All at Sea, page 19
Charlotte lives in a chocolate-box village in Kent with her parents and sister. She looks like an eighteenth-century milkmaid, studied child development at university, is only twenty-two, and goes out with a thoroughly nice long-term boyfriend. Her last holiday was to Disneyland in Florida. Charlotte would be forgiven for finding a place like this more than a trifle unnerving.
On paper, Danielle’s background might look a little edgier, having grown up on a council estate in Hackney, the eldest child to a single mum of St Lucian descent. But Danielle is the most innocently demure, cautiously self-effacing woman I know. She and Charlotte had not met before we assembled at the Gatwick check-in desk – and having witnessed the depths of my despair at close hand, neither was expecting this trip to involve fun. What happens during the following fortnight comes as a complete surprise to all of us.
Everything begins to make us laugh. The Treasure Beach boys buzz around Charlotte and Danielle, and to my astonishment Charlotte falls in love with hardcore Jamaican dancehall. Minerva’s caretaker is a young man called Weedie who I have known since he was a boy, and every time he plays Vybz Cartel, Charlotte exclaims in her home counties vowels, ‘I love this music!’ Although Jamaican patois floors her completely – ‘I can’t understand a word anyone’s saying!’ – soon she is riding around the village on the back of Weedie’s motorbike. The girls go out every night, and even when taken to the local Go Go bar return mildly shaken but elated to have clocked up another cultural adventure. Danielle is courted by a gorgeous young man who literally serenades her (‘He won’t stop singing at me!’) and is so bowled over she takes to shouting up at the stars: ‘I love this place! I feel so free!’ A trip I had pictured as a form of pilgrimage is beginning to look more like Girls Gone Wild.
One night a group of old friends from the village come to supper. Afterwards someone suggests we go to a bar in a nearby village, so we pile into cars and head up into the hills. The bar is just a shack on a grassy hillside, and a karaoke stage is set up outside under the stars. Each singer is more hilariously lamentable than the last, and eventually someone suggests we all go up together and have a go ourselves.
For ten years Tony failed to talk me into karaoke. There is no way in this world I’m about to get on that stage. ‘Let’s do it,’ Charlotte says. ‘Yes!’ agrees Danielle. ‘Come on, Dec,’ someone urges. ‘Remember, yolo.’
Yolo? Oh God, yolo. You Only Live Once – that sub-adolescent acronym for the Facebook generation, popularly invoked to excuse all manner of ill-advisable behaviour. Only here, right now, it suddenly sounds like the purest philosophical wisdom. I don’t know who suggests we do ‘One Love’ – the last time I heard it, Tony’s coffin was being carried out of his funeral – but suddenly it seems like the best idea in the world, and as the others bundle onto the stage I join them.
Afterwards Charlotte and Danielle take the mics and follow up with a Lady Gaga duet, bringing the house down. Then someone thrusts a mic into my hand, and before I’m fully aware of what’s happening the three of us are singing, of all things, ‘Lady Marmalade’. When it’s over we are laughing and reaching for more vodka when a tall man I vaguely recognise approaches. ‘Good to see you,’ he says. ‘Las’ time mi see you, you was in mourning. How di boys?’ He shakes my hand warmly. As he turns away I ask my friend Balty, who was that? ‘Who, dat? ’Im own dis bar. Dat di chief superintendent of police.’
Oh dear God. I have tried so hard for so long to be a good widow – to get it right, to behave correctly – and now the very policeman who dealt with Tony’s death has found me drunk in a bar, singing ‘Voulez-vous couchez avec moi?’ And the extraordinary thing is, I no longer care.
With each passing day, the holiday gets sillier and funnier. When Nikki flies in from New York we resolve that as most Jamaicans have at least two names – their official one almost no one even knows, and the one everyone calls them by – we need street names. Nikki is Breezy, on account of breezing in and out a few days later, and Charlotte is Sandy, in theory because she hates the sand, but endorsed unanimously, I suspect, because we can all detect echoes of Olivia Newton John in Grease. Danielle is Queenie, for reasons no one can remember: Jake wants to be Ready, and Joe comes up with Pinky Po. I can’t remember who came up with The General for me, but everyone declares it perfect.
The strangest thing is, I agree. Until Tony died I had always assumed identity to be indelible, but pity and helplessness have turned me into a meek stranger, diminished and pitifully placatory. I had never felt less like a general in my life, nor liked myself less. But with each passing day here I can sense strength returning. I am coming back to life. When I recount tales of Tony’s funeral to friends – the requirement for a bouncer, the dark extortion attempt by W – what had felt like horror stories begin to assume the comic charm of anecdotes.
The new mood is contagious, and the boys sense it. ‘We,’ they take to announcing proudly, ‘are like Crazy Wild Jamaicans’ – and it is true, they are. Of all the agonies of Tony’s death, to see fear contaminate our sons had been one of the hardest, and Jake’s terror of water has tormented me. Tony’s fear of water cost him his life; had he not floundered and gasped in panic, the swell could not have flooded his lungs. My anxiety is not that Jake might one day drown too, but that his phobia about water will infiltrate his feelings towards the world. Fear can be dangerously infectious, and I want his old boldness back.
Day by day, a little more returns. He learns to swim in the pool at Minerva, and one night he and Joe throw their own impromptu pool party, splashing about until midnight with a gang of local kids they know. They both become casually matter-of-fact about drowning. ‘This is so I don’t drown,’ Joe tells me, pointing to his rubber ring. When Jake stubs his toe in the pool and yelps ‘Ow!’ Joe inquires calmly, ‘Are you drowning, Jakey?’
One morning we go back to Pelican Bar, the bar built on stilts out in the ocean. Both boys say they want to, but Jake repeatedly warns me, ‘I’m going to be a bit scared when we get there.’ As we plane across indigo waves he stands and lowers his hand overboard, electrified by the speed and warm spray, and when he clambers off the boat up the rickety steps he turns to me in surprise. ‘Oh, it isn’t scary at all.’ He and Joe swim in the surrounding shallows for over an hour, chasing fish and pretending to be sea monsters. The following day, when the wind picks up and the sea turns rough, we head to Frenchman’s beach where the fiercest waves come crashing in. Jake used to love the ocean on days like this – ‘More monster waves!’ he would shriek, willing them to tumble him upside down under water – but these are powerful enough to make even Danielle and Charlotte hesitate, and as we wade into the surf my heart is in my mouth. Under protest (‘But I can swim now! I don’t need this baby thing’), Jake has put his floatation vest on; I have no fear for his physical safety. He plunges headfirst into the first roller and disappears, surfacing in a salty daze behind us on the sand. For an awful moment I think he is crying. But he is laughing – ‘It got me, it got me! I love it’ – and races back in to catch the next wave. Joe is in Charlotte’s arms when a mammoth breaker spins them both into underwater somersaults, like a giant washing machine. When they eventually emerge he has been sick all over her hair, but both are shrieking with delight.
We still have not been back to Calabash beach. I don’t expect the boys will want to – but one day Jason and Laura invite us to a beach barbecue at a house just around the headland from Calabash. As soon as Jake hears this he exclaims, ‘That’s near Calabash Cottage! Can we go back to Calabash Cottage?’ Unsure that I will be able to hold myself together, I leave the boys at Minerva later that morning and drive alone to Calabash Bay.
As I reach the beach I spot Blouser cooking over an open fire beside his shack. Damian waves from the villa above, and we embrace. A group of young men from a villa along the beach are standing waist-deep in the ocean playing frisbee, no further out than Tony was when he drowned. I stare at them, envying and despising their ignorance; they have no idea what happened here, and if they did I doubt they would believe it. I can barely believe it myself. The geometry defies reason, the distances are too tiny. How could this placid little corner of the bay, no bigger than an average garden lawn, have stolen a man’s life? I thought that coming back would make what happened real to me, but I was wrong.
I do not cry or come undone. I feel quite calm. At first I think this must be numbness again – but as I sit and gaze out to sea realise it isn’t that at all. The sensation is so unfamiliar, it takes a moment or two to identify. It is peace. I feel closer to Tony here, where he drew his last breath, than I have at any moment since he died.
When I return to Calabash with the others, Charlotte is stunned. The innocent tranquillity is so unlike the picture she has carried in her mind that she simply cannot comprehend how this can be where Tony drowned. Danielle breaks down, and has to go back to the car. But the boys race up and down the beach carelessly, waving up to Calabash Cottage and clambering over fishing boats, as if oblivious to the significance of this spot. Only when I ask if they would like to swim does Jake’s expression tense. ‘No,’ he says quietly. ‘Let’s swim at Minerva.’
The sun is hovering just above the horizon when we reach Minerva, and the five of us swim out into the bay to watch it set. As it sinks from view, bruising the sky pink and purple, I am struck by the date. It is the 15th of February – nine months to the day since Tony died. They have been the longest nine months of my life. But the misery that felt as if it would imprison us for ever has lifted; here we are, the very same people who stumbled into this house nine months ago, dismantled by grief, and now everything is different. Whatever happens now, and whoever we become, we are no longer those broken ghosts. I turn to look at Jake and Joe’s heads bobbing in the water, and for the first time we feel like a family again.
Acknowledgements
A list of all the people who have helped since Tony died would be longer than this book. Their generosity and love has been astonishing, and humbling. Where my children and I would now be without them, I do not know.
But I do know that without three of them, this book would not exist. To Jenni, Johann and Natasha, my gratitude is limitless and everlasting. Thank you.
Footnote
Chapter 7
fn1 Richard stood trial and was found not guilty the following year.
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Decca Aitkenhead, All at Sea
