Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  They were worried by a piecemeal approach to the island, with no rounded vision for reform. All the problems intertwined: erosion, a non-existent infrastructure, a small, ageing population, lack of money. A government official had been sent to eradicate the rose apple that choked indigenous plants. When it was ripped out there was further erosion of the soil. The tradition of barter had worked in the past but now there were too few islanders, and resources were depleted. Money couldn’t be made out of selling honey, dried bananas and curios if no ships called. Nor could they compete on prices. The cost of drying bananas was high. The generator was driven by diesel transported at prohibitive cost. It would be cheaper to give them money and save the electricity.

  Hank said, like Rosie, that he’d missed out on his daughters’ childhood. After they’d gone away to school in New Zealand they’d never really come home to Pitcairn in spirit. And Rosie now missed out on her role as a grandmother. But over and above everything was the trouble of these trials. The cost was so high. And what would it buy them but grief?

  IV

  LEAVING PITCAIRN

  Chaos imposes limitation upon our ability to forecast

  38

  We grouped by the jetty. The wind was a light west-northwesterly. ‘Perfect,’ Kurt said. ‘We’ll be in Mangareva in thirty-six hours. Two hundred and sixty nautical miles. Seven knots an hour.’ To me the sea looked wintry and rough. ‘The sea’s sweet,’ Hank said. ‘The wind will catch your sails.’

  Rosie’d taken me to the shore on her quad bike and I was spattered with mud. A clutch of Pitcairners was there to say goodbye: all four of the island’s schoolchildren, Nola with a bag of pineapple buns, Hank with a crate of cabbages, bananas, grapefruit, Clementines, pawpaws, yams and passion fruit – ‘for the journey,’ he said and would take no money. Bea rested a spear with a crab wriggling on its spike against the jetty wall and stamped my passport. ‘Welcome to the Pitcairn Islands, Police and Immigration’. It seemed a contrary stamp, as I was leaving, but everything Pitcairn seemed contrary. ‘B. Christian Police Officer,’ she wrote beneath it in curly writing.

  Lady Myre had been there since dawn. She was dressed for the sea, the logo FIRST MATE on her T-shirt, her visor white, her mascara blue, her shorts patterned with anchors. Her elegant legs were peppered with bug bites and mud. Round her neck were a spyglass and compass, clipped to her belt was her flask of rum and pawpaw juice. Her fourteen pieces of luggage stacked by the jetty all bore what I supposed was the Myre crest – a dragon at odds with a pitchfork. ‘My man,’ she called to Kurt. He gave an embarrassed smirk. ‘Ship ahoy,’ she called, and waved at the catamaran as it bounced on the waves in Bounty Bay.

  Kurt took her luggage and my small rucksack ahead in the dinghy. I hovered, waiting for his return, anticipating separation from the islanders. The visiting officials were arrayed, pleased I was leaving with my views unpenned. Mary, orchestrator of the Truth Game, gave me a triumphant peck. ‘Back to Hampstead, eh?’ She looked, as ever, pleased with what she said. Les, the locum, talked of seasickness remedies, his nice wife smiled. The social workers stood about looking like social workers, the two policemen looked bored.

  I hugged Rosie and told her I’d miss her. ‘How well we hit it off,’ I said, ‘two women from such different backgrounds.’ She said she’d miss me too. I thanked her for all her many kindnesses. She thanked me for the blouse and gave me a letter she’d written to her Chinese friend Charles Mo in Mangareva. Perhaps he’d help me find accommodation there, she said.

  Lady Myre tripped from the jetty to the dinghy and Kurt’s arms with a whoop and an ooh-la-la. I stepped down decorously with merely a steadying hand. We sped out to sea and I waved: at the small group on the jetty, at the Hill of Difficulty and Bang Iron Valley, at this isolated, troubled island to which I’d never return, at some inner melancholy, at a half-imagined image of that bedraggled group of fugitives who’d arrived there in January 1790, desperate for fresh water and the peaceful cover of trees. Most of all I waved at Rosie, though I soon could not see her wide, smiling face. Those abducted Polynesian women, Mauatua, Faahotu, Mareva, Teatuahitea, were with her, in her work, in her cooking, in her dark skin and hair, in her knowledge of the island and the Pitcairn dialect. I hadn’t intended to leave when I did, or in this hurried way, I regretted I’d not been to Henderson Island or seen the flightless rail, but it had seemed serendipitous when I heard Kurt’s voice on the intercom and saw his yacht on the ocean.

  ‘Bye-bye, Bounty Bay,’ Lady Myre called. She flicked extravagant kisses from her fingertips then turned to the virgin territory of Kurt, her ascent from the dinghy to his boat, and her journey into the blue.

  There were three cabins. Kurt had the largest with a control panel by his bed. The second was taken up with yellow oilskins and all Lady Myre’s luggage. The bed to which she and I were consigned took up most of the third. ‘Queen size,’ said Kurt. There were two windows close to the sea, which could be opened if it was calm.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Lady Myre. ‘What fun. Are you for aft or starboard?’ She wheeled in a case the size of a cupboard. ‘I don’t want much for the voyage,’ she said, then whispered, ‘So we’re bed-mates after all.’

  Kurt pulled the anchor, hoisted sails and talked about mainsails and roller reefing and the wind abaft the beam. He showed us how to switch on the engine, pump the toilet, boil the kettle and blow our whistles when we fell into the sea. He explained how, if the boat flipped over in a storm, though it couldn’t be righted, it was possible to survive for two weeks in a watertight cell in the cabin.

  He fired the engine. Pitcairn receded to a grey strip on the horizon. Within a month it would break into the world’s news, an isolated rock defined by its desperate past and the vast Pacific Ocean, its menfolk shamed, its people uncertain what citizenship they held or from where help might come. Kurt bounded the deck. I sat at the ship’s wheel and he switched from autopilot to manual and told me to watch the dials and keep the course on twenty-nine. It was as near as I would ever come to navigation. I felt exhilarated as I steered the waves, at one with the sea, the wind and the sky. I was an eighteenth-century mariner on the wide southern sea, there was nothing in view but the circle of the world, a frigate bird, a tern, a distant wave’s crest that might be mistaken for a ship.

  Lady Myre swayed on to the deck holding a carrier bag. She was the colour of Kermit and her mouth was fixed in a rictus. ‘Sick,’ she said, then lay on the floor. Both she and I were wearing transdermal patches of Scopoderm behind our ears, and acupressure wristbands, and had swallowed quantities of Stugeron. I felt scornful of her for not being more of a sailor, for not being able to transcend such visceral things. I felt an intense sense of freedom on this small boat and on such a journey of chance. Close to the sea and the wind and sails, I imagined the Bounty cutting its lonely course, with the mutineers searching for the uncharted island of Pitcairn. I imagined Captain Bligh and the other eighteen men plying the ocean in that launch half the size of this boat, living on an ounce of bread and a quarter of a pint of water a day. Kurt cut out the engine and the wind caught the sails. This, I felt, was the true experience of the sea.

  But suddenly, too, my body felt cold and a wave of nausea made me groan. ‘Keep busy,’ Kurt said. ‘Don’t give in to it. It’s all in the mind. Keep your eyes on the ocean.’ He said he was starving and asked me if I’d like fried eggs and sausages. I made it to the toilet but couldn’t recall what to do with the levers. Kurt ignored me. I returned to the deck and lay beside Lady Myre. Her eyes didn’t register. My teeth juddered. I didn’t mind if I were to die. She held my hand. ‘What an adventure,’ she whispered with a slur. ‘Isn’t it corking?’ A smell of fatty sausage wafted by. ‘Aren’t we lucky ones?’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t miss this for worlds.’ Then she threw up again.

  Time seemed to stop. I was aware of Kurt moving the sails, of the sky darkening as the world turned. At some point he suggested we’d be more comfortable in the cabin, but neither of us
moved. At night he covered us with blankets and oilskins. I dozed and woke and saw wave after wave furled with white. I saw the moon emerge from clouds. Beyond the awfulness of it all I felt glad to be on this small craft. I heard the music of the ocean in a timeless night and felt the thread between then and now. I thought of Bligh and his crew and how the sea had washed over them and they’d bailed all through their dark nights. I imagined them throwing valued stores overboard so they could bail better and to lighten the boat: clothes, rope, spare sails … I thought of the lies told to Titahiti, Manarii, Oheu and the other Polynesian men trapped on the Bounty in a chaotic venture they couldn’t control. And the animals – the pigs, goats and hens – and their bewildered suffering on a journey to hell.

  So Lady Myre and I spent our night together, prone on deck. Even in the dark she looked weird, her nose very small, her mouth very wide. She’d wrapped a jersey round her face to protect her ears from the wind. At one point she sang in her clear soprano, ‘Oh Mr Porter, what shall I do? / I wanted to go to Birmingham and you’ve taken me on to Crewe,’ and then convulsed with laughter, which made her head hurt and her stomach retch. I said I thought she’d wanted to go to Picton. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what happens, you start out intending one thing and you end up with another.’ I hadn’t the energy to remind her of my interest in chaos theory, and how small initial differences amplify until they are no longer small, and of the order that lies behind chaos but is not providential.

  The following afternoon, feeling better, we sat with Kurt in the cockpit lounge and sipped peppermint tea. But the weather had gone haywire, I suppose because of unknown variables. The predicted wind direction was spectacularly wrong and we were being blown due north by force seven winds at thirty knots an hour, with gusts of fifty knots and waves forty feet high. Kurt said it didn’t matter because there was no land to crash into before Alaska. He didn’t want to pitch into the wind or use his limited fuel, so he hove to, reefed the sails, pulled up the dagger boards, turned off the autopilot and said we’d go where we would and wait for the weather to change.

  There were terrible cracks and bangs as the sea pounded the boat. Lady Myre said she wanted something stronger than tea. She’d finished her rum, so I got my flask of Glenfiddich from my bag. She added cranberry juice to hers to hide the taste, though I told her I doubted this was a good idea. Our glasses swooped across the table.

  ‘Let’s talk about sexual organs,’ Kurt said. I said I’d rather not. ‘He’s a dry stick,’ Lady Myre whispered. ‘The slightest spark will ignite him. Cross your legs and hunch your shoulders.’

  Kurt then went to the cockpit door and yelled, ‘You bloody bitch.’ I feared I was very much at sea with two extremely strange people. ‘Bloody fucking Pacific,’ he said. ‘If I’d’ve known it would be like this, I’d never have come here.’ Then he sat and delivered a monologue, for he hadn’t spoken for all those days. He said he’d lived on this boat for four years, had given up a lucrative veterinary practice in Basle and never again wanted a house. He’d left his wife because he was in love with his receptionist. For a year they hadn’t touched, but the atmosphere between them as they tended the Chihuahuas and wolfhounds had been electric, all day, and day after day.

  ‘Dear oh dear,’ said Lady Myre. A huge wave broke over the deck. Her open case slid across the cabin floor.

  He realised he’d never loved his wife but he needed a woman and didn’t want to sail alone. He was now forty-nine and his moods veered from depression to elation. When young he’d read Nietzsche and thought of suicide. His father’s tyrannical moods had ruled the house and his mother was subservient to him – he’d died twenty-six years ago of prostate cancer. She was now eighty, Valium-addicted and with her memory shot to pieces. She didn’t know Kurt was alone on the ocean, she thought he was with his last girlfriend Leila, who was Brazilian and black and had no money and was so beautiful she was stared at in all the ports. She had three children, all with different fathers, and had deceived Kurt into thinking they were her brother’s children. She used to leave her knickers on the windlass and the rigging.

  ‘Dear oh dear,’ said Lady Myre once more. The sky was black with rain, and lightning forked the ocean. Kurt went outside and again shouted, ‘You fucking bitch.’ I was afraid he’d be washed overboard, leaving Lady Myre and me alone to manage the boat.

  The wind, now gale force nine, moaned, and blue-black waves, fringed with white and high like mountains, cracked against the boat. Lady Myre lurched to the cabin, I supposed to be sick again. I refrained from mentioning the cranberry juice. Kurt said sailing was a metaphor for freedom, and the ocean helped him formulate his thoughts and to find himself. I thought of the Bounty and of being cooped up. I felt I had a better understanding of why they might have massacred each other when the opportunity came. Once again Kurt asked me if I’d like a sausage. He got out a packet of bright-red things acquired from the Pitcairn shop. I wondered why he resisted Hank’s fresh fruit and vegetables. I thought of the hunger of the ocean’s sharks and of how long it might take to die of hypothermia. I had a headache and felt very strange.

  ‘You look like an ostrich,’ Kurt told me. ‘You watch every wave. You go to the worst-case scenario. I am anxious, but you make me more anxious.’

  Lady Myre returned, dressed as a pirate, in knee-length breeches and cummerbund, with a red-spotted kerchief round her head. She’d applied bright-red lipstick, green eyeshadow and a sickly perfume – Joy, perhaps, by Jean Patou. She lurched with the yacht, whooped and slid to a seat. ‘You’re very good-looking,’ she said to Kurt. I said I must lie down. I felt sure they’d manage without me.

  I lay on the cabin bed and watched the waves pound against the window glass. I didn’t see how such a small boat could survive this pounding much longer. I hoped for a quick demise. The thought of first being cocooned with these two for a fortnight, upside down in the watertight hull of the cabin, seemed an unwelcome option. I imagined the Pandora as it wrecked on the barrier reef, the wailing of the wind in the rigging, the cries for help, which did not come, of the drowning men, some still in shackles.

  I closed my eyes and again tried to remember the names of the mutineers with Fletcher Christian on the Bounty as he searched for Pitcairn: Alexander Smith, Edward Young, Matthew Quintal, William Brown. It occurred to me that I never used Lady Myre’s first name and that I didn’t know her unmarried name, and how bleached of meaning names become, and how hard they are to remember if they are unfamiliar sounds.

  I thought of David Nelson the botanist, in that open boat with Bligh, racked by fever and gut pain and without even the comfort of a soft bed and a warm blanket as I had now. Bligh named Nelson Hill in Tasmania after him when he stopped there in February 1792 in the Providence on his second breadfruit journey to Tahiti.

  I tried to recite the inventory of what they had with them in the open boat: twine, sails, some bread, pieces of pork, six quarts of rum, six bottles of wine, a quadrant and compass, four cutlasses, no maps … I wondered why Christian allowed them anything. He knew what a resourceful navigator Bligh was, how fired he’d be by the challenge to survive with scant resources. Why hadn’t he tipped him empty-handed into the boat to a certain death, the way people now abandon dogs on the motorways? I puzzled again about the true relationship between Christian and Bligh. Bligh had said Christian was the ‘object of his particular regard and attention’. What had that meant beyond dining with him nightly and tutoring him in the ways of the sea? And what was behind that plea of Christian’s: ‘That Captain Bligh, that is the thing. I am in hell. I am in hell.’ Bligh was quick to say the mutiny was ‘not to be wondered at’ because of the lure of the Tahitian women. But Christian didn’t seem that enamoured of women, whatever the fiction told by Clark Gable, Marlon Brando or Mel Gibson.

  My reveries soothed me, so that although I didn’t forget I was being buffeted towards Alaska in dangerous seas, or how uncontrolled the situation was – that I was quite beyond reach of rescue and
that no one who cared for me knew where I was – I found I could listen in a disinterested way to the thwacking of the waves. I thought of the real meaning of metaphors of the ocean – all at sea, washed up, adrift, going under – and although I felt detached from hope or prayer and had no sense of fate, as I lay still my mind calmed into the acceptance world of luck and grief and the split-second recognition of chance.

  Lady Myre crept into the cabin at some indeterminate hour, shed her clothes, put on men’s pyjamas – Sir Roland’s perhaps – and crawled in beside me. She snuggled far too close. She smelled of peppermint and whisky and her perfume and of the sea somehow and the outdoors. ‘I know you’re not asleep,’ she whispered. ‘Who could be in all this?’ A mighty wave – was it the tenth? I wondered – cracked against the boat. I said nothing. I felt I was the eye of the storm inside and outside the catamaran.

  ‘You know I’m incredibly attracted to you,’ Lady Myre said. I refused to be unnerved even in this noisy dark and with the chaotic motion of the sea. With every rise of the boat to the wave’s peak an eerie light strobe-lit her face. Yesterday she’d been green, tonight she was silvery white. She’d wound some sort of wires or pipe cleaners into her hair – I wasn’t going to enquire why. ‘Please put your hand in my jim-jams and make me come,’ Lady Myre said. I lay very still and kept very quiet the way one does in the vicinity of a roused creature of an unfamiliar species whose intentions are unclear. ‘Please,’ she said.