One Long Thread (12 page)

‘I'm so glad you came,' Pearl said, linking my hand over her arm.

I wasn't sure how to reply. Part of me was glad, too. I felt close to Pearl, like we shared something of each other and I couldn't imagine going through life without her being a part of it anymore. Though a bigger part of me felt guilty for being there. For running away and leaving my family like that. There was no excuse for what I did. Mum must have been out of her mind with worry.

‘I could have picked a better time.'

‘Ah, there's always better times for everything.'

‘Why did you come here? I mean, why here, exactly?'

‘It's where Jack and I spent our only year together.'

‘But I thought—'

‘Sometimes life gives you second chances. His wife had died of cancer and,' she laughed softly, ‘you wouldn't believe it but we met by chance, one day, at the cinema in Sydney. His children were grown and, well . . .' she shrugged. ‘We came here for a holiday and liked it so much we stayed.'

My mind was busy thinking. ‘So his children would be Mum's half-sisters. Or brothers?'

‘Yes.'

‘Has she ever seen them?'

Pearl hesitated. ‘I think that's what put the final rift in our relationship, you know. I wanted her to get to know his kids. I had this stupid thought that we could be a family of sorts. Silly,' she added.

I couldn't believe I didn't know anything about it. I thought back to the memories I had of Pearl and her visits. But I didn't remember hearing any talk of this other family.

‘Your mother didn't want anything to do with them. She met Jack once, but . . .' she trailed off. ‘She was such a wild thing as a kid.'

‘My mother?' I said, incredulous.

‘Oh yes. She had a wild streak in her, that's for sure. Never listened to a word I said. Always getting into mischief.'

I couldn't believe it. For a minute I thought she must have been telling me lies. ‘I couldn't imagine it.'

‘Boy, I could tell you some stories about her. I never wanted her to marry your father,' she said, her voice turning softer and more serious. ‘That was the final straw, so to speak. She was determined but I didn't think he was the man for her.'

‘What happened?'

‘She married him. Quickly. Said he was the love and light of her life and I should mind my own bloody business. Your mother always needed something else to believe in. She never trusted that she was enough. First your father, then the church. If there's one thing I know, Ruby, it's that we have to live by our own light. There's nothing else we can do.'

I could see the church up ahead of us. There were people standing in small groups around the entrance. I didn't feel so strange in my dress. There were women wearing dresses with various mats and
tapa
and
taovala
s tied around their waists. Men, too, in cloth skirts covered with woven mats. Garlands of flowers were strung around necks. I could hear singing, deeply melodious, rich harmonies.

‘She didn't cope too well after you girls were born. And I was travelling a lot. And then I found Jack.'

I still couldn't believe what my mother was like as a teenager.

‘She loved Sally. More than me,' I said and I was surprised at where it came from.

‘Now, you are wrong there. She never had to worry about you like she had to worry about Sally. Boy, that girl was worse than her mother, from what I hear.'

‘I never thought Mum knew.' My mind was reeling with this information. It was like I was looking back at my life with a totally different lens.

‘You kidding? Why do you think your mother took Sally with her?'

I stopped walking. I'd always thought it was because she loved Sally more. It had never occurred to me that there was any other reason.

‘She always hated my name.'

Pearl smiled. ‘I think your mother needed to blame something for how things turned out. She really loved your father.'

I felt guilty with that thought. Like I was somehow responsible for hurting her too.

‘No one is responsible for our happiness or lack thereof. No one but ourselves.'

‘What happened to Jack?'

‘He passed away three years ago. I wanted your mother to meet him again but she never would.'

I felt a change in Pearl. Like she had exposed a vulnerability inside herself that she didn't know what to do with. It was only slight but her body slumped, she felt heavier against my arm.

I was thinking how complicated life is and how there are no simple roads or paths. We are a fabric of mistakes and hurts; a family tree of fumbled attempts, successes and failures.

As we entered the church, making our way through a hundred or so guests, their faces alive with smiles and tears, I had this moment of clarity. Knowing that I'd passed though something, or crossed over something. An invisible marker in life. I could never go back to who I was. Only forward towards who I would be.

We stood and the timber pews creaked and groaned. An organ began to play and the feeling of being surrounded by a hundred Polynesian voices singing was a physical experience, the sound resounded through my body, and my response was emotional. The sound of happiness, a joyful sadness. I was surrounded by love in all its mysterious chords.

The bride arrived beside her soon-to-be husband. She was wrapped in
tapa
, decorated in flowers and woven wrappings. Barefoot, her ankles and wrists were enclosed in circlets of flowers. Her skin shone, luminescent with oil. Her face glowed with promise and expectation.

I felt transported outside of myself into this community. I could not understand a single word either spoken or sung yet I felt at home.

At the wedding feast, we sat on the ground at what appeared to be giant toolboxes. In the cavity of them there were trays and trays of food. Garlands of sweets and flowers were strung across the handle and under nets to keep the flies away.

Baskets and baskets of whole cooked pigs were brought out among the guests. The bride and groom were at the front, facing us all seated on large mats. They were presented with metres and metres of
tapa
, some lengths taking ten or more people to carry them, opened, displayed, then folded and placed before them.

I could not help thinking of my mother sewing white wedding dresses for people in the Aberdeen and how alien that whole concept felt among this wedding.

Pearl began talking to me about how religious Tonga was, how, since the missionaries came, Tonga embraced religion wholeheartedly.

‘It's quite a conservative country,' she told me.

But I could only see the beauty of that day and moment. There was so much food in front of us that we could only eat a fraction of it.

As we were eating, a girl stood before the bride and groom. Behind her, to the side, was a group of musicians. They began to play and sing and the girl danced. Her knees bent, she moved her head and arms in little flicks, the small movements of her feet moving her to one side, then the other. Guests began to stand, move forward and dance around the girl. A feeling of warmth and excitement spread through the crowd. We joined in, clapping. More people stood, moved to the front and either danced with the girl for a time, or placed paper notes on to the girl's oiled skin. Some of the money dropped to the ground. People dancing around her picked it up and tucked it into the fold of the matting and
tapa
wrapped around her body. Pearl told me that the money would be given to the bride and groom.

I was only vaguely aware of the time. Soon I would have to leave that faraway place and all its mystery and magic. I would have to push through the small cocoon that had protected me from all that was real and present back home.

A friend of Pearl's drove us to the airport. Pearl clutched me tightly to her and cried openly. ‘Oh my girl,' she said. ‘I wish I could make everything better but I can't.'

I nodded, feeling tears coming to my eyes.

‘Give your mother my love,' she said, nodding as though I understood much more than she was able to communicate. ‘Tell her I will write to her.'

‘I'll try to come back. Next year,' I said, thinking I'd like to see the efforts of all our leaf chopping and gathering, all our love and attention bearing silk.

‘My babies are calling me,' Pearl said, turning and walking out of the airport, towards the sunshine and her silk.

I had so much to think about on my way home but my head was a whirlwind that wouldn't settle on anything coherent or reasoned. Instead, I closed my eyes, plugged in the earphones, and concentrated on my breathing. In and out. Unfortunately there was no time to change my clothes before the flight and I had to fly home in a gaudy ill-fitting apricot dress and beige sandals. I decided to leave the
taovala
fastened around my waist too.

19.

Both my mother and my father were waiting for me at the airport. They stood apart, Mum surrounded by a few of the Aberdeen, and Dad was alone. My heart lifted at the sight of him. I ran the last few steps and saw Dad's face crease as he looked at me. I ignored it, rushing straight into his arms. He held me close and firm. ‘I'm sorry, Dad,' I said.

‘It's all right, Button.'

Mum came towards me. I'm not sure what I expected, her admonishment and disappointment, but she said ‘I'm glad you're all right.'

The Aberdeen kept their distance as I walked between my parents towards the baggage claim. I wasn't sure if they'd spoken in person but I felt their tension. In that moment it was hard to imagine they were ever married, that they held each other and talked to each other with an uncomplicated familiarity when they seemed so different and so distanced. It was hard to imagine they were even acquaintances.

I began explaining my clothes to break the tension. I kept mention of Pearl to a minimum and focused on the people, the wedding, the silkworms. Dad put his arm around my shoulder and laughed.

‘I can't say it looks good on you.'

Despite herself, Mum smiled.

We left the terminal for the carpark and I couldn't help but glance around for Barry.

I went with Dad to his motel where he left me alone to unpack and change. I hadn't touched my phone since the flight to Tonga and I turned it on. The screen flashed and beeped with the unanswered calls from Dad and there were a few voice messages, too.

It's Barry
.
Please call me.

I know it's wrong but I really like you
.

I threw the phone on the bed and lay down. I wished a lot into those words but humiliation rose up inside me. I was totally out of my depth and wished I had someone to talk to about it. I considered Dad but it wouldn't have been fair to him at all. I considered Becky but decided she'd get wound up in the excitement and turn it into something superficial and childish. I picked up the phone and texted Barry. I waited. And waited. Then I dialled his number. The phone rang out. I dialled again, the phone rang out.

I could only imagine the questions and complications that Sally's condition presented at the hospital, my parents and the Aberdeen. I didn't really want to know, I didn't want to ask, but I couldn't help those thoughts going around in my head. It was the night before the funeral and I wondered where her body was and how she went from that body on the bed, still warm, yet gone to wherever she was, waiting.

Dad and I caught a taxi to Mum's house. Somehow all of our combined raw emotion had become a shroud of melancholy. Like a deep and peaceful sadness.

Mum's house was lit with candles. I recognised many of the same people from the Aberdeen but they appeared different to me now. We were enveloped in a community of singing. Quiet, unaccompanied voices. The song never ended, it resonated with the same rise and fall of sadness. That steady, pulsating rhythm of endless emotion. We sat on the couch and, after a while, I didn't feel strange at all. No one was looking at anyone but rather we were made to feel alone and connected all at once. For a moment I glimpsed something of what my mother found so compelling about her religion.

My mother wasn't in the lounge room and, after a while, I stood and left my father, walking downstairs to her sewing room. I heard the machine, the staccato of needle bursts running fast, then stopping, running fast, then stopping. I stepped into the doorway and she turned her head a little, acknowledging my presence, without fully turning to see me. I walked over to her and sat on the floor beside her legs. We didn't talk, the singing and the sound of the machine spoke for us, guiding us along an invisible track through the river of our sadness.

I leant my head against her legs and felt her body pause before continuing with her task. I leant in closer and let my head rest against her skin. I felt her warmth and was reminded of this exact moment so many years before when I would have been no older than four or five. The feeling of my mother at her sewing, the sound of those needle bursts imprinting themselves within my skin? Is this where I first sat, dreaming of what I could create? Was this moment my formation? When I was young I wanted so much to be like her. What a blessing are those moments when there is nothing to worry about, no thought of trouble or grief in the world.

I stood and looked around the room. There were drawers and tables containing materials and threads, needles and bias bindings, bobbins and dressmaker's chalk. I took some material and scissors and thread and made something for Sally.

At some point in the early hours of the morning we stopped. I heard my mother sigh and felt her release as if a tangible weight shrugged free from her shoulders. She turned on her chair to look at me. Her eyes were heavy and swollen with black rings. Her skin seemed heavy too, but underneath those surface things, she had melted from her composed determination. She was vulnerable but free and I had not felt that close to her for so long.

‘She did things,' Mum said. ‘Things I can't even begin to—'

‘I know,' I said. ‘I know. Sally was who she was and we can't change that.'

Mum looked at a silk moth I held in my hand that I had made while she sewed. She took it from me. It was all white, stitched from the remnants of different silks and satins, its wings stiffened with visafix as if that creature were about to fly free. She held it in her hands, cupping it carefully, as if it was fragile and real.

I took it from her and placed it on the bodice of the dress she had finished sewing. It would be the last thing Sally ever wore and I almost smiled with the thought that she would have hated that dress beyond words.

There appeared to be nothing to distinguish it from an Aberdeen wedding dress, but Mum took it from the machine, held it up and explained the differences. The shape of the bodice was shorter, the sleeves were longer and the embroidery on the bodice formed a garland of thorns. On the back, just below the neckline, was a small embroidered circle. That, she told me, was a pearl. The pearl of great price. A funeral dress would usually be cream in colour, as opposed to the white of a wedding dress. But, in Sally's case, she would go to heaven as the bride of Christ, being unmarried on earth. Mum said this with such certainty, as if it were force of nature, like gravity and air and water, that we needed the completion of a man to make us whole. I wanted to tell her she had it all wrong, that love was a higher value, surely, not entrapment for the sake of social standing or some atonement for being born female. I wished she had read Jane Austen and discovered what women like her had been telling us for so long. I felt that marriage, in those terms, makes a mockery of love and reduces it to nothing. I decided if it were possible I would never ever marry at all.

Mum opened the top drawer of the sewing cabinet and took out a needle, threading it quickly with a strand of white thread she pulled from the bobbin at the top of the sewing machine. Holding the silk moth in place, she stitched it carefully to the bodice, ensuring the body was held fast to the dress but the wings remained outstretched.

I could not bring her back or save that small life inside her. I could only leave her with a token as fleeting and as beautiful as she was. A moth that spent an entire life preparing for but a few days of magnificent flight.

I was back at the hotel in bed before I realised what it took for my mother to have sewn my silk moth onto Sally's funeral dress. There was no moth mentioned on the pattern or in Aberdeen custom. It must have felt right, for all the wrong reasons, for her to have stitched it to the dress. For me.