House of Ashes (24 page)

‘Bones,’ she says, and he realises this is the first piece of news about the House he’s ever heard which makes him feel interested.

There’s a female Prime Minister now in charge of the country, but not like Aspasia Garland, not a real hand-on-heart type person. There’s a woman in the House, but she can’t
stop the crooks. Same, same. Sans Amen has gone from bad to worse since all those years ago. The small island is now rich, the economy is booming, so much so that Sans Amen is no longer considered
a developing nation. And yet corruption has increased; each government steals what it needs. One ex-PM was rumoured to be wiretapping the whole country. When he left, another senior minister was
caught pocketing vast sums of money. The cost of living has soared while those in central and rural areas still scrape by. All the white people in Sans Amen do yoga while all the Indian people send
their children abroad to study law and medicine. And the black man? He never again united or rose up and fought back or achieved any of those old heroics of ideology. Like anyone else, he wants to
make a buck in this so-called rich island. The black man will make his money how he can. Resistance was tried, twice, and both times it failed – and so now it’s as if his heart has been
taken out of his chest and pounded flat and then re-inserted. That is how he feels about politics. Heartless.

But the
bones?
Four humans? He remembers the place felt haunted.

‘Who find them?’ he asks.

‘They digging there. They renovating the House. Now they getting the bones examined in New York; they plan to bring a team down now, to dig up the place. Is possible there some kind of
burial site under the House of Power, something so.’

‘Oho,’ he says, trying to show no real interest. And yet he’s intrigued; he can’t help himself. Bones? He remembers the ground floor of the House, the brother they called
Ashes; he remembers the library, Jesus on the cross.
The first will be last and the last will be first
, Ashes had said. He said Jesus had been a revolutionary. Long, long time ago now.

*

At 8 p.m. Joseph starts his shift at the visitors’ centre at the back of the hotel on the beach, behind the car park. His wife works at the desk selling permits; from
March to August it’s prohibited to walk the beach without a guide after 6 p.m. To start with, he goes out on to the sand alone to estimate how many creatures are already nesting. April, a
full moon. Dozens will be on the beach and when he goes out to look, he’s right. Sleek leathered black humps everywhere, like an invading fleet has landed from across the ocean, all of them
pregnant females, their wombs swollen with eggs. All of them are bursting to bury their loot after their long migration from the cold waters. Every one of these creatures will be their own midwife.
Each is a nursery craft. They have self-piloted all the way across the Atlantic to be here, right here on this tiny cove, L’Anse Verte.

His daughter Soleil and her friend Maria come with him tonight, two skinny girls, laughing and trying to be serious all at once. There are twelve visitors in his group tonight, all staying at
the hotel.

He briefs them in the car park.

‘Turtles are very startled by light, okay. So please, no flash photography. We cannot allow cameras on the beach. Or torches. You will need to stick close by me.’

The group nod as one. They are all carrying cameras. Most pack them away.

There are couples, a family with kids, an older man, the grandfather, two single women. It’s midweek and usually the visitors midweek come from Sans Amen; the beach and the centre is
famous now. People arrive from all over the world and from Sans Amen. That has been a great privilege of his job, showing his own people this sight of the turtles. As a child he didn’t know
much about them.

He leads them out down the lane to the beach which is damp from the river nearby. The small group follows him and his infrared light and quickly they find a huge turtle, maybe seven hundred
pounds. She is digging her egg chamber and he settles the group around her to share the information he knows. He hasn’t been much to school, let alone university, but he’s studied these
creatures for decades and he is as knowledgeable as the teams of American marine biologists who come here, and those from the BBC and
National Geographic
. He now calls himself a
conservationist. It is like being a husband or a father to the earth.

This turtle has begun to lay, and so he holds her hind fins apart discreetly, like curtains, and shines his infrared torch into the chamber.

‘The female turtles take around two hours to nest and lay. It’s hard work, and so they cannot nest when it’s day. It’s too hot. Now she will drop around one to two
hundred eggs. The chamber, as you can see, is about two feet deep. So the eggs are quite safe.’

The visitors peer into the chamber. Soleil and Maria crouch near the hole, watching. The white eggs look like hand-blown paper globes. They gently slide out of her cloaca into the chamber walls
of sand. The young girls are quiet and reverent, like women scopsing jewels.

‘The turtles will nest up to ten times in a season, maybe lay a thousand eggs and disappear. Reptiles aren’t mothering creatures. Once they have dug and laid, they slip back off,
into the sea. They don’t see their young again. They need no contact with them.’

‘Wow,’ says one of the women in the group. ‘They come all this way to lay, and that’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘The juvenile turtles will be born about eight weeks later. They take five days to dig themselves out of their nest,’ he explains. ‘But once they are visible, if they hatch in
the day, most will be eaten between the beach and the sea by corbeaux or frigates. One in a thousand live to adulthood.’

Joseph has spent a lot of his life hand-releasing hatchlings into the sea. When the hatchlings start to emerge, he’s on the beach most of the day with his bucket, collecting the tiny black
stars, but he cannot save them all. Many he finds dead, pecked to death.

‘That’s a minuscule number.’

‘Yes. But the ones that do survive return to this beach twenty or thirty years later to give birth. Sometimes I think the reason why is because of the very miracle that they survived at
all.’

Back in the car park, Joseph says goodbye to the visitors. Soleil and her friend Maria are tired and they are both so stick thin he could easily scoop them up in his arms together. He likes it
when his daughter comes to help, that she is learning about these creatures too.

The older man in the group hangs about a little, as if he’d like to say something. He looks about sixty and he has a quiet pensive manner.

‘Thank you,’ he says shyly and yet with some considered intent. Joseph feels drawn to him; he has come to know he’s often drawn to older men. He hovers, now holding the hands
of two little girls who need to go to bed.

‘Those turtles made me sad,’ the old man says.

Joseph nods. He’s seen people weep at the sight of them.

‘I had no idea. No idea . . .’ and then he says, almost with an absent mind, ‘that so many come to Sans Amen.’

‘Yes. That’s because there’s been a ban on hunting them. For fifteen years.’

‘So now they come safely?’

‘More or less.’

‘One good thing happening here on this island, eh?’

Joseph smiles. ‘It was the idea of Aspasia Garland, remember her? She was once the Minister for Environment.’

‘Of course I remember her. She was one of the hostages. At the time of that attempted coup. She survived the ordeal, a great lady.’

Joseph goes silent. He wants to get away now, from this conversation. And yet he almost wants to boast too,
I knew her, I knew her, she gave me the idea to come here .
. .

The older man gives him a look which is deep and raw and also a little lost.

‘I know something about that attempted coup,’ he says. ‘My wife, she was caught up in it too. Unfortunately, she didn’t survive like Mrs Garland. She was shot and killed
. . . by those lousy murderers.’

Joseph freezes. He stares. How did this man come here? Why is this man standing in front of him?

‘I’m sorry . . .’ Joseph stammers.

He looks at Joseph, still full of anger and regret. ‘Bloody ruthless bastards. I was left a single father of two children. It was a shock at the time. They were devastated and so was I.
Hypocrites. I . . .’ And then he pauses as if he’s only just put his finger on what has come to him, with the turtles.

‘She was pregnant when they shot her, you see. Three months pregnant. My wife. In the House of Power. You remember that terrible thing? Eh? The attempted coup d’état. She used
to work there as a clerk and she was shot dead. She was pregnant. And . . . well . . . I’ve always been glad they executed all those bandits. They deserved what they got. But those sea
creatures . . . made me sad. Sad for my wife and our unborn child. And also for . . . those men. I have never felt any compassion for those men before, ever. But some of them were boys. Those
creatures . . . they gave me a surprise. Where do they come from . . . ? Is like they bring an old wisdom with them.’

Joseph nods, but he feels old suddenly, and hot in his gut, a liquid feeling spills through him. The horror of it all never faded. The remorse has atrophied, and now it is melting into his
blood.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers to the older man whose wife he shot.

*

Joseph finds his wife still busy at the centre, looking pretty, as usual, her thin locks tied back and hennaed red at the ends. She has amber eyes and a way of looking at him
which can be soft and hard at the same time. Killer look in her eyes, which is why he married her.

‘Please,’ he says, ‘take them,’ meaning the children. ‘Something’s come up.’ And she gives him that look and this time he gives her his look back and
says, ‘Not now. Ah goin,’ and with that he’s gone, out the door, and walking across the car park to his jeep.

His hands are shaking as he jabs the key in the ignition and switches on the headlights, shaking. Tears are falling too and he can barely see. He takes the jeep out on to the thin tarmac road
and through the village where every single man who isn’t on the beach guiding visitors to the turtles is drinking rum and standing outside the parlour; thank God the windows have an opaque
strip which partially hides his face and he makes a gesture which vaguely says hello. All the men outside the parlour nod gently. He accelerates past them and keeps driving till he reaches the next
cove and then he parks facing the oncoming surf. The beach here doesn’t get so many turtles. The waves are rolling in, slick and black and silent. His face is wet with tears. The woman he
shot dead was pregnant. The woman he shot dead as a teenager had a baby in her stomach. He wonders if he should just load his pockets up with stones, wade out into the surf. She will never go away,
that woman. She has been with him all his life – it is as though he shot his mother dead. She was trying to escape out the window. There was a moment when she saw him and she begged.
‘You are like my son,’ she pleaded, and he shot her straight through the belly.

Joseph puts his forehead to the wheel of the jeep and feels his ribs shake, his stomach heave. She will not go away, that woman. And now . . . there were two of them. He’s a double
murderer. It happened so long ago that sometimes he almost can forget what happened. Sometimes, it’s like he can pretend he is someone else.

All that was over eight thousand days ago. He has kept count in numerous ways: on walls, in sketchbooks, in his head. In footsteps. In breaths. In leatherback turtles. He has collected his days
of so-called freedom in stones, in leaves on the trees. But she has never died on him, that woman from the House of Power. She has haunted him and he has often wondered if he should walk out into
the sea to stop her infestation of his dreams. It would probably be wise to take his own life as a way of recompense. It would be a cancellation of a debt. He owed her his life. The others paid
with theirs.

He gets home very late and lies awake thinking it’s time to go back. The House of Power. Amerindian bones. Jesus on the cross. He ran away and never returned and maybe it will be okay;
maybe it will help. He has been so scared. He has been hiding. He saw what happened to the others. The commune was bulldozed and the brothers disbanded, joined other groups. The Leader’s
entire movement evaporated soon after the execution. Enough time has passed. Since then he hasn’t prayed, he has led a secular existence.

He should go back.

At dawn Soleil comes into the bed and he makes space for her and he lies still while his wife and child are warm and fast asleep next to him. The light is creeping in behind the curtains. He
dozes a little and as he dozes he dreams of running. In his dreams he is running through the City of Silk, down towards the sea. The pavement is hot and broken up and there are vagrants asleep on
the ground and there is a megaphoned voice shouting at him saying,
Give up, come back
. Then he sees a giant rusted satellite dish and men standing in a line, falling in a heap to the
ground. When the men fall, his legs begin to give and then he finds he is running on his knees through the streets. He sees his mother, Mercy Green, with one eye. His mother says to him,
Give
yourself up you wutless good-for-nothing boy
. His mother turns into the minister, Mrs Aspasia Garland, who is carrying a baby turtle in her hands. His mother says to Mrs Garland, ‘He
should give himself up, shouldn’t he?’ Mrs Garland is standing by an open window in the House of Power with the turtle and she smiles and says, ‘I know where you went, I know
where you disappeared in your adolescence.’

Joseph slips from the bed and he goes to the bathroom and splashes water onto his face. He brushes his teeth and stares hard at them. His teeth are perfect. His face has marks on it now, creases
and small scars from accidents and acne in his later teens. He has the face of a man who people like. He learnt to smile more, trust people more, since he got married. He is aware that women find
him attractive and that men are drawn to him too. He figures it is his teeth and his smile. His face breaks open when he smiles and he has learnt that this makes others feel good. It makes him feel
good too, like he has a charm. He remembers the way Aspasia Garland spoke to him once, in the House, using her voice of authority, like she was an important person; it was a politician’s
voice, strong and clear. Over the years he has somehow copied this. Sometimes he speaks like she did: precisely, as if he has authority. It impressed him as a young boy. And now he uses the same
technique and he impresses people too. Firm and yet polite; it gets people on his side.