Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  Kurt ferried us to the airstrip on the far side of the lagoon. He and Lady Myre hugged, kissed and vowed to remeet in Tahiti, Samoa – wherever. She’d reclaim her luggage, she’d sail with him again. Her life, she said, was in his cabin. I wondered what he’d do with twelve cases of her clothes and things. He shook hands with me and wished me bon voyage.

  The officials had turned into South Sea tourists, in shirts adorned with palm trees, their hair bleached by the sun, their luggage neat. Their journey had been calm and mine violent. I felt an irrational qualm of culpability: the storm happened because I shouldn’t have gone to Pitcairn.

  The plane was late from Tahiti and the heat intense on the dusty runway.

  ‘Have you packed these bags yourself?’ the French official asked Lady Myre as we checked at the airport desk.

  ‘Of course not,’ she replied. ‘I wouldn’t dream of packing my own bags. I’m Lady Myre.’

  The contents of both bags were tipped out, the stones, detritus and coconuts confiscated. She was led away, over her shoulder she gave her subversive smile. She returned after about half an hour, the official had his arm round her and they were laughing.

  She seemed exhilarated to be continuing her journey with only a bag of shoes. ‘What a wonderful opportunity to start all over again,’ she said, and I thought of the bountiful earth, feeding its creatures so that they might be fed on, again and all over again.

  I looked down at islands circled by lagoons and reefs, dwarfed by the sea and distance. I could imagine how gaps occurred in the great plates grinding below the ocean bed, how magma spewed up to form these mounds of land that cooled and sank and created reefs. I thought of the Bounty with its methodical rigging, and how, if a prescient crewman had told Bligh about thermodynamics and digital radio and said wait two hundred years and you’ll fly to Tahiti in sixteen hours in a bird-like winged machine, and you’ll tell the Admiralty, voice to voice via an orbiting satellite, about Christian’s transgression, he’d’ve thought it more fanciful than the Second Coming of Christ. I wondered what transformations there’d be two hundred years on from now: extra-corporeal travel perhaps and interplanetary harm.

  Lady Myre’s hand searched for mine. ‘Are you scared?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I answered. ‘Why should I be scared?’

  ‘It seems strange to be hurtling through the air,’ she said, ‘after all that ocean. But if it crashes we’ll go together and what a comfort that will be.’

  40

  In the cool of Tahiti’s airport lounge, observed by the Braveheart visitors, I slipped the envelope of dollars to the Chinese shopkeeper’s daughter. The crowd was dense, but we easily met, alert to each other’s expectation. She was urban and elegant. In a large Renault she took Lady Myre and me to the Sofitel hotel and tried to book us in at the discounted residents’ rate.

  The receptionist wouldn’t agree to it, but when Lady Myre declared her title she adorned her with a garland of frangipani and accorded us a king-size bed in a luxury room with a view of the ocean. The counter was strewn with gardenias and hibiscus flowers, front-of-house allegiance to past time. Lady Myre bagged handfuls of them. All things free she squirrelled away: paper screws of sugar, hotel stationery, shells from the seashore, twigs.

  Her rank and the self-assurance that went with it would have served her in eighteenth-century Tahiti. Bligh consorted with the high chiefs, the arii – the nobles. He didn’t hobnob with the lowborn manahune. The high chief of a tribe was revered and deferred to. Land, title and hereditary prestige belonged to him. He was carried on his servants’ shoulders, food was fed into his mouth, he wore a girdle of red or yellow feathers, he could command human sacrifice.

  There were many tribes, their land demarcated by the V-shaped valleys and the mountain ridges. The house of the highest chief was not luxurious, he made no display of personal possession, his servants ate the same food. Birth counted for everything, wealth for very little. The enduring symbol of a high-born family was the marae, the open-air stone-and-coral temple that spoke of permanence and transcended the transience of life. The gods were secondary, to do with sunlight, wind, birdsong, the sea. All the maraes on Mangareva had been destroyed by Laval.

  The Sofitel was to a standard. The room had a huge bed with plumped pillows, a minibar, brochures about Tahitian pearls and tours, a TV in a cabinet, a view from the window of palm trees and false sand, a print on the wall of a fishing boat, an annexed windowless bathroom with little pots of shampoo and moisturiser and a hairdryer locked to the wall.

  Lady Myre lay on the bed, her arms splayed wide. ‘Civilisation,’ she said. ‘A bed, a proper lavatory, a television.’

  I said I favoured life without television and considered it a barrier to meaningful experience.

  ‘Then come and have a meaningful experience with me,’ she said. ‘You can keep your head down while I watch the chat shows.’

  I ignored her and made a display of sorting my papers.

  ‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘Stop being a spoddy twerp. Let’s have a candlelit bath, order normal food and wine, hire a video and indulge ourselves after our ordeal.’ She fancied Spartacus. Didn’t I just love Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons? I probably knew Laurence Olivier was a bit of a woofter but so were most of those Romans if the truth be known. She topped up her Sprite bottle with rum from the minibar and considered the room-service menu.

  I told her my plans. I wanted to see Matavai Bay where the Bounty had anchored, make a tour of inland Tahiti to imagine the tribal settlements where Bligh had collected breadfruit saplings, then go to an exhibition about the Polynesian canoe at the Tahiti Museum. After that I’d fly to the island of Tubuai to see Fletcher Christian’s Fort George settlement, then get a plane to London.

  ‘Whither thou goest I will go,’ she said, but there was rebuke in her demeanour. She wanted sex and I wasn’t complying. I wondered what she was like when she didn’t get what she wanted.

  ‘You’re an awkward little Mousey,’ she said. Stubborn.’ Then she said I wasn’t safe on my own and that she’d read of a Tahitian custom called mafera, where young men climbed through open hotel windows and had sex with women while they slept. I should watch out for anything untoward in the night, and unless I was certain it was her, I should call reception. She took a gardenia from behind her ear, tore it in two, gave me half and said I should do the same for her: it was a Tahitian sign of reciprocal fidelity. I pointed out I didn’t have a gardenia. She told me there were all sorts of signs to make, if I was up for intercourse. The Belgian yachtie had told her about them. I should hold up the right finger of my right hand then hold my right wrist with my left hand. That would do it. Or if I bent all my fingers and wiggled them and laughed heartily …

  I suggested she phone Sir Roland and tell him the good news of her safe arrival.

  ‘I’ve quite forgotten poor Roley,’ she said, ‘now I’ve got you.’ She suggested we order champagne and seafood risotto and mango à la Sofitel.

  I told her to choose what she wanted for herself. I’d eat downstairs and see her later.

  ‘Are you playing hard to get?’ she asked as I left the room, and there was warning in those clear blue eyes.

  In the foyer I used the webmail facility. Three messages from Verity were friendly and informative. She wanted to hear from me. Where was I? Was I all right? What were my plans? She’d found a flat in Colchester. She’d felt melancholy as she packed but was now busy settling in. Wasn’t it strange, she said, how one spent so long in a place then moved and scarcely thought of it again? Mother’s house too had been sold and her possessions auctioned, though she didn’t know this. All available money was needed to provide for her care. She might live for a decade in this twilit state. She was over-sedated, kept falling, and spent her time scrabbling in a drawer looking for things she couldn’t find. I sent messages of my whereabouts and safety and said I’d had a stormy journey from Pitcairn to Mangareva.

  They seemed so tentative, these frail link
s to a receding world. It was true what Verity said: we move on, we forget. For eighteenth-century travellers the past could vanish. The Bounty crew fathered children on Tahiti. Peter Heywood had a fine house there with an avenue of trees. He had a partner and a child and was working on an English-Tahitian dictionary. Then Captain Edwards came in the Pandora and took him away in chains to shipwreck and judgement.

  The dining room looked out over a swimming pool, the sham beach and coconut palms. No cutter would come to this harbour to herald wonder. I ordered cheese, fruit and wine. A stray dog scrounged the tables with a depressed look in his eyes. I gave him a crust of bread, then he wouldn’t go away. He’d’ve stayed with me for ever. He sat and stared, ate bits of mango and custard apple but preferred the cheese. Here was the hunger of the world. No culinary fads, just a need for calories – any old fuel to stave off death for a while.

  At an adjacent table an oriental-looking woman cleaned her knife and fork on a napkin, again and again. A jacket was draped on the back of the chair opposite her, so I assumed she had a companion. In American English she ordered one meal, two plates and a jug of hot water. She cut a plate of steak, then put it on the opposite place mat. She cut up salad, seemingly for herself, asked for ketchup for the chips, ate only a bread roll and drank the hot water, which she poured into a glass. The dog didn’t bother with her. He knew she’d give him nothing. Again and again she bent to the floor, threw a ten-cent coin, and peered to see which way up it landed. To break her encapsulation, I asked if she was American. Her family was from China but had moved to San Francisco – she had a brother and a sister there. She said she liked Tahiti and preferred the Sofitel to the Meridian.

  A waitress swore in French at the dog. It slunk to a door and watched from there.

  In the foyer I booked a ticket for a tour the following day, to Lake Vaihiria and inland Tahiti, in a four-wheel-drive. Then, guilty at abandoning Lady Myre, I booked her a ticket too.

  She’d left a note on the king-size bed. As I was in solitary mood, it said, she’d gone to buy clothes and explore Tahiti by night. I bathed in lavender-perfumed water, shampooed my hair and turned on CNN news. I watched President Bush say he’d never relent in defending America, whatever it took. He said he had a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom. I began to wish I’d stayed with Lady Myre, eaten risotto, watched Spartacus and enjoyed the comfort of her arms.

  It felt strange, the move from the fervent ocean to this nowhere room. At around midnight I worried she might have come to harm. Her French was so peculiar. Then I thought of how spirited she was and how indestructible she seemed.

  The moon was eclipsed by neon. Nor could I hear the ocean above the music from the lounge. I imagined the Tahitian canoes with a hundred and fifty paddlers, the bright stars they navigated by, the tribal chiefs decorated with red and black feathers, the clanging of coconut shells to herald attack, the sound of wooden trumpets and drums from hollowed tree trunks, the dazzle of pearl-shell knives, and bright dancing skirts …

  ‘Mafera,’ Lady Myre hissed as she crawled into the bed. She gave her convulsive laugh, her hands were cold and for a moment I was totally alarmed. ‘I’ve had such adventures,’ she whispered.

  I was pleased she was back safely, but I didn’t want to talk and be awake all night. She’d been to downtown Tahiti in le truc – the rough transport bus – and got herself tattooed. She wanted to show me, but I insisted she wait until morning. She said it was discreet – a bird of paradise at the base of her spine. It was very sore so I mustn’t be rough with her.

  I said there was no danger of that. ‘Now go to sleep,’ I said. And I told her how in the morning we were going inland to the crater at the centre of Tahiti, which showed how the island was formed in a huge eruption aeons ago. I said we’d travel through the valleys in the mountains where Tahitian chiefs had ruled their tribes and Bligh gathered breadfruit plants.

  ‘What a determined explorer you are,’ she said. ‘But I don’t care about any of that. What I like is that no one knows where we are.’

  I agreed that I liked that too.

  Then she began her familiar caressing, which I’d also grown to like. I asked no questions about her past, her lovers and chance encounters. Our kisses seemed part of the journey, the sea and the surprise of each day. ‘What’s that?’ she said and guided my finger to a little lump in my armpit about the size of a clitoris.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘A cyst, I suppose.’ ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘But you’d better get it checked out.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not on Tahiti.’

  ‘No not on Tahiti,’ she said and we giggled, I don’t know why, then snuggled down.

  41

  Those sailors in their journals didn’t write the truth about their sexual behaviour and desires. They denied they were rapacious and didn’t admit to homosexuality, because it was considered a crime. One nautical punishment for it was to tie the offending men together, then throw them into the sea. It made me ponder Christian’s cry: that if Bligh humiliated him more he’d take him in his arms and jump overboard with him. And Peter Heywood told Sir John Barrow, who wrote about the Bounty in 1831, that Christian had a mitigating secret to do with his falling out with Bligh and that he himself had personal information too private to divulge.

  Bligh, on his second breadfruit journey to Tahiti, logged his interest in an effeminate islander kept ‘solely for the caresses of men’:

  The Young Man took his hahow or mantle off … he had the appearance of a Woman, his Yard & Testicles being so drawn in under him having the Art from custom of keeping them in this position; those who are connected with him have their beastly pleasures gratified between his thighs … On examining his privacies I found them both very small and the Testicles remarkably so, being not larger than a boys of 5 or 6 Years old and very soft as if in a State of decay or a total incapacity of being larger, so that in either case he appeared to me as effectually a Eunuch as if his stones were away.

  Bligh didn’t record why the young man was brought to him, or whether he gratified his own beastly pleasure between his thighs. Perhaps his curiosity about his privacies and the texture of his testicles was academic, a diversion from potting breadfruit and commanding the Providence crew.

  The Tahitians, unembarrassed by sexual diversity, wanted to accommodate all the desires of these mariners. They hoped to benefit from their visit and they deferred to their whiter skins, but they were bewildered by their behaviour and afraid of them too. A chief became morose after his pregnant wife had sex with George Hamilton, surgeon on the Pandora. He feared his child would be born piebald.

  Nothing prepared the Tahitians for the contagious diseases European visitors brought them: gonorrhea, syphilis, influenza, dysentery. The effect was beyond the wrath of any of their imagined gods. Imported disease halved the population in four decades. Nor had they any choice but to capitulate to the power of firearms. If they resisted the men on these warships they were destroyed, like game, by their guns. Their response was to want guns for themselves, to want the power inherent in the possession of arms.

  The English mariners thought of the Tahitians as natives of an inferior civilisation. Samuel Wallis stuck a flag in the sand and named the island King George the Third Island, though it already had a name. Bligh came as an envoy of commercial enterprise: to uproot a thousand breadfruit plants in exchange for nails and beads.

  42

  I found it hard to decipher Lady Myre’s tattoo. It looked as if someone had kicked her bottom. She was unconcerned and confident that it would ‘settle down’. She’d had it done in a booth by the market that was open night and day. She said Roley wouldn’t mind if she got engraved with seven continents and changed her name to Lydia. I told her tattoos were spells printed on the skin and that Taaroa was the god of tattoos. First he painted the fishes in colours and patterns, then taught the art to mortals. I said tattooing was a ceremony, which should be accompanied by music from drums, flutes and co
nch shells. She said her man had an electric needle, which sounded like a dentist’s drill. I explained that ‘Tatua’ was a Tahitian onomatopoeic word for the sound of the teeth of a boned comb as it punctured the skin with pigment. For the Polynesians, I told her, tattoos were emblems of virility and status, for the sailors they were signs of macho brotherhood, or sexual involvement, but for the mutineers they became the ruddled marks for slaughter.

  She said it was irritating, the way I pontificated, as if I knew everything, and that I was an encyclopaedia of useless information. If I wasn’t so cute, she’d run a mile. In the tattoo booth she’d done some research on kava, the traditional Polynesian intoxicant. You made it by chewing the root of the pepper shrub, spitting this into a bowl, then adding coconut juice mixed with pepper leaves. The effect was befuddlement, stupefaction and sleep; it suppressed appetite, made the skin go scurfy and the eyes red and inflamed. She said I should try some. I should drink a lot of it. It might improve my libido and stop me turning into a bore. Then she ordered Buck’s Fizz and shish kebab to be sent to the room.

  In a huff I phoned and booked air tickets to Tubuai, to leave in two days.

  Lady Myre sat apart from me in the foyer of the Sofitel as we waited for the jeep that would take us inland. An Israeli couple who spoke only Ivrit were waiting too, and the Chinese woman from the dining room, who seemed calmer than on the previous evening. There was a display of Tahitian dancing for our entertainment. A printed blurb advertised it as a traditional welcome, the movements representing earth, wind and the rising sun. The hair of the girls was plaited with flowers, their shoulders and arms were bare, but not their breasts, their skirts were feathered, their petticoats white, their makeup by Lancôme – or was it Elizabeth Arden? To my embarrassment, after a minute Lady Myre joined in too, with a gardenia clenched between her teeth. She beckoned me to join her, but I pretended not to notice. The staff behind the counter started clapping, and guests gathered to watch the leg kick of this not-so-young Englishwoman. I was the only discomfited one. I feared identification with her, though in my heart I admired her joie de vivre. The Chinese woman resumed her coin-tossing when she felt secure from scrutiny.