Last night I dreamt I went to Mendali again, back to the turquoise sea and the sky.
I returned to an island adrift in time, to a village whose inhabitants floated through the gentle, unformed pattern of their days. I could see Small Tome standing by the porch of his church lit by the sparkling sunshine, resplendent in one of his most colourful robes. He smiled as he watched the children appear from the toy-town schoolhouse and rush towards the inviting warm waters of the lagoon.
Beyond them, out off the small point where the skeleton house stood, a figure sat still in a short, smooth dugout canoe. The wisp of breeze that blew in from the Pacific lightly ruffled the man’s great frizzy fuzz of hair and fluttered the coloured ribbons that hung down his back.
From one of the small kitchens a steady thread of smoke rose a little before slanting away over Ellen’s head as she sat in the shade and split coconuts with a glinting bush knife. Stanley, Small Small Tome crouching by his side, threw a three-pronged hook far out from the jetty.
Behind them, along the path that ran beside the clearing and under the broad branches of a Ngali nut tree, came two boys carrying new buckets filled with water and feed. On their heels tottered a naked black boy, a picture of innocence – until he picked up a piece of coral and threw it at a ginger cat that was slinking its way along a hedge of hibiscus. The cat hissed and flashed away up three steps into a leaf house that looked out over the bay.
Time had inevitably ticked by even if in Mendali its progression had been all but imperceptible. The dawn of the new Millennium was celebrated on the strip of beach by the village. No champagne, no fireworks, no promises to try and create a better world or even to go on a diet. Instead we sat and ate fish cooked on the fire, drank from coconut shells and sang songs, the words to which I now knew by heart.
“We are one big happy family…”
More than once during my stay in the Solomons I had almost felt that we were, but there was now a part of me that wanted to see other family and friends and that also wanted to find out how I would now react to the place from whence I had come.
Grimble one evening after a couple too many sundowners had burbled on about “never wanting to go back to civilisation again…about all the false values of it…about all these simplicities being enough for anyone.”
But somehow they were not. I wished they were but they were not. Not for always.
Standing on the jetty, watching a furious, splashing canoe race that was being cheered on by the rest of the village, I explained to Luta, Tassels and Small Tome that I was thinking of heading home.
“No wariwari,” Luta said and turned his disappointed tattooed face to smile at me. “Butta yu come back lookim mefala?”
I promised that I would, for Grimble had, on the other hand, been perfectly right when he remarked just prior to his own departure that, “the islands are like a drug; they entice and they lull you. They will lure. You will be hooked. You will always want to go back.”
They had, I was and I do.
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