Authors note: What follows is a work of fiction based on real life events. None of the characters depicted are real and any similarity to real people living or dead is purely coincidental.
Message in a Bottle
My part in this story started in April 2015 on the small Caribbean island of Barbuda. That morning I had made the short flight from Antigua to visit the Frigate bird colony nesting on the Mangroves growing in Codrington Lagoon.
Earlier in the day I had crossed the lagoon from Codrington village in a flat bottomed outboard boat and eaten badly cooked and leathery barbequed lobster at a shack on the beach, a long narrow ribbon of pink sand lying between the lagoon and the turquoise sea.
After lunch I visited the colony. I was at the northern end of the lagoon, and near the entrance to the sea when I saw it. It was a brown glass wine bottle bobbing in the water close to the vegetation at the edge of the lagoon and I pointed it out to the boatsman. He was an old Black man, grizzled by the weather and years of hard toil, and as he navigated towards the offending bottle he swore under his breath at those "damn tourists" who had no respect for that beautiful spot.
As we approached the bottle I took a couple of photos of it on my phone. Soon I was able to lean out of the boat and scoop it up and I could immediately see that the bottle was very old and tightly sealed with a cork and wax although no capsule covered it. It was impossible to see if there was anything inside, but that did not stop the old man from voicing his opinion.
"Message in a bottle. Maybe it'll tell us where the treasures hid," and he smiled and looked away as I slipped it into my backpack.
I wasn't sure what I would do with it, but it looked old and interesting, and it was undeniably littering the lagoon. Nonetheless I soon forgot about it as I continued my tour amongst the Frigate birds, the males resplendent with their bright red throat pouches.
Later that evening when I had returned to my hotel I had dinner with my tour party. They had elected to lie on the beach for the day rather than make the side trip to Barbuda and I had gone alone. This was not unusual since they lay on the beach every day and not one of them had taken the trip to Nelson's Dockyard or the island of Hell's Gate with me.
Call me stupid if you wish, but I had not flown over four thousand miles from London to Antigua to lie on the beach all day. If I were a potato in need of baking there were far closer beaches in Europe I could have visited.
That April I was recently divorced, fortunately with no children, and in need of a holiday away from it all and I wanted time to recover and lick my wounds. My (by then) ex-wife had been unfaithful to me but had still managed to get a very favourable divorce settlement from me. At the time I owned a small but very successful publishing house and the divorce court seemed to think that eighteen months of faithless marriage, during which time she never worked, was worth several million pounds. She had made no contribution to my net worth prior to this except negatively, having spent her way up and down Oxford and Bond Streets on a regular basis.
That evening I was happy. I was free and unfettered, and If I had thought about it, I would have considered the divorce settlement money well spent. My only mild regret was that I had come on holiday with a party of folk with whom I had little in common, but it had been a last minute decision to come to Antigua and the flight and hotel had been convenient and a good deal.
Following dinner I returned to my room alone. One of the single women on the tour, a middle aged, attractive teacher from somewhere in the north of England had already hinted that she might be up for it, but I wasn't interested, and she had finally taken the hint and that evening had gone back to the tour guides room.
***
I lay on my bed with a glass of scotch in my hand and contemplated the glass bottle I had rescued from the water, then I made up my mind and crossed to the dressing table where the bottle was standing and shook it hard. Nothing appeared to be inside but using a nail file I was able to prise the cork out of the neck of the bottle and look inside. In the dim light of the hotel room I could see nothing and was looking for an alternate source of bright light when I thought of my phone. When I switched its torchlight on I was finally able to see inside the bottle and was astonished to see a tightly wrapped roll of paper tied with string sitting within the brown glass container.
The problem was how to get it out without damaging it or the bottle, so I left it where it stood, lay back on the bed, and as I pondered the problem, poured myself another very large scotch.
In the morning I visited St Johns and after visiting a pharmacy was able to obtain a pair of long handled forceps following which I impatiently returned to the hotel. Using the forceps it was the work of moments to extract the paper roll from the bottle.
I put the roll on the writing table that the hotel provided and saw at once it was bone dry. The cork and wax had done its job, and not a drop of water had got inside the well-sealed bottle. Then { took a deep breath and using my nail scissors cut the twine holding the paper and unrolled the sheets.
I saw at once there were several sheets of paper about six inches by eight inches in size which looked as if they had been torn from a diary or notebook. Each sheet was covered in tiny spidery writing handwritten in back ink. The paper was bone dry and intact but browned and appeared aged. Although the ink was faded the writing appeared to be, with a little effort, just legible.
I carefully separated the paper sheets and counted twelve tightly coiled pages, and then holding the first sheet open I was able to read 1/5/15 at the top right corner and realised I was looking at a diary. As I read on I realised I was looking at the record of events which had occurred just under a century ago and that the bottle had been in the water for almost one hundred years before it had been found.
It was difficult to hold the tightly coiled sheets of paper flat and decipher the faint writing and it occurred to me that, impatient as I was, the message could wait just a little bit longer. A few days earlier I had bought a heavy "coffee table book" about Antiguan cooking and now I put it to an alternate use and placed each of the diary sheets flat between its pages before leaving the closed book with the bottle in my suitcase.
I spent the remainder of the day at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in St John's watching the fourth day of the first test match between The West Indies and England and was lucky enough to see the catch by Chris Jordan off the spin bowling of Joe Root. The populist press labelled this as one more "catch of the century."
I hadn't known there was a test match being played when I booked my trip but this, like my finding the bottle, was just one of those coincidences that mother fate likes to throw at us, and as I returned to the hotel by taxi in the early evening I thought of something my over-superstitious mother used to say,
"Mark my words. Things always come in threes."
And I wondered what was next.
That evening I ate alone and then returned to my room before retrieving the book and its contents from my suitcase. The heavy tome had done its job and the pages of the manuscript were now flat. I sat at the writing table, switched on the lamp, poured myself a scotch, and with the help of the magnifying app on my mobile phone I started to read.
