geese and peacocks), forty-two dogs and an unknown number of cats and cattle, some feral. Seventy-five graves set close together like a rosary round the church – the departed need their space, but not at the expense of the living. Only three graves left, up to two deaths a year.
And now another, unexpected. Officer Dorado Bardelli heard the news that morning from Liesa Pelani, who came over to the office. Dorado received the words released from Liesa’s lips as though they were any other; it was only once she had closed the door on the departing messenger that she felt the dragging pain. She leaned against her desk, shocked, letting tears well and fill her eyes. She had been at school with Angelique; they had played house-house together, and nurse-nurse, and skipping games. Angelique had always been the patient, dying of some terrible illness, and Dorado would take her temperature with a stick under her tongue and listen with her ear to her flat chest to hear the bumping of her heart and the tide of her breath. She would boil up leaves for medicine and Angelique would refuse to take it, saying she didn’t know what was in it; and so Dorado would decree that Angelique was dead, and she would play along, holding her breath and getting floppy. Dorado would run and call the doctor, Roland Kohler, who would come and save Angelique in the nick of time. Then she and Roland would get married and Angelique would cry and feel left out. But Roland had grown up and had left for the mainland and Dorado had fallen in love with Clarence, the mayor, a man already taken. Angelique was the one who had married a doctor; there should have been some insurance in that, but now they said she was dead. Dorado needed to see Angelique dead before she believed it. Perhaps she was just pretending.
She knew Clarence would arrive soon, in his all-weather gear and his agitation. She went to the mirror fastened to the wall over the hand basin and dabbed at her eyes. She must be strong for him, she must steady her hair, which was all over the place again. She would tie it back, braid it, force it into submission, except that it helped to obscure her ugly face. Things would only go from bad to worse now she was getting older. Why had the pretty one been taken away? She screwed her features into a knot, then stretched them wide open over the bones of her face. Clarence had confided his private theory to Dorado: that facial exercises done daily kept the skin flexible and firm and prevented the sagging of flesh, the dewlaps and the jowls from developing. It was ridiculous, wept Dorado, her face going gargoyle as she dragged her hairbrush through the dark thicket on her head. She mopped at her eyes again, wondering whether his wife knew, or whether his little vanity was their secret.
She heard Clarence’s car drive up. She pulled her jacket down sharply over her behind, put on her best face and opened the door to him. He gusted in, dripping, hardly noticing her, already saying something, his arms punctuating his meaning with forceful gestures. She wanted to quieten him, to take him in her arms to reassure them both. But there were eyes all around – the office window looked clear out onto the road – so she busied herself, making him a strong cup of tea. Later, perhaps that evening when the fuss had died down, she could take him to her.
“It’s an act of God,” he declared. “I’ve called a council meeting at eleven. It’s our duty, Dorado, to rescue the doctor from gossip and superstition. Orion Prosper has cured us all of something or other over the years!” He brought himself up in front of the mirror, and looked into it critically. “Jerome can make a sensible announcement in the factory cafeteria, and Minister Kohler can set the villagers’ minds straight on Sunday.” He turned and looked at Dorado for her response. She agreed encouragingly. Her tears had abandoned her. She was up for anything.
“We must go round to the doctor’s house,” Clarence decided. “Express condolences, a public display of solidarity.” He looked at his hands, at the soft pulp of them. “It’s so difficult, death. Awkward.” He frisked his pockets, found his cigarettes and lit up. “You’ll come with me?”
Dorado got ready, pulling on her all-weather gear, pleased to see Clarence relax a little. He touched her cheek softly. “You always know what to say, after the obvious.”
Dorado and the mayor went out, pushing through the storm to the police vehicle parked beside the flagpole, on which the chivvying wind was playing the strings allegro: ting-ting. The officer paused a moment to wrestle with the loops in her thick gloves, lowering the flag to half-mast; there it wrenched about, threatening to tear away into the sky.
Chapter Three
Aunt Frieda held the small bundle of her niece in her arms, eased the bottle’s teat into the baby’s mouth and rocked her slowly to the rhythm of her grief. It came back to her like yesterday how she had done this very thing for Angelique, the last-born, the latecomer to the family, the angel. Frieda, the eldest, had had to look after Angelique as her own while their mother worked at the crayfish factory. The baby sucked hungrily, stopped and squirmed, torn between hunger and discomfort, sucked again, then broke her face into a grimace of complaint. Frieda stood, put the bottle down. She had been up all night like this, the night that she should have been keeping a vigil for her departed sister to smooth her passage into the afterlife. She’d lit a candle and had whispered the prayers of supplication to the ancestors while busy with the baby. It was the best she could do.
Frieda put the baby on her shoulder to wind her, the wails flailing against her ear, the tight gourd of the infant’s belly straining against the colic. She’d seen this before. She knew what the problem was, what she had to do. Poor child, she had enough to cry about – her mother disappeared into heaven, her father into his bedroom. Her own tears ran down her face. She knew what she had to do, but she was afraid. Surely her dear sister would understand. And the doctor needn’t know, it could be hidden from him.
She jigged around the room, patting the infant on her tiny back, trying to wind and soothe her. “Hush, now, hush.” No mother, no father, grandmother and grandfather gone too, the doctor’s parents and sister estranged and her other aunt away to the mainland, unable to get to the island to attend the funeral. What a story, what a beginning to a life! Aunt Frieda cooed and clucked over the poor young squalling thing while she changed her nappy, and told her stories of the island and how they came to live there, to distract them both from their great loss.
“Once upon a time, a sailing ship lost its way in a storm, blown away into the southern ocean while trying to go north. Oh yes, things don’t always turn out the way you plan them, you’ll get used to that fact.” The baby whimpered and sobbed, pulling her little frog legs up, looking into Frieda’s face with her deep, dark eyes. “That ship was a slave ship, stealing black people away from their homes and selling them across the ocean – those that survived, that is, for many died of dehydration and chest complaints and heartbreak, all crammed down in the hold like animals, though nowadays you’d go to jail for treating an animal so bad.” She cleaned and dried and oiled the baby’s bottom as she’d done for her own children, both grown up now, and shook her head. “Us humans, we’ve got a lot to answer for, we have.” She put the baby’s cap on – for she knew, like her mother’s mother before her, that a baby loses most body heat through the head, where all the thoughts, lessons and memories are stored, and there was a cold rain outside. It thrummed hard on the roof of the doctor’s house, reminding him in his bedroom at the end of the passage of his endless grief.
“This ship was due back home in the north, and after discharging her cargo, she set sail. The storm brought her south, and wrecked her on this isle, along with twenty survivors. They were both crew and slaves, for a few of the slaves, mostly favoured women, were being taken back to the old world. Already one was pregnant, for you know, slaves were forced to do whatever their masters told them. Oh, we have a lot to answer for! But good things can happen out of bad, look at me! Without all that I would never have been born, and neither would you!” And she laughed her gap-toothed laugh through her tears, and jigged and soothed her niece, and found some comfort there for herself.
The doctor was seated at his desk reading The Annals of Modern Orthopaedics, trying to concentrate on the diagnosis and treatment of osteitis, trying to block out the buffeting of the baby’s cries and his own
