IT WAS one of those days that you regret ever getting out of bed.
Westerners, being the smart people they are, normally file these days under someone’s less than bright folder called Murphy’s Law.
How and why it is referred to as such escapes this Root’s comprehension, but it points to an Irish name and if the stories we hear about the Irish are any indication, then there’s some logic in the reference.
There was an obscure book you came across somewhere titled Are you Irish or normal? so that figures.
A quick research turned up the following: Murphy’s Law is a popular adage in Western culture that broadly states that things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance.
I think that the situation in PNG, it is given every chance.
If there’s more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way. It is most often cited as “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong” (or, alternately, “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time”, or, “Anything that can go wrong, will,” or even, “If anything can go wrong, it will, and usually at the most inopportune moment”).
It turns up when you least expect it. But once things do start to happen, you begin to realise that you should have stayed in bed.
Rachel likens it to ‘getting up on the wrong side of the bed’ whatever that means.
But you start to realise the reality of the situation after observing her father staggering and feeling his way through the corridor of the house towards the outhouse.
She knows how it is and feels an inner warmth seep through her being – a feeling perhaps, of love and sympathy.
Sixty-something dad probably didn’t sleep at all last night anyway, she thought. No doubt, he had a five-hour battle with the bedbugs and the mosquitoes and lost. He had rings around the eyes the shape of great big shiners.
Mum thought they looked like the halo on the moon but darker in colour, standing out like a malady against his brown skin.
He was in a sour mood so everybody who was up early shied away from him, lest they invited that big foot from being exercised on their hind quarters.
He made his way groggily but determinedly to the loo and paused. Since there was no sound emanating from the outhouse – if inside you can look out through the cracks in the walls - and pushed at the door.
It would not open. He banged it.
The din invited curious looks through the windows and doors of the neighbourhood.
Everyone thought he was funny the way he was wriggling his bum and Rachel and family knew that if he knew they were giggling, he would think it wasn’t funny at all and physically drive that point home in his “usual way”.
Amid the moans and groans and a couple of several more hard raps on the side of the outhouse, he barked out orders that the occupant vacate the premises immediately.
There was no immediate response and after a couple of desperate thumping of the walls, he sought alternative venue to do his business at the back of the outhouse.
Relieved, he was coming around the back when he spied his daughter Mori pushing at the toilet door. He was all attention as he tried and door and suddenly it opened.
A realisation dawned on him and he swore.
Mum had been reminding him all this time to fix the latch on the door.
And no wonder. Nobody was occupying the loo in the first place when he first sought its relieving comforts.
Next thing to do was to have a nice cold shower.
His towel was in the laundry so dad ‘borrowed’ mum’s, which was hanging on the line outside anyway, and mum screamed at him.
He often wondered why mothers were said to have eyes in the back of their heads.
He just ignored her and mumbled something like “whatever happened to us being once in marriage?” and went to look for his toothbrush.
He found his toothbrush but the tooth paste seemed like it had nothing to offer. It was like somebody had already utilised the last squeeze out of the toothpaste.
He collects his shaving gear after a good search of the nook and crannies in the house where he left them and discovers that the razor blade had gone wokabout.
He screamed his son’s name just to relieve the pent-up anger rather than expecting him to respond.
He knew where the razor ended up. The son was always nicking the blades from his shaver to cut the tyre tubes with his friends to make catapults.
With a night-old stubble, pasteless toothbrush and an inflating desire to literally murder somebody, he stumbles into his makeshift shower room.
He undresses and in the process he has a little accident with the zipper which took some excruciating moments to undo.
Whimpering he stands beneath the shower, turns on the tap and closes his eyes to relish the first drops of what would, be believed, to be the most refreshing shower he had ever had in a long spell.
Nothing happens.
He opens his eyes and looks up only to be pelted in the face by at least three droplets of water before the dribble stopped altogether.
He stood there agog, the little dribble of water slowly slipping down one side of his face.
He looked up again at the shower head, willing it to open up and engulf him with its refreshing contents. Seconds turned to minutes and minutes were something one terribly impatient and frustrated man could do without at the moment.
He swore then, the sound of his voice so loud, the elderly deaf widow next door actually sat up and looked over her shoulders in curiosity.
But it was a way of getting it out of the system, so to speak.
The vibrations set off by his frustrations could be felt right throughout the precincts.
After five minutes or so, he saunters out of the showroom, wrapped only in mum’s towel and was greeted by his Engan kaiminingios (brothers). One of them owns the tuckershop down the road. And, as is common in this part of the world, they make a habit of indulging in all-night binges and the indications were clear as the day.
The evidence in fact, were in their hands, not to mention, their faces - the bloodshot eyes, the noisy and slurred communication and the half-empty crate one of them carried. Oh, and the do-not-care attitude and lack of respect that they accorded his neighbours in passing.
It could have reminded dad of those sentimental days when he was supposed to count the ways he loved mum. On this occasion though, Rachel thought the situation called for how many ways they repulsed her and there were enough to fill Mori’s school exercise book.
Dad thought they arrived in a nick of time, though. What else could go wrong on the day?
“Due to the poor quality of water, I’ll stick to booze” had been his motto when the taps ran dry in the settlement.
There’s certainly logic in the saying, “birds of the feather flock together” after all. And Dad, in his current frame of mind, may have needed a quick fix.
They settled under the house, dad unwashed, unshaven, undressed and generally unhygienic and it seemed like the arrival of his friends was going to make the gathering look like they’ve been frolicking in the Baruni dump.
But as they got into the swing of things, a heated argument broke out among his guests and during the confusion, an empty bottle thrown in anger, accidentally smashed on dad’s head, rendering him unconscious for a couple.
It was just as well, as all hell broke loose with his Engan friends going at each other in a wild melee that eventually simmered through the streets of the settlement in blaze of carnage.
He woke up half an hour later in his bed and thought he never left. But feeling his sore head, he sighed and asked if he had been up and about.
The situation was explained to him.
Then his eyes settled on devastated loo and shower room.
He did not know whether to laugh or cry. Both had been a problem to him this day.
He fell back heavily into his bed and sighed: “And I thought it was just a bad dream.”
Later when he had recovered fully, he said he had actually planned to go and watch soccer at Bisini Parade that day but resigned himself to what The National was going to produce to next day.
And he sheepishly admits that the Wise Counsellor’s words came to the fore that moment:” Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans …”

 

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