Kk 8 first practice

 Was Michael’s house sweet smelling when his father brought back fish and chips for supper on Fridays?

Was Michael moving completely free in his own cave?

What were the man and Stella doing?

What did Michael’s erstwhile enemy do when he saw him moving his finger at the first time?

Describe how was Kensuke’s cave and what he used to do-

speaking

Kk 8

All that silence said

I smelt vinegar, and thought I was at home. My father always brought us back fish and chips for supper on Fridays and he loved to soak his in vinegar – the whole house would stink of it all evening. I opened my eyes.

It was dark enough to be evening, but I was not at home. I was in a cave, but not my cave. I could smell smoke too. I was lying on a sleeping mat covered in a sheet up to my chin. I tried to sit up to look about me, but I could not move. I tried to turn my neck. I couldn’t. I could move nothing except my eyes. I could feel though. My skin, my whole body throbbed with searing pain, as if I had been scalded all over. I tried to call out, but could barely manage a whisper. Then I remembered the jellyfish. I remembered it all.he old man was bending over me, his hand soothing on my forehead. “You better now,” he said. “My name Kensuke. You better now.” I wanted to ask after Stella. She answered for herself by sticking her cold nose into my ear.I do not know for how many days I lay there, drifting in and out of sleep, only that whenever I woke Kensuke was always there sitting beside me. He rarely spoke and I could not speak, but the silence between us said more than any words. My erstwhile enemy, my captor, had become my saviour.When he sang to me it was like an echo from the past, of my father’s voice perhaps – I didn’t know. Slowly the pain left me. Tenderly he nursed me back to life. The day my fingers first moved was the very first time I ever saw him smile.

Every day now I was able to see more of where I was.There was nothing rudimentary about it at all. It looked more like an open plan house than a cave – kitchen, sitting-room, studio, bedroom, all in one space.I could see the dark gleam of metal pots and pans lined up on a nearby wooden shelf. There were other shelves too lined with tins and jars, dozens of them of all sizes and shapes, and hanging beneath them innumberable bunches of dried herbs and flowers.  At nights he would roll out his sleeping mat across the cave from me, up against the far wall. I would wake in the early mornings sometimes and just watch him sleeping. He always lay on his back wrapped in his sheet and never moved a muscle.

Kensuke would spend many hours of every day kneeling at the table and painting. He painted on large shells but, much to my disappointment, he never showed me what he had done. Indeed, he rarely seemed pleased with his work, for just as soon as he had finished, he would usually wash off what he had done and start again.

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Kk 7

Abunail

In an instant I was on my feet, shouting at the top of my voice and waving frantically. I leaped up and down screaming for them to stop, to hear me, to see me. “I’m here! Here! I’m here!” Only when my throat was raw and I could shout no longer did I stop. The tanker crept tantalisingly slowly along the horizon. It did not turn, and by then I knew it would not turn. I knew too that no one would be looking, and that even if they were, this entire island would be little more than a distant hazy hump on the horizon. How then could they possibly see me? I could only look on, helpless and distraught, as the tanker moved inexorably further and further away from me until it began to disappear over the horizon. This took all morning long, a morning of dreadful anguish.

True, the old man had brought me a sleeping mat and a sheet. He was looking after me, he was keeping me alive, but he was also keeping me prisoner. I promised myself that I would never again let such a chance go by. I would gather a great beacon of wood, but I would not light it. I would set it all up and wait until the moment I saw a ship. If this one had come, I reasoned, then another one would come, had to come, and when it did, I would have my fire glass ready, and a cache of paper-thin, tinder-dry leaves.

I had almost finished when someone did indeed discover what I was up to, but it wasn’t the old man.

I was heaving a massive branch on to the pile when I felt a sudden shadow come over me. An orang-utan was looking down at me from the rock above – I could not be sure it was the same one as before. He was on all fours, his great shoulders hunched, his head lowered, eyeing me slightly sideways. I dared not move. It was a stand-off, just as it had been before down on the beach.

He sat back and looked at me with mild interest for a while. Then he looked away, scratched his face nonchalantly and sloped off, stopping once to glance back at me over his shoulder before moving on into the shadow of the trees and away. It occurred to me as I watched him go that maybe he had been sent to spy on me, that he might go back and tell the old man what he had seen me doing. It was a ridiculous thought, I know, but I do remember thinking it.

A storm broke over the island that night, such a fearsome storm, such a thunderous crashing of lightning overhead, such a din of rain and wind that sleep was quite impossible. Great waves roared in from the ocean- It was fully four days before the storm blew itself out, but even during the worst of it, I would find my fish and fruit breakfast waiting for me every morning under my tin, which he had now wedged tight in under the same shelf of rock. I thought often of my mother and father and the Peggy Sue, and wondered where they were. I just hoped the typhoon – for that was what I was witnessing – had passed them by.

Then, one morning, as suddenly as the storm had begun, it stopped. The sun blazed down from a clear blue sky, and the forest symphony started up where it had left off. I ventured out. I found my beacon had not collapsed. It was sodden, of course, but still intact. Everything was sodden. There could be no fire now until it had dried out.

The air was hot and heavy all that day. It was difficult to move at all, difficult to breathe. Stella could only lie and pant. The only place to cool off was the sea, so I spent most of that day lolling lazily in the water. I was lying in the sea, just floating there and daydreaming, when I heard the old man’s voice. He was hurrying down the beach, yelling at us as he came and waving his stick wildly in the air.

“Yamerol Abunail Dangerous. Understand? No swim.” He did not seem to be angry with me, as he had been before, but he was clearly upset about something.“Why not?” I called back. “What’s the matter?”

“No swim. Dameda! Abunai! No swim.” Then he had me by the arm and was leading me forcibly out of the sea. His grip was vice-like. There was little point in struggling. Only when we were back on the beach did he at last release me. He stood there breathless for a few moments. “Dangerous. Very bad. Abunai!” He was pointing out to sea. “No swim. Very bad. No swim. You understand?” He looked me hard in the eye, leaving me in no doubt that this was not meant as advice, this was a command that I should obey. I felt at that moment like defying him openly. I wanted to call him every name I could think of. But I didn’t. I didn’t go swimming in the sea again either. I capitulated. I gave in, because I had to. I needed his food, his water.Until now, except for occasional gut-wrenching pangs of homesickness and loneliness, I had by and large managed to keep my spirits up. But not any more. My beacon stayed obstinately damp.

 In the end I decided not to go up onto Watch Hill any more, that it just was not worth it. Instead I stayed in my cave and curled up on my sleeping mat for long hours during the day. I lay there drowning in my misery, thinking of nothing but the hopelessness of it all, how I would never get off this island, how I would die here, and my mother and father would never even know what had happened to me. No one would, except the old man, the mad man, my captor, my persecutor.

Dejected and depressed I may have been, but I was angry too, and gradually this anger fuelled in me a new determination to escape, and this determination revived my spirits. Once again I went on my daily trek up Watch Hill. One morning, with sleep still in my head, I emerged from my cave, and there it was. A boat! A boat with strange red-brown sails – I supposed it to be some kind of Chinese junk – and not that far out to sea either. Excitement got the better of me.I ran helter-skelter down the beach, shouting and screaming for all I was worth. But I could see at once that it was hopeless.I tried to calm myself, tried to think…The fire! Light the fire!

t seemed an age, but there was a wisp of smoke, and shortly afterwards a glorious, wondrous glow of flame spreading along the edge of one leaf. I bent over it to blow it into life.

That was when I saw his feet. I looked up. The old man was standing over me, his eyes full of rage and hurt.He said not a word, but set about stamping out my embryo fire. He snatched up my fireglass and hurled it at the rock below where it shattered to pieces. I expected him to screech at me, but he didn’t. He spoke very quietly, very deliberately. “Dameda,” he said.

“But why?” I cried. “I want to go home. There’s a boat, can’t you see? I just want to go home, that’s all. Why won’t you let me? 

He stood and stared at me. For a moment I thought I detected just a flicker of understanding. Then he bowed very stiffly from the waist, and said, “Gomenasai. Gomenasai. Sorry. Very sorry.”

“Are you watching, old man?” I shouted. “Look! I’ve crossed over. I’ve crossed over your silly line. And now I’m going to swim. I don’t care what you say. I don’t care if you don’t feed me. You hear me, old man?” Then I turned and charged down the beach into the sea. I swam furiously, until I was completely exhausted and a long way from the shore. I trod water and thrashed the sea in my fury – making it boil and froth all around me. “It’s my sea as much as yours,” I cried. “And I’ll swim in it when I like.”

I felt it, a searing, stinging pain in the back of my neck, then my back, and my arms too. A large, translucent white jellyfish was floating right beside me, its tentacles groping at me. I tried to swim away but it came after me, hunting me. I was stung again, in my foot this time. The agony was immediate and excruciating. It permeated my entire body like one continuous electric shock. I felt my muscles going rigid. I was going to drown but I did not care. I just wanted the pain to stop. Death I knew would stop it.

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Kk 6 practice

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Kk6

I, Kensuke

He was diminutive, no taller than me, and as old a man as I had ever seen. He wore nothing but a pair of tattered breeches bunched at the waist, and there was a large knife in his belt. He was thin, too. In places – under his arms, round his neck and his midriff – his copper brown skin lay in folds about him, almost as if he’d shrunk inside it. What little hair he had on his head and his chin was long and wispy and white.I could see at once that he was very agitated, his chin trembling, his heavily hooded eyes accusing and angry. “Dameda! Dameda!” he screeched at me. Ancient and skeletal he may have been, but he was moving fast, running almost. “Dameda! Dameda!” I had no idea what he was saying. It sounded Chinese or Japanese, maybe.

I was about to turn and run when Stella, who, strangely, had not barked at him at all, suddenly left my side and went bounding off towards him. Her hackles were not up. She was not growling. To my astonishment she greeted him like a long lost friend.

He was no more than a few feet away from me when he stopped. We stood looking at each other in silence for a few moments. He was leaning on his stick, trying to catch his breath. “Americajin? Americajin? American? Eikokujin? British?”

“Yes,” I said, relieved to have understood something at last. “English, I’m English.”

It seemed a struggle for him to get the words out. “No good. Fire, no good. You understand? No fire.” He seemed less angry now.

“But my mother, my father, they might see it, see the smoke.” It was plain he didn’t understand me. So I pointed out to sea, by way of explanation. “Out there. They’re out there. They’ll see the fire. They’ll come and fetch me.”

Instantly he became aggressive again. “Dameda!” he shrieked, waving his stick at me. “No fire!” I thought for a moment he was going to attack me, but he did not. Instead he began to rake through the sand at my feet with his stick. He was drawing the outline of something, jabbering incomprehensibly all the time. It looked like some kind of a fruit at first, a nut perhaps, a peanut. Now I understood. It was a map of the island. When it was done he fell on his knees beside it, and piled up mounds of sand, one at each end – the two hills. Then, very deliberately, he etched out a straight line, top to bottom, cutting the smaller end of the island off from the larger one.

“You, boy. You here,” he said, pointing back towards my cave at the end of the beach. “You.” And he stabbed his finger in the mound of sand that was my hill. Then across the whole of the sand map he began to write something. The lettering was not letters at all, but symbols – all kinds of ticks and pyramids and crosses and horizontal lines and slashes and squiggles – and he wrote it all backwards, in columns, from right to left.

He sat back on his haunches and tapped his chest. “Kensuke. I, Kensuke. My island.” And he brought his hand down sharply like a chopper, separating the island in two. “I, Kensuke. Here. You, boy. Here.” I was already in no doubt as to what he meant. Suddenly he was on his feet again waving me away with his stick. “Go, boy. No fire. Dameda. No fire. You understand?”

I did not argue, but walked away at once. Stella had stayed with him. I whistled for her. She came, but not at once. I could see she was reluctant to leave him. She was behaving very oddly. Stella Artois had never taken kindly to strangers, never. I felt disappointed in her, a bit betrayed, even.

So far as I could tell – though I couldn’t be sure of it – there were only the two of us on this island, the old man and me. In which case, it stood to reason that only he could have left me the fish and the bananas and the water. Surely that had been an act of kindness, a sign of friendship, of welcome? And yet, now, this same man had banished me to one end of the island as if I was a leper, and had made it quite clear that he never wanted us to meet ever again. And all because I had lit a fire? None of it made any sense at all, unless he was out of his head and completely mad. I wondered how long the old man had been on the island, and what might have brought him here in the first place. Who was he? And who was he, anyway, to tell me what I could and could not do? And why had he put out my fire?

It came to me suddenly that I had seen the old man’s face somewhere before. I had no idea how that could be. As I lay there pondering this, I felt the piece of glass in my pocket pressing into my hip. My spirits were suddenly lifted. I still had my fireglass. I would build my fire again, but this time somewhere he wouldn’t discover it. I would wait for a ship to come, and until then I would survive. The old man had survived in this place. If he could, I could. And I could do it alone too. I didn’t need him.

Stella seemed to have dreamed the same dream for at once she was bounding up on to the rocks above the cave. She found what she clearly expected to be there – her bowl of water full again. And there, too, high on the shelf of rock beyond her, was the same upturned tin, my water bowl beside it, just as it had been the morning before. I knew it would be full, and I knew as I lifted aside the tin that the food would be there again.We were not friends. We would not be friends. He would keep me alive, keep Stella alive, but only so long as I lived by his rules. I had to keep to my end of the island, and I must never light fires. It was all quite clear.

With any real hope of immediate rescue diminishing day by day, I became more and more resigned. I knew I had no choice but to accept his terms and go along with his regime, for the moment. He had now marked out a frontier, a boundary line in the sand from the forest down to the sea on both sides of the island – and he renewed it frequently, as often as it needed to be. Stella strayed over it of course – I couldn’t prevent her – but I did not. It wasn’t worth it. In spite of the animosity I had seen in his eyes and that huge knife in his belt, I didn’t really think he would ever hurt me.

From high on my hill I did catch distant glimpses of the old man. Often in the mornings I would see him spear-fishing in the shallows, sometimes alone, but often accompanied by a group of orang-utans, who sat on the beach and watched him, fourteen or fifteen of them I counted once. Occasionally he would be carrying one of the young ones on his back. When he moved amongst them, it seemed almost as if he was one of them. My recurring nightmare was the mosquitoes at night. I tried sleeping in another cave, deeper and darker, but it smelled dreadful. Once I had discovered it was full of bats, I left at once. I had severe problems, too, with sunburn. I had learned rather late that I should keep all my clothes on all the time, and I made myself a hat to keep the sun off my face and my neck. It was very broad and Chinese-looking, made of palm leaves, the edges folded into one another. I was quite pleased with my handiwork.

Sunburn, I discovered, was a discomfort I could help to prevent, and that seawater could soothe.

One day, after yet another fruitless morning of watching on the hill, Stella and I were coming out of the forest when I spotted something lying on the sand just outside our cave. At a distance it looked like a piece of driftwood. It was not driftwood at all, but a roll of rush matting. I unrolled it. Inside, and neatly folded, was a sheet, a white sheet. He knew! The old man knew my miseries, my discomforts, my every need. He had been watching me all the time, and closely too. He must have seen me scratching myself, seen the red weals on my legs, on my arms, seen me sitting in the sea every morning to soothe away my sores. I carried the matting inside the cave, unrolled it, wound myself in the sheet, and just lay there giggling with joy. I could pull the sheet right up over my face. Tonight there would be no way in for those cursed mosquitoes. Tonight they would go hungry.

I went racing along the beach to the boundary line where I stopped, cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted, “Thank you! Thank you for my bed! Thank you! Thank you!” I didn’t really expect an answer, and none came. So I wrote my thanks in the sand right by the boundary line and signed it. I wanted so much to see him again, to talk to him, to hear a human voice. 

The next morning, after a breakfast of fish and jackfruit and coconut, Stella and I made our way back up to the top of my hill  when I looked up and saw a ship on the horizon. There was no mistake. It was the long bulky profile of a super-tanker.

Kk 5 practice

Kensuke k5

Kk 5

After that, I determined to remain on the beach all that day, and stay close to my cave and the rock above where the fish had been left for us. I would keep it always in sight, so that I would at least be able to see who it was that had helped me.
I decided I would explore further along the beach, right to the end if I could, just so long as I could keep my cave in view all the time. It turned out not to be a rock at all, but a long sheet of rusted metal – clearly all that was left of the side of a ship’s hull, now sunk deep in the sand. I wondered what ship it was, how long ago she had been wrecked. Had some terrible storm driven her on to the island? Had there been any survivors? I noticed then a fragment of clear glass lying in the sand nearby from a bottle perhaps. It came to me in a flash. Eddie had showed me how to do it.A piece of paper, a bit of glass and the sun. We had made fire! I didn’t have any paper, but leaves would do. If only I could get a fire lit, if only I could keep it alight, then I could sleep by it at night – it would keep the flies away, and the animals away, too. And, sooner or later, a ship had to come by. Someone would spot the smoke.All of a sudden Stella sprang up from her sleep, a deep growl in her throat. She turned and ran down towards me, wheeling round to bark her fury at the forest. Then I saw what it was that had disturbed her.

A shadow under the trees moved and came lumbering out into the sunlight towards us. A monkey, a giant monkey. Not a gibbon at all. It moved slowly on all fours, and was brown, ginger-brown. An orang-utan, I was sure of it. He sat down just a few feet from me and considered me. I dared not move. When he’d seen enough, he scratched his neck casually, turned and made his way on all fours slowly back into the forest. Stella went on growling long after he had gone. Then I saw smoke. I smelled smoke. There was a glow in amongst my pile of leaves. I crouched down at once and blew on it gently. The glow became flames. I dashed into the forest and collected all the debris, all the dried-up coconut shells, all the wood I could find. Back and forth I went until my fire was roaring and crackling like an inferno. Sparks were flying high into the air. Smoke was rising into the trees behind me.

I was coming out of the trees, loaded with wood up to my chin, when I realised there was much less smoke coming from the fire than there had been before, and no flames at all. Then, through the smoke, I saw him, the orang-utan. He was crouching down and scooping sand on to my fire. He stood up and came towards me, now out of the smoke. He was not an orang-utan at all. He was a man.