Chapter 32

A SHIPWRECK OF LEAVES

He wakes to the sound of no more rain. Out through the grime of the porthole he can see a single seagull swoop through the dimming sky. Soon darkness will fall, when the whole of the Pacific gives way to dreams of sea and sleep and slowness. But this is his time – the time he can move with sepia swiftness.

The boat creaks as he walks – or rather, Henry moves within its water-warped spaces, a mouldy cavity his figure passes through. Up and out and he hardly needs to duck his head, so perfectly formed is he for this tiny space, and then he’s out on deck, the wedding-suited captain of the Nike 2.

The deck is angled up, as if cresting a wave, so to get to the prow is like climbing a hill. As he begins to mount the deck he wonders if the weight of his body will bring it crashing down, to attain the precarious balance of a seesaw. But the boat doesn’t budge and he continues to teeter in midair.

When he finally jumps down, the thud of the earth sends his body into shock. Landfall is always jarring like this, like waking from a vivid dream. It can leave him feeling flatfooted, this sudden meeting with the shore, ill-prepared as he is for a reality so unyielding, for a life not at sea.

He looks up at the strangely distended hull, beached among a graveyard of boats just before the yacht club on the point. The Nike 2 had been shelter from the rain as the world receded back through curtains of water; his escape hatch.

He stands barefoot on the sodden grass, swimming in his wedding suit. After nearly a day cradled in the bunk of the boat, and still wet from the rain, it’s even more ill-fitting than before, as if the man who wore it yesterday is not the man wearing it today; it’s the skin of his former self. He sails forth in his sagging seams.

It had happened as simply as looking out the window. Yesterday at the altar he had stared up at Mount Vaea and felt it deep down – just as Teuila had promised the feeling would be. Instantly he knew. He knew the wedding was a mistake and that he must wend his way back to the thing he loved.

Teuila had told him to stay in the moment: ‘focus so intently on what you want that all else falls away.’ All the faces in the church had blurred, a sea that had been miraculously parted by his will. It had cracked down the middle, this former reality of his life, and down it he had gratefully escaped.

He can’t remember running, just slipping like water down a drain, falling to find its own level. From the church he had skimmed the food markets, moving within the shade of the umbrellas, past the pyramids of tobacco and taro roots wrenched rudely from the earth, with the cheese smell of breadfruit drying in the sun. Something like a rip had taken hold of him, for it felt more like swimming, and he didn’t struggle against the current.

Which is how he had washed up at the bus depot by the harbour, each bus a brightly coloured boat of desire, a debris of words. Lurking between the Laumosooi Breeze and Lady Lanuvea he had found a reef of shadow as dark as his wedding suit. From there he had followed the grinning skull of Blue Machine through a whirl of exhaust smoke, and with it he had dispersed into the park beyond. Between him and the point, the peninsula was potholed with tombs and their memories, which merged with the long shadows cast by the trees. Like an arrow he took up only as much space as necessary as he swept along.

He had almost reached the yacht club when he recognised the laughter of his high school friends Joe, Mr T and Leon – probably onto their third beers out on the deck. He couldn’t face them, not then, for in marrying Shema he would have also been marrying them. He couldn’t even begin to explain things to their unbelieving faces, so instinctive had his actions been. So he turned around, but he couldn’t go back to town. At that moment the Nike 2 offered herself up as a vessel to dream in, and sometime soon after that the world turned to water.

From then until now he was suspended, but suspended in his medium. He is the hydrographer, after all: the plumber of ocean depths. If nothing else he knows how long to hold his breath and wait for the right moment to swim up and break the surface.

It’s his time now, these last minutes before night, when shapes swim and surface. When Henry can assume the shape he wants to be. Down the peninsula he moves seamlessly in shadow. Slivers like a gecko. Slung like a spear.

Past the yacht club now and he can hear the laughter from the deck – raucous and ribald – but this time he isn’t scared. With each step along the road he can feel that life being left behind, becoming smaller and smaller, insignificant in his slipstream.

Above him a small plane twists in the sky, its buzzing growing fainter, as if draining the last of the sun. Soon nothing comes between him and the point except the house itself.

The roar of the surf on the reef isn’t so distant now. Nor is the smell of the ocean. But this scent lingers with something closer at hand, of earth and roots and leaves. It’s a preposterous tangle, like a shipwreck of leaves, something both marooned here and cast adrift. What the house harbours he scarcely knows himself. It beckons like a buoy on the horizon, marking depth and distance, telescoping time.

As a guide at Vailima, it had angered him how beholden they all were to Tusitala’s story – to the hand of history. As if their own lives didn’t matter. Now he longs for a future without a past and maybe not even a future, just a present, where nothing comes between them, between their bodies and breath. For at three o’clock in the morning he will tap on the window and let the fragrance of her garden in. This is all he wants. Wilhelmina.