The party was held in a daughter’s house. All the island’s women took food for it and two big tables were loaded with goat stew, chicken stew, chips, pizza, rice, pasta, salads, broccoli, mashed squash, green-banana pilhi, arrowroot pudding, pumpkin pie, jelly, cheesecake, chocolate biscuits, gluten patties and coconut-meringue pie. There was fruit juice to drink and the bare light bulbs seemed bright. No one smoked.
Lady Myre piled a plate with raspberry jelly then sprinkled the contents of her flask over it. ‘Are you Randy?’ she asked a large man in a T-shirt with a PITCAIRN ISLAND logo, then gave her explosive laugh. He turned away. The women stayed in one room, the men sat on the verandah and the children scuttled around.
I sat next to Steve and a man he called Sambo. They told me stories of their prowess. Steve had once caught a shark at the jetty and when he cut it open in its gut was a whole goat that must have fallen off the cliff into the sea. They boasted of catching 140 fish in an hour from a small boat with a wire and a hook and of goading a whale into the harbour and jumping on its back. The island was their playground. I commended Steve on Dr Scantlebury’s rescue. He shrugged. ‘It’s just what we do,’ he said.
I imagined the island men boasting of sexual conquest with the same lightheartedness as they boasted of the fish they hooked or the rats they shot. Their reference was not to the sensibilities of other and, as they saw it, lesser creatures, it was to the force of the sea and the thrill of conquest. They looked like mutineers, like pirates. They didn’t go to church or consider Judgement Day. Their strength worked the long boats, felled trees, built houses and the prison and rescued a drowning man in a storm. They resented intruders who assumed moral superiority and told them how they should behave.
I asked Steve about shipping and he laughed. Eight months was the longest without a ship coming by, he told me. It had never been worse than now.
Often I trudged the island: to Garnet’s Ridge, Ginger Valley, Flat Land, Up the Beans and Down Rope, and always with a sense of being watched. There were few creatures to observe – only cats, rats, geckos, chickens and seabirds. On a day when the sun shone I searched for the giant tortoise, Mrs T, but didn’t find her. I walked to my favourite place at St Paul’s Point where the waves pounded more fiercely and with brighter spray than ever I’d seen. Faint spray fluttered over me and I wrote in my notebook of island things: how a shark washed up on the rocks was thought to be dead until it bit off someone’s hand, how Pawl, the biggest, fiercest-looking man on Pitcairn, was one of the few untainted by sexual wrongdoing. He’d shaved his head and was covered in tattoos. Around his neck he wore pendants of a shark’s tooth, a black pearl, a shell, a piece of horn. He’d pierced his ears with many holes by jabbing them against a spike, and he’d made the rings he threaded through.
I looked up to see Bea and two men observing me. They hesitated but kept to their plan and clambered with barefoot ease to the lower rocks to fish. They stood in the spume of the waves, cracked fish dead and threw them into a basket. I called to ask what they’d caught. Bea held up a brightly coloured fish. There was nanwee, grouper, parrot, wrasse, but the friendliness was formal. I was an intruder.
I walked on. Much of the land was eroded. Where once there’d been pineapple plots and banana trees, now there were stretches of empty red soil, or rose apple bushes fit only for firewood. I passed Nola’s house. She was baking bread on wood embers in a stone oven. I sensed her reserve and left. At the prison, Hank was spreading the gravel path and Pania was filling nail holes round the trim of the doors. I admired the tongue-and-groove of the walls, the light fittings, the shower rooms. I wondered if the potential prisoners building their own cells had devised some way of ensuring escape. Foolishly I asked this and again met with discouraging politeness.
In the museum were motley relics displayed in rickety glass cases: bits of broken wood and ballast, a cannonball and rock encrusted rope, all apparently from the Bounty; copies of all postage stamps printed for the island; a set of Victorian scales for weighing letters; an old mould for making a hat; photos of Graham Wragg counting bird bones; photos of tourists arriving at the other islands in the Pitcairn group, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno; photos of girls in the Adventist school, covered neck to ankle in white muslin uniforms.
On the board by the courtroom was an edict that all firearms must be handed in by 7 September. Failure to comply would result in ‘the enactment of an ordinance to enforce their surrender’. A letter of response from the islanders said they needed their guns to shoot down breadfruit and coconuts from the trees and that this was one more act of interference.
At her house Rosie was talking to Lady Myre about living in a state of fallen grace and how Lucifer was once an angel. The policemen sat at the table eating eggs, chips and chocolate pudding. I checked my email. Nothing from Verity. Mother had told the staff at Sunset View that her children had conspired to have her imprisoned there.
Rosie assigned the Saturday sermon to Lady Myre. She’d failed to interest her in banana-drying, or anything much, and seemed
