The Amnesia Clinic (19 page)

Arkk
, it squawked.

‘Big parrot,’ I said.

‘Technically, he’s a scarlet macaw,’ said Ray. ‘Only he doesn’t like people very much, thanks to our friends up there on the hill.’

‘The dome?’ said Fabián, setting down his chair immediately. ‘We meant to ask you. What is that place?’

Ray spoke distractedly, keeping a patrician eye on the parrot.

‘Matter of fact, we don’t know. Whole boatloads of people go in and out of there, but we never see them, except out to sea sometimes. Place is completely closed off. My guess is that somebody very rich built it as a holiday home and hires it out.’

‘But you don’t know that for sure,’ said Fabián.

‘Why. You got a theory?’

I shot Fabián a warning glance. He stuck his tongue out at me.

‘I guess it could be a club of some kind,’ Ray continued. ‘Maybe even a hotel. But if it is a hotel, it doesn’t have a name. And it sure as hell doesn’t take any passing trade.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the passing trade can’t get to it. When they built it, about six years ago, they made a road on stilts to get the building materials up there, then destroyed it afterwards. Now the only access to the place is by boat. Or, if you prefer, you can use the helipad.’ He snorted. ‘Very fucking James Bond.’

‘Cool,’ said Fabián, enthralled.

‘I used to climb that cliff quite a lot before, for the wildlife – there was a whole colony of rare sand lizards up there – and they just bulldozed right through it. Blew the top off and put down the foundations before we even knew it was happening. The environmentalists would go nuts if they found out, but I guess somebody got a backhander.’

‘Couldn’t you stop them?’

‘I went up there one day after they’d started building it to have a look, maybe talk to someone. Ran into the kind of people who don’t negotiate, know what I mean? Didn’t feel much like poking around up there again.’ He gestured at the parrot. ‘Anyway, one day, during the building works, I found this guy flapping around in the water at the bottom of the cliff, as good as drowned, with both his wings broken. God knows what they did to him – chopped a tree down with him still inside it, or something. Whatever it was, they screwed up his wings so much he can’t fly. And now he lives down here with us, and we feed him so much that he can hardly walk. Don’t we, buddy?’

Arkk
.

‘That’s awful,’ I said. ‘No wonder he’s pissed off.’

‘He’s pretty harmless, but he does like chewing on my furniture. Just stay clear of the beak, and carry a few treats with you to keep him happy. You’ll be fine.’

I thought Fabián would be crestfallen to hear this refutation of his theories about the dome, but it didn’t seem to have registered with him.

‘What sort of treats?’ he said. ‘I haven’t got any spare flesh on me.’ Then, suddenly grabbing Sol, ‘But perhaps we can find a tasty morsel somewhere round here.’

The girl squealed, then let out a peal of laughter as Fabián picked her up, put her under his arm and hauled her towards the parrot. The pair of them collapsed on to the floor, giggling. As they rocked about on the sand-covered planks, a worried look came over Fabián and his hand shot out behind Sol’s head in case she came close to hitting it. The parrot gouged a piece out of a table leg, let out another screech of rage and shat on the floor.

Arkk
.

‘That’s it, buddy,’ said Ray, soothingly. ‘You tell ’em.’

Ray poured each of us a hair-raising dose of sweet coffee, then said, ‘We better hit the waves soon; this weather isn’t going to hold. Coastguard says there’ll be a storm this afternoon. It’s the season for it:
El Niño
. Sorry guys, but I don’t make the rules.’

‘We’ll be ready in five minutes,’ said Fabián, getting to his feet.

‘Are we really going treasure hunting?’ said Sol to her father. Fabián had obviously been stoking her up.

‘Sure, baby,’ said Ray. ‘But don’t forget:
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive
.’

‘Okay, Daddy,’ said Sol, who was trying to fit a shell in her ear and not giving her father full attention.

‘What?’ said Fabián.

‘Robert Louis Stevenson,’ said Ray. ‘Means that what you see on the journey is more important than the destination. Don’t you guys read?’

‘Whatever you say, dude,’ said Fabián. When we were out of Ray’s sight, he mimed shooting himself through the temple with a revolver, and as we trudged back to our cabin, he muttered, ‘Fucking hippies. Imagine growing up with
that
as your father.’

‘You’re in a good mood this morning,’ I observed.

He paused and looked around. ‘Yeah, I suppose I am. Must be getting away from home.’

‘I thought you’d be pissed off at what Ray said about the dome.’

‘Are you kidding? I thought it was fantastic. I love this place. I wish we could stay here for a week.’

‘How are we going to get away with that?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s only Friday. We’ve got at least forty-eight hours until we have to think about getting home, so let’s just enjoy ourselves.’

There were four of us in Ray’s wide-hulled, sturdy fishing boat. Ray stood to one side, piloting us at speed from the stern, his grey mane whipping about him in the wind like a cat-o’-nine-tails. I sat on a wooden bench opposite him, watching the water as we belted along. Fabián and Sol lay together on the prow, passing a pair of binoculars between them to scout for pelicans or whale tails. In spite of the hostility of their first meeting, Fabián and Sol had hit it off, and they had been fooling around together all morning. He’d even told me the previous night how much he’d have liked to have a little sister like her. I was pleased. Sol had provided an unexpected, uncomplicated distraction for Fabián, and it seemed to be making him happy.

The island rose slowly from the horizon like a dark loaf in
an oven. Birds veered and swooped at its edges like parasites, as if the island were a breathing thing large enough to sustain life in exchange for grooming perks. We carved our way closer, through water that seemed to have changed colour every time I looked down. Coffee-coloured near the mainland, it had blurred to the grey of slate slabs as we gathered speed, and as we neared our destination, it now lightened even more. At one point I glimpsed a bloated, dead goldfish below the surface and thought of treasure. We approached a small harbour with a pier, where a boatload of tourists was disembarking, but Ray ignored this, gunned the motor and steered us round to the next cove, where there were only outcrops of black lava at which to land. He’d explained to us before we left that technically you were supposed to have a special permit to visit the island because it was a nature reserve. He’d also explained that he did not possess such a permit, and that our visit would therefore have to be fairly discreet.

The bay was bottle-glass green. Buds of coral grew within it, fed on by shoals of tiny fish. Ray brought us into what was obviously a favoured mooring spot, where the boat would be hidden from the island by mighty lumps of pumice.

‘I ought to have a smugglers’ cave to show you here, but I don’t,’ he said. ‘You’ll just have to imagine one.’

The boat tilted as I stepped off it. I imagined the weight of my one pace sending a ripple away over the surface of the ocean, perhaps momentarily unsettling a Japanese fisherman thousands of miles away. The rock felt rough underfoot, as if we had chanced upon an island of sandpaper. I looked down into the water as frequently as I could, hoping to discern, amid speeding fish and whorls of coral, the glint of Spanish silver.

Like its more celebrated cousins in the Galápagos, the island yielded little in the way of plant life, but it swarmed with animals: pairs of blue-footed boobies, stately giant
iguanas, slow-motion flocks of brown pelicans, even an albatross we surprised nesting quietly behind a thorn bush. Ray proved to be quite an expert and excitedly pointed out to us the various endemic species as we walked around.

‘But where’s the fucking treasure?’ Fabián whispered to me, as Ray enthused about a sea otter frolicking in the shallows.

Within the hour, we’d seen fine examples of lava gulls, oyster-catchers and frigate-birds, to say nothing of marine iguanas and lava lizards. Finally, Ray said, ‘If you want to see anything more, we’d have to get out to the Galápagos, which would mean chartering a slightly bigger boat. And breaking some much more serious laws. How about it, guys? Ready to head back?’

‘What about this treasure?’ said Fabián. ‘Where’s it supposed to be?’

‘Oh, that. Nobody knows, man. Could be in any one of these little coves. Wait. Do you know what that is? Vermillion flycatcher. Very rare.’

‘I think we’d really like to do some treasure hunting now.’

Wet ropes of hair flapped on the back of Ray’s vest as he turned away from the bird. ‘You’re right. Let’s go swimming before the storm breaks,’ he said. ‘Gonna be a big one.’ He led us to a bay of black sand and volcanic rubble, where the shallows extended far out to sea over large, egg-shaped boulders.

‘Lots of good nooks and crannies round here where treasure might hide,’ said Ray. ‘I’ll start over here, and you guys can fan out and cover the rest of the bay.’ He stepped out of his shorts, pulled off his vest and had soon become a collection of walnut-coloured limbs forcing towards the horizon. Sol leapt into the water to follow him.

‘This isn’t right. We promised her a treasure hunt,’ said Fabián.

‘She seems happy enough,’ I said.

‘That’s not the point.
I
promised her.’

I sighed. ‘Okay. Look around you. If you were Francis Drake, where would you drop your treasure?’

‘Don’t patronise me.’

‘It isn’t like you to be this crap at enjoying yourself. Come for a swim.’

He held up his plaster cast in response.

‘You could paddle,’ I offered.

‘You go. Even I know that the treasure isn’t going to be in a bay so shallow you couldn’t even park a rubber dinghy. I’ll stay here.’

As I swam, I cast glances at the shoreline. Fabián sat, not even looking at the water, compulsively swabbing his face with alcohol. From a distance, it looked as though he were talking to himself. Ray gave up the pretence of the treasure hunt within minutes and began boosting his daughter into the air and catching her delighted little body as she hit the water.

‘Weather’s turning,’ he said when we got out. ‘We better grab a wave, or we’ll be stuck here.’

Clouds had begun to assemble overhead, forming a lid that pushed down tightly on the air below, like the palm of a hand on a jack-in-the-box. The temperature rose. The wildlife sped up: birds hurled themselves through the air; iguanas sloped off to safety.

‘I’d like to take you further round the island, but we can’t stay. The tourist boats will have taken off hours ago, and we should do the same,’ said Ray.

‘We can’t leave.’ Fabián was watching him intently. ‘I want to find some treasure. That was why we came here. You haven’t delivered.’

Ray laughed as he towelled himself off. ‘Listen, kid. Joking aside, there’s no fucking treasure on this island. And
if there were, we wouldn’t find it. We have to go now before this storm arrives.’

Fabián stood up. ‘This is bullshit. We came here for treasure.’

‘You’re serious? You’re not joking? I thought you were just doing this for the benefit of my daughter. You’re fifteen years old.’

‘Daddy, can’t we look for treasure just for a little while?’ said Sol.

‘Honey, we can look for it someplace else. We have to head back now or it’ll be a rough crossing.’

‘Treasure,’ said Fabián. ‘I promised Sol we’d find treasure and we will.’

Ray put an arm round Fabián’s shoulder to take him aside, but Fabián threw it off.

‘Treasure.’

‘Okay then. I’m a democratic sort of guy. Anti, you have the casting vote.’

‘Maybe we should come looking again tomorrow, if there’s going to be a storm,’ I said. ‘Although the treasure was our objective, I suppose.’

‘Right. Now we have “objectives”,’ muttered Ray. ‘Okay. We’ll go back to the boat and see what it’s like round there. But I have final say. Fucking kids.’

The waters in our bay frothed and chopped against the rocks. As we descended the track towards the shoreline and I scanned the water, I saw that even the fish had taken cover. Trees and bushes struggled against the wind, as if strait-jacketed and refusing to go quietly.

Ray began untying the boat from its moorings as soon as we were all on board. ‘I’m not about to risk my life and my daughter’s for some kid who can’t grow up,’ he said. ‘We leave now.’

‘Look.’ Fabián was looking over the side at the water’s
surface. ‘There’s something there.’ For an instant, I thought I could see something metallic sparkling in the coral, but then a swell of angry tide wiped over it again. Fabián removed his T-shirt. ‘I’m just going to check what it is. It won’t take long.’

The boat reeled at this suggestion, and I was almost thrown off my feet. I felt sick just being on the water here in a harbour, without even contemplating the journey home. I grabbed hold of Sol, more to steady myself than protect her – her sea legs seemed to be fine.

Ray jolted the boat’s motor into life, but Fabián was still staring into the water. Ray shouted at him over the engine noise and the wind: ‘You are not going in that water. With these currents you’ll get grated up on the coral like fucking Parmesan. Forget it.’

Fabián stood firm, riding each new wave as it hit the boat. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not afraid of the sea. And there is treasure down there.’

‘You can’t go in, anyway,’ I added. ‘Your cast.’

Throughout this, Fabián had been rubbing his plaster cast against the metal side of the boat, as if scratching an itch. Now, he brought it crashing down on the side as hard as he could. As if cracking a troublesome egg, he raised and slammed it down again. Cracks appeared in the plaster, separating the signatures and quips of our classmates back in Quito. Then Fabián was pulling at the cast as if it were a kitchen glove, using the side of the boat for leverage, and finally it came free. He threw it in a wide arc over the sea, where it plopped and bobbed. Verena’s felt pen heart bled red and violet into the water. His arm was paler than the rest of him and he rubbed it briskly, shedding flecks of dead skin on to the water like confetti. He stood, ready to dive.