Read Online Genie and Paul by Natasha Soobramanien - Free Book Online Page B

acknowledged the other. It went on like that for a while. Time’s like chewing gum when there’s nothing much to do except be experimented on. There was the pool table, but that got taken over by the ex-cons and the nutters. The ones who signed up for the danger money trials. Tests where they stopped your heart or flooded your lungs or burnt K-holes into your brain. We kept well clear. We just read or watched TV. Me and Paul were of a kind. We knew it ourselves. But neither of us really knew where to start. Then one day, one of the nurses brings Paul in a backgammon set. He asks if I want a game. I didn’t know how to play. So he taught me. Not just the rules but the strategies as well. He wanted me to give him a good game. So we start playing. And, when we started playing, we didn’t stop. We played first thing. We played while we ate. We played when the doctors were doing their rounds. We played late at night, using wads of bog rollto muffle the sound of the dice. When people asked if we weren’t bored of playing, we let the clatter of dice speak for us. We played one long game. We agreed that backgammon beat chess hands down for the great swathe of chance that cut across the game play. We liked the speed and the sudden turns of fortune. But, eventually, just playing wasn’t enough. Winning wasn’t enough. Fear of losing wasn’t enough. We began to play for dares. Progressively daring dares. Who would have to give the winner their biscuits at teatime. Who would have to alert the nurse to imaginary side-effects (hallucinations, glow-in-the-dark spunk). Who would have to ask Spider in the end bed if he ever regretted getting that tattoo done. And so we sat there day after day, moving our wooden men across those 2-D spikes, moving them all home. So imagine how we feel one morning when Paul reaches for the set and it’s gone. Spider comes up. Asks us if we’ve lost something. We know it’s him but he won’t admit it. Then the nurse has a go about us causing trouble. So we give it up. And that’s when we started talking. I mean really talking. About ourselves. Why we were in there. Paul wanted the money to go back to Mauritius. He’d gone over two years before, he said. But he’d come running back to London when his brother got killed. Jean-Marie, I remember his name. But there was nothing for him here. He missed the place. Not just Mauritius, I’ve realised since. I think it was also his brother he was missing – not his brother at all, I know now, but your half-brother. He sounded pretty cool, that guy. Paul told me a lot about him, about the island, about all the things he did over there. But most of all he talked about Jean-Marie. I remember one story about him. Nothing much happened but it made me see him how Paul might have done. Him and all his crew, the ones Paul hung out with, they used to go to this same spot by the river to fish and smoke weed. You couldn’t see them from the road.I remember how Paul described it. The foliage dense and full of litter. They’d sit around, looking out to the processing plants and factories by the docks of Port Louis, and Jean-Marie would say shit like, Call that a capital city? Or, How many Port Louis could you fit into London? I think that’s what Paul dug about him. He was bittersweet. Too big for the island. They’d sit passing beers and joints around while they set up the rod over the water, which was smooth with oil. Paul said the first time they took him there, Jean-Marie pointed to this rainbow patch on the water and told him the fish they caught came in its own oil. No need to stick any in the pan when they fried it. And that was what they’d do when they caught the fish – fry it up with garlic and chilli and salt and eat it, hot and fresh, with their hands. So this was how they sometimes spent their Saturdays. But one afternoon, this copper comes along with a sidekick. He’s new to the force. He must have seen them on the road and followed them down