A Way of No Ecstasy

36

A Way of No Ecstasy

So you landed at Bird and when they opened the door you felt like the heat was going to suck you out of the plane. You hung back behind the steward’s politely obstructive arm while Upper Class filed out, smug superiority written over every face. Then it was your turn to feel richer-than-thou as he stood back to let you exit, and smiled a deferential ‘goodbye’ while Economy stood behind him, panting for freedom. You walked down the aircraft steps into the Caribbean sunshine as the sound of the steel band wafted over the tarmac to welcome you, just as it had done thirty-three years before.

But that was only nine years after Independence and it had all changed now- even the name of the airport had changed. Back then it was called Cool Edge or maybe Coolidge or some such. And in those days it was you panting to get out of economy with your mates and down onto those unbelievable white sands you’d read about. And when the four of you, taking a year out to see the world before university, managed to settle the argument over who was to pay the taxi, you asked the driver to take you to the beach that had the prettiest girls on the island. So he said you must want Dickenson Bay and when you said you liked the sound of the ‘Dick’ part but you weren’t so keen on getting a ‘son’ out of it, it raised a laugh from your mates. And if you’d known what was coming, then you’d likely have got out of the taxi and back onto the next flight to anywhere. But you didn’t know and you couldn’t know so you just flowed with that new-wine-in-old-bottles exuberance of young men grasping hold of a world they know for a fact will deliver them everything they dream of. When you got to Dickenson, all four of you raced down onto that soft white sand, past that all important market stall, leaping and whooping and swinging your Black Sabbath and T-Rex t-shirts over your heads. And without stopping you ran headlong into the white surf and the warm petral water and swam out a few yards to lie on your back looking up at the perfect blue sky, thinking it was the nearest place to paradise you’d ever been.

You hadn’t seen her then. But she’d seen you.

You passed those days lying in the sun and watching the bikini-clad tourist girls slide past, up the sand and back down again until they were sure that you and every other vaguely virile male on the beach were half erect or better at the sight of them. And you passed the nights in the nightclubs of the beachside hotels or in St John’s where the same girls, or girls just like them, gyrated to steel bands and rock bands and poured out onto the street, still dancing, with rum punches in hand and boyfriends glued to their hips. And it seemed that if you so much as looked sideways at anyone with good tits or a pretty face, the boyfriends would be on you in an instant, demanding to know what your game was, threatening you with Christ-knows-what, and dispatching you, tail between your legs, back to Dickenson, where you’d wank your way to a lonely sunrise.

And still you hadn’t noticed her, standing behind a makeshift stall every day at the top of the beach, hidden away amongst the t-shirts and dresses and blouses that she sold to the holiday makers. And still you hadn’t seen her looking at you, barely taking her eyes off you except to serve a customer, for the whole of the eleven days you’d spent on the beach. Chances are if someone hadn’t stolen your one good t-shirt while you slept you’d never have had cause to go to her beach stall to buy a new one with money you didn’t want to afford. Even then you’re not sure you’d have really noticed her if it hadn’t been for the way she fixed her eyes on you, and the shy sideways smile she gave you. And then there was the slow, slow way she poured your change carefully from her right hand into your left palm as she supported it with her own left hand so as to prolong that first touch as long as possible, gripping your gaze desperately until you understood precisely what she wasn’t saying. It was only at that moment that you finally got the point and asked her name and she answered in a shy whisper ‘Ruth.’ And that was the turning point. That was when everything became different. And it became different because of the Rules.

You’d first become aware of the Rules as soon as you went to school. In Mrs. Baker’s reception class, you had dutifully beaten on tambourine and xylophone while singing happily out of key to a badly tuned piano that ‘the ink was black and the page was white.’ And when you went home and sang your new song to Mummy and Daddy, they nodded and smiled approvingly to hear how ‘together you were going to learn to read and write.’ But you became uneasy when you got to the part that said ‘a child is black, a child is white’ and the nods and smiles became a little less enthusiastic and you thought you must be singing the words wrong even though you remembered them from class. And by the time you reached the end where it said ‘now the child must understand that this is the law of all the land,’ Daddy had left the room and Mummy wasn’t smiling any more. And when you asked if you’d done something bad Mummy said ‘no of course not, Darling’ and that it was a lovely song and everyone should learn to sing it. But that night when you’d gone to bed you heard loud voices downstairs. The next day you were sent to school with a note. The next week Daddy came to see Mrs. Baker. The week after that you started at a new school and you thought you must have done something really, really bad and you cried because you hadn’t meant to be bad. But no one ever told you what you’d done and you didn’t know didn’t know why you had had to change schools, you just knew you were a bad bad, boy and you had to be more careful next time.

As you grew older your understanding of the Rules grew, with you. You came to realise that there were bad programmes on TV and that Daddy turned them off. You weren’t to talk about them, even if it was ‘Love Thy Neighbour,’ and all you friends were talking about it in school the next morning.

You remembered when you finally knew when you the Rules perfectly. You were twelve and out with Dad one morning, when coming towards you up the street were a black man and a white woman and the woman was pushing a push chair with a baby in it that was a bit black and a bit white and you thought that was called ‘half-caste.’ When Dad crossed the street without warning you weren’t surprised, because you knew it was in the Rules for him to do so. And you also knew it was in the Rules that you weren’t supposed ask him about it. It was only later when you were thinking about it that that you’d realised you had come to learn the Rules without anyone ever saying what they were. But now you just knew them by heart.

Later, in Science, you learned about a process called osmosis.

*****

It was ok, it really was, because at nineteen Ruth had already had a lifetime of looking after herself and everyone else and just one more child wouldn’t make any difference at all.

It was ten years since her mother had died; ten years since she was left to look after four brothers and sisters aged from four to seven; ten years since she learned to feed the family on the erratic next-to-nothing money Dadda was willing to give her when he was sober. School had been out of the question, of course, so she’d taught herself what she could from borrowed books by lamp light when the children were in bed and Dadda was busy upending beer bottles and sliding his hand up loose women’s skirts in a dark corner of some dark bar. From the books she’d learned enough to dream of more life than her obligations to a dependent family would ever permit. On the odd occasions that she could find some free time she would go to the airport at St. John’s and watch the flights arriving and leaving, watch their cargo of white tourists disembarking and re-embarking and wonder what it must be like to afford a holiday. Or if there was no time to go to the airport she would stand on the hill overlooking Half Moon Bay and wait for the catamarans, their sails full of wind, their decks full of holidaymakers, circle past from the north until they disappeared behind the headland to the southwest, always ending up where they started and changing nothing, driven by a wind they could follow but could never control, making circles round the moon, as Ruth thought of it.

At fifteen she’d discovered that money could be had from the tourists for baskets and toys that she could weave from palm fronds that cost nothing. And since her youngest brother was now nine and better able to look after himself, Ruth set herself to the noble art of parting white people, burned lobster-red by the unforgiving sub-tropical sun, from as many of their green dollars as possible – a skill at which she proved to be particularly adept. From woven trinkets she moved on to small items of jewellery and eventually to a stall at Dickenson. At first the other vendors had tried to shoo her away, but for those determined enough to withstand the pecking of the established traders, eventually the opposition died out. If her role as parent from the age of nine had taught her anything it was patience and determination. So she shrugged off the sarcasm and the occasional half hearted sabotage attempt on her stall until eventually the opposition fell silent. Within a year she was accepted as a trader herself and after a second had one of the best looking stalls on the beach, selling trinkets and toys and t-shirts and dresses.

About that time she’d been surprised to find herself the subject of male attention for the first time, wondering what on earth it could be that brought the boys buzzing round her stall like sand flies. Occasionally one would press his attentions onto her too far and she’d push him away hard, or cry out for help, whereupon a bevy of wide-girthed middle aged female traders in long skirts and headscarves would surround her stall and drive the unwanted intruder back with derision and an occasional balled fist. Accordingly, male attention, in Ruth’s mind, became a matter at best of irritation and at worst fear. But that was before David had come.

She’d not known his name then. She’d seen him arrive at the beach with his friends one afternoon when the sun was hot and thought anyone sensible who had a choice would be sitting in the shade of the bar with a beer cold enough to make condensation run down the outside of the glass. She’d noticed them initially for their stupidity – giggling immaturely and bumping her stall as they ran down to the water, rushing as if sea wouldn’t still be there tomorrow. She’d watched the blonde one, the one with legs and arms a bit too long for his torso and a beard unusually full for a boy his age, as he came and went over the next few days. She could see he wasmaking the beach his temporary home before moving off to some place Ruth could barely dream of and could never aspire to go. She would toss her head back and tell herself it was nothing to her as he eyed the bikini clad white girls parading their bodies shamefully along the beach, trying to look as if they didn’t know every man’s eye was on them. She’d watched as he rinsed his horrible black t-shirt – the one with the awful demon motif on it - under the beach tap and thought about how much better he’d look in one of hers. When she found herself returning to the beach each evening after trading hours she first convinced herself she was only being sensible in making sure nothing bad happened to her pitch for as long these foolish young Englishmen insisted on camping out on her stretch of sand. But when she stayed awake into the night awaiting their return, and when she felt her heart beat faster as she heard them approaching, and when she felt angry and betrayed and cheated on when they staggered back, drunk and singing, and the blonde one had his arm around a girl, that was when it started to get difficult to ignore what was happening to her. And when, the following night, she stole the horrible black t-shirt while the blonde boy slept, she couldn’t pretend any longer.

*****

After you’d extricated yourself from the grip of that long meaningful gaze, you made you way back to your mates further up the beach, but you couldn’t help looking repeatedly back. And each time you did, there she was, standing by the t-shirt stall watching you, never taking her eyes off you, telling you with that incessant stare how much she wanted you and that she was yours whenever you decided to take up the offer. She was nothing special to look at. There was no particular attraction in her round, even face, no distinctive poise about her bearing or advantage of height to bestow elegance upon her. She was just an ordinary black girl, braided hair, full breasts, short in the leg with a waist line that was already beginning to prophesy expansion in middle age. Mercifully your mates hadn’t seen the exchange, so there was no teasing or goading or mockery and you had the rest of the morning to collect your thoughts. So when Henry had gone off with the girl he brought back with him last night – the one you put your arm round momentarily until he jabbed you in the kidneys to warn you off – and when Jamie and Frank had ambled away to see if they could blag a ride on a catamaran, you’d made an excuse and stayed behind. When there was no bravado and no one egging you on, you had the chance, for once, to do exactly what you wanted to, to sail your own boat to exactly where you chose to go. And you decided right there and then that your destiny didn’t include a black Antiguan girl called Ruth, because when all the bluff and bravado of nineteen-year-olds was stripped away, underneath it all you thought of yourself as fundamentally one of the good guys and hurting people and walking away wasn’t who you wanted to be. So no, there was going to be no taking advantage, no quick shag and jetting off to your next scheduled destination. You decided then and there that when Henry and Jamie and Frank came back you’d tell them you’d had enough of Antigua and you wanted to move on. And just to make sure the point was clearly made, you started packing up your rucksack. You were just zipping up the top with a decisive pull that told the world you absolutely meant what you said, when from behind you she spoke.

“I thought you might like a drink,” she said. For all the years that have passed, you can still hear it; that deep Caribbean voice; the voice that sounded like tropical waterfalls and felt like the sun on your back; the soft, shy voice that made you realise that the only thing you knew was what you did not know. And for some unfathomable reason you didn’t need to turn round to know that she held a can of chilled beer in her outstretched hand, even if you didn’t know that she’d gone to the bar to buy it with the money you’d given her for the t-shirt. But you had to turn round, you couldn’t not turn round, couldn’t just carry on with what you were doing, pretending you hadn’t heard. And as you did turn, there she was, exactly as you knew she would be, holding out the beer, only that in the other hand she held one for herself as well. And in that turning, you’d let her breech your defences, hadn’t you? And when you reached out for the beer and said’ Thank you,’ because you’d accepted something from her, you’d put her in control. That gave her the opportunity to steer where all this was going, even though later she told you there was no way to control any of it, only the wind to follow that would bring you both back to where you started, only the circles round the moon.

You sat side by side on the sand, she a little distance from you to start with, watching the waves caress the beach, drinking the chilled beer and saying nothing, because there was nothing that needed to be said. But during the conversation that you weren’t having, there was the compulsion to touch and be closer and you knew she wanted it just as you wanted it. So you moved nearer to her until your hips were touching and your knees were touching and your feet were touching. And then it was the most natural thing in the world to reach out your hand and let it fall gently on the soft inner side of her thigh – not that you were coming on to her, not that you wanted to touch her up or shag her, because those thoughts just weren’t there. There was simply the need to be closer.

*****

It didn’t happen the way she planned it to. Though the t-shirt she stole was scuffed and torn, Ruth was overwhelmed with guilt for taking it and dropping it into one of the refuse bins behind the beach bar. So when he came to her stall to buy a replacement, though her heart beat so hard it hurt, it was as much out of shame as excitement. And when he paid her with a large Caribbean Dollar note, she carefully counted out the exact change and poured it into his hand, to ensure she took nothing else from him that was not hers to take. Their eyes had met of course, just like in the movies she very occasionally afforded to see in St John’s, but as she looked at him all she could think of was that she’d done him wrong, put him to unnecessary expense. And when he had asked her name she could give no more response than a one word answer, could find nothing inside herself to prolong the conversation, so overcome was she with her own boldness and dishonesty and manipulation. And when he had smiled and walked away an empty retribution sweep over her, chastising her for her wrongdoing, his departure punishing her so fittingly for her crime. She chided herself for her dishonesty and her presumptuousness and her foolish hope that he might have reason to take interest in her. She stood, watching him, in hope that he might turn around and worried that if he did he would see the tears in her eyes. But he was too far away to see the tears in her eyes and too far away for her to reach out to and too far away for her to love. And still the sense of guilt for the only materially dishonest act of her life plied upon her, and pressed her down, so that she missed several of the tourists that looked in on her stall and might easily have been persuaded to do business with her.

“Enough,” she eventually said to herself, knowing that there would be no relief until she had compensated him for the deprivation of the t-shirt. And thus it was that the barman at the beach bar was amazed to find Ruth, frugal, careful Ruth, serious, responsible Ruth, standing in front of him asking for two chilled beers. He was not to know that their price was almost exactly the same as that of the t-shirt she had sold to David whom she did not yet know as David. ‘I will take him the two beers and leave them with him without speaking,’ she determined. As she carried them up the beach they chilled her hands to discomfort. But as she reached his camp and saw he was packing to leave, her guilt was exceed by her fear of losing what she had only just found and had never possessed, and she had to speak. “I thought you might like a drink,” she said, holding out just one of the beers. And as he turned to face her and thank her, she found just enough confidence to sit where he motioned that she should, a respectful foot and a half away from him. As they sat side by side, silently watching the waves slide up the beach he moved closer to her so that she felt anxious and uncomfortable and excited and wanted. And when his hip touched her hip and his knee touched her knee and his foot touched her foot she said nothing. And when his hand slipped down to caress the inner side of her thigh, she wanted nothing but to sit silently with him, watching the surf.

Ruth had no way of knowing how long they had sat there, apart from the movement of the sun and the afternoon shadows it was casting longer and longer upon the beach. Eventually, though, she knew there was something else she wanted; something she wanted to show him and share with him. Without looking at him and without turning to him, “I would like to show you my cats,” she said.

*****

Harry’d never thought of himself as an ambitious man. After all, when he was a kid the whole family had been offered the chance to leave the island – back in ’69 it was, a couple a years after Independence, when Pappa had discovered there was work to be had in London as a bus conductor. Pappa’d thought he’d look mighty fine in one of those dark blue peaked caps he’d seen in the recruiting brochure, rolling tickets for those fine English people that rode the bus to work every morning. But Mamma, she didn’t feel right about it. Said it didn’t ‘witness with her spirit’ and she’d had no word from the Lord that they was to go. Anyway, she said, a man needed to really know he was makin’ the right move afore he left an island with a different beach for every day of the year, and wasn’t that paradise enough for anyone? So the idea had been dropped, the family had stayed and Harry had grown up in Antigua.

“Smilin,’ always smilin’,” Mamma used to say of him. “That boy always smiling. Smilin’ Harry’s blessed wid the happiness of the Lord Hisself, Praise His Holy Name.” And for his blessed state of happiness she would call upon him to do good works in thanks and praise to her God. Ever obliging, Harry would follow her instructions, distributing bibles in St John’s on a Saturday morning, collecting for the missionaries of Africa in the afternoon and taking discarded school books to the young girl next door in the evenings, the one who was struggling to raise her brothers and sisters and still give herself some kind of education. And sometimes Harry would stand outside her ramshackled house, such a contrast to his own, and watch through the window as she studied by lamplight. Then he would whisper a prayer to a god he was not sure existed in thanks that she was not his responsibility.

While God graciously received Mamma’s praises in the Elim Pentecostal Church each Sunday, Smiling Harry would walk the beaches, one each week, to find out if it really was true that the Island had a beach for every day of the year. He pursued his objective faithfully, walked and counted twenty-nine beaches until, just after his tenth birthday, they’d done long division in school and he’d dauntingly calculated it would take him almost seven years to complete his self appointed task. At that moment he’d decided to accept Mamma’s estimate. However, by then it was, so to speak, too late. For Smiling Harry had already walked the ten miles from Willikies, climbed a hill on the south eastern side of the island and seen a sight that made him quite certain there really was a God, just as Mamma had always said.

From where he looked down, the lush vegetation fell away beneath a cloudless cerulean sky for perhaps two miles until it reached a bay shaped like a crescent moon. There, a strip of coral pink sand seemed to open its arms to welcome the white foamy surf that rolled and tumbled towards it. To the southern half of the crescent stood what he assumed to be a small hotel. To the northern end, there was nothing; nothing but sand, and surf and the warm sunshine sparkling on the surface of the impossibly turquoise water; nothing but a nearly disused car park with rough stone steps down onto the beach and a tumbled down wooden bar. It was at that moment that Harry knew two things. First, that he would never leave this island. Second, that if it was to be within his power, when he grew up he would live and work in this bay.

When he graduated school he portered at the airport, waited table at English Harbour and worked road construction around St John’s whenever the Government was willing to spend the money. And never mind if friends called him to drink at the bar and stop working so hard, or the girls looked at him with inviting eyes or shook their hips suggestively as they passed him. Smiling Harry heeded none of them. “What you need all dis money for Harry?” Mamma would ask. “Don’ you forget, St. Paul say Money is d’root of all evil an’ you be going to the Devil if you love it too much.” But to Harry the money was no more than a necessary step on the road to Half Moon Bay. By the time he was twenty-two, he had enough money to buy a small area of land around the bar and the right to use the road that led down to it. It was to be another two years of portering and waiting table and road construction before he had saved enough to rebuild the bar until finally, in 1974, Smiling Harry’s opened for business.

*****

Well, of all the things to break the perfect moment! You weren’t sure you’d heard her correctly, so you asked her to repeat. “I would like to show you my cats,” she said again.

“Your cats?” you questioned incredulously, still believing you must have misheard her.

“Yes. My cats,” she repeated, “My sea cats, circling the moon.”

And then you knew that one of you must be suffering from excessive exposure to the sun. But you really weren’t quite sure which, so you thought you’d better go along with her.

“Come with me,” she said standing up. And you walked with her, slipping your hand into hers and not caring what anyone thought, back to her stall, where she locked up for the night. Then she took you to where she parked her scooter and motioned for you to get on the back. Down into St John’s she drove you, past the brightly coloured Anglican churches and Pentecostal churches, past the innumerable makeshift billboards advertising reflexology or massage or spiritual consultation and out on Factory Road towards Wilikies. Here the signs of salvation yielded to a mishmash of chain linked fences dividing residential plots, their houses ramshackled and barely habitable or brightly painted and proudly maintained, the gardens a jungle of weeds or carefully tended, until the shanty town finally gave way to a thirsty greenery that lusted after the rains that were yet to come. Down on to Half Moon Bay she drove, where she killed the two stroke engine just as the light was beginning to fade. She took your hand again and walked you down to a beach bar called Smiling Harry’s where the barman, who was all of six foot four and built with it, was just closing up. He greeted her warmly, merely glancing at you, a look of some suspicion in his eyes. Then she insisted on buying you another beer, even though you didn’t really want it. And you sat, the two of you, at an old rickety wooden trestle table, one can of beer between you, looking out into the bay until she grabbed your hand and said “Look, a cat” pointing out into the water. Your eyes scanned the waves repeatedly, looking everywhere for some unfortunate furry animal that might have been swept out into the bay, but you could see none. And she gripped onto your arm and said “No, look there! The boat!” And you looked where she was pointing, right out into the bay, further out than you’d be comfortable swimming, until at last you saw what she saw and understood what she meant. You peered through the rapidly disappearing daylight to see the silhouette of a catamaran as it slipped silently round the bay and disappeared behind the tip of the southern headland.

“Now I understand!” you said, laughing.

But she looked at you with dark serious eyes and shook her head and said “No, you do not understand. You only see, you do not understand.”

And in that moment you knew she was right – that you were nineteen and just testing the water of life with a cautious toe before committing yourself and you knew that though you saw, you did not understand. And you knew that though she couldn’t have been any older than you, this girl who even now didn’t know your name yet had taken control of your heart, this girl could see and could understand in a way that you could not; that in a way you could not yet explain to yourself, this girl was your beginning and your end and all of the journey in between. So you looked at her with eyes more honest than you’d ever looked at anyone ever before and you implored her: “Teach me.”

Then she smiled at you and took your hand and led you down on the pink sand that was turning to grey in the falling twilight. You left your sandals at the foot of some stone steps and walked together down to the water’s edge where the sea swept over your feet and the soft wet sand seeped up between your toes. Then, seeing that there was a hotel and lights and tourists to your right you turned away, turned to the north, seeing your way by the starlight as the last of the daylight sighed and died. Hand in hand you walked up the beach through the surf, listening to the waves breaking on the shore, until you were well away from the last few people on the beach. As you came to the northern end of the crescent you knew, and you knew that she knew, that it was time. She led you up the beach to a place where the bushes swayed over the sand and you lay with her, sliding your arms under her back and kissing her face until she turned her lips towards you. Then you kissed those lips as if you’d never kissed another girl before and as if you never wanted to kiss another again for all the days that you would live. And as you kissed her she slid her hands down inside your shorts, pushing them down your thighs. Then using her feet, she pushed them further, until she’d removed them from your legs entirely, making you naked from the waist down. But even though you knew what she wanted and you wanted it too, you were too shy, or too overwhelmed with the moment to do more until she slipped her hand between your thighs and guided your cock towards her open legs. And then you weren’t shy or overwhelmed any more.

Later, as you both lay back looking up at the stars, you asked her about the catamarans. Why were they important to her? What was it about them that attracted her attention? And she told you how they carried the tourists that came to the island, always clockwise, always following the prevailing winds, able to move in the flow of the wind yet never able to move against it; how they carried the hopes and dreams of each person aboard, how they made people feel that they had arrived where they wanted to be and that they had everything they could possibly want. Yet in truth all they could do was go on sailing round the island, ending up back where they came from and that meant that their end was there, right there, in their beginning. And because for those that rode the cats nothing had changed on their return, that meant that they had nothing and that they knew nothing. And right where you were, at Half Moon Bay, all they could do was sail past, circling the moon. And you told her you thought you understood, not realising that it would be years before you truly did.

*****

Though she knew he had not understood, he came willingly – a first act of trust that she did not feel she deserved. For the first time in her life she’d shut the stall early, asking the neighbouring trader to look over it for her. She’d taken him out to Half Moon Bay on her little moped, deliberately passing her own home and Harry’s without comment, concentrating on the feeling of his arms around her from behind as she drove. When they’d arrived at Smiling Harry’s Bar she’d looked directly at Harry, as if to tell him not to interfere. So Harry, clearly against his real inclinations, just served her with a beer that he knew was for the man and that he knew she could not afford, saying nothing, but worrying lest she came to harm. Later she had taken him down onto the beach and they’d walked away to her special place where she liked to sit and watch the sun go down. And when the last of the day light had gone she had taken him in her arms and, despite his reticence, taken him inside herself – the first man to whom she had entrusted her body – the only one, as far as she was concerned, that she would ever do this with. And afterwards they had lain in the darkness, and she had tried to explain, with a wisdom beyond her bodily years, a knowledge born of past lives, or genetic memory, or collective unconscious, beyond both their understanding, how few the choices there were and how much people fool themselves into believing they are in control. But he had not understood. She had not expected him to.

Afterwards, all through the fall months of the northern continents, when the cold winds blew the tourists to the island in their droves, they had come to the bay at the end of each day. She took to shutting up the stall early to enable them to ride over in the daylight. David, as she had come to know him to be named, would buy the beers from Harry and they would sit at the trestle table looking out to see as sunset threw fire across the sky. As the days passed Harry watched David’s relationship with Ruth deepen. Then he came first to accept, and finally to like David.

Harry would tower over him as he brought the beers. “Why you sittin’ so still, Mon?” Harry enquired as David sat silently by Ruth one afternoon, looking out to sea. “You made of nitro-glycerine or sumthin?” Then he roared at his own joke and took to calling David ‘Nitro,’ a name of which David heartily approved, but knew, like everything here, belonged to the island and not to him.

At home, or so the newspaper headlines told you, they were having a winter of discontent, consisting of three day working weeks and power cuts and strikes. But you had no particular need to go home anyway. Jamie and Frank and Henry had move on, heartily pissed off at your preoccupation with “that black girl” as they insisted on calling her – at least that’s what they called her in your presence. So you’d allowed yourself to sink slowly into that famous Caribbean nonchalance, not caring too much what the world did or what the day did. You found yourself work here and there, cleaning a bar in the morning, preparing vegetables in a hotel kitchen during an afternoon – whatever you could find until Ruth was ready to shut up shop. And yes, though you hated to admit it to yourself, you’d even started to write poetry when there was nothing else to do – a sign of a complete and utter nutcase as far as you were concerned at that time. But what the hell, you were never going to let anyone else know about it, let alone read it, so what did it matter?

As Ruth slowly revealed more of her life to you, you would find ways of slipping cash to her without making much of it. She for her part, would accept the money and the consideration gratefully, saying nothing. Each afternoon you’d balance precariously on the back of her moped, clearly designed without a passenger in mind, and slip your arms around her waist for pleasure as much as for stability as she guided the little vehicle down to Half Moon Bay. Each twilight you’d arrive at Harry’s a few minutes before closing and without your asking he would pull out two cold beers and two sandwiches, waving your hand away when you tried to pay him saying “No money, Nitro, no money. You jus’ look after dat girl – she mada gold, man – she precious.” Then you’d sit with her at the trestle table looking out into the bay, waiting for the catamarans to make their twilight run around the island. And as the darkness fell she would lead you once more down to her special place on the beach, the place that was now special to you too, where she would open her heart and her body to you and you would make love by star light.

You had no way of knowing, no way of anticipating. That day, a Saturday, when she came to you at Dickenson looking troubled, when you asked her what was wrong, she did not reply. She just took you by the hand like it was any other day and led you to the moped and drove you to Half Moon where Harry served you beer and sandwiches just like it was any other day, though something told you it wasn’t like any other day. And when the darkness fell she led you down onto the beach and to your special place, still saying nothing. And you knew, could tell, could feel in the racing of her heart and the grip of her hand on yours that this was different. That night she made love to you with a passion, a fire that you had not known in her before, as if by the burning of that fire and the thrusting of her body under you and upon you and in front of you, she could outrun the coming light of day. But the world turned and the night passed and the daylight came. And as the first grey streaks of dawn sketched silhouettes on the beach, she told you; told you that this was the last time; that your shared time had run out of time and that it was time for you to leave.

Then came angry words and violent eyes and a turning away.

Then came weeping, because you knew, even though you did not want to know.

Then came hugging and until finally there came acceptance; a sullen acceptance, devoid of reconciliation that faced the hated truth that you could not change the world or outrun it and you could not change her mind or even steer it.

Then came cold, cold misery.

And by this you knew you really were leaving.

You knew her reason, even though she refused to speak of it. You knew that there were rules, rules of appearance that cemented bricks of hypocrisy into impenetrable walls of expectation. And though you hated yourself for it, you knew that you could not break down the walls and you knew that there would be no transcendence and there would be no redemption. All there would forever be was the cats, and she, and you, circling the moon.

And all she would say as she made you promise never, ever to look for her was that it was ok, it really was, because she had already had a lifetime of looking after everyone else and just one more child wouldn’t make any difference at all.

*****

Afterwards, travelling the world didn’t have the same attraction as it had done when you set out. So there was nothing for it but to go back to England and pull pints in a bar in some city noisy enough to suppress the memory of her eyes for maybe a few hours at a time. And at first you reckoned you’d not take up that place to read English at Bristol, but when the time came, with the pressure from your parents and the fact that Henry had gone to Oxford and Frank to UMIST and most of your mates were doing something similar, you didn’t try to steer against the wind. As you applied yourself, at first unenthusiastically, to undergraduate courses in modern literature and the Romantic Poets, it seemed like in the voices of Keats and Shelley you could hear the echo of her smile - but not so that it hurt, not in such a way as to tear off the scar tissue that was starting to grow over your memory. After a while you found yourself falling in love again and it was a love that would last a lifetime. But this time the love was not for a woman but for Eliot; Eliot who was always Sterns with you but who, privately, you liked to think of as your friend Tom; Eliot who in ‘East Coker’ stopped you in mid stream with words that were as beautiful as a Half Moon Bay; Eliot who finally explained it to you so that at last you understood, that ‘In my beginning is my end,’ and ‘to arrive at where you are, to get from where you are not, you must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy,’ and ‘what you do not know is the only thing you know,’ and ‘in order to possess what you do not possess you must go by the way of dispossession.’ You wept when you read those words, wondering how one man could know so much and how, though long dead, he could know so much about you; and how one woman who, like as not had never read those words, could have understood them and made the choice for you, that you were to go by a way of no ecstasy.

When undergraduate days were over and you’d surprised yourself with first class honours, and because you didn’t really know what to do next, when Jamie suggested an MA in creative writing at East Anglia it sounded like a good way of not deciding anything at all for a bit longer. So you went, and you wrote and you were surprised to find that you could do it; that you could do it well enough that the MA led to a PhD and a debut novel that the critics weren’t too unkind about. When you started submitting to the poetry magazines you told yourself that it wasn’t really in the expectation of getting anything published. And when Poetry Today took Scheherazade Suite and called it the most enigmatic, haunting piece of writing from a new poet in years, you convinced yourself it was only because the name David Freeborn was already know to them from your novel and you told no one it was about her. But when Circling the Moon won the TS Eliot Prize you had to face up to your own talent. So you went on writing until you woke up one morning and found you were due to sign copies of your fifth novel in Borders and the weekend broadsheets were talking about collecting first editions of your work. So you supposed that meant that you’d finally arrived, and that was fine, because as your old friend Tom has said, and your lover had decided for you, you had gone by a way wherein there was no ecstasy, which meant it was ok that the only thing you knew was what you did not know.

*****

After the Englishman had gone, Harry knew Ruth was hurting badly and he knew that it fell to him to support her through her grief. He was relieved when she accepted gratefully. With his mother having died and his sister having left the island there was no woman in his life. Though he had no attraction to women, this was something of which, if you were wise, you did not speak openly. When running a business at Dickenson became too much for her, she was more than grateful for the job he had arranged for her cleaning at the hotel at Half Moon Bay and she had eventually trusted him enough to tell him of the child before the rest of the world needed to know. While they were sharing confidences, Harry told her his own secret and a sense of shared conspiracy drew them still closer. Eventually, when he had proposed marriage she knew clearly what was on offer and what was not. And for this, too, she was grateful, for she had determined that in at least one way she would never belong to any man but the Englishman. This marriage would put the matter beyond question.

So with her brothers and sisters nearing the age of self sufficiency, Ruth married Harry and named her son David. Then there was contentment and a calm, peaceful kind of happiness, restful as the lapping waves, even if this was a way of no ecstasy. As the boy grew he learned to call Harry ‘Pappa.’ As for Harry, his choice of pet name for David was all but inevitable. And because he had always heard his Pappa call him ‘Nitro,’ David never felt the need to ask for, nor did Harry feel a need to provide, any explanation.

All that is recorded of that day in 1995 is that Luis changed direction. Eleven times that season the island had been spared the coming of the hurricanes so there was no particular reason to be concerned when the meteorological offices announced that the twelfth would pass close by without making landfall. And there was no particular reason to worry when the sky turned greyer that morning, and no particular reason to fear when the rain started. But when the wind changed to an uncommon north-westerly, and that old blow Luis duly followed, when the gales started to thrash the palms and shake the hotel roof, when, as Ruth had always foretold, it was universally realised that there was no way to control the wind and that all in its path could only follow, and when Hurricane Luis concurred in her opinion and drove straight onto Half Moon Bay, taking out both the hotel and Smiling Harry’s Bar, then, then there was cause for concern.

After Luis there was the silence.

After the silence there was denial.

After denial there were eleven dead.

After the deaths there was the way of no ecstasy.

*****

You never married, of course; bought a converted barn and twenty-three acres out in Suffolk; kept your private life just that – private. Over the years you thought many times of looking for her, or sending some kind of investigator to look for her. It wouldn’t have been hard on an island of 35,000 people. But she did not want to be found and you had promised not to look. So there was no investigator and no search. There was only that gnawing emptiness surging up when least expected, reminding you that you no longer possessed what once you had possessed; reminding you that now there was only the way of dispossession.

When the diagnosis came through, there was no one close you could tell. You spent the remaining months as all men would – in applying yourself to doing those things that pleased you best. In your case that meant finding homes for the animals, selling the barn and setting up a trust fund for young aspirant writers from the Caribbean who wanted to study at British universities.

Eventually all that was left was money. You bought a one way ticket to the only place where you still had unfinished business. And because there was still quite a lot of money you decided to fly Premium Economy.

So you landed at Bird, and that when they opened the door you felt like the heat was going to suck you out of the ‘plane. You hung back behind the steward’s politely obstructive arm while Upper Class filed out, smug superiority written over every face. Then it was your turn to feel richer-than-thou as he stood back to let you exit, and smiled a deferential ‘goodbye’ while Economy stood behind him, panting for freedom. You walked down the aircraft steps into the Caribbean sunshine as the sound of the steel band wafted over the tarmac to welcome you just as it had done thirty-three years before. And because you were three or four minutes ahead of Economy you got to the taxi rank before the queue had formed. As you gave the driver your destination it made you smile to think that this time there was no one to argue with over how to split the fare.

He dropped you outside the entrance to Harmony Hall where a bevy of deferential porters charged the car with the intention of carrying your bags and your computer and your golf clubs and anything else you might be about to put your hand on. You smiled at their disappointment when they saw that you came with nothing but a single holdall which you insisted on carrying yourself and you smiled even more when your saw their enthusiasm at the size of the tip you gave them for not carrying anything at all. You dumped your bag in your room, taking little notice of the view of Brown’s Bay, because after Half Moon Bay nothing, even on Antigua, would ever come close to comparing. Instead you dropped down to the jetty where the hotel’s little boat, Luna, was waiting to take you over to Green Island. The irony of that name was not wasted on you. On your return, for want of anything more pressing to do you called into the art gallery to check out the Paul Elliott exhibition. Not that you were a particular admirer of his work – it was just the surname that caught your attention. So you couldn’t claim any particular intervention of fate or a purposeful universe when she spoke those familiar lines to you.

*****

She had arrived at virtually the same time as he had, having decided to come for the Elliott exhibition. Of course, she had recognised him instantly from the pictures on his book jackets, even though his hair was thinner and greyer than the airbrushed versions would have his public believe. When no woman exited the taxi to stand beside him, her eyebrows rose and her hopes widened. But she made no immediate move. She had no intention of positioning herself in his eyes as some overly-mature swooning groupie. He would be tired after a long flight, she reasoned and would need time to acclimatise before she could expect from him the characteristically British response of politeness or the possibility of a more extended conversation. Later it was genuine serendipity – or, as she preferred to believe, synchronicity - that brought him into the Paul Elliott exhibition just as she was concluding her own first visit. She had been a collector of Elliott ever since she left the Caribbean, following his career more particularly when he move to St. Martin, yet had never before taking the opportunity of visiting an exhibition on home territory.

Freeborn was standing in front of a typical Elliott canvass – the sea, an enticing Caribbean turquoise, viewed unattainably though the open shutters of a colourful shanty house; inside the house, the dark barrenness of the room just visible. He stood in a clichéd evaluative pose, holding his catalogue under his right elbow as he studied the painting critically. Standing a discrete two feet from him, she mirrored his posture and matched his respiratory pace. Allowing thirty seconds or so for his unconscious sense of rapport to click in, she spoke, addressing, it seemed, the canvas, rather than the man.

“So let us sit upon the ground and weep oceans into the graves of dead children,” she quoted.

He stiffened but did not turn.

She continued. “Let us rage our affronted aphorisms at the inherent injustice of the universe and the moral systems better men than us design.”

“This is a scene of peace and calm. Yet you see rage and injustice in it?”

She hesitated then answered carefully. “You and I are destined from birth to see it differently. You are English. You are a tourist. You see a cloudless sky, a warm blue sea viewed through the shutters of a colourful house. You buy the painting, take it home, hang it on the wall and tell your friends of your vacation in Antigua. I am Antiguan. I too see the sky and the sea. I see a house painted bright yellow on the outside to hide the darkness and poverty that is on the inside. I see a distant sea in which others play while I must work to feed my fatherless family.”

He considered the proposition carefully. Still maintaining his posture and without turning he spoke. “ You must think me shallow.”

“I don’t think anyone could accuse you of shallowness, Dr. Freeborn – introspection, certainly, but is that not a characteristic of all writers – and of poets in particular?”

When he responded, it was not to answer the question. “Then shall we make pilgrimage to the Shrine of Incredulity…” he began.

“Adding to our number,” she interjected, “from the lost souls that we meet as we passed by the villages of the damned.”

He turned slightly, including her in his gaze along with the seascape. “Surely it is too much to see in these houses the villages of the damned? These are pictures of joy, of hope, no?”

“True,” she said, “but when you were first interviewed about that poem you insisted that the villages of the damned were habitations of the soul, not the body.”

It was some moments before he responded. “Twenty-five years,” he said quietly. “Twenty-five years since I built the villages of the damned.”

“Yes,” she answered, “but I was an intern at Poetry Today when Scheherazade Suite was published. I remember the excitement it caused – the debates that ran over what you were really writing about.”

“I’ve no intention of telling you now, if that’s what you’re here for,” he replied.

“No, Dr. Freeborn.” She winced, knowing she had taken the conversation out of his comfort zone already. “No, I didn’t mean to suggest you would change an avowed intention of a lifetime.”

“You have the advantage Mrs. …?”

“Dawkins, she replied, “Esther Dawkins. I’m a lifelong admirer of your work – the novels as well as the poetry.”

“Unusual.” he said “My publishers tell me I never made the impact west of the Atlantic that they would have liked. I’ve certainly never been recognised personally in the Caribbean before.”

“Well, as I’ve said, I was an intern at Poetry Today.”

“And when you returned to Antigua?”

She shook her head. “I stayed in England; married an Englishman, raised three children in Brookman’s Park and worked in publishing until my husband died.”

*****

She would have caught your eye anyway, though not so much because of the way she looked as because of the way she moved. There was that gracefulness about her, the same elegant poise that you’d always supposed lay on at the root of the ability of native peoples worldwide to carry loads on the heads. You’d often thought that whereas your people were burdened by the weight of the world on their shoulders, that same weight, differently balanced, bestowed grace and elegance upon these people. And you were aware of her drawing close to you, looking at the painting next to you, then finally betraying her real purpose in that rather inelegant and over-obvious attempt to engender rapport by matching your posture and breathing. She needn’t have. You had already decided to talk to her. The poetry came as a surprise though - that much you had to admit. Then there had been the conversation about the painting that she had viewed with eyes so different from your own, leading you to wonder if you’d had your nose so far into your own art for the last twenty five years that you’d failed to notice everyone else’s. And then there was the disclosure that reframed everything.

They had seated you at a balcony table overlooking the bay below - not that the sea was visible through the darkness of a cloud-shrouded night, though. But you could hear the breeze swaying the trees, and the lonely calls of insects hungering for species fellowship. She had talked to the waiter in some version of English that was beyond your ability to follow, ordering both food and wine that you suspected would not be available to the average tourist. The problem, of course, was that dinner held the expectation of disclosure on your part, and disclosure carried the threat of the very kind of emotional intimacy that you consistently avoided. So with little thought or no though you did what you had long since learned protected you best in such situations. You turned the charm up to full volume, concentrated totally upon her and asked her about herself. You weren’t to know the consequences.

“How did you come to leave Antigua, Mrs. Dawkins?”

Her eyes glazed a little, retreating into enticing memories. “I followed a man, Mr Elliott, a white man.” You did not trouble to correct her mistake. Your silence drew more from her. “It was the old, old story really. It was 1976. I was eighteen. He was twenty-one - a tourist. I met him in nightclub at English Harbour. I fell in love. He went home at the end of his two weeks holiday. I was miserable, so I followed him.” She cradled her glass in her right hand, swirling the red wine inside, making it catch the candle light and reflecting it onto the ceiling above the table . “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I knew my parents would see it as disobedience more than foolishness. They’d considered moving the whole family to London – in 1969, I think it was. Pappa’d been offered a job on the busses. Mamma had said no. And when Mamma said no Mamma meant no. It didn’t matter how many years had passed or what my reasons were. They even turned down the invitation to the wedding. She wrote to me – told me I was sinning against her and Pappa and against God. ‘Honour thy father and mother,’ she wrote. Never spoke to me again til the day she died. The only contact I had with the family was through my brother.”

“Is he still here on the island?”

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “In a manner of speaking,” she replied.

Seeing her discomfort you changed subjects and the rest of the evening was given to talk of art and poetry and literary prizes. Two bottles of wine and an arrestingly good meal later, the hands of the clock drew towards the vertical. The conversation had slipped into a comfortable lull – the kind beloved of caring families and conspiratorial drinkers. After a while she saw you glance at the time and she spoke. “Crows feet pointing to midnight, Dr. Freeborn?” she asked with a knowing smile. You frowned at her, confused, until a gossamer memory wafted gently up through the layers of your consciousness.

“Now your crow’s feet point to midnight…” you began uncertainly.

“when the coachmen turn to mice,” She replied, raising her eyebrows.

“And the lovers yearn for freedom…”

“… when the laughter turns to ice.” She smiled quizzically at you. “Surely you’ve not forgotten your own poem, Dr. Freeborn?”

You laughed. “No,” you answered, “The Jester. But I wish everyone else had! Not one of my best.”

She looked intently into your eyes. You looked back at her, gently turning down the invitation.

*****

She had taken the unspoken rejection with excellent grace. But you were glad, nevertheless, that the words had not actually been exchanged. Shortly afterwards she had excused herself, offering a polite hope that she might see you again before your respective vacations ended. Dishonestly, you had concurred.

You slept late the next morning, hoping to avoid her at breakfast. When you did wake, you hung around the hotel for the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon, talking to no one, ignoring the view and the warm breeze that blew gently in from the hotel’s main balcony. Ignoring the external environment was a habit you had developed over a lifetime. Internal stimuli, however, were a different matter.

Of course, she wasn’t the first person to have confronted you with the life-wrecking reality of that unutterably foolish mistake you had made at the age of nineteen. She wasn’t the first black woman you’d met who married a white man, or the first to bear mixed race children who had to live with whatever taunts and prejudices might have come their way. She was, however, the first Antiguan you’d met who had done so. And, however many times you told yourself that your mistake at such a young age was understandable, and your reaction now illogical, that still made it different. And that was what kept barging uninvited into your thoughts from the front and from behind and from the left and from the right. That was what kept beating insistently on the bark of your consciousness, like some manic woodpecker, refusing to be ignored until it broke through to gorge itself on the writhing insect nest of your silent self deprecation. It was that incessant knocking, together with the sympathetic racing of your heart that eventually had to give voice, physical voice, until from the silence of your corner table in the bar you let out an “Oh, FUCK IT!” at the top of your voice, that stifled every conversation and turned every head in the room towards you. And, of course, here you were all but unknown, so you couldn’t rely on peoples’ willingness to indulge creative types like writers and artists in order to excuse you. So you coloured up just like anyone else and muttered “I’m sorry,” as you rose rapidly from your table and made a hasty, tail-between-legs, exit.

There was only one thing to be done, of course; only one Shrine of Incredulity for you to make pilgrimage to, and it might as well be now as at any other time. So you marched determinedly out through reception to the taxi rank and hailed the first cab without waiting for the concierge to do it for you. You had the rear door open before it stopped and you’d instructed ‘Half Moon Bay” before the driver had had time to ask you ‘Where to?’ On arrival you were surprised to find just one other cab at the top of the lane leading down to the beach. You thought to yourself that Smiling Harry’s Bar must, for some reason, be less popular than it had been in your day.

Steeling yourself for the potential need to summon a courteous smile should it later be required, you handed the cab driver several notes and didn’t notice whether he waited or not – your thoughts were on the beach a hundred yards away. Then, making your way back into a fleeing past that was rapidly receding into a grey twilight, and forward into an unwelcoming future shrouded in impenetrable darkness, you fixed your face firmly towards the beach. You had intended to ignore Smiling Harry’s Bar with its expected gaggle of drinkers and to go straight on down the stone steps onto the beach. You’d thought to leave your sandals at the foot of the steps, just for old times’ sake. But when you got to the top of the steps you couldn’t resist just one single glace to the left, one last look at Smiling Harry’s, just for old times’ sake . And one glance was all it took. She was sitting there.

She was all you saw at first, sitting at a rickety trestle table where you’d sat thirty-three years ago. The sight of her, alone, crying, was enough to exhume all your skeletons at once. So you had to turn round, you couldn’t not turn round, couldn’t just carry on what you were doing, pretending you hadn’t seen her. And because you’d turned, you’d let it all back in, hadn’t you? And that was why even though she’d not looked up, even though she’d not seen you, you had to go to her. And as you started walking towards her you began to take in the rest of the scene that really was shimmering. And for just that moment you couldn’t tell whether that was due to the falling light of early evening, or from the tears in your eyes or because she, and everything around her, were all ghosts. It was then you realised that she was sitting at the only complete table in the ruin of a bar that had been derelict for God knows how long.

When you reached the table, she’d still not looked up and was still crying softly. You sat down opposite her and could have wished for a single can of beer, so cold that the condensation would have run down the side of the can, to be on the table between you. But there was no beer because there was no bar. All there was was the silence that wrapped itself around your respective miseries. You were used to your own silence, used to your own misery. But you weren’t nearly as familiar with someone else’s and that made you uncomfortable. You stood it as long as you could. Then you spoke.

“What did you mean yesterday, when you said your brother was still here ‘in a manner of speaking’?”

She had known you were there as soon as you sat down, of course, but she had kept her gaze on the table, more in touch with her memories that you or the broken down bar or the evening. Finally she sniffed, wiped her eyes and looked up at you. She was silent for a while more. Then she answered - at length and surprisingly eloquently. “He was my lifeline, David, my umbilical to home. We wrote all the time. I must have asked him in every letter if there was any sign of a thaw in Mamma’s attitude. There never was. She wouldn’t even let me come to Papa’s funeral in ‘82. Left word in her own will that I wasn’t to be allowed to attend hers either. That was 1994. David, was I so awful? Was what I did so terrible that’s she cut me off like that?” And now she was weeping again, reaching across the table for your arm. “After our parents died Harry just told me his own news – about the bar, about his own family. He’d married the year I left. That was a surprise. I’d always assumed... well, anyway. But his son was born six months later. And if you got a girl into trouble in Antigua in 1976 you married her. No two ways about it. Harry loved that boy to bits though – sent me pictures of him all the time. Ruth christened him David – your name, but Harry always referred to his son as Nitro – said he’d be a still and quiet man, just like his father.” She didn’t notice that your body had stiffened. “Strange really, that he’d refer to himself in that way. There was nothing still or quiet about Smiling Harry.”

You sat there, holding her hand in the twilight, trying your damnedest to stop yourself from crushing it. You wanted to think – somehow get your head in order. But silently your mind raged its affronted aphorisms and would not be still.

“Because Mamma had died we’d planned a family reunion for ‘95. I was so happy I could come home at last. I was going to bring my family to meet Harry’s. It was to be my first visit since I’d left – nineteen years, David, nineteen years.” She was weeping harder now, but desperate to carry on, to get the story out, as if doing so would somehow exorcise the pain and lay those interminably active ghosts to rest. “And then came Luis. In 1995 Hurricane Luis just… blew my people all away. I came home to see my family for the first time in nineteen years. And I did see them. I did see them, David. But they were lined up in three wooden coffins. I thought I was coming to love them and to laugh with them. But when I got here all I could do was bury them.” She grabbed your hand hard and pulled it across the table to her, weeping uncontrollably onto it, shaking with great heaving sobs. You did not resist, but neither did you encourage her. All you could think of was your own twenty five years. The twenty-five years that had passed since you built and inhabited the villages of the damned.

It was later, much later, when she had cried herself to sleep and was breathing heavily that you extricated yourself gently from her grip. Then you wandered slowly back to the stone steps and down onto the sand, not stopping to remove your sandals. As you made you way down to the water there were no more affronted aphorisms left inside you to rage. And as you made silent pilgrimage to the Shrine of Incredulity, behind you you could hear the shuffling feet of lost souls as they added themselves to your number. Finally, you arrived at your destination, the one you had been moving towards, the one you had been returning to, for twenty-five years. There beneath the bushes, her bushes, you sat upon the ground and wept oceans into the graves of dead children.

As you sat and as you wept, the western sky threw blades of red and orange fire over the clouds. It was too dark to see much, but you could hear the night winds goading the waves into a spray that made you taste the salt on the breeze. And as you sat and as you wept, you wished, you wished so hard, for the sound of tropical waterfalls and the taste of coconut rum and the feeling of the sun on your back. And as you sat and as you wept you knew, you knew for a certainty, that somewhere out there on the dark water, their sails filled with a wind they could only follow and never control, the sea cats were circling the moon.

May 2009

Antigua