Dying (13 page)

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 as 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.