by Amanda Smyth
‘An aneurysm can be hereditary, right?’
‘Rarely.’ He gets up and puts his hand on Georgia’s head. ‘I don’t want you to worry about that, okay. Just don’t sit under the coconut trees.’
He is sorry this conversation got started; he noticed on his last visit to England that Georgia talked often about death. On her bedside table he found a rather depressing non-fiction book about terminal illness called How We Die. It had bothered him. The counsellor told Miriam, when death arrives like an unwanted guest in a family, life is never the same again. It was normal and inevitable that, as she got older, Georgia would start asking more questions. It worries him that he will not be there to answer them. How will they communicate? By email? Skype? Will she want to talk to him? Or will Georgia align herself with Miriam and cut him off entirely? It is possible. The thought of this makes him feel anxious.
Right now Miriam seems okay; she is up and watching Terence who is putting the nuts into a pile. He is glad that she hasn’t been paying attention to their conversation.
Martin says, ‘Come, let’s go see how he does it.’
‘Don’t get this on your clothes,’ Terence says, ‘you’ll never get the stain out.’
They gather around for a better look. Terence holds the nut in his left hand and, using his cutlass, chops the end until he makes a sharp point and then he slashes the top and the coconut water squirts out. Georgia’s eyes are wide; the speed and precision of his hand as he rotates the nut, combined with the controlled slicing of the long silver blade, is impressive.
‘That’s quite a skill,’ Miriam says.
‘Can I hold it?’ Georgia asks. Terence tells her to be careful; the blade is as sharp as a sword. He offers the cutlass with both hands. It is heavier than she thought; she lets it dangle, then she swings it like a cricket bat. ‘No,’ he says, ‘like this.’ He wraps his hands around hers. Together, they lift the cutlass.
‘You always lead with the elbow and cut down at an angle,’ he tells her. ‘Flick with the wrist at the last moment.’
Georgia gives Martin a look. ‘This feels scary,’ she says. Terence brings the cutlass down into the earth. Whap!
‘My goodness,’ Georgia says, her face lit.
The juice is a perfect lukewarm temperature. Coconut water can heal, Terence says. It will rehydrate, and it is full of protein. ‘It’s good for wrinkles.’
‘So, do I pour it on or drink it?’ says Miriam, patting her thin face.
He was always intrigued by Miriam’s long ritual of face cleaning at the end of a day: the Alice band, the cotton pads, the lotions and creams. Has it paid off? Perhaps. Without it her skin might look older than it does now. Safiya mostly uses soap and water, and occasionally a little cold cream, which she keeps in his fridge. He likes the old-fashioned smell.
When they have finished, Terence lays the nuts on the grass.
‘They look like people’s heads,’ Georgia says.
He raises the cutlass high in the air, and hacks through the middle of each coconut.
‘Ouch!’ shouts Georgia, then ‘ouch!’ again.
He rips the two halves apart. The inside is pale like wood, and when splayed, offers two bowls of white jelly. Using a flap from the chippings, they scoop out the white flesh. ‘Isn’t this incredible,’ Martin says, and he swills the jelly around his mouth. Miriam isn’t sure about the slimy texture, but she likes the juice very much.
It is almost dark when they help clear away the husks into a wheelbarrow; Terence will take them to a pile on the other side of the fence. Now and then when there is enough to burn, he makes a small bonfire.
After dinner, Georgia and Miriam play scrabble on the coffee table while Martin watches the local news. The expressive face of the newsreader strikes Miriam as she reports on a Trinidadian kidnapping.
‘She acts as if it was her mother snatched from the family home. Look at all that emotion.’ Miriam finds this amusing. ‘Can you imagine if this was Moira Stewart or Trevor McDonald?’
‘Trevor McDonald was actually born in Trinidad. A little place called Claxton Bay.’
‘Well, he clearly wasn’t trained here.’
There are images of a large concrete house on stilts, and a residential street. This might be Arima; it looks like somewhere in the east. The footage is shot with a cheap video camera. A young man in shirt and slacks is talking to camera. Martin has met him at various media events: a bright, bilingual graduate, slightly effeminate, who has worked with Safiya as part of the news team. Once when he was leaving a party at the American embassy, the man helped him with a flat tyre. Martin seems to remember that he sings in a professional choir.
Miriam says, ‘The anchorman is the same. He looks as if he’s about to cry.’
‘Trinidad is small; he might know this woman. He could have gone to school with her. Anything.’
‘How long has she been missing?’
‘Ten days,’ he says. ‘She’s probably already dead but the kidnappers want the cash so we have to keep negotiating. These kinds of operation cost them a lot of money. You have no idea how organised these criminals are. They have more forensic know-how than the police.’
When he first arrived in Trinidad, he worked with Raymond on several kidnapping cases. He was surprised by the expertise of the kidnappers. They often maintained anonymity by bandaging their victims’ heads with gaffer tape. If victims caught sight of the perpetrators, they shot them. He knew of a fourteen-year-old boy who, after seventeen days, was about to be released to his mother and father. During the removal of tape from his face, one of the kidnappers accidentally tugged his eye open. They shot him dead, tossed his body on the shoulder of the highway.
‘These people show no mercy.’
Georgia says, ‘But what happens if they don’t deliver the body?’
‘It’s too late—the money has gone. It’s a risk they take. It happens pretty often.’
‘That’s awful,’ says Georgia. ‘So either way you lose.’
Miriam is half lying down; her legs are resting on the leather pouf. Where her tie-dye dress falls away, he can see the top of her white thigh.
Miriam says, ‘What would you pay for me?’
He should have seen this coming; he carries on looking at the television.
‘Yes, what would you pay for Mum?’ Georgia is now sitting up straight.
‘It depends what they were asking.’ He gets up and goes to the shelf to look at the DVDs. He scans the titles.
‘Well?’ says Miriam.
‘No one would take you; I’m not wealthy enough.’
‘But what if they did take her?’ Georgia wants an answer.
‘Then I’d sell everything I have and give it to them.’
By nine they are exhausted. They are still on UK time, and it is some unearthly hour in the morning. Georgia has fallen asleep watching Forrest Gump. Forrest has started running, out of his yard, into the street. He is bearded, scruffy, and running all the way to Alabama. Martin imagines what it would be like to do exactly this—to get up now from this sofa and run outside, to keep on running until he reaches Port of Spain and the door to Safiya’s Woodbrook house.
Miriam loudly yawns and stretches her arms above her head. ‘Sorry to be such a wet rag.’ She gets up, pecks him lightly on his lips and shuffles to the door. ‘Maybe if you can come to bed a little earlier, we’ll get on the same time zone quicker.’
While Georgia dozes on the sofa, he stays until the end of the film. He’d forgotten how sad and unashamedly pro-America it is. And that famous line: Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get. What they don’t say is that you can exchange the chocolates for something else. There is a returns policy, even if it’s complicated and costly.
Curiously, with all his plans to leave Miriam, money isn’t something he has thought too much about. If he can find a way to stay in Trinidad, he will let her keep the house in Warwickshire. He will pay maintenance for Georgia, school fees. He do
es not want Miriam to struggle financially if he can help it. He can rent for a while, perhaps even stay where he is. But it has occurred to him he will need a base in England, too—a small flat or a terraced house: a home for Georgia to visit.
He checks the gate at the end of the passageway and draws down the electric metal shutters. He must remember to tell Juliet that the Dials have done a good job. The place certainly feels secure. He wakes Georgia and sees her to her room. She walks as if she is still sleeping and when they reach the sliding door, too tired to kiss him, she rubs her eyes and nudges her cheek against his. From the passageway, he can hear music; it must be Terence. His room is right there.
FIVE
Island Car Rentals is on the other side of the highway, near the main turning into Scarborough. He pulls up outside a small concrete purpose-built block decorated with red, white and black bunting, the national colours of Trinidad and Tobago. There is a line of cars on one side of the building identical to the one he is driving. In the air-conditioned room, a young woman sits behind a desk reading the National Enquirer magazine.
He tells her that the car is not right for them; there is no air conditioner and it is too small for a family. Is it possible to exchange it for something else, something bigger? Without getting up, the young woman opens a door behind her and calls out to someone.
After a few moments, a tall black man, in his fifties or so, wearing a baseball cap embroidered with NYC, steps into the office. He is sweating, overweight. He looks like a man under pressure. He explains that all the cars outside are actually booked. They have been running a special deal with Virgin Holidays and they have no more cars left.
‘Two flights coming in this afternoon from London. We have the Virgin flight and BA arriving. Next week is Monarch. And then we have the Scandinavian flights too.’
He can believe it; and, of course, Carnival is coming; migration to Tobago is part of the Carnival recovery process.
So, they are short of cars. And he has already paid for this. What to do? He takes out his wallet.
‘My wife and daughter have come to Tobago for the first time. I want to show them your beautiful island. But as I’ve just explained to the lady, that car won’t get us very far.’
He flashes a wad of $100 notes.
The man takes off his cap and rubs his shiny head. He is thinking hard. ‘I really can’t help you. Everything booked. Everything.’
Then his expression changes; he has an idea.
He says, ‘I could rent you my second vehicle. My personal car. It’ll cost you another $3,000. It’s yours if you want it. I can’t do it for anything cheaper than that.’
The woman whistles. ‘He love that car like it his baby.’
They walk outside and around the back of the building to a black four-wheel-drive car. A Hyundai Tucson. It has dark windows and it looks like a security vehicle. It is exactly like his neighbour’s car in Trinidad. How about that? This could be fun, he thinks. And the interior looks almost new, the seats are well-upholstered. There is a cardboard box in the back, which the man removes. It is full of papers, cigarettes, office junk.
‘I’ll take it,’ he says, counting his cash before the man changes his mind.
‘It has everything—air con, stereo, central locking, big trunk. And it’s automatic.’
‘Great. I’ll feel like Patrick Manning.’
The man rolls his eyes. ‘That scamp.’
‘Well, they say people get the government they deserve. We’ve got Gordon Brown, you have Patrick Manning.’
‘Look,’ he says, ‘there’s a new stamp of Patrick Manning’s face here in Tobago. No matter how they try, they can’t get the stamp to stick. You know why? People spitting on the wrong side of the stamp.’
He laughs, and shakes the man’s hand. He must remember to tell Safiya.
Over the next two days, in their new black Hyundai Tucson, he takes Miriam and Georgia on a tour around the island. Georgia hooks her iPod up to the stereo; these are songs he hasn’t heard before. Young people’s pop music, he supposes, tunes Safiya must know. Georgia sings along, loudly at times. Miriam gazes out at the lush, passing green land, the little houses on thin stilts, the blue, glittery sea, the wild, thick bush. Yes, he thinks, Miriam has always been happiest in the sun.
They cruise along the Milford Road to Englishman’s Bay, to a restaurant he has read about in the guidebook. It is empty; they are the only customers. The waitress, a young black woman, is shy or a little unfriendly, he cannot be sure. Safiya says Tobago people can be sour. The girl brings menus and a complimentary jug of lime juice. The lobster was caught right here in the bay early this morning.
It is quiet here like a dream. Overlooking the water, they eat the curried lobster, sweet corn fritters, sweet potato pie, cassava.
‘Swiss Family Robinson,’ Miriam says.
He realises that they have little normal time left together, and he wonders how Miriam will cope when he tells her about Safiya.
They walk along the beach; the sand here is pale like unrefined sugar. Georgia wants to swim—the sea is clear as glass—but there are jellyfish floating like little sails in the water, pale mauve sacs. He recognises the Portuguese man-of-war. He tells them about the time he was swimming and this same type of jellyfish stung a young boy paddling near the shore. The boy began to scream. His mother tried to pull him away, but its long tentacle attached itself to her neck, and then looped onto her face. It was only by going deeper into the sea that she could free herself.
‘Yuck!’ Georgia says. ‘This happened in Trinidad or on another island?’
‘At Mayaro beach in Trinidad. But there are other places to swim which you’d love. Like off the mainland, there are all these little islands: a leper island called Chacachacare; the island where the nuns lived; there are dolphins there sometimes. It’s like Pirates of the Caribbean. The water’s not like this, it’s green.’
‘How do you get there?’
‘If you’re lucky, someone’s kind enough to take you on their boat.’
‘Who did you go with?’ Georgia ties back her hair; her long neck is pale like soap.
‘There was a group of us from the office.’
He catches Miriam’s look.
‘One day we’ll go there and you can see for yourself.’
There is something remote about this part of Tobago, something that feels uninhabited, untamed. And yet, he knows of villas tucked away in these small, pretty hills: luxury villas with infinity swimming pools and armed security guards. When he suggested to Juliet that they might stay here, or further up by Parlatuvier, she reminded him of a brutal attack some years ago, on the wife of an Italian diplomat. During a dinner party for her female friends, four masked men broke into the house and subjected the women to all manner of humiliations. One of the women, a UK national, was spared because she was menstruating.
He drives into Scarborough, an old-fashioned town with colonial style buildings and a fort overlooking Rockly Bay. He shows them the old police station, a tatty white and blue wooden structure, where, for two weeks, at the start of his trip, he worked hard with a small core team advising on interview and interrogation techniques.
He was shocked to learn that there were no audio recordings, just notes made in longhand and A4 notebooks. A superintendent might ask an officer to go and speak to a suspect, then tell him what he said. Often, there is nothing written down.
Like Chinese whispers, the information is easily misinterpreted or forgotten. Before an interview, there is no preparation, no research on the person or the crime he’s connected with. In England this simply would not do. When he explained how procedures worked elsewhere, the younger officers were surprised and amused. One or two seemed keen and made notes. At the end of the training, the human resources manager told him his techniques would only create more work.
‘This might suit your country, Mr Rawlinson, where you have plenty resilience and resources. But Tobago police are extremely busy; they don’t
have time for all this.’
He points out the Blue Crab restaurant where he ate lunch every day. Usually alone, although sometimes he was joined by Stephen Josephs, a senior officer, a macho individual, who seemed, to him, to enjoy nothing more than hobnobbing with foreigners.
‘We could go there for lunch one day,’ he says. ‘They do a delicious soup with cow heel and dumplings. Their rum punch is pretty good, too.’
‘Cow heel? Like cow feet?’ Georgia makes a face. ‘Ewwww.’
Miriam stares at the frontage as if she is piecing together something in her mind. Then she says, ‘Do police here drink while they’re working? Is it allowed?’
‘No, but it happens. More than it does in England.’
In fact, when he went on patrol with Stephen, he spent most of his time in rum shops. That night, Stephen drank four or five beers. Conversations with locals were chummy, familiar and often inappropriate. Everyone was ‘uncle’, or ‘breds’, or ‘sweetheart’.
‘You have to ask yourself,’ Stephen told a barman, ‘if your wife keeps coming out of the kitchen to nag at you, what have you done wrong? I’ll tell you—you’ve made her chain too long.’
And later, to a group of young men, ‘What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? Nothing, she’s been told twice already.’ Martin felt awkward, embarrassed. What was the man thinking?
When the shift was over, Stephen drove him back to his hotel, taking the long scenic route over the old road parallel to the coastline. He drove slowly with one hand on the wheel, the other hung out of the window. The sea was lit by the moon; there were small rolling waves. He told Martin this was where he swam as a child, and where he now took his own children, aged two and five; it was his favourite spot on earth. He lost his father when he was a boy. But this loss had made him more determined than ever to succeed. What doesn’t kill you must make you stronger, he said. He is living proof.
As he got out of the car, Martin thanked him. Then he said, and it was clumsy, ‘You know, in England, Stephen, drinking on duty is a serious criminal offence, not to mention drinking while you’re driving. Tonight you’d probably have lost your job.’
