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

Bligh was, how fired he’d be by the challenge to survive with scant resources. Why hadn’t he tipped him empty-handed into the boat to a certain death, the way people now abandon dogs on the motorways? I puzzled again about the true relationship between Christian and Bligh. Bligh had said Christian was the ‘object of his particular regard and attention’. What had that meant beyond dining with him nightly and tutoring him in the ways of the sea? And what was behind that plea of Christian’s: ‘That Captain Bligh, that is the thing. I am in hell. I am in hell.’ Bligh was quick to say the mutiny was ‘not to be wondered at’ because of the lure of the Tahitian women. But Christian didn’t seem that enamoured of women, whatever the fiction told by Clark Gable, Marlon Brando or Mel Gibson.

My reveries soothed me, so that although I didn’t forget I was being buffeted towards Alaska in dangerous seas, or how uncontrolled the situation was – that I was quite beyond reach of rescue and that no one who cared for me knew where I was – I found I could listen in a disinterested way to the thwacking of the waves. I thought of the real meaning of metaphors of the ocean – all at sea, washed up, adrift, going under – and although I felt detached from hope or prayer and had no sense of fate, as I lay still my mind calmed into the acceptance world of luck and grief and the split-second recognition of chance.

Lady Myre crept into the cabin at some indeterminate hour, shed her clothes, put on men’s pyjamas – Sir Roland’s perhaps – and crawled in beside me. She snuggled far too close. She smelled of peppermint and whisky and her perfume and of the sea somehow and the outdoors. ‘I know you’re not asleep,’ she whispered. ‘Who could be in all this?’ A mighty wave – was it the tenth? I wondered – cracked against the boat. I said nothing. I felt I was the eye of the storm inside and outside the catamaran.

‘You know I’m incredibly attracted to you,’ Lady Myre said. I refused to be unnerved even in this noisy dark and with the chaotic motion of the sea. With every rise of the boat to the wave’s peak an eerie light strobe-lit her face. Yesterday she’d been green, tonight she was silvery white. She’d wound some sort of wires or pipe cleaners into her hair – I wasn’t going to enquire why. ‘Please put your hand in my jim-jams and make me come,’ Lady Myre said. I lay very still and kept very quiet the way one does in the vicinity of a roused creature of an unfamiliar species whose intentions are unclear. ‘Please,’ she said.

In my career as a lesbian I’ve had a great many lovers, many of them exciting, all of them unsuitable, but I’ve always retained a sense of in some way choosing my destiny for the night. This night it seemed was to be an exception. I wondered if danger had made her sexual. I’ve heard sex is never more intense than when bomber planes fly overhead. I suggested Kurt was more up for it than I and clearly found her attractive. I said I wouldn’t at all mind or feel left out if she went to him and they shared a cabin.

‘You little fool,’ she said. ‘It’s you I want. I’m more attracted to you than to anyone for years.’

I made the drear excuse of the headache, for I didn’t want to offend or be unkind. In fact my headache, curiously, had disappeared and the huge capricious ocean no longer seemed my main concern, though it continued to buffet this bauble of a boat towards the most northern shore. ‘Perhaps we should just lie quietly together,’ I said, ‘a shelter from the storm.’ She made an exasperated noise but then became quiet and put her arms lightly around me. I didn’t want to encourage her or be misconstrued, but out of a sort of gratitude I gently nuzzled my face against her neck.

Thus we arranged ourselves, rather as on the previous night. I was aware of the silkiness of her skin and of her thoughtful stillness. I tried not to think about the oddness of her manner, the smallness of her nose, the wideness of her mouth, her alarming changes in skin colour and the way she made me think of Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death. In this violent night she was my consolation. Or at least she was there, unlike anyone else. The mighty ocean lifted us high then dropped us down. We had no choice but to assent to its ferocious rhythm, its repetition. Its waves pushed us hard against each other. I lay in the slight arms of this strangest of strangers and sort of had sex with the sea.

‘This too will pass,’ I said.

‘I hope it never does,’ she replied.

At some point in that timeless night I struggled to the toilet: to be sick, of course, and to have a pee. I staggered and clung to a protruding sink or jamb. There was water swilling over the floor, and the cockpit door was open. I tried to look outside for Kurt but there was just the maniacal sea. I was soaked with spray when Lady Myre hauled me back into the bunk and I told her of my fears.

‘I hope he’s gone,’ she said. ‘Then it will be just you and me and the cruel sea.’

I supposed I was afraid, but I had been more afraid, when young, of rejection, abandonment and the indifference of those whom I would have liked to love me. I did not doubt the sea’s indifference on this wild night, though it seemed like involvement of the deepest sort.

I thought that perhaps when morning came the storm might give way to a rueful sunrise and calmer seas and the chance again to