Fucking brilliant.
I turned off and drove along a thin strip of coral dust up to a two-storey cinder-block building that looked like a Soviet gulag from the 1960s, except this one was covered in dead air conditioners and drying laundry, with yet another crazed and snorting tethered pig in the front yard.
As I got out of the car, I heard a familiar voice. “Ray! There you are! How did your epic fuckfest with LACEY go?”
Christ, did everyone and his dog know about LACEY? I turned around and saw Neal, nut brown, in another of Arnaud du Puis’s Paul Smith linen suits. His pant legs were rolled up, he was carrying a pair of five-hundred-quid loafers and he looked, for all the world, like a blue chip film star who didn’t do drugs and who had invested wisely in real estate, and who now was taking a bit of time out to do a series of prestige ad campaigns for American Express cards, Tissot-Omega watches and a fundraiser for some ghastly disease mercifully confined to Africa.
“So, why aren’t you on the yacht?”
“I was, Ray, but then I got sleepy and a Zodiac kindly ferried me back. Forget about me, though. Tell me more about LACEY! Everyone’s dying to know how it went. It was Fi’s idea to give you two a sex holiday.”
Aneurysm II: Return of the First Aneurysm.
“Neal, to be honest, I don’t remember anything about the past eight hours. Last thing I remember is reading Spam labels with you in the supermarket. Has anyone blown up New York or London yet?”
“I don’t think so. But Atlanta is being evacuated. A lot of the satellites have gone down, and most of the major optical cables have been chopped.”
“Fucking hell.”
Southern Cross Cables to NZ, Hawaii, Fiji and U.S. Mainland Australia-Japan Cable
Indonesian Sea-Me-We 3 and Jasaurus links
Papua New Guinea APNG-2 link
PPC-1 and Sanchar Nigam links into Guam
Hawaiian Telstra links
Gondwana link from New Caledonia to Australia
Intelsat
Inmarsat
SingTel Optus Earth stations
Zodiac Marine & Pool is a French company known for their widely used small inflatable boats. The word “ZODIAC” is a registered trademark for rigid-hulled inflatable boats.
We found a patch of shade. “Is this our hotel, then?”
“Best the island has to offer. Not really any worse than a few of the cardboard boxes I’ve lived in.”
“Neal, how can anybody possibly have standards lower than yours?”
“Don’t be so quick to judge, Ray. I happen to know that Monocle magazine rated the food in the Deet’s restaurant as among the world’s best Polynesian cuisine.”
“Since when the fuck do you read Monocle, Neal? When you were in Brussels attending a Eurocurrency crisis meeting?”
“Monocle is a taste-making forum for global elites. No harm in a common man like me dreaming of one day living inside a stainless steel meat locker furnished with classic Eames chairs. And instead of being fussy and negative, Ray, why don’t we go inside and give the food a try?”
We started towards the gulag tower. A thick brown hand inserted a piece of cardboard into a window on the lowest level, reading: RESTAURANT BE OPEN.
“Din-din is served!” Neil announced.
As we headed towards the door, I threw a stick at yet another menacing, feral, tethered pig that, no doubt, considering my sunburned skin, saw me as a walking block of Spam. Something about the Pacific always turns one’s thinking to cannibalism in the end.
“Neal,” I said as I opened the door, “people here have been calling me vakubati and then promptly flipping out and screaming and fleeing my presence. Any idea what that’s all about?”
Neal said, “Raymond, you’re the vakubati.”
“Please explain.”
“Vakubati is the Kiribati word for fuckbuddy.”
“Since when do you know the Kiribati language?”
“Everyone in South Tarawa knows about the vakubati, locals and visitors alike. News spread like wildfire.”
“How the fuck did I become the fuckbuddy-slash-vakubati, or whatever the hell it is?”
“When we were tripping out in the Spam store, Sarah told everyone in the store that you and I were fuckbuddies—cheeky sense of humour that bird’s got.”
“Go on.”
“So the thing is, Neal, the Kiribati blame the world’s potential nuclear war on you.”
“So then, what—I’m the boogeyman to these people? Why not you, too?”
“Well, Ray, look at the facts: you’re bright red, you’re a bit on the thin side, you haven’t had a shave in a while and, at the moment, you’re wearing no shirt and a Gumby hat. It doesn’t take too many brains to connect those dots, it doesn’t.”