How Do I Love Thee? (22 page)

‘Whadya reckon?’ I ask Rosie. ‘Americans?’

‘They look it,’ she says.

‘No,’ says Kurt. ‘They’re Germans.’ I tell you, he’s a mastermind at this, and if he ever goes on one of those TV quiz shows, his topic will be picking German backpackers by sight.

‘You sound pretty confident,’ I say.

His girlfriend, Ingrid, nods, ‘German.’ So we watch the four newcomers struggling up across the hot sand, sweating under the weight of their backpacks, that familiar look plastered on their sunburnt faces. A look of awe or amazement. The look you get when you step onto a tropical island like this, half your head still in the busy streets of Berlin or Hamburg or somewhere.

Losana leads them past us, up to reception.

‘I think they look more American,’ says Rosie. ‘What do you think? American?’ she asks looking at me for support. I just shrug. Then I think better of it. ‘Yeah, could be,’ I say.

‘We’ll find out tonight,’ says Ingrid.

So we sit there talking some more, watching the sun slowly creep towards the horizon. It doesn’t begin to cool down until just near sunset. That’s a beautiful time. You forget the sapping heat of the day like you can forget bad times when you’re in a moment of happiness.

‘I could live for times like this,’ I told Rosie last week as we sat on the sand watching our first sunset on the island.

‘But they pass,’ she said.

‘Yes, but only if you let them.’

‘They pass,’ she said again. ‘Everything does.’

I didn’t want to pick another fight so I said, ‘Yeah, but isn’t the moment wondrous.’

Dinner is served each evening up in the open-air bungalow that is the meals and entertainment area. And each evening we have to go through a regime of enforced fun and games before we get to eat. Kurt and Ingrid always roll their eyes at this. And sure enough, just before dinner is served that evening Losana steps into the middle of the dining area and bellows out a ‘Bula!’ that would lift the thatch off a less well-constructed dwelling. There are about twenty of us on the island at the moment. Couples mostly, but some lone travellers too. Then Losana asks in a loud voice, like a pantomime character, if there are any new arrivals there
this evening. Of course there are—she greets them when they arrive.

The four new arrivals are on the other side of the six English backpackers. They raise their hands and Losana tells them they need to stand up. So they stand, sheepishly, as we all did when we first arrived, and one after another they each say things like, ‘I am Helmut und I’m from Chermany.’

Kurt smiles. ‘Too easy,’ he says.

‘You slipped over and paid them to say that, didn’t you?’ I say. ‘They’re really from Luxembourg or somewhere.’

He just smiles. He’s the king of cool sometimes.

‘Tell us about yourselves,’ Losana demands of the four.

They look confused, as if surely saying that they are German is enough.

‘I live in Berlin,’ says one of the Helmuts. ‘I work with computers.’

The other Helmut also works with computers and the two girls are at uni. I wish one night Losana would ask, ‘What’s your dream in life?’ Or ‘Tell us about your childhood.’ When she’s satisfied that the question has been answered she lets the food be brought out. Tonight it is beef and rice and some stew or other. I often wonder if this is real Fijian food, or do they try to make it more European for the tastes of the guests.

As we eat we keep an eye on Losana. You never know when she’s going to pronounce compulsory fun and games. Tonight it is just as the fruit dessert ends. She climbs to her feet and claps her hands. ‘Bula!’ she shouts again.

‘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.