Worst. Person. Ever. (16 page)

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Miss Phibbs’s Restaurant and Foot Clinic now
open after tsunami repairs. Perhaps enjoy a delicious
meal of octopus, coconut, tinned luncheon meat
and hen’s eggs. Or maybe excellent entertainment
on a colour television set.
“
Satellite dish since 1994.
”

•

Bridge to North Island is now out of commission
due to salt corrosion. Truck access now only
at lowest tide.

•

Remember: condoms promote licentiousness,
so reconsider before using.

•

Coral is pretty, but it cuts you easily and then
infection will set in and you will die.
Remember sand shoes when visiting reefs.

•

Kiribati is a full voting member of the United Nations.

“Sarah, we just passed our hotel.” (The hotel, I might add, resembled a detention facility in a cruel post-architectural world of cinder blocks and corrugated zinc sheeting. Dumpiness notwithstanding, I very much wanted to be there.)

Sarah was rubbing my head with PABA lotion. “We’re going into town for supplies.”

“Why now? Shouldn’t we at least check in first?”

“No. I think it’s best to go now.”

The last thing I wanted was to displease Sarah, so I shut up.

Sarah, Neal, Elspeth and I were in a fifteen-seater Toyota van driven by a local. Owing to the escalating global nuclear situation, the private jet that brought us here was forbidden to leave. Elspeth had now joined us as a prisoner of Bonriki until things cooled down. Most everyone was waiting for the heli-evacuation unit to take us to the island so, nuclear crisis or not, we could start shooting our dreadful, dreadful, dreadful TV show.

Kiribati was basically Wake Island covered with palm trees, grey, highly flammable-looking thatched roofing, feral dogs, rusty trash barrels and thousands of poor people smiling, though God knows why.

Neal said, “Supposedly, Kiribati will be the first country on earth to vanish with global warming. Saw that on the telly last year.”

“I can just imagine the ripple effect that news must be having at the United Nations,” I said. “Kenya and Kuwait will have to sit beside each other. Sparks will fly.” Sarah’s hands on my scalp felt heavenly, particularly when she worked the base of my skull—such tenderness. It almost made me forget the X-ray sunlight and the stop-and-go jerking of the van on a road that suddenly became blocked by goats.

I yelled a command to the driver. “Fucking hell. Just throw rocks at them.”

“No, we must let goats do their thing.” Our driver, apparently, found goats sacred.

Sarah stopped her scalp rub and turned to Elspeth. “Why don’t you help me out with my shopping list. I can’t wait to see the delicious local treats this magic island has to offer.”

I was horrified. “No! My head isn’t fully lotioned!”

“Oh, Raymond! I’ll finish working on you later. Come on, Elspeth. My paper and stuff is at the back of the bus.”

Elspeth was excited. “I wonder if they sell bikinis here, though I’d have to shave me lady bits first. Looking a bit like a barber shop floor at the moment.”

As the women sat in the rearmost seats and bonded over shopping, Neal and I stared at the goats. “Neal,” I
asked, “have you ever, you know, wondered what it might be like with, well,
not a person?
”

“You mean a goat, Ray?”

“Neal, those are
your
words not mine, and I’m appalled that that’s the first place your mind went—but a goat is as good a place to start as any.”

“So you
are
, then, thinking about goats?”

“No, no, I don’t want to fuck a goat, Neal.”

“Sheep, then?”

“Don’t be coarse. I’m trying to have an elevated conversation here.”

“So you’re wondering in a scientific sense about the physical sensation of the act?”

“Well, sort of.”

“Technically, a sheep would be better than a goat.”

“Why is that, then?”

“A sheep’d take instructions from you.”

I let that sink in.

Neal asked, “Ray, you
are
talking about a female sheep, right?”

“No, Neal, there’s nothing wrong with fucking a male sheep, because if I did find something wrong with it, that would mean I was insensitive to the needs of the gay sheep community, and, of course, I believe in equality and peace and freedom for everybody—Oi! Benders forever! But for the purposes of this discussion, yes, female sheep. Definitely. And definitely not lambs. Because that would be wrong.”

“Well, you couldn’t really just hop the fence and go at it. You’d have to establish some level of trust first.”

“Neal, I really think taking a ewe on a date is too much effort for too little payoff.”

“Like she might change her mind at the end—and then you’re out ten quid for a plate full of clover and a zinc bucket of lager.”

“Neal. Stop right now.”

“You’re right. Probably all you’d need is a pile of alfalfa to keep the front end busy, and maybe a leash to make sure it doesn’t bolt when you get to the good part.”

“That sounds about right.”

“I feel like I’m on the Discovery Channel, decoding animal intelligence like this. You bring out the best in me, Ray.”

“I’m touched, but back to our sheep. You’ve got past the first hurdles and now you’re, well, ready to make the big move.”

“Wait, Ray—condom or unprotected? I don’t want to get mad cow or anything.”

“Neal, I think you should be more worried about your date. She’s only been grazing in a meadow for a few years, whereas
you’ve
basically been the clogged bacterial centrifuge of West London since the days of Adam Ant.”

“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.

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.

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
?”

The Ecstasy was kicking in. I ventured, “I’m squalling. These islanders
sont
squalling.
Nous nous squallons.
”

Neal pulled up to a cinder-block grocery store and parked. Sarah and Elspeth vanished inside, while we sat there transfixed by a shiny piece of red plastic hanging from the store’s eaves. It turned sort of rainbow colours the longer we stared at it. Then it started to make faint chiming sounds. A wind chime was our initial musing.

“Neal, that piece of plastic is fucking amazing.”

“It is magnificent. It wouldn’t be out of place in a New York art gallery.”

We got out of the car to better appreciate the plastic. Its magnificence blossomed ever outward, fractally, and I felt connected to all life—not just my own, but also the lives of all human beings on the planet, and possibly the universe.

Neal said, “Ray, we’re just grains of sand in the scheme of things.”

“Neal, you are so right.”

“All we are is dust in the wind.”

“Look, it’s turning blue—laser beam blue.”

We stood there gawping until a fly landed in my mouth and I horked it out, laughing. It was terribly funny. It just was. Neal thought so too, and we both laughed to the point where our stomachs dry-heaved. Small children with sticks stopped and stared at us, while stray dogs avoided us, rightly fearing our magnificent grasp of the true fabric of the universe.

We were shitfuck stoned.

“I must own that piece of plastic, Neal.”

“To the victors belong the spoils.”

“Give me a leg up.”

“Sure thing, Ray.”

Neal kneeled and offered me his cupped hands. I stuck a foot in and he lifted me up to make a swipe at our piece of sacred plastic, but I overreached and fell onto my butt, my elbow landing in, of all things, an octopus somebody had abandoned, goopy and smegmacious. I shrieked like a wee girl. Neal found this utterly hilarious—it wasn’t. I frantically removed the fine linen shirt that had once belonged to poor, doomed Arnaud du Puis, while Neal sat doubled over atop some plastic milk crates from Australia until he could catch his breath. As I scraped the worst of the octopular sludge from my arms, Neal hopped on one of the crates and grabbed the piece of sacred red plastic from its string, placing it in his dapper linen jacket’s inside pocket.

“Neal, that’s
my
piece of red plastic.”

“Sorry, Ray. Fate gave you one chance to grab the brass ring, and you missed. Then fate gave me a chance, and the sacred talisman is mine.”