Coconut Chaos, Diana Souhami [leveled readers TXT] 📗

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