Genie and Paul

by Natasha Soobramanien

  I’m his sister.

  Not you. The sister who died.

  What are you talking about?

  His twin. The tumour. In his stomach. The one he has lived with all these years. He told us he had had this terrible pain all his life and then when he went to the doctors they told him he had a cancer but when they did some investigations on him they realised it was not a cancer but it was his twin sister. She had got stuck to him in the womb and had been growing inside him all this time. He had to have her cut out, he said. He was here to recover. He said he was full of guilt because he felt like he’d killed her. Is that true?

  Without replying, Genie turned and left.

  (x) Paul

  This morning it was diarrhoea. He squatted, felt his gut go slack, pulled some leaves from the hibiscus bush and wiped himself, shaking a little and suddenly weak. He’d go for a bathe in the sea.

  He looked up at the sky. It was hard to tell what time of day it was. Today, the sky was white, harshly lit. It looked like a London sky before snowfall. He had not seen snow in a long, long time, he suddenly realised. For a second he wondered if he ever would again, and then he caught himself: was that it? Had he unconsciously made the decision never to go back to London?

  He recalled the first time he had ever seen snow: the memory of Genie’s encounter with it was more vivid than his own. She was five. She had stood in the middle of the garden in her red galoshes, with her mouth open, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. And Paul had shown her there was nothing to be afraid of, even though he could not be sure of this himself. He pointed out, when it settled, its static, fibrous quality, like magnetised iron filings, the way it crackled on the skin and felt rough on the tongue. Soft as fur, but ruffled, like the hackles on the back of a cat’s neck. Paul had felt bad for Genie when it all melted days later and the stuff turned to a dirty red brown slush and they saw what it had been covering – all the rubbish and the shit – all the rubbish and shit in the garden of 40 St George’s Avenue, the garden Genie had always hated. He remembered how she had hated its long damp grass which hid, she was convinced, all manner of repulsive creatures, such as the snails that were clustered at the edge of the path. Paul would walk along it and jump with both feet onto any snails he saw, taking great delight in the crunching sound, while Genie picked her way through them as though they were mines. If ever she trod on one she would leap up howling as though the soles of her feet had been burnt. Paul found this funny. One afternoon, he had guided her towards a robin he said he could see in the bushes.

  Where? she’d asked, looking up, stepping ahead, as Paul had planned. Kerrrrrunch.

  But before she could scream, the sky had ripped open and it had started to rain – fat drops that fell heavily like a shower of stones. In a second they were soaked. She and Paul had looked at each other, laughing with the shock of it.

  Come on! he’d said, taking her hand and pulling her back towards the house. He grabbed the hem of Genie’s anorak, and pulled it over their heads. Icy drops slid from the plastic onto their foreheads, stung numb with the cold, and as they ran up the path he looked to see Mam at her rain-streaked window looking out at them. When they got inside she was waiting at the door with rough towels. She’d wrapped Genie up in one and rubbed her hard, while Paul shook himself like a dog.

  Well! Mam had said. Like Leda’s children, in the same shell.

  Paul got to his feet, dizzy, shaking, and made his way back to the shack.

  (xi) Genie

  When the sun went down, the floodlights round the hotel pool went up, and a sudden golden-blue glow filtered through the curtains of Genie’s room. Out by the terrace bar a sega band was setting up, and the sound of instruments being tuned broke through Genie’s sleep. She had passed out earlier that afternoon. She lay on her bed, staring at the veins of light on her ceiling, reflections from the pool.

  She got up and wandered back out to the bar. Regis was still on duty. He did not look up at her as she took a stool at the bar but continued making up a cocktail, which he then pushed in front of her.

  On the house. You might need that.

  The bar was still empty. Most of the guests were getting ready for dinner.

  Was I really drunk?

  Really drunk. You should go out there and listen to the band. He smiled. Tourists love that shit!

  How many times? I’m not a tourist.

  You might have mentioned it earlier. A few times.

  Tourism. It’s a form of prostitution. That’s what my brother said when he came back from Mauritius. It’s true. You let these rich people in, they give you money, you treat them like gods.

  You don’t tip like a rich person.

  The waitress came back to the bar with her empty tray. While Regis was making up her order he asked what she thought about tourism as prostitution.

  Her name was Katy. She looked Genie up and down. Oh, well, me, I see tourists more like children, she said. When a tourist dies here or in Mauritius, it’s big news. The way it is when a child dies. Drownings mostly, but every now and then something worse. Something one of the locals has done. I always feel like the death of a tourist is worth more than the death of one of us.

  That’s true, Regis mused. Whenever a tourist dies there’s this feeling that all of us are responsible somehow.

  We were responsible for looking after this person and we failed, said Katy. She flashed a smile at Genie, collected the beers and went to deliver them.

  Genie looked closely at Regis. The dimples had gone.

  What are you doing here? she asked. In Rodrigues? Why haven’t you left?

  Why should I? It’s my home. Where my family live. My sister. I’ve seen enough of the outside world – the people that come here, what I see on the news – to know I don’t need to see any more of it. Maybe that’s how your brother feels. Maybe he’s had enough of it.

  He doesn’t even know how he feels.

  And how, mademoiselle, do you know that? You don’t know what he feels.

  I know he ran away from me yesterday.

  So you kept saying earlier. And he wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t gone looking for him. I tried to tell you that the first time I met you, when you came here showing me his photo. As though you were a gard, or he was a lost dog! Maybe he just wants to be a tourist for a bit. I don’t mean stay in a swanky hotel. I mean, have a holiday from his own life. Leave him to it. If he wants to come back, he will.

  But he never will, she thought suddenly.

  Rodrigues was the sister island of Mauritius and Paul, she thought, was her brother island, remote and totally isolated but somehow connected and, as Rodrigues was to Mauritius, a dependency. She realised now that she had thought this all her life: she was supposedly the baby sister, the younger one, the less clever one even. But she knew, and Paul did too, that she was the stronger one. Was this because she was younger? Paul had been alone for the first five years of his life. Her arrival must have changed his world. Genie had never known such a disruption, would never know the solitude he’d experienced before she was born. And then Genie realised – and the thought made her gasp almost – that for her it would be the opposite. She would know it if Paul were to die before her. She thought about what Gaetan had said. About how Paul would not want to be found, but how Genie was not giving him that choice.

  She drained her cocktail. The sega band had started playing and guests were starting to wander out of their rooms to the poolside. The sound of clinking glasses and laughter floated over to Genie as she walked past the pool and into her room. She went over to the desk, switched on the lamp, sat down in front of the pad of hotel letterheaded paper, and picked up the pen beside it.

  Let him have his choice.

  (xii) Paul

  Something was squatting on his chest. Or that was how it felt, anyway, when his struggle for breath shook him. Something was squatting on his chest, breathing in his face.

  Oh God.

  He felt the panic start to form over him
like skin on boiling milk. He didn’t know what to do when it got him here, right here in bed, in the only place he felt he could escape it. There was nowhere left to go. He had to fight his way out of it. He had to think of something so that he didn’t start thinking too hard about breathing and thinking that if he stopped thinking about breathing he would stop breathing for good, and when he got to the point where he thought he was about to stop breathing he started scrabbling at the dark with his fingers, as though trying to slit his way through it, as though he were in mourning and rending his clothes.

  He lay on the mattress, squinting at a black stain on the floor. It appeared to be dissolving, then intensifying. The ants. They were moving in the purposeful way of commuters. They could have been people observed from a satellite. He lay there for some time watching it spread and contract, pulse of its own accord. This unnameable pain which he still carried – the name of it always on the tip of his tongue – had long since broken up and the bits floated free around his body now like clots. He watched the stain dissolving. He stared at the ants, trying to distract himself from the sound of the sea, from the fact that he remembered too much. He remembered the time he had brought Mam the daffodils. He’d looked out into the weed-choked beds of the gardens and seen them, almost hidden by the overgrown hedge. So bright they were! So yellow against the dark wet green! And he’d run out and tugged them all up, and made a great glorious pile of them which he’d gathered, running back into the flat, into Mam’s room and she’d slapped him round the head, for pulling them all up, for dropping them on the floor, for running into her room without knocking where he had surprised her, standing naked, looking at herself in the mirror.

  There were the memories. There were the ants. And then, Paul thought dully, there were the pills. He leant over to his suitcase and pulled it open, reaching for his washbag. He pulled out the tub of pills and twisted it open. Then he shook out one of the pills, and swallowed it.

  (xiii) Genie

  Genie lay by the pool in her bikini, blindly groping from time to time for the cocktail set down next to her lounger. She felt the sun trail red shadows across her closed lids, and was gradually succumbing to the rum that thickened and slurred her thoughts. Tomorrow she would leave. She would fly back to Mauritius, and, from there, home to London.

  Her Mauritius, she realised, was imaginary, cobbled together from a few patchy memories and the stories she’d heard from Paul and from Mam. But Genie was more Mauritian than Paul, technically (this was only ever half the story, Mauritius, half his story, and funny how the white half was the dark half, she thought). You could also argue that Paul was more Mauritian than her: he’d spent more time there. And, unlike him, Genie had never felt the desire to return. Perhaps she was afraid it would disappoint her. Or perhaps she saw Mauritius as more his than hers. It was like childhood, she thought, looking at a little girl playing in the pool. You can’t ever go back. Every morning this little girl waved to Genie, and Genie always offered her a small smile in return. She knew the little girl read it as sad, lonely. But in fact she was simply tired: tired out by the heat, the salt air, the silence, the long hours spent alone, the effort not to think of Paul, the rainbow of cocktails she worked her way through each afternoon by the pool. She had written Paul a letter and left it with the girl in the rum shack. He would know where to find her if he wanted to see her. But she would no longer be looking for him.

  She took another sip of her drink. It was layered, red and yellow. She took her swizzle stick and swirled it around. Mauritian could just be another word for ‘mixed’. Their mixes were just different, that was all. Everyone was a bastard there, on that bastard island – the bastard of England and France left to grow up wild in the tropics.

  She heard squeals and splashing and opened one eye to see the little girl paddling erratically towards a beach-ball her father had thrown into the pool. And now, having reached the ball, she was shrieking with delight and frustration, struggling to cling to it in the water.

  The further away you were from a past hurt, Genie thought, a self who got hurt in the past, the more you felt as though that self wasn’t you. It was more like your child, an innocent whom you, as an adult, with your advanced perspective, your advantage of hindsight, should be in a position to protect.

  Genie had become more and more angry with Paul. So what? What could she do about it now? All she knew now was, how could he? How could he do that to her? How could he leave her like that? Like this? She and Mam always used to say to Paul, You think too much. Now Genie would have added to that – of yourself.

  Mademoiselle? There were dimples now whenever Regis said this to her in public. She looked up into his face and thought groggily, Dark skin kind of concentrates you, makes you occupy a more sharply delineated space. If you were white here, in this blinding light, you’d kind of melt into the whiteness of the sand or the sky.

  He handed her a piece of paper. She sat up, unfolded it. It was a hand-drawn map. She looked at him, puzzled.

  My sister has a small snack place near Baie du Nord, he said. Your brother’s been seen there a few times. He’s living nearby, on the beach.

  (xiv) Paul

  Look at me, bringing poison into Paradise! Paul thought, reaching for another pill. There was a time when he’d debased his coinage: he cut his drugs, crushed them to dust, sold them as space dust. Dust from space was radioactive. And people who took this stuff glowed in the dark. They emitted heat. There was an expression in Creole, pa koze: don’t talk. It implied absolute agreement with what someone had just said: I know what you mean. No need to explain.

  The first time he and Sol had taken an E together – Paul’s first ever time – out in that field, the grass brushing his ankles like Eloise’s hair on his bare skin, the sky frosted with stars, they had looked at one other and said nothing. And then he in turn had introduced El to Es in another wordless but eloquent encounter. To think they had ever called that stuff Ecstasy, he laughed. How naive they’d been. These days it was more Mild Excitability. Not even that, he thought, thinking about the increasingly frequent waves of paranoia that licked the edges of his consciousness whenever he took pills in London. There had once been an innocence about it (or had it been about them?) that had been cut with something cruder, over the years. When had that happened exactly?

  Now, as he took another, he didn’t talk. But the sea would not shut up. The sound of it was beginning to engulf him. It was ceaseless. For variety he imagined that the noise outside was rain. Rain or the constant sound of cars on a distant motorway. It could have been the wind in the coconut trees, the flapping of ragged banana leaves or the faint roaring sound when he put a shell to his ear or when he couldn’t sleep at night. Like tonight. Like every night. Anything but the sea.

  There was a bush by his shack. Paul had no idea what it was, but the needles were spiny, as spiteful-looking as the black railings he used to see everywhere in London. When it rained heavily, the sound of the drops on its whip-like branches was like a large animal drinking, lapping something up, or like the sound of fire. And the wind sometimes sounded as if it was drumming at his door (the piece of zinc he had to drag open or closed), demanding to be let in. But he swallowed it. Paul realised that, when it came down to hardships you couldn’t change, mistakes you couldn’t undo, you just had to swallow them.

  (xv) Genie

  She had taken him for a tree at first – one which might have escaped the cyclone, it was so slight. And then, as she walked further along the beach, she saw it was a man, and then she saw in this figure a much thinner, darker version of Paul, his profile smudged by the grown-out hair, the beard. He was standing on a ledge of land which stuck out over the sea, just looking out, as though scanning the horizon for a ship, as though watching the sun set, but now all that could be seen of it was a bar of hot light at the horizon, and the sky, fast deepening.

  Paul!

  Running as she was screaming, hoarsely, out of breath, over the sand which was packed hard and col
d where the sea had rolled over it, her bare feet slapping flat on it, flip-flops in hand, like running on rain-wettened London pavements. He did not turn around immediately, as though the sound of her cry took a long while to reach him.

  Paul!

  He saw her and moved slowly down towards the beach where she was running to meet him. Without a word he stepped forward, and when she folded him into her arms she was shocked to discover how little of him there was left.

  (xvi) Paul

  He dreamt she’d come to see him. He’d been standing on his rock, watching the setting sun bloody the sea, and he’d turned to see her on the beach, approaching him. He could see her mouth open, knowing that she was calling to him, but could hear nothing for a while, and then he’d heard his name. It had seemed ages since he’d heard his own name from someone else’s lips.

  And when she’d thrown her arms around him she had felt more solid than she’d ever felt in real life. She was sobbing, and when finally she’d stopped crying she’d asked him to go back with her. Told him it would be better for him that way, that if he was sorry about what he’d done to her, if he wanted things to change, then this was his chance. He could not remember much of what he’d said in turn, only that he could not go back, and then she’d looked at him, quite closely, and asked what was wrong. And, when she asked, he couldn’t tell her. That was the ultimate wrong, that he should have to say what was wrong with him. Come with me, she’d said. And he’d said, The blue honey of the Mediteranean, that’s what Fitzgerald said.

  And she’d looked at him as though finally she understood, and then she had started crying again.