In World City Read online

  His grandmother was silent for some moments, then turned and carried on down the track, resuming her soft humming. After another five minutes, she again stopped to face him. “You find it then? This place where you could live forever?” inclining her head back up the jungle-clad mountainside. The question was matter-of-fact, without a trace of severity or sarcasm.

  Dion shook his head. He hadn’t found his place. He had found several places that looked like it – clefts in the rocks, water running over boulders, tree ferns – but none of them had felt anything like his place. His feeling of desperation had been less about being lost than finding himself so far from where he wanted to be. The places he had found had just seemed ordinary; the water much like what came out of the tap, the boulders mere lumps of rock.

  His grandmother looked at him and saw his disappointment. She nodded slowly then said, “Maybe I help you find that place, Dion. You see ‘im up on the Cabrits when I call ‘im. Maybe I teach you some things.”

  When they got back, his father was predictably furious. He had been distracted and inconvenienced. Dion’s mother had been made anxious. After the upset subsided, Dion’s grandmother said to his father, “This boy needs to explore, son. I found him for you. I’ll take him in hand – get him back when you want him.”

  She had begun by taking him for long walks, saying little, except to point out some tree or flower; where it was growing, how the other plants grew in relation to it, its shades of colour, the pattern of stones around its base. Sometimes she would rearrange things slightly, as if adding a brush stroke to some unfinished picture. Dion followed and watched, uncharacteristically obedient. He had seen the world change when she killed the cock up on the Cabrits and now she was showing him things that seemed somehow close to that changed world. He was interested in those things. It seemed important he get to know them better.

  Edward Charles had returned to school a month after the cock was killed. He looked fit, happy and well. There was a special assembly of thanksgiving for his recovery, which most people ascribed to prayer. The headmaster announced, “It is an established fact that prayer can make all the difference in cases of serious illness. Thus each one of us can contribute to the well-being of the others in our community. You will remember that special prayers were requested for Edward when medicine was unable to help. I know that many of you prayed, and now you can see the result.” The biology teacher remarked, within Dion’s hearing, that it was more likely to have been the new cytokines that had just arrived at the general hospital in Roseau.

  Dion knew the world had changed when his grandmother had worked magic on Edward’s behalf and did not doubt she had been responsible. He asked Edward what he thought about getting better and Edward had replied, “My mum and dad think it was God done it.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I just woke up one morning about a month back and I felt this kind of warm feeling all over me. It was funny. But it didn’t feel like God or angels or any of that good stuff.” Edward paused, unsure how to continue. Then he grinned and said, “It felt kind of bad really.” Dion grinned back – he knew what kind of bad Edward was talking about.

  But Dion told no one about what he had seen his grandmother do, unaware she had said nothing about staying silent, unaware he could already be trusted.

  For all his truancy, Dion was top of his class in technology and he used its words to try and describe to himself what had happened when his grandmother killed the cock: ‘If you think that everything we see is like some kind of video disk. Like everything – all the trees, rocks, houses – people even. You imagine they’re all like the patterns of dots on the disk. But you put that disk into the disk player and what those patterns turn into is colours and sounds and films and things. What I saw up on the Cabrits was like the disk being played.’

  He imagined telling this to his grandmother, but the opportunity to say the words was somehow never quite there – or he felt they would sound clumsy or awkward. She seemed to pass through the world like some natural thing, wind or water, capable of great force, but ungraspable. She knew in advance when things were going to happen: when a flight of birds would turn, when the rain would come, whose the next baby would be. She would be there when a baby was born before anyone had even thought to go and tell the priest. People expected it of her. They liked to hedge their bets and have her grant the child her own kind of blessing. Dion would stand by like an acolyte as she muttered away, invoking a host of entities with names no one could ever quite make out. The babies seemed pleased to see her though, and Dion soon gave up trying to listen to the words, concentrating instead on the extraordinary sight of a new life just arrived, perfect in itself, as much a part of his grandmother’s world as anything in the forests or rivers.

  People believed Dion’s grandmother actually made the things she foretold happen, and Dion, growing more confident with her, asked if this was true. She nodded her head from side to side, neither affirming nor denying.

  After some moments, she said, “People think what I do is like what they teach in that school you go to... sometimes.” – a pause and a smile, then, “Listen, they think I work like you work with a spanner or one of those computers – just make the right moves and everything work okay. It not like that, Dion. Spanners is a way of doing things that don’t cost you nothin’ – nothin’ personal. You just make the right moves, apply the right muscle and you get what you want. What I do is different. What I do is like going on your knees to the bank manager. Ask nicely and maybe you get that loan you want. You watch me, Dion, and you see I deal with the plants and things round here same as your dad deals with his business people. But there’s plenty know how to talk to business people but not many know how to talk to what’s on this island. They think it just in the way – all that jungle, all those rocks and stuff.

  “But you know all this, Dion. You don’t need me tellin’ you. You saw it all one time. Stick around me and you see how I do it.”

  Dion watched carefully and came to realise his grandmother could see the future because she was living so closely with the world that she felt its intentions in ways that others – who saw that world as an obstacle – could not. He remembered best one evening when they were sitting quietly on the veranda together, his grandmother’s gaze settled on some distance beyond seeing and Dion watching the deep lines that framed her expression ease and flex as she pulled on a clay pipe that had in it something that certainly wasn’t tobacco.

  Abruptly, she took the pipe from her mouth and pointed with its stem. “You see that dog, young Dion? You watch ‘im.”

  A mangy stray was nosing excitedly along their street. The dog cocked its leg against the corner of their veranda, releasing a yellow splash of urine. “Him pissin’ now,” Dion’s grandmother said. “You watch ‘im piss.”

  Dion felt her delight at the spectacle – a dog doing what dogs do. “Him sniffin’ now. Him sniffin’ where that big black bugger that hangs around with Jackson’s boy done pissin.”

  They both watched intently and Dion felt a momentary shift inside himself. For a moment, just a moment, he was on the inside of the dog. He could almost smell what Jackson’s boy’s dog smelt like. “Now you see ‘im go,” Dion’s grandmother urged in a sudden whisper, and the dog pricked up his ears and shot off around the far corner, leaving them laughing, entirely unknowing as to what had set the animal running. Then she pointed to the thin crescent that had just resolved itself in the gathering twilight above Morne Diablotin. “Moon comin’ up now,” she said.

  *

  Dion got to be confident enough with his grandmother to ask what he had seen up on the Cabrits that time when she killed the cock. What had it been that had wheeled across the clearing between the ruined blockhouses?

  “Nothing you need to know the name of, young Dion,” his grandmother warned.

  Dion persisted. “Suppose I wanted to call him. Would he come if I did the same things you did?”

  “Dion Le
fevre, I tell you what happen if you try that kind of thing,” his grandmother said, staring him straight in the face, more severe even than when he had asked if she turned herself into a coffin. “What happen to a kid like you that try that shit is he get noticed by a lot of bad stuff that roamin’ around and he get eaten alive. I told you, Dion – what put Edward Charles right is not just something you turn on ‘n off. Not like machines in hospital. I tell you, Dion, what put Edward Charles right is like the King of America.”

  Dropping her severity, she said, “Listen, suppose you go up to his door – this King of America – an’ you go up to his door the way you are right now, young Dion, an’ you say, I want to see the King of America. You know what happen? If you lucky, the guards laugh at you. More likely they lock you up and give you a hard time, call up a psychiatrist, that kind of stuff. No, if you want to go see the King of America you got to work at it a long time. You got to get to know the right people and you got to get to know how to talk to them. And you got to get to be someone of some consequence, so the King of America might be interested in spending a few minutes with you. All this take time, Dion – lots and lots of time it takes before you ready to call on the King of America and get him to do favours for you. So you got a lot to do and a long path to take if you want to call up the one I called up on the Cabrits. And you start by learning to see the world properly. And that why you follow me about and see what I see. Long path to the King of America, Dion, but I make sure you start on the right track.”

  She was indeed teaching him a different kind of attention to the one they taught in school. When the class planted seeds and charted the growth of the seedlings, Dion found it made no sense. It was entirely arbitrary compared with the growing world his grandmother had shown him. How could you understand seedlings when they had only the unchanging object of the container and its little charge of compost? What his teachers showed him in class was what you could do with isolation. He felt that isolation in the classroom and in all he was being taught. His truancy increased.

  The school punished him with detentions and additional work, and complained to his father about his son’s absences. His father said it was their problem if they couldn’t keep an eye on the boy while he was in their care. Dion’s father was taken up with other things. He was busy. Dion’s mother would wring her hands and half-heartedly scold her wayward son, with half an eye on his father as she tried to judge the proper line to take. He got bad reports, there was talk of expulsion, but his technology was considered exceptionally good. All his grandmother would say was, ‘There’s different ways of knowing your way around, Dion. You listen to me and you maybe get to know one way.’

  Dion’s parents didn’t much like his grandmother, although they tolerated her occupying a small room in the corner of their house. She was his father’s mother. She said to Dion, “Your father’s father, French white from Martinique. Can’t remember his name. He quit like they all do, but he treat me okay – leave me provided for because of his kid. No more than that, mind you. Your father got no time for you, I know. All he want is to get rich. That why he make up to that Trinidad Asian and marry his daughter. That all right. Your father, he want to be a proper man. He stick with your ma and he make the kind of husband her father want for his daughter. But you, young Dion – I don’t know about you. You real mix. Bet you got some damned Arawak in there somewhere. But you certainly got a lot of me in you – black ‘n black. You want to get rich? You listen to your daddy. But if you want to live so when Death come for you, you good and ready, you listen to me. You live so you learn how to die – that’s all. Must be that way, else how come everyone who ever lived finish up dead?”

  *

  The air over the lake was suddenly chill and Dion opened his eyes to see the sky had clouded over. He felt a lick of wind pass over his face and jackknifed himself upright, treading water firmly. A shadow was moving across the water and seconds later the gust hit him full in the face. He made for the shore with regular, determined strokes, though the wind piling waves in his face made for a difficult swim.

  Cycling hard, he still got home late, but there were no recriminations. Instead, he found an open bottle of wine on the table and two empty glasses. His parents only ever had wine on special occasions. Dion looked at the wine bottle then at his father; he’d not heard of anything special happening. His father looked pleased and slightly flushed. He said, “Whitlam’s coming next week. He’ll turn this place round if no one else will. I’ve made a deal to acquire this whole area for him to develop. Where this squalid little street is, there’ll be a golf course and holiday flats.”

  Dion was pleased to see his father pleased; it made the house an easier place to be. But who this Whitlam was he had no idea. Neither did he care – no more than he cared about golf courses or holiday flats. Dion’s parents lived in a world that meant nothing to him. He had a world of his own: his island that he had seen the wholeness of and whose life he felt as his life; his island to whom his grandmother was introducing him; his island that had in it a place he could live forever.

  Handelmann’s Hotel...

  Dion watches the porter insert the lock card. He thinks of Miranda Whitlam – at least, Miranda Whitlam when he had last known her: Miranda Whitlam, who brought down everything he had built. Miranda Whitlam, he had tried to betray.

  How does such a person greet you after ten years?

  “Hello, Dion. How’s it going? I hear you’re working in World City now.”

  He had recognised her voice instantly, had felt a sick emptiness and replied, “I’m all right. Where are you?”

  “I’m back where you started – in the Waste. Where did you think?” A pause, then, “Listen, I have something new I want to get going. Can you give me a way in?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “I know that. Where do you want the contact made?”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Dion had known he could turn her in. But he’d already tried that once. In the ten years since, his only consolation had been that he had not succeeded.

  “Okay. Handelmann’s, room 243, 3.30 p.m. Saturday.”

  He watches the porter reach for the door handle, thinks of his own hand on the handle of a hotel-room door, with the warmth of her body close to him, the pressure of her hand on his shoulder, the softness of her hair against his cheek. He waves away the porter and walks into the room alone.

  4

  Miranda Whitlam discovered that if she stared hard enough at the moonlit wall of jungle confronting her from her new bedroom window, she could make of it an abstract picture in planes of grey. She could make the moonlight shadows flatten over instead of beckoning her to fall into them, and she could see the tangled, writhing foliage that threatened to reach out and grasp her become no more than an intricate arabesque.

  Continuing to stare fixedly at the two-dimensional picture, she could feel her anxiety easing with the increasing depthlessness she could impose on the scene. More than that, just two dimensions made jigsaw-puzzle pieces of the tangled jungle screen, pieces she might be able to reach out and grasp and perhaps rearrange, reorder in some way, just as her father had done with those lines on his screen.

  Shortly after seeing him work his magic, just before they had left for the island, she had tried it herself with some interlocking plastic bricks the house-clearance had revealed, pushed to the back of one of her cupboards. She built what she called ‘a world’ with them. Then, as she changed the strange, geometrical wasteland she had constructed into an arrangement of towers and palaces, Miranda imagined that a part of the real world was changing accordingly. The game carried an eerie fascination. She felt herself being drawn up into her head; into a strange, cool, crystalline way of seeing things. It was rather like the feeling when she had believed herself able to walk into the tapestry scene in her father’s study; detached; free of the world around her.

  Now, on the island, staring at the jungle and turning it i
nto pieces of grey jigsaw puzzle, she could just about recover something of that detachment. There was a difference though. Now she felt her life depended on it.

  *

  Miranda and her father had travelled most of the way to the island in a large, spacious airliner. Then, in somewhere hot, dimly lit and full of black faces, they transferred to a tiny propeller-driven plane that they had to themselves. After bumping through turbulence and making several steep, banking turns, they touched down on an airfield set among mountains, the runway seemingly barely big enough for a bird to land on.

  After climbing down from the plane onto the shimmering heat of the tarmac, they had been obliged to walk across to the airfield’s main building where there was another sea of black faces, looking to where a slightly larger plane had just landed and was beginning to disgorge its cargo of passengers. Miranda carried a small bag across her shoulder in which she had the book and two handheld computer games that had been her sole occupation during the journey. She felt herself beginning to sweat in the humidity. She didn’t like this place they had come to. Her distaste deepened with the smell of engine fumes and the sight of the stained concrete of the airfield building, then the milling black faces that crowded around her; the shouting, the waving and the agitated, excited exchanges, the scattered splashes of colour on the materials the women wore, the sweat-stained armpits of the men’s white shirts.

  Whether or not her father liked it, she couldn’t tell. For most of the journey he had been working a portable screen, which she had watched him take from his briefcase at the beginning of the flight in the same way the gardener back home would have reached for a trowel or knife – a barely conscious action, only to be noticed if she had surreptitiously moved the expected implement. Now her father applied himself to the island’s air terminal with the same determined detachment.