Genie and Paul Read Online Free PDF Page B

themselves considering him as he stared at his food, not seeing it at all, inhaling deeply and holding himself still the way some hunting dogs did before swiftly executing an expert act of retrieval in the undergrowth.
    That was when Paul told them what had happened in Mauritius, the night Jean-Marie had died. It would not bequite true to say that Paul told them in the same tone he might have used if asking for the salt. But still Genie felt there was something almost casual, something unfeeling , in the way he told them.
    It had happened the night of Paul’s birthday. A whole gang of them had gone out. There’d been a big fight. Paul had gone for one of the gang, Maja. But Maja had had a knife. Jean-Marie had got between them. That was how he’d died. Genie held her breath, not daring to speak. Mam, also quiet, was immobile too: she did nothing to wipe away her tears. But Paul had nothing else to say. He just bent to his plate then and ate as though someone were about to remove his food. He only looked up when he’d finished.
    Mo capav gany ankor?
    Mam brushed the back of her hand to her cheeks, took his plate and got up to refill it. Genie gaped: Paul, speaking Creole?
     
    Genie asked him about that later on when they went over to the newsagent’s to buy ice-cream.
    Fabs – they’re your favourite, right? said Paul, leaning into the deep-freezer.
    Oh, no. I like Mivvis now. Genie was surprised to hear this take the form of an accusation.
    They walked outside with their lollies.
    In Mauritius, Paul said, lollies come in totally different flavours. Really exotic ones like guava and mango. Even lychee-flavoured.
    Genie pulled a face. I hate lychees, they remind me of eyeballs.
    Still?
    They walked slowly towards the park, licking their lollies in the honeyed light of the late afternoon.
    So how come you can speak Creole now?
    I never forgot it.
    Don’t they speak English over there?
    Yep.
    So why didn’t you just speak in English?
    I wanted to speak Creole.
    Creole’s like Latin or something. Nobody really speaks it, do they? Well, only people in Mauritius.
    Only? There are about a million Mauritians just in Mauritius.
    But it’s not a proper language, is it? You can’t write it or anything.
    Actually, you can. It’s more fun when you can speak to people in their own language. You feel like you belong.
    They sat on the swings. Genie struggled to catch the drips from her lolly while Paul told her about the gang of guys he’d hung out with over in Mauritius – Jean-Marie’s friends and cousins. One cool guy called Gaetan.
    Genie had a special technique for eating Mivvis: she would suck the juice out of her lolly, then she would bite off the tip and crunch down into the ice-cream centre. There was, Genie felt, a weird parallel between the considered negotiation of her lolly (via her tongue, and the skilful wrist flicks which allowed her to escape rogue drips) and this carefulness she now sensed between herself and Paul. It might have been his new knowledge of death. Death felt like yet another person in Mauritius that Paul knew and Genie didn’t. She felt a strange kind of fear and fascination: who were these people? She had always known everyone Paul knew. Not knowing Creole – barely able to remember her own half-brother, whom she would now never know, whom she could not think of as dead since he had only ever really been a memory – and not knowing his friends, not knowing Mauritius, made her feel left out. Genie knew Creole only as the language of adults. The language they were told off in at home.
    I would rather be treated like a visitor. Then people would take you out and stuff, and treat you. I would have made them all speak English to me.
    Paul nudged her and smiled. Tilamerd! To tetu kom en burik, twa!
    Just because I can’t speak it any more, doesn’t mean I can’t understand, she said.
    So what did I just say?
    Something about me being a little shit, she said, trying to detach her tongue from the