Dying Read online

  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.

  It wasn’t only the desire between her and the singer that was dangerous, it was the fact that the singer was black. You couldn’t live in a hotel like the Grand Pacific and not know about race. It was the whole point of the place. The guests in the hotel were white. The hotel workers were black. One group was there to serve the other. That was the pact we had all entered into. Now here was my sister flouting the rules in the most flagrant way, allowing desire to challenge the order. My brother was the one who betrayed her. She was punished for her crime and returned to boarding school under a thunderous cloud. I wondered what the other staff had made of it all; they must have seen the way the singer had looked at my sister, and the way she had looked back at him. I’d seen it too. I was relieved when she finally went back to school and I didn’t have to fear for her anymore.

  As for me, even though I had become aware of the presence of sexual desire in others, I was not afflicted with it myself. I was so ignorant about sex that, when a kitchen boy took me into the deserted dining room one afternoon, I thought he was playing a game. We lay on the carpet, under a table, and he rubbed his hard body against mine for a few minutes while I waited for the game to start. And then it was over and we left. We even stopped in the kitchen to chat with one of the cooks about what he was making for dinner. He was chopping up fresh pineapples at the time and gave me a bowl full of dripping fruit to take outside. While the kitchen boy went back to work I took my pineapple and ate it on a bench by the seawall. As usual I looked for poisonous snakes in the water, waiting for the telltale flash of black and white. And there it was, unmistakable, a whip thin body, an arrow-like head, aiming for the deeper water further out.

  As time went on, the workings of race revealed themselves to me in other ways that were less to do with sex and more to do with power. My mother found us a cottage in an all-white neighbourhood outside Suva. The only Fijians to be found were the gardeners and the housemaids who came out to work there. For a few hours every day, our housemaid would be busy washing our clothes in a copper in the back yard, sweeping the floors, making our beds and scrubbing the shower. And sometimes she would cook. Her specialty was a fish stew made with coconut milk and cassava. It would be waiting on the stove for my mother when she returned from the convent school where she’d found a job. I would come home from school to the sweet smell of the stew filling the house. It became as much a part of my life as the green mangoes and spicy dahl in greasy paper cones that we purchased from an Indian roadside stall a short bike ride from the house.

  Of the housemaid’s other life, her real life, I knew nothing, until one day she asked me to come with her to meet her family. It was a long walk in the heat. By the time we got there, I was sorry I’d come. There was nothing to see, just a concrete hut stained red from the surrounding mud, with an opening at the front and a couple of wooden flaps for windows. It was surrounded by banana trees and vegetable plots dug into the clumpy soil. In the doorway stood an older woman, perhaps her mother, and a clutch of children, all too shy to speak. I didn’t know their names or their ages or even if they all belonged to the housemaid. And I didn’t know how to talk to them. Perhaps I was shocked by the simple way they lived. Perhaps I was struck dumb by a nascent form of shame. I wouldn’t, at the time, have been able to say exactly what I was ashamed of, but I did know that I wanted to get away a
s quickly as possible. I only had to look at the housemaid, for whom I had developed a sort of love, to see that I had disappointed her, and that the whole visit had been a mistake.

  The discovery of my privilege was not glorious in any way, nor did it fill me with any pleasure. But it did make me see things that I might have missed before. It made me see, for example, how some girls took their privilege to be a right of birth and were not at all ashamed of it. My father had decided to buy me a bargain pony and join me up at the local pony club. I don’t know why I agreed, when I wasn’t a keen rider. I can only think I did it to please Dad, since horses were one of his passions. It was clear from the outset that I was outclassed. I knew some of the other girls from school, who had been riding since they could walk, in gymkhanas, competing for ribbons, all of which I knew nothing about. I didn’t even really know the basics, so had to start out in a beginners’ class, practising mounting and walking, while the other girls were taking their ponies over the jumps in the main ring. Perhaps my pony sensed my humiliation and decided to exploit it, because no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get him to obey me.

  ‘You have to let him know you’re the boss,’ my father advised.

  ‘But I’m not,’ I said. ‘That’s the problem.’

  I tried to imitate my friends, thinking I might fool my pony by faking a confidence I didn’t feel, but he continued to take the same liberties, and I continued to flounder.

  I don’t think the other girls meant to be unkind, but they started to comment on my lack of general competency as a horsewoman. It happened in the stables as we were saddling up, or after the day’s lessons were over. I would be brushing my pony’s coat, or combing his mane, when they would start to instruct me in the proper way to brush or comb, in the right way to walk around a horse and the best way to handle a horse’s hooves. I was grateful, but I was also aware of the pleasure these girls took in being my superior in all things horse-related. Their manner towards me was much the same as their manner towards the Indian man who ran the stables. They spoke to him in the same half-friendly, half-hectoring way, even though he was the same age as their fathers. I wonder that he didn’t slap them, but he couldn’t of course. They were protected by some invisible force field that shielded them from censure. Everyone could feel it, even me. So I thanked them for their advice and did as I was told. Not long afterwards I decided to quit riding altogether.

  ‘I don’t fit in there,’ I told my father.

  And that was the truth. The pony club was not my world. I had wandered into something I didn’t understand. My horse knew it even before I did.

  If I tell these little histories now, it is because they conjure a feeling of what it was like to be me back then, the same but different, the body still growing up and out into the world instead of contracting and retreating from it. It’s often said that life is short. But life is also simultaneous, all of our experiences existing in time together, in the flesh. For what are we, if not a body taking a mind for a walk, just to see what’s there? And, in the end, where do we get to, if not back to a beginning that we’ve never really left behind? Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past. It is all, according to T. S. Eliot, the same thing. I am a girl and I am a dying woman. My body is my journey, the truest record of all I have done and seen, the site of all my joys and heartbreaks, of all my misapprehensions and blinding insights. If I feel the need to relive the journey it is all there written in runes on my body. Even my cells remember it, all that sunshine I bathed in as a child, too much as it turned out. In my beginning is my end.

  The moments that stand out for me are the ones when I felt most alive. Even as a dreamy child, there were times when I came awake. Fear will do it, hence my fascination with sea snakes, and love, which in my experience is so close to fear there is barely a difference. ‘Every love story is a potential grief story,’ says Julian Barnes in Levels of Life, which is something I knew from a very young age. I think most children do. It comes in the wake of consciousness. Everything lives until it dies, including the people we love the most, which, in the days of my dreamy childhood, was my mother. I took a trip with her around the main island of Fiji. We travelled with a girl I knew from school and her mother, my mother’s closest friend there. We stayed at beachside motels along the way, driving from village to village, town to town, without any particular destination. At the end of every day there was always a beach and a swim and a bed with clean sheets, and no hint of disturbance.

  Except for one evening. My mother took me out for a reef walk, to the very edge, where the reef drops away and the water changes from turquoise green to blue-black. The surf out there was pounding, the wind was blustery, and I wanted us to turn around and go home. But my mother stood firm, a wild grin on her face, her hair whipping around her head, her arms outstretched.

  ‘Just look where we are!’ she shouted, spinning around to take in the sweep of the beach behind us. I realised then how far we had walked, how tiny we must look from the land, two dots against the horizon. And I felt a surge of love for my mother, as if at any moment I might lose her to a rogue wave or a shallow swimming shark, for I knew they were out there cruising in the black water, just metres away.

  ‘The sun’s going down,’ I said.

  ‘Time to go.’

  And so we made our way in, the tide rising around our feet and the sky turning mauve then orange then molten yellow.

  That night I went over the scene in my head many times before I fell asleep, trying to settle my heart, but every time I pictured my mother’s tiny figure surrounded by all that water I panicked again and my blood pounded. Even my sleep was filled with anxious dreams, where my mother and I were falling off the reef’s edge into fathoms of churning water, and where it was up to me to save her. And then I would wake up and hear the surf in the distance and realise, with the most overwhelming sense of relief, that she was here with me, in the same room, breathing softly in her bed.

  No wonder my mother and I remained close for most of my lifetime. We went through a lot together, when it was just the two of us. We even survived a Fiji hurricane, rushing around in our swimsuits to ready the house, while the rain came down in solid walls of water. My father was stuck on another island, so there was no one to help us. But my mother had her wits about her: she found where the hurricane shutters were stored under the house, and fetched a ladder. My job was to hand the shutters up to her one by one, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds. They were heavy and the wind was careering around the garden in all directions at once. I had never seen such a display of force. It was animal-like in its ferocity, as if a herd of enraged beasts had been loosed upon us.

  The cacophony continued all day and all night. We curled up together in bed and waited it out. There was nothing else to do but cling to each other for courage and warmth. The worst thing was the noise, the banging on the tin roof as the wind threatened to rip it off, the din of the hammering rain, the crack and clatter of the trees outside the window. There was no possibility of sleep. We lay awake and afraid; it was all I could do not to sob aloud for pity at us being so helpless. But I took my mother’s lead and refused to give in to terror. By the morning, the wind and rain had started to ease off. It must have been two or three days later that we drove into town. It was a shocking sight. There was debris strewn everywhere, the road was full of potholes where the tar had washed away, trees were snapped in half. We parked by the harbour front, near a park, where two enormous shade trees had been upended. Their roots hung in the air, caked with mud, and people gathered round to stare as if it were a crime scene. I think sorrow was their chief emotion. I felt it myself when I came over to look. I took hold of my mother’s hand and tried to communicate my love for her that way, because words seemed inadequate.

  ‘Let’s go and see what food we can find,’ she said. ‘We’ll feel better once we’ve eaten.’

  I still miss my mother, even now. When I was told I had a
tumour in my brain I was given a choice. I could have surgery immediately to remove it, or I could have a few doses of radiation to kill it off. Both methods were effective but each entailed an attendant risk. I didn’t decide straightaway. I slept on it over the weekend. I was high on steroids at the time, and I remember lying in my bed, unable to sleep, silently discussing my options with Mum as if she could hear what I was thinking. I even asked her to pray for me, since I didn’t know how to pray for myself. I thought back to how she had made it through some of the bad times in her life, and I recalled her reading her old leather bound Book of Psalms, a relic from her Anglican childhood. I couldn’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer from my days at Sunday school, though I did try. The Lord is my shepherd I told myself, and then stalled, thinking that, if only Mum was with me, she would know what to do, just as she had known what to do in the hurricane.

  In the end, I opted for the operation, half hoping I wouldn’t wake up at the end of it. You would know what that feels like, Mum, I thought, given how you died. How many nights must you have lain awake, praying that the Lord would take you in the night. If I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take. But he showed you no mercy, and he is unlikely to show any to me. This was the tenor of my silent nighttime ravings. I was a child again, a little feverish and confused, unable to tell the difference between real and phantom, fact and fiction, and I wanted a cool hand on my forehead, a boiled egg with buttered soldiers, any sign at all that I was not abandoned.