One Long Thread (9 page)

It seemed so long ago that my mother had been that woman I remembered at the kitchen window looking at the moon. It was tragic how life had sucked her down to the bones, all her spontaneity, her laughter and freedom had vanished. I knew then that I didn't ever want to be like that. Whatever happened, life was something too precious to give up on so easily. Sally may have had too much of it, but she lived life like a flame might, always burning bright. Fearing nothingness more than regret.

I heard somewhere that the reason why makeovers never last is because people secretly prefer familiarity over change. They might profess to wanting to look beautiful, but if you cut and colour their hair, apply the right makeup and clothes and reveal their stunning potential, it scares them witless. It doesn't feel right. I don't think happiness ever felt right to Mum.

Ruby
, I thought, looking at myself in the mirror. I decided that red was my favourite colour.

I heard my phone, muffled somewhere inside my bag, beeping to let me know there was a voice message. It was almost dawn.

Call me when you wake up. Please call.
It was from Barry.

I fell asleep on the couch, waking to find Mum standing in the passage looking at me. I was still wearing the coat. She blinked and blinked again. I don't know if she was seeing me or not.

‘Take it off,' she said and I lowered my head feeling stupid. I undid the buttons and slipped my arms out and folded it slowly, not knowing what to say.

‘This is all a punishment,' she said. ‘Sins of the father.'

I didn't know what to say.

‘I should have been a better mother. If I had been a better mother she would never have left. After everything I did for her . . .' she trailed off. ‘Sit with me,' she said and I sat down, placing the coat on top of the suitcase. ‘I won't make the same mistake with you, though.' She stiffened, sucked in a deep breath, sitting up straighter on the couch. ‘You'll have to go back to Melbourne to get your things but I won't make the same mistake. We'll have to get you baptised,' she turned to me and smiled and my skin crawled. ‘We'll find you a nice Aberdeen boy and you'll be my bride in white and everything will be fine. I didn't keep a close enough eye on her. I won't let that happen again.'

I tried to tell myself that grief was twisting her in knots and I shouldn't read too much into what she was saying. I tried telling myself that she needed me just to be there, to listen. That what I felt and needed didn't matter right now, but I felt a vice tightening around my throat and panic rising in my guts. My head began to spin as though my whole world had been whisked away from me. A thousand thoughts thundered in my brain and I wondered whether Dad was in on this, whether he had planned to give me to Mum all along. I felt like I had no one I could trust, that the ground underneath my feet had turned to sand and I was slipping and falling.

Mum was looking at me, wanting me to say something but I was mute. Nothing would get past the lump in my throat. The only words I had were tears that came rushing, hot and sticky, rolling down my face.

Mum stood up and pouted, stepped sideways to where I was sitting and squashed herself to me, tapping me forcibly on the back and blocking my nose and mouth with her chest. ‘It's all right,' she said. ‘I'm here and I'll never leave you. We have each other and God and that's all we need.'

I called out for Sally in the silent space of my mind. I shouted and called and begged her to listen. My need was crazy and desperate and no matter how much I shouted inside the shell of my own being, she was not there. She was gone forever and I had never felt so small. We were a pair, there were always two of us. There was never a moment in the memory of our bodies or minds that we had been without the other though this knowledge had no words. I closed my eyes and waited for my mother to let me go. And when she did, I leapt off the couch. I looked at her and realised something of what must have happened.

‘You wanted Sally to get married, didn't you?'

‘He would have looked after her, he was willing to marry her and accept her into the Aberdeen family.'

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. No wonder Sally ran away.

‘Where is her present?'

My mother stared blankly towards me.

‘I sent it for her birthday.'

I saw her shoulders rise slightly, the tilt of her head before she raised her chin. ‘We don't believe in birthdays,' she said, folding her hands over each other, clasping them firmly on her lap.

‘What did you do with it?' I was shouting.

Calmly, my mother replied, ‘I got rid of it.'

Something about that admission gutted me and my voice faltered. ‘Did you even open it? Did you look inside?'

She turned her head away from me towards the kitchen without answering.

I left her, running downstairs, taking the red coat with me. I opened the outside door to my room and locked it behind me. I threw everything into my suitcase, expecting my mother to follow me, to hear her banging on the door. But she was too caught up in herself. Perhaps she thought I would come around if she left me alone. Perhaps she was praying for me, asking God to make me see sense. I called a taxi.

While I waited I heard Mum's footsteps upstairs. I heard a few cars pull up and looked through the window. It wasn't the taxi but people from the Aberdeen. I heard their doors open and close, their footsteps climbing the front stairs. I felt trapped and abandoned all at once. I scribbled a note and left it on the sewing machine.
I'm going home.

When the taxi arrived I raced outside pulling my suitcase behind me. We were driving away before faces appeared at the window upstairs and I saw Brother Daniel step out onto the front landing and run quickly down the stairs. I turned away from the window reducing my options and future down to the bare essentials. I had money, I had a passport, a phone and clothes. I had everything I needed to get out.

Strange how little things come back into your mind. Far off things, inconsequential things that have almost nothing to do with what's happening in the moment. I thought of Becky and the musical and how Dad laughed so loud I could hear him from the stage. I thought of Mr Grandy and the phone conversations with his mother. I thought of Amona sitting on the couch with Dad and wondered which video they had chosen to watch. I thought of Mum, when I had loved her, pretty and free, framed in the sunlight of our window when we were kids. And I thought of Sally and the last night we had spent together, our hands touching and how she had been gone for so long. I felt the breath go right out of me as I let her go. And I thought of Pearl and the last card that had come from her last year.

Hello!

Birthday greetings to you, my heart. How is life, how is it all? Would love to see you sometime. Come for a holiday, Tonga would love you.

Grandma Pearl xxxx

When I arrived at the airport I was propelled by one thought only, I had to get home, back to Dad, back to where I felt safe. But when I went to buy the ticket I couldn't do it. I panicked with a sudden thought that Dad might send me back.

‘If we were rational creatures we would never get out of bed or live or love,' Mr Grandy once said to me. Nothing I felt seemed rational or fair or right.

A voice message came through just before I boarded the plane but I turned the phone off. I might have stayed if I'd got that message earlier. I thought about that Empress discovering silk for the first time, pulling that thread, further and further, more and more, wanting to see what was wrapped inside. I could not see a way forward. Every door seemed closed and the walls were caving in. I was blind to everything, save that flimsy thread of an idea that could take me away from it all. So, just like Sally, I ran. Far away.

What Pearl must have thought, seeing me on her doorstep, drenched from the rain, like that. No warning, no announcement. She could have put me on the next plane back home, that's what my own mother would have done. But not Pearl. She took me inside, put that red coat across my knees and told me something of herself. And that first night, far away, I dreamt of the moon turning to confetti over me; a bride in white.

16.

I woke badly. My body had been curled around the pillow, my left arm was numb and all I wanted was food. The red coat was on the floor as I swivelled my legs over the side of the couch and I remembered arriving the night before, Pearl crushing me to her, the pulse of rain and the tang of dye as she told her story.

The air was sweet and breathing it in reminded me I was so far from home, tempting me to get straight back under the covers and forget. Instead I smoothed my hair down, looking vaguely for a mirror, but then I'd never much cared for how I looked. Standing in the corner of one large room, the house appeared to be an all-in-one kind of room. A sink and bench top on the far side, small table and two chairs, the couch I had slept on. A few bookshelves against the walls. The sweet-smelling air, blowing through the open window. The faint sound of the ocean. I thought about tucking my shirt into my jeans, but left it out.

At the door I found my purple Converse Sneaker and noticed the flooring for the first time. Squares of rattan fibre woven or plaited together. It was an odd sensation walking barefoot across it, the uneven corrugations pressing into the soles of my feet as if I were paper pressed to a lino print. But, then, I was in Tonga; a small island in the archipelago, a girl from Melbourne. I was Fanny or Betsy, waking to the world at the top of the Faraway Tree in the Enchanted Wood.

‘You're awake,' Pearl appeared at the front door. Her hair was long, completely grey and held fast in a ponytail. The edges of a blue sarong, wrapped around her body, flapped in the breeze.

‘Come on,' she said before I could speak. I hesitated at the door, reaching down for my shoes. ‘Don't need those,' she said, smiling.

I followed her out the front door, which I attempted to close behind me, but it banged against the doorframe, opening slightly. Ahead of me, my grandmother laughed. ‘Come on, there's lots to do.'

I glanced back at the door but followed her anyway.

It was too dark when I arrived to see much of anything. It was all shadows and shapes in the rain. I ignored a sinking feeling in my stomach because I should have told her everything, right then. About what happened to Sally and how I had run away from it all. I thought back to what she told me the night before; the red coat, her mother. How life was a cycle you just couldn't fight. I wanted so much to believe her.

We walked around the side of the house, clad in blue shingles, to a smaller room attached at the back. I heard it before I stepped inside, a sound like the rustling of a thousand miniature trees. I had dreamt of that sound, I thought. I decided that I would talk to Pearl about why I'd come, just as soon as there was the right moment.

‘Take a seat, Ruby,' Pearl said, when we were inside the room. She pointed to a small timber chair against the side wall and seated herself beside a table which was covered in leaves. Beside her feet were baskets, woven with a fibre I didn't recognise, filled with more leaves. She took a knife to a wad of leaves and hacked into them roughly, sweeping them into another, mostly empty, basket on the other side of her legs.

She turned back to glance at me. ‘I can't say it wasn't a surprise to find you on my doorstep last night,' she said, laughing softly.

‘What time is it?' I said, realising how hungry and thirsty I was.

‘Sometime in the afternoon, I think,' she said non-committally, shoving another pile of chopped-up leaves into the basket.

‘I always thought it would be your mother who came looking for me, seeking more answers to the wrong questions.'

‘Mum is in Darwin,' I said. I felt suddenly stupid and wished I hadn't left. I don't know what I was thinking. It was insane. If I didn't eat I was going to pass out.

‘You picked a great time to come find me, darlin'. Busiest time of the year right now. I'm committed to these little ones,' she pointed around the room, her finger not indicating any one thing in particular but the general contents of every basket lining the many shelves – stacked from floor to ceiling – around the room.

The smell of the room made my stomach churn. It was earthy, farm-like.

‘If you help me we can have this sorted quickly and we could slip away into town to get some supplies.'

I stood up, smoothing down my T-shirt.

‘You must be starving,' Pearl said. ‘Dry crackers in the tin on the bench inside. Butter and jam in the fridge.'

Pearl hummed as we worked, chopping through the baskets of leaves that we stacked into other baskets. She stopped humming to explain what needed to be done.

‘Silkworms are as fragile as newborns, you know,' she began and I just listened. ‘You've got to feed them every two hours, and feed them well so they'll produce fine silk.'

I nodded, taking in her instruction, wondering a great many things I felt unable to explain or ask.

‘We'll clean out their baskets, keep a close eye on them, make sure they shed their skin and, most of all, keep eating,' she said. ‘We want them fat and strong.'

My fingers were green with the moisture of the leaves.

‘Right,' she said, stopping and wiping her hands on her apron. She passed me a cloth and bent down to pick up the first basket, pointing to the next one for me to pick up. We began at the far side wall, starting with the baskets on the top shelf, moving down each basket until the floor. I watched her dish out even handfuls of the green leaf mulch and spread it around the basket. I began on the next row, pulling the first basket towards me. The inside of the basket was alive with movement. A hundred or more tiny worms wriggling their way through the leaf matter. I spread a handful of the food from my basket into theirs as Pearl had done. Looking over to me, she nodded, pleased.

I closed my eyes briefly and imagined an impossible future where nothing that had happened ever happened. Where we were two precious gems, cocooned in silk. And the world was a heartbeat, outside, filtered by golden light. Before I ran away, when I saw Sally, she was just like that.

Pearl and I emptied the baskets of chopped leaves, sharing the food between the baskets of silkworms that filled the silkhouse. We headed out, Pearl still dressed in her sarong, walking along the road, passing small thatched dwellings she told me were called
fales
. There was nothing familiar there, everything was strange and arousing. The air was a heady perfume of gardenias and frangipanis that grew beside roads and rockeries and houses. We passed groups of people, sitting, cross-legged, on patches of lawn. They struck me as large and warm-hearted and the sound of their laughter was infectiously joyous. I heard music, though I couldn't locate its source, rich voices in harmonies, accompanied by a steady beating rhythm.

‘Close your mouth, Ruby. You look like your eyes might pop out of your head,' Pearl said and I closed my mouth, pulled back my eyes and laughed nervously.

‘It's like . . .' I couldn't find the words.

‘I know,' she said, hoisting the banana-leaf basket more comfortably on her hip. ‘I felt like that the first time I came here. I thought, “Pearl, you are in another world entirely”.'

‘How long, exactly, have you been here?'

‘I don't know,' she shrugged absently. ‘I've lost count,' she tilted her head. ‘Ten years or so, I'd say. Tongans aren't as bound by time as we are. Didn't take me long to figure that out.'

There was a lot I wanted to ask her.

We arrived at the markets, an open space between a few rough buildings in the main part of town, a ten-minute walk from her house. Displayed on rough trestle tables was an array of foods from taros and green bananas to fish and mussels. Hanks of grass-like fibres, wooden handicrafts and drums. Ornate carvings, tables of fabrics dyed in bright colours bearing floral imprints or Tongan words. Pearl filled her basket with food, talking in Tongan. She hugged a large woman with a mat wrapped around her waist and an insane number of fresh floral wreaths about her neck. Her smell was overpowering, like I was doused in perfume. She walked around the table and embraced me warmly. She pulled away and held me by my shoulders as she talked to Pearl.

‘Kalo here says I have much work to do to fatten you up. She is so worried by your skinniness,' Pearl laughed and Kalo spoke sternly to Pearl, punctuating her meaning with a finger directed first at my lanky frame, then at Pearl's nose.

‘Eowee,' Kalo said dramatically, or at least that was my translation of what she said. The Tongan version of ‘Oh my god!'

Pearl passed me her full basket as she left Kalo to scour another food stall. I tugged at my shirt and waved goodbye.

I watched Pearl disappear, engrossed in her potato selection, while I stopped at a table laid out with fabrics. I placed the basket on the ground and ran my hands over the fabrics.

‘You like?' the Tongan lady said in English.

I nodded and smiled. I thought of Mr Grandy and my whole life before Sally's accident. I'd brought my sketchbook with me, but I hadn't touched a piece of fabric or sewn anything since that last week before Amona came home and Barry called. It seemed a lifetime ago.