The Anniversary

Nosy Be airport was familiar. Most immediate was the warm slap of the equatorial air. The place was littered with daggy remnants from the eighties: the wooden immigration booths, the fading advertisements, the linoleum floor and most distressingly, the plane we flew in on. The people were also clearly islanders from their complexion and the way they stood. Their cheery but unhelpful demeanour was also recognisable.

And, as my father and I sat on the conveyor belt under a desperate ceiling fan, security confirmed that they had lost our luggage. Not all of it, though; of the four bags we had checked in they had managed to deliver one to the airport, and through some deus ex machina it was mine. The others contained the clothes of both my parents and my two younger siblings as well as such nifty things as sunscreen, toiletries and the first aid kit containing the majority of our anti-malarial medication. All of these bags were back in Johannesburg, optimistically.

Both the news itself and its delivery represented precisely the kind of casual incompetence that I had grown used to, even fond of, a year earlier.

Sitting in the carpark of the airport as my mother argued with a placid official from Air Madagascar, surrounded by the unmistakeable sounds of an island around us, my brother asked me if this reminded me of Chuuk. I told him it did, a lot.

Chuuk is an isolated archipelago about 1800 kilometres North East of New Guinea and is the most populous state in the Federated States of Micronesia. I had lived on the main island of Weno for ten months in 2010 at a high school called Xavier College and teaching at a nearby middle school.

I had found myself talking about Chuuk more ever since I arrived in Africa to visit my family who now live there. Perhaps it was the feeling of leaving Australia again, and the curiosity that accompanies the observance of a foreign land. It felt stronger here, though.

In the middle of the night we drove through dense tropical jungle on poor roads past ageing plywood shacks. It was all very familiar.

***

The boat that arrived for us at Nosy Be harbour looked like it had recently dropped off a fresh batch of asylum seekers at Christmas Island. But there were only thirteen of us on the tour and the atmosphere was cruisy. I’d been on these sorts of boats before. Over the course of the week it ferried us between campsites, criss-crossing the archipelago at the Northern tip of Madagascar.

The islands themselves were spectacular. They possessed had the dense beauty of the tropics: the way the cloudless sky broadcasts every colour in its boldest hues, the way the sun, which the equator brings a few kilometres closer, sculpts the shorelines in long curves, the way the plants so fiercely contest for such fertile soil. They were at times both hypnotic and overwhelming.

On one island I found a small coconut tree near the beach. Enlisting the help of my little brother, we set out to collect some coconuts. He went about the task with the wonderful urgency that an eleven year-old approaches life with, buzzing around me suggesting, pleading, questioning and complaining at times doing all of this simultaneously. Eventually, we beat two of them down with a long stick and carried them to the shelter where we ate. After five or so minutes of hacking at one with a knife I realised that I had forgotten how to properly open the damn things. My brother, in a fit of boredom, threw the other at a tree trunk and it immediately burst open spilling most of the coconut water. I glumly returned to my own and after another solid minute of hacking heard the triumphant squelch of the shell being pierced. I brought the coconut to my lips. I had not forgotten the taste.

Another night I sat up late waiting to vomit. My stomach had been upset for an hour or so, and I was sitting on the beach letting the time pass until its grievance was addressed. The islands were dark silhouettes from my view of the beach, the stars were plentiful. The dark of a world without electricity is shocking to Western sensibilities; there was only a gas lantern in the dining shelter. I paced up and down the beach before vomiting ferociously under a tree. I buried the remnants under the sand and looked out at the night.

On the second-last day of the trip we travelled to one of the densely inhabited islands. They had a zoo and avenues of souvenir shops. My family eventually retreated to a café to drink Coke out of glass bottles and wait for our tour operator to find us. A heavily tanned-European sat shirtless writing quickly in French. He did not look unlike a writer I had read, DBC Pierre. A woman in her sixties wearing a large hat and a purple kaftan approached us in a madly tilting gait. She was an expatriate Australian; they turn up in the strangest of places. In a slightly mad monologue she described the slightly mad life she lived on a slightly mad island. She described the way the islanders would shit on the beach and let the tide take their waste away, I had seen similar. She described the staph infections that plague the population and I fingered the white scar on the back of my neck. And she described the freedom she felt living in a place like this. I stared at my feet.

It was not only what she had described that struck me. It was the peculiarities of her madness, the specific words she used and the specific gestures she accompanied them with. We had lived in similar worlds.

The next day the boat sailed into the port of Nosy Be, the water turned from translucent blue to an opaque grey-green. The port was a series of concrete embankments, ramps and staircases that was flooded with people. We farewelled our guides, they had been charming and hospitable. We were hastened into cabs waiting at the shore; a crowd of people stared curiously at us.

We drove through the town. It pulsed with energy, people poured out of colourful colonial buildings that had greyed under the strain of poverty. We drove into the hotel and I remembered the date, December 17th. I’d been back for a whole year. I’d been preparing myself for some sort of emotional response but all I found was a stillness.

***

When I returned to the hotel room I sat at the desk and started to think about a year of home.

I remembered how scared my parents looked when they realised that the emaciated figure that had just stepped into the airport terminal was their oldest son. They hadn't seen a picture of me in months.

I remembered how I needed to see Sydney the way the tourists see it and gawk at the unapologetic gorgeousness of the harbour. I was on George St and I could smell it half a kilometre away. By the time I had reached the Rocks I had broken into a light jog. I darted through the crowds at Circular Quay station and it appeared in front of me. It pulled the breath from my lungs. The Bridge,The Opera House and the impossibly blue harbour itself all stung in the December glare. I needed the physical reaction, the shock, the stun, to jolt me into being home.

I remembered how at one stage, I think it was about May, I had had the paper bag of letters scattered across my bedroom floor. They had even formed a hierarchy, the most read sat in a pile by my bed and the others staggered towards the fringes of my room, catalogued for their frequency. I had received most them in the few days before I had left, some of the students even forming little bundles of them for me denoting their particular social group. They spread like a jigsaw puzzle across my floor. This was not a conscious effort by any means.

I remembered how I sat in a café at Milsons Point trying to convince a boy who had been two years below me at school to go to Micronesia. It was winter, a cold wind cut through the back streets and I cupped my coffee to warm my hands. I told him that he had to go.

Because… Because…

Because Chuuk beckons you. Because the gravity of its madness pulls you into its orbit. Because it is a breathtakingly beautiful place that is at times profoundly fucked up and it is truly liberating as only an island can be.

The roof of Xavier will always be my view of Chuuk. During the day it belonged to the tourists who came to admire the panorama. But as the sun went down it would be returned to us. We sat at dusk and drank cheap Filipino beer quietly; we were hiding from the students.

The Pacific never looked bigger from that roof. It was the horizon on three sides, and after the islands and the waferish reef it seemed to extend into imagination, our senses failing to comprehend its immensity. We sipped our beers and sighed, we were a long way from home.