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

Dear Verity

It’s strange to receive email here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with nothing in sight for days and nights but the sea. The journey’s taking longer than expected because of pan pan weather, but hopefully we’ll arrive at Pitcairn in two days’ time. Life on board the Tundra Princess is very comfortable, the food’s good, my cabin’s luxurious and I eat with Captain Dutt and the officers in their mess room. There’s one other passenger for Pitcairn, a strange woman called Lady Myre who seems to think she’s travelling to Picton on New Zealand’s South Island to be reunited with her long-lost half-brother. I think she’s a bit soft in the head. Tonight there was a party on the crew deck, but I left early. I think of you and at times I wish you were making this journey with me.

Love etcetera

Lady Myre didn’t show up for breakfast the morning after the party. I took coffee to her cabin. Her face looked unironed and grey roots sprouted from the blonde of her hair. She languished on her bed in a lemon silk housecoat, and she had a gold Alice band in her hair. She said her head ached because of there having been two Wednesdays and the clocks going forward an hour each day. All the cabin clocks were altered from the bridgehead in the night, which added to her confusion. She believed that the right time was that shown on her watch.

She seemed in a bad way. I told her it would be no big deal for her to fly home to London from Panama and that she was in no fit state to be buffeted by the waves in a longboat and then have to struggle up Pitcairn’s Hill of Difficulty. She snivelled and said her whole life had been a hill of difficulty.

I told her she couldn’t easily phone home from Pitcairn. She grizzled and said what did that matter – she’d no one to phone, no one loved her. She seemed unstable. But then her manner changed, she gave a sly look and said I was only goading her because I wickedly wanted to leave her alone with all these men. She patted the bedcover for me to sit beside her and said now she felt like girly talk. She closed her eyes and appeared to sleep. I sat on the fixed bench and talked winsomely of tectonic plates, island formations and the turbulence of tsunamis, but she didn’t respond. She opened her eyes to slits, asked why I’d never been married and was there a significance to my wearing a ring on my little finger. ‘Why should there be?’ I replied. She seemed determined to be personal. She said she’d heard it was an indicator of homosexuality, but that wasn’t always true. Roley’s dear friend Colonel something-or-other was always lusting after some little darling and he wore a beautiful onyx on his pinky. Again I obfuscated. Though I’d no wish to conceal my sexual orientation, I feared frankness would disadvantage me on Pitcairn, given the teachings of Adventism. Nor did I want to disconcert the crew of the Tundra Princess.

I made some fatuous remark about how everything signified. She looked most comfortable reclining on her bed and I admired her unselfconscious ease. She said, ‘It’s clear you’re not going to tell me anything about yourself. You’re going to remain an enigma.’ I didn’t deny this. I asked if her husband minded her travelling alone and in such an unconventional way. ‘Roley?’ she said. ‘No, he’s such a dear. He doesn’t mind what I do. He gave up trying to understand me the day after we married. He knows that if I say I’m going to Singapore I’ll end up in Saskatchewan and if I say I’ll be away for a week it probably means a year.’

I pondered this information and how it fitted in with chaos theory and variations in patterns of random interconnected change. I supposed her provocative movements were because of her training as an actress and her year with the Shaw Savill Line. I asked if she felt like going up to the bridgehead to talk to Raja and Captain Dutt about our approach to Pitcairn. She said, much as she’d love to her head wouldn’t allow it, so I went alone.

On the stairs I passed the cadet Salman Kanjee. He looked gaunt and hadn’t slept. I’d thought him an arrogant young man but now he was deflated. He’d dropped all the keys to the stores out of the top pocket of his overalls into the sea. He’d checked that the containers of kiwi fruit were securely lashed, then bent over the side of the deck to look at the swirling waves. He feared he’d lose his job. The purser had received the news in silence. Some keys had no duplicates. It was a coveted position to be a cadet. Salman told me he was landsick – not homesick particularly, but sick of the sea. He wanted to walk down familiar streets, or sit in a cafe with a girlfriend.

On the bridgehead deck I looked out over the ocean and at the few intrepid seabirds that swirled in the ship’s wake. Bligh had logged sight of porpoises, an albatross, blue petrels, shearwater, pintados, sharks, dolphins, whales and phosphorescent fish. Raja, who was keeping watch, said no creatures were visible in these deep cold waters. We might voyage for weeks and see no other sign of life, no other ship, no scrap of land.

He explained something of the wonder of the computer screens to me. To keep watch was essentially to observe a screen. Radar could pick up a ship twenty-four miles away. If something went wrong with the refrigerated containers – a loose connection or a swing in temperature – this would show up on the screen. But still the watchman at all hours surveyed the sea with