A Conversation Before I Leave For The Suwarrow Atoll

It's a pretentious title, but it's a true story- I'm going to this South Pacific Island to shoot a documentary- this is an account of the last conversation I had with a girl I like before leaving

“Imagine yourself sitting in the dark of the theatre, and you hear this hollow slap, slap, slap of seawater hitting off the side of boat, and it’s loud and clear like your ear is right down at the water-level and then the picture kicks in- it’s bright;” I’m trying to describe to her the ideas I have for the film I’ll be making out there.

“You see the head and shoulders of a man- he’s rowing the boat. As he pulls back on the oars, he comes towards the camera and he goes out of focus. He pushes back on them- the oars- now and this brings him into focus as he moves away from the camera. All you can hear is the slap, slap, slap and all you see behind him is the pure blue of the sky. It’ll be a bigger sky than we have here,” I mean what I say, but it doesn’t sound like it; the words sounded so much fresher when I thought them this morning

“And then the camera pans to the left and up and you see the green leafy ridge of the island rise over his shoulder. There’s a breeze blowing through the leaves- this breeze has blown for hundreds- no, thousands- of miles across the ocean just to rustle these leaves and it’s a pure breeze- there’s no smell of petrol or rubbish or concrete.

“So as the camera pans up and left, the sky starts to fill the frame again. And that’s when the title comes in in big white letters. And you leave that for a moment before you hear the hiss of sand being sliced and pushed aside and it cuts to the hull of the boat the guy was rowing being pulled up onto the beach. And then I’ll go to a wide shot- there’ll be a few guys standing around the boat on these virgin sands and the sea will be behind them; it’ll be a long blue line and you’ll know- you’ll just know to look at it that this line will stretch back for thousands of miles before you reach any other island, it’s that remote. And then the clever thing is, it’s that you realise then watching this that it isn’t just a real island, it’s more a metaphor of an island- that these guys’ footprints that are the first to break these sands ever aren’t just walking on the shore of some paradise beach- they’re walking on the shore of the human heart.” I’d more to say after that, and it would have gotten better, except I was too embarrassed now. It suddenly struck me as soon as I said ‘the human heart’ how stupid I sounded.

“When are you going?” she asks, trying to speak over the echo of my saying ‘the human heart’.

The light catches the dirtied honey-caramel of her hair and I think about how it’s going to go blonde in the summer and I wonder if she doesn’t put a little bit of lemon juice in it to help it along. But right now the light is fading, the sun is going down, even though it’s only four o’clock.  

            I look her straight in the eyes which I’ve never done before and I say; I-

            I bite my tongue.

            And I answer instead, “I don’t know-” I look away and break into the charming half-smile I’d been practising. “�"maybe I’ll never come back; maybe I’ll end up going native.”

            She laughs a little and I’m hoping it’s because she’s imagining me in Mutiny On The Bounty, surrounded by all the tanned, topless, Technicolor girls.

            I laugh too but falter a little half way through- I doubt she’s noticed cos she’s been distracted by her Blackberry all along anyway- and it’s because I’ve thought of the truth- that I’ll be back in a month and that there is no island, only a sandbank on the end of the world and that if it is an island then the natives are all only rats anyway.

Author's Note

I am aware the syntax and even grammar in parts isn't "right"- this is an effect that I'm going for