‘What?’ says Jim.
‘I think,’ says the doc, ‘if there’s anything you’ve always wanted to do but never got round to, now is the time to do it. If you can.’
‘You mean … ?’ says Jim.
‘You got it,’ says Doc Bat.
So Jim thinks he might as well try for Honolulu. It’s only a short hop but he’s never found the time to go there and he’d like to see the bright lights and the action before he checks out. He takes off and he’s flapping, flapping his way to Oahu. He’s running out of petrol when he sees the lights and there’s the airport with ALOHA in big letters on it. How he’s over the Japanese garden and he echolocates me. ‘My kind of human!’ he squeaks. ‘She’s into this kind of thing.’ And with that he drops dead in front of me.
OK, so Jim Bat got my number. Why not? I was probably broadcasting on all frequencies, ALDERTON’S MY NAME AND DEATH’S MY GAME. I felt sorry for Jim but I had other things to think about, like why I came here.
In 1993 when the grief in me was like something with hooks on it stuck in my throat, I spent a night at the Mini Hotel Sleep/Shower and the quietness and tranquillity of it calmed me down and helped me pull myself together. Now the Mini Hotel was gone but I thought I might find that old quietness in the gardens or the lounge in the middle of the night. It didn’t happen. In my chair in the lounge I was tired but not sleepy; I was awake for a long time with my eyes feeling dry and sandy and I dozed off now and then with strange pictures in my head but no useful thoughts.
What I was feeling for Elias wasn’t the kind of rush I had with Adam. How could it be with Elias and me both so much older? But when he held me that night while I cried I felt as if I’d come home after being gone for a long, long time. I’d been trying to keep my death life separate from the live life that Elias was part of. Why hadn’t I told him about Django? If I told him about that I’d be inviting him into every part of my life and I wasn’t sure he’d be safe there.
Henry turned up with a coffee for me. ‘I thought you might be wakeful,’ he said.
‘Thank you. I was.’ I said. ‘Too much on my mind.’
‘Remember,’ said Henry. ‘The bat chose you. You’re special.’
26
Elias Newman
29 January 2003. Jimmy Wicks’s phone number was ex-directory but I remembered other band names. Howard Dent was not ex-directory and he gave me Jimmy’s number. When I phoned I got Jimmy’s ex-wife Tracy. She sounded as if the breakup had not been amicable and demanded to know why I wanted Jimmy’s number. On the spur of the moment I said that he owed me money. ‘That makes two of us,’ she said. ‘If you see that bastard, you tell him I’ve got friends who know where he lives.’ She gave me a number, and when I dialled it the phone was answered by a man who sounded suspicious. He said Jimmy was out but he offered to take a message. I said who I was, told him I was calling about Christabel, said it was urgent, and left my number.
I wasn’t very hopeful but he did actually phone me and said that he’d meet me at The Anchor & Hope in High Hill Ferry, Upper Clapton. With my A to Z I located the pub by the River Lea, opposite the Walthamstow Marshes in E5. I took a taxi there and found him on a bench outside the pub, finishing a pint and looking at the river. The sky was grey and darkening, the wind was cold. Two Hassidic Jews all in black were on the path on the other side of the river, arguing about something as they walked. Their black gesticulations made the landscape seem more still, more bleak. A train clattered past the marshes to the bridge, grew larger, and was gone. Jimmy looked as if he’d drawn the short straw in a lifeboat where somebody was going to get eaten. He finished his pint, shook his head, and said, ‘OK, here we are. Whatever it is you want to talk about, why couldn’t we do it over the phone?’
‘Let me get you another pint. What’re you drinking?’
‘London Pride.’
I got two, came back to the bench, and sat down. ‘Cheers,’ he said without much conviction.
‘Cheers. I don’t feel completely at ease with you, and I thought we could talk better face to face.’
‘Why don’t you feel at ease with me? Because you’re screwing Christabel?’
‘I don’t feel at ease because I’ve noticed that you’re not comfortable seeing me with her.’
‘Are you or aren’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Sleeping with her.’
‘That’s neither here nor there.’
‘That means you are. So what’s on your mind?’
‘She’s gone to Honolulu and Maui and she said it was to do with the past. She seemed not in the best of spirits when she left. I was wondering …’
‘You were wondering what I could tell you?’
‘I feel awkward saying so, but yes, I was.’
‘You feel awkward because if she wanted to tell you anything more than she did, she’d have done it, right?’
‘OK, I felt kind of foolish coming to you but I’m worried about her.’
‘Welcome to the club. Everybody that knows Christabel worries about her. My round.’ He took our glasses and went inside. ‘Thirsty work, talking about Christabel,’ he said when he came back with our pints. ‘Excuse me while I make a pit stop.’ When he sat down again he said, ‘Are you in love with her?’
‘Yes.’ So there it was, out of my own mouth. ‘Are you?’
‘Have been for years but she’s never been interested in me.’
‘But you’ve been married until recently.’
‘So? That never stopped anyone from loving somebody else. You’re not married?’
‘That’s right, I’m not.’
‘Thinking of marrying Christabel?’
It was dark by then. The Anchor & Hope sent out its beams like a beacon for the weary traveller and the street lamp by our bench had come on while I sat here talking to Jimmy Wicks and saying what I’d never said to Christabel. A train chuntered past the marshes with its windows golden in the evening. It grew large, crossed the bridge and the reflecting river, and left a plume of silence behind as it disappeared. ‘I’m superstitious,’ I said. ‘I’d rather not say more about us just now, I don’t want to jinx it. I know that something’s troubling her but I don’t know what it is. She said she’s gone to Maui for a kind of remembrance day. Can you tell me anything about it?’
Jimmy sighed. ‘Did you know she had a son?’
‘No. Who was the father?’
‘Guitarist with a German band, Adam Freund. He’s dead now. So’s the son.’
‘What happened?’
‘Light rig fell on Adam. That was in 1990. Three years later she went to Maui with her son — Django his name was and he was four years old. He fell off a cliff.’
‘Jesus’.
‘Jesus didn’t save. She never got over it.’
‘Understandably. Was she married to Django’s father?
‘He was married to somebody else. She’s had a bad history with men.’
‘What kind of bad?’
‘There were three or four of them who met untimely deaths.’
‘Are you saying that she had anything to do with that?’
‘No, but I think it’s always working on her.’
I nodded and so did he, then we both shook our heads and drank our London Pride in silence for a while. ‘Any idea where she’d be staying on Maui?’ I said.
‘Probably the Pioneer Inn in Lahaina or Rudy Ka’uhane’s place.’
‘Who’s Rudy Ka’uhane?’
‘Just a friend, nothing romantic. He’s a carpenter, made Django’s coffin. The Pioneer Inn always knows where to reach him.’
‘Thanks, it’s really good of you to help me. You’re a good man and I’m grateful to you.’ I grabbed his hand and shook it. He seemed embarrassed.
‘No use being a dog in the manger, is there. I’d really like to see her happy and I wish you luck.’
‘I don’t take anything for granted. I see you’re ready for another pint.’
‘They go down
fast and they go through me fast. I’ll be right back.’
I got a pint for him but none for me. When he came back I said, ‘Are you thirstier than usual?’
‘I am, actually.’
‘Have to pee more than usual too?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Might be a good idea to see your GP, get him to test your blood sugar.’
‘You think I’m diabetic?’
‘I think you should check your blood sugar.’ I was remembering my father and the sweetness he couldn’t metabolise. What a lot of blocked sweetness there is in the world!
27
Christabel Alderton
26 January 2003. Here I was then, with the night to get through and ten years ago on my mind. I’d thought January 1993 would be off-peak for holidaymakers but the Aloha Airlines flight was full, many of them hoping to see whales. ‘I’d like to swim with them,’ said a boy across the aisle to his girlfriend.
‘I don’t think they let you do that unless you’re David Attenborough,’ she said.
Django was craning his neck to see out of the window. ‘Are there sharks down there?’ he said.
‘All kinds of things,’ I said. Such a deep dark blue, the water below us, then a fringe of white surf as Kahului Airport came into view back in 1993. The palm trees were moving a little as if they didn’t care one way or the other. It was a dull day and those trees put a jungly smell in my mind.
Some of the arrivals were being greeted with leis, some not. Bert Gresham had been to Maui and he had arranged for Rudy Ka’uhane to meet us. Rudy was holding a placard that said ALOHA CHRISTABEL & DJANGO in large capitals. I was startled to see Django’s name like that, it was almost as if he’d grown up and gone away. He was quite pleased with it because he could already read his name. ‘Aloha,’ said Rudy, and he hung leis around our necks. Then he explained the honi greeting and did it with Django and me just as I did it with Henry Panawae this night ten years later. The pink flowers of our leis looked edible and they smelled like youth and first love, which seemed a little shocking since they and I had only just met. ‘Plumería,’ said Rudy. ‘My wife grows them at our place. Those are some of our leis that the kids are hanging on people now.’
‘But not on everybody,’ I said.
‘Some of them are ordered before the flight, some people buy them here, others don’t bother with them.’ A very large brown man, Rudy. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and his arms and legs were like tree trunks. He took our cases and led the way to his car, and when we stepped outside the jungly smell I’d had in my mind was the real smell of the place. With a little petrol added.
Django said, ‘This is far away.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is.’
‘Far-away trees.’ he said.
‘Palm trees,’ I said. The sun had come out and it printed the shadows of the palms on the ground with every frond and the spaces between sharp and clear and black.
‘Does God see everything?’ said Django.
‘What makes you ask that?’ I said.
‘The shadows.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘He sees what He wants to see. Sometimes He looks away.’
Django nodded. We’d never talked about God, he must have picked it up in playgroup.
‘God is somebody who looks away most of the time,’ said Rudy to me. ‘He sure was looking away when the Americans hijacked these islands.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, they don’t have it in white history books?’
‘Rudy’ I said, ‘I’m a singer with a rock band and I don’t read a whole lot of history.’
‘OK. In 1900 Hawaii became a US territory. It was illegally annexed and everything since then, statehood and the rest of it, is illegal. I better not get started on this. Here’s my car.’ His Land Rover looked as if it had a lot of mileage on it and not much of it on roads. A hand-lettered bumper sticker said KOKO AND NO UKE.
‘What’s koko?’ I said.
‘Hawaiian blood. Don’t matter if you got a lot or a little, you Hawaiian and your land been took from you. So let’s get it back.’
Django and I were both knackered from all those hours of travel and Rudy was making me uncomfortable. ‘Could we perhaps put history and politics aside for now?’ I said. ‘We’re only here for the whales.’
‘What’s uke?’ said Django.
‘Ukelele,’ said Rudy. He mimed strumming one. ‘I don’t got no uke for playin’ on da beach at Waikiki.’
Django let that pass. ‘I like this car,’ he said.
‘Her name is Lucille,’ said Rudy.
‘Like B. B. King’s guitar?’ I said.
‘You got it. She da kine good old girl.’
‘You da kine good old man?’ said Django.
‘That’s me,’ said Rudy. ‘You da kine smart kid, brah.’
‘When I’m big I’ll have a Lucille,’ said Django.
‘She da one,’ said Rudy. ‘You da kine man she like.’
‘What’s da kine?’ I said.
‘It’s just only a kind of talk we do here sometimes,’ said Rudy. He loaded our luggage and us into Lucille and off we went with a roar and various rattles. ‘I’ll take you to the Pioneer Inn now,’ he said. ‘You’ll want to get some rest, have a look around Lahaina. Tomorrow I’ll show you the Iao Needle, next day you do a whale-watching cruise.’
‘What’s the Iao Needle?’ said Django.
‘It’s a big rock in Iao Valley State Park — it’s something you should see before we go anywhere else.’
‘How come?’ said Django.
‘You’ll see when we’re there,’ said Rudy.
‘When we go whale-watching,’ I said, ‘we don’t want to do it from a boat.’
‘Why not?’ said Rudy.
‘I’ve been having bad dreams about water.’
‘No problem, I can show you where to watch from shore. Tomorrow I’ll bring you something to keep away bad dreams.’
There was singing on Lucille’s radio but the engine noise was drowning it out until Rudy pulled over and stopped. Then we could hear, in Hawaiian at first, a vocalist with very lush backing and a voice that was like the voice of oceans and islands coming on the wind from far away. The refrain was in English:
Cry for the gods, cry for the people,
Cry for the land that was taken away,
And then yet you’ll find Hawai’i.
‘Who is that?’ I asked Rudy.
‘IZ,’ said Rudy. ‘Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.’.
‘So much loss in the words and in his voice!’
‘Loss is the only game in town,’ said Rudy. ‘Loss is the main action of this world. Anybody says different don’t know what’s what.’
Lucille started off again and nobody said anything for a while. We were on the Kuihelani Highway heading down to the coast where we turned into the highway to Lahaina. We had the sea to our left and the mountains to the right but I was too tired to take much in and that song had filled me with sadness. Django had fallen asleep in my lap clutching his cloth crocodile.
It’s 2003 as I write this about 1993. I know I’m getting the conversations right but some of my comments can’t help being from now rather than ten years ago. Lahaina used to be a whalers’ town. Now it was selling itself as a place that used to be a whalers’ town. A while back a movie was made that starred Spencer Tracy and Frank Sinatra, The Devil at Four O’Clock. This island played the part of Talua, a nonexistent movie island. Lahaina and the Pioneer Inn were featured as somewhere else and there was still a poster to prove that it happened.
In the early nineteenth century (some local history here that I picked up) Lahaina became known as the whaling capital of the Pacific. It was a sailors’ town where women and drink and violence were plentiful. There was more violence in the 1820s when the missionaries came to town, not to give instruction in the missionary position but to fight sin. Sin fought back, and the sailors even fired th
eir cannon at the mission. Eventually the local chiefs restored order, and seamen who didn’t return to their ships at sundown were imprisoned. By 1901, when the Pioneer Inn opened, Lahaina was pretty well civilised. The house rules from that year include:
YOU MUST PAY YOU RENT IN ADVANCE.
YOU MUST NOT LET YOU ROOM GO ONE DAY BACK.
WOMEN IS NOT ALLOW IN YOU ROOM.
IF YOU WET OR BURN YOU BED YOU GOING OUT.
YOU ARE NOT ALLOW TO GIVE YOU BED TO YOU FREAND.
ONLY ON SUNDAY YOU CAN SLEEP ALL DAY.
The Pioneer Inn was meant to look like an old plantation house, I was told. Sugar was still big business; the cane was burned in the Pioneer Mill whose stack overlooked the town. The inn was a very wide building with a red roof and a veranda across the whole front of it at the second level. A very shipshape-looking place. The building was blue-grey with white posts and railings, window frames and doors. From our veranda we looked out on banyan trees and Front Street and over the water to blue mountains that were like mountains in a dream. I was seeing them for the first time but they seemed half remembered, half forgotten. I thought there might be words in my mind but when I opened my mouth nothing came.
The room was plain but good: white walls and a handsome bed with a watercolour over it of a little red-roofed house among palm trees — an original painting, not a print. The lamp on the bedside table had a lathe-turned base of dark polished wood which matched the bedposts. There was a cot for Django on which he went back to sleep immediately. I’ve known a lot of hotel rooms in my time. It’s always as if a self has gone ahead to wait for you in the room; maybe a self you didn’t know you had that day: a happy self or a sad one, whatever. You walk into the room and it says, ‘Hi. This is how we are today.’ But I wasn’t sure where I was and I couldn’t remember why I’d wanted so much to watch whales. In my ignorance I’d thought of Maui just as a place where you went to enjoy yourself but after listening to Rudy and that song I felt that these islands really didn’t want me and Django.
We both had a good kip, then went out past the little lighthouse to the harbour where the whalers used to anchor. There was a square-rigged ship there, the Carthaginian. This ship also starred in a movie, Hawaii, for which it was converted from a Baltic cargo schooner to its present incarnation. As far as I could make out it never had been a whaler, although now it housed a whaling museum. Django wanted to see it so we went aboard. There was the skeleton of a whale that you could walk through but Django wouldn’t. ‘It doesn’t want us here,’ he said. The harpoons and lances upset him, as well as the blubber knives and try pots. ‘This is a bad place,’ he said, and we left.