Heaven's Edge

220 Pages·1.326 MB·English

by  Romesh Gunesekera

HEAVEN’S EDGE
ROMESH GUNESEKERA
Helen
Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly …
William Blake
Contents
I Nuburn
II Maravil
III Moon Plains
IV Flight
V The Garden
VI Chrysalis
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
I
Nuburn
I arrived on this island, by boat, the night of the fullest moon
I had ever seen in my life. The sky was clear and the sea
phosphorescent; the coastline, from a distance, looked
entrancing. Two flying fish, accidentally netted, were
released by the boatman as we docked at the pier of the
Palm Beach Hotel. I thought that was auspicious.
The steps down from the jetty were a little rickety and the
iron handrail had corroded in several places, but the ground
was firm. I stood on the beach and breathed in. I felt elated:
this was the moment I had been waiting for. Even the
breeze was warm.
I followed a footpath littered with dead urchins and
broken crabclaws and climbed up to the hotel overlooking
the bay. The gate at the top wouldn’t fully open and I had to
squeeze past a giant screw-pine; one of its thorny leaves
scraped the sea that had coated my arm. In front of me a
blue plumbago shrub exposed a few pale flakes broken off
the moon. A yellow light on the garden terrace blinked and
went out. I crossed the strip of lawn not knowing quite what
to expect.
The Palm Beach Hotel, I had been warned, was thirty
kilometres from Maravil and the only other hotel open to
visitors; it had no brochure and no guaranteed amenities.
When I reached the long, low building I could see that the
paint on the outside wall had cracked and peeled; a trail of
blisters ran down one side of the portico and the wooden
beams of the veranda were warped. The hotel sign had not
been repaired.
I brushed the sand from my shoes and pushed open the
door, careful not to touch the loose glass in the frame. I
rolled my case into the foyer feeling a little nervous. The
floor was made out of coarse, uneven granite and the small
plastic wheels fixed to the bag rattled over the bumps; there
was no other sound. In a corner, behind a desk, I noticed a
receptionist asleep. His narrow face had crumbled at the
edges; his tunic was unbuttoned. I waited at least a minute
before gently rapping on the counter.
‘I have a reservation,’ I said in slow English.
The cowls over his eyes slid open. He stared at me.
‘From the Sea-Link Corporation,’ I added, trying to be a
little upbeat. I had a fortnight confirmed with an option to
renew, indefinitely if I wanted to. I had been told there was
very little business these days anywhere on the island.
Opening a large ledger, the receptionist flicked a page
over. ‘No,’ he grunted. The lids slipped down again, leaving
only a pair of narrow slits through which he watched me.
‘We have no reservation.’
I started to panic and fumbled around for my papers.
‘You want a room?’ he asked then, as if issuing a
challenge.
‘Yes.’ I found my passport and the booking docket. I
offered them to him.
He riffled through the documents. After some time he
relented. ‘Maybe one, but no discount.’
He pushed the passport back to me, together with a
registration card and a faded tariff sheet. While I filled in the
card, he inched out from behind the desk. He was a small,
scrawny man and seemed to have some trouble with his
foot. He limped down a dim corridor. I quickly signed the
card and followed him.
The room he led me to was the last in the line. He
switched on the light; it barely made a difference but I felt
relieved. The bed was large – king-sized – and solid; inviting
despite the mangy blue coverlet. He pointed at the
shrouded windows. ‘Sea view.’
A gecko emerged from behind the frosted lampshade
fixed to the wall.
‘Good,’ I nodded. The boat I had travelled on would have
left by now. It wasn’t due back again until the end of the
month. ‘I’ll take the room,’ I said, ‘at least until the next
boat.’
He made an odd guttural sound and then stared at my
bag with his head awkwardly lowered. It took me a while to
realise he was waiting for a tip. I handed him a ten-dollar
note. The foreign exchange made him, briefly, almost
garrulous.
‘Pool, minibar.’ He jerked his thumb and pivoted, cracking
his joints. ‘Breakfast not included. Extra charge.’
‘OK,’ I said. That was not what I had come for. I had not
wanted to cruise in on a cut-price package deal, full-board
or half. I was on a mission to explore an older terrain and
discover for myself what was best to remember, and what
might be better to forget, here and in my life. I would have
told him so, but he looked much too sullen and worn-out to
care.
After he left, I drew back the curtains and opened the
windows to let the sea breeze in. There was no air-
conditioner. It suited me; I wanted to know what a night in a
hot country was really like. To hear the crickets and the
cicadas, to smell the citrus and the citronella, the warm
earth dreaming, and feel the spirit of the place brush
against my skin.
My grandfather Eldon had warned me, as I was growing up
between the fig trees and rat-runs of a rowdy, congested
London, ‘You must decide for yourself how you should live in
this world. Like a flower seeking light, we each go where we
find our best sustenance. Yet in reaching out – free as we
are – we have to be careful not to lose more than can ever
be gained.’ He would lecture me in his sheltered garden,
pruning his roses, watering his delphiniums, trying to pass
to me the lessons of what he called his extended innings,
while I trained my ears to the roar of aircraft coming in to
land, one after another, at nearby Heathrow. He was gravest
when he spoke about my father’s undertakings. ‘We have a
choice, you know, and sometimes that is hard. Sometimes
we have to choose between people and places, the sky and
the earth. War and peace.’ He lifted his large, wavering
hands as though he wanted to admonish my dad – his
absent son Lee, the ace air warrior – through me, and I
watched as though Eldon was my absent father: each of us
occupying the other’s empty space.
Both my father and my grandfather had been quick to
escape their formative traps. Eldon by coming to England
from this apparent pearl of an island, and Lee, fifty years
later, by leaving England, his birthplace. I never had the
same compulsion to move – until the day my father’s voice
returned and urged me out.
*    *    *
In the morning, I woke up hot and hungry. The glare from
the window flattened the room. I wondered what the rest of
the place looked like in daylight. I changed into my shorts
and went in search of breakfast.
A couple of parasols had been put out on the terrace and
two waiters were squatting down by the pool. I ordered the
local menu and was served a plate of raw roti, some red
desiccated coconut and a glass of sour undrinkable juice. I
asked for bottled water and was given a jug. It was probably
permanent hunger, or some parasite in the gut, that made
the staff seem so unfriendly, but I didn’t think of it then. I
just felt disappointed.
Most of that first day I spent adjusting to the heat and the
humidity. It was something I had only ever experienced
before in horticultural glasshouses, and it was difficult for
me to believe that the temperature was not temporary.
Inside the hotel I walked around in a daze, ducking into
the dingy comfort of the arcade room every half hour or so
to punch a bunch of pinball buttons and swill another glass
of iced lotus-brew. The atmosphere, even in the
aromatherapy room, was absolutely stultifying. Nowhere did
I see any sign of other guests. It didn’t surprise me, given
the warnings about civil strife, oppression and levels of
residual radiation; quite apart, that is, from the service.
Late in the afternoon I dipped into the shady saline pool
to cool down and recover the plans I had hatched on the
boat, or even earlier, while I was still wired to my home-
web, looking for news of this forgotten, assaulted island; or
listening to my father’s last recorded words.
When I got out of the water, I heard the buzz of a small
aircraft and saw a military plane disappear behind the ailing
cassias. Although there were no obvious transport facilities
at the hotel, I was still confident I could find a way to visit
some of the places Lee and Eldon had been to on their one
and only journey abroad together. The journey that had
changed my father’s life.
He was seventeen when he first came here, brought to
pay his respects to the ancestral land Eldon himself had
spurned for decades. They had visited graveyards and
sleepy suburbs; they had done a grand tour of the country
which Eldon recounted time and again over the years. ‘We
went everywhere: the wildlife reserves, the ancient cities –
more ruined now than ever before – up to the cool tea-hills,
and then down through miles and bloody miles of those
damn low-country coconut plantations.’ I still remember how
Eldon would pause and then mock me with his calypso
version of my juvenile dub, ‘Whole generations went to pot,
you know, chasing the golden bloody coconut …’ But,
despite ridiculing the coconut kings of those days, his
fondest recollection of that trip was the hunt for an
ancestral home in his so-called low-country: a farm cottage