Born and raised on the island, Mana-oua-oua (meaning seagull) was an unaffected, straight-forward girl with no particular aspirations except to be good, honest, and to one day marry and have children. It was all she wanted in life and, although the cinema had come to Noumea and she sometimes saw posters for films and pictures in discarded magazines, she had no wish to be anybody other than the person she already was.
And that was a nice person. She was good-looking in the Polynesian way, slender, slightly coy, with a quiet but self-assured voice. She spoke French fairly well and had a good smattering of simple English, but she did not regard these attributes as anything other than the norm. Like most islanders she was slow-moving, never rushed, uncomplaining. A small smile invariably played about her mouth and she had smooth coffee skin which she treated with palm oil as her mother and her grandmother had done before her.
Mana did own some European-style clothes. There was a yellow cotton frock that she had bought in the second-hand stall in the market, also a skirt and blouse. She saved these items for best but, if asked, she would have been unable to tell you what “best” was all about. She was almost always dressed in a lava-lava, and she had some twenty or even thirty of these, which were shared with her sisters and other close female relatives. When at home she wore the lava-lava around her waist, and when she stepped outside she hoisted it up under her arms. She was always barefoot.
When Greg stepped in to her life he brought trouble with him. She supposed she loved him, but knew automatically and instinctively that he was not for her. He was a different league … not necessarily a better league, but a different one … and she looked forward, in her uncomplicated way, to meeting an island boy to marry. But first, there was the problem of Greg.
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