How Do I Love Thee? Read online

  ‘Time to go,’ I whisper, and we slip off into the darkness. The English backpackers at the next table aren’t so quick, and of course the Germans have no idea what’s happening, and she’s quickly got them up on the floor playing some game that involves dancing on a sheet of newspaper that is folded smaller and smaller and smaller until you fall over.

  ‘I’m sure it’s a traditional Fijian custom,’ I say as we wander down the beach by moonlight.

  We sit on the beach talking until the power goes off, and then we have to find our huts by moonlight and turn in. Tonight we’ve been talking about the worst jobs we’ve ever had, and then we got onto our first boyfriends or girlfriends. I can remember after I broke up with my first girlfriend, at sixteen years old, vowing that I’d never talk about her to anyone else. Everything would be secret, just between her and me. It lasted until I met Rosie. I never wanted to keep any secrets from her. Wanted to tell her everything.

  Maybe it was just a way of trying to get her to share more of herself with me. I don’t know. She really gets on well with Kurt and Ingrid though. She says they make this holiday for her. I’m happy to spend half the day just lying in the hammock out the front of our little hut on the beach. She says she doesn’t have such a hammock-shaped outlook on life. Says she enjoys talking with Ingrid, who, truth be told, doesn’t really have great English. But that doesn’t seem to stop them. They sit in the shade and talk for hours. Every now and then she asks me to come and sit with them, but I tell her I’m on the edge of some major philosophical discovery; if I can just spend enough quality time in the hammock looking out over the ocean, it will come to me.

  It is dark in the little hut and we search around for things by feel, like blind people. The generator is switched off every night about ten o’clock or so. The theory is, I guess, that everybody should be in bed by then. It doesn’t seem to fit in with the backpacker lifestyle though. They should leave the generator on until after midnight and then not bother switching it back on until about ten am or so, rather than seven am.

  Rose lies down on the bed. ‘How are you feeling tonight?’ I ask her.

  ‘Not too bad,’ she says.

  I don’t push it. Some nights that’s as good an answer as I can ever hope for.

  We go to sleep wrapped tightly in each other’s arms, bare skin on skin, breathing in time with each other. It’s been a long time since there were no niggling problems snuggled in there between us.

  In the morning I get up early and wander down to the water’s edge. I see the six English backpackers further down on the beach. They’re a close group. They always sit together, and sunbake or swim together. But one of them always looks so sad. I watch her and see the way she sits at the water’s edge a little apart from the others, and wraps her arms around her legs. Looking out over the horizon. And I wonder what or who she’s left behind way out there.

  I like to sit in the shade of the large communal hut sometimes and watch the staff and the other guests doing the things they like to do. Rosie goes snorkelling for hours and studies the sea life. I watch the island life.

  There are about a dozen Fijian staff on the island. Losana is the hostess and does all the welcoming and farewelling, and is the life of the party each day. But I notice that when she pauses to sit down and rest for a while, her face goes blank. Like she’s looking at something far away from all this. It’s a different look to that which the tourists get when they look into the distance. Like Psycho Vicki from northern England. That’s what we call her. She always looks like something is creeping up on her. Like she’s getting ready to spin around and kick somebody. Or the Welsh guy who never talks to anyone, but just lies in the small TV room looking at the soccer on the satellite TV. Or Yoko from Kyoto and Aaron from Ireland. They’re an unlikely couple. They don’t even share much language in common. I sat with them once as they were struggling to maintain a conversation and I asked them, ‘Why Fiji?’ And it turns out they met at the airport when they arrived here and have been travelling together ever since.

  They’re a real odd couple. He’s got such fair skin that it burns if he spends the least amount of time in the sun, and she’s golden and tanned, and he’s shy and reserved and she has that Japanese schoolgirl way of looking down at her feet whenever anyone talks to her. But to see them together there, just sharing something beyond words, it is amazing. I could watch them all day.

  I turn back and look at Losana. She sees me and her face fills up with activity. She slaps her hands on her knees and stands up and bustles off to the kitchen. I’d like to ask her one day about that faraway look she gets. But not today. Today I’m going to talk to the Fijian barman, Lutu. He seems to spend most of the day just sitting in the shade of the big hut. He’s a big fella and could easily have played rugby for Fiji when he was younger. He has a wave and a smile for everybody who walks past him, but he’s very hard to engage in conversation. But I’m working on him.

  As Rosie says, ‘I deserve full points for determination.’

  I ask him to tell me about cannibalism. He stares at me as if it’s something he doesn’t really want to talk about. But I say, ‘I’m really interested in this. I’m fascinated by Fijian culture.’ So he tells me that Fijians didn’t eat people indiscriminately. They would kill a person if they transgressed some rule or law and, as a warning to others, they would eat him. Just a bit of him, in fact, not all of him. And they’d throw the rest away. But missionaries came in the 1800s and brought the word of Jesus, he says, and they stopped eating people—and then he adds with a grin, ‘But Europeans tasted best anyway. We called them long pig!’

  Later I ask the cook if we’re having meat, Fijian style, for dinner, and he stares at me a moment and says with a grin just like Lutu’s. ‘No. It’s European meat!’

  It takes me a moment to understand that he’s making a joke.

  Fijians are funny like that. I watch them looking at the young couples cavorting in the water and see the way they frown a little. They don’t approve, but they don’t say anything. This is something really interesting—before the Europeans came to Fiji and the other Pacific islands, life was pretty much all about sun and surf and sand and sex and so on for the locals. But the European missionaries, those that didn’t end up in the cooking pots I presume, convinced the Fijians that they had to change their ways and be more like them. So in time it’s become a real conservative place. Cover your full body. Don’t expose your shoulders or midriff or legs, you know. But all the Europeans who come here now, they live like the Fijians used to, living for the sun and surf and sand and sex and so on.

  Go figure!

  There’s another island ritual that I didn’t mention. Each night at dinner the dozen or so island staff stand up and sing a song of welcome for the new guests and a farewell song for those who will be leaving the next day. And Psycho Vicki has got into the habit of standing up there with them. Like she’s a Fijian for a night or something. Kurt thinks she wants to be an islander. Rosie says she has ‘look-at-me’ written all over her. I’m not sure either is right. She’s rake thin and looks a bit like Keira Knightley, and I took pity on her one evening as we were playing a game of billiards. She was sitting on her own, and I invited her to join us. But it turned out to be a real tactical error. Every time me or Kurt spoke to her she found a reason to find a hidden insult or challenge in it. I would have thought she had a thing about guys, but she just loved hanging around with the Fijian guys.

  After a bit she started disputing the rules we were playing by and told us that when the Fijian boys arrived from work they’d really kick our arses. They’d have us for dinner!

  I tried to make a cannibal joke out of that, but she wasn’t interested. And then I saw Rosie giving me one of her looks, to let me know that since I’d been dumb enough to drag her into the game I had to figure out how to be clever enough to get rid of her. I gave her a pleading look, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  Luckily Vicki’s friend Jill from Scotland came along, and
she went off with her. Now Jill is one of the nicest people you’re ever likely to meet on a tropical island like this one. She’s a little plump and smiles a lot and seems to be the only person on the island who doesn’t have any hang-ups or things she’s running away from or looking for. But sometimes, near dusk, I’ve seen her walking along the beach by herself as if she’s suddenly remembering something sad.

  I asked Jill once, ‘Why Fiji?’ and she said, ‘Because it’s a million miles from Scotland.’

  Jill told me that she was from south of Glasgow. And I said, ‘I didn’t think there was much of Scotland south of Glasgow.’ And she said, ‘There’s a wee bit.’ And I liked her at once for the way she smiled at me when she said it. Like it was an old joke between us. I told Rosie about it and she just shook her head. ‘How can you know anything about a person in such a short time?’ she asked me. ‘It takes years to know if you really like somebody.’

  I ask most people on the island. ‘Why Fiji?’ sooner or later, and the diversity of answers makes me wonder how many people really know why, or would admit it if they knew it.

  Kurt and Ingrid have been touring the islands of the Pacific for two months now. They tell me there’s a beach on Tonga, which is right next to the international date line, where you can sit and be the first person in the world to see the sun come up. They tell us how they went there and sat on the beach before sunrise, expecting it to be crowded. But they were the only two people there, they said. The first people in the world.

  I loved the sound of that.

  They ended up in Fiji because there was a cyclone heading for the Cook Islands where they had been. Fiji seemed to have good weather at the time and so they flew here in a small plane and looked around for a remote and cheap island to visit.

  They look like they’ve been together forever and know just what type of drink or food to fetch the other. I watch them sitting together and talking, or reading German books on ideas and reading out passages to each other every now and then.

  I could watch them all day too.

  Most of the English backpackers have a copy of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. And most of them don’t know why Fiji. Like they don’t really know why Dan Brown, although the universal opinion seems to be that you can’t stop reading him, but when you get to the end it leaves you a little disappointed. I wonder if that’s what most of them will say of Fiji when they leave. They seem to be trying so hard to have fun. Drinking and laughing all night and looking like crap for most of the next day.

  I walked down the beach today and went past a place where the English backpackers had been sunbaking, and I found the word ‘FIJI’ written in shells and sticks in the sand, like a young girl might do, trying to capture something of the magic of it through writing the word. I imagine it was the sad girl who wrote it, and I wonder if it helped her to understand why Fiji any better.

  The first morning I saw Kurt and Ingrid they were sitting in the shade outside our hut, and I thought, that’s our shade they’re sitting in! And I watched them reading these big heavy books and taking notes, and then I thought, these could be interesting people.

  We ended up sitting together at lunch the first day and have had every meal together ever since. Kurt said he’d picked us for Australians. He’s truly amazing at this.

  Like us, they’re a little older than most of the backpackers, and maybe have a little more money as they’re also staying in a hut by the beach rather than the dorms further back on the island where there’s no ocean breeze. Kurt is tall and has a shaggy beard and Ingrid is small and very petite. But they both have the same wide smile. She looks stunning in her black bikini too, but I’d never tell Rosie I thought that.

  I just say, ‘They always seem so happy together.’

  ‘Maybe they are just happy at this moment,’ she says.

  ‘Maybe they are always happy,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe you just like to imagine that it’s possible for people to always be happy.’

  ‘Maybe I do.’

  ‘Of course you do.’ Then she looks at me and gives a small shake of her head and lays one hand against the side of my face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  I almost ask, ‘For what?’ But I don’t really want her to say.

  At dinner we compare favourite books with Kurt and Ingrid, and I’ve never heard of most of the authors he tells me about—even though most are English and American. But Kurt says he’s never read The Da Vinci Code. Ingrid punches him gently on the shoulder, like it’s a mark of achievement.

  We sit up on the beach that night swapping favourite films and working hard on a bottle of Jack Daniels between us. Rosie settles under my arm and dozes off somewhere around modern French cinema, and I remember, in a lull in the conversation, looking down at her and suddenly feeling that our section of the beach was floating away from the island, slowly drifting off to an even more remote place, maybe close to the international date line.

  So I’m lying in the hammock under the shade of the trees the next morning, thinking about the feeling of being conscious as somebody takes a bite out of your heart, when I feel the whole world stop moving. I’m just lying there, suspended above the earth, and I can see nothing in front of me but the horizon. It’s as if, for a moment, nothing else exists except that horizon. It’s as if the whole world could be simplified down and understood by that far line where sky and sea meet.

  As if everything really could be understood.

  I’m hanging out with Kurt later, while Rosie and Ingrid are snorkelling. She’s a bit grumpy at me today. I no longer ask why. I think Kurt senses something and wants to ask what’s the matter, but it’s easier not to talk about some things. So instead I’m telling him about a conversation I had with Losana about life in modern Fiji. She was telling me that modern Fijians don’t spend enough time with their families and that it is very bad for Fijian society. She told me that they are too busy chasing Western things. And then she told me that all the staff on the island work twenty-five days straight at the resort and then have five days off.

  ‘Twenty-five days!’ I say. ‘Most of us aren’t on holidays that long.’

  Kurt nods. ‘I can’t imagine being apart from my family for twenty-five days at a time. I mean, when I have a family.’ It’s the first time he’s talked about the future like that. It doesn’t surprise me though. You just know him and Ingrid are going to get married and have children and maybe settle down somewhere in Austria, and then sit up late at nights sometimes telling each other stories of their memories of being in Fiji and the other Pacific islands.

  ‘She said they didn’t always like it but the pay is good,’ I tell him.

  We sit in silence for a bit and then I add, ‘Did you know she has two daughters on the mainland? One is six and one is ten.’ And Kurt nods again. I don’t need to tell him that I’m thinking Losana’s story about the local staff is really all about herself.

  Maybe everybody’s stories are really all about themselves.

  As we sit there we look up the beach and see that the Welsh guy has left the TV room and is now hanging out with the English backpackers.

  We watch them for a bit and Kurt says, ‘No man is an island.’

  He’s too cool for school sometimes.

  That afternoon, before dinner, the Fijian boys are back from work early and haven’t started their kava for the evening, and me and Kurt are at the billiards table trying to get a feel for its individuality. This table was never built for the tropics, you see. The heat or the humidity has bent the wood under the felt cover, so you line up this perfect shot and tap the ball, and watch with despair as it rolls off to one side somewhere. But the Fijian boys have been playing on it for years and know just how to play it. They line up shots that you think have no chance of getting near the pocket, and the ball rolls all over the place and in it goes! It’s some complicated revenge on colonialism, I think.

  But, here’s the funny thing, after a couple of drinks you can play much better on the table. And,
the way I see it, if we have enough, we’ll have the same bumpy and warped logic as the table itself, and can dare to take on the local chapter of the Fijian National Billiards Team. So Kurt and I decide it’s worth a try. We tell the closest two guys that we want to challenge them in a doubles match. They look at us and smile.

  So we set the balls up and start playing for our national pride. Rosie and Ingrid sit behind us watching. Our cheer squad. The Fijian boys sink two balls each with their first shots, and Kurt and I have only managed to embarrass ourselves. ‘Don’t worry,’ I whisper, ‘This is all part of my plan: they’re not going to be able to find their balls among all ours soon.’

  Kurt has had just enough Jack Daniels that this sounds logical. ‘Yeah. Good plan,’ he says. I wink and walk around the table trying to find a shot that won’t look too bad if I miss it. I line up one of the tens—there are two tens—aiming for the corner pocket, and I bash it. It ricochets off the twelve, which bounces around and goes into a side pocket. I try not to look surprised, and look across to the two Fijian guys and give them a slow nod to let them know that was the shot I was planning all along.

  Then I turn back to the ten. It’s in the middle of nowhere, but I bend down and eye it up carefully, and pow—it goes in! Right where I was aiming for. Kurt is grinning. Ingrid claps wildly. Even Rosie joins in. The two Fijian guys are looking a little concerned. ‘Do you think I should sink the rest now?’ I ask Kurt. ‘Or do you want to have another turn?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ he says. I look at the two Fijians, and line up a real easy shot on the thirteen. But the cue ball goes in instead of the thirteen. ‘Shit,’ I mumble. The two Fijians are smiling again.

  And so the game progresses. But then Kurt’s Jack Daniels seems to kick in suddenly and he sinks three balls in a row! And we’re suddenly even with the Fijians. They’re looking around to make sure that none of their co-workers are watching. This isn’t looking good for them. The tall one, Aki or Agi or something, lines up the five and pots it in a smooth powerful shot. Then he lines up on the black. Ready to end the game.