How to Stop Time(75)

‘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.