by Amanda Smyth
The garden is suddenly flooded with bright security beams. Well done, Miriam. He can see the boy better now. He is slightly bug-eyed with high cheekbones, a snub nose. Martin is almost certain he is one of the boys they saw fishing that first day.
‘Go down to the beach while I tie the dog. I’ll see you there in a minute.’ He watches him take off over the grass.
Miriam says, ‘Is everything okay?’ She looks surprisingly calm.
‘Tell Georgia to stay inside. He seems all right. I’ll see what I can do to help.’ Martin leads Conan around the corner to Terence’s porch, and quickly ties him to the tree. Then he heads back towards the steps.
The boy is squatting beside the boat, and, yes, he can see the brother now. Also bare-chested and younger, he is obviously in pain. He pulls his brother’s arm around his neck and then lifts him up. Martin watches him help his limping brother over the sand; one of his feet drags underneath him.
‘What happened?’
‘He’s stood on a sea egg.’
They have wrapped a T-shirt around his foot. It is difficult to see if there is blood.
Martin takes the other side, and they make their way up the beach towards the steps. The wounded one is younger; he grips onto the wooden rail, and, holding onto his brother, slowly hoists himself up. The stairway is narrow and there is a clump of plants along the edge with barbed long tongues that seem to get in the way. They make their way along the path; the brother’s face is pouring with sweat.
Miriam and Georgia are waiting in the veranda. He is sorry Georgia is there, but it is too late now. Martin explains quickly what has happened. Miriam says, ‘We should go inside to the bathroom where the light is brighter.’ Then, ‘I’ll get a bucket of water.’
They follow Martin through the main doors of the veranda. They both smell bad, a rich and sour sweaty smell. He leads them through the living room, which is now much brighter with the ceiling lights on. The huge Turkish rug feels luxurious underfoot. He catches sight of the wounded boy’s pained reflection in the mirrored mahogany cabinet where there is a display of Swarovski crystal ornaments.
They reach the double bathroom attached to his and Miriam’s bedroom. It is a peculiar function in this house that there is not a separate guest bathroom. Each bathroom is attached to one of the rooms. He could have used the spare room, but it’s too late now. He throws open the door and turns on the bathroom lights. Miriam has left her underwear on the floor and he quickly picks it up. The young one sits on the toilet lid and puts up his foot. The heel of his foot is dark with spikes, some of them are broken, and they are embedded in his skin.
Miriam brings a bucket of warm water. She goes to her wash bag and pulls out her tweezers, blue-handled tweezers she’s had since they got married. She lays the hand towel on the floor. Martin stands near the door; in the mirror he watches the other boy who keeps looking around.
‘How is it, Miriam?’
‘Maybe we should call a doctor. I can get some of them out, but it’s not easy to see.’
Martin realises, if he were to call the emergencies, he is unsure of their exact address. They are, of course, somewhere near the golf course. He remembers the road had a simple name, something like Back Road, or Lower Road? And the house belongs to the Dials. That’s all he knows. How can he describe the house? It is probably the only house on the golf course with lights. He wishes Terence was here. It is unfortunate that this should happen while he is out.
Suddenly the brother gets up. He feels sick. He stands and leans over the basin, a fountain of pale yellow liquid pours out of his mouth. He groans.
‘Come, come,’ the boy says. ‘Let’s go.’
Georgia is perched on the sofa. She looks concerned, worried. Martin is sorry this has happened.
‘All okay,’ he says, cheerily. ‘We’ve got it under control.’
The two boys make their way through the living room. The older brother stares at Georgia. She smiles at him but he doesn’t smile back.
She says, ‘Are you going to the hospital?’
‘No, I’m dropping them home. They’ll go to their doctor.’
She opens the front door, allowing them to pass through.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘Stay here with your mother. Why don’t you both watch a DVD or something. Make sure and lock up the house when we leave.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I love you, Dad.’
Outside the yard is dark, and he hears the electronic double beep as Miriam opens the car doors. They can put him in the back, she says. They shuffle along the gravelled path and the brother is sweating profusely; he is making a peculiar groaning sound. In the last few minutes his condition has deteriorated. Miriam lays a towel on the back seat and Martin moves out of the way, letting the older one tip his brother sideways into the back of the vehicle. He can still sit up; and his head is back on the headrest, his eyes are half closed.
‘I’ll drive you home but you’ll have to show me where it is.’
‘I will show you,’ the boy says. ‘It’s not far.’
Miriam says, ‘I’ll wait here with Georgia. Don’t worry. Call me, okay, tell me what’s happening.’ She gives him the gate opener.
Martin tells the boy to put on his seat belt, and he does. He reverses up the drive, through the gates and out on to the track. He tucks the gate opener on a shelf under the radio. The road is dark; there are no streetlights here.
He puts his foot down. In the rear mirror, the brother is propped up against the window; his eyes are now closed. Martin hopes he doesn’t vomit again.
The boy runs his hand over the dashboard.
‘This car cost plenty money.’ He strokes the leather seat. ‘I would like a car like this. How much it cost?’
‘About $150,000. Maybe more.’
He could explain to the boy that the vehicle is rented, but he doesn’t.
The boy fiddles with the buttons on the door and his window slides down. He does it again. Up, down.
‘Easy on the buttons. We have the air con on.’
Martin turns on the radio; he finds the easy-listening station and gets Madonna’s ‘True Blue’. Somehow it does not seem appropriate and he turns it off. He is glad of the power of the vehicle; no doubt he is going over the speed limit. He remembers from his last trip: Tobago police rarely patrol the smaller roads.
‘Were you fishing out there today?’
‘They have no fish.’
‘So what were you doing?’
‘We look for lobster, crayfish. They didn’t have anything. We have to go up on the north coast. Too many people fishing these days—it’s like they empty the sea.’
He drives down along the dark road. He has never been here before, although it looks vaguely familiar and he wonders if this is the road to Englishman’s Bay. They carry on, the sea is to the left; he can see the light from the moon playing on its surface. There is a hotel.
‘They go here to watch the turtles, is that right?’
The boy nods. He is looking out, enjoying the journey.
‘Is it somewhere here?’
‘Yes,’ he says.
The road begins to curve and twist. He feels as if they are climbing, and he opens the window to let the breeze in. There are no lights, no sign of life. He wishes he had cigarettes; perhaps he will pick up a packet on his way home. On either side of the road there is tall grass; and the view of the sea has gone. The sky is black and vast. It is hard to tell the difference between the land and the sky. Where are they?
‘I hope I can find my way back.’
‘Yeah, man, you’ll find your way.’
Houses start to appear. They pass a church, a school next door. This is a big village, he thinks, more like a town. On the main street there are a couple of bars, a small supermarket, still open. The boy tells him to slow down. On the right the road forks. A couple of small houses sit at the top of an incline. He thinks how poor it is, the patched-up houses, the tatty curtains, the
old falling-down steps.
‘Here is good,’ the boy says.
On the side of the road is a life-size Spiderman figure, sitting crouched, looking up at the sky.
He says, ‘What’s with the Spiderman?”
‘Somebody steal it from the cinema and put it here. They never come for it.’
‘How long ago?’
The boy shrugs; he doesn’t know.
Together they help the brother out of the back of the vehicle. He is still in pain, but he looks better, and, at least, he can rest his bandaged foot on the ground. Good old Miriam.
‘Will he go to the doctor?’
‘Maybe,’ the boy says.
There are chickens running around, pecking at the ground. One rushes underfoot, the boy kicks it hard; it lands like a small pillow in the drain.
Martin says, ‘Your brother must see a doctor; he could get a serious infection. He’ll need a tetanus, maybe antibiotics.’
‘Yes,’ the boy says.
Martin turns the car around. In the rear-view mirror, he sees them staring after the vechicle as he drives away. What are they waiting for? He follows the road back through the village and down the hill towards the crossroads. It seems shorter heading back, and soon he is on the main road leading to the house. He feels relieved. When he reaches the house, Miriam opens the gates. He parks up near Terence’s room. The lights there are still not on. Perhaps Terence has a lady he visits at night. The mother of his child. Unfinished business. Who knows. It is not his concern.
Miriam calls, ‘You okay?’
He locks the vehicle. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘coming now.’
Above, stars glimmer like broken, scattered crystal. The black sky is enormous. Martin feels tiny, a pinprick of consciousness looking out at itself. Is everything part of him? Is he part of everything? The stars, the planets, this island? Buddhists would say so. Buddhists would say, all that we are is the result of what we have thought; we are all one. He does not know; he can accept this as a theory. But he doesn’t actually feel it. He has never felt it. Perhaps we are nothing more than crabs scrabbling in the bottom of a barrel.
From the pathway, he can see inside the house, the orange light of the kitchen. Through the burglar-proofing, Miriam is talking to Georgia. They look surprisingly cheery, especially Georgia who is laughing, her head back. They are having a good time without him. He is not a part of their lives; he hasn’t been part of their lives for some time. He is disconnected from their world, unplugged. It is not a pleasant thought; in fact, it makes him feel strange. And standing outside looking in, he wonders for a moment if this is how it feels when you die, when you leave your body, and witness your loved ones carrying on without you. He goes inside.
NINE
He doesn’t sleep well. At 5.30 he goes outside to the yard where it is just beginning to grow light; the sky is a smoky blue, the air is cool. It occurs to him, they have been here exactly a week; it feels more like two. Time, as they say, is relative. It has always been a mystery to him. The curious fact: a clock on the top of a mountain moves differently from a clock positioned at sea level. Tall people age differently from short people. Why does time seem to rush towards us when we are older? And why does our youth seem easier to recollect than later years. There is mind time, and there is real time. Lately, his sense that time is running out has been real and acute.
He wanders over to the storeroom where Terence is sorting through a large bag of snorkels and goggles and armbands. Conan sits at his feet, his stump on show. Chelsea, Terence’s daughter, is arriving this afternoon; he knows she will want to swim. Terence is surprised to hear of last night’s drama. In all his time here he has never heard of trespassers.
‘People know this is private land; they never use the beach.’
‘Well, to be fair, I don’t think they came here intentionally. They got washed up when their boat conked out.’
‘Did Conan bark?’
‘Yes, he didn’t like them much, did you, Conan? What does that tell us, eh?’ Martin pats Conan’s dark head. ‘Look, the boys were okay, we just didn’t expect to see them and they caught us offguard. I’m sure they meant no harm.’
They walk to the end of the lawn and look down at the beach. The pirogue leans against the bank; a rope ties it to the tree that reaches beyond the rocks. It is a tatty-looking boat with the word Princess painted on its side. There is a net slung in the back, a couple of empty Coca-Cola bottles, cigarette butts. The engine looks pretty new. Terence thinks it belongs to a fisherman in the village known as Tin Man.
‘Why do they call him Tin Man?’
‘Tin, like thin.’ He holds up his little finger, and grins. ‘He likes to smoke weed. The boys are probably his nephews. I’m sure I’ll have seen them around.’
Terence says he did a good deed; he might have saved the boy’s life.
‘I didn’t really have much choice, he was in a lot of pain.’
‘The first thing you should do with a sting like that is pee on the wound.’
He tries to imagine what would have happened if he had offered to pee on the boy’s foot. Not a pleasant thought.
‘If you’d been here, Terence, you could’ve done just that.’
They both laugh, imagining the scene.
Martin says, ‘Why not bring Chelsea over to meet Georgia later? Miriam is making a cake.’
It is still only 6.45. Terence opens the gates and Martin drives away, leaving Miriam and Georgia sleeping. The road to the airport is clear. He drives steadily through Canaan and into Crown Point. Outside the hardware store haulage trucks are starting up. At the traffic lights, two brown dogs stand in the middle of the road, and they look as if they are stuck together. At first it appears as if there is something wrong, a kind of mutant double dog, an accident of some kind. But then he realizes that the dogs are fucking. As if they’ve been soldered together. One of the animals is trying to pull away and cross the road, but the other one is attached and heading in the opposite direction. He toots his horn, and the male gets his way, dragging the female to the grassy pavement. She looks terrified.
He is glad that Georgia is not with him; he would have to make a joke, and no doubt he would feel awkward. He has no idea what Georgia knows about sex; he hopes very little. There is something about her that seems remarkably innocent; perhaps because he would like to think her so. But then no one really loses their innocence; it is either taken or given away willingly. For now, Georgia seems to be intact. Long may it last.
He picks up coffee from a Vie De France café. It is surprisingly quiet; the world is still waking up. On the front of the Express newspaper, the headlines report on a family drowned at Toco. How does this happen? The photograph shows a young woman, the mother, kneeling and bawling in the road, and to one side four bodies covered with white sheets. Their feet stick out. A shocking and distressing image; it would never be allowed in an English paper.
He’s heard about police officers using their mobile phones to photograph crime scenes and selling them on to the press. It’s a way of making extra money, of subsidising their low incomes. No doubt this is one of them.
The Internet café is open but there is no one inside. He waits for a few minutes, and eventually a woman comes in and, without speaking, points at one of the machines. He checks through his emails swiftly. Juliet has sent through a PDF copy of his new contract. He scans it briefly; apart from the date it looks almost identical to his last contract. He is surprised by how relieved he feels. Two more years in Trinidad—it will do for now.
There is nothing else that needs his urgent attention. Whatever is there can wait. He’d wondered if Safiya would write to him, knowing he’d check his emails, and he is disappointed.
He dials her number, and her voicemail kicks in. He tries again. If she gets this within the next half hour she can call him back. For now, he misses her like the deserts miss the rain.
He knows this is schmaltzy and later she will tease him, but it will also remind her
of a happier time when they danced to the song in the platinum members’ lounge, at Zen nightclub, Port of Spain, before he left for England.
They’d been drinking tequila shots, and it came on at the end of the night. When the song finished, he remembers kissing her deeply in a cloud of dry ice. A few people actually clapped. Later, Safiya was embarrassed and blamed the tequila. She never liked a public display of affection, and that night she’d given in. He’d told her, ‘It’s good to surrender; the greatness of a man’s power is the measure of his surrender.’
He is glad to be out; he feels like himself again. He likes this car, its size and solidity. It attracts some attention at the school bus stop. He has noticed, rich or poor, children here are always sent to school looking immaculate. In their bright turquoise uniforms, the young girls stare; they think he is somebody important. Ha!
At Penny Savers there is new stock: oranges, pineapples, apples and bananas. Miriam will be pleased. He finds eggs, Milo, a powdery chocolate drink that Safiya loves. He is sure that Georgia will like it too. He picks up flour, cocoa, sugar, butter. Later, Miriam will bake a cake for Beth’s birthday. It is what they do. It is what they have always done.
‘You must celebrate her life,’ the bereavement counsellor told them. ‘Celebrate all that you loved about her.’
At the time, the idea of celebrating anything was incomprehensible, and he’d felt angry with the counsellor. But anger, she said, is an important part of the healing process; beneath anger is sadness.
‘You have to mourn losing, not just your daughter, but the person you were before she died.’
He remembers thinking, will I recognise the person I am going to become?
Meanwhile, Miriam was drowning in her grief; she was prepared to hold onto anything. At times she found it difficult to breathe, as if, she said, concrete blocks were pressing on her lungs. That day she lay on Beth’s bed, her face red and swollen from crying. She said, ‘How is it that God could need her more than me?’
He was astonished. ‘God?’
Back then, he’d wanted to protect her from the outside world, the looks of pity, sad glances. It was bewildering to him how clumsy others could be.
