Leigh Clark
This bittersweet story of island love reveals the steamy underside of female passion and just what it takes to satisfy the appetite of a fully aroused lover.
Do you know what they call our island? Honeymoon Island, that’s its new name – it’s what they call a marketing angle. I can understand why – there’s nothing more beautiful than the place I call home, nowhere more suited to making love either, but it’s dangerous too.
And I know what they say about me too- Marania, the bride of the Island, as if it’s a big joke. Of course I’m a tribal chief now, and the first woman every to hold that title, and I’ve never been married, and above all, I look like the archetypal Honeymoon Islander, so it’s a joke that makes some sense, but the truth is much stranger.
Start with the looks – mine I mean, I’m tall and broad, skin the colour of a coconut husk, long curling black hair – you think I look just right for an Islander? But the place has been a ‘honeymoon’ island for centuries. The Chinese came here to trade and left behind babies, the neighbouring tribes came to barter for brides and once white people turned up in their big wooden ships, any Islander was as likely to have red hair and epithetic eye-folds or blue eyes and golden skin as they were to look like me.
Then the missionary societies got to hear about us, and for a long time the honeymoon was over. Oh yes – we Islanders had to pay for all the sins of our ancestors. They made us wear clothes, sing hymns, get married before enjoying the natural pleasures of each others bodies – they made us suffer.
There was one thing the missionaries had a blind spot about though. They were so focused on barstardy and fornication that they missed one major part of Honeymoon Islands native culture, and that’s where my story really begins. You see, young men and young women live separately here. Between leaving home and settling down to raise a family, they move into the Youths’ House or the Maidens’ House – long huts where each sex learns the skills necessary to survive. Boys fish and hunt, girls cook and harvest fruits and nuts. Boys tan leather, girls weave cloth. Boys learn to swim and dive in salty mother ocean and girls do the same at the freshwater falls in the interior of the Island. Each sex is supervised and trained by elderly and bad-tempered guardians of their own gender, to encourage them to learn their lessons well so that they never end up alone and forced to work as a teacher.
And that brings me to Lehera. She and I moved to the Maidens’ House on the same day. Her family were from the other side of the Island so I’d never met her before and when she walked into the clearing around the hut with her small bundle of clothing and tools, I looked at her and knew I’d found the love of my life.
She was fair enough in skin tone to be white, but her eyes and hair were as black as mine although her hair fell as straight as the waterfall to her waist. She had dressed as the missionaries insisted, in a shapeless cotton smock, but she’d run all the way to the House and sweat made the fabric grip her like a lover’s fingers, outlining her small wide-spaced breasts and rounded navel.
I loved her. At first I only loved her with my spirit, working alongside her to cook and clean and grow vegetables in narrow fields that were all Honeymoon Island’s steep volcanic form allowed. And perhaps that was all I would ever have done, if the island hadn’t forced us into each other’s arms. Lehera went everywhere at full speed, as if life was trying to escape her. She was as wild as a tropical bird and as tempestuous as a summer storm and only I could calm her when her spirit was unruly.
One day Lehera and I were walking a narrow path one day, high in the hills, to collect vanilla pods from the vines there. We sold them in the market to buy fish for dinner – once our currency had been shells, but the missionaries had made us use coins and notes, as if they were more godly.
Lehera slipped and cut her foot on a rock. It was a deep, jagged wound and her pale face became paler with shock until she looked like the ghosts some of the missionaries talked about. Honeymoon Islanders didn’t believe in ghosts. When you died, you went back to being part of the place you died in.
I half-carried her to a stream near the path and set her on the bank while I looked at her injury. It was too close to nightfall for her to hobble back down to the Maidens’ House, even if I could support her weight and guide her in the dark.
“Put your foot in the water, Lehera,” I said. “It will stop the pain and wash it clean.”
She nodded and only bit her lip when the cold water stung her bleeding flesh. She was brave. I left her sitting there while I searched the area in the last of the light for food . When I returned she was lying down and I could see the foot was still bleeding, so I lifted it from the water and dried it with my smock before binding it with strips torn from its hem. I laid my wet and ragged dress on a tree branch to dry. We ate mountain apples and coconut and I watched carefully to be sure she was getting strength from the food. By the time we finished it was dark and so I sat close, with my arm round her, knowing that our teachers would not be foolish enough to search for us at night. She put her arm around me, then her other arm. I felt her fingers, soft and warm, joined around my waist. Then one had slipped free to play with the hair that fell in curls to my hips. In return, I stroked her hair, then somehow found I was caressing her back, her arm and my other hand was on her thigh, like the shadow of night on the moonlight of her skin. And then she kissed me.
Girls in the Maidens’ House practiced kissing. It was part of our training, like learning the dances to entice a man or the cooking skills to keep him happy, it was part of our life there, but this kiss was different. It came to me, in the few moments after her lips touched mine, that this kiss was not practice. It was the kiss we had been told to offer to a lover – questioning, without reservation, expressing desire.
Her tongue explored the cushion of my lower lip and I remembered that I was naked. It was as though she read my thoughts – her hands moved to my breasts and began to stroke their undercurves as though calming a nervous animal. I sighed, my breath entering her mouth, and her tongue darted forward.
Then, for a while, I lost my mind. I lifted her and moved her to a bed of moss and knelt over her, looking at her pale body drinking the moonlight. I ran my hands over her breasts and belly, feeling the heat in her skin and the way her back arched to keep contact with my fingers. I stroked her thighs, listening to her broken breathing as she said my name over and over and over again, like a prayer. And when I slid my finger into her, impaling her like a fish on a hook, it was as if I was pleasuring my own body. It seemed I had come to know her so well that I understood exactly where to press – above her pubic bone to force the soft flesh down onto my searching fingers, where to tease – my free hand grazing its nails over her thighs so that she opened them, out, out, out, like a night-blooming flower, and where to put my mouth – lowering my lips gently to the tiny coral-coloured jewel that stood proud in the moonlight, lapping it with long strokes until Lehera sobbed with happiness and tangled her hands in my hair, pulling me down onto her.
I held her afterwards, wondering how we could go back to what we had been before, but even as I wrapped my arms around her, she began to move against me, sliding her thigh between my legs, pinching and rolling my nipples in her hands as though I was a field to be ploughed and harvested simultaneously. She knew my body as I knew hers, with the instinctive wisdom of love, and she gave me back the pleasure I’d given to her.
We were happy, for a while. The next morning we went back to the Maidens’ House and nothing was said about our adventure, but our teachers watched us closely and when the time came for us to prove we could survive on what we had learned, Lehera and I were assigned to a high mountain slope to live for three months, harvesting breadfruit. The missionaries didn’t like us being sent out on these tests with had the uncomfortable undertone, to them, of initiation rites, but our teachers made a point of telling us to read our bibles regularly and so there was nothing the missionaries could complain about.
Lehera and I did not read our bibles. Nobody troubled us. Our remote plantation was too remote to travel to easily and so we spent our days climbing trees to collect the fruit and our nights learning how to love each other in all the ways possible between women. Near our hut was a waterfall – not like the tall curtain falls we’d played in during our time at the Maidens’ House, just a stream spurting out of a rock face – but the pool it plunged into was as cold and dark as a well and no matter how much we tried, we could never plumb it, always being forced to come up for air before we’d descended to its full depth.
We took to visiting the pool at night, when I would straddle Lehera’s body and watch her rise to the ecstasy my fingers could give her like a fish rising to the bait. One night I said, “You look like the Moon Goddess, fallen from the sky,” and she leaned over the black pool and looked at her lovely face in the water.
“Then, as the Moon Goddess, I command you to kiss me, Marania,” she said.
I did as she said, but a cold chill ran down my back – the missionaries would have said my words were blasphemous and our own people would say Lehera’s would make an enemy of the moon.
I knew how many days we had been given, so I was expecting the summons back to our respective villages. I had even worked out a way for us to see each other – I would train with a woman in my village who looked after the sick, and Lehera could learn to make medicines from the herbs around her home from another woman who was renowned for her healing skills. That way I could travel to collect the herbal treatments every few weeks and we could at least have one night together. I refused to think about what would happen when a man wanted to marry one or the other of us. As far as I could tell Lehera didn’t think about any of this at all.
But I had reckoned without her wildness. When she saw the old messenger, far in the distance, toiling up the mountain to take us home, she ran to the hut and grabbed a blanket.
“Come on,” she said.
“Where?”
“To the pool. We can have one more night alone…”
She was right. The route to the pool wasn’t easy to find and the sun was already setting. The traveller would assume we were out finishing our harvest and would make herself comfortable in our hut while we could have a last few hours alone. I picked up the garland of Tahitian gardenia I’d been making as a farewell present for my love, and we ran together, giggling, hand in hand, to the pool.
The waterfall jetted rose water, then blood, as the setting sun coloured it, and finally the deepest blue, before vanishing from sight in the night. Lehera and I watched it and then turned to each other like cannibals, tearing and biting each other, as if we could consume love like a feast.
The moon came up slowly, almost reluctantly, I thought and we lay on our backs, exhausted for a while, fingers still entwined, to watch her progress across the sky. Then we loved each other again – I bent my head between Lehera’s thighs and, for the first time, instead of shouting and moaning her pleasure to the night sky, she laid her forearm across her mouth to muffle her pleasure, for fear of the sound carrying to the one who waited to take us back.
I thought, bitterly, that this was how it would be from now on – furtiveness and silence, hiding away and denying the truth of our love – and even so, I thought that better than a life apart. But I had reckoned without Lehera’s wild nature.
I lay down and pulled her head onto my breast, running my fingers through her hair as we waited for our breathing to slow so that we could make it race with joy again. At some point I fell asleep.
When I woke the day-birds were just beginning to sing. The garland I had made for Lehera to take home was on the surface of the pool, ripples still spreading out from it as though it had just landed there. Lehera was not in sight.
For only a few seconds I looked around, expecting her to appear from the forest. Then I knew. I screamed loudly enough to wake the island, and dived.
Each time I surfaced I screamed again, until the messenger appeared at the pool’s edge. She dived as I rested and for a few minutes, although it seemed like hours, we took it in turns to seek out the black depths in which Lehera might still be alive. Too soon, she shook her head. I ignored her and carried on diving until she dragged me from the water. I was too weak and cold to stop her. I watched as she lit a great smoking fire to alert the Islanders and as soon as I was warm and my limbs stopped cramping, I began to dive again, this time to bring my beloved’s body back into the light.
We never found her. Despite the best divers, male and female, trying their utmost, nobody could reach the floor of that deep pool. I heard people saying she would float up, when nature was sick of her, but she never did.
I can see by your faces that this isn’t the story you were hoping for when you came to the Island, all you honeymoon couples. Do you think I’m putting a curse on you? Many people thought Lehera had cursed the God of water with her death, and I knew myself that she’d defied the missionaries’ God and our own moon Goddess, but I told nobody of it.
They took me home, and no man would have me, for fear I was unlucky. They tore apart the hut we’d shared and cut down the breadfruit trees and burnt it all, to appease any spirit that might be lurking, and I was forbidden to leave my village.
After a few years people forgot the details of Lehera’s suicide, and I was able to move around the island freely enough, although I never got near the highland pool that held her bones prisoner. An old man lived in a new hut near our former home, and spent all his days keeping any trouble-loving islander from visiting the pool for fear Lehera’s spirit might drag him or her down into the black waters.
So, for ten years, I did what I’d planned to do. I learnt my craft as a healer. I was as bad-tempered as any teacher in the Maidens’ House, and old before my time, and soon people forgot to keep an eye on me and let me do as I pleased and go wherever I chose. For a few months I stayed away from the pool, but then, as soon as I was sure that I was no longer observed, I began to travel closer and closer to the pool. The place fascinated and terrified me equally. It was the last placed I’d seen Lehera and so it drew me, but I feared that once there, I’d pick up the heaviest rock I could find, bind it to my wrist, and dive down to join her forever.
Then I heard that a hotel company wanted to build a honeymoon spa on the site of my … our, waterfall. Don’t worry, little love-birds, don’t huddle together in your newly-legalised couples – the spa wasn’t built there. You aren’t sleeping where Lehera and I slept, and laughed and loved. I made sure of that.
But to prevent the desecration of the pool, I had to go into local politics. I fought to convince Honeymoon Islanders to preserve our beautiful home from rapacious developers, to demand a say in all the tourist proposals, to insist on a fair wage for those working in the honeymoon industry. And the day I won, after years of battle, I went up to the pool for the first time since I’d lost my love. The sun was setting and the sky turned from gold, to bronze, to purple. The waterfall splashed into the black pool and I lay on my back and watched the moon cross the sky. If Lehera wanted me to join her in the watery darkness, I was ready now.
I’d fallen asleep at the pool once before, but I was wide awake when she came to me. I felt her hands cover my eyes and lay still, smelling the fragrance of the Tahitian gardenia flowers I’d made into a garland for her, even though it was long past their season to bloom.
“I missed you,” she said. “Why did you stay away so long?”
I took her wrists in my hands and wrenched them from my eyes. Lehera knelt behind me, laughing. She was as real as the moon and the only sign she wasn’t just like me was that her hair was wet, dripping silver beads onto her breasts and thighs.
I leaned forward and touched my lips to her forehead. Her skin was as warm and fresh as the day she’d died. I moved lower, kissing the water droplets from her body, and she arched her back and murmured in pleasure.
Before I pushed her onto her back, I asked one question. Why?
“I couldn’t bear to be separated from you, Marania. Not for a single night. So I asked the moon to let me join her and she took me.”
I began to cry. All those wasted nights when Lehera and I could have been together!
Now it was her turn to kiss the moisture from my face. “Don’t cry, my love. Don’t regret. We will always spend our nights together now.”
Then I did ease her backwards, and held her down while my mouth devoured her body like a starving woman finding a perfect, ripe fruit on the forest floor.
Her hair never dries. We spend each night together, on the moss by the pool or in the hammock I’ve swung between two trees, and every morning I awake alone, but my body is scented with the Tahitian gardenia’s heady perfume.
Your honeymoon apartments are close to Lehera’s home, but it is one of the places considered sacred on Honeymoon Island and no guide will lead you there. Lehera and I will share one thing with you though. The garlands around your necks are Tahitian gardenia. At night, when we have loved and laughed enough, we weave them for you, so you will remember that no matter how long you are parted, your reunions will be like honeymoons – and to remind you also to always thank whatever gods you believe in, for giving you each other.
