One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  ‘Yes,’ said Gold. ‘That’s just what I always say.’

  If Gold’s reply was by way of staking a claim, marking his territory like some dog lifting its leg, his affable smile belied it. He picked up his knife and fork and resumed his breakfast. The plump and baggy doctor lacked the physique to provoke sexual jealousy, but it was impossible not to envy how at ease he was with the child, his comfortable familiarity with his surroundings, the ghosts of many other breakfasts he had eaten here that were summoned by the casual disappearance of every forkful of food into his beard.

  ‘You intend to stay here – I mean, on the island – for good?’ said William.

  ‘Yes, what have I got to go back to the States for?’

  A wife and children in Albany, William thought, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t want to embarrass Gold. You couldn’t really blame anyone for deserting his family for Lucy and anyway, who was William to censure someone else for leaving their family? He’d abandoned his before he even had it.

  Lucy reappeared with a plate of minoa toast, fried turtle eggs and fried red – he hoped – fungi. She set it before William. He looked at the food and felt as much like eating it as he had the greasy, bacteria-laden repasts served up so many years ago by Mrs Beach.

  ‘Eat!’ prompted Dr Gold. ‘You have a long journey ahead of you to day. You need a full stomach.’

  The man’s concern seemed genuine in spite of coming with a reminder of William’s departure and his defeat in the matter of Lucy. William lifted his knife and fork and picked at a red fungus without conviction. He’d gladly have swallowed an orange one, fully accepting the inevitable consequence, could he have guaranteed it would evoke any concern in the woman who now sat across the table from him, her face impassive.

  Dr Gold cleared his throat and gently pushed Perdita from his ample lap. ‘Managua, I wonder if you could spare a moment on Lucy’s garden? She’s been trying to grow a few yams but there’s a bit of a problem with worm infestation . . .’

  With a weary sigh Managua used the edge of the table to raise himself from his seat. He accompanied Gold down the steps, Perdita running after them and taking the doctor’s hand. ‘Is be real bugger for grow yams. Sometimes I is can see what for people is prefer dollars . . .’ muttered the old man. They disappeared around the side of the house.

  William put down his knife and fork, now he was safe from stew. He stared across the table at Lucy. She stared back, defying him to blink first. Even as he looked at her it seemed to him that her breasts were sharpening for battle. He couldn’t tell that she was reappraising this man with whom she had had what really was no more than a fling so many years ago. Of course, elsewhere, it would have amounted to more than that. In another society he would have been considered the father of her child.

  ‘I is bring?’ said William. ‘I is bring?’

  ‘What?’ Lucy was taken aback by his tone. He had surely come to the island to see her. What other purpose could his visit have? She had not expected to come under attack.

  ‘You taught our child to say “I is bring.”’

  Lucy bridled. ‘I didn’t teach her anything. This is her home. She speaks like all the other children here. Anyway, she’s not our child. We don’t go in for physiological paternity here.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You’re not her father. A father is someone who lives with a woman and moulds her children, not someone who deposits a dollop of sperm inside her and clears off.’

  ‘Is that why you didn’t tell me about her?’

  ‘Yes. It was none of your business. It had nothing to do with you.’

  ‘The child’s the spitting image of me.’

  ‘That’s nothing but coincidence. There isn’t a causal connection.’

  ‘How can you believe that?’

  She shrugged and looked out at the ocean. Today, with the clouds overhead, it was grey and implacable. ‘It’s no more ridiculous than thinking Coca-Cola can save the world.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You were right, I was wrong. There’s nothing else I can say.’

  ‘You can’t say sorry to the whole island for what you’ve done. It won’t bring back their legs or their health or their customs. How are you going to compensate them for that?’

  ‘I wasn’t apologizing to them. I was saying sorry to you. For not taking notice of you. For getting everything so wrong.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then, isn’t it! That’s bloody well all right!’

  Lucy’s voice had risen and it was now so loud it brought Managua and Dr Gold scuttling round the building from the back garden with Perdita skipping beside them.

  ‘Look, Mamu,’ she shouted excitedly, ‘Managua is find yam!’

  William stood abruptly, and went down the steps to meet the child.

  ‘Look!’ she shouted, holding something up, but his eyes were too full of tears to see what it was. He seized the child in his arms, picked her up and hugged her tight. When he relaxed his grip, she stared at him with something like fear in her eyes and ran back up the stairs to her mother. William set off towards the sea.

  ‘Good luck, my friend!’ he heard Dr Gold call after him.

  Fifty yards or so along the strand, a puffing Managua caught him up. William strode along without speaking. The old man was scarcely able to keep up. Finally when they’d rounded the headland and the house was out of sight, William let up a little.

  Managua paused to wipe his brow. ‘That Miss Lucy,’ he panted. ‘She is be plenty nice but sometimes she is can be plenty damn pointy too.’

  William didn’t comment. Irrelevantly he found himself thinking, In a few hours I’ll be leaving here for ever and I still haven’t seen a yam.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  LUCY PAUSED IN her reading of the Arabian Nights when she heard the plane’s engine. The children craned their heads to watch it climb higher and higher into the sky and grow smaller and smaller as it took William Hardt further and further away.

  Lucy thought of the pile of well-thumbed letters in her rusty old biscuit tin. She had constructed from them the frightened boy who had alternately blinked and molar ground his way through life. She had fitted this profile to the fading memory of the man she had scarcely known.

  It was all so long ago, their relationship, that the man she had briefly loved then, if that’s what it was, had been subsumed in the man of the letters. She felt like one of those women who meet men on the Internet or who marry prisoners on Death Row. It was so much harder to engage with the real thing.

  Maybe she should have replied to his letters. She’d chosen to become an islander because she’d wanted to record the destruction of an isolated and primitive culture by outside influences which she had so correctly predicted. It would be her next, angry, book. And she’d wanted to give practical help to ameliorate the effects of modernization. She could, for example, provide the education the island’s children would need to survive in this more modern world. She could minister to the sick. But this altruism had not been her only motive, she knew. Becoming an islander meant denying William any connection to her child, for what repercussions might not his influence have there?

  She had felt sorry for him today, sitting there with his eyelids flickering away and she hadn’t even had the kindness to tell him she’d read his letters and understood. The poor man had kept putting a hand over his eyes to conceal the tic, or had clamped his jaws shut and ground his molars. She felt strangely affected by his disorder. He had found comfort in writing of it to her, but there had been no comfort here, today.

  Did she still think of him as a lover? she asked herself. Certainly if she were to, it would be as much for his tics and rituals as in spite of them. He had hardly changed physically. The hair was a little thinner, there were a few lines around his eyes. But mainly he was as she’d remembered him. Then again, she thought, looking at her daughter, she’d had his mirror image before her every day. So why had she let him go? Why had she not encouraged him to stay?

  She’d
got annoyed with him, it was as simple as that. She was still furious for what he’d done to the island and her fury had surfaced in their quarrel over the way Perdita spoke. Even that made her angry when she thought of it now. How typical of an American to be incapable of allowing the difference of others! They always wanted everyone to be like them! They were so convinced of being right!

  Still, it wasn’t fair to blame all Americans. Dr Gold wasn’t like that. He’d abandoned his country and his career to come here to help the people. He worked tirelessly for them, putting in fourteen-hour shifts every day at the hospital. Lucy knew she couldn’t make it on the island without him. She wasn’t able to be a complete islander yet. She wasn’t ready to abandon ‘I am’ for ‘I is be’ just now. That would take time.

  Lucy looked at her daughter, now, like all the other children, standing to watch the plane shrinking to a speck in the distant sky. She felt suddenly sorry for her child, growing up with a mother who had no husband, no man to mould her. And yet, Perdita was an island child, defined not by her blonde hair but by her grass skirt. Lucy had chosen to stay here. Her daughter could not be moulded by a man who would try to stop her saying ‘I is be’. It would never have worked.

  She lifted the book. ‘Come, children, sit down now. Let’s get on with our story.’

  No-one took any notice. The children were all standing, peering at the spot where the plane had disappeared, craning their necks, searching the sky. One or two leaped up and down in excitement. Lucy couldn’t work out what was going on. Then she heard an aircraft engine, faint at first, no more than the hum of a mosquito, but soon growing steadily louder, until the children were pointing at the sky and shouting.

  ‘Look, Mamu,’ cried Perdita. ‘Plane is come back.’

  Lucy looked, and sure enough, there it was. No wonder the children were so excited. It had never happened before.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  ‘STREWTH!’ THE AUSTRALIAN pilot had the joystick back as far as it would go but you could still hear the plane’s undercarriage brush the top branches of the trees. A moment later they were clear and the pilot had relaxed enough to remove his baseball hat and wipe his sweating forehead with it, just as he had when he’d landed the plane before. ‘That was fucken close, mate. I’m bloody glad I won’t be doing that again.’

  ‘Why not?’ William asked as he peered out of the window beside him at the shrinking island below. Another minute and they’d be so far away he wouldn’t be able to make out the insults his interference had inflicted upon its emerald beauty.

  ‘Because I like fucken living too much, that’s why. I’ve told them I’m not doing this run any more. Fucken runway’s too short. Let some other poor bastard get killed taking Coke to a load of one-legged Abos. Have you seen the size of those people? You take two or three of them to the big island and it’s a fucken miracle if the bloody plane can even get off the ground let alone over the fucken trees.’

  They were over the coastline now. There was the village, with the New Globe Playhouse rising magnificently out of the ramshackle collection of huts and concrete-block houses around it; there was the Captain Cook, shiny white and finished now, and that SUV was probably Tr’boa’s taxi. There was the shitting beach where this morning he had taken what was almost certainly his last ever alfresco dump unless he ever went back to the Long Island shore and ate another carry-out pizza. There was a solitary fishing boat, Lintoa of course, getting in the day’s catch before turning superstar for the evening’s performance of Hamlet. And there, below now, as the plane followed the shoreline, there was Lucy’s house where no doubt she and his daughter, rightly named Perdita because she was surely lost to him for ever now, might look up from their recitation of two times two is be four and think of him. Not that two twos always did make four, of course. Sometimes, no matter how you computed things, the answer came out odd. He thought how right, how even, how symmetrical it would be if he and Lucy could be together. Impossible to believe now that only a few hours ago he had sat on that very porch below, eating breakfast with her and the new man in her life and Managua . . .

  William clapped his hand to his forehead. ‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘Turn the plane around, we have to go back!’ What a fool he was! Why hadn’t he thought before? Of course there was nothing between Lucy and Dr Gold!

  ‘What?’ said the Australian. ‘Are you serious, mate?’

  ‘I’m a fool,’ William said aloud. The Australian gave him a strange, worried glance. William began laughing. The pilot looked alarmed.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter, mate?’

  ‘Breakfast!’ shrieked William.

  ‘Breakfast? Listen mate, we don’t do breakfast on these flights. I got some biscuits somewhere . . .’

  ‘No, not me, them!’

  The pilot glanced quickly at his instruments as though afraid to take his eyes off William. He shook his head. ‘Sorry, mate, I just don’t get it.’

  ‘They were eating breakfast together!’ William cried.

  The plane dipped and then righted itself as the Australian, looking positively scared now, stopped staring at William and concentrated his efforts on flying.

  William didn’t notice the man’s fearful expression. He was thinking about how Dr Gold had been eating breakfast with Lucy when he and Managua arrived. They hadn’t made any attempt to hide it. There had been no frisbeeing of plates through windows, no desperate whisperings about egg yolk staining facial hair. And Lucy was always so respectful of the island’s traditions. She would never have offended Managua by openly flouting them. Eating breakfast with Gold could mean only one thing. There must be some other explanation of why he had spent the night in her house. It couldn’t be sex. She wasn’t sleeping with him!

  ‘Turn the plane round!’ William cried again.

  ‘Now listen here, mate . . .’

  ‘I said, turn the plane round. I want to go back!’

  The pilot laughed. ‘You’re fucken joking, mate. There’s no way I’m going back there. Whatever it is you’ve forgotten, you can just fucken send for it later.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten anything, I just changed my mind.’

  ‘Too late for that, mate, you’ll just have to wait for next week’s flight.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m desperate. I want to go back now.’

  ‘No way. No way I’m doing an extra landing and take-off.’ He gunned the engine to indicate that not only was he not going back, he was getting away faster.

  William leaned over and grabbed the steering mechanism. He tried to turn it and the plane lurched.

  ‘What the fuck—’ The pilot smacked him in the face with his fist. William slumped back into his seat. ‘Haven’t you had enough of people hijacking planes lately, mate? I could have you locked up for life for trying a trick like that.’

  William rubbed his cheek. ‘I’m sorry. Please, won’t you turn around? I really do need to be back there today.’

  ‘No way. Nothing on fucken earth would make me chance that runway two more times. Nothing.’

  ‘I’ll give you a thousand dollars.’

  ‘Make it two.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Cash?’

  ‘Yes.’ Of course William hadn’t got anywhere near two thousand dollars on him, but he’d worry about that when they were on the ground. Purnu must have that much from all his business affairs. He’d surely lend it to William at a suitably exorbitant rate of interest. He hoped so. He couldn’t imagine being able to buy this guy off with yams.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  ‘Is be, or is be not, is be one big damn puzzler:

  Is you be bigger man for put up with

  Clubs and bamboo pits of real damn bad luck,

  Or, is take blowpipes for fight herd of pigs

  And is by use of snakebite, end they?’

  THERE WAS COMPLETE silence, Lintoa was doing the great soliloquy so well. Those in the audience – most of them, really – who had been rustling family packs of potato chips and crun
ching the contents, stilled their hands. They watched enraptured, open- and empty-mouthed. No-one so much as thought of disturbing a candy wrapper. No-one popped the tab on a can of Coke. There was but a single person who was finding it hard to concentrate but it was not because he was the only one who had seen the play before, if, that is, he had. It was the presence of Lucy next to him that was making things difficult for William Hardt.

  Managua turned to him and smiled with the satisfaction of an author who knows his work is going down well. There was no anxiety in his expression. What I is tell you? it said. This is be performance of Hamlet even you is not be able for forget. It was the same self-confidence he’d demonstrated upon his encounter earlier with William outside the theatre when the American was supposed to be hundreds of miles over the horizon. Any surprise was blown away by literary vanity. ‘I is be glad for see you, gwanga,’ he’d said. ‘I is know all along you is not can miss this.’

  William’s meeting with Lucy a moment later had been more awkward. She’d stared at him, not completely surprised, which made sense, when you thought about it: anyone not preoccupied with Jacobean drama would have noticed the plane had come back. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again quite so soon,’ she’d said brusquely. ‘You stayed away rather longer last time.’

  William had had difficulty composing a reply. She obviously hadn’t read his letters and ‘I think I love you’ didn’t seem an appropriate remark to someone who didn’t know he’d had a relationship – albeit a somewhat one-sided one – with her for the past six years. She hadn’t exactly opened the door to that kind of declaration. Fortunately just then Dr Gold showed up accompanied by a middle-aged American woman and three children of various sizes, all a few years older than Perdita. He introduced them to William as his wife and children. They’d arrived on the plane William had left – and come back – on. The doctor presented his family all round and as Gold was talking to him William overheard Mrs Gold say to Lucy, ‘I hope your daughter’s recovered. I understand she was real sick.’