Island Time
By cromer
- 832 reads
ISLAND TIME.
"WHERE'S MY WIFE??" roared Henry.
His wife was in Rarotonga and it was said that he had another in
Seattle but to neither was he then referring.
"AND WHERE'S THAT BOAT??"
The boat had been and gone, its occupants full of bush beer, staring
up blankly, not knowing why they had come and deciding therefore to go
back. The MV Manuvai rolled at anchor in the dusk outside the reef. Day
four of a three day trip. Island Time.
For the island of Mautiu had closed. It lay there, a low ragged wall
of raised coral thickly topped with ironwood trees and coconut palms
and little sign of movement. The Manuvai had come on Saturday morning
with sugar, powdered milk, corned beef, many dozen cases of beer and
half a dozen assorted papaa deck passengers along for the round trip,
living on tinned sardines and Cabin Bread.
But a big swell was running and the anchor wouldn't hold the outer
slope of the reef anywhere near the village; neither in that sea could
the island's boat have taken cargo without losing some. So the Manuvai
could only move round to the lee and wait for the sea to abate. In the
meantime, the islanders had adjourned to the bush beer school. It was
the weekend, after all, and this weekend, the school was in session.
.
Which was why, by Saturday afternoon when the sea was workable, Mautiu
wasn't. Henry had tried to raise them on the radio but their set, like
the islanders then, was on the wrong wavelength. Some of the crew had
swum ashore, timing a wave to be lifted onto the reef, to see if
someone would at least bring out the boat to fetch the rest of the
ship's company.
And they did go through the motions. They convened the Island Council
and the Council duly granted authority for use of the outboard if
anyone cared to leave the party and do the ferrying. But the volunteers
- or more probably those volunteered - who eventually came out had by
then already had a few. They arrived, blank faced, off the starboard
side and getting no immediate response to their shouts - mainly because
their shouts weren't making sense - decided to get back to the
home-brew.
Home-brew after all was part of the heritage, a formula brought back
from Tahiti six generations ago, an artform just illegal enough to make
it delicious - metaphorically at least, there was no accounting for
taste.
For I knew something about the taste of home-brew; it was still with
me after a school visit elsewhere a week or two earlier. That rainy
night, I had followed whispered directions (everyone knew where the
school was but it was not quite polite to mention it) to find a small
hut tucked behind mango trees away from the track. And there, where oil
lamps threw flickering shadows up flimsy pandanus walls, school members
sat around looking as nefarious as Polynesians could, which wasn't
very. It was the brew that was evil; sugar, yeast, hops and water, like
vinegared wine and twice as strong, several gallons of it in a
polished, hollowed-out palm trunk the shape of a bongo drum. With mild
formality, the MC had dished out in a communal half coconut shell to be
downed in one. But he seemed to set a fast pace and with only chopped
coconut and tomato to soak it up - or perhaps because of that - my
demise came early. I had gone for damage limitation by retiring twice
for a feigned leak and working a two finger regurgitation in a bush
outside but the limitation was still limited.
It had nevertheless been a mellow evening. The young island policeman,
whose wife turned up to drive us both home, explained, as the car was
stopped so I could regurgitate once more, that he preferred to drink
with the older men because the young ones always picked fights. It was
somehow a consolation for the age I was feeling at that moment.
The Mautiu bush beer school, known as The Syndicate, would have been
similar though it sounded bigger and its recipe - with pawpaw and mango
- better. There were the usual rules: men only, money for food on the
family table before leaving home, no member to pick a fight with
another and no wife beating on the return. Fair enough. But it still
sounded like the youth wing of the real ale movement - half the ship's
crew were there for a start - and things, we surmised, might get a
little boisterous by the time the barrel was low.
So our faint papaa hearts had jibbed, first at the blank-faced
boatmen's offer, and then, more emphatically, at that swim over the
reef which, to anyone not born to it, promised an instant skinning.
Thus on Saturday evening, we had settled instead for a quiet drink
aboard, sitting around the grubby table in the stern under a dim bulb,
relaxed in the assumption that they would unload on Sunday and we could
then take a gentle stroll ashore along frangipani-scented lanes of
crushed coral while they did so.
But Sunday, it transpired, was for The Lord and the Syndicate if in no
particular order. Someone apparently suggested getting the Seventh Day
Adventists to do the job but it happened that there were only two on
Mautui, sober though they might have been.
So Sunday passed as had Saturday with the Syndicate still in session.
The sun dipped towards the sea between huge columns of rose-coloured
cumulo nimbus, the frigate birds hung like kites on the trade wind, and
those still aboard the Manuvai drank red cans, now from the island's
new consignment, and caught bright orange coral trout over the stern.
There wasn't much else to do. Unless.....
"WHERE'S MY WIFE??" roared Henry once more. With the mate and the
engineer holding the fort, Henry was definitely off watch. He stood
there, six feet and fourteen stones of bare-chested, coconut-fed party
potential in a red and white hibiscus print pareu and, hopefully,
Y-fronts. His wife in the context of the question was the Californian,
though she didn't regard herself as his wife in any context; she was
down below trying to lash the door of a cabin, another faint-hearted
papaa. It was a huge joke and no one was really sure of the punch line.
We leaned on the rail, gently sipping our beer and laughing nervously,
each wondering which of us would try to influence the ending if the
ending looked like becoming inappropriate.
'I AM GOING BELOW' he announced suddenly, taking a swig and wiping his
mouth with the back of his hand, 'AND I MAY BE RATHER A LONG TIME!'
Then he paused and looked quizzically at each of us.
'Didn't someone famous say something similar?? In colder climes,
perhaps? ....never mind! DON'T WAIT UP FOR ME!!!'
And, pausing only to point resolutely down the stairs, he descended
them four at a time.
We looked at each other, quickly gathered around the top of the stairs
and strained our ears.
His muffled voice sounded along the lower corridor.
'Let me in!!!.'
The reply was inaudible but of only two syllables.
'Pleeeeeese....'
'No!'
'Pleeeeeeeeseeee'
Nothing.
'UHOOOOOOOOOO'. His voiced boomed in the depths of the ship. It was
angst but was it still humorous?
We heard him coming back and hastily resumed positions as he bounded
up the stairs and re-merged into the dim light. For a moment, he stood
there, pretending to cry. But then he straightened, placed his hands on
his hips and his smile broadened like a breaker on the reef..
'HAH!' he cried. 'Clearly captain's rights are no longer what they
were! There is a better party ashore. I wish you all GOODNIGHT' and
with that, he leapt onto the rail and dived into the sea.
We crowded to the point from which he had departed and watched him
recede landwards into the darkness. And when he was no longer visible,
we stepped back and looked at each other.
Oh!
Oh, well that was all right then. Crisis averted. Perhaps not even a
crisis at all. He wasn't a bad bloke, that Henry. In fact he was a good
bloke, really. Ran a good ship. It was all a bit tingly when he started
after the Californian but she had retreated quickly and it was all just
a bit of joshing, wasn't it? He liked a good laugh. Liked a party. All
the Islanders did.
And now he was ashore with most of the crew and having a good time.
And here we were, staying with the soft option perhaps but under a
tropical night sky in a warm breeze with access to the island's supply
of grog for which we would square up in due course. It wasn't too bad
all round, really.
We sat down once again around that grubby table and settled in for a
few more beers. As the moon rose above the trees, we had tepid
conversation: the Kiwi volunteer on dental work in the islands, the
Canadian on teaching techniques in Ontario, the English artist - he
doing a Gaugin In Paradise - relating Python sketches. Ralph from the
next island, a wiry fifty-year-old with the colour of mahogany, three
days growth of grey beard and a succession of roll-ups, tried some
Maori songs, melodic, relevant but, to us, unintelligible. He did do a
passable rendition of "You Are My Sunshine" and with the beer, we
almost led on from there, but almost was as far as we got and so he
repeated "You Are My Sunshine" and, refusing to be wet-blanketed,
continued to do so.
And the Manuvai continued to roll. She rolled a lot. She was a four
hundred tonner built for river and coast work in Germany, and anchoring
in a Pacific swell was probably not what her architect envisaged. She
had once been sunk in a collision with a Russian trawler in a North Sea
estuary and lay on the bottom for two years until the insurance company
raised and pumped her out, and sold her to the South Seas. Her plates
were dented and scarred, her decks pitted and brown, her cables thick
with greased oxidation like chocolate paste, her winches as rusted as
old machinery in the long grass of some temperate farm, but they
worked. Now she plied the Cook Islands on as many cylinders as the
engineer could muster and a new set of zinc blocks every six
months.
We didn't hear the boat return. We just saw two forms come over the
side in the moonlight. The Kiwi gave a sharp in take of breath.
"It's him" she said through clenched teeth.
"Who?"
"Big trouble. Assault convictions, the lot. He's crazy on the grog. I
had to treat him when he punched his own teeth out."
She ran and shouted to the boatmen. They were pulling away in
alcoholic oblivion but her urgency prevailed when she climbed over the
side and jumped for it. We heard her hit the water but we were looking
for the newcomers, waiting motionless as the stern rose and fell and a
coral trout flapped on the deck.
The two men walked slowly into the light with bags and coconut mats.
One in trousers and floral shirt was middle aged. The other in shorts
and singlet was younger with the build of a middleweight boxer and a
smile revealing a single tooth in his top gum.
"Kia Orana Captain!" said the younger man in a surprisingly loud voice
to no one in particular. Why had he left the Syndicate? Expelled under
rule three?
The other tossed his head at the upper deck, climbed the ladder and
then vomited over the side from above us. The boxer, staring steadily
at us, followed him upwards.
Right.
The cabins were not ours, nor anybody's, and they were hot and cramped
and airless. We had been sleeping on the hold cover in the warm breeze,
or on the wooden life jacket boxes on the upper deck where the canopy
deflected the showers, or even on that greasy table if no one was
eating.
But the cabins had doors - not lockable, true, but doors nevertheless.
We lay on bunks, sweating and awake. Suddenly the door burst open.
There he stood.
"I have brought you some orange juice, Captain." And he had.
"Thank you!" said the Canadian, assuming command. The rest of us
stared at the ceiling. The boxer withdrew.
Pity Henry wasn't there. He would have sorted this out. Pity perhaps
that we weren't ashore ourselves for that matter. We might not have got
over the reef but we could have taken our chance with the swirling surf
in the narrow gap they had blasted to get the boat in and out. There
would have been ukuleles and laughter at The Syndicate, and it was
after all not impolite to decline a round or two.
"I have brought you some corn flakes, Captain." He was back and,
again, he had.
"Thank you."
It need not have been the Syndicate of course. Visitors were welcome
anywhere. People always asked you in, hoping to know all about you,
offering food and sweet drinking coconut - Polynesian hospitality,
wanting unreserved acceptance. But we had missed the boat.
"Shall I clean the toilet now, Captain?"
'What...? Good idea!"
It was. It would have been sobering. We lost the night to fitful sleep
and woke to the sound of voices and the winch engine. The hold was
open. The boat had returned full of men shrugging off hangovers. The
swell was down; it was a workable day. Day five of a three day trip.
Island Time.
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