The Tropical Issue Read online

  I promised to tell him, if I took the job, the minute she took up with Andy Warhol. I was glad to see his hangover go. I felt quite a lot better myself. Ferdy did that to you.

  We drove to the Rua das Dificuldades, what else, at the bottom of the Carro do Monte, or sledge run, and found out that the sledges, when empty, were stacked in the Rua do Comboio with their ropes out.

  Anyone could have produced an old, doctored sledge. Anyone could have put a grotty rope in, instead of a good one.

  No joy from that.

  On the way we stopped and photographed a Fetish Tree, which was bare. Dangling from it were a lot of unhealthy green globes like grenades. I supposed Ferdy was clearing the text with the Vatican.

  We also nabbed a high-angle shot of a mimosa tree at the bridge by the dockyard. I let the steps rock, and got bawled out. I was looking at Pal Johnson’s yacht, and wishing I’d taken up portrait painting.

  We drove up to the top of the sledge run, watched in fear and trembling by all the Hammers, who thought we’d come back to sue them.

  It turned out that the two guys who’d pushed off our sledge were on their way in a taxi to Ferdy, Kim-Jim and me with bunches of flowers and written apologies from everybody from the Delegacao do Turismo da Madeira downwards.

  They were also briefed to point out that it wasn’t their rope, and the sledge had been tampered with. And that their normal Sledge-Hammering safety record went back unbeaten to before the invention of wood.

  Actually, I believed them, and after a bit, I could see Ferdy did too.

  ‘O.K.,’ I said, ‘but what about Eduardo?’

  Eduardo was at home, they all said. How could I think Eduardo was responsible, when Eduardo had been away, because of his mother-in-law’s baby?

  Which had arrived, I was interested to hear. A boy, nine pounds in weight and made by nature, Senhora, for a career on the Carro do Monte.

  A bouncing boy, it would seem.

  I thought I would like to visit Eduardo.

  Eduardo lived at Camara de Lobos, a village built on its ear on the coast. We photographed a thing covered with sort of scarlet bananas, called a Coral Tree, and a thing with red drooping leaves called a Custard Apple Tree, and a thing like a green pin-cushion called a Dragon Tree.

  At Camara, we got directions to Eduardo’s house from a guy selling turtles at the fish market. The turtles were all rocking about on their backs with their wee mouths tight shut and their flippers out.

  My wee mouth wasn’t shut. Ferdy got me away, and we ran for it.

  The sun was getting hot. The sea in the harbour was blue, and there were a lot of palm trees with shadows like mine. We jogged up a steep cobbled path and found Eduardo’s wife sweeping the steps of a shabby, red-roofed white house, with five assorted kids and some cats playing round her.

  From the size of her apron, Eduardo’s mother-in-law’s baby was nearly an uncle. I don’t know how that man ever got time to sledge anywhere.

  She didn’t have any English, so we got out the dictionary. It ended up as a sort of committee job including the neighbours.

  We needn’t have bothered. Eduardo had never mentioned his hat. She didn’t know anything about an accident at the sledges. Eduardo wasn’t here anyway, but at his mother-in-law’s on the San Vicente road. Drive west, and turn up to the right.

  She gave us the address when we asked for it, once she understood the accident wasn’t Eduardo’s fault. She also took the money Ferdy gave her, for the children.

  We said our obrigados and got down to where we had parked the wagon, which was full of pale blue clusters of Plumbago, which I thought was a pain in the back, and red Mexican creeper, and those seamless white lilies you see at weddings and funeral parlours; all covered with pages of the Diario to keep off the sun, which was going to bleach the chrome out of my hair if it got any hotter.

  I had to get back soon. We looked at the time, and decided to try for Eduardo.

  We drove along the coast past the bougainvillaea and the palm trees and the little houses with pots of orchids on the steps, and cacti, and zulus, and patches of pink and white flowering fruit trees, and, growing wild, clumps of red-hot pokers like Robina my mother grows. Grew.

  We turned up the San Vicente road as directed, and it was snowing.

  Ferdy, who spends all long car journeys singing opera in the original tongue, finished a very low part from Prince Eager, and started swearing instead as the wagon began skidding and squelching through cuttings as steep as the sledge ride, with snowy pine forests on top of them.

  Around us suddenly were these Disney-type mountain peaks, with lower hills all ridged with terraces, as if someone had taken a palette knife round them. Joining them were ladders of little green steps, cut into the slope, with grey reed cabins dotted about, with their thatches bound neatly with willow.

  Perched on the ridges were square buildings with black boilers beside them, sending up white steam beside faggots of cut cane.

  Low down, there were plantings of cabbages, and bananas with potatoes between them, and thickets of lilies, their big fleshy leaves mixed with mummified Rangers.

  The slush slid off into deep roadside gutters of rushing white water. The road got higher, and small peaks in valleys began moving past big peaks in the distance, with snow on them, and waterfalls like bits of frayed cotton.

  The snow turned to rain and you saw there were farms about, and people working. Someone forking seaweed on to a patch. A lot of people moving about in a vineyard, with their black umbrellas hanging open upside down on the boughs.

  Which reminded me why we were here.

  I said, ‘We ought to be near Eduardo’s house.’

  There was quite a lot of traffic. Lorries loaded with cane and bananas and workmen in round hats with earflaps and pom-poms came downhill towards us, driving round tumbled boulders, or it might be a wet black sheep with long legs like a goat. In the hiccough when Ferdy changed gear, you could hear a lot of birds singing, as well as the clang of sheep bells all over, and, of course, the sound of water pouring downhill like a dam busting.

  I thought it was the hell of a place to have a nine-pound baby.

  Eduardo’s mother-in-law’s house was nearly on the road, with a lot of kids walking up to it, pulling a sledge piled with green stuff, and no doubt starting their sledge training early. They all carried knives shaped like the Coombe’s banana symbol.

  The house was two storeys high, with an outside stair, and its grey thatch had weathered like tidemarks. The roof corners were pegged with clay pigeons.

  We got out, and found the rain easing off, and the puddles deep, and yellow as poster paint. The door was opened by an old soul with her head in a shawl, and wellies showing beneath her black petties.

  I had an idea she was Eduardo’s wife’s grandmother, and was probably about Ferdy’s age. Such things don’t seem to strike Ferdy. She didn’t like the look of my hair.

  A lot of escudos improved matters, but she still wouldn’t let us come in. She had no English at all, and none of her words were in the dictionary, being made, it seemed, entirely of bullets.

  Ferdy, who wanted to get back to a Judas Tree, was all for chucking it in. We were saved this time by one of the children, wearing a dress over flared trousers, who stood embracing her cutlass and told us that Cousin Eduardo was at Monte, with the sledges.

  Ferdy, who earns a fortune snapping the young of the wealthy, dropped to his hunkers, admired her dress, her trousers, her earrings, her hair and her chopper, and told her we’d been there and he wasn’t.

  She said that in that case, who knew?

  In the end, Ferdy gave her a coin from his pocket and then, under mob attack, flung what he had to the other kids. Finally he drew out a large, healthy piece of paper money, and announced that he wished to lay something, in person, in the cot of the new little one.

  It didn’t get us into the house. They brought the newest little one out, all of eleven hours old, with a white felted cap pulled
down as far as the snib of its freezing red nose.

  It didn’t pinch me, but it did look like Eduardo. I had even started to say so, when Ferdy put his arm round my shoulders, and nearly twisted me silly, which was just as well, when I worked it out later.

  From the back yard rose a thick column of steam, and the noise of regular bubbling. I had planned to walk round the house, and even look into a window or two, but three men had come out, and a couple of younger women and a few more children and a dog, and it was like looking at a meeting of the Godfathers’ Union, Members Only night.

  We turned, shivering in our gear for Madeira the Floating Garden: the Island of Gentle Summers, and made our way back to the wagon, where the Floating Flowers were dying of winter.

  We raced back down to the coast, to be in time for Natalie’s make-up.

  It was sizzling hot. All the hotel swimming pools were full of brown people. The palm trees shone like green varnished feathers, and all the flowers writhed about waiting for Ferdy in masses of pink and orange and yellow and purple.

  No one had told us that there could be a forty-degree difference between the mountains and the coast in the spring time. Eduardo’s wife’s parents needed their heads examined.

  We got back in time, although there were moments when I thought Ferdy’s flowers had a better chance of making it than we had. We howled down to the sea with Ferdy’s bracelets jangling and his sideburns lifting like gull wings.

  Among the cars that we passed was this little sports job, with open windows and water skis strapped on the roof.

  I wouldn’t have noticed, if the sun hadn’t lit up the driver. A tall, tanned young man with a mop of frizzed yellow hair.

  A man I’d seen before.

  Wearing black. Running down the fire escape of 17b. Sneaking into and out of Owner Johnson’s posh bedroom.

  I screamed for Ferdy to stop, and he wouldn’t. He said he wasn’t going to stop, even if I’d seen Eduardo. I began to say it wasn’t Eduardo, and then thought what the hell.

  I didn’t need Ferdy. If this yellow-haired thug was on Madeira, I’d find him. If, on second thoughts, I even wanted him.

  You might say I had enough on my plate over Kim-Jim, without taking up the Owner’s private life as a hobby.

  Really, I was only interested in Johnson’s problems as a way of getting even with Johnson.

  My aunty in Troon was dead right. I wasn’t a very nice girl.

  All the same, I decided, as I stepped trembling out of the wagon and helped Ferdy collect his wilting sex-fiends.

  All the same, I thought. When I’d had lunch and fixed Natalie for her interview, I might see if she’d loan me some water skis.

  Chapter 9

  There were plenty of water skis on offer, and flippers and everything. Kim-Jim told me to help myself and he’d square it with Natalie, whom I’d just tidied into her fourth and last outfit and who was being photographed by the pool, with Dodo on call just out of camera range.

  Everyone else, refugees from the Magazine team, was indoors. Kim-Jim and the parrot were watching telly in such a haze of contentment that I just told him that the Great Sledge Disaster was still a mystery.

  Now Roger the Demon had flown out, you could see he wasn’t bothered. I was only glad he didn’t seem to want to go back to Lisbon at once.

  The parrot never looked round from the telly, no doubt because it was learning the soundtrack. Bits it already knew. ‘Another fine mess you’ve got us into, Oily!’ it was bleating, as I shut the door.

  Sunflower seeds and old films. I thought what a nice life it had.

  Ferdy I left where he was, tarting up ageing flowers in Natalie’s workroom and photographing them. We had had a row because I wouldn’t help him, having spent the afternoon doing the same job for Natalie. Also, I knew he was cross because the Magazine had sent their own photographer, whom Natalie had accepted.

  Which was their look-out, both of them. I got my gear and hiked down to the kiosk for water skiing.

  Proving, Rita, that you don’t know when to let well alone.

  There was a short queue: kids, students, beginners. The big hotels had their own arrangements. There was only one boat, and a longish wait in between. The guy who ran it spoke English, and I got talking to him. After a bit, he said, ‘You ski a lot? There is a fast boat, not here just now.’

  What I wanted was a fast boat that wasn’t feeding a queue. And that wouldn’t mind, for example, taking a turn past all the other ski stages, and having a look at anyone else in the water.

  We agreed, not for nothing, that he would get the big boat to come back, and I’d have it. The kid he worked with ran off to organise it. I stayed on the stage, dangling my legs and chatting up the talent in bits of English and bits of mime, which was fine once they’d got over the shock of my hair and my two sets of lashes.

  The kids were good value, and I’d already sold them the news that I’d a special boat lifting me, by the time the special boat came.

  And I’ll say it was something out of the way. A white Avenger launch which cut its way towards us like an electric saw, throttled down, went into reverse, and floated up to the staging, flipping its ski rope towards me.

  There was nobody in it but a wee black-haired Portuguese guy at the wheel, who grinned and exchanged shouts with the ski-boss on the ski platform behind me. As he threw me the tow, I saw his shirt was tucked into creased belted trousers, which meant he didn’t plan to enter the water very often, if at all.

  By then I was in the sea, my skis sticking up in front of me. The speedboat guy said, ‘O.K.?’ smiling to me, in an accent you would cut in Sauchiehall Street, and before I could answer, never mind talk about where we were going, he leaned forward, still watching me, and set the launch moving.

  He was good. That boat slid into its racing speed like a nappy going under a baby and I rose up on to my skis without a shake or a tremble. And we were off.

  It was a sort of high spot, that, in the whole hellish business.

  From the sea, Madeira really looked like an island of flowers, with the palms and the green, and the thousands of red-roofed white houses climbing all the way up the hillsides. The sea was bluer than ink, and the spray was warm and expensive-looking, and my knees and thighs and shoulders were behaving like best quality bed springs: strong and firm and elastic.

  I hoped thousands were looking at me, and wished Kim-Jim were among them. And Ferdy. And even possibly Johnson and Natalie.

  Except that Johnson, convoluting at Reid’s and getting people to pay for their telephone calls, might object to the sight of his porter-bashing Miss Geddes skiing all round his yacht and pricing it. Which was one of the reasons why I was here. Singing, actually. I can’t sing, but I was.

  We skimmed out towards the sea, passing little boats, and big boats, and yachts. We didn’t pass a yacht flying the Red Ensign because there wasn’t one. The spot where I’d seen it before lunch was empty. If Lenny had sailed Johnson’s boat in from Tenerife, he must have upped anchor and sailed it off again.

  I did some fancy stuff, sheering from side to side. I jumped. I sang, between puffs. I yelled a few times to the boatman, freeing a hand to point in to shore, where from time to time you could see other skiers, not nearly so far out.

  He turned round the first time, in case, I suppose, I was bawling to say I had broken my neck. After that, he just waved vaguely behind. I suppose he thought he could judge by the yell whether he was pulling a load of snapped bones behind him or not.

  There are people who can tell by the sun where they are going, but nothing ever tells me but people. It was therefore with quite some surprise that I recognised in the distance the striped top of the fish market where Ferdy and I had seen the poor passing-out turtles.

  Camara de Lobos, six miles out of Funchal. The Naval Club. Water skiing.

  I began to yell at the driver. Competing with me, music tootled out over the water. There had been a bandstand in Camara beside the church and the taxi ran
k.

  I couldn’t see the bandstand for this yacht, anchored well out, which was bang in my way.

  This white yacht, flying club colours and a snazzy Red Ensign, with a short name on her bows I could almost see.

  I didn’t need to see it. I knew what it was. I took a huge breath and roared to the guy at the wheel of my launch, stabbing the air with one finger.

  ‘Over there! Over there to the yacht! I want to get close to the yacht!’

  And glory be, this time he turned round, grinned, looked where I was pointing and, spinning the wheel, put his thumb up.

  He was bloody good. From the roaring speed he’d kept up, he slackened until there was just enough to keep me upright. He set a course for the bows of the yacht, and took me on a wide, gentle arc that brought me along one white, glossy side, round the stern and up the other.

  When you got near, the name was big enough to read quite easily.

  Dolly, it said.

  And she was smashing. Whoever he’d bought her from had got it right. She had two tall pale masts, and brass railings, with a blue fringed awning over the cockpit. The curtains were blue, too, at the saloon window, and there were cushions and shining wood everywhere, and glittering gear and neatly coiled ropes.

  She wasn’t trailing a boat, and although there were clips on the cabin roof, the dinghy it was fixed for was missing. I looked, as I went round, but nothing moved. If Lenny had been there he had gone, leaving a companionway, I saw, down the offshore side.

  An invitation to loot.

  Not very clever, I thought.

  An invitation to board?

  I could never get my boatman to drop me off and pick me up again. He didn’t understand English. And if he did understand, he would probably call in the guardias.

  I couldn’t make up my mind. My mind was made up for me. I suddenly swallowed the sea.

  I swallowed it because the rope had gone slack. Losing power, I had crashed over sideways and was sinking.