“Slight change of subject, Ray. What about all the daggy bits around the sheep’s arse? Kind of a turnoff, I’d say.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
At this point our driver lurched around to stare at us, purple of face, then screamed at us to get out of his van.
Déjà vu.
“Sorry, mate, what are you talking about here?”
“You are unholy. I cannot have you in my van. Leave right now.”
“What is he talking about?” Sarah called from behind us.
I was the picture of innocence. “No idea. We were just talking about our love of animals, and—boom! He’s lunging at Neal and me, asking us to leave his van.”
Our driver escalated his screaming and began making threatening gestures at us. But Neal, with his dancer’s grace, seized the man and pushed him out the door in a flash, then leaped out after him. On the littered road’s edge, he put a chokehold on the incensed driver to the point where the man’s eyes bulged, his mouth frothed and his oxygen supply was depleted enough to make him less of a threat. “Looks to me like we’re at a standstill,” said Neal, whereupon a motorcycle, sounding like an amplified coffee grinder, zoomed up from behind us at some insane speed and ploughed directly into our driver, hurling him like a Muppet off into a taro shrub. The biker stopped—a young Australian hostel-goer.
“Fuck me! He’s not dead, is he?”
We all stared at the body, which seemed utterly still.
“Looks like a goner,” said Elspeth.
“No, he’s breathing,” said Sarah.
“Neal, you’re a former paramedic,” I said. “What should we do here?”
Neal crouched to do an assessment. “He’s definitely not dead. Doesn’t seem to be anything broken. Let’s call the police when we get into town.”
Our Aussie friend was relieved. “You guys are the best.”
“Always happy to help a fellow traveller.”
“Good on ya. Here’s four hits of Ecstasy, and if you get desperate, there’s exactly one flush toilet on this island that works. It’s in the Mormon high school building. If you act all serious and pretend to like God, you’re in, and there’s five minutes of heaven awaiting you. Cheers!”
And our fellow traveller was off.
30
We looked at the pills in their Ziploc baggie. I was about to tuck them into my pocket when Neal said, “You know, Ray, why not give these pills a try right now?”
I considered this for a moment. “Hmmmm … You know, Neal, I like your attitude. Indeed, let’s say ‘yes!’ to life.”
We each popped one; they tasted bitter, sort of metallic. Sarah and Elspeth declined, and we got back into the van, Neal at the wheel. He asked, “Sarah, why do we have to buy groceries? Someone in your position shouldn’t be doing scoutwork like that.”
“Because of the nuclear crisis, all food shipments to the island from Australia and Fiji have been stopped indefinitely. The locals don’t know this yet—we have a one-hour head start to secure all we need for the shoot. We have to clean the stores out before word spreads and looting begins. Let’s just go in, max out our credit cards and exit without leaving a ripple in the water.”
The goats before us had cleared to make way for our van. Fortune was smiling on us.
Gilbertese, or Kiribati, is a language from the Austronesian family. The word “Kiribati” is just the modern rendition of “Gilberts,” after Captain Thomas Gilbert, who happened upon the Gilbert Islands in 1788. Unlike many languages in the Pacific region, Kiribati is far from extinct, and most speakers use it daily. About thirty percent of Kiribati speakers are fully bilingual, also speaking English.
FUN FACT: One early difficulty in translating books into Kiribati was references to features such as “mountain,” a geographical phenomenon unknown to the people of the islands of Kiribati (heard only in the myths from Samoa). Such adjustments are common to all languages. For example, the Gilbertese word for “airplane” is te wanikiba—“the canoe that flies.”
About 107,500 people speak Gilbertese, as follows:
In Kiribati: 98,000
In Fiji: 5,300
In Nauru: 1,700
In Solomon Islands: 1,230
In Tuvalu: 870
In Vanuatu: 370
In Ooga Booga: 13
Okay …
I’m not proud of what happened next, but history demands a full account.
I remember beginning to giggle as we pulled into an appalling slum. “A slum?” says I. “How can there be a slum in the middle of the tropical Pacific? What the hell?”
Neal was agog. “Ray, this is Betio! The magic slum of the Pacific! I saw it on BBC4 at the Russian Kum Guzzling Traktor Sluts’ lounge when they were giving me a pedicure. All the islanders living here were relocated from their old coral atolls because of the nuclear testing. But there’s fuck all for anybody to do here, so they sit in squalor for a living. Is that a verb … to, uh … squalor?”