LITMIR.BIZ

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by our shared, communal fantasies, buzzards searching for pieces of our beliefs to strip off the bones of real truth. It’s as if we have created these islands to embrace the metaphor of human life but have never viewed the rolling plain of that life itself, spread out as it is in front of us. This is the medical truth:

      Death came to The Communion Islands in search of bats, not to interrupt our human lives, not to disrupt our general well-being. She was a woman looking for flying foxes. Fruit bats! A fruit bat lover, an amateur chiroptologist (a bat scientist, that is), an avid explorer (if exploring is seeking out that which you cannot yet understand), Death sailed from Europe in a cloche hat.

      Old woman Death sailed from England. Southampton in sunny Hampshire, speaking geographically. Her deadly heritage was French and Scottish, mostly; with a touch of that darker Anglo-Saxon that frequently reaches out from the Celtic nations, and some remnants of what we call here our B.O.I heritage (Born On the Island). Something she had born in her because of her islander mother, long past. Death, let it be known from the outset, sometimes comes from within.

      Death came to us to provide something of a rebuke to her European past, and a declaration (though she didn’t realise it) of her erstwhile islander future. Her mother’s own life—of which she knew almost nothing, because her mother, following the Fate of many islanders in her mother’s day, was barely 13 when she was taken as a dark smooth native to a dank day in a cloudy London—almost certainly spurred her on.

      Of course, people write these histories all the time!

      I could probably write a pretty decent one of Death, make her a man most likely, and younger, swap her cloche, her beaver, her surgical bonnets for a dark green Homburg, give her a name like Ramsbottom or Finlayson-Smyth or maybe Philips-Einstein, if not for the obvious scientific connotation. Point her neat beard to match her tall black pompadour, and present her in an old plaid coat, provide her with a silly monocle and a regular left-footed gimp, as surely she must have.

      But you don’t want to read a pretend history of Death. Why should you? You want the real thing, so that’s what I’ll give you. Long live the Queen! Long Live Poetry! Long Live Independent Music!

      Let’s call Death what she was: a traveller, a gambler, an occasional flimflam woman and, like all true fanatics, quite possibly the saviour of us all.

      1b. 1971: Dying and Love Go Hand in Hand

      1.

      Enter our capital today. Turn to the right. Look there! The streets here in Panapoon are named after famous local orchards. Little Wyntonville, Merry Pines, Golden Acres, The Apple of Your Eye. A nice little collection of basket cases. Apples, peaches, pears, apricots, plums. Great orchards once graced this mid-coast and kept us coasting coasters in a good penny. Suffice it, we’re not entirely the offspring of stone fruits but stones sure do loom large in our history; along with the cored memories of ancestors with secretive fleshy tastes. Apropos: we once hosted the Annual World Rubber Footwear Manufacturers Convention, in the days when boots made a man and stamping through a berry patch barefoot was everybody’s business. Look carefully, and you can still detect the ridged rubber footprints in our modern primordial mud here. And smell the fruits.

      After one hundred, maybe one hundred and five yards, turn right again. Ignore that compulsion to swerve toward the glaring golden spotlights of Beninni’s Open Door Grill.

      “Fresh Fish Daily. Come in! Come in!”

      Given all that hoo-hah, the compulsion is understandable.

      “Shrimp-U-Like”.

      Sheesh!

      “Rock lobsters!”

      Rocking, huh?

      Ignore this culinary aberration (place it, perhaps, in that barrel known as “Fools and The Sea”), and continue on through our capital. Here you will see her. She’s entering now, one deadly step at a time, a careful clipping to her rigid boots on the old milk jetty, a ruffle of sea breeze in her dark hair, her deep blue coat collar inadvertently upturned to point to her red cloche hat. You’ll be getting the drift.

      “Hello. Hello. . . .”

      2.

      “Hello, hello!”

      I suppose I have to admit right at the outset that Death entered our town on my back. It was she and I. I and Death. We two, together, from the start. She - that English doctor, that is - had been pursuing her batty hobby, by heading back to the land of her lost mother’s birth. I had been piloting a small seaplane, and still do, among my other flighty faults, running supplies, scenic tours, emergencies, and so forth.

      The not often quiet old woman (I soon found out) had recently emerged from my open door. I thus stood to be corrected.

      “Hello. Hello.”

      “Yes,” I said, stepping out onto my offside pontoon, and turning forthwith toward pompadoured Death beneath her bright, wide red hat.

      “Where now?” she asked. O, had I known the full story!

      “Where,” I said, skirting along the fuselage with my calloused hands, casually, deep in the pockets of my fine yet drooping overalls.

      “Yes,” she said, clip-clop, a wild curl of a deep black eyebrow pointing provocatively in my direction. Death’s small but sculptured head turned redly left and then redly right.

      “Where should I go now . . . to find . . . him?”

      “Him?” I asked, referring to our young island clerk who, as it turned out, was destined to become our first dying man. “Ummmmmmmmmmmmm.”

      (For reasons connected with decorum of the deceased, the rites of passage, that kind of thing, I should refrain from recording mere civilities, but I place this “ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm” here for all you sensitive living readers. Bless you. Suffice it, I have learned a survival trick or two from my mountain dwelling parents. But a destination for Death I knew nothing about)

      “Ummmmmmmmmmmmm.”

      And, sensitively, further:

      “Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”

      That morning, I had flown up to Monkthornton. Flown, that is, on an instruction from a local crook who runs a small parcel service here, in and out of the islands and, in between selling beds to the bedridden and mitts to the mittened, sends some work my way (funnelling the frozen expressions of our irregular island visitors, who he has fleeced. I never ask what it is I carry in those boxes of his, who these people are, or why he chooses me to carry them. I consider his crookery a gift horse. Immoral as this might seem).

      I picked up the passenger (namely red-hatted Death) who was waiting at the crookery, losing the blouse off her back, radioed back to the office, and flew southward, avoiding the Ackeronites, as it turned out that a storm had come in (those mountains are subject to climatic inconsistencies, just to spite me, I swear) and I wanted to avoid upturning my morient madam.

      As it turned out, despite her unique credentials, Death had not come in search of victims. She was not on official business at all. She told me her plans on the way:

      “The fruit bat, mister. That’s why I’m here.”

      Death was a woman of few but loud words, and even fewer but silent limitations (we later discovered). But bats were flying there in her pompadoured belfry, perhaps obviously you could say, and in that deep hidden cave of her impossibly bleak heart too, as it happens.

      “Family Pteropodidae, sub-family Nyctinmeninae,” she said, peering down from my plane as we pitched and yawed over the jungle around Burdekin. “You have some of the finest specimens in the world here in these islands.”

      “News to me,” I replied, holding things firm in a prevailing up-current, Death in the seat beside me.

      “Pygmies, barebacks, blossoms, giants, speckled, monkey-faced,” she said, reeling off sub-species like she was stringing out tickertape from beneath her blood red hat.

      “Oh,” I said,

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