Paradise News

by David Lodge

  Yours ever,

  Brian

  Dear Joanna,

  Well, I’ve discovered where he goes every day. I followed him yesterday, without his knowing. I wore dark glasses and a big floppy hat bought specially for the purpose. He went down to the beach, to a place where they have surfboards for hire. He met a couple of men whom he seemed to know there, and they all put these great surfboards on their shoulders and went into the sea. I watched from the beach through a slot-machine telescope. The other two men were much better at it than Russ. He seemed to find it difficult to get going, the waves kept sweeping past him, leaving him paddling frantically behind, looking a bit silly. But once he managed to catch a big wave, and he actually stood up on the board for a few seconds and I could see him grinning all over his face with triumph before he overbalanced, and fell into the water with a splash. For those few seconds I almost forgot what a pig he is.

  Love,

  Cecily

  * * *

  Dear Greg,

  I’ve discovered surfing! Fantastic! Better than sex!! Met two great Australian guys who are teaching me how to do it.

  Best,

  Russ

  * * *

  There has been a steady rise in the percentage of tourists staying in Waikiki who make excursions to one or more of the Neighbor Islands: 15% in 1975, 22% in 1980, 29% in 1985, 36% last year. Whether this is because the charm of Oahu is wearing increasingly thin due to overdevelopment, or because organized excursions to the other Islands have been more effectively marketed and advertised, is uncertain.

  Went to Kauai yesterday on one-day tour advertised as “Paradise Quickie”. Wakeup call at 5.15. Minibus collected me, and various other red-eyed, yawning tourists waiting outside their Waikiki hotels, among them Sue and Dee, the two British girls who have a habit of popping up wherever I happen to be. I suppose I must have mentioned that I was taking the tour and they thought it sounded interesting.

  Transferred from minibus to coach which took us to Honolulu airport, against the early morning rush-hour traffic already clogging the freeway. At airport, tour rep distributes boarding passes and instructions. Kauai veiled in rain as we approach. Pilot has to make two attempts to land. Sue has white knuckles. Dee yawns impatiently. We look through streaming windows at drenched airport, apprehensive in our shorts and trainers. Kauai has been christened “The Garden Isle” by Hawaiian Vistors Bureau, which is a euphemism for “rains a lot.” Somewhere in the middle of it is Mount Waialeale, the wettest place on earth (annual rainfall 480 in.)

  The day trippers are herded into groups and various tour company minivans. Our guide is Luke. He introduces himself from the driver’s seat via a microphone. “My friends call me Lukey, which means you are Lukey’s groupies,” he chortles. Sue laughs. Dee groans. We drive out of airport, along newly macadamed road. Still pissing down. Palm trees thrash furiously to and fro like windscreen wipers.

  We stop at various hotels to pick up more passengers, then commence tour of the island. It seems necessary to drive for hours along very boring roads in order to get to any place of even modest interest: medium-sized waterfalls, a large but ugly canyon, a waterspout hole in the rocks by the sea. (Busloads of tourists waited in vain, with cameras cocked, for the spout to do its stuff, like waiting for rhinoceroses to mate.) The highspot of the tour is a trip up the Wailua river. This is the only navigable river in Hawaii. Otherwise it is of no particular interest or scenic beauty. However a considerable fleet of riverboats has been established to ferry people up and down it. On the boat we are entertained by a rather jaded troupe of Hawaiian musicians and hula dancers. The terminus of the trip is the so-called Fern Grotto, allegedly a historic site for the celebration of weddings, and certainly a popular gathering place for mosquitoes. The musicians sang the “Hawaiian Wedding Song” for us, and at the end of it you were supposed to kiss the person next to you. I manoeuvred myself next to Sue, who is the prettier of the two girls, but at the last moment she changed places with Dee, so I had to kiss her instead.

  The only really attractive feature of Kauai is its coastline. We kept getting glimpses of beautiful beaches, especially tantalizing in the afternoon, when the sun came out, but we were never allowed to get out of the minibus and explore them because we were always tearing off to another bloody waterfall. And Luke became quite stroppy if, when we got to it, we didn’t all get out and photograph it. The whole excursion has made me rethink the opposition between pilgrimage and paradise. The holiday paradise is inevitably transposed into a site of pilgrimage by the innate momentum of the tourist industry. Trivial or totally spurious sights are fabricated or “marked” (MacCannell, 1976) in order to construct an itinerary along which the tourists can be conveniently transported and “serviced” (by shops, restaurants, riverboats, entertainers, etc.). Dee seemed quite impressed with this theory. I sat next to her in the minibus for the latter part of the trip. It seemed only polite after kissing her. Sue may be prettier, but Dee is cleverer.

  * * *

  Dearest Des,

  Just got back from wonderful tour of Kauai, they call it the Garden Isle because of all the lovely flowers growing wild there. Amazing waterfalls. This waterspout wasn’t actually working when we stopped, perhaps the tide was out. Big news is that Dee has got this Roger bloke interested at last. She tells him all her holiday disaster stories and he writes them down in his little book.

  Fingers crossed,

  Sue

  * * *

  Dear Denise,

  I’m sorry to tell you that your father had one of his turns yesterday, and had to be rushed to hospital. They kept him in overnight, under observation, but said he could come home today. I say home, I mean hotel, how I wish it was home. I thought about phoning you but there didn’t seem any point with you so far away. I reckon you should receive this just before we return so you will be prepared if Dad is not up to scratch when you meet us at the airport. Of course I will phone if anything sudden happens.

  I’m telling everybody here it was the heat, but really it was the shock of finding out something about Terry. I don’t know how to tell you, Denise, but your brother is a homo. There, I’ve said it. Did you have any idea when you were younger? I’m sure I didn’t, but it’s been so long since he lived at home. I knew there was something wrong as soon as he met us at the airport and his “special friend” turned out to be a man, this Tony. He’s really very nice, but Sidney couldn’t stomach it. Just refused to talk about it.

  Terry can’t do enough for us, ferries us about in a huge hire car, meals in the best restaurants, I can’t eat half of it, we’ve been everywhere, seen everything, Pearl Harbor, hula dancing, and the hotel’s beautiful, but Sidney wasn’t enjoying himself, kept sloping off to a so-called pub he’d discovered, the Rose and Crown, trust him, just behind the sea-front. Then, the night before last, after dinner, Terry announced that he and Tony were going to get married. Apparently there’s a gay minister down under who will marry them, a sort of marriage anyway. Well, your Father nearly had a fit there and then. He went very white and then very red. Then he just walked out without saying a word.

  I knew he’d have gone to the Rose and Crown, so after a little while I went out and fetched him. He was there, sure enough, drinking with a man called Brian Everthorpe we met on the plane, rather a loud type, I don’t care for him much, though his wife’s all right. They made me have a gin and orange, and then I brought Sidney back to the hotel. He kept muttering under his breath, What did we do wrong? I said we didn’t do anything wrong, Terry is just made that way. He said, do you know what they do, men like that? And I said, no, and I don’t want to, it’s none of my business and none of yours either, I said. You’re going to make yourself ill over this if you’re not careful, and sure enough the next morning he had one of his turns, and had to be rushed to hospital. We were on our way to the National Memorial Cemetery when it happened, the bus made a detour to the nearest hospital, a Catholic one but they were very nice. Terry is ever so upse
t, or course. So all in all, it’s not the happy holiday we looked forward to. I just hope your Father keeps going till we get back home.

  Your loving Mother

  Dear Travelwise Customer,

  On behalf of Travelwise Tours, I hope you are enjoying your vacation in Waikiki. As your stay on the beautiful island of Oahu draws to a close, we hope that we will have the pleasure of welcoming you to Hawaii again one day.

  In the spirit of traditional Hawaiian hospitality, Travelwise Tours, in conjunction with Wyatt Hotels, invite you to cocktails and pupu at 6 p.m. on Wednesday 22nd, at the Wyatt Imperial Hotel on Kalakaua Avenue (in the Spindrift Bar on the Mezzanine Floor).

  This invitation card entitles you to one complimentary cocktail and one plate of pupu per person. Cash bar also available. There will be a short video presentation of other Travelwise holidays available on the Neighbor Islands, including the fabulous new resort of Wyatt Haikoloa.

  Aloha, Sincerely Yours,

  Linda Hanama

  Resort Controller

  Dear Miss Hanama,

  Thank you for your invitation, which is accepted. May I point out, however, that only three invitation cards were enclosed, and my party numbers four. I would be grateful if you would forward an additional card to obviate any possible unpleasantness at the door.

  Yours sincerely,

  Harold Best

  Paradise Gems

  Paradise Cruise

  Paradise Plants

  Paradise Record Productions

  Paradise Home Builders

  Paradise Upholstery

  Paradise Puzzle Company

  PART THREE

  Ho’omkaukau No Ka Moe A Kne A Moe Wahine:

  To learn to be expert at man and woman sleeping. Thus, preparation for sex; sex education.

  Ho’oponopono:

  Setting to right; to make right; to correct; to restore and maintain good relationships among family and family-and-supernatural powers. The specific family conference in which relationships were “set right” through prayer, discussion, confession, repentance and mutal restitution and forgiveness.

  – Nn I Ke Kumu (Look To The Source)

  A source book of Hawaiian cultural practices,

  concepts and beliefs, by Mary Kawena Pukui,

  E. W. Haertig, MD, and Catherine A. Lee.

  1

  “DO YOU BELIEVE in anything at all, Bernard?” said Ursula. “Do you believe in an afterlife?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Come on now, Bernard. Give me a straight answer to a straight question. What’s the point of being a college teacher if you can’t do that?”

  “Well, modern theologians tend to be a bit shifty about the afterlife, I’m afraid. Even Catholic ones.”

  “Really?”

  “Take Kung’s On Being a Christian, for example, one of the modern classics. You won’t find anything in the index under ‘Afterlife’ or ‘Heaven’.”

  “I don’t see the point of religion if there’s no heaven,” said Ursula. “I mean, why be good, if you’re not going to be rewarded for it? Why not be bad, if you’re not going to be punished in the long run?”

  “They say that virtue is its own reward,” said Bernard, with a smile.

  “The hell with that,” said Ursula, and chuckled hoarsely at her own choice of expletive. “And what about hell? Has that gone down the tubes too?”

  “Very largely, and good riddance, I’d say.”

  “And purgatory with it, I guess?”

  “Oddly enough, modern theologians, even non-Catholic ones, are rather more sympathetic towards the idea of purgatory, though there’s very little scriptural warrant for it. Some see analogies between purgatory and the idea of reincarnation in oriental religions, which are rather fashionable nowadays, especially Buddhism. You know, expiating in one life for your sins in a previous one, until you reach nirvana.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hmm … well, roughly speaking it means the extinction of the individual ego, its assimilation into the eternal spirit of the universe. Release from the Wheel of Being into nothingness.”

  “I don’t think I like the sound of that,” said Ursula.

  “Do you really want to live for ever?” Bernard risked teasing her. These theological discussions, which had become a regular feature of his visits to Makai Manor, struck him as treading on very thin ice, considering Ursula’s condition; but she was always the one who initiated them, and she seemed to derive a quirky satisfaction from tapping his professional expertise and probing his scepticism.

  “Sure,” she said. “Doesn’t everybody? Don’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “I’d be quite glad to be rid of this self of mine.”

  “You might not think so in a better place.”

  “Ah, place,” said Bernard. “That’s the difficulty, isn’t it? Thinking of heaven as a place. A garden. A city. Happy Hunting Grounds. Such solid things.”

  “I always used to think of heaven as a kind of huge cathedral, with God the Father up on the altar, and everybody worshipping him. That was the idea we got from Religious Instruction at school. It sounded kind of boring, like a High Mass going on for ever and ever. Of course the nuns told us we wouldn’t find it boring when we got there. They seemed quite excited at the prospect, or they pretended to be.”

  “There’s a contemporary theologian who has suggested that the afterlife is a kind of dream, in which we all achieve our desires. If you have rather low-level desires, you get a rather low-level heaven. More refined desires and you get a more refined heaven.”

  “That’s a neat idea. Where’d he get it from?”

  “I don’t know. I think he made it up,” said Bernard. “It’s remarkable how many modern theologians who have rejected the orthodox eschatological scheme feel free to invent new ones that are just as fanciful.”

  “Gee, you sure know some jaw-breakers, Bernard. What’s that word? Escha…?”

  “Eschatological. Pertaining to the Four Last Things.”

  “Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven.”

  “You learned your Catechism well.”

  “The nuns used to strap us if we didn’t,” said Ursula. “But I think this guy has got something.”

  “It’s a bit elitist, though, don’t you think? A heaven of beer and skittles for the hoi polloi, while the better educated get – what shall we say, command performances by Mozart, and drawing lessons from Leonardo da Vinci? It sounds too much like this world, where some get to stay at the Moana, and others at the Waikiki Surfrider.”

  “What’s the Waikiki Surfrider?”

  “Oh, it’s the hotel where Daddy and I were supposed to stay, as part of our package holiday. It’s one of those huge, anonymous eggboxes, several blocks from the beach.”

  “Have you been there, then?”

  “Er, yes, I have,” said Bernard, slightly embarrassed. “I went to see if I could get a rebate for the room.”

  “Any luck?”

  “No.”

  “No, I’m not surprised … If you could have the heaven of your desire, what would it be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bernard. “I think I’d like the chance to live my life over again. Not decide at the age of fifteen to become a priest, and see what happened.”

  “You might have made a lot of different mistakes.”

  “Quite right, Ursula. But I might have had better luck, too. One can’t tell. Everything is connected. I remember, some years ago, I was watching a football match on television, England against some other country. Apparently it was a very important match – some kind of cup. My young curate, Thomas, had the set switched on, so I watched to be companionable. England lost the game by a penalty in the second half. Poor Thomas was tearing his hair at the final whistle. ‘If only we hadn’t given away that penalty,’ he said, ‘we’d have got a draw and been through to the finals.’ I pointed out to him that this assertion was based on a fallacy, namely, that you could extract the penalty fr
om the game without altering it. In fact, of course, if the penalty hadn’t been awarded, the game would have continued without interruption, and every movement of the ball from then onwards would have been different from the match we watched. England might have won, or lost, by any number of goals. I pointed this out, but it didn’t seem to console him. ‘You have to go by the run of the play,’ he said. ‘On the run of play we deserved to draw.’”

  Bernard chuckled reminiscently, then became aware that Ursula had fallen asleep. She did this not infrequently, little catnaps in the middle of a conversation, which he hoped were attributable to tiredness rather than boredom.

  She blinked and opened her eyes again. “What were you saying, Bernard?”

  “I was saying, sometimes things can happen in a life quite against the run of play. Like my being here in Hawaii.”

  Ursula groaned. “How I wish you’d come before, when I was well! And before the place was spoiled. When I came here in the sixties, it was so beautiful, you’ve no idea. There was hardly a highrise hotel in Waikiki, and I could walk in a straight line from my apartment to the beach. Now there’s a wall of hotels all along the shore, and just one narrow passage you have to squeeze through to get to the sea. I used to go for a swim every day of my life, there was a little gang of us wrinklies who used to meet at the same spot. We used to use the showers beside the Sheriden pool, the attendants knew us and turned a blind eye. But one day a man turned us away, such a rude man, and that was the beginning of the end. Waikiki wasn’t like a village any more. It was like a city. So many people on the beach, in the street. The rubbish. The crime. Even the climate doesn’t seem to be what it was. It’s too hot for comfort in the summer now. They say it’s because of all the construction. It’s so sad.”