At my father’s invitation, I went to visit him in the West Indies. Home was a swanky hideaway on the island of St Kitts, up in the mountains – the former governor’s private residence no less, with stunning panoramic views of the sea. It was amazing what all those withheld child-maintenance payments could get you.
It was hard to make up my mind about him – he was a tropical Rasputin one minute and a reallife Pirate Of The Caribbean next, possessing all the qualities of Oliver Reed except for the ability to act. No one who met him could fail to notice a spectacular scar, etched like the fossil of some ancient caterpillar, around his right eye socket – 47 stitches worth. He’d been glassed by a West Indian ‘yardie’ in a bar, after trying to impress my younger brother Chris by telling a group of them to ‘Keep the bloody noise down so I can talk to my son.’ (Austin had inherited some of the belligerent headmaster rituals of his own father who’d worked his way up to that position from a family of coal miners, lording it over the son at both home and school).
But he wasn’t an outright monster. When we first went sailing together I couldn’t help discovering an old-fashioned prude lurking within. We were enjoying a drunken day’s cruising around the island on his yacht, Monkey Hanger, when Austin noticed us drifting into a coral reef in choppy water. He barked orders at his Texan girlfriend, Kirsten, who was in the galley below, to come up on deck and help. I’ll admit I noticed she wasn’t wearing any underwear as she dashed to adjust a sail and her long, but not long enough, T-shirt flapped upwards in the wind – but really it wasn’t such a big deal. After all, wasn’t this supposed to be an emergency situation? Austin’s priorities abruptly changed, however. ‘COVER YOURSELF UP, WOMAN!’ he growled in his Hartlepool accent, as if his and his two sons’ lives depended on it. It didn’t make any sense to me. Imagine if we’d ended up coming a cropper, all over the forbidden glimpse of a Texan beaver?
Our father was a gracious host at first, but after a week or so started resorting to type. Were we really supposed to feel that grateful for his re-emergence into our life? If it was thanks he wanted, I might as well have thanked my bum for taking a shit. I did agree to take his Alsatian, Marley, for a walk twice a day, up to the volcano and back, but that was just to get out of the house. On the way, we’d see the spider monkeys playing in the sugar-cane plantation. What a life they had, lolling in the sun, sucking on the sugar and shamelessly masturbating all day long. Despite their rotten teeth and fading eyesight, they looked happy enough to me.
I was broken out of this reverie when my father and brother told me they had plans for a jungle expedition. It took us a whole day’s trek, then we spent hours making clearings with our machetes for the planting of mangoes. At least, that’s what my father told me the clearings were for…
I was smoking a lot of weed for the first time in my life – there was a lot of it around. And that should have given me a clue, yet still I didn’t see the connection. Being a stoner had transformed me from the space cadet I’d always been into a lethal space commando. In the midst of a stoner haze, everything seemed within reach – as long as you sat well out of reach. Months of Caribbean living passed in a blur of sunny basketball humiliations at the hands of local street kids, while the heavenly tropical breeze caressed away the blisters and our family discord.
One day, my father flew to Miami to pick up a vacuum-packing machine. On the way back, he explained to Customs it was for peanut farming. That wasn’t so inconceivable – peanuts were popular, after all. Surely only people who were allergic didn’t like them?