Coconut Wireless

by Nicola Baird

  Lovelyn gulps, she really doesn't know how Henderson is still such an innocent. Surely people use bush magic in the bush? Or has it become some strange town chemical used as widely as the mist that kills the mosquito larvae?

  So she says what cousin-sister's always say. "Look, there's my bus, will you sponsor me?" And Henderson searches his pocket and gives her the few coins not wasted at the G-Klub. He, and another 20 people, flag down the bus - but Lovelyn is lucky, it's their bus boy's bus and naturally he offers her the best seat, in fact the only seat - which is at the front, next to the driver. "See you later, Henderson," she shouts and then is gone; 19 people gnash their teeth, they want to get home, out of this heat, eat and forget that the Solomons has lost the Oceania Cup again.

  At last Henderson can cross the road into the peaceful hospital complex. He avoids the out patients bloc (frightened of those nurses) instead crossing the green lawns, past the mural in praise of breast feeding towards Stella's room. Peeks in through the mosquito screen and to his horror sees the bed is empty. He blinks. This can't be true. She can't have gone. She's really shamed him now, he wanted her and she's just upped and gone. And then he feels a small hand slotting into his hand. He looks down, it's a tiny girl, maybe four or five years old. She has her thumb in her mouth and clearly doesn't plan to speak. But she tugs at his hand and leads him off to another prefab building. This is the public ward - and in it is a bed where Stella is resting.

  The little girl runs to the bed, and resumes her position by Stella's head. Stella wakes up. Sees Henderson eyeing her curiously.

  "Are you feeling better now?" he asks.

  "I'm glad you're here - I thought you'd runaway from me," Stella speaks slowly, smiles slower, gently returning to the world, still feeling the aches where the MP laid into her.

  "And who's this?" asks Henderson gesturing towards the little girl.

  "This is my daughter. Ellen say hello to your… “ She looks at the young man shyly, standing close to her bed in his jeans and vest, “your new uncle."

  A Japanese nurse, wheeling a metal trolley, enters with incomprehensible news for the patients just as the step-daughter-to-be and the father-to-be shake hello hands formally above the wife-to-be's bed.

  "Yes, yes, flied lice tonight. You like it oloketa?" the nurse, black hair in a tight bun, flat black shoes, is determinedly upbeat. Whatever it is on this trolley, it is not something she would wish to eat. "Nice flied lice!" As one, the ward shakes its collective head: thinks longingly of home food, real food.

  "Stella, this is news," states Henderson trying hard not to feel confused. He wonders what more to say and then opts for gift-giving. "Kaikai for you both," says Henderson passes over the banana leaf parcel which Ellen swoops at with ravenous delight. She looks like she hasn't eaten since history began.

  "Oh, Henderson. I'm sorry to surprise you like this, you know giving you such a big daughter. Can you handle this?" Henderson nods, feels a few inches taller in fact; feels like he loves Stella - hasn't even hugged her, or kissed and still feels this love - and already he has a child!

  "It's good, this ... immaculate conception," laughs Henderson giving Ellen a rather false, but affectionate grin.

  Stella smiles too, but it is a tense flash of teeth. She needs to get away from her useless husband, and it’s going fine so far. She just hopes Henderson is going to be equally happy about the child already kicking at her belly.

  ***

  SENT REGISTERED POST

  November 1990

  I don’t know you, or like you, Suzy, but this is a difficult letter to write. Here goes. Please stop sending your sexually-frustrated, homesick rambles to Dan. Dan and I have been going out for 4 months now and I think it is time you gave up treating him as your lover back home. If he receives more letters like this from you be sure that I’ll tear them up.

  Yours sincerely, Cassie

  CHAPTER 12: THE HONORARY MRS

  When Suzy’s students found out she’d never been to a football match before they were shocked. Here was a woman who had travelled the world, owned a car, had completed school, got a university degree, and wasn’t ruled by family eyes and ties – but wasted her freedom by avoiding live soccer. At register in the run up to the Oceania cup they teased her about the big Solomon games, said the home team fans were so scary that if she dared go she’d become the Late Mrs Trevillion…

  Teaching at King George VI (or KG6 as everyone called the secondary school) was going well, although the first few months with Mrs Trevillion had been tough for everyone. Especially Mrs Suzy Trevillion. Those first days she looked at the curriculum she despaired, aware that her classes might be able to add, subtract, divide and recite the appropriate complex formulae exam boards demand, but there was no teaching time to help students learn the sort of financial literacy needed for life. She wanted her students to find it as normal calculating, questioning and challenging estimates for little jobs as pointing flaws out within the world’s complex economic systems. She’d hoped the students would become excited by another way of looking at a maths problem. Mrs Trevillion wanted them to enjoy guessing the answer then showing off their calculations but found they struggled against informal methods of maths learning whenever she got them to snap shut the tatty books (1970s primers bought back in 1980). There was nothing to stop them getting her modernist approach, all clever boys and girls with parents who expected their progeny to find a job with a good salary they could share amongst the wantoks. In 15 years time some would be at UN meetings, run the central bank, be policy-setting MPs - certainly taking on roles that a middle class Londoner might envy. But their learning habits were already set by a schooltime of drill, rote and recall learning. After setting a challenge about whether you could put a price on a landscape, or how much a dolphin caught in Solomon waters should cost a Mexican hotel chain, Lovelyn, one of the least shy girls in Form 5b (rarely around thanks to her repeated, unexplained absences) put it: “Us students don’t want to think in school, we just want to do what you tell us.”

  On the plus side Suzy’s students were incredibly well-behaved. Lessons started at 8.15am after a hard work churchy assembly of prayers and Bible readings in the cool, open-sided chapel the students spit into formal teaching sets scattered around a campus of airless, boiling PortaCabins. As well as being too hot, most students were ravenous for most of their school life, especially the ones coming in to the school from out of town who relied on lifts in passing copra lorries – they’d perch on the sacks or sit unsafely on the sides of the open-backed trucks. No health and safety official would have allowed it, but the islanders innate good luck seemed to ensure far fewer tumbled out on to the road than annual guesstimates would suggest should.

  Some boarded at the school, and even the day pupils could eat lunch there, indeed each week a Form 4 class was cancelled so the students took their turns growing, cooking and serving dinner for 300. But when Suzy tried to use this in a practical set of Q&As her form room came to a pencils down stop unsure about the relevance of how many people 10 kilos of sweet potato can feed. “Mrs Trevillion we know the answer. It feeds everyone?”

  Bafflingly in the Solomons it did – or at least so Suzy found out after her week in the village. Here was a place where good lives were measured by generosity. Good meals by the quantity you could consume. Anything leftover could be shared out, building up community glue – or fed to the pigs seeing as they’d be a fatter treat when the next feast took place.

  Suzy found she had to learn the old “custom” ways, and educate her students for the new. Living in Honiara wasn’t as simple as a village life of bells and a day spent gardening or fishing while the kids played naked on the sea shore. Those things were happening, but good times also needed seleni. And so did she if ever she took a stroll out of her house to meet up with friends.

  Even if today’s big game at Lawson Tama stadium was free, Suzy didn’t plan to expose her footie ignorance in a crowd of 10,000. So she headed to the Yacht Club, figu
ring the game would be live on a screen, forgetting Solomon Islands has no TV. The games she remembered flickering on a TV close up to the long wooden bar were matches recorded on to videos overseas, then airmailed in from wantoks and friends.

  Dr Maylinda, holding a prescription lense mask, is waiting in the shade of the Yacht Club’s frangipani trees for her dive buddy to go chasing turtles and lion fish on the rusty Japanese hulk sunk in World War 2. Over the years the wreck had turned into a reef, or at any rate a protective nursery for fish. As the bow is partially out of the water, and the rest sits no more than 30 metres down, all just a few strokes from a white sand beach innumerable Western magazines have voted Bonegi 2 the best dive site in the world… Yet even so close to town it was rare not to have the place to yourself as Suzy knew from snorkelling over it and then trying to hitch a lift home.

  “Hi Suzy! Are you feeling better after your brush with malaria? It’s horrible having malaria fevers in this heat isn’t it,” said her friend happy to talk about her professional obsession. “Until you’ve seen what it can do it’s hard to believe malaria’s degenerative power. Anyway you’ve had a proper Solomon insect induction so I’m sure it will help you get into some better habits. Like no drinking on verandas at dusk. Shut screens. Wear long sleeved clothing with trousers to stop the female anopholese mosquito biting you. Use a treated bed net. Keep climbers off your house…” lists Maylinda with a smile, knowing her advice may be good, but even Doctors have trouble keeping the rules.

  “When I first came here I thought taking my malaria pill was the highlight of my week,” admits Suzy pleased to meet another football refugee.

  “I think you must mean anti-malarial…”

  “Yes exactly. But I was feeling depressed, that’s not me, so figured it was the mozzie drugs. As you probably guessed when you heard I’d been to the malaria clinic I rather gave up taking them. I just didn’t want to do two years of white pills. What do people do who live here?”

  Maylinda laughs again, this time as bitterly as chloroquine tastes. She knows that 1,000s of people are killed each year, spleens wrecked, babies aborted, babies failing to thrive, toddlers left in acute pain, teenagers missing the chance of important exams, and she knows the incidents are on the up. But what to do? Whoever finds a proper prophylactic will surely deserve their Nobel peace prize. Trouble is, it doesn’t seem likely.

  A hoot from a low slung white truck filled with oxygen canisters distracts the doctor. “Got to go, see you at Fabien’s party,” she squeezes Suzy’s arm, surprised again by her formality. “No he didn’t need to invite you, just come with me and Bruce… See youz.”

  The afternoon is so hot she feels like she’s in a sweat lodge. Suzy plonks herself at a shady table overlooking the beach, takes out the Solomon Star from her bag and starts fanning herself. Two naked children are running in and out of the low waves that roll on to the slither of beach. It’s an astonishingly quiet Saturday Yacht Club. Even the sound of islanders passing by with the steady slap, slap of flip flop on ground seems stilled. No one hisses for the uniformed waiters to bring over bush lime or beer because the waiters too are at the game. Lulled by the heat, it’s always stickier in the early afternoon, and meditative from staring at the distant islands of Ngella she falls asleep – too tired to read her newspaper – until interrupted by the ever-cheerful Ewan.

  “Don’t like football?” asks the VSO boss surprised. Still you can help us drink a few consolation Tigers. Chairs are carried over and soon there’s a gang of men – Scottish, British and Solomon nationals carrying out a noisy post-mortem of the disappointing match. Since the game finished Ewan’s already said it himself a few times, so takes the chance to quiz one of his newest volunteers. Not many of the volunteer teachers are based in town as so many of the Solomon Islands secondary school students are crowded into boarding schools on remote tips of the main islands where trained local staff, with or without their families, don’t much like being sent.

  “Job going OK?” Ewan’s picked up the Ozzie habit of turning every sentence into a question.

  “It’s good. Classrooms are a bit hot… students are bright, but very shy…”

  “Expect you terrify them in your shoulder pads and super modern techniques. It’s been chalk, talk and drill forever and now year five is expected to estimate when the national reserves run out. And what to do about it?” mocks Ewan (actually quite impressed). “Keep it up and those KG6 students will turn into the sort of accountants who might create a revolution. Or at any rate challenge ministerial misuse of public funding. Actually, have you had a Ministerial visit yet? I look forward to finding out how you handle that.

  “You know you look a bit pale, malaria take it out of you? Have another Tiger and I’ll get you a club sandwich – but don’t expect it to come with bread as the SolAir flight from Brisbane was delayed so there’s a rumour that there’s no flour in town…”

  “So long as the beers don’t run out mate,” cracks someone at the table.

  “One more thing: you didn’t come out here because you want a brown baby, did you?” asks Ewan, seemingly serious again.

  Suzy chokes into her stubbie, unsure if this is a come-on or a question. Figures it’s just the way men living down under speak. “Ewan! Are you translating that weird ‘Are you married? Do you have a video? line so many men use here, or is this a serious field manager question I need to answer?”

  Ewan smirks then gets up to talk to a man in white shirt and tie – possibly the MP she danced with at the G-Klub. So Suzy doesn’t get the chance to tell him that the answer is 100 per cent no. No baby, not even a cute little brown one; at least not until next century.

  ***

  BLUE AIRMAIL LETTER sent by Suzie to Dan, but TORN UP BY CASSIE – (CROSSED IN THE POST)

  Dearest Dan

  Excuse my last, truly strange, neurotic, letter. I can explain it now - within seconds of my size sixes flipping and flopping up to the Post Office I started feeling odd. Then odder. Sat down. Felt worse. Got up. Definitely dizzy. Took a taxi home. Head began to thump. Body felt weak - limbs aching like flu ... OK this is dull. Just imagine a hangover, multiply it by a few days (assuming you're still taking anti-malarial prophylactics, otherwise could be a lot more) and plenty of sweat. That's malaria. A fortnight on and I still feel feak and weeble (whoops ... did you know the dreaded M (W?) also brings on dyslexia?) Anyway I took the trad three-day sick leave (used by locals as much to recuperate, so I'm told, as to get out of signing important treaties - that's if you're the PM, or even a big shot MP - or even to avoid exams - if you're the invigilator with a hatred of sitting still or a student without the knowledge: to be honest I can't blame the kids who decide to opt out, at least it's their choice. School seems to be an anachronism here sometimes, still teaching lessons about how to use a slide rule and not even a sign of a computer. Completely inappropriate for turn of the century teaching, though there are whispers that things may change and the curriculum development unit is brainstorming itself out of jobs. Good for them!

  Yes, malaria has left me as bitter about education as the chloroquine pills you have to down in order to make it up and out of bed. It's scary too, to think that plenty of people also mash their dose up and use them for suicide. All too often it's over marriage rows - ie, who gets selected for them. Lots of locals have fait accompli arrangements to build up family ties. Youngsters aren't exactly dragged kicking and screaming down the aisle, but you can't say they get much personal choice. Dating (as me and you know it) seems to be forbidden: go to the cinema with a boy and you're a unit. (These aren't real cinemas by the way, no Woody Allen or Steven Spielburg round here, despite the rumours, it's all Chinese kick boxing and exotic methods of death. Real Bruce Lee stuff, Beautiful Brandon too, I guess. You know the kind (admit it!) when there are 56 deaths minimum per scene and plenty of implausible situations: Brucie babe v wild animals AND trained killers BUT still walks away without a limp, and usually WITH a 36-24-36 blonde on his arm). Where was
I? Yes, if the boy talks throughout the movie and the girl decides he's a complete moron she can't ditch him and try another one at the next show - because if she does, everyone will think she's a whore. My students told me this apocalyptic tale, but beware - they certainly know how to wind me up, so I can't be sure how accurate this tale of teenage trauma is! I'm sure people have worked out how to date here, it's just I've no idea what it is!

  Marriage is quite a trend though: either in church (full white dress, veil etc) or custom (common-law partnerships). I've been invited to two weddings during the Xmas hols (can't wait!) which sound amazing, haven’t had to cope with a rush of Big Day invites before.

  One good thing about here is that I don't need to be married to earn unearned status, that Mrs badge. Everyone calls me 'white man' (argh!). When corrected, ie, "I'm a woman", they grin and call me white missis. It's no good running through the history of feminism (should that be femisiMs?) and explaining I want a different title, so I've decided to try pragmatism, and get used to it. From now on address all letters to Mrs Suzy won't you because I’m a non-married married.

  Well, that's about it from me. I think it's time I went and did something creative, make a rice and tuna fish dish, for instance. To reassure you: my job's OK and I'm no longer sick. How about you? Has Cassie forgiven you yet?

  Love - the Honorary Mrs

  CHAPTER 13: WALKABOUT

  HENDERSON WANTS TO take Stella home. Stella resists. She feels safe in the hospital, fearing that Henderson's wantoks won't be as understanding as he claims. Exasperated by her stubbornness Henderson gives up, moves closer to this complicated woman lying uncomfortably on the women's ward's grey-stained sheets, and whispers in her right ear: "This is our first argument!" Stella smiles, a great wide-mouthed smile, clearly her intuition was spot on, this man really is different. At once she relents, agreeing to Henderson's plan.