Heaven's Edge by Romesh Gunesekera Read Free Book Online

The way she wafted through the hotel and tumbled into my room. Our walks together on thebeach, through the forests. Her camouflaged crops, the lantana blossom, her chickens, her pigs and her goats. The coir mattress on her vermilion bed, her body in my arms, every fold and fissure within her. I could remember the sun, the moon and the stars. And far away my grandfather’s garden and my journey from his to hers.
    It is enough, I wanted to say then. It was more than I had ever dreamed was possible.
    She had shown me everything that mattered on the coast, except the city. She said she didn’t like Maravil, even though her closest friends were there.
    â€˜Doing their own thing?’
    â€˜Yes, traders, and … Jaz.’ She said he was the best friend she’d ever had. ‘He is always able to make me feel good when I’m down.’
    â€˜I’d like to meet him then,’ I said.
    She laughed. ‘You wouldn’t understand him.’ She described Jaz as Maravil’s most erogenous creature; ensconced in the exclusive Carnival Mall – a restricted leisure centre – he could do practically anything except set himself free. ‘No one can reach beneath his surface,’ she explained.
    I said I’d like to try.
    â€˜The mall is for pass-holders only, but you need an official ID even to get into the city – unless it is a market day. You have to be registered by birth or trade. Or branded like one of their captives.’
    â€˜What about foreigners? I thought there were some there?’
    â€˜Sometimes they keep foreigners like pets. Usually some dumb diplomat who steps outside their special enclave, or one of the rare tourists from the quarantined north resort who goestoo far.’ She grinned. ‘They tag you then. You would be free to remain but not to leave our warlord’s domain.’
    It figured. I told her Eldon’s story. ‘He used to say there is a long tradition of washed-up tourists suffering what he called inescapable hospitality here: the Argonauts, seventeenth-century sailors. The odd globetrotter, you know?’ Only then, in the retelling, did it strike me. ‘I think he really believed that in any country it is only the foreigner who can feel a genuine sense of belonging, of arrival, of arriving home. We become committed: perpetually enchanted or permanently detained.’ I began to wonder about ancient mariners, traders and travellers. But was he right? We were all foreigners once. And what about the history of slavery? Enforced migration? Escape and exile? Uva? The stuff that was going on around us? It’s not just a matter of who you are, or where you are; surely how you got there must make a difference? What he meant, perhaps, was people like himself. Was that what I was beginning to feel too? ‘Perhaps people like me,’ I added. ‘We feel committed.’
    She laughed. ‘Desire, my love, is all you feel.’
    She parted my tight curls and moistened a path of enchantment with her silver-studded tongue from my throat down to my navel. Then, in her retreat, she undid the weave of her homespun cloth exposing every curve and cleft of her uncoated flesh, the whole spine of her hidden plume.
    Her body was always warmer than mine. In the early hours of the morning the warmth drew me to her under our gossamer net. And when we had water to shower with, her warm surface melted mine into a sea of concupiscence rippled by her bluish tongue. Her silver anklet would pierce my back; I would hear the sound of feathers pressed to herperfume, buried between her stride, her fingers tugging at my hair, her whole body buoyed up in my hands. But I failed her when she needed me most. Too slow, too uncertain; my hopes that day, at our palm beach, were what let me down.
    Uva had gone back to the farm, alone, to collect our daily basket of fruit; I was in my room trying to make sense of a map she had managed to get for me. Four weeks had