I knocked on Rosie and Hank’s bedroom door. They’d heard the news on the speaker beside their bed. ‘Steve will deal with it,’ Rosie said. Both seemed uninterested in yet another tourist floating past on a casual journey, wanting something.
I climbed to Garnet’s Ridge and across the bay saw the yacht, a small, bright white speck, bobbing with the tide. It looked more like drifting polystyrene than a ship of rescue. Hours later I found Kurt by the Breadfruit Fence. He was tall and strong-looking, wore glasses and was deeply tanned by the wind, sea and sun. No one had gone out to his boat to fetch him. He’d waited until light then taken his dinghy to the jetty. He’d sailed from Antwerp, hadn’t spoken for forty-nine days, and he wanted a beer and a cigarette.
I explained why Pitcairn was a dry island, the conversion to Seventh Day Adventism, how cigarettes weren’t sold, there was no cafe, and liquor couldn’t be drunk without a licence. I said I knew of an islander who might help him out.
Lady Myre scuttled up, breathless with anticipation. She hugged Kurt extravagantly and called him her saviour, her vision of wonder. He looked perplexed, having been alone for all those days. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked. Mangareva, he said. To meet with his friend Wilhelm. And then to American Samoa. ‘Take me,’ she said. ‘You must get me off.’ She told him how nightly she was bitten by bugs, of her fear of going to the bathroom because of spiders as big as her hands and the sound of scuttling mice, of land crabs that crunched cockroaches, of being stung on the bottom by nesting wasps, how the men on the island were sex offenders who peered through her window hoping to molest her, how her husband Sir Roland Myre had run the Admiralty, how she’d never wanted to go to Pitcairn at all but had been grotesquely deceived by a shipping agent.
It all poured out in a torrent. Some of it was not as I’d remembered, but her desperation was real. Pitcairn was not to her liking. It occurred to me it must be strange for this man who’d been so long alone to have silence broken by this tirade. He asked if I had similar problems. I said, ‘Not quite,’ but that I too would like to travel with him, if he’d agree, because I didn’t know how else I’d ever get off the island. I explained about the Braveheart, plying to and from Mangareva bringing judges and lawyers and policemen to Pitcairn, and how it was chartered by special licence to the British government and couldn’t take tourists. Kurt said he’d consider the legal and insurance implications and let us know the following day. I took him to Pawl’s house and procured eight cigarettes and two cans of lager. He was startled by Pawl’s multiple ear piercings, extravagant tattoos and shaven head, and I wanted to tell him that here was a kind and gentle man, with a talent for making jewellery and an enthusiasm for books.
Ed the policeman came in, though it was still only about nine in the morning. Word had got round that the two Englishwomen and the lone yachtsman were together. He needed to check it all out. He took Kurt away on his quad bike. Lady Myre said she was going to her room to light a candlenut and say a novena to Erasmus, the patron saint of boatmen.
Next morning Kurt called to say he was sorry but he couldn’t risk it. Wayne wanted me and Lady Myre off the island but had warned him if he took tourists he might have his boat impounded by the French customs at Mangareva and be fined twenty thousand dollars. He needed to get to Samoa and then to Australia to meet up with his sister.
Lady Myre’s eyes rolled. She rocked and keened and said she’d die on Pitcairn and that God was punishing her. Her clothes were covered in red mud, the lights went off at ten at night, there were no shops, no television, no newspapers, no servants. She was dying for a cup of real coffee. Sex offenders peered at her through lit windows, her husband was in the Admiralty …
So Kurt agreed to take us. I had to admire (and not for the first or last time) how adept she was at having her way. He coached us to say to the Mangarevan authorities that we were friends of his from Basle, we’d arranged to meet him at Pitcairn, we weren’t paying passengers.
His boat, called Luceann after his children Ludovic, Cedric and Annette, was, he said, the Mercedes Benz of yachts – none better, built in Perpignan to a very high specification and with great attention to detail. Though Lady Myre and I must share a cabin, we’d have all comforts: reading lamps, a hot shower, a flush toilet … He’d checked the weather forecast with Hank. We must be down at the jetty by ten the following morning.
It was a day of packing and hasty goodbyes. I tried not to communicate the excitement I felt, not to inspire dissatisfaction in those compelled to stay. I couldn’t believe those mutineers and deceived Polynesians – young, strong and at home on the sea – would have stayed in this cut-off place. If they’d had the chance to leave on a small boat on an uncertain journey to an unknown destination, they’d have taken it. And it seemed understandable that the women, after the men had gone, would tear down a house to build a boat to follow in their wake.
That last night, long past the time when the generator was switched off, Rosie, Hank, Michael Young and I talked by candlelight. They all lived by
