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

‘At the earliest,’ said Lady Myre. ‘Add “at the earliest”.’ ‘At the earliest,’ I wrote, and explained my details. I was confused as to why she didn’t contact some mutual friend and I began to doubt whether Sir Roland existed, or if she was who she claimed to be, but her agitation was real. She was then restless in the long hours when the electricity generator wasn’t working and unreceptive to my explanations about the need for patience over a reply, because of the rotating of the earth around the sun and people’s need for sleep.

When Rosie returned from the jetty I gave her the watch and vaccines, then took courage and gave her the blouse. She made a gracious display of carefully unwrapping it from the tissue paper, then put it on and paraded and exclaimed. Hank and Lady Myre watched. It was abjectly wrong. Shiny and clinging, it revealed in all the unflattering places. I resisted apology for that would have prompted undeserved reassurance. Rosie said she’d wear it in church, and when she and Hank next went to America to visit Adventist missions. Verity had been right. Something ordinary for twenty pounds from Leather Lane would have served. Some large, dark, cotton garment that covered up. I’d tried too hard and I’d failed. Lady Myre said it was smashing for a disco and was there one on the island? She then told a gushing anecdote about when she’d won second prize in salsa dancing at the Hackney Empire, wearing a tuxedo and silver slingbacks and smoking a fat Havana. Neither Hank nor Rosie knew what she was talking about and she gave the impression of being deranged.

On Rosie’s quad bike we toured the island. All two square miles of it. We clung on and bumped down the mud tracks, through Adamstown – named after John Adams, who wasn’t John Adams at all, or Alexander Smith as he’d previously called himself, but just another rogue who’d jumped ship, mutinied, murdered, and holed up on Pitcairn – along the Edge, past Big Fence and Down Side, past the courthouse and church, the Bounty’s anchor on a plinth, the governor’s house, the cave at Garnet’s Ridge where Fletcher Christian was said to have shut himself away and moped, past the old gaol and the satellite station. ‘There’s a phone in there,’ Rosie shouted, above the noise of the bike. Lady Myre became agitated and insisted she must phone Sir Roland. Rosie said it was very expensive and she’d have to ask Wayne, the governor’s representative, who was the only one with a key.

I had no clear sense of what was where and felt we were going round in circles. It was undoubtedly a rugged place of sheer cliffs, steep peaks and little valleys. The awfulness of it was a sense of being stuck. No ferry at dawn, no departures, arrivals, no journeys. I thought of my mother in residential care. No brave new world and such people in it.

Rosie stopped at one of her gardens, as the plots of land inherited from ancestors were called, to gather oranges, lemons and grapefruit. There was the sweet sharp smell of citrus as in a timeless way we three women put fruit into baskets. I thought of the iniquity of not according gardens to the Polynesians, of the disparagement coded into the word ‘blacks’, of my resentment if I was treated as ‘only a woman’. Again I imagined the anguish of the Polynesian women as they watched the Bounty burn.

As I chopped cabbage in Rosie’s kitchen, I counted twenty-seven cats in the yard by the door. They scratched at fleas. Kittens flitted in and grabbed any food that fell to the floor. Tomcats sprayed. Each day Hank boiled a saucepan of rice for them all, in case they were the reincarnated souls of Christians. Most of them were orange or black-and-white. There was constant war between the island’s cat and rat populations. When the feral cats were winning, Steve Christian, who was the island’s engineer and dentist as well as the mayor, chased them with a chisel and chopped off their testicles. They’d drag themselves around for a while then recover. He did the same for the island’s goats. When the rats overwhelmed, the islanders went on shooting sprees. On their best day Rosie and Hank shot fourteen hundred brown or black rats. Hank shot at one that looked as if it was praying by the roadside. He missed, and supposed it had been spared by the grace of God.

Rosie cracked a coconut on a spike and shredded its flesh. She prepared an enormous meal: green-banana pancakes, breadfruit patties, wild beans, nanwee fish, lamb baked in coconut milk, cabbage salad. Lady Myre said she was too upset to eat any of it, but changed her mind when Rosie told her nanwee was called the dream fish for its hallucinogenic properties and that her own mother, after eating it, would moan in her sleep and call out the names of long-dead ancestors.

Conversation moved naturally to the Resurrection and the Second Coming of Christ. When He arrived, the good would have eternal life and sinners would be damned, unless they repented and followed the cross. On a video, gospel singers swayed. Lady Myre sang along to ‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord’. I set the table and poured myself a glass of wine from my box of Spy Valley Pinot Noir. Discomfort registered on Rosie’s face at the sight and smell of wine. Hank sat at the head of the formica table and graciously thanked God for providing our supper. Lady Myre warbled an extravagantly loud ‘Amen’. Hank talked of the problems of shipping and the cost now that the island’s supplies were heading towards Panama. Something scuttled beneath the table. I swatted my arms and