The magic brings fear, and I’ve always felt the fear. The two storey, five bedroom house we grew up in groaned with bad memories, made before we ever lived there. A man once killed his wife with a machete in what became my dad’s study. With one possession, he killed another. I had nightmares. I say to Mum now, “I was never a good sleeper was I?” She doesn’t remember it that way. “You were fine,” she says. Parents get busy. The things that loom large for a kid are not so big to them, so they forget. But I can’t forget the demons dancing at the bottom of my bed, the heat clinging to my hands and feet, binding me to their presence.

Sleep paralysis, I now know. It happens when you become conscious somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. You see, you want your body to be completely relaxed – this stops you from acting out the absurd pantomimes of your dreams. But if your muscles are all disengaged but your mind is switched on, well, it’s terrifying. You lose the ability to control your body. The trick I established was to keep screaming in my mind until the body synced up. Then I would sprint to my parents’ bed and toss and turn between their warm bodies until, eventually exhausted, I would drift away.

I always thought my nightmares might be tied up with the superstitious beliefs of the land. Mum told me stories about vada tauna doing puri puri to make people sick, as retribution for past grievances. I heard stories told with such conviction that they became truth to my young mind, but somewhere in it all, the truth, you realise, is entirely subjective.

Papua New Guinea is a small island northeast of the Arafura Sea, west of the Pacific Rim, centre of small-town, big-time corruption thriving on gold, copper, coffee, drugs, arms, people. Despite being one of the world’s least liveable places (according to The Lonely Planet), it is also one of the world’s most resource rich.

PNG shares its sweet potato-shaped landmass with West Papua, known also as Irian Jaya, occupied by Indonesia under some dodgy doings that the world permits. Merdeka meaning ‘freedom’ in Bahasa Indonesia, is a prize for which the West Papuans are fighting a losing battle, or a privilege so many of us take for granted – but that’s a whole other story.

My childhood was made up mostly with the quiet observation of the ripening of fruit, of a red dawn across a verandah sliced with palm trees, of the smell of bully beef and sweet tea, of the silence except for a distant bus backfiring like a gunshot, and then the actual gunshots. There was also the crackling of fire and the yellowed pages of comic books, and arms lifting machetes in the dark night. Then there was the last plane to Sydney, and losing my best friend Biru.

My grandmother left behind thirteen kids, thirteen little broken hearts, my mother’s was one of them. My bubu was long gone by the time my mother met my father. Sitting on the back of a crowded open truck full of villagers, on a fateful rainy day, my dad, the white man, the student teacher, escaping enlistment in a war he didn’t believe in, put a coat over her shoulders. With one gesture he sealed her fate and his own.

My mother never taught me her language. Or languages. Her reason was that she didn’t want me to be disadvantaged. She wanted me to speak real good English. So I learned my mother tongue from the TV. Mum was afraid that knowing PNG customs and traditions would somehow affect how much of the white stuff I would pick up. She thought that the white stuff was the important stuff.

It’s easy to see why she thought that. Village life was hard, especially for women. My mother was arranged to be married three times. The first was to Igo, a fisherman, and she couldn’t stand the smell. The second was Goata, he got her cousin-sister pregnant, so he had to switch. The third time, I don’t remember what happened. She just said no I guess. Each rejection (even the one that wasn’t her fault) led to her head being shaved so that she could be properly shamed.

When my father saw her on the back of that truck he fell hard. I don’t know why. I’m not saying she wasn’t intelligent, funny, beautiful and magical, but she wasn’t exactly the easy option. She was the pastor’s daughter, the smart one, the one who could dance. The one who would bring in a lot of pigs, shells and rice as bride price. He was a scrawny bellbottom-wearing, mustachioed boy from Sydney, with aspirations to be a boxer, but not a soldier.

It would be years before the white side accepted the black side. The white bubu never really did accept her. Mum would have to stay in a hotel, while Dad took us kids to visit. But the black and white grandmothers maybe had more in common than they realised. They were women of an era when women were poured into moulds – housewife, homemaker, mother. Both women had a sickness they couldn’t defeat. The white one went so far as to try to cut the hard lump of her disease from her breast with a knife. The Glaswegian fireball that travelled alone as a teen to a new frontier, had no fear. The women were hard and strong. All fire, no smoke.

Along the coastal region, among the Motuan people, a girl becomes a woman through the visual motif of tattoos. A code which is embedded with thorns from something like a lemon tree, using pigment made from the charred remains of the candlenut, is read by men to understand that the girl is ready to be taken as a wife, or read like a map by people from other villages to tell where she is from. The thing about tribal tattoos is that the memory of the pain washes over you like any trauma, like grief, or the yawning shock of childbirth.

So my mother tells me. She touches her ink sleeves and shuts her eyes remembering the first tapping, the bleeding and the wiping of the blood. The pain when they go over it the second time is so profound that the sensation remains 50 years later. I can’t remember if Biru had tattoos. She must’ve kept them hidden.

The memories of my childhood in that wet, hot, illogical place play out in my mind like projections of super 8 film onto a dusty wall – glitchy and broken, with traces of ghosting. The more I replay these scenes the more the film degrades until it’s comically obligated to burst into flames.

Biru was as skinny as me, and I was pretty skinny. My brother said I would have to run around in the shower to get wet, is how skinny I was. She lived in the little house behind our big house with her brothers, uncles, cousins but she was our main haus girl. She washed our clothes, did the gardening, went to the market sort of thing. Her mother died sometime long before I understood what death was.

She seemed to want to know me, without the judgement I felt from the full PNG girls at school, or the constant curiosity of the white kids. Being mixed race was still a weird thing at the time. Like somehow your black-skinned mother struck it lucky, or your anglo father must’ve fucked up. So much is kept from you as a kid and you are left to interpret these complexities in the playground.

Biru and I would journey around the garden, pulling down unripe fruit like guavas and rambutan, our mouths distorting with the bitterness. We would collect the akuri nuts, the orange shells the size of a seven-year-old’s fist, and smash them with stones until the tiny little canoe-like nut would emerge, broken.

Biru liked to smash many nuts and when she had a pile next to her she would sprinkle a little salt on and then consume luxuriously. My method was to pick at the broken nuts in their damaged husks and consume them as soon as each husk was open, wanting to immediately know the flavour for a few unsatisfying seconds. Biru always shared with me.

One time, I came out from the back door of the kitchen, and I saw Biru with a stone. Her arm was rising and falling. It was the wet season. The air was always moist and monsoons hit our pacific neighbours. Sometimes hard, sometimes soft. Life was brimming from every tree, bush, and creek. The underside of my cubby house would be clustered with caterpillars. The mango tree would be weighed down with the promise of deliciousness and after a big rain, the tadpoles would float down the concrete guttering which rimmed our backyard, on their way to becoming little adult frogs. Biru sat near the edge of the running water scooping out tadpoles and smashing them with her stone.

Not long after the tadpole smashing, Mum told me Biru was leaving because she was going to be married and we should be happy for her. She got a good bride price. She was still as skinny as me. She went away. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I understood from kitchen conversations between people taller than me at the time, that she was pregnant, that she was sick. That her new husband’s family kicked her out because someone had put bad magic on her. That she was alone.

After she left, those afternoons without anyone to smash nuts with felt empty and long. I collected tadpoles and sat with them squirming on a warm flat rock, my arm raised with my stone ready to understand why someone might want do something like that. I put the stone down and gathered the tadpoles into a shoe box so I could keep them as pets.

The outside felt scarier than ever. Biru was my guide to understanding that landscape of colour and noise. It was safer inside. I watched so much TV my family didn’t need the TV guide, they could just ask me and I could tell them what was on. Blossom. Sale of the Century. Punky Brewster, Dr Who, The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Monkey Magic. When I was outvoted on what to watch, I would go to my bedroom and read books on how to hypnotise people, on how to make magic with my eyes and fingers, on how to vanish into thin air or make fire with my hands. With these skills I would kill all the bad people on earth. An angel assassin. A ghost moving through dimensions of reality or a spirit with a deadly mission.

Sometimes when the demons at the foot of my bed left me alone long enough, I would have vivid dreams. One time I thought I saw Biru moving down a hotel corridor, always turning a corner before I could see if it was her. I ran after her and she kept turning corners. Finally I caught up, I reached my arm out to the back of her shoulder. She turned and her face was a smashed tadpole. I woke but my body remained asleep, out of my control. Even after we finally left PNG, the nightmares didn’t stop, they stayed for a few more years. I searched endlessly for serenity in sleep. Alcohol, weed, sleepytime tea, more alcohol, less coffee, window open, window shut, unfamiliar bodies to cling to, but not much worked.

Somewhere between black and white, between the wet season and the dry, between wakefulness and sleep, you become conscious. Aware of your body, but not able to move it, thinking your thoughts and knowing a dark sea surrounds you. The super 8 of my childhood flickers on and off. I’m reminded when I see my mother’s tattoos, or when she complains of an old pain in her neck I know was caused by an injury inflicted when she was fifteen, by brothers and uncles in a culture rich with complex rituals and overflowing with injustice. No story ever really ends, it’s just interrupted with ad breaks and to-be-continueds and sequels and prequels and adaptations.