Chapter 34

NIGHT SONG

The track ahead is submerged in darkness. For an outsider, there is no hint of what lies ahead, so inscrutable is the dense foliage. But Teuila has climbed Mount Vaea enough times to know that around the next bend or two the summit will reveal itself miraculously like an ocean giving way to an island, a solitary speck of space marked by the sign: Western Union Money Transfer.

As she nears the top she doesn’t know what comes first – the song or the memory of the song. But as the dusk sky opens overhead, the lines of Sarah Vaughan come rushing to her.

Where do you go, when you feel

That your brain is on fire?

Limned by the island’s outline, she and Henry had laid here, submerged in the yellow-green shadows of the breadfruit trees. It’s as if the mountain top has been designed for just two bodies at rest.

Across the headstone they’d written their names, adding them to the other scrawls and scratchings over time, marking it like a tattoo.

Where do you go, when you don’t even know

What it is you desire?

It’s like returning home: the whitewashed tomb carries the bluish hue of her night-time sheets. She hangs the duty-free bag in the trees and eases herself down. While the sun has tracked to the tops of the trees, the cement is still surprisingly warm. Stretching out, she can feel it along her spine, down through her legs. Only now does she notice the fine lacing of cuts, like an unfinished tattoo.

Letting her hand spill over the chalky edge, she closes her eyes.

She tries to think of nothing, and then wonders if such a thing is possible, preferring to slip into va, the space in between.

She becomes aware of the distant sound of a plane. The sound grows louder and louder until she can feel its dark undercarriage pass over her, casting a cold shadow, as if she were underwater and looking up at the hull of a ship. Then as the sky erases all traces of it, she starts to sing.

From behind her ear she takes the hibiscus and brings it up to her eyes, twirling the stem around in her fingers, casting everything in a warm reddish glow, and for a moment she imagines the scene as he approaches the peak, being drawn by this rosy light.

As the night comes, and the town awakes,

Sounds of children calling, and the squeal of brakes …

It’s only when her lungs and diaphragm work in tandem, channelling the mountain air and transmitting it as song, that she feels truly alive: her heartbeat made manifest. And if songs are receptacles of breath, then teaching Henry to sing, with her prescribed notation of stops and starts, had bottled hers. All he has to do is open his mouth to release her.

Music, but a lonely song,

When you can’t help wondering:

Where do I belong?

Around her she can feel the wings of a flying fox stroke the air, coaxing the surrounding darkness, and for a moment she stops singing. Closer comes the rustle of breadfruit leaves, just behind her, and she cranes her neck around to see.

She is both scared and fearless, holding the flower to her eyes. Her heart begins to race then steadies, scanning the trees with her eyes, staring so intently until a figure begins to emerge slowly from the shadow of leaves.

There is no need to hurry, she thinks, as they have all the time in the world to declare themselves.

As he leans in from the trees, her first instinct is to name him, so tall and silvery is the stranger, leaning towards the reflected light of the tomb. In his peacock-coloured shorts and German sandals he could be Caspar David Friedrich, she thinks, leaning in from the distance.