Yes, tobacco life insurance, and I think the tobacco husband was actually more useful than the flesh-and-bone one, because the tobacco husband could fish, clear land and transport a woman and her load wherever she needed to go, which was all real husbands did back then anyway. And if there was no fishing line in the strongbox for the flesh-and-bone husband to use, nor any tobacco or cigarettes, soap or kerosene, he probably wouldn’t have been able to satisfy the needs of the household. Furthermore, a flesh-and-bone husband might lose his strength for clearing small plots of land. So tobacco always trumped them as husbands. Ah, yes, and brandy too. I could never understand why men on our island went to such great lengths to get products that provided enjoyment for such a short amount of time. It made me think that maybe we had more than just material needs on the island. But what could be made of a man who spent his whole day sitting in a canoe on the choppy sea and then prowled the streets looking for tobacco and brandy as soon as he set foot on land? As a child, I thought tobacco and brandy must be the most powerful substances known to man. It’s easy to see why youngsters desire cigarettes and brandy when they see the strongest men in their communities making superhuman efforts to get them. Youngsters look up to such men and think the quickest way to be like them is to get tobacco and alcohol for themselves.
My grandfather, the house, his room, that hair, which I think he groomed in the privacy of his sleeping room. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again now he’s come back to mind: what was it with that haircut? I know some people make deals and pacts with dangerous beings and if their deals turn sour they have to honour whatever they agreed to, which might mean doing strange things in public. But although we suffered terrible hardship on the island, we did have mirrors. As a man who’d once been a sailor, the captain of a ship even, grandfather must have had a mirror and he must have looked at himself and seen that his haircut looked ridiculous. And though it’s true he never left the house, people still saw him, and they must all have thought that crazy haircut really didn’t suit him. How could that man he went to the cemetery with, a man who was supposed to be his friend, not have said anything about such an awful haircut? What were they hiding? What secrets did they share? What mysterious things were they mixed up in for something that everyone saw and thought ugly to be of no consequence to them? They who were adults, older men even! I mention his haircut again because we found nothing in his room to explain it. Whatever his reasons were for having that haircut, they weren’t reasons of a tangible or material nature, just as the reasons for his overall behaviour lay beyond our grasp. We saw things in his room, but nothing to explain why an adult man would shave the hair off one side of his head and act like it was perfectly normal, indeed act like it was the only hairstyle to have.
Furthermore, why did he cry on the night of the fire? I ask this now, when I’m no longer a child, for, looking back, I see how inconsiderate it was of him to shed those tears in front of us, that he had no appreciation of how we’d react to seeing him cry. I think he either didn’t know how to act like an adult or basically wasn’t an adult, and all the people who cared for him, or gave him food, must have thought the same. Grandmother and our mothers, and even our fathers who were away in that place you went to by boat, all treated grandfather like a child who needed looking after. And why did he never speak when there were so many children around him who were anxious to hear what he had to say? Had something happened to him when he was younger that caused him to lose his voice? And what secret did my grandmother’s niece know that enabled her to chat to him, or at least to seem satisfied by their conversations? If I’m asking all these questions again, it’s because I still don’t know the answers. And like I said, I’ll talk about what was in his room later, when it’s time to talk about him again.
Several days after the Pico burned, we were in the square playing billiards when what I’ve described as the most significant and distressing thing in the island’s history occurred. Did I say billiards? As kids we had a set of see-through plastic balls with coloured pictures inside them, pictures of flowers and things like that. We liked those balls a lot, so much that one day, out of curiosity, we broke into them to find out what the pictures really were. But as soon as we broke into them, the pictures disappeared, so we stopped doing it pretty quickly. It’s always sad when you break something pretty but it’s especially sad when you do it deliberately and it proves to be pointless. Anyway, we used to play a game with those balls, a game we called billiards. The game consisted of throwing your ball to try and hit your opponent’s ball, while proving your skill at laying traps, exploiting openings and speaking in the special jargon of the game. Part of the tactics involved drawing lines in the sand with your hands while saying the names of the positions and moves in the special jargon. But, just as there were shortages of everything on the island, so we ran out of the balls, which were white people’s balls, and then we couldn’t play any more. But we couldn’t just stop playing billiards, so we found a solution. Back then there was an unusual plant that had very thin branches. These branches didn’t grow upwards but rather in circles, coiling round the plant’s stalk to create an impenetrable barrier that no human could get through. And the barrier became all the more impenetrable when the outside branches dried out and grew spikes, tiny little spikes that pricked your skin and held on to your clothes. It was a very self-protective plant and anyone who went anywhere near it risked getting tangled up in its thin, spiky branches, or pricking their feet on the dead spikes that dropped to the ground. Anyway, this plant, which really was quite something, had little capsules in spiky shells, and the shells opened when ripe to reveal a ball, the billiard balls of our island. Admittedly they weren’t perfectly round, like the white people’s ones, nor did they have pictures inside them, but for the purposes of the game they proved a good replacement for the real billiard balls. What’s more, it meant we had lots of billiard balls to play with, although to get lots you did have to suffer a few scratches and pricks scrambling about under the plant’s tangled web of branches. It’s a plant everyone ought to see, especially when its branches are dry. Very few living things could get through its spiky branches. Some soldiers came to the island from the place where our fathers were, or possibly from somewhere else, and we named the soldiers after the plant. The soldiers were black, but they never learned our language and they didn’t know how to swim or paddle a canoe, despite the fact that they were adults. As I said, they never learned our language. How did they expect to do a good job of being a soldier in a place where they knew nobody, didn’t speak the language and couldn’t swim or paddle? I don’t know whether that’s why they were named after a plant you couldn’t pass without getting a sharp reminder it was there. We islanders never learned their language either. Nor did we make friends with them, though we didn’t treat them badly. The only thing we learned about them was that when they opened their mouths to start a conversation, to call someone over or stop a passerby, they said something in their language that can be translated as ‘Me say’. Imagine that! You don’t know someone, you’ve never spoken to them before in your life, you can’t even see their face from where you’re standing, and when you want to speak to them for the very first time, you begin with ‘Me say’. That ‘Me’ thing must be very important to them. I personally think that anyone who uses ‘Me’ as the first thing he says to a stranger is rather strange himself. Especially if the person you don’t know but want to talk to isn’t even looking at you. Is that why they tried to be soldiers without knowing how to swim, fish or paddle a canoe?