Dada 122

Ships articles ran for two years then and for the Chinese crews they used every hour before they allowed them to sign off. Maybe he was teaching me with his long silences when I moved into his house as though secrets could safely exist in a place of their own company. What he was instructing me was really his own experiences when he crossed rivers and bays and sounds and tended watch below in days of unceasing change that he could never see nor spend time with except for brief spasmodic moments on deck, his cap jauntily set upon his head between the watch bell and the stars.

The woman in blue might have been the daughter in the story from France, the one who threw herself down the well. It would have fitted with her own sense of things never really belonging unless they were about something or someone else.

‘Not a month after the pirates were captured, some hung, others put in camps, then the Rajah took your great grandmother. Oh he was a terror, his wife, the Lady was asleep in their bed, of  silken  sheets when he had her. So it continued even after he ‘put’ her with his Chinese manager. He still came for her. Wives came and went but he always came back to her, well after the boy was born. He came back to her, always insisting.

‘How do you know all this’ I asked her. She pointed a manicured finger to her head.

‘With us Sea Dayaks, the memory never dies. I have known of you since your Dada swore his revenge’

‘Were you one of his girlfriends’ I asked.

‘’He is 25 years older than me’ she said. ’It left him hating all authority’ she said.