CHAPTER ONE
Older but not wiser, we perused the Times Educational
Supplement for jobs, on a dull afternoon in August at my house in Milton
Keynes. Carol was back, and suddenly,
living in Milton Keynes didn’t seem to matter as much! My bosom buddy had spent the previous year
working in a school in the Himalayas, and had finally flown back to somewhere
nearer sea level.
Outside, nothing was
happening. Inside, the walls remained
perfectly aligned and painted magnolia. Carol sighed and looked out of the
large, double-glazed window onto a square patch of lawn penned in by a
chest-high, cheap, wooden fence. “How
can you live in a place called Pennyland?”
As I didn’t know the answer to
this question, I hedged. “It’s only a
name.”
“It’s a stupid name.”
I had to admit that Carol was
right. It couldn’t have helped that she had been used to living in a
mountaintop retreat in Tibet, above the clouds and as remote as you can get
from affordable housing, inadequate porches and gas central heating.
“How do you stand it?”
“It’s not that bad,” I said,
half-heartedly.
A man cycled past. “Christ!
It’s worse than science fiction!”
Baffled as I was by this
particular insight, I laughed, and Carol gave me a look that I recognised
instantly. It was a look that said it
was time to set out again into the world, united against the banal, the drab
and the superficial, determined to have some fun and wreak some havoc. I went back to the newspaper and kicked off
with something contentious:
“There’s one here for a maths teacher in Bejing. I could be
the stay-at-home housewife.”
“No thanks,” replied Carol.
“Too much of a culture shock?
Don’t want the Saturday morning military training?”
“Nah. Can’t stand
Chinese food. All those wriggly bits.
And oyster sauce – can’t eat oysters since Alice!”
“In Wonderland?”
“Yeah.”
“The Walrus and the Carpenter?”
“The very same. Poor
little oysters…”
I realised that, cartoon horror apart, and allowing for
Carol’s sketchy knowledge of proper Chinese cuisine, this would be a deal
breaker. Food was top priority. Followed closely by sunshine, a great beach
and a good library. Good looking,
intelligent men of independent means were also a consideration.
“No blokes there, either. Too short.
Too Chinese.”
I could not argue, although I
would not have put my feelings in quite the same way. Carol spoke her mind, whilst I generally harboured my sharp-edged
opinions. I didn’t mention the fact
that, this time, she was indulging in a stereotypical assessment of a nation
containing over one hundred million people, not all of whom would be too short
or, indeed, too Chinese.
“What about this one?” I
suggested. “English teachers
required by the Seychelles government.
Sounds interesting.”
“Aren’t they in the Indian Ocean?” Carol sat back in her chair
and poked a finger into her ear. She
was as beautiful as ever. How I had
missed her!
“I believe that is correct, you lovely tart,” I replied,
pretty sure that Carol knew a lot more about the Seychelles than she was
letting on.
“Capital?” she asked.
“Mahé.”
“Climate?”
“Tropical.”
“Food?”
“Fish. Creole style.”
“Chips?”
“I think it’s more likely to be rice,” I said, although I was
not entirely sure.
“Fish and rice with curry sauce!”
“We can make our own chips,” I said, reasonably. “Just need a chip pan and some Trex.”
“Granted.” Carol chewed the pencil we were using to circle
ads. It had also served as a coffee
spoon and more recently, to kill an ant.
“Shall I read the rest of it?”
“Don’t see why not,” she said.
“The National Youth Service of the Seychelles seeks-
“The National what!”
“Youth Service. Must
be something like the Department of Education.”
“Doesn’t sound like the Department of Education. Go on. Let’s hear it.”
“The National Youth Service of the Seychelles seeks
qualified teachers of ESL to instruct secondary school students on the island
of Ste. Anne.”
“Never heard of
it. There’s Mahé and Praslin and some kind of bird
island. Let me see.” Carol grabbed the paper. “Twelve-month
contracts. Flights and accommodation provided. Interviews to be held in London
on 14th/15th August.” She closed the newspaper and
got up. “Want a cuppa?”
I followed my friend into the kitchen, thinking that the
interviews would be at the end of the week, in three days’ time.
“Where d’you keep the biscuits, you bugger? Hope you’re not still buying those
Poptarts!” Carol was opening cupboards, rummaging.
“There are some Jammy Dodgers in the cutlery drawer,” I told
her. The mention of Poptarts had
brought back a momentary nostalgia.
She eyed me and I eyed her back.
“Are we going?” I asked.
“Book it, Danno,” she said.
We were not the kind of girls to pass up an opportunity like
this. We had been through university
together and worked for Playboy in London, as blackjack dealers. After that,
Carol had left England to sell encyclopaedias in Germany and had thrown it in
after meeting a businessman at a party who offered her a job teaching English
to Buddhist monks in the Himalayas. I
had gone on to work as a secretary in London at various establishments which
were practised in the art of exploiting as little as possible of a person’s
potential and where, at my lowest ebb, I had slavishly typed out legal
contracts for solicitors who patronised both me and their clients. Later, I had worked for a very nice family
with a business just off Oxford Street, in a small office, up some rickety
stairs, where I had learned all there was to know about high-tensile
low-density bin bags (didn’t take long), including how to fold them and label
them, before sending them off with a quote for anything from a couple of
hundred to tens of thousands. And,
after just over a year of knowing that I didn’t want to be in plastic for the
rest of my days, I had applied for and, to my utter amazement, been accepted by
Queens’ College to do a postgraduate teaching certificate at Cambridge
University. I subsequently took up my
first post in Milton Keynes, where I discovered that I was no good at
controlling a class of secondary school kids who didn’t care about Keats, and I
gradually came to realise that the next proper adventure was long overdue. All I had needed was the return of my best
friend and sparring partner.
Carol had descended from the
mountains under slightly mysterious circumstances, which she refused to
divulge, but which had probably involved some kind of extra-curricular activity
with one of her students. She had
telephoned me to say that she wanted to come and stay for a while. So, with my
probationary year as a very eager, but more or less ineffectual English teacher
at Stantonbury Campus mercifully completed, and with no one begging me to stay,
there was nothing to stop us, apart from fear of the unknown and crushing
financial limitations. We were in the
market for some excitement and risk. A
teaching job in the Indian Ocean, with all expenses paid, seemed an opportunity
too good to miss.
We looked up trains to London and, in the meantime, found out
that the Seychelles was a group of volcanic and coral islands stuck in the
middle of nowhere, with a language that was based on French, due to the fact that
they had been colonised by… France.
Following this, the islands had been subjected to British rule, before
gaining independence in 1976. I wondered vaguely whether we would be welcomed
by the locals, until Carol pointed out that anything “we” had done to them was
bound to be better than the treatment they would have received at the hands of
our closest allies, the French, who, according to Carol, had used the
inhabitants as slaves to work on their plantations and probably taught them to
roll their ‘Rs’.
