Black Marina (15 page)

Still, there’s no need to be cynical about the aims of a young woman like Marina. She comes here to bring in one invasion and she’ll trigger off another, in the shape of the biggest pumpkin of the lot, the US of A.

How does it go? I thought of the words the minute I saw that blot on the water, the head swimming in, half-under the sea. The words of a black woman writer, Alice Walker, of her heroine Meridian:

You can see it all in her eyes. They shine with her knowledge
that she is the future. She is the light. She, with her calm acceptance of purpose, can bring the mightiest country to its knees. God help us all.

‘Marina,’ I say. She looks startled: she doesn’t know I know her full name and what she tells to Lore – already now she begins to suspect I know her plans. Her eyes stare quite insolently at me, as if she couldn’t care less whether or not I tell her the one thing she wants most in the world to know. Or does it matter to her less than I think? Whether Ford is dead or not? Has the ideal taken over from reality? Will she be as proud and as happy to give him an honourable burial – attended, no doubt, by black Marxist-Leninist troops who will stand round the grave with their gun salute – as to greet him with open arms? I’d rather not try to answer that. That’s something I don’t want to know.

‘If you … come across a strange-seeming kind of girl,’ I say, ‘when you go down to the lagoon …’ And my voice tails off. I don’t like to say ‘white’. ‘Her name is Pandora. Be careful with her a little, she isn’t well.’

Maldwin Carr’s pencil starts to race. What good this will do him I couldn’t say. But I think to myself that it’s a world created by the Mr Carrs that’s ultimately responsible for a girl like Pandora going mad. No calm acceptance of purpose for her – no purpose at all, more likely. She fell under the hand of a man, her father in this case, but a rich man a powerful, white casual man, and she fell to pieces because of it.

But Marina has her purpose – and it may be better to kill and burn than to incinerate yourself. Marina may seem ‘a little crazy’, like Meridian in Alice Walker’s book, but she’s not crazy, to her own mind, like Pandora.

And thinking all this, I dare say that’s when I made my first decision. Just to teach you, Marina, that your pure-
little-revolutionary
act can be pretty irritating to an old cynic like me. These things can jump two ways, you know. You come
to find your roots on the magical island of St James, baby. OK, so I’ll help you with your identity. And maybe you and that poor mad girl will have something to cry about together after all.

‘This girl Pandora may say strange things,’ I say into Marina’s cool, intent eyes, ‘but she doesn’t know what she says.’ And as Marina frowns, puzzling out what I can
possibly
mean, I say under my breath to Pandora how sorry I am. ‘But I just had to get you away from here. You won’t get better anyway … and you do need looking after properly, you know. I just had to do what I did, and you don’t know – you can’t remember – at the best of times.’

*

Maurice Bishop, Prime Minister of Grenada, was murdered on 19 October 1983. He and his girlfriend, Education Minister, Jacqueline Creft, were freed from house arrest by an adoring crowd of fellow Grenadians. The prisoners were confused and a little stiff: they’d been tied for some days to iron
bedsteads
. All the same, they made a triumphant re-entry to St George’s. They were very hungry and Mrs Creft, Jackie’s mother, rushed out as the procession passed her door and said, ‘Hold it, I’ll bring you out some bread.’ But by the time she’d run into the kitchen and back out again, the procession had surged on. She never saw her daughter again. I don’t know why – that story seems to me the saddest one of all. And yet Ford’s belief in a pure Leninist state for the little West Indian island went quite undiminished. Maybe he’s right, who knows? They gunned down Bishop and his men, and Bishop’s last words were, ‘Oh God, oh God, they turned their guns against the masses!’

On 27 October US marines arrived at St George’s. Hudson Austin and Bernard Coard, leaders of the coup, were
arrested
. The Grenadians were delighted to welcome American troops.

I thought about these things just after the coup, two months ago, when I took Pandora’s big limp hand and we walked down to the lagoon again, turning this time up to the creek. Maybe Ford is right. There’s no place in the world any more for people like Sanjay, or his expensively crazy
daughter
, or his houses, or his books rotting in an old library with tropical fern growing through the roof, or for me, for that matter. But I’m just one who didn’t get away.

‘They’ll never let you leave the island without a generous handshake,’ Lore wrote. ‘All those years of hard work you’ve put in on St James. All that standing in the store till your legs drop off.’

Ha, Lore, if only you knew. Last time I was trying to get my act together and move off of this place, I asked Jim Davy to ask Sanjay and the consortium what my redundancy would be – tactful, if you know what I mean. No, I wrote to Lore, Jim Davy came back to me saying they’d give a real good party in the Bar with fireworks and the lot. And he said with that creepy little smile of his, ‘And Sanjay’ll have a gold bracelet for you, I’ve no doubt. Something of Dora’s – that poor daughter can’t want her mother’s jewellery.’

Oh thank you, Mr Davy, I sure am glad I asked. ‘As for the girl,’ I said to Jim Davy, ‘you’ll really have to take her off the island. She’ll put off overseas investment. She was naked at the north point the other day, you know, trying to fuck a palm tree down by the edge of the water. Mighty Barby was on the beach, laughing. A whole party of Japanese
businessmen
touring the island in the consortium’s antique sloop turned back out to sea so as not to have to witness it.’

Pandora’s much worse now – and I was thinking all the time we were walking to the creek that day how to make her worse, so Jim Davy would come and take her away.

As it turned out, it was all much easier than I’d expected. The big digger and dumper owned by the Venezuelans on the island had cut a swathe right through the jungle, and just
where the little harbour used to be, grown over now for ever so many years since the last time I took the silly kid there and she screamed her head off at her precious ships played with by somebody else. ‘You have to share in life, don’t you, Pandora?’ I said as we turned up the creek and stood staring a moment at the red gash in the earth made by the digger, the tyre marks like giant fish scales on the drying track. Beyond, stale water glinted yellow in the new clearing under the trees.

‘Sharing is called democracy,’ I said to the poor idiotic girl and she laughed at me with her thin lips. She seemed happy and quite excited. ‘Or it’s called socialism,’ I said, and at that moment I decided Ford was right. I pushed Pandora gently ahead of me until she reached the edge of the harbour and the first skeletal masts of her father’s model ships peered blackly up at her through a cloud of steam on the water. I thought too of Dora at this moment – I don’t know why – dancing in the Rose Drawing Room of her freezing mansion in West Cork. Her eyes were bright. She wore a whole row of bracelets, and they slipped and crashed like coins at a gaming table.

‘Look what we have here!’ I said to Pandora, as if we’d stumbled on the Wizard of Oz at a birthday treat. I knelt down, pulling her with me to the edge of the greenish-black slime that now filled the toy marina. The ships must have been preserved by it being so windless and airless here. ‘Now just fancy that!’ And I began to pull at the tattered sails. A boom, fragile as a mummified finger, crashed without sound into the ooze.

‘No!’ Pandora cried. ‘No! No! No!’

I won’t go on here about the ensuing scene. What
memories
came into the girl’s splintered mind I’d find hard to say. There was Daddy, of course … and marina … and marina again … and Millie and dress, pink dress, something like that. Poor Pandora, the mosaic nearly fitted. Then it blew to smithereens again.

But when she’s safely gone with Jim Davy – and to be properly cared for, this time – I’ll make sure Sanjay looks around at this Godforsaken island and finds nothing to keep him on it at all.

*

So that must have been when I made my decision. I stopped at Millie’s on my way back to The Heights. She was in her yard and she came out with that slow, very serious look of hers that she wears sometimes just to stop the guests at Carib’s Rest from patronizing her, expecting a bright white smile in a friendly face along with the fancy grouper fish she’s been taught to cook with a sauce of fresh lime and walnut chopped up. But I saw she’d been thinking more deeply than that. So have I, Millie, I said to myself, before saying quite casually, ‘By the way, Ford blew in this
afternoon
. Can you beat it? After all these years.’

It was clear Millie’d already seen him because she just went on nodding, as if I’d said nothing of interest at all. I felt all at once then that I’ll miss Millie when Sanjay and I leave the island – I’ll even miss Tanty Grace, who looks at me so kindly and forgivingly, even though she knows the secret of the terrible thing I wished, and which she brought about, whatever anyone may say about this biological warfare stuff. I’ll miss Tanty Grace for finding evil natural and so making it possible to live in a place like this, where everything is so beautiful but there’s just no hope. It’s hard too to imagine Millie and Tanty Grace going on living here when I’m gone – as if they come to life only when I look at them. Of course, with Sanjay gone too they’ll have to do other things – go and get jobs with the Venezuelans, go up to the States maybe …

‘He say he come back an see me again tonight. It is folks who coming to see he. And I say they come here when …’

Millie’s words, like my thoughts, tailed off. How much does she know? I wondered. But why should she take a risk?
Poor Millie, all she’s done is obey orders. First Sanjay (‘Wash my shirts’), then Mrs Van der Pyck (‘Cook this way and that way’), then Ford, back after all this time to tell her what she wants in life after all. Then I remembered that Ford was right. You had to tell people what to want in this kind of a situation. The whole thing stuck in my throat rather all the same. And the danger was quite taken for granted. What the hell happens, I thought (for I was afraid to say it to Millie), if US marines land here tonight too and Millie gets killed in the crossfire? Just like what harm did Millie ever do anyone? And my eyes filled with tears, thinking of Jackie Creft’s mother and the loaf of bread she went quickly – but it was impossible to be quick enough – into the kitchen to get. All Millie has done is feed people, care for people. Such reckless loyalty demanded before she’s even had a chance of a better life.

‘Tell them to come to The Heights,’ I said.

Millie looked down the road to where a child was
swinging
on the branch of a tree. She looked as if she was in two minds whether to go down there and tell the child to stop before the branch broke. And then decided against it. She shook her head. ‘He come here,’ she said.

And we parted ways, but not before Millie told me she’d bring them after all to my room at The Heights later. I felt like Teza (I can own up to it) that evening, with an important meeting ahead, and maybe violence, or police interference at least. I drank up some rum, but there was plenty left there for the landing. And I thought of them all coming ashore. On to sand and the roots of Sanjay’s gnarled, fairytale trees at the southernmost tip of the island.

*

Later Maldwin Carr would find it hard to say what exactly had led up to Holly’s statement. The woman was rambling quite a lot. At one point she even went and pulled down a
book from the shelf behind his head and read aloud to him out of it. As he made his notes her voice, thickened with rum, declaimed, ‘Your future is the future of Great Britain’ and, as he scribbled down his findings on the Ford affair, ‘The future of Great Britain is your future.’ He knew all this was to impress the girl Mari, who stood by the door like an uncertain soldier, one moment brave and defiant, the next drooping. And impress her all these words did. She never took her eyes off Holly Baker. Maldwin Carr even began to wish he’d never contemplated bringing the girl out to St James with him. But he suppressed the wish, as he was well trained to do in his frequent travels through countries where suffering and deprivation were so great that to feel pity rather than gather news would have been like jumping into the sea with an umbrella. He wrote, glancing up now and again:

As Maldwin Carr sat and scribbled, his mind went back to the parties where he’d seen Dora and Sanjay – the
spontaneous
and glorious sixties parties, where Jimi Hendrix played and Janis Joplin and the spirit of self-love dressed up to let it all hang out went in a camp-fire throb and wail. And
excitement 
was so great that the girls seemed to grow and expand as the party wore on, like the Japanese paper flowers that you put in water. How Sanjay had loved paying for them! For the men in Mr Fish shirts too, and all the dope, and another room for boozing. How glad he’d been to greet his friends: hip publishers; young film directors trying to capture on film those already superannuated giants, Sonny Rollins,
Thelonius
Monk, John Coltrane; women who worked on fashion magazines and looked anything but – more like mermaids captured in an aquarium, long hair and faces ghastly with too many late nights. And Maid win among them – ‘My favourite spy!’ and Sanjay was holding out his arms in that laughing, slightly self-deprecating way. No one had expected Sanjay (no one who knew him at school, that is) to make such a pile of money. But his easily disposable, amusing ideas were just right for the times. Maldwin bit back a smile, remembering the craze for ‘instant’ paper clothes, and
Sanjay’s
brightly coloured cheap little cameras which took twenty photographs and then you threw them away, like a briquet lighter. ‘After all, who wants more than twenty photographs?’ Sanjay would say. ‘They’re so boring.’