‘Oh, Mr Furneaux . . . it is a pleasure, sir.’
His astute eyes studied me a moment. ‘You never look a day older, Frears.’
‘Sea air, sir.’
‘Fancy more of it? Want to go back out there?’
He gestured towards the horizon beyond the harbour. ‘It willbe different this time. Cook has prepared things a little better than Wallis.’
‘Are you sailing on Cook’s boat?’
‘Not exactly. I am accompanying him,’ he told me. ‘On the voyage. As a commander on theAdventure. I am assembling a crew. Would you like to be part of it?’
Somewhere above Australia, now
I am on a connecting flight between Sydney and the Gold Coast, feeling tired. I have spent most of the last two days either in aeroplanes or at airports. There is a baby crying at the back of the plane. It makes me think, momentarily, of Marion, when she was teething, and how worried Rose had been, imagining the pain could be fatal. In the same way every dog is similar to every other dog, every baby’s cry echoes every crying baby there has ever been.
And, on that note, there is a young couple in front of me. A head sleeping on a shoulder. A man’s head on a man’s shoulder, the way you never used to see. It is a touching sight, I suppose, but makes me jealous. I want a head on my shoulder, like Camille’s had been on mine, just before Hendrich’s call. Is this how I had once felt about Rose, at the beginning? Or is this something different? Maybethis isa different kind of love. Did it matter?
I think about how we have barely spoken a word to each other during the last week at school. I think about an awkward moment near the kettle in the staff room. She was rummaging through the teas, looking for chamomile. The silence screamed.
My mother had told me to live. After she had gone, I had to live. It was easy for her to say, but of course she was right. And it was an understandable wish. When you die the last thing you want is for your death to leak out and infect those left behind, for those loved ones to become a kind of living dead. And yet, inevitably, that often happens. It has happened to me.
But I sense it is getting closer. Life. I sense it, just inches aheadof me. Marion is part of it. The suddenly very real idea of finding her. I sleep and I dream of Omai. I dream of seeing him standing on a South Pacific beach staring out at sunset. And when I get to him I grab his arm and he crumbles away like sand and there is someone else, someone smaller, there beneath him, like a Russian doll. A child. A child with a long braid in her hair and wearing a green cotton dress.
‘Marion,’ I say.
And then she, too, crumbles into sand, into the beach itself, and I try to keep her intact even as the water washes her away.
And when I wake up, the baby is no longer crying and I am there – here. The plane has landed, and I know that in a matter of hours I will be seeing someone I haven’t seen for centuries. And I can’t help but feel terrified.
Huahine, Society Islands, 1773
Arthur Flynn, second lieutenant of theAdventure, sunburnt, sweltering in his once white shirt, knelt on the sand, holding bright red and white ribbons in his hands and, in clumsy, emphatic sign language, mimed tying them in his hair. He smiled an imitation of a pretty girl, quite a reach given his scorched face and scalp and untamed beard.
But still, his audience of little children seemed impressed. I had travelled enough to understand that laughter was pretty universal, at least among children. Even the older islanders, standing a little more po-faced behind, were suddenly smiling at this strange red-skinned Englishman playing the fool. Arthur handed a ribbon to the long-haired girl nearest to him – she could have been no more than six years old – and, after confirmation from her mother, she took it.
Then Arthur turned, and said to me, in a voice softer than his usual, ‘Frears, do you have the beads?’
Behind them, the two ships sat like inanimate elegant beasts transferred from another reality.
As we stayed there, giving out gifts and peace-brokering with ribbons, I saw a face in the crowd that I recognised. It was a man I had seen before.
He was holding a wooden board and he was wet from the sea. I had seen similar wooden boards on my last visit to the Pacific Islands. They were used by fishermen to go out to sea. They would stand up on them, riding waves. Sometimes they had seemed to do this wave riding simply for fun. But none of this explained howI could know this man. How could this be? I had never visited this island before. I tried to think. It didn’t take long before it came to me. It was the man whose hut I had refused to torch. The handsome one with the long hair and wide eyes. But that had been on Tahiti. It wasn’t a vast stretch of ocean he had travelled over, but it seemed ridiculous to imagine he’d done it on nothing but a board of wood. And in Tahiti he had been bedecked with necklaces and bracelets, denoting a status his unadorned chest and arms would suggest he no longer had.
He looked exactly as I had remembered him. I supposed four years wasn’t that long. His face looked at me with a kind of longing, a desperate need to communicate something.
I looked around, at Arthur and some of the other men, hoping perhaps that the man’s attention might be diverted elsewhere. But no. It stayed solely on me. He spoke words I couldn’t understand. Then, with his right hand, he pinched the ends of his fingers together and brought them to his chest. The fingers beat against his chest in rapid staccato succession. I understood the mime.
I.
Me.
Him.
Then he pointed to the sea, to the boats, then beyond to the horizon. Then he looked down at the sand and gave a look of either fear or disgust. He kept that expression as he turned to look behind him, towards the breadfruit trees and lush green jungle beyond the beach, before looking again to the boats and the ocean. He did this a few times until I was clear about what he was saying.
I heard boots in sand walking towards me. I saw Captain Cook and Commander Furneaux, together, sharing a mutual frown.
