Two weeks later, Raphael smiled sweetly when Georges said, ‘You couldn’t catch a sweat!’ Another fishing trip had ended in tangled lines and an empty bag.
‘At least I try. All you do is nothing!’
‘I’ve got my mother to watch!’
‘Her and a bottle.’ Raphael smelt his friend’s breath and waved his hands. ‘I know.’
Georges needed a drink at eleven in the morning to set him even. He had persuaded his boss to give him wine instead of cooking oil. He smoked too much and kept apart from most of his work-mates. They weren’t involved or insulted. He scared them. His (company) machete was always kept sharp. He wrapped it in an oiled cloth each evening, and walked home slowly with a filled screw-top bottle he’d owned for five years. This fitted in his pocket and was his prize possession. It had GILBEYS written in raised letters around its neck. He topped it up twice a day.
His mother was waiting for him. She hadn’t noticed him leaving in the morning, and wondered if it was him coming home. She had lost her mind in 1959, when a lorry had demolished her previous hut. She’d been cooking and smelt oil ever since the accident. The lorry had been coming at speed from Simpson Point, where it had been overloaded by a group of six irresponsible men. She had cut her hair and embarrassed Georges for months by not staying at home.
He said, ‘I’m back!’ and propped his machete against a bucket. He kicked a dog off the veranda and sat down. ‘Mother?’
She hadn’t remembered answering a question for six years. All she could remember was a man flying through the windscreen of his truck, through her hut and into a stack of brooms.
Georges laughed and shook his head. For all his behaviour he wanted to look after his mother until she died. She died in the spring. He had been in the shop.
‘I’ll take the usual, and a bottle of that.’
‘I kept one back for you. It came in yesterday.’
‘I knew it would.’ It was cane spirit. ‘Keep another.’
The shopkeeper tapped his own head. ‘Don’t worry. There’s plenty more.’
‘Mind there is.’ Georges pulled himself up and pointed a finger. His head touched the roof.
He walked home for his lunch. Other workers sat under trees in the plantation while the sun rose directly overhead and peeled the skin off rocks. Dogs lay by taps; the only things that bothered were flies. The day ripped itself open and sighed to a dead and solid halt. Even Maude gave up working in her garden. Her hoe had made clouds of dust that drifted across the road and settled on neighbours’ washing. A jeep over-heated and blew up.
Georges found his mother dead in her chair. She had a surprised expression on her face and a streak of bird shit in her hair. Georges prodded her and yelled, ‘Mother!’
Maude ran to see. She couldn’t understand how she’d missed realising the woman was dead. Death affected her in the strangest ways. ‘She must have died when that lorry crashed,’ she said, to explain herself, and helped Georges lay his mother out in the hut.
Maude stayed with the body while Georges walked back to East Point. ‘My mother is dead,’ he said to himself. He took out his bottle and had a drink. ‘My mother is dead,’ he said at a house that overlooked the green.
‘You’ve got some money?’ said a man.
‘Here.’
‘Wait at home. We’ll come in half an hour.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Go on.’
Georges walked to the shop. The man he’d spoken to was a mourner; when the shopkeeper saw him again he said, ‘Back again?’
‘My mother is dead.’
‘Oh, Georges. Georges…’
‘I just found her. She looked like she was about to say something.’
‘Oh…’
‘She didn’t.’
‘No…’
‘She’s dead.’
A woman came to buy some soap but the shopkeeper waved her away. He put his hand on Georges’ shoulder. ‘What do you need?’
‘More drink. And some tea. Coffee?’
‘Here…’
‘Can I pay tomorrow? I haven’t got any…’
‘Next week, any time.’
‘Come tonight.’
‘I’ll bring some more.’ He tapped some bottles and smiled. ‘No charge.’
When Georges got home, Maude had swept the hut and left the rubbish in a pile beneath the shelf. She’d ringed it with shells and laid a clean sheet of her own over the body. The mourners came, wailed, and in the evening people came from every village on the island and remembered the corpse as a walker.
Maude knelt Odette beside her and prayed for the spirit to find itself a solid boat, warm winds and calm seas home. She fingered the shroud and when she’d finished said, ‘Open a bottle for Georges.’ He was sitting in a corner.
‘Come on, Georges!’
A man from Balisage began a song about graves opening and spirits flying to Africa. He had a deep voice and no one joined him in the first verse. Another man sang the chorus and waited for a drum in the second verse.
Raphael passed Georges a jug as the mysterious ‘spirit-seeker’ stood up and began to dance. He was from Marianne, carried a switch of coconut leaves and held his eyes wide open. He looked around the crowd and whispered for the spirit to come out. He flicked at anything that moved. Children stood back. He kicked his legs, crouched down and leapt up again. The singing grew louder. Bottles were tossed into the sea. A ‘story-teller’ appeared and began to bother the mourners.
He pretended to be an insect and told a story about five gods and a ship that flew across the ocean with captured spirits. They laughed at people on earth – the mourners jeered. The ‘spirit-seeker’ waved his switch at the man and shouted. Georges covered his ears and yelled ‘Mother!’ over the din, but no one heard him. Maude took Odette and Leonard home, and came back with more wine. She passed the bottles around and took one to Georges.
‘Here!’
When the story-teller had reached a point in his tale where the gods caught a goat, the mourners threw corks at him and chased him away. They left him on the beach and went back to play dice and cards on Georges’ veranda.
The body was carried to Minni-Minni and buried there the next day. For seven nights following, a cup of tea was left out for the spirit, on the eighth a plate of unsalted food. On the ninth day, the spirit was taken away in the pile of rubbish Maude had swept under the shelf. The rubbish was carried to a distant spot by the women from the twelve huts by Georges’, dumped, and in fear of the spirit of his mother haunting them no one looked back as they walked away. Ilois watched death carefully, and didn’t want too much spread over so many small islands in the Indian Ocean.
‘If the spirit-seeker’s from Marianne, why does he have to live in a hut?’ said Odette.
‘There’s things you don’t need to know.’ Maude pricked her finger on a needle. She was sewing Georges’ trousers. He had brought them over the day before and hoped Maude would suggest he stayed in her hut. He could have the veranda. He was hardly ever at home anyway.
He opened his mouth to ask but all he said was, ‘They got ripped. Could you sew them?’
‘Leave them on the rail. I’ll do them later.’
‘I…’
‘Yes?’
Georges looked around. ‘When’s Raphael home?’
‘That’s him.’ She pointed to a boat approaching the shore.
‘He left work early today.’
‘I know.’
Georges pointed at the trousers. ‘I’ll pick them up…’
‘Tomorrow.’