Genie and Paul (15 page)

I saw a film once. I forget the name. In it, a soldier, an American soldier, goes AWOL during the Second World War. He is hiding on an island in the South Pacific. On this island, children play freely. They swim and they fish and they laugh. The people are beautiful. Happy. Everyone has enough to eat. Everyone shares. They sing. It’s the most beautiful singing. The soldier thinks he’s found Paradise. That was what it was like on my island. That was the life I knew until I was six years old. I lived in a small cement house near the sea with my father, and mother and my twin sisters, Marie-Laure and Giselle. You didn’t know I had sisters, did you? And my dog, Fusette. We called her Fusette because she was shaped like a little rocket. Me and Fusette went everywhere together. She used to swim in the sea and catch fish for me! You wouldn’t believe what that dog could do. Then one day, when I was six, everything changed. One of the twins, Marie-Laure, got sick. My father took her to Mauritius to get her seen by the doctors there. But, like everyone who had travelled over on that ship, they never came home. Once they arrived in Mauritius, they were told they no longer had the right to return to the island. To live on it. None of us did. It was a time of great anxiety and confusion. We were all told that we would have to leave. No one wanted to go. But then the ship that used to bring our supplies – all the things we couldn’t make or grow for ourselves on the island – stopped coming. It was as though the outside world had forgotten about us. People started
arguing over things they would not have argued about before. There was a breadfruit tree in our neighbour’s garden. We used to help ourselves to the fruit which grew on the branches overhanging our garden. But now the neighbour started complaining about this. She was an old woman who lived alone. We often helped her out with things. Fetching wood, sharing our catch, and so on. She said the tree belonged to her and we weren’t to eat the fruit on it. But she could not have eaten all that fruit herself, never mind collected it! My mother got angry and said if that was how she was going to be then we would not want her fruit, which would taste bitter to her anyhow. So we were forbidden to touch the fruit, which went ungathered and fell off the tree and rotted into the ground. And all this time my father and Marie-Laure were still in Mauritius. We had no news of them. We were worried for Marie-Laure’s health, besides. It was around this time that we started seeing strangers on the island. White men in uniforms, with charts and instruments. They would smile at us kids but we were afraid of them. And shortly after the men arrived, the dogs began to disappear. One day, I was out on the beach with Giselle and Fusette. Fusette just darted up the shore to something which looked like a washed-up log. She started circling this log, crouching low and howling. We ran to look. It was Hector, a neighbour’s dog, a very handsome Alsatian. When I tried to take Fusette away from this awful scene she bit me. She had never bitten me before. After that, the bodies of more and more dogs began to turn up, bloated and fly-blown. They had been poisoned. We were told by these officials – the white men in uniform – that arrangements were being made for us to leave the island. We were angry about this. But then came one terrible night. I will never forget it. My mother had refused to let me play out that day. I snuck out into the yard anyway to take Fusette her rice – our dogs ate what we ate – but she
was not there. Before all this, we had let her run free, like all the other dogs of the island. But during this time we had kept her tied up in the yard so that she would not disappear like the others. But now she was gone. I wanted to go looking for her but my mother would not let me. I cried and screamed. My mother slapped me. She had never hit me before. She said it was not like how it was before. Things were changing. It was too dangerous for me to be out on my own. Strange things were happening. I was sent to my bed where I just cried and cried, imagining what might have happened to Fusette. I must have sobbed myself to sleep because I woke in the middle of the night. I had had a nightmare. And as I gradually became more awake I realised with a growing horror that the terrible sounds I had heard in my sleep were coming from outside, from reality, and not from my bad dream. It was a howling, a terrible howling, of many, many dogs. And one of them, I know now, would have been Fusette. It was the British Government who ordered the rounding-up and the gassing of our dogs. It was the US Navy who did it. No, not the Navy. Members of the Navy. Young men, younger than we are today. Men like the soldier in that film. Men who probably liked dogs themselves. Who might even have grown up with dogs, or had them back home. It was these men who slaughtered our dogs, and how they could do it I do not know. After that, no one resisted the orders to leave. We were allowed one suitcase per family. We didn’t have much but most of us had more than could fit in a suitcase. My father had made me a kite. Such a pretty thing. I had to leave it behind. He will make you another one, my mother promised. A better one. If there was one consolation in all this, it was that we would be reunited with Papa and Marie-Laure after almost a year apart. I don’t know if I can impress upon you – I certainly couldn’t fully conceive it at my young age – the enormous pain of standing on the
deck of a ship, watching your island recede from view, not knowing when you will see it again. Of course, never, for some who died shortly after we got to Mauritius. And never, we were told by the British Government. But we could not think ‘never’ as we watched it disappear from view until all we could see around us was the sea, which is like saying the middle of nowhere. It was a horrible journey. We slept on bags of birdshit in the hold, listening to the horses on deck. They sounded terrified. They made a terrible sound. But we were strangely silent. In shock, I think. We were offloaded in Mauritius, and taken to our new home. I almost laugh to think about it now, but if I could imagine a place that was the exact opposite of our island, it was the place they took us to. An abandoned estate. More like a barracks. No glass in the windows, no water. Filth in all the rooms. Rats, cockroaches. A prison. As if we were being punished for something. And the man who came to meet us there, my father, was no longer my father. Not the man I recognised. He had grown thin. He was so painfully thin that it seemed to me as he walked towards us that he was in pain, as though his bones which stuck out of him like knife blades cut him up as he walked. He smelt strange to me. Marie-Laure was dead. She had been very sick. They had given her medicine for the pain and after she had died my father had taken what was left of it for
his
pain. And this thing which was all he was living for now was killing him. Giselle died soon after we arrived. She had what we came to call
sagren
. It’s a word that means sadness, regret. It eats you up inside. It turns you into a shadow. We never saw my father much, after that. Me and Mam moved from the prison to a place in Port Louis. The night Jean-Marie died, when we went to visit the
marsan
, do you remember? Do you remember the miserable state of his place? We lived in a place worse than that. But my mother didn’t seem to care. She didn’t seem to care about anything by then, not
even me. Do you remember the woman from that night? The whore we paid to have sex with you? That is what my mother did. What she became. A shadow, I tell you. I am one of the lucky ones. In prison, I found Allah. Or he found me. And now I know a kind of peace. I do not touch alcohol, I do not touch cigarettes, I do not touch
ganja
, I do not touch women. But you, I can see
sagren
in you. You are not the boy you were. I know why you’ve come looking for me, after all that happened. After what I did to you. I took your brother. Allah has sent you to me. So I can look you in the eye and ask your forgiveness, and tell you to open your heart to Allah, and become
my
brother. That is the only way I can make amends for what I did to you.

The first time Paul met Gaetan was at Tamarin. Gaetan had never really been part of Jean-Marie’s regular crew: he was a surfer and had his own friends. And he was a fisherman, a country boy, living south. But he was a cousin of one of the gang and Jean-Marie had always liked him. Gaetan rarely came up to Port Louis, but every now and then they’d all head down to La Gaulette to meet up with him, to swap beer and
ganja
for some of his catch, which they’d cook up on the beach. Paul met him the day Chauffeur got his truck and drove them all down to the beach.

It was a Saturday. Paul and Jean-Marie and some of the others were helping a neighbour build a terrace on his roof. Most of the roofs in Pointe aux Sables were flat and looked unfinished, with rods poking up out of the cement, left like that to give their owners the option of extending upwards when the money was available. But then there were newer houses, built with pointed roofs in the Western style.

What a statement to make to the world, Jean-Marie had said to Paul, pointing these out. That you have reached your potential for growth.

Work was finished for the day and they sat around sharing a bottle of beer. Maja took a swig, then spat it out.

If I’d wanted a hot drink I would’ve had tea.

Jean-Marie laughed and took the bottle from him.

If we’d done things my way, he said, we would have finished quicker and this wouldn’t have had time to sit around sunbathing…

Maja took a spent match from the floor and started to prod at a millipede crawling by his flip-flop. It avoided his attentions, executed an elegant feint and rippled away. He flicked the match at it. Paul was still looking at the millipede – impressed by its economy of movement – when he heard a truck pull up outside the house. An unfamiliar horn sounded. Maja looked down.

Well, fuck me! Chauffeur’s got his
transporte
!

Most of Jean-Marie’s gang, his friends and cousins, had two names: their birth name and another acquired once people had worked out who or what they were:

– Chauffeur was
Chauffeur
because he was a bus driver.

– London was
London
because he had been there once and talked of it often (Where did you stay? Paul had asked, and London, raising bulging eyes to the sky, had said dreamily, Croydon…).

–
Tilamain
was born with an unformed hand.

–
Maja
meant ‘crazy fun’. Paul never did find out what his real name was.

– And Jean-Marie was sometimes known as
Zanblon
because he was as purple-dark and neatly made as the fruit itself, and Paul secretly thought that his personality had a sharp, complicated flavour too. They liked to complicate the flavours of their fruit, these Mauritians: if you stopped on the street at a bike-kiosk – a glass case attached to the back of a moped, the case stuffed with
zanblon, goyav desin,
slices of small Victoria pineapple – you were offered with your fruit a twist of paper filled with pinkish powder, like sherbet, to dip it into. It wasn’t sherbet though but
disel piman
– a mix of chilli powder and salt. The colour of the earth in the cane fields.

Until that Saturday, it had felt to Paul as though he and the gang were always running around looking for
something –
ganja
or transport or beers or money or girls or a radio station playing good
seggae
or sometimes just one of the others. So when Chaufffeur got his truck everything changed: one less thing to look for, and something to help them go looking for everything else they needed. It was a sweet little Toyota flat-bed in good nick – only two years old, with 60,000km on the clock and a decent stereo. It was smart, too: glossy black paintwork and an aquamarine trim. They circled it, squatting down to examine the tyres, rapping a couple of times on the body to check out how it sounded. They smiled at each other in approval, though only Jean-Marie was a mechanic. Then they unhooked the tail of the truck and sat on it. They peered through the open window into the driver’s cabin and turned up the volume on the stereo.

Jean-Marie said, So where are we going?

Tamarin, said Maja. Let’s go find some
ganja
.

Yes, said Jean-Marie. Gaetan will be there.

They all piled in and Chauffeur floored the accelerator. He slammed the horn whenever they passed a group of girls. They barely glimpsed faces, he drove that fast. Paul was glad to be sitting by the window, so he could lose himself in the view.

Paul had been out there almost four months already, but still he took delight in all the snack shacks, the lovingly
hand-painted
signs, the bushes of bougainvillaea like squashed-up boxy Chinese lanterns, the mixed look of the people, the mixture of races, which was so new, so fresh still, that you could if you wished disentangle them – the Creole from the Chinese, the European from the Indian. But sometimes you could stare for a long time without really being able to tell until the last minute, until a face turned, an expression formed, and from the corner of your eye some Indian or African or Portuguese or French or Dutch turned and
slithered away as suddenly as it had been glimpsed. The way
all
of it was a mixture of half-familiar from childhood, and foreign after London.

Paul felt as though what rolled past his window were a film, with the car stereo as a soundtrack. They were listening to The Clash and the music seemed just right to Paul: nostalgic music for the others, who were reminded of a time when they had been as young as Paul was now, ten days shy of his seventeenth birthday. It was so English, that sound, so
London
, pulling him in another direction, which was the way Paul thought he liked things best then, being slightly between two worlds. But every now and again his eyes would go unfocused and he would not see Mauritius: these were the times when he was thinking of Genie, and of how much he wanted her to be here with him. It was as though he could not hold them both – Genie and Mauritius – in his mind at the same time.

The
marsan
was a rich
blan
, his father a lawyer for one of the big sugar companies. He looked up at them and nodded as Paul and Jean-Marie walked into the bar. Paul saw him draw back a little, saw him notice that Paul wasn’t Mauritian, the way everyone seemed to know, though how, Paul couldn’t tell. And perhaps that was the position of the foreigner, Paul thought: never quite understanding what it was about him that marked him out as foreign.

Jean-Marie greeted him and introduced Paul.

You French? the
marsan
asked him, in French.

I’m English, Paul replied, in Creole.

And so they chatted in Creole for a bit about England, its football teams, its weather. Marcel – that was his name – asked if Paul was a student. Paul replied that he was not. He’d left school, he said, and now wanted to make a life for himself here.

And you? Paul asked.

I’m a fisherman.

Paul must have given him a funny look – Marcel must have seen him take in the white-gold skin, the designer surf T-shirt and slack unmuscled arms – because he added, A planter too. Also, I make things out of shells.

Nice life, Paul said.

Yeah, Marcel said. It would kill him to work in an office. Wearing a suit and tie and all that. Every time he put on a tie – for weddings or funerals or whatever – he thought he was going to choke.

On their way back to the beach to hook up with the others, Paul said, That bloke. He didn’t seem like a fisherman to me.

Fisherman? said Jean-Marie. All that guy fishes for is money from his mother’s handbag. He’s not doing anything with his life except waiting for his parents to die. You’ll meet Gaetan. He’s the real deal.

It’s still odd to me, Paul said, hearing a white guy speak Creole.

Well, he’s Mauritian. But his first language would be French. That’s what he’d speak at home. Guys like that, they’re the first to pick up all the new slang in Creole. Guys like that say
mari
and
bugla
a lot. He’s a cunt. Him and his brother. They’re always having run-ins with Gaetan’s lot. Surf business – don’t ask me. Turf wars over this place. His
ganja
is good, though.

And sure enough Gaetan was there that night at Tamarin, with his surfer friends. He had built up a fire and sat tending it, sitting apart from the rest of them, smiling shyly at Paul now and then.

You see how different these country people are from you and me? Maja whispered. Even then Paul had felt uncomfortable with the conspiratorial way in which he
spoke. He did not like Maja implying that he and Paul thought the same way. After Jean-Marie’s death, Paul would come to learn that Gaetan’s silence and distant smile were typical of the fishermen here – as though they spent too long staring out to sea.

Gaetan picked up his guitar and started to play, his friend accompanying him on a jerry can filled with sand. They sang a
sega
, ‘Roseda’, Maja explaining the lyrics to Paul. A man imploring his beautiful young wife to stop the drinking that was destroying her. Maja, so fond of sneering, seemed to be genuinely moved.

And there, on the beach, through a rain so fine it looked like smoke, the moonlight was almost blue. You saw the sea stretch out to the west but then – how could Paul explain this? – it just stopped. There must have been a mist down but you couldn’t tell, you couldn’t see anything. It looked like the end of the world, Paul said.

Like an apocalypse? Jean-Marie asked, passing him the coconut bong.

Paul took another warm, fragrant lungful.

No, he said, almost sighing as he exhaled. Like the world ends here.