Heaven's Edge Read Free Page A

talks,’ I said and immediately regretted the tone I had used. At the same time I resented the implication that the surliness I had encountered everywhere was, in some way, my fault. Blood rushed to my face.
    She saw that and suppressed a smile. The skin, stretched thin, trembled. ‘You must be the tourist at Palm Beach?’
    I thought I detected a note of disdain in her tone and, for a minute, I was the one without words. I was not a tourist. At least that was not how I saw myself. Neither was I a native. My categories were different and seemed too difficult to explain to her. I was a man in search of a father, or perhaps in search of himself. The same as everybody else, but on a journey that seemed longer. I told her instead that her doves were the first birds I’d seen since I had landed, even though I had heard there were birds everywhere on the island.
    She picked up the empty cage and shook her head, turning glum. ‘That was before war changed our nature here.’ Her eyes darted around, away from the pond, as if to show me the consequences: the sparse scattering of etiolated flowers under the stooped grey trees. ‘Now you have to search hard to find anything beautiful.’
    I remember feeling some serious misgivings then about what my father might have been involved in and the true nature of my peculiar inheritance. But what could I do? Despite what she said, I thought the glow in her face was beautiful. I watched dewdrops form on the skin around her mouth and on the slopes of her nose. Sunlight turned them into gems. She was unlike anybody else I had ever seen. Slim and small, she seemed to possess all the space around her. Her face drew everything into it. I didn’t want her to move. I wanted to see the shape of the smile she had hidden; to retrieve it for myself.
    I can think of a thousand things to say now but then, stammering over every other word, I floundered. I tried to explain that I had come looking for something. My lost soul perhaps, I said, half-jokingly, trying to mask my confusion.
    She cheered up at that and almost laughed. ‘I can see that.’
    I smiled, wanting to encourage her. Wanting more. For a moment it seemed possible, and that everything would work out right. Then the surface of the pond darkened. I looked up at the clouds that had appeared above us. When I turned back to say something to her, she had gone.
    The trees and the bushes around seemed undisturbed. I felt depleted. I didn’t know what I had done wrong; perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to joke about the soul, things spiritual. For some this was, once, an island of the devout. I searched for some mark – a footprint, crushed grass, anything – but it was as though she had never been there.
    In the end I returned the way I had come, trudging slower and slower.
    By the time I got to the hotel the sun’s last beads had seeped out of the sky. I found an old deckchair andtook it out to the Sundowner Hut overlooking the pier where the boat had docked a week earlier. The sea rolled from dark burgundy to a lunar blue, erasing the crossing I had made and nudging me back to the reasons that lay behind it.
    My father died somewhere in this jungle when I was still a child. My mother took her own life, far from home, not long after. I felt I had never really known either of them; they had hardly ever been around and I had to make do. I grew up with my grandparents, believing I should stay close to home. From an early age I learned to be ultra-cautious. My grandparents themselves had breathed the air of diverse places, but when they spoke of their itinerants’ history, I saw only trails of migration that seemed either cruel or futile: the pointless effects of a wayward gene.
    My grandfather had been an instructor in a small Chertsey flying school on the edge of London but he had retired long before I was born and was, for me, always an old man with silver hair lining a cloudy brown face; his