One Long Thread (17 page)

The silkhouse was left idle for the entire day while we chatted – I could make out a few words here and there – played cards, ate and drank. I was hugged and presented with so many flower leis and pieces of
tapa
, I was barely visible beneath all the foliage. Plant my legs in the earth and I could have been the Faraway Tree itself, bearing flowers and foliage of every colour, shape and variety, my arms reaching out towards a distant future full of expectation and imagining.

In the evening, when the food was brought out of the house and out of the ground, Pearl stood to address the crowd. She cried, unashamed tears rolled down her withered cheeks, her belly rocked as she sobbed. I could not understand most of what she said, though I picked up on her sentiment and found tears coming to my own eyes. I felt a sense of peace inside my soul. Contentment in where I was, where I had been and a longing, all the same, to go back home. I stood and Pearl embraced me before ordering everyone to eat.

When the meal finished I was dragged to my feet and made to dance. I protested, knowing my body could never make the graceful and artful movements I had seen. But I was ignored, made to bend my knees, hold my hands out and follow the other girls. Despite my awkwardness I laughed and pretended to know what I was doing. Singing a tune I did not know, words I did not understand, in a body that looked completely unsuited for anything that poised.

The last guest didn't leave until late into the night. We hugged them goodbye and retreated to the house which felt too quiet, too empty now that we were alone. I made Pearl a cup of tea and we talked until the sun came up and a new day took me home.

26.

For the first few weeks after my return I was consumed with completing my major project for college. I sifted through my hundreds of photographs from Tonga and spread them across the entire floor of the sewing room, shuffling and sequencing them. There were pictures of Pearl chopping leaves into the woven baskets, reaching up to take down baskets of worms. She was feeding them, changing their old leaves. She was singing, laughing, holding her knife out towards the camera as we shared a joke. She was hugging Luisi at the markets, standing before a table of sarongs, printed with blues and greens and silk-screened hibiscus prints. She was sipping milk from a coconut, her neck thick with floral wreaths. She bent down beside a Tongan man, his legs covered with the wood shavings from the drum he carved, beside the main gate to the markets. There were groups of children, barefoot and smiling, their teeth white against their dark, shining skin. Women clustered on the grass around giant spreads of
tapa
, seated in pairs with mallets in their hands, pounding out strips of mulberry bark into flattened lengths. They were glueing lengths together, dipping their brushes in candlenut dye and applying family crests in repeating patterns over the sheets of
tapa
.

The worms were fatter, their heads raised and some pictures caught the first fine threads that began to emerge from their heads. I had a dozen pictures of golden silk orbs, masses of cocoons. I was dancing, my body copying the graceful positions of dancers, knees bent, my hands making rounded actions. Men bent low over the
umu
, their
taovalas
swinging around their waists. Roasted pigs emerging from the smoking pit, trestles of food.

I examined my photographic record of my visit to Tonga and, as I sequenced the pictures into the story of silk, I realised it could not be separated from Pearl or her friends or myself. It was not just about the thread or the fabric it produced. It was about a community of people. Their hopes and dreams, their lives and loves. And, perhaps, it was even more about fragility; the precarious balance of hope and life, and the inevitability of death. Each picture ignited powerful memories and connections within my body. I was bound to them all with threads of a shared experience. But it was the last picture I bent to pick up off the floor and hold in my hand that told the true story.

It would be easy to overlook this picture because, at first glance, there was nothing extraordinary there. Just a picture of a tree; a simple, indistinguishable tree among a grove of similar trees. Thin brown trunk and sapling branches with green leaf hands open, waiting. The paperbark mulberry tree. I realised that without its silent existence and patient belonging, its unsung glory, its steady growing, there would be no silk, no
tapa
, no life and love that breathed in every other picture spread around my floor.

The essay on culture and textiles, silk and
tapa
almost wrote itself as I struggled to keep up with writing down the ideas and thoughts that sparked in my mind. I sat at my keyboard right through lunch and dinner until I was finished. I cut the essay into sections and mounted the information beside photographs in my folio.

I opened one of Pearl's boxes of silk that I had stored in the garage and spread it over the floor. I held the different textures and shapes in my hands. I placed hanks of it between baking paper – like Pearl had explained to me – and ironed it together. The bulk of the silk flattened and fused together into stiff paper. I painted the paper with different coloured dyes and cut shapes and strips and assembled them together into bark forming a trunk and branches, and leaves. I glued it to the front of my folio:
The Family Tree by Ruby Moon.

When I arrived at work, Mr Grandy was busy with a customer but his smile was warm and I felt so glad to be home. He flicked his fingers towards the office and I looked up to find the door open. I caught sight of someone's legs seated on the chair, the door obscuring their body. I stowed my handbag under the counter and took the stairs to the second level and the office. I pushed open the door to find Molly Goodweather.

‘Ruby, dear,' she said, lifting her hands towards me. Her fingers shook, heavy with gems on every finger. Her arms rattled with an array of gold bracelets and bangles. I reached down to hug her.

‘So lovely to see you, dear,' she said.

‘You too.' I was still a little awe-struck in her presence and was never sure of what to say.

‘Now,' Molly said, ‘I want to hear your thoughts about what you're making for the
Young Designer of the Year Award
.'

I laughed. ‘I really don't know.'

‘Then get talking,' she said, pointing to a pencil and paper on the desk. ‘Or rather designing.'

Dad and I were alone for the first evening in a long time as Amona had just flown to Perth for a week with her job.

Dad appeared at my bedroom door, holding up a video and his favourite sherry. ‘Want to join me?' he asked.

I'd been pinning a bodice together and I had pins in my mouth. I rested the material down on the table and removed the pins to smile. ‘Sure thing.'

I sat close to Dad, resting against his shoulder. His body was warm and familiar and comforting. He lifted his arm and put it around my shoulders and together we watched Fred Astaire who was my Dad's very idea of the model man. He hummed beside me – he's not bad with a tune – and I could feel the sound reverberating through his body.

‘What do you think Sally would have done with her life?' I found myself saying.

‘I don't know. I really can't imagine,' Dad said.

‘I'm so glad I have you, Dad.'

‘And you always will.'

We were quiet for a while before I broached a conversation I'd been avoiding. ‘I've got something to tell you,' I said and his concentration strayed from the TV as he turned to glance at me before looking back at the screen. He murmured in his throat and I continued. ‘There's this boy and it's complicated.'

I had his full attention as he shifted his to turn and look at me. ‘Barry?' he said and I was so surprised I didn't know what to say next.

‘Pearl wrote and told me,' he said. ‘With very specific instructions about making sure I knew how important it was for a girl to follow her heart. And be with the man she loves. And that if I so much as put my little toe across your path of love she would personally fly here and . . .' he paused, ‘and sort me out.'

‘She did what?'

‘I know,' he said, smiling. ‘Though what she actually said about what she'd do to me if I stood in your way was a little more specific.'

I couldn't believe it. What a nerve! But I felt a wave of affection, too, in feeling loved and looked after.

‘Well,' I didn't know what else to say.

‘And Barry called me too.'

‘He did?' It seemed as though everyone was busily involved in my own life, except me.

‘He didn't want me thinking—' he didn't finish. He sighed. ‘You like him, Ruby?'

‘More than like,' I said a little quietly not sure how Dad was going to react to this whole situation. Though the fact that he hadn't brought up Barry's phone call with me until now was a good sign, I thought.

‘You're a big girl,' he said.

‘He lives in Darwin,' I said and it sounded ridiculous. But that's how I felt.

We sat in an awkward silence while Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were graceful and poised inside the small television box, their movements together so fluid and choreographed. And perhaps that's what was so enjoyable about it. Even the unrequited loves and failures, fights and misunderstandings were part of a planned story. And life just wasn't like that at all.

Dad had stopped humming and we were consumed in the feeling like we should be saying something to the other, but neither of us sure what that should be. The need and expectation sat heavy around us, bringing our hearts into our throats.

‘I like him,' Dad said eventually and I moved on the seat to fit my head under his shoulder.

‘I've never gone very far with a boy, Dad, but I think Barry is going to change all that.'

It had been a week since I told Dad about Barry. I was alone in my room with the sound of Dad's last footsteps on the hallway still echoing, his voice, his hug. His last words before a week apart. ‘Look after yourself, Button,' he said, not registering the slip.

Amona had called saying she'd been offered a complimentary weekend at a guest house just outside Perth and asked if Dad could join her for a week. Dad had a stash of holidays up his sleeve and organised a week off. There was discussion about me going with him but I had less than a fortnight to make the dress for the fashion awards. And Mum's latest news meant I no longer had a place with her either, so for the first time ever I stayed home by myself.

The day before a letter had arrived announcing that Mum was getting married. To marry again in the Aberdeen, a man and woman involved must renounce their old lives completely and give up any remaining family, friends or ties from their previous lives in order to receive the sanction of marriage as complete newlyweds. To be honest I wasn't shocked about the marriage itself or that Mum had surrendered all sense of herself to be consumed completely by her religion. But what upset me was that after everything, after losing Sally, Mum would be prepared to give me up so she could get married in her church. I could have coped if she had found a wonderful man and rushed halfway around the world to marry him, that being with him meant she would not easily be able to see me. I would understand that her happiness meant compromising between being near me and being with the man she loved. But there was no sound reason why she couldn't marry this man and still see me. Except that her version of church and God demanded she pretend she had never been with any other man so she could present herself, white and clean, before the altar. Mum had given me up for a god that demanded control and domination. A god who believed it was right for a mother to abandon her daughter. What was worse was that the letter hadn't even been written by her but her husband-to-be whose duty, he said, was to protect his future wife from any pain and complications involved in taking up and honouring her duty. By inference I was the pain and complication.

This situation, he explained, was not without hope for me or my mother because each and every day they would pray for me, that I would accept my own salvation as freely as they had done, accept God into my heart, and join them in their community of Aberdeen faith. If I renounced my own life, I could be, once again, joined with my mother and we would bask together, forever, under the loving light of God.

When I showed Dad the letter he hugged me, not knowing what else to say. ‘It's unbelievable, Ruby,' he said shaking his head. ‘It's a cult, you know. They're all brainwashed.'

Barry emailed me an article that had appeared in the Darwin paper exposing the Aberdeen as a fraudulent cult. It likened them to other cults that had made headlines around the world and told stories of families torn apart by their fanaticism. I took that letter and every other one she had ever sent me and burnt them all. It was a strange feeling watching the smoke snake up from the metal bin. I expected to feel anger or sadness but really what I felt was emptiness. I had been losing my mother for so long that it felt like just another thing I had to do.

It occurred to me, as the flames burned bright then died quickly, that my mother would get to have her bride in white after all. What a price to pay.

I wondered if I was the kind of girl who would never fully grow up. Unlike Becky and Rachel I wasn't itching to rush headlong into the world of my own independence. I wasn't ready to leave Dad and Amona. I thought of the coming week alone as my first test.

I pulled out my scrapbook from underneath my bed and opened it to the back page where that newspaper clipping Sally had left behind had yellowed with age. It came away from the page easily, and I fixed it to the fridge with a magnet. I took all of the boxes of silk from the garage and put them in my room. I walked around them for a while, thinking, hoping some inspiration would weave itself through the fibre and into my imagination. I took some of it in my hands and felt its strength and tested its resistance, pulling the fibres apart and fluffing the silk.

I opened my folio on my bed and flipped through all of the pages. I lay out the
tapa
I had been given, the apricot dress, Pearl's sandals and the
taovala
. I spent the next hour wandering through the house, touching faded family photographs, running my fingers over the wall of Dad's videos. I tried to look at the house as if I hadn't lived every year of my life there. What might it have looked to a stranger, how might they have read us?

I ordered pizza and sat on my floor with the open box beside me and my sketchbook on my lap. I picked up my pencil and began experimenting with a design.

I woke in the morning. My neck hurt from where I had fallen asleep against the leg of my bed. The pizza box was still open and the smell of cold cheese and oil was strong. Somehow I had wriggled free of the blanket I pulled around my shoulders at some stage of the night before and I was freezing cold. My hands felt almost numb.

I sat up and pulled the blanket around me. It must have been dawn, the air was colder and the first streaks of light appeared through the window. I ran down the hall to the bathroom, feeling as though my body was in slow motion and I was still partly dreaming. My breath blew white fog in front of my mouth and I thought of Pearl and that morning she woke to a foggy world, the smell of dye and the shaky beginnings of our whole lives.

I cleared out a space in the laundry and filled the washing tub with hot water, pricking the pods of red dye with a fork and tipping it in. I watched the water bleed until the tub was full. The blanket fell from my shoulders and I left it on the floor, running back along the passage, barefoot, to take up all of the silk in my arms and return to the laundry.