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There is music here, and moisture; the two are much the same and the air is saturated. It is saturated. The high, brown-treed mountains are built with a mezzanine level of cloud. The island, surrounded by Caribbean waters, is smothered beneath a damp and hot atmosphere, hundreds of metres deep. And for all this it is the dry season. It is near the end of dry season. Smoke threads into the clouds. Electric popping cicadas crackle in the ground. Fire fingers reach out in bursts from the mountains, but there is not one raindrop to be snatched from this sodden sky.

Along a twisting, unquenched road, Marshall drives Barlow down from the mountains towards the port.

"It cannot be lasting like this, nuh uh," she says and gears down to pass a truck. "We're needing the rain, now."

Barlow loves the lilt in her voice, the way she gets to the end of a sentence with special slow stresses. It is part of the pleasure of these trips to the island.

"Soon come," he says and smiles. She smiles, too.

The car is an old Japanese, built of thin, plastic panels that shake with each change in speed. The windows are wound down full to get what air they can. They pass the truck and Marshall pulls in, just as the road curves steeply round. Two bends later they come up behind more traffic, a long line queued up with another truck ahead.

She slaps the top of the steering wheel. "At this time of day, and with all the rest of the day, but no, don't they have to, they have to come out, now." She leans toward her window, peers ahead, seeking out the next chance to overtake.

Barlow's attention moves out of the car. Though the mountain appears, from a distance, as if it is nothing but trees, when you are up close and driving through it you see that housing is slotted in wherever there is space. Ramshackle constructions with clambering, corrugated iron roofs. And if they spent their entire lives drinking rum, these houses, they would end up with just such loose and shabby frames. Between the homes there is a dense, squashed, heat-exhausted vegetation. It is packed in. Banana trees, and Calabash trees with clusters of round, green fruit, like party balloons the morning after. There are the vivid yellow and red explosions of Poui, like flames.

Here and there, whole sections of hillside are blackened and charred. It is near the end of a season: the dry earth yearns beneath its wet sky. In these places, where the hillside has burned away, you can see down to the city. There are tall, gleaming buildings, new with polished panes of glass where there once was air. Crouched below, thick and low-lying, is the vagrant, begging shanty of the old port. The clean-cut towers with their steam-pressed angles stand tall, braced and waiting. For there are urban seasons, too: there is wealth to be snatched from the glinting, reflecting sky. The slums are baked dry. Their sound comes up to the mountains. It starts in the city. It floats up; it reaches the mountains, a gathering ache of calypso, reggae, of gospel choir. It soaks the air.

Ahead of them the truck pulls in to join three others off the road. Here the hillside is to be levelled for a new layer of housing. Sawdust of felled trees coats the site. They have lopped away great slices of hill and the earth shows smooth and flat and red, like meat.

"When it comes," Marshall says, "the rain - when it finally rains all of this will make a landslide. No one is thinking. They can't think only small small days beyond what they are doing now. It rains in a deluge."
 

In the centre of town they park in a small lot behind Saint Paul's church. The glass in the church is grey and cracked. Marshall reverses into her space at a tight angle, not checking the rearview. One clean movement. She pulls on the hand brake, a dry ratchety sound, and kills the engine.

"Be leaving the windows just a notch now, for the air, it is safe, safe," she says.

They cross the parking lot and Barlow nods to the attendant who stares and then looks away. The attendant is with two others. It seems that it really does take three people now to stand in the parking lot all day and watch cars.

One year ago, on Barlow's first trip to the island, there had been only the one attendant. He was friendly back then. His expression not attached to flat and shifting eyes.

"A new man, ma'am," he had said, when they first met.

"This is my boss," Marshall said.

"The big boss man, big boss sir." The attendant tapped fingers to his head in a mock gesture and gave a yellow smile, cracked as the church windows.

"From Canada," Marshall said.

"Welcome to the big man from Canada and a word of advice, sir." He reached forward and placed a hand on the leather portfolio that Barlow carried.

Barlow pulled back.

"No, no." The man clutched his hands in front of him. He looked to Marshall and said, "Lip sees. Lip sees." The words were insistent, soft. Barlow did not understand.

"It's the logo," Marshall said. On the front of the portfolio, embossed in gold on the brown leather, a stylized 'e' with three dots after it. The Ellipses gas project. The dots left the tail of the 'e' in an ascending diagonal line, like tiny rising bubbles. "He's right, you mustn't carry a thing like that, to identify you, it is just a precaution."

Barlow turned the portfolio to face the logo into his body. "Thank you," he said.

"Yes, yes," the attendant said. "Lip sees, no."

One year later the friendly advice is absent. In its place, a predatory surliness. They leave the parking lot, the eyes of the three men on them, and head towards Richmond Street on the Esplanade. The pretty local girl and the large white man, they turn down a side street. You do not need a leather portfolio. You don't need the Ellipses emblem: Barlow's wealth is there in his oversized frame, in the lumbering and loafish space that he fills. Petrolly eyes are on him. Marshall's well-sprung steps are like tinder.

The side street has the mark of the slum on it. They keep to the middle, not using the raised sidewalks, the tipped and broken slabs. Tiny shops are crammed together. Electrical supplies. Photocopy services. Some just shuttered up with metal grills. Ahead, the size of four or five shops, there is a gap where fire took down a department store three years ago. On either side the walls are still blackened. Now, a vendor works in this open spread of rubble from behind his painted blue trolley. Chickpeas and chopped, wet bell peppers, he stuffs the mixture into patties, wraps the patties in wax paper: breakfast for twenty cents. A pipe player beside him pushes notes, pushes music into the hot air. He stands like Pan, jaunty with goat legs. Pipes hang from the crooks of his arms and he is selling if you are buying. Fashioned from the junkyard: flues and car exhausts and water pipes. Filed down, sunk with fingertip-sized holes. Painted white.

Barlow and Marhall approach. A car pulls into the side street. Slow moving, it could be any car. Three men sit low in its seats. The music of the pipes is fast; the car slow, barely a sound. Back in the parking lot the attendants have disappeared. Pan looks up as the pretty local girl walks by with her stranger. Notes issue fast from his fluttering fingers. The car slides behind the girl and the white man.

The kidnap is very fast. Twenty seconds. The car doors open street-side and two of the men come out. They know how to lock your arms half way up your back.

"Don't fight," Marshall says. Her head is knocked against the roof of the car as they force her inside. It makes the sound of a machete swung into watermelon and it snaps her head to one side. Barlow, a businessman, entitled not to be part of this, shouts out. These are the attendants from the parking lot. But the sight of Marshall's injury quiets him. It is a glistening smear across her forehead, with the worst of the cut on the side that he can't see.

"They won't hurt us," she says. "Don't hurt us."

They are inside, pushed close against each other with their kidnappers on either side. Four people on the back seat, driver up front.

The vendor continues with the busy selling of breakfasts. He has witnessed the whole scene. The car never stopped moving. It carries on up the street, unhurried. Behind the breakfast crowd, in the middle of the street, there are two bags. Marshall's black purse. Barlow's attaché case. The piper is still playing. The attaché case lies open, its spine broken and the brass hinges twisted out of shape. Beside it there is a brochure with the Ellipses refinery on front. Cylindrical buildings. Clean metal.
 

Barlow sits on a hard chair, hands tied up behind its straight back. The fastening is so tight that his fingers buzz, feeling tingly and fat. The sense of the room is that it is made of wood. You can tell this from the rough, close feel of the heat, which is like the first hours in his summer cottage, before opening the windows and doors, before the air cools and the breeze off the lake. When one of the men is in here with them, Barlow listens to the pacing up and down, and from this he has got the room at about twenty-five square feet. Twenty-five times twenty-five is six hundred and twenty-five.

The blindfold went on when they left the main north-south expressway. He has been calculating ever since. For some miles they travelled parallel with the comforting noise of the highway close by to the left. His last hope was to hear police sirens. When they turned away from the highway the drive became slow and winding. The men and their two captives were quiet. Barlow knew the appearance of the island here. It was open and flat. The dirt roads had large stones and deep ruts. His hand squeezed tighter on top of Marshall's.

It was difficult to walk from the car with the blindfold on and the men pushing. You wanted to go much slower. Looking down, you could see your shoes but you could not see as far out as the toecaps. The steps at the front of the house were taller than expected. He understood that the house was built on stilts.

Barlow knows that Marshall is in the room with him. He just does not know where. He speaks her name, no reply comes. Her breathing is in the room; she is somewhere.

"Marshall? Are you hurt?"

Still nothing.

"I have to know."

Marshall says, "I need the toilet. I'm needing it right now. It's all my attention not to wet myself."

Barlow smiles. "I'm hungry," he says. "I'm starving."
 

"Do you still need the toilet? Marshall?"

"Man, you have to be quiet, I have to concentrate."

He is worried about his fingers, they are a big concern. He flexes his wrists against the tight binding. There is no feeling in his fingers. There are no sounds from outside. You can not even tell if the kidnappers are still in the house. His back aches. His knees are like knitting needles have been poked into the joints.

"I'm not hungry any more," he says. "Is your head okay? Is it a bad cut?"

"Man, you need to be so quiet now."

"I'm trying to figure out where we are. There are three of them, I didn't count any more. They're the attendants from the parking lot. Do you know them? You're supposed to make friends with a kidnapper, or is it you're supposed not to? I was reading about it. I think it's you're supposed to make friends with them. Is there anything you can use?"

"I can't talk, Barlow, I'll wet myself."

"This is the first time for a foreign national. You and I were talking just the other day. It's supposed to be children of the rich. There's a ransom, there's a hand-over, release." He keeps on with his calculations. His thoughts go to places and he stops talking out loud.
 

They are fed. They are untied and the blindfolds removed. The bathroom is upstairs; one of their captors leads them up to it. He is an Indian, so young that you can believe he only left school this year. Barlow calculates. There is no sign of the other two. There does not appear to be a weapon or in particular a gun. He tries to form a good understanding of the house. It is unfurnished. The windows are boarded up. Bright stripes of sunlight show where there are gaps in the wood.

The toilet is at the end of a short corridor.

"Keep it open."

Marshall had made to close the door. The two men stand facing her. She has on a pink suit with a short skirt. Ordinarily, Barlow likes to see her in this. Her legs are very fine. The blackness of them is so deep that they seem to glow with it. It does not do to be looking so pretty when you are imprisoned.

"There's no dignity in this," Barlow says. "Let her have it shut. And also she could use a bandage."

Her hair is thick and wiry, pulled close and tight. Most of the wound is underneath and you can not see if it is a bad one.

"It is better for you to treat us well," Barlow says. A mistake. He had been making progress until this.

The Indian turns to him. There is more age in his face, more aggression, than you would guess from his slight build. He has a half inch on Barlow in height. The Indian punches him in the chest. It is a boxer's punch, the hand loose, the power of it not from bunching into a tight fist, but from the speed and from the flatness of contact, from knuckle to joints. He places another one, straight away, on the side of his face. Two quick jabs. Barlow steps back. His arms are in front of his body with the palms forward, the fingers curled. It does not make sense to fight back. He knows this. There are moments of waiting between the punches and then they uncoil at him very fast. He doubles over. The next one is an undercut, to lift him back up. It is methodical and sustained.

While the Indian beats him up, Marshall uses the toilet.

***

"I'm sorry."
"It's okay. Be quiet."
"I'm sorry I didn't help you."
"No help to give, you did right."

The part of Barlow that hurts most is the fingers, from when the man stamped down with his heel. He is not going to look at them any more. Last time he looked at the pinkie on his left hand the top half was bent straight back, at a right angle to the rest of the finger. Red like raspberries. There is plenty of feeling there now.

They are back in the large room. Twenty-five square. They are not tied to chairs any more. No blindfolds. Marshall sits propped up against the wall with her feet straight out. Barlow's head is on her lap. Below his ribs it's like all the skin has been kicked away, so he lies very still. His little finger has a swollen, cold ache, like a bad tooth. The woman's bare knees, her legs, the feel of her lap beneath his cheek, these are the pleasant things that remain.

Marshall says, "Not whether you should or not, make friends with your kidnappers. It's something that happens of its own accord, after time. A syndrome, that's what you read. We'll form a bond because that's what happens."

She strokes his head, his hair, her fingers through it. His shirt is damp under the suit jacket, clinging in places where the bruises are.

"That was our chance, wasn't it?" he says. "Upstairs. If I'd done something, overpowered him, that was how we get out of here. Fight back, hit back."

"It doesn't do," she says. "Shush now, it doesn't do."

Something had gone wrong. With their hideaway, their captors. There were no longer the three. The Indian had sat and watched them for two hours. Barlow resting his head on Marshall's lap. The Indian on the straight-backed chair. Then the Indian got up and left the room.

"This has been waiting," Barlow says.

"Shush now."

"From the first time I came here, piling up. This island, you can feel it."

"You were always buying tickets."

Barlow tries to sit up. Stays with his head on her legs, mumbling across her skirt. This is how you give up, part one, when you see a good amount of certainty on either side of the present.

"I was always buying tickets," he says. "First few kidnappings, you think this is all a part of it, third-world island and it's there with crime and calypso. Some people getting kidnapped."

"Nine times in ten they pay the ransom."

"It's not going to end with kidnapping. All around us you can feel it. Feel it the whole last year. I kept buying tickets. Told them to keep our money in the refinery. Acceptable risk, I used those words. But your seasons here, they burst upon you. The kidnappings, they were the first few raindrops, the big raindrops."

"End of dry season."

"Tell me how the seasons change."

Marshall strokes her fingers through his hair. Lets them push, gently, against his scalp.

"Tell me how the seasons change," Barlow says.

"A few raindrops. Big ones. You see them splash."

"You told me this, once."

"One or two drops. The clouds you've had them for weeks. And then suddenly it's sheets of rain, sheets of rain and you can't see the building across the street, and even the mountains slide under it."

"You said it was like snatching water from the sky."

You don't feel as bad if you can make giving up into a team effort.

"Listen," Marshall says.

There is nothing to hear.

She takes her fingers from his hair and says, "Listen. There."

Nothing to listen to.

"The sugar cane," she says. "Wind through it." She copies the noise, says Whoosh, and she has maybe not given up. She makes the word as long and slow as she can, repeating it, over, over, returns fingers to hair, dancing them so gently, whispers and whispers her word, her voice reducing until, yes, there it is, wind in the sugar cane. Had not heard it, would never have noticed without Marshall. But it is there and it is constant; he has it now. And Marshall, sighing.

"I know where we are," she says. "The old Tate and Lyle buildings. Very close to the refinery. Old plantation from the grand days. I know where we are. They use these huts at harvest. Crews in, sleep them in these. Gangs. It's going to be so busy in just two weeks' time. This very place."

They listen to the wind in the sugar cane. Harvest in two weeks. Before the harvest there is the burning, to clear leaves that are like large green fans. The fields are taller than a man; they have secrets inside. After the fires you can walk easily among the cane. Come the discoveries: black husks of stolen cars; sometimes charred bodies, from kidnappings that do not work out.

They burn the fields. They harvest the cane. It is the last big act of the dry season, sending smoke into the clouds.

"Whoosh," Marshall says. Like going up in flames.
 

"Promise me."

"No."

"Nuh uh. Promise, please."

"I can't do that."

"We have to face this. He can have me, he has a woman captive and it's the sort of thing to do, he might. Little Indian boy. All I'm saying is the same for me, like I did for you, not to get in the way. Stand back like I did. You knew you just had to take your beating. It was the right thing to do."

"We're not talking about him beating you up."

"But promise me."
 

The Tate and Lyle buildings are long houses on low stilts. They accommodate up to thirty workers each during their couple of weeks in use. Five of them grouped at the edge of the sugar fields: one hundred fifty workers. The fields bounded by shiny silver tubes of pipeline, for feeding gas from the sea to refinery. They feed gas in pipes around the edges of fields that are burned before harvest. This, too, they call acceptable risk. The refinery is the boss. It has done something to the air. The air is thin, as if itself refined, everything taken out, everything save the pure elements. The sky is a reflecting metal.

The road to approach these houses is long and wide and straight, lined with evenly spaced trees. They are painted white at the base. It is an imitation of the past, when lime was used to protect the trees. The paint only kills the trees. It suffocates and poisons. It is on nice and thick and white on every tree. It looks like the past, like lime on the trees, but it is white paint and it means ten years of life at best.

Toward the houses, between the trees, an old jeep, open topped behind the hub. It is full of men - there are fifteen - crowded in back and waving flags. Flags of all colours; small triangular standards, orange, on long poles and some have two, blue, yellow, some three, and all waving and the wooden poles chopping against each other. The colours all mean things: uncle; recent wedding; good fortune. Some of the men will get work. Two will billet in the house that was used as a hideaway. They will speculate with strangers about the rope tied around the chair; when they find the woman's white panties upstairs, next to the toilet, they will use them for a new flag. In the tall, blackened fields, after the fires, they will find answers.

***

"Listen. There."

"I'm listening."

"Keep on that, the only sound. Wind in the sugar cane, hear it soft, soft, gentle. Hear it like music, like soft, constant rain. Nothing to be scared, any more."

"It's all I'm listening. Make the sound again. Whisper it. Say, Whoosh. For me, the sound."

"I'll whisper."