Chapter 10

STOLEN THOUGHTS

Ahead up the hill the view is suffused with barbecue smoke, blanching the afternoon heat through which comes the yawning note of roosters. Past a road sign he ambles. Kill your speed. And then another. Be smart – slow down. The heat softens him, as if his body is but a membrane porous to the stories floating through the air.

Somewhere Lewis has read how people are but vessels of ephemeral fact, encoded with data transmitted from one generation to the next. As the heat begins to make sensuous his thoughts, softening them, he thinks of himself as the Scottish writer’s amanuensis, channelling Tusitala’s words out of the atmosphere.

He walks on. There is no footpath as such, just spilling gardens that bring forth the occasional dog or child to witness the passing of the stranger in his teal-coloured shorts and Birkenstocks. In Tusitala’s day, the forest would have tumbled all the way down to town, with not so much a trail as a faint crack of light between the taro leaves. To a painter’s eye, the palette would have registered as a myriad of green.

This afternoon, the Cross Island Road carries the lulling whoosh of taxis and SUVs.

He hunkers down. Away from the harbour, the sea air soon thickens. Waiting at the lights for an unending stream of traffic, he feels a discharge of sweat so sudden it’s as if his facial features are liquefying. As his body softens, his senses sharpen. In visual riffs up and down the road, buses parade like catwalk queens, lavishly costumed, extravagantly titled: Queen Poto, Lady Lanuvea. Even their thick black exhaust seems perfumed. Halfway up the hill Lewis stops to wipe the sweat from his brow. A bell tolls for early Mass and over a garden hedge he watches a dog sunning itself on a low-lying concrete tomb. Lewis moves closer to the hedge. The dog flips over and he can just make out the inscription below: Ray Taulapapa Lesolosolou 1939–2005. Beyond the tomb, a deep green lawn travels up to a small garden bungalow – louvred, but more closed than open. As Lewis waits to pick up a breeze the song carries out to him through the tiny slits of air, Whitney Houston’s ‘Greatest Love of All’. Only with the breeze does Lewis notice the banner strung high above the roof. The fabric is the same colour as the sky, so when the white embroidered words begin to stream with life, it’s as if they are written by a plane:

In the end

My Immaculate Heart

Will Triumph

The words are still pulsing when he turns back to the road. Here a taxi has stopped, and the driver is calling out to him with a friendliness that makes him wary.

‘Hello! Where are you going?’

Lewis can taste the salty sweat as he smiles and motions up the hill. ‘Thank you but I’m happy to walk.’

Walking on, he notices that the taxi is stalking him – offering and retreating – in a series of slow–fast shifts through the barbecue smoke. Soon all he is aware of is its shifting shadow. Which is how Blue Machine nearly knocks him from his feet, flicking mud at his legs as it passes in a burst of reggae. A painted skull grins below the back window of the bus as it disappears around a bend.

Turning back up the hill, Lewis notices the taxi is still stationed just metres away. It’s there in his peripheral vision, something he wishes he could brush off like a fly. He moves to quicken his pace, but his sandals catch in the mud and he lurches suddenly into the middle of the road.

There the taxi is waiting for him. Smiling from the open window, the driver’s face is broad and calm, inviting him in. The door has been opened, issuing forth the sound of Christmas carols, and Lewis pauses only briefly before stepping in. A necklace of shark’s teeth hangs from the rearvision mirror, along with a crucifix.

As the car slowly climbs the hill, groaning under their collective weight, Lewis realises he’s forgotten to tell the driver where he is going. ‘Vailima, please.’

‘Yes, I know,’ the driver says.

The car’s cabin feels sunken and small, a metal skin for their bodies’ warmth. Even the silence that settles over the cab takes on a bodily shape. Lewis is scared, then excited, by the idea that the taxi driver can read his thoughts.

Turned down low on the stereo, Dolly Parton is singing ‘I Believe in Santa Claus’. As they climb higher, the cabin begins to cool with the air from the mountain outside. Through the open window Lewis can absorb the green, pooled by purple, with moving traceries of red from the tendrils in the trees.

‘Si‘usi‘u pusi,’ says the driver, following Lewis’s eyes. ‘Cat’s tail.’

The higher they go up the road, the bigger the houses. They pass a Mormon college and churches of seemingly every denomination – Baha’i and Seventh-day Adventist – but no people. Coming to the gates of what looks like the biggest house of all, the taxi slows. An ancient tree canopy obscures the house from the road but for a glimpse of red tin roof which sweeps up in imitation of the mountain behind.

‘Why have you stopped?’ Lewis asks.

The driver buries his head in his hands before looking up, his fingers tugging the skin around his eyes. ‘I can’t go any further – it’s a sacred place,’ he says. ‘Some Samoans are still afraid to go in there.’

Lewis looks at the overgrown gates: they seem to contain more than a house. Their heaviness marks a point of transition, he thinks, not unlike Henry Jekyll’s red baize curtains parting to another world. Through the gates he imagines a spillage of stories, mineral-rich, which are carried down the streams that fall from the mountain behind.

The taxi’s engine is still running as the driver tells Lewis the story of the aitu fafine. Their bodies begin to vibrate with the story, as the image of the spirit’s red flowing hair is carried out through the open window to find shape in the branches bobbing with si‘usi‘u pusi outside.

‘The wind can bring her,’ the driver says, ‘or the sound of singing along a stream, and heaven help the man who falls for her and follows her through the forest. He feels light-headed at first. Then –’ He brings some fingers up to Lewis’s eyes, pressing them so they turn white. ‘And then he goes –’ The driver clicks the bones in his fingers. ‘Like that, something in his brain just goes.’

The driver is now looking at the mountain that rears up behind the house.

‘Why did he come to Samoa?’ the driver asks. ‘Was it for the peace and quiet, so no one could steal his thoughts? But then why did he become involved with the chiefs, with everything here? Why did he want to be buried on top of the mountain, to be carried up by Samoans, when he knew it was difficult to get to?’

The driver’s knee is knocking against the gearstick now. ‘His dream was to look out over Upolu. They say it is a beautiful view of the sea from up there, but I think it was more symbolic. I think he wanted to be High Chief.’

The man’s voice has dropped almost to a whisper. ‘Up there no one can steal your thoughts.’

Lewis is still staring into the gap between the trees as the taxi drives off. It’s inscrutable, that absence of leaves, and as his eyes adapt to the darkness, a streak of red bursts through, sweeping low before flying off.

The bird makes him think of the Scottish writer and the flash of vermillion caught in his painted eye; how two rainy seasons after his last sitting he met with a convulsion as violent and as final as Henry Jekyll’s in the book.

Mayonnaise. Of all things, he’d been helping his wife on the back verandah, whisking the egg yolk with the oil and tasting the sharpness of the lime, when the bowl fell suddenly from his hands, sending a pale trajectory across the dark gardenia hedge.

‘Do I look strange?’

These were his last recorded words. That night Sosimo kissed his hands and laid them across his breast, knitting his fingers together like flowers. The next morning the household watched his coffin, held aloft by a dozen brown hands, disappear into an ocean of leaves. Every now and then, at a turn of the mountain, it would emerge from the trees, bobbing higher and higher, floating free.