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  I nodded, recognising this as a comment on the day. “A guy, dark-haired, having a heart tattooed on his…” I gestured towards my chest and his eyes followed my hand, lingering there when I moved my fingers away.

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  I frowned slightly, not sure that I wanted to be interrogated about my relationship by a complete stranger. “No.”

  “Good.”

  He didn’t seem inclined to say anything else, just folded his arms and smiled at me.

  “I was expecting him to still be here.” I indicated the tattoo chair.

  “Yeah. He was expecting to still be here too. I sent him home.”

  “You sent him home?”

  He turned away, tidying up the table beside him which looked like a cross between a dentist’s instrument tray and an explosion in a paint factory. “Yeah. I didn’t like his attitude. If I’d been here when he came in the first time, we wouldn’t even have done his outline.”

  “His attitude?”

  He turned back to me. “He didn’t want a tattoo.”

  “Oh yes, he did, he talked about it for days!” I was starting to wonder why I was defending Demmy, in fact, why I was even continuing this conversation. Demmy wasn’t here, so I should just head for home.

  “Nah. He wanted the pain of having a tattoo. He’d have been just as happy if we’d left the ink off and just worked him over with the needle.”

  I nodded. “You’re right. I hadn’t seen it that way, but you’re perfectly right. He was very… interested in pain.”

  The tattooist brushed his hair out of his eyes and grinned at me again. “And I’m very interested in tattoos, so when somebody comes in here and appreciates my work, then I’m happy, but when some guy only wants to be hurt, and doesn’t care about the quality of the artwork, then I send him away.”

  I grinned. “He must have been rather upset?”

  “Nah, I gave him the number of some drongo down the road who’d work on anybody. He’ll be down there now, getting some crappy colour and, given the bloke’s no artist, a lot of pain. So everybody’s happy.”

  I didn’t want to end the conversation. I was enjoying his company!

  “So what kind of attitude to you like your… customers (was that the right word, I wondered?) to have?”

  He grinned. “We like to call them clients, not customers, and as long as they want to have something permanent and beautiful, that has meaning in their lives, permanently etched onto their skin, then we’re happy.”

  I nodded, trying to think of something else to say.

  “Take you for example.” He reached out and took my hand. I jumped slightly and then relaxed. “You have lovely olive-toned skin, dark hair, a small, pale tattoo would be something that really enhanced your body.”

  I stared into his light-brown eyes, mesmerised by his words. He was very sexy.

  “Go on then,” I said.

  He smiled, pressing his fingers into my palm. “Go on then?”

  “Yes, tell me what kind of tattoo you think I should have. I should warn you though, that I’m not very keen on pain.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t worry about pain. When you really, really want something, you’ll hardly feel it.”

  He pulled me over to the shiny black chair and I sat down, feeling its slick surface giving under my weight. He left me to angle a couple of lights on me and then returned, his face now hidden by shadows apart from his white teeth.

  “Take off your top,” he said.

  I laughed, but he was serious. He folded his arms. “I can’t advise you unless I can see you.”

  I lifted the hem of my T-shirt, pulling it over my head, and folded it onto the chair beside me. He stepped back again, so he was totally in silhouette and stared at me. I felt myself getting hot. Then he turned away, to lock the door and lower the window shades.

  “Now the bra,” he said.

  I unfastened it, letting my breasts fall free.

  He reached over and stroked the tops of my breasts and I felt a flood of moisture between my legs, which parted on the chair as if inviting him in. I looked up into his eyes, through the lock of hair that had fallen forward again and then extended the movement, widening my legs deliberately.

  He kissed me, very gently, his hands still exploring my chest. I felt like a map, a globe, that this man was learning with his fingers, contours and shapes, rivers, mountain ranges, seas and deserts, all taking form under his fingertips. I arched my back upwards, pushing my whole world into his hands.

  He stepped back.

  “An arrow,” he said. “A tiny arrow. You have lovely breasts. Under your left breast, where the heart is supposed to live, a pale arrow, golden even. Where nobody will see it, unless you want them to.”

  I shrugged. I just wanted his hands on me again, but he turned away, sitting on the stool beside the chair and pulling his tray of implements towards him.

  “First the arrow,” he said. “Then…”

  I let the ‘then’ console me as he slid some slick gel onto his hand and then on my ribs. “You’ll have to hold up your breast,” he said, smiling, and then bent his head to suck gently on my nipple as I lifted it towards him.

  My head fell back and I closed my eyes.

  The next thing I knew was the wasp-like buzzing of the tattoo gun. I jumped, and his mouth tightened around my breast, then drew away, leaving a sensation of complete abandonment.

  The pain wasn’t bad, and he worked really fast. I was still wondering what the hell I thought I was doing when he lifted the gun away from my body.

  “Done,” he said.

  I opened my eyes. He was holding out a round mirror with a handle. I took it from him and used it to look at what he’d done to me.

  A tiny yellow arrow, very ornate, as if it had strayed from an ancient map to my body. It was faintly ridged as the skin beneath it swelled to take up the ink and a bead of blood, my blood, hung from its tip. It was beautiful.

  I grinned, catching sight of my own pleased smile in the mirror as I handed it back to him.

  “Now…” he said, and slid the mirror between my wide-spread legs, pulling my panties to one side so that by looking down I could see the mirror beneath me and my own dark cleft with his pale fingers vanishing inside. I arched again, letting him deeply inside me, and we both watched in the mirror as he thrust into me, his fingers as straight as an arrow, until I came.

  Then he kissed me again, gently and with what I knew was finality.

  “How much do I owe you?” I asked as I climbed from the chair and adjusted my underwear.

  “Nothing,’ he said, licking his fingers to catch every drop of my juice. “You’ve paid me in full.”

  I never went back to his shop. Why would I? I’d been given the perfect Valentine—you don’t spoil that by trying to work out who it’s from.

  Honeymoon Island

  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 tur
ned 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 pe
ople 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.