Topsy struggled from his chair and stepped up to the table. “I haven’t seen that in years. That’s a British topographical map. Accurate to the inch.” He studied tiny numbers and lines indicating elevations and the island’s narrowest roads. “They were rotters to the last, but they made a decent map. We used these when we laid down the ring road.”
Professor Cleave slid the map out of Topsy’s shadow and penciled something onto its brittle surface. “If you leave at sunrise, you’ll arrive at the Plantations well before dark.”
“When I was young, the only plantations were working plantations,” Topsy said. “We walked to work before dawn and we came back after the sun went—”
“I wrote in landmarks.” Professor Cleave emptied his glass and handed the map to Helen. “Take water from here or from the pump down the road. It’s no difference to me.”
“That map wasn’t yours to give,” Topsy said. “But I suppose my walking days are over.”
“Sleep in my daughter’s room.” Professor Cleave placed his glass on the table and pushed it in Topsy’s direction. “In his room. It’s what she would have wanted.” Without another word, he disappeared into Cora’s bedroom.
“It’ll be a tight fit with your man,” Topsy said.
“He’s not my man.”
“That’s the first good news. You’d have to be desperate to shag a man wearing that sort of shirt.” Topsy settled back into his chair.
“Where are you going to sleep?”
“In the room behind the kitchen. Now take the lamp.”
He stretched his legs, and she took the lamp, knowing the room behind the kitchen was merely a fiction to dignify charity.
She found Dave sprawled across the narrow bed, breathing unevenly. She surveyed the pared-down belongings of an old man: a framed photograph on a nightstand, a porcelain bowl and shaving brush, wrinkled shirts draped over a chair, and stacks of disintegrating newspapers. Topsy’s gestures had loosened something inside her. She fingered her stitches, feeling as though nothing were holding her together, extinguished the lamp and lay down on a woven rug. We gathered in a patch of moonlight before her. She studied the movements of our antennae until the strangeness of her situation became a salve, and then slipped into restless dreams about crooked lines marking a path into the unknown. She twitched like mad all night, as if she were alert to every danger and every possibility, as if she had antennae.
At daybreak, she found Topsy sleeping in his chair with his fingers curled loosely around its armrests. During the night, he’d repacked her bags with bread and jam and Cora’s half-eaten chocolate bar. She watched his chest rise and fall, whispered her thanks, and then slipped outside to find Dave waiting for her, tracing the side of his face with his fingertips. Followed by the sideways stares of curious goats, they walked to the bottom of the hill and headed south, with the sun breaking over the trees and warming the ground beneath their feet.
Suddenly, so many people seemed to be on the move, scuttling from one place to the next. Some possessed only the most limited means of flight. That, at least, we had in common with the two Americans, and with Tremor.
FLIGHT
WOE TO US WHO suffer the curse of stubby little wings, vestigial appendages suitable for neither flying nor fanning ourselves on a hot day. (One can hopefully appreciate our love of air conditioning in light of this one regrettable aspect of our anatomy.) Fault-finding scholars have spilled rivers of ink caricaturing our limited flight capabilities. In the Records of the International Entomological Association, Dr. Jane Weir writes, “Members of the species Periplaneta americana are notably awkward in flight, capable only of gliding from higher to lower elevations, and of brief and lurching airborne movements.” Other authors of the same bent need not be quoted. Why reward insensitivity? Those possessing means of flight, natural or artificial, would hardly understand the terror or indignity we experienced centuries ago, when we scattered one step (“lurch”) ahead of Europeans’ machetes and shovels.
Perched on the Ambassador’s roof, we experienced the long-lost sensation of flight without lifting a wing. We might never have missed our primordial wings, had it not been for Paul Müller, the chemist who concocted DDT, the progenitor of modern pesticides. In his toxic wake came parathion, pyrethroid, tetramethrin, and diflubenzuron—horrible compounds that sent us lurching once again. We remember our first whiff of the sterilant gas imported by American hotel managers. It inflamed our antennae and turned our gastric sacs. It nearly drove us mad.
Some of us fled St. Anne, only to discover that the same threats plagued us everywhere. Even in New York City, the so-called roach capital of the world, we grew sick from poisons sprayed in subways, four-star restaurants, and corner delicatessens. The sewers became unsafe, for traces of unspeakable things poisoned the water. Certainly, there have always been “safe houses”: abandoned tenements and dive cafés and hourly motels. The Ambassador served as one for a while, in the days of Tremor Prentice, when the maids were too distracted to maintain their insecticidal regimens.
For years, cars provided some escape. On St. Anne, we boarded a car for the first time during an unexpected fumigation of the Governor’s Mansion. Panicked, we scuttled down the porch steps and slipped into the undercarriage of an idling Bentley. A clutch popped, an engine roared, and a love affair was born. While the governor dispensed bon mots to a white-gloved chauffeur, we clung to struts and gleaming chrome fenders and watched the road streak beneath us, giddy with the sensation of flight. For decades, no one thought of spraying toxins beneath seats and dashboards. We lived in James Brooks’s Avenger, in Patsy Williams’s state car—a Fiat outfitted with massive ashtrays—and air-conditioned tourist vans. We learned to fly with wheels instead of wings. Few of us dwelled on the fact that we’d grown dependent upon those eager to destroy us. We grew comfortable with air-conditioned compromises.
Our glorious flight came to an end in the 1980s, thanks to Fountainhead Chemical Solutions, manufacturer of Roach Out!, a neurotoxin approved for use in cars and other closed spaces (“Kills roaches, not kids,” commercials claimed). By 1990, the drivers of almost every taxi and luxury car had begun using Roach Out! If we’d been thinking clearly, we would have taken to the undersides of bicycle seats. Enthralled by its speed and sheen, though, some of us continued to ride in the prime minister’s SUV. We lived in denial, explaining away strange illnesses as hangovers from cocaine dust and spilled champagne. When the shaking became intolerable, we’d leave the car, swearing never to return. Those of us who did return were always worse for the experience. Nietzsche was wrong when he wrote, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Some things just leave you gutted and sick, crippled in mind and riddled with tics.
CHAPTER TEN
WHATEVER GLORIOUS TECHNOLOGIES THEY have at their disposal, humans are lurching more and more these days, woefully unable to navigate strange currents or sustain their exhausting flights. Tremor spent the day after the riots on the floor of EZ’s house, recounting coups against the police and slowly coming down, dragged by adrenaline’s ebb and the gravity of his actions. He sat with his back to a wall, trying to stake his place in dying conversations, distracted by memories of birds scattering from a body, Crazy Mary lying in the road, his father’s hand wrapped around a belt and his own wrapped around a bottle.
He touched a trace of blood on his pants and imagined Crazy Mary and a stranger haunting him from both sides of the pale divide between life and death. By evening, he would have given anything to erase the image in everyone’s phones and scour his name from every spray-painted wall in town.
He turned to EZ. “They’ll be looking for me.”
“None of the police are showing their faces tonight.” EZ jabbed Tremor’s shoulder.
The woman Tremor had slept with shrugged. “Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to go. Not if you can’t swim.”
Tremor scraped his palm with a bottle cap. “It’s just time before everybody’s looking to make money off me. Turn me in,
” he whispered.
EZ looked sideways at Tremor. “Tomorrow, I’ll talk to a man who can get you to Jamaica on his boat. Help you disappear. Cost you, but you know how to pay him.”
Tremor relaxed his shoulders and felt the sweat on EZ’s arm mingling with his own as his latest, nameless girlfriend curled up at his side. By nightfall, he’d smoked enough to slip into a dreamless sleep in EZ’s bed, on sheets smelling of kerosene and cum.
He awoke to the sound of screaming and the sweep of flashlight beams. Before he saw their faces, he felt their batons pressing into his ribs and their hands twisting his head, forcing his gaze to the woman cowering in a corner, shielding her breasts. They dragged him from the bed and ordered him to dress, and he struggled to control his hands long enough to zip his pants. As handcuffs closed around his wrists, he looked down at the coins scattered across the floor and a base metallic taste filled his mouth. They led him from the house and pushed him into a police car, and then dragged the woman, naked and screaming, into the yard. She knelt in the glare of headlights, her elbows planted on gravel and her fingers buried in her hair. In the curvature of her spine, he saw his own terror and shame.
He arrived in Portsmouth as dawn broke upon walls spray-painted with graffiti about diseased Americans and pigs and prostitutes. In the shaky, unmistakable letters of his name, he saw the incontestable warrant for his arrest.
We generally avoided the police station, a nest of dread and misery. Some of us had scaled its walls to escape the riots, only to find worse things on the inside. The morning Tremor arrived, we were lost within its confines, lurching deeper and deeper into dark warrens with a misguided sense of direction and dim hopes of escape, only to find ourselves, through repeated missteps, in suffocating stairwells and indistinguishable cells. We had nowhere to run but forward, into a future not of our choosing, spared the bottoms of boots and the force of folded newspapers by sheer dint of our negligible size and inconsiderable crimes. Tremor had gained far too much notoriety to escape anyone’s disgust. He walked down a concrete corridor, unbalanced by fluorescent lights and flanked by three policemen. At the end, the man behind him uncuffed his wrists and turned him toward a steel door.
“Now you can work out what happened on the beach. Your friend claims he didn’t kill the white man.”
He unlocked the door and pushed Tremor into a cell. In the watery light passing through a barred window near the ceiling, he discerned the form of John Bowden lying on a bare cot with his hands upon his chest. Tremor might have thought him dead, if not for the sounds of labored breathing and the slight movement of a head turning his direction. He registered swollen eyelids, a darkly bruised jaw, and the angles of broken fingers—the features of a man so badly marked by beatings that he could only become a suicide statistic hanging from a sheet.
When the door closed behind him, Tremor sat down on a second cot. He spoke only once.
“What will they do to me?”
John Bowden turned to face the ceiling again. Tremor wrapped his arms around his ribcage and dug his fingers into his back, held himself in a solitary embrace and sobbed.
An hour later, two guards came for him. In a spare basement room, they cuffed him to a metal chair. He looked at a faded bloodstain on the concrete floor and tried to remember what had happened on the beach, too unmoored to recover the truths he’d abandoned for lies. We clung to the underside of a steel table, overcome by the smell of bleach and our rising terror in the dreaded maze beneath Portsmouth’s prison.
After a sleepless night, Professor Cleave had spent an hour sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at a streak of crusted blood still on his pants. He heard voices outside the house and tried to fathom the simple acts of standing up and taking his first steps, of speaking or eating after the two nights he’d just passed. He considered the objects in his room, so ordinary and unreal. The soft yellow curtains concealing a world strewn with wreckage. The willful clock keeping track of empty time with its insistent springs and gears. The brittle Palm Sunday cross offering hollow benedictions from the wall above Cora’s pillow. His redundant car keys lying on the floor.
When he finally wandered into the living room, he found Topsy shouldering his way in through the front door and fastening his belt.
“What were you doing out there?”
“Doing my bit by conserving water in the toilet tank. Starting the day.” Topsy parted the shutters and searched for loose cigarettes. “You look like you haven’t ended last night.”
Professor Cleave turned from the sunlight pouring through the front door when Cora entered the house, carrying an aluminum pot of tea she’d been steeping. She drew a jar of marmalade from the buffet and placed a loaf of stale bread on the table. Without a word, Professor Cleave broke a heel from the loaf and slumped into a chair. Topsy tore into a piece of bread with his back teeth and fixed his eyes on his son.
“You should change that shirt. The smell’s an affront to common decency.”
“There’s no such thing as common decency.”
Topsy picked a half-smoked cigarette off the floor. “Then it’s an affront to my nose. It’s gone a strange way, and your mind will be going straight after it.”
“I’ll change it when there’s cause,” Professor Cleave said. “I have nowhere to go.”
Cora fanned herself with a church program and watched him nurse his tea. He met her eyes and opened his mouth, and, finding no words, feared that grief had returned to plague their marriage. Only the sound of a punctured muffler dispelled the silence. Topsy shuffled to the window and saw James Brooks climb from a parked car.
“It’s that foolish cousin of yours. I hardly recognize him. He used to look like a goat.”
Cora smoothed her dress. “Look at us. The dishes and the filthy floor. What would any decent person think?”
“No need to be house proud for that communist. Look at that car he’s driving. Some kind of Nissan. A step down from his glory days. But his pants and shoes are smart. Smarter than the man himself.”
Professor Cleave brushed past Topsy. Outside, James Brooks was adjusting the cuffs of a crisp shirt. Those of us huddled in the weeds marveled at the strangeness of human conceits. Admittedly, we also marveled at James Brooks’s car (an ’09 Nissan with a sunroof and spoiler) and momentarily lost ourselves in dreams of radios tuned to tolerable stations.
“I’m sorry about Desmond.” James rested his hand on Professor Cleave’s shoulder.
Professor Cleave pressed his knuckles to his forehead and looked at the ground. “You were both right. They were on the streets for him. That boy Tremor. And now Desmond’s dead.” Professor Cleave faltered.
“You can’t carry the weight of it.”
Professor Cleave pulled away from James and looked up at the sky. “I can see you’re not here to talk about him,” he finally said. “And I can’t talk about him.”
“Even the time for proper grieving is gone.” James glanced at the house. “Is your father here?”
“Where else would he be?” Professor Cleave turned to the house, and James took a deep breath and followed him inside.
When James entered, Topsy stroked his own jaw. “Without water for a shave, I’m wearing whiskers. They’ll be confusing me with your friends, hairy things talking loud and living with loose women.”
James stiffened. “There was only one woman, and she wasn’t loose.”
“Don’t mistake me. I don’t judge her. She didn’t know what she was getting. She couldn’t see through the hair.” Topsy settled into his chair. “But you discovered shaving suds.”
“This is nothing to talk about now.” Cora led James to the table and placed a glass of water before him. “We’re being rude to our guest.”
James took a sip of water and turned to Professor Cleave. “Things are happening quickly. The police are hardly to be seen, except at a few checkpoints. And Buttskell has been at the Plantations for two days.”
“Life is sweet in the prime minister’s su
ite,” Topsy mused. “But he’ll be returning the key soon, getting on the next plane and getting laid on some layover.”
“He has learned such shameful talk from American radio,” Cora said.
“Parliament plans to deliver a vote of no confidence,” James continued. “Butts will be abdicating his official responsibilities in the next day or two.”
“He did that years ago,” Topsy said.
“And Graham Douglas will lead the provisional government,” James continued.
“The strike was against the police,” Professor Cleave said. “Not a call for a new government.”
“People want a return to normalcy. Butts can’t—”
“There was never anything normal here,” Topsy said. “All of them have been clowns, from the British to Butts. They’ve been winding you up for decades with promises and parades.”
“Let me get to the point.” James raised his voice. “Douglas’s deputy came to see me. Douglas needs a driver. He thinks you’d be suitable.”
Professor Cleave narrowed his eyes. “He can get a driver on any street corner.”
“He needs to broaden his base. As a member of the two largest unions, you’d bridge two parties.”
“I’m a member of the Hospitality Service Workers’ Union in name. Douglas has pushed for nothing but tax breaks for foreigners. He’s never said a word about wages or schools.”
“He thinks you’d lend credibility to the new government. You have a reputation for standing against police corruption.”
“For being a victim of corruption. And anyone who remembers my case remembers who secured my release. It was as much a sham as my trial.”
“No one cares about details. If we work with Douglas, we could have a voice in what happens.”
“And a responsibility for it.”
The Wonder That Was Ours Page 20
