‘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.