‘You’re awake,’ Pearl appeared at the front door. Her hair was long, completely grey and held fast in a ponytail. The edges of a blue sarong, wrapped around her body, flapped in the breeze.
‘Come on,’ she said before I could speak. I hesitated at the door, reaching down for my shoes. ‘Don’t need those,’ she said, smiling.
I followed her out the front door, which I attempted to close behind me, but it banged against the doorframe, opening slightly. Ahead of me, my grandmother laughed. ‘Come on, there’s lots to do.’
I glanced back at the door but followed her anyway.
It was too dark when I arrived to see much of anything. It was all shadows and shapes in the rain. I ignored a sinking feeling in my stomach because I should have told her everything, right then. About what happened to Sally and how I had run away from it all. I thought back to what she told me the night before; the red coat, her mother. How life was a cycle you just couldn’t fight. I wanted so much to believe her.
We walked around the side of the house, clad in blue shingles, to a smaller room attached at the back. I heard it before I stepped inside, a sound like the rustling of a thousand miniature trees. I had dreamt of that sound, I thought. I decided that I would talk to Pearl about why I’d come, just as soon as there was the right moment.
‘Take a seat, Ruby,’ Pearl said, when we were inside the room. She pointed to a small timber chair against the side wall and seated herself beside a table which was covered in leaves. Beside her feet were baskets, woven with a fibre I didn’t recognise, filled with more leaves. She took a knife to a wad of leaves and hacked into them roughly, sweeping them into another, mostly empty, basket on the other side of her legs.
She turned back to glance at me. ‘I can’t say it wasn’t a surprise to find you on my doorstep last night,’ she said, laughing softly.
‘What time is it?’ I said, realising how hungry and thirsty I was.
‘Sometime in the afternoon, I think,’ she said non-committally, shoving another pile of chopped-up leaves into the basket.
‘I always thought it would be your mother who came looking for me, seeking more answers to the wrong questions.’
‘Mum is in Darwin,’ I said. I felt suddenly stupid and wished I hadn’t left. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was insane. If I didn’t eat I was going to pass out.
‘You picked a great time to come find me, darlin’. Busiest time of the year right now. I’m committed to these little ones,’ she pointed around the room, her finger not indicating any one thing in particular but the general contents of every basket lining the many shelves – stacked from floor to ceiling – around the room.
The smell of the room made my stomach churn. It was earthy, farm-like.
‘If you help me we can have this sorted quickly and we could slip away into town to get some supplies.’
I stood up, smoothing down my T-shirt.
‘You must be starving,’ Pearl said. ‘Dry crackers in the tin on the bench inside. Butter and jam in the fridge.’
Pearl hummed as we worked, chopping through the baskets of leaves that we stacked into other baskets. She stopped humming to explain what needed to be done.
‘Silkworms are as fragile as newborns, you know,’ she began and I just listened. ‘You’ve got to feed them every two hours, and feed them well so they’ll produce fine silk.’
I nodded, taking in her instruction, wondering a great many things I felt unable to explain or ask.
‘We’ll clean out their baskets, keep a close eye on them, make sure they shed their skin and, most of all, keep eating,’ she said. ‘We want them fat and strong.’
My fingers were green with the moisture of the leaves.
‘Right,’ she said, stopping and wiping her hands on her apron. She passed me a cloth and bent down to pick up the first basket, pointing to the next one for me to pick up. We began at the far side wall, starting with the baskets on the top shelf, moving down each basket until the floor. I watched her dish out even handfuls of the green leaf mulch and spread it around the basket. I began on the next row, pulling the first basket towards me. The inside of the basket was alive with movement. A hundred or more tiny worms wriggling their way through the leaf matter. I spread a handful of the food from my basket into theirs as Pearl had done. Looking over to me, she nodded, pleased.
I closed my eyes briefly and imagined an impossible future where nothing that had happened ever happened. Where we were two precious gems, cocooned in silk. And the world was a heartbeat, outside, filtered by golden light. Before I ran away, when I saw Sally, she was just like that.
Pearl and I emptied the baskets of chopped leaves, sharing the food between the baskets of silkworms that filled the silkhouse. We headed out, Pearl still dressed in her sarong, walking along the road, passing small thatched dwellings she told me were called fales. There was nothing familiar there, everything was strange and arousing. The air was a heady perfume of gardenias and frangipanis that grew beside roads and rockeries and houses. We passed groups of people, sitting, cross-legged, on patches of lawn. They struck me as large and warm-hearted and the sound of their laughter was infectiously joyous. I heard music, though I couldn’t locate its source, rich voices in harmonies, accompanied by a steady beating rhythm.
‘Close your mouth, Ruby. You look like your eyes might pop out of your head,’ Pearl said and I closed my mouth, pulled back my eyes and laughed nervously.
‘It’s like . . .’ I couldn’t find the words.
‘I know,’ she said, hoisting the banana-leaf basket more comfortably on her hip. ‘I felt like that the first time I came here. I thought, “Pearl, you are in another world entirely”.’
‘How long, exactly, have you been here?’
‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged absently. ‘I’ve lost count,’ she tilted her head. ‘Ten years or so, I’d say. Tongans aren’t as bound by time as we are. Didn’t take me long to figure that out.’
There was a lot I wanted to ask her.
We arrived at the markets, an open space between a few rough buildings in the main part of town, a ten-minute walk from her house. Displayed on rough trestle tables was an array of foods from taros and green bananas to fish and mussels. Hanks of grass-like fibres, wooden handicrafts and drums. Ornate carvings, tables of fabrics dyed in bright colours bearing floral imprints or Tongan words. Pearl filled her basket with food, talking in Tongan. She hugged a large woman with a mat wrapped around her waist and an insane number of fresh floral wreaths about her neck. Her smell was overpowering, like I was doused in perfume. She walked around the table and embraced me warmly. She pulled away and held me by my shoulders as she talked to Pearl.
‘Kalo here says I have much work to do to fatten you up. She is so worried by your skinniness,’ Pearl laughed and Kalo spoke sternly to Pearl, punctuating her meaning with a finger directed first at my lanky frame, then at Pearl’s nose.
‘Eowee,’ Kalo said dramatically, or at least that was my translation of what she said. The Tongan version of ‘Oh my god!’
Pearl passed me her full basket as she left Kalo to scour another food stall. I tugged at my shirt and waved goodbye.
I watched Pearl disappear, engrossed in her potato selection, while I stopped at a table laid out with fabrics. I placed the basket on the ground and ran my hands over the fabrics.
‘You like?’ the Tongan lady said in English.
I nodded and smiled. I thought of Mr Grandy and my whole life before Sally’s accident. I’d brought my sketchbook with me, but I hadn’t touched a piece of fabric or sewn anything since that last week before Amona came home and Barry called. It seemed a lifetime ago.
17.
We had to tend to the silkworms around the clock and Pearl explained to me that at least, with me helping, she’d get more of a break around her two-hourly schedule. As we wo
rked, she taught me her craft, how silkworms only ate the leaves of one variety of tree – the mulberry. And while the variety of mulberry known as the white mulberry is the most common variety to feed silkworms, the Islands of Tonga have an abundant supply of paperbark mulberry leaves that she collects, chops and feeds to her babies.
She didn’t ask about why I’d come or press me for details and we never discussed how strange it was that I’d arrived out of the blue, like I had. She seemed to accept my arrival as normal and continued on, regardless. I was relieved and began to relax. Each time the wind blew, I smelt gardenias or frangipanis and it was so beautiful, so startling, all the thoughts I had disappeared.
It was hard to think of Pearl as my mother’s mother and I began to understand something of their conflict. I could not imagine two more different people. My mother was fine-featured, controlled and routined. She searched the world for details and answers and neat equations. Whereas Pearl was rough and overflowing. Her skin sagged around fatty arms and legs. Her feet were calloused and her sarong was tied carelessly around her body.
‘Silkworms’, she continued to tell me, ‘will eat continuously for months, and shed four times before spinning their cocoon. It’s not strictly true that silkworms eat only mulberry leaves’, she added. ‘You can feed them beetroot leaves and their silk will spin red. Or a version of red. But if you feed them right and love them, they will spin you silk of the highest quality.’
My arms ached from the chopping and leaf-spreading when we took our next break.
‘I’ve promised to help my friends with their tapa,’ she said, cleaning her hands and splashing water on her face. I followed her, leaving the silkworms to gorge on their latest batch of leaves. Inside that room it sounded like perpetual rain.
‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here,’ I said to her as we walked.
‘Everything has an answer in its own good time,’ she said. She took my hand and squeezed it, clasping it to her chest and we walked a good way, like that, bound together. She began to sing, which was a mixture of Tongan words and some humming. It was awful and I laughed. She let go of my hand and said. ‘Never was much of a singer but I love it.’
‘Go on,’ I said, turning to watch a group of children run up to the edge of the road to stare at me.
She said something in Tongan to them and waved her hand in their direction. ‘I’m really going to have to fatten you up,’ she said. ‘In Tonga, the fatter you are the more you are loved by your family. Your little body is enough to make a Tongan weep,’ she said, clicking her tongue. ‘My friends will think your mother neglects you.’
I swallowed with that thought. But Pearl began singing again and I couldn’t help but laugh.
At the end of the road we turned left and passed three small fales before coming to a group of women seated around what appeared to be a large piece of beige fabric, on the grass. Pearl waved as we joined the group. The women shuffled to make room for Pearl who dragged me down to sit beside her.
‘Tapa,’ Pearl said to me, indicating the cloth.
I looked closer, touching it, gently. It didn’t feel like cloth at all, just thick paper.
‘The women make it from the bark of the mulberry tree,’ she said. ‘They tear off long strips of bark, soak it, pound it out into flat strips, glue it together and decorate it with family designs and crests. Just think, one living tree produces this,’ she said, taking a pot of black ink and dabbing a thick brush into it. ‘And me and my babies use the leaves to make silk. If you ask me,’ she said, ‘this, right here, is God. Nature’s great creativity.’
The women – there were no men – were dressed in a variety of clothing similar to what Pearl wore or I had seen worn on my brief trip into town. Fabrics or dresses draped around their bodies, overlaid with some form of matting or weaving tied around their waist. Some of the women in town had longer dresses with smaller bands securing lengths of long, woven tassels.
Pearl turned to me. ‘Luisi over there,’ she pointed carefully, ‘this tapa is for her daughter’s wedding. Tapa is very valuable and given on special occasions. It’s a measure of wealth and regard,’ Pearl said. ‘I was here for the King’s tenth year celebrations,’ she said, laughing. ‘Oh, my, you have never seen such feasting or so much tapa. For weeks there were tables and chairs set out along the foreshore for as far as you could see.’
I nodded, but the details seemed almost far-fetched to me. I ran my hand over the edge of the tapa. The entire piece was as large as ten metres square, I thought.
Pearl spoke Tongan for a moment before returning to English. ‘If you are still here,’ she said, ‘you can come to the wedding.’
Pearl opted for a quick nap after we chopped and fed the silkworms double so we could stretch out our next shift for an extra few hours. I lingered in the silkhouse, cleaning up and taking a moment to catch my thoughts.
As well as the baskets containing the silkworms, the room held wooden spinning looms and taller baskets. There were boxes piled up on top of each other, a refrigerator and some chairs. Beside the main work table was an old metal filing cabinet. I moved around the room, lifting lids on baskets and peaking underneath sheets draped over looms. The sound of the feeding worms was a comforting, rhythmic sound, and made the room feel alive. Their smell didn’t bother me any longer.
In two of the baskets I found what appeared to be tufts and hunks of raw silk resembling dirty, matted cotton balls. Kilograms of it. I took hold of it and ran it through my fingers, squashing it, kneading it. My mind drifted into thoughts of how it could be woven into thread and fabric, and I was trying to recall the different ways silk was produced. I became aware that I had no idea what Pearl did with all her silk and decided that, with the looms I’d found, she probably span the cocoons into thread of some sort. I really knew so little about her.
I slumped into a chair beside the door and felt a wave of exhaustion that was as much from the physical work I’d been engaged in all day as the weight of what I was avoiding. I thought of Barry and how my leaving must have felt to him. I wanted to cover myself in blankets, to be locked inside something safe and not come out. I longed for it despite realising how selfish and cruel I’d been. I wanted that land to swallow me whole and keep me. I didn’t want to climb down that Faraway Tree at all. I wanted it to move on, with me wrapped up inside.
It was dark by the time we arrived at Pearl’s friend’s house. Pearl took great delight in telling me how much Tongans loved their food.
Shortly after arriving in Tonga herself, Pearl had been invited to a dinner where plates and platters of food had completely covered a trestle table set low on the ground. There was so much food, she told me, that there was no way the guests could possibly get through even a small proportion of it. The dinner was to celebrate the return of a daughter back to Tonga, who had been studying in New Zealand. The girl’s mother had addressed the guests, expressing her love and pride in her daughter. Soon after starting she burst into tears, weeping and wailing that she could not provide enough food.
‘The abundance of food is an expression,’ Pearl said, ‘of the amount of affection or esteem or value. She could not afford a quantity of food suitable for her love for her daughter. Tongans aren’t perfect.’ I felt there was so much more underneath this simple statement.
Pearl continued, ‘But I love them anyway.’
I couldn’t help thinking of Dad and our trips to Charlie’s Chinese Restaurant for our birthdays and how it would feel wrong to let a birthday go by without that ritual.
Pearl and I were greeted warmly and much fuss was made over me, again, though I still couldn’t understand what was being said. I thought about asking Pearl to teach me just a little Tongan, like how to say my name, how to talk about the weather. We were outside, the air was warm, filled with a soft breeze and people gathered about the open space in different groups and huddles. I fel
t self-conscious in my Western clothes and skinny body. I thought of Becky and her constant claims of being too fat, despite being a small size eight. A dose of Tonga could be good for her. I found myself smiling and feeling warm about my friends, all of them, and it surprised me.
In a corner underneath a large tree a group of people were singing. Some sat cross-legged, clapping and swaying. A few men beat sticks on upturned buckets.
Pearl pointed to our left where a group of men formed a circle around a spot on the ground. I watched as they bent down to lift something from the ground. Steam rose, they strained and retracted backwards with the weight. They shuffled sideways and their steaming load was placed on the ground. I leaned over to get a closer view and watched them remove smoking banana leaves. Once finished, small bundles of food, wrapped in silver paper and other leaves, were placed on plates and passed around.
A dozen or more children ran and played around us. Their laughter was wild and unrestrained.
Halfway through dinner I heard what I thought was the sound of pigs and found a group of piglets running free beside a cluster of fales.
‘This food is cooked underground,’ Pearl explained. ‘Tongans heat rocks, dig a hole and line it with banana leaves. They pile in the bundles of food, cover it with more leaves and fill it with dirt. Underground oven,’ she said, finishing the last of her sweet potato. ‘Called an umu.’
A group of boys were looking at me, pointing and laughing openly and I felt embarrassed.
Pearl straightened up beside me and glared at them. ‘Tongan boys,’ she said with a sniff. ‘Gorgeous,’ she said, shaking her head slightly. ‘But trouble. Big trouble. I’m sure one of them will be asking you to marry them before you leave. They try it on with any foreign girl.’
I looked down at my plate and felt my face flush. I imagined Becky there with me and couldn’t stop a smile coming to my lips. Casanovas for sure.
We finished with dinner and wandered home. Pearl and I were content in each other’s company. The moon glowed, like a white promise, above us. The silkworms, ever ravenous, had to be fed and we tended them in the near dark, kerosene lamps lighting our workspace and the smell of burnt fuel stinging the back of our throats. My eyes blurred and dragged, heavy with the need to sleep. When each basket was full of leaves, we extinguished the lamps and trudged wearily back inside to fall into our beds.
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