The Long Way Home

The bus gave out in Savanna-la-Mar at ten past nine in the morning, in the rain, with a sound that made everybody on it stop talking at once.

Simone was not on the bus. Simone was in the car park of the wholesale opposite, loading two boxes of her aunt’s things into the back of a Corolla she had borrowed from her cousin, and she watched forty people come down off a dead bus into weather and stand there with the particular patience of people who have done this before.

She was going to Kingston. She had told herself she would leave by eight and it was already after nine, and there was a woman in the crowd holding a baby and a man with a guitar case and a boy in a school uniform on the wrong day, and she stood by her open trunk and thought, do not do this.

“Who going Kingston?” she called.

Six people turned around. Five of them were going to Black River.

The sixth was a man in his forties with a canvas bag and a hard case, and he came over and said, “I going Kingston,” and then, seeing her face, “You can say no. I not going to take it personal.”

“What’s in the case?”

“Trombone.”

“Show me.”

He put the case flat on the wet ground without a word of complaint and opened it, and it was a trombone.

“Rohan,” he said, straightening up.

“Simone. Put it in the back. And I am telling you now, I have three people expecting a text from me with your name in it before I pull out of this car park.”

“That is sensible,” Rohan said. “Spell it with an H.”

· · ·

The rain followed them past Ferris and let go somewhere before Black River, and then it was that hard bright light you get after, with the road steaming and the sea appearing and disappearing on the right.

They did the whole opening round: where you from, who you know, who your mother is. She learned he had been playing since he was fourteen, that he had done eleven years on ships and had got off them, that he taught at a school in Kingston three days a week now and played weekends and that the weekends paid better, which he said without any bitterness at all.

He learned she was a quantity surveyor, which he made her explain twice, and that the boxes in the back were her aunt’s, and that she had spent the week emptying a house.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right. She was ninety-one.”

“That is not what I asked.”

Simone drove for a while. “No,” she agreed. “It is not all right.”

He let that be. He did not fill it. She noticed that he did not fill it, and she noticed herself noticing.

· · ·

They stopped at Middle Quarters because he said if she drove past Middle Quarters without stopping he would have to report her, and they ate pepper shrimp out of a brown paper bag standing beside the car with the hazards on.

It was too hot for her and she said so, and he laughed at her, and she told him she was from town and had nothing to prove, and he said that was the most honest thing anybody had said to him all year.

When he handed her a napkin his fingers went across her wrist. Nothing. Two seconds. She got back in the car and put both hands on the wheel and thought, all right. So that is what is happening today.

· · ·

The road up to Mandeville is where a drive stops being a drive and starts being time.

He asked her what she would do if she didn’t have to do anything, and she said she did not understand the question, and he said neither did he the first time somebody asked him. She told him about a diving course she had paid for in 2019 and never taken. He told her he had written eleven pieces of music and played none of them for anyone, not once, not for a person in a room.

“Why not?”

“Because when you play a thing you write, people look at you after,” he said. “And they are not looking at the music.”

“So?”

“So I am forty-six and I don’t know what my face does.”

She glanced over at him. “It does plenty,” she said.

Rohan looked straight ahead at the road and did not answer that for about a mile, and when he did answer it, it was to point out a turn she had been about to miss.

· · ·

There was a landslide past Porus and the police were turning everybody back through the interior, and that is how nine hours happens.

By four they were on a road with no signs and she let him take the wheel because her shoulder had gone. She put the seat back and shut her eyes and did not sleep, and the car filled up with the particular quiet of two people who have said the easy things already.

“You can sleep,” he said.

“I know.”

“But you not going to.”

“No,” she said.

Some while later, over a stretch of broken road, he put his hand on the back of her seat to reverse out of a wrong turn, and his forearm was an inch from her shoulder for the length of the maneuver, and neither of them moved, and then he put both hands back on the wheel.

Nobody said one word about it. It sat in the car with them for the next forty miles like a third passenger.

· · ·

Dusk came down while they were still in the hills, and they came out onto the main at May Pen in the dark with the traffic thick and the whole of Kingston laid out ahead in a haze of orange light.

They stopped talking around Old Harbour. It was not awkward. It was the other thing, the one where every sentence you might say has been examined and discarded for saying too much.

She took the wheel back for the last stretch because it was her cousin’s car and her cousin’s insurance, and Rohan gave her directions to where he was going: an address in Vineyard Town, off the Old Hope Road, a left and then a right.

“There,” he said. “The next left is you.”

The indicator was already on. She had put it on without deciding to, somewhere around the stadium, the way your hands do the thing your mind is still pretending to consider.

Simone drove past the next left.

She could feel him turn his head. She kept her eyes on the road and her hands where they were and her voice as level as she could get it.

“I am going to ask you something,” she said, “and I want you to know I have been thinking about it since Middle Quarters, so you are not obliged to be gallant about it.”

“Ask me.”

“Do you have anywhere you actually have to be tonight?”

The lights changed ahead of them and she had to stop. In the red light she finally looked at him, and he was already looking at her, and whatever his face did then, he did not know what it was doing, and she did.

“No,” Rohan said.

“All right.”

“Simone.”

“Mm.”

“The trombone is going to have to come in.”

She laughed so hard the man in the car beside her looked over, and she was still laughing when the light went green, and she did not take the turn for Vineyard Town either.

· · ·

Some while later, in a flat on the second floor with the windows open and the night coming in off the yard, she asked him to play her one of the eleven.

He said no.

She asked him again in the morning, with the coffee, in a pair of his socks, and he was quiet for a moment and then he took the horn out of the case and stood in the middle of her front room in yesterday’s shirt and played her a thing nobody else had ever heard.

Then he looked at her after.

He knew exactly what his face was doing.

❧