Genie and Paul (14 page)

Jean-Marie and his gang knew that they were no longer so young. Already their nights were spent reminiscing about other legendary nights from years back. They liked to tell Paul these stories, but really they were talking to themselves, to their pasts. But then there were the nights when everything came together, and Paul knew these would be talked about in the same breath as all the other nights they’d told him about, the ones he’d not been around for.

Then came the night that ended them all.

It was Paul’s seventeenth birthday. The plan was to go to Sainte Croix to pick up some
ganja
from a friend of Maja’s. Paul and Jean-Marie were waiting for the others to pick them up. It was just around sunset. Pointe aux Sables being on the west coast meant they got the full force of it. If you sat on the veranda you couldn’t see the sun setting, just the high garden wall and the trees and the sky above you, but that was what Paul liked: he liked the way the sky turned a funny colour, turned everything a funny colour, though you couldn’t see the source of the light. The whole place was lit up in such a strange way, it felt as if something terrible was about to happen. But it never did: the day ended and night fell. That was all.

He and Jean-Marie had just finished work. It was too high up for mosquitoes so they could enjoy their beer in peace. In the distance they could hear the sound of the Hindu prayers and canticles being offered to bless the
construction of a new temple, mixing with the sound of the
muezzin
, dog fights and dog song, and the frenetic beeping and squealing of mopeds as they zipped about through the narrow streets below. They watched the local dogs run up and down, cheering on their favourite as he thundered past:
seval lisien
, Jean-Marie called him:
horse-dog
. Another, Minette, looked like a doe, Paul thought. Because they were mongrels, they all reminded you vaguely of something else. Then Jean-Marie told Paul the story of his dog, Helena, a handsome Great Dane. Privately Paul thought that the breeds that were pointed out to him here as Alsatian or Labrador were not quite like the breeds of those same names in England. There was always some other breed, or a cross of them, lurking in the background. One day, Helena had been taken ill and Jean-Marie had borrowed a truck from work to take her to the vet. He had sat in the back with her, soothing her, while Maja drove. And then, he said, she took my hand in her mouth and bit ever so gently on it and looked up at me and I knew she was trying to tell me that she was going. And then, she died. Someone poisoned her, he said bitterly. There are some jealous people around.

Paul didn’t quite understand why anyone would be jealous of a dog, or who would be so jealous that they would do such a thing. But then he thought, perhaps in the same way that English dog breeds were different from breeds of the same name in Mauritius, perhaps jealousy here was of a different species from the kind you encountered in England. Or perhaps it was not the dog they were jealous of. And then Paul thought,
Maja
. Maja was like these dogs you found in Pointe aux Sables, the ones that hung out on street corners with no fixed address, finding dinner and a corner for the night with one of the local families, who had so many dogs of their own they never noticed one more. Maja, an Ilois,
had come over from Diego Garcia with his family as a kid (he’d once told Paul with some bitterness how the British Government –
your
government – had brushed them off their island like so many crumbs and tipped them into the rats’ nest that was the shanty town of Cassis). The forced exile had broken up Maja’s family and when, as a teenager, he’d hit a bad patch with his mother – his father long since dead – Jean-Marie, who knew him from hanging around the local garage, had invited him round for dinner. Maja had stayed for days.

Yes, jealous, Jean-Marie said. It’s a sardine tin here. When you cram people in and they can’t escape, they turn on one another. Do you know that
seggae
, ‘Paradise on earth, but hell for us…’? Do you know why
ganja
is illegal here? No? Well, if I were a politician, the first thing I would do would be to ban something that makes people think about things, question them.

And then he told Paul about a recurring dream he had.

I’m running, and as I’m running I’m getting lighter and lighter and I don’t want to look back.

Are you running away from something or to something?

I don’t know. It’s like when I’m driving. When I get to the edge of the island I just want to carry on driving.

On the way to Sainte Croix, to visit the
marsan
friend of Maja’s, Jean-Marie asked Chauffeur to stop off at the shrine of Père Laval. They would be passing anyway, he said. The remains of Père Laval, a celebrated missionary, were supposedly buried underneath the plaster effigy of him which lay in state, seeming almost to float on a sea of candles in the dim little chapel.

Chauffeur whispered to Paul that if you touched him he would bring you luck or help cure sickness. No wonder Père
Laval was looking a little chipped. The paint was peeling off him. The way he’d been painted, he looked as though he were wearing make-up, and as they left the shrine Paul sniggered and said this to Jean-Marie, who frowned. Paul could never understand this about Jean-Marie, how he could be so intelligent, so thoughtful, so damn cool, and yet have this respect for things, traditions, faith and so on – why didn’t he question everything, or at least laugh at things, the way Paul did? There was an innocence about Jean-Marie, a kind of naiveté that made him no different from the others. It made Paul wary of him, made Paul look down on him at times, and left him a little sad, as though he and the person he liked best in the world would never quite get each other.

The area where Maja’s
marsan
friend lived looked a lot poorer than Pointe aux Sables. It was full of zinc shacks but they looked different from the ones you saw out in the country; these were left unpainted and were not well-maintained. They did not stand in carefully tended gardens, but scrubby yards. Paul saw chickens pecking in one abandoned lot so full of rubbish it looked like a garden full of overgrown flowers. They stopped off at the shop to buy a bottle of whisky. A group of lads younger than Paul were sitting outside. They looked at Chauffeur’s truck suspiciously as it pulled up. Their heads were all shaved in elaborate patterns that looked almost like barcodes to Paul. He wondered if the patterns meant anything.

By the time they got to the
marsan
’s place – another zinc shack and, like the others here, shabby and uncared for – it was raining hard. The yard had turned into pools of yellow mud. As they jumped out and raced to get inside, Paul saw that against the back fence was a stack of hutches full of rabbits. He doubted they were kept as pets. In London homeless people kept dogs for company, protection, a sense
of dignity – you were not the lowest of the low as long as another life depended on you. He wondered if the rabbits in their hutches made these people feel better about the shacks they lived in.

They crowded in and cracked open the bottle of Long John whisky. It tasted of the barrel it had been stored in, and was so rough, Paul thought he felt splinters in his tongue. He did not feel comfortable in the presence of the
marsan
’s dog, Bad Boy, an ugly, muscular creature, nor of Calesh himself, who had the same stupid look about him and in his string vest was equally ugly and muscular. The conversation followed an almost formal, ritualistic pattern of compliments and enquiries. Paul’s mind drifted off to the rhythm of the rain on the corrugated iron roof until Maja whispered in Paul’s ear, Do you like her?

Who?

Maja nodded at a divan in the corner. Paul had barely registered the girl who lay curled up on it, watching television with the sound turned down. Maja had told them that Calesh’s sister was a little simple.

He nudged Paul.

So you weren’t staring at her?

No, Paul said, looking anxiously at Calesh, to see if he’d heard.

What, you don’t like her? Maja whispered, with a sneer.

Paul tried to keep calm. In strip lighting, expressions were harder to read. The place looked alien. Calesh, like Bad Boy, was looking up now, having felt some tension in the air.

Well, of course she’s pretty, but…

But what? You don’t like girls?

Paul shook his head in exasperation, meaning, No, it was not like that at all.

No? He doesn’t like girls! Maja announced to the room, with a laugh.

But I do. Paul said. But –

But what? And then Maja started to laugh.

The woman was about his mother’s age. She had yellow-brown skin and a crooked smile. She patted Paul on the arse. The others stood outside hooting as she closed the door on them, saying, Wait your turn, I won’t be long with this one.

It was another
lacaz tol
. The roof was leaking.

It’s been like that since the cyclone, she shrugged. Come and sit down, she said, patting the bed. It was the only place to sit in the room. Apart from the bed there was a small table covered in faded formica with a pattern of roses, a wardrobe, the door of which was closed on a piece of striped garment, and a low shelf which seemed to serve the dual purpose of shrine to Our Lady and dressing table: it held a small statuette and some incense, and bottles of perfume, talc and make-up. When Paul sat down, he smelt damp on the sheets.

The woman took his face in her hands and kissed him deeply. It tingled: he guessed she had been eating chillies. It was a soft kiss. Everything about her was soft, Paul realised, as she took his hands and placed them on her hips. But not soft in a nice way.

She laid him down on the bed and peeled off his shorts. To his shame he had an erection, which she started to knead firmly. It felt good. She saw him squirm and said, Not yet.

She took a condom from beside the make-up on her shrine and slid it over his cock, and then, pulling up her dress over her head in one movement, manoeuvred herself onto him, rocking back and forth. He didn’t want to touch her, but she took his hands and placed them on her breasts, which were large and slack. Her areolae were huge, dark. They frightened him. They looked like the fake eyes on butterfly wings, meant to warn off predators. And all the
while she was grinding, gradually faster and faster, until Paul felt something tear inside of him and he came.

As she was getting dressed he lay there, dumb. He felt as though he wanted to cry, and he felt thirst and something like hunger all at the same time.

When he stumbled out, he turned to her and thanked her (she laughed), thinking, Why? Why thank her? as though she had done him a favour. Perhaps that was insulting, he thought: she had been paid, after all, the others having taken care of that. A birthday present, they’d said. But she had not been paid much. Paul thought of what little that money would buy in London and felt ashamed.

When he went out into the road, Maja was still sneering.

You were quick. She should have charged half-price.

Paul ran at him, windmilling his arms, and before anyone knew what had happened he had smashed Maja on the nose, Maja’s hands flying to his face as though trying to catch all the drops of blood which now shook from him.

Then everyone began to shout at once: Maja, swearing at Paul, rushing for him, put his hand to the pocket of his jeans and in one motion dug out a flick knife and pulled it open. Some of the others were trying to drag him back, asking him what the fuck he was doing, trying to wrest the knife from him, and then Jean-Marie was leaning into him, saying, Cool it, Maja! Cool it!

By this time Paul had started to cry, and he was too angry to care, running at Maja, oblivious to the knife, screaming at him. Before he knew it, Jean-Marie had jumped between them, and for a second the three of them rocked back and forth, locked together in something like a hug, until
Jean-Marie
gave a cry and fell back onto Paul, a dark jet of blood forced from his neck. Tilamain tore off his T-shirt and tried to staunch the flow, but when Jean-Marie slumped back and gurgled, eyes wet and blinking slowly, unfocused, like a
newborn taking his first look at the world, Tilamain shrank back, horrified. Paul, holding Jean-Marie, felt him drop, as though in a faint.

It was only then, absurdly, that Paul wondered what it was that Jean-Marie had asked of Père Laval.

On the bus from Gaetan’s to Port Louis, Paul noticed the small roadside shrines. He thought, Who has died? They reminded him of the bunches of tired flowers you saw tied to lamp-posts on treacherous stretches of London road. But these shrines, he realised, were exactly that: little drive-by places of worship.

Mauritius was even smaller than it had appeared when he’d arrived more than a fortnight previously. Everywhere he looked, those same fields of cane, those same small cement-block houses, the pyramids of black rock cleared from the fields where the cane grew. The landscape seemed to be repeating itself. But Paul was leaving that night for an even smaller island: Rodrigues. Gaetan’s words had shaken him. Paul had no wish to stay in Mauritius, but nor could he go back home. So he was moving on. The fact that Rodrigues still lay in ruins after the cyclone did not discourage him: he’d be left alone there. He could hide out among the broken trees and the people trying to rebuild their lives.

The previous evening, Paul had taken Gaetan out for a Chinese meal in Flic-en-Flac to say goodbye. Gaetan, still guilty from his outburst, tried at first to dissuade him. He sat twisting a napkin which bore stains that could no longer be washed out. But Paul had decided.

Those things you said. You were right. I should go. But before I leave, there is someone I want to see.

Before you go, said Gaetan, I want to know. Why did you come? What happened in London?

Paul had always thought of Gaetan as a simple man, and sometimes, even, a stupid one. Paul thought this because there were times when he said things that Gaetan appeared not to fully understand. Now Paul was at a loss to offer any kind of explanation, or, at least, one he thought Gaetan might understand. He realised that although he could be quick-witted in Creole, bantering and bartering in it, he lacked sufficient fluency for the language he needed now. Or perhaps it wasn’t the language he was lacking. All he could think of was,
mo onte
, I’m ashamed.

And after he’d told Gaetan the full story, of how he had just run away and left Genie there, Paul had said to Gaetan,
Mo onte
. And Gaetan had said nothing, and couldn’t even meet his eye. He understood shame, at least.

At first, the capital seemed not to have changed much. At the bus station, the buses looked as clapped-out, the terminus as pot-holed, the pavement as cracked as he remembered. Walking through the city’s heat – more intense here than on the coast – Paul recognised the ornate dilapidation of old colonial buildings, and the shabby little old-fashioned shops with signs in faded, fancy-lettering advertising
articles de luxe
. Luxury items. In fact they sold exercise books, brooms, skipping ropes, buckets, washing lines, footballs, shoe polish, beauty creams, tinned cheese, hair dye.

The same produce was being sold in the bazaar with the same patter: the pyramids of chillis green as vipers, the milky blue glasses of
aluda
. But here in Port Louis, Paul noticed, people spoke French to you now. Creole had become the language of intimacy. It was offensive to speak it to someone you didn’t know. And set back from the road, behind professional fencing, he noticed more new buildings in the commercial district, shiny plate-glass tower blocks with mirrored surfaces – almost as tall, but not quite, as the royal
palms which lined the central avenue stretching down to the new waterfront development, Le Caudan.

Le Caudan was where he was going. There he passed through colonnades of shops that sold real
articles de luxe
– duty-free jewellery, exquisite pieces sculpted from local wood. It was odd to think of Maja here. But this was where he worked now. Gaetan had not understood Paul’s need to see him. Paul did not understand it fully himself. Thinking about it now, he guessed he wanted to know if that night had changed Maja’s life irrevocably – changed Maja – the way it had changed him. As for the others – Chauffeur, London, Tilamain – when he thought of them as they were when he’d known them, he could imagine them running riot in the air-conditioned corridors of this place, laughing at all the expensive tourist trinkets, eyeing up the designer watches and hi-tech gadgets with a kind of juicy, vital envy. But if he thought of them as they probably were now, he did not like to think of them here. They would look awkward, shabby, slightly apologetic. A bunch of guys in their late thirties, early forties, married probably, with their wives and their sweaty vests, their pirate DVDs of dubbed American action movies, their football pools, their fly-swats and their Saturday bets during the turf season. He was scared to see them. He was scared of their disappointment, their resentment: that someone with his opportunities should have squandered them so royally. And he was scared that they would be as fucked-up as he was. There were relatively few ways to get fucked-up in a country this small, but it was possible: he did not want to see if they had turned to drink or to horses, to drugs or to loan sharks; if their wives, their families had turned their backs on them. He did not want to know if they were unemployable now because the kinds of jobs that were plentiful these days were what they would have seen as women’s work – jobs in hotels, in textiles. Or
work that was for skilled people. Educated people. How could he face them, with his privileged life, as they always saw it – with his chance to see the world, his freedom to love whomever he wanted to love?

Mauritius had corrupted him: he had come to this tiny island and he had felt like a giant, or a man at least, though he saw too clearly now that he had only been a boy. Paul had felt, when he left them, a sense of being old before his time. He’d believed when he’d gone to London that there he really could do anything, really could go anywhere. And in the face of all that opportunity, that
responsibility
– he’d been paralysed.

At Burger World, Paul joined the queue to be served. When the Chinese kid behind the counter asked what he wanted, he asked to see Maja. The kid called out to the kitchen. Maja – an older, slower, more dishevelled Maja in a Burger World baseball cap and apron – appeared in the doorway. Saw Paul. Almost gasped.

I’m leaving for Rodrigues tonight, Paul said. I’m on my way to the port. But I wanted to see you.

Maja took off his apron, lifted the counter and came through. He led Paul to a free table which was shaped like a toadstool, the seats shaped liked smaller toadstools.

I often thought about writing to you, Maja said. To explain why things happened the way they did. Why I was the way I was. But now you are here, Maja said.

Tell me, said Paul.