BEAUTIFUL VEINS

Swimming back into consciousness, Kieran Maslow’s first realization was the sweet smell of burning flesh, his own, slightly tempered by the heat of hammers banging down alternately on the femoral replacement. Two oblongs of white material, he gradually realizes, were crossing over continually at the foot of the operating table. Flickering his eyes about, he discovered his slab of flesh trussed up beneath a net that prevented any movement, unless suddenly shunted side to side as if he were cold turkey about to be carved up.

This second time around, he’d been wise to request a stronger anaesthetic than epidural.


Dozing, adrift. Disoriented, getting bearings by degrees. A cave of dissolving edges hived by dusky darkness. Save a shaft of dim light, a doorway. Occasional figures flitted into the shadows beyond his resting place.

Then at last a visor of shadow up close: ‘So you are awake then.’

For at least an hour. Possibly two. ‘Mm,’ Kieran smiled primly.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Good, thank you.’

‘Any pain?’

‘No, none.’

‘That’s the way; but you can’t have anything to eat till eight o’clock. I’m Gerd and I’ll be with you till the night nurse comes on duty. Now do you know about the patient-controlled analgesia?’

‘The what?’

‘Here,’ she said, ‘take this handset. If you need pain relief, push this button once. It won’t let you over-do it.’

Oh, yes, he remembered something from Pre-Admission.

‘You should feel some relief from the infusion pump in a couple of minutes.’

‘Thank you. I’m fine at the moment.’

‘I’ll just give your feet a feel then I’ll fit your catheter.’

O god, no! he groaned inwardly.
Two years previously he’d begged not to have a catheter inserted, pleaded for a whiff of morphine, then gasped and cried out by turns as the apologetic doctor threaded the tube through the eye of his penis. Now he was astonished that a female nurse would be attending to the task, especially when she slapped the cream on rough as old guts, though more measured when she shoved the wire in three incisive thrusts.

He exhaled, incredulous. ‘That time it scarcely hurt.’

‘You’re still under the influence,’ Gerd replied, matter-of-fact.


‘Wakey, wakey, I’ve brought you some tea,’ she announced later. ‘Can you sit up a little? Here, reach up and hold onto the monkey bar. Go easy.’ She swung the tray in.

Quite peckish after fasting for twenty-three hours, Kieran tucked into a modest portion of green salad, a thin slice of tasteless brown bread and a beaker of tea, but at the first sip of the brown soup he felt his temperature rise alarmingly, a rash welling up on the back of his hands, dizzy sensations, nausea and the rush of panic. He groped about for the buzzer.

‘What’s up?’

‘I feel sick, nurse. I’ve got a rash already,’ extending the back of his hand. ‘It was the soup.’

‘Just a moment.’ Gerd whisked the tray away.

‘Was that prawn soup?’

‘No, the kitchen never serves prawns. What else are you allergic to?’

‘Parsnips, turnips and swedes.’ And prawns, but I forgot to mention those on my list of allergies.

‘My, you are hot, aren’t you,’ she said, wiping his forehead with a napkin. ‘I’ll give you something for it and see if your temp’s up.’


Again the same nurse was on duty before breakfast the following day.

‘All ready to rock n roll?’

‘Sorry?’

‘We’re taking you down to the imaging centre to get a scan of your hip. So we need to unhook you and roll you onto the gurney.’

‘Okay.’

‘Which side’s the wound on? Right side, so we’ll do a half-roll onto your left, you move both hands onto this rail,’ she tapped. ‘Good man! Hold it. We’ll slide the under-sheet out.’

‘Uh,’ Maslow gasped and tensed, as Gerd carelessly caught the tube of his catheter. He could feel the tug on his penis.

‘There. Now, easy does it, roll over onto your left side. Good! All done. Let’s roll ‘em on out!’ she directed to a couple of silent ring-ins.

Hauling the gurney with left hand out into the corridor and swinging wide to avoid the Zimmer frame of an elderly lady in pink woollen dressing-gown, Gerd cannoned into the wall without warning.

‘Uh!’ grimaced Maslow, as the jolt reverberated through every bone.

Oblivious to the patient’s anxiety, Gerd took off down the corridor between empty parked beds and wide-eyed seniors shying back in a huddle, brassed off about the impending strike. Bloomin’ pay could be docked, fines imposed. No way can I depend on a hardship fund. Only that morning she’d read in the Herald Sun that she could even risk jail in defiance of Fair Work Australia. What a downer of a day this is gonna be! She’d paged twice for transport, but the orderlies were too busy. Anyway, she’d treat herself to a glass of wine tonight and a foot rub. I must get another packet of toe-spreaders from the 2$ shop, she remembered.

They descended by lift into the catacombs of the hospital, where the light grew gritty grey, the temperature dropping ten degrees. The stack-up of gurneys slewed like abandoned supermarket trolleys. Maslow felt a streaming freshness wash over his face.

‘Scanner techs are already twenty minutes behind,’ muttered a male orderly.

‘I’m not a happy camper,’ replied Gerd. ‘I’ve got to pick up meds from pharmacy, get meds into patient two on time and change his dressing, and this patient,’ nodding down at Maslow, who was beginning to feel guilty at the trouble he was causing, ‘will miss his first doctors’ round.’

Somehow with her strident voice and rough-caste complexion, she contrived to thread a way forward. Maslow braced when she hovered to roll him, but all of a sudden he was winched onto a Hover Matt and floating on a cushion of air without being bruised and battered about the privates.


On the second evening one of the doctors poked his head round the door, circumspectly, a stumpy-short man of Asian extraction. Shiny black hair, high cheek bones that lent plumpness to a boyish, unlived-in face. Plodding in his over-long white coat like a superintendent of a toy factory. Must’ve been in his early thirties, but could’ve been eighteen. Except that his training as orthopaedic surgeon cost fourteen years.

And closed the door behind him, discreetly.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked Dr Pang, without the usual heartiness or brisk efficiency of the surgeons who’d greeted him in theatre; more like the distracted air of a worry wart.

‘Really good, thank you,’ croaked Maslow, a soreness gumming the roof of his mouth.

‘Any pain?’

‘No, none at all. Unless I try to move my dodgy leg sideways.’

‘Try to keep that leg close to the mid-line and not roll the knee outwards.’

‘Okay.’ Then, because of the ominous silence and his own hazy drifting mood: ‘Actually I’m as smug as a mug in a hug. No, you goof. I’m as snug as a bug in a rug,’ he chirped, savouring the cerulean after-glow of anaesthetic and paracetamol and snuggled-up warmth in the soft mound of pillows. My blue heaven, what a cocktail!

The stumpy doctor didn’t register a smile. Perhaps he wasn’t ready to listen. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?’

‘No, of course not.’ In his current state of post-operative bliss, Maslow would answer to anything.

‘Some of them might seem rather . . . invasive.’

Gee, he is solemn. Maslow was intrigued. ‘Be my guest!’ Certainly, his anxiety before the hip operation had floated off on wisps of ether. His utter thankfulness that the op was all over together with his new-found sense of peace were lubricating his dry mouth with the flow of speech. He carefully reached for the glass of water on the side-tray.

The youngish or inexperienced doctor paused, still wondering how to begin. He picked up a chair one-handed from the corner, shuffled forward sheepishly and deposited himself directly behind the foot of the bed. ‘How would you describe the general condition of your health?’

Jeez, how many more times? ‘Let me see: before the accident two years ago I was fit as a trout. But while hanging out all this time for the repeat operation, I’ve occasionally been bitten by the black dog.’

‘Par for the course, I'm afraid. Depression is quite common when queues for major surgery are so long in public hospitals. What about when you were younger?’

Still no nibble. What is he banging on about? ‘Just the usual illnesses of a kid growing up in the fifties: boils on the legs that my infants teacher, good old Miss Minette, used to bathe at the front of the class . . . mumps, measles, chicken pox, tonsillitis . . . a stream of heavy colds and catarrh, all that free creamy-thick school milk in bottles . . . the very real scare of polio . . . oh and whooping cough at the age of two. I’ve still got the scar across my lung,’ he said with a trace of pride, as if he’d fought on the front line in the sombre glazed green and bog-brown wards of his morbid youth. And he recalled a picture of his mother in a hospital bed at Mayday, her ashen face twisting round to give a final glance of goodbye to Kieran and his younger brother and sisters, as if the grim reaper were stalking all of them. ‘Lady’s problem,’ their father muttered in the creepy cold corridor to kill their fretful whines of enquiry.

‘I see,’ though the earnest doctor sounded dismissive. ‘And what about more recently?’

‘Occasional bouts of flu. Generally, I’ve been in pretty good nick. Sometimes I get a bit run-down with my lecturing load. Bigger classes, the expectation to publish or perish. Low energy levels. But the next day, I’m right as rain. Soon as I mount the podium and claim that lectern, the energy kicks in. Has to. Otherwise you’re a candidate for sick leave big-time.’

‘Forgive me,’ he murmured, conspiratorially, ‘do you do drugs?’

‘Huh, didn’t have to in the sixties and seventies. Just breathed in deeply,’ Maslow chuckled. ‘But seriously, since then I’ve been clean.’

Too quickly, as if to cover his own embarrassment, the doctor spoke: ‘Have you ever had any sexual diseases?’

An almost imperceptible wince about the patient’s eyes didn’t escape the inscrutable Doctor Pang, even allowing for the subdued light of early evening in a windowless one-bedroom ward.

‘For the first time in their conversation, Maslow’s delivery was slow and hesitant. ‘Not that I know of . . .’ as if trawling through the strategies of recent campaigns.

venereal a. Of sexual desire or intercourse; relating to a disease (contracted by sexual intercourse with person already infected); hence –LY adv. [ME, f.L. venereus (pertaining to sexual love) + -AL]

‘Oy, Purity! Betcha didn’t know you can catch the pox from sitting in the bog or drinking from a dirty cup or kissing a girl who’s got it?’ bragged Joey Benwell, taking a playful swing at Maslow’s balls in the schoolyard.

Like a flash, it comes back to haunt the thirteen year old naïf - Dreaded Monday afternoon: cadet parade after lessons in full battledress. The heavy, prickly khaki impinged on one’s genitals. After square-bashing and rifle drill, his knob was strangely tumescent. Once home in his bedroom, he wrenched it out. Trembling fearfully, for the first time he unsealed the whorls of foreskin. Flecks of dried skin mottled the crown. Then on the ring, what? ‘Smegma’, was that the word? Christ Almighty! Spots! Tiny white spots! His abdomen gave a huge yawing lurch, he felt sick, faint, slumping down onto the bed, his heartbeat thumping.

God, o God! he whimpered, rubbing himself frantically, but the spots stayed fast, horribly real, condemning. Beside himself with fear, panic more like, he snatched up a pen-knife and began scraping at the hideous white pinheads, now and now and ouch, Christ that hurt! The loathsome shaft had turned raw and crimson, beads of blood settling into the folds of stinging skin. In wild desperation, he clutched at his testicles to examine. Larger white pimples on his scrotum!

‘Chancre’, ‘lesion’, ‘gonococcus’ . . . such were the words he secretively uncovered in the Oxford Dictionary in the darkest corner of the school library. They burned into his consciousness every sleepless night for the next eight years. Millions of spiralling spirochete he saw boring up and through his spinal cord, gummas invading his liver, buboes burrowing into the lymph nodes of his groin. Stooped, slumping, bilious, he was knocked every which way by his shameful disease. Hardly a crumb of comfort, but in his clumsy research he came across a theory that the bard himself was tainted by the chancre. He read the de Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, men of letters in nineteenth-century Paris. In his diary, Edmond records how his brother’s face becomes more flaccidly unrecognizable by the day, a rubbery mask to his brother’s consternation, as the syphilis eats its way up the spine. Adolescent Kieran terrified himself witless. He could hear the very chomping.

O Guy de Maupassant, how did you cope? Weren’t you committed for insanity? Twice? Christ, I might be dying for another twenty-five god-damned years!

Although he’d learnt to swear in a hurry, he’d somehow lost the art of shedding tears.

‘I’m very sorry to ask this question,’ the white-coat stumbled on, casting his black-eyed gaze downward, running his thumb-nail over the tips of his fingers. ‘Do you have any . . . er sexual partners?’

‘Three. No, just a couple. The other . . . defunct,’ Maslow said with a finality edged with irritation. And welling regret, he was surprised to feel.

‘How long have you known them?’

‘Ten years at least.’ He didn’t care to count.

‘And what sort of women are they?’

‘What do you mean?’ Maslow’s face crinkled with indignation. He tried to sit up with the aid of his knuckles pressing down on the mattress, before realizing he wasn’t supposed to move, couldn’t in fact.

‘Did they . . . do they have any other sexual partners?’

‘Is this interrogation really necessary? I’ve already provided answers to both Pre-Admission and again yesterday morning to Admission.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Aren’t there privacy laws to protect against prying?’

‘Yes, you are right to be annoyed. Please believe me, I need to know. Honestly. More for my benefit than yours.’

This is a bit rich. But the guy did seem a humble sort, penitent. ‘I’m not a hundred per cent certain, but I don’t think so.’ To be precise, he trusted one; about the other two he was doubtful. But then because of this nagging rancorous doubt, his passion had ebbed away over the years. One can tire of so much howling anguish. And the unforgiving body or soul, or restless, jealous mind slowly gnaws away at sensitivity, even requited love. ‘Oh, I’ve just remembered. I did get thrush one time. One of these ladies owned up when I expressed my agitation, but she hurriedly apologized and rushed me a tube of Canesten anti-fungal cream.’

The doctor remained stony-faced. Spoke even more slowly: ‘What about sexual relationships with men?’

Kieran frowned, almost blurted a chuckle. This is absurd. ‘Not at all.’ A pause. ‘Oh, wait. Just once. I was twelve. My best pal and I were getting changed at the swimming baths. Same cubicle. Ogling the girls in their costumes. One-piece in those days. There was a gap at the top of the cubicle door. It was just a quick hand-job. We never spoke about it afterwards.’

‘But you didn’t ever practise . . . entry?'

‘Of course not,’ Maslow broke in quickly. ‘Never even thought of it. Never with a male. Rarely with a woman. Even then it felt bizarre.’

‘I see.’

‘Why? What’s all this leading up to?’

Another weighty pause. The doctor levelled his gaze, his soft-spoken voice a flat monotone. ‘Do you remember when I was emptying your catheter into the bag this morning?’

A small, white-coated shape bending low by the foot of the bed. ‘Vaguely.’

‘Some urine splashed into my eye. At least, I blinked and my eye was suddenly very moist.’ He gave a hapless shrug of his shoulders. ‘Of course, it could’ve been purely imaginary.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ And suddenly Kieran genuinely was. Flippancy had escaped like hot air from a Hover Matt on the fritz.

‘No, no, it was not your fault. My own silly lapse in concentration.’ Dr Pang let the weight of exoneration sink into the fuzzy consciousness of the patient lying prone and puzzled. ‘Do you mind if I give you a blood test?’


It had been a long day for Dr Pang. He’d woken at five, spent an hour rounding on the patients, those who’d had recent surgery then the prospective patients for procedures.

Later that morning he’d assisted Dr Chew on a double knee operation, set an adolescent’s fibula and repaired a mother’s patella.

Fortunately, Kieran Maslow’s repeat op the previous morning had proceeded satisfactorily but required close monitoring. The scan of patient Maslow’s first hip operation two years ago had clearly indicated that the shaft of the replacement prosthetic was slightly skewed. How come the doctors taking the two later reviews had missed it? Overwork, fatigue, utter carelessness? It was only when Dr James Harley Ogg, the Head of Ortho, had responded to an urgent request from a sports therapist advising that the latest scan showed no cement had been used – not in itself unusual – but a glaring gap at the top of the prosthesis indicated unwanted movement. Understandably, the patient was suffering from increased referred pain in various loci of his right leg. Dr Ogg’s first reaction when he clapped eyes on that scan was outrage. A blight on the division; indeed, on the public hospital itself.

‘Good God!’ the stern-faced Dr Ogg had declared at the review before Pre-Admission to the repeat operation.

Maslow’s mouth dropped open. Fear stoked his pale green eyes. Oh god no, what’s wrong?

‘How old are you?’

‘Fifty-six.’

‘And you’re pretty fit?’

‘Before the accident, yes. I used to enjoy an hour’s walk every evening backed up by a regular fifteen-minute stint on my rowing machine.’

‘That rorty toff did the wrong operation. I don’t comprehend why he was cutting corners. This is the operation he should have done on your mother,’ Dr Ogg fulminated at the scan on the screen before him.

What do you mean? My mother died ten years ago.

‘He should never have given you a hemi-arthroplasty, a partial hip replacement. You’re too fit and too young.’

‘Crikey! No wonder the discomfort was steadily growing worse. Sometimes I can barely walk.’

But Dr Ogg wasn’t listening to the patient’s demonstration of various hot spots on his right leg, in particular the sorely sensitive knee, but already barging into the adjacent consulting room to berate the culprit responsible to young Dr Pang.

Dr Pang had become accustomed to such blame-storming. Thank god, the hospital had operated on the correct hip. But what if patient Maslow were tempted to sue the hospital, especially after Ogg’s outburst, or rather his candour? Fancy owning up to the shocked patient that not only had the original surgeon performed the wrong operation, but botched it into the bargain. Damage control’s been thrown right out the window. Most unprofessional.


It had indeed crossed Maslow’s mind to sue the hospital. Odd though it seemed, the more confident he felt each day about eventual and possibly full recovery, the more he considered the idea. Both mental and physical strength were slowly returning; he was preparing to take on the world like his old self. Yet at the same time, he was so thankful that finally someone had given him a sense of hope. Dr Ogg had spoken out courageously, at risk of facing the consequences of excoriating a colleague and the hospital itself. Of course, he couldn’t seriously contemplate suing. From the understanding lass at the desk in Outpatients, who slotted in the appointment for the second operation at the earliest cancellation, to the attentive and warm-hearted nurses and the two surgeons who encouraged confidence in others with their genial spirit, he was only too grateful and delighted that the job had finally been done and the prognosis sounded promising.

So very different from the aggro he felt boiling up at Pre-Admission when one of the other triage candidates, Jim Sparkes, a burly man in a wheelchair, his left foot bandaged on the footrest, asked, ‘What are you in for?’

‘Repeat surgery for a fractured hip,’ replied Maslow.

‘Another poor bugger fitted out with that shonky hip implant, eh? Over two thousand of ‘em last year in Oz alone. And they’re still using the bloody things!’

The pusher of the wheelchair nodded, his mousey wife, thin lips pursed with the injustice of it all.

‘Mm . . . the Doddleson De L’Oreole prosthesis. I’d already been growing ulcers for eighteen months to get on the waiting list for a third review. My right leg wasn’t getting any better; in fact, it was a damn sight worse!'

‘Bloody hell, you must be angry as a cut snake.’

‘No, not really,’ he lied, recalling bitterly some nights when he was close to tears of rage, tears of self-pity, unadulterated frustration just lying there, a lump of helpless flesh. Not to mention that all the surgeons attending his first hip procedure had declared the operation was a great success, which the subsequent doctors at both first and second reviews had confirmed. Even his fuzzily benign and warmly upholstered GP commented two months after the operation, ‘Are you still limping?’ but showed no undue concern. Then the therapist referred by the GP had tried him on the Polites bars, but on two occasions following those sessions his unsteady right foot had refused to touch the ground; he couldn’t straighten his leg for several minutes to resume the walk home. Surely, something was not quite right.

Yet the operation was a great success, he kept telling himself with mounting sarcasm. ‘What can you do? Anger without outlet just eats of itself. Erodes self-confidence.' For god sake, will I never be able to walk again?

‘Me, I’d be ropeable, wouldn’t you?’ Sparkes said, turning to his neighbour slouched on the next chair along, left arm in a sling, hand thickly bandaged.

‘My word! What’s more, I’d sue the buggers for everything they've got if they mucked me about.’

‘When the scandal of the faulty hip implant broke, my blood froze. At first I tried not to think about it. Your operation was a great success! I lay on the rack, not sleeping a wink. My innards turned to slush. I just had to face the fact. I was in meltdown. I took a taxi to the hospital - I’m not supposed to drive with this leg - and found my way to the Hospital Patient Manager, who directed me to Health Information Services.’

‘How’d yer go?’

Maslow was staring straight ahead, as if he still couldn’t believe it. ‘Not only was that first operation botched, but I’d been gutted with the Doddleson.’

‘Sons of bitches!’ exploded Sparkes. ‘Unbelievable!’

The missus nodded furiously.

‘Isn’t that class action still running?’ said the stranger, no longer slumped but riveted upright.

‘Yes, I did get six thou comp,’ conceded Maslow. 'Even so, I've lost two years of well-being. My legal eagles argued the case that the faulty prosthesis caused complications in the operation, not the neglect of the surgeons or hospital. Any rate, I’m more frustrated at not being allowed to walk, my fitness gone right down the gurgler. I was sixty-five kilos before the op, would you believe? Now,’ he said, making a semi-circular gesture with his arms, ‘I’ve blown out to a stodgy seventy-five.’ Maslow checked himself with a frown. Repressed anger was leaking out dangerously.

‘Anyways, you don’t know how lucky you are, mate,’ replied Sparkes. ‘I’m sixty-one and one hundred and fifteen kilos. At fifty, I was still running 10.7 for the 100 metres. Then I got diabetes 2 and had to give up smoking.’

‘How could you possibly run that time and smoke?’

‘Easy. The race is all over in ten seconds. But because of the diabetes they removed my big toe so I can’t hardly walk.’

‘Mm, big toe,’ mumbled the wife with a mild nod or three.

Marlow didn’t know whether to feel better or worse.


Nurse Angelica Simmons preferred working nights. If you were lucky, the long ten and a half-hour shift contained small oases of hushed stillness, perfect peace, apart from the administering of patient meds every couple of hours. Her restless DIY husband did odd jobs about the neighbourhood, noisy tasks all of them, installing empty olive barrels as water butts beneath sawn-off drain pipes, buzz-sawing overgrown branches or vacuuming leaves onto neighbouring nature strips. In his workshop out back he moulded toys of wood that he promoted in his candy-striped van spray-painted with Tony’s Toys in rainbow lettering across the panels. Sundays, her two uni boys would descend with a swag of dirty laundry and scoff the sausage sizzle round the pool.

Besides, you gained an extra day off in the week to do your banking, visit the gallery, take a coffee Grand Marnier in the Gardens. Whatever the circumstances, the division one nurse with twenty years’ experience at the Alfred Hospital and Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute was reputed for her composure, efficiency, and warm bedside manner. However, storm clouds were banking up on the industrial front. The ANF (Australian Nursing Federation) was calling for a rally at Festival Hall. Victorian nurses feared that the ratio of one nurse to eight patients (one to four on the two daytime shifts) might be abandoned for a more flexible system. There was even talk that aides with limited experience would replace nurses made redundant by such government changes. But Angelica’s immediate concern was the closure of beds and the postponement of elective procedures. The nursing profession would surely be vilified by the general public, especially those already suffering long delays for surgery. And what about patient safety? Unqualified health assistants couldn't possibly be the ears and eyes of doctors. They wouldn't have sufficient training or experience to detect the slightest change in a patient's condition that might spell a sudden deterioration.

Which reminded her to give patient Maslow his meds and update assessments and chart meds for her eight patients.


I can’t afford to take any chances, Dr Pang considered. If I’ve been infected by even the slightest drizzle of patient Maslow’s bodily fluid, I must take preventive measures. Nowadays treatment with anti-retroviral drugs has reduced both the mortality and morbidity of HIV infection, but I’d feel mortified if word got out. How serious was the guy when he spoke of inhaling bad smack in the sixties? Or was that just Aussie understatement? At least, the screening of blood products for HIV has eliminated transmission through blood transfusions, thank god. Let me see, what were the symptoms? Fever, swollen lymph nodes, sore throat, myalgia, malaise . . .

Dr Pang was already feeling limp and very tired.


Not in her usual good spirits, Angelica. She’d heard on the news about the threat of a superbug outbreak in hospitals if the nurse-to-patient ratios were cut and aides were introduced. And it was the militant nurses who were generating these fears. For if registered nurses were replaced with aides, it wasn’t just golden staph that would spread but VRE (Vancomycin Resistant Enterrococchi), which does not respond to antibiotics. Patients who have suffered transplants or heart and lung operations were most at risk.

After she’d parked her yellow Hyundai in the staff car park for the 21:30 night shift, she was disappointed that her model patient, Kieran Maslow, who was due to commence his course of iron tablets today, was no longer in the single-bed unit. Instead, swapped over, a grizzled old-timer with a hook nose of dew drops pointing up from the sheets, baying with a faltering rasp, ‘Nurse, I shouldn’t be here! Where am I? I have to go home’, ‘Nurse, nurse!’ he cried, struggling to get out of the covers. ‘Nurse!’

Holy Moly! Not post-operative delirium! she thought, rushing into the one-bed ward, apprehensive about what she might find. 'Oy, you just stay there in bed.’
‘I’m in pain for chrissake!’he wailed, flailing his gnarled fists.

'SSh, be quiet, you'll wake the other patients!

'I've gotta go home!'

'Just you lie down! She caught his wrist long enough to read his name. Horrified, she saw that he had pulled out the IV tube from his arm and blood was leaking out. Warding off the blows as she wrestled him back, she wondered how she might call a Code Grey for an unarmed personal threat and grab some gloves to avoid smears of blood while restraining him in bed. Shit! Other staff must be answering bells. What the hell! 'Be a good man, Dirk, you're not well enough to go home.'

Okay, so the customer/patient is always right, so let the hits keep coming. Shield up, my girl!

Suddenly pushed out of his comfort zone, Maslow found himself in a four-bed ward with three chatty patients, so was relieved when Aileen, the charge nurse, drew the curtains round each bed, bade goodnight and turned off the lights. As soon as she had departed, Arie scrambled out on the side not railed up, gasping and muttering in low Dutch, darting with a swaying motion into his corner and issuing forth a tintinnabulation of urine into what sounded like a pannikin, at the same time blasting an extenuating fart from Jeremiah Clarke’s ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ with no compunction at all. And scuttled back into bed with nobbled knees knifing like thin scissors.

It wasn’t long before the rhythm of whistling snores and occasional snorts was broken by strange yelps of nightmare or threats of skulduggery spurting from along the corridor. An hour later Maslow was still awake, wishing he could turn onto his side or front instead of keeping vigil about the exact position of his gammy right leg. One false cross-over and he’d be up for a third hip op. So the medicos said.

Groping around in the dark for the control to call nurse, he knocked his beaker onto the floor with a rolling clatter. Suddenly, everyone was wide awake, three snufflers and the on-rushing charge nurse.

‘Maslow’s had an accident,’ mumbled the thick-accented Arie, whose observation was drowned in the bustle.

‘What’s up, darl?’

The eighty-four year old Dutchman, a former central defender with Wilhelmina, the ethnic ‘wogball’ club in the fifties, now skin and bone in a baggy polythene nappy, refused to be railed in at night. ‘I can’t pee lying flat,’ he wheezed, ‘it’s not natural. I have to stand up.’

‘You’ll have to use the bottle, darl. It’s too dangerous for you to get out of bed in the dark.’

‘No, no, I cannot do zat,’ with a jut of grey-wizened jaw.

‘I don’t want you falling out of bed and suffering a re-fracture.’

With a cunning glint of the eye, ‘No, zat is not possible.’

‘All reet,’ said Aileen in decisive Scottish brogue. ‘But press the buzzer when you need to get out of bed.’

‘No, I must go now!’

‘All reet,’ said Aileen, eyes following Arie’s wavery stick legs across the ward. Turning, she noticed the old feller had soiled his bed with a slushy yellowy turd. At once, she hauled off the offensive sheet, bundled it up, fetched a starchy white one from the cupboard, re-made and smoothed down the bed, all before Arie had flushed the toilet and stuttered back.

‘Now try to get some sleep, darl,’ she said, tucking him in and taking away Maurie’s bottle.

Amazing how frequently the nursing staff wring their hands with sanitized rub at all those dispensers liberally spaced about the hospital, Maslow speculated, admiring Aileen's calm and discreet professionalism. How many thousands of microbes are squatting on my face, I wonder? Or millions of probiotic bacilli breeding in my gut? Ah, the contents of Pandora’s Box have nothing on the Maslow eco-system, he sighed.

‘Ooh, excuse me,’ giggled Perdita, who’d just let rip a ripe raspberry. ‘I’m lactose intolerant but can you believe there was milk on my tray for tea?’

‘It’s the most natural sound in the world,’ Maurie said calmly. ‘Don’t worry about it. You’re very quiet, Kieran.’

Maslow pretended to be asleep, reminded of the low-colonic sounds of the Temperance Seven’s wind section warming up for a concert at the Elephant and Castle.

‘Unlike your predecessor, Kieran,’ added Maurie, trying to coax his neighbour from behind his curtain. ‘Now he was barking mad. Kept us all awake the whole night through.’

‘He was a mental case,’ muttered Arie. ‘You can hear the bugger's yelling even now.’

‘Yeah, a proper fruit cake,’ chimed in Perdita, never one to be ignored. Her loud, cutting squawk must’ve woken the poor blighters in Ortho 10 next door. ‘Did you get that disgusting oily honey drink purgative? Jeez, whenever I call for the bedpan it’s so embarrassing. “It’s really really urgent, nurse,” I say when she rocks up. “You must turn to the side to hit the pan,” she says. I haven’t got the faintest if I’ve settled flush plum in the centre of the frigging pan, then I push and strain and the angle’s all skewy and bugger me there’s not a bloody thing there.’

Ever reassuring, Maurie said, ‘We’re all in the same boat’.

In the bowels of, mused Maslow, who’d been shocked at the sight of his first post-operative stools – hard black lumps of coke painfully extruded into a toilet bowl of liquorice-coloured urine.

‘How’s your leg?’ asked Maurie, though all too frequently he’d heard Perdita’s story of choking on a doughnut as she descended the stairs, falling and breaking both tibia and ankle, a story with which she’d waylaid every new nurse, visitor, Maurie’s wife and Arie’s daughters and grandchildren.

‘It’s a bit of a worry. I can barely feel my toes.’

‘Best tell the nurse. Thank your lucky stars you had Dr Chew. Same as Kieran. He’s a top cutter.’

Top cutter! On his first-ever hospital visit, Maslow’s picture of ‘a top cutter’ would have flashed Jack the Ripper stalking skint prostitutes among the starving middens of Whitechapel. But now, for the repeat operation of having the same muscles, tendons and nerves sliced through, he was readily accepting. He couldn’t go on limping in pain for the rest of his days. Even now Maslow, the shaft of his penis lying snuggled in the neck of the bottle nestled between his thighs for fear of reflux or splashing or even missing the neck on waking suddenly with a burning sensation at the tip of his projectile, felt strangely relieved by the Rabelaisian banter. Which meant he’d managed to swallow his apprehension about the removal of the catheter by Aileen, anxiety which could have caused retention of fluid again. Two years ago his bladder had retained 600 mls of urine, forcing a three-day delay of his discharge and the insertion of a second catheter for his return home. Thank god, I’m fluent! Behind his half-closed curtain he was flourishing his bottle three quarters full from beneath the blankets and resting it on the bed rail. In the half-light it possessed the golden glow of apple cider.

With a look of pride, a satisfactory night’s work, Aileen collected the bottle, held it up and winked at him. She’d make a note of the measurement. This patient wasn’t a urological case after all.

Further along the corridor, Angelica was feeling like a wet rag.


On the fourth morning Maslow fell from grace. He’d been so puffed with satisfaction at the encouraging comments from both doctors and nurses that one moment of carelessness reduced him to infant shame, a moment that flashed back from the fifties, a grizzling Morris Maltby trailing across the playground, an abject solitary, the tell-tale tokens of diarrheia bobbling down his leg and staining his grey shorts and socks, an image of a boy he’d never once spoken to, a boy from whom you kept your distance and disgust to yourself, apart from a ghastly stare frozen on your innocent chops. And the shame that he now felt, pushed in the wheelchair from bed to toilet, relieved after the first crescendo of gas that readily gave way to the effluvium of loose bowels, only to discover with a self-pitying whimper that he had peed a torrent through the two-inch gap between the over-chair seat and the toilet bowl. The tide of urine was spreading towards his feet.

He forced himself up with a yelp on his strong leg, shuffled gingerly round the puddle, wiped himself clean and mopped his brow. No way could he bend down, of course. The slough of shame had opened up beneath him.

There was nothing for it but confess. Joy, the effervescent Asian nurse who invariably called him ‘darlin’ and fluffed his pillows and ‘How’s my sunshine?’ as she placed the tympanic thermometer in his ear, glided across to oversee his hoisting both legs conjoined back up onto the mattress. Joy, always lifted by the gentle green vista of parkland beyond the hospital precinct, the soundproof windows maintaining a constant temperature, without the hot-tempered northerlies or chilling southerlies.

‘Joy, I’m terribly sorry . . .‘ he began, in a low, penitent voice.

‘What’s the matter, darl?’ At least, this patient wasn't about to dip into life-threatening oedema.

At his wretched confession, her breezy, sunny features clouded over for the first time on her watch. As she opened the toilet door, a louring disgust froze her expression. She said not a word but stormed out to the staff toilet. For the first time since removing herself by sponsor from the leaning towers and concrete canyons of Shanghai, Joy’s tear ducts were piqued.


Waiting in the solitude of the transit lounge, Kieran Maslow sat in a too low armchair that threatened the stability of his repaired hip. Processed from the orthopaedic ward, he longed to be released into the warm, dappled sunshine of a spring afternoon. Physically, he was still vulnerable. He’d had next to no practice on his forearm crutches and already a slight ache cramped his hands, while his thumbs were already sore from gripping tight. Examining his inner left wrist, he noticed a pallid yellowy green bruise left by the placement of the drip, undid the cuff of his right sleeve and made out the faint yellow almost dun-coloured bruising beneath the band-aid and cotton wool over one of the blood tests. His right thigh was ridged by dressings becoming itchy and still damp from the shower that morning. The nurses hadn’t worried about the dried liver-coloured weeping from the operation. Even the age spots between raised blue veins on the back of his hands stood out more obviously tawny like markings on a Melway map.

He cast his mind back to Monday morning, day one, when he reported to Admissions at seven o’clock. Was it only four days ago? He’d tensed up over whether the operation would proceed, given that the ANF was threatening to close beds and he’d already counted three staff sporting red T-shirts emblazoned at back with Respect our work. A nurse who walked with upright robotic elegance that stemmed from the straightest back and blank expression had prepared him for the first procedure for the day. She asked a series of basic questions about his identity and general health, medications and allergies, then told him to change into the medical gowns behind a drawn curtain and wait. He recalled his crestfallen resignation, for he’d drawn on the white elastic stockings and short red socks with white flocking on the soles and reassured himself that he could still boast Cyd Charisse’s legs, when the nurse made the comment as she adjusted the green motif of the sole, ‘You’ve got thin ankles,’ and stretched the gusset firmly up his thighs. ‘And thin legs.’

And the lower half of his back was itchy with raw bed spots that Angelica had chastened with cream early on the first two mornings. Yes his body, suddenly old and blotched with unaccustomed shades of colour and gristly ultra-marine veins and deltas of spidery veins on the lower part of the operated leg that he’d never noticed before and screws in his back from a too soft mattress.

Then he recollected Angelica in his emersion from a dreamy swoon in the blankness of night in the single-bed ward, her blonde curls brushing across his face as she reached across. Had he been thirty-five years younger, he might have locked onto her.

No, you wouldn’t, he challenged. You just needed a symbol of hope.
‘Time for your blood test,’ she’d said. ‘Just a slight prick.’ And taking hold of an arm, ‘Oh what beautiful veins!’

He was taken aback. There was nothing aesthetically attractive about the pallid spindle of his upper arm. He could scarcely make out any veins, let alone any of Tiepolo opalescence.

‘The blood’s flowing very easily,’ she explained, at the same time noting an absence of needle tracks and punctures.

His wilting ‘oh’ must have sounded disappointed or confused, but his blood pressure went skyrocketing.

And earlier that morning, some memorable moments to rejoice. Roistering into the ward like strolling players at the curtain-up of a Shakespearean play attired in bespoke slim-fit dark grey suits, cheery red ties, pointy black shoes and smiles gleaming beneath thick sheeny raven-wing hair, the leading two male surgeons, Asian in appearance, effusing youthful bonhomie and self-confidence or a sense of pride in their skills, the slim female surgeon also Asian, more reticent, wearing black pant-suit, white blouse, sharply cropped hair and air of calm professionalism, followed by the manager of the two rehab centres and, lastly, frowning note-taking students scurrying to keep up.

The two genial surgeons approached Maslow’s bedside. ‘Your healing is going extremely well, Kieran. You can go home today,’ said one, consulting his notes. ‘Rehab, isn’t it?’

Jeez, after only four nights!
‘Yes,’ the manager called over. ‘We’ll give him discharge info after lunch.’

‘Splendid.’

As the surgeon turned to go across to Perdita, his bespectacled colleague moseyed up close and confided: ‘Oh, by the way, your blood test was satisfactory.’

‘Thank you,’ said Maslow, somewhat bemused. Blood test? What blood test?
When Dr Pang skirted the foot of his bed, downcast, scarcely daring to meet his eyes and offering only the slightest of nods, Maslow was touched. Seconds later, it clicked. He couldn't help chuckling inwardly. Why, of course! The good doctor was no longer at risk.

                                                                                                                                          Michael Small

October 31-December15, 2011

ON THE VERGE OF PROSTRATION

While waiting for the sex worker, Declan was jittery as a hooked jewfish and full of self-loathing. Why had he allowed Baz to talk him into it? Why had he even ’fessed up to feeling lower than a snake’s belly, desperate for some sort of intimacy after all these weeks?

Still, he’d managed to make over his quiet room into a more intimate space, as Baz had suggested, dispensing with the colour poster of the Kangaroos AFL premiership team of 1999; back numbers of Wellbeing he’d recently bought up and was currently devouring; a rickety, old desk; crates of dog-eared books going back to uni days; and comfy old vinyl armchairs. Replacing them with scented tealight candles in metal cups; bottles of natural oils, jasmine, ylang-ylang and lemon-scented tea tree, for the coffee table; soft sheets and fresh plump pillows for the single bed; and a pair of Zen loungers with quilted stitching to hug the corners.

Naturally, he couldn’t ask his wife for favours while he lay helpless in this crippled state. It was bad enough that she forced herself to empty the bag every morning as well as readjust the ties on his leg so the catheter wouldn’t slip as he limped and shuffled and cursed, occasionally wincing at the slight tug on his penis which might cause some damage. To what exactly, his mind didn’t wish to venture. And when early one morning she was in the fiddly process of emptying the bag, she didn’t realize the tube wasn’t secured and spilled a puddle of urine on her tawny shaggy rug. That indelible stain, a scrubby gingery yellow, acted as a pin-prick on the air-cushion of their relationship as well as constant reproach to his ineptitude. He shrank to infantilism, cranky and bloody helpless.

So as for hoping to try again for sexual intimacy, it was out of the question, however much he yearned that they would or even could. His surgeon warned about inevitable leaks, no question. Possibly for several years. It didn’t bear agonizing over. But what else could you do, just lying there like a beached porpoise? Even his weight had ballooned. Yet that might be the least of his problems. For a start, he could barely alter position without discomfort. When he did so, he must calculate a tentative move, gentle in easy stages, so as not to stretch or aggravate that still-tender pelvic area. Fortunately, the catheter had been removed after three weeks; otherwise, he would never have listened to Baz’s urging.

As his best mate had done years ago, with disastrous consequences. It was at the heart of the Cross, Declan celebrating his eighteenth birthday with a Saturday night on the town, getting an eyeful of the birds in their off-the-shoulder gaudy tank tops, short skirts, waterfall braid hairdos and splashes of Prisma glitter. Even to this day that scene from the dawn of the eighties returns as nightmare, showgirls flaunting outrageous costumes with feathers and cheeky flashes of flesh, gender crossers recently coming out and usually content with just the price of a drink for their services. Go into the Venus Room on Hughes Street and it wasn’t just love that was in the air. You were bound to pick up something in that dive. At least, not AIDS back then. No, but laws against street soliciting had just been repealed, so the Cross was oozy with sleaze and sex.

What a buzz for young Decky and Baz in their funky denim jackets. Typical, always seeking the limelight, his daggy mate would apply designer Metal paint that simulated leather, stitched on sequins, tassels, ribbon roses, rhinestones and, on the back, some natty freehand lettering. As for Declan, a dual track of nail heads running down the front was a ripper.

But working the streets was a tad dangerous, what with a spike in knife attacks, pack rape and police harassment. Many of the prossies and drag queens hung out for drugs, but then again the trans-gender ‘girls’ had little chance of any straight work. The element of risk and hustle, outrageous gear and shocking colour, hubbub and traffic-snarls, drunks, druggies and stoushers, tourists and strippers, voyeurs, all sorts in the sozzle-eyed mix that made for an atmosphere of simmering excitement. The Cross and Darlo were the places to be at, no worries.

Loitering on the corner of Darley Street puffing a ciggie, a prossie was slowly trolling back and forth, staring for a few seconds in each direction, brazen in low-cut velvet camisole and fluorescent micro-skirt that hardly covered the half-moons of her buttocks.

‘C’mon, Dec, let’s check out the old shag-bag. See how much she knocks us back for a bang. Say, man, you have eyes like cod’s ballocks.’

To his shame, Declan recalls his own gormless sniggering, his heart-pumped daring fuelled by lurid curiosity and sexual arousal as he tagged along behind Baz, who bold and brassy as a booferbox started negotiations. Snatching at breath, palms moistening, Declan was still holding back, eyes skittering about, lest they’d be spotted by a familiar face.

‘Lise says make it twenty-five bucks for a quick hand-job, mate.’

Declan swallowed hard, breathless excitement leeching away fast, a wave of nausea suddenly gathering in the pit of his stomach. ‘Nuh no, you go ahead. I’m just fine.’

‘Say, man, it’s your birthday, for chrissake. This is my shout.’

‘No, really . . . ‘

‘Hey, c’mon, man, I’ve set you up,’ Baz nudging him in the ribs then grabbing an arm. ‘Her pad’s less than five minutes away, just round the corner. Betcha London to a brick, it’ll be all over in a jiffy.’

‘Is youse comin’or ain’t youse?’ The girl, a hard-bitten forty at least, had a flat voice of rusty nails. ‘Make up yer bleedin’ minds, yer tossers.’

‘Sorry, love, it’s his first time.’

‘Jerst follow me, no messin’.

Faint with fear, Declan allowed himself to be steered along by Baz to a dimly lit apartment block. He still remembers that prolonged stare of a watchman or joe bonce in the front office next to the porch steps as judgmental, but over the years that stare becomes more pitiful: another despicable sucker.

He finds himself in what may have been a bed-sitter with tizzy clutter. Certainly, the roughly made bed dominates his mind in bitter recall.

‘Sit down over there.’ Somehow the pro ground out words from a slant in her livid mauve lips and powder pancake cheeks smudged rouge.’ She was shrewdly sizing him up without giving anything away, but for the contemptuous tone in her hard-shut face and the watery grey eyes.

‘Take yer pants off first.’

Clenching teeth, toes and sphincter almost uncontrollably, he’d known he was going to hate the trip as soon as the cow had opened negotiations on her patch, way before the laying on of insensitive maulers brown-mottled with care-worn age and neglect. Nor was she going to strip off one scrap of clothing, for which he was much relieved. He could sense her potential for rough stuff in the tatts on her upper arms and the dark blue and faint yellow of vicious bruising. Even her brittle lacklustre hair, twisty with side ponytail mussed up like a deserted bird’s nest, a dyed ginger, repelled Declan, who in many ways had remained an idealistic adolescent, fascinated with the variations of girls’ hairstyles, the texture and sheen, flowing tresses or treacly curl, above all the light jounce of a traditional well-kempt ponytail.

The stony, slightly pitted oval face hovering before him couldn’t mask her boredom, her look-away quick-rubbing motion merely aggravating her unresponsive client lying prostrate.

‘Ave youse bin drinkin’? she rattled after a couple of minutes of mindless tedium.

Thankfully, her abrasive voice had cut through the still-born silence. ‘Nuh, nuh, no way,’ he squeaked. Only a couple of jars, he groaned within. Not nearly enough.

‘Well, this is a fucking waste of time.’ Though she was still going through the motions, her distracted air spawning a tetchy impatience. Abruptly she signed off as if stricken with palsy, having made not a jot of difference; in fact, if anything, his member had shrivelled to a periwinkle

Some of the tension immediately drained from his body, he breathed more easily. He’d been tempted to quit before he’d entered her den, put the after-burners on and scarper back to the hostel to drown himself in a hot bath. So besmirched did he feel, he might have retched any moment.


The prospect of new clients - she preferred to regard them as patients and herself as ‘enabler’ or ‘facilitator’ or ’provider’, as much as she disliked the impersonality of those words - always made Shani apprehensive. She couldn’t be sure of their motives, their attitudes, their real needs, their mental health. And if these guys were disabled, she had to negotiate behind their defences, adapt her techniques to their physical and/or psychological limitations and persevere with re-building their confidence and self-esteem. Ultimately, their belief in the possibility of finding a caring love tendered unconditionally. How odd, given that in her other life she’d been sickened by the penetrative force of the male ego. In her new role she knew that if her relationship with handicapped men hit the mark, both parties would be satisfied. Chances were, though, in some sense she’d be rejected.

In her teens Shani had been a sexually open person, not a superfox hooking up, but not afraid either to experiment without forming attachments. Prematurely, she’d been made to feel aware of her physical attributes and knew how to keep a straight back and confident posture, even at the cost of wolf whistles from building-sites. But she was wary of giving her heart; in fact, she was disgusted whenever she caved in to a powerful emotional release, knowing how vulnerable she was, especially when sighing and shuddering in rapture.

Okay, she did derive some pleasure from hostessing at Delilah’s, the tips she’d provocatively tuck into cleavage or garter often amounting to more than her base wage, for she was invariably singled out by lonely hearts trying to win her sympathy with malicious sob-stories of faithless or fruitless wives; or a herd of shickered footy players chiacking at the end of season; or silvertails up themselves flashing big bucks for a bucket of champagne on ice which she hardly sipped, all for a harmless canoodle over sweet nothings in a private alcove. Ah, those poor bastards with leaking dicks.

No swot in her green cord and jumper schooldays, but a bit of a smart arse in theatre studies and art, Shani was unlikely to impress future employers with her c.v. except those in the exotic dance industry. Well, she could certainly jitter, easy as pee-the-bed-awake, knew she really really wanted to go for it. Access was all too easy. The great rage was pole dancing, which required an instinctive feel for the music, a lack of inhibition in the glare of spotlight, intertwining seductively with a giant symbolic phallus, handling, fondling, pouting over. To cope with all those oglers and pervs out there in the subdued lighting, gawping and drooling, hands clamping down their erections, she morphed into a head-tripper, capable of spiriting herself off to some desert island in the South Pacific or gliding gracefully through blue skies and fleecy clouds on a ginormous spread of wings, a pure white wandering albatross.

Well, not exactly pure white. There was a black tip to her tail. Once she had witnessed a flock of hundreds of these magnificent birds feeding at Malabar, one of Sydney’s sewage outlets. But more than capable of soaring above and beyond.

During a sexology course, Shani was confirmed sensual with keen kinetic intelligence. Growing resentful of being just a nerd magnet, she found her sensitivity to touch gratified in day-time tactile therapy courses. Like most participants, she felt her heart chakra deeply touched, for her whole body intuitively moved into the right positions, rhythms and applications of energy through her hands as she rowed up a partner’s back, briefly rocked her weight on the trapezium before gliding more lightly down and finally outwards to the base of the ribcage and a gentle squeeze of the waist. In particular, she enjoyed rowing up the back of the thighs, where her palms could apply firmer pressure on the belly of bigger, more resistant muscles.

But you could also learn from participants who were more fidgety listening to instruction or awkward about removing outer layers of clothing or who applied too much or too little pressure at various parts of the anatomy, so that the receiver was no longer soothed with pleasurable and relaxing sensations but irritated by a rough, jarring invasiveness that held no awareness of rhythm or a partner’s needs or certain sore spots or areas such as the spinal cord that had to be avoided. There was no heartfelt feeling behind the strokes, no lightness or fluency on the transference of weight from one foot to the other round the massage table, no rhythm smooth and seamless.

Whereas she leaned into her strokes and glided, savouring the warm sensation from human touch, the two-way transmission of pure white energy, as if Graeme Murphy had arranged her choreography.


If Daphne was awkward about bedroom procedures – ‘Can I do something for you?’ she’d offer in an aseptic tone of voice, scarcely daring to look him in the eye, then bite on her lower lip, Declan in turn durst not risk asking for any favours, even if he’d surprised himself by a nocturnal stiffy that was quite involuntary – but she was much more at ease, albeit more dutiful than cosseting in her manner, at preparing appropriate meals for a prostate tragic: plenty of cooked tomatoes and strawberries; seafood for selenium; red meat without the fat for zinc; plenty of soy-based products, like tofu; and vitamin E from whole grains. Green tea might help; or might not.

In reality, their new diet came years too late; the congestion of seminal fluid had already inflicted insidious damage on the prostate gland.

‘Hey, mate,’ inquired Baz in Tigers top and camouflage shorts, lobbing in to mow Deck’s lawns one breakfast time, trying to be cheery, ‘What’s with all this fuss about oats? You’re supposed to sow ‘em, not eat ‘em.’

Declan continued masticating dead solemn, as if he hadn’t heard.

‘How’s the old prosty?’

‘Oh for chrissake! If you don’t belt up, I’ll show you my scars!’


If truth be known, Daphne had been awkward about bedroom procedures since menopause. Six years older than Declan and well into second marriage, her irregular sleeping patterns and doubts about the efficacy of wrinkle creams made her irritable. Those itchy sensations and anxiety over vulval hygiene led to her taking at least three showers a day. Even the unsuspecting Declan became aware of her vaginal dryness when he’d detected a precautionary measure of jelly or cream. Their infrequent sexual coupling was becoming painfully inhibited and gucky. Even at courting they’d been chary about letting go, seldom holding hands in public, perhaps the fear of failure out-running their good luck at finding a soul mate a second time. Love-making these days was seldom blessed with a warm smile or ironic chuckle over ridiculous contortions of not-so-taut flesh or a long sigh of smug rapture emitted toward the bedroom ceiling.

So that deep and meaningfuls were diddly-squat. It wasn’t as if Daphne didn’t talk to him. On the contrary, her button-holing about work at Jade Beauty Products had become obsessional. The same old saga about self-serving loafers amongst the sales team she managed, who failed to return customer phone calls promptly, invented excuses for sickies, barely met sales quotas and evidently went moonlighting at the company’s expense. Whatever happened to the notion of loyalty to bosses who provided you with a decent livelihood? And it wasn’t as if she ran a tight ship, pulling rank. Somehow her resolve not to get outwardly flustered at such malpractice was wearing her down. And the lax behaviour of these skivers didn’t change; the saga dragged on. The division leader urged her to take a stronger stand, but once Daphne had been accused of bullying she was reluctant to create a scene and get summoned to mediation.

In trying to be supportive when she drove home from Jade Beauty emotionally drained and at wit’s end, Declan would automatically mix her a stiff gin and tonic, prepare a strong cuppa for himself and a bowl of seaweed crackers, then plump himself down for the latest episode of confrontation or dereliction of duty.

‘I ask you, is it right that the company should shell out five thousand bucks for a week of surveillance, ten hours per day?’ she ranted. ‘We’d need camera footage, time sheets and a plethora of documentation to stand as evidence if Jade were to move on these guys.’

Declan perked up at one point, wondering if any of the male reps would be sprung by a private dick for visiting another skirt, either at a brothel or on a casual fling. Which added another layer of hypocrisy to his own curriculum of impending guilt.

Increasingly hobbled by this repetitious monologue, he anticipated that if she asked, ‘How was your day?’ she’d respond dully, ‘That’s good’, whatever his answer. No longer was she attuned to him. Gradually he ceased to tell about his own anxieties, essentially the state of his health, the imminent termination of his own career and the bleak prospects of life after radical prostatectomy. Just shrugged out token replies. ‘I’m okay/fine/not bad.’ The crusty cripple neither desired nor expected pity, but was decidedly testy at the quickening pace of time leaking from mortality.

In the early days of courtship their conversation was full of the delightful surprises of confessional intimacies in getting to know the other. While Daphne was struggling with divorce and nurturing two teenagers through adolescence and a disrupted home, she was more than ready to divulge her feelings to a sympathetic and understanding listener. Nowadays she was sounding shrill or frumpy and he couldn’t bear the loss of such intimacy that had brought them close together. Desire was pricked and discarded like a used condom. He’d grown more attached to his other co-dependant, his mobile phone. As a result, sexual practice had deteriorated into a weekly, if chancy, short-term release from nervous tension.

The clincher had landed late one Friday afternoon. Daphne had arrived home from Jade in a foul mood and ordered a second gin and tonic.

Here we go again, thought Declan. Occupational depression. ‘Don’t you think you’ve drunk enough?’

Staring straight ahead at the wall, she held out her glass. ‘I’m dead,’ she said. ‘You’re dead.’

He had no idea what she was muttering about. When he did rumble her meaning, it was too late to bring the matter up.


For her therapy work, Shani rarely applied any make-up to her face, sometimes some blush if she was looking a little wan or tired. But in the case of sex therapy she would wear her smoky eyes, a full-on deep navy metallic eye shadow, not merely to look sexy and sensual but also to present a more other-dimensional mystique. A strong burgundy lipstick created a sultry effect and she’d add a slick of clear gloss on eyes and lips. She’d become hauntingly beautiful, Pharaonic like Cher.

A black lace top was the most suitable in the circumstances, alluring but not too sexy. Jewel-coloured palazzo pants and espadrilles. And mustn’t forget the glass necklace with seahorse pendant.

Would this guy see me as an over-amped lush, though? Or surrogate partner? I’ll have to square it with him from the outset that he should have counselling on his sex functioning, personal and family history, intimate relationships et cetera, before we explore sacred territory. Nuh, wake up, Shani, I’d best wear something demure that shows off my radiant health, my transparency.


It was Baz, who could never be accused of selling one of his mates, who’d heard it from a mate’s mate, a tradie with Hire a Hubby, about a chick that occasionally did a job on crippos or guys with sexual hang-ups.

‘So you see, Dec, you’ll need aids, like a VED to pump yourself up, literally and figuratively,’ he chuckled awkwardly, trying to make light. ‘Either that,’ he continued professorially, ‘or twenty-five grams of Viagra every other day. Lucky you,’ he chortled. ‘If that doesn’t do the trick you could insert a suppository into Joe Cocker, and/or have injections into his side. Ouch! Or you could go the whole hog and get a penile implant. Or you could use another oral medicine or . . .’

‘Just give it a rest, Baz.’

‘Sildenafil, vardenafil and tadafil,’

‘Sounds like snow maidens from the fjords of Norway.’

‘Well, use it or lose it, eh, man?’ chuckled Baz. ‘You’d make do with a snow job, wouldn’t you?’

‘Not necessarily. Just to experience one more time that lovely warm glow suffusing your nether regions unlike any other sensation would be divine.’

‘You will, mate, you will. You won't have any trouble getting it up again.’

Spoken like a true sweaty jock, Declan thought, a red-blooded male like you. 'Apparently, some men don’t experience the return of spontaneous erection for three years.’

‘Patience is the name of the game. Always look on the bright side,’ replied Baz, bursting into the Monty Python song and doing a little jig suspiciously like a mariner with a wooden leg humping a hornpipe.

At least Declan appreciated the importance of psychological resilience. He chose not to remind Baz that the surgeon’s skill in sparing the nerves round the malignant walnut was a key factor in recovery. In attempting to preserve natural potency, some surgeons cut much closer to the gland or replaced native nerves with nerve grafts from the foot. Well, that’s what they’d explained at Pre-Admission.

Once the visiting nurse had popped the catheter out, Declan was aching to test the ruins of sexual prowess. The pathology report sounded encouraging, though he was not entirely continent. Fingers crossed, it appeared likely there was no need for radiation, hormonal treatment or chemo. His plumbing was bound to shaft him, though, absolutely humiliate him before the sex worker. Nor was there any guarantee he would experience - one could hardly enjoy - an erection, especially if he was agitated. Besides, for some men erections never return and most require aids. Nevertheless, he was desperate to know whether his juices were simply all in the head.

All the while he was beating himself up over neglecting to have regular check-ups of the prostate, both digital probe and PSA test with the GP. He was further aggravated by an article stating that riding a bike could be linked to impotence, making prostasis worse if you wear skimpy shorts and set the wrong saddle configuration. Being positioned close to the saddle, the poor old prosty suffers every bump and pothole. Okay, he sighed, so he should have worn padded bike shorts or invested in a gel pack seat. Why was it that ignorance of the obvious grew with age?

‘Yer know, you were a bloody idiot not to go for a check-up,' said Baz. ‘I did warn you about your percy prosty.’ Yeah and half the time he’d refer to the fearful gland as prostrate percy.

And now Declan was that all right. ‘Yes, I know, he replied wistfully. But he remembered when Baz told him the first time in vivid detail and exaggerated sound effects about the physical probe with lubricated surgical glove. Reluctantly, perhaps naively, and ready to wince, he’d asked him what it felt like being so hideously invaded.

‘Oooh, the most delicious sensations,’ Baz had slurped in his Kenneth Williams’ metallic nasal accent. ‘Unreal, duckie. Could’ve begged for a repeat dose next day.’

Declan’s revulsion was justified at Billy Connolly’s stage re-enactment, the comedian standing with legs spread wide apart, bowed over and looking round anxiously at the medico about to take a run at his derriere.

‘You’re too squeamish,’ Daphne snapped. ‘I kept telling you to run along to a men’s shed. Just be grateful you’re not a woman. We poor sods have all sorts of dreadful speculums and scopes poked up our vagina. Or a gynaecologist on the prod.’

Which didn’t console him one jot.


Broad-minded as she was, Shani resented being tagged a sex worker. She’d never sell her own crack. Even when she placed her weekly advertisement in the local paper under Massage Therapy (strictly non-sexual) clearly stating her accreditation, she’d still receive kooky phone calls from hesitant or hard-breathing or spaced-out or drunk-rotten jerks plucking up courage to shock or sully her with requests or demands for some form of sexual gratification. She would matter-of-factly refer them to Personal or Adult Services columns advertised alongside the bona fide health practitioners, ads that satisfied erotic lust with tantalizing promise: Ladies, Trannies, Bi-Guys + Fetish; or Tranni Danni or Tantra with Amorantha.

However, she did make allowances in best practice therapy when occasionally a client, not necessarily the youngest, experienced an erection during a strictly relaxational massage. Forewarned by her teachers, she would unfussily gather the indiscreet member in a fold of the covering sheet and deftly place it over the other leg that she wasn’t about to row up.

They’d waited till Daphne announced a weekend residential course on marketing, How to Sell Yourself, in a function room at Wrest Point casino, before his mate made the necessaries. Even so, Baz was waiting for the bomb to drop over inviting a sex worker to Declan’s joint without Daff’s knowledge. He was also choked by the memory early in his own marriage of phoning on the sly for a fly-by-night prossie. A few days later his home was done over like a dog’s dinner. The cops asked a few curlies about possible suspects. Of course, he couldn’t come clean. His wife would have cut his balls off with a carving knife. When Nettie returned from work, she shuddered at the news of a break-in and the gut-wrenching sight of upturned drawers, stripped bed, papers, books, CDs, cushions strewn all over the floor, dirty washing scragged over the laundry lino.

‘We have to wait for the finger-print boys,’ was all he could mumble.

‘O god, what did they take?’

‘Oh er . . . just my Pentax, my silver christening bowl, my Swiss Army knife . . . There may be one or two other odds and sods.’

Suddenly, it dawned. ‘What about my wedding dress and my two evening gowns?’ she quizzed in a shrill voice. In the drawn-out silence, she glowered. ‘And Mum’s gold wedding ring?’

Baz could only look down at the carpet as defence against burning anger, as if she held him responsible.

‘And all my lovely shoes!’

Never would he blot out the pain in that hysterical shriek that broke up in bitter sobs and tight little fists pummelling his open chest.


She was beginning to doubt whether she was doing the right thing. Tania, one of the girls in tactile therapy, had said, ‘You must love yourself, Shani, before you can love others, but also look after yourself. The spiritual path is fraught with danger where sex is concerned. The Tantric way promises sexual fulfilment, but can you be sure that genital urges or neurotic emotional needs aren’t disguised beneath an aura of spirituality?’

Intimacy with a stranger was indeed a scary thought. Was she dealing with a predatory male with an obsession about the Big O? And on his own turf too, away from the security of her own space with the aligned energies of feng-shui and the scent of lovely flowers and heavy incense. What’s more, she hadn’t acquired a licence or degree to practise Tantric sex therapy, though she did possess a certificate from an intensive in Maui as well as confidence in her erotic intelligence. And the notion of expanding consciousness, of finding a holistic philosophy by whose values she could live, of awakening sexual energy to attain an exalted state of being not dependent on the act of sexual union, why, these were liberating aims. And being of service to those crippled without being servile, wasn’t that a crusade?


Homo dysfunctionalis, that’s what he was – urinary, bowel, erectile . . . you name the disability, he fretted over it. He knew now the torture of sense-deprivation. And in his helpless, childlike state, yes, being caressed and held was more desirable, more essential than full conjugals. But Daphne seemed even more embarrassed and edgy about the new configuration of their relationship than he was, unsure whether to reach out a hand to steady him or even to show sympathy, whereas his act of reaching out for her was like holding a mirror up to his own helplessness, his utter dependency. I can’t even get myself into the right position, he groaned. Besides, he’d never liked the idea of having to arrange or plan for sex, unlike Baz. That was so unnatural. Then again, he hadn’t completely scrubbed the memory of that ugly old cockchafer at the Cross. And yet . . . it was just that his libido was ebbing back to normal just a few weeks into rehab.


She closed her eyes, tensed her shoulders, let them slump with the breath forced out, began to inhale deeper, more slowly. All the while paying attention to her breathing.

‘You are a powerful Divine Goddess. As such you have always dwelt in the sanctuary of my heart. Once more it is time for my Goddess self to manifest.’

Her inner vision conjured her safe sanctuary on Maui amongst the proteas of deep red and magnolia pink; the slender boles of palm trees calmly bowing over white sandy beaches; the dune-binding shrubs with half-flowers whose fruits had colonized the Pacific Basin; the still, shady quiet of a bamboo forest that brought back memories of the cathedral at Cordoba, those thousand pillars of granite, onyx, marble and jasper that supported its Moorish arches; the Seven Sacred Pools in Kipahula, waterfalls rushing down to the ocean; up on the rim of the volcano of Haleakala, sweeping over peaks and the soft, silvery hairs of silversword with spikes of purplish flowers and bog greensword; slipping down from the trailhead of Sliding Sands into the crater, spinning down sharp drops and switchbacks into the vortex faster and faster toward the valley floor.

Where gradually she invoked the image of her teacher, Ramon, sixties-something and bald but with youthful, supple skin and gentle but slightly disarming smile, average height and ramrod-slim, naked but for loincloth, serene, quietly dignified in sacred ritual. Saw herself as an initiate in white robe shuddering with apprehension, attacks of nerves, grave doubts swelling to panic outside the sacred space. There’d still be time to break the connection, her hand held light in his palm. Next moment, bathed in an aura of calm, as if something of his essence had channelled through, for there they were, nestling in the centre of the bed ringed by big fluffy pillows. In the Yab-Yum position, Ramon was cross-legged and she, astride, sitting on a cushion to facilitate pressure, her own legs wrapped round, the soles of her feet touching.

And she called up those rituals of breath-work that had made such an impact, matching the rhythm of her breathing to that of her teacher. Facing each other, a hand on each other’s heart and feeling each other’s breathing. Then Ramon would change or reverse rhythm, so she had to keep in sync or exhale when he inhaled. So many hours of practice till it became intuitive, timeless. Then embracing, chest against chest, stomach to stomach, pelvis to pelvis, breathing in sync, sensing the rhythm of the other. Next she could feel Ramon’s breath on her neck, her ears and face, then on her lips, without the slightest touch or hint of kiss. Gradually, she could tingle with his energy, their connectedness, a sense of the life force itself, a sense of being at one with the cosmic energy as if falling through a galaxy of stars.

Some time later Shani grounded herself, took three deep drawn-out breaths and when steady opened her eyes. Smiling, because she recalled her gathering acceptance of the course, for even sacred ceremonies can revel in a sense of fun. A mood that may seem childish to outsiders or those who swear by the primacy of reason, but the individual imagination does have a role to play. She remembered in a body-painting session how her partner, Johari, a dab hand at finger-painting, a girl from Sacramento, had inscribed her back with designs of the Sacred Serpent, all bulging fiery eyes and tongues of flame, warty scales of malachite green and claws of mango yellow - the mango tree is a Hindu symbol of love, the girl had declared - requesting Shani in turn to devise a ritual for their Sacred Bath Ceremony.

Ah, those were the days, my friend. But what to do about this Gaz’s pal, Declan?

Firstly, there were ethical concerns. No way could she pass herself off as a guru with the wisdom, knowledge and experience to awaken sexual energy in others. Certainly not initiate Baz’s friend into the  the Tantric way. In his delicate post-operative condition, he certainly mustn’t attempt the ‘pelvic floor’ exercises. Besides, it sounds like he’d be devastated if he couldn’t experience an erection, let alone an ejaculation. No, both body and spirit must be carefully prepared over a period of time by yogic disciplines, not rushed, lest the patient suffer adverse physical effects, such as intense heat or cold, diminished sexual desire, crawling sensations, strange visions, whatever. Pity, though. I know the valley of bliss from giving and receiving sexual pleasure without climax.

So what can I do with a couple emotionally estranged? Okay. Talk straight. This is a once-off. Advise couples counselling with health pros, even though they'd frown on this guy's relationship with a therapist who dared suggest sexual exercises. He's got to do some work on himself, later with his wife. Blindfolded at first, otherwise grievances and bitter recriminations might surface. Then hopefully fall into each other’s eyes and not stay blind to the promptings of ego. Surely they can't let intimacy fade away like it's not worth a cracker. For now, though, gentle massage on skin and soft tissues to reassure. Perhaps a guided meditation. Which should re-balance his energy and get rid of some tension in body and mind. Yep, right on.


Imagine you are walking through a rainforest . . . Notice how intensely green the rainforest is . . . How many different shades of green can you see? . . . Look at the unusual shape of the trees . . . how their branches and lianas bend over you as if they are giving you shelter from the sun . . . Can you feel the warm rays of the sun? . . . How stippled in shadow is the path now? . . . Run your fingers over the different textures of leaves and barks and stems . . . Give yourself time to notice the detail of their diverse forms . . . Now you are walking down to the banks of a river . . . Can you see the river through the trees . . . or hear the sound of water? . . . Notice all the various coloured flowers springing up along its banks . . . Breathe in deeply to appreciate their heavenly perfume . . . You enter the water, splash yourself and dunk your head . . . Notice how fresh and soothing it is . . . Take a few steps towards mid-stream . . . till you feel the current loosening you up . . . Allow yourself to flow with it . . . Just relax because you know you can simply float . . . you feel so buoyant . . . Listen to the babble of the water and the birds singing . . . What kinds of birds are flying around you? . . . Keep the rhythm of your breathing nice and steady as you are borne along by the current . . . Just floating along, relaxing and enjoying the different sounds and scents . . . How many types of butterfly can you see with their brightly coloured wings? . . . Listen carefully and you will become aware of a louder sound like the rush of water . . . Can you make out the bubbling white water of Kundalini Falls twenty metres ahead? . . . How do you feel now? . . . Don’t be alarmed, for you have the strength to overcome any obstacle . . . So prepare to leap out of the water to avoid the big boulders . . . Tense your arms and legs to feel their strength
. . . You’re fast approaching the whirling eddies, so get ready . . . and jump as high as you can into the clear blue sky . . . Hang in mid-air for a few seconds and look around . . . An enormous white albatross is gliding beneath you . . . Already you feel the breath of wind from the beat of her very wide wingspan lapping your face . . . Now you are falling, slowly buoyed by that wind beat . . . so prepare to hitch a ride on the albatross’s back . . . Carefully does it, yes, you’ve landed safely . . . Give the albatross a gentle pat on her shoulder in appreciation of her ride . . . Feel the texture of her thick white feathers and the stream of warm wind in your hair . . . Look down at the river meandering below . . . Can you make out a circular recess in the bank marked out by small boulders? . . . Its still blue waters possess the calmness of a sacred pool . . . Yes, the albatross is circling, lower and lower . . . until she finally sweeps down on the water to land with a splash
. . . Slide down from the albatross into the water . . . Do you feel refreshed by its warmth and buoyancy? . . . Check out the sensations in your own body . . . Is there any residual tension? . . . Or are you calm and relaxed? Just lie there for a few minutes. And when you are ready, open your eyes.


After Shani had slipped away into the ether like the wraith of some guardian angel, Declan slipped back into light slumber, embalmed in vinyl, warm and snug and strangely at peace, too fuzzily relaxed to stir a finger, floating, drifting across the tides of memory.  Then suddenly bumping against seawrack or driftwood of that river. 'And when you are ready,' reached out an echo of that caressive voice from over the palmy horizon, 'open your eyes.'

Readily, he obeyed, though flaked out in flummox, casting around.

Daphne, my god!  Did he still want to keep her sweet? Or even sour? In a twist of facial muscles, No, really!

. . . Well, do you?

One thing for sure:  he wouldn't be chewing it over with Baz, no way.

                                                                                                                                           Michael Small
September 7, 2011-October 4, 2011

IA ORANA, TAHITI

 I came to like life here, with its ease and its leisure, and  the people with  their good-nature and their happy smiling faces.  The Fall of Edward Bernard, W. Somerset Maugham

Thursday: Papeete

Landing at Faa’a airport in late evening, Clay was breezily waved through immigration and greeted by the balmy air and grin of his young transfer driver, Thierry. Not so pleased, though, by this long-haired French émigré’s driving skills, left hand solo while texting, phoning a girlfriend and puffing away on a ciggie for most of the journey. The road down the west coast was fortunately dormant, but also dark, so Clay could gain no insight into his shadowy surroundings, except the humidity, for he was already prickly with perspiration, still bundled up in wintry garb. An hour later he was dropped off at his relais, shown into a spacious room that opened out onto a garden and unpacked.

Next morning he was awakened by the hum and draught of his ceiling fan, the bright rays of sunshine filtering through the drapes and a burble of voices at the long breakfast table on the patio. Having briefly introduced himself to the two French couples and the older, more reticent German pair, he tucked into slices of tangy grapefruit, reassuring cornflakes, a soft sweet banana rationed by each plate, a chocolate croissant and serial cups of coffee. Then with keen anticipation he set out to discover the delights of a sub-tropical paradise. Walking along the narrow grass verge at the side of the two-lane road, he soon located the entrance to the plage publique, already crowded by nine o’clock with the car park almost full and bodies hugging the broader square of sand where a stream trickled into the lagoon.

Pretending not to notice the bronze statuary of topless women of various ages, European and Polynesian, he halted at the edge of shore to ingest his first vision of that iconic image of a paradisal island – the long, low, level line of lacy white ruffles of surf tumbling over the hidden reef, a view that lingered across the bay. And to the north-east, a distant bluey-black mass of a sister island a dozen miles away, Moorea, a mirage louring against dazzling light.

Then trudging over the sand towards wavelets purling close to the tree-line, he found a spot sheltered from the sunshine too blinding for his wintry eyes, plumped himself in the roots of a low-branching tree with white flowers and took out his notebook.

‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ he said cheerily to the recumbent figure of his neighbour. ‘Quelle sorte d’arbre avons-nous ici? I notice it has reddish-brown nuts.’

‘Voici, c’est temanu en tahitien. Vous etes australien?’

‘Oui. Je regrette que mon francais est tres faible.’

‘Donnez! Let me write it. This wood, it is used for making the bottom of pirogues . . . err canoes. Voyez-vous le long de la plage, les lianes, le purau la-bas . . .’ He was pointing to a shrubby-looking tree. ‘Ca, c’est pour les fibres . . . err cords to hold canoes of wood together.’

‘Merci beaucoup, monsieur. Ca, c’est tres interessant.’

‘Mais tristement,’ he added, shaking his head, ‘The Tahitians once had everything they needed. But now, huh.’

‘Pardonnez-moi.’ Already Clay was stripping off T-shirt and board shorts. ‘One of my ambitions is to swim in the South Seas.’

‘Attention! C’est merdique!’

Mindful only of large stones and dead coral formations in the shallows and the shifting coral crush, he failed to enjoy his brief dunking, except that the stickiness of his body was relieved from the sauna. He was still rubbing his eyes when the stolid figure of his neighbour said what sounded like ‘salte’ with an 'e' acute. ‘Tres salte, n’est-ce pas?’

‘Do you mean “salty”, Clay replied. ‘Or “sale”?’

‘Salty, bien sur. And dirty, obviously. Didn’t you notice the trash you were swimming in? I’d never swim here, certainly not on a public holiday. You’ll make yourself ill.’

‘Christ, my eyes are stinging!’

Jean Claude was about forty, with thick white chest hair, a thickening girth and body ‘assez bronze’. Based in Papeete, he worked the numerous islands of French Polynesia for an assurance company.

‘I see that you are mesmerized by the reef and the rolling of surf,’ he said. ‘Don’t be tricked. Beyond this hypnotic vision lies the tragedy of many a matelot.’

Clay was prepared to risk his rusty schoolboy French, but Jean-Claude was more willing to test his solid grounding in English. And even more willing to discharge his disenchantment.

‘Since the 1960s France has pumped so much money into Tahiti,’ he was recounting. ‘The locals just pocket the money. They desire to imitate the Europeans with consumer goods. Their philosophy is hedonism, living for the day. And why not?’ he shrugged his burly shoulders. ‘The seasons scarcely change. In contrast, the Europeans, especially those from the north, really suffer winter and have of necessity learnt to plan for the future.’

‘But aren’t Tahitians worried about climate change?’

‘Of course, Polynesians know climate change is happening. The coral motus are only three metres above sea-level and marine biologists predict that seas in French Polynesia could rise four feet by the end of the century. What do you think will happen to all those villages that occupy the narrow coastal plains? But for Polynesians when they wake up in the morning, the sun is always shining. So they become lazy, more self-indulgent. Many turn to alcohol, tobacco, drugs. Cannabis is grown locally on many properties. How can the police keep an eye on it when, as you can see, most properties back onto thick maquis . . . err bush. You can grow anything up there on rich volcanic soil. I’d say many families in Tahiti have ready access to drugs, soft drugs. America supplies the hard drugs.’

Sensing the burning sensation on his pinkish-white body, Clay wrapped the beach towel over himself, for now they lay sprawled in stripes of shade.

‘So welcome to the dark side of life in Tahiti. Only last week there was a French television documentary that showed French army helicopters tracking pakalolo, that is to say marijuana crops in our jungle, police burning tons of drugs, scenes of miserable poverty, domestic violence, prostitution, you name it. Apparently, the police seize over one hundred and ten million dollars’ worth of weed every year, but they claim that is only a small fraction of the business. And yet now there is a push to legalize the drug trade to aid the economy. Even more disturbing is that no family here in Tahiti can escape from knowing some victim of incest, rape, prostitution and in particular pregnancy among the young girls unmarried. Here is a situation of great shock, n’est-ce pas?’

‘Tell me, Jean-Claude, what’s stopping you from going back to France?’

‘I can’t go back. I wouldn’t recognize the place I once loved. What’s more, I have a quite good life-style in Tahiti. Yes, I admit it, and a secure job that gives me the occasion to travel.’

‘Even so, it’s your homeland,’ said Clay, observing Jean-Claude’s far-away gaze beyond the fleecy surf-break. ‘You know, I used to dream of settling down in Nice. Ah, la Baie des Anges. Ca, c’est vraiment magnifique!’

‘In France racism is a big, big problem, even in Nice, not whites against blacks, but blacks against whites. It was President Mitterand, a left-wing socialist, who made tensions much worse. He introduced an immigration policy that at first seemed successful. Immigrants were encouraged to assimilate into French culture and Christianity but were permitted ‘the right to difference’. But since when have ideals measured up to practical reality? In recent years we have seen the fabric of French society being torn apart. We didn’t predict the problems for the children of the second and third generations of North African Arabs. They were living in the poor housing projects in the outer banlieus of Paris and could get no work. Is it a surprise when they rebel with so much anger? Chirac was obliged to declare a state of emergency against anarchy absolute; Sarkozy deported those rioters who were French naturalized.’

‘Yes, I saw the riots on TV, all those cars torched, the hatred and violence of the barricades all over again. A dreadful shock. Of all the cities in the world, Paris remains my favourite, but I haven’t been back for many years.’

‘It’s just not the same. French culture has been diluted. In the schools too there is a lack of discipline and intellectual rigour.’

‘Even in the lycees?’

‘Mais oui, even there. More egalitarian attitudes since ’68 have led to a loss of respect for the professors, a loss of interest in learning but emphasis on passing exams and getting a comfortable job in the professions. Mon dieu, the parents blame teachers for their children not winning the marks desired. This is absurd. It is necessary for these parents to take more responsibility. Attention, regardez l’heure! Maintenant je dois voler a un rendez-vous tres important. Excusez-moi.’

‘Eh bien, monsieur, beaucoup de remerciements pour vos impressions de Tahiti,’ said Clay, shaking Jean-Claude’s hand. ‘A bientot!’  But rather hoped it wasn't.

‘Jouissez vos vacances. Et rappelons-le: Tahiti, c’est un paradis perdu.’


Downtown in the Marche de Papeete, Skye was bowled over by the exotic perfumes and explosion of rich colours from the bounty of varied flower arrangements, flower necklaces and headbands, the flame-coloured spears of the Birds of Paradise dazzling, before she located the gaudy flower-patterned and sun-drenched Tahitian sarongs and was running a hand over the fabrics on display. ‘What is this white material?’ she asked the beamng, eager-to-please assistant, up on her toes with every step. ‘The texture is very fine.’

‘Voici tapa or cloth made from bark of tree, ute. You say, paper mulberry tree.’

‘And this rougher cloth, the chocolate-coloured one?’

‘Ca, celle de aoa or banyan.’

‘I like very much. I will take three,’ she said, holding up three fingers, ‘but give me a few minutes to look at all these designs.’

‘D’accord, mam’selle.’

Skye took her time appraising the various motifs of lizard, tiki, shark teeth, the Marquesan cross, fish tails, human figures dancing. She’d take the dancing figures herself and give a couple to best friends she geeked out with - perhaps. Her mother, no, she wouldn’t appreciate that sort of pressie. ‘We’re not squandering our savings or super on you. The bucks stop here!’ was a tirade still etched with acid. ‘Once you’ve got your degree, you’re on your own, my girl!’

‘Voila, mam’selle. And do not forget to put a tiare Tahiti behind your right ear if you don’t ‘ave a loverrr and you will take a step more closerrr to paradis.’

‘Merci bien. Yes, I should be right with this monoi insect repellent, Temptress nail polish and a new bikini I’ve just bought.’ And laden, descended the stairs for an espresso and chocolat fondant.

Now twenty-two, Skye had taken her degree in actuarial studies, done what Dad had recommended for future security, but god, what a bore that bloody course! Still, she’d hustled for part-time work at Financial Solutions and at the same time graduated in a fun correspondence course in travel writing, much to her father’s consternation.

Anyhow she could afford to splash out a bit, book a cabin for herself on the Transit de Paradis and pay the single supplement. More than once she’d been warned that by-lines for travel writers are only paid in advance to pros with proven track record, but it wouldn’t take long to write the notation: ‘For sale at your rates’. What the hell, she’d kick up her heels in a cruisy life-style and tuck a flower behind her right ear; besides, she deserved a three-week break from the home guard.


At Pa’ea, a few minutes from his relais, Clay found a super marche where he bought a baguette and packet of Emmental, but he wasn’t so much hungry as thirsty. He’d boiled some water the night before and put it in the fridge. Beyond the plunge pool he sat down beneath a coconut tree for his pique-nique modeste. Above, the clusters of green coconuts were so small they looked like plump acorns in tan helmets burgeoning on long, thin twigs of twisty spider legs. Rags of fibrous matting hung limp from pliant olive green branches arching over the grass and knotted roots of a fig tree with a pointy rabble of prehensile claws.

Apart from a couple of nodding hens scrimmaging in the earth, it was very quiet, that time after noon when every Frenchman evaporates for a two-hour siesta in the heat of the day. Though in the dry and mild season of June, the temperature would be hardly 25 degrees. Certainly the air away from the fumes of the main road was sweet with the scent of yellow hibiscus and jasmine.

Late afternoon saw Clay turning up the allee from his guest-house, the relais, toward the hills along a rutted, pebbly track of private residences, a typical Polynesian allee, narrow, quiet, but a world in itself to young kids on their bikes or a pair of teenage girls walking up and down glued to mobiles, a whirr of red-throated sparrows alighting on a stone wall, squeet-squeet, one, two, three, four in sync, chickens by turn darting and scrabbling, a cockerel flapping onto a wall, then crowing his territorial rights. These private residences boasted well-tended lawns, a sleepy dog or two, invariably the tall, slender-boled coconut palm leaning high over the fare, a tiare tree, the national tree, white petals like in-curving propeller blades, a breadfruit tree with its spread of long leaves and plump, round fruit in green skin and a pamplemousse, providing giant, thick-textured grapefruit that one sliced rather than halved.

Then up on the last terrace, mainly short grass, coils of lengthy hose and children’s swings looking seaward over the coastal plain, a banana tree with four decks of baby green bananas, from which extruded the ribbed tail of a devil and fluted mauve leaves of its flower and a banyan tree with several organ pipes bunched tall and straight. Up ahead, the bush with sheeny verdancy, bloodied with the red flowers of frangipani, impenetrable and silent. In a scarcely visible clearing just beyond the edge, he spied a children’s tree-house and pondered the whereabouts of the cannabis plantations.

Between the tiered boughs of the canopy, Clay could glimpse the sun as blinding orb above the silhouette of Moorea, streams of smoke seeming to rise from the rocks at the island’s base, the sea a quivering silver.

In the evening he strolled along the main road to the playground of the local primary school where a mobile van with cooking ranges, a solitary roulotte, was serving sweet and savoury crepes and waffles. It was a cheap meal, the almond, chocolate and banana pancake with raspberry coulis, but he relished the different sweet taste at first before the sugariness made him wince, but he enjoyed the darkness relieved solely by the van’s string of lights, the warm evening air with the scent of gardenia, the few excitable kids skipping in from the shadows of the car park to place their order at the counter followed by a single parent and the sense of quiet in the darkness, for the traffic had eased considerably. He recalled a distant memory of a Greek island, dining at a small table right down on the harbour front, secluded in the dim orbit of one’s own lantern.


Back at her pension, Skye was impatient to experiment with different wraps for her pareu. The assistant had told her there were at least twenty methods, as every island had its own style. The cloth, patterned with Marquesan symbols in a bright orange with diagonal bands of darker orange, measured about six feet by three. She followed basic instructions.

Now, let’s see. Take two ends of the pareu and hold them longways behind your back. Next bring them round to your front. Hold the edge of one end over your shoulder and bring the opposite edge of the other end around to join it. Tie both ends together over your shoulder. Et voila! Vous etes tres belle, mam’selle, she said, winking with a pout at the three-quarter length mirror, glancing over her shoulder as she spun into a series of appreciative half-turns.


From time to time, Clay had been chewing his lip about the family he had left behind. The excitement of adventure to do something by himself for himself was mitigated by pangs of guilt. But he had been quiescent too long, hadn’t he. It was all very well for Mercedes to be dedicated to her career, earning as a hard-nosed solicitor over twice as much money as himself, but ever since their two daughters had reached adolescence Mercedes had somehow managed their lives, just as she appeared with her energy and certitude to dominate his. And now that he had reached the big 5 0 and his daughters had graduated from uni, he felt the ties to his marriage paying out ever more loosely. Now he was sailing in uncharted waters.

For more years than he cared to remember he had been senior partner in a small publishing company that produced a handful of self-published biographies of seniors who wanted to circulate copies to their family and friends, usually a modest run in memoriam. Clay would refer to a standard list of basic questions to ask the would-be author, his principal strategy to tease out the most interesting details and dramas and ensure the sitter did not waffle too long. There was little scope for imagination, but he shared other people’s happy moments and sympathised with their bouts of hardship and suffering. Until recently, the most popular enquiries had come from World War II veterans; nowadays increasing interest was shown by Vietnam vets. After tape-recording the author’s account over half a dozen sessions only – otherwise one would lose the compulsion and possibly the narrative thread - he’d spend a month editing, not changing the characteristic style, the individual voice had to be authentic to readers, but tidying up the expression and checking the sequencing of events. His business also derived an income stream from publishing an educational magazine with national circulation fortunate enough to enjoy the rights to syndicated articles from Time magazine.

Clay had taken an intensive four-week course (non-credit) on the Post-Impressionists at La Trobe uni to do something a bit more stimulating and discovered that Paul Gauguin’s yearning to escape to a remote island in the South Pacific chimed with his own inner needs. He finally plucked up the gumption to broach Mercedes about – wait for it; he held his breath - cruising the Marquesas Islands.

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘It’s about time you took some initiative. Where on earth are they?’

At first stunned that his wife wished to shuffle him off so readily; at second, relieved that civil war had been averted, if only temporarily; then thirdly, increasingly anxious about the hidden costs of wanderlust in extremis.

‘I think both of us need a decent break,’ she said briskly. ‘I might consider flying solo myself soon.’

Clay’s stomach gave a lurch. What did that mean exactly? Flying solo? But he knew Mercedes wanted him to ask, so swallowed any vestige of pride and jealousy. Besides, if Marlon Brando could find dreamboat Tarita in Tahiti, then who knows? In the meantime he’d better get down to some serious reading on the great French painter.


Having dumped his case next to the others by the gangway, Clay mounted the ladder and presented booking papers at reception and received a key-ring. Soon the next group of boarders was requested to muster at various stations to meet the guides who would show them their quarters.

‘Bonjour, je m’appelle Mareva. Good morning, my name is Mareva. I am going to take you to your dormitory. Please follow me.’

Clay was amongst half a dozen who stepped out on to the narrow side of the restaurant deck and walked along the gunwale towards the stern. The guide, a thick-set Polynesian in her thirties, black hair in a bun and a white flower behind her left ear, unlocked a sturdy metal door, ‘Mind the step!’ and gathered them up in a gloomy square room divided by two rails of coat hangers. Round its perimeter were storage lockers for cases as well as double-decker bunks closed off by café-style curtains.

Then amid mutterings: ‘Is it mixed? Men and women?’

‘Yes, it is uni-sex,’ was the matter-of-fact snap, followed by one or two startled looks and raised eyebrows, as if ‘share accommodation’ had been interpreted as something quite different.

‘Some of you are in here, which has space for everyone to hang their clothes or washing. There you see the number of your bunk.’ Mareva pointed at two small cupboards at the base of each tier of bunks. ‘If you are in the upper bunk, you must take care of the ladder. The others are in the next room.’ Which proved to be a dark, narrow coney warren: entry passage with two short wings.

‘Hmm, tight fit,’ as they squeezed in. ‘Oops, pardon me.’

‘Here you have your security cupboards for valuables as well as clothes. Your second key will open them. So don’t lose your keys, huh?’

Clay was already fussing with pockets for passport, wallet, thank goodness, the keys . . . Now where the hell did I put my traveller’s cheques?

‘And first door on the left, very important, huh, you have toilets, showers and washing basins. Have you some questions?’

‘Yes,’ said Clay. ‘Where’s our luggage?’


A gracefully sleek white ship, the Transit de Paradis, with distinctive orange bubble on the prow at water-line. The front half of the vessel was given over to the hold for cargo, dominated by two enormous yellow pincers, arms of the Liebherr cranes, facing each other at rest but swinging out over the side with a hoist for 4-wheel drives, autos, mopeds, outrigger canoes and general stores unloaded at small villages, which might be transported to outlying communities and hidden valleys. Also mounted, tenders for disembarking passengers and four orange lifeboats. Freight to be collected might include goats, citrus and noni fruit for health-allergic Californians. The biggest export was copra, the solid, dried coconut meat, which contained an oil that Polynesians use in cooking and making margarine and soap.

Some 350 feet in length, 50 feet wide, the Transit de Paradis boasted a restaurant, two bars, lounge, conference room, small gym, swimming pool, library and sun decks. In fact, Clay was exploring decks, stairs and lifts when an announcement was made that he ignored. Already he’d located the gym and tested an exercise bike while gawking out to sea through a porthole. He’d met no one when he made his way back up to the restaurant deck, found his way to the heavy door, tripped on the high metal step but was propped up by the stubborn door and spotted his suitcase amongst others in the middle of the square room. He decided to unpack while his shipmates were otherwise occupied.

All of a sudden there was an almighty explosion, as if a boiler had blown up in the engine room, before it dawned that the beginning of a traditional Polynesian welcome given by the musicians to the new arrivals had struck up, the almighty thwack of a pahu anaana, a bass drum two metres tall. By the time the resounding of heavy drumming and slighter refrains of plangent singing and bursts of applause had ended, he had shoved his case into an empty locker and piled his clothes and odd items aimlessly into his security cupboard and posited electric razor, glasses case and the leaky sun cream lotion into the small drawer beneath his lower bunk.

Then rejoined other passengers on the boat deck for a beaker of punch and handful of nuts. The Transit de Paradis was already ebbing smoothly out of port, then once beyond the barrier reef rocking with gentle rhythm. Digital cameras in hand, those freshly embarked were looking back at the slowly disappearing houses burrowing up the hillsides of Papeete and teetering on the edge of deep-cut ravines or snaking up over the newly bulldozed brown slashes that scarred their view.

Sunday:  Fakarava

In the darkling dawn the first flames of sunrise. Spiky silhouette of palms. Sparsely planted fares with shiny roofs along a thin line of atoll. Castles of cloud banked on far horizons. The Transit de Paradis inscribes a half-circle towards the anchorage a hundred metres from the slender littoral. The smallest motu or islets floating in the sea look sinister, like grey-edged black microbes under the microscope. Slate grey reef herons with greenish legs are feeding off the mud flats.

Alighting from the barge at the pier meant a short walk to the sliver of paved road through Rotoava Village, on either side of which lay the open sea and the expansive lagoon. The expected stalls were laid out by patiently smiling locals without any hassle for visitors to buy the local speciality of black pearls or wooden mementoes or tapa cloths.

Several incursionists split for the beach for a snorkel or swim close to the reef. All adrift, Clay fell in with other couples sauntering toward the Catholic church to witness rather than attend mass. In the front pews to the right of the aisle young children, perhaps five or seven, nearly all girls dressed in best white dresses, were singing Polynesian hymns in bursts of enthusiasm, verse after verse, whipped along by a middle-aged conductor marking the beat with her emphatic downward gestures. Dandling babies in their laps, a dozen proud mothers were sitting in the back pews with other perfectly dressed infants, their menfolk presumably fishing out on the reef.

In the garden of one wooden fare a small group including Skye were making hats by weaving pandanus leaves over and under, secured by wiry coconut fibres.

From some preparatory reading, she recalled James Michener narrating how one day in the oceans of time, perhaps a million years ago, a coconut chanced to bob up on the volcanic soil of a remote Pacific Island.

‘So much depended on the coconut,’ the middle-aged lady in her bright flower-patterned pareu was saying, hunkered on the ground, a dry, scrubby dirt overlaying the splinters of dead coral, ‘specially for the original habitation of these islands. How many names do you think there are for the different stages of the maturing coconut?’

‘Isn’t it twenty-eight?’ said Skye.

‘At least!’ said her instructor, with a giggle and gleam in her eye, as if daring anyone to challenge the number. ‘First, some jelly is scooped out by old people or sick people. Then when the nuts are still young, they provide delicious water. When they’re old, precious oil or sweet milk. The palms are used as thatch for the roof of our fares. Wood from the trunk – as you see there are no branches - is used for building fares and bridges or carving gods. Hard shells make cups and containers. Ribs from the fronds we use for starting fires. See those large, feathery leaves?’ she said, pointing to the tall palm leaning over them. ‘Their sharp ribs make darts. Very painful,’ she giggled again. ‘Strips of leaves make hats, mats and baskets. The sap of tree blossoms makes a sweet drink called toddy or tuba and is also used to make sugar, vinegar and an alcoholic drink. Fibres from the husks give us this sennit or twine and also the short, stiff fibres called coir that we weave into mats, ropes and brooms.’

‘So that’s the story of coconut,’ added Skye, studying her reedy green bonnet with approval. ‘What more would you need? And it even grows on the coral atolls with precious little soil. Awesome!’


Exoticism, eroticism was far more than a wet dream; it served to refine the sensibility of Baudelaire, whose sensual love for his Venus Noire, her sculptural beauty and heady scent, transported him into the land of dreams. Gauguin too felt that ‘terrible itch for the unknown’. As early as 1887 he declared, ‘I am off to Panama to live there like a savage’. And later: ‘I am off to Martinique’; then ‘The matter is irrevocably decided. I am off to Madagaskar’; then ‘to Tonkin.’ Eventually: ‘I shall be leaving shortly for Tahiti, a small island in the Pacific where one can live without money.’  Letters of Gauguin

And Clay smiled at the recognition that he himself was off to destinations unknown.

Monday: En Mer

A languid mood pervaded the Transit de Paradis under a dome of lacustrine blue.

So even an invitation to the navigation deck lent some structure to the morning. The perky chief engineer ushered the English-speaking group into a room with a wide-angle view on three sides of the stark Pacific. Standing in spaces between radio gadgets, banks of controls and computers, the group gravitated towards the prominent bucket chair facing out over the wide blue plasma of ocean. With a cheeky grin, Skye promptly claimed the seat. ‘Now where’s our global positioning system?’ she asked.

‘Everything’s on cruise control,’ retorted the chief engineer with good humour. ‘At least, I hope it is.’ And proceeded to explain the 12.5 km cruising speed of the Mak engine, the power of the diesel generators and the efficiency of the desalination system.


At reception, passengers could borrow specialist books that explored the cultural life of the Tuamotu and Marquesas Islands. Clay signed for a couple of tomes in English on the life and works of Gauguin and took them up to the lounge.  A heated discussion was already brewing at the bridge table, the well caparisoned lady from East Perth vituperating against a penalty; an American couple were deep into Scrabble, Jim frequently apologizing to Nell about transgressing the time rule; and occasional transients were checking out the library annexe for popular paperbacks and magazines bequeathed by previous voyagers. Clay grabbed a hot chocolate and was flipping through the illustrations of Gauguin’s oeuvre when he was taken by an oil painting of Two Tahitian Women on the Beach, 1892.

The women fill the canvas from border to border; although in effect, the top of the head of one and complete right arm of the other are cut off. The strong vertical architecture is bridged by a dog’s body and legs, while the ground of watery rose and two bands of orange sand brushed in as decoration is rapid and carefree to give an ‘unfinished’ look - characteristics of twentieth century art. Both women are statuesque and solid, especially from the waist down, providing a dignity that belies the popular designation of ‘savage’. However, the profile of the woman with her back to the observer has a ‘primitif’ face that suggests a culture tracing back hundreds of years before European discovery in the late sixteenth century.

Whilst there was a sensuousness about their bearing, these were not the beautiful erotic women of the western male’s imagination; indeed, there was a modest gesture, one arm covering both breasts, held by the woman on the left, but a natural un-self-consciousness. Nor was there a hint of that lightness of movement and undulating hands practised by the graceful dancers that had delighted passengers on the Transit.

Coming across the illustration ‘Vahine no te miti’ (‘Woman of the Sea’), a large-boned woman whose valleyed back and boulder-like posterior dominated the frame, a band of orangey sand providing bright contrast with her dark skin tones and black hair, Clay was reminded of a co-incidence that had occurred only three days before in Papeete. He was meandering back from the Musee de Tahiti et Ses Isles via the surf break, then cutting through a field of mango trees alongside the Hotel Meridien to the beach beyond its overwater thatched bungalows. There was no one about as he scanned south, for the beach backed onto the walls and concrete steps of relais and private properties often guarded by snarling guard dogs. Every so often streams and run-off through pipes would be flowing down from the mountains, spilling out into several deep pools which he would gingerly transverse.

Sauntering, sometimes scrambling, back along the narrow strand of sand pocked with pebbles and beach hibiscus, deep pools and incoming currents, he was suddenly struck. The other side of a tree growing out from the stones, angled at forty-five degrees, was a coppery-skinned woman lying on her back on the sand. He checked his step for a moment, then circumspectly approached the contorted mass in a widening arc. Something strange about the woman’s frame appealed, for it seemed larger than life, save for a foreshortened head slightly aslant, but her long black hair was knotted with a flame-coloured ribbon and plumed out to one side like drapery. Her big strong thighs were jackknifed and slightly splayed out in front, so that the arch of her legs dominated with fleshy calves. Breasts, smooth oval discs, had slid down her sides as if too heavy for their customary pose.

With his slow, softly, softly trudge in a widening arc, scarcely taking his eyes off her, wondering at rather than admiring the still, sleepy, intimidating form that reminded him of Picasso’s colossal mock-Classical figures of the1920s. He sat down about fifty metres from this vision, bemused, his gaze cutting from the hypnosis of coral surf ruffling the reef to a fixation on this Amazon marooned. Until his attention was disturbed by the backpacker who chanced along, passing close by the woman’s feet with surprise then incredulity, pointedly ignoring Clay, who was ready with embarrassed acknowledgement. And parking himself forty metres beyond the Australian, stared out to sea, presumably waiting for some further revelation. Now feeling uncomfortable, as if confronted by his alter ego, a Peeping Tom, Clay reluctantly resumed his ramble round the bay, still marvelling at that imposing vision, exiting eventually at the public beach of Pa’ea..


Slathered in 30+ and an application of French White nail polish on her toes, Skye was stretched out on the banana lounge in the missionary position, fidgeted with the underside of her new bikini top, white tiare petals on red ground, then lay back with her head again pointing heavenward in bliss. She’d bunched up her frizzed black hair at the back to avoid irritation.

What was irritating her was not the CD’s monotonous thump of double bass and wail of Polynesian singers emanating from the bar overlooking the swimming pool, but her story.

Or rather the failure of her travel article to write itself.

Occasionally, she flipped over on her front and unhooked the strap at her back, and extended the undersides of her arms as if flying through space instead of gliding through these level, satiny blue waters of the vast, outlandish Pacific, shot through with the thinnest of milky striations and the diffused riffle of white wake, no vessel in sight, nothing green sighted since the last coconut palm on the atolls.

Tootsies snugly poised on white plastic chairs or stools, passengers, American, Australian, German or French, were soaking up sun as well as the much vaunted local beer, Hinano Tahiti, liqueur de coconut, le rhum brun and other exotic ruby red or blue heaven cocktails served by the big-boned, bare-chested barrel of a pony-tailed, muscle-toned Polynesian barman with the blank stare of a tiki petroglyph and a deep cavernous growl.

When suddenly Forrest, the American from Florida, said, ‘Say, waita minute. Isn’t that there bird a frigate?’

There was a scrape of deck furniture and scrambling lurch to the stern rail, pocket-sized cameras conjured up from nowhere.

‘Wow, he’s a beauty, isn’t he?’ waxed Forrest, a big, bluff blond guy with a calm but smooth voice in an easygoing American lilt that could dominate a ten-seater table in the restaurant. ‘No kidding. Probably checking out the wake for food scraps. Funny thing, yer know, we’re so focused on the touch screen of our i-Pads that we don’t even notice the sky.’

The lone black bird hung in the air with distinctive broad, M-angled wings, long enough for the happy snappers. Skye vaguely heard the buzz of excitement but was sinking too far into her doze to stir from her haven of warm comfort.

Tuesday: Ua Pou

A sense of eager anticipation amongst the early risers scuttling about with cameras for best vantage point on the upper decks. Virtually a somnambulist, Clay had already ghosted into the lounge for a coffee to kick-start, then the library for a quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas to inscribe in his notebook:

The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense.

At first blush the mountains dropped from the shrouds and the basalt stacks slowly stretched knobbly fingers into the underbelly of sleepy, sombre-grey puffs of cloud.

Dark green ravines with scree of Gauguin’s viridian green sloped down to the faces of cliffs chalky-white to orange. Clay spotted a black maw of a deep, dark cavern, then wedged in a narrow valley the curt landing-strip cut down from the hills to the beach for low take-off over the sea. A vertical groove of what might have been a cascade frozen and hills denuded, rounded, mined to dirt, grey-scored with a dusting of chocolate earth.

Round the promontory, the first signs of a small township hugging the shore and a scatter of white houses nestling further up the valley. Prominent over all in the foothills of peaks pleated with green skirts, a large white cross stood tall.

Rays of sunshine break through, casting an orange luminescence over this rugged terrain and clump of bushes clinging to steep hillsides. Here flourished the white fairy tern with the most perfect black pearl for an eye.

Cautiously, the Transit de Paradis turns in the mouth of the bay and edges its stern towards the sheltered harbour devoid of visible movement and seacraft, save four yachts and a white catamaran bumping out to sea.

But on the village pae pae the musicians were ready with greetings, perhaps the first tourists they’d seen in three weeks, with Marquesan songs on guitars and medium-sized drums, tutu, and women to place leis round the neck of each passenger. Ultramarine lorikeets gathering nectar and flower pollen from local gardens gave piercing shrieks. A flock of red-browed firetails was feeding in grassy fields.


‘I’m no foodie,’ said Clay, gawping suspiciously at the goat cheese mousse.

‘Oh dear, you poor old thing. There’s humanity in an act of gourmandise, you know. Every time we zest up our lemon custard with a grand cru Marquesan vanilla clove, we peek into the varieties of human experience and improve our chances of expressing individual elan. Ultimately, it’s precisely that exciting melange of aromas, flavours and cultures that warms the cockles of humanity.’

He was still savouring a smidgin of the liver-coloured mousse, a hunk of baguette at the ready in case he needed to smother the taste, then nodded with almost reluctant appreciation.

‘There you go. It didn’t burn off your taste buds, did it?’

‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘Anyway, my name’s Clay from Melbourne, Australia.’

‘And I’m Marianne from Woolloomooloo. Pleased to meet you.’

‘Likewise. So what sort of work do you do, Mary-Ann?’

‘Marry Anne,’ she said pointedly. ‘I create edible artworks.’

‘You do what?’

‘I suppose you could say I’m a food stylist. Or you could say I’m a pseudo-Tussaudiste.’

‘I would if I could get my tongue around it. Please explain.’

‘I just lerrv the work of the Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. You’ve heard of him, I suppose?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest.’

‘Arky was a genius. He painted human heads as pieces of fruit or veggies or flowers etcetera etcetera. What a scream! Remember he was a Renaissance man.’

‘Really? Mm, very bold-o. So you’re a painter, sort of?’

‘Rather! But a painter manqué. In effect, a photographer. I cheat, of course. I use clay and blue tack to stick my heads together before they wilt or go mouldy. Whereas a Gauguin self-portrait may crudely be described as oil on canvas, my typical sconescapes could be defined as crudités digitales. Or star fruit, taro, breadfruit, limes, papaya, banana, what-have-you.’

‘Creating what exactly? Arkimouldo?’

She shrugged a shoulder and gave a shrewish pursing of her lips. ‘I could do a mock-up of your mug with liquorice allsorts in no time. A more satisfying creation would be a tiara of tiare flowers ensconced on a pamplemousse head, with flower stone eyes, onion ears, a sweet banana moustache and a neck of yam. How’s that for starters?’

‘Hmm. Very down-to-earth.’ Though he looked gob-smacked. ‘More wine?’


It was evident that Gauguin’s bright, bold colours became more sombre in several of his last works after the death of his favourite daughter, Aline, in France in 1897. What surprised Clay was that in spite of the artist’s physical deterioration, syphilis, serious heart condition, severe case of eczema, paranoia, attempted suicide, he was still able to do some of his best work, even captivating dreamscapes of The White Horse with the green tinge of the white horse set against the red horse with naked rider, perspective askew through a tangle of blue branches; and the pink sand that also dominates the ground of Riders on the Beach:

Colour, which is vibration just as music is, is able to attain what is most universal yet at the same time most elusive in nature . . . I dream of violent harmonies, wrote Gauguin in a letter to Andre Fontainas in 1899.

But it is Self-Portrait with Spectacles which Clay contemplates with admiration. Painted shortly before his death in 1903, Gauguin levels a steady gaze at the viewer, as if accepting the reality of imminent death. The bronzed bullet head and penetrating eyes testify to an inner strength and a determination to reveal the truth as he sees it, the stubbornly proud head of a defiant outsider.

Wednesday: Nuku Hiva

Departure in convoy of forty jeeps up a narrow, winding road through the mountains towards Hatiheu. Views over the dense green valleys dizzying. At the second look-out, the procession of vehicles parks along the edge of the road, from where one seeks the Transit de Paradis lying in state, the solitary vessel in the bay. Skye feels an immediate rush of warmth, recognition that the white-hulled ship has already become a homey assurance.

Suddenly, a skirl of shrieks. Someone, a woman, has collapsed to the ground down a slippery bank. Still she screams as a dozen flock round to help, but most hold back for fear of aggravating what sounds like a serious injury. Crumpled up, hidden by bystanders, others turning away while sensing ominous pain, the stricken woman’s imploring, begging, ‘Non, non!’ screaming in stabbing bursts, more gutteral with every slight adjustment of movement or physical touch from every well-intentioned gesture.

‘Stand back, everyone!’ calls Diodore, one of the French-speaking tour guides, rushing in to the circle.

‘Where’s the doctor?’ mutters Nell through clenched teeth near the edge of the mountain. ‘This is horrible.’

‘I think it’s her ankle,’ offers another.

The portly ship’s doctor is trotting downhill with medical bag in hand, but as soon as he kneels by the woman’s side the intermittent screams rend the air briefly, then die.

Muttered rumours pass around the outer circles that are already drifting away to gaze out at nothing in particular: ‘Perhaps the bone has broken through the flesh.’

At last a hush has fallen over the body, over the whole tour. Within twenty-five minutes an emergency vehicle has roared up the mountain. It’s the last the injured party glimpses of the Marquesas, from a stretcher; the last news the holiday-makers hear of her officially. On the grapevine, Martine was airlifted to Papeete for treatment to her broken ankle; then she and her husband were flown back to Paris.


Clay had been speed-reading Herman Melville’s Typee. What did the very young American whaler turned author have to say about the Marquesas Islands in 1842?

What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up? Naked houris – cannibal banquets – groves of cocoa-nut – coral reefs – tattooed chiefs – and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with breadfruit-trees – savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols – heathenish rites and human sacrifices.


Never use clichés, advised her tutor, Aeneas Wunderlich. Skye was casting a critical eye over a typical piece from her community newspaper she’d brought along as a reminder of the pitfalls of travel writing. She set about underlining the hard-sell clichés, verbal and imagistic: ‘Treat yourself to a slice of Paradise’ . . . ‘awesome beauty’ . . .’lunch on the private beach sounded simply too good to pass up’ . . . ‘in time for sunset cocktails and a veritable feast served under the stars’ . . . ‘for un-spoilt, secluded luxury, Rangiroa is hard to beat’ . . . ‘unparalleled views of the azure waters of these fantasy islands’ . . . ‘this is the stuff deserted island fantasies are made of’ . . . ‘ranked high on many Aussies’ must-see, must-visit lists’ . . . ‘for a break filled with underwater wonder and natural beauty that is literally breathtaking, the Marquesas Islands have it covered.’

‘You need a good lead,’ Aeneas had advised. ‘Write down key words to build each paragraph with a sense of unity. You’ll soon find yourself tearing up draft after draft and discarding some of your best ideas.’

No such luck. If only.

‘Cross out gushy superlatives, like ‘lovely’, ‘terrific’, ‘unbelievable’, ‘best’, ‘supreme’, ‘ginormous . . .’

Which didn’t leave too many words to play with. Fanbloodytastic!


Clay was puzzling over one of Gauguin’s last works, D’Ou venons-nous, Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? (‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’). He was firstly struck by the intensity of the colours, particularly since Gauguin was usually too poor to spend money on paint, let alone canvas. The numinous blue, reddish browns and dark greens were predominant colours but by no means naturalistic.

The painting seemed to be a synthesis of images, though tellingly devoid of male figures: sensuous and contemplative females; religious and secular; Biblical and Polynesian symbols. You could read the painting from right foreground to left to reflect the journey of life, from the sleeping baby to the old woman facing death. The central figure, like Eve, is reaching up for a mango, suggesting fertility and the pleasures of life, countered by the idol with rigid upraised arms pointing to the Beyond or inevitable death or warning against breaking tabus. Two young girls appear to be contemplating their own destiny. Animals and birds also belong in this luxuriant tableau and the pattern of twisting vines adds to the dream-like atmosphere.

He could barely wait to rub up against the spirit of Gauguin on the morrow.

Thursday: Tahuata, Hiva Oa

Hiva Oa, shaped like a seahorse with jagged tail. The Transit de Paradis anchored in its gullet at Atuona.

The second busload was dropped close to Calvary Cemetery, to which they walked on a steady gradient that offered a splendid view over Baie des Traitres. Jacques Brel’s headstone with plaque featuring the images of the Belgian singer and his mistress was situated just inside the entrance, that of Gauguin two rows up to the right, erected on a slightly higher mound with an arthritic frangipani struggling cross-wise out of it, a handful of white, yellow-centred flowers hanging on. On the headstone stood his bronze casting of the clay figure, Oviri, a naked female divinity – Gauguin described it to Mallarme as ‘a cruel enigma’ - treading on the bleeding head of a wolf as she strangles the cub. Perhaps suggesting that the tormented artist was finally destroyed by his own demon – his driven talent. Or was he hinting at the enigma of our own final destination?

‘Highly over-rated, eh,’ declared Zak, a Canadian from Alberta whom Clay had been trying to avoid on account of his acute deafness, which meant repeating every comment half a dozen times, during which the guy with creased forehead and screwed-up eyes was struggling to read his wife’s lips for an interpretation. Yet he could be as sharp as a cut from live coral. At their first encounter over lunch when Clay had asked her, ‘What part of the States are you guys from?’ Zak had read his lips quick enough, reached over the table to grab his wrist in a vice and threatened to administer a Chinese burn with a breathy ‘Say, Mac . . . ‘

Palms out hastily raised, Clay was about to issue a public apology when his wife stepped in, ‘Can it, Zak! The gentleman didn’t know.’

‘I’d still like to pay homage,’ retorted Clay testily.

Then the group straggled down toward the Magasin Gauguin, an old clapboard general store where the artist had bought his supplies, including bottles of liquor that he kept cool in a well beside his house. A huge mango tree grew alongside, some fallen fruit rotting along the side of the road, sniffed at by a half-starved dog with rib-boned undercarriage. Clay fell back, suddenly taking it into his head to examine the faces of the local womenfolk to check out any resemblance to Gauguin’s offspring or sultry models from five generations back. The first woman who approached, forty-something, slowed down to a standstill, glared back in turn, disconcerting him into turning away to cough theatrically into his fist as she drew level. Then a bare-footed teen lingered on the store’s veranda, staring with curiosity at the passing tourists, before skipping down onto the narrow roadway. With a more surreptitious appraisal from lowered eyes, Clay was unnerved to look up at such a blinding smile and giggle that he quite forgot the aim of his research.

A more likely prospect emerged, shoulder-length raven hair tied in two plaits, red hibiscus flower tucked behind her ear, wearing a pareu halter-style.

‘What’s the dilly-o, stare-cat? You havin’ a perv at me?’

‘Excuse me, I was wondering if you were a descendant of Gauguin or one of his models?’

‘No way, man. Moleskin I mebbe, but I ain’t no sex on a stick Poly, if that’s what bakes your biscuit.’

‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I thought . . . ‘

‘Now you quit that hasslin’, you old noodle dick. I’m on vacation from Maui.’

Crushed as coral heads by careless flippers, Clay could barely walk straight, let alone think. He was in no mood to search for Gauguin anywhere, least of all in the Paul Gauguin Cultural Center. Duty-bound, he mooched around aimlessly. The gallery threw up much reading about the many paintings on display, but he could only stare blankly. Till his attention was arrested by the epitaph from the local bishop:

The only noteworthy event here has been the sudden death of a contemptible individual named Gauguin, a reputed artist, but an enemy of God.

‘Huh, Lady Gaga would’ve been incensed by such damnation!’ muttered the young journo, locking eyes with Clay, giving a shrug and ironic grin before hurrying on.

Clay smiled ruefully at Skye’comment, but felt thoroughly let down by the lack of originals. Like many Marquesan artifacts, he learned, nearly all Gauguin’s paintings are housed in European museums. Even the artist’s Maison de Jouir had been re-built with copies of carved wood panels and lintel, on whose inscription he almost choked: Soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses. The original House of Pleasure evidently a poke in the eye to the local bishop disgusted by Gauguin’s bohemian life style. But none of the other visitors appeared disappointed by this collection of mere faint-hearted copies. Could his own perception be so misguided, so snobbish?

Leaving the store with only a few postcards, chewies and a can of coconut water, Skye headed for the Jacques Brel Cultural Center. She’d never heard of the Belgian singer/composer but had just learned that he had performed many charitable deeds in the Marquesas. Apparently, he’d died of cancer and wished to spend his last days in an earthly paradise. She contented herself with standing at the entrance, from where she had a close enough view of his Beechcraft Twin Bonanza airplane, Jojo, hanging from the rafters.

While she’d been driving her rented car around the two-lane coastal road of Tahiti a few days before, Skye was composing: ‘the sun was painting a glorious vermilion and tangerine sky over the gold and purple ridges of Moorea’; ‘the island mirage some twenty kilometres distant’; and once she’d motored bumper-to-bumper in rush-hour traffic beyond the township of Pa’ea, ‘the brilliant white sand and the opaline green of the lagoon, and the virgin bush to her left, running down steep valleys from The Diademe, Mt Aorai and Mt Orehana in such an intensity of emerald shades’; ‘at Cape Matavai the warm sand on the popular beach comprised grains of the finest ebony’; and when the Transit de Paradis ‘lauded it over the whole wide world of the balmy Pacific’, she would simply describe ‘a lapis lazuli pane of glass beneath a canopy of cerulean sapphire’.

Oh yes, she could write all right. Thank god, she was making progress. Every so often she would take out her navy-bound Austral Journo Syndicate pass to prove to herself she was indeed a freelance travel photojournalist. Have lance, will travel, yeah, paki, paki, paki!

Next morning she woke early to the shudder and start-up rumble in the bowels of the Transit de Paradis. Oh, shit! She sensed at once that her choice of writing style was too dense, surreal even, without breathing space, as luxuriant as the magic realism of South American novels, straining credibility and utterly inappropriate. And yet, she screamed inside her head, if you had just revelled in Paradise, how on earth could you bloody well use simple words to describe the goddamn place!

Friday: Fatu Hiva

Early morning found Clay once again hunched up in the library next to the two computers, dead but for occasional games of patience that absorbed a stray crewman late at night, reflecting on a quotation from Thor Heyerdahl’s book, Fatu Hiva: Back to Nature.

Our wonderful time in the wilderness had given us of what man had abandoned and what mankind was still trying to get even further away from. Progress can be defined as men’s ability to complicate simplicity.

But Heyerdahl also witnessed how mosquitoes bearing elephantiasis could scratch away at the idyll.

Looking toward Fatu Hiva from the lounge balcony, Clay wondered what impression Alvaro de Mendana might have received from this first European sighting of the Marquesas Islands in 1595. What did he actually see after a month exposed to the glare of the empty, unremitting Pacific? Perhaps cranky on a poor diet or ill, for he was only months away from his death from malaria in the Solomon Islands. He was certainly jittery when lying off the neighbouring island of Tahatua next day. After he’d gone ashore in the bay that he named Madre de Dios to celebrate mass and replenish his water supply, his caravel was surrounded by canoes of hostile warriors. After the mother of all skirmishes, two hundred Marquesans perished as cannon fodder.

So would Mendana even have had time to wonder at the chimneys of basaltic stacks? Or the green ripeness of valleys bearing down on his tiny batch of cobbled timbers? Would anything strike a sixteenth century navigator as aesthetically beautiful? Words like ‘sublime’ and ‘awe’ seldom appeared in the English language until the second half of the eighteenth century, the blossoming of the Romantic sensibility of Rousseau and Wordsworth.

As for himself, Clay could never get enough of these oh so intensely verdant, virginal valleys sloping down to the ocean, struck dumb by their majesty, their distant beauty, their intimation of calm. Polyunsaturated he would ever remain, surely.


At Omoa, Skye was fascinated by the village women at work. They appeared to be the dominant inhabitants and most in touch with preserving old customs. Three of them demonstrated beating the barks of blackberry, banyan and breadfruit trees to make tapa cloth for clothing. The women’s hair was adorned with umehei, a bowknot in which sachets of aromatic plants and flowers were used as love potions – scents of spicy basil, mint, sandalwood, tiare, ylang-ylang. Indeed, Tahei, the tall, slender, shyly good-humoured English-speaking guide, snuggled up to one of the women fifteen years older to prove their seductive appeal. Skye kept the spike of the white-flowered ylang-ylang that had passed round and tucked it into the button-hole of her shirt.


Dipping through The Happy Isles of Oceania, she had read Paul Theroux’s description of Fatu Hiva, the American's choice of most beautiful island in the world:

It’s the way the daylight plunges into it only to be overwhelmed by the darkness of its precipitous valleys and the dangers of its shoreline that give it the look of a green castle.

Wow! How could she ever write something so vivid, so charged with the energy of spirit, so perceptive about elements intangible?

A small group of twenty or so hike across the cliff-top path from Omoa to Hanavave, another small village further round the coast, Friedhelm and his video camera surging ahead. They begin the ascent through groves of cashews and ush valleys roamed by herds of wild horses, cross Mt Teamotuto with near-sighted views of two phallic peaks along the skyline of Hanavave Bay. Much to Diodore’s relish, the early explorers had christened the bay Baie des Verges (Bay of Phalluses), which outraged the missionaries who re-christened it the Baie de Vierges.

‘Mutt’s nuts!’ Skye exclaimed with a belly-laugh, much to the utter confusion of the French-speaking guide.

Descending into the valley of Hanavave, she glanced back at the visage of George Washington atop his own grey-headed basalt stack and tossed a casual John Wayne salute.


In her cabin, where occasional waves would slosh against the porthole, Skye was running her eye over one hundred possible titles that her tutor had posted which might inspire. Nothing leapt out, but half a dozen set her imagination racing.

How to blow your money on safari.
The black pearl capital of Polynesia.
Does global warming affect your mood? Hot places for ‘hot’ travellers.
Burping, belching, flatulence. Go easy on exotic fruit.
The most seductive dance in the Pacific.
Which races have the most to smile about?

And she immediately thought of Vainui, the waiter extraordinaire, whose appearance and manner had held her in thrall in the restaurant. Friedhelm, the German travelling by himself whose cabin was in the same passage, had pointed out that at every meal-time Vainui always wore the same colour watch as his shirt or pareu and his coronet of gaudy flowers, white or red or blue, whatever. But his big round eyes beneath thick black eyebrow liner and black mascara on both eyelashes and his extraordinary gracious movements and effeminate gestures and high-pitched voice and beaut smile of a man who loved his work, gliding, sometimes sweeping, about the tables, it was all a bit bewildering at first. Then Friedhelm explained the Tahitian custom of mahus, how some young boys might be brought up to play the feminine role and were more inclined to enjoy doing work traditionally associated with island women. They were not necessarily gay, though some did solicit foreign tourists in Papeete.

But Vainui was the epitome of charm itself and it was soon apparent that this man with fascinating personality, albeit a mysterious life-style, was warmed to by everyone. She acknowledged that she wasn’t the only woman on board who would have happily given him a cuddle, more so than those tall tattooed men with six-packs who’d whisk her into the whaler.

Then, of course, there was Marana, who had the gift of the gab, tons of energy, especially when the audience responded to him enthusiastically and he could feed off their energy. And when the dancing class was making a hash of the steps, there was Marana cracking a joke or demonstrating the movements with gushing attention. His instant ear-to-ear grin was infectious. As was his running commentary at the fashion parade round the swimming pool to show off the hats made from pandanus leaves in which he described every contestant in encouraging terms as well as close detail of their pareu. Then he made his pet pitch for applause, ‘Paki, paki, paki!’

Most thrilling was his high-octane dancing, those incredibly strong thigh muscles in solid forward crouch, those leg muscles quivering in scissor-cross at frantic speed, his long-jawed stare of hostility as he became thoroughly immersed in his warrior role, his unflagging energy that kept the audience spellbound. What an entertainer and sexy with it, she thought. Paki, paki, paki!

Saturday: Hiva Oa

At Meae Iipona, Puamau, the tall, emaciated and fragile stone tikis are amongst the largest in Polynesia, except for those on Easter Island. The tallest of a warrior chief stands at 2.43 metres. Some anthropologists credit people from Puamau as the first settlers of Easter Island.

But it was the traditional pig dance that seemed to animate the extensive stone-scattered marae, as Marana’s troupe recaptured both the tension of hunters scouring the jungle for the wild pig and then with much deep aerated grunting and a full sideways upturning sweep of the neck the wary reactions of the quarry snuffling the scent of its pursuers - a ritualized dance executed at frantic and relentless speed.


Skye had attended most hour-long rehearsals for the Polynesian dancing class. On two occasions during meals three female staff had sashayed up the main aisles of the restaurant, while the band of four crewmen provided lilting music on ukuleles and guitar. It was a bit of a struggle, she thought, remembering the Marquesan words of the song, though she could hold up a copy just in case, more particularly to pronounce every syllable and remember the alternate rhythm of consonant/vowel, consonant/vowel. Which meant consciously opening and elongating the mouth.

She was pleased that the presentation would not be too fakey; no grass skirts or bikini tops, no supposedly erotic hyper-active bottom-wiggling. In fact, the young trainee waitress, the modest, sweet-smiling Moea, served as inspiration with her oh so gentle and graceful movements rendered in an understated way, especially the slight faltering tuck-in behind the leading leg and rocking motion held before the countering sway back. Really, really cool.

Sunday: Tahuata

While most of the party were observing Sunday mass at the Catholic church, Skye found her way to a studio nearby. She was tempted by the simple decorative motif of Hei ta’ vahna, representing a crown of cockerel feathers that resembled a bracelet in arrowhead pattern. More interesting because more complex were the geometrical patterns of Kova’eh, coconut leaves on the inside wrist, red and black, with an oval containing the now-familiar tiki face, beady eyes and lolling tongue.

Why not just do it? Bodily adornment was a beautiful art form today as well as a measure of personal identity. For Polynesians at the time of Captain Cook’s first visit in 1769, tattooing was regarded as sexually alluring, driving many of his sailors to cop the pain of a razor-sharp shell cutting intricate patterns into their paler skin. She ummed over the decorative patterns, admitting that their meaning no longer reflected status or wealth, not even initiation, a quaint, old hat notion. Besides, not just her peers with the fad of sleeve tattooes but even her parents’ generation were sporting nose studs and the initials of loved ones machine-worked on their private parts. No doubt her father would be disappointed, her mum disgusted.

And the simplest design would take the best part of the day to execute, which would be pretty boring. As the tattooist was pulling on a fresh pair of surgical gloves, Skye laid eyes on the needle for the first time. A slight shiver ran up her spine.


Clay sensed that his focus on Gauguin had waned with the superficial and hollow representation of the painter’s legacy on Hiva Oa. As much as he enjoyed his brief study and gained some insight into the artist’s psyche and oeuvre, he didn’t gain a true inkling of the flat colours vibrating in Gauguin’s authentic work. Besides, he began to reflect more upon the driven nature of the artist, the extent of emotional torment and hardship he endured to get in touch with the ‘savage’ aspect of his own nature. Did he admire the man’s steadfast integrity of his artistic vision? Of course. All these traits were heroic. But what about the notion of placing duty to one’s art above duty to one’s family? In particular, a father’s responsibility to nurture his young children? Wasn’t there something demonic about such costly self-actualization?

Monday: Ua Huka

Crescent shape and high plateau deeply indented by narrow river valleys. A volcano formed by magma forced up from the bowels of the earth; named the Marquesan hotspot. Unlike other Marquesan islands, dry scrub beyond the valleys, laid waste by herds of feral goats and wild horses.

Will our Polynesian Night prove a second Marquesan ‘hotspot’? Skye wonders. You must be kidding, girl.

With stealth, against the blaze of sky and smouldering clouds at dawn, the Transit de Paradis chugs through the keyhole, Invisible Bay, the narrowest in the Marquesas and most dangerous for a vessel of her size. The choppy waters fling foam against the black rocks piled beneath sheer cliffs that enclose the harbour in giant pincers. The Transit begins its slow turn to port, 180 degrees, with few metres to spare either side. Black undersides of rock reveal striations of dark chocolate brown edged at their peaks with a close shave of cropped greenery.

In two dinghies, careering forward in a widening arc to left and right, two pairs of seamen furrow a course to hold the mother vessel steady with long, floating hawsers. Sure-footed as the feral goats just visible on the steep slopes, the matelot in bare feet bends forward, teetering, poised on the prow of the dinghy, suddenly springing onto wet rocks to secure the nylon hawser that holds the ship fast to a bollard cemented into rock. In the aft his steersman is cajoling the Yamaha engine, nudging close, closer, steady now, steady, to the bollard, through the heavy spray of surf crashing, the bucking dinghy nosing closer and closer, the matelot calculating the precise moment, then leaps with ridiculous ease.

Early-birds filming from various vantage points or watching in admiration burst into spontaneous applause. Then the second team perform the same manoeuvre over the other side of the harbour and earn further acclaim. The four men return to the loading bay in the hold and winch the lines to stabilize the Transit in the middle of the bay.

Forrest for one was shaking his head in wilderness wonder. ‘Yer know, every morning my wife and I get up in the dark in case we miss anything at sun-up. We’re so anxious, our nights are like going through the ringer of the Miami turnpike. No kidding. But no complaints. This sure is a wonderful, wonderful trip.’


‘Listen, this is very important,’ said Maeva. ‘It’s a little rough out there. Make sure you have both hands free when you go down the ladder. Trust the crew who will help you get into the barge. You must step onto the black platform and wait till the crew say okay. Okay? They will lift you across. We don’t want any heroes. Just relax. We haven’t lost anyone yet.’

There was some uneasy laughing and pinched mouths and anxious glances at those wittering behind in the queue on the main deck. Clay was caught up in readjusting the strap of his carry-all of wet weather gear, towel, mosquito repellent and plastic bottle of eau Royale from over the shoulder to round the neck, so that it hung down his front beneath his life-jacket and turned him into a stuffed pullet.

The queue shuffled forward but pressed up since no more than six were allowed on the gangway ladder at one time. The waves slapping up against the Transit did indeed look violent, rendered more menacing by the barge rocking away from the stepping-off platform. For a brief moment Clay wondered whether to retreat to the library for a quiet perusal of Gauguin’s paintings, but the fidgety press behind deterred. Barred by the arm of a crew member at the top of the ladder, Clay watched Forrest, the inveterate yachtie of the Keys, being restrained by the crewman standing behind the black platform almost nonchalantly, one hand hanging onto the ladder. Given the okay, the big American with a whoop and long drawn-out ‘All right!’ was steadied into the barge by the arms of two crewmen. Mamie, his much younger wife, seemed to have something to live up to, but ‘Come on, sweetie, you’ll be fine!’ yelled Forrest, who was urged to sit down and stop rocking the boat. As if he could, in those conditions.

Meanwhile Clay was making his way gingerly down the ladder, not daring to look away from each bevelled rung, clinging on tight to the rails, but given a fright when he realized the left rail might jam up against the side of the Transit and crush his knuckle, but could hear the generous applause for Mamie’s safe landing and Forrest’s high-seas roar of approval. As he all but collapsed into the arms of the crewman at the bottom of the ladder, he half-expected Forrest to yell out, ‘Step up to the plate, man! You can do it!’

Instead, ‘Relax!’ ordered the brusque female voice from the middle of the barge. But the open side of the barge was bucking away several feet, then coaxed back but too far the other way. Clay peered into the roiling depths and envisaged himself mashed and mangled, gone for all money, shredded in the blades of the propeller and spat out as shark bait. Now the barge was correctly positioned but suddenly kicked in the air, to the gasps of the safely settled, sloshing his feet and whetting him across the face.

Then all of a sudden: ‘Okay!’ barked the two Polynesian wide receivers.

‘Nuh, no!’ he whimpered.

‘Just relax! ‘And stand up straight!’ urged Maeva, the commandant. Clay jerked his body up half a metre, braced and took a deep breath.

‘Go!’

Before he quite understood, he was somehow winched, hoisted and bundled into the sturdy arms of the waiting crewmen. To whipped-up applause, he puffed out his cheeks in relief, performed a mock stagger hand on heart to a seat, jolted by a slap on the back from Forrest with the reassuring tones: ‘We’ll make a seaman of you yet, Clay!’ and a warm glow of relief mixed with a soupcon of pride.


In a tizz at the handicraft centre in Hokatu, Skye bought up a collection of wooden turtles, tikis, platters and hair pics for her bezzies.


Two of the small complement of Kiwi passengers had come up with the notion of performing the Maori haka dance for Polynesian Night. Marana jumped at the idea and urged the two Caucasians to join his own troupe of Transit dancers who worked behind the scenes and who regularly performed in Papeete’s hotels during their week’s shore leave. Thrilled with the suggestion, they cast around for any Aussies who might wish to join them. Clay, who had been liberally oiling himself with Sauvignon Blanc, mulled over the notion of hoofing the haka, specially since he felt guilty at refusing point-blank to join the Aussie contingent with their vocal rendition of Tie me kangaroo down, sport. There was still an hour or so before the Polynesian dancing that would provide the climax to the evening’s entertainment, time enough to practise a few basic steps in the conference room.

Clay removed his Indonesian shirt with the burnt orange-to-fawn ground and swirling leafy patterns picked out in navy blue that suggested the eye of a peacock’s tail; his wreath of crinkly dried leaves; his Ocean brown sandals from Best for Less. Marana had rustled him up a pareu, which he girded into a loincloth and tucked in, unsure whether he’d remembered the various folds and tucks demonstrated on How To Wear Your Pareu night. He regretted that his medium-sized, scrawny body was not very warrior-like, especially when he cast an envious eye over the heavily tattooed bodies of his Polynesian cohort favoured by an impressive V-matting of jet chest hair. Then reassured himself that one of the two Kiwis was short, stringy and bespectacled, though, he had to concede, the guy did look quietly confident, sincere, full of patriotic fervour. Oh, Christ! Clay sank quick gulps of white wine and vowed to compensate with demented, growly demeanour and fist-clubbing gestures.

The girls, or rather ladies, mostly over forty-fives but some a game sixty plus, filed and flowed onto the pool deck, looking for the most part unself-conscious in their variegated pareus purchased from the Transit boutique, arms delicately, gracefully extending with tender emotion as if in parting or suffering a sense of loss, one side, then the other, palms open, wavering from wrist extended like palm fronds in a gentle breeze, appealing, soft voices plaintive and haunting:

E reo, e reo o ta’u i faroo

E reo no te manava

E reo no te aroha

As the faint voices faded away on the breezes of the warm night air:

E reo, e reo o ta’u i faroo

From amongst the crew, the bare-chested musos were already stolid in position, the drummer, none other than the pony-tailed barman with drum-like torso, Tamatoa, two side drummers and two ukule players and guitarist, as the warriors strode out to the pool deck stage. Fuzzy in the head, Clay suddenly realized what it meant to be exposed in the front row with a sea of smiling, even chuckling, faces, some no doubt disbelieving this non-troppo manifestation, and in the shadows of his corner a host of passengers seated beneath the metal steps leading up to the sun deck. Facing across the pool, he put on his fiercest scowl with dropping lockjaw, readied his arms as if to brain someone and angrily plonked down his legs in half-squat pose with a beefy grunt.

When the thunderous thumping revved and the warriors struck their familiar aggressive stance, Clay was already showing his lack of practice or lack of timing or lack of militant purpose. Worse, a ritualistic dance requiring complete unison to rouse the gods to lend courage to their violent assault, revealed an alarming vulnerability on the left flank. Continually sneaking a low glance to his right to imitate or rather catch up with the sequence of movements, a vacuous smile on his shiny face, more bemused when he stomped to starboard without perceiving that fellow warriors, bawling murderous threats, all steely-eyed and grim-jawed, were pounding to port; or when amid a crescendo of horrible cursing chants as they were rolling the whites of their eyes, Clay was poking out his tongue to his scissor-leg routine that was more Chaplinesque than Maori or even Polynesian; or when they were leaping and flourishing their imaginary weapons, he was bugging out his eyes. And when finally the whole phalanx advanced a sidelong step to stare down the enemy with the most pug-ugly rictus and belly-roar of hate, Clay hopped back in line ten seconds too late to utter his solo snarl that suddenly broke into a falsetto scream as he snatched at his pareu unravelling.

Wolf whistles pierced laughter, uninhibited gales from the men, sniggers and smirks from the ladies, wide toothy white smiles from the Polynesians and a sheepish, red-faced, lop-sided grin from the ersatz-warrior himself.

Tuesday: Nuku Hiva, Ua Pou

Despairing of his conversational French, Clay would repair to the library and occasionally dip into a copy of the XIXe Lagarde et Michard. He chanced to come across the sonnet Parfum Exotique, in which Baudelaire recalls his voyage to the Indies in sensuous images. The charm of ‘l’evasion exotique’ transports him into a land of sunshine and well-being: the scents, visions and songs of an exotic culture lift his soul towards the world of dreams, where he imbibes long draughts of the wine of memory. Resonances of Gauguin, surely:

Une isle paresseuse ou la nature donne

Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux;

Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,

Et des femmes dont l’oeil par sa franchise etonne.

A poor sleeper at the best of times, Clay would wake up two or three times in the middle of the night, draw the curtains aside, trying not to scrape his kneecaps on Amandine’s bunk above for fear of disturbing her pleasant dreams and tiptoe to the toilet without brushing past the coat hangers of madame’s wardrobe clinging to every hook and handle and waking Chantal in the bunk nearest the doorway, who suffered from apnoea but who slept with earplugs, fervently assuring Clay that it wasn’t on account of his snoring but her own.

On three such nocturnal forays he was mortified to cross the mincing path of a woman in white nightgown bent on the same purpose. Scarcely daring to look at each other in the murk and certainly too embarrassed to speak, they sidled round each other and disappeared into adjacent cubicles.

For one shore visit they made a grab for the same life-jacket and both opened their mouths to laugh, but couldn’t emit, save the lady with her eyes. She was very much a loner, Clay noticed, a woman with a ghastly white make-up that gave her a haunted demeanour, a feline face highly expressive in a flicker of one eyebrow, slight nod or two as if she sensed you could read her thoughts, and a modest moue with pursed lips.

Then one evening he made for a ten-seat table at the far end of the restaurant and sat primly in the middle facing the entrance. For what seemed a very long five or eight minutes Clay sat there alone, hardly daring to look at the later arrivals passing through the doorway, trying to give the air of someone unperturbed by his increasing sense of isolation, mocking himself for the just desserts of his reserve. Even Mary-Ann or Marry Anne had cast a dubious once-over in his direction then skittered over to a gent with boiled egg for head and cauliflower ears. Beat, who had introduced the Aussie contribution to Polynesian Night and had acted the kangaroo with limp fore-paws hopping along the line of faint-hearted singers, had told him as much: ‘There are some people on board who don’t make the effort to mix.’

To which he had to bite back the rejoinder teetering on the edge of his tongue. ‘Not everyone is fortunate enough to have their partner in tow as first reserve.’

Just as he was about to transfer to another table and risk being rejected there also, a short waif with eyes lowered was walking towards him on pale spindly legs, then raising one eyebrow in that odd way of hers. He noticed the tattoo of red pustules from nono bites below the gauzy hemline.

Resisting the temptation to say with a hollow chuckle, ‘We mustn’t keep meeting like this,’ Clay nodded a firm because grateful nod. ‘Bonsoir, madame. Je suis Clay. De l’Australie.’

Without any trace of irony, as if they had never met in clandestine fashion in the catacombs of their joint home in their darkest hours, the white face flickered into animation: ‘Je m’appelle Eulalie.’

‘What a euphonious name! And where do you come from?'

‘Marseille.’ Already she was worrying at those insect bites.

’Allow me to pour you some wine. Rouge ou blanc?’

‘Rouge, merci.’

‘And what is your profession?

‘A singerrr.’

‘J’aimais Johnny Halliday.’

‘Mais oui. Johnny Alliday,’ she nodded.

‘Francoise Hardy. J’ai jete mon coeur.’

‘Mais oui.’

‘Et j’aime encore La mer de Charles Trenet et oh aussi Non, je ne regrette rien by Edith Piaf, c’est formidable,’ and found himself humming the opening defiant statement and conducting with his knife.

Suddenly the cat-whiskers of a smile was stretching across her thin lips caked with ruby lipstick and a twinkle in her watery eye. Clay bit his lip in embarrassment then noticed for the first time that the other eight seats been filled and everyone was staring at him. Throughout the canard a la prune he acted the clam.


Hi, guess what! I’m the youngest kid on the block. The average age of the boat people is all of eighty-five! Yeah! . . . Nuh, just kidding . . . More like fifty-five . . . I don’t fancy the pants off anyone here and no, I’m not begging for it . . . But there's this guy I went snorkeling with, Fried Helm . . . Dead keen on photography, sometimes flashes his underwater photies, like this humongous manta ray with undulating fins like wings . . . No, it’s harmless, so’s Fried Helm . . . Fat chance. He’d prefer to nuzzle up to a reef shark or take shots of Monument Valley or some endangered species no one else could even see! . . . No, Friedhelm’s okay, a decent pork fritz, fit as a trout and not testoed, task-oriented, I must say . . . No, he didn’t show me his sea-cucumber. The guy’s a curlie, if he’s a day. Now listen. Listen! I had a rare time in Papeete and I bought you a battery-operated boyfriend . . . No, course not . . . seriously, I got you a lovely Polynesian number . . . to wear, stupid! . . . You’ll look fanbloodytastic!


Aeneas had drummed into Skye the imperative of checking facts. There was no room for slovenliness or wilful distortion. Or a slight exaggeration about the friendliness of the locals to make an article more appealing.

Think of an angle; come up with a good lead, such as ‘The dangers of women travelling alone’. Bloody ridiculous! she scoffed

What would her readers mainly be interested in? Scenery, food, history, people, customs, cost of living, shopping, flora and fauna etc etc.

Probably the footy results back home, she thought.

If all else fails, declared Aeneas, make a list spontaneously of ten things that you have enjoyed doing. It may just work.

Wednesday: En Mer

Clay clambered out of the pool, having been swamped by a wave that swirled over the side and caught him by surprise. The water, chlorine and salt choked him, all but drowned him, and he dog-paddled frantically to the ladder a metre away in a splutter.

‘Ah, this is the life,’ sighed Jim, his open book lying at the side of the banana lounge. ‘Somerset Maugham, eat your heart out.’

Clay was dousing beneath the hose, then rubbing himself down. Is this really the life? he ponders.


Some unusual experiences on the Transit de Paradis that I have enjoyed:

I have designed and made by hand my own Polynesian outfit from natural fibres.
I have learnt to snorkel and swum with reef sharks and manta rays.
I have followed on horseback Herman Melville’s escape route from pursuing cannibals.
I have learnt to wiggle my hips more gracefully and dance the tamure.
I have witnessed the most beautiful sunset in the Marquesas Islands.
I have hooked a grouper and cooked it amongst coconut palms on Rangiroa.
I have observed an oyster inoculated with an irritant to create a black pearl.
I have eaten pork cooked on pandanus leaves in a traditional earth oven.
I have sat in the captain’s chair on one of the world’s last passenger/cargo ships.
I have plucked star fruit and mangoes fresh from the tree for a delicious snack.

Panicked into getting the assignment done, she enumerates with surprising rapidity, so relieved that she will meet her deadline. And if the editor makes suggestions for alterations, so be it. She’s bought more time. In any case her memories would remain fresh and unforgettable for at least a month. Especially the pork piece de resistance sampled at an island restaurant that arrived dry, tough and unrecognizably chewy.


On-board entertainment that evening after the poisson cru of raw red tuna and coconut milk was karaoke. At the back of the lounge, Mareva was insisting that Eulalie, who nestled deep in an armchair, should sing. Several times she refused, growing more flustered, but urged on by her compatriots, whose penchant for such entertainment clearly outshone the extroversion of other nationalities, eventually yielded.

 La mer

Qu’on voit danser

Le long des golfes claires

A des reflets d’argent

La mer

Des reflets changeants

Sous la pluie

It was an astonishing performance. She sang in an eerie, high-pitched screech, a wauling unheard of, far too shrill for Clay, who cherished the familiar mellow tones of Charles Trenet, but nonetheless felt a lump in his throat at the tears running down her haggard face. He wondered if she had led the life of a gamine like ‘the little sparrow’.

La mer

Again the verses rolled on:

Les a berces

And in wave upon wave repeated, Eulalie’s whitewashed visage trammelled with tears. Finally, she choked, shoulders trembling. Marana turned down the volume, whereupon the whole assembly gave her a thundering ovation and the odd ‘Bravo’ with sage nod or understanding gaze.

Clay was gulping back the tears himself when Mareva descended upon him with the microphone. ‘Now it’s the turn of the English speakers.’

‘No, I’d rather not,’ came the pathetic mutter, but the shrinking violet was prevailed upon by the French resistance and a Chris de Burgh song that suited his baleful mood and crackly squeak that might just about talk its way through the lyrics:

I’ve never seen you looking so lovely as you did tonight,

I’ve never seen you shine so bright . . .

Gradually, Clay found himself sliding into the emotional range of the song, which somehow triggered within a nebulous sense of yearning or giving release to some past sadness or quest for some mysterious anima or simple gratitude for this opportunity in the South Seas to glimpse the Land of Cockayne. Whatever the melding of sentiments, his inhibited voice gained a measure of fluency, a modulation of deeper feeling.

I never will forget the way you look tonight

The lady in red, my lady in red

My lady in red, my lady in red

I love you

Again, the applause seemed heartfelt. Even so, Clay was a blubber of mush, unable to stir, exhausted but somehow cleansed, head bowed, his fixed gaze lost in a blur of tired red carpet.

Thursday: Rangiroa

At last, Rangiroa, one of the highlights of the cruise, and again the bustle of several groupings and camera-clickers eager to lay claim to the biggest reef in the Tuamotus, named for ‘long sky.’ Over seventy kilometres in length, consisting of seven motus, and twenty-six kilometres wide.

They can just make out the long, low grey smudge of line, the pencil-thin gleam of sand, a pallid yellow, almost white. Occasional combers. Thick clumps of palm trees stretch across the horizon like tufts of grass. The rising sun scintillates the wake of the Transit de Paradis with a scatter of sparklers.

In calmer waters now. Little sign of habitation. A single-decker bus or Le Truck beetling along the shore road, a smatter of gleaming white-roofed houses and thatched brown roofs like traditional Japanese hats. Not a boat in sight, but closer, and two specks of fishing boats drifting towards the pass. Where suddenly someone in a crow’s-nest yells, ‘Dolphins!’ and the chorus of ‘Oohs’ and ‘Get yourself over here, Jim, pronto! Jimbo!’ and ‘Did you get it, Chretien?’ and ‘Jetzt los, Friedhelm!’ and a scuffle to the starboard rail to witness their welcome and escort, frolicking grey humps, sometimes three leaping in unison, then closer to the Transit’s hull zillions of flying fish, mere sharpened pencils from this height, skimming away like torpedoes to avoid breakfast, pursued by the yellow bills of dive-bombing crested terns.

The supposed strip of sand close by the entrance to Tiputa Pass clarifies as sea-wall.

The yellow arm of the crane swings out to starboard with the first whaler of three helmeted crew on board being lowered to assist the pearl seekers to disembark. The second group will beach before a coconut grove on gravel-like dead coral and cranky tree roots.

Drifting in intimate scrum over the coral gardens, glass-bottom boats offered an extravaganza: butterfly, angel, parrot, damsel were just a few of the multi-coloured fish, striped, marbled, barred, electric, darting in and about the reef ledges. Most memorable were the rainbow parrot, the yellow-tailed butterfly with black mask and the Emperor angel with alternating stripes of yellow and purplish blue.

‘C’etait tres belle,’ Clay said to Nohoarii, their guide who had been very reserved, almost sullen, in his terse commentary, to lift his spirits as he stepped ashore. ‘Il me semble que le changement de climat n’est pas encore trop de probleme ici.’

For an awkward few seconds Nohoarii studied the Australian in the ridiculous floppy, lop-sided sunhat that sat deflated on his head and whose soft rim covered his forehead down to the ogling shades from beneath his beetle brows. ‘Vous etrangers, vous ne comprenez rien,’ he muttered.

‘Que voulez-vous dire?’

‘You, les privilegies, you visit our islands and demand more hotels with hot showers and mosquito nets, more big croissieres, cruisers, runways, you even push for an aeroport international. Ca, c’est absurde, une idée impossible. Our eco-systeme is so delicate. What is going to happen to our traditional way of life?’

‘But tourism gives you a better living, surely.’

‘For some, peut-etre. But the truc . . . the trick is, more tourists means death to the old ways, and it’s these old ways the tourists want to see. The change of climate has already caused many problems for the Tuamotu people.’

‘What sort of problems?’

‘Do you know that the temperature in the lagoon rose suddenly near four degrees in 1998 and in a few months much reef was dead?’

'Hmm, I do remember now something about the effect of El Nino.’

‘Oui, exactement. This caused a lack of crevettes . . . little shrimps . . . ‘

‘Plankton?’

‘ . . . so the young fishes of the reef had no food. Today we see that the number of adult fishes is very small.’

‘Yes, I understand. I’m very sorry to hear this.’

‘But what are you doing here? You do nothing to help us, nothing. You collect data, yes, but nothing changes. Yet you come here to live comme les grands seigneurs, so you can forget the contamination you have caused in your own countries.’

Ten minutes later, having meandered awkwardly between stacks of dead grey coral to a stretch of white sand and pellucid warm water, Clay was rolling over on his back, utterly glum, floating like a corpse of cork, with nary a twitch of a stroke. It was some time before his reverie was broken by a frigate circling down to attack a flock of terns, realising all of a sudden how buoyant the water was and how thundering difficult it was to get his old sneakers back down onto the sand.

Friday: Papeete

Having eaten of the lotus every day, the touring party bade their farewells over breakfast or hugs and kisses in the reception area or even promises to write down on the wharf, awaiting luggage or transfers. Half a dozen men were cradling their new hand-crafted ukulele.

Marana, touting for business, still trying to sell his group’s CD of Polynesian music – mainly traditional, some surfer-cool, fast ukulele riffs and exorbitant drumming -successfully button-holed Clay to make up numbers for his round-the-island tour.

Led by Marana, the five passengers were walking into a narrow valley, completely deserted and peaceful, the Arahurah Marae, an ancient temple erected on a black stone platform in a beautiful well kempt garden among pandanus trees. Marana pointed out two totems painted red that represented royal warriors, a path of burning stones which young men nerved themselves to walk over to illustrate their strength of mind, and the area where the skulls were displayed to boast the victors’ power.

‘Now you westerners,’ he was saying, ‘want to make too much out of cannibalism. You should know that the winners did not eat the whole body of the losers, but just a very small piece, enough so that the mana or spirit of the fallen warrior was passed onto the winner. Of course, sacrifices were made. Here you see stone pens for pigs to be sacrificed to the gods. Sometimes humans and prisoners.’

‘Was the religion similar to what we used to have in Hawaii?’ croaked the elderly American.

‘Very similar,’ replied Marana. ‘Priests would pray for the gods to descend and reside in carved tikis.’ He paused, his demeanour uncharacteristically solemn. ‘In Polynesia we don’t write too much down about culture or religion, but we do speak with genuine feeling and gesture. Our words are sacred, our breath is sacred. Ideas about religion we release only a bit at a time, keeping it among ourselves.’

At Marlon Brando’s ‘swimming pool’ at Faone, just beyond the Orange Valley and the white-sanded beaches of the Sea of Moon, the sight of Marana suddenly stripping down unabashed to his under-daks left them all startled, as he tentatively walked into the torrents of water crashing down ice-cold from the mountains upon his head, then standing resolutely long-jawed, presumably to prove his indomitable strength of mind, staring back dead-pan at the five tourists munching on star fruit they’d just plucked and watching out for his next trick in amused disbelief.

It was in rural Mataiea that Gauguin found a measure of peace. He shares his hut with a new ‘wife’, ‘a child of about thirteen’:

Tehamana yields herself daily more and more, docile and loving; the Tahitian noa noa pervades the whole of me; I am no longer conscious of the days and the hours, of Evil and Good – all is beautiful – all is well.  Journal, 1893

Gauguin already knew that the paradise of ‘the noble savage’ and his supposed innocence had long since disappeared; more significantly, the artist had overcome his huge disappointment and discovered the tropical paradise within his own imagination.

Clay had resolved from the outset to forgo the slap-up feed at the lagoon-side restaurant.

‘You should eat with us,’ Marana almost pleading. ‘It is major part of our Polynesian life-style to share big feast with our friends.’

‘I’m sorry, Marana, but I plan to clap eyes on at least one Gauguin original. This is my last chance. Ever.’

‘But we cannot enjoy all this lovely food if you don’t share it with us. Come, there is plenty of room, we can enjoy the best dishes on the island and we have our own beautiful white sand beach to look over.’

‘Sit down, man,’ the American practically whispered. ‘Just take it easy!’

Impatient to be off but trembling, Clay walked out of the restaurant with a determined, ‘I’m very sorry. I really must go.’ But when he reached the entrance to the Musee Gauguin, he saw the notice: ‘Closed for renovation.’

Bitterly disappointed and increasingly embarrassed, he walked around the building and along by the river, then back through the botanic gardens to wear off his ill-humour, scarcely noticing among the variety of trees, the palms and chestnuts, the astonishing palette of orchids, oblivious to what the Persians would have called a paradise garden. Instead, his thoughts were buried in a pond of water lilies.

Is this the life? he asked himself again. As much as I’ve immersed myself in the Marquesas with all those indelible images and feel refreshed by this . . . time-out or escape? I know I couldn’t live in one of their villages for long, however charming and peaceful. I’d crave more brain food, otherwise I’d get bored witless. At the same time I need some bolt-hole in my imagination to retreat to, some hint that one day things could be happier, even if that’s a self-deceptive trick to keep hoping. They probably won’t get better in an Aristotelian sense, because even the word ‘virtue’ has been mocked out of currency. Moral codes seem devoutly adhered to only by rigidly fanatical sects.

What we enjoyed on the Transit de Paradis, some might call the good life. Okay, for an annual holiday it’s a fantastic experience, but from another perspective it’s pure drooling decadence. Yes, I still feel twinges of guilt, not just about jetting off and leaving the family, but about not being of much service to anyone. And how many people dropped dead from starvation while I’m consuming my marlin steak? Thousands!

As a student I was never taught to equate the good life with amassing wealth or material things, as Jean-Claude reckoned was becoming the norm in Tahiti. Yet if at the same time he’s right about the increasing incidence of drug abuse and domestic violence, then the materialist quest is cannibalistic, utterly immoral. By contrast, the Marquesans still appear to prefer the traditional ways and a fairly simple lifestyle. Yet even on the islands, several households boast ownership of three vehicles per capita. So is the answer to strike a balance between the spiritual and material? Perhaps for some Marquesans. But where does that position me?

Admittedly, Epicurus taught that the only good in life is pleasure but he did concede that not all pleasures are good. In any case I don’t experience real pleasure much, or happiness for that matter. Rather, contentment is a more apt descriptor of my best states, an inner peace. Fess up, Clay, you’re just emotionally repressed! No, wait a mo! Happiness is fleeting, transitory, right? I do frame many scenes from the past with a golden glow. Mere nostalgia? Or does one’s own perception of past events change according to one’s mood of the moment?

Look, are we entitled to pursue happiness? Yes, according to the American Constitution. But surely striving for happiness per se seldom leads to lasting pleasures; more likely it leads only to the frustration of desire. Isn’t that something like Buddhists believe? It may also demote the importance of a range of other deep emotions which serve to define our humanity, valid though possibly painful, which many refuse to own up to. I understand Gauguin’s desperate desire to withdraw from the splurge of western materialism, but I have neither the courage nor self-belief to do so, nor, most important, the talent or spiritual anchorage to hold me steadfast. What work could I do to sustain myself? Conduct interviews in Polynesian villages? For what purpose? The preservation of traditional culture is already being reclaimed by trained anthropologists. The restoration of tiki? I’m not the physical or practical outdoors type.

O god, perhaps in this life I haven’t used my intelligence actively. Or wisely.

For half a century, Clay concluded, he’d lived the not-so-good life.

Marana greeted him warmly when, head hung in shame, he dawdled back into the restaurant, pretending to look at the ocean through the windows. ‘Come and join us, Clay, and help us finish all this food. In Polynesia we never like to leave an empty plate.’ As if to demonstrate, he forked up some French fries and handed the rest of the king prawns to his bulbous driver, who was cracking, scooping and swallowing like a conveyor belt.

‘Sit down, man,’ mumbled the American. ‘Try to be an ambassador.’

‘No, really.’ At last Clay confronted his dilemma:  traitor or hypocrite?

Gradually his mood lifted with the ascent of the four-wheel drive up along the narrow, winding road to the Taravao Plateau, the scenery suddenly transformed from bush to rolling European farmland lush and unspoilt, with fields of cows and horses and a sweeping vista over plunging cliffs to both coastlines of Tahiti Nui.

Clay was keen to see where Captain Cook had observed the transit of Venus, as they drove onto the low sandy peninsula covered with ironwood, the northernmost point of Tahiti. Captains Wallis, Cook and Bligh had all landed ashore on the neck of this very beach after anchoring their ships beyond the reef in Matavai Bay.

With spurts of indignation, Marana described another massacre of his people. When Captain Samuel Wallis’ warped into Matavai Bay in 1767, one quarter of his crew was ill with scurvy, including himself. From their canoes, the Tahitians hurled stones at the Dolphin, which returned favour with cannon fire. Two days later the locals launched an attack on both the vessel and the watering party ashore. Wallis trained the guns first on the canoes, then the retreating warriors on the hill, massing there with women and children under a hail of grapeshot. Wallis sent a party ashore to destroy homes and canoes, before the Tahitians sued for peace. In the terms of the trade agreement, young women were offered who, in the words of the captain, ‘played a great many droll wanton tricks’.

‘When the Protestant missionaries landed at Point Venus in 1797,’ continued Marana, ‘they were shocked by my people’s customs. They stopped our dancing, our songs about love, said no-no to our tattoos, our naked bodies, our habit of making love to different partners, even wearing flowers in our hair. These were all tabu. And our tradition of accepting boys to be brought up living life as females, mahus, was regarded as an ‘unnatural crime’.  So,' he said through gritted teeth, 'those missionaries gave us the sense of sin and Mother Hubbard.

‘Also whalers and traders followed the missionaries. They spread diseases that we Polynesians could not resist. Their arrival led to a taste for alcohol and more weapons and prostitution.’ He paused, his stern, wide-set eyes ranging over all five tourists, finally boring in on Clay. ‘Free love is a myth in Tahiti today. So take care, eh? And remember: most prostitutes, even the most beautiful, are disguised transvestites.’

Clay picked up a wodge of fine black sand still warm to the touch, suddenly flung it spilling out to sea, before turning slowly to mosey back through the tree-shaded park to the tall, white lighthouse.

‘Cook estimated the population of Tahiti to be forty thousand,’ said Marana. ‘By the 1820s it had fallen to six thousand. So you see why many Polynesians hate Captain Cook! Not just those who are pushing for independence.’

Returning through traffic-snarled Papeete to deposit passengers, they drove along Rue Paul Gauguin. Mainly a nondescript commercial street, the fidgety, eager-eyed Clay concluded. The great painter would have loathed it.

Back in his stop-over room at the Sofitel, Clay turned to face the bathroom mirror. The stare was reflective, sliding into dejected. Abruptly, the end of his trip had sheeted home. Hardening his features, he puckered his nose and shunted out deep, breathy pig grunts, then rolled his head in an exaggerated sweep and toss like a savage beast scenting those bloody-minded human hunters. And snuffled. He could almost smell methane.


Skye was bent on having an early evening as her flight back to Melbourne via Auckland departed at eight o’clock, requiring her to be at Faa’a by five-thirty, which meant getting up at four.

Conveniently situated near the Fare Terirooterai, her guest house up the hill on Rue Venus, was the Italian restaurant set in a grove of trees on Boulevard Pomare across from the waterfront. The only Italian couple on the cruise had invited her to join them. Caught in two minds, remembering Aeneas’ injunction to own a sense of adventure and not dine at a posh hotel, she reluctantly gave in, not wishing to let go the Transit experience completely. Having enjoyed her course of veal in Marsala wine and a coffee and feeling mellow but a little saddened, if not disorientated, she was strolling in the warm night air amid distant carnival singing and monotonous drumming toward the Jardin Paofai with its thatch-roof buildings and then on to Tohua Toata, the popular gathering place for families at inexpensive snack bars for a final circuit.

Suddenly, she felt an arm on her left elbow, a physical presence and warm breath on her cheek, another man up close on her right side.

‘You want to have a good time? We teach you to dance the tamure at the amphitheatre,’ said the tall one, with a dark patch, a tattoo, beneath his ear, giving a sudden gyration of hips that caused Skye to quick-step away in alarm, drawing their chuckles.

‘No thanks,’ she frowned. ‘I just want to be left alone.’

‘We have some pot,’ the tall one said, as if that explained everything.

‘Very good pot,’ said the other with tush-teeth and the charm of a feral goat.

‘I’m not interested.’

‘Fresh from the hills above Puna’avia. We know very nice beach next to the pirogues. Just over there. You know our famous racing canoes? It’s number one sport in Tahiti.’

‘Mako is famous canoe star. If you like, he can give you ride in his canoe’

‘I don’t like. I’m flying home early tomorrow, so goodbye.’

‘No, no, please,’ Mako persisted. ‘You come with us. We give you good time.’

‘Piss off!’

‘Where you from?’

‘Bugger off or I’ll call the gendarmes!’

Skye felt a prod in the back, then a hefty shoulder barging her towards a picnic shelter.

‘Get your filthy hands off!’ she screamed.  Kicking out like a savage, she brought a knee hard up in the sleazebag’s coconuts.  'Yeah, go flog yourself!'

Sunday:  parahi, Faa’a

The sign at the entrance to the airport caught his eye:  Bienvenue au Paradis Tahiti. Clay felt an instant pang of regret. Yet when he met up with half a dozen of his Aussie crew seated in the same row of seats, chatting away like old buddies, he could only nod and smile at their ‘How’s it goin’, Clay?’ and ‘Back to reality, eh, mate?’ he kept walking to a seat behind a pillar. So he hadn’t re-invented himself. There was no island scene tattooed on his back with surf break, palm tree and reef shark. Or tiki emblazoned on his forehead. Nor was he eager to rejoin his wife, who no doubt would still insist that going to her pump and spin classes was strictly her own down time. But in spite of occasionally making a fool of himself, being socially gauche and timid with some residual anxiety, why yes, in his own way he had in effect been quite happy without even realizing.

Skye was sitting alone, chewing gum, impatient to board. She wouldn’t cry on about it. No harm done. Maybe her pride, self-respect or something. At least she’d given whatshisface, that Mako creep, the order of the boot. Too many night owls, thank god. Could’ve done with a joint, though. Monday morning, first thing, she’d go into Financial Solutions, try to wangle her old job back. Stick it for a bit, then stick it up ‘em. They owed her.

                                                                                                                                              Michael Small
June 2-August 8, 2011