The Boy Who Talked with Animals
Not so long ago, I decided to spend a few days in the West Indies. I was to go there for a short holiday. Friends had told me it was marvellous. I would laze around all day, they said, sunning myself on the silver beaches and swimming in the warm green sea.
I chose Jamaica, and flew direct from London to Kingston. The drive from Kingston airport to my hotel on the north shore took two hours. The island was full of mountains and the mountains were covered all over with dark tangled forests. The big Jamaican who drove the taxi told me that up in those forests lived whole communities of diabolical people who still practised voodoo and witch-doctory and other magic rites. ‘Don’t ever go up into those mountain forests,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘There’s things happening up there that’d make your hair turn white in a minute!’
‘What sort of things?’ I asked him.
‘It’s better you don’t ask,’ he said. ‘It don’t pay even to talk about it.’ And that was all he would say on the subject.
My hotel lay upon the edge of a pearly beach, and the setting was even more beautiful than I had imagined. But the moment I walked in through those big open front doors, I began to feel uneasy. There was no reason for this. I couldn’t see anything wrong. But the feeling was there and I couldn’t shake it off. There was something weird and sinister about the place. Despite all the loveliness and the luxury, there was a whiff of danger that hung and drifted in the air like poisonous gas.
And I wasn’t sure it was just the hotel. The whole island, the mountains and the forests, the black rocks along the coastline and the trees cascading with brilliant scarlet flowers, all these and many other things made me feel uncomfortable in my skin. There was something malignant crouching underneath the surface of this island. I could sense it in my bones.
My room in the hotel had a little balcony, and from there I could step straight down on to the beach. There were tall coconut palms growing all around, and every so often an enormous green nut the size of a football would fall out of the sky and drop with a thud on the sand. It was considered foolish to linger underneath a coconut palm because if one of those things landed on your head, it would smash your skull.
The Jamaican girl who came in to tidy my room told me that a wealthy American called Mr Wasserman had met his end in precisely this manner only two months before.
‘You’re joking,’ I said to her.
‘Not joking!’ she cried. ‘No suh! I sees it happening with my very own eyes!’
‘But wasn’t there a terrific fuss about it?’ I asked.
‘They hush it up,’ she answered darkly. ‘The hotel folks hush it up and so do the newspaper folks because things like that are very bad for the tourist business.’
‘And you say you actually saw it happen?’
‘I actually saw it happen,’ she said. ‘Mr Wasserman, he’s standing right under that very tree over there on the beach. He’s got his camera out and he’s pointing it at the sunset. It’s a red sunset that evening, and very pretty. Then all at once, down comes a big green nut right smack on to the top of his bald head. Wham! And that,’ she added with a touch of relish, ‘is the very last sunset Mr Wasserman ever did see.’
‘You mean it killed him instantly?’
‘I don’t know about instantly,’ she said. ‘I remember the next thing that happens is the camera falls out of his hands on to the sand. Then his arms drop down to his sides and hang there. Then he starts swaying. He sways backwards and forwards several times ever so gentle, and I’m standing there watching him, and I says to myself the poor man’s gone all dizzy and maybe he’s going to faint any moment. Then very very slowly he keels right over and down he goes.’
‘Was he dead?’
‘Dead as a doornail,’ she said.
‘Good heavens.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It never pays to be standing under a coconut palm when there’s a breeze blowing.’