Will Randall - Solomon Time: Adventures in the South Pacific

Will Randall

United Kingdom

Solomon Time

Adventures in the South Pacific

2002, EN, 91809 words

Accosted by a drunken girl at a wedding, Will Randall is informed that if youre not married by the time youre thirty-two you should grab the first person that walks past or give up and go abroad. So when the opportunity arises to swap teaching for the South Pacific, it is an offer that Will single and eighteen months past his sell-by date is unable to refuse.

Spread lazily across the Tropic of Capricorn, the Solomon Islands are not so much the Pacific archipelago that time forgot, as the one that forgets about time. As Will quickly discovers, it is a place where only the sun and the moon govern the order of the days, and where schedules and deadlines do not translate into the local dialect of pijin English.

Wills new home is Mendali, a village so remote that it can only be reached by dugout canoe. His challenge: to keep the community self-sufficient is the face of foreign developers. It is a task that pits him against sharks, mosquitoes and shipwrecks, but one in which he is aided by a treasure trove of characters, from the pirate look-alike Tassels to the rock n roll quiffed preacher Dudley Small Tome.

Recalling such writers as Gerald Durrell and Robert Louis Stevenson, Solomon Time is set to become a classic of South Sea island life.

O pening one eye carefully, I snapped it closed hurriedly against the white glare of the sand. I tried again. A small hermit crab was making its way steadily up the beach with all the deliberate determination of an ageing hill walker. Stopping, it turned its two black-tipped antennae to glare at me disdainfully.

Havent you got a home to go to? it asked, before it shrank into its own.

Attempting to sit upright, I managed only to raise myself onto one elbow leaning, to my surprise, on my inflated yellow life jacket. With my free hand I brushed the grit from my eyes, cheeks and forehead, out of my ears and nose, the fine grains stinging against my skin. Gently lap-lapping, the water around my ankles was calm blue, the light breeze of an early morning just frosting its surface. The sun, casting fine shadows through the coconut leaves high above me, was already preparing for its daily offensive and, as a vanguard, a squadron of brightly coloured parrots zoomed from its furnace centre. With wince-making squawks, they flew in small swoops directly overhead. Aiming with the pinpoint accuracy of Pacific Bomber Command, their leader released his payload. A direct hit, it landed with a wet splash on my salt-stiffened T-shirt. I groaned as the bird flew off waggling his wings. Obsequiously, the rest followed, screeching their congratulations as they banked away towards the cover of the trees.

To add to my discomfort I discovered that, whilst I had slept, my tongue had been mysteriously glued to the roof of my mouth. Squeezing my finger carefully between cracked lips, I dislodged it but as I did so thirst thundered through me and welled up in minute spots of sweat on my forehead. Every joint crackled as I heaved myself to a sitting position and unsuccessfully tried to run my fingers through my hair. Feeling it over as a blind man might an unfamiliar object, I discovered that it had set saltily solid. Parted just above the right ear, it stood out at an angle, a lopsided crest.

Staggering to my bare feet, dryly whistling the Dambusters Theme, I made my way down the beach until I was knee-deep in water. The yellowish grey stain on my stomach had seeped, like a noxious scientific experiment, into a wide circle. After a few half-hearted attempts to wash it out, stretching the shirt down with one hand and splashing water upwards with the other, mainly into my face, I gave up, the coordination required eluding me. So, slowly and very carefully, I pulled the offending article up and over my head. Dropping it into the water, I watched it slip slowly below the surface where it floated like a large amorphous jellyfish that had been crapped on by a parrot.

Shading my eyes with both hands, my thumbs pressed firmly into my temples, I peered up and down the shoreline. White beach. More white beach. Turning my back on the sea, I looked up at the deep green, impenetrable jungle. It stared back implacably and grunted.

Trudging to the next point of land, I squinted further on round the island.

Nothing. No leaf huts, no children throwing themselves into the water with great screeches of delight thankfully, as now my head was beginning to throb like a big bass drum no wisps of smoke from the kitchens signalling kettles and tea, no fishermen in wooden canoes waving their paddles in greeting. In fact, none of the familiar sights and sounds of the small village that I was, by now, so used to waking to. Nothing, just the quiet stillness, the untouched haphazardness of a desert island.

Litter had been strewn the length of the waters edge: shells, leaves, twigs had all been discarded by the risen tide as it slunk back out to rejoin its parent ocean. Now white-capped noddies, those beady, bargain-hunting birds, picked the tangled mass over, scavenging for any useful junk or tasty leftovers. Nowhere, though, amongst all this flotsam was there the cheering sight of a beached canoe or even a wet footprint in the sand. No, absolutely nothing, just miles of sand, acres of jungle and several billion gallons of bloody sea.

My thirst, now fearsome, had me by the throat. Poking a coconut out from the fringes of the bush, I tried light-headedly, half-heartedly really, to break it apart on a washed-up giant clamshell. Hopeless. In frustration, I hurled it into the sea where it bobbed and winked in a distinctly self-satisfied fashion. I turned in disgust and headed for the shade of some small sago palms.

Anyway, no need to worry, hey, said a small, slightly high-pitched voice in my head, someone is bound to turn up soon enough, youll see. It wasnt as though this was the first time.

Hang on a minute, interjected another, considerably deeper and gloomier voice, doesnt that leave just a few unanswered questions? You know, just for exampleWhere am I? How did I get here? And why is someone bound to turn up?

I rolled onto my stomach and tried to come up with some satisfactory answers. A couple of hours must have slipped by because when I awoke I discovered that the sun had quietly shifted position, catching the bottom third of my left leg unawares as it did so. My calf and ankle were now a soft pink, a shade of skin colour that is healthy, even desirable, after a long, invigorating walk on a frosty morning but was, in this case, more likely to result in a great deal of discomfort. The way things were shaping up, I was going to get pretty little sympathy.

By the time I had sat myself up again, my deliberations had reached only a few, fairly unsatisfactory conclusions. Try as I did, I could not piece together the events leading up to my mysterious presence here. I did, however, succeed in deducing, from various elementary clues, a number of near certainties. First, from the nature of the scenery, I was pretty sure that I was on one of the Solomon Islands. Which one of course was still open to debate with, myself. Secondly, the tranquillity of the morning led me to conclude that I was this particular islands only occupant. Thirdly, all the classic symptoms proved beyond reasonable doubt that I had a thumping and possibly terminal hangover. Oh, and finally of course a faint surge of wellbeing washed over me, for of this I was quite certain I was Chicken Willy.

Spirit of Adventure

In which my big mouth bites off more than it can chew cold feet attempt to back-pedal I am buoyed by a surprise gift but eventually packed up, I am packed off.