Show Me The Sky Page 3

  But the Rev. Thomas, as many a white man who considers himself greater than his peers, believes physical labour, including the skilled and brave toil of our intrepid sailors, is only fit for those without words, the ‘uneducated and illiterate’, and while shinning down the mizzenmast I was scolded like a disobedient child and ordered that I put my shoes back on. ‘If you want to be regarded as a gentleman, not a savage, then you must behave so.’

  Many times, cut with comments that would start wars between chiefs and tribes in our respectful kingdom, I have held my tongue before the white man and his twisted wisdom. As I listened to the reverend lecture on the mind before the arm, forbidding my ‘labour among the commoners’, contented myself with the blood-rush of exertion pulsing in my limbs.

  2 October 1834

  Today the wind freshened, and after slow progress tacking the English Channel, the dotted end of the Needles finally slipped the horizon, the British Isles gone.

  This was a kingdom my mind could not have entertained prior to stepping down from the gangplank of the Fortune ten long years ago. Alas it has receded into cloud and sky, again a world only to be conjured by my inner eye.

  Once more do I realise that I might never see her again.

  4 October 1834

  Amid the rising swell, the cold brace of the Atlantic and its northerly winds, the reverends and their families have been much quietened by seasickness, finding the open deck and its shifting topography only conducive to discharging the contents of their stomachs over the sides.

  This morning the wife of Rev. Stevens, worst affected by the motion of the Caroline – even somewhat queasy bobbing along the Thames Estuary – appeared most suddenly from the hatch, running hither and thither and shrieking about the deck in a most delirious whirl, threatening to whomever may hear that she would cast herself into the waves if the Lord ignore her prayers for a calmer sea. Several sailors and myself restrained Mrs Stevens – quite forcefully keeping her person until the arrival of her husband and the capt. She was ushered below by the somewhat embarrassed Rev. Stevens, and it was only after a drop of rum and the administering of some sleeping medicine that brought her peace of mind.

  On witnessing such a commotion, a complete dejection of self just from the rolling waves, I was moved to utter a small prayer of thanks to the Lord for sparing me of seasickness.

  6 October 1834

  This being the sabbath, all on-board, save the most necessary sailors, listened to a service delivered by the Rev. Jefferson. Many of the rougher deckhands, no doubt as far from the Saviour as the people of my untutored lands, seemed to barely tolerate the sermon, whispering snide words and flashing grins like mischievous schoolboys.

  It is this rejection of the Lord, by those verily born into His midst, which suffers me much consternation for the missionaries and their gallant efforts to convert my heathen brothers – us who have known only the toy gods and false idols born from our darkened minds.

  7 October 1834

  The squally seas have subsided, and with a light yet favourable wind, the Caroline cuts the waves with fair progress.

  The missionaries are men of schedule and order, and a working rhythm to the days has already been established, along with a voyage committee formed by the following:

  Rev. Lilywhite – should be considered director, though Captain Drinkwater will supersede authority on maritime matters.

  Rev. Jefferson – vice-president, with natural ascension to president if some misfortune were to occur to Rev. Lilywhite.

  Rev. Stevens – to take charge of the library, with myself as his assistant.

  Rev. Thomas – responsible for the stewardship of the missionaries’ provisions, ensuring the equal distribution of articles – mostly tea, sugar, butter and cheese – and their quantities.

  How the thought of this stodgy sustenance makes one long for the succulent papaya! So swollen with juice it falls from laden boughs on the gentlest breeze. English fayre may derive from many more pots and pans, but a pudding of suet or ladle of gruel does not enliven the palate as does a bowl of turtle soup, the gleaming oyster slipping the tongue, a coconut creamed, or an orange that glows like the setting sun.

  God may have spoken to the white men first, but surely he came home and sat at the table of Fiji for his dinner!

  12 October 1834

  I am a week without an entry in my journal, as each morning of the past five days has been spent with the Rev. Stevens in the small but well-stocked library, nestled between the galley and the quartermaster’s stores. First we unpacked the boxes of books loaded at Blackwall, before arranging them upon the shelves – minus several bawdy tales belonging to the captain, quite flushing the cheeks of Rev. Stevens upon closer inspection – and logging their contents, title, and author.

  In the habits of the officious and paper-loving Englishman I am versed, and know well enough not to complain. But how he loves to invent a job! Several instances I had to bite my tongue on instruction from the Rev. Stevens, particularly when asked to rewrite the catalogue again by title rather than author. This laborious process of copying words from one place to another is to provide a reference list for the borrower – even though it is only the reverends, their wives, or the senior officers likely to be perusing the collection. All this importance to an arrangement of books that will be taken down and dispersed on our arrival in New Holland!

  Such an invention of labour and importance I shall not miss. Though I have little doubt that both the good and bad habits of the white man will accompany his travels.

  13 October 1834

  Reading the final sentence of my last entry, I am moved to offer a few words to our Saviour:

  Dear Lord, I pray that my apprehension for the future of my people, my fears for the earnest work of the missionaries, and the calamities of my imagination be wronged by your divine intentions. The passengers of this ship would not be the first of your harbingers to meet their maker on the end of a Fijian war club. Nor grace the feast of a chief with their very own cooked flesh. May your love and care keep us safe from harm. Amen.

  14 October 1834

  The further we sail from the shores of the British Isles, and the closer we get to my sunlit home, the more I am engaged in reflecting upon my adopted kingdom.

  Beyond those cities of smoke and industry, a land scarred by factories and foundries, a people with so many hands busied producing more and more things whether useful or useless, it is the inner effect of this life that begins to trouble my soul.

  Many times, be it in the court of a Lord or tavern of drinkers, I was asked whether I was homesick for my distant shore. Not wishing to offend, for a man does not visit the hut of his neighbour and talk of his own roof, I would answer their polite questions with compliments for the English soil I stood upon. Yet my heart was no diplomat. For the first time in my life, maybe in that of any Fijian, I understood the word lonely.

  But I do not mean to be by oneself, without companions, for any Fijian knows that whether in the depths of the darkest forest, walking at dawn on an empty beach, or even diving the reef among silent fish, we are held by the hand of the Great Spirit, joined to the beat of breaking waves and wind in the leaves, all things singing life, together.

  With or without God, lonely is a word carried by a man in a room full of strangers, along a busy street where he does not know the names of those he passes, and offers neither greeting nor his hand in acknowledgement. This lonely is a state of being unshared, of private thoughts imprisoned and starved, wasting away without light or company. Even the closest families can live in loneliness, sitting at the same table each night for dinner, but wasting breath on triviality rather than sharing matters of the heart.

  I am warmed at the thought of embracing my brothers, of clasping my mother and father tight to my chest. They are my very own blood, yet they may not recognise their own son, surely the first Fijian to be clothed in a suit from Savile Row.

  22 October 1834

  Nothing remarkabl
e has occurred since my last entry over a week ago, and as the Caroline makes good progress on a favourable SE wind, we have little to do but tend to our duties assigned by the committee.

  25 October 1834

  The warmer climes and lightened breeze have given the missionaries and their families some aspect of what to expect beneath the southern sun – and how inappropriate to be clothed in a heavy cassock of black.

  One would have thought that a lesson from the midday rays would educate the missionaries of the need to shed layers. Yet the zealous piety of Rev. Lilywhite has caused much grumbling among the seamen. On observing his wife taking her circuitous stroll among the sweating, half-naked sailors, the rev., a greying and frail man, moved more swiftly than one would have thought possible, scolding the bare-chested men and sharply ordering his wife below deck.

  Has the Lord not created us in His image? If so, why is this a shape to be ashamed of?

  27 October 1834

  Dead calm. Fearing a vertical sun’s ‘sickening effects’ the missionaries have untied their hammocks, and along with the bedding, brought it upon the decks to be aired, thus affording the benefit of fresh air to their berths once the smoke had cleared from fumigation with tobacco and sulphur.

  How the white body shrivels before the burning globe! It makes one think of pale worms dug from the dank soil. Blessed are we with skin cured dark from the glorious sun, free to enjoy its rays without layers of cloth and hats of straw!

  2 November 1834

  The torpor of a dead calm has finally passed, and not soon enough, as neither seaman nor missionary finds comfort with idle hands.

  It is this incessant attention to time that I fear will frustrate my dear pilgrims the most. My Fijian brothers and sisters, and the ancients gone before them, were content to reckon time from the rising of the sun. Yet of all the unnatural obsessions of the West, even beyond the accumulation of power and status through money, the measure of success by metal and paper, it is time, the thing that cannot be held, kept, or driven by any will but that of the stars and the moon, of which the white man makes constant commotion.

  The idea that each moment in each day can be divided and numbered, sliced into so many pieces like a sweet papaya, then again multiplied by the amount of days, weeks, and months in a year, will be a mystery to even the wisest chief.

  When asked my age, I could only answer with a guess at the number of moons I have walked this earth, for the Fijian does not countdown his death in such a fashion. The enquirers duly felt sorry I had not a day reserved on the calendar to celebrate my birth, yet it was I who felt pity for them, a lament for the soul waiting to expire.

  Time escapes the white man like a slippery fish, clutched too hard by the hungry hand. By not chasing something that cannot be caught, my brothers can live without haste and fear of a ticking clock. God has not enslaved us to his pocket watch. My people should be wary of the white man and his sickness of the passing day. We do not need more than what is between the rising and the setting of the sun.

  5 November 1834

  Further work on the dictionary has kept me from this journal, along with preparation for the Fijian lessons due to commence with Rev. Stevens, the only one of the brethren on-board to be stationed in my homeland.

  I am both nervous and excited about assuming the role of teacher. The Rev. Lilywhite took me to one side this morning and reminded me of the responsibility invested in those with knowledge.

  17 November 1834

  Once again I have neglected my journal. I have missed this dialogue with the page, a chance to give form to thoughts I could not share with acquaintances considered more professional than friend.

  Regardless, a dedicated teacher must be fully committed to his pupils, and much time has been spent preparing lessons for the Rev. Stevens, which normally would have been dedicated to this diary.

  The rev. has been a model student, benefiting greatly from his studies of Hawaiian and the wider origins of the languages known as Malayo-Polynesian, of which Fijian is a member. On first learning that my mother tongue had cousins dotted across the Pacific, from Formosa to New Zealand, Easter Island to Madagascar, I was thrilled to hear how far our family had spread. There are chiefs who will deny this truth as malicious rumour. ‘Fijian is pure,’ they will bellow. ‘A single kingdom with a single tongue.’ Following which exclamation will be mistrust and suspicion of the white man, with only the magic of the musket, or the Gospel, to enforce the truth.

  This bleak prediction of the future aside, it is with great pleasure that the Rev. Stevens and I sit and study, most generously offered the captain’s quarters while he is above deck supervising our journey south. Though I have resolved to be a tamer instructor than the Mistress Beaumont, I am committed to producing a competent speaker of Fijian, a man to stand before my brothers in the name of God and tell them to cast aside their false idols and heathen ways.

  Stolen Car

  He was lifted from his seat, weightless on earth. The car hung in the sky. For a few precious moments, Jimmy was an astronaut floating in space. All that had happened and would happen meant nothing. He was free.

  And then the ground.

  Glass sprayed in glittering arcs as the car flipped and toppled down the bank. Even when the world stopped turning, the wheels kept spinning. Strung upside down by the seat belt, he opened his eyes. A crimson ribbon unravelled on the surface of the stream. Blood dripping from his forehead. He unclicked the seat belt and splashed into the freezing water, then crawled through the broken window.

  ‘Now, you’re not going to start running, are you?’

  The voice came from the clouds. He looked up to the bridge and saw black and silver uniforms, a blue light pulsing. The policemen watched him stagger like a drunk and fall face down in the rain-fast brook.

  Two days before the crash, just as his teacher marked him down as absent, he had stood at the junction of the M1. Sunshine beamed through the grey and broken clouds. The shadows on ploughed fields drifted into each other like shifting continents. He watched the changing map. He listened to the traffic. It sliced through the water with a sound like hissing through teeth. He stepped back from the exploding puddles.

  When no cars passed he took the penknife from his pocket and wiped the bloodied blade on the wet grass.

  The first time he stuck out his thumb, a driver reined a truck on to the hard shoulder in a fanfare of air brakes and plumes of spray. The cargo was a mass of steel girders that shone through the rain. He ran along the kerb, pulled himself up to the passenger window and tapped on the glass. A bald man studying a map shooed him away. He jumped down from the step and called him a cunt. But no one heard or was there to listen anyway.

  After an hour of waiting, of watching cars splash and pass, staring faces hanging in windows, he jogged over the slip road and under the bridge. He turned to the wall and pulled his numb hands from the sodden sleeves. The dried blood of another life cracked across his skin. He fumbled with the buttons, desperate for a slash, dead hands, paled and paralysed with cold. His piss was luminous yellow. Steam rose to the roof, dry and dusty with blackened cobwebs, shuddering with the weight of roaring traffic.

  He shivered when he finished, thought of him walking on his mother’s grave.

  From the next change of lights a black Mercedes pulled over. The driver pressed the horn twice, and again, Jimmy ran along the kerb. He bent over at the passenger window and a Pakistani man in a navy suit put the glass down.

  ‘You goin’ London, mate?’

  ‘I stop forty miles before M25. I can drop you at the services.’

  ‘Sound.’

  The Mercedes door shut with a satisfied clump.

  ‘Cheers.’

  Jimmy had never been to London, but this is where people from the North go when they run away.

  ‘You look cold.’

  ‘Fuckin’ freezing.’

  Jimmy shuffled in his seat and sniffed. The leather squeaked against his wet jeans, muddied and f
lecked with the same red clay that covered his trainers.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the driver. ‘It’s a good heater.’ He drove the tilt of the slip road and eased into the southbound flow.

  ‘Nice car, mate.’

  ‘You think it’s mine?’ He smiled and drove on. ‘I drive diplomats and foreign dignitaries. To and from the airport. Meetings, lunches, you know.’

  No. Jimmy didn’t know. He sat back in the seat and rubbed his hands in the stream of hot air from the vent. The driver looked across smiling, assured, nodding. As though he divined his past, present, and future.

  ‘So, what is it you’ve done?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Or what is it you’re going to do?’

  ‘Just goin’ to see me auntie, mate.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  They drove on in silence. Jimmy looked to the hedges and pylons stepping off into sheets of rain. Then the driver looked across again.

  ‘What do you think people see when they look at you standing there? By the side of the road.’

  Jimmy sniffed and creased his forehead. ‘Probably think I’m gonna rob ’em or somethin’.’ He shrugged. ‘I dunno, mate.’

  ‘You’re a distance they’ve never been to.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry. Maybe I don’t make sense sometimes. My English.’ He switched on the wipers and spoke his name. All Jimmy heard was a muddle of sounds. ‘And yours?’

  ‘James. But most people call me Jimmy.’

  He nodded. Weighed it like it was of the greatest significance. The traffic was slowing in the rain and he changed from the inside to the middle lane.

  ‘Life is very curious, you know. When I was a boy I had a rifle of my own but no shoes.’

  He stopped and thought about his words, looked ahead, through the rain-splashed windscreen.