The group nod as one. They are all carrying cameras. Most pack them away.
There are couples, a family with kids, an older man, the grandfather, two single women. It’s midweek and usually the visitors midweek come from Sans Amen; the beach and the centre is famous now. People arrive from all over the world and from Sans Amen. That has been a great privilege of his job, showing his own people this sight of the turtles. As a child he didn’t know much about them.
He leads them out down the lane to the beach which is damp from the river nearby. The small group follows him and his infrared light and quickly they find a huge turtle, maybe seven hundred pounds. She is digging her egg chamber and he settles the group around her to share the information he knows. He hasn’t been much to school, let alone university, but he’s studied these creatures for decades and he is as knowledgeable as the teams of American marine biologists who come here, and those from the BBC and National Geographic. He now calls himself a conservationist. It is like being a husband or a father to the earth.
This turtle has begun to lay, and so he holds her hind fins apart discreetly, like curtains, and shines his infrared torch into the chamber.
‘The female turtles take around two hours to nest and lay. It’s hard work, and so they cannot nest when it’s day. It’s too hot. Now she will drop around one to two hundred eggs. The chamber, as you can see, is about two feet deep. So the eggs are quite safe.’
The visitors peer into the chamber. Soleil and Maria crouch near the hole, watching. The white eggs look like hand-blown paper globes. They gently slide out of her cloaca into the chamber walls of sand. The young girls are quiet and reverent, like women scopsing jewels.
‘The turtles will nest up to ten times in a season, maybe lay a thousand eggs and disappear. Reptiles aren’t mothering creatures. Once they have dug and laid, they slip back off, into the sea. They don’t see their young again. They need no contact with them.’
‘Wow,’ says one of the women in the group. ‘They come all this way to lay, and that’s it?’
‘Yes.’
‘The juvenile turtles will be born about eight weeks later. They take five days to dig themselves out of their nest,’ he explains. ‘But once they are visible, if they hatch in the day, most will be eaten between the beach and the sea by corbeaux or frigates. One in a thousand live to adulthood.’
Joseph has spent a lot of his life hand-releasing hatchlings into the sea. When the hatchlings start to emerge, he’s on the beach most of the day with his bucket, collecting the tiny black stars, but he cannot save them all. Many he finds dead, pecked to death.
‘That’s a minuscule number.’
‘Yes. But the ones that do survive return to this beach twenty or thirty years later to give birth. Sometimes I think the reason why is because of the very miracle that they survived at all.’
Back in the car park, Joseph says goodbye to the visitors. Soleil and her friend Maria are tired and they are both so stick thin he could easily scoop them up in his arms together. He likes it when his daughter comes to help, that she is learning about these creatures too.
The older man in the group hangs about a little, as if he’d like to say something. He looks about sixty and he has a quiet pensive manner.
‘Thank you,’ he says shyly and yet with some considered intent. Joseph feels drawn to him; he has come to know he’s often drawn to older men. He hovers, now holding the hands of two little girls who need to go to bed.
‘Those turtles made me sad,’ the old man says.
Joseph nods. He’s seen people weep at the sight of them.
‘I had no idea. No idea . . .’ and then he says, almost with an absent mind, ‘that so many come to Sans Amen.’
‘Yes. That’s because there’s been a ban on hunting them. For fifteen years.’
‘So now they come safely?’
‘More or less.’
‘One good thing happening here on this island, eh?’
Joseph smiles. ‘It was the idea of Aspasia Garland, remember her? She was once the Minister for Environment.’
‘Of course I remember her. She was one of the hostages. At the time of that attempted coup. She survived the ordeal, a great lady.’
Joseph goes silent. He wants to get away now, from this conversation. And yet he almost wants to boast too, I knew her, I knew her, she gave me the idea to come here . . .
The older man gives him a look which is deep and raw and also a little lost.
‘I know something about that attempted coup,’ he says. ‘My wife, she was caught up in it too. Unfortunately, she didn’t survive like Mrs Garland. She was shot and killed . . . by those lousy murderers.’
Joseph freezes. He stares. How did this man come here? Why is this man standing in front of him?
‘I’m sorry . . .’ Joseph stammers.
He looks at Joseph, still full of anger and regret. ‘Bloody ruthless bastards. I was left a single father of two children. It was a shock at the time. They were devastated and so was I. Hypocrites. I . . .’ And then he pauses as if he’s only just put his finger on what has come to him, with the turtles.
‘She was pregnant when they shot her, you see. Three months pregnant. My wife. In the House of Power. You remember that terrible thing? Eh? The attempted coup d’état. She used to work there as a clerk and she was shot dead. She was pregnant. And . . . well . . . I’ve always been glad they executed all those bandits. They deserved what they got. But those sea creatures . . . made me sad. Sad for my wife and our unborn child. And also for . . . those men. I have never felt any compassion for those men before, ever. But some of them were boys. Those creatures . . . they gave me a surprise. Where do they come from . . . ? Is like they bring an old wisdom with them.’
Joseph nods, but he feels old suddenly, and hot in his gut, a liquid feeling spills through him. The horror of it all never faded. The remorse has atrophied, and now it is melting into his blood.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers to the older man whose wife he shot.
*
Joseph finds his wife still busy at the centre, looking pretty, as usual, her thin locks tied back and hennaed red at the ends. She has amber eyes and a way of looking at him which can be soft and hard at the same time. Killer look in her eyes, which is why he married her.
‘Please,’ he says, ‘take them,’ meaning the children. ‘Something’s come up.’ And she gives him that look and this time he gives her his look back and says, ‘Not now. Ah goin,’ and with that he’s gone, out the door, and walking across the car park to his jeep.
His hands are shaking as he jabs the key in the ignition and switches on the headlights, shaking. Tears are falling too and he can barely see. He takes the jeep out on to the thin tarmac road and through the village where every single man who isn’t on the beach guiding visitors to the turtles is drinking rum and standing outside the parlour; thank God the windows have an opaque strip which partially hides his face and he makes a gesture which vaguely says hello. All the men outside the parlour nod gently. He accelerates past them and keeps driving till he reaches the next cove and then he parks facing the oncoming surf. The beach here doesn’t get so many turtles. The waves are rolling in, slick and black and silent. His face is wet with tears. The woman he shot dead was pregnant. The woman he shot dead as a teenager had a baby in her stomach. He wonders if he should just load his pockets up with stones, wade out into the surf. She will never go away, that woman. She has been with him all his life – it is as though he shot his mother dead. She was trying to escape out the window. There was a moment when she saw him and she begged. ‘You are like my son,’ she pleaded, and he shot her straight through the belly.
Joseph puts his forehead to the wheel of the jeep and feels his ribs shake, his stomach heave. She will not go away, that woman. And now . . . there were two of them. He’s a double murderer. It happened so long ago that sometimes he almost can forget what happened. Sometimes, it’s like he can pretend he is someone else.
&nb
sp; All that was over eight thousand days ago. He has kept count in numerous ways: on walls, in sketchbooks, in his head. In footsteps. In breaths. In leatherback turtles. He has collected his days of so-called freedom in stones, in leaves on the trees. But she has never died on him, that woman from the House of Power. She has haunted him and he has often wondered if he should walk out into the sea to stop her infestation of his dreams. It would probably be wise to take his own life as a way of recompense. It would be a cancellation of a debt. He owed her his life. The others paid with theirs.
12 APRIL, 2013
He gets home very late and lies awake thinking it’s time to go back. The House of Power. Amerindian bones. Jesus on the cross. He ran away and never returned and maybe it will be okay; maybe it will help. He has been so scared. He has been hiding. He saw what happened to the others. The commune was bulldozed and the brothers disbanded, joined other groups. The Leader’s entire movement evaporated soon after the execution. Enough time has passed. Since then he hasn’t prayed, he has led a secular existence.
He should go back.
At dawn Soleil comes into the bed and he makes space for her and he lies still while his wife and child are warm and fast asleep next to him. The light is creeping in behind the curtains. He dozes a little and as he dozes he dreams of running. In his dreams he is running through the City of Silk, down towards the sea. The pavement is hot and broken up and there are vagrants asleep on the ground and there is a megaphoned voice shouting at him saying, Give up, come back. Then he sees a giant rusted satellite dish and men standing in a line, falling in a heap to the ground. When the men fall, his legs begin to give and then he finds he is running on his knees through the streets. He sees his mother, Mercy Green, with one eye. His mother says to him, Give yourself up you wutless good-for-nothing boy. His mother turns into the minister, Mrs Aspasia Garland, who is carrying a baby turtle in her hands. His mother says to Mrs Garland, ‘He should give himself up, shouldn’t he?’ Mrs Garland is standing by an open window in the House of Power with the turtle and she smiles and says, ‘I know where you went, I know where you disappeared in your adolescence.’
Joseph slips from the bed and he goes to the bathroom and splashes water onto his face. He brushes his teeth and stares hard at them. His teeth are perfect. His face has marks on it now, creases and small scars from accidents and acne in his later teens. He has the face of a man who people like. He learnt to smile more, trust people more, since he got married. He is aware that women find him attractive and that men are drawn to him too. He figures it is his teeth and his smile. His face breaks open when he smiles and he has learnt that this makes others feel good. It makes him feel good too, like he has a charm. He remembers the way Aspasia Garland spoke to him once, in the House, using her voice of authority, like she was an important person; it was a politician’s voice, strong and clear. Over the years he has somehow copied this. Sometimes he speaks like she did: precisely, as if he has authority. It impressed him as a young boy. And now he uses the same technique and he impresses people too. Firm and yet polite; it gets people on his side.
He finds his jeans and a jersey and his baseball hat. He decides he will drive half of the way, then park in a private car park he knows and then he will catch two maxis the rest of the way, one across country, the second into town. He will be travelling south and then east, back to the City of Silk. It will take him hours, maybe half the day to get there. He will call his wife on the way, a small lie. ‘Something came up last night . . . a family thing. Ah goin into town.’ She will be very surprised. He’s never been back to the City of Silk in all this time. He goes all shut down when she mentions taking a trip into town. She will be curious as hell. But he’ll make an excuse; he will not say the truth, which is I haven’t told you everything. I shot a woman dead. I shot a pregnant woman dead. That is what I have been hiding from you for twenty-three years.
*
The trip across the centre of the island is long and bumpy. Villages flash past. The road, in places, feels soft, as if the asphalt is warm from the core of the earth. There are jhandi flags outside colourful houses and there are old men sitting on chairs outside these houses and young pot hounds asleep on their sides. There is KFC and Subway almost everywhere and overcrowded Christian cemeteries, their tombs all lopsided from the earth which is slowly and mysteriously mobile. Sans Amen is not such a small island; it feels spacious and unknown. Fields appear, and hulking black water buffalo with cattle egrets standing on top of them like angels astride their chariots. And the spicey smell of chadon beni is everywhere, blessed thistle, a cilantro which grows like a weed. Chadon beni and the stink of car fumes as other maxi taxis weave in and out of the traffic, some letting out black puffs from the exhaust.
The countryside of Sans Amen is full of secrets – perhaps some just like his. How many others are hiding out here? How many failed, intimate, desperate stories are being hushed up and extinguished here? Just like his. Joseph remembers his city childhood, his mother, his first life, the life which ended in a bullet-hail. Thank God for all this countryside. It gave him cover. He thinks of the other escaped gunman, Ashes, and he wonders what happened to him. Is he still in the country, hiding? Did his wife forgive him? He watches, mesmerised, as the island flashes past: rastamen with towering wrapped dreads selling bags of pommeracs in the road, massive factories selling paint, sweet drinks, hardware. Villages where the maxi tracks into thin maze-like private roads, Julie mango trees standing laden and sturdy behind walls; he sees a young woman poking the branches with a long stick. And all along the way the mauve-green mountains hover in the background, like the curves of a colossal woman lying on her side, the slopes of a generous lover. Joseph feels tense and screwed up and nervous the closer he gets to town. It will be okay, he whispers.
*
When they reach the City of Silk it is mid-afternoon. The savannah is parched to a crisp brown fuzz from all the hot weather and the Pouis are like delicate pink clouds erupting in slow motion from the tops of the trees. The ground beneath is all mottled pink and it looks like someone has dropped lots of tissues around them. The maxi flies much too fast down the middle lane and then it’s round the corner and he sees the gargantuan silver domes which look like shells inside each other, or like a part of a space rocket has fallen off and plummeted to earth. Already he feels uncomfortable. The City of Silk used to feel village-like; he knew the place, he knew the streets, the people. It was for everyone. Now he wonders if it has changed too much, if it has become a City of the Rich. These silver domes look like they landed here from an alien universe. He thinks he has made a big mistake coming back. To do what? See what?
Joseph asks the driver to let him off close by, at the top of Francis Street, and it is then that he is glad of the baseball cap. His heart starts to beat much faster and he feels a tightness in his entire body as if it is trying to make itself smaller. The sky is high and open and blue and he walks down the pavement in the full glare of the sun, past many shops, most of which are opticians; it’s like everybody has gone blind or short-sighted in the City of Silk. And then he passes some offices and government buildings like the Ministry of Finance and then, he forgot it was there, the big gaol, yes, squat and low and sweltering in the sun. In the middle of the city. The Leader saved him from a spell inside there, years ago now. It has a gatehouse and a low rusted galvanised roof and a tower and a spotlight and a small door in the big green metal door. A woman goes to the small door in the big door and rings the buzzer and waits. There is a man in uniform talking to another woman; a green army van is parked outside.
Joseph walks past the entrance to the gaol in the centre of town. Not one single person turns to look at him. Not the female soldier driving the van, not the armed guard in the tower, not the woman waiting for the small door to open. He strides past all this, floating inches from the hot pavement, past the water hydrant, past the big church on the right surrounded by fir trees and royal palms which resemble fancy umbrellas, past a set
of balconies which he remembers well, the famous boys’ school, a school he used to walk past all puffed up and furious when he was younger. This school only takes the very best scholars, men like Hal.
Joseph walks on, unseen. He is a visitor, or a tourist even, feeling uncertain, feeling like he has made a stupid decision to come all this way. He walks past more shops, the street getting busy with life, with people. He is deeper into town now, and the vibe he remembers begins to show itself. A man walks towards him who is bleary-eyed from drugs. There is a sleazy nightclub with laughing Buddhas out the front and a sign saying that patrons must dress elegantly casual.
The City of Silk is small, he realises, tight and packed and busy. But when he left he was small, a boy. Now he is grown it is as if he has put on the right pair of spectacles, or he has adjusted the lenses on his eyes to the right strength. The City of Silk is not so big at all. In his memory the streets were very long and wide, but this isn’t true, they are narrow. A man with a straw hat on walks towards him and Joseph notices his short-sleeved shirt is empty on one side. Joseph dares to look into the man’s face and the man looks back, a practised defiance in his eyes. The one-armed man is the only person to notice him at all, and that is because Joseph is staring at the space left by his arm.
Soon, he reaches City Hall and his innards freeze and there it is: the famous square, the main square in town, where old men go to socialise. It is surrounded by high wrought-iron railings. He can see old men still sitting there, playing chess, like they never left. The square has a bandstand and a fountain and it feels quiet and peaceful, like it is safe. And yet he feels bad, awkward and unsure of himself. He crosses the road and enters through the open gate and then he is walking calm so, through the square in front of the House of Power which is still painted magenta after all these years. He forces his legs to carry him, to keep walking towards the end of the long narrow pathway. He feels sick and unsteady, like his nerves are all up by his head and his stomach is like soup. He remembers jumping out of the back of the truck marked W.A.T.E.R. with his new gun, running up the steps to the public balcony shouting, God is our saviour.
House of Ashes Page 19
