Alroy

Of course it was Alroy’s fault, but in the end—and the end was many, many years later ---I was glad of what happened that afternoon because I got a story out of it and, eventually, more than one.

Great Aunt Consuela told me about Alroy. She didn’t actually introduce us or even name him. As a matter of fact she was pretty vague about how she knew him.

She’d been married to an Irish police inspector in the colonial service, visited the Emerald Isle with him regularly on holiday and was into all things Irish. She was a widow, when I knew her, but the Inspector remained very much alive for her. She consulted him constantly in one mysterious way or another. His “going over,” as she put it, seemed no obstacle to his talking to her.

Ireland and its folklore came to life for me when she spoke of them. The Banshee wept audibly for her before bad news reached her of one of her friends, and she had what appeared to be an uneasy relationship with Leprechauns. She would, I thought, when I grew up, have made a superb copywriter for the Irish tourist business.

“The Leprechauns,” she said, “are cobblers by trade and are fond of gold. Sometimes they can warn you, or give you good advice. But they can be wicked, you know. Not really wicked-wicked. Tricky-wicked. They can cause trouble.”

“What do they look like?”

“Little old men about three feet tall. They turn up here in the rainy season. They wear very old fashioned clothes: red jacket, red knee breeches, black stockings and buckle shoes. You shouldn’t try to catch them. They’re suspicious of humans, but you can talk to them.”

‘Here’ was Jamaica.

Shortly after she said that I went down with a bout of fever and when it had run its course, my Mother left me in the care of the owner of a guest house in the countryside to recuperate. I kept getting malaria and must have stayed at every country house on the island. It was always excruciatingly boring. They never had books any normal person would want to read and I had read most of mine and only ever had no more than one to take with me on those exiles from home.

This particular house had a straw table on the veranda piled high with murder magazines. One morning before breakfast I leafed through one of them and found a story of an elaborate murder plot that apparently hadn’t worked. There was a picture of a bomb hanging on a rope under a bed over a jar of acid. The victim, had there been one, needed only to get into bed to weigh the bomb down into the acid to make it explode.

I didn’t want to read the story. The guest house was a gloomy, old plantation ‘great house’ that now took in guests and needed no assistance to give me the creeps. I dashed out into the garden, climbed over the wall at the back of the house and made off into the woods which were dripping wet from rain in the night.

Alroy, which was what he said his name was, seemed to be expecting me. I knew him immediately, red suit and all. He even had red hair! There he was, sitting under a tree in the blue-green-pink light of a rainbow that sprang up to the sky through the trees from near his feet.

“How is your aunt and where is she?” he asked.

“She’s in Montego Bay. How do you know her?”

“She’s a friend of the Little People,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came for the Captain’s gold.”

“What captain?”

“Old Sir Henry’s. He has no use for it now...”

“Sir Henry?”

“Yes. Sir Henry Morgan. And what are you doing here?”

I told him and I told him how awful things were and that I wanted to go home.

“Easy,” he said and winked. He it was who put me up to the idea of knocking back half a dozen peppers or so. (You can read the story I’ve posted to see what happened. It is, of course, a fiction. But it is firmly based on the reality of my eating peppers and a hurricane that I thoroughly enjoyed as a small boy.)

Since that first meeting, Alroy has shown up again more than once, though not exactly in the same place. I don’t summon him. He sometimes turns up when I visit my home in Wujdan, a tiny house with an inner garden and a view of snow-topped mountains on one side and the sea on the other. I go there when I want to think about something serious, or when I want to write. Where is it? You may well ask. It is in a country that lies somewhere between Egypt’s Red Sea and Jamaica’s Ocho Rios.

Alroy likes the garden. I guess he must climb over the roof to get in. I have never seen him coming or going. He has taught me some interesting things. But I’ve learnt to watch my step when he gives advice with a wink.