A different hurricane, p.1
A Different Hurricane, page 1
a different
hurricane
a different
hurricane
a novel
H. Nigel Thomas
Copyright © H. Nigel Thomas, 2025
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Publisher: Meghan Macdonald | Acquiring editor: Kwame Scott Fraser | Editor: Russell Smith
Cover designer: Laura Boyle
Cover image: Meteorological map: istock.com/Yuliya Shavyra; upper drop: Adobe Images/Microgen; middle drop: Adobe Images/Faizan; lower drop: Adobe Images/Sheviakova
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: A different hurricane : a novel / H. Nigel Thomas.
Names: Thomas, H. Nigel, 1947- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20240340329 | Canadiana (ebook) 20240340345 | ISBN 9781459754065 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459754072 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459754089 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCGFT: Gay fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS8589.H4578 D54 2025 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.
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For the Richards family in Riley, St Vincent, especially Agatha Richards, “Tant Alice,” where I found the quiet haven I needed during the last four years — 1964–1968 — before I immigrated to Canada.
Chapter 1
A mug of coffee in his left hand, Gordon walks from the living room onto the front porch. He disturbs a grey grackle searching for crumbs under the patio table. It flies left, to the fence separating his property from Austin’s, and fluffs its feathers. Protesting my presence, Gordon thinks.
It’s past eleven. He’s still in his pajamas. He wonders what Allan would say if he finds out that for more than a week, he hasn’t done the prescribed morning walk out to the highway at Sion Hill. “Exercise is imperative, Gordon. We’re descended from hunter-gatherers.” Imperative. He chuckles at Allan’s bookish language. His has become bookish too. Maureen’s influence. Exercise. He sighs. Allan, who lifts nothing heavier than a stethoscope, castigates him for not exercising. Has a gym downstairs. Never uses it, his wife, Beth, says.
He turns left and limps to the seaward end of the side porch, the other arm of its reversed L; it runs the width of the house. The short arm is at the front. He leans against the porch railing, holds on to the mug, and stares down the cliff at the Grenadines Wharf and the cruise ship berth. No cruise ship in the harbour today. Six cars are lined up to enter the hold of Admiral I. It should have departed for Bequia fifteen minutes ago. In the few square feet of mostly bare space between the Grenadines Wharf and the cruise ship berth, someone’s afterthought for a park, a man sits on the lone picnic bench eating from a container perched on his lap. Near the shore, the sea is emerald with patches of turquoise. Farther out, it’s azure with linear patches of brown sargassum, less now than in 2015, when it was fouling beaches all over the Caribbean and causing tourist cancellations and panic in hotel owners and workers. Calm everywhere. Just the occasional car horn and the rhythmic slosh of the waves against the quays. No hint of a breeze, even. To his right the red and green corrugated roofs of Kingstown extend all the way out and up to Edinboro, where Allan lives. The air is humid and heavy.
* * *
What will Frida ask him when she arrives today? In his nightmare two nights ago, she wagged the flash drive containing Maureen’s journal in his face and shouted, “Murderer! Murderer!” He awakened, relieved. Frida wouldn’t read that journal for another twenty-four years. Usually it’s Maggie, his mother-in-law, who accuses him.
His legs feel tired. He should sit. He turns and glances at the patio table and its four chairs. Rust shows in the wrought-iron frames. Six years ago, he’d have promptly sanded and repainted them. In the last six years, he couldn’t convince Maureen to sit here, even with the light turned off.
There’s a stabbing pain in his neck. He holds the railing firmly with his free hand and rotates his head eight times to relax the neck muscles. Sometimes this works. He’s had these neck pains for the last six years. At first, they came with a tremor and chills, even on the hottest of days. The muscle relaxant Allan prescribed helps; the piercing jab with each heartbeat is gone, and the tremor and chills are now rare.
He can resist his legs no longer. He hobbles to the table and sits.
Since Maureen’s death a year ago, he has had more trouble sleeping. He awakens instinctively to curtail the nightmares. Maureen wags her finger at him and threatens to expose him. Sometimes it’s Medusa Maggie turning him to stone as he tries to run from her, but can’t move. He awakens and spends hours thinking about the nightmares and how to stop them.
He couldn’t fall asleep last night. Two hours before going to bed, he learned of Dexter Pottinger’s death on Facebook. Dexter’s face, painted in the colours of the rainbow, haunted him. He’d thought Dexter courageous for being the public face of last year’s Jamaica Gay Pride. Dexter’s neighbours heard him calling for help and didn’t respond.
After lying awake for more than five hours, Gordon had got out of bed around 5:00 a.m., went to the liquor cabinet, and poured himself a double Scotch. Allan must not know he does this regularly. He prescribed melatonin for him to take in the early evening. “Gordon, you must sleep for eight hours.” Said with the usual unctuousness. My dear Allan, you must know I cannot command sleep any more than you can medicate against nightmares. Bet you have nightmares too. Might explain your recent interest in psychiatry. Guilty like me. But lucky. Damn lucky.
He took the Scotch into the living room, sat on the recliner bought for Maureen’s comfort eighteen months before her death, and watched BBC World to get the latest on Irma, now a Category 4 hurricane and projected to return to a Category 5. It was predicted to hit northern Cuba and Florida. In the evening, Allan had phoned him from Union Island, worried about the damage Irma might do to Cuba. He’d spent a year there studying Cuban methods for treating psychiatric illnesses, and had visited Baraguá, where the descendants of English-speaking West Indians, including some of Allan’s relatives, still live.
Together, three years ago, they watched Gloria Rolando’s documentary Los hijos de Baraguá, and Allan pointed to a few of his cousins among a group of women doing the maypole dance. Some of them might well have been Gordon’s cousins too. One of his father’s uncles had moved to Cuba after work on the Panama Canal ended. The Baraguá houses are like the wooden houses of Gordon’s childhood: unpainted, perched on metre-high cement pillars, and roofed with rusting sheet metal. In 2004 Ivan, a Category 3, devastated Grenada. He shudders at what a Category 5 might do to Baraguá. “And while we’re following the devastation Irma is causing,” said the BBC newscaster — a South Asian woman in a skin-tight royal blue dress, her accent like Maggie Thatcher’s — “José has become a Category 4 hurricane and is following the same path as Irma. Barbuda and the Virgin Islands might again be struck.”
His mind swarms with pictures of the devastation in Barbuda and St. Martin; Harvey in Texas; the monsoon floods in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh; the five hundred thousand Rohingya escapees from Myanmar now huddled in camps in Bangladesh.
The horn signalling the departure of the Bequia ferry brings him back to the present. The pain in his neck has lessened. Now, with his elbows on the table and his hands supporting his chin, he recalls the two hurricanes he experienced: Allen in Barbados in 1980, and Tomas here in 2011. In 1980 he was on his way home from Montreal the first Saturday in August, having just completed the first year of an economics degree at Concordia University. He’d had to change planes in Barbados for the flight to St Vincent, and had decided to spend the rest of the weekend there to visit his two paternal aunts and to fulfill a promise he’d made to May to find out what had become of Albert, their half-brother who’d lived with them in St Vincent briefly. His plan had been to leave Barbados on the Monday morning. But two days before, his cousin Mark had picked him up at the airport and said that Hurricane Allen was heading for the island. It struck the next night. His aunt’s recently built one-storey wooden house withstood the thunder, lightning, rain, and wind. He thinks the worst of the terror lasted about two hours. Next day Mark took him on a drive from Bagatelle to Speightstown. They saw very little damage — fallen trees for the most part. Later he learned that five hundred homes had been damaged. But in mountainous St Vincent, the hurricane had knocked out all radio communications. T he first sight that greeted him as he landed in St Vincent three days later — the airport had been inaccessible before then — was the large number of houses in Arnos Vale and Villa that had lost their roofs. At the time he and Maureen lived in a rented house in Kingstown Park. It wasn’t damaged. But in Riley, it left their neighbour Mrs. Beach’s house a pile of rubble. Visiting May and his mother ten days after the hurricane, he found the trunk of a breadfruit tree still blocking the road.
Six years ago, Tomas blew off several roofs, including Austin’s and May’s, and left water damage all over the island. A glancing blow. The micro rainstorms, atmospheric rivers, hitting St Vincent in the last ten years have been deadlier than the hurricanes. Some of the graves the last one unearthed are still open. Disasters that kept him working late into the night, costing the damage and providing the figures the PM needed to bolster his pleas for overseas assistance.
* * *
In Montreal there had been accusatory nightmares too. He’d been tempted to divorce Maureen and stay in Montreal. But there were the tens of thousands of dollars he’d have had to repay the St Vincent government for the scholarship he’d received. He’d signed a contract to work for a minimum of seven years following graduation. Most of all there was Frida. But in Montreal he’d felt free. For the first time he didn’t fear prosecution, persecution, or disgrace. Were it not for Frida, he might have remained, the money notwithstanding. André would have helped him repay it. How would that have affected their relationship? In his dreams about André there’s always an element of betrayal. Would he have been the one to look after André when he became ill? Would the relationship have lasted that long?
That scholarship. God and governments work in mysterious ways. A month before Frida was born, a scholarship that he had been promised for three years was suddenly available. He was informed about it in mid-July, and Frida was born on August 13. She was four days old when he left for Montreal. In his four years at Concordia he made one trip back to St Vincent — that August when Allen pounded Barbados, St Vincent, and St. Lucia — to celebrate Frida’s first birthday. When he saw her, already walking and saying her first words, he knew he had to return to St Vincent to raise her, a fact he remembered each time he was tempted to remain in Montreal.
* * *
He stands, swings his arms a dozen times, then returns to the front. Above him on the steep incline to his left, Theo, Austin’s son, is dribbling a basketball, reminding Gordon that it’s Saturday. On weekdays Theo attends community college. Gordon stares up the incline. Behind the fence of white plastic laths, only Theo’s head and extended arms are visible. He shakes his long hair out of his face each time he’s about to throw the ball. The ball bounces off the rim of the basket or misses altogether.
Austin Nichols is White, sixty-two, a widower, and the heavy equipment manager at what was once Cable and Wireless. “Without a university education,” he sometimes brags. He irritates Gordon with his never-ending complaint that St Vincent is no longer a British colony. “We had things good-good and then that damn fool Cato went and got independence and fucked things up. Then Mitchell, he fuck it up some more. Now under Gonsalves … man, all I can say is, we totally fucked. I want to be in a country where my son have a future. You know, Gord, in 1998, I had a chance to work in Tortola. Right after Francine and I got married. But she had her job as a pharmacist here. No way she wouldo’ find that kindo’ job in that one-horse place … Theo wouldo’ been born in Tortola, though. Today he would be a British citizen and have a future.” He paused a long time and stared at Gordon across the patio table. It was just the two of them sitting on Gordon’s side porch. Austin never speaks about Theo when Beth, Allan, and Percival Grant (Freckles), the neighbour to Gordon’s right, are present. Maureen was already dead. “You know, Gord-boy, you lucky to hell and you don’t know it. Your Frida born the right time. Look how that girl take off like a jet plane! We did just move here when she get that scholarship to study in Jamaica and her picture was in the papers. And now she have a big job with a drug company. You must be proud as hell.”
“Theo will turn out all right. You’re too pessimistic. There are still opportunities here, only harder to find.”
“Man, them opportunities is for the brightest o’ the bright. Or the ones with connections. I ain’t got no connections with them higher-ups. And my boy ain’t scholarship material. I know he does study hard. He does work his ass off. But he not like your Frida, nuh … his name not going be in the papers. He barely passing his courses. Them opportunities you mention, they’s not for him.”
“But his name was in the papers.”
“You mean for that painting!” He shook his head. “That don’t mean nothing. You don’t see all them Rasta fellows on Bay Street and outside the market with their art? You ever see anybody buying?” At the arts and culture fair held at Easter, Theo had won first prize in the painting category for his thirty-by-forty-inch canvas of Kingstown Seen from Cane Garden. A picture of the painting was in Searchlight.
“Austin, cut the boy some slack. Look at the millions paintings going for these days? Peter Doig, a Trinidadian that dropped out o’ high school, sells paintings for millions.”
“You pulling me leg or what? He is a exception. Most o’ them paintings is by dead men. I hear them painters starve to rass when they been alive. Some had to bull to eat.”
“A few did well. Andy Warhol died a millionaire. Theo’s work is better than his. Peter Doig is still alive. Austin, loosen up; let the boy follow his dream.”
He pouted and shook his head skeptically.
Austin is worried about more than Theo’s intelligence. At eighteen, he’s a bit overweight, and his voice is as high-pitched as a keskidee’s chirp. His beautiful hairless face (minus his jowls), dark hair reaching midway down his back — sometimes in a ponytail — mincing walk, swinging hips, and rippling boley-size buttocks — draw attention. “Une demoiselle,” Beth once remarked and quickly added, “I don’t mean anything. He can’t help how he is.”
Theo’s fat comes from Austin, who has quite a beer gut and heavy jowls. The swinging hips too. But not the buttocks. Flatter than Gordon’s. Austin’s trousers hang there like pleated curtains. Theo got his from his mother, Francine. Every couple of years, Theo’s maternal cousins come from Mayreau to visit. The paternal relatives live mostly in Bequia. They never visit. Austin rarely mentions them.
Theo no longer accompanies Austin when he visits Gordon. Never did more than eat and play games on his tablet when he used to come. Probably a recluse. Gordon has never seen him bring friends to the house or interact with the neighbourhood kids. For good reason. Freckles the neighbour tells his sons, loud enough for half of Cane Garden to hear, to keep away from “that sissy up there.”
Freckles thinks that Flossy, Austin’s housekeeper, does more than cook and clean. “Gord, you ain’t see she in that house sometimes past eight o’clock of a night and then he driving she home? Can’t say I blame he, nuh. She a sweet little thing.” He swallowed and licked his manicou chops. “See that ass on she?” He whistled, passed one hand over his clean pate, and placed the other on his crotch. “You and Austin is buddies. Ask him for me, nuh? I want to make a move on she, but I don’ want to trespass, yes.”
Freckles’s wife, Christine, was still around then. She is childless. A pediatric nurse. For a while, she took Freckles’s beatings in stride, including one he gave her the day after they celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary. Until she left him, she got beaten on average once per week. One time she ran out the house and called the police to escort her back home.
“Maybe she thinks there’s nothing better out there. Better the devil you know,” Maureen said while she and Gordon stared at the police and Christine entering Freckles’s gate. (The steep downhill curve in the road gives a full view of about a third of Freckles’s house.) She had already told Maureen that she was afraid to leave him.
Austin had a different explanation for Christine’s staying. “You see that thing he showing off in them tight jeans. That’s the secret. It have women who go endure fire and brimstone for that.”
