Free Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath

York. Much of what he told me has since been contradicted by Vera, though I do know that they got through the money in a matter of weeks and then moved south, and this I know because I had to wire them funds to a bank in Miami Beach. I suppose I was a fool, but for years I thought about him constantly, my devotion sustained by the very occasional letter, usually a scrawled thing on onionskin paper with drink smears and cigarette burns all over it, and the margins alive with sketches and doodles. How I treasured them! I wrote back copiously, and subjected any man who showed an interest in me to a withering comparison with Jack, and never, of course, did any of them come close.
    I didn’t see him for more than ten years, and much happened in the meantime. After they left England I grew close to my father, and when he died I was surprised how deeply it affected me. He left the bulk of the estate to me. Jack got nothing, nor, to his astonishment, did Gerald, who by that time had become a doctor, and had a family, and was set up in a good practice not far from London. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I sold the house in Suffolk and a year later moved to New York. I too had been intoxicated by Vera’s description of the city that long-ago night in Camden Town, and with every subsequent visit I paid to Manhattan—this was after Vera and Jack had gone south, of course—my feelings for the place grew stronger. I bought the brownstone on West 11th Street, and quickly established the kind of quiet, bookish existence I had always wanted. There were a number of desultory love affairs, but through it all Jack was never far from my thoughts, or absent from my innermost heart. I attempted to invite myself down to Port Mungo several times, particularly when I learned that they had a child, a daughter—Peg—but he put me off every time. Then had come a letter in which his need of me was so nakedly apparent that I began to organize my travel arrangements the same morning.
    And so I made the long, hot, arduous journey south, culminating in a four-hour trip down the coast on a slow ferry. I was profoundly nervous, and at the same time giddily excited at the prospect of seeing my beloved brother again. He met me off the boat, at the jetty. He was almost thirty now, and what I saw advancing on me was an unkempt, sunburnt man in faded canvas shirt and pants, his long hair bleached in strips by the sun and tied back in a ponytail. He greeted me in his familiar manner—clasped me to him stiffly—while Peg, barefoot and brown-skinned, hid behind him and watched me intently with dark, wild eyes. He murmured to me as he held me in his arms.
    —Gin, how really good of you to come. It’s a vile journey.
    —I’ve missed you, I said, and then, to myself: more than you will ever know.
    We made our slow way, in fierce heat, with Peg pushing the wheelbarrow in which my bags had been stowed, along dusty streets, between listing shacks, to the warehouse district. Everybody seemed to know Jack and Peg, and much interest was shown in me. Jack grinned as he watched me shake hands with old black men with rheumy eyes and gold teeth. I understood not a word of what was said to me until Peg shyly translated. We eventually fetched up at a vast ramshackle wooden structure built out over the river. This had apparently been their home since the day Jack and Vera first arrived in the town.
    Later we sat out on the deck over the river and drank rum. We watched the sun go down behind the western mountains as the Mungo turned black, its surface alive with flickering insects and flashes of silver. Sounds both human and animal punctured the silence, and on the far bank I saw children splashing about in the shallows, and behind them, against the gathering sunset, broken-down shacks with tin roofs and crooked chimneys from which woodsmoke drifted into the rain forest beyond. Jack took a strange pride in this primitive place he had come to, and in particular in that