Chapter 20

IN TIME OF RAIN

Lewis wakes to rain. At first he can’t see it from the vantage point of his bed. The maid has drawn the curtains – not for his privacy, he assumes, but to shield their eyes from his spread-eagled nakedness. His limbs seem to jut out at all angles like his books piled up rudely on the coffee table.

But he can sense it. To his ears, the individual droplets form a symphony; that it is unvarying comes as a relief at the same time as he feels consigned to a watery underworld. It’s something that connects him to everyone on Upolu, this rain, drawing them into the one consciousness.

He’s imagining this as he urinates in the bathroom, his penis still distended from sleep, and looks out through the louvres and flyscreen to the back garden, the leaves labouring under the weight of the droplets.

The rain drowns out the sound of everything, including the call of the maids. So as he goes back into the bedroom to open the curtains, he is surprised to discover a retinue of them standing there in their long dresses in matching canary yellow, with their mops and buckets.

‘Talofa, good morning!’ they call in unison, before slowly dispersing into the rain.

Stepping into his tartan boxer shorts, he tries to makes sense of all that greeny-greyness out there. He can discern the darker shapes of palm fronds moving back and forth through sheets of water, and the shadows of shrubs which fan out to reveal a strange liquid void at the garden’s heart. Once his eyes adjust, he realises it’s the hotel swimming pool, an eye swelling with tears. At the corner is an artificial island with a solitary palm tree. Its loose leaves lash like a madwoman pulling out her hair.

In spite of the rain, a young man edges barefoot around the pool with his net. Lewis can just make out the words of his T-shirt: God can do! And across his back: Just ask.

Lewis marvels at his apparent faith in navigating the blurred space where the garden finishes and the pool begins. He wields his net aloft in the watery sky, like a giant oar.

Lewis thinks of the pool as the Pacific itself, its water level rising and falling and constantly changing outline and shape to accommodate such brave and extravagant lost souls.

He’s thinking this as he sits cross-legged by the coffee table, here in the Roberta Haynes fale at the hotel on the harbour. The room is perfectly shaped like an egg. The curtains and bedspread are patterned in 1950s ‘island style’; the ceiling, carved and vaulted, rises to a central pitched point. Looking up he feels newly hatched into his parents’ age.

The day before he had noticed other garden bungalows identical to his, each connected by a freshly painted black path lined with shrubbery and small wooden sculptures. Each carried a different name: Marlon Brando, William Holden, Harry Bullock … famous past guests who had stayed here during the hotel’s heyday. It tickles him to be confined to this fantasia of fales, especially now the outside word is losing its shape and definition in the rain. This sea of curiously shingled huts, each an island or an idea.

Lying open before him is a book with a photograph of the Scottish writer. The reproduction is poor, but everything about it is otherwise clear. It’s a few months before the arrival of the Italian painter. Tusitala sits on the verandah at Vailima, an island in a sea of women: his mother in profile like Whistler’s mother; Aolele glowering, perhaps reproaching the photographer for taking too long; Aolele’s daughter looking askance, a shadow of her mother; and their Australian maid dressed in white, her whale-boned waist still painfully thin. Within months she was on the steamer ship back to Sydney.

Her stern brow and refusal to smile remind Lewis of the university colleague he once shared an office with, also called Mary. He grew fascinated by the way this Mary preened her eyebrows and how she hummed with pleasure while eating her food at her desk each lunchtime.

He’s still staring absently at the photograph when he hears the sound of drumming outside. Breakfast is being served. Cast adrift on the coffee table is a small box inscribed with pharmacy type: name, address and instructions to take one daily with food. He shakes it, hearing the metallic sheets inside, studded with blue, the keepers of his equilibrium, and slowly rises.

Any compulsion he once felt has gone. He feels loosened, like stretched elastic, without the desire to spring back to his former life or shape. Coming here to the island has freed his body somehow, relaxing him and releasing him from the pang of need. It’s as if he has already dived into the pool outside and is swimming like a tadpole underwater, slowly changing shape. The water offers no resistance. For the moment there is no need to come up for air: God can do! … Just ask.

He puts the pills out of sight on the top shelf of the bathroom vanity. Closing the mirror he pauses, surprised by his own reflection dwelling there. The strangeness of it. His heterochromic eyes have never looked so dissimilar; a long crooked nose pulls the symmetry of his face out of balance. Caked around one nostril is a tiny trace of blood from the night before and he feels the faintest of wobbles. Not even the silver moustache can join the two halves of his face together. It’s a struggle to comprehend such a vision of himself. He imagines swallowing the pill and becoming miraculously whole. At the same time he realises: This is how I am.

Sometimes, when he isn’t expecting it, the image of his twin brother will materialise – in a window, a doorway or a sliver of mirror. Never does he appear at the same age he died but, rather, in uncanny parallel with Lewis’s own life. This morning it’s as though Garry has emerged, dripping and tingling, from the swimming pool outside – hair plastered across his brow, moustache drooping.

He smiles, water trickling down his chin. And then, as if daring the mirror to release him, he spins around. Where at school Lewis had excelled at languages, Garry shone in Latin tango. At the Year Nine dance class, lines of girls eager to be whirled out first would regularly mistake Lewis for his brother, and he would revel briefly in the duplicity before freezing when the music began. Then he would watch Garry’s quicksilver moves across the stage, fast–slow, fast– slow, always a fraction ahead of his partner, and think, if only the two of them were put together – with his cerebral love of pictures and words and Garry’s of bodily rhythm, they would be in perfect sync.

‘You know I resented you,’ his brother tells him through the mirror. ‘The way you could see things. I never could. Things were always moving too fast.’

‘But you could feel things,’ Lewis begins to protest, but already Garry’s image has started to fade. Then it disappears altogether, and Lewis is faced once more with his absence.

A school concert and hockey season were the official reasons Lewis wasn’t on the trip. No, Lewis couldn’t possibly miss the under-seventeens finals, and so he was spared the joy flight down McMurdo Sound. Until that year he had shown little ability for sport. But on a muddy hockey field, at last his looping limbs could do some good. And then there was the school orchestra. Even with a knocked-about cello his long white arms became unusually eloquent, sometimes reducing his bow to wispy strands of horsehair. There was a school concert the same week as the Antarctica flight.

He remembers Garry was becoming something of a stranger. It was 1979 and he was beginning to coat his long lashes with mascara, stiffening his shoulder-length black hair with eggwhite. Around his tiny wrists he tied strips of ripped calico like bandages. As a boy Garry had liked to draw himself as an earringed pirate or a Japanese princess, and now this vision was materialising before the family’s eyes.

‘You’re going down paths that are alien to me,’ their father had said when Garry arrived home one morning at breakfast time, the bandages still dangling from his wrists.

Yes, a trip to Antarctica would be just the thing, it was decided. So Aunt Agatha was summoned from across the Tasman, alighting with her black Gladstone bag, pinched waist and pert pink nose. It was then she had given Lewis his first book on art, with Manet’s little drummer boy on the cover. As they leafed through the pages together, Aunt Agatha always turned to the colour plate of Vermeer’s lacemaker. With her downcast head guarded by ringlets, the lacemaker seemed to offer an interior world quite unlike the bold gaze and dancing hands of the drummer boy.

‘You shouldn’t favour one twin over another,’ Aunt Agatha would tell his mother. ‘You know it will come back later in life to haunt you.’

But despite Aunt Agatha’s protests, she and Lewis were there at Mascot to wave the family off.

It’s still raining as he waits at the hotel entrance for his taxi. Glimpsed through the trees, the harbour has become a dirty washout with the sky. So evenly grey it could be a painted opera set, the sharply silhouetted palm trees but cardboard cut-outs. Like extras, the bellhops run – their umbrellas, lavalavas and flip-flops constricting moves that would be unbridled on a rugby field. Lewis is so entranced by their movements that he doesn’t pay much attention to the taxi being whistled over to him until he steps down into the darkened cabin.

Hanging from the rear-view mirror is a necklace of sharks’ teeth, along with a crucifix.

‘Hello, Mr Wakefield,’ says the driver from the day before.

Once again Lewis is struck by the man’s calm, knowing manner. The bellhop offers a few words in Samoan before closing the door behind him.

‘I won’t be climbing the mountain as I’d hoped,’ he begins, without quite knowing where his words might lead him, ‘because of the rain. Where is the public library?’

The taxi has already looped back onto Beach Road and is slowly heading into town.

The driver points past the cathedral and a cluster of government buildings ahead through the pinky cloud of coral trees.

‘See the clock tower at the roundabout? Just the other side.’

The clock tower stands on its own island in the traffic and appears like a lighthouse squashed down by a giant’s fist. They drive past it at walking pace.

‘Are you married?’ the driver asks.

Lewis smiles at the thought. ‘No, I’m not.’

Marriage. It’s the most unimaginable of things. In his parent’s wedding photo, his mother wore a white lace mini, and his usually hirsute father was unrecognisably cleanshaven.

Lewis can’t imagine ever giving up his individuality and turning into someone he could no longer recognise.

‘Have a girlfriend?’

Lewis decides to humour the driver. ‘No, my work is too busy to have someone else in my life.’

The driver smiles to himself. ‘Do you meet Samoan ladies?’

Lewis suddenly remembers the Tropicana the night before, and how the women’s names wafted through the air thick with kerosene smoke. Today it all seems like a dream. But he prefers not to share last night’s story with the driver, who has turned suddenly suspicious.

‘No,’ Lewis says. ‘Work.’

Slowing the taxi down so that it is all but stationary, the driver turns to him and confides, ‘It is different in your country, my friend.’

The springs in the car seat squeak as he leans in closer. Lewis can see a stud glittering in the man’s earlobe and wonders why he hadn’t noticed this until now.

‘Here we have customs and traditions. There must be a man and a woman, and the two come together.’

The taxi has stopped outside the Nelson Memorial Public Library, its entrance marked by a wall of crazy paving.

Lewis is still remembering last night and how men and women came together on the dance floor, but probably not in the way the driver envisaged.

‘I’m only saying this because you were seen last night at Tropicana.’

Lewis looks up guiltily, wondering if the man has stolen his thoughts again.

‘There are no secrets in Samoa,’ the driver says with a smile. ‘They are always being told.’

Lewis feels momentarily caught out, another palagi not to be trusted, a heaven breaker.

‘I find it strange, that’s all,’ the driver says, leaving his suspicions to dangle in the cab.

Lewis can’t help himself. ‘Strange?’

‘That an educated man such as you would choose to spend time –’ here he pauses to let out a sigh – ‘with them.’

‘Them?’

‘Yes, those moral degenerates you were seen with last night.’ The man’s anger comes like a thunderclap in the rain. ‘They are God’s disgrace, those fa‘afafine.’

Flicked from the man’s tongue, the word sounds magical, like a genie released from a bottle. Lewis is astounded. ‘You mean the girls performing on stage?’

‘Surely you must know,’ the driver says with a final bitter laugh.

Lewis really doesn’t mind not knowing. And with this realisation he quickly pays his four tala and steps out into the rain.