Paul heard about it and he walked into the back yard and cut the rope. You just don't do that. Everyone waited to see what Marsdon would do, but he didn't do anything. He's hated Paul ever since. It was after that he went to the States and got into the army, or that's what he said he was doing. I wish he'd stayed there.
Paul didn't know the woman, he wasn't being noble as far as I could tell. He did it because it was dangerous; he did it because it was fun. Some fun if you ask me. You'd never know when he was going to pull one of those, you'd be washing your hair and you'd look out the window and there he'd be swinging from some goddamn tree, like Tarzan. He was like a little boy that way. He always said he knew what he was doing, but I knew some day he'd try it once too often and that would be that.
That's one of the reasons I stopped working on his boats. He was taking too many chances.
The stuff comes from Colombia, on the freighters. For the government there it's just another cash crop. Nobody can do anything about the freighters and once they're out in the ocean nobody can do anything about that either, except maybe hijack the boat. People have tried that but it's not too safe any more, they're shooting back. The U.S. knows which boats it's on, they follow everything by satellite, they can track the big boats by the sound of the motors; so they can't get it into the States that way. They bring it here, to one of these islands, and they split it up and put it onto yachts or private planes, they're using those more now, and they take it up to Miami or maybe in through the Virgin Islands. It's not just the U.S. and Cuba trying to control it here. The third group is the mob, and they're spending more money. It's a guaranteed multi-million-dollar business, so they can afford a top-level lobby in Washington, to keep them from legalizing it. Nobody wants it legalized, then you could grow it right there in your own back yard, the bottom would fall out of the market.
Ellis never stopped them, they were paying him off, but that may be changing, he may want in on the ground floor. He just made a big bust in the harbour over at St. Antoine. It seems some locals were growing it up there behind the bananas and smuggling it out on the fishing trawlers. A medium-sized operation but the big ones don't want any competition, and Ellis doesn't want the peasants marketing it themselves, he'd lose his cut. I'd guess it was the mob who put Ellis up to making the bust. Two to one he'll resell it himself.
At first they were just hiring Paul's boats, piecework, to make the run up from here to Miami. But then he went down there himself and bought his own army general. He figured why should he be the middleman when he could buy wholesale himself and sell retail, which makes sense except that then he had them all down his back, the CIA, the mob, Ellis, the works. No thanks, I said, I like my skin the way it is, only the holes God gave me. I told him I'd do the tourists, they'd trust me more because I was white and a woman, as long as he bought a few local cops for me, I'd do retail, but none of that other stuff.
The second reason I stopped was Prince. I just met him in a beach bar and it was love at first sight, that never happened to me before. I know you think it's weird because he's so much younger than me but that's the way it happened. I don't know what it was, maybe it was the eyes. He looked at you straight on, you felt that everything he was saying just had to be the truth. It wasn't always, I found that out, but he always believed it was. He even believed all that communist stuff, he really believed he could save the world. He couldn't tell you something and not believe it himself. He was so sweet. I was a real sucker for that.
He didn't want me going out on the boats with Paul, he didn't want me having anything to do with Paul in that way any more, he was jealous as hell. I guess I was a sucker for that, too. He wanted me all to himself, nobody else ever wanted that. He wanted us to have a baby. I never felt that important before.
As for Paul, you know what he did? He shook hands with me. That was all. I thought I was going to cry but instead I laughed. And I thought, that's what it's been like all along, sleeping with him and everything, there's been nothing more to it than that. Shaking hands.
Rennie wakes up in the middle of the night and Paul is still there, she can hardly believe it; he's even awake, he's a shape in the darkness, above her, resting on one elbow; is he watching her?
"Is that you?" she says.
"Who else would it be?" he says. She doesn't know. She reaches out for him and he's tangible, he doesn't go away.
It's early morning. Rennie can hear a sound outside the window, a bleating. She gets out of bed and looks: it's a goat, right beside the house, with a chain around its neck attached to a stone so it can't wander off. She wishes it would shut up. Two men are nearby, hacking at the shrubs with machetes. Gardeners. One of them has a transistor radio, which is thinly playing a hymn. Paul is still asleep, he must be used to it. She was dreaming there was another man in the bed with them; something white, a stocking or a gauze bandage, wrapped around his head.
When she wakes again Paul is gone. Rennie gets up and puts on her clothes, then wanders through the house looking for him. It's nobody's house, it could be a motel, it's empty space and he's left no footprints. It occurs to her that she's just spent the night with a man about whom she knows absolutely nothing at all. It seems a foolhardy thing to have done.
She goes outside. There's a tree beside the porch, covered with pink flowers, a swarm of hummingbirds around it. It looks arranged. The too-bright sunshine, the rock garden, the road below it along which two women are walking, one carrying a large tree limb balanced on her head, the foliage and then the blue harbour dotted with postcard boats, the whole vista is one-dimensional this morning, a scrim. At any moment it will rise slowly into the air and behind it will appear the real truth.
There's a noise coming from behind a clump of trees to the east, a desolate monotonous wail, a child. It goes on and on, as if this is a natural form of speech, almost like breathing. A woman's voice rises, there are thumps; the child's howling changes in intensity but not in rhythm.
Rennie looks through the telescope, which is focused on one of the yachts. There's a woman in a red bikini, lowering herself into the water; the telescope is so strong that even the roll of fat above the bikini bottom, even the striations on her belly are visible. Is this Paul's hobby, peering at distant flesh? Surely not. Yet the telescope confers furtive power, the power to watch without being watched. Rennie's embarrassed by it and turns away. She swings herself in the hammock, trying not to think. She feels deserted.
When Paul still doesn't come back, she goes into the house. She checks out the refrigerator for something to eat, but there's not much. Ice cubes in the ice cube tray, a tin of condensed milk with holes punched in the top, a small paper bag full of sugar, some yellowing limes, a pitcher of cold water. Noodles in the cupboard, a bottle of rum, a packet of coffee, some Tetley's teabags, a tin of Tate & Lyle golden syrup with a string of ants undulating around the lid. They skipped dinner last night and she's starving.
The logical explanation is that Paul has gone for food, since there isn't any. She wishes he'd left a note for her, but he doesn't seem like the note-leaving type. The house is very empty. She walks through the livingroom again; there aren't even any books or magazines. Maybe he keeps his personal things on the boat, the boats. She goes into the bedroom and looks into the closet: a couple of shirts, a spear gun and a mask and flippers, jeans folded on a hanger, that's it.
In the bureau there are some T-shirts, neatly stacked, and stuck at the back of the top drawer a couple of photos: colour snapshots, a white colonial house with a double garage, a green lawn, a yellow-haired woman in a shirtwaist dress, smiling to reveal slightly buck teeth; hair short and close to the head, an unsuccessful permanent growing out, two little girls, one blonde, one reddish-brown, both in pigtails with ribbons, it must have been a birthday. The mother's hands on their shoulders. The sun casts shadows under their eyes so that even though they're smiling they look slightly disappointed, the disappointment of ghosts. In the other picture Paul is there too, much younger, a crewc
ut but it must be him: a shirt and tie and pants with sharp creases, and beneath his eyes the same shadows.
Rennie feels she's prying but she's into it now, she might as well go on. It's not as if she'll use it for anything: she just wants to know, she wants to find something that will make Paul real for her. She goes into the bathroom and looks through the medicine cabinet. The brand names are unrevealing: Tylenol in a large bottle, Crest toothpaste, Elastoplast, Dettol. Nothing unusual.
There's another bedroom, or she assumes it's a bedroom. The door's closed but not locked: it opens as easily as all the other doors. It is a bedroom, or at least there's a bed in it. There's also a table, with what looks like a radio on it, a complicated-looking one, and some other equipment she can't identify. In the closet there's a large cardboard box standing on end. The address label's been torn off. It's full of styrofoam packing beads, but otherwise empty. It looks very familiar.
There's someone in the house, walking across the wooden floor. She feels as if she's been caught in a forbidden room, though Paul hasn't forbidden anything. Still, it isn't nice to snoop in other people's houses. She comes out, closing the door behind her as quietly as she can. Luckily there's a hallway: she can't be seen.
But it's not Paul, it's Lora, in a fresh pink dress with bare shoulders. "Hi there," she says. "I brought you some stuff." She's at the kitchen counter, taking it out of a straw basket: bread, butter, a carton of long-life milk, even a tin of jam. "He never has anything in the house. I'll make us some coffee, okay?"
She gets out the electric kettle, the coffee, the sugar; she knows exactly where everything is. Rennie sits at the wooden table, watching her. She knows she should feel thankful for all this attention, thoughtfulness, but instead she's irritated. This isn't her kitchen and she doesn't live here, so why should it bother her that Lora is acting as if she owns the place? And how did Lora know she'd be here? Maybe she didn't know it. Maybe she's in the habit.
"Where's Paul?" says Lora.
"I don't know," Rennie says. She's on the defensive: shouldn't she know, shouldn't he have told her?
"He'll turn up," says Lora lightly. "Here today, gone tomorrow, that's Paul."
Lora brings the coffee, a cup for each of them, and sets it down on the table. Rennie doesn't want to ask for food, though she's ravenous; she doesn't want to tell Lora about missing dinner. She doesn't want to tell Lora anything. She would like Lora to vanish, but instead Lora sits down at the table, settling in. She sips her coffee. Rennie watches her hands, the squat fingers, the rough gnawed skin around the nails.
"I wouldn't get too mixed up with Paul if I was you," she says. Here it comes, thinks Rennie. She's going to tell me something for my own good. In her experience, things that people told you for your own good were always unpleasant.
"Why not?" she says, smiling as neutrally as possible.
"I don't mean you can't," says Lora. "Hell, why not, it's a free country. Just, don't get mixed up, is all. Not that he gets that mixed up with most people anyway. Easy come, easy go. Around here there's a high turnover."
Rennie isn't sure what she's being told. Is she being warned off or just warned? "I guess you've known him a long time," she says.
"Long enough," says Lora.
Now there are footsteps and a shadow falls on the front window, and this time it is Paul, coming across the porch. He walks through the door smiling, sees Lora, blinks but keeps on smiling.
"I went for eggs," he says to Rennie. "I thought you'd be hungry." He sets a brown paper bag down on the table, proud of himself.
"Where in hell did you get any eggs, at this time of day?" says Lora. "The eggs aren't in yet." She's getting up, to go Rennie hopes, she sets down the coffee mug.
Paul grins. "I've got connections," he says.
Paul scrambles the eggs, quite well, they're not too dry; Rennie gives him three and a half stars for the eggs. They eat them with jam and toast. There's a toaster, though the only way you can get it to work, says Paul, is by short-circuiting it with a paring knife. He keeps meaning to get a new one, he says, but new toasters are smuggled in and none have come in lately.
After breakfast Rennie thinks she should offer to wash the dishes, since Paul did the cooking. "Forget that," says Paul. "Someone comes in." He takes her hands and pulls her to her feet and kisses her, his mouth tasting of buttered toast. Then he leads her into the bedroom. This time he takes off her clothes, not too quickly, without fumbling. She takes his hands with their blunt practical fingers, guides him, they slide onto the bed, it's effortless.
Rennie comes almost at once, they're both slippery with sweat, it's luxurious, indulgent, gleeful as rolling around in warm mud, the muscles of her thighs are aching. He pauses, goes on, pauses, goes on until she comes again. He's skilled and attentive, he's good at it. Maybe she's just a quick fuck for him, a transient, maybe they're both transients, passing through, is that what Lora was trying to say? But she can live with that, it's something, and something is better than nothing after all.
After a long time they get up and take a shower; together, but Paul is absent-minded as he soaps her back and then her breasts, carefully enough but he's already thinking about something else. She passes her hands over his body, learning him, the muscles, the hollows. She's looking for something, his presence in his own body, the other body beneath the tangible one, but she can't reach him, right now he's not there.
Paul takes Rennie's arm above the elbow as they step out into the white light. She wants to ask what they're going to do now, but she doesn't, because it doesn't seem to matter. Go with the flow, Jocasta would say, and she's going. She feels lazy and unhurried; the future, which contains among other things an overdraft at the bank, seems a long way from here. She knows she's fallen right into the biggest cliche in the book, a no-hooks, nostrings vacation romance with a mysterious stranger. She's behaving like a secretary, and things must be bad, because it isn't even bothering her. As long as she doesn't fall in love: that would be more than secretarial, it would be unacceptable. Love or sex? Jocasta would ask, and this time Rennie knows. Love is tangled, sex is straight. High-quality though, she'd say. Don't knock it.
They walk down to the sea and along the beach. By now he's remote but friendly, like a tour guide. Part of a package.
"See that building?" he says. He's pointing to a low shed-like structure. It's painted green and has three doors. "That made a lot of trouble here a couple of years ago. Ellis built it, it was supposed to encourage the tourists."
"What is it?" Rennie asks, unable to see why it would be encouraging.
"Now they use it to store fishnets in," says Paul, "but it used to be a can. A public can; Men, Women and Tourists. The idea was that the tourists would get off the boat and need a place to shit, and it would be right there handy for them. But the people here didn't think a thing like that should be down on the beach, out in the open like that. They thought it was indecent. They filled it up with stones, Tourists first." He smiles.
"They don't like tourists?" says Rennie.
"Let's put it this way," says Paul. "When the tourists come in, the prices go up. The big election issue this year is the price of sugar. They say it's getting too high, the people can't afford it."
"Just as well, it's bad for you," says Rennie, who believes in roughage, more or less.
"That depends on what else you have to eat," says Paul.
There's music, coming along the beach, wooden flutes and a drum. It's a parade of some sort, a mob of people walking along on the sand. Even though it's morning they have torches, cloth wrapped on sticks and soaked in kerosene, Rennie can smell it. Behind the adults in the crowd, around the edges, children are jumping and dancing in time to the music. Two kids are carrying a banner made from an old sheet: PRINCE OF PEACE: HE WORKS FOR YOU NOT YOU FOR HIM. Out front is Elva, chin up, strolling rather than marching. She has a white enamel potty in one hand and an unfurling roll of toilet paper in the other. She holds these objects high, as if they're trop
hies.
Rennie and Paul stand to the side as the parade goes past. At the very end comes Marsdon, still in his boots; the heels sink into the sand, it's hard for him to walk. He sees the two of them but does not acknowledge them.
"What does it mean?" says Rennie. "The toilet paper."
"It's aimed at the government," says Paul. "It's what they'll need after the election."
"I don't understand," says Rennie.
"They'll be so scared they'll shit their pants," says Paul. "Roughly translated." He's indulging her again.
They walk up the beach to the main road of the town. The parade has turned around now and is coming back; people have stopped to watch it. There's a car parked also, with two men in mirror sunglasses in the front and a third in the back. He's wearing a black suit, like an undertaker.
"The Minister of Justice," says Paul.
Paul says a lot of the stores are closed because of the election. Knots of men are gathered here and there; sun glints on the bottles as they pass from hand to hand. Some of the men nod to Paul. Not to Rennie: their attention slides over her, around her, they see her but only from the corners of their eyes.
They go up the hill and along a back street. There's a persistent hum; as they walk north it becomes a throb, a steady heartbeat. Metal, a motor of some kind.
"The power plant," says Paul. "It runs on oil. That's the poor end of town."
They go into a store called The Sterling Emporium. Paul asks for some long-life milk, and the woman gets it for him. She's about forty-five, with huge muscled arms and a small neat head, the hair screwed into lime-green plastic curlers. She brings out a brown paper bag from under the counter. "I save it for you," she says.
"Eggs," Paul says. He pays. Rennie can't believe how much they cost.
"If they're that hard to get," she says, "why doesn't someone start a chicken farm?"