Chapter 29

LORD OF THE NIGHT

Wilhelmina keeps her headphones on as she begins to clear away the books, the music releasing in little curlicues of sound. Tottering on the table, the books threaten to collapse under their own musty weight. On the rare occasion they journey out from their shelves – like they did today with the Australian stranger in his teal-coloured shorts – she longs for the moment their covers snap shut and they can be slid back into place, to occupy their slivers of darkness again.

She feels a pleasurable emptying out as her head fills with sound and she returns the last of the books to their homes. Dionne’s smoky voice soon expands in the space, feeling its edges and filling out the little grooves and bumps along the shelves.

She feels close to the vocals this afternoon, even if in a sense all the songs she hears are the same. Dionne is always walking down a street, trying to hide her feelings.

Just tell me that we’re through …

After a sleepless night and a slow-moving day, the song’s emotion is all she can feel. The previous evening at Tropicana had panned out not unexpectedly – in a trail of beer and cigarettes which lit up the dawn. With the Australian set off safely in his taxi, she and Tara had sat out on the darkened deck, their umbrella an island in the rain as they reprised the wedding, playing out its trio of sadness. From Shema’s viewpoint to Henry’s to Teuila’s they had shifted, taking it in turns – even re-enacting the ceremony, with Tara substituting a tablecloth for a veil.

‘Shema never had it so good,’ she spluttered over a sudden heavy downpour of rain.

Wilhelmina played Teuila, mimicking perfectly her slumped shoulders and downcast looks. Even the way she let her tears run, unfettered, down her face was like Teuila. But they were real. For Wilhelmina sees it as her duty to serve Teuila by channelling her, to love her by inhabiting her soul, to feel her sadness, but also to imagine a different future – a future where Teuila and Henry might be together, not through.

It’s four o’clock and closing time for the Pacific Room. Wilhelmina always feels reluctant to leave. She’s been entrusted with the words in these books – just as Dionne has been entrusted with the lyrics to Burt Bacharach’s songs. She accepts them with good grace and respect, even though they don’t always respect her in return.

It strikes Wilhelmina how Dionne might lose her man in the end, but she always gets the song; she says a little prayer. So Wilhelmina thinks as she puts the last of the books away and turns the photocopier off, its lights trailing off and its trays rattling into silence. The books might hunker down in darkness each night, but come morning she has the power to switch the lights on and summon them. In this way she thinks of every unopened book as an unsung prayer. It’s up to her to release them.

Up through the skylight Wilhelmina can see the canopy of the coral trees outside. As she turns off the light, all she sees are the trees. At once the bookstands retreat into peoplesized shadows, shyly circling the reading table which holds the last of the light. With everything where it should be, everything back in its place, history can at last recede into the distance and the room begins to fill with a different kind of knowledge.

As Wilhelmina locks the library doors for the day, she imagines the forest spilling once more down to the sea.

It was her father, and his father before him, who had told her the lesson of the trees: to admire the gatae not for their coral blossom but for their scabby bark – a precious balm for centipede bites. And it was her great-grandfather Carl who had first passed down the story of the forest: how, being a volcanic island, each plant had journeyed from far across the water to arrive here – by person, bird or bat.

With a fantastic fanned moustache and deep worried eyes, Carl was a botanist employed by one of the large German trading houses, Godeffroy & Son. This was in the days when the forest met the sea, and people moved around the island more freely by boat. Apart from the steam train that hauled copra to the harbour, the colonial powers had barely left a trace on the mountain’s dark canopy of green.

Drawn to the forest, Carl was a chronicler of every leaf, which he’d mark in extraordinarily precise German script. Wilhelmina remembers him with a photograph she keeps in her bedroom, at her place beyond the yacht club, a vinetangled house with its own secret garden.

In this photograph Carl – dwarfed by monster taro leaves on the mountain road – is comically clutching a spear. But what really endears this quaint figure to Wilhelmina is the grass skirt he has carefully wrapped around his trousers, colonising his sturdy German thighs. These thighs he had passed down to her, along with the photo – and, of course, her name, that of his mother back in Münster, who waited patiently for a son who would never return.

She closes the door. The sun is already beating a path to the mountain glowering softly behind her, the sky teetering towards twilight. Away from the bustle of the main road, Wilhelmina takes the shadowy path along the foreshore. She moves slowly past the tomb of the unknown German soldier, towards the yacht club and its languid flotilla of boats. To her right, the harbour is a darkening wash at her feet.

Passed along with Carl’s photograph was the story of how he had watched the great storm ebb here on the edge of the harbour. It was March 1889, and boat debris littered the narrow strip of sand at Carl’s feet, the language of their cargo – English, German, American – ridiculously mashed up like a child’s nursery rhyme. In the end, the hurricane had spared no nation.

She walks on past the graveyard of boats, the white hull of the Nike 2 glowing blue at dusk. Just do it … She turns up the volume on her headphones. Bursting through the twilight, gently ripping it, comes the sound of Dionne’s voice, emptying it out, finding its own horizon line.

Before his death Carl had drawn up plans for a secret garden. It was to be something modest during the day, almost plain, bordered by ylang-ylang trees and furnished with shrubs with names more beautiful than their unremarkable foliage: the moso‘oi and alii o po, or lord of the night. But in darkness these plants would flower with the most intoxicating of blooms. Their beauty was best appreciated with the eyes closed, beheld by the mind, on a still night with the faintest of breezes. It was to be Carl’s fragrant garden.

But as Wilhelmina nears the yacht club all she can smell are the fish fingers grilling on the deck out the back, and then, a few steps more, just the sharp brine of the sea.

Up past the club, and there’s no mistaking her house. Alone on the point, it rears up like some primordial beast, a modest shack made palatial by the vegetation that grows up and around it, surfing its walls and roof. So dense is the tangle that it’s impossible to make out any windows or doors, not even an entry – just a TV antenna that points up into the twilight sky, waving shyly with fala fala vine.

With each step she visualises not only what is past, but also the semblance of a future, thinking of Carl, but also asking, always asking: What would Teuila do? As if each step will bring her closer to what she desires.

After dinner and perhaps a movie or two, if the wind isn’t blowing too strongly from the sea, the vines will loosen and the house will open up to the sweet stirrings of Carl’s secret garden. It’s the scent Wilhelmina imagines coming to Teuila as Henry tumbles in through her open window, the air swelling with moso’oi and alii o po, three-dimensional in the darkness. She imagines desire smelling like this.

And it’s to this fragrant forest that Wilhelmina longs to return.