A Bird on My Shoulder (2 page)

Turning the pod over, I see its shadow side. Dark stains of brackish water have pooled along its wavering ridge; it is damaged, blemished, altered from innocence.

In these years I too have come to know my own darkness. For a long time my inner world became like furniture in an abandoned home, covered in dusty, grey sheets. There were times when I no longer had any certainty that the day would come
or the night would follow, and nor did I care. I wondered how I would ever survive, care for our children, or find a moment's happiness again.

One of the dominant emotions I've wrestled with has been guilt that the children no longer had a father. Like all guilt it has an irrational component; I know I did everything within my power to save Julian's life and to prolong it – as did he. But the regret remains.

The fact that Julian was so much older than me had never been an issue between us when we were together; after he died it haunted me.

‘How old was he?' was often the first question that strangers would ask.

‘He was sixty-three,' I'd reply. I could see them making a quick mental calculation.
Oh, but you're so much younger. Interesting.

‘Oh, well, he'd had a good life then,' they would say with a hastily processed smile.

Yes, Julian had had an amazing life and no doubt people said such things to be consoling, or to assuage their own unspoken fears. But whatever his age, he was still the soul mate I had lost, the man I ached for. And surely the more salient point was that seven precious children were now without a father.

•••

The clock ticks steadily, punctuating my thoughts. Without my even noticing, the hands have moved past the hour. I sigh with relief – the tenth anniversary has come and gone. There has been no trauma, no tears.

Next to my bedside lamp is a photograph of Julian with his arm around my shoulder, the warm glow of a late-summer afternoon falling on our faces.

I look more closely at the image and try to conjure the wider remembrances of that day, of that life so long ago, but memories can be fickle. Over the years I have collected an amalgam of truths, of impressions, more like the colourful strokes of an urgent brush; sensory fragments, all distorted by time.

Sometimes the recollections are more acute, but often as I strain to preserve the thought and hold it up to the light, the moment dissolves. So many good memories became all but obliterated when Julian died; perhaps the only way is to try to paint the past with my imperfect words.

I settle back in bed with a clean pad of paper resting on my lap. It is time to be with him. I begin to write, edging quietly towards the familiar stillness of the night, overwhelmed by all I want to remember and everything I would rather forget.

2

Once upon a time I surrendered to love; my heart

opened as the warm night enclosed me. I was young,

willing to be shaken, to bear with fresh, open eyes

all the truths that would, in time, unfold.

It was 13 March 1995. I was lying on my bed under a creaking ceiling fan in my Port Moresby home, pale and weary from a mysterious stomach bug and trying to think of a way to get out of the evening's party.

‘We have to go,' said my friend Ros Nougher, cranking open the rusting louvred windows.

I had first met Ros in Sydney six years earlier, after I had arrived from the UK and found my first job at Australian Associated Press. She took me on as a personal project and introduced me to everyone she knew; within months I had become part of her extended community.

I sat up. ‘Do we really?'

Ros held out a packet of painkillers, smiling at me. ‘Yes, we do. I've only got two more days here. And you've got to go – it's your job.'

I sighed and took the tablets from her hand.

‘Anyway, you never know who you might meet,' she said, raising her eyebrows.

‘I've already told you,' I shot back. ‘Not interested.'

•••

I had come to Papua New Guinea because of an inexplicable obsession that began when I was thirteen. It was 1976 – the year after the fledgling South Pacific democracy had gained independence from Australia – and I was sitting almost 20,000 kilometres away, with my back against a hot radiator, idly leafing through an encyclopaedia in my local library in Kidderminster, England. I loved going to the library. It had an appealing musty smell and carved mahogany balustrades and, in every corner, wrought-iron spiral staircases leading to a mezzanine level.

Papua New Guinea
. The description was brief and the photograph was grainy but it was enough: remote villages in tropical forests, men and women adorned in ceremonial feathered wigs, furs and grass skirts. It appeared a more natural world, free of manufactured ugliness, a world as far away from my own reality – an industrial town in middle England in the mid-1970s – as I could imagine.

I was captivated by the idea of another life, in a world with a long, uninterrupted vista of the past. We had our own history, of course: so much of it. I caught the bus to high school from Chester Road, still as straight and purposeful as the Romans had intended. From our house I looked across long-established fields where the vast course of English history, from Viking invasions to medieval life, from despotic kings to the Industrial Revolution, had played out over centuries of turmoil and change.

Perhaps it was the sense of a less fragmented, more traditional society which appealed so deeply to me. Perhaps it was the lure of an island paradise. I really cannot explain it. I only know that PNG became the place I most wanted to live. If, as Graham Greene said, there is ‘always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in', then this was surely that moment for me.

Shortly after I arrived home that day to our small two-bedroom house on the outskirts of town, I announced to my parents that I would be going to live in PNG one day.

‘Mmm, excellent,' my father said from behind
The Guardian
.

•••

After a disastrous first attempt at passing my university entrance exams, in 1982 I finally won a place at the Polytechnic of Central London to study what was then one of the very few degrees in television and radio journalism in the UK.

My older sister Libby, who was also studying in London, rang me one day to say she'd heard that the Commonwealth Institute had invited groups of dancers from the South Pacific to perform at a festival in Kensington. ‘There's a group from Papua New Guinea,' she told me. I decided to make a radio documentary about them as part of my degree.

In a vast marquee in the centre of London, I found a group of dancers wearing grass skirts, bird of paradise headdresses, leaves, red-and-white-painted faces and gleaming body oil.

I introduced myself to a young woman standing near the door in all her finery and asked if I could interview her. We stood in the gloomy sunshine, away from the bustle of the tent. The tape started rolling.

‘My name is Susannah Wamp and I come from Mount Hagen in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea.' Susannah spoke softly with a quiet reserve, but her English was good and she was thoughtful, warm and engaging. We spent some time talking about her life, her impressions of England and the meaning of the dance she was taking part in –
tainim het
(turning head), a courtship dance.

I discovered Susannah had not yet seen much of the city or the surrounding countryside, so after our interview I invited her to come out with Libby and me the following Sunday.

When we arrived at her hotel she was standing nervously
at the main entrance with her friend Josephine. ‘I am happy to see you,' she said.

As we drove out of London, Susannah was glued to the window. We passed a large hanging sign with the words
Sunnyside Kennels
written on it and a picture of a large black dog. ‘What is that?' she asked.

I thought for a moment about how to explain. “It's like a hotel for dogs,” I began. “People go away and they pay someone to put their dog in a house and look after them.”

‘People do this?' she asked. She explained that in her culture, dogs were simply part of tribal life and survived by scavenging; in a subsistence lifestyle which was dependent on the seasons for a good crop, people always came first.

After lunch in a pub just outside London, we headed back home. Pulling up at some traffic lights, Susannah noticed another painting of a large fluffy dog, this time in a shop window below the sign
Dandy Dog
. She laughed softly. ‘Another hotel?' she asked.

‘No,' I said slowly, my embarrassment rising. ‘Actually, that is a hairdresser for dogs. People take their dogs there to be washed and have their hair and nails cut.'

The car filled with hysterical laughter.

Spending time with Susannah and Josephine was the first opportunity I'd ever had to shine a spotlight on my own culture. I found myself trying to explain, with enormous difficulty, why
we put old people into nursing homes rather than care for them, or why people begged on the streets when, as Susannah put it after seeing a dishevelled homeless man pushing his belongings in a supermarket trolley across Sloane Square, ‘There are so many rich people here; could they not give him some food?'

A few days later, before they were due to leave, I invited Susannah and Josephine back to my flat for what I told them was a traditional English summer tea: fresh strawberries drowning in clotted cream. Despite the obvious cultural differences, I felt Susannah and I were kindred souls and I sensed she did too. Every few months a battered airmail letter would arrive from Wilya village on the outskirts of Mount Hagen, reigniting my passion to visit her one day and fulfil a long-held dream.

•••

My eventual arrival in Papua New Guinea many years later had all the hallmarks of fate. In 1988, at the age of twenty-five, weary after two years as a financial journalist in London, I decided to go to Australia based on the flimsy advice from a member of staff at Oxfam who I had phoned about a voluntary job in Mount Hagen.

‘To be honest, you're a bit young,' I was told. ‘And the fact that you're a woman might be a problem. If you really want to go to PNG, I'd say your best bet would be to get a job in Australia and work on it from there.'

I had wanted to travel for a while, as I had never taken a gap year, so I sold everything I owned and, with a mixed sense of fear and exhilaration, got on a plane.

After a few weeks of knocking on doors in Sydney, I was offered a job with AAP, which also happened to have an office in Port Moresby. But it seemed unlikely they would ever send me – the foreign postings were reserved as a reward for journalists who had stayed with the company for years, something I could never imagine myself doing. Four years later – having completed two long walks in the desert – I decided I could not live in the city anymore; I needed a new adventure. When I told the editor-in-chief that I was resigning, he suggested that instead I should go to PNG to fill in while the incumbent correspondent was on extended leave over the Christmas holidays.

I remember so clearly my anticipation growing as a thin green strip of land appeared in the distance on a hazy horizon. As I pressed my face against the aircraft window, I could feel years of inexplicable longing welling up inside me, tears coursing down my cheeks. The excitement was compounded when, on arrival, I learned the PNG correspondent had just resigned; applications for the permanent position were now open.

Within days I was smitten by the dishevelled city and its chaotic energy, the spontaneous friendly smiles and open affection. I worked like a demon, even writing stories on Christmas Day in my effort to impress. The support for my presence from
my Papua New Guinean colleagues was overwhelming – they warmed to me instantly and I to them. They helped me to learn the ropes and even wrote to my editor in support of my application to stay in PNG.

A month later, by some extraordinary miracle – which probably also had something to do with the fact that hardly anyone else had applied – I was offered the posting.

After briefly returning to Sydney to pack, I stepped off the plane for the second time into a wall of blasting heat and I knew, with absolute certainty, that everything I ever wanted would be somehow found in this most unlikely and seemingly difficult country. Not even the prospect of living by myself in one of the world's most dangerous cities had, even for a moment, dimmed the bright star of this longstanding passion.

By the time Ros came to visit, I had been working as a foreign correspondent in Papua New Guinea for AAP for more than a year. Every day was a new adventure as I was increasingly drawn into the layers of another, fascinating world, an ancient, complex culture full of contradictions, impossible to categorise.

I gave little real thought to my wider future; I was thirty-one, I loved my job and, while I had not given up hope of meeting someone who I could build a life with, I was philosophical about its likelihood.

Privately, of course, I dreamed of a lifelong, loving union. I became a little defensive when asked to explain, particularly
by my mother back in England, why I had not settled down yet. I had sent her a postcard earlier that year, a cartoon of a young woman looking nonplussed while her mother hovers in the background.

‘Dear, the whole family wants to know why you're not married yet,' the mother is saying. The younger woman is rolling her eyes. ‘Tell them,' she replies, ‘. . . tell them I forgot.'

I certainly did not imagine for a moment, as Ros and I got dressed for the party, that I would soon find my future husband. In the drugged air of that ordinary tropical night, a whole new life was stirring.

3

I want to carve a bright new world, a world that

springs from nowhere like the farthest aching star.

We drove out slowly through the electric gates, serenaded by the howls of local security dogs. The house, which had an office downstairs, was surrounded by razor-wire fences, mercifully camouflaged by huge swathes of flowering bougainvillea. The company's loyal but ageing housekeeper, Geri, was carrying a long-handled machete as he scanned the darkness. Even though he performed the role of night security guard with gusto, I often wondered what he would do if anything serious should ever happen.