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 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.