1. Prologue #

Beadie sat in the sun beneath the carriage window with her arm on the sill, flicking her fingers in the warm wind that rushed in. She’d sat like this every afternoon for the forty-five minute commute home on the Blue Line, which ran from the university at the port out to The Valley, where she was staying. She brought her arm in from the sill and rotated it in front of her, wondering if she was getting more brown, and then ran it along her forehead where sweat had beaded.

Three people sat opposite her, like an audience. One of the girls, short and dark, had put her tennis shoes on the empty seat next to Beadie, and the other sat straight up in the lap of a huge man, who held her arms and caressed her fingers gently. None of them was older than twenty-five but the big guy looked senior.

‘Did you think any more about it?’ said the short, dark girl, leaning forward. Her name was Anvi.

‘I don’t know, I think I’d rather just go to the lawns and finish my work,’ Beadie said.

‘But I wouldn’t feel comfortable going by myself.’

The big guy with the girl in his lap spoke up. ‘Trixie and me’re going.’

‘So what? You say you’ll show up and have some drinks, then you disappear.’ Anvi said, putting on a posh voice that sounded a bit like Beadie’s accent. ‘You guys are flakes, and you’re no good to me.’

‘It’s not my scene,’ Beadie said.

‘So make it your scene. It’s a good way to meet people, and I want to meet someone who isn’t Indian.’

‘George isn’t Indian. He’s from Lanka and you’d think you could tell,’ the Big Guy said.

‘It’s all the same shit!’ Anvi slapped her legs, then withdrew her feet from Beadie’s seat. ‘I’m sick of it, I swear to god I’m going to move to Oslola and marry a huge, blonde viking who will pepper me with little kisses.’

Beadie smirked but she didn’t feel like hearing this again. She looked out of the window and watched the rooftops fly past. The bright streets of Cama were mostly light stone cut up by canals, but periodically great big seagrape trees flashed past and cast a green shadow inside the carriage. Their leaves whipped the open windows as they passed and Beadie pulled her arm inside. A moment later the train slowed and turned, and she could see the locomotive ahead of them.

Today or yesterday marked six months in Cama, an island republic of the Commonwealth which ran to all corners of the Caribbean. It was hard to believe in her grandfather’s time that these pretty little stone houses and courtyards had been wooden shacks and tin roofs. It was hard to believe it had once been called Grenada; that this all had been part of the British Empire. London had been her home six months ago. Now, in its former colony, it seemed as distant as the ghost of its empire.

She shifted in her seat and put her back to the window. Her connection to Cama was abstract and ancestral, and her relationship to the Commonwealth was basically administrative. She was part-Caman, and she looked like the people here. Maybe, in her British provinciality, she had thought that was enough. But she knew she was a foreigner. It was not that she believed in bloodlines or inherited memory; she was a social scientist, or going to be one. But if she indulged that feeling, she had expected this place to feel a little more familiar.

‘What about coffee, then, on the lawns,’ Anvi said, looking desperate. ‘I can get ice coffee from Morrison’s and we can study on the lawns.’

It was a pitiful compromise masking total capitulation, and Beadie laughed and accepted. Anvi smiled her big smile and stretched back out across the seats, her white shirt collar bunching up all around her neck. She was funny, Anvi; a third-generation Tamil girl from Sri Lanka or some such. She had almost no conception of being Tamil. They didn’t think of themselves like that; that was the crude internationalism of the epoch of rest. That was exciting to some people; a country with no history, no race; no expectation of how you should live. It was difficult to tell whether this was a natural desire to get along or a form of self-censorship, a conscious or unconscious instinct to deny yourself and your history.

Anvi was short with rich, ocher skin and moles all over her arms. Her hair was short and dark and went every which way so that it looked like black flames around her head. She looked at you intensely and with all of her attention. Beadie watched her as Anvi rummaged in her purse for aubergine lipstick she applied habitually. She didn’t know much about her; had never been to her home. She was studying mathematics, and must have been very intelligent, but who knows? Anvi did not really talk about that stuff.

The other girl was called Trixie and sat next to Anvi in the lap of her guy. That’s what they called each other; ‘my girl,’ or ‘my guy,’ but it meant the same thing. It was common here to have someone you saw regularly, sometimes for sex, sometimes to cuddle or talk. You might call that dating, but they called it casual romance. This on-off, noncommittal charade could go on for years, seeing many ‘girls’ and ‘guys’ along the way. As if!

For all their colloquialisms, love played out the same way it did everywhere. Beadie was annoyed by this, because she had made a lot of the assumptions about this ambiguous ’liberated society’ and expected that love was elevated here; intuitive and organic. But she watched Trixie, the way she talked with him; her meek smile and innocent questions about what her guy was doing after university – it couldn’t have been plainer. They played it off like they didn’t care, but no, even in the Caribbean girls worried about ’their guys.’

She watched them play with their hands and the gentle way he touched her upper arms; she watched jealously, contemptuously. Beadie had never had a serious relationship; she was too busy. Anvi was looking in her bag but she knew it bothered her too. She suspected that Trixie savoured the envy.

How they all knew each other she could scarcely remember. They had met at one of the university socials, and they all lived in The Valley, so it must have emerged organically on this train. The lovers liked the company, and Anvi had seemed like she wanted a friend. Beadie was a foreigner, and foreigners rarely choose their friends.

It was the early afternoon and the warmest part of the day, but the carriage was cooled by the open windows and swivelling fans mounted to the roof. They called these ‘student’s cars.’ The air-conditioned carriages up the front were more comfortable but sealed in. It was polite to leave them to the working public, and the students liked the fresh air rushing in anyway. As the train rattled west towards The Valley, Anvi started asking Beadie about her about life overseas again. A lot of Camans liked playing this game with foreigners. Commonwealth natives were provincial and curious.

‘So a good television, like a really good one, is maybe twelve thousand dollars,’ Anvi was saying, since this was her favourite game. ‘Sorry, I mean pounds. Twelve thousand pounds.’

‘For a top of the line one, with a spectracolour screen, maybe. But most people own a much cheaper one for maybe a few hundred pounds.’

‘And how much work would you need to do,’ Anvi leaned forward and rested her mouth on her fingertips, ’to make twelve thousand pounds?’

‘That’s a lot of money. For an average person, that’s maybe eight or ten months salary.’

‘And salary is the total amount of pounds, correct?’

‘It’s what you get for working; your pay.’

‘Bwoah,’ Anvi said, smacking her head. ‘That’s all! Eight months to have a television like that. That seems like a great deal.’

‘Yes, but Anvi,’ Trixie said, still using her guy as a chair, ‘you keep forgetting, they work full-days. You work half-days. They have televisions because they work so hard, so it would take you twice as long.’

‘Still,’ Anvi said, nodding, ‘I would really like to have my own television.’

Beadie smiled wearily. She was bored of doing this every other day but was always amused by Anvi’s childish reaction. She thought it was cute, in a way – this apprentice mathematician, tripped up by a salary. Anvi did not handle or work with money and so had no idea about any of it. How quickly her enthusiasm would dry up if she ever found out that you did not just work for televisions and cars and dreams – you worked for shelter and something to eat first; the rest came later. Living cost a lot of money, continuously. It was easier for her to imagine paying for televisions than the gas meter.

Trixie and the big guy got up as the train slowed and the brakes shrieked. They were going to see the afternoon news and film at the Georgian Cinema in Darbeau. Trixie patted down her skirt, which had wrinkled up the back where she’d been sitting on him.

‘See you tomorrow, ladies,’ she said, and the big guy waved.

Anvi brought her legs down to let them out, and shuffled over to where they had been sitting. She leaned forward.

‘You know, I’m really sick of them,’ she whispered, watching them leave the platform through the open window. ‘The way Trixie rubs my face in it.’

‘She likes to see us watching,’ Beadie agreed. She wiped her forehead again. When the train stopped for any period of time you became aware of the heavy humidity in the air.

‘They do! She tells me about her dou-dou,’ she said, using the Caman creole word for lover. ‘They are shameless, you know that? I said to her yesterday, I said, I don’t want to hear about dou-dou’s big dick anymore.’

Beadie laughed. ‘She tells you?’

‘With me, oh, yes. See, she’s nervous of you, she thinks you’re too cute. She’s a very jealous person. But I’m not a threat because I’m not pretty, so she tells me about the risky places they fuck, about the romantic gifts he brings her. And she says he’ll settle down with her after university – and I don’t say anything, but she’s delusional. Gus sees other women, but she doesn’t want anyone to know that. So why would he trade all those girls in for one Trixie?’

‘Don’t let her make you feel bad, Anvi. You should feel bad for her. When you find your Viking, he’ll treat you well. But look at how Gus treats Trixie.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, looking out the window after them, ‘anyway.’

The ’lawns’ was what they called the grassy embankment out back of Beadie’s apartment block. It sloped gently towards a freshwater creek that widened downstream into St John’s River, which flowed past the University of Cama and out to sea. It’s a shame it didn’t flow the other way, thought Beadie, because it would be nice to float home after class in the cool water.

By late afternoon the mountains around The Valley had cast a cool shade across the lawns, and it was a good place to sit and work. Her desk wasn’t big enough; she was a messy worker. There was space to spread out on the lawns, and around her she had textbooks and papers and rulers. Anvi had gone to the coffee shop for ice coffee. Beadie smiled when she saw her return.

‘I was thinking,’ Anvi said, a little out of breath, ‘how did you get the name, Beedy?’

Beadie took one of the metal bottles from her hand and moved a book so she could sit down.

‘My parents,’ Beadie said, unscrewing the cap and taking a sip. ‘It’s my name. Beatrice Clarke.’

Anvi stopped mid-sit, her mouth open. ‘Bea-trice? Are you kidding?’

‘No.’

‘I thought your name was Bee-dy, like beady little eyes or something. I thought there might have been a story about it.’

‘Do I have beady little eyes?’

‘No!’

‘What’s the story behind yours?’

‘The story behind mine,’ she said, exhaling through her nose, ‘is that two short little Lankans in the late twenty-thirties got a little too excited after dinner, and I emerged nine months later, and unfortunately for my parents I was a girl and not a boy, making a total of three girls and zero boys, and they called me Anvi, a name which means something only to people on a continent I’ve never been to and don’t intend to visit.’

‘What a story,’ Beadie said, and smiled. ‘You never intend to go to Sri Lanka? You don’t want to see what it’s like?’

‘I’m Veletian,’ Anvi said, using the formal Commonwealth name, and she looked up. ‘You have dark skin. Don’t you want to go see what Africa is like?’

‘You’re a racist.’ Beadie spluttered, before laughing. ‘My ancestors are from here, the Caribbean.’

‘Your grandfather, mine too. Everyone’s from somewhere if you go back far enough.’

That’s how it went – they didn’t like to talk about it. In London conversations about your ancestry were blasé. The past reached through to the present; it was a part of life. In Cama, it was almost offensive, as though just asking implied they weren’t ‘Full Commonwealth.’ It was a prideful characteristic.

‘Beatrice Clarke,’ Anvi said, lying back so she was lying across the cool grass. ‘That’s a nice name. Classy.’

There were a few others out on the lawn, enjoying the afternoon. They were all students. Her apartment block was full of them, and she thought it might have just been student housing, but she had run into some families in the halls. Some of her neighbours looked foreign, but how could you even tell here? She had no landlord and paid no rent, so it was ambiguous even to her. All of this had been set up by her scholarship agent.

All the students were dressed basically the same, in navy and white. It was a uniform of sorts, purchased off the rack from a department store. It was funny how the sameness highlighted sweet, trivial differences. Anvi had rolled up her sleeves that had pink stitching in the interior of the white cuff. It was slightly discoloured by aubergine lipstick from where she’d carelessly wiped her mouth.

You were supposed to wear leather shoes like in secondary school, but when they could get away with it all Camans wore sneakers or tennis shoes. It was one of those behaviours that emerged all around the world in the ephemeral and dislocated way fashion does. They took pride in them; kept them clean. Was there anything less culturally tangible than a sneaker? How appropriate it seemed that it was here, in the land of no history or race, that they dress so plainly and placelessly. Beadie hadn’t brought a single pair with her. It reminded her of her early friendship with Anvi, nearly five months ago.

‘If you don’t have any dunlops, we should get some,’ Anvi had said on a station platform, pushing her foot next to hers as if measuring them.

‘What do you mean, “dunlops”?’ Beadie asked, pulling her foot away.

‘Shoes, if you need shoes. What do you call them? Joggers? Runners? Are you from Verde or something?’

‘Verde? I told you, I’m from the U.K.’

‘I forgot about that,’ Anvi said, followed by a remark so baffling Beadie still didn’t know what it meant. ‘No wonder you don’t have any good shoes.’

On the lawns, Beadie dropped her pen onto the margin of her textbook and looked down at her shoes – Dunlops; bought some time after that conversation. She looked at Anvi, who had her eyes closed and held the metal coffee cup to her cheek.

She remembered her disappointment when she saw her new shoes. ‘Oh, they’re different – we could have matched. They look good on you, though.’

Beadie moved her white tennis shoe beside Anvi’s, comparing the colour of the candy cane stripe on the heel. Anvi had rolled her socks down so they looked like a donut ring, like she was twelve rather than twenty-two. She used to think that Anvi was a tedious hanger-on. Why would an adult woman care about whether her friend’s shoes matched? She enjoyed seeing her petty disappointment. Now she remembered it with regret.

In Britain, people talked about self-expression, but clothes serve basically the same purpose everywhere – they communicate things about you; who you are, who you associate with, what you value. Vekllei was a little more transparent about clothes as a kind of language; a social object rather than a commodity. She remembered being taken aback when Anvi had asked to borrow a shirt for a social. She had not realised it was a sign of respect.

It was absurd, to a foreigner – disappointment that your government-owned tyre company sneakers didn’t match those of your friend. Anvi probably didn’t even remember it! It was ridiculous – but Beadie also chose not to match, didn’t she?

Beadie nudged Anvi’s shoe with hers.

‘Anvi, did you want to go to that social? I’m almost done here. We’ve got time.’

Anvi didn’t open her eyes. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘do you know how many socials we’ve got in this country? Too many.’

‘What about your viking?’

‘He’s not here, he’s in Oslola,’ she waved her hand, ‘and he’ll wait for me, anyway. As long as I want.’