My father had a big moustache, which often hid a small smile.
I have only been to America once. It is not easy to avoid the place, but for years I managed it.
I’d been put beside Mrs. Isabel Swale. Her husband, Arthur, already sozzled when we’d arrived, had drunk himself into an aphasic stupor and followed the conversation stupidly, as a dog follows the ball during a game of tennis. Mrs. Swale badgered me with questions about the Kiona without listening to the answers, so that her inquiry was disjointed and did not create anything resembling a conversation.
She was a large woman, a mother of many children by the look of her long nipples and stretched stomach skin, which lay in neat folds like a stack of bedsheets in my mother’s linen cupboard.
By the time I reached New Guinea in 1931, when I was twenty-seven, my mother and I were the only remaining members of our family, and she had become a great psychological burden to me, both needy and despotic, a tyrant who seemed not to know what she wanted for or from her last remaining subject.
He didn’t answer, but I wasn’t bothered. I was flattered that we’d got to this stage already, that our minds could wander without apology.
