“We will know where to find you. Just enjoy yourself, try to forget us for a while.”
I laughed.
“Some hope.”
“We can eradicate Jane and Layla, just so you can focus on being you again. You can have some or all the memories back whenever you like.”
“No thanks, the memories help keep me sane.”
“Okay, then. Good luck.”
Moments later, through that gut-wrenching experience I had been through before, I ended up in the shack and alone this time.
It took me a few moments to reach the parking lot, to see that nothing had changed in my absence.
The car was as I had left it, with my holdall in the back. I slipped behind the wheel and started the engine. I almost expected it not to start as I’d been away for such an age. But then, I hadn’t, had I? It had been just a few hours for my car.
Minutes later, I was heading south once more with the sun on my face and wind whistling across where my hair should have been, had my scalp not been shorn.
I felt the ache in my knee and knew that I was home, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. Hell, I knew it, but didn’t have to like it.
I wondered what sort of people I’d meet on this little adventure. I hoped they’d be okay, as most academics I met were of a different mentality to me.
I settled down and relaxed, letting my mind rummage through the memories that I had accumulated. I was inordinately pleased that I had chosen to keep them, as most of them made me smile, even if I cried a little too!
Chapter One
The Linguist.
It was very late by the time I finished the paper, nearly two in the morning. The one thing I hated about academic institutions was their predilection for reams of papers that no normal person ever had the time to read. I knew for a fact that this tome would be probably read properly by a handful of people. Many students would skim to the parts that they would find relevant, but for most of the world, it would never see the light of day. However, universities are full of such people, who are anything but normal. I should know, as I am one of them.
After printing off the last page and saving my file to memory stick, I switched the PC off and turned out my desk light. It took me a while to put the pages in order and place them in the binder, which then went in my briefcase by the front door of my flat.
As I did so, I noticed an envelope on my mat. I didn’t recall seeing it there when I got in at 6pm, and I hadn’t heard it arrive.
It was simply addressed to me as ‘Dr. Gillian MacLeish’. There was no address, neither was ‘by hand’ or anything else written on it. I frowned, as in an age of email and telephones, mysterious notes were rare. But, as I said, universities are full of strange people.
I opened the note and read it.
Dear Dr MacLeish,
I apologise for contacting you in this manner, but I am in a bit of a rush. I was given your name by Professor Hyndman from Oxford, who assured me that you are the best in your field.
I am setting up a small expedition to an island near the Caribbean, off the northern coast of Venezuela.
This island, which is very small, is particularly difficult to land safely on, and for many years was thought to be uninhabited, and uninhabitable. It appears that a people group have been living there with no contact to the outside world. They are believed to be the descendants of the survivors from a slave ship that was wrecked in storms in the early nineteenth century.
My personal field of expertise and interest is primitive religions, and their development and evolution through displaced people groups. I have done extensive work with various tribes in Africa, and traced their descendents into other parts of the world through their religious practices and beliefs.
As a linguist, specialising in the African tribes’ dialects and languages, and the Afro-Americans’ language development, I thought you would be interested in joining the expedition.
The funds have been authorised, and I am seeking to take an anthropologist, a linguist, and a medical doctor as well. This group may still be living in conditions that have remained unchanged since the original survivors arrived there.
If you are interested, then please call me on the number below, at any time between 0800 and 2200.
Russell Whiteman
I had never heard of Russell Whiteman, but it was too late to check up on him now. I put the note in my briefcase and went to bed.
The alarm woke me at 07:30, but I felt as if I had not been to bed. I dragged myself to the bathroom and showered. I dried myself off, looking at my reflection in the mirror.
It is a funny thing to despise oneself, but I do. I have done so for an awfully long time.
Being now thirty-four years old, as I looked at my too-pretty face and delicate feminine figure, I wondered how fate happened to build me so. I had always been a tomboy as a little girl, where my Dad had been the centre of my little universe.
I was brought up on a farm in Scotland, so from my earliest memories, I recall the joy of riding across the fields on the back of an old motorbike and shooting in the woods. My four older brothers spoiled me rotten, as I just wanted to be like them. I wanted to do what they did, liking what they liked.
This was fine until I was about eleven, when my body decided to do something else. While boys of my age grew upwards, I grew outwards. Where they developed strong shoulders and sturdy legs, I grew breasts, developed an hour-glass figure and long fine legs.
My mother was inordinately pleased as I became so ‘pretty’. She kept telling me I had a figure to die for. However, she didn’t understand, no matter how often I tried to tell her that I wasn’t interested in clothes, in makeup and trying to catch me a boy who would in turn make me become yet another baby factory.
In a way, I was fortunate as fashions in the 70s were sufficiently vague and androgynous to allow me to dress comfortably, but rarely in the manner that my mother would like.
I can remember the day she took me to one side and asked if I was a lesbian.
She seemed not at all re-assured when I answered in the negative, because she then asked me, “Well, why haven’t you got a boyfriend?”
I hadn’t thought about it. So I did, realising that I had loads of friends who were boys, but none of them were interested in me as a girl, or maybe they were, but I regarded myself as just one of the group, one of the lads, if you will. Indeed, I had very few female friends, as I had nothing in common with any of them.
Sex?
This was the strange bit. I knew I was a genetic female, yet I wasn’t sexually attracted to men, and neither was I attracted to other females. However, in my dreams and fantasies, in which I invariably tended to be male, then and only then did I imagine having sex. The stranger thing was that my partners were always female, and they never had faces. Occasionally, I would fantasise about males, but this caused me some stress and anxiety.
I almost had a lesbian fling once, out of curiosity. I’d been at university in Oxford, where Candice was another student. She was openly bisexual, and at a party one evening, we had danced together. Too much drink reduced my natural inhibitions, and we ended up snogging on the dance floor.
Initially, it felt oddly right kissing a girl, but when I remembered that I was supposed to be a girl as well, it felt wrong.
I chickened out when she invited me to join her in bed.
I was one screwed up person!
As a result, I immersed myself in my studies, qualifying from Oxford with a first in French and African Languages. I then went to Paris and studied there for a couple of years. As I became interested in the West African dialects in particular, I went and spent some time travelling the various regions of West Africa, becoming a specialist in my field. I had travelled extensively in Ghana, Senegal, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Togo, Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire.