25

Laura slipped out of bed, quietly, believing Dan was still asleep. She tied her hair in a ponytail and slipped on an ‘ie lavalava and blue t-shirt. She glanced at him, and then opened the bedroom door and disappeared down the corridor, her burnt skin still stinging from having spent the previous afternoon in the hot sun. No one else in their family was awake.

Outside, she pulled a bush knife out of the thatching of the kitchen fale, in which a few chickens were foraging, and then headed for the mangroves.

There wasn’t yet any trace of sunlight in the transparent greyness of the dawn light that encompassed everything, and into which she moved quickly. She headed towards the shore, her light auburn hair shimmering in the tangy breeze blowing in from the dark sea and the waves breaking on the reef; her bare feet, toughened by a week of living in Malie, stepping fearlessly on the sharp rocks, bitsy sand and roots. Soon she was following the narrow leaf-covered track through the stand of palms and into the powerful smell of sea mud and the thick tangled area of mangrove trees, whose long crablike roots were now covered by the high tide. Her lungs and pores and head and nerves were more alive than she had experienced for many years. Everything was so strange, so new, yet so invigorating, so challenging; like a perpetual injection of self-renewing adrenalin. So contrary to the ways Daniel and she had expected. ‘Life is so basic and difficult and different in Malie, and there’s little privacy,’ he’d warned her. ‘As for the mossies and flies and cockroaches, they are humongous!’ All that was certainly true, she’d concluded after their first two days, but instead of alienating her from Dan’s aiga and village, those aspects had drawn her compulsively deeper and deeper into them. She hadn’t expected herself to react this way, and she was euphorically surprised by it, and in congratulating herself on her reaction, desired more of it.

For instance, yesterday, against Dan’s, Lemu’s and Fa’alua’s caution that she’d get sunburn and hurt herself – besides, Palagi shouldn’t do such work – she’d spent most of the afternoon in the mangroves, with Teva and Ma‘amusa, two of Dan’s young female cousins, who were finishing high school at Samoa College, gathering and stacking firewood. It was hot, hard, dirty, smelly work. In her ineptitude, she’d been relentlessly determined to learn from her new-found cousins how to identify the right wood, use a bush knife to hack it from the trees, slash the small twigs and leaves off the branches and then cut it into short lengths and stack it. And she hadn’t minded her cousins laughing and giggling and wondering why Dan’s very pale and delicate Palagi wife wanted to do such menial work. She could’ve stayed in their house, which had all the comforts of a Palagi home. Why voluntarily choose to do this? And to enjoy it – they’d never enjoyed it – was even more puzzling and strange. What was wrong with her?

After they’d made the first stack, they told her that was enough wood but, without replying, she’d continued a second stack. They then had to continue working themselves, and their puzzlement had turned automatically to resentment. The Palagi woman didn’t even mind being covered with sweat-soaked dirt, mud and mosquito bites, and getting her hands blistered and cut and her soft skin burnt to the reddest red they’d ever seen! Served her right for making them work and work and work and then, when she’d mastered the bush knife and the technigues of cutting and stacking, outworking them in speed and skill and neatness. They didn’t like that, no; no weak Palagi was going to do that to them!

All that changed when, unexpectedly, Laura had plunged fully clothed into the water and, like a dolphin, had swum into and around the mangrove roots, obviously loving it. In her hilariously inept Samoan, she had invited them to join her, and when they hadn’t she’d scooped up handfuls of mud, rounded them into balls, and belted them, shrieking and laughing and laughing like a Samoan. They’d leapt in then and, within seconds, a furious mud fight ensued; they were soon all covered with the stinking, healing mud. They’d looked at one another and, seeing only their eyes twinkling out of cloaks of mud, had stopped and laughed and laughed some more, Laura out-laughing them in a way adults (and Palagi) shouldn’t. In their growing, loving admiration of her, they promised themselves never to tell the elders of their aiga that Laura, their Laura, had behaved like a Samoan and a child while they’d been gathering firewood. They’d joked and laughed some more on their way back to the house.

Lemu and Fa‘alua, Daniel’s stepmother, had rushed out, shocked by Laura’s being covered with mud and sunburn and bites and cuts, and had started blaming the girls for her condition, but she’d laughed and told them she’d had a wonderful time. And again, they were surprised when she’d insisted on showering with them in their outdoors shower (in full view of everyone), and not in the one in the house.

A quivering sense of achievement radiated through Laura as she arrived at the stacks of firewood. She had to take the firewood home before others found it. She noted that no one had done that during the night. The problem was, short of carrying the wood home using her arms – that would take hours – how was she going to do it? Her delighted questing mind found the solution in her memory of Albert Wendt’s novel, Leaves of the Banyan Tree, which she’d studied in one of her undergraduate English courses. One of the characters had stripped the bark from the branches of fau trees and used that to tie firewood in a tight bundle. Then, using more bark strips round his shoulders to tie the bundle to his upper back, he had carried the huge weight home, looking like ‘a beast of burden’. She was vigorously eager to see how much weight she could manage, and over what distance. She should be superbly fit after two hours of gym training in Auckland four days a week, she thought. Daniel, after years of training for rugby, now detested such training, and jogged only once a week on his own, because Laura found jogging monotonous.

Using the bush knife, she quickly cut down long young fau branches, then with her teeth she gripped a bark strip at the end of one branch, grasped the branch firmly with her hands, and, triumphantly surprised at how easily it came off and how well her teeth survived the ordeal, pulled it off. She did the same to two more branches. Still thinking of the passage in the novel, she took two strips and placed them parallel to each other on the ground. Across those she neatly stacked a layer of firewood, considered whether she could carry it, and decided to place another layer on top of it, then another, and, almost bursting with her own self-belief, yet another. There!

With all her strength, and using a knowledge of knots she’d acquired at Girl Guides, she tied the strips around the firewood firmly, tested how well they were holding, stepped back and admired her handiwork. No, she wasn’t romanticising the South Seas and the outdoors subsistence life, close to nature and using your ingenuity and the sheer strength of your body to survive. No, no noble-savage-thriving-in-a-South-Seas-paradise bullshit for this badly sunburnt kiwi Amazon, who was revelling in her ability and strength and desire to overcome all the challenges in this different way of life, and through that learning other ways of doing and seeing and being. It was a compulsive continuation of her lifelong exploration of her own possibilities and testing the limits of her courage and her body.

Around her the heat and light were intensifying rapidly, and her clothes were already soaked through with sweat. Like Tauilopepe – that was the name of the character in the novel – she stood above the large bundle of firewood, her muscles tightening with pulsing blood, her courage thudding in her throat, visualising, step by step, how she had to lift her load. She was relieved her teenage companions weren’t there to see her if she crumpled.

Now, one step forward, right above the bundle. Turn your back to it, squat, reach down and back, grip the bark handles: first the left; uuuppp! Shove your arm through the handle now that is almost to your shoulder. Right! Now squat again, your right hand gripping the handle. Uuuppp! Yeah, shiit! Got it! She held the handles steady round her shoulders. Her whole body trembled with the weight of the bundle, and her knees threatened to break. She staggered forward, stopped and steadied herself. For a moment she doubted her ability to carry that weight. Just like Tauilopepe! Her saliva tasted suddenly of blood; she’d bitten the corner of her tongue – yes, but it was proof of her stoic refusal to break under the weight. She took another step. The handles were cutting into her shoulders. You can bloody well do it! She took another step, then her feet started following each other, determined step by determined step, over the track through the mangrove trees, now glittering with sun snared in their dew-covered leaves, through the fertile fetid smell of mud drying in the heat, through her easy comfortable, pampered, smug life of material and physical comfort back into the terrible, terrible cupboard darkness in which her increasingly depressed mother had shut her whenever the fiery demons of her inevitable visions threatened to abduct her and where, in her desperate fear, she’d learned the feel and depth and geography of that darkness and had used that to live with it, overcoming it so she could confront any fear.

As she stepped over a large puddle in the track, she hesitated and gazed down into her reflection. Yes, you do look like a beast of burden, but a grinning victorious one.

Within a few demanding minutes she was outside the kitchen fale, trembling uncontrollaby after bearing that weight all that way. She dropped her shoulders, releasing the handles, and her load plunged with a resounding thud into the ground behind her. She flexed her arms, easing the pain from them.

She looked warily at the house, at the back veranda; she was relieved no one was watching her. Swiftly she turned and, with firm steps, hurried back to the stacks, her whole being singing. Since meeting Daniel she had been learning Samoan and reading everything he’d written and everything she could find on Samoa, including the poetry. Now she was testing that reality against the real Samoa; or was that read reality shaping how she was seeing and being in Samoa? Fuck that dry intellectual wanking, she thought; just live it and enjoy it – and she admitted to herself that she was loving it. Besides, Albert Wendt’s and Daniel’s versions of Samoa were too bloody dark and bleak and distressing for her. She had never told Daniel that. Yes, her mind, body, everything that was her was thriving in the reality of Samoa as she lunged headlong into it.

After her fourth load, her body was a quivering bundle of wracked, pain-clogged muscles and bone, but she was heady with excitement at her refusal to give in.

Fifth load. As she staggered towards the kitchen fale, she sensed people on the back veranda, but she deliberately stopped herself from glancing in that direction, not wanting any of them to interfere with her struggle by rushing forward and offering to take her load. Her sweat-soaked clothes flapped round her. She turned her back to them.

‘What are you doing?’ Daniel’s concerned voice slid over her left shoulder. She released her load; it cracked loudly as it hit the ground. With her back still turned to them, she jogged back down the track. No, not even her crazy mother and the mainly abusive foster homes the welfare department had farmed her out to had been able to destroy her. Daniel knew nothing about that – she hadn’t allowed him into that past. Not because she was ashamed of it or didn’t want to shock him or win his love with it. No, she wanted her whole triumph over the brutal, violent circumstances of her childhood to remain hers and hers alone.

Her astonished aiga was now on the veranda and in and behind the kitchen fale, observing her with her last load; her two cousins had neatly stacked her previous loads and were now rushing to help her, but she held up her hands and waved them away. When she faltered, they rushed forward again. ‘Fuck off!’ she ordered. Astounded, shocked, the two looked at their elders and Daniel. Laura pushed past them, stopped beside the stacked firewood and threw back her shoulders wildly. She had finally conquered the task she had set for herself. She released her last load, turned, squatted, pushed her arms under the bundle and, rising to her feet quickly, lifted the bundle and hurled it onto the stack. Wheeling defiantly, she headed for the shower under the breadfruit trees. ‘Malo galue!’ Lemu congratulated her.

‘Terrific work, Laura!’ Dan called.

Wonderful, wonderful! she sighed as the thick, bone-healing shower of cold water poured down over her; fucking wonderful! From the cupboard darkness, she’d learned to cherish even her mother. After her mother had hanged herself in the asylum, Laura had, over the years, fashioned her memories into a tragic story of an innocent heroine whose insane demons had driven her to her death.

Teva brought her a large towel. Conscious that they were all watching, Laura wrapped it around her body. Under it, she did as she had seen Dan doing and carefully slipped off her wet ‘ie lavalava and t-shirt. She squeezed most of the wetness out of them and, refusing Teva’s offer to take them, took them herself and hung them on the line. There, two more achievements: undressing in public and not allowing others to treat you like a permanent guest.

Teva and Ma‘amusa were starting the fire in the kitchen fale to boil the kettle as Laura hurried past and onto the veranda. ‘Having a good time killing yourself?’ Dan asked, his eyes twinkling.

‘Fuck yes,’ she whispered so Lemu and Fa‘alua, who were sitting on the veranda railing, wouldn’t hear, and swept past him and into the house.

In the bedroom, she gingerly spread calamine lotion over her mosquito bites and the sunburnt areas of her body, wincing and shutting her eyes in relief as the coolness of the lotion eased out the pain.

She was amused by her appearance when she looked at herself in the dresser mirror: red blistered skin, with large expanses of white lotion. Reluctantly and carefully she put on some light panties and a clean ‘ie lavalava and dried her hair with the hairdryer. She told herself she was succeeding superbly in achieving her aim for her first visit to Samoa and Dan’s aiga: to learn everything about everything so she could see Dan in his complexity and depth and failings – and he had many of those – and thereby be able to cope better with the boundless, frightening love she had had for him ever since she’d helped him survive the break-up of his parents’ marriage. Before Dan she’d not experienced such a love – and it was, at times, terrifying, because she knew but didn’t want to know that she would even sacrifice her life for it.

She met Dan in the corridor, embraced him tightly, kissed him and, before he could caution her again, swept out and over the veranda, almost running. She went into the kitchen fale, where, in the thick smoke of the fire, she found Teva and Ma‘amusa, who were fanning the smoke away from their choking faces with large breadfruit leaves.

‘You strong,’ Teva said in English.

‘Yes, you very strong,’ Ma‘amusa echoed.

‘Yeah, tough!’ She laughed. She knew her cousins were quite fluent in English after spending four years at Samoa College, where English was the medium of instruction.

‘You not need to do all this,’ Teva said.

‘No, this work for Hamo people, not Palagi,’ Ma‘amusa elaborated.

‘I’m not Palagi or Hamo; I just want to learn,’ she countered. When Teva laughed and Ma‘amusa joined her, Laura joined them too, and the smoke and fale and surroundings vibrated with their laughter. ‘I don’t even know how to make a fire,’ she admitted.

‘But there is electric stove in the Palagi kitchen in the house,’ Teva pointed out.

‘But I’m not a Palagi; I just want to learn.’

‘What is the use of open fires in New Zealand?’ Ma‘amusa asked.

‘Good bloody question,’ she replied, ‘but I just want to know how to make a fire like this.’

‘What about electric kettle in the kitchen?’ Teva tested her. ‘It is quicker and no smoke.’

‘Don’t care, just teach me how to make a fire,’ she ended, her eyes and nose now choking with smoke-induced tears. ‘You teach me Samoan too, okay?’ They nodded eagerly. ‘From now on you talk only in Samoan to me, all right?’

‘What if you don’t understand?’ Teva asked.

‘Never mind. Only Samoan, okay?’

‘Okay!’ They chorused. ‘We use the “t” or “k”?’

‘I’m not a faifeau,’ she joked, ‘so use the “k”.’ She struggled up, swallowed back tears and phlegm, caught it at the back of her throat and then, with a loud swacking sound, spat it out of the fale, like she had seen Lemu do. She took the end of her clean ‘ie lavalava and wiped her mouth and the choking tears from her eyes. Her companions tried not to laugh when they saw the black charcoal streaks she left on her face and ‘ie lavalava. Yes, their strange friend was learning, they decided.

‘Laura, o oe o le loia, a?’ Ma‘amusa asked. They waited as she struggled to figure out the question.

Teva started interpreting, but Laura said, like a real Samoan: ‘Se, aua!’ So they waited, knowing lawyers weren’t dumb. Only very smart and intelligent people went to university and graduated as lawyers, Lemu had told them repeatedly, and every aiga in Samoa wanted their sons to be lawyers, so to be a woman and a lawyer, Laura was doubly intelligent.

‘Koe fai … fai mai lau … fesili,’ Laura asked.

‘Magaia lau fa’a-Samoa, Laura!’ Ma‘amusa congratulated her. So Teva repeated her question.

Laura’s face lit up, her eyes alight with discovery. ‘Ī, o a‘u o le loia e le iloa – e le iloa kafu se afi!’ Her companions clapped, and she clapped with them. The smoke had cleared, and the fire was now flaming freely under and around the soot-caked kettle.

She had suffered a week of Palagi breakfasts of cornflakes, fried eggs, toast, butter, marmalade and coffee, because she hadn’t wanted to offend their hosts by asking for Samoan meals. When she had told Dan as much the previous night, he’d hedged, and she knew he too didn’t want to cause offence. Dan in New Zealand, where he’d grown up, was more difficult to understand, because he was ‘at home’ there, blending in easily with everything. But in the past week of their first visit together to Malie, where she was expecting him to be even more part of everything, she was seeing him more clearly, because he was definitely not fitting into what was expected of him. Being a Samoan, Malie was expecting him to know about what that was, and behave accordingly. But the Dan she loved had never wanted to conform to what the majority of people wanted; not in New Zealand, anyway. Here he was caught between being a non-conformer and being ‘a proper Samoan’, which, she was now convinced, he didn’t really know much about. She was deriving enormous enjoyment out of observing him wriggling and squirming as he tried to walk that endless tightrope. Here, the people had accorded her what she called pre-forgiveness: being a naïve, mannerless Palagi, they expected her to break and trespass on and be ignorant of every feature of civilised Samoan behaviour, and when she trespassed, their forgiveness was automatic. Poor Dan, though! Her beautiful, tortuously introspective darling was caught in the quagmire of identity and his people’s demanding expectations.

‘O le a le breakfast fa‘a-Samoa?’ she asked her companions, after struggling to formulate the question.

‘O le fa‘alifu, le koko Samoa …’ Ma‘amusa started.

‘Ma se i‘a falai po‘o se pisupo,’ Teva ended the menu.

Laura remembered and looked at the basket of taro and bunch of green bananas that she and Dan had fetched from the plantation two days before and had put on the far rafters of the kitchen fale. Beside them was a large black pot. Dry coconuts lay outside by the firewood. Getting up quickly, she hurried over, took down the pot and went to the outside tap. ‘O le a le mea ua kupu?’ Teva called. Ma‘amusa got up to go and help her, but Laura waved her back down to her seat of coconut husks.

They watched her as she staggered back with the pot now full of water, thumped it down next to the kettle on the fire and went over to the rafters. Teva brought the pot’s silver lid and put it on. Laura – and they marvelled at her strength – pulled down the hefty basket of taro, and with one hand and on well-muscled legs carried it over to the valusaga outside and dumped it there. Again, more work; Teva and Ma‘amusa sighed and looked at each other. They got up stoically and went to fetch the basins, other ingredients and implements needed for making the Samoan breakfast their Palagi lawyer friend obviously wanted.

‘Why not make your Samoan breakfast in the kitchen?’ Dan suggested hesitantly, when he came out and found Teva teaching Laura how to husk coconuts using the dangerously sharp mele‘i. One wrong move and you could impale yourself on it.

‘Kaukala in Samoan,’ Laura demanded. She jabbed the coconut down onto the sharp point of the mele‘i. Dan jumped over and stopped her. ‘Ou ke fia iloa fai!’ she insisted. So he stepped behind her, his body tight against her back, his jaw pressing down over her right shoulder. He gripped her hands from behind and, pressing down on the impaled coconut, twisted, and levered part of the husk off the coconut shell; then, once again, he jabbed the nut down on the point and twisted and levered up, and another strip of husk peeled off, and so on until the whole shell was bare of the husk. All the time Laura was breathlessly aware of his warm body, his slightly musky odour and his bulge against her buttocks. ‘Sexy, too, darling,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve never been closer!’

‘Fa‘aoga le gagaga Samoa,’ Ma‘amusa reminded her, and they all laughed.

For the next hour or so, they taught Laura how to split open the nuts, scrape the meat out of them using a tuai and squeeze the milk out of the meat; and to scrape the skin off the taro and, using a heavy machete, cut them into pieces and lower the pieces into boiling water. Then they helped her roast the cacao beans, peel off their hard skins and pound them into a paste in the wooden pestle. When their breakfast was almost ready, her cousins congratulated her on being ‘the best lawyer cooker of Samoan food in the world!’

‘In Samoan,’ she reminded them.

They looked at Dan, who, grinning widely, interpreted: ‘Laura, o oe o le loia e gumela kasi i le makaupu kau kuka i le lalolagi.’ Dan and Ma‘amusa and Teva bowed to her, and she curtsied to them. When she looked round, the rest of their aiga were on the veranda and in the faleo‘o, grinning and applauding.

She would have prefered to serve their Samoan breakfast the Samoan way, but when she hurried to the dining room to prepare, she found that Fa‘alua had already set the table the Palagi way, with cutlery and crockery and even serviettes.

Since arriving, Laura had felt uncomfortable being treated as a special guest, eating in the Palagi house’s dining room with only Lemu and Fa‘alua and Dan, while the rest of their aiga ate afterwards in the faleo‘o. There were some things in the Fa‘a-Samoa that she would never conform to, and one of them was the strict division between class and age groups, according to which the untitled men, women and children served the matai and elders and then ate separately, afterwards. Now, Laura set places for Teva and Ma‘amusa at the table. When her cousins refused the gesture, she gazed heatedly at Dan, who ordered them to sit down at the table.

In tense silence, the others took their places, with Lemu at the head of the table, as usual. For the first time, Laura experienced not one twitch of guilt about offending her hosts.

‘Good morning,’ Lemu greeted them, in English. ‘Laura, will you please say our grace for the breakfast which you have prepared?’ What? She stopped herself just in time from declining automatically. For a lost moment she didn’t know how to react to the request, and everyone – especially Dan – experienced a tense awkwardness. Finally, she banished her qualms about being an atheist, convincing herself that, from what she had observed of Samoan behaviour, religion was more a social custom than anything else.

‘In Samoan,’ Dan said, and she could feel him enjoying that.

She cleared her throat, softly, and then, hesitantly but deliberately, she prayed using the ‘k’: ‘Le Akua e, fa‘amolemole fa‘amaguia mai ia Lemu ma – ma lo makou aiga akoa.’ She paused; now more sure of herself, she continued, ‘Ku‘u mai ia Kanielu se loko fa’amaualalo aua e le iloa e ia oga fai se kuka magogi pei oga makou kukaiga ma Keva ma Ma‘amusa. Fa‘afekai mo mea ai ua e foa‘i mai mo makou kino. I le suafa o Iesu, Amege!’

Lemu thanked her, and added, ‘You speak better Samoan than your husband.’

‘Hear that, Kanielu in the lion’s den?’ Laura laughed.

‘That’ll be the day!’ Daniel countered.