by John Boyne
‘I have four horses,’ I told her. ‘Two for my carriages and two for riding. I treat them well, of course. Feed them the finest oats, keep them clean and brushed. Or I have a man who does that for me anyway. He lives in the stables with the horses. And I’m above him.’
‘You employ a man to live with horses?’ she asked me, sitting up a little on one elbow and staring at me in surprise. I thought about it. I’d never known anyone who kept horses, so wasn’t sure who looked after them usually or where they typically resided. However, I still knew more about them than she did, so I believed myself to be fairly safe in the lie.
‘Well . . . he lives near by,’ I told her. ‘Not in the actual . . . not in the actual stable itself.’
‘Will you let me ride your horses when I come to England?’ she asked me.
I nodded quickly, anxious to please her. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You can do whatever you want. You will be the wife of a famous, wealthy man. No one will be able to tell you what you can and cannot do. Except me, of course, as I’ll be your husband and there are laws about things like that.’
She smiled at me and leaned back again. The issue of marriage had come up on our previous encounter, when she had done as much to excite me as had ever been done in my life and we had only stopped short of consummating our relationship then by an unfortunate accident that had come over me while she was playing with my bits and pieces. I had told her that I would bring her back to England and make her a fine woman and she had seemed thrilled by the idea of it.
Whenever I was with Kaikala, these lies came easily to me and, in truth, they seemed to be little more than harmless fibs. I didn’t imagine she really saw herself sailing across the seas to a new life with me, and I wasn’t entirely sure that she believed all the things I said about my supposedly wealthy existence back home either. I thought it was just a game, something that two young lovers might pretend to each other in order to imagine a different life from the one that they actually had.
‘But what about you?’ I asked her. ‘Won’t you miss your family, your home on Otaheite? It’s unlikely we’ll ever come back here again, you know.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, shaking her head quickly. ‘I won’t miss it. My mother and father, they don’t care much for me anyway. And they care even less for each other. And anyway, Yay-Ko, I am different from them.’
‘Different?’ I asked. ‘Different how?’
She shrugged her shoulders and I watched as she ran a finger down to her titty and encircled the dark bud at its centre in a distracted fashion. I wanted to kiss it, but even after all that we had done I still did not feel the courage to do so without a proper invitation.
‘When I was a child, my mother told me about the men who came before,’ she explained. ‘She was my age, you see, when they were here.’
‘The men who came before?’ I asked. ‘You mean Captain Cook and the Endeavour?’
‘Yes, them,’ she said. ‘She told me about those men: how kind they were, the gifts they brought, and how they stayed and made love to the women time and again.’ I gasped a little in surprise; she had no shame in her story-telling and I admired her for it. ‘It was my favourite story. I asked her about it frequently. But I always had to imagine it in my mind. What it was like. What they were like. And I thought that if they ever came back here, then they would take me with them when they left. This is a paradise to you, Yay-Ko. To me, it is a prison. I’ve been a captive here all my life, knowing there’s more out there, knowing there’s a world that I have not seen. And I want to see it. My parents will never leave. No one here ever leaves. They would never show me the world. Tanemahuta would never show me the world. So I waited. And then you came.’
I nodded, and it struck me that the fantasies of people the world over held a lot more in common than might generally be recognized, and while I was considering her words again one jumped out at me as being something that I did not understand.
‘What did you say?’ I asked her. ‘Who would not show you the world?’
‘My parents,’ she replied with a smile.
‘After them.’
She thought about it, recalling. ‘Tanemahuta,’ she said. ‘He would not.’
I raised my eyebrows and sat up, staring down at her in surprise. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t heard you mention that name before.’
‘He is nobody,’ she said with a shrug. ‘No one special. He is my husband, that is all.’
My eyes opened wide when she said this and my mouth fell open. ‘Your husband?’ I asked. ‘You’re married?’ This was fresh news to me and I immediately felt the excitement that was upon me from lying here naked with her drifting away again.
‘I was married,’ she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘He died.’
‘Oh,’ I said, a little relieved, but still not entirely happy. ‘When did you marry?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, staring at me as if she couldn’t fully understand why I was so interested. ‘I was twelve, I think.’
‘Twelve? And how old was he?’
‘A little older. We married on his fourteenth birthday.’
I gave a low whistle and tried to imagine that happening back home in Portsmouth. You’d be locked up for less, I knew that from personal experience.
‘What happened to him?’ I asked her then. ‘How did he die?’
‘It was a year ago,’ she told me. ‘He fell from a tree one morning. He was always doing foolish things. He was not a clever boy. Not like you, Yay-Ko.’
‘He fell from a tree?’
‘And broke his neck.’
I thought about this and lay back down, surprised that this was the first I had heard of him. ‘Did you love him?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘He was my husband. I loved him every morning and every night and sometimes in the afternoon too.’ I frowned, suspecting that we were talking to each other about something different. ‘Why do you ask me about him?’ she said then. ‘He doesn’t matter. He’s dead. We are alive. And you are going to take me with you to England.’
I nodded. I was under no illusion that Kaikala had been untouched when she had met me; after all, she was the one who had taught me how to make love, an art I was sadly unskilled at and still wanted teaching in. And why should she have told me about her past anyway? I had told her naught of mine except a bunch of fanciful lies. She could tell that my mood had altered a little and rolled over on top of me, exciting me once again.
‘Yay-Ko still happy?’ she asked me.
‘Oh, yes,’ I replied quickly. ‘Very happy, thanks very much.’
‘Yay-Ko will not leave me behind when he leaves?’
‘Never,’ I promised. ‘If it came to a choice, I would stay on the island with you.’
She seemed displeased with this answer. ‘But I don’t want to stay on the island,’ she insisted. ‘I want to leave.’
‘And you will,’ I said. ‘When I go.’
‘When is that?’
‘Soon,’ I promised. ‘Our work comes to an end shortly and we will depart. Then I will take you with me.’
This appeared to satisfy her and she leaned down to kiss me. I rolled around in the grass with her and in a moment I was above her again, making love, lost to all thoughts of the world except the act that we were committing and the pleasure that she was giving me. Almost lost, anyway. For at a particularly unfortunate moment I found myself distracted a little by the sound of snapping near by. I paused in my movements and looked around.
‘What was that?’ I asked.
‘What?’ she asked, looking around. ‘Don’t stop, Yay-Ko, please.’
I hesitated, convinced for a moment that there was someone there, someone in the thickets observing us at our play, but the forest had returned to its natural sounds now and I shook my head, sure that I was being foolish.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, kissing her. ‘I must have been imagining things.’
An hour lat
er I emerged from beneath the waterfall, where I had gone to wash my body clean before saying goodbye to Kaikala. As I stepped towards her, soaking wet and pulling the hair from my eyes, I felt self-conscious and awkward allowing her to observe my nakedness, despite all that we had done.
‘Don’t look,’ I said, covering myself.
‘Why not?’
‘I’m shy.’
‘What is this?’ she asked, frowning; it was a word that none of the natives there were familiar with.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, pulling my britches on and dragging my shirt over my head. ‘I must go back now, Kaikala. The captain will miss me soon and it’s best not to keep him waiting.’
She stood and kissed me one last time and my hands ran down her spine to her rump, which I squeezed joyfully. Of course, I had the motions again, but there was no time to satisfy them; it would be more than my life was worth if I was found missing when the captain needed me, so we said a final goodbye, arranged to meet again the following afternoon, and I made my way back whence I had come, through the trees, letting them close behind me as I saw her beautiful form disappear.
As I left her alone in this secret place of ours, my face filled with a smile of satisfaction, I looked down and noticed my boot-prints, which were crushed into the grass beneath me, pointing back in the direction from which I had come, the place where Kaikala and I made love every day. I frowned, realizing that anyone who came near this spot might see them and follow them and find us. I resolved to be more careful in future.
I am not always a clever person.
Another few minutes passed before I stopped suddenly, my face growing scarlet with embarrassment, rage and suspicion. I looked down once again. I never wore boots when I came to visit Kaikala. I was barefoot.
The tracks were not mine.
34
ACHAP WILL DO SOME STRANGE things for love and in recognition of that I come to a part of my story that is both painful to recount and humiliating to recall.
There were many customs prevalent on the island which we, as Englishmen, were not familiar with, but there was one in particular which had become something of a fad among sailing folk and that was the art of the tattoo. It was Captain Cook, when he first visited the Pacific Islands on the Endeavour, which numbered a young William Bligh among its crew members, who first permitted his crew to copy the traditions of the Pacific people by adorning their bodies with colourful imprints that remained indelible for ever after. On returning to England and displaying these badges of experience, it was said that a fair number of ladies swooned into a fainting fit, but it had become more and more common over the previous ten or fifteen years for a salt to consider a tattoo a mark of honour. I had seen many of them on the arms and torsos of the sailors in Portsmouth. Some were small and careful designs; others, bright and bold and lively, as if their images might come to life and dance a jig towards me.
It was Kaikala who first suggested to me that I might join this group myself, on another afternoon when we were swimming in our private lagoon. Ever since the incident when I believed we had been espied in our love-making, I had grown more cautious. It wasn’t that it was against the ship rules to form alliances with the native girls; on the contrary, it was the norm. But I was not one of those who grew excited by the idea of being watched by another while I was about this saucy business, and had I discovered who had observed us that day I would have boxed his ears.
I had emerged from my plunge and was running at speed around the lake, the better to burn off my excess of energy as well as dry my body, when I noticed Kaikala staring at me and laughing. I slowed down to a halt, instantly discouraged that she was mocking me in my nakedness, but when I demanded an explanation for her outburst she simply shrugged her shoulders and told me that I was impossibly white.
‘Well, I am a white man,’ I told her. ‘What else would you expect?’
‘But you are so white,’ she insisted. ‘Yay-Ko is like ghost.’
I frowned. It was true that when I had left Portsmouth more than a year before, I might have been a pasty class of individual, but there was little doubt, as far as I was concerned, that I had changed for the better over the course of my experiences. I had aged a year and three months, after all, and that showed in the improved size of my body, my stance, my complexion, the ruddiness of my cheeks, the length of my whistle and my strengths as a man. And as for my colour, well, the sun of Otaheite had transformed me, to my eyes at least, to a rather attractive shade of bronzed brown.
‘How can you say that?’ I asked. ‘I have never been so tanned before.’
‘Are all Englishmen as white as you?’ she asked. ‘I’m delightfully brown,’ I protested. ‘But, yes, they are.’
‘You can never marry me with such pale skin,’ she said then and looked down at her own body in the water with sadness in her eyes. I followed the direction she was looking in and stepped over to her, leaning down to touch her shoulder.
‘And why is that?’ I asked. ‘I thought we had an understanding.’
‘Haven’t you seen the men here?’ she asked. ‘You know what you must do.’
I sighed. For some time I thought this had been coming and I had not been looking forward to it. Many of the crew members had already undergone the tattooing process. The scut Mr Heywood, to my immense surprise, had been among the first to do so, installing the three-legged insignia of his native Isle of Man on his right leg. (It was no shock to me that his screams were heard halfway across the island, and probably all the way to England too, when the adornment was being applied.) Others had followed his lead and improved upon it. James Morrison had the date of our arrival in Otaheite emblazoned upon his forearm. Even Mr Christian had submitted to the process and had a curious design drawn on his back, a creature that was unfamiliar to me, with arms outstretched, peering at his observer as if he wished to eat him alive. He had recently added to his collection with native designs on his arms, his shoulders and across his torso, so that he appeared to be becoming more like a native than an Englishman.
‘Before a man can marry,’ Kaikala informed me, ‘he must be tattooed.’
‘Well, perhaps a small one,’ I suggested, for I have never been a one for pain. ‘A small flag on my shoulder.’
‘No, no,’ she said, laughing. ‘A man cannot marry without having the proper adornment. The tattoo protects the wearer from the evil spirits by sealing your sacredness inside you.’
I frowned and thought about it and immediately shook my head. ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘Not in this world.’ I knew exactly what she was referring to, for I had seen the process take place on a local lad who was preparing for marriage only a few weeks before. Here’s the fact of it: his buttocks were entirely tattooed a dark shade of black. The young fool lay on a block for half a day and allowed two artists to complete the job, one working on the left, the other working on the right, and despite how painful it appeared to be he never uttered a cry throughout the whole procedure. I admired him for that but thought he looked a damn fool when he stood up for all the world to see, men and women alike, with his freshly darkened skin. I also heard it told that he could not sit for the best part of two weeks afterwards; indeed, I had seen him only the previous day and he still seemed to be walking with some difficulty.
‘I’m sorry, Kaikala,’ I told her, ‘but that’s not something I can do. Even if I could submit to the pain, which I can’t on account of the fact that I’m fierce cowardly, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with a colourful rump. I couldn’t stand it. I’d be ashamed.’
She looked downcast, but something in my tone or phrasing told her that I was serious, for she nodded her head and seemed to accept this as the case.
‘Perhaps just a small one, then,’ she said, reverting to my earlier offer.
Reluctantly, I nodded; if it had to be done, it had to be done. I wanted to please her, after all.
And so it was that two days later I was taken to Kaikala’s uncle, who was a master tattoo a
rtist, and I explained to him what I wanted, what it should be, and where it should be placed. I had brought a thick stick with me to lock between my gnashers in order to have something to bite down on while the artwork was being created. I had told no one, not even Kaikala, the design that I had chosen and refused to allow her to be present while it was being created, and in my foolishness, oh, sweet mother of God, in the innocent foolishness of my fifteenth year, I had come up with something that I thought would secure her heart for me for ever. I explained my plan to her uncle and he stared at me as if I was a Bedlamite, but I insisted and he simply shrugged his shoulders, told me to disrobe, and then he fetched the ink-pots and sharpened the animal bones that were the tools of his trade and then at last he set about creating his latest masterpiece.
It was late evening when I returned to camp and even from some distance I could hear Captain Bligh calling my name loudly. By the sound of it, he had been calling me for some time and I tried to pick my legs up and move faster but, suffering such tremendous pain as I was, I found it difficult to move. The perspiration was teeming from my forehead and my shirt was fairly stuck to my back. I was glad that evening had fallen at least as the cool breezes floating in my direction made my agony a little easier to endure.
‘Turnstile,’ said the captain when I stepped inside his tent. ‘Where the devil have you been, lad? Didn’t you hear me calling you?’
‘Begging your apologies, sir,’ said I, edging inside and looking around at the faces of the full complement of officers – Mr Christian, Mr Fryer, Mr Elphinstone and Mr Heywood, the scut – who were gathered around the table, wearing serious expressions on their phizzys. ‘I was elsewhere and lost track of time.’
