The Sex Lives of Cannibals

Pardon?

“I sed y gut a fookin fag? A ciggy?”

I gave him a cigarette. With trembling hands he drew the smoke in. “Ugghhh.” Snort. “Hrrmgghh.” Snort.

As a skilled journalist, I knew how important it was to establish a connection with one’s subject and find a common language. I asked him, “So what the fuck were you thinking, fucking poet laureate and shit?”

“I’s a feelinn out a jub application to deliver fookin newspapers ’t fookin four o’clock n the mornin, n I thut to meself ther ass to be somethin better n this, u know wha I meen? N wha cuud be better n bein e fookin national poet, sittin round writin fookin poems all day.”

Indeed. But not in England.

“Problem wi fookin England is A, u’v got to be fookin good, and B, the fookin job’s taken.”

These inconvenient facts would dissuade many, but not Dan Wilson. He consulted an atlas. “I’s lukin fur someplace remute. I luked at the fookin Pacific, luked at the fookin middle, n found Kiribati.” Snort. “Y gut another fag?”

I gave him another cigarette. “Y mine if I take two?” He lit one and placed the other behind his ear. “Hrrmmph. Hak-hak. Chhhhhhh-thwoooo.”

Wilson was not quite the semiliterate wreck of a being that he appeared to be. His answers, despite the fookins, were practiced, smoothed over after dozens of interviews in the UK. His correspondence with the government of Kiribati was arranged chronologically in a neat folder. His round-trip air ticket was paid for by a film production company, which had provided him with a camera to record a video diary. But now that he had arrived on Tarawa, far away from the media glare, what on earth was he going to do here? I asked him how he had been spending his time.

“I’m jus swimmin, sleepin, chillin out, partyin. U know, doin what the fookin I-Kiribati do.” Not quite, but never mind. Did he plan on writing verse? (“Have you written any fucking poems yet?” I asked.)

“I aven’t written a fookin thing. I’m waitin until me fookin hut is ready and then I’m just gonna write and see wha fookin comes out. I don’t really write serious poetry, just comic verse.” Who would have thunk. “So I’m jus chillin til I get to Tabiteuea North.”

Tab North? The Island of Knives?

In Kiribati, whenever one hears of a murder, one’s reaction is, Really? And then, inevitably, one hears that the murderer is from Tabiteuea North, and the reaction is, Ah, yes, of course, that explains it. They are very sensitive on Tabiteuea, and very quick to resort to the blade. Was Wilson aware of the island’s well-earned moniker? I wasn’t sure, but I decided not to tell him. I was, frankly, very curious to see how he would get along on Tab North. Perhaps the president was more devious than I thought. Honest, embarrassing me in front of the world is no problem at all. Now here is your hut on Tabiteuea. Feel free to sleep with the women.

But I don’t think Wilson would have been perturbed. The palm fronds swayed. The lagoon shimmered. He had a good kava buzz going. An attractive young woman walked past—the president’s niece? “Y know,” said Wilson, who seemed very content, in a glazed sort of way, “I’s temptin to fookin disappear here, to jus cut copra and make fookin babies.”

A highly original thought, little explored in verse. I wondered what would become of him, carried so far by a little jest. Kiribati certainly had no need for him. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote of a chief on Butaritari: “His description of one of his own songs, which he sang to me himself, as ‘about sweethearts, and trees, and the sea— and no true, all the same lie,’ seems about as compendious a definition of lyric poetry as a man could ask.” Perhaps then it was Wilson’s job to introduce the limerick to Kiribati.

But this would not happen either. In the weeks that followed, Wilson disappeared into the belly of Betio, the seaman’s bars where it is considered bad form to demonstrate an ability to walk upright. The expatriate grapevine was rife with tales of drunkenness and lechery and, unusual for Tarawa, where expatriate drunkenness and lechery are the norm, the stories carried the faint whiff of disapprobation. It was often noted that he had no money, and that he was living off the generosity of the I-Kiribati. He had discovered the bubuti. He manipulated custom. He brought women to the president’s house. The president’s wife was livid.

I encountered Wilson once more in the bar of the Otintaii Hotel, a modest cinder block hotel donated by Japan, where I-Matangs and government workers gathered on Cheap-Cheap Fridays. Wilson was shit-faced, and deliriously, rapturously happy. He was getting married. The lucky bride was a Chinese woman who had arrived in Kiribati to buy a passport, and Wilson kindly offered himself as a husband to improve her chances of escaping China. He liked Asian women, he explained. And island women too. They knew their place. A man could be a man and a woman a woman. None of this gender equality nonsense. Sylvia said: “It must be very difficult being so short.”

Snort, said Wilson, and then he retreated into the night, two more cigarettes dangling behind his ears, continuing on his dissipated journey, shortly to end with a ticket back to the UK and the resumption of the (brideless) life of an English lout.

CHAPTER 12

In which the Author discovers, while rolling in a swell, Sunburned and Stinging with Sea Lice, and circled by a very large Thresher Shark, which, contrary to his nature, he was trying to catch, that the Pacific Ocean is a Very Great Thing Indeed.

There is a moment, shortly after you accept the imminence of your demise, when it occurs to you that you could be elsewhere, that if you had simply left the house a little later or lingered over a coconut, you would not be here right now confronting your own mortality. This thought occurred to me just as I encountered a very large wave, a rare wave, a surprising wave, a wave that really had no business being where it was, pitching and howling, leaving me with a fraction of a second to make a decision. The options were not good.

Ahead, I could see Mike paddling his surfboard furiously up the face of the wave. Mike had lived on Tarawa for seventeen years. Mike was not a normal guy. He had arrived all those years ago with his wife, Robin, a renowned artist from New Zealand who was seeking both a new motif for her work and the opportunity to bring a few I-Kiribati souls into the Baha’i faith. And so, like me, Mike found himself living on Tarawa more or less as an accessory to his wife. He had taught in every school on Tarawa and was currently working as an administrative aide at the New Zealand High Commission, but his world revolved around surfing and books. If a book arrived on Tarawa it would soon be in Mike’s hands, and this made him very valuable as a source for reading material. We often had deep and lively discussions about the books we read.

“What did you think of Midnight’s Children?” he would ask.

“I thought it was pretty good.”

“It was baroque drivel,” he would inform me. “What about Infinite Jest?”

“I really liked it.”

“It was the most profoundly disappointing book I have ever read.”

I decided that under no circumstances would I ever let him read a word I had written. Unfortunately, just days after the Washington Post published an article of mine, an article that I dearly wished would never be read in Kiribati, because it was a fusion of two separate articles which had been conjoined by the editor so that it became, in his words, “a Frankenstein-like monster sent lumbering into the world,” Mike stormed into the house with a copy. It had been faxed to the high commission by the New Zealand Embassy in Washington. “What kind of hack work is this?” he demanded.

Sigh.

As a source for books, Mike always tried to be helpful. “I think you should read this,” he proposed, handing me Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes. This particular book is about a guy who really wants to be a novelist, but instead of becoming a novelist he becomes a loser alcoholic living a sad, sad life.

“Thanks, Mike,” I told him afterward. “I really enjoyed that one.”

“I thought you would,” he said with a sly grin.