Ghosts

I’m in English Harbor, Antigua, after our Atlantic crossing, and mindful of ghosts: under the palm trees, along the wooden balconies of colonial buildings, between the mangroves.

The tourist guides say English Harbor is the world’s only working naval port from the Georgian era, preserved as it was during Britain’s long conflict with France. And it’s true, the buildings where Horatio Nelson and thousands of his countrymen were stationed remain intact – even if put to rather different uses.

Where the great ships' sails were repaired, you now drink pricey rum; there's a beauty salon and wine bar in the cramped officers' quarters. What hasn't changed at all is that your anchor digs right into the same mud where tree sized anchors of the Royal Navy once dropped. Indeed, modern anchors not infrequently become entangled with remnants of chains and other artifacts from those days of maritime empire.

English Harbour looks quaint now, at times elegant, at times like a film set. Yet this port was originally built for war, a stern place and in the 18^th century so ridden with malaria and other tropical diseases that sailors sent here from across the Atlantic died often without setting eyes on the enemy. But even cannons eventually become picturesque. Imagine the tourists crawling over an American base (Guantanamo or Okinawa might be the closest matches) in 200 years? The ghosts could already be gathering.

Tying “Moon River” to the old stone quay here was to tie also into history of my own that I had almost forgotten, or not forgotten, but put away, unloved, yet preserved all the same.

Sometimes it seems that we live several lives, moving on, reinventing, and yet at the same time never really outrunning ourselves. We shed much, but, voluntarily or not, carry bits of what happened, even if only a shadow -- perhaps the reason why we're rarely as much in control as we like to pretend. "I am a part of all that I have met," Tennyson wrote.

Certainly I've come to Antigua on my terms: as a father in my own boat, thousands of miles into a voyage construed from my own dreams, financed with my pennies, made with the woman I love, who is my fate, and with two children who are to us what rain is to the cloud. My world might appear well defined.

Yet another boat and very different me once moored at this same stone dock.

I was 16. I was on holiday from school in England and joining my father on his yacht, far bigger than “Moon River,” which he based in Antigua. I’d already been several times to the boat, either here or in other ports, each time showing up with my latest poor school reports, well-hidden cigarettes and ocean of teenage rage.

But this time, something was different. We had a guest on board: my sister.

Natasha and I hadn't seen each other since we were small children. We hadn't talked to each other, written to each other. We hadn't lived in the same country. Now, after a decade, in this Caribbean paradise, aboard this beautiful boat, we were being reunited.

Whatever extraordinary emotions, whatever tumbling of internal walls or awakening of dreams that may have occurred in those days, everything was filtered and obscured, as ever, through the deadening fog of my teenage mind.

I’d very much like to say, or at least think, that this meeting with Natasha was magical, or moving, or life-changing. You know, one of those Hollywood scenes with the swelling music.

Yet I didn’t feel this. Or didn’t want to. Or didn’t let myself.

What I felt more than anything was something like surprise: that this grown up girl – she had just turned 21 – really was my sister. The last time we'd been together she'd been about 11 and I about six (way back in another of those previous lives). So now she seemed unreal, yet real, already something like a particularly vivid ghost.

Uncertain what to do, I made sure I didn't appear to care. I suspect her approach was about the same. We simply existed in the moment. We went to a beach together. We walked about the shops. The crew on my dad’s beautiful boat took us snorkeling and so on.

For sure, we never talked about the past, never raised the subject. Most of that time in Antigua she was an abstraction to me, a person I might find on any boat in the Caribbean: that girl in the bikini, the girl in the hammock, the girl enjoying paradise. Not my lost sister.

Natasha was beautiful. She was tanned and smooth. A raging, boys-school teenager, I genuinely enjoyed the glamour of walking around with a girl – a real, proper girl. Really, that was probably the principal emotion I had, or let myself have: a self-congratulatory realization that my sister was beautiful.

I hardly remember anything we said to each other. We definitely never had that talk. I know that. But I also know there were moments when we caught each other’s eyes, Natasha and I, and that then we didn't speak because we couldn’t speak. Then we weren’t in paradise at all. We weren’t in one of those gaudy bars that the sailors went to; we weren’t on the dazzling beach; we weren’t on the sunbaked deck of our father’s beautiful boat. We were in some kind of abyss then, too far under to know which way was up, which down. Not an easy place, perhaps, but real and rare. I never realized how lucky I was.

Natasha’s visit to the Caribbean lasted a week or two, just like any ordinary holiday. It seems the reunion wasn’t a success. She flew back to our mother. I never saw her alive again.

Thirty years later, returning to English Harbour, I found myself looking for Natasha's ghost -- whether out of fear (a nervous look over my shoulder) or curiosity, I wasn't sure.

My quarry was elusive. Fact is, there’s literally only one place in English Harbour – an undistinguished stretch of road outside the gates – where I can remember precisely that I was with her.

Hard as I try, I can't even recall the spot where we'd said goodbye. She must have taken a taxi for the airport when she left. Had we gone with her? Did I kiss her on the cheek? Did we hug? Did we promise to write? Did we cry, smile, joke? Where exactly did I see her for the last time? I have absolutely no idea.

Frustrated, I searched for clues online (where else does the modern ghost hunter go?), discovering against all expectations that the professional skipper of my dad’s boat in those days is still around on the island. He’s become a painter. Plucking up courage, I went to see him, rowing "Moon River's" dinghy to the end of a mangrove-lined cove, and working my way to the road. Up the hot hill I walked. What would we even talk about? Would that summer with Natasha come up, or would it be just pleasantries? I found the place. But his neighbors told me he'd left, gone to England for several weeks -- far beyond the time I could spend waiting in Antigua. My heart pounded. What was the Greek god of anticlimax?

Despite all the heritage preservation, English Harbour has changed dramatically in the last three decades. Superyachts the likes of which were barely contemplated in the 1980s lie crammed into the old haven like rows of cars. Falmouth Harbour, once the down-at-heel extension of English Harbour, is even flashier. It was here that I now took my search.

On a hot, squally afternoon, I walked along the bay, uselessly trying to conjure the wilder 1980s, when I'd take out my rage on a windsurfer every day, tearing back and forth across the tropical water, hour after hour. Now superyachts swamp the landscape, enormous, opulent machines designed largely to make rich, old men happy. There's no room for a lonely kid on a board today.

But I remembered a rasta fisherman who used to operate from Falmouth back in the day. He'd had a shack by the roadside with a handpainted sign outside that said: "POWER, FISH, ICE."

My dad and I always loved that sign. The rasta was a big, fit man, impressive on his own terms. But the sign, crudely drawn, lent him an elemental quality in our eyes. On an island with an economy dedicated to doling out luxury and frivolity, the rasta (we decided) was a wilderness philosopher, a kind of tropical demi-god who mastered wild things in the sea, who combated the sun with ice, and in some Delphic way wielded power -- not just because he had a generator or stocks of car batteries in that shack.

Memory of the sign and its dreadlocked master became my totem now. The rasta was my link to the past. Not just to the past of Antigua, but to that other life of mine, and of my small family.

Still, the simple huts once lining Falmouth have been upgraded and yet again my search seemed doomed. Certainly I was never going to find that old sign. Back and forth I walked, remembering conversations with my dad, the crafty cigarettes I had in the bushes, the crackling Caribbean stars so different to what I knew in England, and the constant gnawing feeling of having been brought to a place where everything was perfect, but where what I really wanted would never be possible.

Suddenly between a small wooden house and a small food shop I recognized the spot. The shack was gone. The sign too. But the shape of the land, the rim of the road, maybe even the angle of the afternoon sun, merged, laser-like, so that I was sure immediately, beyond doubt. And on that spot stood a rasta – not young; about the right age in fact. He was washing a car.

The moment the rasta turned I knew he wasn’t the same man, but that did not matter. The past rushed in. "Power, fish, ice," I said. "Know what I mean? There was a sign with just those words on it. Another rasta, a fisherman... Big fellow..."

The passwords: Power. Fish. Ice.

The rasta began to mumble and it was only then I realized he had a speech defect and clearly other ailments, a man in suffering. Power. Fish. Ice. I kept repeating my question in slightly different forms until his answers stitched themselves together.

"Yes it was here," the rasta said. “That was my brother. He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Gone, gone. Disappeared in the sea.”

I said I was sorry. The rasta put his hand out to shake.

"Peace."

"Peace."

Maybe I understood him, maybe not entirely. Can you ever understand ghosts?

About 15 years after Natasha came to see us in Antigua, I was at work in London when I got an email saying she had died. She drowned in the swimming pool at the end of my mother’s garden in South Africa.

I didn't know how to mourn for someone who had already vanished long before. I learned. Then I took the plane to my mother’s distant home for the funeral.

When it was time, I was the one who went to collect the ashes. The drive took me into a treeless, gritty Cape Town neighborhood far from the verdant garden (and fatal swimming pool) of my mother’s heavily guarded house. In a dim room, the undertaker gave me a box. To my horror – but also, I have to admit, my perverse interest – he hadn’t closed the lid properly and a light, yet distinct puff of my sister's ashes wafted up onto my hands: our first connection, you could say, in many years.

All my life the childhood ghost of Natasha had haunted me, the one from before we were separated, the ghost of my older sister in pigtails and riding clothes. Among the ashes, I met another, this wraith in a box.

And now that I am back in Antigua, typing this under a mango tree, I realize at last that I have found the third, a ghost to complete the puzzle, a ghost I can call up in the blackest tropical night -- the ghost of Natasha at 21, Natasha when she was right here with me, the numbskull, raging teenager. Natasha who vanished, who was reunited with me, vanished again, and now in some sense has returned.

I became angry (angrier!) in the wake of those unhappy holidays. Angry that I'd let everything precious slide from my hands. That I'd had no idea. Clueless. That I'd barely risen above that single thought: “Wow, she’s beautiful.”  No big chat, no rebuilding, or building, or any sort of construction whatsoever. Not even an exchange of mementos when we said farewell. Just rage and through the rage my banal, vain delight that this mysterious sibling was beautiful.

That anger's over now. Watching another rum punch sunset fade to nothing, watching ten and eight-year old Zephyr and Looli scamper around English Harbour, creating their own lives, I realize I can't change what happened 30 years ago. Besides, beating yourself up is, by definition, a battle you'll lose.

I've learned a lesson in coming back to Antigua. Learned that you can't argue with ghosts. You really can't. That you have to take them as they are. So I will.

Yes, let me say it.

Natasha: you were beautiful.