“I don’t think she’s going to the music festival. I really need to track her down. She’s got something I’m looking for. Look, if you were me, how would you go about looking for her?”
Benjamin Higgler reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a map of the island. “We’re here, just south of Williamstown…” he began, making a felt pen mark on the paper. From there, he began marking out a plan of campaign for Fat Charlie: he divided the island into segments that could easily be covered in a day by a man on a bicycle, marked out each rum shop and café with small crosses. He put a circle beside each tourist attraction.
Then he rented Fat Charlie a bicycle.
Fat Charlie pedaled off to the south.
There were information conduits on Saint Andrews that Fat Charlie, who, on some level believed that coconut palms and cellular telephones ought to be mutually exclusive, had not expected. It did not seem to make any difference who he talked to: old men playing draughts in the shade; women with breasts like watermelons and buttocks like armchairs and laughter like mockingbirds; a sensible young lady in the tourist office; a bearded rasta with a green, red, and yellow-colored knit cap and what appeared to be a woollen miniskirt: they all had the same response.
“You the one with the lime?”
“I suppose so.”
“Show us your lime.”
“It’s back at the hotel. Look, I’m trying to find Callyanne Higgler. She’s about sixty. American. Big mug of coffee in her hand.”
“Never heard of her.”
Bicycling around the island, Fat Charlie soon discovered, had its dangers. The chief mode of transportation on the island was the minibus: unlicensed, unsafe, always overfilled, the minibuses hurtled around the island, tooting and squealing their brakes, slamming around corners on two wheels whilst relying on the weight of their passengers to ensure they never tipped over. Fat Charlie would have been killed a dozen times on his first morning out were it not for the low thud of drum and bass being played over each bus’s sound system: he could feel them in the pit of his stomach even before he heard their engines, and he had plenty of time to wheel the bicycle over to the side of the road.
While none of the people he spoke to were exactly what you could call helpful, they were still all extremely friendly. Fat Charlie stopped several times on his day’s expedition to the south and refilled his water bottle: he stopped at cafés and at private houses. Everyone was so pleased to see him, even if they didn’t know anything about Mrs. Higgler. He got back to the Dolphin Hotel in time for dinner.
On the following day he went north. On his way back to Williamstown, in the late afternoon, he stopped on a cliff top, dismounted, and walked his bike down to the entry gate of a luxurious house that sat on its own, overlooking the bay. He pressed the speakerphone button and said hello, but no one replied. A large black car sat in the driveway. Fat Charlie wondered if perhaps the place was deserted, but a curtain twitched in an upper room.
He pressed the button again. “Hullo,” he said. “Just wanted to see if I could fill my water bottle here.”
There was no reply. Perhaps he had only imagined that there was someone at the window. He seemed extremely prone to imagining things here: he started to fancy that he was being watched, not by someone in the house, but by someone or something in the bushes that bordered the road. “Sorry to have bothered you,” he said into the speaker, and clambered back onto his bike. It was downhill from here all the way to Williamstown. He was sure that he’d pass a café or two on the way, or another house, a friendly one.
He was on his way down the road—the cliffs had become a steepish hill down to the sea—when a black car came up behind him and accelerated forward with a roar. Too late, Fat Charlie realized that the driver had not seen him, for there was a long scrape of car against the bike’s handlebars, and Fat Charlie found himself tumbling, with the bike, down the hill. The black car drove on.
Fat Charlie picked himself up halfway down the hill. “That could have been nasty,” he said aloud. The handlebars were twisted. He hauled his bike back up the hill and onto the road. A low bass rumble alerted him to the approach of a minibus, and he waved it down.
“Can I put my bike in the back?”
“No room,” said the driver, but he produced several bungee cords from beneath his seat, and used them to fasten the bike onto the roof of the bus. Then he grinned. “You must be the Englishman with the lime.”
“I don’t have it on me. It’s back at the hotel.”