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.