The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest

by Graeme Lay

  Dashwood, an Englishman, became a lagoon-side legend in the Cook Islands, living first on Rakahanga in the Northern Group, then on Mauke, marrying on both islands and writing memorably about his life in exile in the South Seas under the nom-de-plume Julian Hillas (his mother’s family name). The son of an English vicar, Dashwood was by most accounts a vain, snobbish, eccentric man. The local people named him Rakau, meaning wood. Trader, author and radical politician, Dashwood left an indelible impression on the Cook Islands, but later when I visit the graves and see the empty house I sense a forlorn, melancholy atmosphere about this, his last place of rest. His books, like the man himself, have now melted away into history.

  I’ve picked a good day to arrive on Mauke: the island is playing Mitiaro at rugby, on a field a little way along the road from the Dashwood house. Because of the heat, the game starts late in the afternoon, when the sun drops behind a row of coconut palms which separate the field from the lagoon. The field is mostly grass, with strips of dusty red earth along the sidelines.

  A big crowd turns up to watch as the Maukians, in green jerseys, and the Mitiaroans, in black, trot out on to the field. I watch from the top of a bank across the road. The Mauks, who are bigger, faster and better organised, run out to an early lead. They have a small, barefoot, bandy-legged winger, who bolts like a rabbit to score three tries. By half-time it looks as if it will be a rout, and as a recent Mitiaroan I feel a bit disconsolate. Besides, their captain is the island’s Air Rarotonga manager, and his office was also half my bedroom. He’s a big, muscular guy with coppery hair tied back in a ponytail, and during the breaks he exhorts his team desperately.

  This works, to some extent. The Mitiaroans begin to show more determination and some individual brilliance, and they score three tries. But their kicker misses the conversions, two from right in front of the posts, and this brings howls of derision from the crowd. The ponytailed skipper scrags everyone in sight, including the bandy Maukian winger, whom he chases determinedly, overtakes, collars and throws down on to the bare earth. But when the game ends in twilight, victory still goes to the Mauks. The team, and the crowd, are jubilant.

  Tautara’s bungalows are set out among coconut palms, white sand and tropical gardens a little way back from the lagoon. In the centre is an open-sided, thatched shelter and table and chairs, where meals are served. Staying in the bungalow next to mine is a colossal Rarotongan man with a flat, granite-like face and a lantern jaw. George tells me he used to prop for the Waitemata rugby team in Auckland. Now he’s as big as an entire front row and wheezes like a Mac truck’s air brakes when he speaks.

  Tautara’s wife, Kura, lays out a dinner of chicken, fried tuna, sweet potato, tomato salad and fruit. George and I help ourselves, then the big man gives me a nod. ‘You say grace,’ he commands. I mumble an invocation remembered dimly from childhood, and George nods in approval. Then he picks up his heaped plate and gets to his feet: ‘I have to go now, excuse me.’ And he waddles off, carrying his dinner before him.

  I’m confused. Why doesn’t he want to eat with me? Is he taking his meal somewhere else? If so, why? Does he adhere, perhaps, to some bizarre sect which forbids him to share his table with a non-believer? I never found out, but before I left I bumped into George outside our bungalows and asked him if he had enjoyed his time on Mauke. He nodded firmly. ‘Oh yes, I like coming here. A nice change, doing nothing.’

  ‘You’ve been on holiday, then?’

  ‘Oh no, I’m here on business. Working for the government.’

  Mauke quickly becomes my favourite of the Three Roots. It’s pretty, completely unspoilt, and everywhere is accessible by bike. There are rain forests and rocky coves and old churches, and it’s dogless but not beerless. In the main village of Kimiangatau, opposite the Taunganui landing, there is a sweep of green and two lovely old Catholic churches side by side, one large, the other small, like mother and child.

  After borrowing a bike from Tautara, I set off to explore Mauke. There’s virtually no traffic, so pootling about on a bike’s the perfect way to do it. An east incline takes me about a kilometre inland, where the road forks and there are two other villages, Ngatiarua and Areroa. At the junction of the three roads is a large white Cook Islands Christian church, on the wall of which is painted: 1882 Oliveta Church. The first thing I notice is that there are two long concrete pathways leading up to the side of the church, each of which has an archway above it, and each of which leads to a separate entrance. This must, I realise, be the famous divided church of Mauke.

  When the church was planned, the two villages couldn’t agree on its interior design. These differences proved irreconcilable, so a wall was built across the centre of the church, and each of the two villages completed its chosen design on its side of the divide. When the acrimony at last was over, the wall was taken down, revealing startlingly different colour schemes and decorations. Today the pulpit straddles the centre, and each village enters by separate doors, sits on its own side and takes turns in singing the hymns. The ultimate example, perhaps, of Christian factionalism.

  There are three other European guests at Tautara and Kura’s bungalows, backpackers who teamed up after meeting in a hostel on Rarotonga. There’s Ian from Stoke-on-Trent, Benny from Copenhagen and Jon from Dallas, all in their early twenties. In the evening we sit around the dining area, drink beer and swap island stories.

  Ian’s a printer: tall and lean, with cropped brown hair and a slightly bulbous nose. Benny is blond and blue-eyed, very handsome in a Viking-ish way and always smiling. Jon is skinny and rodent-like, with a tangle of long fair hair and slit eyes. They had intended to catch a cargo boat to the Northern Group but it broke down a day out of Rarotonga and had to be towed back to port. So instead they took another supply boat to Mauke, liked the island and have been here for a couple of weeks.

  Now Benny and Jon are thinking of moving on, but Ian assures me he’s staying put. He loves the island, mainly because he’s fallen in love with a girl he met at a dance in Kimiangatau village. Trouble is, he’s by no means sure of the local protocol regarding courtship. So when Kura joins us, he says to her, ‘What I’d like to know, like, is ’oo should I ask about takin’ her to the dance on Friday?’

  Kura frowns. Clearly it’s a bit tricky, although by no means without precedent. After all, how many other Englishmen have come to these islands and fallen in love with local girls? Dashwood was the best known, but many of his compatriots have also enlarged the region’s gene pool. Kura gives Ian’s question full consideration, then replies. ‘I think … first you should ask her father. You see, she works in his shop, and as she is the oldest child, she has most responsibility. And because it is her father’s business, he is the one most directly concerned. Yes, I think you should first ask her father.’

  Ian nods, his brow creased with concentration. He accepts the situation, though obviously he doesn’t relish it. ‘Okay, okay … I’ll go and see ’im termorrer …’

  My curiosity about this courtship is aroused, so later I bike up to the big old-fashioned shop in the village where the girl in question works. I can see immediately why Ian is smitten. Tara is about eighteen, with long dark hair woven into a plait. She is demure and graceful. Her father is a large man with slightly simian features, who speaks excellent English. We chat while his daughter moves about quietly and purposefully behind the counter, reaching up for tins of corned beef or mackerel from the shelves.

  After parking my bike, I walk around to the back porch of a house in Kimiangatau. Sitting on the ground, turning maire leaves into garlands, are half a dozen women and a transvestite. Two of the women I recognise from earlier in the day when, biking through the fernland zone up on the island’s plateau, I came upon them plucking the leaves from maire shrubs. There are mounds of maire leaves all around the group. The leaves are smaller but somewhat similar in shape and shade to a laurel. As each garland is finished, it’s handed to a man who packs it into a big plastic bag, squashing it down on top of th
e others.

  ‘What are they for?’ I ask one of the women.

  ‘We send them to Hawaii,’ she replies, ‘for the tourists.’

  A tally is kept of each worker’s total, then the plastic bags are dispatched to Mauke’s airport, and thence to Rarotonga. In a day they’ll be on their way to Honolulu. The Maukians grumble about the mark-up the Americans put on the maire garlands, but it’s still a good, reliable export. The consignment I’m looking at, the woman tells me, is worth $3,000– $4,000. And the maire shrub is an obliging partner in the enterprise – the more its leaves are picked, the faster it grows.

  Cycling back to the bungalows, I notice on a blackboard by the rugby field the manifest for tomorrow’s Air Rarotonga flight out. My name has been chalked on the board, along with several others, including Benny and Jon’s, the bags of maire and some taro. In this fashion everyone on Mauke knows who and what is coming and going.

  Ian, Benny, Jon, Tautara, Kura and I sit around drinking and chatting in the dining area on the last evening. Benny has only a few days’ leave left from his job as a bank teller in Copenhagen. ‘When I go back,’ he says dolefully, ‘I will stare at my computer screen and for months all I will see are the islands of the South Pacific.’

  Jon will go on to Aitutaki, but Ian’s definitely staying put. There’s another dance tomorrow night, and, ‘I’m goin’ ter try me look one more time.’ I don’t blame him.

  As the maire bags and taro are stowed in the plane’s hold, we all climb aboard. George somehow wedges his body into a seat at the front alongside mine. A local man carrying a small plastic bag full of white powder drops it on the floor as he pushes past. It splits open and the powder goes everywhere, but the man appears totally unconcerned. If he is a heroin smuggler, he’s very casual about it. One of the pilots sweeps the powder up, and I whisper to George, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Starch,’ he replies gruffly. ‘From the arrowroot. Used for cooking.’

  As usual on the outer islands, most of the local population has turned out to see the plane take off. Through the window I can see the tall figure of Ian, standing in the open doorway of the terminal. He gives us one last wave. Then the door is made fast and we taxi out on to the wide, dusty runway. Seconds later Mauke is falling away beneath us: palms, plantations, forest and a pink ring of reef. Then a few wisps of cloud and the apparently endless Pacific Ocean are all we can see.

  Back at home I check on the internet for demographic trends on the Three Roots. I find that between 1996 and 2001 the population of the southern islands of the Cook group declined by 26.2 percent. Atiu, which in the 1960s had nearly 1,500 people, in 2001 had only 620. Mitiaro’s population has always been small – barely more than 300 – but at the last count had sunk to 250. Only Mauke (700) and Aitutaki (2,322) are holding their own.

  As on most of the South Pacific’s outlying islands and atolls, the people of the southern Cooks have decided that their future, and that of their children, lies elsewhere, either on the primary island – Rarotonga – or the suburban streets of Auckland. This is understandable, but it leaves me wondering what the Three Roots will be like in another decade, when they’re populated only by the very old, and a few young people who dream restlessly of a better life, away beyond the blue horizon.

  TWO

  MEN BEHIND BARS

  RAROTONGA, COOK ISLANDS

  FOR A WRITER to consider the islands of the Pacific is to think mainly of their colonial pasts, of the days when ships, not planes, carried people to them, when writers could abandon their pasts and live in shacks under the palm trees, write by hand in the light of kerosene lamps, send their manuscripts off by sea and, on infrequent visits to the island’s only town, rub shoulders and other parts of their bodies with the dusky locals.

  The central location for this fantasy is usually a waterfront bar, a dingy establishment with sagging, sandy floorboards where deeply tanned men with bloodshot eyes and murky pasts sit on stools and stare at a row of spirit bottles with stained labels, tormented by memories of those they left behind, or of money-making schemes which came to nothing. The writers’ plots are usually melodramatic. The bar is run by an unfrocked priest who lives out the back with a native woman by whom he has had numerous children, and he has an affair with a missionary’s wife who cuts the throat of his mistress before slitting her own wrists on the beach. Somerset Maugham and James A. Michener have a lot to answer for.

  In real life, most of the bars have gone long ago, or have been spruced up so much that the romance, along with the stained spirit bottles and the tired floorboards, have disappeared. The most famous of all, Quinn’s Bar, in Papeete, is no more, although there’s a bar by the same name in Papeete’s Sheraton Hotel. But here chic couples and French civil servants sip tropical cocktails and nibble on kalamata olives as they contemplate only the menu and the adjoining restaurant’s wine list. In the bars of Pago Pago, where Somerset Maugham’s histrionic short story ‘Rain’ is set, the patrons stare mainly at video screens showing gridiron live from places like Baltimore and Cleveland, while even Rarotonga’s once-legendary Banana Court today serves mainly lattés and fruit smoothies from its verandah. Only Apia’s waterfront road retains a few of the places where classic European human wreckage can be observed amidst a fading décor and tipsy, importuning locals. Recently an extremely drunk visiting European yachtie tumbled to his death from the first-floor balcony of one of the seamier of these bars. All is not yet lost.

  Sitting on a plane high above the Pacific, I’m reading an H. E. Bates story set on the island of Moorea. An Englishman lives with an ugly Tahitian woman who loves him but whom he does not love. Eventually she tries to kill him while they’re out fishing in a canoe because he has fallen in love with another, beautiful Tahitian girl. After a terrible fight she falls overboard and is mortally bitten by a shark. The story is called ‘The Grapes of Paradise’, a title perfectly in tune with its melodramatic events, and although the plot is improbable it is entertaining because it conjures up the colonial era so well. It also causes me to regret the passing of the real Quinn’s, and other bars, before I had the chance to know them. As I sip Cabernet Merlot at 9,000 metres and listen to Puccini on the plane’s headphones, I read, ‘He sat in bars on the waterfront and watched dust blow out of potholes in the road outside and then blow back in again.’

  Putting the book down, I stare out the plane window. The Pacific looks very close, a deep, clear, inviting blue. All that lies between me and the sea are a few drifts of kapok cloud. My mind dwells on Bates and Jack London and Somerset Maugham and James A. Michener and James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff and Robert Dean Frisbie and writers like them who immortalised the old Pacific. Was it easier making a living writing novels when time moved at a schooner’s pace and a writer could live well on a dollar a day? In one sense it was: to be a writer then was to be a member of a very exclusive club. A new novel, particularly one set in the South Pacific, was an event, so every novel published stood a decent chance of rewarding its writer. Today the world is awash with novels. Every airport I go to is stacked with the wretched things, flaunting their tawdry covers like harlots desperate for custom. Sometimes I get the impression there are more novel writers than readers.

  As I’m lamenting this seismic shift in literary fortunes, the plane makes a perceptible shift in its trajectory. Then, seconds later, through a gap in the clouds, I see my destination, a small green cone, veiled by cloud, encircled by white reef waves. Rarotonga.

  First port of call: Trader Jack’s Bar and Restaurant. In years to come, this place will probably be as legendary as Quinn’s Bar was in the 1950s and ’60s. ‘Trader’s’ overlooks the lagoon in downtown Avarua, at the mouth of the Takuvaine stream. The closest building to the sea in Rarotonga’s capital, its predecessor was struck by the full force of Cyclone Sally in 1987. A generous measure of the Pacific Ocean poured through the front of the building and passed on out the back, radically rearranging the décor. When things calmed down, owner Jac
k Cooper decided to rebuild his bar on precisely the same site, working on the theory that lightning doesn’t strike the same spot twice.

  Lightning, no; cyclones … maybe. But so far, so good. Big storms have since swept through Trader Jack’s, but there are efficient warning systems now so that Jack and his team can shut shop, pack up all the booze, crockery and cutlery, shove them into a shipping container, and move the container inland until the tempest has passed. And the building’s strong, no doubt about that. It’s tempting fate to call it cyclone-proof, but it’s built on piles and is open underneath, so that an angry sea surges through the foundations, rather than the bar and dining area above. And if the storm’s not threatening enough to cause an evacuation, there’s no finer place on the island than the deck of Trader Jack’s to sit and and observe the warning signs: the sky turning the colour of graphite; the glowering clouds moving closer, then dissolving into torrents; the oily waters of the lagoon being cuffed, beaten, then thrashed by the wind. It’s like being in the bow of an anchored ship and feeling as well as seeing a storm engulfing the vessel.

  But usual weather conditions in Rarotonga are not like that. It is far more typical to sit out on the deck of Trader Jack’s in the warm still air of late afternoon, sipping a drink and watching the sun slide down, gilding the lagoon water before turning the sky to a painter’s palette, and seeing the glassy reef waves rear, then break on both sides of the place where the Takuvaine stream has made a passage through the coral. Right beside the deck, coffee-skinned local kids cavort in the lagoon, a charter boat unloads its catch, and the paddles of outrigger canoeists dig deep as their slender vessels head out of the tidal basin towards the gap in the reef.