3 True Stories Concerning Coconuts

Sri Lanka, Brazil, England

Hello dear subscriber. It’s been a week for many of us.

I hope this collection of stories brings a smile.

That’s all I’m going for.

Sending you love.

Wil

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1. Kilinochchi, Sri Lanka, early 2013

The generals were barrel-bodied, their bellies bulging over belts several notches too tight. They were the first to sit. Then the guest of honour. Then his entourage. The rest of us were left to stand at the edges of the hot, dusty airport waiting room while young women in traditional Sri Lankan dress served fresh coconuts to the seated VIPs. They were a rainbow of yellow and green, those coconuts, like giant, overripe limes. The tops sliced clean off them. Straws poking from the wounds. Since my buttocks had started to turn dangerously clammy in the heat, I was heartbroken not to be given one myself.

The guest of honour was something of a celebrity in Britain, a cricketer considered one of my country’s very best. But, with his playing days behind him, his athletic prowess was by then put toward completing charity walks, and he was in Sri Lanka for his latest walk to raise funds for the charity I worked for.

We had all of us flown over in business class luxury from London to the capital of Colombo the day before. But it was an olive green military plane that would see us delivered to the starting point of the walk in Kilinochchi.

I won’t go into detail about that military plane flight other than to share that it taught me precisely the kind of stoicism I will manifest in the face of certain death. By which I mean, I will manifest none at all. This I learnt on waking mid-flight to find the plane in free-fall and filling with smoke, certain I was about to die.

Or so I was convinced.

It turned out I’d woken to the shudder of the plane landing and a harmless mist gathering at the roof of the plane, something I would go on to learn was normal for such a military craft in hot and humid temperatures.

Safely landed and stood in that military airport, sweat announcing itself in all my bodily crevices, the generals educated us on the relevance of where we were. The northern town of Kilinochchi had been the base of the Tamil Tigers, the recently-defeated rebel insurgency against which government forces had fought a long Civil War until just a few years before.

The cricketer didn’t stop looking at his watch during this brief lecture. He was a cantankerous sort, that guy. I’m sure he would have rather been in a hot-tub than sat in conversation with local dignitaries. Years later he would come into some bother after a picture of his cock and balls was posted from his Twitter account. He insisted he’d been hacked, and I have no reason not to believe him. None at all.

None.

Eventually, with their coconuts dry and the flesh between my thighs very much not so, we moved from the hot and dry lounge onto the hot and humid runway where military jeeps were waiting to take us to our accommodation for the night.

90 non-air conditioned minutes later, we arrived deep into thick forest, the sky hidden behind green canopies of trees I didn’t recognise. Night had fallen by then and a great bonfire had been built for our arrival. Within minutes, a troupe of dancers, none of them wearing more than grass skirts and the tiniest of chest coverings, were dancing around the fire to the beat of drums and singing.

One of the generals from the airport approached and called us to come in close. This was once the home of the enemy, he said. The terrorists. The suicide bombers. Great battles were fought and won right here. Your cottages for the night, he explained, were once used by the terrorists themselves. Now they are yours, he said with a full chuckle.

If it hadn't been for the plane ride hours before, that night in the “cottage” may have ranked as the most terrifying experience of my life.

For one thing, “cottage” was really overselling things. I want you to picture something more along the lines of “murder hole” or possibly “torture pit”. That gives a better flavour of the place. Our hole/pit consisted of 2 bedrooms, an external shower, a lounge area that had one wall entirely open to the threats of the outside, and a ceiling that was no more than a thin sheet of corrugated tin.

As well as sharing it with my “room buddy” for the trip, a colleague called Paul I barely knew, there were a handful of other… beings present: several spiders that looked like those face-huggers from Alien, a deeply suspicious-looking praying mantis the size of my forearm, and several other leggy things that boasted more hair on them than I can my entire body. The presence of these things convinced us the balcony would be the safest place to see the evening out.

For the next few hours, thick rain drumming on the thin tin roof, we sat in a silence we kept from becoming awkward by sharing cigarettes and talking about the one thing we had in common, a love of Arsenal Football Club.

Paul was the first to leave for bed. And, Just as I was starting to enjoy the absurdity of this skinny jean-wearing content writer from cosy England ending up in a terrorist’s jungle hideaway, Paul returned.

Both beds were set up, he said, but only one had a mosquito net.

We agreed it was in both our interests to sleep together.

And so we took off our shoes, tucked our trousers into our socks, helped spray insect repellant on each other wherever we could find exposed skin, and went to bed, side by side.

Over the next 9 days Paul and I would go on to sleep at hotels of such exquisite luxury I’m sure I’ll never see the like of them again. Hotels with beds strewn with rose petals, jacuzzi hot tubs, massaging armchairs, and the only insects the fireflies pirouetting in the air safely on the other side of a well-sealed window.

But it remains that night, the one I spent wrapped in a terrorist’s blanket next to a man I barely knew, I remember best.

2. Copacabana Beach, Brazil, mid 2013

Now that we’re no longer 14 year olds at an English military boarding school, I can admit that Tosin was probably the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. Unlike me, he didn’t need to roll his trousers at the hem because the smallest size was still too big for him. He never seemed terrified of the girls we went to school with. And he definitely didn’t need to phone his mummy before bedtime to stop himself from crying to sleep every night.

So, yes, we did make an odd little couple when we started sharing a room together in our second year.

But, despite our many differences, Tosin did enjoy doing two things together in that room of ours I’m willing to talk about here: he liked to wrestle me naked having freshly moisturised himself after a shower, and he liked to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with me on his Playstation.

He would always play as Tony, and I would always be a Brazilian skateboarder called Bob Burnquist.

Those were the rules: Tosin was Tony, I was Bob.

13 years later and I would find myself sat with Bob Burnquist on the Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. The charity I was working for then, the same that had taken me to Sri Lanka months earlier, was holding an awards ceremony for famous sports stars in the Brazilian city. I was there to interview those sportspeople and to create content for social media, website stories, and such things.

Early in the trip, I’d been given the choice of interviewing Bob or the cricketer I’d walked across Sri Lanka with. Being a sentimental guy, I thought it would be fun to meet the man I played as all those years ago with Tosin. And so, following a PR event out on the beach, I joined Bob and my colleague Paul for a quick interview.

Bob was lovely. Sat in the shade of a palm tree, he answered my mundane questions bound for the fluffiest of fluffy web stories with enthusiasm and good humour. And, just as I was running out of things to ask, Playstation games not being a comprehensive education into the intricacies of skateboard culture, a short, deeply-wrinkled man wearing an Arsenal football shirt and pushing a trolley of lime-green coconuts approached us calling Bob’s name.

Bob and the coconut vendor then unleashed a volley of words in what I’d come to recognise as Brazilian Portuguese. The back and forth between them, the full, round vowels and gentle lilting consonants sounded to me like water boiling in a pan getting ever hotter.

Bob asked if Paul and I wanted one and I said that sounded great, I really had been keen on tasting one ever since I failed to do so in Sri Lanka. Bob stood up. He walked over to the trolley. He took a coconut in one hand and a machete from the trolley in the other. Three swift hacks of the knife later and a perfect hole at the top had been created for him to drop a straw into.

He’d clearly done this before.

For the next few minutes I sat silently in the perfect Brazilian sun while Bob and Paul slurped their juicy coconuts. I was weighing up whether to let the others know my coconut was as dry as a camel’s arsehole when Bob said something I wasn’t expecting.

“Eeslington.”

“Excuse me,” I said

“Do you know somewhere in London called Eeslington?”

“Maybe you mean Islington?”

“Maybe,” he said. “The coconut guy. I mentioned you’re from London. He said his cousin lives in a place called Eeslington.”

“Well, it’s a small world,” I said.

He nodded, and I continued sucking from my dry coconut.

3. Islington, London, late 2013

The closest I’ve ever got to drinking from a fresh green coconut happened a few months later.

It was the morning after the office Christmas party, and I’d woken on the sofa of a living room I’d never seen before. Sat on my own, uncertain where my trousers were, I tried to piece together how I’d got there. Paul and I had ended up getting friendly following our adventures together in 2013. The last thing I could remember was him convincing me to go to a nightclub after the staff party.

I stood and, after checking my phone (it was dead) and a quick survey of my surroundings, I realised the trousers on the other side of the room were my own.

Trousers in hand, I opened the living room door to a dark, windowless corridor. It was at that moment an enormous tank of a man came slumping out of a bathroom directly in front of me. We looked at each other. I started to wish I had my trousers on. Before I could say anything he gestured with a nod of his head to the room at the end of the corridor.

I slowly walked to it and opened the door.

“Hello again,” a dark-haired woman said to me from her bed. I said hello and she asked me how I was feeling. I said pretty good and, wrapped in a yawn, she said good in response. The room smelled like peaches.

An hour or so later she led me back through the living room to a small kitchen lit white with the sun through an open window. After a few moments adjusting to the glare, two things caught my attention. First, a bowl of huge, lime-green coconuts, and, second, through her window, the home of my beloved Arsenal Football Club, the Emirates Stadium, right there on the other side of the road.

“You want one,” she said, assuming I was admiring her coconuts and not the sight of that beautiful stadium. And, just at the point I was about to tell her how big an Arsenal fan I am and how I do, in fact, still have nightmares about Nayim from the half way line, I stopped.

Yes, I did want one. I never did get one in Sri Lanka, I was given a duff one in Brazil. This was my chance to finally see what one of these things tasted like.

I often wonder now how different my life would be if I hadn’t decided to take up that opportunity. But that’s the choice I made that morning, and, as you’ll see, my life’s never really been the same ever since.

She went on to tell me she loved their fresh water most of all. And she loved using the soft, young flesh in smoothies. No, you can’t get them from supermarkets, she told me. Luckily for her, a market seller round the corner has them most weekends.

Contrary to what I assumed would happen, she didn’t open it for me there. She had to get ready for a hockey game and kicked me out 10 minutes later. This is the reason why, one morning in late 2013, I could be found outside Emirates Stadium holding a fresh coconut in one hand and the number of a girl I barely knew written on a post-it in the other.

Thinking it was the safest place for it, I placed the post-it in the bottom of my canvas tote bag, and set off down the streets of Islington in North London. I kept walking, full of the self-satisfaction one tends to feel on such mornings, until a short, sharp, shriek caught my attention.

It sounded like someone calling a name. A Spanish name, perhaps.

“Jupé, Jupé!”

What had poor Jupé done, I wondered? It sounded like he’d really pissed someone off.

I turned and realised Jupé was, in fact, me. A market stall seller tending to a rainbow of fruits and vegetables was shouting Jupé and her eyes were fixed angrily on me.

I’d been entirely oblivious to her stall as I’d walked past it, and I held up my palms in a show of deference. But it did nothing. She started pointing to me. And then not to me but to my bag.

The bag I had moments before placed my coconut in.

It was at that point I noticed the collection of coconuts on her stall, identical to the one now in my bag. The panic ricocheting around my head coalesced into understanding.

I wasn’t being mistaken for an attractive young Spaniard called Jupé.

I was being mistaken for someone who’d just tried to make off with one of her fresh, lime-green coconuts without paying for it.

“You, pay!” She said again. “You, pay. I call police.”

I assured her my friend up the road had given it to me. I assured her I didn’t need to pay. But by that point some very bald, large men started interrogating me in cockney accents, and anything I said in my delicate, very much not cockney accent seemed to only aggravate them further.

And so I reached in to my bag, took out my coconut, and handed it over.

The only way I can explain never finding the girl’s telephone number again is that, doing as post-its do, it had become stuck to the coconut in my bag and was now in the trash of an Islington coconut seller.

And so I never did hear again from the girl who lived at Arsenal and loved coconuts.

But I’m a simple man. I’m not smart enough to date more than one person at a time. If I’d had her number, even if only to organise a first date or coffee somewhere, that would have rendered me “off the market”.

I certainly would have never gone to a bar in East London called The Dolphin a week later to serve as wingman to an old university buddy. I would have never drunkenly danced with a blonde Finnish girl who, it turned out, was on a brief holiday from Sweden. And I would not be here, 12 years later, writing this in Finland where I live with her, and our two children, and our little dog.

This really happened. Like everything else I have set down in this newsletter, it is a true story.