Ivory (7 page)

Vilanculos was a crush of people and cars. There were long queues at the airport, but the Tremains were leaving Mozambique by road. Alex shivered as he recalled the
pop-pop-pop
of gunfire and the long, painful blasts of his father's hand on the car's horn as they edged through the crowds of panicky Portuguese and jubilant Africans.

A few of his parents' employees and their offspring were still living on the island, and they'd all been glad to see Alex return later in life – at least that's what they'd said. But how many of those wrinkled old men, or those once beautiful young maids and waitresses, had torched the bedding and curtains of the place where they'd once worked? How many had fired bullets from assault rifles into the bottles and glasses behind the bar; soiled the carpets and smashed every window in all of
the one hundred and twenty rooms once the Tremains had left? Their revolution taught them the Portuguese were evil, colonialism was wrong, and that every symbol of Mozambique's European past should be destroyed.

The resort had been profitable, but Donald had ploughed most of his money back into improvements. Like many other colonials, he had never really believed he would be evicted from the glorious tropical paradise he'd come to regard as his home. In the end, they had fled across the border to Southern Rhodesia, where the whites were engaged in their own war against black nationalists.

Homeless and virtually broke, Donald had enlisted in the Rhodesian Light Infantry, the country's all-white regular army regiment, and eventually applied for and been selected for service with the elite Special Air Service.

Young Alexandre decided that when he grew up he, too, would become a soldier, and take back the country where he'd been born, and the hotel where his family had been happy. His father, away on military service for months at a time, would whisper tales of parachute raids into Mozambique, where he'd ‘helped even the score' for the loss of the life he'd built for his family.

Half British, half Portuguese, but African born, Alex never really felt accepted by the other white Rhodesian boys at his private boarding school. One school day that began like many others would stay in his memory forever.

‘Pork and cheese, pork and cheese,' two bigger, older boys taunted him as he walked to assembly. Alex clenched his fists at the local slang for a Portuguese person. His knuckles were scabbed from the last fight he'd won over his mother's heritage. He'd been about to take on this pair when the headmaster called him over.

‘Tremain . . . Alex. Come with me to my office. I'm afraid I have some unpleasant news for you.'

‘Sir?' Alex had felt the lump rise in his throat, constricting his breathing, and the hot welling of tears even before the gaunt old man had told him.

Ironically, things got easier for him at school when the headmaster made a point at assembly the next day of reading an item from the
Salisbury Herald
about the posthumous award of the Silver Cross of Valour, Rhodesia's second highest award for bravery, to Captain Donald Tremain, Special Air Service, who had been killed in action near Mapai, Mozambique, on a cross-border raid. Tremain, already wounded by machine-gun fire, had carried a wounded comrade to safety before dying of his wounds.

After that Alex had left Africa for England where his father's family paid for him to attend Stowe private school where he completed his secondary schooling. He spent his holidays shuffled from one relative to another. None really wanted him. The legacy of his father's disgrace and his mother's profession as a dancer – Alex wondered if it really was ballet she had danced – was always whispered not quite out of earshot.

As a fourteen year old Alex had read of the exploits of Britain's Royal Marine Commandos in the retaking of the Falkland Islands following the Argentine invasion. Growing up on an island he'd been around boats since birth, although he couldn't see how naval training would equip him with the skills he'd need to see off the wild-eyed fighters armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers who still inhabited his dreams. The marines seemed like a good compromise.

The thirty-two week recruit training course at Lympstone in Devon on the wind and rain swept south coast of England taught him what an easy life he'd lived so far, and if he'd thought his British background would lead to acceptance, he was disabused of such romantic notions when his corporal dubbed him ‘the African Spic'.

In England he found himself in more than one fight with other marines in his intake, who derided his Portuguese looks and Rhodesian accent. He never lost a bout, and eventually won acceptance. But if his dark hair and eyes and olive skin were a liability in barracks, they were an asset in the local pubs and nightclubs where the young marines went in search of drink and women.

As Alex gazed up at the hotel from the water, imagining even more ambitious renovations and expansions, Danielle walked out of the
hotel's foyer. When Alex was a boy a uniformed African doorman had opened heavy brass and glass doors. Now Danni picked her way through charred beams and fresh new lumber. She wore a pink T-shirt and green cargo pants and carried a bulging backpack on her shoulders.

Mitch got up from the deckchair he'd been lying in, under a palm tree in the garden. Alex swam to shore.

Alex had met Danni while shopping for fresh fruit and vegetables in the marketplace at Vilanculos. It was her smile that had drawn him to her. He'd helped her pick some tomatoes and translated for her. The stall keeper had wanted to charge her tourist prices, but Alex had bargained him down firmly and, in the end, paid for the purchase despite her protests. She told him over Manica beers at a beachside bar that she'd left Ireland a month before her thirtieth birthday. Tired of being nagged by her mother and aunties about marriage, and bored with her job as a partner in an accounting firm, she'd chucked it all in and gone in search of adventure and herself.

Danni had come to the island that day. A week later they were the last people propping up the beach bar after the other men had turned in at what passed for a reasonable hour on Ilha dos Sonhos. The rest of the gang were going deep-sea fishing early in the morning, but Alex would spend the day like most others, painting and renovating yet another hotel room.

It had been oppressively humid all day and the night was no different. Lightning marbled the dark sky and Danni moved out from under the thatch as the heavenly drums sounded.

‘Come inside, you'll get wet,' Alex said as the first fat drops started cratering the white sand.

‘Not on your life. This is my first ever tropical thunderstorm and there's no way I'm going to watch it from under cover.' She spread her arms and looked up. ‘It's warm. Warm rain!' She was grinning with wonder.

The storm came with the noise and ferocity of a waterfall and Alex had let Danni drag him first into the downpour and then into the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. She'd gone in still clothed in blouse
and skirt, but he'd peeled them off her as they stood, waist deep, and kissed.

‘Come to bed with me,' he'd said into her ear over the patter of the rain.

‘Now, just slow down there a minute and let me think about that, mister. We're both single, over twenty-one, and you're the most handsome man I've ever met – plus you own your own hotel and island . . .'

The bond between her and Alex had grown and she took to sharing his suite on the top floor of the hotel most nights.

Nothing was said, but Mitch would have been blind not to know that Danni was more than just a guest on the island. It made his drunken pass at her at a beach
braai
unforgivable.

‘No, Mitch!'

Alex had heard Danni yell from the gloom beyond the bar and had left his seat and run into the night. She had collided with him and he'd wrapped his arms around her.

‘God in heaven, that man's a pig,' she'd said, breathing deep to calm herself.

‘Fucking bitch tried to come on to me, then called red light,' Mitch said when Alex challenged him.

‘I want you to apologise to her, Mitch.'

‘I got a better idea. How about you fucking share her around, Alex.'

Alex's first punch had broken Mitch's nose and, although the American had later split his eye and left him with bruised ribs, he'd extracted the apology to Danni he wanted – albeit a surly and grudging one.

Things hadn't been the same between Alex and Mitch since that night, and Mitch had been against letting Danni in on the secret of the Island of Dreams and the odd mix of people who lived there. Mitch wanted her gone.

Danni had asked Alex, on more than one occasion, how he was funding the slow-progressing renovations. Her curiosity was piqued when a barge laden with bags of cement, cartons of tiles, buckets of paint and a shrink-wrapped pallet of new power tools landed at the jetty two days after the island's menfolk had been away on a fishing trip.

Then Mitch had caught her in the boatshed.

Alex hadn't asked why the American had been following his girlfriend after dark, but in a way he'd been glad when things had come to a head. Danni had taken Alex's keys from the bedside drawer and, while the others were in the thatched beach bar, drinking beer and watching the rugby from South Africa on satellite television, she had freed the heavy padlock and ignored the
Danger – do not enter
signs. Alex had told her there was only fuel and motors stored there, and that the monkey's skull and kite feathers nailed above the doors were simply to deter petty thieves from the village.

She'd found enough weapons and ammunition to wage a small war. As well as assault rifles and pistols, there were rocket-propelled grenade launchers, crates of explosives and hand grenades, and a rack of one-piece military flying suits. There was body armour and gasmasks, combat boots and, in the centre, two rigid-hulled inflatable boats painted in grey and black camouflage stripes.

Mitch had dragged her to the bar. ‘She was in the shed.'

‘What are you . . . mercenaries?' she'd asked, shrugging the ex-navy SEAL's hand from her forearm. ‘I know you're all ex-military.'

‘No.' Alex had turned off the television.

‘Drug dealers?' Danni hadn't sounded convinced. She'd seen Alex turn down a joint from Kevin and he'd told her himself, soon after she arrived on the island, that no one who worked for him at the hotel was permitted to use anything harder than grass or booze. ‘The boats . . . what are you, Alex? A pirate?'

Mitch had glared at him, shaking his head, but Alex had said, ‘Yes.'

He didn't think she would turn him in to the authorities – not that the Mozambican police would have done anything, other than report back to him. The local police chief had been in his pay for two years. He had worried, though, that Danni would leave him. As she was finally doing now.

Alex strode from the water, running a hand through his hair.

‘All packed, I see.'

‘Yes.' She looked at him, then out over his shoulder at the endless sea
for what seemed like a long time, as if imprinting the sights, smells and sounds of the beachside haven on her memory. ‘You're going to miss having an accountant around,' she said eventually.

He smiled. ‘I will. I hope Sarah's been paying attention to what you've taught her.'

At the bar, after she'd found out his secret, he'd offered her membership of the crew, at the same cut as everyone else. His finances were a mess. She'd accepted and soon, via internet and phone, established offshore accounts for him in Jersey and the Cayman Islands, and produced a spreadsheet of incomings and outgoings. She'd had fun at first, she told him, working on the other side of the law, but things had changed.

‘Sarah's more interested in pistons than profit and loss,' Danni said now.

Sarah had shown up on the island one day, wading through the shallow aquamarine waters after jumping off a fishing dhow. She was freewheeling through Africa, catching local buses, trains, and even boats, in search of thrills of any variety. She told Alex she'd heard, on the mainland, of some crazy white men who were fixing up an old hotel, and hitched a ride on the boat to come have a look for herself.

Alex was wary of visitors. He had had Danni search Sarah's clothes and backpack thoroughly while Sarah had downed cane spirit and Coke at the bar. Heinrich had been working on an outboard motor outside the boathouse, still tinkering and cursing as the sun went down; Sarah, half cut, had wandered down, drink in hand and offered to take a look. The German had scoffed, but said, ‘Be my guest.' In fifteen minutes she'd had the motor purring.

Later, while Danielle had been tapping on her laptop in the gutted restaurant, Sarah had moved her bar stool closer to Alex and run her hand up the inside of his bare thigh.

Danni had been hinting at marriage for a while. Alex had told her he wanted her to stay on the island – indefinitely – but that he couldn't contemplate anything more permanent until he had finished renovating the hotel and become a legitimate businessman, something he fully
intended on doing. Things had cooled between them and it had been two weeks since she'd slept with him when Sarah arrived.

When Danni had caught them kissing she'd shrugged the incident off, telling Alex that since he couldn't commit to her, then he was free to sleep with anyone he wanted to, and that the same counted for her.

He hadn't believed her and now, seeing the set of her mouth and the bulging backpack, it was clear she wanted an all-or-nothing relationship.

‘It won't be the same without you here, you know.' He reached out and touched her warm cheek with the backs of the fingers on his good hand. ‘Come back and visit any time.'

She took his other hand – the one which had been maimed and scarred in the explosion – and lightly kissed the remaining digits, one at a time. ‘Come find me if you ever grow up, Alex.' She smiled to show there was no animosity in her words.