The Far Side of the Sun (4 page)

‘Don’t you?’ she asked.

She knew he longed to be Governor of Australia, or of Canada at the very least.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, exhaling his frustration into the humid darkness, ‘I regard these islands as my Elba.’

Elba? Napoleon’s place of exile. The hubris of it took Ella’s breath away. She shivered and moved to go back indoors, but with a sudden display of charm he took her arm through his and smiled engagingly.

‘Come, Mrs Sanford, let us have the next dance.’

Dodie’s house lay further along the coast in the next cay, tucked under a grove of casuarina trees that drooped their long green fingers over the sand. It was no more than a wooden shack with one room, a roof of thatched fronds that didn’t leak too often, and two windows that kept constant watch over the ocean. Summer storms were harsh, dramatic and frequent here, and their ferocity had shocked her at first when she and her father came to this tiny speck in the ocean six years ago.

She lit the lamp. The oily smell of kerosene rippled through the room and the amber light shuffled the night shadows into dark corners.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

Morrell was lying on the single bed, curled on his side with his arms wrapped around his stomach.

‘All right…⁠’ His breath came in shallow gasps.

‘Good.’

Now that she could look at him in the lamplight, she could see that his skin had taken on the same colour as the galvanised bucket she had placed beside him, so grey it no longer looked like skin. She didn’t know where to start. Where to touch. Where not to touch. She knelt down beside the bed and tucked a folded clean white towel under his hand on his stomach. He shut his eyes.

‘I owe you,’ he muttered.

His face was heavy-featured under a mass of bushy brown hair and even with his eyes shut, Dodie could see the toughness of him. But that toughness was crumbling as the pain started to eat away at it. She rested her hand on his cheek and a faint smile touched his lips.

‘What are we to do?’ he whispered.

‘You must let me look at the wound.’

‘Leave it.’

‘It needs to be bathed and cleaned.’

A grunt came in response. His mouth clenched in a tight line.

She leaned over him. ‘Mr Morrell, there is a woman who lives not far from here who knows about this kind of thing, she’s good with illness and…⁠’

‘No.’

‘She’s not a doctor or a nurse or anything official. She wouldn’t report you to anyone. Her name is Mama Keel and she knows everything there is to know about herbs and healing, so I could…⁠’

‘No.’

‘… fetch her and she would know what to do to help you. She wouldn’t breathe a word.’

‘No.’

‘I have to, Mr Morrell, can’t you see? Because I don’t know what to do.’

His eyes opened a slit. ‘Do nothing.’

She started to rise from her knees but his hand gripped her skirt. ‘Do you like this woman?’ he asked urgently.

‘Yes, she’s —’

‘Do you want her to die?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Then tell her to stay clear of me.’

Dodie felt the hairs rise on the skin of her arms. ‘Are the people who did this to you so dangerous,’ she asked in a stunned voice, ‘that they would hurt people who help you?’

His eyes stayed fixed on hers. He nodded.

She backed away from the bed, fear sharp in her chest. Outside she could hear the moan of the waves, and unconsciously she paced her breath to their rhythm.

‘Very well, Mr Morrell. No Mama Keel here.’

‘You are quick to understand,’ he said with an attempt at a gallant smile, but she could see he was losing strength as fast as the clean towel lost its whiteness.

‘Mr Morrell,’ she spoke louder, her voice trying to drag him back to her, ‘I’m going to run over to Mama Keel’s place. To get something for your pain. I will be quick.’ She smiled at him brightly. ‘We both need help if we’re going to get you through this.’

Before he could reply or seize her skirt again, she had kicked off her shoes and was flying up the beach.

She’s gone
.

To hell with her. She complicated everything
.

The dark figure of Flynn Hudson was crouched at the water’s edge. He watched her run. She was fast as a jack-rabbit. He reckoned she must have cat’s eyes in her head, the way she could see in the dark even when the clouds switched off the moonlight.

It was one of the things he hated about this darned island. The dark. It got to him. It was a world away from what he called darkness in Chicago, where he could flit down unlit rat-infested alleyways and still see where he was going. Here the darkness was so intense it felt like getting thrown down a well and having the lid slammed shut on top of you. That kind of dark. Solid and unbreakable. It swallowed her now. As he trailed a hand through the water, he questioned where the girl had gone. At this hour? With blood still wet in the barrow?

Don’t come back
.

He rose to his feet, his limbs eager to be on the move once more. They didn’t like to stay still, didn’t care to be a sitting target the way Morrell had been. The moon slipped free from the grip of the clouds, making the white sand of the beach glow silver-blue in the moonlight.

Goddammit, what kind of colour was that?

A colour he’d never seen before in his twenty-four years, but in the weird light he could see the shack up on its little plot of scrub, clear as fresh spit. A minute or two was all he had, he reckoned. The jack-rabbit could come skidding back at any moment.

He moved forward, conspicuous on the beach now. His thoughts were leaping ahead of him, unleashed. He could almost see their footprints in the sand.

Mama Keel’s cabin was perched alone on a rocky stretch of land and showed no lights, but Dodie could hear the soft crooning of an island song somewhere inside. Everyone knew Mama Keel never slept.

‘Mama Keel,’ she whispered and tapped on the door.

It shifted on its rusty hinges, in no hurry to get itself open. Behind it stood Mama Keel, a broad smile of welcome on the strong bones of her face before she even knew who it was who had turned up on her doorstep in the dead of night. In her arms lay a fretful infant.

‘Well now, Dodie, you look mighty het up.’ She stepped back into the darkened room at once and pulled a box of matches from her dressing-gown pocket. ‘Come in.’ She lit a lamp, keeping its flame low, and when she turned to look at Dodie a stillness settled on her.

‘Oh my Lordy, girl,’ was all she said.

‘Mama Keel, I need help.’

‘You is covered in blood, child.’

‘It’s not mine.’

‘I’m real glad to hear that. Whose is it?’

‘A stranger’s. I found him in the street on my way home.’

Mama nodded and half closed her purple-black eyes, as if peering at something only her own gaze could see in the dim light. Her long string-bean of a body in its tattered old dressing gown seemed to grow very still, and Dodie had no idea what she was imagining. The wound maybe? The blood spilling from it? No one knew what went on inside Mama Keel’s head under all that tangle of wild grey hair.

The main room was plainly furnished – handmade seats, a table, a cupboard – everything strictly functional, except for a colourful decoration of bird-feathers suspended on a rattan thread that zigzagged back and forth across the ceiling. Mama Keel’s black skin gleamed in the lamplight and a calmness radiated from her that steadied Dodie’s breathing.

‘Mama Keel?’

The woman blinked.

‘He’s been stabbed,’ Dodie told her. Her voice sounded strange and unfamiliar.

Immediately Mama Keel eased the sleeping child onto a rug that lay in a cardboard box in one corner of the room, scooting a grey cat out of it first with her foot. ‘Joseph!’ she called softly. A door opened and a gangly white youth in his teens emerged from a back room. He was wearing nothing more than a pair of shorts and his fair hair was ruffled into spikes from sleep, but his eyes shot wide open at the sight of Dodie.

‘Don’t stare, boy, it’s bad manners,’ Mama Keel said briskly. ‘Just a splash of blood. Here, take Elysia for me.’

The boy ducked his head, scooped up the cardboard box and vanished. Dodie looked down at the scarlet stains embedded thickly under her fingernails and at the streaks of blood over her waitress uniform. What kind of man did this? Pushed a blade into another man’s flesh. Cold hard sorrow rose up in her and she opened her mouth to speak, but no sound emerged. She raised her hand to her cheek and found her fingers cold as ice.

‘Sit down, Dodie.’

‘I have to get back. He’s waiting for me.’

Mama Keel spent a moment resting a warm comforting hand on Dodie’s shoulder, then abruptly she was all movement, gathering pots and packets and jars of strange-smelling liquids. She thrust a tin mug into Dodie’s hands with the command, ‘Drink it,’ and Dodie did so, though it tasted bitter and felt as if it stripped enamel from her teeth. When she saw Mama Keel wrap a scarf around her head and tip the herbs and potions into a straw basket, she laid a firm hand on the basket’s handle herself.

‘You mustn’t come, Mama. You must tell me what to do.’

‘You bein’ foolish, darlin’ heart. You know nothin’.’

‘It’s too dangerous. There are men who want to silence him.’

Mama Keel paused. ‘You scared?’ she asked softly.

‘Yes, I’m scared. Of course I am. I’d be crazy not to be. But I’m also scared for you. You are too…⁠’ she gestured towards the door from which the boy had emerged, ‘too precious here. They need you.’

Dodie knew that Mama Keel watched over a shifting pack of feral waifs and strays. She had no children of her own but her door was ever open to the island’s orphans and runaways, and behind that door there could be anything from ten to twenty young souls who clung to her. Without her, the waves would come for them.

Mama Keel breathed hard through her broad nose.

Dodie opened the basket purposefully. ‘Just tell me what to do.’

The door of her shack swung open at Dodie’s touch. Yet she had latched it, she was sure. Behind her the vast reaches of the Atlantic Ocean sighed, low and insistent, and threads of moonlight floated on the waves. As if nothing had changed. She stepped over the threshold. Wary, but not wary enough. The black muzzle of a gun was pointing straight at her and sent her heart spinning up into her throat.

‘Get in here. Quickly.’

It was Morrell. He was propped up awkwardly on one elbow, sweat pouring off his face, a tiny pistol dwarfed in his hand.

‘Shut the door,’ he growled and collapsed back against the pillow, letting the gun fall to his side.

Dodie kicked the door shut and bolted it. ‘Don’t ever do that to me again.’

‘I didn’t know it was you.’

She dumped the basket on the table and started unloading it. ‘Has anyone else been around?’

‘No.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’

Why would he lie to her? ‘Have you been out of bed and opened the door?’

He rolled his head to one side to look at her and gave her half a smile. ‘Yes, I’ve been out for a half-mile swim and a few handstands under the stars.’

She tried to smile back at him but didn’t quite make it, so busied herself with the medicines instead, smelling them, tipping ingredients into a cup, putting water from the enamel jug to boil on the kerosene stove. The shack started to fill with aromas.

‘What the hell is all that stuff?’ Morrell muttered.

‘It’s native bush medicine.’

He grimaced. ‘Does it work?’

‘Of course it does. Bahamians have been using these herbs for hundreds of years.’ She looked up from the bowl of chopped green cerasee leaves. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Morrell, they know what they’re doing. It’s often impossible to get a doctor to the hundreds of Bahamian Out Islands. They had to find alternative medicines that work, so…⁠’ she paused and walked over to his side with a small pot of what looked like rabbit pellets, ‘take three of these.’ She smiled encouragingly and held out a cup of cerasee infusion for him to wash them down with. ‘They will help the pain.’

He took them and swallowed them down, making no comment on the bitterness of the infusion. His skin had a slick sheen over it like furniture polish and Dodie could feel the heat radiating from him as she removed the towel.

‘Now, Mr Morrell, let’s look at this wound of yours.’

He was tough. She’d give him that. He made no sound but watched everything she did, his hands curled into fists at his side as though wanting to strike her away. Dodie worked with great care. She did exactly what Mama Keel had told her. She bathed the wound, applied a pungent herbal antiseptic, and holding the raw edges of his flesh tight between her fingers, she drew them together over the slippery innards inside. A coating of stiff antiseptic paste to seal the wound finished the job. And all the time her fingers worked, she murmured to him constantly, to steady him, though she had no idea what words were coming out of her mouth.