Coconut Chaos
Page 21
‘You must do what you want to do, Mousey,’ she said.
‘Are you coming with me?’ I asked. That was as near as I could get to saying I hoped she would. She said she wasn’t ready, that this was an adventure and she wanted to live it.
Then she told me I was a disappointment to her. She felt I’d gone cold on her and I never said anything nice about her. And it bored her rigid the way I went on about the mutiny on the Bounty and chaos theory. She said I used this stuff as a barrier to keep life out. It was now that mattered not the eighteenth century. At first she’d thought I was cute and up for it, but I should learn the lesson that if I couldn’t give more I’d always be on my own. ‘We meet on a ship,’ she said. ‘We make the best of whatever feeling is between us. But you – you let everything slip through your fingers.’
I took my bicycle back to the hire shop then sat by the shore and looked out to sea. The horizon sixteen miles away was the limit of our vision, so Captain Dutt had said. It shimmered and invited, though there were no ships on it. Go the sixteen miles and there’d be another sixteen miles. No end to the limitation of it. I wondered what my journey would have been if I hadn’t met Lady Myre sitting on her pot noodles at Tauranga harbour. More focused perhaps but as adrift as I now felt.
I thought of Bligh and Christian and how they hadn’t made the best of whatever feeling was between them. I imagined the mutineers scanning the horizon beyond the reef, dreading the ship of retribution yet expecting it too. In the afternoon I packed my Eagle Creek bag and caught the plane back to Tahiti.
45
And then a car to Tahiti airport, in transit, wanting to be on my way. Harold Wing had again rearranged my flights. I’d change planes in Los Angeles, then to London and then … There’d be waiting at airports, but waiting in a departures lounge wouldn’t be much different from waiting somewhere else. I extravagantly tipped the taxi driver. He looked like Chief Otoo with a halo of black hair. I’d no more need of Pacific francs. He gave me a large black bead in appreciation and said it was a pearl.
The ritual of check-in and boarding gates didn’t seem like travel: a disembodied voice announcing delays and closing of gates, the checking of papers, emptying of pockets, the scrutiny of baggage. I asked for an aisle seat near the front of the plane.
I waited to fly over the knocked-about world, to go through time zones, two Wednesdays, so many Wednesdays, and then no more. Local time, estimated arrival time. The names of places on a screen: Kupang, Malang, Banjarman. The names of those long-gone much-raped pretty girls: Mauatua, Vahineatua, Teio, Faahotu …
I thought of Bligh and those starving men. At the edge of life and death. Drenched with rain and seawater, guided by the stars the sun and the moon, battered by waves, wringing out their tattered clothes, dividing a morsel of bread, a captured bird, into eighteen equal pieces. ‘Who shall have this?’ Gate 28 now closing.
I wondered where she was, that Lady Myre. Had she married Tahu, or met up again with Kurt, or Garth the step-brother? Had Sir Roland sent a ship to collect her? I scanned the waiting passengers and thought I saw her, that straight back and rolling walk, that modulated embarrassing voice: ‘Drivah you’re going too fast.’ I wondered why I missed her, she was so unsuitable, it wasn’t rational love. But her indifference to uncertainty had allayed my confusion, and she was so good at the thrill of the moment, the fruits of the day.
Images of a journey: her singing on the coach to Tauranga, seasick on the deck of Kurt’s catamaran, wasps swirling round her, gardenias in her hair – all of it gone. Thanks for all your generous love and thanks for all the fun. The words of some song. And such a yearning on my part for something I’d never find. Did she collect things because of the elusiveness of the moment – the stones from the beach, travellers that passed by – whereas I let it all slip away? Would passengers please proceed to Gate 34, now boarding.
As she stood in the lagoon at Tubuai, a spear in her hand, in her mind’s eye she was a Polynesian fisherwoman. Or dancing with Captain Dutt, how amused the sailors seemed. The chaos of her sermon on Pitcairn, her calm in the storm. The storm was so much more than any violence in my heart but it hurt me to remember the silkiness of her skin, the comfort of her arms, the sweetness of her kisses. We shared a journey, it ended, we went our separate ways. I wondered if she too in a way was seeking home.
You have to be so close to one person only, to hear the beat of a heart. A catamaran with a broken rudder, the crack of huge waves against the boat. Her cries too, and mine. Beyond the fear I’d rather have died by drowning in those seas, in her arms, on that night, than in the old people’s home.
But the morning came and the danger passed and the sea was calm and the sun shone. And so again goodbye. Goodbye to the crew of the Tundra Princess, to Verity, to mother, to the moon and the Pole Star and the wasps in the hymnal. Goodbye to my brothers, to Jackie the tame frigate bird, to those who chose to go to sea but didn’t choose to drown. And goodbye to the journey and the elusive moment, for there is no stillness in the turning world.
In a discarded English newspaper at Los Angeles airport I read a letter from a distant relative of William Bligh’s, Maurice Bligh of Sittingbourne. Hollywood film-makers, he wrote, blamed his ancestor William Bligh, RN, FRS, for the mutiny on the Bounty. They should realise there never was a mutiny, only a ‘piratical seizure’. There was no evidence that Bligh was a tyrant. ‘Fletcher Christian wasn’t an aristocrat like Marlon Brando seemed to think, but a sweaty, faceless, badly educated poor boy from a bankrupt family. If he looked like the only known portrait of his son Thursday October Christian he had problems.’
This later Bligh was partisan about his great-great-great-uncle, thrice removed, whom others called Bounty Bastard Bligh. I wondered about the favours Bligh gave and took from Christian and Heywood both. Heywood had connections in high places, so he didn’t swing from the gibbet for helping Christian mutiny. Lord Hood, who presided at the trial, was a family friend. He took him as a midshipman on his ship the Victory. Heywood then had a long and successful naval career and became a captain. The men who died ‘hanged by the neck’, found guilty of mutiny – John Millward, Thomas Ellison, Thomas Burkett – didn’t have connections to bail them out. Bags over their heads, nooses round their necks, a shot from a gun, ropes pulled, their bodies swung for two hours in the rain.
Millward had said that a musket was forced on him in the fracas of the mutiny. Thomas Ellison said, ‘I was no more than between sixteen and seventeen years of age when this was done.’ Thomas Burkett left a son on Tahiti.
So many people in the departures lounge, whatever the time of day or night. All on their way. The women on the Bounty, menstruating, unable to keep clean, unable to get away, caught in a man’s world. The eight-year-old girl who saw John Adams despatch Matthew Quintal with a hatchet and the blood spatter the walls. My own mother, so old, beyond reach. She had a fine face, high cheekbones, an engaging laugh. I wished I’d asked for a photograph. The stowaway boy on Bligh’s second breadfruit journey who died when he reached England. The quiet gardener, David Nelson, who worked to make the breadfruit enterprise a success. Ridiculous Dr Huggan, all the time drunk and disreputable. The sea closing over floundering men when the Pandora was wrecked and the boats were full.
Christian claimed he’d only taken one coconut because he was thirsty. One thing led to another. If everything connects, who can know it all. The abducted Tahitian girls climbing the Hill of Difficulty, losing even their names, weeping as they saw the Bounty burn, enduring sex, giving birth, tearing down their houses to build a boat to escape captivity. The Pitcairn girls who couldn’t say they’d been caught like fish by the Pitcairn men. The animals … Pigs shoved over the cliffs because of some loony notion of God’s will. Cows and goats tethered and sliding as the waves rolled. The cats who’d jumped ship when they spied land, to be chased and castrated centuries later by a rapist with a chisel.
And I, moving among facts, half-truths and illusions, not a scribe
of certainties, with a central image of a rudderless boat, at the mercy of the sea, at the mercy of the storm, striving for direction to an undirectional journey, most at home if there was a joke. The fumes from a plane on the runway gagged my throat. Surabaya, Solo City, Singapore now boarding, gates now closing, arrival time unknown.
46
I boarded another Boeing 747. I glanced to the left as I walked to the right. I turned when I saw that blonded head. She was stretched out on her reclining seat, iPod applied, a Bellini and almonds on her personal side table, the white sapphire glinting, demurely dressed in Rosie’s blouse and a black silk trouser suit, reading the Wall Street Journal.
‘Hello, Mousey,’ she said. ‘Are you going to steerage class?’ I said I supposed I was. She asked me to be a darling and get her bag from the overhead locker, she wanted to file a nail. I handed her a small black case. She said she’d bought essentials in LA while staying at Mulholland Drive, but couldn’t wait for Martina and the row of possibles at Harrods. ‘I told you Roley would sort things,’ she said. ‘He always does. He’s such a dependable old dog.’ I said I’d imagined her married to Tahu and baking fish on stones in Tubuai for his five children. ‘Please, Mousey,’ she said. ‘Do I look like a Polynesian native? When push comes to shove I’m strictly Room 500 at the George Cinq.’
Then she told me I’d played silly buggers, going off on my own, leaving her with those yachties, then snubbing her at the Sofitel. ‘I’m far too nice and straightforward for a headfuck,’ she said, and now there was ice in those translucent eyes. But she said she’d no regrets. It had been her best holiday ever, apart from when she went white-water rafting in Ecuador, and if again she was marooned on a scarcely inhabited island, or stuck at sea in a small boat in a force twelve gale, she hoped she’d have me in bed with her to get her through the night.
What could I say? I thanked her for all the love and all the fun. She turned to the shares page of her paper. I made my way to my seat.
AFTERWORD
I CANNOT SAY, ‘All characters in this book are entirely fictitious and bear no resemblance to real people alive or dead.’ Perhaps I should say, ‘Any character in this book bears only questionable resemblance to a real person, alive, unborn or dead.’ I’ve hovered between fact and fiction. The ‘I’ of author and narrator are not one and the same, but nor are they entirely distinct. I have kept to the public record for facts about eighteenth-century sea voyages and the felonies of present-day Pitcairn men, but the narrator’s relatives, love affairs and preoccupations are not mine. Yes, I travelled to Pitcairn on a cargo ship, stayed on the island, left on a catamaran, but my actual journey was not as written here. Or some of it was like it, but different too. So in answer to the unasked question, what really happened? Well, I made a voyage, half-remembered, half-imagined and open to interpretation.
My gratitude is unequivocal. All thanks to Pedro Niada who prompted me to this journey. Pedro lives on Robinson Crusoe Island, 360 miles west of Chile. He was my guide when I stayed there in 2000 to write Selkirk’s Island. In 2003 he sailed the South Pacific. In an email he told me of Pitcairn’s remoteness, rough terrain and strangeness. His email coincided with news reports about crimes of rape and assault of Pitcairn girls. The accused men had the same surnames as the eighteenth-century mutineers from HMS Bounty.
Pitcairn, the mutiny on the Bounty, chaos theory, and a sense of being drawn to an isolated faraway island all resonated in my thoughts and feelings when Pedro sent his friendly email and like a mutineer I wanted to sail with the wind, because of a private chaos of heart.
Thanks too to Philippa Brewster. Halfway through working on this book I slipped into a cafard. Philippa called round every second Thursday for coffee and pages in progress. With her help I got back on course.
I revised my draft manuscript in the writers’ residence on Chloride Street in Broken Hill in the Australian outback. It was an ideal retreat. My thanks to Marvis Solfield, Broken Hill’s library manager, for arranging the residency and to Gillian Parry for recommending me.
This is the third of my books designed by Peter Campbell. This time there’s the added delight of his illustrations for the text. His collaboration reflects our abiding friendship. I’m grateful to Alan Samson, publisher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, for his help and guidance. Georgina Capel, my agent, as ever gave her much valued support and advice. Anne Clements read the manuscript and made many a discerning comment and improving point. Naomi Narod watered my plants while I travelled.
And all thanks to my friends in Devon. There is a real Mill Cottage where Pam Mills lets me write. The swallows do return each year. And at the top of the lane is the Greenshields’ farm, where at the end of many a working day I’ve sat by the log fire in the inglenook to drink a glass of wine and to chat and joke with Renate and Annie.
London, Broken Hill, Devon, 2006
About the Author
Diana Souhami is the author of many highly acclaimed books: Selkirk’s Island, winner of the 2001 Whitbread Biography Award; The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and winner of the Lambda Literary Award; the bestselling Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 1997; Natalie and Romaine; Gertrude and Alice; Greta and Cecil, Gluck: Her Biography; and others. She lives in London and Devon.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 2008 by Diana Souhami
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8373-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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DIANA SOUHAMI
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