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.