Dada 24

The boy’s shouts continued. They seemed to be looking over at us as they crashed between tables. Was this what they had come for; their journey around our islands ? We had seen them before but they were drinking and shouting at each other as if we did not exist. They looked at us from dazed eyes that were red and tired from the inside out. They looked as if they had been working long hours before their plane journey from Europe or Australia and then went straight to the bottle. InsideI felt calm but the dazzling explosion of the blazing sun and the mocking faces of the Indonesians, their features translucent amidst the rain and the sea, drifted towards me like an ominous cloud.

Iskra said he would deal with this. I held up his bandaged arm and shook my head. I found myself gasp inside my lungs for breath as if I were under water. My heart sent rapid little waves to wash over inside me. Rain danced on the matted roof. It would soon be gone. The lemon light of the sun would come again. Shabela’s pipe passed between us . Iskra had taken it with him in an act of rage at his honour so cruelly ripped and not properly defended, no matter what he said.  Shabela would not mind. He would say ‘and with the grace of god’ and laugh.

‘Everything they pull is pulled from us’ Iskra said. He grimaced in a tight smile as he smoked and made a fist of his face. I could hear my Dada. It is a paradox that lives deep within us and keeps us revolving around our own deceptions. His white shirt seemed whiter and whiter, his skin darker along the forearms. Somewhere in the course of the day he had lost his gangster cap...

The white boys were a nuisance. They would stand and then suddenly sit down; or rise again and roar with laughter, near to tears, like ferocious two year old twins. They put their hands up like make believe fighters. They were intent upon creating uproar in the face of our silence. These sacred moments came at the end of our day when our uneasy lives are swept clean across the South China Sea; the catch brought home by the boats from Thailand with all their illegal crews, the fish, girls and  constant supplies of ya bang.