The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest

by Graeme Lay

  ‘What’s happening?’ I ask the driver.

  ‘The mini-games. These people, they call the radio, they say how much money they give for the mini-games.’

  Mini-games? A contest for small people? Or possibly small games – table tennis, marbles, arm wrestling, petanque – for ordinary-sized people.

  ‘What are the mini-games?’

  ‘Games for people from all over the Pacific. Guam, Vanuatu, Cook Islands, Pup-oo New Guinea. Every four years they have South Pacific Games. Every two years we have mini-games.’

  ‘For all Pacific countries?’

  ‘Pretty much. But not for Australia and New Zealand.’ He chortles. ‘They too big for mini-games. Too much people.’

  ‘What sort of games will you be having?’

  ‘Tennis, golf, athol-letics, volleyball, netball. Lots of games, hundreds of people.’ Voices are still coming through the radio static. ‘That’s why people are ringing up. To give money. Mini-games costs a lot of money.’

  The guest-house, located in a leafy street deep in Nuku’alofa, supplies me with a room with a concrete floor, many louvre windows, a large bed and a private bathroom. The room opens on to the courtyard of a large rambling house with numerous semi-detached units set among banana palms and hibiscus bushes. Weary from an excess of inflight food and drink, I go straight to bed. To bed, but not to sleep. All night dogs bark and bay, while in the unit next to mine a group of happy evangelical Christians from the United States sings songs praising the Lord until three in the morning. When at last the dogs and Christians have run out of steam, the roosters take over. One crows continuously for two hours, just outside my window. I get about thirty minutes’ sleep in all. At seven o’clock I get up, check out and call a taxi to take me to the Keleti Beach Resort.

  The Canadian also mentioned Keleti Beach. ‘It’s outa town but it’s quiet, and the beach is kinda nice. American-run, too.’ Quietness is a priority right now. Writers immerse themselves in quietness, breathing it in and converting it into books. The photosynthesis of silence. The only book I could have written in that guest-house would have been entitled How to Murder a Cock/Dog/Christian.

  I’m still in a splenetic mood as I’m driven out of Nuku’alofa and along other straight, flat roads lined with long grass and palm trees. Then we come to what is clearly an arterial road, and turn on to it. As we pass a large stadium, the driver, who so far has not spoken, says, ‘That is National Stadium. New. French gives us money for it. Mini-games start there tomorrow.’

  It certainly looks impressive, the high grandstand, the big all-weather track, the line of flagpoles. If there is time, I might go and have a look at the athletics, I think idly. Then the taxi turns off this main road and along an unsealed one, then off the unsealed one and along a dirt track which runs between unfenced verges of rank grass. At the end I see a plywood sign, hand-painted in blue. Keleti Beach Resort.

  Just inside the entrance to a one-level, breeze-block, louvre-windowed building is a reception desk and a small lounge containing a round plastic table and chairs. A series of shells on vertical strings makes a kind of curtain between reception and a large, concrete-floored courtyard. The wings of the buildings lining the courtyard have wide eaves sheltering rows of metal tables and chairs, and rows of coloured light-bulbs are strung across the yard. Through the far end of the courtyard I can see the horizon, a line of streaky cloud and the brilliant blue sea.

  Behind the L-shaped reception desk is a woman of about fifty-five. She has brown hair tied back in a bun, skin the colour of putty and spectacles with very thick lenses. A fold of white skin under her chin, and a wide, tight mouth, give her a frog-like appearance. Her upper arms are broad, with bags of flesh hanging from them, and she has a paperback novel in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Looking up, she gives me a tight smile. She has light blue eyes. Very calculating light blue eyes.

  ‘Morning.’ Her accent is American.

  ‘Hello. Do you have a vacancy?’

  ‘We sure do.’

  She sets the cigarette down on a clamshell ashtray. ‘We can do you a whole fally fer thirty puh-ungas a night, haff a fally fer twenny-five puh-ungas, or a dorm-it-tory room for ten.’ Dormitory has a boarding-school ring to it, but this is neutralised by the ten pa’anga aspect. I’m a budget traveller, so I ask to see the dormitory room. The woman leans back and calls imperiously at the shell curtain: ‘Ladu!’

  A Tongan boy of about sixteen, curly-haired, handsome, well built, with a smooth, shapely face, appears. He is wearing a yellow T-shirt, blue lavalava and jandals. The woman passes him over a key.

  I follow the boy down a descending concrete path lined with red and yellow crotons. At the bottom is a custard-coloured, two-storeyed building with a flat sloping roof and a concrete terrace along the front. Behind the building is a cluster of towering coconut palms, and in front of it a sweep of lawn from which sprout small palms and hibiscus shrubs. Latu unlocks the end door of the building and I walk in.

  The room is narrow but contains two beds – one on either side of the room – made up with blue linen. The floor is bare concrete and there are louvre windows at the front and rear. Under the window by the door is a small table and a chair; behind the door is an open rail from which hang a few wire coat hangers. The room is cool, it has everything I need, and I can hear no dogs, roosters or evangelists. Through the front window there is an agreeable view over the garden and the sea beyond. And all for ten pa’anga.

  ‘Bathroom is along there,’ explains Latu, smiling.

  ‘It’ll be fine, thanks. I’ll come up and sign the register when I’ve unpacked.’

  I walk out on to the concrete terrace. The sky has turned grey but it’s very warm. Below me the grass slopes away to an area planted thickly in banana palms and aloes. To my right a concrete path undulates up to several well-spaced oval fales with yellow walls and roofs of red-painted corrugated iron, like the helmets of conquistadors. The reception block and dining area up to my left are ramshackle, but the profusion of plants and palms softens their unsightliness. And, although I can see a harem of scratching, pecking chickens guarded by a ginger-plumed rooster down on the grass, there is no noise except the regular rising and falling of the nearby sea.

  I set off down the lawn to investigate. A sandy track passes between boulders of black basalt. Tiny mercurial skinks dart left and right to get out of my way. The track opens out on to a small beach at the foot of a basalt escarpment about five metres high. The surface of the sand is still damp from dew, but underneath is soft and warm. Sinking down into it, I stare out at the sea.

  The lagoon is narrow and carpeted with coral, twisted into myriad shapes. Clear, sandy-floored pools separate the ridges of coral, ascending in a series of steps to the reef itself. On the top the reef is level, but on the landward side it is terraced, resembling a line of little ziggurats. In front of these terraces is a pool of calm, clear water, and skeletons of dead coral, jagged and brown, portrude from the white sand.

  My eyes are drawn to the terraced reef. The sea is surging and foaming over and through it, exploding upwards in a series of continuously performing blow-holes. It is like watching a long line of fountains programmed to play at slightly varying intervals. The water looks irresistible, but my bathing togs are not yet unpacked. Later, after I’ve set up my room, I’ll swim. But still I make no move, and it is another half hour before I tear myself away from the hypnotic sight of endlessly surging, erupting sea.

  It’s Saturday today. Tomorrow, the South Pacific sabbath, the shops will be closed, so if I want to see Nuku’alofa properly I’d better do it today. There is a resort mini-bus that goes to the town but I’ve missed it, the woman at the desk tells me. Her name is Joyce, and when she sees that I’ve put ‘writer’ on my registration card she’s suddenly very friendly. ‘Did yuh bring yuh books with yuh? There’s just no damn books in this country. I read everything – always have – but here? Just fucking Bibles.’

  I offer to lend he
r some novels, and ask how I can get into town. She suggests a taxi. Then I notice an old bike in the yard. Could I borrow that? Sure, sure …

  With a decent bike, Tongatapu Island would be ideal terrain for a cyclist. There are few hills and not much motorised traffic. But this bike is way past its best. It has no brakes and has long been a stranger to an oil can. I don’t think it’s been ridden more than a few hundred metres since Queen Salote was on the throne. Still, it gets me along a lot faster than walking.

  The greyness has gone from the sky, replaced by a deep blue and traces of high, feathery cloud. I follow Joyce’s instructions, and cycle along narrow, dusty white tracks between long grass and scruffy palm trees until I join the main road. There I’m overtaken by big crammed buses, whose passengers peer at me through the open windows. Beside the road, children stop and stare as if I’ve got two heads. Cycling cannot be a common form of transport in Tonga, I conclude.

  Nuku’alofa is a dusty, old-fashioned town with narrow streets and crooked, two-storeyed buildings. Everything looks old and run-down: the wooden buildings, the vehicles, the merchandise in the shadowy shops. There are lots of people standing about, looking as if they have nothing much to do and all the time in the world in which to do it. Most of the men are smoking. But there is something so sleepy and unhurried about the town that it is instantly appealing. It would be the perfect location for a movie set in nineteenth-century Mexico. I prop the bike up against a fence, buy a Coke from a streetside food stall and sit at a rough wooden table to drink it.

  Watching the people standing about or strolling past is an absorbing pastime, and as I’m doing so I realise there is an influx of visitors. Young men and women dressed in brightly coloured tracksuits are wandering about among the locals. They must be the mini-games athletes. Their tracksuits proclaim their nationalities and sports. There are netballers from the Cook Islands and athletes from Vanuatu; weightlifters from Nauru and tennis players from Tahiti; boxers from Papua New Guinea and golfers from Guam. They walk along the street with an easy, lithe gait, looking as if they just can’t wait to run, jump, hit a ball, press a weight or pin an opponent to a mat.

  Watching these young athletes gives me a new appreciation of Pacific solidarity. They are here not just because they are athletes but because they are people who inhabit a special region and feel part of it. Some are Melanesian, some Polynesian, some Caucasian; others are of mixed race. What unifies them is the ocean which surrounds their island homes.

  The bike has now become an encumbrance. I can’t leave it anywhere because it doesn’t have a lock and chain, and, lacking brakes, it can’t be ridden in traffic. So I walk and push it down Taufa’ahau Road, across the intersection of Wellington Road to the waterfront and along to the Royal Palace.

  The traditional rulers of Tonga – the Tu’i Tonga – went back 1,000 years; the present monarchy goes back only to Tonga’s 1875 constitution. This was written by an ambitious Methodist missionary called Shirley Baker (a man), and enshrines absolute power in the monarch, his appointees and thirty-three ‘noble’ families. All land is owned by the monarch, and about 100,000 commoners vote for just nine of the thirty parliamentarians. So grateful was King George Tupou I of Tonga to his missionary friend for securing the throne for the house of Tupou that he made Shirley Baker minister of foreign affairs, comptroller of the revenue, and premier of the kingdom. This did not endear Shirley to all Tongans, and in 1887 he only just survived an assassination attempt.

  Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Tonga retains its feudal system, and is ruled by the ailing Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, who succeeded his much-loved mother, Queen Salote, in 1965 and is now 86 years old. The monarchy, modelled firmly on the English system, is these days heavily criticised by educated expatriate Tongans, who decry the lack of democracy and absence of press freedom enshrined in the constitution. Although the king remains popular with commoners, the momentum for social and political change is slowly building, and will undoubtedly come to a head after his death.

  The palace building, set on a velvet lawn, is not large as palaces go, but it is stylishly colonial, with white walls, red roof, fretwork around the verandahs, finials and ornate bargeboards. Palace guards in immaculate white jackets, red-striped trousers and smart hats eye me with more than a passing interest as I lean the bike on a concrete gatepost and peer at His Majesty’s pad. One guard has a bright fixed bayonet on his rifle. These chaps look as if they’re very keen to enforce the kingdom’s status quo, so I decide to push off.

  Back at Keleti Beach I set up my laptop on the table under the front window of the dormitory and plug it into a power point. I’ve purloined a table of the right height from the dining room. The bottom of the window is level with my chest, so that I can see out over the lawn, palms and basalt boulders. There is a peep of the sea and a sweep of sky, the first ultramarine, the second powder blue. It’s serene and beautiful, and soon I’m typing conscientiously, glancing up periodically for refreshment, like a swimmer taking breath.

  After I’ve filled my self-imposed 1500-word quota, I get up from the table and stretch. The palms are casting long shadows across the grass as the sun sinks in the sky. It’s been a gruelling day, what with biking and writing, and I decide to lie down on the bed for a late-afternoon nap. In a few minutes I’ve dozed off.

  ‘Aaah … aaah … aaah … aaah …’

  Appalling sounds, unmistakably of human suffering, shatter my sleep. They are coming from the other side of the concrete-block wall to my right. As I sit upright, the choking is replaced by a dire groaning.

  ‘Uuuh … uuuh … uuuh … Jesus Christ …’

  Good God, what is happening in there? Is someone being murdered, or is it suicide? I get up and put my ear to the wall. There’s a crash, followed by a snapping of wood – is furniture being broken? – then a groan. Then, a period of silence, followed by horrible snoring. The snoring gets louder, and my concern is replaced by resentment. That’s just what I need: a vomiting, snoring drunk for a neighbour. As I get ready to go and have my evening meal, I resolve to move further down the dormitory to get away from the swine who’s disturbing my peace. After locking my door, I pause and peer in through the louvres of Room Two. All I can see in the darkness is a broken bed on which is huddled a shadowy figure whom I guess to be male.

  The Keleti Beach dining room is long and rectangular, lined with louvre windows and tapa-patterned curtains, and with real cloth stuck to the walls. Latu, now dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt, tupenu (a dark skirt) and jandals, is a very attentive waiter. As well he might be, for apart from me there are only two other diners, a couple.

  The man is in his early fifties, big, with slicked-back hair and a large, slumped stomach. He smokes continuously, even as he eats. He looks to me like a Darryl. The woman is plump, with long brown hair, and wears a short-sleeved blue cotton frock. She can be no older than twenty. She looks down all the time, and barely utters a word when he speaks to her. She looks like an Angela. There is a melancholy air about the couple. Are they father and daughter? I don’t think so. Although there is a certain similarity about them, the way Darryl looks at her is not the way a father looks at his daughter. Lovers, then? Probably. The presence of the odd couple stirs my curiosity. Where did they meet? By the water dispenser? In the factory canteen? At the photocopier? What did he say to get her to come away to Tonga with him, a man three times her age?

  After the meal I walk across the courtyard and into the lounge. It too is a long narrow room with louvre windows. It contains a few well-worn vinyl sofas and chairs, a TV set and DVD player, and french doors which open out to a broad verandah. On the verandah I can see a table-tennis table and some weightlifting equipment. At one end of the lounge is the bar. It has a small horseshoe-shaped counter, above which is a sheet of steel reinforcing mesh, painted cream, in which a head-sized hole has been cut. Behind the mesh is a man of about sixty, and in front of it, sitting on a stool, a much younger man. With the steel grid bet
ween them, they look as if they’re in a Central American prison on visiting day.

  As I approach the bar, the older man looks up and says in a drawl, ‘How yer doin’?’ Joyce’s husband, I presume.

  He is scrawny, slack-shouldered, balding, with folds of skin hanging from his turkey neck. A cigarette droops from a corner of his mouth. I order a Royal beer, posters for which I have noticed in the town, and he ambles off down a passage and opens a fridge. The man on the stool looks at me crookedly. He is about thirty, with cropped brown hair, a fleshy, flushed face, and brown eyes. He wears a tight white T-shirt and cheap-looking jeans. His eyes seem to be having trouble focusing. Blinking hard, he shakes his head as if trying to dislodge water from his ear, then peers at me.

  ‘Ow’s ut going’, thun?’

  ‘Not so bad, thanks.’

  ‘Jost arrived,’ ave yuh?’

  ‘Last night. From Auckland.’

  ‘Me too, jost arrived. I’m frum Brimming’im. Ing-lund.’

  ‘That’s a long way from Tonga.’

  ‘Bit of a boos ride, yus. Me name’s Rob.’

  As we shake hands, the barman returns with beer and pours it into a plastic cup. I try it. It’s dry and well chilled, and has a pleasantly hoppy after-taste. I see from the label that it’s brewed in Tonga, ‘with Swedish assistance’. I say to the Englishman, ‘That’s good beer, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s all right, yus. I’ve ’ad worse, like.’

  ‘Do you live here, Rob?’

  ‘Me? Shit no, oim jost vistin’. Oi luv in Feegee.’

  ‘What’s that like?’

  ‘VB Bitter. All VB Bitter.’ He belches and pushes his plastic glass under the grill. ‘Same again, thanks Bill.’

  Not quite understanding, I ask him, ‘Have you seen much of the Pacific?’

  ‘Seen it awl, mate. Bin everywhere.’

  ‘I’m going to Samoa for my next trip. What’s that like?’

  ‘Vailima. Not a bud brew, neither. Gerries do thut wan.’ He puts one hand flat down on the bar for a moment, to steady himself. His face has gone a terracotta shade. Frowning now, he continues, ‘Least ut’s Vailima in Apia. In Pago ut’s Budweiser. American there, y’see.’ He rolls his eyes ceilingward, recites: ‘Niue, Steinlager; Tahiti, Hinano; Raro-tong-ga, Heineken.’ He belches again, interrupting the litany of lager. ‘Bot doan’t go ter fookin’ New Cally-doanya. Yer cun’t get a decent beer there. All woine. Too many Froggies, y’see.’ Looking perplexed now, he peers through the mesh at Bill, who’s pouring him another Royal. ‘Bot Tahiti’s Froggie too, und they’ve got beer there. Hinano. Foony, thut is. Why is thut, Bill? Why cun’t yer get a decent beer in New Cally-doanya?’