Kensuke's Kingdom

  Stella interrupted my thoughts. She was whimpering pitifully at me from the rock below, and I knew it wasn’t love or comfort she was after. She caught every strip of fish I threw her, gobbled it in one gulp, and waited for the next, head on one side, one ear pricked. After that it was one for me, one for her. Her beseeching eyes would not let me do otherwise.

  The fish was raw, but I did not mind. I was too hungry to mind, and so was Stella. I kept the red bananas all to myself. I ate every single one of them. They weren’t at all like bananas back home, but much sweeter, much juicier, much more delicious. I could have eaten a dozen more.

  Once I had finished I stood up and scanned the forest. My benefactor, whoever he or she was, had to be somewhere close by. I was sure I had nothing to fear. I had to make some kind of contact. I put my hands to my mouth and called out again and again: “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” My words echoed around the island. Suddenly the forest was alive again with noise, a great cacophony of singing and hooting and howling and cawing and croaking. Stella barked wildly back at it. As for me, I felt suddenly exhilarated, elated, ecstatically happy. I jumped up and down laughing and laughing, until my laughter turned to tears of joy. I was not alone on this island! Whoever was here must be friendly. Why else would they have fed us? But why wouldn’t they show themselves?

  They would have to come back for the bowls, I thought. I would leave a message. I found a sharp stone, knelt down, and scraped out my message on the rock beside the bowls: Thank you. My name is Michael. I fell off a boat. Who are you?

  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 who had helped me.

  Stella ran on ahead of me down into the sea, barking at me, inviting me to join her. I didn’t need any persuading. I plunged and cavorted and whooped and splashed, but through all my antics she just cruised steadily on. She always looked so serious when she swam, chin up and paddling purposefully.

  The sea was balmy and calm, barely a ripple of wave to be seen. I didn’t dare go over my head — I’d had quite enough of that for a lifetime. I came out clean and refreshed and invigorated, a new person. The sea was a great healer. My bites were still there, but they did not burn anymore.

  I decided I would explore farther along the beach — right to the end if I could — just so long as I could keep my cave in view all the time. There were shells here, millions of them, golden and pink, thrown up in long lines all along the beach. Before long I came across what seemed at some distance away to be a flat wedge of rock protruding only very slightly from the sand. Stella was scrabbling excitedly at the edge of it. 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 onto the island? Had there been any survivors? Could any of them still be here? I knelt down in the sand and ran my hand along it. I noticed then a fragment of clear glass lying in the sand nearby, from a bottle perhaps. It was hot to touch, too hot to handle.

  It came to me in a flash. Eddie had shown me how to do it. We’d tried it in the playground at school, hiding behind the garbage cans, where no one could see us. 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. I ran up the beach and gathered whatever I could find from under the trees: bits of cane, twigs, all sorts of leaves — paper thin, tinder dry. I made a small pile on the sand and sat down beside it. I held my piece of glass close to the leaves and angled it to the sun. I had to keep it still, quite still, and wait for the first wisp of smoke.

  If only I could get a fire lit, if only I could keep it going, 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.

  I sat and I sat. Stella came over to bother me — she wanted to play — but I pushed her away. In the end she went off and sulked, stretching out with a sigh under the shade of the palm trees. The sun was roasting hot, but still nothing happened. My arm was beginning to ache, so I arranged a frame of twigs above the leaves, laid the glass across it, then crouched by it and waited. Still nothing.

  All of a sudden Stella sprang up from her sleep, a deep growl in her throat. She turned and ran down toward me, wheeling around 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 toward us. A monkey, a giant monkey. Not a gibbon at all. It moved slowly on all fours, and was brown, ginger-brown. An orangutan, 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.

  So there were orangutans here as well as gibbons. Or perhaps it was orangutans that made the howling noise and not gibbons at all. Maybe I’d been wrong all along. I’d seen a Clint Eastwood film once with an orangutan. That one, I remembered, had been friendly enough. I just hoped this one would be the same.

  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 put on a few more leaves, then a dry twig or two, then some bigger ones. I had a fire! I had a fire!

  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 knew I could not rest now, that the fire would need still more wood, bigger wood, branches even. I would have to fetch and carry until I was quite certain I had enough to keep it going, and enough in reserve.

  Stella, I noticed, would not come with me into the forest, but stayed waiting for me by the fire. I knew well enough why. I kept a wary eye out for the orangutan myself, but I was too intent on my fire now to worry much about him.

  My pile of wood was huge by now, but all the same I went back into the forest one last time, just in case the fire burned itself out quicker than I expected. I had to go deeper into the forest, so it took a while.

  I was coming out of the trees, loaded with wood up to my chin, when I realized 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 orangutan. He was crouching down and scooping sand onto my fire. He stood up and came toward me, now out of the smoke. He was not an orangutan at all. He was a man.

  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, around 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. His whole body was shaking with fury. I backed away as he scuttled up the beach toward me, gesticulating wildly with his stick, and haranguing me as he came. 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 toward 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. “Amerikajin? Amerikajin? 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 toward 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 backward, 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. When, after a while, I dared to look back, he was kneeling down beside what was left of my fire, and scooping still more sand onto it.

  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.

  When I next looked back, the fire was not smoking at all. It had been completely smothered, and the old man was nowhere to be seen.

  For the rest of that day I stayed in my cave. For some reason I felt safe there. I suppose I had already begun to think of it as home. I had no other. I felt as an orphan must feel, abandoned and alone in the world. I was frightened, I was angry, I was completely bewildered.

  I sat there trying to gather my thoughts. 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 were 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 mind.

  I took a long, hard look at my situation. I was marooned on an island in the middle of nowhere, very probably with a madman for company, and a bunch of howling monkeys (at least one orangutan amongst them) — and God knows what else might be hidden in the forest — and millions of mosquitoes that would eat me alive every night. I knew only one thing: I had to get away. But how? How was I ever going to get off the island unless I could attract the attention of some passing ship? I could be here for the rest of my life. The thought didn’t bear dwelling on.

  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?

  I curled up in my cave, closed my eyes, and just wished myself back home, or back on the Peggy Sue with my mother and father. Such wonderful dreaming almost lulled me to sleep, but the mosquitoes and the howling from the forest soon dragged me back to consciousness, to face once again all the appalling implications of my wretched predicament.

  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.

  I felt hungry again and thirsty, too. Tomorrow I would go into the forest and find food for myself. I would find water. Somehow or other I would catch fish, too. I was good at fishing. If I could catch them in the reservoir back home and off the Peggy Sue, then I could catch them here.

  I spent that night cursing the hordes of whirring insects that were homing in on me, and the chattering forest that would not be silent, that would not let me be. I kept seeing the reservoir in my mind’s eye, and my mother laughing in her skipper’s cap. I felt tears coming and tried not to think of her. I thought of the old man. When I fell asleep I was still trying to remember what he had said his name was.

  I awoke and knew at once that he had been there. It was as if I had dreamed it. Stella seemed to have dreamed the same dream, for at once she was bounding up onto 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 upside-down 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.

  As I sat there cross-legged on the rock, chewing ravenously on my fish and throwing pieces down for Stella to catch, I realized exactly what he meant to imply by this. 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. But I was frightened by him, and because of that, and because I had too much to lose, I did not want to confront him. After all, he was providing us every day with all the food and water we needed.

  I was beginning to find some edible fruit for myself — in particular, a prickly shelled fruit (rambutan, I later discovered). It was delicious, but I could never find enough and, besides, Stella would not eat it. I found the occasional coconut still intact, but often both the milk and flesh were foul. Once or twice I even tried climbing for them, but they were always too high, and I very soon gave up.

  I tried fishing in the shallows, fashioning a crude spear, a long stick I had sharpened on a rock, but I was always too slow in my strike. There were plenty of fish, but they were too small and too fast. So, like it or not, we still very much needed the daily ration of fish and fruit and water the old man was bringing us.

  I had searched my end of the island for fresh water, but could find none. I thought often of trespassing into the old man’s part of the forest to look for it, but I dared not. For the most part, I kep
t close to the forest tracks.

  It wasn’t only the old man’s laws or the howling of the monkeys — which I came to understand as a warning — that prevented me from venturing into his side of the island; it was the orangutan, too. He had seemed placid enough, but I had no idea how he or his friends might react if they found me in their territory. I kept wondering, too, what other creatures might lurk unseen, waiting to ambush me in the dark damp of the forest. If the constant jungle talk was anything to go by, the place was crawling with all sorts of dreadful creatures.

  Just the thought of the orangutan and the terrors of the unknown in the forest were quite enough to deter me, enough to stifle both my curiosity and my courage. So I kept largely to my beach, my cave, and the forest track up to my hilltop.

  From high on my hill I did catch distant glimpses of the old man. Often in the mornings I would see him spearfishing in the shallows, sometimes alone, but often accompanied by a group of orangutans, 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 were one of them.

  Time and again I tried to stay awake until the old man came with the food at night, but I never managed it. I never even heard him, not once. But every morning the water would be there; the fish, too (it often tasted smoky these days, which I liked better). The fruit would not always be the same. Much of it was strangely scented, and not at all to my liking. I ate it, anyway. Besides bananas and coconut and berries, he would leave me breadfruit or jackfruit (at the time, of course, I had no idea what they were). I ate everything, but not so greedily now. I would try to save some of the fruit for an evening meal. But I could never bring myself to save the red bananas; they were just too delicious not to eat all at once.