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

landed on Pitcairn in 1790. Nine years later thirteen of them had apparently been murdered. Twenty children were left on the island: nine boys and eleven girls. It was the only place they knew.

Edward Young died of asthma on Christmas Day 1800. John Adams was left in terrible command. In a notebook he began his autobiography but didn’t get far: ‘I was born at Stanford Hill in the parrish of St Jon Hackney Middlesex of poor But honast parrents. My farther Was Drouned in the Theames thearfore he left Me and 3 More poore Orfing’ – thus the founding father of Pitcairn, the one who definitely didn’t leave and wasn’t murdered, the only mutineer still there in 1808 when Captain Folger arrived in the Topaz.

He became a self-appointed chief, the inheritor of a kingdom. He ruled nine women and a host of fatherless children. After a drunken fit he had some sort of vision in which God told him to show the way forward to his people. With his interpretation of the Bounty Bible he ruled them all. The children grew up brainwashed by him and in service to him. Advised by the angel Gabriel he enforced morning, afternoon and evening prayers and ruled that everyone must fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. Working women fainted as they hoed and slaved. Their Polynesian identity was taken from them and they were severed from their rich Tahitian roots. They chanted from the Bible and had no verbal humour or irony. As the island’s children grew up they married cousins, half-brothers, uncles, aunts. Adams officiated, using the island’s single wedding ring. These children inherited strong limbs, diabetes, asthma, and a lack of candour.

Adams ordered that his daughter Dinah be shot when she had an illegitimate child by Matthew Quintal’s grandson Edward. Her sin was fornication. When no one would shoot her, Adams attempted it himself. Edward’s father, Arthur, restrained him. Perhaps Dinah didn’t know that her father had murdered Arthur’s father by cracking his head with an axe. Perhaps Edward knew and sought revenge.

I wandered back to Adamstown in dappled light. Bea was painting her boat yellow. She’d called it the Dolphin. She said an announcement had been made over the intercom asking if anyone had seen me and knew where I was. I wondered if this was concern for my safety or suspicion as to what I might be doing.

33

Lady Myre and I were invited to supper by the governor’s representative Wayne and his Albanian wife Tania. He was young but old, and with the demeanour of a secret agent. He’d been posted to Pitcairn for a year to deal with the logistics of the trials, then he’d be transferred to some other uncommercial outpost of the old colonial world.

The house assigned to him was clean and well-equipped, as neatly built as the prison and with all amenities. It had a private generator and an electrically operated mosquito repellent. There were shelves of CDs, DVDs, and videos. There was a lone cat, neutered by a government vet and with a flea collar. All that the officials might want was shipped with them and extra supplies were brought on Nigel Jolly’s Braveheart. They kept to a standard, mixed with each other and seemed no part of Pitcairn. The islanders called them visitors and seldom remembered them when they left.

Equally polished and pristine was the other guest, Mary the schoolteacher, plump and complacent, in a well-ironed white blouse, her white hair washed in good shampoo. She too occupied a government house, but a new, smarter schoolhouse was being built for her use. She too was on the island for a year. She was about seventy and had gone to New Zealand from Hampstead. Her husband, who wasn’t with her, was a painter. In her school were four children, aged four to fourteen. She said she had one rule: ‘Keep your hands and feet to yourself.’

The food had an Albanian slant: spicy chicken and rice, salads, barbecued fish. There was a chilled New Zealand Chardonnay, and an elaborately decorated chocolate cake.

I foolishly asked, ‘Where did you get that?’ ‘From the French patisserie down at the bay,’ Mary said, then spurted with laughter.

Lady Myre was wonderfully herself in a rustling green skirt and a pink feathery boa. She’d painted each of her toenails a different colour. ‘Don’t you love them?’ she asked Wayne. ‘Aren’t they jewels?’

We ate on a verandah overlooking the sea. The talk was of planned improvements for the island: the reconstruction of the jetty, shipping links with French Polynesia, the feasibility of an airstrip, a concrete surface for the Hill of Difficulty – though it was thought that if mud stuck to the wheels of quad bikes from tracks to the houses and gardens, they’d skid off the concrete and into the sea. All the grant allocation had to be spent by the end of the financial year, but not much had yet been agreed.

I asked a few questions about the forthcoming trials.

‘The truth is going to come out,’ Wayne said.

A notice had been issued requiring all islanders to hand in their guns before the court convened. One or two had refused. The guns were to be taken from them out of fear of ‘hot-headedness’ or that they might be used against defendants or victims.

Conversation shifted to Lady Myre and her iPod, the temporary dressing on her tooth, her attempt to learn to drive a quad bike.

‘Are you travelling together?’ Wayne asked.

She said we were, I said we weren’t. There was a thoughtful quiet. Then she went into a performance about her time on the Shaw Savill Line and how she’d starred in Kenya as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and the audience had left in droves at the interval. ‘Is it me you’re after, Willie?’ she declaimed, ‘or is it something else? Is it a kiss you’re after, Willie? or is it something else?’

No one knew what she was talking about. They looked uncomfortable, even alarmed. ‘And you,’ Mary asked