As well as the wider sense of guilt he felt for the victims of the attack there was the specific feeling that he might have done something to save Sandy Beach. Of course to begin with he didn’t know for sure that Beach was one of the casualties. In the first couple of days it was almost impossible to find out. Calls to Beach’s employers were useless because their headquarters in the World Trade Center had been obliterated along with everything else. It was three days before William was able to find out for certain that Beach was listed as missing.
Here surely he had to assign himself some responsibility. He was with Beach only a few minutes before the attack, for Christ’s sake! He should have been able to do something to prevent him going to work. If he hadn’t been so selfish, so obsessed with his own mission of returning to the island and Lucy and the child who was more than likely his daughter, he could have saved his old schoolmate. If he’d only pressed him to have a second cup of coffee! Beach would surely have called on his cell phone to postpone his meeting. The guy was such a tightwad he’d have been certain to have done that for another free coffee. But what was he thinking of? Sandy was almost certainly dead and here was William remembering his meanness, something that was no fault of his own but a result of his impoverished childhood. Jesus, the poor guy had lived in a house where he probably never got a coffee because no-one could ever find the stuff or a cup to put it in! If he, William, had been a kinder person, he might have suggested Beach call in sick and they take the day off and trawl a few bars. He might at least have appeared interested in Beach’s conversation which would almost certainly have led to the latter getting on a roll talking about himself and maybe forgetting his appointment. There were dozens of things he could have done that he hadn’t. Maybe it was stretching it, insane even, to suggest he could have prevented the entire attack. But he could at least have saved Sandy Beach.
This was all bad enough but what made it worse was that although he had failed to save Beach, Beach had saved him. If he hadn’t met Beach he would never have learned about Lucy having a child, quite possibly – no, almost certainly – his own daughter, and would never have decided to head immediately to the island and would therefore have gone to his meeting and most likely have been killed along with the people who had turned up and were all posted missing. He felt not only the guilt that all survivors feel, but the additional burden that he owed his continued existence to one of the victims.
William’s anxiety levels were not only raised by these feelings of responsibility, but also by his own imagination. He saw himself standing in his own office watching through a window an aircraft heading straight for him. He realized that these visions had little basis in reality, that they were collages of various Hollywood disaster movies, indeed the whole thing was exactly like a Hollywood disaster movie, only this time without a Bruce Willis to come to the rescue. Like William, where had Bruce Willis been when they needed him?
William’s sympathy even extended to the hijackers. He suffered nightmare visions of the doomed building hurtling towards him through a cockpit window. But try as he might he could not put himself in the terrorists’ shoes. Imagine setting off that morning knowing that in an hour or so you would be dead! The plan had been undeniably audacious and executed with devastating efficiency. But imagine wanting to die! Had any of them had second thoughts? Had they maybe seen the building rushing towards them and wanted to turn away? Probably not. They had killed the pilots of the aircraft, aircraft that some commentators suggested they knew how to fly but not how to take off or land. They never had any intention of returning safely to earth. Various TV experts had spoken of the suicide bombers’ religious beliefs. They had set out that morning determined to punch a hole in the sky through to the next world. That afternoon, while William and the rest of the world were watching reruns of their attack, these nineteen men would be in paradise, each of them enjoying the ministrations of seventy-two virgins. How William envied them their belief, their total conviction. Going off on a business trip in the morning, taking lunch in another world. The President of the United States called the terrorists cowards. William couldn’t agree. You could call the attacks underhand, targeting defenceless civilians without warning, but how could an attack in which you were definitely going to perish be cowardly? Sneaky, yes. Insane, mistaken, inhumane, yes, yes, yes, but lacking in courage, no.
Once William knew of the fate of Sandy Beach, he had but one thought: to get away. In one respect this was a strange ambition. For the first time in his life William was not alone. He was no longer the odd one out. The result of 9/11 was that suddenly everyone in America had OCD. Everyone was walking around looking tense and afraid. Everyone was fearful of some unspecified danger. Their tall buildings were no longer monuments to American economic superiority but vulnerable beacons that invited hijacked planes to destroy them. You could get gassed on the subway; Jesus Christ! it had already happened in Tokyo. You could be on your way home and die trapped like a rat before you got there. You could be shot at a gas station by a deranged Arab sniper. There wasn’t any safety any more. Everyone was twitching this and that, counting right and left, touching both walls of the corridor now. Yes, the person without OCD was the odd one out these days. You saw the disorder especially in the leaders, the politicians. The President reacted like any other OCD sufferer, indulging in activities that had no logical connection with the terrorist threat but that he and his advisors believed would magically ward it off; he made loud noises about bombing countries that had no connection with the terrorists as well as those that did and often repeated mantras about freedom and democracy which William found rich coming from a man who had been illegally elected. When William saw TV footage of the hole that had been the World Trade Centre, the vast space now given over to dust and rubble reminded him of another patch of scorched earth he’d seen where nothing was left alive. He remembered the phrase Sandy Beach had used that last time he saw him, What goes around comes around. Except of course it never did. It only got as far as the innocent and the uninvolved like those who had died here. It never made the full circle to those who ran the show.
Seeing the craziness all around him, people buying survival kits and stores of food and flak jackets and gas masks, was like a macro version of the OCD weekend. William knew he had to get away to a place where there were no tall buildings or aircraft or televisions on which to watch tall buildings being hit by aircraft, where his country had already done its usual damage and moved on, it was to be hoped, for good, where there was a woman he had maybe loved and a daughter he had never seen. As soon as planes were allowed up in the air again, one of them had William on board, eyelids furiously working, as they raced the westering sun.
SIXTY-SIX
WILLIAM’S FIRST GLIMPSE of the island from the window of the plane took him by surprise. Although he had expected there to be an airstrip – the plane that was carrying him had wheels not floats, after all – nothing had prepared him for the stark white gash in the dark green of the island’s central forest. It reminded him of the scar on a man at his health club whose chest had been opened up for heart surgery. Here it was not the only cicatrice. Other white threads emanated from it in different directions all over the island, as if the one big operation had led to the necessity of other, smaller incisions.
The plane banked sharply and began to descend towards the airstrip stretching before it. They hit the ground with an alarming bounce. The aircraft seemed to be eating up the runway much too fast. With the Twin Towers still firmly in his mind, William didn’t like the speed with which the volcano at the other end of the airstrip was approaching them.
But then the Australian pilot sitting beside him hit the brakes and the plane slowed fast. It came to a halt with maybe ten feet of runway to spare.
‘Well, here we are,’ said William, trying to sound nonchalantly confident, as if he’d never for a moment thought they wouldn’t be.
‘Yeah, thank Christ,’ said the pilot, taking off his baseball cap and wiping h
is sweating brow with the back of it. ‘I’m never quite sure I’m going to make this one. It’s a hell of a short runway.’
As William carried the small bag he’d hastily packed three days earlier down the plane’s steps there was the noise of a car horn. It was so unexpected on the island that it was only when he saw the SUV headed along the runway towards him that William realized what the sound was. The vehicle screeched to a stop beside him.
‘Hey, gwanga, is can really be you?’ At first William didn’t recognize the driver. He could tell the guy was young, mid-twenties probably, but his eyes were hidden by large mirrored Ray-Bans. And although he’d called William by his old, familiar island name, he was much bigger than anyone William had ever met here. His solid neck was piped into a barrel chest. Below that – another surprise – instead of a pubic leaf he wore black cycling shorts from which tree-trunk thighs emerged and spread themselves across the car’s front seat.
‘Well, you is want for ride village or you is go walk? I hope you bag is not be so heavy this time.’
‘Tr’boa?’ said William. ‘Is it really you?’
‘Ah, sorry.’ Tr’boa removed the sunglasses. His face broke into the big open smile that William remembered as his first sign of welcome to the island what seemed a lifetime ago. Only now, he noticed there was a gap where Tr’boa had lost one of his incisors. ‘Come on. Jump in!’
William tossed his bag into the back of the car and climbed in beside the young man. Tr’boa throttled up the engine noisily and unnecessarily and then took off, wheeling round with a squeal of rubber and roaring back up the runway.
At the far end, the one where the plane had first touched down, Tr’boa hit the brakes hard and swung the wheel so the back end of the vehicle slid round and they were at right angles to their original trajectory. A road ran across in front of them. Tr’boa put his hand on the horn and swung left into the road, narrowly missing another SUV that cut across in front of him, horn also blaring.
‘Goddam!’ shouted Tr’boa above the engine’s abandoned roar. ‘That fool is must be deaf for he is not hear my horn!’
He turned to William and smiled. ‘Is be plenty more easy than landing beach, is not be so?’
‘Yes,’ said William, pressing his panama to his head so the slipstream didn’t carry it off. ‘Lucky for me you were around when the plane came in.’
‘Is be nothing for do with luck. This is be how I is make living. I is drive taxi.’ The jeep was doing sixty now on a dirt road. It was bouncing William around so much he had to use his free hand, the one that wasn’t holding the panama, to cling to the top of the door.
‘Oh,’ said William. ‘But you still go fishing?’
Tr’boa turned. ‘You is must be make joke. Man, what for I is go spend all day on boat for catch fish nobody is go want when I is can make more in two, three trips in car? I is must be mad for do that.’
‘Look out!’ screamed William. There was a double blare of horns as a pick-up truck bore down on them and Tr’boa swerved just in time to miss it, braked hard to avoid a tree that came at them out of nowhere, skidded back across the road and finally finished up in the dip off the other side of it.
‘Damn fool!’ he said. ‘Is not look where he is go.’
William raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t been so terrified since the night he’d flown with Purnu. If he ever had.
Tr’boa put the car into gear, pulled back onto the road and smiled. ‘Well, is be more fun for drive car than for fish. Is not be much excitement for go fish, unless maybe you is be attack by shark and then is not really be excitement is be just plain terrify.’
Tr’boa drove more slowly now. He obviously sensed William’s dismay at the near-wreck and had anyway probably done enough showing off.
‘Seem to have been a few changes around here,’ observed William, as he noticed one or two concrete buildings along the route and other dirt roads branching off it, the white threads he had seen from the air.
‘Yes, gwanga, and is all be thanks for you.’
Another SUV roared past with a klaxon blare as he said this. ‘You is see. We is not have cars before you is get we dollars.’
William winced. ‘How come you managed to buy a vehicle?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t get any compensation.’
‘My uncle is give me some. He is lose foot. Rest is be from my wife. She is get money for loss of she mamu who is be kill by bomb.’
‘You’re married? Congratulations. Who’s the lucky girl?’
Tr’boa grinned. ‘Is me who is be lucky, not she, as you is know when I is tell you. Kiroa.’
‘Kiroa? You netted Kiroa?’
‘Sure thing. I is be plenty good fisherman for catch that one, is you not think? Now I is be taxi driver.’
The road took a couple of treacherous twists and turns which Tr’boa negotiated by much athletic wrestling with the wheel, assisted by noisy skids and swearing. When they hit a clear stretch again, William pretended to gaze casually at the jungle flashing by. He cleared his throat. ‘I understand Miss Lucy is still on the island?’
‘Sure thing. You is want I is take you she place?’
‘No, I, er, I just wondered.’ He cleared his throat again. His voice, when it came, sounded to him dry and rasping, thick with the phlegm of self-consciousness. ‘Does she live alone?’
Tr’boa seemed to take a moment to think about this. ‘Miss Lucy, no, course not. She is not live alone.’
William’s heart sank, but then, what had he expected? It had been five years. Lucy was an attractive woman. The island had most likely had an increase in the number of Western visitors since he was last here. Then it occurred to him that Tr’boa might have taken his question too literally, that he might have been referring to Lucy’s child. Before William could ask him more a tinny rendition of the Star Wars theme interrupted him. Tr’boa used both hands to pat the pockets of his shorts, then put his right hand back on the wheel just in time to stop the vehicle leaving the road again and with his other hand pulled a cell phone from his shorts pocket.
‘Yes, I is be on way from airport now.’ He turned to William. ‘I is take you village or Captain Cook?’
William had intended to go to the village, but now he thought about it, the Captain Cook might be the better option. He would be alone there and could collect his thoughts. He’d come on the spur of the moment. He needed a plan of action.
‘The Captain Cook.’
‘OK, he is want for go Captain Cook. I is make pick up there for go shop.’ He flicked the cell phone shut and tossed it onto the dashboard. ‘Phones!’ He rolled his eyes heavenwards. ‘I is think is be better when no-one is can find you.’
They drove on in silence. William couldn’t bring himself to press Tr’boa about Lucy’s living arrangements. He feared bad news. He wouldn’t want Tr’boa to see the look on his face when he got it. They passed what William figured must be the turn-off for the village, as there were lots of people around. At first he thought they must be tourists from the States. He assumed there had been an influx of them as the result of the airstrip making the island more accessible, although he was surprised to see so many; it still wasn’t that easy to get here. The reason he thought they were Americans was that they were all so big. They lumbered along on giant sequoia legs. Their butts were so huge they had flat tops like tables. You could have stood a cocktail glass on some of them and not had to worry about it slipping off. Their arms looked tiny and out of proportion to their massive torsos and stood out from their bodies like penguin flippers, because the rolls of fat around them wouldn’t allow them to hang by their sides. They had no necks at all. Their heads just rolled about on top of their torsos as they waddled along. Apart from their size, the other thing that led William to conclude they were American tourists was that they had the uniform. Women’s legs were encased in floral Bermuda shorts that made their distorted lumpy thighs appear to be sacks of potatoes. Huge T-shirts hung from barrage-balloon breasts that projected a couple of feet in fron
t of them. The thighs of the men strained against the unforgiving material of knee-length Lycra shorts. Unspecified lumps of flesh fought one another beneath the butt area of the same garments as though they kept small but pugnacious animals down there. They too sported tent-like T-shirts. Behind them often trotted scaled-down versions of themselves, their overweight children.
They came to a family that was strung out across the road, stumbling along, chatting to one another. They ignored Tr’boa when he honked. They were all too busy munching potato chips, each of them, father, mother, son, daughter, carrying in one hand his or her own giant pack, from which the other hand absent-mindedly transferred food to the mouth. Another SUV was coming from the other direction and Tr’boa had to wait for it before he could pull out around the family. As he did so, William had a good sight of them and realized they had the honey-coloured skin and facial features of islanders. As they passed other huge people toiling along the road he saw they also had the local characteristics. But not only did these people not look like the slim, diminutive natives he remembered, they didn’t even look human. It was as if some race of grotesque aliens had invaded the island during the five years he’d been away.
It was some moments before he was able to speak without his voice choking. ‘Tr’boa, what happened? How come everybody got so—’ he had been going to say ‘fat’ but then he noted the absence of anything that might pass as a neck on his companion’s body and the thighs that smothered the car seat next to him, ‘big,’ he finished, diplomatically.
‘I is not be sure. Managua is say is be because we is not eat we own foods no more, others is say is be because we is have cars and is not walk, or catch fish or chop wood or do all they things. Purnu is reckon is be evil magic. He is claim for know who is be for blame.’