Hours later my whole body seemed to rock with the flow of blood; a gentle movement allied to the rise and fall of soft sifted breath in deep flesh. Numbness had spread from one leg up through my shoulders into the lower part of my head. There was comfort in the heavy smell of warm water, the fecundity of low-lying leaves, steaming chlorophyll, and hot moist air raddled with pollen. A light lapping vibrated through the wood with occasional clicks and chuckles as the rudder swung, or a flap slapped the water like a sucked flipper. Splintered sunbeams illuminated the cracks in the faciaboard, spiralling wood-motes and the floating debris of brushed feather dust. I unbuckled the strap that held me and the blue webbing retracted lazily, as though the coil had to remember what needed to be done warp by weft. I straightened up, shifting my weight from one side to the other. Everything rolled alarmingly. I saw that the plane was floating on a lake filled with lotuses and water hyacinth. The nearest shore was about a forty metres away and thick with lowland trees. My leg wouldn’t move. There was no wound to be seen; no pain. But slowly, as it revived, blood seemed to bruise the flesh. I slid back the glass dome of the cockpit; the air outside was dank, sweet, dense. There was no sound except for the lapping of the water against the fuselage, and round flat leaves flopping. The lily pads were familiar. Like those in the Waterlily House in Kew. I closed my eyes and remembered one time when we had all gathered together outside the entrance: Eldon, Cleo, my father and my mother. My father took me by the hand and pulled me towards the steamed-up door. But Eldon didn’t want us to go in. ‘It’s too hot in there. The Palm House is better.’
My father glowered back at Eldon. ‘You used to say this was more like the place where you were born.’
Eldon looked surprised, although I imagine he must have felt a tinge of secret pleasure.
Before they could argue, Grandma Cleo intervened. ‘Did you hear the peacock? Down by the lake? I’ll take the little one to see it. Penny, you come too.’
I can never forget the disappointment when my father let go of my hand and disappeared into the Waterlily House alone. I did not have the words to say what I felt then; I could only look. My grandfather wagged his head gloomily and ambled towards the large glass Palm House opposite instead.
Cleo and my mother started towards the lake, but I refused to budge. I wanted to wait for my father. When he finally came out Cleo told him, ‘This little one wouldn’t move without you. He wants us all to stay together.’
I did.
When I forced open my eyes again, I expected to see them all by my bed. Instead I found only the jungle frowning around a giant eye. A little unsteadily, I stepped out on to the wing. I lay down, spread-eagled, and sipped a handful of silky water. Only then did I try to get the aircraft to move, paddling without much effect. I climbed back into the cockpit and tested the rudder pedals; they were still wired up. I worked them, slowly wagging the tail-fin from side to side. Part of it was submerged in the water and as a result the plane nosed forward. I pushed harder, right and left, right and left. The big bird began to waddle towards the shore like some slow beast from the past.
When I released the catch on the catapult, seconds before the soldiers stormed the airstrip, my hands had automatically gone to the joystick, my feet instinctively to the rudder bar. I had to forget the terror of the troops, Jaz’s breached body, the detonation of the grenade exploding in Kris’s hand. Somehow I had to learn to fly. I felt the control stick drag as the plane and the wind pressed against each other. I held it firm and the aircraft soared. The whistling of the cold air, the spinning propellor and the emptiness of the sky above the clouds soon soothed me as the wings caught the updraught of a sea-thermal rising against the mountains. The altimeter needle spun faster. The plane climbed higher. The piece of red yarn taped to the outside of the glass flew safe and straight in the airstream. I levelled off up there like an ace. My father would have been proud of me.
The plane floated free for ages until Farindola, wreathed in smoke far behind, seemed no longer even to exist. Then the horror of it all caught up with me and I lost control. The motor cut out: my peacock dipped. The electric starter would not fire again. I didn’t panic: methodically I tested the controls and managed to bring the plane to an even, steady descent. In the distance, to my right, I could see a solitary mountain; below me the spiky canopy of a rainforest; and not too far away the moist alluring eye I had been looking for. The beaked head below me seemed to crane forward. If not for the smooth upward curve of its neck, the landing would have been a dive. The bang was hard but before my head struck the sidebar, I saw the water rise in a huge spray around the cockpit as the plane gouged the lake.
Once I got ashore, I felt I had to rest. I needed more strength to explore. As the light began to fail, water sounds grew: a steady lapping, the plopping of what could have been fish breaking the surface. Insects whirling in the twilight.
I ate a chewbar from the survival kit and watched the water like a hunter, as Kris would have. Should have? The evening air was warm. My whole body was warm: skin, blood, porous flesh. If Jaz was there, he’d have been bustling about: washing, flossing, preparing himself for the night, chatting, honking and gabbing; sucking in his cheeks, rolling his eyes and talking non-stop to keep the darkness at bay. How I wished I could. Despite what had happened, I found I could think of him quite calmly. It was as though by flying I had been able to leave my emotions behind. Up in the sky a magnified moon appeared, staining the world with false light.
In the morning, I remembered that if this was the region where Eldon had described small coconut estates floating like oases in the jungle, then there should be some sign of human habitation around. It was somewhere here, long before the bombing, the blight and the reasserted jungle, that his beloved twenty acres had once flowered with its thatched cottage and sandy garden: an integral part of my imagination even before Uva made it my promised land. It didn’t take long to reach the first plantation of tall grey trees. They still grew in rows, laced with sunlight. Although not as straight as they once might have stood, they were in better shape than those by the old beach hotel. The ground in between was covered with papery creepers. I stripped a fallen palm frond and cleared a path marking, as I went, a wake which I could follow back later. The older trees looked neglected, but I saw that there were enough nuts around from the younger, wilder ones to feed on as long as I found a way to husk them.
Eventually, I reached a fence: the strands of barbed wire were broken but the concrete posts had survived. On the other side scrub had spread over parts of a road.
I went along it until I arrived at a gateway guarded by two concrete elephant heads. The intertwined arms of an avenue of blossom trees beyond them seemed to beckon me. Their broad rubbery leaves clutched bursts of firm flowers, reds in the first trees, giving way to smooth whites further on; each flower glowed with a rich flame at the centre where the petals retreated in a swirl. I was drawn in. The road then banked around a thick hedge and brought me to the brink of a cry.
The house sat low, dappled in dreamlight. The thatched roof bearing down to the ground in the way stone-age dwellings do – close to the earth – sweeping down like a brushstroke with gaping holes where meteorites could easily have passed through. The wall facing me was a hushed pale yellow, while all around overgrown flowering shrubs had entangled themselves with each other in a cacophony of vaulting purples and oranges. On the left I could see a large empty swimming pool, with dwarf palms and lime trees dotted around it in the sand. Beyond the main house, like playground shelters, several smaller mud huts and sheds languished in various stages of disrepair.
I knew then that this had to be the place I had always been yearning for without ever quite knowing it; but was it my refuge or a place already occupied? Although the house looked neglected, the exuberant flowers gave the place an air of continuing habitation. I knew I should be cautious. I slipped back behind the hedge and settled down as though it were a nest that needed to be watched. My nerves were bare. I felt drained.
I wondered whether my father might be inside, not dead but another recluse hiding out in an ancestral home, waiting for things to turn better, a son to find his true self. Lee, the ancient aviator threading seashells, waiting to be relieved of his story; his blue-winged Kfir, dripping wax, tucked away in a thatched hangar. If he were to emerge, I wondered, what should I say?
‘It’s me. Marc. The son you left behind.’ The words tightened into a child’s fist. ‘I’ve come, like you wanted me to.’ Yes, I would have asked him. ‘So what was it that brought you here, Papa? That has kept you here? Where was the wedding? What happened to the band?’
I saw him as an old man, now more like Eldon than anyone else; a strong gaunt face, a mantle of silver hair. His phantom voice would be gravelly. ‘I came, son, because I love this place. The warm ocean breeze, the smell of the earth here, the closeness of the moon. When my father first brought me here, I realised this was what I had been looking for all my life. From the first moment I saw the curve of its vulnerable coastline, as we flew in, I knew I would one day have to make this place my own. Just breathe this air, feel the texture of the jasmine, the lantana, the lilies. This was a garden like I had never imagined before. Have you seen the parrots? The orioles? The woodpeckers? The sky is magic. More full of stars than I had ever dreamt of before. I fell in love here. I wasn’t leaving you when I returned here. I came because I knew that one day you would too, and I had to do the best I could to preserve something of what I found here for you.’
‘But you came because of war, a destroyer …’ Eldon’s distraught accusation echoed in my head.
’No, son. I came to save what I found here, before it was all squandered away. I came to do what I believed was right.’
I imagined him, in his youth, arguing with his own father as they drove around the hills of this island. ‘No, they must not flood the valleys, the old tanks will do. No, they must not destroy the forests, these animals must live too. No, no more plantations of tea. Go for bio-diversity. No, no more history. No more insane bloody foolery. No more war to end war.’
My eyes were smarting. I was completely disoriented. You can’t do that, I wanted to retaliate. But it was my grandfather, surely, not my father speaking. The garden could only be his. This had to be the cottage he was so fond of, the one he had searched for in vain with his son. That was a kingfisher, not a Kfir.
No one emerged. A voyage of love. I realised I was delirious. If anyone would have been hiding inside, it would have been Uva, not my sparring paternal ghosts. Uva, I whispered to myself, with her feathers unfolding.
Yet, I felt more like a child stirring there, than a lover.
A mosaic path glittered under a film of sand. It snaked between large earthenware pots and concrete urns up to a patio sheltered by a luscious pergola of rumpled leaves and white trumpet flowers. A small veranda led to the house itself where big brown shutters sealed the doorway like the flaps of a storybook.
I moved forward slowly, bathed in sweat.
Under the pergola the patio had been tiled in cobalt; the chipped metal chairs and tables, even the light that entered, was cool.
On the other side paving stones led across the sand to a wooden door blocked by a fallen branch. The house must have been abandoned. I breathed a little easier and edged forward as though into an adventure film from a golden era.
The door creaked open. I could make out a big stone sink in one corner and a long galley of waxed cupboards. I poked my stick into the room and rapped the walls: tak, tak, tak. Nothing flew out. No bats, rats or night owls. Not the slightest rustle of life. Even the roaches must have left, I thought. The sink was dry. Above a ledge thin strips of light outlined a closed window. I opened it. Bright sun lit a table piled with clay pots and utensils. A child’s shrunken football was lodged underneath, just as mine used to end up under the work bench in Eldon’s garage. In the still warm air I heard Jaz’s haunting exclamations as he uncovered the cornucopia of our Farindola larder. If only he were here … It hurts to remember everything that has happened, but at least here, with my eyes closed, I find it easier to mould memory to need and practise the simplest art of survival.
In the centre of the house there was enough light from a small spiral staircase to see a cane settee, a dresser and two wooden trunks. In a corner, a small glass-fronted case held some old almanacs and magazines. There was a yellowed newspaper clipping tacked to the side: a picture of a small padded batsman leaping up, both feet off the ground, hitting a cricket ball high into the sky.
The big trunks were like treasure chests: packed with sheets, towels, sarongs, cotton quilts. To me they all seemed pristine despite being threadbare.
The orderliness with which everything had been packed away, except for the football, suggested a house that was never permanently occupied. Every item was storable, kept for periodic not constant use. The place had not been abandoned in a hurry; the family it belonged to seemed to have closed up the house at the end of one weekend, and gone away never to come back.
Some people are able to do that, I guess; perhaps have to do that: close the door and never look back, never return. Perhaps it is what everyone wants to do. After Eldon died, I remember his old friend Anton’s refrain: ‘Leave the past behind, Cleo. Pack your bags. I’ll help you move somewhere new.’ But she wouldn’t. She said she wanted to stay while Eldon’s beloved roses continued to bloom, and she still had the strength to tend to their neat suburban beds.
Exploring the house I felt I too might be able to keep some faith here.
There were two rooms, one on either side of the stairway, each with two beds. The smaller one, stencilled with birds and fish, had a toy cupboard crammed full of jigsaws, board games and crumpled inflatables for the pool. It felt safe despite what had happened to the rest of the region. Perhaps Samandia was the preserve of the gods. I was ready to believe it.
The upper floor turned out to be a large open arena where the slanted roof had been extended to form the only wall. The other sides were shielded by nylon tats which dropped below the edge of a wooden balustrade. From the front I could see a riot of pinks and oranges. Colours that seemed profoundly familiar. Beyond the flowers, where the sand gave way to tough wild grass, coconut palms reached up towards the sky, and beyond them tall jungle trees sprouted small red flames. Just to look at the jumble of blossom, the shimmering herringbone fronds, was to revel in life that seemed amaranthine. I could live here, I told myself then as Jaz might have. There was even an enclosed crop garden and several fruit trees, including mango.
As I surveyed my new domain two ring-neck parakeets screeched past, their short wings furiously beating the warm thick air. They shot between the trees – fast, hard, green bullets – and headed towards the lake I had come from. Their screeches echoed the glee of similar parakeets arriving in Eldon’s garden one summer. I had been the first to notice the new migrants on the Victoria plum tree that spread its long, arching branches over the rose bushes. There were three of them, startlingly green, seeming to climb out of my jungle book then, ripping into the soft mildewed fruit with their bright red beaks. I dragged Eldon out to look at them because the old man had not believed me. ‘There are no parakeets in this country, my dear boy.’ But I was right; they were parakeets, and they thrived in his garden, the botanical gardens nearby, and all the fruit orchards of southern England, adding vivid colours, loud songs and unexpected eating habits to the jetscuffed end of his brittle British century.
Marooned on this hallucinogenic island, I felt I had finally reached the original home of those chance migrants and the other brightly coloured birds that had fascinated me all my boyhood. I was convinced that this, not the Palm Beach coast, was my actual haven – my real destination. Hers and mine.
In a storeroom I discovered mattresses wrapped in plastic, charcoal, paraffin, candles, a carton of matchboxes and a case of arrack. Right at the back a vintage rifle, protected by an oilcloth, and a box of bullets. The rifle had a brass name-plate pinned to its wooden stock: Lee-Enfield. I was delighted.
I wanted to explore the other sheds and huts to see what else I might recognise, but I was ravenous by then. From the walled enclosure I collected a gourd, some okra, various wild fruit and a handful of speckled beans and brought them back to the house. The flesh of the gourd was hard and needed to be boiled. Using some twigs from the garden I set about making a fire in the stone stove outside. It took several attempts. Eldon would have been appalled: ‘You must learn the basics of survival. How to make a fire, walk without water, control your sphincter. You have to be prepared for anything, my boy, and be completely self-sufficient.’ I remembered him telling me how on their famous trip together, he and Lee had trekked for hours through the last remaining rainforest of the island in search of a smoking waterfall and a leopard without spots. ‘I couldn’t keep up,’ Eldon confessed stifling a guffaw. ‘Your father could trek all day without even stopping for a pee. He learned to survive, you see, on nothing but his wits and a bit of self-control.’
Finally I had discovered, it was exactly what I needed to learn too.
That night, watching the candlelight, I couldn’t stop the final images of Jaz and Kris from returning. I tried to recall our earlier moments together instead. Especially Jaz presenting his elegant vegetarian dishes, chatting in his easy way, wheedling persistently whenever his curiosity was aroused; giving the few precious days we had in Farindola a rare charm.
I remembered how one evening he had flourished a kitchen knife and done his little Torvill dance, using a tea-towel as a mask. ‘Look at this. It’s so sharp you could split a lentil with it.’
Something in the way he held it spun me back.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. You just remind me of someone.’
‘A real devil?’
‘My mother, actually,’ I blurted out.
His eyes widened, tickled by the thought. ‘Really. Tell me about her. What was she like? I bet she was gorgeous.’
‘It’s just the knife you were waving about. I remember her with a knife.’ A fragment of a memory from the last time I had seen my mother and my father together surfaced.
‘Like Uva’s?’ Jaz asked surprised.
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘No, it was a kitchen knife. Like that one. She had it in her hand.’ My father was back from one of his journeys abroad. My mother was in the kitchen.
‘What did she do?’ Jaz asked.
I didn’t know. I still don’t know. ‘That is all I remember,’ I said. ‘He left after that, I think. He came here for ever.’
‘Why?’
I had asked my grandmother Cleo the same question when I was older. Why did he leave? Why did he never come back? Was there an argument? I remember Cleo placing her hand over mine and speaking in a slightly husky voice. ‘You see, my dear, Lee was always fascinated by the prospect of adventure. That’s why he joined the RAF. The uniform seemed so much more glamorous to him than your grandfather’s flying school kit. And Lee so loved those fast fighter planes. He wanted to go faster, you know, than his dad in his little Cessna. Faster and further. But after that Gulf effort, he said he needed to believe in something that made more sense. He seemed to think his father’s old home could give him that. I told him life grows from the inside, but I guess we all need a little prompting to start us off. He spent a whole year on the island. He met your mother there. He fell in love and wanted to make it their home one day. So a few years later, when he was asked if he would go back and do some work there, he felt he couldn’t refuse. I think they needed someone to help with air supplies for refugees, or something, but Eldon could never believe that the plane he was in that day was not military. He wouldn’t listen to anyone. Not even me. He never forgave Lee for getting into a uniform in the first place. But I’m sure Lee wanted to show us what else he could do. You see, your father always thought he could do everything, handle anything. He wasn’t really leaving you, or your mother, you know. He went because he believed he was needed there. He always said he was just going ahead, to sort a few things out. He wanted us all to be able to join him one day.’
If only that was true. If only there was a place where we would be reunited for ever with the ones that we lose. If only this was such a place. Perhaps it is. Perhaps that is what the earth is. Our world. A place where we look for those we had lost elsewhere in our previous, less evolved, lives. Could it be? But I have found nothing of his actual life here, or of any of those whom I have missed.
I didn’t want to dwell on him any more that night. I thought I would try to settle down in the smaller bedroom – the child’s room. The sky was visible through the window in there. I lay down looking out for the stars I knew must still be sparking somewhere. I fell asleep dreaming of fathers again; this time not mine.
* * *
I dreamed of a big man, sturdily built, with a large broad chest and an impressive mane of thick black hair. He wore an orange sarong and a copper armband. He carried a scythe with one hand and held a bronze spear in the other. He was standing barefoot on a beach. At his feet a peacock struggled with a silver arrow in its throat. The sky was pitch-black and there was water, impending water, everywhere. He spoke, but his words were in a language I did not understand. He knelt down and tried to remove the arrow from the bird. The arrowhead was caught in the cords of its throat. Each time he pulled the shaft, the bird would rise trying to cry but the only sound came from its flapping feathers. Beneath them the barbed wings of a steel warplane glinted. He put his foot on the bird’s thin blue neck and yanked the arrow once more. The moment it came out, another arrow rushed through the air. This one pierced his own throat. Both arrows looked as though they had once belonged in his leather quiver. As he fell, he seemed to change shape into a leopard. I heard Uva cry out, calling him father. I looked around and saw her bathing in a stream. She had a cloth wrapped around her and knotted above her breasts. The cloth was wet and clung to her skin. With each bowlful of water that she poured, she seemed to dissolve. I shouted out to her but my voice couldn’t reach her. The air thickened with a curtain of rain between us. The river-bank I stood on began to erode. The dotted pattern in the cloth washed away, then the cloth itself melted, leaving her naked in the brief light before her figure too went. The rain, like the waters of the river, turned red; a familiar contaminated waterhole-red. I kept calling to her. I could hear her murmuring; I floated on the contours of the sound. From the shore I entered my cell in the compound outside Maravil and tripped over a polythene bag. Inside it were her remains: a silk skin. In my ear her voice echoed singing the praises of a cocoon.
‘Where are you?’ I shouted, knowing that her presence could not have been only in that discarded shape. Her life was not just breath, but an incarnation surely of a soul wishing; wishing still to share our temporary illumination.
I heard her cry out again. The sound woke me.
I was in a sweat: my face and hands had been bitten all over. Warnings about maladies and fatal infections, the rows upon rows of repellents and prophylactics I had ignored at the chemist back at the terminal before I set off, whizzed around mocking me. My arms ached; my head was swollen. The insides of my thighs hurt. All my muscles seemed to have been twisted in the night. As I tried to unstretch, the sole of my left foot curled in a spasm. It was unbearable. I wanted to pull it apart; turn my body inside out and tear it to shreds. My skin was burning, itching, retreating. I flung off the sheet and saw my body had erupted. I tried to bend my toes but they were like stumps. I could see horns protruding, yellowed and ridged. My bones being extruded. The journey from life to death, I realised then, was an unpeeling. The converting of an inner life into an outer.
Where was the boatman who stripped back the layers?
I felt sure Uva was dead. I wanted to plunge into her darkest, thickest jungle to die too and rot; fertilise her wretched earth if nothing else.
Then an excruciating, gut-wrenching cramp wrung every tube in the pit of my body. I wanted to scream to do something to ease the pain.
I staggered out of the house into the trees, trying to keep moving. As I blundered about the jungle, punching at leaves, the sounds that had plagued me slowly receded, the gripe eased. But even there it seemed Eldon had to have the last word. I don’t know why, or how, he came to be the arbiter of my whole life. I couldn’t stop him. ‘We all have a vision of the world as it should be, and our place in it.’ He launched into another of his little sermons. ‘But for most of us it takes a lifetime to discover it.’ Good, I was exhausted. My life was over. I wanted no more of his dodgy homilies. I wanted everything to be over. There seemed no point in drawing it out. Stop breathing, I told myself, and soon it would end. But then, a little further on, I heard the sound of another breath: a lung exhaling, inhaling. Slow, deliberate, difficult breathing. There was nothing to be seen that could be making the sound until, in a clump of overgrown roots, I spied a small brown huddle. A foot clawed the air as if trying to get a hold of something to push it further into the centre. The creature tired quickly and lay with its eyes half closed. I made a soothing, clucking sound and pushed some leaves towards it. There was no reaction. I touched it. The fur was warm. It still did not react. I thought it must have died, sapped by its last effort to escape, and touched it again, feeling warm meat underneath. This time it did move, revealing a wound on its arm. I tried to shift the awkward limb and the monkey whimpered. It is sometimes kinder to kill, I remembered.
I couldn’t. I felt a bond. Evolution was not the survival of the fittest. Our evolution must come from the survival of the weak, retrieved against the odds, I realised. It must matter, otherwise why would we care about anyone? How could I have felt anything meaningful for Uva, if we were only the random firing of some scattered neurones; the accidental binding of chemicals in a pointless law of cosmic efficiency? I could see then why I had to value life over death. Any life, including mine.
I couldn’t live without Uva, but if I was to die without her, I would have to come back and start again. Samandia was the only safe place I knew she knew. We have to live in hope. It was clear to me then that I had to help the animal to survive. I stripped off my shirt to use as a sack to carry it. Only when I lifted the creature up did I notice one of its legs was also hurt. It was not going to be easy.
Back at the house I cleaned the wounds with lime and gunpowder extracted from a cartridge. I even made a cradle for it out of coconut fronds.
The monkey was too feeble to do anything. I gave it water, and tried to feed it fruit.
‘You’ll waste away,’ I said when it refused to eat, idiotically pleased to be able to address another even with this dire warning, even if it had no understanding of my words. I had made my choice.
Although I still felt a little ill, by evening I was able to coax a small banana into the monkey’s mouth. It seemed grateful, and I felt grateful myself for its presence, its vulnerability.
With the monkey dependent on me, my priorities became clear. I thought we would both sleep better on the upper floor where the air was fresher. In a cupboard I found a set of mosquito nets and I rigged one up from a roof beam. I lugged up a mattress for me and a basket for the monkey. It was like becoming a child again, when novelty could so easily displace anxiety.
I felt safer on a solid floor that had escaped the tug of the earth. I wanted to defy the earth. To live with the weightiest things floating above the ground: to bring boulders and rocks, a bathful of water, tubs of flowering shrubs, a garden plot, anything and everything upstairs. All to float in a world above a world. To live in the gracious memory of our antenatal flights; our seeking of natural light.
The next morning, rested and collected, I could see a whole day’s work fall into place. How I would have to stamp my own mark on the house, shape it to my needs. I felt I should redesign the whole place, become an inventor, an artist and a carpenter. Become my own Kris – even a Crusoe: plunder the wreck, explore the surroundings. There could be other houses around, possibly even inhabited. I felt an urgent need to know more, and to be in control once again. I felt a strength I had not felt before.
The path I had first cut from the lake was still plain to see. Perhaps too plain. Fortunately fresh leaves were beginning to unfurl at the edges, and in the bare patches new life had emerged: oddly shaped black beetles, a line of tottering leaf-cutters, corrugated caterpillars. I picked my way warily around the edge of the lake in case it had already become a trap, but there was nothing to fear.
Pulling the half-beached aircraft right out of the water, I saw again how painstakingly Kris had installed the two solar panels on the wings using bright brass hexagonal screws, how he had replaced the rubber wheels on the fuselage and renovated the padding in the cockpit. It was not so long ago, but already these were the very things that needed to be removed. To be utilitarian – to recycle, to waste not – seemed undeniably right, and yet required a measure of ruthlessness which seemed mercenary. I had to look at everything in that way; those were the values I needed to survive. Need now for ever.
Then, just before I closed up the cockpit, I saw a small parcel lodged between the seat and the safety harness; a piece of silk tied around it.
I had to force the lump in my throat down, hard. Picking up the parcel I slowly unwrapped it.
My first thought was that this time the knife really was Uva’s. But again her symbol was not on it. It had to be Kris’s. He must have died without it. It floated in my hand, a pair of furled wings. A gift? I climbed out of the aircraft and, once on the ground, flicked it open the way I remembered Kris, and Uva before him, do; like an eye flashing. I stared at it as though by looking I could decipher all its secrets, return all the blood it had let: to the soldier in his workshop, to the bats in the cave, to the old couple in Farindola. By the water’s edge I knelt and rinsed the blade. Closing it firmly I placed it in my breast pocket and felt an echo of Uva’s hand on it, as though she had reached through the skin of another to touch me again. Warm and close. She would want me to be a survivor; she’d be relying on me to be here. This time I knew I must.
Within a few days I managed to fix the pantry door, refit the pulleys for the broken tat, clear the drains and even re-hang the metal gates, buckled as they were, discovering practical skills I never knew I had. I went back to the aircraft and completely dismantled it. Every mechanical bit, every scrap of wire, wood, strut and bar that might come in useful, I brought back to the sheds around the house and stacked up in a stupendous jigsaw puzzle never to be reconstructed. I made birdhouses to entice barbets, the way Eldon did for his robins and finches, and feeding trays and birdbaths. ‘My father must have been the robin,’ I quipped to my speechless companion as work displaced despair. ‘And I am the son.’
Engrossed in these functional tasks, I didn’t worry about what might lie ahead. There had been no sign of any other inhabitants; no sign of any danger. All I was concerned with was to make this place my home and hers: a magnet for our endangered souls.
When the monkey grew strong enough to move I let it wander about the garden. It never wanted to stray very far. It limped about, mimicking me by collecting firewood, bunches of beans, brinjals and bananas.
It wasn’t long before I felt the need to tackle the walled crop garden and bring it under proper control too. There was so much I could have learnt from my grandfather about gardening, but all I could recall then was the old man’s enthusiasm for watering and for pruning.
‘These green suckers have to be taken out,’ Eldon used to say, carefully parting the roses. ‘Otherwise the whole bush turns to jungle.’ As a child I would watch him open his red secateurs and clip the bright new shoots bristling with giant thorns and chuck them to the side of the lawn. ‘You see, my boy, you have to look after the old if you want to foster the young.’
He was so proud of his rose garden. He had about two dozen rose bushes: Nymphenburgs, Nur Mahals, Golden Wings and Moonbeams. He was not an expert, but he enjoyed his flowers and tended them with real care. Every month, and sometimes even more frequently, he would visit Kew Gardens to check how well his roses were doing in comparison with those propagated by the professionals. He would pick up tips from the rose beds by the Palm House and marvel at the regimental discipline and unwavering control displayed there. I remember the year he managed to beat the pros for the first bloom. He had celebrated with a chilled bottle of Cava from his local wine shop, where he couldn’t stop himself from mentioning it to the young sales assistant. I was with him, choosing a packet of crisps for my treat. ‘The bloom,’ he had said raising the bottle. ‘For the bloom.’
For him the passage of time was marked in a hundred different ways: by plants that blossomed perennially, biannually, diurnally, bushes that fixed the seasons, buds that breathed by the week, the day, the hour, and over them all every few minutes aircraft, kin to his own, that would swing like the carriages of a galactic wheel. He had been a pilot training pilots for most of his life, and a gardener for only his last years. Every four minutes, then every three, and sometimes every two minutes, the roar of a passing aircraft brought back to him his lifelong involvement with the sky, just as each bud in the garden drew him down again to his abiding earth.
‘The future,’ he was fond of saying, ‘is not something you can imagine. You can only rearrange the past in your mind, you know, to look like it is still to come. We have to bathe in a pool of memory, and play little tricks with its surface, just to live another day. We think we are going forwards, but really we are always on a journey going back to find something that we might once almost have had.’
Thinking of my own future, I set about locating the cinnamon and the turmeric that I was sure were growing somewhere around. I found chilli and tomato. I needed more nourishment. I cleared an area bigger than the whole of Eldon’s old garden and squeezed seeds wherever I could. I wanted to tame the plot to produce all that I needed, and exactly when I needed it, as ambitious agriculturists the world over have done so often before. All that was required, I believed, was time and keen observation: measurement and calculation, skills I reckoned I must surely have inherited from my fastidious forebears.
By the end of the day I was exhausted; my hands were sore from digging and my skin stung, but I could see I had made a real impression on my surroundings: the ploughed land exuded a sense of real vigour from those wilful acts of ownership. The wilderness was in retreat, but even Uva could only commend me on the flowering it was bound to leave in its wake.
In the days that followed, I became obsessed: planting, replanting, transplanting. I cut an irrigation channel from the well so that even the runoff from my daily wash-bucket ended up watering the crops. I became expert in recognising subtle variations in the podzolic soil. I uncovered a store of rock phosphate in a shed and worked out how to use coconut husks for moisture retention, fibre as mulch, recycle waste through organic compost-generation. I dreamt of domesticating the jungle fowl I had seen running around the lake. I made traps and plans for extensive re-fencing, bringing more and more of the land under my care.
Occasionally I came across useless huts and only once another house of a more substantial nature. I immediately stripped it of fire-lighters and stores. The whole area had been completely depopulated, but it didn’t dishearten me. I wrote my initial wherever I went, convinced that one day Uva would come and see my mark and know that I was here, faithfully waiting. With Kris’s knife I carved the letter like a bush-lark’s wings on tree trunks, I drew it with charcoal and even wrote it in the sand.
During the nights, though, doubts did return. How would she know I’d escaped? She might have thought that, even if I had, I would never make it this far. Maybe I had been too slow in getting to Samandia, just as I had been too slow to save her at our Palm Beach Hotel. The odds were against us there. I should have realised it. The odds were against us all along.
In daylight I didn’t let such thoughts deflect me from turning the whole plantation into a self-sustaining refuge. A garden husbanded for her: full of flowering bushes, arboreal vines, thick yellow-bordered, succulent leaves. I embedded red crabclaws in between and arranged bursts of blue tumefied lances in the pots.
Working with the trails of pink and orange and purple that wafted in the warm breeze like butterflies nourished me; those translucent wings gave me a pleasure unlike any of the more utilitarian tasks I had done earlier. Sometimes I would see Jaz in the lazy lift of a dazzling arm, or catch Uva’s moist perfume in the cracks between the petals.
I wanted space and order, light and colour. I wanted the place teeming with a hundred different types of birds, of bees, of squirrels. I wanted them all to come, drawn by a lodestone of passion and the heady, overpowering scent of a garden in the middle of a jungle; to bring Uva with them, and if she could not come here, I wanted the garden to become her.
* * *
Each day I cut a notch on a tree by the well; each night I worked on a crude map using an old table-top and ink made out of charcoal and water.
I dreamt of building a cistern, with an intricate network of bamboo aqueducts hovering just above ground level, perfectly pitched to achieve an overall gradient of a few centimetres. I wanted a smooth even flow which, with little valves and contraflow switches, would measure out the right douche for every one of my favourite plants. I imagined opening the watergate, like an olden-day rajah, as the sun collapsed releasing a perfect benevolent flood. The small electric motor from the aircraft would have been ideal for pumping up the water from the well, except that I couldn’t get it to work. I fantasised about harnessing a team of wild oxen to an Archimedean screw, but the practical solution I finally came up with was a windmill to power the spindle on the well.
I designed a set of four sails out of palm fronds and bed linen. I made them to fit the broken propellor from the plane, planning to fix the whole thing to the coconut tree by the well. Only when all the components were in place, on the ground, did I realise that I hadn’t worked out how I would get it up high enough. I was furious with myself. While I vented my frustration, the monkey scuttled away to the breadfruit tree at the end of the garden. But my luck held, it seemed then, once again. What was it the old man used to say? ‘The difference between the impossible and the possible is sometimes simply a matter of geography.’
The breadfruit tree was fifty paces from the well; with its graduated limbs, it looked like a stairway to the sky. The branches were prodigious: the gnarled limbs more solid than the earth itself. They offered easy footholds and the tree hardly moved as I hauled myself up. I clambered one more level and edged towards a little gap of clear air. It seemed perfect. I took one last look and was horrified to see the glint of a steel blade hacking through the saplings on the other side of the stretch of open scrubland.
A small figure in khaki emerged wielding the machete. I could see a gun slung over one shoulder, The figure moved slowly, testing each step, each breath of air. The monkey huddled up to me. I didn’t know what I should do. I only had the little butterfly knife with me, more a talisman than a weapon.
The figure stopped, unstrapped a knapsack and perched on a boulder. The gun was placed next to the knapsack. With the cap also off, it looked like a woman. Her hair fell to her shoulders. She consulted a small device from her knapsack, tapping at it. I was desperate to shield the house, the garden, my fruit trees and crops. If I had my rifle, I thought, would this be the time to use it? To stalk, get close, and then shoot to kill? Wasn’t self-protection my right.
She drank from a water canteen, her head flung back. Then she donned her equipment and retreated back into the jungle.
I released my breath. She had turned away from the house, and towards the dried-out river in the south. I reckoned there was enough time to collect the rifle and still catch up with her at the river bend. I dropped to the ground and ran; the little monkey gripping my back. Slipping into the house, I grabbed the rifle and took a short cut past the anthills, checking all the time for signs of any other intruders.
When I reached the river bed the woman was already at the door of a small Explorer Gadfly – a single-seat mini-helicopter – parked in the sand. She packed the back of it with her equipment and then, loosening her uniform, squatted down. I stretched out on the ground, my heart pounding the warm earth. My father, I knew, was an expert marksman. I clipped the telescopic sights into place and lifted the rifle to my shoulder. The stock against my cheek and the steel trigger beneath my finger both felt wet and slippery. My beard prickled. She was now unarmed, motionless; well within range. The cross-hairs on the magnified lens divided her slim figure into four segments. With one bullet her body could be punctured. It would collapse, dehydrate and wilt in the baking sun. Feed our hungry land. Do it now, Jaz implored. If I do this now, will I be safe? Will I save this place? I asked myself. Yes, Kris hissed. If you kill her now, whoever she is, you will at least have some reprieve, and her flying machine to escape in if they ever come looking for her. The little monkey beside me covered its eyes with its small maggoty hands. But I didn’t squeeze the trigger. The woman rose, fixed her clothes and climbed into the Gadfly. A moment later it took off with a quick whirr. I remembered how Eldon, my father’s father, said he had never even killed an ant. Then, and only then, did I think of Uva.
That evening I persuaded myself that the woman I had seen was only a scout who had temporarily lost her bearings. The geographic, even the military, interest in abandoned coconut plantations for any of the island’s warlords must surely be very limited. She must have just stopped to relieve herself on a long cross-country flight. I was sure she had seen nothing worth coming back for, but even so her appearance troubled me. Although I convinced myself there would be no more scouts, I knew I should be more cautious about the signs and markings I made for Uva, the careful cultivation and my programme of renovation. Any stray flight overhead, a re-routed satellite, would notice the vegetable plot, the orchard, the garden and the repaired roof of the house.
In the end I pinned my hopes on the possibility that such an isolated and primitive homestead as mine would be ignored if ever seen from the air. Nevertheless I knew I needed a balance between order and ruin to give me peace on all fronts. The beguiling windmill, my dreams of toil-free irrigation, had to be abandoned. The labour of the bucket soothed my nerves, tired me out so that I could sleep a little more soundly at night. The case of old arrack I had found helped, but it also made me jittery. The screech of the parakeets at sundown, the cries of new jungle birds discovering the orchard sometimes rattled me. The evenings turned fraught. I couldn’t stop myself from recalling the figure of the intruder: adjusting her height, her hair, her movement. Comparing it to what I could visualise of Uva. The worst was when I imagined she might have been the one in my sights and that I had not recognised her. I wondered then whether she would have recognised me? A gunman with sunburnt skin and hair in dreadlocks? Perhaps the days had been too many.
Every evening I’d tot up the score on my wooden calendar, again and again, as though they were the beads of a liturgy.
Then one night, having lost count several times, I tripped over my solar lamp. It burst into a thousand sharp stars in the empty pool.