Dying (12 page)

As childhoods go, mine was remarkably free of upset. I never thought it strange that
we moved around so much. It was just what we did. And it never cost me either my
appetite for pleasure or my rude good health, so I was lucky in that way, and fortunate
to have a mother who never gave me any cause to doubt her love. My father was the
one to be wary of, but he was often away. Even when he was home, it was his indifference
I had to contend with,
rather than any outright antagonism. I'm talking about a time
before his anger was ever directed at me. Back then he aimed his attacks mostly at
my sister, and of course at my mother, who always bore the brunt of his discontent.

Dreamy would best describe me as a child. My early certainty that I was part of the
animal kingdom resulted in a state of enchantment that stayed with me for years.
No doubt this was in some part a defence mechanism, a way of insulating myself against
my father's increasingly troublesome nature, but it had other advantages as well.
It meant that for a long time I experienced the world as an unfolding series of glorious
discoveries, as if everything in it was only put there for my enjoyment. I was drunk
with sensation, in love with the unaccountable abundance and variety of things. Imagine
my delight then when I found myself suddenly transported to Fiji, a place of such
lush and uncommon beauty it made me reel.

For a child with my epicurean turn of mind, Fiji was as close to paradise as it is
possible to get. Warm, sensual, full of smells and colours and sensations of extraordinary
force. The light there was so pure it infused every object with an extra intensity,
so that a flower was not just red, or a blade of grass just green, to be glanced
at and then ignored. Flowers, grass, leaves, sky, sea, sand drew my gaze and made
me stare, until I, too, was infused with red, green, blue, white, my body replete
with brightness. For
some weeks I lived in this state of dazed illumination, paying
so much attention to light and colour that I became as entangled in them as I was
in the beings of the dog and cat and the garden snails.

During this time we were lodged in a bungalow in the garden of the Grand Pacific
Hotel, set back from the harbour front. This was my second garden, so different from
my first. The trees here were nothing like the hefty eucalypts in the forest garden.
These were slim coconut palms, some of them growing straight up, others leaning precariously
into the ocean breeze, their fronds constantly clacking overhead. Men from the hotel
would sometimes shimmy up them to reach the coconuts. I used to hear the fat fruit
slamming into the ground like medicine balls, and I would stay and watch as the men
slashed the outer skins away and cracked open the shells. I sat on the grass with
them and chewed the white flesh they handed me. And I stared at their perfect limbs,
and their strong teeth, and their gleaming hair, because I'd never seen bodies like
theirs before; they seemed flawless. I was fascinated, too, by the way they moved,
so easeful and languid, the women the same as the men. I never saw them hurry. Out
of respect, I slowed down myself, lazed in fact, spending my days in a state of semi-wakefulness,
either swimming, or lounging, or staring at the water where it lapped against the
sea wall. I was watching for snakes. The men had told
me they were deadly, so I was
drawn to them as a source of terror. The sight of one sliding through the oily harbour
slick was enough to stop my heart.

At some point the subject of school arose. But in Fiji even school turned out to
be a source of delight. I had been unimpressed with my first school, a charmless
establishment for infants through to Grade Three, with draughty classrooms and asphalt
playgrounds that bruised your knees when you fell. There I'd been clothed in a scratchy
grey tunic that seemed always to be damp, and a bulky grey jumper if it was cold.
I thought the outfit an insult to the body inside it. Perhaps this was because I
associated the uniform with the humiliations I suffered while wearing it, the playground
squabbles that left me bleeding from the nose, my demotion from Grade One because
I was weak at sums. Others suffered, too, sometimes worse than I did, like the boy
from our street who shat in his pants on the way home from the bus stop, in full
view of everyone, and walked home with the offending material running down his legs.

Those kinds of accidents happened frequently at that school; it was a time of considerable
bodily anxiety. My one pleasant memory is of a teacher running cool water over my
wrists under a tap. I must have been out playing in the heat. She showed me where
the veins ran close to my skin.
‘Your blood runs all through your body,' she said.
‘So if you cool your blood down, that helps to cool the rest of you.' It was the
most important lesson any teacher had taught me thus far, and I loved her for it.
I was immediately conscious of the blood pulsing in every part of me, and it was
true that the cold water was drawing all the heat out of it.

To dress for my Fijian school I first needed to be measured by a tailor. My mother
took me to downtown Suva, always a treat: the sights and smells of the narrow streets
were captivating. The market in particular lured you in with its promise of plenitude.
Here was a sweet-smelling maze of fruit stalls and fishmongers and farmers' stands
selling things I didn't know the names of and had never tasted. My mother took notes
for the time when we moved into a house with a kitchen and a house girl who could
teach her what to buy and how to cook it.

‘What fun this is!' she said, rubbing her hands together. I'd never seen her so excited.
Perhaps it was because she'd made a new friend that morning in the hotel lobby.

‘He's asked us both to dinner,' she told me. We were drinking milkshakes during a
break from our shopping. ‘His treat.'

My father was away flying at the time, which always
improved my mother's mood. She
lit up when he was gone. Her skin seemed to glow and her eyes shone more brightly.

At the tailor's shop she showed me all the colours I was allowed to wear to school.
On any given day I could choose between a tunic that was pink, mint-green, baby-blue
or yellow. The tailor was an Indian, small, with coal-black eyes and stained teeth.
He took my measurements, then pulled down a bolt of cloth so I could feel its weight
and texture. I thrilled to the whole procedure, and understood that this new school
must be an entirely different sort of place from the one I'd left behind. For a
start my uniforms were to be made from this lightweight, open-weave cotton with its
delicious sugary smell. While I inspected buttons and belt buckles and socks, the
tailor turned his attention to my mother, persuading her to buy some blouses and
a dress, exchanging banter and smiles with her as if they were old friends.

‘What a salesman,' she said, when we were finally back out on the street. ‘I couldn't
say no.'

Before we left town we stopped at a stationer's shop to buy my new schoolbooks. Stationery
had been one of my earliest glorious discoveries. I had loved it since I could remember.
I was a particular fan of coloured pencils in box sets or tins. There was a Derwent
seventy-two collection that had reduced me to tears, probably because my mother
had
refused to buy it for me. But everything else appealed too, all the paraphernalia
that went with making marks on paper: fresh exercise books full of lined pages just
waiting to be filled, botany books with one page lined and one page blank, project
books with blank pages throughout, sketchbooks for drawing, rulers, paste, scissors,
fountain pens, nibs, ink, lead pencils, erasers. They were best when new, of course,
when everything lay ahead of them, and before any mistakes and erasures had occurred.
Which is no doubt why I loved them, because they were promise made manifest.

On my first day in class, I was allocated a magnificent desk. Made of solid timber,
its hinged lid opened up to reveal a spacious cavity, where all of my stationery
could be arranged. It was a more serious piece of furniture than I was used to, and
implied a more orderly approach to schoolwork than I had so far experienced. As it
turned out, orderliness was what I had needed all along, the sort of quiet, steady
progression through things, which builds understanding and confidence. Our classroom
was on the first floor, an airy, light-filled space that looked out onto mango trees
and sports fields, and caught the sea breezes coming in off the ocean. I remember
sitting there, watching our teacher shape the letters of the alphabet in cursive
script for us to copy from the board, and sensing a shift in my consciousness almost
as powerful as
my earlier awakening in the garden. It had to do with the act of writing,
which suddenly seemed like the most important thing in the world to practise and
master, not for its meaning—that would come later—but for its mystery.

At first my devotion to handwriting derived from the pleasure I took in forming the
shapes on the page, but along with that came something else, a yearning to capture
things—sounds, speech, what I saw out the window, what I felt when it rained, what
the villages looked like along the bus route to school—and make them communicable
to others. The letters of the alphabet had this power. If you learned to draw them
well and order them in the right way, you could tell anybody anything you liked,
make a picture for them out of words, make them see what you saw.

This was a major discovery for me, that out of my hand and eye could come marks and
symbols with magical properties. It meant that my consciousness could express itself
to the consciousness of others and, though I didn't fully comprehend that at the
time, I did feel it in the classroom: the beginning of a quest, of a search for
the miracle of mutual comprehension that I have pursued to this day. I still write
so as not to feel alone in the world, but now I type. What is lost in the process
is the hand-drawn aspect of the written word—some of the magic has faded, as it
must
do from all childhood pleasures. They begin and they end.

A hotel is nirvana for a hungry child, or so it seemed to me. There is food everywhere,
available at every hour of the day and night. I ate whenever I felt like it; I simply
gave the waiters or the barmen the number of our bungalow. Soon enough I didn't
even need to do that. Once in a while my father tried to curb my appetites, by banning
soft drinks and desserts at dinner, and threatening me with unnamed consequences
if I continued to frequent the pool kiosk. But when he was away and my mother was
in charge, I reverted to old habits and ate whenever I was hungry, without any regard
to the cost.

Perhaps that explains why I took so readily to my mother's new friend.

‘Order anything on the menu,' he told me, in his lovely rich man's voice.

My mother had told me he was in oil. ‘A Texan,' she said, although this meant nothing
to me.

All I saw was a man with laughing green eyes and a broad smile and a thatch of sandy
hair growing grey at the temples.

‘A sailor,' my mother had said.

‘On a ship?'

‘On a yacht.'

For three nights we ate with him, and for three nights he said the same thing.

‘My treat. Anything on the menu.' He meant it as a joke by then, the Grand Pacific
menu being as modest as it was.

But it was no joke to me. Delighted, I ordered a Coke each night, and finished up
with that height of extravagance, a banana split with chocolate sauce.

I could see my mother liked her friend as much as I did, but I suspected her reasons
were different from mine. I would look at her sitting up eagerly at the table and
feel a shift in her, like a turning of the tide. She was still excited. Her skin
still glowed and her eyes still shone brightly, but now there was something else
that I couldn't put a name to. She seemed to hum. I wondered if I was the only one
who felt it, and then I looked at the Texan and saw that he must be aware of it too,
because his eyes had stopped laughing and he was watching my mother in a new way.

I had never seen sex before. I don't mean the act, I mean the presence of desire.
All of a sudden there it was, as plain as day. It was the same thing that made the
house girls giggle when they stood around the kiosk teasing the barmen. It was why
the high school girls went silent in front of the boys on the bus. It was why my
sister had got
into trouble at her Sydney boarding school for talking to boys at
the train station. My father had had words with her on the phone.

‘Why do you insist on behaving like a tart?' he said.

At the time, I thought he was referring to some kind of cake. Now I wondered if my
mother was behaving like a tart, too. I didn't think so. All she was doing was enjoying
herself. It didn't last long. It was only a flirtation. Her new friend sailed away,
my father came home, and that was the end of it. Nevertheless, I did start to watch
her and my father more closely after that. Once desire had entered my sights, I started
to notice it everywhere, even in my parents, who seemed more vulnerable the closer
I looked, susceptible in ways I'd never suspected before, and not in full control
of their faculties. Even their bodies appeared ready to betray them at any moment.

When my sister and brother arrived for the holidays, I saw the same vulnerabilities
and susceptibilities in them and put it down to the same cause. Eliot had grown a
foot taller, his voice had dropped an octave, he locked the door when he had a shower.
In my sister the changes were even more pronounced. She had bigger breasts. She wore
more make-up. Her skirts were so tiny you could see her underwear.

‘You can't go to dinner looking like that,' my father told her.

‘Why not?'

‘Because it's disgusting.'

The boys in the hotel band didn't find it disgusting. They invited her to watch them
rehearse. By the end of the week the lead singer was holding her hand and asking
her to meet him after the show. My brother and I took to spying on them in the garden,
watching them kiss and fondle each other in the hibiscus bushes. I don't know what
my brother was thinking, but I always prayed they'd stop soon and say goodnight,
because I knew my sister was playing a dangerous game.