It was hearing Creole from two strangers that had made Paul realise he should abandon London for Mauritius. In the three days that followed Genie’s collapse and his escape to Hotel Europe, Paul had not left his room once. Three days had slid away like sweat off Paul’s back, leaving nothing but a salt stain on his sheets: three days and three nights he had spent there, lying drenched in his bed, alone. The morning his fever broke, he had woken with the certainty that if he didn’t get out of London he would die. This in between dreams of him and Genie, each one ending with him saying something terribly sad that was not Sorry but seemed somehow to mean it.
During his fever, Paul had barely eaten. He still felt no urge to eat but he spent a long time looking at vegetables. Looking at vegetables made him calm. The vegetables outside the Turkish shop: onions, nestling in their grubby cardboard box; the ripe tomatoes hung tightly together, still clinging to their vines. If you touched the vines then held your fingers to your nose you went dizzy with the smell. What was it? Earth?
He pinched off a bunch and took them into the shop. Two dark-skinned middle-aged men – not quite Indian, not quite black – stood by the counter, chatting in another language, which Paul, registering the mild shock he always felt in these situations, recognised as Creole. Then, having run out of conversation, the two men stood nodding together. They both noticed Paul standing there with his tomatoes, staring at them. Paul knew what he must do. Where he must go.
Leaving the shop, he felt calmer. He looked wild, though, he realised, as his reflection swam up at him from the window of a parked car: his shirt hung off him and his eyes had hollowed out. He had not shaved in days. And he noticed the sky’s dull glint, like the sheen on old meat: it was going to rain. London rain wasn’t cleansing, it just shifted the dirt around. But Paul didn’t move any faster as the first few drops started to fall – though everyone around him was rushing for cover: the dusty old black guys who sat outside the minicab offices, the hard white kids who pulled up hoods to hide skin like pitted cement. Paul didn’t care about the rain. He didn’t care if it turned him to mud. He didn’t even care that, though it was still only March, there was already something warm and greasy, something second-hand about this rain which reminded him of the water that dripped out of air-conditioning vents onto the streets in summer – not water but the sweat of overheated office workers. Paul didn’t care about anything except getting to Mauritius.
Which would mean seeing Eloise again.
(ii) March 2003
It wasn’t the gunshot that woke him so much as the noises which followed: a car speeding away, a woman screaming, pausing for breath, then more screaming which seemed to segue into the astonished yelps of police sirens. He slept badly after that, his head full of terrible dreams about Genie. The next morning, looking out of his window, Paul saw ribbons of blue and white police tape stretched across sections of the road. Squad cars with flashing lights stood patient as horses while policemen nearby squinted into the middle distance, muttering self-consciously into their walkie-talkies. Bystanders watched and waited while kids ran around randomly like looters, working off their excitement. It felt as if a royal visit were expected.
Eloise was coming to see him. Perhaps she would think all this fuss was for her.
Paul lay back on his bed. He and Eloise had never stayed in a hotel together. In fact, he had stayed in a hotel only once before. A girl at his school used to sleep with boys for money. She liked him. She would do it for free, she said, but she wanted to stay in a hotel. She had picked one all the way across town, in Kensington. He’d had to hock his bike to pay for it. He’d ended up in Knightsbridge by mistake. Wandering around that area, trying to find the hotel, he’d felt as though he were in a foreign country. If you wanted to feel like a stranger in your own city, you just had to get lost in a part you’d never been to before, where you didn’t belong. That was how he’d felt, looking for that hotel. He remembered the flashy car dealerships, the displays of oriental carpets for rich people to wipe their mud on. The Arab men in their shades and flowing robes, the Arab women in their shades and flowing robes, the liveried men loitering at the doors of hotels, all as transitory and featureless as the whorls of dust which blew disconsolately down the long blank streets. All the boutique windows slippery with a numb blank richness that looked right through you, and him, gawping, poor as a cockroach.
He had remembered that girl and the hotel again years later, the first time he’d gone to Eloise’s house: her mother lived in that same part of town. He had gone there to rescue a drunken Genie. He had not let Genie down that time, at least.
He’d found the hotel in the end. He remembered the room as dim, the walls a dull shade of red, the colour of dried blood. The air was thick with stale cigarette smoke and dust. This and the slow pounding in his chest had made it hard to breathe. He had lain on the bed and waited for the girl. A few hours later he was still lying there alone, smoking the packet of cigarettes he had bought her for afterwards, watching MTV. He hadn’t even felt like wanking.
And now he was back in that same hotel room, the red one, the air again heavy, and again he was alone. But this time, instead of lying on the bed and waiting for the girl to show up, he pushed aside one of the thick velvet curtains at the window and stepped behind it. He could see, in the large mirror opposite, just above the bed, that he was completely hidden in its folds. Again, he waited for the girl. But when the door opened it was Eloise who came in, followed by Sol, both of them panting as though they’d been chased there, the door slamming shut as Sol pushed El up against it. Then everything slowed down as Sol leaned in to kiss her. Paul realised then that he’d known all along they would appear there together. And, as he watched, Paul felt so jealous and so turned on that he had to bite his lip hard to stop himself from pushing back the curtain and joining them where they now lay on the bed, El on her back, long hair fanned out behind her as though floating in water. Floating in water: yes, he thought dreamily, sex in dreams was always slow, like floating, and as he thought this he realised that he was dreaming and, realising this, realised he was not fully asleep after all and that the thwump thwump thwump of them on the bed together was coming in fact from outside the room, someone was banging on the door of his room, the other hotel room outside his dream where he now lay, alone, awake and with a hard-on. Securing it with the waistband of his shorts, he slipped on his jeans and opened the door.
He didn’t recognise her immediately. It was the hair. It was no longer the shade of dyed red that had made her skin look creamier than French butter. She’d gone natural, an indeterminate brown colour with an almost greenish sheen – the colour of sticks that crack underfoot in an English wood, he thought. It was bobbed, accentuating the little pointed chin that used to dig into his shoulder so viciously when he held her, as he did now, before she pulled away smartly.
Have I seen you in a suit before? he asked.
Not unless you count school uniform.
She came into the room. Sat down on the edge of the bed. Can I smoke?
Paul shrugged.
Put some clothes on, she said, not looking at him as she took out a packet of cigarettes, the menthol kind that teenage girls favoured, a taste she had never outgrown. She offered Paul the packet. Smoking them had always reminded him of Eloise: the actual taste of them – fresh and cold and hot and stale all at the same time. She looked around her.
Nice room, she said.
It is by my standards. I’ve only stayed in a hotel once before.
I know. You’ve told me the story.
You remind me of her, you know. The girl who never came to meet me.
His immediate thought when he’d first met Eloise had been that she looked as though she should have a tail. She looked as though she licked herself clean.
She was kind of feral like you.
Eloise fished into her handbag and brought out a brown envelope. This is what you wanted, right? I don’t want it back. And I don’t want to see you again, Paul
.
I’m not planning on coming back any time soon. Thank you for this.
I have to get back to work now.
Where’s your work?
Canary Wharf.
Ah. Daddy.
His company, yes.
I’ve only been there once. To Canary Wharf, I mean.
What business would you have round there?
He raised an eyebrow. There’s a lot of business round there. But Paul had been too intimidated by the place to return. Some of the buildings he’d seen there were of a cobalt-blue glass, like the kind you looked through to view an eclipse. Perhaps you needed to look through coloured glass – emerald glass, grey-green glass the colour of the river – to see this place, Paul had thought, craning his neck to take in the Olympian heights of the buildings around him as he waited for the dealer who was coming to buy drugs from him.
I work in one of the tallest buildings there, Eloise said. Every time I go into it I remember a story you told me. The one about an ancient Greek philosopher who committed suicide by jumping into a volcano and how this other philosopher a few centuries later, some French guy, admired the Greek for choosing Earth over Heaven: What an affirmation of love for the Earth! Then the French guy was diagnosed with a terminal illness and also killed himself – by jumping from a building.
I don’t remember that story, said Paul. Look at you. Job in the city. All smart. New boyfriend too, hey?
She nodded.
Paul got a soapy corrosive feeling then, as though his skin were covered in battery acid: a mixture of jealousy, sadness, lust. He had not had sex in such a long while that the thought of it scared him. In between break-ups with Eloise he would have casual sex with people he met in bars. But increasingly he’d found that the experience diminished him somehow. The effort of having to make himself anew for each encounter, after each encounter, made him feel as though he were losing pliability, as though he were – he’d heard this somewhere, about something else altogether, but he’d forgotten what – losing a little of the gold leaf from his photograph.
Paul leaned over and kissed Eloise. Hot ashes and mint. She pulled away.
Come on, Paul, she said gently. You know it’s not going to happen. She reached out a hand, but her touch was cautious, as though she were touching something which might be very hot.
You’ve changed, Eloise.
Good, she said. When I was with you, I felt as though I was on the edge of the world; I felt like I was outside looking in. You made me feel like that. I loved that about you, I sought it out when I was young, but it scares me to be like that now. How can you live like you do? Why do you always want to make things difficult for yourself?
I just need to know that I’m alive.
Why do you have to be dead or alive? she said. Can’t you find a happy medium like the rest of us? You wanting to run away from your mum and Genie, for example. What’s that about?
Paul told her everything.
He told her about the night he’d broken his rule and given Genie a pill when she’d asked him to sort her out: how he’d refused and she’d pouted, said she’d take her business elsewhere, nodded at a bloke Paul didn’t like the look of. How he’d said, Don’t be stupid, he could give you anything; how Genie had smiled in a way that said, Exactly!
And so he’d slipped a pill from his cigarette packet and passed it to her. As she’d squeezed his hand in return he’d thought in a flash that it was all fucked up, him giving Genie this fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil when Genie – her smirk lit up by the strobe – was surely the snake here… Paul told Eloise about losing Genie, about finding girls in a back corridor, the girls with long lashes, high heels who looked like an avenue of spiky winter trees, leaning against the walls of the narrow corridor that led to the back room, at the back of which was a trestle table heaped high with coke. He told Eloise tales that made her nose water, of how he’d troughed at that trestle table, taking turns with the spiky girls, then jumped the queue until he’d felt sick with himself and everyone around him; how he’d left the place, left Genie there. It was while he was outside, striding up and down in the watery first light of morning, his body thrumming with power chords played on cathedral organs, that an ambulance had pulled up. He told Eloise that it was while he was wondering, Why not a back entrance for such eventualities, for the casualties, as they would for the VIPs? that he’d caught sight of the girl on the stretcher and seen, through the plastic mask clamped to her face, that it was Genie. And, before she could ask him, he told Eloise, Yes. I left her there.
(iii) Looking for Gaetan
The plane was about to land. The last time Paul had seen this view he’d been sixteen. He had taken the dark stains across the sea for forests of coral or seaweed fields. He knew now that they were in fact the shadows of clouds. Even something as insubstantial as a cloud cast a shadow. As the plane banked, Paul saw the sudden sweep of bay, that shy sort of turquoise, and felt hopeful for the first time in a long while. Paul was hoping that this feeling – this London feeling – would disappear when he arrived in Mauritius. He had lived with this feeling for a long time, he realised now, but it had become unbearable since the night of Genie’s collapse.
But that feeling had not gone at all, he thought dully, as he stepped out of the plane and walked down the steps onto Mauritian soil, the heat giving him that welcoming hug, so tight it brought tears to his eyes. If anything, it got worse as he entered the terminal. It’s jet-lag, he told himself. It’s just a hangover. But it was neither of these which had shaken him up, he realised as he collected his suitcase – Mam’s suitcase – from the carousel. It was guilt. Shame. Fear. It was the pills. Now, as he walked through Customs, slowing his pace to slow down his heart, a nasty dark mist of a hangover beginning to descend, he thought, If I’m to be punished for what I did to Genie, let someone stop me. Let someone pull me over. Look through my case. Open the tub of chewable Vitamin C tablets. Take one out and frown, call over a colleague.
But the Customs points were unmanned. He walked through unchallenged.
Paul had not been in touch with anyone but, even so, walking through Arrivals, he scanned the chaos of brown faces. He saw nobody he recognised, though in each of those faces he saw something half-familiar. That was how it felt to be in Mauritius again.
He could not recall ever having felt so oppressed by the island. The taxi drove along narrow roads shuttered by high-growing cane fields. Paul remembered the sugar cane, but it was the back of the driver’s neck that brought Mauritius rushing home to him. That shade of brown. Almost reddish, like the earth barely glimpsed in the densely planted fields. And beyond the fields, eruptions of rock shaped like books flung aside, and dominating it all, even from a distance, Le Morne, like a petrified fortress.
The sky was full of clouds, the sun squinting through them, and the sea, as they turned onto the coastal road, was not at all the easy blue it had seemed from the plane. They passed shallow beaches where women stood in the water, hems of their skirts in one hand, sieves in the other, dipping them in the sea, sifting through what remained. Further on, by Pomponette, a group of schoolboys, skin blackened by the sun, were running into the sea in their underpants. Smaller somehow. Sadder.
The driver had given up on conversation back in Souillac, but as Le Morne pressed up against the windows he tried once more.
I don’t need your ghost stories, Paul said. I know all about this place.
Neither of them spoke again until they reached La Gaulette, where Paul stopped the driver. He would walk to Gaetan’s village from there.
On the road, he passed a stall where a woman stood hacking steaks from a big fish, weighing them on bloody scales. He nodded to her and she nodded back in the serious, almost formal way of country people here, who were wary of strangers.
Do you know Gaetan Pierre? Paul asked.
Oh, Gaetan. She shrugged disdainfully. You’ll find him outside the shop.
Paul had not even considered that Gaetan mig
ht not be around. It had been fifteen years, but Gaetan would not have forgotten him. But Gaetan might well have believed that Paul had forgotten him. He felt a stinging shame then, remembering the letter he never answered.
It seemed even less of a village than he’d remembered. Just a cement-block shop and a row of lacaz tol, shacks of corrugated iron, some carefully painted and set in plots of well-tended land. Where the panels had been left unpainted you could see faded letters indicating former use – construction site fencing, mainly. A few men were squatting outside the shop, chatting and passing a bottle of beer between them. One of them, Paul realised with a shock, was Gaetan. They stared at one another for a few seconds. Then Gaetan, clearly drunk, ran over to him.
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