Free Black Marina by Emma Tennant

really, Lore said. Finding a photo in a drawer. Nineteenth-century style. Until she saw it there and a ring with a little locket built in and another tiny photo inside that, with a lock of Teza’s hair round it – until then, she said, she hadn’t been sure whether Ford was her father or not. After all, Teza hardly liked to acknowledge fatherhood in the new matriarchy. But she had been in love with him once, she must have been. It was tragic, Lore said, that Mari came down to the basement holding the ring and the photo as if she’d just stumbled on the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx, or something: ‘Wasn’t Teza’s hair yellow then?’ Andso on. The poor girl was crying … and Mari was a tough London girl, she’d say it again, it was really pitiful to see.
    Lore is a good sort, really. She may say she had no choice but to help Man look for her father, but there’s not many that wouldn’t have just packed their bags and left. I mean, it’s a heavy assignment. And when Ford was finally confronted with his daughter, who’s to say he’d be welcoming? Lore did it out of the kindness of her heart. And I hope I find the kindness myself not to blurt anything out to the girl in the short time she’s here. Because she sure has to go soon.
    I knew bad news when I saw that spider-girl swimming over in the glare of the sun, at that hour in the afternoon where everything goes double, and the girl swam above her spider shadow to bring us all more trouble here.
    How can I say that Ford walked into this store just a few weeks ago and denied his own daughter – or as good as, anyway? ‘You might say that it’s lucky,’ I tell Lore in my thoughts – for I need Lore now. Lucky that Ford left here before Mari could discover the truth. Which is that all her efforts to find her father would have gone unrewarded anyway.
    *
    ‘… the man they call Sanjay.’ The girl is standing by the counter and then she has to step back because one of those yachting - cap - and - shorts - with - legs - like - German - sausage comes in – I can’t even remember his name, he’s from the villa with the oleanders and the keskidees caged up out the back.
    ‘Well, Holly,’ he says. ‘And how’s my lady pirate, wanderer of the seven seas today?’ He glances sideways at Mari, his interest immediately disguised by an apparent keenness on the display of suntan lotion – Ambre Solaire, a coconut oil to burn the white people till they go blotched as poor Pandora, Johnson’s Baby Oil for the millionaire women who like to saythey keep their beauty preparations to a minimum. ‘Guess I’ll have one of these,’ he mutters. Grey and pink, like a skinned armadillo he stands next to tawny Mari; and she feels his eye on her crotch and moves out to the concrete walkway outside the store.
    ‘Mari!’ I cry, as the hundreds of beads and tiny molluscs tinkle behind her. ‘Wait!’
    But, as in a corny nightmare, it is too late. I take old yachting cap’s EC dollars with fury, while he squeezes my hand as a substitute for the girl. By the time I’ve rung up the cash register and pulled change from the scoured drawer, the girl has gone. Striding the low hedge of hibiscus as if there were no such thing as demarcations between private and public property, a hotel lawn where the rich and white may walk and others can’t (although you wouldn’t find any notices saying so). I’m inured by now, I suppose, to our tiny, pettily obsessive social system. And something equally pettily ridiculous in me is shocked that the stranger Mari doesn’t know you can’t just walk up to Carib’s Rest by crossing the hedge that divides it from Holly’s store.
    *
    If such things were possible, then Holly herself might do it from time to time. Jim Davy is the only one who takes little Holly for a drink on that verandah, with its lean-back, comfortable chairs in chintzes imported by Duchess Dora from Harrods. Disregarding Mrs Van der Pyck’s stony stare, Jim orders a