Coconut Chaos Diana Souhami (classic books to read txt) 📖

The bed to which she and I were consigned took up most of the third. ‘Queen size,’ said Kurt. There were two windows close to the sea, which could be opened if it was calm.

‘Mmm,’ said Lady Myre. ‘What fun. Are you for aft or starboard?’ She wheeled in a case the size of a cupboard. ‘I don’t want much for the voyage,’ she said, then whispered, ‘So we’re bed-mates after all.’

Kurt pulled the anchor, hoisted sails and talked about mainsails and roller reefing and the wind abaft the beam. He showed us how to switch on the engine, pump the toilet, boil the kettle and blow our whistles when we fell into the sea. He explained how, if the boat flipped over in a storm, though it couldn’t be righted, it was possible to survive for two weeks in a watertight cell in the cabin.

He fired the engine. Pitcairn receded to a grey strip on the horizon. Within a month it would break into the world’s news, an isolated rock defined by its desperate past and the vast Pacific Ocean, its menfolk shamed, its people uncertain what citizenship they held or from where help might come. Kurt bounded the deck. I sat at the ship’s wheel and he switched from autopilot to manual and told me to watch the dials and keep the course on twenty-nine. It was as near as I would ever come to navigation. I felt exhilarated as I steered the waves, at one with the sea, the wind and the sky. I was an eighteenth-century mariner on the wide southern sea, there was nothing in view but the circle of the world, a frigate bird, a tern, a distant wave’s crest that might be mistaken for a ship.

Lady Myre swayed on to the deck holding a carrier bag. She was the colour of Kermit and her mouth was fixed in a rictus. ‘Sick,’ she said, then lay on the floor. Both she and I were wearing transdermal patches of Scopoderm behind our ears, and acupressure wristbands, and had swallowed quantities of Stugeron. I felt scornful of her for not being more of a sailor, for not being able to transcend such visceral things. I felt an intense sense of freedom on this small boat and on such a journey of chance. Close to the sea and the wind and sails, I imagined the Bounty cutting its lonely course, with the mutineers searching for the uncharted island of Pitcairn. I imagined Captain Bligh and the other eighteen men plying the ocean in that launch half the size of this boat, living on an ounce of bread and a quarter of a pint of water a day. Kurt cut out the engine and the wind caught the sails. This, I felt, was the true experience of the sea.

But suddenly, too, my body felt cold and a wave of nausea made me groan. ‘Keep busy,’ Kurt said. ‘Don’t give in to it. It’s all in the mind. Keep your eyes on the ocean.’ He said he was starving and asked me if I’d like fried eggs and sausages. I made it to the toilet but couldn’t recall what to do with the levers. Kurt ignored me. I returned to the deck and lay beside Lady Myre. Her eyes didn’t register. My teeth juddered. I didn’t mind if I were to die. She held my hand. ‘What an adventure,’ she whispered with a slur. ‘Isn’t it corking?’ A smell of fatty sausage wafted by. ‘Aren’t we lucky ones?’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t miss this for worlds.’ Then she threw up again.

Time seemed to stop. I was aware of Kurt moving the sails, of the sky darkening as the world turned. At some point he suggested we’d be more comfortable in the cabin, but neither of us moved. At night he covered us with blankets and oilskins. I dozed and woke and saw wave after wave furled with white. I saw the moon emerge from clouds. Beyond the awfulness of it all I felt glad to be on this small craft. I heard the music of the ocean in a timeless night and felt the thread between then and now. I thought of Bligh and his crew and how the sea had washed over them and they’d bailed all through their dark nights. I imagined them throwing valued stores overboard so they could bail better and to lighten the boat: clothes, rope, spare sails … I thought of the lies told to Titahiti, Manarii, Oheu and the other Polynesian men trapped on the Bounty in a chaotic venture they couldn’t control. And the animals – the pigs, goats and hens – and their bewildered suffering on a journey to hell.

So Lady Myre and I spent our night together, prone on deck. Even in the dark she looked weird, her nose very small, her mouth very wide. She’d wrapped a jersey round her face to protect her ears from the wind. At one point she sang in her clear soprano, ‘Oh Mr Porter, what shall I do? / I wanted to go to Birmingham and you’ve taken me on to Crewe,’ and then convulsed with laughter, which made her head hurt and her stomach retch. I said I thought she’d wanted to go to Picton. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what happens, you start out intending one thing and you end up with another.’ I hadn’t the energy to remind her of my interest in chaos theory, and how small initial differences amplify until they are no longer small, and of the order that lies behind chaos but is not providential.

The following afternoon, feeling better, we sat with Kurt in the cockpit lounge and sipped peppermint tea. But the weather had gone haywire, I suppose because of unknown variables. The predicted wind direction was spectacularly wrong and we were being blown due north by force seven winds at thirty knots an hour, with gusts of fifty knots and waves