In 1964, when Leonard was ten, old enough to think he knew what to expect, and bored, he walked from his home on Diego Garcia to play in a pair of wrecked planes that lay in the jungle beyond the village; operated by the British to protect their Indian Ocean interests, abandoned at the end of the second world war and haunted by the phantom buzz of bust radios and the noise of ripped wires twitching in the wind; Leonard was warned by his sister, Odette: half his age but she stared him in the eyes and shook her head.
‘I’m going, anyway,’ he said, and walked away from her. She watched the back of his head. He didn’t turn round. ‘Alright,’ she said and followed him.
The sun boiled the sweat on their faces as they left their village and walked down the track that ran behind huts and vegetable gardens. Birds cried, they disturbed flocks of chickens and gangs of rats as a breeze clacked the leaves of the coconut palms that rose above the shore.
‘Come on!’ yelled Leonard. His sister was lingering by flowers. ‘We can pick them on the way home.’
‘I don’t want to pick them, anyway,’ she said, and caught up. ‘They’d only have got in the way. They smelt nice, though,’ she said, but he didn’t answer.
They walked through the plantations and jungle. Coconut harvesters yelled and asked them what was happening, an abandoned animal shelter confirmed their path. Its thatch had been blown away, the roof beams were cracked and where animals had been safe was now open and pointless to mend. Whoever had built the place had given up and gone somewhere else.
An hour’s walking made them hungry. Leonard said, ‘I’ll climb,’ at a coconut tree, but Odette said, ‘No. You catch.’
‘Why?’
‘I stretch further,’ she said, and was shinning before her brother could stop her.
She climbed like a monkey, reached the nuts, waved and scared a cloud of birds away from the tree tops to the lagoon, where they flew around.
She cut a coconut and threw it to her brother. He shook his head, but he was used to her. He cracked the nut on a rock, spilt the milk and cut some flesh with a knife (his own property).
On Diego Garcia, the ocean was never more than yards away. They walked to a beach, sat on a rock, chewed and stared at familiar things. Leonard cleaned his knife on a cloth and spat into the lagoon. ‘One of thee finest natural harbours in the world’ – he didn’t know that. Others did, though – some people who ate coconuts with forks and did polite things with napkins.
Leonard and Odette had never seen a napkin. They wiped their mouths with the backs of their hands and watched the sea rustle the coral flakes and leave tiny shells in ridges by their feet. The water was smooth and shone with a luminescence though the sun was high and dazed them. Tiny fish came to the shallows and dipped around, watching for food. The boy tossed some coconut into the water. The pieces sank, the fish sucked and blew.
‘We should have a net.’
‘They’re not worth it.’
‘Nice colours, though. See…’
Beach disappeared over every horizon, thick and constantly moving jungle fringed the frame. A stand of palm trees whispering, wild donkeys butting each other in clearings, the distant rumble of the coconut train and the call of a fisherman in the lagoon. He was casting into deep water, seeing the fish before they knew he was about.
‘That’s Christian’s father,’ said Leonard.
‘No. It’s Michel.’
‘It isn’t…’
‘Leonard! I know who it is!’
‘You…’
‘MICHEL!’ yelled Odette.
‘YES!’
They could have stayed on the beach for hours, but the thought of the forbidden made Leonard stand up and say, ‘Come on!’ He tucked his knife into his belt.
They walked for the rest of the morning and half the afternoon before reaching the planes. Odette had been saying they were lost and should have done something else when Leonard brushed away some undergrowth and saw them.
‘NO!’ he yelled, ‘LOOK!’
The planes were Catalina flying boats, blown from their marine moorings by rare cyclonic winds in 1944. Twenty years of jungle growth had swamped them, but in places their hulls shone through the vegetation. Leonard’s eyes widened as he moved towards them. Odette shook her head. She wasn’t impressed by other people’s junk.
‘I’ll be swimming,’ she said.
‘Don’t go far,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘You’re scared!’
‘Me?’ He looked at her. ‘Scared?’
‘You are. You’ve got that look on your face. I can tell. I always know.’
‘You can’t. Don’t pretend you’re Mother.’
Odette looked away. ‘I’m going swimming.’
Leonard sat in the remains of one of the aeroplanes and hummed to himself. He tried to imagine it breaking from the jungle and rising to circle the lagoon before dipping and flying west.
West (1200 miles away) was Mauritius – his father had been there – it was a big country. He climbed into the place where the cockpit had been, sat down beneath a faded pin-up of Dorothy Lamour and imagined the smashed instruments and broken controls working and clouds passing.
He thought about other countries he could be flying over, and oceans, as the noise of Odette’s swimming came through the trees. Africa, France, England.
He was thinking when something cracked in the jungle and everything hushed. Birds stopped singing, and when he listened for his sister, her splashing seemed to melt away. Another crack, a breeze and the sun was sinking.
Stories of spirit pilots and the phantom buzz of broken radios had attracted Leonard, but when he was alone and where some ghosts might be, a creeping zinged down his spine and jangled in his ankles. Crack, again, and he yelled ‘OI!’, jumped out of the ‘plane and ran through the jungle to the beach.
‘What?’
‘I heard something! By the ‘plane.’
‘Of course you did. All sorts of things live out here,’ she said, and walked out of the water and along the sand.
‘But it wasn’t just anything. It was breathing.’
‘You couldn’t hear that!’
‘I could!’
‘Scared now?’ said Odette.
‘No… I’m not.’
They walked home as the sunset took daylight and wrung it bloody red. Pieces of sky turned fleshy pink and burnt into the night, boiling the sea orange, turning it gold where it met the sun…
‘We’ll be late for food,’ said Odette, and pulled her brother along the beach.
‘It’ll keep.’
‘Not hot. You want it hot?’
‘Alright.’
Leonard’s imagined crack followed him through the trees. He wondered what shape and colour it was. He had heard all about the spirits Georges’ mother worried about. Odette mumbled about why did she always end up following him.
They passed a hamlet. People called and gutted fish on stones. Other children played with ducks, women didn’t bother to worry. Cats chased rats up trees. The smell of cooking and woodsmoke, and the cry of a bird drifted across the lagoon as the roar of surf broke along the seaward reefs.
‘Come on,’ said Odette. ‘We’ve walking to do…’
‘I am!’
‘Faster.’
‘I can’t.’
They walked as the stars came out and the lights of their village blinked across the water. These illuminated the old huts and neatly thatched roofs. A signpost pointed to places everyone knew the direction to; old people whispered. Three men pushed a stalled jeep along the road as Leonard and Odette walked up the beach and were home to their mother’s ‘I was going to call you. It’s hot!’