The Sinking Islands

4. Bore

No sooner had I received it, I showed the compendium to Daphne, my editor, and without any fuss I was booked for Rarotonga in three months time.  In the mean time, I continued to correspond with Rita, and I read up on the islands.  My favourite was the island of Aitutaki, where the competition was set to be held that year. Aitutaki is an almost-atoll, they say.  After reading about these 'atolls,' I've come to the conclusion that they are grand places.  These odd islands--which are circles of coral with a lagoon plopped right in the middle--were thought by Charles Darwin (the Charles Darwin) to be old Volcanoes that had, through the movements of the tectonic plates, sunken back into the sea.  Some atolls, even a few in the Cook Island chain, have sunken so low that, although they might be as tall as Kilimanjaro underneath the water, they only extend a couple of metres into the air.  Now, with global warming and all, the squatter of the islands will soon disappear completely.  It's a sad and beautiful idea I think;--Anyway as I was saying, Aitutaki isn't quite an atoll, it will be eventually, but we'll have it around for a few hundred years yet, which is a good thing considering some people consider it the most beautiful place in the world.  I don't know if that's true. The pictures I found all showed brown people smiling and tropical fish that looked so close to the water you could practically grab them with your hands, which is nice. You can also book a bungalow that sits out propped up on stilts in the lagoon, which is nicer. One bungalow just for yourself and your family.  So when you fly or sail in to the island, a porter throws all your luggage on a boat and rows you out to your room.  If you get hungry, you press a button on a phone and he rows out with something to eat. I can't think of a better way to live.  If a room didn't cost more per night than what I used to make in a month picking fruit ($1200 NZD), I'd have loved nothing more than to dangle my feet from one of those little bungalows with a cane fishing rod plopped out in the lagoon.

Although dreaming of island life and Rita Faltone on the other side of the world was nice, it wasn't quite enough to fill my stomach. Mostly, I passed time with small local pieces. I spent one weekend with a nineteen year old kid in Blenheim who had spent all his money from the age of five up to now buying fire-sparklers.  He'd accrued so many that he thought he had enough to set some kind of record, but when he had contacted the people at Guinness they said they'd only turn up if he paid for flights and board for the whole camera crew.  Not having any money left over, he had to settle for the local media instead, which in this case meant yours truly.  I even helped him unpack a few of the sparklers myself.  We couldn't find a rope big enough to bundle them all together so he stacked them in a pile and we lit it up.  The pile burnt so bright you couldn't look at it directly.  And then, in less than the time it takes to read this paragraph, his years of savings were just a smouldering stack of grey wire.  I'd be surprised if he'd set a record anyone would care about, but his family and friends and the boy himself were all lovely people.  (For whatever reason most of my co-workers hate those feel good pieces, but I think that's where the real heart of a country lies. I'd take a group of school kids picking up litter in the afternoon over the dozen odd times I've had to sit outside the parliamentary steps with the other reporters, just to hear a politician repeat what we already knew they were going to say.  Yes, they are Mr. Key's thoughts and we probably should have asked him about it instead.  No, we didn't really expect a comment there. Oh, you don't agree with your opponent and you think his opinion is based on incomplete information? Bore, bore, bore.)

A week before I was set to go, Rita's secretary sent me a novella sized gloss pamphlet filled with facts on all twenty-two of that year's competitors.  I studied that thing back to front.  Each participant had a posed picture, a short biography, a stack of starred ratings, like out of some RPG. Besides an overall star-rating, stars were also given for such divergent categories as dexterity, cunning, visual appeal, and even 'pizazz.' 

Both 'The Champ' Larry Larsen and The New Boy Wonder were 5 stars out of 5 for every single trait.  The Boy, whose real name was Levin Vanuvelunaha'utene, was a native from the northern Cook Island of Rakahanga.  Rakahanga is a small pearl-growing atoll with a population of a hundred and twenty-seven.  (Levin's name might sound a little misleading, but don't be fooled because he is almost entirely native, being only a tiny fraction Russian.  The exact proportion is impossible to calculate due to the frequency of incest, but somewhere in his ancestral history sits a Russian explored named Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen who visited the island two-hundred years ago, the boy's last name being a rough transliteration which celebrates this fact.  The first name however is mostly coincidental, as The Boy's mother was fond of the novel Anna Karenina).

Other similarities of history also linked the 5 star competitors.  To take part in the 'sport,' competitors are usually backed by a sponsor who provides a set of jewellery used for the game's 'pearls.'  These, I would later learn, are part of an elaborate betting strategy where the winner takes home all the jewellery after each match (they use new jewellery every game).  Given the stakes, usually competitors are hand-picked from all around the world.  Both The Champ and The New Boy Wonder however are exceptions.  Both had naturally stumbled into the 'sport.'  The Champ came across the event one day while canoeing with his fiancé of the time around the island of Rarotonga.  Many years later, when The Champ was at his peak, The New Boy Wonder also came across the event when a group of his buddies snuck into that year's Apadwick in an attempt to steal the jewellery.  Unlike his friends though, The New Boy Wonder fell in love with the 'sport' and he has continued to attend it every two years since. That's not to say that Levin's friends stopped attending either, only they still to this day do not watch the games.  Both The Champ and The Boy were also similar in that they volunteered to join the event.  Both were lucky to be accepted.  The Champ had asked one, very drunk, Hubert Faltone, who thought why the hell not and fired his own contestant on the spot.  Comparatively, The Boy didn't experience the same instantaneous success, but after switching vocations back home to pearl gathering, he tailored his body to perfection, and through continuously asking eventually his persistence annoyed some anonymous benefactor into taking pity.