Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  Lady Myre was in my bed under the net, moping. She said she was desperate to go home. It was all too much, going to church on Saturday and eating coconut pudding, which was bad for her cholesterol count, instead of lemon sorbet. She’d missed five consecutive instalments of Sex and the City and she wanted to sit in a restaurant and have a proper meal with waiters serving her. She said she pined for a dressed crab in Wheeler’s. She wanted to hang up her clothes, soak in a bath, talk on the phone to her friends, sleep in a comfortable bed, have the papers delivered. I told her she could get Sex and the City on DVD and that one of the good things about travel was that home seemed so special when, after many adventures, one at last returned there.

  Barbara invited everyone on the island to a party for her seventieth birthday. She was from Florida. Six years back she’d been on a cruise that stopped at Pitcairn for two hours, and she’d spent the time talking to Charles Young. On its return from Easter Island to Auckland the ship stopped again. They talked for another two hours, he then flew to Florida, they married in the Little Church with the Big Heart and together travelled back to Pitcairn.

  Between them they had seven children from previous marriages. The shack they lived in looked as if it had been trashed by an intruder determined to find a small, well-concealed piece of evidence. Neither of them seemed to mind the chaos. Barbara talked to herself in a quiet, conversational tone. Charles was distinguished by having inhaled a cockroach while snorkelling. He said it was still lodged in his lung ten years later.

  The party was held in a daughter’s house. All the island’s women took food for it and two big tables were loaded with goat stew, chicken stew, chips, pizza, rice, pasta, salads, broccoli, mashed squash, green-banana pilhi, arrowroot pudding, pumpkin pie, jelly, cheesecake, chocolate biscuits, gluten patties and coconut-meringue pie. There was fruit juice to drink and the bare light bulbs seemed bright. No one smoked.

  Lady Myre piled a plate with raspberry jelly then sprinkled the contents of her flask over it. ‘Are you Randy?’ she asked a large man in a T-shirt with a PITCAIRN ISLAND logo, then gave her explosive laugh. He turned away. The women stayed in one room, the men sat on the verandah and the children scuttled around.

  I sat next to Steve and a man he called Sambo. They told me stories of their prowess. Steve had once caught a shark at the jetty and when he cut it open in its gut was a whole goat that must have fallen off the cliff into the sea. They boasted of catching 140 fish in an hour from a small boat with a wire and a hook and of goading a whale into the harbour and jumping on its back. The island was their playground. I commended Steve on Dr Scantlebury’s rescue. He shrugged. ‘It’s just what we do,’ he said.

  I imagined the island men boasting of sexual conquest with the same lightheartedness as they boasted of the fish they hooked or the rats they shot. Their reference was not to the sensibilities of other and, as they saw it, lesser creatures, it was to the force of the sea and the thrill of conquest. They looked like mutineers, like pirates. They didn’t go to church or consider Judgement Day. Their strength worked the long boats, felled trees, built houses and the prison and rescued a drowning man in a storm. They resented intruders who assumed moral superiority and told them how they should behave.

  I asked Steve about shipping and he laughed. Eight months was the longest without a ship coming by, he told me. It had never been worse than now.

  Often I trudged the island: to Garnet’s Ridge, Ginger Valley, Flat Land, Up the Beans and Down Rope, and always with a sense of being watched. There were few creatures to observe – only cats, rats, geckos, chickens and seabirds. On a day when the sun shone I searched for the giant tortoise, Mrs T, but didn’t find her. I walked to my favourite place at St Paul’s Point where the waves pounded more fiercely and with brighter spray than ever I’d seen. Faint spray fluttered over me and I wrote in my notebook of island things: how a shark washed up on the rocks was thought to be dead until it bit off someone’s hand, how Pawl, the biggest, fiercest-looking man on Pitcairn, was one of the few untainted by sexual wrongdoing. He’d shaved his head and was covered in tattoos. Around his neck he wore pendants of a shark’s tooth, a black pearl, a shell, a piece of horn. He’d pierced his ears with many holes by jabbing them against a spike, and he’d made the rings he threaded through.

  I looked up to see Bea and two men observing me. They hesitated but kept to their plan and clambered with barefoot ease to the lower rocks to fish. They stood in the spume of the waves, cracked fish dead and threw them into a basket. I called to ask what they’d caught. Bea held up a brightly coloured fish. There was nanwee, grouper, parrot, wrasse, but the friendliness was formal. I was an intruder.

  I walked on. Much of the land was eroded. Where once there’d been pineapple plots and banana trees, now there were stretches of empty red soil, or rose apple bushes fit only for firewood. I passed Nola’s house. She was baking bread on wood embers in a stone oven. I sensed her reserve and left. At the prison, Hank was spreading the gravel path and Pania was filling nail holes round the trim of the doors. I admired the tongue-and-groove of the walls, the light fittings, the shower rooms. I wondered if the potential prisoners building their own cells had devised some way of ensuring escape. Foolishly I asked this and again met with discouraging politeness.

  In the museum were motley relics displayed in rickety glass cases: bits of broken wood and ballast, a cannonball and rock encrusted rope, all apparently from the Bounty; copies of all postage stamps printed for the island; a set of Victorian scales for weighing letters; an old mould for making a hat; photos of Graham Wragg counting bird bones; photos of tourists arriving at the other islands in the Pitcairn group, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno; photos of girls in the Adventist school, covered neck to ankle in white muslin uniforms.

  On the board by the courtroom was an edict that all firearms must be handed in by 7 September. Failure to comply would result in ‘the enactment of an ordinance to enforce their surrender’. A letter of response from the islanders said they needed their guns to shoot down breadfruit and coconuts from the trees and that this was one more act of interference.

  At her house Rosie was talking to Lady Myre about living in a state of fallen grace and how Lucifer was once an angel. The policemen sat at the table eating eggs, chips and chocolate pudding. I checked my email. Nothing from Verity. Mother had told the staff at Sunset View that her children had conspired to have her imprisoned there.

  Rosie assigned the Saturday sermon to Lady Myre. She’d failed to interest her in banana-drying, or anything much, and seemed to feel her discontent as a reflection on herself as host.

  Lady Myre took to the idea but wanted an audience. On the Shaw Savill Line she’d played to a packed theatre every night, she said. And in No Sex, Please, We’re British the queue for returns in Huddersfield had stretched halfway down Queen’s Street. ‘Bums on seats,’ she said, ‘that’s what’s needed.’ There was a reason why the theatres were full and the churches empty: people were having a better time at the theatre. As for the Bible, she’d been incarcerated by herself in enough hotel rooms with iffy TVs to know it wasn’t an easy read. How could you get excited about a book called Leviticus? All that wrath of God and plagues.

  She called her sermon ‘The Second Coming’. I asked if that was a good idea in the light of the current sex charges. She said I was a naughty mousey. She printed out a flyer and we delivered it to all the houses:

  THE SECOND COMING

  11 a.m.

  Come to Church this Saturday and hear Lady Myre’s

  Views on this Perennial Problem.

  Lady Myre is not Representative of Any Known Religion.

  Free Gifts, Singing, Dancing.

  None of the defendants showed up. I wondered if they feared a stitch-up. The policemen sat in the back row and looked more formal than usual. Wayne was there and his wife. Hank began with church business: the times of forthcoming Bible studies, the rota for polishing the pews. Lady Myre was late and the pre-school-age children
restive. Her entrance was calculated. She wore a sort of tunica alba and a headpiece that seemed like a cross between a mitre and a bicycle helmet. She looked like Edna Everidge impersonating a bishop. She distributed tambourines and maracas and offered what she called ‘a warm warm welcome’, then took off with the song ‘Lord, I’m Coming Home’:

  Coming home, coming home, never more to roam;

  Open wide thine arms of love, Lord, I’m coming home.

  As ever, she brought more than herself to the situation. The mood grew lively, though uncontrolled, and Damian who was three became overzealous with his tambourine. He couldn’t be dissuaded from banging and rattling it inappropriately, then cried at an effort to take it from him.

  Her sermon was disappointing: anecdotal and discursive. She went on about meeting Sir Roland on Riis Beach. I noted that the story changed with retelling and the frenzied Pekinese stealing the bathing hat had become a Yorkshire terrier. ‘I believe in destiny,’ Lady Myre said. ‘Che sera sera, whatever will be will be.’ She started singing again in her operatic soprano. The bewildered congregation joined in, ‘The future’s not ours to see. Che sera sera.’

  I pondered the confusion of opposed ideas: God, or no God, chance or predetermination, chaos or linear narrative. Not for the first time I felt relief at the one certainty of death. Lady Myre talked of her search for her half-brother. Once again I doubted the existence of a Garth or a Sir Roland. She said perhaps she was a second coming. Why else would she have holed up in such a peculiar place? She always travelled with Explore where everything was done for one. All she’d ever wanted was to spread a little happiness. She jiggled from side to side with the palms of her hands facing us:

  Even when the darkest clouds are in the sky

  You mustn’t sigh and you mustn’t cry,

  Spread a little happiness as you go by.

  There were guffaws from the congregation, murmurs and shuffling. Lady Myre was undeterred. There’d been, she said, in her country England a very wonderful lady prime minister, the first ever, who was inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi:

  Where there is hatred let me sow love,

  Where there is darkness, light,

  Where there is sadness, joy.

  That, Lady Myre said, was how she felt too. Then she led the singing for another of her gospel songs, if that’s what they were:

  We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray,

  Baa-aa-aa!

  Gentlemen wankers out on the spree,

  Damned from here to Eternity.

  God ha’ mercy on such as we,

  Bah! Yah! Bah!

  Then it got out of hand. There was worse than murmuring from the visitors, and Damian couldn’t be constrained on his pew. He marched up and down, banged and rattled his tambourine and shouted ‘Baa! Yah! Bah!’ I heard the word ‘Blasphemy’. The two policemen moved to help Lady Myre from the platform. Did we know, she shouted, that those lines were composed by the famous English poet Rudyard Kipling? ‘That’s enough,’ Ed the Scottish policeman said and took her arm.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. She scooped a handful of beads from a white bag and threw them into the congregation, such as it was. There was a shriek from one of the social workers, who thought they were a sort of explosive. The beads rolled down the aisle and along the pews. Nola and the children scrambled for them. Lady Myre was hurried from the church. ‘Hands off, young man,’ she said. ‘I’m Lady Myre.’

  The islanders went home. I congratulated her on a spirited performance.

  ‘Was I moving?’ she asked.

  ‘Intriguing,’ I said. ‘But it’s gentlemen rankers, not wankers.’

  She looked nonplussed and said she knew a fair number of wankers but what were the others? I told her I believed they were officers who’d been promoted from the ordinary ranks of foot soldiers. She said Roley’s friend Sir Anthony Polworth had taught her the words and he had a soft ‘r’.

  Over lunch of pickfish and sweet potatoes Rosie’s good cheer seemed forced. Hank ate in silence. I feared they were offended. I talked of general things: ham radio links, the dried-banana business, but they remained wary and reserved, as if any exchange of niceties might be a trap.

  And then it happened. Early one September morning after a night of bugs, the usual ghostly visiting from Lady M. and concern over when a ship might call, over the intercom came a man’s voice with a German accent. ‘My name is Kurt. I am a lone yachtsman. I am from Switzerland. I need to land. I need water and to purchase supplies.’ He’d anchored, and he gave his bearings and asked if a boat would come out to pick him up.

  I knocked on Rosie and Hank’s bedroom door. They’d heard the news on the speaker beside their bed. ‘Steve will deal with it,’ Rosie said. Both seemed uninterested in yet another tourist floating past on a casual journey, wanting something.

  I climbed to Garnet’s Ridge and across the bay saw the yacht, a small, bright white speck, bobbing with the tide. It looked more like drifting polystyrene than a ship of rescue. Hours later I found Kurt by the Breadfruit Fence. He was tall and strong-looking, wore glasses and was deeply tanned by the wind, sea and sun. No one had gone out to his boat to fetch him. He’d waited until light then taken his dinghy to the jetty. He’d sailed from Antwerp, hadn’t spoken for forty-nine days, and he wanted a beer and a cigarette.

  I explained why Pitcairn was a dry island, the conversion to Seventh Day Adventism, how cigarettes weren’t sold, there was no cafe, and liquor couldn’t be drunk without a licence. I said I knew of an islander who might help him out.

  Lady Myre scuttled up, breathless with anticipation. She hugged Kurt extravagantly and called him her saviour, her vision of wonder. He looked perplexed, having been alone for all those days. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked. Mangareva, he said. To meet with his friend Wilhelm. And then to American Samoa. ‘Take me,’ she said. ‘You must get me off.’ She told him how nightly she was bitten by bugs, of her fear of going to the bathroom because of spiders as big as her hands and the sound of scuttling mice, of land crabs that crunched cockroaches, of being stung on the bottom by nesting wasps, how the men on the island were sex offenders who peered through her window hoping to molest her, how her husband Sir Roland Myre had run the Admiralty, how she’d never wanted to go to Pitcairn at all but had been grotesquely deceived by a shipping agent.

  It all poured out in a torrent. Some of it was not as I’d remembered, but her desperation was real. Pitcairn was not to her liking. It occurred to me it must be strange for this man who’d been so long alone to have silence broken by this tirade. He asked if I had similar problems. I said, ‘Not quite,’ but that I too would like to travel with him, if he’d agree, because I didn’t know how else I’d ever get off the island. I explained about the Braveheart, plying to and from Mangareva bringing judges and lawyers and policemen to Pitcairn, and how it was chartered by special licence to the British government and couldn’t take tourists. Kurt said he’d consider the legal and insurance implications and let us know the following day. I took him to Pawl’s house and procured eight cigarettes and two cans of lager. He was startled by Pawl’s multiple ear piercings, extravagant tattoos and shaven head, and I wanted to tell him that here was a kind and gentle man, with a talent for making jewellery and an enthusiasm for books.

  Ed the policeman came in, though it was still only about nine in the morning. Word had got round that the two Englishwomen and the lone yachtsman were together. He needed to check it all out. He took Kurt away on his quad bike. Lady Myre said she was going to her room to light a candlenut and say a novena to Erasmus, the patron saint of boatmen.

  Next morning Kurt called to say he was sorry but he couldn’t risk it. Wayne wanted me and Lady Myre off the island but had warned him if he took tourists he might have his boat impounded by the French customs at Mangareva and be fined twenty thousand dollars. He needed to get to Samoa and then to Australia to meet up with his sister.

  Lady Myre’s eyes rolled. She rocked and keened and s
aid she’d die on Pitcairn and that God was punishing her. Her clothes were covered in red mud, the lights went off at ten at night, there were no shops, no television, no newspapers, no servants. She was dying for a cup of real coffee. Sex offenders peered at her through lit windows, her husband was in the Admiralty …

  So Kurt agreed to take us. I had to admire (and not for the first or last time) how adept she was at having her way. He coached us to say to the Mangarevan authorities that we were friends of his from Basle, we’d arranged to meet him at Pitcairn, we weren’t paying passengers.

  His boat, called Luceann after his children Ludovic, Cedric and Annette, was, he said, the Mercedes Benz of yachts – none better, built in Perpignan to a very high specification and with great attention to detail. Though Lady Myre and I must share a cabin, we’d have all comforts: reading lamps, a hot shower, a flush toilet … He’d checked the weather forecast with Hank. We must be down at the jetty by ten the following morning.

  It was a day of packing and hasty goodbyes. I tried not to communicate the excitement I felt, not to inspire dissatisfaction in those compelled to stay. I couldn’t believe those mutineers and deceived Polynesians – young, strong and at home on the sea – would have stayed in this cut-off place. If they’d had the chance to leave on a small boat on an uncertain journey to an unknown destination, they’d have taken it. And it seemed understandable that the women, after the men had gone, would tear down a house to build a boat to follow in their wake.

  That last night, long past the time when the generator was switched off, Rosie, Hank, Michael Young and I talked by candlelight. They all lived by their Adventist beliefs. I thought how brazen evangelical religion was – how it imposed certainties and took away customs and doubts. It seemed strange to expect retribution for baking a cake on a certain day.

  They talked of their fears for the future if the jetty wasn’t built and shipping improved. The island was being turned into a prison. They felt they missed out on the benefits of British citizenship but were penalised by the disadvantages, and they wondered what other charges might be levelled against them. They’d no knowledge of the intricacies of British law. Only in 1970 had they been given British passports and citizenship. Before that their passports, issued in Fiji, stipulated their right to reside on Pitcairn.