The Pacific Room Read online

  ‘Are you going home?’ Lewis finally has the courage to ask.

  ‘Bro, you’re not wrong.’ Carried in the man’s voice is a surety and warmth, something generated with time and long distance. Lewis recalls how each human cell contains two metres of DNA, and he’s thinking this when his companion points to the map on the TV screen with his fork.

  ‘I’m born in Aotearoa but this is my homeland. I want to see how my other family is going.’

  The man’s plastic fork hovers in the air, as if to emphasise the point. ‘You are Samoan by your values and by your behaviour, not by where you were born.’

  Lewis realises they are no longer talking about a piece of geography, a map point in the Pacific, but something embodied by this smiling man who calls him bro.

  He soon learns that his companion is Troy from Savai‘i; that after Christmas he will travel by light plane to a hip-hop festival in Pago Pago, American Samoa. Together they study the map on the tiny screen in front of them.

  ‘The only difference for me is that when they speak English they’ve got an American twang.’

  Troy’s hand still hovers over the screen, as if he has just this minute tossed these two stray islands, Upolu and Tutuila, in a game of knuckles.

  ‘Do you think they’ll ever be united?’ Lewis asks.

  ‘No, never,’ says Troy. Once again there is that surety and warmth in his voice.

  ‘We’re cool being two. We’ve had the missionaries, the Krauts, the Kiwis and the Yanks telling us what to do. Think of us as two islands connected not separated by water.’

  Troy then brings his arm down next to Lewis, spilling into his space.

  ‘The Pacific is the body we share.’

  Chapter 5

  TUSIATA

  He is always climbing. Up a hill barely cleared, with leaves the size of elephant’s ears. Now in the stillness of the room his face is shiny with sweat.

  Along with his battered paintbox and easel, he brought with him the image of the swimmer. Before reaching the house he had come across the mountain pool, cleft from rock and overhung with trees. As he approached, it became an auditorium of sound for the slow strokes of the swimmer. The arms curved up and over in the style he recognised from Frederick Cavill’s floating baths on Lavender Bay. Crawling, they called it. And there was the frilly kick in the swimmer’s wake. His eyes were drawn to the rotating sockets of the swimmer’s shoulders, the mechanism for this body moving swiftly through the water. An Australian body. The shoulder’s steep bank of muscles was bookended by a boyish head and girlish ankles. He kept alive the question of the swimmer’s sex as he quietly slipped away.

  ‘You are late,’ the writer says, ‘and my time is precious.’

  The painter is confused. Only the other day the island’s dateline had shifted, edging ever westward, as if America had cast its liquid shadow across the Pacific. So midday here is the morning of the following day in Sydney.

  He is dripping with impressions, all these things that swim around him and slip away and fall into the sea. He must change the time on his watch, he thinks, tapping the face of his fob as if it were a crystal ball.

  Time. At his Sydney studio, where he would occasionally teach, the painter is not known for the hours and minutes of the clock: In the morning I open the student, and then I go over to the public house and rest. In the afternoon I shut the student up.

  ‘So what time is it?’ he asks the writer.

  ‘Time you started painting my portrait,’ comes the quick reply, as sprightly as a metronome.

  He had arrived in Australia by accident almost seven years before. The destination wasn’t important, just the distance – to be a hemisphere away from his disapproving father, the Marchese. On landing in Melbourne the painter felt his spirit loosening along with his brushstrokes. Then straight away in Sydney he became known for the writhing figures of his Bacchanalian Orgy. A dancing maiden, a drunken emperor, an empire fallen. Through it all he had dragged his brush, smudging the tale’s moral line, and Sydney society was aflutter with the daring independence of southern neocontinentalism.

  Still, nothing quite prepared the painter for his coming to the island. From the steamer’s deck the mountain rose sharply, its soft-seeming green flanks like moss. In his viewing glass he picked out giant bird’s-nest ferns through drifting handkerchiefs of mist. Then, as the Lübeck bucked its way through the reef’s opening, strains of a brass band reached his ears. These were accompanied by shiny spots of colour, macchie: flags flapped, guns banged, oars flashed.

  Once they cleared the Adler, whale-like in the middle of the harbour, Apia heaved into view: the shambolic trading store straight ahead, demarcating the London Missionary Society Church to the left, bulldog-squat, and the loftier cathedral to the right – colonial gatekeepers to stop the lavafed forest tumbling into the sea.

  From the side of the rocking boat, the painter glimpsed native children spilling through the trees afloat with flowers – Goya red and Tiepolo pink – the size of their faces. Parked on his pony by the shore, the Scottish writer was so thin – the blue sash circumnavigating a waist that could have been cupped by a pair of hands – he was rendered all but invisible; to the painter, a mere chink of light.

  It was late the following day, a Saturday, when the painter, strolling the harbour road with a fellow traveller from the Lübeck, formed his first three-dimensional impression of his subject.

  There was no denying the Scottish writer this time, with his silver thistle pinned to a dark velvet lapel – in town for dinner that night with Lady Jersey, the Sydney governor’s wife. Grounding his presence was the short mannish figure at his side, with stoic ankle boots and a stormy face. She seemed nut-coloured, with large brown hands emerging from the white fringe of her shawl, her face lost in the penumbra of the parasol held aloft by the writer.

  ‘There goes the Scottish novelist and his American wife,’ said the companion on his arm. ‘Why don’t you paint his portrait?’

  On the first morning he discovered a house painted peacock blue, sprayed crimson with bougainvillea. Tilted up from the garden, the verandah appeared something like a stage. Dressed specially for Lady Jersey’s visit, the boys Sosimo and Talolo had limed their hair, a flower pegged behind each ear. Most of all he noticed the tattoos on their legs below their tartan kilts: the inky blackness of them, patterned as finely as serpent scales.

  Soon they were joined by the American stepson, ridiculously robust, his musculature foreshortened from the painter’s vantage point on the lawn. The young man cocked his head and called up to his sister on the balcony, who in turn called to her stepfather inside, who moments before had been dictating passages to her from his bed. Her voice, like her mother’s, carried something of the corn plains of Indiana.

  Into the smoking room the painter was ushered. The doors and windows channelled a breeze, mineral-rich, from the mountain behind. A fireplace stood in the corner, its bricks unlicked by flame. Just as exotic, a lion’s taxidermied face stared up at him from a rug in the middle of the floor. Gradually the painter’s eyes were drawn to the wallpaper around him. Its ochre background was patterned with a design similar to the tattoos on the boys’ legs. Inside the room the sensation was of being sandwiched by skin.

  ‘Uncle will be down shortly,’ said the stepson, pausing to eye off the equipment that dangled from the painter’s arms. ‘You know, I too have a box of paints.’

  The painter was used to these sudden declarations, and at his studio in Sydney was privy to divulgences of the most surprising kind – especially from young ladies during lifedrawing classes.

  ‘No, really,’ the young man continued, determined to get it out. ‘You know Treasure Island?’ The painter nodded.

  ‘Well, the map of the island was mine – just a boyish doodle – and the tale was written for me. I am not making this up. Uncle will tell you so himself.’

  With this he was off, and the idea quickly took hold of the painter as he waited in the silence of
the smoking room – to paint the Scottish writer here, with curtains blocking out the breeze, in this place without women.

  When the writer finally descended, he was as impossible to pin down as a dragonfly. Around the room his spirit buzzed. Which made the painter all the more determined to confront his subject with this idea for the portrait.

  A month or more before, as the Lübeck passed through the Sydney Heads, plunging into the Pacific, he had begun reading The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for the first time. Even as the waves washed over the deck and water poured down below and into every conceivable space, he kept reading, tantalised by the very idea of identity – even when his cabin was under three feet of water and his brushes began floating towards him.

  Now in this other Pacific room, still floating, he was knitted to the idea. ‘Maestro,’ he proposed with barely a stutter, ‘imagine that you are not truly one, but truly two.’

  Still he is climbing, dazed by the sudden darting movements of his subject. For no sooner has the writer sat down than he is up again, ready to fly off.

  Gripping the painter’s arm he says: ‘What I don’t want is a repeat of the John Singer Sargent upstairs.’ Swiftly they move from darkness to light, up the back stairs and into the writer’s study. It takes a moment for the painter to adjust his eyes, so sweeping is the view of the harbour. Then, as they turn their backs on the dazzle, the room’s inky corners slowly reveal themselves: a desk strewn with papers, and a single bed, slung with a curtain of mosquito netting, in the process of being made.

  Cowering on all fours is a chambermaid. Elegantly outstretched, she reminds the painter of the swimmer outside. Her carroty hair falls limply forward, not quite dry.

  ‘Mary,’ says the writer, ‘I want to show our visitor the John Singer Sargent.’ Standing up, she straightens her apron with long, languorous strokes. Even her forehead seems elongated, the painter thinks. And as the light falls on her face, he notices the silky down of a moustache across her unspeaking mouth.

  ‘Damn queer as a painting,’ the writer says. The pronouncement brings the three of them face to face with the portrait, which floats above the mantelpiece on a wall painted the palest of greens. Once again the painter is pulled from light to dark as the John Singer Sargent summons the chilly gloom of a hemisphere away.

  ‘Edinburgh?’ he asks.

  ‘No, Bournemouth,’ the writer says, ‘though it carries all the gaiety, don’t you think, of Madame Tussauds.’

  It is the composition of the painting that strikes the painter as most curious. Not strictly a portrait but, rather, two figures inhabiting the same space. In this strange painted tableau his wife sits on a sofa to the right, veiled like a poltergeist. He paces a Turkish rug to the left, his back to her, fingers emerging from velvet cuffs to scuttle over his chin.

  ‘No, we can’t repeat the mistake of the John Singer Sargent,’ the writer says, his eyes still fastened on the portrait. ‘This time my wife has been banished to the garden or the wilderness of her bed.’

  The painter can sense Mary’s attenuated body seizing up at these words, as if she were a writing machine recording all the stray nerves in the room.

  He turns to her and realises she has yet to utter a word. Her mouth has parted slightly, mannish and square and softened by the wisps of blond, but still she doesn’t speak. In an instant her face has grown paler, her dark eyes glassier.

  ‘Oh, I think I am falling.’ The words slip out of her, liquid deep. The painter can feel the tensile strength of her shoulders as she falls into him, swooning with the dead weight of a faint. His head is in her hair. She smells of the forest, of things mineral and airborne, unfixed from this place.

  Only once she has been eased down onto the floor does he permit himself to look up at the writer, who stands frozen above them, his face oddly transfixed. In an instant he can see the cause of her fright.

  It is but a shiny spot, a macchia, but still quite shocking in the brightness of the harbour light. A scarlet glob of blood has escaped his nostril to tremble on the edge of his face.

  Chapter 6

  TREASURE ISLAND

  On the tarmac the heat rushes to meet him. It’s a grainy warmth, something for Lewis to rub up against, as threedimensional as the darkness. On the walk to the low terminal building at the edge of the runway, all that blinks through the velvety air is the sign, royal-blue lettering on white, with a flowing red flower in the corner: Talofa welcome arrivals.

  Everything around him tells Lewis to slow down – the long shuffling queues at Customs inside, the way the blades of the ceiling fans calmly slice the air.

  He asks the man who takes his arrival card about the long red flower on the sign. Again there feels to be a time delay, coupled with a shy avoidance of his eye.

  ‘It’s a ginger,’ the man finally says with the faintest of American accents. ‘In Samoan the word is teuila.’ To the tired traveller, the word sounds like three little air kisses – too wee la – and for the first time in a very long while, Lewis smiles.

  The Customs man flicks through his passport as if it were a book, although many of the pages are blank, before handing it back to look Lewis deep in the eye: ‘Talofa.’

  The word catches Lewis momentarily off guard, as if it were a casually lobbed hand grenade, and not the simple Samoan greeting of ‘go with love’.

  ‘Talofa,’ Lewis eventually responds, his mind beginning to race. ‘Talofa!’

  At the baggage claim he watches the huddling shapes that emerge on the conveyor belt – small houses taped and bound and woven with sheets of plastic – until a lone black bag with a tartan ribbon on its handle slides out to shyly circle the room. Three times around it goes, the conveyor belt squeaking in the air-conditioned stillness, until it finally dawns on Lewis that it’s his.

  In the arrivals hall, the crowds are gently milling and shuffling as if it were afternoon and not four-thirty in the morning. The men and women are all wearing the same kind of pleat-less three-quarter-length skirt, Lewis notices; no wonder the Scottish writer felt so at home here in this corner of the Pacific.

  His eyes move in myriad directions. A fountain keeps changing shape and colour in a rainbow of fluorescence. Ceiling fans and recorded ukulele music strum the scene from above, in a commingling of real and story time.

  He steps out into the warmth, his limbs moving stiffly through the air. His hotel shuttle bus is waiting for him just a few metres across the road, but the distance seems longer, like wading through water. Standing there, as if just for him, is the driver. He, too, is wearing a skirt – a lavalava, Lewis soon learns. And as the bus eventually plunges into the dense darkness beyond the fountain, the thought liberates him: the idea of not wearing trousers.

  The small bus hugs both the road and the coast. Every now and then they pass a thatched meeting house, each one empty and neon-lit, a perfect oval of light. The movement almost lulls Lewis to sleep, but when the bus suddenly swerves to avoid a dog lying in the middle of the road, the warmth once again rushes to greet him through the open window, though this time it brings with it the fragrance of a flower invisible in the darkness outside.

  Lewis sniffs the air and at once he begins to see. Unbelievably the sky has started to lighten, revealing in the distance the vaporous outline of a mountain. There’s something about it that makes Lewis want to sit up and take note. It’s the closest he’s come to experiencing landfall, having descended to the island so swiftly in darkness. Something is waving to him through the window, huge and heavenly as if slipping through the sky. Although he has seen them countless times in books and on postcards, nothing quite prepares him for his first glimpse of coconut palms. All around him he watches them sharpening into view, nodding and multiplying, and still he can’t quite believe it – their keening beauty at dawn, their absurd giraffe-like tallness, the way their heads burst darkly through the sky. At last he can feel his marrow melting.

  Just light enough now to read, he takes from his jacket pocket the
note that has been written for him, snaking around the corners of his boarding pass like a tattoo: ‘Left along a lane past the market you will find a fale with the sign Tropicana Nightclub. Go on a weeknight and tell them that Troy sent you.’

  Again there’s that sense of surety and warmth, and in an instant he realises he’s arrived.

  Chapter 7

  TEUILA

  From the slowness a piece of poetry breaks free – scrawled across the side of a bus barely moving down the harbour road, as does Teuila Lesolosolou. When pronounced, her name quickly patterns the air, quite unlike the slowness of her shuffle. On this or any other morning, all movement stems from the hips, which swivel with little discernible effort, as does the breeze off the harbour – little puffs of the Pacific, keeping her body in equilibrium.

  Today her destination is the old Catholic church whose twin steeples edge up from Beach Road’s avenue of coral blossom like an uprooted tooth. As the bell tolls for Henry’s wedding, she stalls. An idea flowers up through her body, which has almost come to a stop. With the morning sun prickling her toes she releases the feeling that has announced itself in the lightest sheen of sweat across her temples and forehead, as if her skin is breaking up into particles of air.

  She starts to sing:

  Fascinating rhythm

  You’ve got me on the go.

  Fascinating rhythm

  I’m all a quiver.

  The voice is high in the head, keeping a deeper resonance at bay.

  What a mess you’re making

  The neighbors want to know

  Why I’m always shaking

  Just like a flivver

  As Teuila sings her mind turns, slowly at first, then faster, but not too fast. It spins like one of the old vinyl records her embassy friend Klaus plays each week for their whisky nightcap, Sarah Vaughan Vol. 1 Night Song, softly smoothing time. Even when the needle jumps the songbird’s voice is steady and true.