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When I get off the bus a couple of blocks behind Waikiki Beach, Coral and her floral muu-muu are nestled in the corner of the bus shelter. I give her a wave on my way to Wanda’s flat. I’m about to stash a month’s rent in Wanda’s version of a safe – an envelope taped inside Doris the dummy’s armpit – just in case I need to reserve my bed against intruders waving cash. I haven’t seen Wanda since I got back, but we’ve kept in touch via text message.
She forgot to remind me about the cat. It’s sitting on my bed as if it owns it, flaunting its comfort and my homelessness. Shrugging off its unblinking stare, I remove the sunhat from my Shona sculpture. Shona might be silent, but her closed eyes and sense of peace remind me of the last thing Alister said. Shona isn’t confused about home. She’s grounded wherever she is.
In the doorway to the bathroom I pause, getting the courage to confront Tutu’s mirror. The mirror where spirits can be glimpsed passing through the crack between worlds – the same crack my mother used to visit my dream.
Taking a deep breath, I walk up to the mirror and look at my reflection. No spirits, thank God, but my eyes are there, looking back. They’re just the same. Did they glimpse something through a crack while I was missing? Like Donkey Skin was glimpsed through a keyhole? Something so shocking that it gave me this otherworldly look?
At Hi-Fibes in the basement I buy a big bag of mixed nuts and dried fruit. Coral beams as she stuffs my offering in her pocket. She’s going to tell me something I don’t want to hear, but I won’t go anywhere without her counsel. I’ve worn shorts so she can press her feet against my bare thighs.
After a couple of minutes she opens her eyes and speaks. “Moana.”
Back on the bus, her two words of advice come together. Ala Moana – famous in Honolulu as the name of a boulevard, a shopping centre and a beach. Does that mean if I’d waited for Coral’s second pronouncement, I’d have known the answer was here all the time? It seems obvious now, but also unbelievable that I might never have raced off to France.
I text Wanda the two words and she texts back the translation: Path to the sea.
It fits with what I know in my gut. It’s time to take the path down the cliff. To the place where it all started.
***
Derek is happy to lend me his camping gear, but he can’t help me carry it down the cliff, not until his foot is in better shape. But I have to go now, before I lose my nerve.
Nigel steps in, and we’re about to set off when Derek produces an envelope.
“It fell out of the box with the sculpture,” he says, “when I was flattening it for the trash. I saved it for a special moment,” he adds, before I can scold him.
A card from Fabienne. To read when I’m alone.
Derek waves a handkerchief at the window, making a big deal of being left behind. I’m leaving the objects behind too, because their physical form obscures their message. There’s a physical element to my disappearance – I was somewhere for two weeks – but the reason I was missing must go beyond the physical.
On the road to the windward shore, Nigel updates me on Rupert. “My cousin in California breeds dogs. When Rupert arrived there, he fell in love with one of them.”
“A coup de foudre,” I say. “Love at first sight.”
He nods. “It’s early days, but when he’s around the dog Rupert comes home, if you will. Stops talking about the war. I’ve seen it at the dementia unit. With a dog you can’t keep hiding in the lost place – it makes you live in the present moment.”
I’m thinking about my own ‘lost place’. “Why did you call it coming home?”
Nigel thinks about this. “Parts of Rupert were out in the cold. All that war talk created a refuge, a place where his fractured psyche could hide. Coming home is when you call all your lost parts back together.”
It’s what Davina said. A refuge isn’t the same as a home.
We’re on our way to Davina’s place now, because she’s picked up some news about the curse.
“It’s all local tittle-tattle,” she says over glasses of fruit juice. “When you start asking, everybody’s got a story about the curse of Bantry’s Bluff. I winkled out some gossip down at the Bay Bar, from a couple of old-timers with some drink under their belts. They say there’s a moaning sound that comes from that cove. Years ago, people walking on the beach at sunset heard it – moaning like a ghost. There’s a story about a woman running from her drunken husband – Irish of course, and full of Guinness – and she fell to her death on those rocks. Others say she leapt into the sky and became a star, but at the full moon she always returns. To moan.”
It resonates with the Seven Sisters, and the story Gaston told about the woman who hid in the hut. It was the full moon when I disappeared. I shiver and wonder what I saw.
“Then I tried Google,” Davina says, “and stumbled across a scuba-diving blog.”
“Monk seals in the Bluff Cave? It’s the only reference online to Bantry’s Bluff.”
“Sure, that was there. But listen to this, Selkie. At the exact moment you set foot on Hawaiian soil again,” she fixes me with a knowing look, “they posted a new piece. About the curse.”
The hairs on my arms are standing up. Miguel’s words come back: the powerful person in the shadows. It looks like he was right.
“What did the blog say?” I swallow. “Has anyone else...disappeared?”
Davina snorts. “The blog’s not believing in any curses, girl. There’s a sea cave called the Moaning Cave, in the cliffs below the cemetery. They think that’s where the story of the curse comes from.”
Nigel’s been silent till now. “Sometimes scuba-divers name these places themselves.”
Davina is nodding. “They’ve got some grand theories. I’ve printed the blog post so you can read them, Selkie. Monk seals moan, you know, and they used to visit Bantry’s Bluff in big numbers, so that could be the source of the moaning. But another theory made me think of Derek.”
“He only moans when he doesn’t get his own way,” I joke, trying to ease the tightness in my chest.
“He named his moon boot a mo’o boot,” Davina says.
“He’s on a renaming spree.”
“There’s a legend about Mo’o the lizard,” she continues. “He’s called a water spirit – it’s all in the blog. The divers think the Moaning Cave was once called the Mo’o Cave, that the name got corrupted.”
“Why’s the cave named after Mo’o?” Nigel asks.
Davina laughs and gives me a knowing look. “Because there’s a great big crack in that cliff, shaped like a lizard.”
The revelation almost knocks me over. A lézarde shaped like a lézard. Just like my mind-map. The collision of clues has begun.
***
We park outside the cemetery gates.
“I’ll carry the heavy stuff down the cliff,” Nigel says. “Then help in reverse when you’re ready to come back.”
So he’s not afraid that I’ll disappear.
“Thanks, Nige. I don’t know...how long I’ll be.”
“DD’s packed rations for an army, so don’t rush it. It’s been a long journey. Now might be when the real patience begins.”
“I won’t get at the truth by wanting it?”
He grins. “The old spoon-bending trick. It only happens when you don’t care either way.”
Nigel’s a spoon-bender from way back, but I look down at the bent spoon on my wrist and think of Alister. Now that it’s too late for him to stop me, I send him a text.
His reply is a shock: Ho’i mai! Return!
My fear of disappearing rises up, but I whisper Alister’s words like a charm.
We enter the garden of gravestones, silent except for waves pounding the cliff. It’s a sound that squeezes my chest, but today it’s changed. Last time I thought I was going to die. This time I’m afraid in a different way. But I need to face what happened, so I can live.
Nigel gives me space as I kneel in front of my mother’s grave. She was only thirty-five when she died, and I don’t know what killed her. Something dramatic. It was the way she lived; it must have been the way she died. Last time I was here I heard a voice, but today she’s silent. She’s gone. When her wild raven hair crumbled to dust in my dream, she was shedding the remnants of her earthly persona. She was saying goodbye.
I pick a star fruit from the tree that grows on her grave. For later.
I put my ballet flats on the edge of the cliff. To wait for me.
Then I signal to Nigel and, with our gear on our backs, we scramble down the path to the beach.
***
It’s several nights until the full moon. After Nigel’s helped me set up the tent and left, I sit on the beach. And wait. Something I’ve learnt from Genevieve. The power of waiting.
I’m alone. After my time in Paris, I know about alone. There, I was confused by my sense of abandonment. But alone isn’t the same as lonely. Lonely is an emotion that longs for something else. Alone is a state of being that embraces the present moment. Even the song of the butcherbird sounds different now. Does that mean I’m ready to face the truth?
There have been so many symbols visiting my consciousness these last weeks. Symbols that are implicated in the final outcome. I’ve brought the blog post about the curse and the scrapbook of clippings about my disappearance. I read, trying not to attach myself to anything. The French article that got scrambled in translation gives me a jolt.
When a girl disappears from the back of a seal, it is mysterious, then goes again two weeks later, we ask a Hawaiian empty beach, a crack did she swallow her?
Swallowed by a crack. A crack in time?
As my fear of disappearing threatens to take over again, I let it go. Detachment. Thinking crookedly. Focused inattention. Allowing the puzzle pieces to align themselves beyond my will.
If I analyse what I’m doing, I’d say I’m lolo. Crazy. Taunting the gods to recreate something I don’t understand. But I’ve collected the objects, I’ve gone on the journey, I’ve come back to the place where it all began. Isn’t this the hero’s path – to undertake a great quest, to overcome obstacles and return with wisdom? Ho’i mai! Return! But I’m still waiting for the wisdom and I don’t feel like a hero.
I watch the outcrop of rocks where Alister found my dress. Buried, like my memory. Another symbol. Something happened here. Something big. Something so big I had to bury it. The forgetting feels like the key. It was something that challenged everything I believe. Something about home. Leaving home. Finding home. But I danced on this beach in the moonlight. Home is a place to dance.
The word about whispering comes back: chuchoter. To whisper. Whispering has a quality about it, not necessarily sinister. I’ve been confusing the ‘frame’ with the ‘fact’. Whispering is just a rush of air. A secret. Something to be shared with someone special. Whether it’s a lizard or a crack or a crack shaped like a lizard, when it whispers its message is for me.
Or I’m the whisperer – and I don’t know it.
As the sun sets each evening, I pull on a sweatshirt and listen. How will the whispering manifest itself? As a kind of moaning from the ghost of the woman who haunts these shores? I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve experienced a lot of things I don’t believe in since I landed in these islands. They’ve been very real. If the moaning happens each full moon, I’ll hear it.
One afternoon, a boat appears offshore and a spray of dust takes flight from its stern. Gaston is going home. I say goodbye to him. A troubled man. A selfish man. A brave man. And, to the end, just a man. I remember his horror at the thought we might be soul mates and laugh through my tears. But the objects led me across the world to meet him, so he could mistranslate my message and get me digging deeper. So he and Genevieve could teach me something profound. About love.
***
Derek packed a solar phone charger for me, but I’m letting my battery go flat. Before it does, I turn on the app to listen to the pied butcherbird one last time. The familiar flute-like notes resonate with my reasons for being here – longing fulfilled. I’m being transported by the poignant melody, when I hear something I haven’t noticed before. The distant reply of another bird, almost beyond my hearing. There are two birds on this recording, a long way apart but responding to each other. Their connection brings up the hairs on my arms.
Just before my phone dies there’s a text from Keith: When you get the message, hang up the phone! It’s so timely and ridiculous, I laugh.
I’m saving the special things until the full moon. Fabienne’s card, Keith’s rock. My little black dress and my cowry shell. The full moon is when it will happen. The symbols colliding in this place.
When the afternoon arrives, a storm is brewing. Clouds are building over the sea and the oppressiveness makes it hard to breathe. The cataclysm is almost upon me and the tension is too much. It transforms my excitement and my fear into a new emotion. Dread. I try to drop into a state of calm, but after so many weeks of wondering the waiting has become unbearable. What if the storm comes so late that I miss the full moon?
I throw my hands into the air and shout at the sky, willing the storm to break and crack open my tension, to fill the heavens with thunder claps and lightning bolts, to drench me with a downpour. But there’s nothing I can do. The universe doesn’t jig to my fiddle. It takes its own good time.
My job is to do what I planned. So, with deliberate movements, I eat the star fruit and drink a lot of water. Then I change into my little black dress and tie the cowry shell around my neck. The blank slip from the fortune cookie goes into my secret pocket, and my fingers find a key hidden there. A reminder about doorways. A crack is a doorway...
Late in the afternoon, it happens. The heavens open. I imagined myself channelling some fous de foudre, bounding across the sand and savouring the deluge, but the power of the storm sends me into the tent. Taking refuge in a temporary shelter – another symbol. But the rain pounding the nylon fabric just above my head calms me. I know about tropical storms. This too will pass, as the Buddhists say.
I open Fabienne’s card. Between two sheets of cardboard there’s a tiny blob of red glass hanging from a black ribbon. A pendant. And with it a haiku. She promised to write one.
The heart shape I blow
Runs away on legs of glass
Making a dancer
Under the steady rhythm of the rain, her words make me laugh with joy. They match the tiny work of art in my hand and remind me of what she said, how ‘heart’ holds the word ‘art’. A beautiful image. Behind her English I hear her accent. And her love. She’s made this for me with her own hands, and I spin the tiny runaway heart on its ribbon and laugh as my thoughts form their own haiku:
Hanging by a thread
My heart of glass dances
Finding its way home
I want to tie it around my neck, but I’m already wearing the cowry shell. And the spoon bangle is already on my wrist. I put the heart back into its cardboard covering and slip it into my secret pocket.
The rain stops. When I emerge, the clouds have disappeared and I’m stepping into a fresh new world, with a fresh new view.
I look up. Fabienne didn’t mention the Seven Sisters. She’s already let them go, and they’ve made their own trajectoire across the sky, carrying a little of her soul with them. I think of my essence smeared forever on Andrew’s walls and frown. Like Rupert, parts of my soul are imprisoned in a war zone. But those walls have gone up in smoke! Davina was right about bad things flipping to good. The fire has released my essence, allowing it to leap into the sky like the seven sisters, where I’ll know just where to find it.
The scene I’ve been viewing for days looks new too. The whole time I’ve been sitting on this beach, I’ve been aware of the Moaning Cave, its crack of an entrance snaking up the cliff like a lizard, its tail dipping into the crashing waves. It’s a lava tube, the scuba blog says, formed when a river of lava flowed over the very tip of the point and into the sea, leaving a tunnel at its core. It’s only accessible from the sea, but now the tide is out. Way out. A rare event, according to the blog. It means that at this moment the bottom of the crack is exposed.
Down the sand I race, clutching Keith’s rock. I have to get to Mo’o before the sun sets, before the moon rises. Mo’o rhymes with lolo – crazy! Because there are huge boulders to clamber over in bare feet and wearing my little black dress.
Mo’o looks down on me as the boulders form a kind of path and, after much scrambling, I’m standing underneath his tail. I look up at the crack that’s also a lizard, a dark slash in the face of the cliff. And hear the moaning. The lava tube is moaning through the crack. Or is it the ghost of the woman?
The thought cracks open my mind. Not the woman. My mother. In this moment I know that the woman escaping a drunken man and washed into the sea was her. Always stupid with men, starting with my dad. Tears are flowing. She’s gone and I’ll never know her. But the rumours about her ghost and the curse that she inspired have brought me back to this place.
It’s impossible to climb up the cliff to the crack, but I do it anyway. I roll the skirt of my dress up to my waist with Keith’s rock inside. Then, one step at a time, I climb from one toehold to the next, up to the base of Mo’o’s tail. Not really the lizard of legend, just a crack that looks like him from a distance. Up close, I see its true identity. A crack that moans as the wind whistles through. And the wind has started to blow.
My hand has grabbed a hold in the base of the crack. With strength fuelled by impatience, I pull myself up until I get my foot into the crack, then lever myself upwards until my whole body is aligned with it.
Then I laugh. My communication with the blue-tongue lizard might have been one of my figments, but the lizard knew what it was talking about. It’s all about...being sleek. I’ve run off the baguettes and the croissants for just this moment.
I push Keith’s rock through the crack and, with a squeeze and a slither, I’m through.