Fat Charlie woke, shivering. The flight attendant brought him coffee, and he drank it gratefully. He was awake now, and he had no desire to go back to sleep, so he read the Caribbeair Magazine and learned many useful things about Saint Andrews.
He learned that Saint Andrews is not the smallest of the Caribbean Islands, but it tends to be one of the ones that people
forget about when they make lists. It was discovered by the Spanish around 1500, an uninhabited volcanic hill teeming with animal life, not to mention a multiplicity of plants. It was said that anything that you planted in Saint Andrews would grow.
It belonged to the Spanish, and then to British, then to the Dutch, then to the British again, and then, for a short while after it was made independent in 1962, it belonged to Major F. E. Garrett, who took over the government, broke off diplomatic relations with all other countries except Albania and the Congo, and ruled the country with a rod of iron until his unfortunate death from falling out of bed several years later. He fell out of bed hard enough to break a number of bones, despite the presence in his bedroom of an entire squad of soldiers, who testified that they had all tried, but failed, to break Major Garrett’s fall, and despite their best efforts he was dead by the time that he arrived in the island’s sole hospital. Since then, Saint Andrews had been ruled by a beneficent and elected local government and was everybody’s friend.
It had miles of sandy beaches and an extremely small rainforest in the center of the island; it had bananas and sugarcane, a banking system that encouraged foreign investment and offshore corporate banking, and no extradition treaties with anybody at all, except possibly the Congo and Albania.
If Saint Andrews was known for anything, it was for its cuisine: the inhabitants claimed to have been jerking chickens before the Jamaicans, currying goats before the Trinidadians, frying flying fish before the Bajans.
There were two towns on Saint Andrews: Williamstown, on the southeast side of the island, and Newcastle, on the north. There were street markets in which anything that grew on the island could be bought, and several supermarkets, in which the same foodstuffs could be bought for twice the price. One day Saint Andrews would get a real international airport.
It was a matter of opinion whether the deep harbor of Williamstown was a good thing or not. It was indisputable that the deep harbor brought the cruise ships, though, floating islands filled with people, who were changing the economy and nature of Saint Andrews as they were changing the economy of many Caribbean islands. At high season there would be up to half a dozen cruise ships in Williamstown Bay, and thousands of people waiting to disembark, to stretch their legs, to buy things. And the people of Saint Andrews grumbled, but they welcomed the visitors ashore, they sold them things, they fed them until they could eat no more and then they sent them back to their ships…
The Caribbeair plane landed with a bump that made Fat Charlie drop his magazine. He put it back into the seat pocket in front of him, walked down the steps and across the tarmac.
It was late afternoon.
Fat Charlie took a taxi from the airport to his hotel. During the taxi ride, he learned a number of things that had not been mentioned in the Caribbeair magazine. For example, he learned that music, real music, proper music, was country and western music. On Saint Andrews, even the rastas knew it. Johnny Cash? He was a god. Willie Nelson? A demigod.
He learned that there was no reason ever to leave Saint Andrews. The taxi driver himself had seen no reason ever to leave Saint Andrews, and he had given it much thought. The island had a cave, and a mountain, and a rainforest. Hotels? It had twenty. Restaurants? Several dozen. It contained a city, three towns, and a scattering of villages. Food? Everything grew here. Oranges. Bananas. Nutmegs. It even, the taxi driver said, had limes.
Fat Charlie said “No!” at this, mostly in order to feel like he was taking part in the conversation, but the driver appeared to take it as a challenge to his honesty. He slammed on the taxi’s brakes, sending the car slewing over to the side of the road, got out of the car, reached over a fence, pulled something from a tree and walked back to the car.
“Look at this!” he said. “Nobody ever tell you that I is a liar. What it is?”
“A lime?” said Fat Charlie.
“Exactly.”
The taxi driver lurched the car back into the road. He told Fat Charlie that the Dolphin was an excellent hotel. Did Fat Charlie have family on the island? Did he know anyone here?
“Actually,” said Fat Charlie, “I’m here looking for someone. For a woman.”
The taxi driver thought this was a splendid idea, since Saint Andrews was a perfect place to come if you were looking for a woman. This was, he elaborated, because the women of Saint Andrews were curvier than the women of Jamaica, and less likely to give you grief and heartbreak than the Trinis. In addition, they were more beautiful than the women of Dominica, and they were better cooks than you would find anywhere on Earth. If Fat Charlie was looking for a woman, he had come to the right place.
“It’s not just any woman. It’s a specific woman,” said Fat Charlie.
The taxi driver told Fat Charlie that this was his lucky day, for the taxi driver prided himself on knowing everyone on the island. If you spend your life somewhere, he said, you can do that. He was willing to bet that Fat Charlie did not know by sight all the people in England, and Fat Charlie admitted that this was in fact the case.
“She’s a friend of the family,” said Fat Charlie. “Her name is Mrs. Higgler. Callyanne Higgler. You heard of her?”
The taxi driver was quiet for a while. He seemed to be thinking. Then he said that, no, he hadn’t ever heard of her. The taxi pulled up in front of the Dolphin Hotel, and Fat Charlie paid him.
Fat Charlie went inside. There was a young woman on reception. He showed her his passport and the reservation number. He put the lime down on the reservation desk.
“Do you have any luggage?”
“No,” said Fat Charlie, apologetically.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Just this lime.”
He filled out several forms, and she gave him a key and directions to his room.
Fat Charlie was in the bath when a knock came on the door. He wrapped a towel around his midriff. It was the bellman. “You left your lime in reception,” he said, and handed it to Fat Charlie.