Without me …
I had envisaged a kind of salt water Julie and Julia but …
I guess I lost my beach mojo with the downfall of my thumb and left foot. But I know I’ll get it back eventually. This Monday my specialist appointment finally happens and I have great hopes for the cortisone injection (ouch!). It should release my thumb … fingers crossed (I just realised that’s a pun).
So, in the interim, here’s part two of …
Fiji … a waterblogged memoir …
Accident prone would describe my relationship with the water on our 1969 family holiday to Fiji.
First day: heatstroke, brought on by spending three or four hours straight in the swimming pool in the tropical afternoon Fijian sun against my mother’s advice. Every time I stepped into that sun again, I turned clammy and felt like simultaneously bursting into tears and passing out. Perhaps I wasn’t as cut out for the life under a palm tree I’d imagined, but heatstroke didn’t slow me down much. I just stood in the shade as much as I could.
Neither did a run in with some sea lice, who left itchy bites all over my sister Diana’s and my legs after a wade in the ocean on our second morning.
Nor a massive dose of antibiotics. My wisdom teeth, perhaps in an ironic gesture, had decided to erupt fifty miles from the nearest dentist, causing my gums to become dangerously inflamed.
I plugged on.
Then there was the glass bottom boat for viewing coral. What a magic trip. The captain stopped the engine to allow us to drift over a reef looking at the azure wonderland below, and said we could go for a swim. So I dived straight off the front, forgetting the boat was still travelling forwards. Coming up for air, I was just in time to receive a mighty whack on the head from the bow. I lived, but the combination of heatstroke, antibiotics and the blow to the head was making me a little light headed.
But not so light headed that I didn’t feel like joining a conga line on New Years Eve around the swimming pool in my trendy new culottes … only to be heaved into the water by a drunken reveller.
Having a thick skull proved convenient when, after hauling myself out dripping, I crossed the glossy parquet dance floor barefoot to get the keys to my room from Mum. My wet feet slid from under me and the whack as my skull hit the floor reverberated thoughout the room. Silence. I lay there, wondering what had happened.The band stopped dead, staring in horror, and a Fijian singer, wearing an afro and a gigantic floral mumu put down her microphone and floated across the floor to see if I was still alive.
But Fiji couldn’t kill me, try as it may. I figured the blow to the back of my head evened out the one to the front I got from the boat. Off to my room to change into my second pair of culottes (I’d made two) and I was back dancing again within 20 minutes, albeit a little more carefully, but not before an Indian guy had jumped out from behind a frangipanni tree and hissed like a snake at me on the way back to the party. I scurried for the safety of Mum and Dad. Come to think of it, this bizaare and unnerving sign of male appreciation was the only fruit my desperate efforts at sexiness had borne during the entire holiday.
Fortunately for my weight problem, the inevitable attack of holiday dysentry, combined with a chronic Fijian shortage of chocolate and pastries removed several pounds from my frame, so I was in fact slender and tanned, if somewhat dizzy on returning to Sydney. I continued to dream, unrealistically of the tropics, not pausing to analyse the complete lack of synchrony between that particular fantasy life and the Heathcliff and Cathy one that was developing on the grey and windswept Yorkshire moors of what was left of my brain …
