I looked down at the vast expanse of water, so deep and limitless it seemed like a gigantic shape-shifting beast, surging, cresting, foaming, throwing out spray and flying fish at whim. It merely tolerated our flimsy boat to glide through its surface layers.
Out of a porthole a pair of hands appeared with an orange. They began to peel it. Curly strips of skin fell away into the water, then, when it was fully naked, the mysterious hands withdrew, taking the tempting bright fruit with them.
My mother managed to get one for me, and I sat on the deck with my parents and peeled away curls of dimpled skin like the anonymous hands from the porthold had done. The juice dribbled down my chin, smeared over my cheeks, down my forearms. My tortured stomach gurgled and protested.
Some time later I was back in our cabin, in my bunk bed, turned to the wall. The orange had stayed down for about half an hour. This was the story with all food since the first three days on the ship after leaving Singapore; we were heading for Melbourne. The orange had been a delicious interlude, a folly, a desperate attempt to be well in a flurry of seasickness.
It was sometime after this, when my parents were in the cabin with me, I heard my father say to my mother that I was ‘putting it on’, that I wasn’t really sick, and could stop it if I wanted to. He must have thought I was asleep. Or maybe he didn’t care. I thought about this, and wondered how I could stop vomiting, and how good it would be to be able to do that. However much I tried, the nausea brought me down, again and again. If only the ship would stop moving, I would be able to stop feeling sick.
I spent most of the two week journey in that cabin. We stopped briefly in Perth, and on the way out, the ship encountered gale force winds.
“A creaking ship is a safe ship,” my father said.
And the Patris creaked and groaned and moaned, a wounded animal battered by an ocean in fury. Water beat against the porthole and leaked into the cabin, bringing strong smells of salt and things unknown.
My parents went to a ball one night, my mother resplendent in a halter-neck dress of black and silver that caught the light in hundreds of reflective threads. My father wore a white dinner jacket which accentuated his smooth olive skin. The photo of them taken as they were greeted at the entrance to the ballroom showed my mother beaming, her lips coloured red, a handkerchief tucked neatly into her watchband, and incongruous navy and white plastic sandals peeping out from under her floor-length glamorous gown. The man with whom she was shaking hands was already focused on the next guest.
Once one of the Greek stewards came into our cabin to say hello, and he pinched my cheek as I lay in bed, trying to smile, the covers pulled up to my chin.
There must have been brief interludes when I was not nauseous, as I remember beginning to write a story about Mickey Mouse in an exercise book. My father thought I was writing about our trip, and his face fell when I showed it to him.
I was afraid of the toilets, because there was a time limit to the door. It allowed you fifteen minutes, then it would open automatically. I was terrified that I would lose track of the time and be revealed, stuck to the seat, unable to move, and unable to close the door again.
When we arrived in Melbourne, we travelled straight up to Sydney, and stayed in a caravan park until my parents decided what to do. I soon adjusted to no longer vomiting at the sight of food, and no longer feeling as if the waves were inside my stomach.
My hair, which was past shoulder length, was a bird’s nest of knots, or rather, one enormous knot, at the back of my head. My mother helped me tease it out, but I don’t remember how long that took.
