Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  In my career as a lesbian I’ve had a great many lovers, many of them exciting, all of them unsuitable, but I’ve always retained a sense of in some way choosing my destiny for the night. This night it seemed was to be an exception. I wondered if danger had made her sexual. I’ve heard sex is never more intense than when bomber planes fly overhead. I suggested Kurt was more up for it than I and clearly found her attractive. I said I wouldn’t at all mind or feel left out if she went to him and they shared a cabin.

  ‘You little fool,’ she said. ‘It’s you I want. I’m more attracted to you than to anyone for years.’

  I made the drear excuse of the headache, for I didn’t want to offend or be unkind. In fact my headache, curiously, had disappeared and the huge capricious ocean no longer seemed my main concern, though it continued to buffet this bauble of a boat towards the most northern shore. ‘Perhaps we should just lie quietly together,’ I said, ‘a shelter from the storm.’ She made an exasperated noise but then became quiet and put her arms lightly around me. I didn’t want to encourage her or be misconstrued, but out of a sort of gratitude I gently nuzzled my face against her neck.

  Thus we arranged ourselves, rather as on the previous night. I was aware of the silkiness of her skin and of her thoughtful stillness. I tried not to think about the oddness of her manner, the smallness of her nose, the wideness of her mouth, her alarming changes in skin colour and the way she made me think of Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death. In this violent night she was my consolation. Or at least she was there, unlike anyone else. The mighty ocean lifted us high then dropped us down. We had no choice but to assent to its ferocious rhythm, its repetition. Its waves pushed us hard against each other. I lay in the slight arms of this strangest of strangers and sort of had sex with the sea.

  ‘This too will pass,’ I said.

  ‘I hope it never does,’ she replied.

  At some point in that timeless night I struggled to the toilet: to be sick, of course, and to have a pee. I staggered and clung to a protruding sink or jamb. There was water swilling over the floor, and the cockpit door was open. I tried to look outside for Kurt but there was just the maniacal sea. I was soaked with spray when Lady Myre hauled me back into the bunk and I told her of my fears.

  ‘I hope he’s gone,’ she said. ‘Then it will be just you and me and the cruel sea.’

  I supposed I was afraid, but I had been more afraid, when young, of rejection, abandonment and the indifference of those whom I would have liked to love me. I did not doubt the sea’s indifference on this wild night, though it seemed like involvement of the deepest sort.

  I thought that perhaps when morning came the storm might give way to a rueful sunrise and calmer seas and the chance again to find our course, but the thwacking of the waves went on. I didn’t know if Lady Myre was awake or asleep. She lay silent and still, as if in extremis she’d at last found calm. In the first grey light of dawn I remembered it was my birthday. I decided I wouldn’t tell my companions for it seemed irrelevant. I thought of the ordinary contentment of the previous year: Verity bringing me a cup of tea in bed, her gift of an electronic organiser, her card with a photo of migrating swallows, our supper at a fish restaurant in Borough Market. It all seemed safe and out of reach and long ago.

  The storm did not abate. At dawn Kurt came to our cabin door. ‘I have a very severe announcement,’ he said. ‘And I don’t want you’ – he jerked the word and jabbed a finger at me – ‘to make things worse than they are.’ He said the rudder was jammed. The force of the waves had slammed against it so he couldn’t now steer, and the boat was beyond control. The only way to free it was for him to dive beneath the hull, which was impossible in these seas with waves converged in force ten winds. A wave would crack his head and kill him, and anyway he might need a jack and a wrench which he didn’t have. The wind had apparently again changed and we were now back where we’d been twelve hours previously. He said we’d have to drift until the sea was calm enough for him to dive, which might be for two weeks, and that though now we were again heading towards Pitcairn, the wind was so capricious, the sea so turbulent, all might change again and again.

  I remembered Bligh’s notes about how, in the open boat, when they’d got through the Great Barrier Reef and were pulling the boat ashore on a tiny uninhabited island, a gudgeon had broken from the rudder. That had been in May 1789. He wrote that, had it happened at sea, it ‘would probably have been the cause of our perishing as the management of the boat could not have been so nicely preserved as these very heavy seas required’. I’d looked up ‘gudgeon’ in the dictionary. It was the metal socket in which the pintle of a rudder turns. I’d looked up ‘pintle’. It was a pin or bolt. I supposed that the same thing had gone wrong now, but in very heavy seas.

  I thought of Randy Christian and Dr Scantlebury in a small boat near the Pitcairn coast, of a wave snapping the boat like a twig, and of him dragging Scantlebury with his head bleeding into the dark cave he knew about, and of how these sorts of things were always happening to someone somewhere.

  Kurt railed about the seaworthiness of his catamaran – how the mast had broken in the Mediterranean, so helicopters had to guide him in to St Tropez, and things weren’t yet sorted on that because the insurers said it was his fault, but that this was worse. These were the worst seas he’d ever seen – worse than when he’d rounded the Horn. These winds were at fifty knots. They were force ten to eleven on the Beaufort scale and the swell of the waves took them forty feet high. He asked me what I’d done on Pitcairn to make the seas so violent.

  I got five milligrams of Valium from my sponge bag. Kurt said the wind was again building up. I didn’t see how it could build up more. I noticed he moved round the boat with his legs apart the way drunks do when trying to keep their balance. Lady Myre started to sing ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’ and kept saying, ‘Where are my chocolate brazils?’ She seemed to have even more teeth and an ever wider smile. She wanted us all to play a board game. She’d found one called Dingo and another called Murder on the Orient Express. She dropped both boxes and counters scattered everywhere.

  Between me and Kurt was an atmosphere of accusation. He blamed me for exacerbating things. I asked him to use his satellite phone to inform someone of our whereabouts. I said I thought it would be a consolation if someone knew where we were, and they might think of a way to help us. What ‘someone’ did I suggest? he asked with scorn – his sister in Frankfurt perhaps. I volunteered the cellphone numbers of Graham Wragg on the Bounty Bay, and Nigel Jolly on the Braveheart, both of whose boats plied these seas. Or the Pitcairn Administration Office in Auckland, or a shipping agent there, or a journalist in Tauranga.

  ‘Do you really think’, Kurt asked me, ‘that a small boat would divert to help us in these seas, or that anyone would send out a ship or a plane to rescue us? Do you know where we are? We’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Do you know the size of the Pacific Ocean?’

  I very easily feel guilty, but I couldn’t see how it was my fault that any of this had happened. But he went to his cabin and I heard him speaking to what must have been the Pitcairn Office in Auckland. He gave our latitude and longitude and explained our plight. He said we were 22° 51 mins south in latitude and 132° 06 mins west in longitude. He said it wasn’t a Mayday – he didn’t think we were in immediate danger – but we had no manoeuvrability and if the storm changed direction and we were carried at this speed towards Pitcairn’s rocky coast, we’d be in real trouble. Then he went outside and I saw him sort of swinging from the rigging, and again I hoped he wouldn’t be washed overboard, though he seemed a rather redundant captain as things were.

  Lady Myre decided to scramble eggs, but the pan and everything else flew across the galley. She asked me if I believed in God, and I said I didn’t. It seemed she’d taken little notice of all I’d told her about chaos and random but significant interactions. She said she believed in everything: God, Buddhism, Horoscopy, Love, and that belief seemed better than sceptic
ism, because she’d rather say yes to life than no. And she gave me her terrible smile.

  We ate pineapple buns and cornflakes and tried to stop the powdered-milk mix slopping out of our bowls. Kurt asked about the sex crimes on Pitcairn and, because we seemed again to be heading in that direction, I tried to voice my views about the island and citizenship and the current trials and to what law of what land or conscience a man was answerable when it came to the rape of a girl.

  Lady Myre said she thought mandatory castration was the only thing to stop rapists re-offending. She said she doubted there was such a thing as good sex on Pitcairn and, as far as she was concerned, good sex was defined by the intensity of her orgasm. ‘If on the Richter scale’, she said, ‘it’s of magnitude nine, and ricochets through me, whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh, then I call that good sex whatever the technique.’ She’d found her chocolate brazils and was sharing them with Kurt. She was wearing an emerald-green visor and matching shorts and a purple T-shirt with the slogan DIESEL printed across it. With a wink she told me these were the colours of women’s emancipation.

  Kurt wanted to pursue this line of conversation but I did not. I told him how the estimated cost of the Pitcairn trials was more than five million pounds but very little money was spent on this remote island’s infrastructure. How they depended on rain for the water supply and hadn’t a proper jetty or café or mainland phone. How they were all related to each other and that with few visitors they were suspicious of the outside world and how these troubles divided families and humiliated them all.

  Lady Myre said, ‘We know all this, darling,’ but I wanted to tell them more. I described my last late-night conversation with Rosie and Hank and Michael Young, when they’d said they thought they lived under Pitcairn not British law. I said how the accused men had been encouraged to plead not guilty by the defence lawyers. I agreed with the islanders that some sort of truth-and-reconciliation process would’ve been better for them all. They were fearful of who’d look after them if it was decided they weren’t British. They couldn’t make money from selling curios because where were the cruise ships now? And what use were Pitcairn stamps when there was no way of sending post.

  It wasn’t, I said, that I wanted in any way to defend the abusive men – far from it, it was that I didn’t think this was the best route to reform. Because what was their idea of wrongdoing? I told them how Steve Christian had boasted of killing a hundred and forty fish in an hour. These men needed macho strength to survive the rigours of their crude and difficult life. What was sex for them but violence under a banyan tree? ‘You can’t be a girl on Pitcairn and not have sex,’ Rosie’d told me. And though it was like that for the Polynesian women abducted by Fletcher Christian and Edward Young and William Brown, whose fault was it that customs hadn’t changed? Who policed the place, or taught that sex should be consensual, or was concerned about what was of benefit to the islanders? The teachings of Adventism were so repressive and it was hardly possible to have candlelit dinners or to woo with flowers. ‘Pitcairn men don’t do wooing and flowers,’ I said, ‘though they like to tease … like with a fish on a hook.’

  Outside there was a thunderous crack. Kurt staggered to the deck. I swigged whisky from my flask. Through my oration Lady Myre had been sorting the counters for Dingo and Murder on the Orient Express. ‘It’s a pity you’re such a trendy lefty, with not an iota of a sense of humour,’ she said, ‘because you do look so cute.’ She put her hand on my thigh. ‘Will you be my fish on a hook?’ she said. ‘I’ll woo you with flowers and candlelit dinners. Though I’d quite like to have my way with you under a banyan tree.’

  I wondered if death, when it came, would seem as surreal. ‘We’re talking about the rape of girls’, I said, ‘by very rough men.’

  ‘I know, darling,’ she said. ‘But what can I do about it? It’s an arsehole of an island. It would be better if it sank into the sea.’

  I marvelled at how at ease she seemed in this dangerous situation. On Pitcairn she’d been depressed and scared of cockroaches and bed bugs. Now she seemed blithe and sublimely optimistic, as if safeguarded and in her element, whereas I was afraid.

  Kurt came back and shouted, ‘Yippeeee, yippeeee, the rudder’s free!’ He circled round and punched the air.

  ‘You see,’ said Lady Myre. ‘That’s what happens if you believe in Horoscopy and God.’

  Apparently a counter-wave of similar force had dashed against the rudder and knocked it back into position. Kurt became so happy. He kept shouting yippee, and he sort of yodelled and said he was in love again. He raised a sail, fired the engine, and said now we’d blast towards Mangareva in no time. He put Jimi Hendrix on his CD player, cooked eggs and bacon, and sang along to ‘Rainy Day, Dream Away’. I asked him how dangerous it had been, losing the rudder, and he said it was the most dangerous thing that had ever happened to him, ameliorated only because there was no land mass near.

  The sea turned calm and so did the mood between Kurt and me. We opened a bottle of wine and set the table. Our plates and tumblers didn’t slide to the floor. He even thanked me for finding those phone numbers. He said the contact had reassured him and that now he was glad we’d travelled together, though in the storm he’d thought I’d brought him bad luck.

  That evening the setting sun made a path across the water. The sea was quiet enough for us to hear the squeak of the wind in the bunched bananas, now mottled by seawater, on the rigging. We talked of atolls and coral reefs and the joys of snorkelling. I supposed the Bounty passengers, in these same waters, had times of joy and well-being, of plain sailing in sunshine, of being dry and fed and clean. I thought how like an eighteenth-century sailor Kurt perhaps was, so close to the ocean and the sky, alert to danger, seeking always for an unknown destination.

  The moon came up and the world was a clear circle. We played Lady Myre’s wretched Dingo game, with many counters that belonged to Murder on the Orient Express. Her confused and mystifying rules veered from hunting with Aborigines in Tasmania, to finding Mr Ratchett’s killers on a snowbound train. Kurt became tendentious over what were the real rules, but the only important one was that Lady Myre should win. I willingly lost with all grace, and her delight in victory was strange.

  I had only slight apprehension about sharing a bed with her for one more night. The mood of the sea and the sky and on the boat had so changed. I felt that, though we were none of us friends, we were united by our common journey. It seemed we’d arrive at Rikitea, Mangareva’s port, the following evening without more shared challenges to face. I had my letter of introduction for the Chinese shopkeeper. Soon I hoped to be alone in sunshine, absorbing the colour and life of a true Polynesian island – the scent of jasmine, stephanotis and hibiscus, garlands of flowers and shells, swimming in clear water, the tensions of Pitcairn and raging seas fading into the confusion of memory.

  Lady Myre was in bed before me, the sheet under her chin. ‘Hasn’t it been heaven?’ she said as I turned away modestly to get into my nightie.

  I was unsure what she meant. ‘It’s certainly been memorable,’ I said. I so wondered at her uninflexional mood on this journey and how it contrasted with her hysteria on Pitcairn when she’d feared she might not get her way. It was as if she had only two dimensions: contented or disturbed. She was as serene now as when half-dead with seasickness, or as when the rudder had broken in a force eleven gale and we all seemed destined for the ocean bed, or when she’d been making sexual overtures to me, a far from perfect stranger.

  ‘I’ve never been so happy,’ she said. ‘Of all my holidays I’ve enjoyed this trip to Picton best.’

  ‘Pitcairn,’ I corrected her.

  ‘Pitcairn,’ she said. ‘Oh yes.’

  I clambered up to the bed. To my consternation she was naked. She’d rubbed her face with Elizabeth Arden eight-hour cream and she glistened in the moonlight.

  ‘I so hope we can make it tonight’ she said. ‘It’s such an opportunity, we’d be fools to miss it.’ I began to say
that I was frightfully sorry, but that it all made me feel frightfully awkward, and that embarrassment was a very strong emotion. ‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly under-age sex.’ And that made me laugh because she was fifty-five and I was old enough not to want to say how old that was.

  ‘It has to be consensual, though,’ I said. ‘Not like Pitcairn.’

  ‘Well all right,’ she said. ‘Let’s just have a little consensual snog.’

  And so I found myself surprised by the comfort of her light and tender kisses, the fresh sweet smell of her skin, and the ease and consolation of her enfolding arms. ‘It’s not like Pitcairn, is it,’ she whispered, and I had to agree that it was not, though I couldn’t overlook an underlying sense of this being worse than odd. But then the whole adventure had been rather odd.

  All was calm as we approached Mangareva the following day. Mangareva means ‘floating mountain’. Through her monocular Lady Myre saw birds feeding on a shoal of fish, diving and shaking their feathers, so we knew we’d soon see land.

  A long silhouette of broken islands then appeared, with vegetation flowing down to the water’s edge. The lagoon was turquoise and a fringe of white waves warned of the barrier reef. Bearing posts guided us for the delicate manoeuvre through the reef and into the protected bay. The ocean was now truly pacific, dappled with silver sunlight, and we could see coral in the clear water.

  A dinghy with an outboard motor and two waving figures came speeding towards us. It was Kurt’s yachtie friend Wilhelm, with Claudia, his Brazilian girlfriend for the year. They all hugged and there was much excited exchange in Portuguese and German. They rolled a spliff and Kurt breathed it deep. Kurt asked Lady Myre and me if we wanted to stay on his boat in Mangareva until the air flight to Tahiti in four days. He’d only charge us fifty dollars a night.

  I said I had an introduction to a friend of Rosie Christian’s and that I wanted to be on land.