FIJI BAREFOOT WEDDING

THIS GUY CAME up to me one night and said “man, if I wasn’t me, then I’d sure love to be you” and I just simply sipped at my beer and while staring at a refrigerator behind the bar that glowed, replied “if I wasn’t me, I’d want to me”.

Then I woke up and the first thing that came to my mind was NINE AM. I looked at my watch and it was 7:20am. I had ten minutes to get to the airport and it took at least twenty to get there. I booked a cab and just jumped in it holding my head.

When I arrived in Fiji everyone was lovely. I walked up to a cab driver and asked him where the best backpackers was located and he looked me up and down and replied “Bamboo” and then I asked him how much to get there and he said “twenty”. So I walked over to another cab driver and said “how much to get to Bamboo Backbackers?” and he said “ten”. These were my shitty bartering days (which I’m fucking ashamed of now as I eat corn from the cob with no job as write this) and I was $15,000.00 in debt already and thought everyone was out to get me so I went with the guy who said “ten”.

I arrived at Bamboo and booked a bed and a locker. Twenty four stretchers to a room or something and then I sat down and ordered a Gin and Pineapple juice at the bar and looked and the sand, the blue skyline and felt the breeze under some sort of roof that looked like a wicker basket. The table was timber and my drink was sweating and that’s when I realised I was sweating too. I was still wearing my $40.00 suit from the night before.

Anyways, that night everyone sat around in wooden and plastic seats and on rugs and people drank KAVA and others drank beer and whatever else – there were two types of beer but they were the same as far as I could tell; apart from one having a yellow label and the other green. They both tasted good, I had had many bottles in my time there.

So, we were all sitting around and this man named SALMON came in with a guitar and starting singing When the Saints Come Marching In and it was top notch. His name, I found out later, was actually Simon.

*

DARREN PHONED ME the next morning and said “hey man, I’m on the other side of the island. I woke up and thought ‘this place smells like a tyre fire’ and then I looked out the window and man, sure enough; there was a pile of tyres burning right outside my room!” I told Darren where to find me and three and a half hours later he was there.

“Why are you wearing a suit in Fiji?” a girl asked me. Her friend was sitting beside her.

“Because I’m Luke” I replied and added “it was what I had on at the time. Hey, you two were here last night, you said you were from Germany – where's Germany?”

“You’ve never heard of Germany?" they both asked me.

“Nup, never heard of it – anything of note ever happen in Germany?”

“Well…” one replied.

“I’m Anastasia” replied the other. Darren took a big swig of his Fiji Lager and jumped in the pool.

“What are you guys up to today?”

“Well, there’s a mud pool here and we booked tickets to go there, do you want to come?”

“Yeah why not, can my mate Darren come too?”

“Sure” Anastasia replied. And literally minutes later we were off in a cab to find mud.

*

THE MUD POOLS were great and there were scrappy dogs getting around and a garden to explore.

“Why are you even in Fiji?” Anastasia asked me.

“Because someone at work said she went to a barefoot wedding here once, it seemed nice and I don’t know anyone who’s getting married so I just booked a flight.”

“When are you going back?” she asked.

“I dunno” I replied “when I get bored I suppose”

AFTER THE MUD and gardens we ended up at some stream and Darren was looking at a cow on the other side. Darren had started a Beef Jerky operation back home and he was getting orders always when he looked at his laptop. He told me he gets a cheque from G***GLE every month for his food reviews too. It was highly impressive. I was just a drunk lowlife who found himself in a big building suddenly and needed to escape to an island, any island.

I think for Darren it was also an escape but he’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire here. He kept reading a book called the THE GOOD LUCK BIRD and palming and scratching his head in frustration everywhere we went. Maybe he wanted the barefoot wedding experience, I dunno. I was there to wind down by winding up – which was something I had no idea about at the time. It all just happened that way. There was this pressure from everywhere for all of us. Everyone at the hostel was trying to escape some kind of pressure and a lot of them just kept on carrying it around inside their heads. Me, I just drowned it out with booze.

I was sticking my head out the window on the way back from the lake and we went out for dinner and ate seafood and what not and then all retired to our various wire framed cots and I for one slept like it was nothing else that night.

*

I WOKE UP thinking about how I don’t need anything at all. We four, Anastasia, Jessica, Darren and I, all hitched a boat the next day to an island called MANA ISLAND. There were castles (hotel mansions) at one end but the boat didn’t go anywhere near them. We stopped and jumped off the boat. I’d cut off my suit pants to make them into shorts and my blazer was stuffed into my back pocket.

I had the best meal of fish and chips of my entire life at that point there on that island. Then I walked into a wooden shack which was a kind of chemist but there was nothing much left but a framed poster of POINT BREAK on the wall and as I searched around the cabin to buy something I saw cornflakes, my dog; the dog I’d always wanted, and I began to cry. He is a stuffed promotional item for toothpaste, and he was sitting there next to a half used tube of paste that was for sale on the shelf, and the clerk just said “you want this? You can have it for free.” I paid her fifteen and I still sleep with cornflakes every single night of my life. He’s my most faithful friend.

Anyways, there was shit to do on this island and we didn’t waste any time getting to it. We were told it would take an hour or so to walk around the whole thing so we did. Darren drank some green alcoholic drink while he walked on slimy rocks in the water and I thought “green man drinks lime while walking through slime” and then Anastasia yelled out with her headphones in “THERE’S SO MANY GOOD SONGS WRITTEN IN THE VORLD, AND THEY’RE ALL ABOUT SEX!”

*

AFTER THE WALK the wind blew so hard you could stand up in it and walk straight so we went up to a restaurant and there were a whole heap of travellers there from all over the world. The people served food and the customers ate it and drank and children ran around hiding behind tables and chairs and fighting each other and making up and forgetting and getting on with things. Then a man walked out an announced “IT’S TIME FOR THE CRAB RACE! EVERYBODY GRAB A CRAB!” so we all reached into a red bucket and pulled out our little soldier crabs and the man drew a circle. “Now place all your crabs in the middle and keep an eye on them” he said.

Mine actually won and they gave me some kind of gift and a little girl started crying so I gave it to her and she held it to her chest and ran off to her parents.

“You shouldn’t have done that” Anastasia said.

“oh?”

“Now she’ll always look to men to get what she wants”

I sipped my drink and sat for a while and then I walked off down to the beach to look at the waves and embrace the million knots an hour winds. Anastasia came out and sat with me and I put my blazer around her and then we decided to take it all off and jump in the water. The blazer just flew off into the Gods of the winds and became the property of those Gods.

The water was surprisingly warm. It was warmer than outside of it. Fiji is basically summits of mountains breaching the waves from a giant underwater volcano and we just sat under the water with only our heads popped outside, our hair blowing completely supine to the West. We both looked at the shoreline not wanting to get out and have to deal with the freezing wind against wet skin.

*

“MY PARENTS OWN an island in the Caribbean” Anastasia said the next morning after breakfast. I was on the beach look at the sun and patting a one eyed dog, he’d had a tough time. We walked past a little wooden box marked BUTTS and then walked off to the jetty and I felt like I was the best version of myself I had ever been up to that point. I just wanted to walk straight towards the light, which was in the case the morning dawn.

Little fish swan around the pillars underneath the jetty and we just stared at them for ages. Then it was time for the snorkelling trip.

I didn’t know anything about snorkelling but picked it up pretty quick. We swam around looking at coral and fish and I lost my favourite necklace at the time some there. It belongs to that reef now. Maybe a fish it hangs on a finger of coral there still.

*

LATER, DARREN WAS sitting on the beach still scratching his head and trying to read THE GOOD LUCK BIRD. He was sitting under a palm tree and a small baby crawled over to him and started playing with his phone. When he picked it up he realised the baby had texted his ex-girlfriend and he palmed his head even harder and yelled out “THIS IS JUST LIKE FUCKING KING’S CROSS!” and walked off.

I lay on the sand and picked it up and let it fall through the palm of my hand watching it disappear into the other sand below it and thought and about all the grains of said in the world. “I’m gunna live forever” I thought, and actually said it out loud before I could differentiate between my thought and my speech. Then I thought to myself only “I’m free to be whatever I want to be.” I didn't want to go back to the job I'd run away from.

*

AFTER WE GOT back to the hostel we booked another night. I was always about just booking one night at a time; I always have been that way. I checked my watch and it was six thirty and Anastasia and I went to the markets. I sat down on the ground and had a smoke.

“You just sit anywhere you like.” She said.

I didn’t really respond.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked

“If you ever find out, please let me know too” I replied.

When we got back to the hostel an English girl came up to everyone's table and said “this guy is sailing to Vanuatu, you wanna come?” and while it appealed to me I politely declined, and so did all the rest at the table. There were ten people all gathered around that table that night telling stories about their various adventures and it was too much for me so I walked of again and sat on the beach looking up at the stars.

Anastasia came and sat beside me.

THAT NIGHT AT the hostel we watched a seaplane land on the water. Darren slept next to a fire on the beach and moved closer and farther away in time with the flames. There was a hammock nearby and I lay in it looking at the stars wondering about progression in life, and the Navy for some reason, and then settled on a thought that I was simply Lazy and fell asleep right there in the hammock.

*

“I'M ALL RIGHT” I thought as I woke up the next morning and patted myself down. Anastasia came over with two coconuts that she’d bought and we drank from them and looked out again at the sun rise.

“If you just ask that man over there he’ll get you another one” she said to me and I though “wow, I never want to leave this place” and then I remembered I did have to leave and I had to leave that day. I looked at my phone and booked the next flight. Darren came with me in the cab and gave me his copy of the GOOD LUCK BIRD.

I read the GOOD LUCK BIRD and loved it. It’s about James Brown and a boy who posed as a girl to get through a Huckleberry Finn type adventure. I lent it to my neighbour three years ago and I think it’s in a box somewhere. When Darren gave it to me he said “I never hold onto books”. I asked him if he ever planned on having children and he replied sharply “it starts and stops with Darren” and then walked up to the bar to buy another round of drinks.

I wrote Anastasia a quick letter before I left. I don’t know what Anastasia’s doing now. I've never seen her since the day I left Fiji when she and Jessica watched me get in the cab and waved at Darren and me drive off into the wind not recognising ourselves.