Diego Garcia – WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2022

A Novel

Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781913097936
• eBook ISBN:
  9781913097943
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Edinburgh, 2014. Two writer friends, Damaris and Oliver Pablo, escape London, the city that killed his brother. They spend their days trying to get to the library, bickering over their tanking bitcoin, failing to write or resist the sadness. Then they meet Diego, a poet. He tells them he is named for his mother's island in the Chagos Archipelago, which she and her community were forced to leave by British soldiers in 1973. Damaris and Oliver Pablo become obsessed with this notorious episode and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people, and want to write in solidarity. But how to share a story that is not theirs to tell? And how to account for a loss not theirs to grieve? A tragicomedy interrogating the powers of literature alongside the crimes of the British government, Diego Garcia is a collaborative fiction that opens up possibilities for the novel and seeks other ways of living together.

DANIEL & DIEGO

I. DEBT

This is the story of a book we are still writing.

—

Edinburgh, July 2014. The sluggishness of early afternoon. The sky clouding over, a slight chill in the air. The same uninterrupted sadness, a kind of listlessness that went with everything we did. We’d made it to the Meadows. It had taken us a while to get out of the flat, him offering to buy us a coffee from the Swedish café and one of those cardamom buns we liked so much if she would come to the library. We noticed how people passing noticed us. She noticed how much thinner he was than in London, joggers slipping down on his hips, constantly tugging at the waistband. We slowed our pace. We were still talking about the morning as if something out of the ordinary had happened, when really we’d spent it the way we spent every morning, him coming to her room with coffee, her accusing him of switching the heating off, him denying this. He’d told her, We really must get up earlier. It won’t help to stay in bed. This because we sometimes spent entire days in bed. In the kitchen she lit a tube, picked the raisins out of his cereal, milk still unpoured, put them with the other raisins extracted from other breakfasts. Currency she said, They’ll see us through The Emergency. He ate. We stared at his opened screen. We argued about whether to cycle to the library. But the sky seemed unsettled and unusually close from up here, on the sixth floor. We decided to walk. The billboard above ScotMid still read ‘Straight Talking Money. Wonga’.

In the Meadows, some kind of fair. Tabletop stalls and food tents. Let’s mill she said. He began to look for something – a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 – he was always looking for a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911. By the time we met again the rain was falling. She took him to a stall and said, I’m buying this dress. Is that a dress? Yes she said. She paid then disappeared with the dress, made of material with some kind of special effect, like oil on water. When she came back she had it on over her jeans and raincoat. Just imagine there are whole loads of famous people who were never photographed she said. He thought about this. She thought: He looks like a young Nosferatu. Max Schreck. He would not know which screen star to liken me to because he’s ignorant about these things.

A fine rain. Dim light through the cherry trees. We walked away from the fair not speaking and when we reached the part of the Meadows that opens onto the tennis courts, just before the university library, we turned up onto Middle Meadow Walk. Ignoring the unbroken row of posters – comedy acts appearing next month at the Festival – not ready to stop – not ready for a coffee or a bun or the library – we took flight at the traffic lights and cut through Bristo Square, after that letting ourselves be carried by chance. And the sadness opened out.

—

The city is built on several hills. There are valleys and there are bridges and there are stairwells that connect the two. In those days we would stop on one or another of the bridges and lean over to observe the streets. Sometimes we watched the gardens but never the rail tracks. It was frightening and thrilling to come upon these sudden and dramatic views, which made us think of the postcards sold everywhere on the Royal Mile and all over the city for that matter. ‘The Old Town and the Grassmarket’, ‘Cowgate at Night’, ‘Princess Street Gardens’, ‘Princess Street Looking West’. We would stand there looking down but she didn’t say what she would have said before: We’re too fuckin scared to jump.

Because, when we walked, we failed to take in our surroundings, and because when we stopped walking we usually stopped on one of the bridges and looked down, we always had the sense of living above the city, of looking down – dizzy – on its many faces. We watched people flowing past as though caught in a flood. Knowing the city this way, from above, having arrived only recently, we didn’t feel part of it, though it had once been part of him, the city of his student years. We were nervous and irritable. This seemed to increase our togetherness. It gave us – only us together, not individually, never alone – a place in the world that we had not had before. We wandered the streets, unwelcome, leaning miserably into the wind or drinking ourselves stupid in a pub. All of this under the ugly haar-obscured sky that we didn’t realize we’d invented ourselves.

—

The first time she saw him was in a photograph on a website for a magazine. She thought he looked odd and his story sounded odd. She couldn’t find the story anywhere but found his email address. He could not send her his story because he had bought all the remaining copies he could find of that particular issue of the magazine and had shredded them at the vulgar, pseudo-political, faux-Dada readings he had given for a while at various art schools and gonzo bookshops – though he didn’t tell her any of this. The first time we met she said, I hope you’ve brought money and he said, I have. She showed him a photo of V. S. Naipaul and said, This is my dad, we don’t speak. He pointed out a figure in the audience and said, That’s my brother, he rarely speaks. Or else he never stops. Later when we went for a meal, Daniel came too and he and Daniel ate like rats let loose in a grain-store, even finishing the leftovers on a nearby plate, and it was sad but in the end it didn’t matter all that much. The second time we met it was at a party in a library. The party was honouring a famous English writer – one of those realists who writes like a politician – whom she approached saying, Do you want my autograph? The second party we went to together was a few months after that. We happened to be in Edinburgh at the same time. We found ourselves in a basement bar. We talked beautifully about Can Xue, Dambudzo Marechera, Elfriede Jelinek, all the while drinking ourselves stupid. At one point he came back from the bar with two shots of vodka spiced with hot chillies, we chimed the glasses and she said, To the Mauritian Greats, Devi, Pyamootoo, Appanah, Patel. I am indebted! We drank the vodka down and he said, Hang on! He ran downstairs to the toilet and boaked into the bowl. Meanwhile she’d gone and got talking to a dangerous-looking character who could not look or step or speak without a sparking flow of words conveying his stupid thoughts spilling into the smoky room. By the time he returned from the toilet she and the character were on their way out. She said, Come on come on, we’re going to a party. We left the bar and hailed a taxi. We drove through town. We looked out the windows at the passers-by, many were dressed as police, or perhaps they were police dressed in uniform, and many others were dressed in kilts, and we burst out laughing because we remembered it was New Year. The party was at Restalrig then it wasn’t so we drove on further out of town.

Our character was subterranean, his style of conversation mineral, the way the headlights of the passing cars slanted across her face seemed to dazzle him. London she said when the character asked. He handed round the tubes. She said, Can we? and the character said, This is Scotland and opened his mouth wide to catch the tube and lit it while his sparking words continued to flow. Can I have some of your water she said. Without stemming the sparking he reached into his jacket pocket. With his left hand he passed her the water, with his right an Apple Mac, she drank it down, eyes expanding like cameras chasing mirages in a desert. Would you mind not talking so much he said to the character. Jesus, OK. But the sparking…

We heard the party before we saw it. Felt the speakers in our chests. It was in a field somewhere up the coast, on a small promontory. Red 2 playing as we got out the cab. The character threw his head back and yelled, grabbed her hand, pulled her to the stage. He found them pressed up against the wall of speakers. The character reached out to encircle her with his arms (she didn’t move away) while the sparking flowed into her ear. She stood still, shivering slightly. Then the sparking was in his ear and he moved away, back through the crowd, he saw one of Daniel’s friends who told him Daniel was here, he went to look for him then needed to boak, and then there was Daniel, dancing & she started to dance thinking: Where is he I want to talk to him. She took another Apple Mac and the sparking.

When we came together again it was among a group sitting on the edge of the promontory. From there we could see the black and white sea, the moon, the character gone. Two women were building up the fire. A guy was pissing off the promontory. There were seagulls we heard above the noise of the music and the sound of the waves. Where is she I want to talk to her? Then we were next to each other and Daniel was there and Daniel was trying to tell us something. What? Do you know. What? we said. Do you know the German word for. What? we said. The German for. What? The German for promontory is half-island.

—

Standing on North Bridge, the station roof like a hothouse roof. The rain gone, the afternoon swelling with warmth. She took off her raincoat. The sadness – amplified by something with an edge that felt like hunger. Some kids were throwing bottles onto the mess of broken panes. Now is a dumb lie. Her screen flashed, ‘Unknown number’. She didn’t answer. Since coming to Scotland she almost always kept her screen powered down. She was afraid that RBS, with their clever moves to try to recover the substantial sum she owed them, would find out she was in Edinburgh, right under their noses. She was also afraid but defiant of the nefarious tactics of DCA Mappots, the debt collection agency EDF had sold her less onerous but not insignificant debt on to after two years of failing to recover it themselves. He said, Why don’t you just answer? She said, Why don’t you stop giving advice? He had given his screen away a few months previously, straight off the train from London, numb and crazed, to a teenager who’d asked us for change. Now he didn’t have a screen of his own. He wasn’t on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. for the same reason: The Emergency. She respected his viewpoint and listened with grave concern to his theories concerning asset bubbles, derivatives, guns and whisky and hollowed-out Bibles, total surveillance, TEOTWAWKI, the precariat, Charles Ponzi, the distribution of pornographic images and images of abuse, the totally administered society, the Pharmacopornographic era, structural adjustment, bitcoin, gold, hunger, debt – personal, civic, regional, national, federal, continental, intercontinental, transnational, global, universal, dark pools of – but she could not rouse herself to respond in any particular focussed way. Even so, she did not want them watching him. He did not want them watching her. He did not want them watching us. We did not want them watching us. She did not mind them watching her because she didn’t believe in them, not really, not when it came down to it.

The kids smashed another pane on the station roof, all of the panes dazzling in the sun, now the broken bottle too. She took off the dress from the fair and threw it onto the roof and we watched it being dragged here and there by the wind, which wasn’t so much wind as a kind of constant agitation of stuff, the kind that collects around those sites of perpetual transition such as railway stations, docks, border crossings, motorway service stations, etc. She put her raincoat in our bag. She leant her elbows on the bridge, rested her chin in her hands. He took a deep breath, feeling really shit. Allowing the sadness to overwhelm him, he closed his eyes and rested his head on her shoulder. She smoked a tube. He started to doze. Her/his shoulder/neck felt warm against his/her neck/shoulder. We stayed there resting on top of the bridge while she, not taking her eyes off the station roof, tried to remember a dream she only now realized that she’d had. It had left her feeling lost. She was trying to find her way back into the memory of it, to the almost pleasurable sadness it had left her with, searching for the point where it had begun. But then her ringing screen pulled her back, and his needling about her not answering. He had been in the dream too. A dream about that day in London, the time they tried to find Daniel. The blue honey of the Mediterranean, that’s what Fitzgerald said he’d said.

It was the kind of thing he would say, the quoting of a writer. At least it was the kind of thing he used to say. Since we’d come to Scotland she could not remember him doing it once, this previously constant quoting thing. Unlike most white men who liked to quote writers he would quote as many Black and brown writers as he did white. Dambudzo Marechera:

Whatever insects of thought buzzed about inside the tin can of one’s head as one squatted astride the pit-latrine of it, the sun still climbed as swiftly as ever and darkness fell upon the land as quickly as in the years that had gone.

But all men. Always, always men. She had had to teach him to read women, and now he read mostly women, and no longer quoted.

She shook him and without knowing she was going to say it, said, I’m hungry. Do we have any cash? He lifted his head off her shoulder – feeling really shit, almost violent – saying, Yes, but we should go to the library. I need spaghetti vongole she said, they have it at Marcella’s. Not wanting to feel violent. She took out a tube and lit it to take the edge off her hunger. I don’t think they have it at Marcella’s he said. We stood in silence while she smoked, looking down at the station roof. The dress was still there. Why did I throw the dress away? The kids had gone, leaving smashed panes and the dazzling. When she’d nearly finished her tube she said, Let’s eat then go to the library. OK he said, but I’m not hungry. You can’t share mine she said. She took a fresh tube from the pack and lit it with the still live butt of the first.

It was at the moment of ignition that we first laid eyes on Diego.

—

He was standing on the opposite side of the road, visible in flashes between passing cars, bent over a heap of bags. He seemed to be looking for somewhere to sit down. Why didn’t he just sit down on his bags? Maybe he didn’t want to. We watched him thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans then pull out a small black notebook. He squatted down, unzipped the side pocket of one of his bags and took out a pen. He...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Contents
• Authors’ Note
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• DANIEL & DIEGO
• DAMARIS & OLIVER PABLO
• Acknowledgements
• Sources
• About the Author
• Copyright