‘And I can’t stay alone with you,’ Lady Myre said to him. ‘I’m not a yachtie’s moll and anyway it would compromise my husband.’ She gave me her smile. ‘You and I must continue our journey together,’ she said and it felt like a threat. But I didn’t see how I could forbid her to accompany me on shore, so I looked towards the lagoon and palms and motu, the little bay of Rikitea and the coral towers of the Cathedral of St Michael, and tried to resign myself to another island’s tale.
V
OTHER ISLANDS
The benign indifference of the world
39
The Mangarevan policeman wore tight shorts and flip-flops. He stamped our passports and changed three hundred US dollars into French Pacific francs for both Lady Myre and me. She commended him on the cuteness of his bottom and I supposed that was why her wadge of received notes looked thicker than mine. Kurt told him the story of how we were all friends from Basle. I thought of Christian’s fabrication to the Tahitians after he’d shoved Bligh into a boat at knifepoint. His rehearsed mendacious saga about meeting up with Captain Cook and forming a settlement on Whytootackee. And my mother’s lies about her vandalised possessions. And the grand lies – about God controlling the world, and the goal of paradise, golden stories always created by someone more remote than the ordinary next-door lunatic, tall embroidered stories, because it was unconsoling to confront a bizarre molecular dance of configurations, puzzles and disintegration, where none of us, or it, was more significant than anything else.
The policeman was uninterested in why we’d arrived but said we must sleep on the boat at night. The islanders didn’t want us lodging in their houses. They suspected the yachties of dealing in people, drugs and guns.
In a sad bar by the jetty Kurt introduced us to Stefan, an erstwhile Brussels accountant, with Rastafarian dreadlocks, a limp and no front teeth or money. For twelve years he’d lived on a tired-looking monohull. He caught fish, foraged for fruit and coconuts, and at night stole chickens and occasional drums of fuel for his boat. The limp followed a fall from a tree he’d climbed for breadfruit. He damaged his back, had no medical insurance, was flown to Tahiti and nursed by nuns in a convent. They fed him on soup made from fishheads. It occurred to me that such soup was nutritious and that for days I’d had nothing much to eat.
Four yachts were in the bay. The fourth was captained by a dour-looking Spaniard with black curly whiskers all over his face. He had overhanging eyebrows and only his nose seemed to find its way through the foliage. Kurt said he was on the run but was vague as to what he was fleeing from, or who was in pursuit. Two women sailed with him but two women were sailing with Kurt. I thought how worse than strange the Bounty crew must have seemed to the Tahitians: unreadable, distinguishable only by peculiarity.
The typical yachtie women, in their twenties, scantily clad, voluptuous, dark-skinned, uncommunicative, hadn’t been abducted like the first mothers of Pitcairn, but they completed a male fantasy. The men were the masters, in love with the ocean, the horizon and their boats. They were timeless voyagers, mutineers who’d turned away from society’s constraints. They liked world music, drink, hashish, the wind in their sails and a distant island.
It was unsurprising the Mangarevans wanted them gone. They came from an unknown place, spoke unfamiliar languages, were unpredictable and fell out of trees.
I left the bar while Lady Myre was in the dunny, and walked to the Cathedral of St Michael that loured over Mangareva. It was a testament to the mad rule of Father Honoré Laval, a French Catholic priest who’d arrived in 1834. He’d heard of the islanders’ pagan ways from whalers. He made them build this cathedral as proof of conversion and repentance. It was seventy-five feet high and modelled on Chartres, with seating for two thousand people – four times the current population of the island.
Laval had been received with all hospitality by King Te Maputeoa, given food and accommodation, and accorded respect. He repaid this by uprooting the island’s culture. The Mangarevans were forced into Catholic marriage or celibacy and punished brutally for disobedience. Through punishment and the threat of damnation he made them build, as well as the cathedral, a prison, a monastery and a convent. They hewed basalt, cut coral blocks from the reef, made limestone from firing coral. Fifteen hundred people died in his ten-year rule. Workers were brought in from Tahiti. All the Polynesian icons, temples, gods and holy relics were destroyed and the stone used for Laval’s Catholic fantasy. King Te Maputeoa was baptised and renamed King Gregorio in homage to Pope Gregory the Sixteenth. Accounts of Laval’s savagery reached the bishop of Tahiti from sailors, traders and French officials. He was summoned there in 1871, declared insane and forbidden to return to Mangareva.
Above the cathedral door was the inscription Quis ut Deus? – Who is as God? This strange, lofty, empty space, its vaulted blue ceiling studded with mother-of-pearl stars, its twenty high pillars, its frescoes, cornices, triglyphs, arches and friezes, was a monument to one man’s arrogance and certainty. The altar and tall cross were inlaid with flower sprays of pearls and shells. Once a blue pearl of fabled size lay on the altar, and once a necklace of black pearls adorned the plaster image of the Virgin Mary.
The Mangarevans had been pearl fishers, their lives shaped by their island, the sea, bright flowers, colourful cloths, the food they found, the music they made from shells, pipes and drums. Their soul was still there in the clear lagoon, the silver sands, the small atolls with coconut palms, the huge oyster shells. Pretty children still played, their skin and eyes brown, their noses flat, their legs thick and sturdy. The girls wore garlands of shells, and hibiscus flowers behind their ears. I climbed through forests of hibiscus, candlenut, coconut and giant ferns. Chickens pecked in the aeho grass. From the convent ruins high on a hillside I followed the stone path Laval made the islanders build. It wound down to the shore. When a boat arrived they’d formed a human chain and passed provisions up the steep cliff side.
The fate of this island seemed as capricious as Pitcairn’s. Good didn’t triumph, but neither did bad. Nothing lasted. But the reflections of this day mattered – the smell of the sea, shifting sunlight, concealed creatures stirring among the ferns.
I called on Charlie Mo. He hovered in a store cluttered with condensed milk and rolls of linoleum. I gave him Rosie’s letter and hoped he’d offer me a bed for the night away from the ocean and my companions. He read it and shook his head. It was something about a gun. He smiled and said he regretted there was no place for me to stay, but he waved his hand at green beans and sweet potatoes, offered me food from his shop, gave me a carton of kiwi juice, and asked me to take a letter to his daughter in Tahiti. She’d meet the plane.
I walked the coast with a bag of vegetables. I wondered about Chinese people on these little islands. In 1864 William Stewart, a British businessman, created a vast cotton plantation at Atimaono in southern Tahiti. He obtained a permit to import a thousand Chinese workers. Nine years later the plantation failed, he went bankrupt and the Chinese turned to market gardening, opium-dealing or general trading. Thus the accident of dispersal and the struggle to survive.
I came to another cavernous building, another memorial, like Laval’s cathedral, to colonial disregard. It was a sombre, iron, windowless container, a fall-out shelter built in the 1960s by the French when they’d started blasting nuclear bombs in Polynesia. In 1962 General de Gaulle moved the French nuclear testing centre from the Sahara to his colonies in the South Pacific. No French leader would agree to these tests in his own country. The tiny atoll of Mururoa close to Mangareva was chosen as the site. Eighteen thousand French troops were stationed in Tahiti. The first bomb, a plutonium fission device, was detonated on 2 July 1966 from a barge anchored in the lagoon. The blast sucked all the water from the lagoon into the air then rained it down. It was goodbye to everything that lived in those waters – all those creatures of the deep. The islets on the encircling reef were coated with the corpses of irradiated fish and clams. The coral died.
Seventeen days later another bomb was dropped from a plane sixty miles south of the atoll. Two days after that an unexploded bomb cracked in the sea and plutonium spilled over the reef. On 2 September a 120 kiloton bomb was dropped from a helium-filled balloon. The New Zealand National Radiation Laboratory monitored heavy radioactive fallout in the Cook Islands, Tonga, Fiji and Samoa. Over the next eight years another forty-four French bombs, including five hydrogen bombs, were detonated in the skies near Mururoa. In 1974, after boycotts of French goods and airlines and proceedings against France by Australia and New Zealand in the International Court of Justice at The Hague, the next French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, ordered that the tests be conducted below the surface of the sea.
Forty-six shafts were then drilled along a fifteen-mile strip to the south of the reef. The atoll was blasted to bits. Radionuclides leaked into the sea. Storms and typhoons brought giant waves that washed nuclear waste chaotically each and every way across the ocean. On Mangareva and many other islands people became ill with ciguatera – fish poisoning caused by algae that multiply when coral is killed and infect the fish’s food. The sufferers endured headaches, vomiting and fever. Cancers formed: leukaemia and tumours.
I stood in the ugly, rusty, disused fallout shelter, a monument to a more heinous imposition than Laval’s. All the Mangarevan people had been herded into this windowless can for forty-eight hours at a time, breathing filtered air, while the nuclear bombs were exploded. The blasts were heard on Pitcairn Island 300 miles away, they echoed under the sea, they made great tidal waves.
After this devastation came the reparation of money. An air of unearned prosperity then defined the island. Goods of every sort were sent from the ‘mother country’. The islanders were given cash and prefabricated houses. Local wood and stone were no longer used in building. Every household had a four wheeled-drive vehicle, though the island road went nowhere in particular. A new jetty was built and an airstrip with twice-weekly flights to and from Tahiti.
The Mangarevans had called their land their fenua haohi. It was sacred. It had been defiled. They became dependent on subsidy and compensation, their autonomy gone, forced into a sort of nuclear prostitution. The fish in the sea were still tainted. The Pitcairners might hope for links with Mangareva, but the island had nothing for them and wanted nothing from them. The Mangarevans did not think of Pitcairn. They spoke French, not English. A supply ship from Tahiti arrived regularly with fruit, vegetables and all the produce they needed.
It was dark when I reached the jetty. The moon was full and stars sparkled. Lady Myre was in the sad bar with the yachties. She accused me with her eyes and an untypical reserve. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, like a disapproving spouse. A mixture of oysters, hashish and sunshine had left her pink-coloured and fractious. She’d looked for me, then gone to an atoll with the Belgian vagrant. He’d given her a large bright parrot fish to cook for our supper.
It had been a difficult day, she said. First I’d disappeared, then the nice policeman had told her she’d only be allowed two pieces of luggage on the aircraft. Kurt would have to take the rest to Tahiti or Samoa. She’d meet up with him again some sunny day. Meanwhile, if she was short of anything, she knew I’d sort it, I was such an organised little mouse.
The Braveheart was to arrive the following day from Pitcairn with the officials who’d served their three-month stint. Their crossing had been calm and they’d swum from the boat in the deep still ocean. They knew of our peril at sea. Captain Jolly had made radio contact with Kurt and checked with the Mangarevan policeman that we’d arrived safely.
I was pleased to be reunited with Lady Myre, alarming though her interest in me was. She made my spirits lift. Kurt took us by dinghy to his catamaran and we cooked my vegetables from Mr Mo and her parrot fish, which I hoped wouldn’t give us ciguatera poisoning or worse.
The Braveheart arrived in the night. It sounded its siren as it crossed the reef, a forlorn echo. Another vessel with a name of affirmation: Bounty, Providence, Resolution. ‘Our friends are here,’ whispered Lady Myre. Again we shared the same tiny cabin which now was motionless on the calmest of nights. She didn’t share my awkwardness about our continued intimacy. She treated me with confident familiarity, as if there were no uncertainties to allay. She didn’t mind about my hesitancy as long as I accommodated her abandon.
I remarked on her golden skin now the pinkness had quietened down.
‘D’you find me beautiful?’ she asked, ‘as I do you.’ I kept telling her to shush because sound so carried in this unfamiliar quiet.
‘Oh come on,’ she said, ‘if the Braveheart can bellow like a harpy, I can scream a bit too.’
‘You’re not a ship,’ I said with my customary perspicacity.
‘O yes I am,’ she replied. ‘Your ship has come home.’
I thought of clichés of certainty: I knew as soon as I saw you. It was love at first sight. ‘We’ll be on the same plane to Tahiti as the Braveheart lot,’ I whispered to her. It would leave the following afternoon but only if the weather was fine. I told her of my plan to visit the museum of anthropology in Tahiti, then fly to Tubuai in quest of evidence of Fletcher Christian’s attempt to found a colony there. She said that was fine by her, and that she knew Dubai and Abu Dhabi. She always stayed in the Burj al Arab, but liked the gardens of the Hatta Fort. She kept most of the gold she’d acquired there in a safe at Little Nevish.
‘Tubuai,’ I said. ‘Tubuai. Tubuai. Not Dubai. One of the Austral Islands in French Polynesia.’ I told her it supplied vegetables to Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, and it was where Fletcher Christian had tried to build a settlement he called Fort George, in bizarre honour of the English king, after he’d dumped Bligh on the high seas.
‘Try to sleep, sweetheart,’ Lady Myre said. ‘You’ll feel like death in the morning.’
For much of the night I lay awake. She cradled against me, breathing peacefully. I supposed I was in a fix. It wasn’t that she was wrong, but she so wasn’t right. My journey didn’t feel safe. I didn’t understand myself, though I felt I understood her. I thought of Soni’s arranged marriage and how the customs and expectations of a time-honoured society could sustain two disparate people. The convention of marriage. And I thought of the accepted sexual exchanges of eighteenth-century Tahitians. But two women on a random journey, who’d elided in the night … I pondered the yearning for love, the yearning to feel less alone.
In the morning she garlanded herself, Polynesian style, with shells given her by the Belgian yachtie. She’d heard that a flower worn behind one ear indicated the wearer was romantically available, and behind the other it meant she was married. She couldn’t remember which ear meant what, so gardenias and hibiscus jutted from both. She and Kurt chose to go in the dinghy to the Braveheart in the hope of a large breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausage, chips and beans.
Alone on the boat I showered, drank coffee and sorted my clothes. I wondered about the envelope from Charlie Mo. I opened and resealed it. It was a wadge of dollars. I stared across the lagoon. Suckerfish squirmed around the hull of the boat. They ate the waste and excrement ejected into the bay. In my mind I went back to the storm, to the black, mountainous waves and frantic spray. I imagined the boat tipping over and being trapped in the hull with Kurt and Lady Myre. I thought of the Pandora as it crashed against the Barrier Reef, the prisoners with manacled hands and feet, powerless to swim, how Peter Heywood had said he was haunted by the cries of them floundering, desperate to be saved, and how, when the boat returned after leaving the rescued on an islet, there was silence.
In a passing moment I missed Verity. Each morning she’d tied her dressing gown at the same side, half-filled the kettle, taken the butter from the fridge to soften, let the tea brew for precisely one minute. I would not observe those things again.
Les, the Pitcairn locum checked the Belgian Rastafarian who’d fallen out of a tree. He said his spine seemed all right, he told him movements to avoid and symptoms to
watch for and thought him fit to sail to his next destination, wherever that might be. He also checked Claudia, Wilhelm’s girlfriend, who complained of stomach pains and lethargy. He said she had chronic constipation and should eat beans and fruit and take exercise. I thought of Dr Huggan who sailed with Bligh as the Bounty’s surgeon, how he was always drunk and invented diseases with fantabulous names, and what a good comic character he’d be in a play but how terrifying his ineptitude for those with broken limbs or infections.
Kurt said the officials on the Braveheart had wanted me to leave Pitcairn because they feared for my safety. Someone might shoot me. I was a writer. I’d inveigled my way on to the island. I tried to defend myself. I said I’d mentioned early on in an email to Rosie that I was a writer. She hadn’t seemed bothered. As I spoke, I thought how unpleasant self-justification sounds. Those who choose to think badly of us will do so. It’s hard to change anyone’s mind. The paranoia of the islanders was infectious. The officials had caught it. No one had thought to shoot me, of that I was sure.
Hank had prayed for us in the storm. His next sermon might dwell on how prayer saved our lives. It was a curious notion – a god who made the waves then turned them to the murderous disadvantage of those with whom he was displeased. God the serial killer, the despot, the mass murderer. Yet I felt the generosity of Hank’s hopes: Dear God, let those lesbians in peril on the sea be safe.
I expected Lady Myre to spend hours rationalising her luggage, as she was leaving most of it in Kurt’s boat. But she randomly picked two pieces and seemed reconciled to parting from her possessions. One of the two, an embroidered holdall, was filled with artefacts she’d collected from Pitcairn’s shore and claimed had belonged to the Bounty: a rusty washer, sixteen old nails, a gnarled piece of wood charred at one end, a broken waffle iron and various pebbles that she said were cannonballs and adzes. She also had three sprouting coconuts, a quantity of candlenuts and a large piece of obsidian. In the other case was an assortment of shoes and hats. It seemed she now had nothing to wear. ‘I acquire,’ she said ‘and I discard. Every loss is an opportunity. I’ll dress like Gauguin’s girls.’ I supposed she meant bare breasts and scanty skirts and I wondered about the days ahead.
Coconut Chaos Page 18