‘And what do you do in real life?’ I asked.
‘Real life?’
‘What business are you in?’
‘Oh, we’re just on holidays,’ she said with a laugh that ran deeper than her son’s. ‘We travel together when we can.’
‘Is this your first time here?’
‘Yes, we found it on the internet. You’ve been before, I guess.’
‘Often. I like to stop off on my way to Europe. I’m lucky to have a good excuse.’
‘Then you must give us some advice about the beaches.’
‘There are great places to snorkel. Do you dive at all?’
‘She won’t go in the water,’ Eckie answered, coming up behind her.
‘And he won’t come out.’
‘A water baby,’ I said.
‘Water baby!’
He put down a tub of Bombay mix and went back to the bar. I asked again what she did for a living, but she wanted to talk about the best places to snorkel, to eat crayfish, to buy presents. This is what holidaymakers do: they indulge themselves. They do not want to be reminded of home. When she asked how long I would be staying, I wondered if there was an invitation in the question. She had not mentioned a husband. I looked for a wedding ring and noticed that she wasn’t wearing one.
The party grew as new arrivals checked in and guests came back from their outings. So many Germans, but also Scots, Italians, Swedes. The very pale blondes all seemed to be wearing red cotton pants. The small talk and flirtatious laughter grew louder and hotter until it was a roaring bonfire.
Eckie scampered about, overexcited and glowing, talking to everyone, making a collection of new friends and swizzle sticks. But he could not keep away from her. Every few minutes, he would be back to lace his fingers into hers or lean against her. I liked her neck, the way the tendons showed under her skin as she turned her head, but when he rested his face in that brown curve I thought: impossible. She has a lover already. Metaphorically speaking. She loves the boy too much.
I had another drink, in a glass. The sun slid to the bottom of the sky like a sodden cherry. I was about to excuse myself, when a gust of music and laughter reached us from across the water. A catamaran was coming in, a beautiful white craft with sails furled, running on its engines. The coloured lights strung along the deck were luminous in the dusk, and in that charmed web small figures could be seen dancing. I recognised the Parakeet. I’d done this cruise once before, and I planned to do it again this time, when the work was out of the way. It was touristy, of course, a packaged day trip to one of the islets off the coast, but delightful too. They would moor the cat off a beach strewn with dead coral — it was like walking on bones — and the crew made a barbecue while you snorkelled and sunbathed, and then they fed you fruit and grilled fish and poured rum punch under jury-rigged canvas. Castaways with catering. Perfect.
When the Parakeet drew closer, the dancing became wilder, as if the day trippers wished to show the landlubbers how much fun they’d been having. The captain, a dreadlocked kid in a piratical headscarf, brought them close to the beach, almost in among the swimmers, and then swept out in a wide circle, extending the trip by five minutes, marketing his services. Even before they’d cast anchor, some of the more boisterous dancers plunged into the water and swam for the shore. The others milled around on the deck, showing off their sea legs, waiting to be ferried in on the dinghy bobbing at the stern.
A strange tension crackled between the new arrivals on the terrace and the old hands on the boat. The tourist’s timescale is finely calibrated: a single day is the difference between innocence and experience. The people on the boat seemed browner, saltier, happier. We watched them with envy as the party at the Sandbar faltered. The catamaran had reminded a few among us that there were meals to eat and brochures to read, and they began drifting off. My thoughts turned to my plans for the next day. I said goodnight to Martha and Eckie and went to my room.
I saw them again sooner than I expected: in the morning they were on the shuttle bus to Port Louis. They were heading down to Black River so that Eckie could go parasailing. Tomorrow, he said, they might do the catamaran cruise, and the day after that snorkelling. And then there was walking on the ocean floor in a diver’s helmet. She caught my eye while he prattled on and quirked the corner of her mouth as if to say: humour him, he’s young.
Nearly every seat was taken — tourists on the way to one attraction or another, I discovered as they swapped notes. In Triolet we picked up a housekeeper carrying a bucket full of brushes and a feather duster, and I felt a twinge of solidarity with this woman who also had a job to do. I was going to the factory in Floréal.
I sat behind Martha and Eckie on the bus. Something about the heat and the closeness, the sense of being confined among strangers, made me overly aware of their presence. It was almost as if I were seeing some magnified version of them. I remember looking at the sea chart of her freckled shoulders and the bite marks on the earpieces of her sunglasses. He was wearing a cap, and a tuft of hair like a shaving brush stuck out through the hole at the back. I imagined that the passenger behind me, a German woman who couldn’t stop taking photographs, was paying the same exacting attention to the back of my head, watching an enlarged bead of sweat run down inside my collar.
Before long we fell into a drowsy silence. Even the German’s shutter blinked and closed. On the long, straight road out of Triolet, Eckie’s head dropped and jerked a couple of times, and then he leant over and laid his head on his mother’s shoulder. She put her arm around him and drew him close. She let him sleep that way for half an hour, scarcely moving so as not to wake him.
When the bus stopped on the outskirts of Port Louis to let off the housekeeper, Eckie awoke with a start. Sleep had wiped the features of the man from him entirely: his face was as soft and round as a boy’s. He stretched and yawned. Then we saw it. Perhaps he noticed it first or perhaps I drew his attention to it by leaning over the seat for a closer view. In any event, we looked at it together. On the soft, freckled flesh of his mother’s shoulder, where his head had been resting, was a perfect impression of his ear. He cried out in amazed delight. She dipped her shoulder to see what was causing the excitement. It was strange. The shape of his ear, perfect in every ridge and whorl, seemed to have been carved on her body. She rubbed at it, as if she could smooth it into her skin like a dab of suntan lotion, but it persisted in clear relief. Soon everyone was admiring it and laughing, amused or intrigued. The blood rose in Martha’s neck. I cannot say why, but this odd, displaced organ embarrassed her. I cannot explain my response either: my stomach heaved.
It took five minutes to fade away, slowly losing definition like a waxwork in the sun. Once the commotion had passed, Martha and Eckie began to joke and giggle quietly, both of them flushed and radiant. He kept running his fingertips over the carved skin, discovering his own flesh in hers, again and again. When the image was almost gone, he bent down to it and whispered a secret into her body.
Soon afterwards, they got out. I was relieved. I put aside the briefcase I’d been holding on my lap, stretched my legs into the empty space, and tried to think about other things.
You know that I saw them again. We haven’t had the unhappy ending yet.
The following afternoon, I was reading on the verandah when I saw the Parakeet coming in. It was earlier than usual, but that only occurred to me afterwards. What struck me at the time was the silence. No reggae or chatter, just the chug of the engines and the passengers hunched on the deck. The simple explanations — bad weather, spoilt food — did not cross my mind. A dark stain in the air made me go to the railing and watch the boat come closer. It seemed to me to be lying heavily in the water. There were no showy zigzags or loops; it nosed straight in among the swimmers, the captain cut the engines, and his mate threw the anchor overboard.