by Tony Park
She laughed without mirth. ‘I might, if I thought that was true, or possible. It’s not just the hotel, though, Alex. It’s this Peter Pan life you lead. You’ll never give it up.’
‘Peter Pan? He wore green tights. No, I’m more Captain Hook.’ He held up his left hand.
‘Very funny. I don’t think you’ll ever stop, though.’
‘What?’ He was drunk, but he also knew what she meant.
‘The theft. The piracy. You’re addicted to the danger, Alex. You’re fooling yourself – and all those mad bastards who follow you – that you’re stealing to get enough money to open this five-star wet dream of yours. Thieving’s not a means to an end for you any more. It’s become the main game.’
‘That’s not true.’
She waved his words away, as though swatting a mosquito. ‘The car carrier was crazy, Alex. I wish I hadn’t gone along with it.’
‘Does that mean you want to give me back your ten grand?’
She smiled, then resurrected her grim look. ‘You’re asking for trouble. You read the emails, the piracy report. You’ve put us on the international hot-spot map. You’ll have the bloody South African Navy up here if you’re not careful.’
‘Oooh, now I’m worried,’ he said, waggling his remaining fingers.
‘Well, you should be. I’m going back to Ireland.’
‘You’re serious, then.’
‘Of course I’m bloody serious. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, man, you’re so damn infuriating, I –’
Alex moved closer and placed a hand behind her neck, drawing her face to his. ‘If you want to leave, no one’s stopping you, but don’t leave mad, Danni.’ He kissed her and she, though initially close-lipped, opened her mouth to him.
She broke the kiss, finally, and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘I’ve got to move on. I can’t be a bloody pirate wench for the rest of my life, Alex.’
He sensed movement close behind him. If it was Mitch, he’d belt him. Instead, he felt Sarah’s arms encircle him and Danielle. ‘How about for another couple of hours then?’ she whispered in Danielle’s ear.
Alex waded into the warm still waters of the Indian Ocean. He smelled of booze, cigar smoke and women. It was almost a shame to lose the heady after-party aroma, but he needed to clear his head, so he dived and swam underwater for twenty metres.
He broke the surface and breathed a deep lungful of sweet African air. A rocky reef ran in a straight line parallel to the beachfront, about thirty metres offshore. With a few liberal dashes of concrete added by his father in the late sixties, a seaside swimming pool had been created. Further down the beach a perfect metre-high wave curled and broke on the sand.
He turned and floated on his back. Looking up at the hotel he recalled Danni’s words. What if she really was right?
Alex’s knowledge of his parents’ lives was drawn from memories and whispered asides at family gatherings. What he did know was that while his father had come from good stock, his military career had not been unblemished. Back in England, Donald Tremain had been a captain in the Blues and Royals, the second son of a landed but cashless baronet. There’d been a whiff of scandal in the regiment – something about his father and another officer’s wife, and the mess accounts – and Donald had resigned his commission and gone abroad, eventually landing in Portugal. With neither title nor debts to his name, he’d indulged his one true passion – other than women – and become a wine merchant working for one of Oporto’s port houses, exporting the fortified wine to the United Kingdom. Soon he met and fell in love with a young ballet dancer, Estella Almeida Silva. Estella’s parents were farmers in Portuguese East Africa – Mozambique – and they paid for the couple’s air tickets to the colony’s capital, Lourenco Marques, where the wedding could be held before Estella started to show.
‘Your mother could have been a star, but she wanted to come back to Africa, and bullfights were more popular in Mozambique than the ballet,’ his father always used to tell him. ‘But on or off the stage, Alex, your mother was the most beautiful woman I ever laid eyes on.’
Donald had presumed they would return to Portugal, or perhaps Britain, to start their new life, but Estella’s father had a surprise in store for them. Uncertain about the long-term future of farming sugar in Africa, he had invested in a new hotel being constructed on a tiny island, Ilha dos Sonhos – the Island of Dreams – in the Bazaruto Archipelago. Tourism was booming, with Mozambique a sought-after destination for Portuguese, other Europeans and whites from neighbouring South Africa and Rhodesia. Despite their complete lack of experience, Donald and Estella had jumped at her father’s offer for them to manage the luxurious new hotel.
Alex’s father liked to tell the story about how, just a few months later, his only child had come into the world.
‘Dear God, I was nervous. I wanted your mother to go to the mainland, but she would say to me, “Look, Donald, the women on the island have their children in their homes. It’s the most natural thing in the world.” Natural, pah!’
Estella immersed herself in the running of the hotel and was overseeing the catering for a colonial society wedding of a hundred guests a week after her due date.
‘The high society of Mozambique was there – even the governor. Your mother was waddling about the bloody place greeting guests with a beaming smile in public and swearing like a trooper at the staff in Portuguese behind the scenes. They loved her, you know, but there was never any doubt who was running the show.’
Alex still smiled when he remembered the horrified look his father always put on when he recounted walking into the kitchen, following a breathless message from an African waiter as the wedding feast’s main course was being served.
‘She was on the bloody serving counter, bare to the world, a waitress holding on to each hand and the chef having a coronary trying to get the meals out while you, my boy, were served up to the world.’
Alex’s father told him, before he died, of the tough times and ridiculously long hours he and Alex’s mother had endured to keep the hotel running and profitable. Alex, however, remembered only the good times, until it all ended.
He narrowed his eyes, and in the slanting, golden afternoon light he could mentally edit out the scorch marks, and bullet holes, the broken windows and the weeds of the overgrown garden. Instead, he saw his father in a white dinner jacket and black bow tie; his mother in a fashionably short evening gown, high heels and pearls, tying an African maid’s apron in a proper bow. Waiters in starched shirts and white gloves circulated amidst a crowd of holiday-makers who seemed to speak every language on earth. They bore silver platters piled with glasses of champagne and freshly cooked lobsters. Music played in the disco downstairs, while he and the children of the hotel’s staff chased each other around the palm trees that lined the white sandy beaches.
It was a wonderful time, but it had been too good to last. There had been armed rebellion in Mozambique since the 1960s and, although life had changed little on the island, Alex and his family could not escape the inevitability of history. A bloodless coup toppled the government in faraway Lisbon in 1974 and by June 1975 Mozambicans were running their own country. Their former colonial masters were no longer welcome.
He recalled his father’s mood changing from dogged optimism to barely checked rage overnight.
‘No you can’t take your bloody toys, Alex!’ He’d recoiled from his father’s barked orders to pack one bag, and one only. He’d hidden behind his mother’s skirt, but when he looked up at her he saw she was crying.
Alex’s black friend, Jose, was on the jetty as their boat pulled away from the island. Jose looked confused, but waved. Some of the hotel workers, whom Alex had only ever thought of as friends, were jeering and laughing.
Vilanculos was a crush of people and cars. There were long queues at the airport, but the Tremains were leaving Mozambique by road. Alex shivered as he recalled the pop-pop-pop of gunfire and the long, painful blasts of his father’s hand on the car’s horn as t
hey edged through the crowds of panicky Portuguese and jubilant Africans.
A few of his parents’ employees and their offspring were still living on the island, and they’d all been glad to see Alex return later in life – at least that’s what they’d said. But how many of those wrinkled old men, or those once beautiful young maids and waitresses, had torched the bedding and curtains of the place where they’d once worked? How many had fired bullets from assault rifles into the bottles and glasses behind the bar; soiled the carpets and smashed every window in all of the one hundred and twenty rooms once the Tremains had left? Their revolution taught them the Portuguese were evil, colonialism was wrong, and that every symbol of Mozambique’s European past should be destroyed.
The resort had been profitable, but Donald had ploughed most of his money back into improvements. Like many other colonials, he had never really believed he would be evicted from the glorious tropical paradise he’d come to regard as his home. In the end, they had fled across the border to Southern Rhodesia, where the whites were engaged in their own war against black nationalists.
Homeless and virtually broke, Donald had enlisted in the Rhodesian Light Infantry, the country’s all-white regular army regiment, and eventually applied for and been selected for service with the elite Special Air Service.
Young Alexandre decided that when he grew up he, too, would become a soldier, and take back the country where he’d been born, and the hotel where his family had been happy. His father, away on military service for months at a time, would whisper tales of parachute raids into Mozambique, where he’d ‘helped even the score’ for the loss of the life he’d built for his family.
Half British, half Portuguese, but African born, Alex never really felt accepted by the other white Rhodesian boys at his private boarding school. One school day that began like many others would stay in his memory forever.
‘Pork and cheese, pork and cheese,’ two bigger, older boys taunted him as he walked to assembly. Alex clenched his fists at the local slang for a Portuguese person. His knuckles were scabbed from the last fight he’d won over his mother’s heritage. He’d been about to take on this pair when the headmaster called him over.
‘Tremain . . . Alex. Come with me to my office. I’m afraid I have some unpleasant news for you.’
‘Sir?’ Alex had felt the lump rise in his throat, constricting his breathing, and the hot welling of tears even before the gaunt old man had told him.
Ironically, things got easier for him at school when the headmaster made a point at assembly the next day of reading an item from the Salisbury Herald about the posthumous award of the Silver Cross of Valour, Rhodesia’s second highest award for bravery, to Captain Donald Tremain, Special Air Service, who had been killed in action near Mapai, Mozambique, on a cross-border raid. Tremain, already wounded by machine-gun fire, had carried a wounded comrade to safety before dying of his wounds.
After that Alex had left Africa for England where his father’s family paid for him to attend Stowe private school where he completed his secondary schooling. He spent his holidays shuffled from one relative to another. None really wanted him. The legacy of his father’s disgrace and his mother’s profession as a dancer – Alex wondered if it really was ballet she had danced – was always whispered not quite out of earshot.
As a fourteen year old Alex had read of the exploits of Britain’s Royal Marine Commandos in the retaking of the Falkland Islands following the Argentine invasion. Growing up on an island he’d been around boats since birth, although he couldn’t see how naval training would equip him with the skills he’d need to see off the wild-eyed fighters armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers who still inhabited his dreams. The marines seemed like a good compromise.
The thirty-two week recruit training course at Lympstone in Devon on the wind and rain swept south coast of England taught him what an easy life he’d lived so far, and if he’d thought his British background would lead to acceptance, he was disabused of such romantic notions when his corporal dubbed him ‘the African Spic’.
In England he found himself in more than one fight with other marines in his intake, who derided his Portuguese looks and Rhodesian accent. He never lost a bout, and eventually won acceptance. But if his dark hair and eyes and olive skin were a liability in barracks, they were an asset in the local pubs and nightclubs where the young marines went in search of drink and women.
As Alex gazed up at the hotel from the water, imagining even more ambitious renovations and expansions, Danielle walked out of the hotel’s foyer. When Alex was a boy a uniformed African doorman had opened heavy brass and glass doors. Now Danni picked her way through charred beams and fresh new lumber. She wore a pink T-shirt and green cargo pants and carried a bulging backpack on her shoulders.
Mitch got up from the deckchair he’d been lying in, under a palm tree in the garden. Alex swam to shore.
Alex had met Danni while shopping for fresh fruit and vegetables in the marketplace at Vilanculos. It was her smile that had drawn him to her. He’d helped her pick some tomatoes and translated for her. The stall keeper had wanted to charge her tourist prices, but Alex had bargained him down firmly and, in the end, paid for the purchase despite her protests. She told him over Manica beers at a beachside bar that she’d left Ireland a month before her thirtieth birthday. Tired of being nagged by her mother and aunties about marriage, and bored with her job as a partner in an accounting firm, she’d chucked it all in and gone in search of adventure and herself.
Danni had come to the island that day. A week later they were the last people propping up the beach bar after the other men had turned in at what passed for a reasonable hour on Ilha dos Sonhos. The rest of the gang were going deep-sea fishing early in the morning, but Alex would spend the day like most others, painting and renovating yet another hotel room.
It had been oppressively humid all day and the night was no different. Lightning marbled the dark sky and Danni moved out from under the thatch as the heavenly drums sounded.
‘Come inside, you’ll get wet,’ Alex said as the first fat drops started cratering the white sand.
‘Not on your life. This is my first ever tropical thunderstorm and there’s no way I’m going to watch it from under cover.’ She spread her arms and looked up. ‘It’s warm. Warm rain!’ She was grinning with wonder.
The storm came with the noise and ferocity of a waterfall and Alex had let Danni drag him first into the downpour and then into the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. She’d gone in still clothed in blouse and skirt, but he’d peeled them off her as they stood, waist deep, and kissed.
‘Come to bed with me,’ he’d said into her ear over the patter of the rain.
‘Now, just slow down there a minute and let me think about that, mister. We’re both single, over twenty-one, and you’re the most handsome man I’ve ever met – plus you own your own hotel and island . . .’
The bond between her and Alex had grown and she took to sharing his suite on the top floor of the hotel most nights.
Nothing was said, but Mitch would have been blind not to know that Danni was more than just a guest on the island. It made his drunken pass at her at a beach braai unforgivable.
‘No, Mitch!’
Alex had heard Danni yell from the gloom beyond the bar and had left his seat and run into the night. She had collided with him and he’d wrapped his arms around her.
‘God in heaven, that man’s a pig,’ she’d said, breathing deep to calm herself.
‘Fucking bitch tried to come on to me, then called red light,’ Mitch said when Alex challenged him.
‘I want you to apologise to her, Mitch.’
‘I got a better idea. How about you fucking share her around, Alex.’
Alex’s first punch had broken Mitch’s nose and, although the American had later split his eye and left him with bruised ribs, he’d extracted the apology to Danni he wanted – albeit a surly and grudging one.
Things hadn’t
been the same between Alex and Mitch since that night, and Mitch had been against letting Danni in on the secret of the Island of Dreams and the odd mix of people who lived there. Mitch wanted her gone.
Danni had asked Alex, on more than one occasion, how he was funding the slow-progressing renovations. Her curiosity was piqued when a barge laden with bags of cement, cartons of tiles, buckets of paint and a shrink-wrapped pallet of new power tools landed at the jetty two days after the island’s menfolk had been away on a fishing trip.
Then Mitch had caught her in the boatshed.
Alex hadn’t asked why the American had been following his girlfriend after dark, but in a way he’d been glad when things had come to a head. Danni had taken Alex’s keys from the bedside drawer and, while the others were in the thatched beach bar, drinking beer and watching the rugby from South Africa on satellite television, she had freed the heavy padlock and ignored the Danger – do not enter signs. Alex had told her there was only fuel and motors stored there, and that the monkey’s skull and kite feathers nailed above the doors were simply to deter petty thieves from the village.
She’d found enough weapons and ammunition to wage a small war. As well as assault rifles and pistols, there were rocket-propelled grenade launchers, crates of explosives and hand grenades, and a rack of one-piece military flying suits. There was body armour and gasmasks, combat boots and, in the centre, two rigid-hulled inflatable boats painted in grey and black camouflage stripes.
Mitch had dragged her to the bar. ‘She was in the shed.’
‘What are you . . . mercenaries?’ she’d asked, shrugging the ex-navy SEAL’s hand from her forearm. ‘I know you’re all ex-military.’
‘No.’ Alex had turned off the television.
‘Drug dealers?’ Danni hadn’t sounded convinced. She’d seen Alex turn down a joint from Kevin and he’d told her himself, soon after she arrived on the island, that no one who worked for him at the hotel was permitted to use anything harder than grass or booze. ‘The boats . . . what are you, Alex? A pirate?’
