Tidetown (12 page)

‘Leek and bacon soup,' says Mrs M to her reflection in the mirror, as she puts the book back in the drawer of her dresser. It is her secret record, where for many a long year now she has listed Joshua's favourite dishes, with ticks and dates alongside the times she has cooked them. On other pages she has recorded the compliments he has paid her. ‘You're a fine and fair woman, Mrs M,' is one; ‘I see your cheeks are rosy and full today,' is another. She has long given up any thoughts of love or romance, though there was a time, when Joshua first began to appear in her kitchen, that she'd harboured such notions and hopes. But she soon came to understand Joshua and his singular devotion to the mayor. Nowadays she is happy for the regularity and comfort of his company and his effusive appreciation of the soups and stews she lovingly prepares. In answer to his questions, she often says the recipes, secret as they are, have been passed down from her mother and her mother's mother. He probes no further, so she need never disclose the truth. For the reality is that her mother was sent to the penal colonies when Mrs M was a mere babe. She had been a smuggler, harbouring goods that appeared in her backyard in the middle of the night, and had given a bed to many a pirate that found himself beached on the shore. Mrs M never knew which brigand or bandit came to be her father. When the harbour police took her mother away, kicking and screaming as she did, Mrs M was scooped up in their wake and taken to the nuns for safekeeping.

By age ten she was farmed out as a scullery maid to the manor house. No one worked harder than she. Mrs M (or Biddie, as she was known as a child) scrubbed and shined, cleaned and mended. Unlike the many who malingered and loafed, if one job was finished Biddie would ferret around for another. Always busy, always in service, from dawn to dusk. Her only indulgence was the cakes and pastries that cook put aside for her. The cook knew of the sad and sorry past of the pirate queen and the waif, so was only too happy to see a smile on the face of the little scullery maid. As Biddie grew up, so her girth grew out: a visible result of her love of tarts and pies.

By her eighteenth birthday she was assistant to the cook. Unbeknownst to her, she'd caught the eye of Jack Malone, one of the footmen, who liked two things: women of ample proportions and gambling. So, without exactly knowing the how or the why of it, Biddie became Mrs M, and Jack found a willing bedfellow and domestic. Soon Mrs M began to yearn for a child. But her husband drank and gambled and she always believed that the seed in him (the seed she accepted in the hope of a bonny babe of her own) was weakened and fallow, the life sucked out of it by all the time spent in inns and gambling dens. Then one day two mighty-sized men banged on their door, asking her to present the stumpy legs of her husband so they could break them with the hefty mallets they carried. While Mrs M, still the dutiful wife, remonstrated with the debt-collecting scoundrels, Mr M disappeared through the pantry window, huffed and puffed his way across the meadow behind their cottage and was never heard of nor seen again.

‘That's enough for me in the man department,' said Mrs M to anyone who cared to hear her view on the subject. When the job as live-in assistant cook at the mayor's residence became vacant she applied and was successful. True to form she worked hard and resolutely, learning quickly from Mrs Buckley, the incumbent cook. ‘Hearty food here, Mrs M,' said Mrs B. ‘Wholesome, nutritious and plentiful.' Meals were made up of local fare and produce: leafy greens, earthy tubers, succulent meats. She learned to make pies and tarts, soups and soufflés. On occasions, a man (a tradesman or traveller, never a house guest) would take an interest in her, but they would receive short shrift. Yet when Joshua started to appear at the kitchen door, with his quirky ways and peculiar looks, she found herself looking forward to his visits. He would arrive at varying times of day with gossip and tales, opinions and news. At first she would give him a glass of water to quench his thirst. Then it would be a tankard of porter or a piece of pie. After a month or so, quite imperceptibly at first, she found herself keeping back a delicacy or two, or a portion of a special dish, just in case he should pass by. ‘Look,' she would say, ‘I just happen to have a slice of veal and ham pie. It has the egg yolk in the middle. How would you fancy that with a tomato and a slice of beetroot?'

She began to notice herself paying attention to her hair in the mirror in the mornings as she got ready. She even became aware of a coquettish lilt to her laugh as Joshua told her stories of his day. But as time passed she came to realise that he was oblivious to her fancy; his talk always of the mayor doing this, the mayor saying that. And so their relationship found a level beyond any hopes of romance, settling on a comfortable complicity.

‘The mayor himself has vouchsafed your release into the community,' says the governor, sitting opposite Perch and Carp in their barren cell. She is waiting for a reaction, yet has come to expect none. They turn in unison and look at the governor with a gaze that mingles triumph with disdain, confidence with indifference.

When she first received the letter from the Director of Provincial Gaols decreeing the twins to be the prisoners to be released on the seventh of January she was quite shocked. Following on from her first meeting with Perch and Carp she took the time to read copies of all the correspondence that had passed between them and Angelica. Their growing obsession with the ephemeral Archangel worried the governor. Their letters contradicted what she had heard from them regarding their move away from obscure cults and teachings. Even if, as she suspected, Carp was under Perch's control, it did not diminish the potential danger of the two in the community. So she wrote back immediately, carefully, respectfully (for the Director of Provincial Gaols was a pompous man) listing her deep concerns and doubting the suitability of the twins for release. The one-line reply she received was from the director's personal assistant instructing her to carry out the orders as originally designated.

When she turned her back to leave the cell, the governor was sure she could hear a cackle, a whistle, a strange indefinable sound, but one that was an echo of both victory and malice.

FIVE

‘A man there was, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away the more he had.'
– John Bunyan

On deck, anchor up, the sails fulsome again, our ship cutting through the waves like a clipper, I stand next to Aimu who is looking intently out to sea.

‘Tomorrow we will make land and our next port of call is my home town, Oscar,' he says, as if waiting for it to suddenly appear on the horizon. ‘I have not been back in twenty years. Not once. When I left those shores I was the age you are now,' he says, looking down at me, remembering something of himself.

‘What will it be like?' I ask him. ‘Going home, I mean.'

He thinks for a minute. I love the tattoo he has on one side of his face. Its three lines curl like a wave, running from his temple to his neck. I asked him about it once and he said each stroke reminded him of the way his mother stroked his face the morning he set sail. He could still feel the gentle touch of her fingertips on his skin.

By the expression on his face, he seems to be searching for possibilities.

‘When I think of it, going home, I imagine the day I left. As if nothing has moved on. My mother and father on the riverbank, my brothers and sisters waving and crying and laughing. I picture them still standing there. All these years later, still waiting.'

There is no sign of land on the distant horizon, just a shimmer of a line between sea and sky.

‘But I know it can't be like that. Too much has changed. I've heard talk of pain and suffering,' he says. ‘Letters from my sister. A few words here, a few words there. There is more power in telling little than in telling all.' He sighs and looks out to the distance. ‘Nothing is ever as we remember it.'

Hours later, as I fall asleep, I try to bring to mind what was. To see if it reappears as I remember it.

I'm woken by excited voices, whistles and cheers. Looking out of the tiny porthole I can see a flotilla of small craft surrounding the boat. Dark-skinned people are shouting out, holding up fruits and live chickens, brightly coloured cloth and statues carved from wood and stone. Beyond the boats and the clear turquoise water the shoreline rises from white-sand beaches to a small cluster of houses on a hilltop. I pull on my clothes and rush up the stairs to the deck. There's Aimu leaning over the gun rail, looking to left and right.

‘Cousin Elenoa,' he shouts, waving frantically. ‘Horatio! Olinda!'

One by one, the hawkers in the boat spot their kinsman and wave back, laughing and shouting.

‘Is it you? … Aimu? … You've come back,' yells one.

‘Our fine strong man,' says another, an older woman with greying hair, who holds up a silver fish that shimmers and reflects the early morning sunlight.

‘Uncle Aimu, how we need you,' shouts a tall stout man, sitting on top of a pile of lobster pots on the deck of a small fishing boat. ‘God has sent you back to us.'

Hearing this last call Aimu shields his eyes from the sun rays bouncing off the horizon.

‘Is that really you?' he mutters under his breath, recognising the young man in the fishing boat. ‘Nephew Valence?'

The last Aimu had heard of Valence was the last time he'd heard anything from Cote D'Alkott. It was in a letter from Valence's mother, Carmel, Aimu's sister. She wrote that Valence, then only fifteen, had been spotted at one of Captain Ottega's rallies by the secret police and was arrested as a rebel. It was only the family connection with the president's wife that had saved Valence from a life sentence or worse. Four days later he was dumped on a quiet road on the outskirts of their village. His head was swollen and bloodied and both his shoulders had been popped out of their sockets. Even in the face of his mother's tears and pleas Valence would not bring himself to renounce his commitment to freedom from tyranny. If anything, the brutality and interrogation of the regime had toughened his resolve. Carmel finished her letter expressing worry that there'd be no protecting Valence if he was apprehended again.

As Aimu walks down the gangplank, kitbag slung over his broad shoulder, it is his sister Carmel who is first to greet him.

‘My darling big brother,' she says pulling him close, kissing him tenderly on his cheek and neck.

‘Carmel, my baby sister,' he says stroking her hair, returning her kisses. ‘And here,' adds Aimu, spinning on his heels, ‘is my shadow. Young Oscar, meet my sister Carmel. We will be staying with her while we're in port.'

‘You will be most welcome, young man. You and your own handsome little dog,' she says, noticing Stigir planted between my heels. Carmel's eyes twinkle and, although her hair is peppered with grey and white, she has a youthful sense about her.

The sun is on the rise and the heat is setting in as I follow Carmel and Aimu as they walk up the hill from the quayside. We head along a cobblestoned thoroughfare where chickens, goats and donkeys mingle with a steady flow of men, women and children hurrying to and fro, carrying all manner of food and goods on handcarts, in bags, and on foot, shouting out in a babble of languages. Presently we turn away from the hubbub and enter a small courtyard. There is a shady palm tree in the far corner and a gently bubbling fountain in the centre. It is peaceful and quiet and you would hardly know that such a hive of industry was so close by. I follow the two through a narrow doorway that opens out to a simple room of whitewashed walls and open windows. Carmel bids us to sit on the floor on a large patterned rug. The room is refreshingly cool, with fruit and water waiting for us on a low wooden table.