And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.
Dubai, now
The airport in Dubai is very bright, even though it is the middle of the night. I wander through a shop where a woman wants to spray aftershave on me.
‘I’m all right, thanks,’ I say. But the woman doesn’t believe me. She sprays the scent – Sauvage – onto a thin and perfectly rectangular strip of card and hands it to me. She smiles so forcefully I find myself taking the piece of card and walking away with it. I smell the paper. I imagine all those plants where the scent comes from. Think of how detached we are from nature. How we have to do so much to it before we can bottle it and put the name ‘wild’ on it. The smell does nothing for my head. I walk on and find myself in the airport bookshop. Some of the books are in Arabic but most are in English.
I look for something to read but at first see nothing but business books. I stare at the cover of one of them. It has the author on the front. He is wearing a suit and an unnatural pseudo-presidential smile. His teeth have an Arctic glare. He is called Dave Sanderson. The book, The Wealth Within You, has a subtitle: How to Harness Your Inner Billionaire.
I stare at it for quite some time, in a kind of trance. It is a popular modern idea. That the inner us is something different to the outer us. That there is an authentic realer and better and richer version of ourselves which we can only tap into by buying a solution. This idea that we are separate from our nature, as separate as a bottle of Dior perfume is from the plants of a forest.
As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photo-shopped and filtered.
No one I knew in the 1600s wanted to find their inner billionaire. They just wanted to live to see adolescence and avoid body lice.
Ah.
I am, I realise, in a bad mood.
My eyes are dry from tiredness and from seven hours on an aeroplane. I don’t like flying. It isn’t so much the being in the air that bothers me. It is the arriving in a different country, with a wholly different culture and weather system, just a few hours after you have left Gatwick. Maybe it is because I still remember the size of things. No one understands that any more. People didn’t feel the enormity of the world or their own smallness within it. When I first travelled around the globe, it took over a year, on a boat full of men, who were lucky if they made it. Now, the world is just there. All of it. In an hour I will be on a flight to Sydney, and by lunchtime I will have arrived. It makes me feel claustrophobic, as if the world is literally shrinking, like a balloon losing air.
I move to a different section in the bookshop. The section, mainly books in English or English translation, is titled ‘Thought’. It is a much smaller area than the one for business books. Confucius. The ancient Greeks. Then I see a book, face out, with a simple academic cover.
Michel de Montaigne’s Essays.
It nearly turns me to ash. I even say my daughter’s name out loud, to myself, as if I am close to her again, as if a part of us is contained in every book we’ve loved. I pick it up and turn to a random page and read a sentence – ‘Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it’ – and I begin to feel the onset of potential tears.
My phone beeps. I hastily put the book down. I check my phone. A text message. It is from Omai: ‘Been too long. Can’t wait to catch up. Have booked us in for dinner at a place called the Fig Tree restaurant at 8. Should give you time to nap off your jetlag a bit.’
Jetlag.
It seems funny him writing the word. He belongs, in my mind, to a time when the idea of humans flying was as fantastical as, to us now, humans living on Neptune. Maybe even more so.
I text back: ‘See you there.’
I leave Montaigne and the airport bookshop and head over to a large window and wait for them to announce my flight. I lean my head against the glass and stare out beyond my reflection at the infinite darkness of the desert.
Plymouth, England, 1772
After our return I stayed around Plymouth. I liked it there. As with London, it was an easy place to disappear into. A town of seafarers, ragamuffins, criminals, runaways, drifters, musicians, artists, dreamers, loners, and I was, at various points, any and all of those things.
One morning I left my lodgings at the Minerva Inn and went to the new dockyard. There was a large naval warship sitting high on the water.
‘Impressive, ain’t she?’ said a man on the dockside, seeing my awe.
‘Yes. Yes, she is.’
‘Set to find new worlds.’
‘New worlds?’
‘Aye. That’s Cook’s ship.’
‘Cook?’
Then I heard footsteps behind me. A hand fell on my shoulder. I jumped.
‘My goodness, Mr Frears, you seem a little shaken.’
I turned to see a tall lean finely dressed gentleman, smiling kindly at me.
‘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 will be 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 the Adventure. 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? Maybe this is a 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 ahead of 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 the Adventure, 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 how I 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.
‘What is happening here, Fines?’ asked Cook.
‘Frears,’ corrected Furneaux, with soft authority.
Cook shook the correction away as if it were a midge-fly. ‘Tell us. There seems to be some sort of minor commotion with this . . . gentleman.’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘Well?’
‘I believe he wants to come with us.’
Pacific Ocean, 1773
His name was Omai.
We later learned, when his English was better, that his name was actually Mai, and what he had been saying was ‘I am Mai’ in Tahitian. Anyway, the name stuck, and he never corrected us.
When we stopped off at other islands he would try to get me to stand on his board. The use of ‘surf ’ as a verb was still a long way away, but that is what he was doing, and he could stay upright for as long as he seemed to want to, whatever size the wave. Unlike myself, of course, who fell off to great laughter every time I tried to stand up on it. Still, I often like to think I was the first European ever to use a surfboard.
Omai was a quick learner. He grasped English with remarkable speed. I liked him, not least because he enabled me to escape the more mundane duties on deck. We would sit in the shade, or find a quiet corner below deck, and run through nouns and verbs and share a jar of pickled cabbage.
I talked to him a little about Rose and Marion. I showed him Marion’s coin. Taught him the word ‘money’.
He educated me about the world as he saw it.
Everything contained something called mana – every tree, every animal, every human.
Mana was a special power. A supernatural power. It could be good or evil but it always had to be respected.
One fine day we were out on deck and he pointed at the boards. ‘What is this called?’ he asked.
I followed the line of his finger. ‘That is called a shadow,’ I told him.
He told me mana lives in shadows and that there are lots of rules about shadows.
‘Rules? What kind of rules?’
‘It is very bad to stand on the shadow of a . . .’ He looked around, as if the word he was searching for was somewhere in the air. Then he saw Furneaux heading sternwards over the poop deck and pointed to him.
I understood. ‘Commander? Leader? Chief?’
He nodded. ‘When I first saw you, you did not stand on my shadow. You came near. But you did not stand on it. This was a sign that I could trust you. The mana inside you respected the mana inside me.’
I found it interesting that this seemed of more significance to him than my decision not to set fire to his home. I shifted a little distance away from him.
He laughed at me. Put a hand on my shoulder. ‘It is not bad when you know someone, just when you first meet them.’
‘Were you a chief?’
He nodded. ‘On Tahiti.’
‘But not on Huahine?’
‘No.’
‘So why did you move from Tahiti to live on Huahine?’
He was generally quite a light-hearted person, and remarkably relaxed for a man heading away from all he had ever known, but when I asked this his brow creased and he chewed on his top lip and he seemed almost hurt by it.
‘It is all right,’ I assured him. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
This is when he told me.
‘I know I can trust you,’ he said. ‘I know it as much as I know anything. You have been a good teacher. And you are a good friend. I also sense something about you. The way you talk about the past. The look in your eyes. The penny you have which you tell is old. All the knowledge you have. I think you are like me. You are a good friend.’ He kept saying it, as if needing confirmation.
‘Yes. We are good friends.’
‘Muruuru. Thank you.’
There was some understanding that passed between us then – a confidence to move out into the open.
Hollamby walked by. Hollamby, who I slept next to, had already told me that he thought it was a bad idea to have Omai on board: ‘He is a burden, eating the rations and bringing unknown curses with him.’ He gave us a sideways look, but let his eyebrows do the talking and walked on by.
‘I am older than other men,’ he said. ‘And I think you are too. Your face has not changed in five years. Not one bit.’
‘Yes,’ I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. I was too shocked to say anything else. It felt like the most terrifying and wonderful release, a century before seeing Dr Hutchinson, to find someone like me, and to be able to tell the truth. It was like being shipwrecked on an island for decades and then finding another survivor.
He stared at me and he was smiling. There was more relief than fear with him now. ‘You are like me. I am like you. I knew it.’ He laughed w
ith relief. ‘I knew it.’
He hugged me. Our shadows merged. ‘It does not matter! Our mana is the same. Our shadows are one.’
I cannot express the magnitude of that moment enough. Yes, Marion was like me but I still hadn’t found her. And so Omai made me feel less alone. He made me feel normal. And I immediately wanted to know everything. Looking around, making sure the other crew were below deck or elsewhere, we began to talk.
‘Is this why you came? Is this why you wanted to leave the islands?’
He nodded. Nodding, it seemed, was universal. So was superstition. ‘Yes. It was difficult. At the beginning when in Tahiti it was good. They saw me as . . . as the special One. That is why I became a . . . a chief. They saw it as . . . proof that the mana inside me was good. That I was good. That I was half a man and half a god. No one ever dared come too close to me in the daylight in case they stepped on my shadow.’ He laughed, and stared out to sea, as if the memory was something he could almost see on the horizon. ‘And I did my best and I think I was a good chief but after many, many moons had passed things changed. Other men. They wanted to be chief. And I could not stop being chief. The only way to stop being a chief was to die. So I was . . .’
He mimed claustrophobia. Hands throbbing in the air near his head.
‘Trapped.’
‘Yes, I was trapped. So I had to go. I had to begin like the dawn. But a day is only meant to last so long and then they want the night. I had run out of places to go. I just wanted to live.’
I told him what had happened to my mother. About Manning. About Marion, being like us. I told him how Rose had been in danger because of me. I told him how much I missed her.
He smiled softly. ‘People you love never die.’
I had no idea of the sense of his words, but they stayed with me for centuries.
People you love never die.
‘In England they do not accept us either,’ I told him, returning to our topic. ‘You can tell no one on this ship about your condition. When I return to England, I must become someone else again. Already Mr Furneaux is a little suspicious.’