Dada 114

These were things I did not want to hear anyway. I shouldn’t really suddenly complain though because it was easier for me than some of the others in here. I kept thinking of the big Indonesian with the honest face. The guards give the big ones a hard time, they think they are all mixed up in gangs and drugs and the rackets. They give them trouble. How he must have suffered when he came down to greet his fat shouting wife.

At the beginning of my imprisonment what I found most difficult was that I had the thoughts of a free man – and what was worse, of wanting to sail the little boats upriver again to where there was plenty of trade and dreamed like the pirates of these islands, treasure and ease like my relatives and long lost ancestors who gave the White Rajah’s a run for their money until one of their sons fucked my great grandmother as part of the purge.

I was obsessed by the idea of wanting to be on the sea or sailing around one of those tiny islands, with just the sand and the palm trees and coconut milk for company. Give me a sudden blast of rock to blow through my veins and the music that I imagined would carry me across the sea and away to the southern Philippines or the pirate’s channel to the Molucca’s.

Maybe it was my Dada on the ships; maybe the way he arranged his cabin and bunk and made a palace of his own little cells with the occasional sprinkle of memento’s bought ashore in places like New York and Pernambuco or the roaring forties wharfs of Darwin and Western Australia, maybe that was the stuff that maybe kept us both afloat through the long stretches   when he must have wondered about where his real home lay. It was the same with me.

‘’ Is there anywhere we can call home here or do we have to go back and live on the sea ?’,

The woman in blue was speaking to me again.