Coconut Chaos by Diana Souhami (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📗

MATTHEW QUINTAL seaman aged 23 years, 5 feet 5 inches high, fair complexion, light brown hair, strong made; very much tatowed on the backside and several other places.

WILLIAM MCCOY seaman aged 25 years, 5 feet 6 inches high, fair complexion, light brown hair, strong made; a scar where he has been stabbed in the belly, and a small scar under his chin; is tatowed in different parts of his body.

ISAAC MARTIN seaman aged 30 years, 5 feet 6 inches high, dark complexion, brown hair, slender made; a very strong black beard with scars under his chin, is tatowed in several places of his body.

Bligh delivered these descriptions of the Pitcairn settlers, as well as those of the men who returned to Tahiti, to the port authorities at Timor and Batavia. They were circulated to the Admiralty and to every ship that plied the South Seas.

* Scrofula: supposed to be cured by the touch of royalty.

21

On the fifth day on the Tundra Princess the wind abated and the sea calmed. Captain Dutt said if it was like this at Pitcairn, Lady Myre and I wouldn’t have to climb down the Jacob’s ladder to the longboats, he’d put the gangplank across.

He announced a party, to be held on the crew deck at seven. Frequent parties were part of his command. He held them when the ship crossed the equator or the International Date Line, if the weather was fine, if the crew had birthdays … I fretted about what to wear, for I’d brought only Rohan adventure clothes in my backpack. Pink sandals were my only concession to the party mood.

Lady Myre called for me. She shimmered like a tribal queen in purple silk and feathered hat, her lips crimson, her toenails green. She flashed a large sapphire ring. ‘Don’t you look cute,’ she said. ‘Just like a boy.’

We were guests of honour. The crew lined up to welcome us. They were not going to party until we arrived. Like a memsahib, Lady Myre dangled her fingers to the manner born. Some of the men bowed. Befuddled though she might be, she starred in the part. I was more of a problem in jeans, fleece and glasses, with incongruous pink sandals.

Speakers blared a mix of Indian and western music. There was a bar, a DJ, a barbecue. On a trestle table was a large bowl of vodka, tomato juice and Tabasco, glasses with frosted rims, plates of corn and spam fritters, and sandwich-spread on fried bread. Soni arrived late and looked exotic in a sari and flowing scarf but the crew took little notice of her because she was so wifely. They wore western clothes – jeans and sneakers, T-shirts with logos, or coloured shirts. Their dancing was energetic, sexy and unselfconscious. Sanjeet Dutt encouraged it for the same reasons as Bligh: as exercise, for conviviality and to reduce tension, but he was friendly and observant and took the measure of his men. I thought how when John Mills and William Brown refused to dance a jig at the obligatory hour Bligh stopped their supply of grog. It was not surprising they were among the mutineers.

Lady Myre knocked back Bloody Marys. She danced alone, waved her hands above her head and sang ‘I Have a Dream’ from her time on the Shaw Savill Line. She gave it all she’d got:

Something good in everything I see.

I believe in angels.

When I know the time is right for me

I’ll cross the stream

I have a dream.

The crew loved it and there was a cheer when she then asked Captain Dutt to dance. She took him by the hands and he beamed. Like a lot of fat men he was dainty on his feet.

She tried to get me to whirl about, but I wouldn’t. After a ballroom number with Da Silva, she sat beside me and washed down spam fritters with another tumbler. In a slurry voice she asked Captain Dutt if there was much homosexuality on board. He said there was none. ‘Believe that and you’ll believe anything,’ she hissed in my ear, then offered a complicated anecdote about when Sir Roland had picked up a marine in Skegness who’d pulled a gun on him and told him to keep driving. She then said I should keep my legs crossed, because a standing tool knows no conscience and a sailor from Goa wouldn’t care about my age and strange appearance, for him a change would be as good as a holiday. Once again I advised her to stay on the ship until Panama.

Captain Dutt checked Raja from emptying another bottle of vodka into the Bloody Mary bowl. Harminder quaffed a tumbler of whisky. Prem, who was next on watch, drank only Coca-Cola. Pandal barbecued fish and vegetables. The wind made the coals flare, but Dutt saw the men could manage the incident and didn’t intervene, though Lady Myre’s ear was singed by a flying cinder of red-hot charcoal.

I didn’t like not joining in and I wished I’d brought something snazzy to wear and could contribute and not be awkward. I thought how this was just one thing that was happening at a certain point in time: young Indian men dancing together in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a cargo ship loaded with ten million dollars’ worth of kiwi fruit, heading towards Pitcairn, the most isolated island in the world.

I left the party early, wanting to be alone.

The link between me and Verity weakened as the ship sailed on. In my cabin I mused on the past: the time we brought bay trees back on our bicycles from the flower market, the time we canoed on the River Brett and I steered us into the bank, the time we first kissed and she wondered about the origin of the cliché ‘hook line and sinker’, the times we tried to separate, but then went back. I wrote her an email, aware that Captain Dutt would read