White Sands - Geoff Dyer

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lunch with Gauguin’s heir, I joined some other tourists for a boat trip to a nearby island. The mini-van taking us to the boat was late, but this did not matter because, when we got to the port, the boat was not ready to sail. That was the thing about Hiva Oa: the huge wait to leave contained within it other little pockets of waiting, so that one was caught in an endless hierarchy of waiting. I was always waiting for the next bit of waiting, climaxing with the final day’s waiting, in which I would wait to be transferred to the airport, where I would wait for the plane taking me back to Tahiti before the wait for the enormous airborne wait of the flight back to L.A. (more waiting) and on to London itself. In a sense that is what we are here for: to wait. In Tahitian terms, to put on wait. While waiting, however, one necessarily ponders other questions, questions that don’t go away irrespective of how long one waits: the tiki questions, the questions that stay put, the same questions, according to Harrison Ford’s voice-over in the climactic scene of Blade Runner, that the replicant Rutger Hauer wanted answered, ‘the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?’ But the answers to those big questions turn out be small, or at least have to be itemised in detail if they are to have any chance of doing justice to the big questions. We are here to accrue unredeemable air miles and tier points, to try to be upgraded on aeroplanes and in hotels whenever possible, to try to alter our itineraries to include Bora-Bora and Huahine and to wish that the Internet connections were faster and more reliable. We are here to suffer terrible disorientation and jet lag and to be plagued constantly by the desire to be somewhere else, either somewhere else in French Polynesia or, ideally, somewhere else altogether, preferably nearer home. We are here to wish we had brought different books to read and to wonder what happened to our biography of Gauguin. We are here to wish the food was better and to be afflicted by the torment of heat rash and to wish that we had brought some calamine lotion to lessen that torment. We are here to buy presents for our loved ones and then to spend long hours constructing excuses as to why this was impossible because everything in Tahiti is so expensive and there’s nothing worth buying anyway. We are here to be bored rigid and then to wonder how it was possible to be so bored. We are here to wait at Hiva Oa Airport in the drenching humidity and to feel definitively what we have felt before, albeit only fleetingly: that we are glad we came even though we spent so much of our time wishing we hadn’t. We are here to make sure our seatbelts are securely fastened, our tray tables stowed and our seats are in the upright position before take-off and landing. We are here to go somewhere else.

      2

       The first area of wilderness to which I had independent access—I went there with my friends, without my parents—was Leckhampton Hill, just outside Cheltenham. A sign warning ‘Beware of Adders’ emphasised that you had left the safety of the town behind, while imparting a hint of Eden to the untamed outdoors. If you walked here you always came to the Devil’s Chimney: a vertical promontory of sandstone rock. I’m not sure whether its origins were natural (a pillar of hard rock left behind when the softer surrounding rock was eroded?) or man-made (the lone residue of what had once been a quarry?). Either way, at some point in its existence it acquired this locally mythic name.

       My uncle Daryl and his brother Paul climbed the Devil’s Chimney in their teens, in 1958. There is a photograph of them both, bare-chested, perched on top of it like Hillary and Tenzing on the roof of the world. Climbing up must have been difficult, but not nearly as difficult and dangerous as clambering down.

       The Devil’s Chimney: the place my uncle had climbed. It was a landmark: a place of mysterious origin where something remarkable and risky had been achieved. It is still there today but is now cordoned off to prevent anyone trying to emulate Daryl’s precocious feat.

      On the morning of my visit to the Forbidden City, my last day in China, I woke exhausted, as I had every day of my trip. First, in Shanghai, because of jet lag and the excitement of being in China, then—as the evenings got later, the drinks drunk more numerous, and the morning commitments earlier—from not having enough time to sleep; finally, in Beijing, from a potent combination of all of the above known as lag-induced insomnia.

      There was no time for breakfast. There was never time for breakfast. Min was waiting in reception, pre-punctual as always, never tired, always smiling and happy—but with an air of harriedness beneath that smile as she asked if I’d slept well.

      ‘Wonderfully,’ I said. It’s the easiest thing to do when you’ve slept terribly: say whatever requires least effort or explanation. We shook hands—we had somehow got stuck at the pre-embrace stage of our relationship—and stepped outside. It was boiling already, at eight in the morning. The driver was standing by the car in a white shirt, his hair slicked back, smoking. I couldn’t remember his name. Actually, it wasn’t the name but the face that was causing me trouble: the driver’s name was Feng, I knew that, but this was not Feng, surely. So, whereas yesterday I’d said, ‘Hello, Feng,’ today I just said, ‘Hi there,’ conscious that if this was Feng then he might be offended by the downgrading to anonymity. Was that why he wasn’t smiling? No, no, it couldn’t be Feng. . . . That was the thing about being so tired, you forgot things you should have remembered—things like people’s faces—and then whirred away worrying about them, exhausting yourself still further.

      I settled into my seat as the car began its dreadful journey to the Forbidden City. Beijing was a nightmare city, combining the intensity of New York with the vastness of L.A. Was it twenty million people who lived here? A third of the population of Britain in a city that felt about half the size of England. We were on an eight-lane freeway, barely moving. Fine by me: a chance to snatch the first of multiple naps in the course of what Min had already warned would be ‘a very tiring day.’

      I was jolted awake as the car, having accelerated into an opening, braked and swerved. I’d been asleep for twenty minutes—it was so easy getting to sleep in a moving car in daylight, far easier than in a luxurious bed in a hotel at night. And these twenty-minute naps were incredibly reviving—for about twenty minutes. Min, as usual, was on one of her two phones, sorting out the day’s constantly changing schedule. She’d arranged a guide, she said, to show us round the Forbidden City. My heart sank. My heart is prone to sinking, and although few words have the capacity to make it sink as rapidly or deeply as the word ‘guide,’ plenty of others make it sink like a slow stone: words like ‘having to’ or ‘listen to,’ as in having to listen to a guide tell me stuff about the Forbidden City I could read about in a book back home, by which time any desire to do so would have sunk without trace.

      We were at the entrance to the Forbidden City. I’d driven past it last night, in a different car, under the Chinese moonlight, after a dinner featuring twenty different kinds of tofu, en route to a bar with a view overlooking the moonlit roofs of the Forbidden City. The highlight of the meal had been spare ribs, made of tofu and tasting every bit as meaty as a meat-lover’s dream of ribs without the underlying horror of meat. There had even been a shiny bone sticking out of the tofu-meat, made of lotus root. I’d been dreading three things about China: the pollution, the smoking (a subset of pollution) and the food. The air had been clear, I’d encountered hardly any smoking and the food—the tofu—had been like a new frontier in simulation.

      I climbed out of the car, walloped right away by the heat even though it was not yet nine. The guide was running late, Min said before hurrying off to buy tickets, so we would meet her inside.

      ‘Great,’ I said, hoping the guide would be unable to find us amid the crowds swarming through the gate as though this was the only day of the year entry was not forbidden. Min reappeared with the tickets and we filed into the epic courtyard—already busy, even though we had arrived only moments after tickets went on sale. It was tremendous, this initial view: red walls and golden roofs sagging and boatlike under an ocean of unpolluted sky. We walked into the next courtyard. There were a lot of people here too, but the Forbidden City was the size of Cheltenham, so there was plenty of room for everyone. Jeez, it went on forever, and every bit looked exactly the same as every other bit: courtyards the size of football pitches, cloisters, sloping roofs with rooms beneath them. Doubtless the guide would explain how all these

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