Free Room Service by Frank Moorhouse Page B

roar of this flush is like the surf against the rocks. ‘Flush’ is too anaemic a verb to describe it. I hope it isn’t all going into the azure lagoon out front.
    Vanuatu is not really a holiday resort, it is a training resort for people getting ready to travel overseas. The airline is called Vanuatu Airlines and is painted to look like a coral reef, but it is really Ansett, and the hostesses are from Australia. There’s no tipping, but people are trained to it because the government of Vanuatu takes 10 per cent of everything. Every bill is 10 per cent higher than the stated price.
    Everywhere you go you see people learning to eat in restaurants, learning to sit around pools, learning to shop duty free, and learning to count in foreign money. But because Melanesia is so delightfully slow, they have time to learn how to do these things. Theylearn how to sign their signature exactly the way it is on the travellers cheque. They learn how to hold three official documents in one hand when coming through immigration control.
    Frankly, I hang out at the Bar Rossi built in 1926, and I do my Somerset Maugham act on variety nights. My act is maybe a little too literary for the crowd, but I get a few laughs from the air hostesses to whom I have explained it.
    I do a bit of dealing at the pool, but it is in my own time and anyhow no one’s buying.
    The two hardest things to do in Vanuatu are to get to eat the local speciality, flying fox, and to hear local music. It’s so hard that I feel it is perhaps prohibited to tourists.
    It is a good place for Australians to teach their children to be rude to people of a different colour and culture because the kids can get it right on the friendly Melanesians before they try it on American black waiters and Indian bell captains.
    Of course, when I arrived I headed straight for the snorkelling deal to see the American Second-World-War wrecks. I wanted to see skeletons of American sailors trapped in the engine room and maybe bring up a rusty Smith and Wesson .45. All they showed me was a rusty anchor. And I got ear-ache.
    People say that my Mosquito Repeller is giving them ear-ache. It’s the snorkelling.
    As always at these sorts of resorts I spend most of the morning with the existential dilemma of whether to gofor a swim or not. I never know whether to take money with me to the pool or whether to leave my watch in my room. If you take your wallet and watch and passport and you put them on the poolside table you get sore eyes from keeping them open under water watching your things. Everyone else seems to take their wallets to the pool. I get a wincing headache from the ripping of the Velcro fastenings of all those travel wallets. It is like a nurse ripping adhesive plaster from a body. I worry about putting on sunburn lotion properly, not missing any spot and reaching the middle of my back. Here in Vanuatu I smear it on the TV Screen and rub myself against it because they hit you 400 VTs a day for in-house movies and there’s no television station and I’m not paying. I suppose the 400 VTs go to pay copyright to the people who made the films. Ho ho.
    And what’s the right time to hang out at the pool? When do the air hostesses go to the pool? And you have to decide whether to take a towel from your room which is against the rules. If you get a towel from the Recreation Director (which I do not for reasons I will not explain) you have to get it back by 6 p.m. But what happens if you want to get wet after 6 p.m.? What if the hostesses arrive after 6 p.m. and you want to do some fancy diving from the high board? Do you have your Gibson before the swim or after? I read of people dying from swimming after drinks. Does the wiping of the towel remove the sunburn lotion? What’s the shower beside the pool for? Is it to wash off the chlorine after the swim or is it to wash yourself before the swim?And who’s saying who’s dirty? If you had a shower before