Chapter 8: The Tanks

Peter has got as far as "Well, I'd thought England, probably," when Jessica says, "Here," and that is the end of it.

She says it to her mother, not to him, and then something more in her own language, quick and low, and Mrs. Arapo nods once, as if a bill has been settled. The fruit goes round. Nobody looks at him. He eats a slice of something green and sour and doesn't taste it.

She drives him back to the guesthouse at ten. The streets are empty, the car windows down, the night loud with insects. He waits until they are past the last lights on the main street.

"Here?"

"Here."

"Jess. I've got a job. A flat. I've got a whole life in Manchester." It sounds thinner out loud than it did in his head. He tries again. "You've seen it on the screen. It's grey, and the rain goes sideways, but it's got everything. You could teach. They're crying out for teachers. And nobody puts a lock on anybody."

"No."

She doesn't raise her voice. She keeps her eyes on the road and her hands at ten and two, like a learner.

"Just no?"

"My mother would be on her own."

"Your brother."

"Is eighteen, and on the boats, and after the boats he'll have his own life. She'd be alone in that house." She turns onto the beach road. "And my class. The twins. Dale's boy with his fish. I know every one of them. And when I have children they'll grow up here, with the fruit behind the house, and the lagoon, and."

"And the law."

"And the law," she says, as if he'd said the weather. "Yes."

She parks outside the guesthouse and turns off the engine. The green shutters are closed. The hammock out front moves a little in the breeze off the sea.

"And I won't be the second one to leave."

"The second?"

She tells him then, sitting in the dark car with her hands still on the wheel. Her father. When her mother was carrying her brother, he knew what the second child meant: the card, or the cage, or the third choice. He didn't want the card. He didn't want the cage.

"So he left. That's allowed. You're free to choose." She says it flatly, a line from school. "He chose without us. One morning he was gone. I was eight. My mother had my brother four months later, and she still has his name. Arapo. She won't let him have it back."

"Did he write?"

"Never." She shrugs, and it doesn't come off. "Everybody at the market knows. They're very kind to her. They talk about her very sweetly."

He thinks of the photo on the sideboard, and the silence after it, and the chair he was given.

"I won't go off to England with a foreign man and leave her at that table. I won't, Peter."

He looks out at the dark sea. He'd like to argue, and the truth is he hasn't got much to argue with. The flat, and the boxes nobody has collected. The brackets from Stoke. Dave and his sausage rolls. The canal in the drizzle. He has been half done with Manchester since Carol left, and never said it, even to himself.

And there's Jessica, beside him in the dark, waiting.

"All right," he says. "Here."

She turns to him. "You mean it?"

"I mean it. But I can't just turn up and sit in your mum's front room. I need work. I'm not much use on an island without something to do."

She doesn't say anything to that. She leans across and kisses him, and gets out to open the car door for him, the way she does now without thinking, because the device makes a low car awkward.

The next day he spends in the hammock with his phone, going through the island's job pages, half of them in English and the rest through a translation app that turns every advert into a riddle. Hotel night manager, fluent native language required. Boat mechanic. Fruit packing, seasonal. Lifeguard at the resort pool, swimwear provided, which he reads twice. Nothing for a man who makes sure the bits fit.

The day after that he does it again. Jessica sits on the step below the hammock with her chin on her knees, quieter than he has ever seen her, and when he reads her the lifeguard post she doesn't laugh.

---

Jessica watches him scroll for two days, doing the thing she could fix with three sentences, and by the second evening she can't swallow it any longer.

They are at the place on the beach that grills fish, at the table they have made theirs, with the lanterns and the moths, and he is telling her about a clerk's post at the harbor office that wants a boat licence.

"There's a job," she says.

He stops with his fork in the air.

"At the water plant. Quality control. The lagoon monitoring." The words come out in the wrong order, all of them at once. "Somebody to check the measurements, and the procedures, all that. Dale told me. His boy is in my class, the one with the fish. They can't find anybody here with the training, and it's been open since last spring, and he said abroad is fine, if they'll come."

Peter puts the fork down.

"When did he tell you?"

She could say last week. She could say yesterday. She looks at her hands.

"In January. At the parents' meetings."

"January." He says it quietly. "Before you asked me to come."

"Yes."

"And you let me sit in that hammock for two days reading about fruit packing."

"Yes."

He looks away from her, out to the dark water, and she watches the muscle work in his jaw. She has never seen him angry. She finds she doesn't know what he does with it.

"I was afraid," she says. "If I told you there was a job, I was asking you to come and live in that." She doesn't point. She doesn't need to. "Every day, until they make you a citizen. And after that, the law. All of it, for good. I didn't want to be the one who asked." She makes herself say the rest. "And I was afraid you'd say no. Then you wouldn't even come for two weeks."

He is quiet for a long time. A moth bangs at the lantern between them, again and again.

"Quality control," he says at last.

"Yes."

"On the monitoring side. What do they monitor?"

And she sees it happen. Something in his face turns toward the question, the way a man's head turns at his own name across a room. He's still angry. He's also already halfway there.

"I don't know. The water. The fish." She takes her phone out. "I'll ask Dale if you can see it."

Dale answers within a minute, though it's nearly nine.

*Tomorrow, 10, main gate. Bring him. My boy will be there anyway, it's the holidays.*

---

The water plant sits on the edge of the lagoon twenty minutes out of town, where the road gives up being a road. Peter has seen the lagoon from the car before, a wide blue circle in the middle of the island with gentle hills along its far shore, so still it looks painted. The crater of some old volcano, he supposes, worn down by time. On this side the shore is all reeds, and close up it smells of them and of warm mud, and under that, faintly, of what a treatment plant always smells of, anywhere in the world.

Dale is waiting at the gate, and he is exactly as Jessica described him. A big man, slow and careful in his movements, a wedding ring on a thick hand. He shakes Peter's hand, and his eyes drop once to Peter's walk and come back up, and he doesn't say a word about it. He only nods at a plastic chair by the gatehouse door.

"Sit a minute first. It's a long way round."

Peter sits, and likes him at once.

It is a long way round. Settling basins in rows, grey concrete, the water in them moving so slowly you have to watch to see it. Pumps in a shed that hum through the soles of his shoes. Dale runs the treatment side, he says, and has for twelve years, and he talks about it the way some men talk about their cars: flows, sludge, the tonnes of it per day, the old pump that needs replacing and will outlive them all.

Then the fish house. It's a long low building with the blinds down and the air cool, and inside, along both walls, glass tanks lit from above, each with a hose running in from the outflow. Small silver fish hang in them, all facing the same way, like a crowd waiting for something.

"They live in what we send back," Dale says. "Same water as goes out into the lagoon. If something's wrong with it, they show it before we'd see it on any machine."

At the far end a boy of seven or so sits on a high stool with a pad of paper on his knees and a box of crayons on the floor, drawing the tank in front of him. He doesn't look up.

"That's mine," Dale says.

"What happens if they go wrong?" Peter asks the boy. "The fish."

The boy considers him, crayon in his fist. "Then Dad has to tell the government," he says, and goes back to his fish.

Peter thinks of a message from last autumn, in small lowercase letters. When my mother was young the fish went wrong.

The lab is the last stop. Two benches, a fume cupboard, a woman in a white coat who says hello and goes back to her pipette, and racks of sample bottles labelled by hand. Peter can't help it. His eyes go where they always go in a lab: the folders of procedures, the logbooks, the little stickers on the instruments. One of them says it was due for calibration in October.

"That one's out," he says before he can stop himself.

Dale looks. Then he laughs, a big slow laugh that fills the lab. "That's why we want you."

He explains it on the walk back to the gate. Everything that goes down a drain on the island ends up here, and then in the lagoon, and then in everybody's tap. The plant measures what it can. Hormones most of all; that's what the island remembers. The post is for someone to check the checking: that the samples are taken right, the instruments are right, the numbers in the report mean what they say. The report goes to the ministry every month.

"And if the numbers moved?"

"Then everyone would know about it." Dale says it simply. "That's the job."

At the gate Dale tells him the rest. The plant will sponsor a work visa. Start whenever he can come.

"On a work visa you're a visitor, mind. Same as now." He doesn't look down this time. "Till you're a citizen."

"How long does that take?"

"There's an exam. You sit it here, at the ministry. There's a study guide on the website. Most of it's the lagoon, the fish, what you can put down the drain." He nods back at the basins. "You'll know half of it after a week here. Pass, and you're one of us." Then, without changing his voice at all: "And then you can marry her."

So Jessica's English friend has been no secret to Dale since January either. Peter finds he doesn't mind.

The boy has followed them out with his pad and is showing the fish to Jessica through the car window. Peter watches them. Then he asks it, the island question, as if he's lived here all his life.

"How many children have you got?"

"One. That's him." Dale turns his wedding ring with his thumb. "One to go. We're in no hurry. My wife keeps the calendar on the fridge."

They set the date in the car on the way back, with the windows down and the lagoon going by behind the reeds. Jessica counts on her fingers. Her long school break starts at the end of July. He'll come then, sit the exam, and they'll marry at the end of August, on the last Saturday, before term.

"I want to go back to my class as Mrs. Lowe," she says, and then has to pull over because she's laughing too hard to drive.

---

On the last morning she drives him to the airport, and they say goodbye at the door of the terminal, because she can't come further and neither of them wants to do it in front of a queue. She holds his face and kisses him and tells him August, and he tells her August, and then he goes in alone with his case.

There is a sign inside he didn't notice on the way in. Departing visitors, it says, with an arrow, and the yellow line on the floor, as bright as ever, leading off round the corner.

The same white room. The same row of plastic chairs. The same nurse in the pale blue tunic, who looks up and smiles as if she has been expecting him, which, he supposes, she has.

"Mr. Lowe. Two weeks already. Did you enjoy your stay?"

"I did, actually."

She finds his envelope in a drawer full of them, checks the number against his passport, and tears it open. The little brass key slides into her palm.

"In you come. Takes a minute."

It does. A click, a twist, the cold ring easing off, and then nothing at all. Air. He stands in the cubicle with his trousers round his knees and feels lighter than he has any right to, and stupidly, absurdly bereft, as if he's been handed back something he wasn't sure he wanted. He is half hard before he has thought anything at all. The nurse doesn't comment. She drops the device into a steel tray with a clink.

He dresses. At the counter she gives him a stamped slip for the passport desk, white this time.

"I'll be back," he tells her. "In August. On a work visa. I'm getting married."

The nurse smiles with real pleasure and holds the door for him. "Congratulations, Mr. Lowe! Next time it's for good, then."