One Long Thread (10 page)

17.

We had to tend to the silkworms around the clock and Pearl explained to me that at least, with me helping, she'd get more of a break around her two-hourly schedule. As we worked, she taught me her craft, how silkworms only ate the leaves of one variety of tree – the mulberry. And while the variety of mulberry known as the white mulberry is the most common variety to feed silkworms, the Islands of Tonga have an abundant supply of paperbark mulberry leaves that she collects, chops and feeds to her babies.

She didn't ask about why I'd come or press me for details and we never discussed how strange it was that I'd arrived out of the blue, like I had. She seemed to accept my arrival as normal and continued on, regardless. I was relieved and began to relax. Each time the wind blew, I smelt gardenias or frangipanis and it was so beautiful, so startling, all the thoughts I had disappeared.

It was hard to think of Pearl as my mother's mother and I began to understand something of their conflict. I could not imagine two more different people. My mother was fine-featured, controlled and routined. She searched the world for details and answers and neat equations. Whereas Pearl was rough and overflowing. Her skin sagged around fatty arms and legs. Her feet were calloused and her sarong was tied carelessly around her body.

‘Silkworms', she continued to tell me, ‘will eat continuously for months, and shed four times before spinning their cocoon. It's not strictly true that silkworms eat only mulberry leaves', she added. ‘You can feed them beetroot leaves and their silk will spin red. Or a version of red. But if you feed them right and love them, they will spin you silk of the highest quality.'

My arms ached from the chopping and leaf-spreading when we took our next break.

‘I've promised to help my friends with their
tapa
,' she said, cleaning her hands and splashing water on her face. I followed her, leaving the silkworms to gorge on their latest batch of leaves. Inside that room it sounded like perpetual rain.

‘I suppose you're wondering why I'm here,' I said to her as we walked.

‘Everything has an answer in its own good time,' she said. She took my hand and squeezed it, clasping it to her chest and we walked a good way, like that, bound together. She began to sing, which was a mixture of Tongan words and some humming. It was awful and I laughed. She let go of my hand and said. ‘Never was much of a singer but I love it.'

‘Go on,' I said, turning to watch a group of children run up to the edge of the road to stare at me.

She said something in Tongan to them and waved her hand in their direction. ‘I'm really going to have to fatten you up,' she said. ‘In Tonga, the fatter you are the more you are loved by your family. Your little body is enough to make a Tongan weep,' she said, clicking her tongue. ‘My friends will think your mother neglects you.'

I swallowed with that thought. But Pearl began singing again and I couldn't help but laugh.

At the end of the road we turned left and passed three small
fales
before coming to a group of women seated around what appeared to be a large piece of beige fabric, on the grass. Pearl waved as we joined the group. The women shuffled to make room for Pearl who dragged me down to sit beside her.

‘
Tapa
,' Pearl said to me, indicating the cloth.

I looked closer, touching it, gently. It didn't feel like cloth at all, just thick paper.

‘The women make it from the bark of the mulberry tree,' she said. ‘They tear off long strips of bark, soak it, pound it out into flat strips, glue it together and decorate it with family designs and crests. Just think, one living tree produces this,' she said, taking a pot of black ink and dabbing a thick brush into it. ‘And me and my babies use the leaves to make silk. If you ask me,' she said, ‘this, right here, is God. Nature's great creativity.'

The women – there were no men – were dressed in a variety of clothing similar to what Pearl wore or I had seen worn on my brief trip into town. Fabrics or dresses draped around their bodies, overlaid with some form of matting or weaving tied around their waist. Some of the women in town had longer dresses with smaller bands securing lengths of long, woven tassels.

Pearl turned to me. ‘Luisi over there,' she pointed carefully, ‘this
tapa
is for her daughter's wedding.
Tapa
is very valuable and given on special occasions. It's a measure of wealth and regard,' Pearl said. ‘I was here for the King's tenth year celebrations,' she said, laughing. ‘Oh, my, you have never seen such feasting or so much
tapa
. For weeks there were tables and chairs set out along the foreshore for as far as you could see.'

I nodded, but the details seemed almost far-fetched to me. I ran my hand over the edge of the
tapa
. The entire piece was as large as ten metres square, I thought.

Pearl spoke Tongan for a moment before returning to English. ‘If you are still here,' she said, ‘you can come to the wedding.'

Pearl opted for a quick nap after we chopped and fed the silkworms double so we could stretch out our next shift for an extra few hours. I lingered in the silkhouse, cleaning up and taking a moment to catch my thoughts.

As well as the baskets containing the silkworms, the room held wooden spinning looms and taller baskets. There were boxes piled up on top of each other, a refrigerator and some chairs. Beside the main work table was an old metal filing cabinet. I moved around the room, lifting lids on baskets and peaking underneath sheets draped over looms. The sound of the feeding worms was a comforting, rhythmic sound, and made the room feel alive. Their smell didn't bother me any longer.

In two of the baskets I found what appeared to be tufts and hunks of raw silk resembling dirty, matted cotton balls. Kilograms of it. I took hold of it and ran it through my fingers, squashing it, kneading it. My mind drifted into thoughts of how it could be woven into thread and fabric, and I was trying to recall the different ways silk was produced. I became aware that I had no idea what Pearl did with all her silk and decided that, with the looms I'd found, she probably span the cocoons into thread of some sort. I really knew so little about her.

I slumped into a chair beside the door and felt a wave of exhaustion that was as much from the physical work I'd been engaged in all day as the weight of what I was avoiding. I thought of Barry and how my leaving must have felt to him. I wanted to cover myself in blankets, to be locked inside something safe and not come out. I longed for it despite realising how selfish and cruel I'd been. I wanted that land to swallow me whole and keep me. I didn't want to climb down that Faraway Tree at all. I wanted it to move on, with me wrapped up inside.

It was dark by the time we arrived at Pearl's friend's house. Pearl took great delight in telling me how much Tongans loved their food.

Shortly after arriving in Tonga herself, Pearl had been invited to a dinner where plates and platters of food had completely covered a trestle table set low on the ground. There was so much food, she told me, that there was no way the guests could possibly get through even a small proportion of it. The dinner was to celebrate the return of a daughter back to Tonga, who had been studying in New Zealand. The girl's mother had addressed the guests, expressing her love and pride in her daughter. Soon after starting she burst into tears, weeping and wailing that she could not provide enough food.

‘The abundance of food is an expression,' Pearl said, ‘of the amount of affection or esteem or value. She could not afford a quantity of food suitable for her love for her daughter. Tongans aren't perfect.' I felt there was so much more underneath this simple statement.

Pearl continued, ‘But I love them anyway.'

I couldn't help thinking of Dad and our trips to Charlie's Chinese Restaurant for our birthdays and how it would feel wrong to let a birthday go by without that ritual.

Pearl and I were greeted warmly and much fuss was made over me, again, though I still couldn't understand what was being said. I thought about asking Pearl to teach me just a little Tongan, like how to say my name, how to talk about the weather. We were outside, the air was warm, filled with a soft breeze and people gathered about the open space in different groups and huddles. I felt self-conscious in my Western clothes and skinny body. I thought of Becky and her constant claims of being too fat, despite being a small size eight. A dose of Tonga could be good for her. I found myself smiling and feeling warm about my friends, all of them, and it surprised me.

In a corner underneath a large tree a group of people were singing. Some sat cross-legged, clapping and swaying. A few men beat sticks on upturned buckets.

Pearl pointed to our left where a group of men formed a circle around a spot on the ground. I watched as they bent down to lift something from the ground. Steam rose, they strained and retracted backwards with the weight. They shuffled sideways and their steaming load was placed on the ground. I leaned over to get a closer view and watched them remove smoking banana leaves. Once finished, small bundles of food, wrapped in silver paper and other leaves, were placed on plates and passed around.

A dozen or more children ran and played around us. Their laughter was wild and unrestrained.

Halfway through dinner I heard what I thought was the sound of pigs and found a group of piglets running free beside a cluster of
fales
.

‘This food is cooked underground,' Pearl explained. ‘Tongans heat rocks, dig a hole and line it with banana leaves. They pile in the bundles of food, cover it with more leaves and fill it with dirt. Underground oven,' she said, finishing the last of her sweet potato. ‘Called an
umu
.'

A group of boys were looking at me, pointing and laughing openly and I felt embarrassed.

Pearl straightened up beside me and glared at them. ‘Tongan boys,' she said with a sniff. ‘Gorgeous,' she said, shaking her head slightly. ‘But trouble. Big trouble. I'm sure one of them will be asking you to marry them before you leave. They try it on with any foreign girl.'

I looked down at my plate and felt my face flush. I imagined Becky there with me and couldn't stop a smile coming to my lips. Casanovas for sure.

We finished with dinner and wandered home. Pearl and I were content in each other's company. The moon glowed, like a white promise, above us. The silkworms, ever ravenous, had to be fed and we tended them in the near dark, kerosene lamps lighting our workspace and the smell of burnt fuel stinging the back of our throats. My eyes blurred and dragged, heavy with the need to sleep. When each basket was full of leaves, we extinguished the lamps and trudged wearily back inside to fall into our beds.

Sleep came in an instant and my dreams were pleasant and vivid. When I next woke, I found Pearl seated on the chair beside me. I sat up and rubbed my eyes and she presented me with a hot cup of tea. I could hear the ocean, steadily drumming the shore beyond our window, a relentless, present rhythm and through the window was the small bead of a moon watching over us.

‘I have never loved another boy like I loved Jack,' Pearl said. ‘We'd known each other since we were tots and our mothers would leave us to play together while they drank tea and chatted on. He'd be waiting on the corner near my school for me every afternoon. And he'd walk me home. If my mother had known,' she said and smiled just slightly, ‘well, she would have put a stop to that, to be sure.'

‘My mother never had much room for kindness.'

I found myself marvelling at the woman she was, sitting comfortably inside herself, holding the threads of an inconsistent world.

‘I don't think it was something she had known herself or understood how to give to anyone. My elder twin sisters got what little of it she ever had. Life was hard,' she added. ‘There was no denying that. My days were filled with getting up early, tending chores, walking to school, those brief moments with Jack, then chores till dark. I wasn't allowed out to play. I don't want you feeling pity for me,' she said. I didn't interrupt her to acknowledge that pity was the last thing I felt for her. I sat up straighter in my lounge bed and sipped my tea quietly.

‘But there was a way of these things, you know. We didn't go to dances or school outings. My parents weren't religious. They were hard and I pity them for that, now. I snuck out that one night, with Jack. He showed me the jar of money he'd been saving up for us. He said it would be another six months before he'd have enough for a ring and a wedding. Even with everything that happened after, if I ever had to go through it again, I would still have gone with him that night. The feeling of his hand on my cheek and his lips on mine. His body holding me tight and the knowledge that out of everyone in the world, we had found each other. It only takes one night. And the world can change. I didn't have time to tell Jack before I left. And in my childishness I thought I could find a way back to him.

‘I'll never forget that moment on the train station. Standing in my red coat with people looking at me. And you know, Ruby, I could have let their hatred eat at me. Scorn is a physical thing. But I had Jack and a baby growing inside me and that small glimmer of joy was enough. There were places they sent girls like me back then. We were supposed to give our babies away but I couldn't bear that thought. So I escaped before my time and your mother was born inside a railway station.' She was quiet and sipped her tea. ‘I wouldn't recommend it as a rule,' she said as a small laugh rocked her body. ‘Your mother always hated that coat. But it kept her warm for those first few days.'

I didn't know why she was telling me. Or perhaps I did. I wasn't sure how to react, it seemed so barbaric and cruel and I was torn between a deep empathy for her and admiration and something else I couldn't understand. But she leant forward and cupped my face. ‘Anyone ever tell you how absolutely perfect you are?' I reached out and hugged her to me, I held her tightly like she was the only raft I had.