced.’ Eldon cleared his throat noisily as if trying to untie a complicated knot inside. ‘I told the fellow that this was a squabble that had nothing to do with me. A military brawl between European powers that had been systematically looting the rest of the world. Napoleon, Bismarck, even that woman Victoria had all been, to my mind, pompous bullies craving a bit of their own sun to swagger in.’
His mouth curved down as he recalled the next few months. ‘It was only in September 1940, when the bombs began to fall on civilians in London, that I saw that this, like Spain, might turn out to be something really very different.’ He met refugees who had managed to escape to England and began to feel a bond with those under siege. Even so, he said, he couldn’t bring himself to take life, human life. Influenced by the fringe pacifists of the time, he preferred to give humanitarian help – charity – as foreigners often do in foreign places everywhere. He joined the air medical services, ferrying supplies and wounded patients into hospitals around the country.
It was on one of these missions that he had met Cleo. She had come to England following her brother who had got into the RAF. She had wanted to as well. Eldon said he had been intrigued by Cleo’s loyalty for a country that seemed so keen not to reciprocate her affections. I guess an abundance of love was what allowed her to feel protective; showed her how she sometimes might have to sacrifice the more simplistic ideas about what one should or should not do for the sake of something more dear. I can understand that now, but I am not sure Eldon ever did.
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