The journey to his father’s house was one of those experiences that Charlie would never forget.  After picking up his bags, his dad had steered him out of the tiny airport terminal to the parking lot, which was strangely empty, apart from one or two vehicles.  Most of the emerging passengers were getting into courtesy buses that serviced the local hotels and were waiting by the terminal.  Weirdly, a pair of chickens that were clucking near the terminal’s doors followed them to his father’s battered blue Toyota pickup truck.

“Graaaagh!”  his dad yelled at the chickens, throwing his arms wide and running at them.  “Get away, you pesky, feathered vermin!”  The chickens hopped away, squawking indignantly.  He grinned at Charlie, “Flaming fowl!  Always here, infesting the car park, crapping on cars and getting over the fence onto the apron! One of these days there’ll be an accident and one of these little beauties will take out an airplane!”

Despite his tiredness, and the disorientation of his disturbing dream of Trev, Charlie’s curiosity was beginning to burn.  He was starting to see Tonga in a very different light.  It was certainly nothing like London.  Chickens at the airport?  He hadn’t seen that at Heathrow.  “What do you mean ‘take out an airplane’?” he asked.

“Bird-strike!”  his dad grunted as he heaved Charlie’s bag into the back of the truck.  He paused and rested a hand on the tailgate, saying, “A bird-strike can take down a jet in the air.  If a bird hits a fast moving plane with enough force it can punch a hole through the windshield, or a bird can get sucked into an engine.  You gotta watch a jet engine disintegrate after a bird-strike, it’ll blow your mind!  I’ll show you a video later, if you like.”

“OK,” Charlie agreed politely, but secretly not really wanting to.  He had only just got used to flying; he did not feel quite ready to start viewing air crash footage.  After all, the last flight he had been on featured of a vision of his dead best friend.

“C’mon, hop in!  Don’t mind me going on.  You look pretty beat up.  You’ve got to be tired after that trip.  How long have you been in the air?  Twenty four hours plus?”  He opened the unlocked passenger door for Charlie and gestured for him to climb up into the cab through a litter of old Pepsi bottles, which he shoved onto the floor in one quick sweep.

Charlie nodded wearily. “Something like that.  It’s OK though, I feel all right”

His dad smiled, “You say that now.  It’s because everything’s new.  But in about half an hour I bet you’ll be asleep regardless.  It’s 11.00 in the morning here but it’s 11.00 at night in London.  I guess you’d normally be in bed right now, knowing Angela…I mean…your mom?”

Again Charlie nodded. His dad continued, “Well, I bet you haven’t slept during your flight.  No-one really does in the air, not well anyway.  Your body is going to be screaming at you in a minute.  ‘Let me sleep!’ It’ll say.  No, naughty body, I, Charlie Buttons, am in charge here and I’ll tell you when to sleep.  But before you know it, Charlie, just when you have the secret to life on the tip of your tongue, you’ll be face down in your cassava, snoring your silly head off!”  He grinned again, his ruddy wind-blown complexion contrasted sharply with the white of his perfect teeth.

Charlie climbed in and fastened his seatbelt.  His father walked round the other side, reached in through the open driver’s window to reach the latch and opened the door with the perfunctory explanation, “Broken catch.”  He slid across the shiny vinyl of the bench seat, patched here and there with silver duct tape, and started the engine.  It roared into life and coughed out a cloud of unhealthy exhaust.  “Probably needs a service,” he murmured, revving the engine, selecting reverse gear and roaring backwards out of the parking bay at significant speed.  Dropping the gear lever into first, his dad punched the radio ‘on’ button and the pickup squealed forward in a cloud of blue tyre smoke, complete with some incongruous religious music, played at some volume, accompanied by ukuleles.

They shot out of the car park, scattering some more chickens on the way, and proceeded at light speed down the road towards the capital city of Tonga, Nuku’alofa.

His dad kept up a steady stream of information as Charlie watched trees and buildings whip by the pickup at a bewildering speed.  “You can see that nothing’s like London here, Charlie.  You won’t find a skyscraper in Nuku’alofa, in fact you probably won’t find a traffic jam.  Since people round here don’t move in a hurry, you won’t even get a rush hour.  Come to think of it, you won’t find that much money either!”  The last comment he said quietly, sticking a finger through a small hole in his cargo shorts.

            “The houses you can see are pretty typical one storey constructions that you’ll find all over Polynesia.   The locals like to paint ‘em bright colours, some are pretty fancy and others are not much better than shacks.  People like to keep them neat though.”

            Even with the overcast sky that seemed to strip the colour from the landscape, Charlie could see he was in a very different place.  Despite their cheery colours, many of the houses seemed fairly run-down.  Everyone seemed to be keeping animals –he would have said farm animals – in their back yards.  Chickens and pigs scooted around behind wire fences, startled by the traffic.  There were even a few tethered, placid horses, which stared blankly at the speeding pickup from behind the fences like nosy neighbours.  Palm trees lined the route, which was also bordered by plantations and fields.  Overhead a maze of telephone wires ran parallel with the road, supported by sun-silvered telegraph poles, some of which were leaning at crazy angles.

            “Yeah,” his father continued.  “Most of the land hereabouts is farmed by subsistence farming.  That’s where you grow what you eat.  Guys doing this don’t really earn a lot, but you can eat well.  Have you noticed how everyone is real big?”

            Charlie had, but hadn’t wanted to say.  Many of the people he had seen so far made Chester and Daisy look like supermodels. “Kind of,” he said noncommittally.

            “People round here are huge!  It’s a kind of cultural thing – the bigger you are the better you are.  Did you know that ninety percent of the population are overweight?”

            “No,” Charlie said.

            “Yeah, huge!  People here like to eat,” his father repeated, whilst accelerating from behind, then swerving around, a much slower vehicle – one of the courtesy buses from the airport.  The other driver honked his horn angrily as the pickup rocked from side to side on its worn suspension.  “Cassava, plantain, squash, yams and pig.  You’ll eat that here over and over again.  Maybe some of these darn chickens too!”  The pickup ploughed through a flock of brown hens that were loose on the road.  Irate squawking followed as the feathers flew and the hens scattered in all directions.   Charlie looked behind through the rear window and was relieved to see that they had somehow missed all of them.  “Don’t worry about them, I’ve tried to hit them for years but I’ve never actually got one.  Too smart for me!” 

            As they careered along in the decrepit truck, Charlie realised he was more awake than he thought.   His latent confusion from the dream slowly faded as he started to look around him.  He began to realise that he really was on a tropical island on the other side of the world – even if the weather was miserable.  London really did seem quite a long way away as they passed several very large men waiting by a bus stop, under flower patterned umbrellas, dressed in what looked like long white skirts with broad red sashes around their waists.  You didn’t see that every day, even in Brockley. 

 Several small townships flashed past the truck’s windows in rapid succession, as his father ignored every traffic sign.  With every town there was an accompanying string of stalls beside the road selling all forms of farmed produce.  Some stalls were no more than woven palm mats retaining an improbably large pile of large green vegetables.  Or were they fruit?   No one seemed to mind his father’s appalling driving as they passed at speed, his dad honking at anyone who looked like they were going to step into the road.  Some stallholders looked amused and waved; some were obviously less entertained and shook their heads disapprovingly.  They went through Pelehake, Malapo, Vaini, Veitongo, Ha’ateiho before slowing down and turning into the drive of a small green guest house in Pea, a small township overlooking a long lagoon, barely ten minutes after leaving the airport.

            “Are we here?” Charlie yawned.  “Do you own a …a guest house?”  He peered at the sign, on which was written Isaac’s Luxury Lagoon View Guest House.  Puzzled, Charlie looked at his father quizzically wondering why the name didn’t match his father’s.

            “No!  Me own a guest house?  No!”  his father laughed.  “No, I’m far too irresponsible.  The rooms would never be cleaned and there would never be enough food in the kitchen.  No, I don’t own a guest house.” He pointed out into the lagoon.  “I own that.”

            On the water, rocking gently in the softly lapping green waves, was the flying boat that Charlie had seen in the first picture that he had been shown by his mum.  An elegant, white hull seemed to glow in the dull light of the day; its upper surfaces were painted a sharply contrasting orange. Two engines were set high on a wing, held clear of the water on a tall fin that merged with the hull, and the whole aircraft seemed to glitter like a dragonfly, covered as it was with a bewildering variety of blisters, astrodomes, cupolas, viewing ports, canopies and windows.

            “Oh!”  Charlie said.  “Why have we parked here then?”

            “This is where I keep my Tongatapu car.  Isaac’s an old friend of mine and lets me keep the pickup here.” His father pointed at the sign as if to confirm Isaac’s name.  “We’ve got to go to my house.  I don’t live here on Tongatapu.  I live on Vava’u.  It’s about three hundred clicks north of here.  We’ll take the Cat to get there.”

            Charlie’s heart fell.  More flying?  In a boat?  Three hundred clicks?  He didn’t know what three hundred clicks were as a measure but he suspected it didn’t mean that his dad’s house was just around the corner. “The Cat?”  he asked weakly.

            “The Catalina.  It’s a name that the Consolidated PBY-5A was given by the Brits and the Aussies during the war.  I prefer it to the kinda boring PBY designation that the US Air Force and Navy used.  This old bird used to be with the RAAF hunting Japanese submarines,” his father said proudly, standing looking at the aeroplane floating in the lagoon with a wistful smile on his face.  “I got hold of her about ten years ago and we’ve been together ever since.”

            “The war?”  Charlie asked.  “Do you mean World War Two?”

            “Yeah.  Double-u Double-u Two.”

            “But that was, like, decades ago!  You fly that thing!  It must be ancient!”  Charlie was incredulous.

            His father looked offended, which Charlie regretted, but then he smiled, “Charlie, what you got to realise is that the reason it’s so ancient is because it’s such a good plane.  After all, it’s not crashed yet!”

            Charlie started to complain that this did not make sense but his father simply whistled and strode to the back of the truck to get Charlie’s bag.  Throwing it over his shoulder he beckoned the boy to come with him and he crossed the road to the lagoon.  Charlie, inwardly protesting at another flight in another plane, hurried to catch up with him.  They passed between two very neat, small houses where the neighbours wished them a cheery greeting, most of which Charlie didn’t catch beyond malo something something.  However, his father returned the greeting fluently with a grin and a wave, but didn’t stop.  They hurried on down to the shore of the lagoon where Charlie could now see that there was a small wooden jetty, which had been concealed from view by the slope down to the water’s edge.  At the end of the jetty was moored the big seaplane.  Up close, Charlie could appreciate the size of it.  It was at least the length of a double-decker bus.

            They climbed aboard through a door in the side of the fuselage.  Charlie’s father helped him step across the gap between the plane and the jetty to reach the open door.  “Careful,” he said, “We don’t want you slipping down there,” and he pointed to the water below.   Inside the plane, the cabin was painted a utilitarian green, the walls and bulkheads were covered in conduits and cables that snaked along the fuselage fore and aft.  His father stowed his bag in a storage locker and gestured for Charlie to follow him up to the front into the cockpit.  Wherever Charlie looked in the cabin, there seemed to be some kind of observation port that looked out onto the lagoon from every direction.  It was remarkably light inside.  In the cockpit there were two pilots’ seats facing forward.  “Sit there, Charlie, and enjoy the show,” his father said, pointing at the seat on the right. “If you need a hand buckling up just let me know.”

            Charlie climbed in to the seat.  This was very different from the flight in the jumbo.  That seemed so sanitised compared to this.  Here he was on the flight deck of a World War Two bomber!  Just wait till I tell Trev, he thought absently, then remembered with a start that he was not likely to do this anytime soon. 

            “OK, Charlie, just settle down while I do the pre-flight check.  If you want something to drink, there’s some coffee in the thermos to your left.  If you don’t fancy that then I can get you a Pepsi in a minute.”  His dad popped a hatch open above their heads and climbed out into the fine drizzle.  He slid out of sight down the side of the plane.

            High up in the cockpit Charlie could see out into the lagoon.  All around the shore were the houses of local people, clustered together in greater or lesser concentrations.   His father returned, explaining that he had forgotten to untie the plane from the jetty, closed the hatch and settled into the left hand seat.  He pointed at a set of headphones on the control wheel in front of Charlie, “Put those cans on Charlie, it’s going to get pretty noisy in here soon and those will help you to keep the noise out as well as talk.”  Before he turned back to his work, his father showed him how to use the microphone attached to the headphones.  Satisfied that the boy knew what to do, his father carried on flicking switches and tapping gauges. 

        Charlie was trying to work out how far away the much larger town on the far shore was when a sudden explosion by his right ear almost caused him to jump out of his seat.

 --- 

Thanks for reading.  Please do post any suggestions for improvements.  If you have enjoyed this please do VOTE!  Keep following for further updates to the Prisoners of Solitude.