Nine

“Keeping my Head”

In which we set out in search of Wuni – Stanley points out signs of possible skulduggery – and I am subject to a vicious attack.

It was true that in the hour before dawn the village was at its stillest and even the waters of the horseshoe bay seemed to take a brief rest from their constant movement. The stars were so numerous and varied in their intensity that they lent the sky a solid, rocklike surface that was dotted with so many glinting pinpoints that a clear, monochrome light lay across the shadowy village and the sea was silvered by the reflection of the moon.

Of course, this peace on earth was shattered the moment the town-crier cockerel awoke and decided that as he was up so should everybody else be. With a blatant disregard for his own popularity, or even safety, he would keep up this performance until he was confident that his message had reached every corner of the village. So irritating was he, so snide and so self-important, that had I had the knowledge or the wherewithal, I would have reduced his status from cock to capon very shortly after my arrival. Even the sun, rudely awoken, was forced to appear above the trees, an irascible giant peering in to discover the reason for this commotion.

Old Obadiah, by some distance the most senior citizen of the community, when finally he too could no longer bear the noise, would grope for his paperweight-thick glasses, tie the ill-fitting frames to his head with a length of bootlace and emerge from his house. Shuffling his way to the vestry behind the altar of the church he would sit on the ground in front of a round, hollowed-out log and beat out an intricate reveille. Imperceptibly this remote gathering of houses began to stir.

The water was at its clearest now, unsullied by the traffic of the day, and the resident angelfish swam delicately to and fro, wondering vaguely what they had planned for the day. Not until later would the trevally come scything in; these murderous, bloodthirsty predators with their armour-grey scales snapped up their prey with violent, rushing attacks, that splashed pinkish water up through the stones of the jetty, only then to flip around and cruise swiftly back to the safety of the deeper blue.

From my window I watched blearily as the daylight began to filter down through the water, imbuing the corals with their true colours. Shades of yellow, purple and green floated below the surface, waking too and shifting slightly in the gathering currents. Amongst them, royal blue starfish twinkled dreamily and thousands of fish, shiny magnetic shards each the length of a pocket-knife blade, moved in precise unison, flicking this way and that across the underwater landscape.

We left the tiny bay of Mendali and, sliding through Renard passage, crossed out over the Blanche channel. Like over-officious wardens, dolphins rose and dived at the bow of the boat, rose and dived along our two sides as if to ensure we kept to the correct route. This particular morning there seemed to be more than usual. Perhaps they recognised that this was a proper journey, an adventure. I certainly did; I had brought my life jacket.

Up ahead a slender garfish rose, its sword-like nose piercing the surface of the sea, the bones of its weird green skeleton visible through its translucent body. Through some dynamic that I did not understand, it hurled itself some fifteen feet into the air followed from a much greater depth by the sleek steel of a kingfish, exploding with power. It followed the garfish in its mighty arc and, just when it seemed that the greater fish would seize it between its slicing jaws, the smaller one managed to flick its way out of danger as the two crashed back into the water. The dolphins left us when we reached the safety of the reef’s edge on the far side of the lagoon. Their slick grey forms rose one last time before diving as they turned back to the cooler waters. Tassels watched them go and smiled.

“Time for hunting again soon.”

“Hunting? What, not the dolphins, surely?” I said, voicing the concerns of a generation brought up on friendly tins of tuna and episodes of Flipper.

“Why not?” He looked at me with genuine curiosity.

“Well…” I would have to give this some thought.

As we entered the Roviana lagoon, I discovered that the view from the sea was deceptive. Inside the lagoon there was a mass of islands. Some were large, forested and inhabited, the villages sprinkled carelessly along the shores. Others were tiny and bare, covered with nothing more than a scattering of shrubs or a few coconut trees. One island consisted of a solitary tree, at its foot just enough room to lay out a towel. The Solomon Islands, this thought struck me with a sudden, selfish thrill, must be one of the last places on earth untrammelled by the flip-flops and hiking boots of the holidaymaker and his downmarket, less hygienic friend the traveller. Watch them as they gatecrash the private parts of the planet, unwittingly or negligently causing another part of the real world to be subsumed into a non-stop, Disney-sponsored Coca-Cola carnival that is taking place under the ever-expanding span of the Golden Arches.

There was something secret, almost enchanted about these waterways as we pushed on towards the hills of Mahimba and Vangunu, something timeless, as if nothing had ever been different, something that was so hidden that it could never be found. Could never be spoiled. This thought, though, I knew to be not just simple fantasy but straightforward delusion.

As we snaked through a silted channel between two points, Stanley and Small Small Tome, who had decided to join us, presumably to avoid the rigours of ‘Kindi’, sat up from where they had been lying in the bow and pointed excitedly to our right.

“They want you to look in this island,” grinned Tassels.

“Great.” I laughed the laugh of someone who suspects that they may be about to be the butt of a practical joke.

We beached the canoe and Tassels yanked up the engine, cocking it out of the water. Leading the way, the two boys, their bare feet springing over fallen logs and branches, headed into the bush. Uncertainly I followed. Under a canopy of trees, which allowed just a few shafts of sunlight down to play on the forest floor, we came into a perfectly circular clearing. In its centre was what appeared, at a distance, to be a white, tooth-shaped rock protruding from the earth, a weird geological anomaly in these coral islands.

As I strode towards it, I noticed that the others were hanging back on the rim of the circle. Confused, I smiled at them and stepped closer. Juddering, a series of images flashed before my bulging eyeballs. Piercing stares from empty sockets, lipless, gumless, gaping mouths, a garish orange moth taking flight from a cavity where once the flesh and cartilage of a nose must have been, and teeth, teeth were scattered like so many Ngali nuts around the fringe of a pyramid of twenty or thirty human skulls. I tried not to take a step back but as I did so a stab of light cut across me.

On all sides figures dashed and darted between the trees, disappearing, reappearing. As they closed in, I could hear the panting whoops of the head hunters. I stood with my back to the shrine, the brim of my hat drooping miserably over my ears, until I was surrounded.

Dragging a whimpering old man roughly into the circle, a warrior, his skin black and shining against the white of the war paint daubed on his near-naked body, wrenched his head back by the hair, laying bare his wrinkled neck. With a downward slashing movement of his knife he decapitated him. There was no sound but a dull ‘tok’ as the windpipe was severed and an “Oh!” of surprise from the twisted lips before they drained of blood.

Holding the head aloft the painted figure let out a scream of joy as the drumbeat of the feast started up noisily in the jungle mountains behind. My eyes were swimming, pricking with the sweat that ran down into them from my forehead as these events unfolded in front of me. Wiping my face, I looked again and there swinging in front of me dripping with red ink was Robert’s severed head. He somehow succeeded in looking as smug as ever.

“Sir, my mother wants to know…”

Suddenly everything began to swirl.

“Everything all right, Mr Will?” asked a solicitous Stanley with a smile.

“Er…yes, of course, absolutely fine, thank you. Well this is all very interesting. Yes, excellent. Do you think, should we be getting back to the boat?” I said, heading off in the wrong direction.

“So where do those, er…where do they come from then, Tassels?”

“Smolboy laek for mekem yu fright lil’ bit!”

“Oh, yes. I know, ha, ha! Shame it didn’t work, eh!”

These skulls were the remains of respected ancestors, preserved to be honoured. Although Christian burial had now replaced these shrines they were left as a sign of respect to the dead. There must have been a time, however, when skulls were as ubiquitous as the coconuts that littered the bush; for it was believed that in decapitating a man’s skull and taking it home with you, you would acquire his power. Very often enemies’ heads were brought back alive – that it is to say that a head was kept connected to its live body and the whole was imprisoned in the village until such time as a little more power was required or food stocks ran low. This system cleverly sidestepped problems of refrigeration in this sweltering climate.

Only as recently as 1892 was the terrible head-hunting Chief Ingava, who would think nothing of paddling more than a hundred miles for the quality he was looking for, eventually killed and his fortress that had been built on the fringes of the Roviana lagoon, where now we found ourselves, destroyed by fire. Head-hunting and its subsidiary, cannibalism, were eventually sidelined by the missionaries and the colonial powers in the 1920^s, apparently dying out completely after the Second World War.

Robert Louis Stevenson, however, could hardly talk about anything but ‘long-pig’, the cannibal term for human flesh. He had been taken aback when he had been given directions by a man who was nonchalantly chewing on roast arm of boy – apparently the best cut – and had been doubtful of the motives of a chief who had played host to him and his good lady wife:

“[He was] an incurable cannibal grandee. His favourite morsel was the human hand, of which he speaks today with an ill-favoured lustfulness. When he said goodbye to Mrs Stevenson, holding her hand, viewing her with tearful eyes, he wrote upon her mind a sentimental impression which I try in vain to share…”

That said, he may have been wrong because there was a photograph of the good Mrs Stevenson in the frontispiece of my copy of In the South Seas, and, although the picture was a little blurred, I could not believe that even in the flesh she had been remotely appetising.

RLS considered, however, that, on balance, the cannibals were acting from a principled standpoint:

“They were not cruel; apart from this custom, they are a race of the most kindly; rightly speaking, to eat a man’s flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than to oppress him while he lives; and even the victims of their appetite were gently used in life and suddenly and painlessly dispatched at last.”

I found the whole concept a little more difficult to accept so sanguinely and RC, not much recognised for his enlightened approach, ‘discovered much abhorrence at the very thoughts of it and at the least appearance of it’. So when he came across ‘three skulls, five hands and the bones of three or four legs and feet and abundance of other body parts’ he made a policy decision there and then to shoot any suspect cannibals on sight. They were, after all, ‘poor, ignorant creatures’.

I was worrying the various rights and wrongs about in my mind and praying that I was not going to have to resolve this moral dilemma for myself when we arrived back at the canoe. Inevitably we discovered that the engine was on one of its perennial breaks, refusing point-blank, despite Tassels’ less than delicate ministrations, to start. Apart from the whirring of the spring and the occasional cough, the motor expressed no interest in reapplying itself to its designated task. Small Small Tome, who had disappeared, came back with some bananas and ripe pawpaw. I got back out again. Sitting on the trunk of a coconut tree that grew flat out across the sea, we dangled our feet in the water and ate the fruit as Tassels pulled on the starting rope time after time. Standing in the water to his waist, he was running with sweat. When it became too much he simply sank down below the surface for a few seconds to re-emerge with a fizzing shake of his head and set back to his task only a little less bouffant than before.

“No worries,” laughed Tassels, and Stanley began to giggle. Small Small Tome, recognising the humour of the moment, joined in with his own curious expression of mirth. I was not at all sure how they could always take such a carefree approach: we needed to get on, there was a great deal to do and we were straying off target.

Nevertheless, it was certainly true that one of the excitements of life in the Solomons was travelling by boat. Hardly a sea journey went by without some sort of incident, small or downright disastrous. One of the biggest problems, perversely, was the invention of the outboard motor. A cheap, efficient and quick mode of transport, one yank of the starting cord and you were slicing through the waves, the spray in your face, the sun on your back and the wind in your hair, was sadly an image confined to advertising brochures. In reality hours were spent with the engine cover off and bits of dismantled engine kept precariously from sinking into the clear blue by fingers and teeth. I can only presume that many months of research in the workshops of engineering factories around the world had been required to design an engine that would compliantly start when you wanted to set off, only to break down unfailingly the moment you were out of sight of land or the weather worsened.

Had we been followed by a support ship loaded with spares and qualified mechanics then things might have been a little less wearisome. However, in a country where a screwdriver was a luxury item and a spanner that fitted was as rare as a sharp frost in the morning, there was often little to do but sit and bob. Flagging down passing boats was also problematic as waving normally elicited only a cheerful grin and a raised hand in return as the occupants of the other boat zoomed past.

If various clunkings, grindings, backfires and ominous silences formed the soundtrack to my boating nightmares, petrol became their fuel. It was expensive and we were always running on empty, half a gallon scrounged here, half a gallon siphoned off there. Petrol also had a remarkable propensity to mix itself with seawater, which mysteriously seemed to lurk at the bottom of every tank.

Boating, however, was never a lonely occupation. I hardly ever travelled in a canoe – as all boats, large or small and irrespective of their construction, were called – that was not dangerously overloaded. Our present trip was a roomy luxury.

When the women came back from the market in Munda where they had sold their sweet potato and cassava it was not unknown for there to be twenty-five people plus assorted babies, pineapples, stacks of bananas and sacks of rice on board one dugout canoe. On one occasion Tassels, the official driver, set off with a hair’s width of free board only to experience the novelty of driving a canoe that was actually under water although the raised engine was still running. The contents swam back to the market place and the whole operation, minus a couple of sacks of soggy rice, was started again.

Only rarely did I remember the inflatable life jacket that I had been given back in England, compliments of one of the world’s airlines. So, when the engine broke down or the petrol ran out and the tide was thundering along westward, pursued by malevolent gusting rain clouds, I often wondered how much more of my life on the ocean wave remained.

Still the engine would not start. After a while I, too, resigned myself to searching around for a funny side to the situation, but just as I was beginning to despair of finding one the engine coughed asthmatically, cleared its throat a couple of times, roused itself and started to putter. Hurriedly pushing off lest it should have a change of heart, we picked up speed as we headed for the islands of Vangunu and Nggatokae, ahead of us to the east. Behind us I could see distant islands disappearing, obscured by swathes of dark mist.

Then the first drops began to fall. The sea that had been as smooth as blue glass quickly lost its shine as if smeared by a giant, invisible rag. As the rain fell harder the surface of the sea turned a milky opaque, the drops falling like a million tiny beads that seemed to bounce off it as if off tarmac. Still harder it came and the surface began to smoke with the ferocity of the downpour until I was under the strange impression of being trapped inside in an inverted novelty ball in the midst of a swirling, artificial snowstorm. I was as wet as I was ever going to get and the fall on my back felt like a warm, therapeutic jet at a health spa. The two boys curled up where they sat, their foreheads almost touching their toes, and hibernated. At the helm Tassels, holding the blade of a paddle above his eyes to protect them from the drops that now stung like buckshot, smiled and stuck doggedly to our course. When the deluge could get no harder it did and visibility shrank to the bow of the canoe.

And then it stopped. I watched the clouds overtake us, moving on ahead, soaking everything in their path. Soon, in the heat of the sun and the wind, clothes dried, puffed white fingers uncrinkled and Tassels regained his normal effervescence.

We threw out a fish-shaped lure, which I had bought as an extravagance from Geoff. It wiggled most realistically as it was towed in our wake.

“You can’t fail with this one,” he had promised. “You’ll rape the ocean.”

I did not really want to do anything quite so drastic but up until today I had not had so much as a nibble. Mindful of the Devils lurking below, I handled the line gingerly.

“You bad luck fisherman,”’ said Stanley, taking it from me.

I willed him not to catch anything but inevitably a short while later he yanked hard. Slowing the engine, Tassels and he started to pull, boy’s hand over man’s, filling the bottom of the boat with tangling spools. Out of the water leapt the flashing red and purple spots of a coral trout and, with an expert flick, the little boy brought the handsome fish on board. He grinned up at me as he disengaged the hook from its panting mouth.

“Stanley good luck fisherman.”

“You know, in my country many people go fishing but they sometimes put the fish back in the water.”

“So why now you fella go fish, if you fella put them back inside sea?” asked Stanley after he had signed this extraordinary behaviour to the incredulous Small Small Tome. It was undeniably a good question.

The sun was sinking reluctantly below the horizon behind us as we chugged along the coastline of one of the larger islands until we came to a beach the size of a volleyball court, sheltered by a steep hill and protected from the wind by a rocky outcrop.

“Yumi rest here. Nice water for drink but swim first time.” Solomon Islanders were fastidiously clean and going to bed without washing off the grime of the day was unheard of. I could quite happily just have had a bite to eat, rolled up and gone to sleep, but instead we tramped off, following a stream up through the bush until we came upon a bathtub pool. We took it in turn to wash ourselves in the puckeringly cold water that gushed out of the hillside before returning to the shore to dry off in the last gleams of sunlight.

Tassels chopped down a number of saplings and, constructing a frame which he covered with coconut leaves fetched down by Stanley, he built a bedroom on the sand while I cleaned the fish as my not very effectual contribution to our camp. We cooked it on an open fire, ate it with some sweet potatoes packed by Ellen and washed it all down with coconut milk.

Stanley and Small Small Tome fell instantly and deeply asleep. Tassels and I chatted quietly about the coming day and smoked one of his head-numbing cigarettes, cut from his stick of gooey black tobacco and rolled in a bit of exercise-book paper, which he had somehow preserved from our drenching. Gazing out across the Pacific, the ticking in my head slowed. I had been wrong. There was no need to be in a rush – ever.

As the last embers of the fire blacked out one by one, I lay down, tucking my life jacket behind my head, and closed my eyes.

Ten minutes later in they came, low over the water, hundreds of them, wave after wave, all coming directly for me, their high-pitched whine a forewarning of the impending attack – mosquitoes like MIG fighters. Their meat-seeking equipment was finely tuned and, unerringly, they found their target. With a degree of satisfaction I splatted the first one that buried its hooter into my leg. In the moonlight I could see the dark stain of blood – mine most probably – but soon the onslaught was too great. Their presence at night was nothing new but without the bomb-shelter protection of my net I was at their mercy. Abandoning as impractical a passing thought that I might, as this was an emergency, inflate my buoyancy aid and spend the night bobbing in the protection of the sea, I decided that there was nothing for it but to cover as much bare flesh as possible with the few articles of clothing I had brought with me. It seemed to me deeply unfair as I stumbled around in the dark – morally wrong in fact – that this blitzkrieg was concentrated entirely on me. My companions slept on miraculously unscathed.

Anyway, with a spare pair of shorts on my head and my legs and arms wrapped in my plastic anorak I tried to get some sleep. As I drifted off, I smiled contentedly. All the curious jigsaw pieces that had brought me to where I was lying now were starting to fall into place; all those pieces of sterile information I had been given before I left were developing resonance and hue as the full picture assembled.

I remembered the inconclusive meeting that I’d had with Charles and Juliet prior to my departure. Then I had had no idea what I would do to fulfil the Commander’s intentions but now, of course, I had an excellent plan and tomorrow we were going to take the first step towards putting it into action. I felt a tingle of excitement and a painful sting on the top edge of my right ear. I readjusted my shorts.