The Pacific Room Read online

  Not so long ago Klaus had looked up the word for her in a dictionary as heavy as a tombstone. ‘Flivver, noun, an old cheap car,’ he read out with grim satisfaction. ‘Just like your country’s clapped-out buses.’

  Teuila had said nothing, simply blowing cigarette smoke into the air. Then, just as now, she prefers to think of it as something more mysterious than that – as an uncatchable thing, invisible as the breeze.

  With her black hair pulled back into a ponytail and a white puletasi falling full-length to her ankles, she appears like the other young women perambulating the church grounds with the slap-slap-slap of their sandals. But what the people filing into the church can’t see, pointing as it does out to the harbour, is the flower she has pinned above her right ear. Every now and then with the breeze from the sea it waves, starfish red.

  Teuila breathes in these last few moments of calm. Looking out to where the surf breaks on the reef, she imagines a whole horizon line of flowers, each bloom connected to the next, like the old stories her father told her as a child, fagogo. Stories thread through her like a chain of DNA. Even the lies she tells are offered as flowers, each connected to the next, so the thread at least is true.

  At the travel agency around the corner, where she works, she tells her customers: ‘Lucky is the man who’s going to marry me.’ Teuila Lesolosolou.

  The church is filling. Its interior is cool and white, as tall as it is long, so Teuila imagines herself to be entering an ocean vessel, like the ones she watches slip off the horizon each afternoon. An island in the distance is the wedding altar, a shantytown of woven mats and painted bark cloth fringed by palm leaves. As she takes her seat, the old French organ splutters to life, tentative at first, then swelling with song, summoning them.

  For the people who brush past she is all but invisible. She has chosen to sit furthest away from the altar, next to the door on the left side, the groom’s side, so the flower will be the first thing he sees on entering the church. Unconsciously her smoking fingers form a V shape in her lap. Her legs are demurely crossed, but soon they begin to jump of their own accord, as if imagining flight, so all she can do is look down and will them to stop.

  ‘Under the wide and starry sky,’ she says quickly under her breath, ‘dig the grave and let me lie.’

  When Henry finally enters the church, it is as though the flower alone is singing to him. Teuila keeps her head down as he weaves his way down the centre aisle through the old ladies, a sea of white lace dresses, flying-saucer hats and fluttering heart-shaped fans. Without raising her eyes she can feel his shyness, the gravitational pull of it, as he arrives at the altar to wait for his bride. At which point Teuila permits herself to look up.

  Through her extended eyelashes she takes him in. Just as she sees past his over-starched shirt and uncertain smile, his bride joins him.

  He is smaller than Shema, who to Teuila remains strangely bloodless, but at once he expands before her. His cheekbones broaden then drop away, just as the reef does before the ocean’s fault line; his scattering of freckles disperses into a faint constellation of stars. Best of all she imagines his golden crucifix flicking his collarbone as he breathes.

  That much she can control. But as the priest begins his words, and Henry’ s mother starts to quietly sob down the front, Teuila wonders how she can bear it. If she could now just slip out without being seen, the pain could perhaps be borne away on the trade winds to settle elsewhere, like the cargo ships abandoned beyond the reef. But once offered, her flower can’t be withdrawn.

  She breathes in, her diaphragm contracting and expanding – something at least she can control. Above her she can feel the sun hitting the church roof, curling its edges of tin. The harbour, too, has slowed its soughing, becoming heavy in the heat. If only she could be that still – not this quickening, sickening feeling.

  For a moment she distracts herself with the sequins of sweat that have arisen on Henry’s brow. She wants to pat them down with the handkerchief he’d had specially monogrammed for her in Auckland, but he is beyond her reach now. All she can do is sit and watch.

  What comes over her is involuntary, like a muscle spasming, or the tic under her left eye when she is tired. Quick as a blink she kisses the air. Invisible to the rest of the congregation, it is gathered up and buoyed along by the flick of their fans, darting down the aisle like a fish to catch his eye. At that moment she feels a piece of herself breaking away, then another, and another … Just like a flivver.

  Reluctantly, it seems, the church shudders to life. Around her, the voices spill forth in a rushing human wave, sweeping up everything in its wake. The congregation is singing ‘Lift Up Your Hearts’.

  From where Teuila is sitting at the back of the church, their voices don’t seem to cohere, struggling, in turn, to keep up with the organist who lurches in and out of rhythm. It’s as if the song is breaking down into its individual parts and words, a curdling of sound:

  God’s right hand made a path through the night,

  Split the waters of the sea.

  All creation, lift up your voice:

  ‘Our God has set us free!’

  She is beckoned by the bird. Over her shoulder it has shot, mistaking the chandelier for the sun or perhaps a large lightfilled flower. Her eye is threaded to its darting underbelly of red. It travels with a sudden swiftness that only she can see, its tiny red pulse disappearing into the electric cloud of crystal teardrops. Only then is she reminded of the other hulking presence hovering overhead.

  Glimpsed through the high church window, Mount Vaea appears to Teuila like a heart turned upside down. A mass of dark clotted earth and deep vegetable green, it pulses and shimmers with waterfalls. Even when the rest of the town is caught in rain, it steams and radiates with sunshine, and sometimes it has its head in the clouds. Today she can see the summit. Buried here, alongside the grave of his American wife, is the Scottish writer Tusitala.

  She can recite his ‘Requiem’ with ease, and to Teuila he is the cartographer of the human heart. He is also in a real sense the mountain, and Teuila can measure everything that has happened in her life against its immutable presence, in the wheezing wisps of its heartbeat: ‘Under the wide and starry sky,/ Dig the grave and let me lie.’

  Before he went away, she and Henry would climb to the summit at dusk or dawn. Across stream-licked boulders and mossy logs they would leap, making light of work that could undo the hardiest of climbers. Just the ancient rustle of teak trees and the call of the birds would follow them up, and even these began to fall away as they rose to the top, surfacing into light.

  Across Tusitala’s low whitewashed grave they had scratched their names, and when the last of the embassy joggers had descended the steep mountain track, they would lie in the yellow-green shadows of the breadfruit trees and listen to the distant sound of the surf.

  Even then, years before graduating in hydrography, Henry was able to explain how beneath the endless blue of the Pacific were volcanoes.

  ‘Like this one –’ he marked the ground with a stick. ‘To cough up more islands in the sea.

  Her eyes were pulled to the straight strip of blue beyond the trees.

  ‘It looks calm but it isn’t,’ he said, giving her one of his boy-wonder smiles. Their last time on the mountain she had noticed the freshly painted sign: Western Union Money Transfer. Then when he’d told her the inevitable news that he was going to New Zealand to join the navy, a breadfruit had dropped near their feet – small and prickly and green – and the thought had ripened before her: their love would remain hidden like those volcanoes out at sea.

  It was Henry who had reminded her of the Scottish writer’s tale ‘O Le Fagu Aitu’. How a young Polynesian sailor visiting San Francisco is dazzled by its preposterous wealth. Keawe stumbles into a rich man’s house overlooking the Pacific, where he is offered all his heart’s desires for the touch of a magic bottle. Who could blame him for seizing the chance? But the bottle imp of the story’s title can also bring it
s owner supreme sorrow, Keawe learns; the trick is to know how much happiness is enough, and then to pass along the bottle to another for a price less than what was paid for it. And on and on the story goes.

  Teuila thought of it as they looked out at the reef that final time, Henry’s attentions scattered like buoys across the horizon. She saw love as a bottle imp, something to be wished for in a game of diminishing returns.

  When the singing stops, there is little now but for the deed to be done, for her to act. The stage-like setting of the altar, the palm leaves and the screens of siapo cloth, remind Teuila that this is, after all, a play. Seeing the wedding in this light, as make-believe, helps inure her to the fear. She even allows herself the lazy conceit that this might be, in the end, a dress rehearsal – so stiff and unnatural are the lead actors, so grimly set are their jaws.

  But it’s real. So when Henry takes Shema’s hand at the altar, Teuila wants to rise from her seat in protest. The cut of the bridal gown is unflattering, bulging where it should drop sheer. And her hair, as harsh as a Brillo pad, needs straightening. She should have vaselined her teeth, which keep catching on her best feature, her lips, glossed pale beyond belief, in an attempt at a smile.

  In the garden bungalow halfway up the hill where Teuila lives, her dressmaker’s mannequin wears the beginnings of a swan’s dress, fastening behind the neck in an elegant halter. Drawn from the pages of Glamour magazine, she has imagined puce lips and a French roll in lustrous chestnut – nothing less for Henry’s bride.

  For a moment Shema’s eyes seem to seek her out in the shadows of the church. It’s a look Teuila has grown used to, helpless and beseeching. At the travel agency where she works, village women come to be transported in other ways. For them, Teuila is a choreographer of desire.

  ‘Show me, Teuila,’ they will say. ‘Teuila the adorner. Show me how my husband can love me again.’

  For Teuila, it’s all in the fingers: scissors, seams and a scattering of stardust. Only what you can touch with your hands can you hope to coax into being.

  In this respect, Shema doesn’t stand a chance. Soon the priest will ask the church if there are any objections to the union, and Teuila wonders what it will take to make her rise from her seat – in a gentle roll of the wrists and hips like long ago, when the women farewelled their men going off to war from the sands of the lagoon.

  Though it would be wrong to call this a farewell, thinks Teuila. For she knows that, come three o’clock in the morning, when all the beer is drunk, he’ll emerge rustling from the darkness to tap at her bedroom louvres for the sweet scent of moso‘oi, the pale green flower that blooms only at night.

  She feels the pressure keeping her down like a hand, Tusitala’s hand, pressed on the back of her head. It’s a weight as heavy as the mountain outside, pushing her down into the old church pew, flat as a coffin, making it creak and groan.

  In front of her, a little girl in a pink-sashed dress is struggling in her mother’s lap. There is the flash of white knickers as she flips onto the floor; only her mother’s whiteknuckled hand holds back her desire to run down the aisle.

  From the brief quiet that has descended on the church, Teuila knows that the time has come. The priest has called on the congregation for their blessing of the union, and a breeze unexpectedly answers him, sending an old lady’s widebrimmed hat cartwheeling madly down the aisle. Teuila wonders why it doesn’t just fly over and land on her head, since shoulders are already turning, searching for her.

  The attention feeds her, as oxygen will turn blood red, and she can feel her flower bursting. It’s something to hide behind and speak for her, and so she tucks her head under her arm, just as a swan does, and looks out through the church doors to the harbour, her vision inverted. Here Teuila tries to discern the horizon line, as the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea merge, and she wonders which is the mirror image of the other.

  If I cry like this, Teuila thinks, my tears won’t drop to the ground but rise to heaven. If I stand I’ll fall.

  Just then a windsurfer cuts across the harbour – perhaps one of the embassy kids Klaus had pointed out at the yacht club. From right to left, or rather left to right, the figure makes its dash in the direction of the port, a white tear across the papery blue. And in a blink it’s gone. It’s as if the figure has been swallowed up, submitting to the pull of the horizon, and in its wake the Pacific flows through her, consuming her, so she feels under and within it, a surge of heat shooting to the surface. It’s a blue that goes on forever.

  If the windsurfer comes back, she thinks, I’ll stand up.

  Chapter 8

  HEAVEN BREAKERS

  Tilting like a boat towards the horizon, the colonial lean of the balcony is alarming at first, the way it creaks and complains under the waiter’s bare feet. Before it has time to settle, Lewis reaches for the wine glass and takes a few quick sips. What had at first felt like seasickness soon begins to ease. When he closes his eyes to the sea, the slow scuffing sounds insinuate themselves, free-forming like jazz. Then with the arrival of his lunch Lewis feels himself falling willingly into the view: blue on blue on blue.

  The morning before, Lewis had watched a documentary shortly after he arrived at the hotel. It’s the aftertaste of New Zealand wine, a sharp sauvignon blanc, and the abrupt angle of the balcony that remind him of it.

  Dressed in white and twirling an umbrella, High Chief Tupua Tamasese was leading the peaceful march along the harbour road of three hundred or so mute men of the Mau. As they shuffled along the unmade road, the trees then but saplings, their white lavalavas cast a slow-moving cloud across the New Zealand administration, peaceful and quiescent. It was just after Christmas, 1929.

  Lewis hazards a guess: it was around to the right, beyond the horizontal spread of coral trees, that the police had opened fire on the crowd. A machine gun was trained from the balcony, making sewing patterns in the sand between suddenly scurrying feet.

  For a man of his size, Tupua Tamasese was surprisingly swift. Running into the crossfire, arms held aloft, he sung with baritone sweetness, Filemu Samoa: peace Samoa. His umbrella toppled moments before his body did, forming a white mound sighing softly on the coral road. A rifle bullet had struck his thigh, shattering his femur, so the wound was shy to reveal itself, slowly blooming with blood.

  Unknown fingers had woven a floral wreath across the edge of Lewis’s hotel bed. The documentary had left him feeling drained, in need of a nap. Lifting the limp petals across to the coffee table, he thought of Tupua Tamasese’s fallen body draped in woven mats, the discarded skins of his departing soul: Filemu Samoa.

  That first night a feast, a fiafia, had been organised for the plane-load of new arrivals. Their tables were arranged around a stage in an open-air hut; when the dancing began towards the end of dinner Lewis couldn’t tell what was inside or out. Even the taste of the palusami – taro leaves mixed with coconut milk and salt water – seemed indistinct, neither savoury or sweet, of the earth or the sea. But he grew to like its gentleness, just as he liked the way the dancing ushered the night-time in. And there it was again, the sweet scent of the flower hidden somewhere in the darkness.

  As the dancing quickened, Lewis found himself drawn to a young woman sitting opposite, her wheelchair pressed up to the stage. Her face filled with rapture, hands splayed out, fingers electric. Over the sound of the dancers and the stomp of their feet, he could hear her, and every now and then her father pressed a cocktail glass to her lips, her face bursting with a pink paper umbrella. The sounds she released were like a language known only by her and her father; each note rang out like birdsong.

  Around her, the other guests exchanged polite smiles, their eyes glancing off the oiled bodies on stage, deaf to the dancers’ stomps and calls. The young woman’s body edged closer, as if releasing her soul from the confines of her chair. Tears were streaming down her face, and Lewis wondered about the mysterious transmission enacted before him – of giving and receiving.

 
He thought then of the secret language he had shared with his brother Garry – a song, like hers, released from their bodies, beyond words and aching to express their experience of the world. And now lost to time. Or was it? Perhaps it lay dormant, waiting for some scent or sound, some shape or sinew to release it.

  With the first few sips of wine comes a jolt of jet lag. It’s the delicious disjunction between knowing that he’s here on the balcony, and the sense of slipping past the horizon that appears before him like an unevenly brushed line of aquamarine. He can sense but not see the surf. After another sip, the taste of passionfruit trips off his tongue and he can hear the horizon. He remembers how, only a few years ago, Samoa changed time zones, slipping west over the international dateline. A day had been lost. And around the same time cars had been flipped from right-hand drive to left. The discombobulating thought tickles Lewis as he calculates it’s only two hours earlier in Sydney; thirty-six hours since he last took his medication on the plane.

  His senses are too busy to worry. There’s a sparkle and a velocity to the harbour this midday, which is soon confirmed by the distant figure of a windsurfer, cutting across from the direction of town, unzipping the blue with a streak of foamy white.

  If you squint, he thinks, editing out the glisten of government buildings to the left and the new sea wall that horseshoes around the harbour, it’s easy enough to imagine the scene.

  The image of the Lübeck bucking towards shore comes freely to him, its twin masts announced by a smudge of smoke, bursting through the horizon like all the other steamer ships from Sydney, Auckland and San Francisco before and after it. Heaven breakers, they were called, palagi.