What I do know is that my world has contracted to the size of two rooms, my bedroom and my living room, because these are the rooms where I spend all my time. I sleep in my bedroom, I write and read and watch television in my living room. I’m much like an infant now, with an infant’s dependence. My husband does all the shopping and cooking and takes care of all the chores. My son helps out with the driving, the banking, the running of the household, all of which I used to do when I was well. In the meantime, I lie around and dream. I most resemble a baby in the early mornings when I first hear the birdsong outside my window. It takes me right back to the time of the kookaburra and my earliest lesson in death. The more wakeful I become the more I yearn for the state of unknowing from which I emerged back then.
The kookaburra belonged to the first garden I remember, next to a eucalypt forest. The house was in a clearing but a few tall gums grew at the back and front, so that it seemed to me as if we were in the forest rather than separated from it. And the forest seemed to be in the house, because the rooms were full of forest smells and sounds, and because I brought the forest in with me from my games, and dreamed of it when I slept.
When I was on my own I played in the shadow of these giant trees, poking sticks around their roots to look for cicada skins, stabbing at the gobs of golden sap that oozed from the tree trunks, peering at the armies of ants that ran up the trunks towards the high branches. I stripped ragged lengths of bark and made houses for slaters and snails. When my brother and sister were home I went with them up into the bush, chasing after the dog. I regarded him as human, as human as I was, I thought, with the same feelings, the only difference being that I felt the cold and needed clothes. It fascinated me that he had eyes like mine, and a tongue the same colour, and feet divided into toes. I liked to watch his chest rise and fall while he slept. I liked to watch him eat dead things, and chase after birds, and shit in the forest. I even took to shitting in the forest myself, because it didn’t seem strange to me after seeing him. Human, animal, it was all the same to me.
The point is that I never thought of my body at that time as something separate from the bodies of the dog or the kookaburra, or the skink, or the mother cat up in my sister’s sock drawer, who, one day, had somehow produced more bodies, tiny versions of herself. And I certainly didn’t think of my body as separate from my new consciousness. They were one and the same thing, consciousness being a bodily sensation, just like sight, or touch, or hearing. So, if I had it, everything else must have it, too. I knew this, not from my reasoning, but because it was obvious. When a snail felt my touch, it curled up. When a bird saw me approach, it flew away. When I flipped my sister’s tortoise onto its back, it righted itself and lumbered on. It was all only consciousness at work as far as I was concerned.
I enjoyed my body in the same way the animals enjoyed their bodies. I liked to lie in the warmth of the sun the same way the dog did. I liked my mother to clean my skin the same way the cat cleaned the skin of her tiny kittens. I loved to be fed the same way my sister’s horse loved to be fed. For me, the kitchen was the centre of the house. The food my mother made in there was the greatest pleasure of my life, particularly the cakes—the taste of the batter on my finger, the smell of the oven as the cakes came out, the hot sweetness of the first bite. Or if I’d been sick and off my food, my mother would bring me a soft-boiled egg with toasted soldiers and the salty butteriness would take me to the epicentre of pleasure. I was still half convinced that my mother’s body was made for this purpose, and for nothing else: to supply me with sustenance, to make me glow with health. And I did. I ran, I jumped, I swam at the beach, I learned to ride a bike and speed down the track at the side of the house. And I slept the deep sleep of the healthy and was undisturbed by forebodings or doubts. It was bliss to be alive.
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.