Island goddess

I was at my lowest point. I think I was the heaviest that I had ever been. The days all seemed to lump together like white sauce, indifferently stirred. There were clods of time sticking to the slow soles of my shoes. I barely ate but I seemed to swell larger with each day as if the days were just accumulating in my flesh. I woke up tired, I dozed. Sometimes I wondered why I bothered to wake at all.

And then there was Vanuatu.

I was joining him there. He had been working, was still working. He had gathered a crew of carefree dark skinned teens around him. I blinked, wormy in the sudden exuberance of light. I stepped out of the cab and fumbled through the unfamiliar coinage. The driver said something to me and I barely recognised the words. I thanked him.

Vanuatu. I was here. I shook myself out of my depressive fug and found my way to our accommodation, a cheerless little weatherboard house under a mango tree.

Young coconuts split in half, the jelly flesh scooped up with a squeeze of lime. Sticky flowers opening to drip their sap onto the sandpaper tongue of the earth. Kava kava, reeking of old socks and vomit but the horrors of a cup full of the stuff is followed by an easing back away from the jagged edges of life. I dream of poppies, heroin, morphine as I feel my shoulders unknotting.

Then there are the men. I am big as a mule and pale and green-eyed. My fizzy hair lends me an island silhouette.

I spend too much time alone while he is working. I prune my toes in salt water. A dugong holds me in his strong fins and drags me out to sea. His stomach is the softest belly I have ever caressed. His back is barnacled and hard as oyster shell. "He wants to make 'push push' with you," they tell me.

Sex is everywhere and nowhere as my partner buries himself in the stress of the job.

I walk alone on a little island, a tourist island. I have learned a few words and when the man greets me I can say hello and how are you, and isn't it a lovely day. He is fixing a boat. I swim fully clothed because there is some rule about modesty. I am unlovely. No one would touch me. I feel safe and lonely in my pillow of extra flesh.

It is a short walk around the island. It is raining lightly. There is the sound of the ocean. There is nothing all around except the water and the forest and the intermittent plummet of coconuts thudding on sand.

I become aware of him. He carries a machete. They all carry machetes. His footsteps keep pace with me. He is my shadow. I am wary of him at first, and then I become afraid. When he steps up beside me we both grin at each other. My grin is wide and desperate, his is unmistakable. He looks at my body beneath it's various layers of clothing as if I were exposed to his gaze. He sees the jelly flesh of new coconut, the purple maw of succulents, dripping their stinking floral juices onto his thirsty tongue. I realise that I have been naive. I am alone on a lonely island in the rain. This is a man with a machete.

"You make push push." He points to himself. He points to my breasts, my cunt. He is grinning, and my own grin is so tight with terror that it could split my head apart.

"No thank you."

But it was not a question.

His hand is in my hair, his free hand. The other is still holding his machete. He drags me a step closer to the swell of flowers and ferns.

"No no."

Not a word that he understands in any language. He is all heavy muscle and salty sweat. I can smell his otherness, the difference in our diets fills my nose. He is yams and plantains and skinny chickens. I am brie and olives and smoked salmon. He is determined to have a taste of me. I can not say no.

I remember my few lessons in Bislama. The cheeky teenage girls have taught me a few words, giggling behind their modest hands, dressing me in their frumpy island dresses and saying that I am beautiful.

"I know your name." I say it in Bislama. It is one of the phrases that the girls have taught me. His grip on my hair loosens.

"I know where you work." Really I have said that 'I know job' but he understands and he swears and he takes a step back.

He swears again and again, spitting, and the sand sucks it up and leaves a little bubble of bile near his toes. I know that it is a word for female genitalia. It is the first word that the girls taught me. A word full of sniggering. He is not laughing as he spits it at me.

I turn and I walk and he is my shadow, a little way behind me, chasing me with that word. I walk faster. At some point I turn and he is no longer in sight. I run. I am shaking. I am cursing myself now. How could I put myself in that position. Did I know what nearly happened? Did I have any idea how close I was to a big dark pit that it would have taken years to drag myself out of?

At home I was someone to be mocked, avoided, laughed at, but in Vanuatu I became desirable. A big island goddess. I was followed, whispered to, flirted with. The dugong held me around my sizable waist and eased me further and further out to sea. Men stood between me and my boyfriend, winked and pointed as if I might suddenly race away with them to a quiet spot for a bit of 'push push'.

Vanuatu. The boys just loved me in Vanuatu.