Genie and Paul (11 page)

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 might 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.

Caca Tibaba!
He gave Paul the greeting he’d hoped for – the old nickname, the big hug, the slap on the back, taking Paul by the shoulders and examining him to see if he was still there, the Paul he knew, the little half-brother of his blood brother Jean-Marie, though Paul had been so young then. And perhaps this examination was a way to stop Paul from looking too closely at
him
.

Gaetan lived in the same
lacaz tol
set back from the road. But when he swung open the door – it was unlocked – Paul was shocked at the state of the place. The bed was unmade, the floor littered with copies of
Turf Magazine
and dirty plates,
these last beaded with flies. Unwashed clothes hung limp from the back of the only chair. Some of the weave had come loose from its seat and stuck out untidily like stray hairs.

Gaetan waved an arm about. Nothing’s changed. He smiled, slightly embarrassed.

Gaetan was well past forty now but looked older. His hair had mostly gone and what was left was grey and bristled. The whites of his eyes were flecked with blood and his face was bloated. His Manchester United shirt was streaked with something and he smelt of last night’s drink.

Those horses you used to back – are they still running? Paul laughed, nudging with his foot a heap of betting slips on the floor. They rested on a pile of coins and crumpled tissues, the contents of a turned-out pocket. Paul put the bottle of Le Corsaire on the table, prompting Gaetan to disappear into the kitchen area.

There was a calendar on the wall above the bed, the kind that might come free with a Sunday supplement. The page was turned to January. January of the previous year, Paul noticed. It showed pictures of big grey Gothic buildings. The days of the week were in a language he did not recognise.

Where’s this? he asked.

Helsinki.

Why have you got this up?

I don’t know. Gaetan shrugged. He had returned with two glasses and a bowl of peanuts in their shells. It looks really foreign. Cold.

Paul knew then that he didn’t need to ask if Gaetan had ever managed to leave the island.

A tourist gave it to me.

You’re still playing the hotels, then? Paul asked.

Sort of.

Gaetan nodded towards the chair, which Paul took, while he himself settled down on the bed. He opened the rum and
poured out two large measures of the dark, treacly-looking stuff. They clinked glasses and drank.

So, said Gaetan, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand and looking Paul full in the eyes, making it sound almost like an accusation, where have you been all this time? What are you doing back here?

It was a shock to hear a cockerel again. Paul woke up terrified when he heard it – that raw sound, its voice almost straining, breaking his sleep, a rude awakening, and then the dogs started, and sleep was over for the night. He had dreamt of Jean-Marie. The last thing he remembered them talking about, before passing out. Shortly after Jean-Marie died, Paul had spent a month here. But this time Gaetan had given up his bed and now he lay snoring on the floor, the smell of stale alcohol rolling off him in waves. Paul stepped over him, and went out into the back, to the kitchen area. His friend was a big drinker now, it seemed. They had worked their way through a whole bottle of rum, Gaetan tossing back most of it like lemonade.

Paul filled a pan with water and put it on the stove to boil. Walking out into the yard, he felt a freshness coming in from the sea. It was half-dark outside, the sky a faint lilac, still scattered with stars, and through the trees he imagined he could see the silhouettes of fishermen arranging their nets, dragging their
pirog
down to the water. He’d gone out there with Gaetan all those years ago and suddenly he remembered what a strangely beautiful and terrifying time it had been. But last night, when he’d asked about the
pirog
, Gaetan had just shrugged and said he’d lost the taste for being out at sea. Things were clearly not going so well for him: Paul had noticed a dead pot-plant in the corner where his guitar used to stand. But Gaetan seemed cheerful enough. He had even suggested a trip to Tamarin the next day.

Not tomorrow, Paul had said. There is someone I need to see.

Grandmère seemed to have brightened with age, Paul thought: her hair was a shinier blue-black and her blue-brown eyes gleamed in her brown skin. Or perhaps it was Mauritius that had brightened her. When they hugged, the flesh on her bare arms was like butter that had softened in the heat. There was something to be said for dementia, Paul thought: she carried herself with none of the shame he had noticed in some very old people, who seemed slightly embarrassed to still be alive. What age did Grandmère believe herself to be, anyway? He’d heard that in some cases the memories that came back to the afflicted were received as present-tense experiences; for some their memories stopped at a specific point in time. He’d heard of people who could not recognise themselves in photos beyond a certain age; people who could not recognise themselves in the mirror.

So! Grandmère said, patting the wicker sofa next to her. You are?

Paul, he said.

My grandson’s name. She smiled, seeming to need no further explanation as to who this particular Paul was. She put her finger to her lips and nodded at the antique-looking TV. She was watching one of those corny old soaps he remembered from the last time he was in Mauritius:
Secrets
de la famille
, made in Brazil and dubbed in France. He watched the last ten minutes with her, during which it was revealed that the master of the big house was the father of the young maid’s illegitimate baby. When the credits rolled, Grandmère exhaled with satisfaction and indicated that he could switch the set off now. Then all he could hear was the heavy tick of a clock and suddenly he was back at her place in Hackney, on a Sunday afternoon after church.

Grandmère fanned herself, shaking her head.
Oh lo lo!
she chuckled. Always the same: two sides to every story and the white side is always the dark side. Just like my grandson’s!

Paul, said Paul.

Yes, she said, beaming. Paul.

He looked around. This was not the kind of
over-upholstered
waiting room for death he associated with retirement homes in England. This seemed like a proper home. They were in the
salon
. The room was cool and dark. In the corner was a mahogany dresser, its marble top crowded with coloured glasses and
bonbonnières
; the parquet floors were highly polished and there were cotton lace curtains at the French windows, which opened onto a verandah overlooking a garden.

It’s nice here, Paul said.

Yes, she said. But it’s not Mauritius. I miss Mauritius.

Paul, looking out at the mango trees, marvelled at the power of a mind to deceive itself.

Perhaps you’ll go back, one day.

Oh, no, she sighed, I’m going to die in London. You look a lot like my grandson, you know. What he’ll look like when he’s older.

How old is Paul?

Sixteen. Nearly seventeen.

What’s he like?

Oh, difficult. She sighed again. His mother and sister are very upset with him.

Why?

He’s run off to Mauritius. I lent him some money to do a computer course and instead he bought a plane ticket. Can you imagine! He lied to me.

Are you angry with him?

Not really, no. I can understand. London has never suited him. He came here when he was a boy. With his sister. His
little sister adores him. I must say, he is very sweet with her. My daughter brought them here from Mauritius six years ago when she left her husband.

Maybe Paul never wanted to leave the island.

You’re probably right. If I think about how he was when he first came to London. Oh, it breaks my heart. One story –

Tell me, said Paul.

The first time I ever met my grandson was at Heathrow Airport. He was ten years old. I had gone with my husband to meet them all, Paul, and my daughter and my little granddaughter Genie. And I can barely remember Paul there at the airport: while the rest of us were hugging and crying, Paul was standing on his own, hanging from the railings which separated the new arrivals from the waiting, swinging loosely to and fro, as though he didn’t really care how he fitted into this new family, this new country. He was a very beautiful child. But this was of no comfort to him. He had left behind the only father he had ever known. But worse for him, I think, was losing his big brother. Jean-Marie was really Genie’s brother but Paul missed him more. On that first walk home from the tube station, I watched how Paul looked around, registering just how different London was from Mauritius. That is how we learn to feel at home in a place: to notice what makes it different. Paul did not speak much at all, those first few days. We took him and Genie to the park, took them for walks in the neighbourhood. When we tried to draw him out, when we asked him what he thought of the place, he said, Where are the trees? Where are the dogs? In Mauritius there were many dogs. I remember them myself. They live in the streets and they all look bred from the same stock: skinny but jowly, dog-eared, slack-titted, piebald brown or black and white, or a dirty yellow colour. When Paul first came to London, he would obsessively draw pictures of these dogs. In Mauritius you see
such dogs hanging around in the streets, taking themselves out for walks, snapping at one another in aggression or play. They have that sly, sideways skitter that street dogs develop, so that they never have their backs to danger. When Paul came to London that was what he noticed: there were no fruits hanging on the trees and no dogs wandering the streets. And then one day, some weeks after he and Genie arrived, the two of them were outside playing. When night fell they still had not come home and we began to get worried. When they finally came in, long after they were due home, their mother shouted at them. I asked them where they had been. Paul looked upset and would not speak. But Genie told us this story. They were out in the street when they saw a dog, a ginger dog. Paul said it was lost. Genie asked how Paul knew it was lost and Paul said, ’Cos it’s alone: dogs on their own are always lost. But what about cats? Genie said. Cats are different, Paul said. She said, But why? and he said, Because. This dog belongs to someone, Paul said. The dog nosed around their legs and sniffed their feet. Genie thought they should keep it. I can just see her now, squatting down and throwing her arms around the dog’s neck, kissing his flat, greasy head. Paul felt for a collar. He found a bronze disc on it that said ‘Pieshop’. That’s his name, Paul said. He lives in Camden. He must have been gone from home a while, he’s lost weight: look how loose his collar is. Pieshop lifted his eyes from the pavement, his gaze shifting to and from Paul’s. From some angles, Paul told me later, his brown eyes had an orange glow. Like Genie’s. Then Pieshop dipped his head and licked the pavement. Do you think he’s hungry? Genie asked. Yeah, probably, Paul said, but we don’t have any money. We should just get him back to his home and then he can eat. Paul said he would take the dog back home and Genie said she would go with him. Paul refused, but some way along Brecknock Road when she was still trailing
him he had to stop and let her catch up as he didn’t want her to get lost. OK, he said, come, but you’re not sharing my reward. I don’t want any reward, she said. Will there be a reward? The address was one of those tatty terraced houses with basement flats on the main road where people walking past will throw down their burger boxes and crisp packets. They walked up to the front door and knocked. It was opened by an old man. Pieshop! He called out to the dog but Pieshop only cowered, so the old man climbed down the steps and grabbed him by the collar. Bastard dog’s always running away. As he was closing the door, Genie asked if Paul could have his reward; that Paul had told her Pieshop’s owner would give him a reward for returning the dog. So the old man disappeared into the house and came back with two oranges. There you go, he said, closing the door. What kind of a reward is that? Paul said, looking at his orange in disgust. It was the kind with thin skin that hurt your thumbs to peel. As they were standing there, they heard the man shouting, then heard Pieshop emit a yelp. Oh, cried Genie, that was Pieshop! Genie started to sob and asked Paul to do something. Paul shrugged. I can’t, he said. He doesn’t belong to us. Then Paul threw his orange as hard as he could and watched it burst and dribble down the old man’s door. And then Genie threw her orange and it fell short and rolled away back down the steps towards them and they looked at each other and Paul grabbed Genie’s hand and they ran.

After Genie told us this story, Paul broke down in sobs. The dog was trying to run away, he said. And I took him back. I remembered this story as soon as his mother told me that he had gone back to Mauritius.