WHEN KAIKALA AND I first made love, I’m not ashamed to admit that I let a scream of delight out of me that echoed any of the cries that I had ever heard on the island before. We were in our usual place, by the stream near the waterfall, and she had helped and guided me until my nerves were finally overtaken by my desires and I was able to be one with her. Afterwards, lying side by side as naked as a couple of new-born babes, she quizzed me once again on life in England.
‘I have four horses,’ I told her. ‘Two for my carriages and two for riding. I treat them well, of course. Feed them the finest oats, keep them clean and brushed. Or I have a man who does that for me anyway. He lives in the stables with the horses. And I’m above him.’
‘You employ a man to live with horses?’ she asked me, sitting up a little on one elbow and staring at me in surprise. I thought about it. I’d never known anyone who kept horses, so wasn’t sure who looked after them usually or where they typically resided. However, I still knew more about them than she did, so I believed myself to be fairly safe in the lie.
‘Well … he lives near by,’ I told her. ‘Not in the actual … not in the actual stable itself.’
‘Will you let me ride your horses when I come to England?’ she asked me.
I nodded quickly, anxious to please her. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You can do whatever you want. You will be the wife of a famous, wealthy man. No one will be able to tell you what you can and cannot do. Except me, of course, as I’ll be your husband and there are laws about things like that.’
She smiled at me and leaned back again. The issue of marriage had come up on our previous encounter, when she had done as much to excite me as had ever been done in my life and we had only stopped short of consummating our relationship then by an unfortunate accident that had come over me while she was playing with my bits and pieces. I had told her that I would bring her back to England and make her a fine woman and she had seemed thrilled by the idea of it.
Whenever I was with Kaikala, these lies came easily to me and, in truth, they seemed to be little more than harmless fibs. I didn’t imagine she really saw herself sailing across the seas to a new life with me, and I wasn’t entirely sure that she believed all the things I said about my supposedly wealthy existence back home either. I thought it was just a game, something that two young lovers might pretend to each other in order to imagine a different life from the one that they actually had.
‘But what about you?’ I asked her. ‘Won’t you miss your family, your home on Otaheite? It’s unlikely we’ll ever come back here again, you know.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, shaking her head quickly. ‘I won’t miss it. My mother and father, they don’t care much for me anyway. And they care even less for each other. And anyway, Yay-Ko, I am different from them.’
‘Different?’ I asked. ‘Different how?’
She shrugged her shoulders and I watched as she ran a finger down to her titty and encircled the dark bud at its centre in a distracted fashion. I wanted to kiss it, but even after all that we had done I still did not feel the courage to do so without a proper invitation.
‘When I was a child, my mother told me about the men who came before,’ she explained. ‘She was my age, you see, when they were here.’
‘The men who came before?’ I asked. ‘You mean Captain Cook and the Endeavour?’
‘Yes, them,’ she said. ‘She told me about those men: how kind they were, the gifts they brought, and how they stayed and made love to the women time and again.’ I gasped a little in surprise; she had no shame in her story-telling and I admired her for it. ‘It was my favourite story. I asked her about it frequently. But I always had to imagine it in my mind. What it was like. What they were like. And I thought that if they ever came back here, then they would take me with them when they left. This is a paradise to you, Yay-Ko. To me, it is a prison. I’ve been a captive here all my life, knowing there’s more out there, knowing there’s a world that I have not seen. And I want to see it. My parents will never leave. No one here ever leaves. They would never show me the world. Tanemahuta would never show me the world. So I waited. And then you came.’
I nodded, and it struck me that the fantasies of people the world over held a lot more in common than might generally be recognized, and while I was considering her words again one jumped out at me as being something that I did not understand.
‘What did you say?’ I asked her. ‘Who would not show you the world?’
‘My parents,’ she replied with a smile.
‘After them.’
She thought about it, recalling. ‘Tanemahuta,’ she said. ‘He would not.’
I raised my eyebrows and sat up, staring down at her in surprise. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t heard you mention that name before.’
‘He is nobody,’ she said with a shrug. ‘No one special. He is my husband, that is all.’
My eyes opened wide when she said this and my mouth fell open. ‘Your husband?’ I asked. ‘You’re married?’ This was fresh news to me and I immediately felt the excitement that was upon me from lying here naked with her drifting away again.
‘I was married,’ she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘He died.’
‘Oh,’ I said, a little relieved, but still not entirely happy. ‘When did you marry?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, staring at me as if she couldn’t fully understand why I was so interested. ‘I was twelve, I think.’
‘Twelve? And how old was he?’
‘A little older. We married on his fourteenth birthday.’
I gave a low whistle and tried to imagine that happening back home in Portsmouth. You’d be locked up for less, I knew that from personal experience.
‘What happened to him?’ I asked her then. ‘How did he die?’
‘It was a year ago,’ she told me. ‘He fell from a tree one morning. He was always doing foolish things. He was not a clever boy. Not like you, Yay-Ko.’
‘And broke his neck.’
I thought about this and lay back down, surprised that this was the first I had heard of him. ‘Did you love him?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘He was my husband. I loved him every morning and every night and sometimes in the afternoon too.’ I frowned, suspecting that we were talking to each other about something different. ‘Why do you ask me about him?’ she said then. ‘He doesn’t matter. He’s dead. We are alive. And you are going to take me with you to England.’
I nodded. I was under no illusion that Kaikala had been untouched when she had met me; after all, she was the one who had taught me how to make love, an art I was sadly unskilled at and still wanted teaching in. And why should she have told me about her past anyway? I had told her naught of mine except a bunch of fanciful lies. She could tell that my mood had altered a little and rolled over on top of me, exciting me once again.
‘Yay-Ko still happy?’ she asked me.
‘Oh, yes,’ I replied quickly. ‘Very happy, thanks very much.’
‘Yay-Ko will not leave me behind when he leaves?’
‘Never,’ I promised. ‘If it came to a choice, I would stay on the island with you.’
She seemed displeased with this answer. ‘But I don’t want to stay on the island,’ she insisted. ‘I want to leave.’
‘And you will,’ I said. ‘When I go.’
‘When is that?’
‘Soon,’ I promised. ‘Our work comes to an end shortly and we will depart. Then I will take you with me.’
This appeared to satisfy her and she leaned down to kiss me. I rolled around the grass with her and in a moment I was above her again, making love, lost to all thoughts of the world except the act that we were committing and the pleasure that she was giving me. Almost lost, anyway. For at a particularly unfortunate moment I found myself distracted a little by the sound of snapping near by. I paused in my movements and looked around.
‘What was that?’ I asked.
‘What?’ she asked, looking around. ‘Don’t stop, Yay-Ko, please.’
I hesitated, convinced for a moment that there was someone there, someone in the thickets observing us at our play, but the forest had returned to its natural sounds now and I shook my head, sure that I was being foolish.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, kissing her. ‘I must have been imagining things.’
An hour later I emerged from beneath the waterfall, where I had gone to wash my body clean before saying goodbye to Kaikala. As I stepped towards her, soaking wet and pulling the hair from my eyes, I felt self-conscious and awkward allowing her to observe my nakedness, despite all that we had done.
‘Don’t look,’ I said, covering myself.
‘Why not?’
‘I’m shy.’
‘What is this?’ she asked, frowning; it was a word that none of the natives there were familiar with.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, pulling my britches on and dragging my shirt over my head. ‘I must go back now, Kaikala. The captain will miss me soon and it’s best not to keep him waiting.’
She stood and kissed me one last time and my hands ran down her spine to her rump, which I squeezed joyfully. Of course, I had the motions again, but there was no time to satisfy them; it would be more than my life was worth if I was found missing when the captain needed me, so we said a final goodbye, arranged to meet again the following afternoon, and I made my way back whence I had come, through the trees, letting them close behind me as I saw her beautiful form disappear.
As I left her alone in this secret place of ours, my face filled with a smile of satisfaction, I looked down and noticed my boot-prints, which were crushed into the grass beneath me, pointing back in the direction from which I had come, the place where Kaikala and I made love every day. I frowned, realizing that anyone who came near this spot might see them and follow them and find us. I resolved to be more careful in future.
I am not always a clever person.
Another few minutes passed before I stopped suddenly, my face growing scarlet with embarrassment, rage and suspicion. I looked down once again. I never wore boots when I came to visit Kaikala. I was barefoot.
The tracks were not mine.