|
Wild Banana
In 1988 Susan Sheers lived in an old fisherman’s house near the family temple by the tennis courts. It was dark inside her home, where a high red-tiled ceiling protected Susan and her possessions from the world. She sat smoking in the corner, telling me, in her beautiful, luxuriously modulated tones, about how she used to be an RSC actor. I, who had spent many an evening at the RSC in Stratford, was entranced.
Susan did not tell me this to impress. She simply stated it, and showed me her paintings. The cigarette smoke hung around her like the mists around the mountains of southern China and the coughing was painful, like much of China’s history. Susan’s paintings were exquisite; she always had an eye for blending colours and subtle details. At that time she was painting on silk and the colours bled into one another with whirling ease. Later, when she owed me money (she often owed people money) I asked her to repay me in silk scarves, which I gave to my mother.
When my parents came to stay, Susan took us to the restaurant in Central where she was painting vines on the walls. Every grape had its own bloom, every leaf its own nature; she nurtured the colouring of each feature till its life-force was almost unbearable and you felt like tearing them all down and stamping them into wine, so ripe and ready to drop from the wall were they.
By this time the fisherman’s cottage had been pulled down to make way for the new white-tiled Spanish-style houses which were to become such a feature of Lamma’s nineties housing boom. Susan moved into a white tiled house somewhere or another. Her old fridge would not fit into the new place so I bought it from her. Perhaps she was just economising. Susan did not like paying the higher rent in the new place, it was inconvenient, but she had saved up for a word-processor and was able to write letters. She was teaching English somewhere in North Point, and planned her lessons scrupulously though somewhat idiosyncratically. The thing about Susan was that, whatever she did, she did it with conviction.
I don’t ever remember meeting Susan for the first time. Somehow she was just there. Early one morning, as I was going to catch the ferry to teach summer school, there was Susan lurking on the corner of the paddy fields by the shrimp paste place, drawing the pink lotus blooms which had amazingly appeared flowering in the small pool there. Later, she gave me a huge abstract pencil drawing she had done on the theme of those lotuses. It is exquisite and hangs here in our house in England: the lines of the petals dip like wings into the water, fly with the foliage and kiss the air. For twelve years I have been constantly reminded of the sheer beauty of Susan’s nature by those lines.
Another time I met her on the dip in the back path to Pak Kok. She was photographing the wild banana trees - maybe the very one which appears in accompaniment to her lovely poem in the Lammazine. I would have flown up the hill, but her stillness caused me to stop, and to consider the glorious tough purple flower with its golden coronet.
At the end of 1990 I was living up beyond Father Frank’s place, watering Richard Muller’s permaculture crops. On the night of the winter solstice I had a party - a feast and a play. I wrote the play in the afternoon, scribbled the dramatis personae on pieces of paper, and baked them into the bread. Susan drew the part of the Corpse - which we found screamingly funny at the time but which in retrospect is not funny at all. I have just googled her and found all the parts she played, the rave reviews. That we had such a talented actor playing dead was a terrible waste, but Susan threw herself into the part with gusto: she lay down on a blanket and happily smoked her way through her scene.
Once I met her in Main Street and she’d just returned from doing a courier flight to New York. She had spent her whole time there visiting the art galleries - the MOMA, the Met - her eyes lit up at the memory. Once, when I was living in a fisherman’s house in Pak Kok even more primitive than Susan’s first house, she even came over and joined in a yoga session. I remember her, trying her best to push her rounded back into Paschimottanasana - sitting forward bend.
I left Hong Kong in 1993, but for the first few years did return quite regularly. In the new year of 1996 I went up to Xiamen by boat from Hong Kong with my two year-old daughter Iona and six month-old baby Eleanor. We were going to visit Pita-Das, an American Hare Krishna who happens to be a great cook and who was also friendly with Susan. So after a few days, Susan came up to Xiamen too. We all stayed in the big courtyard house by the sea which Pita rented at the time (it has now of course been knocked down and replaced by white-tiled Spanish-style flats ...). When it rained, the water sluiced through the mouths of ceramic fish and Susan sat smoking, stubbing her cigarettes out in the mother-of-pearl lined shells we found on the beach. Pita cooked and I cleared up and Susan smoked. It was a perfect arrangement.
Pita was working, overseeing the paintings that local painters brought to him every day in the hope that they were good enough for him to sell in America. I wanted to go and see the great roundhouses, so Pita delegated his friend Little Mouse, who had an antique bookshop in town, to take Susan, myself and the children by local transport to visit these amazing eleventh century high-rise constructions. Little Mouse spoke no English and our Chinese was laughable, but it was a most harmonious excursion. It was two days’ journeying by train and bus and I particularly remember seeing Susan, just as we were nearing our destination in the dark of the second day, cradling Eleanor in her arms. When she thought no-one was looking, she kissed Eleanor on the forehead. It was like a blessing to my baby, one of the sweetest moments I have ever witnessed.
Susan of course had no children, and yet from her emanated none of the bitterness that can occasionally accompany the childless. Though her life was troubled and her face definitely rather ravaged, though there was always some battle in the background and though sometimes even I could not deny that her claims bordered on the psychotic, she had moments of beauty and clarity which accessed all areas and knew no bounds.
I was last in Hong Kong in 1999. This time I had gone with my youngest daughter, Belinda, who was then about eighteen months old. By this time Susan was living in a tiny room, eating noodles in some miniature low-budget Chinese kitchen just off Main Street, still smoking the Lucky Strikes. She had however gone to Thailand at some point, for she showed me her face: smooth skin had replaced old scars. Meeting for lunch at the Bookworm one day, Susan surprised me by giving me some lovely silk blouses and a panda for Belinda. I was by no means in need of clothes but I was touched by her gifts, and the silk shirts still hang in my wardrobe, ironed and ready to wear. When I left, a friend (Roz Keep) accompanied me to the ferry, but she had to return to her child.
On the other side, under the towering mirrored buildings which had replaced my memories of Hong Kong’s waterfront, was Susan Sheers. Just standing there, with nobody else around, just as if she were about to take photos of lotuses or wild bananas - except it was dark, and she looked so small under those high glass buildings. I had the luggage piled on my back and into the pushchair and Susan walked with us to the start of the shiny new railway which now skewers the earth to the airport. She saw us off, and my last memory of Hong Kong is of Susan Sheers, standing alone and smiling under the tall, impersonal protection of Hong Kong. She was not smoking.
We have exchanged letters once a year since then. Hers were terse and factual, detailing the failings of her employers to pay her the money they owed her, sundry bits of news, her new place up by Tannery beach which she invited us to go and stay in ... and we never did. Once she tried to send me a parcel of clothes for the children. Her covering letter made it clear she was to be exonerated of all generosity - even apologising for the preponderance of red - but alas, the venture was doomed. She sent them to the wrong address, they were returned, and by the time all this had happened, she could not afford to reclaim the parcel and, deciding that the children would have outgrown the clothes by this time, just abandoned them to the vagaries of the Hong Kong post office.
Last summer I took Iona - now aged thirteen - to New York to visit the art galleries of New York. I thought of Susan, but didn’t send her a post-card. I have become very bad at communication these days and my yearly letter to Susan’s PO Box in Hong Kong is the most regular letter anyone gets. And now even that is in the past.
I only learnt of Susan’s death today (well, officially yesterday now) and I have been inordinately upset by the news. Many friends have passed away over the years and I have been philosophical, but philosophy is eluding me here even though I could not claim Susan as a close friend. I feel the world has been robbed of a spirit of great beauty and generosity. The contrast between the anxiety of her letters and the glorious freedom of her artistic vision, coupled with her complete inability to capitalise on her talents, parallel the paradoxical brilliance of Vincent Van Gogh.
Before sitting down to write this, I called Pita-Das, now living in Florida, still selling those paintings. He told me of the last place he saw her living in - a tool-shed. She liked it because it was only five hundred Hong Kong dollars a month; he said they should be paying her to live there. She didn’t get it.
Susan Sheers will always be Susan Sheers; her image in my mind is accompanied by the shiny steel shears with which she cut off the rest of her life, the life she had before we knew her on Lamma. She cut herself off from her former life, lived frugally and without ego on noodles and cigarettes. On an island of hedonists, Susan lived in natural austerity, resolutely devoid of self-indulgence: she smoked out of loyalty to an old habit rather than through any apparent enjoyment, and it was this dark friend which probably killed her.
Though frequently tormented by the shadows and spectres of doubt, suspicion and paranoia, Susan was capable also of summoning an inner sun which had the power to dispel the dark so utterly and completely that it took your breath away - in a way which had nothing to do with cigarettes. Though her physical frame was spare and stooped, her eyes were bright and she had a window on a world of light and colour through which she frequently flew. The leaves of a banana tree begin tightly-curled, and unwind with the sun till they spread, translucent, vibrant and positively plastic with health, batting with the air. Susan Sheers may have described herself as forlorn and lazy, but that was typical self-deprecation: her works of art balance the shadows of the world with a play of radiance that few are privileged to see. Yes, the wind in time rags the perfect leaves of the wild banana to gold, but the old leaves are soft as suede, the fruit is vibrant, sweet and full of nourishment, and the extraordinary flower is tough, generous and ravishingly beautiful. That, essentially, is Susan.
I just wish I’d mentioned all this to her. I would like to extend my deepest sympathy to her family for their loss. And thankyou to Linda and Daisy for taking care of her in the end. I will find my photos of her - but they don’t express her nearly as well as her own photo and poem of the wild banana tree.
_________________
Lived on Lamma off and on from 1987 to 1993. Now inhabit Glastonbury, UK, but the sound of waves against the Lamma rocks lives on.
|
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
