‘I don’t know what it is with the girls in our family, Ruby. Not one of us knows how to take an easy road,’ she laughed. ‘All I know is there was truly only one man for me, one man for your mother and it seems there’s only one for you. There’s nothing to be done except to let him know how you feel. I often think how differently life might have turned out if I had kicked up merry hell to find Jack before my parents put me on that train. You’ve got to ring that boy, Ruby. You don’t know how it will turn out, you don’t even know that he hasn’t found someone else. But you’ve got to give it a chance. You know, it would mean the world to me if you did.’
We sat up and the sand fell from our backs. I leant forward, resting my hands on my knees. ‘Why silk?’ I asked her. ‘I mean how is it you’ve ended up growing silk in this little place?’
‘Your mother always hated moving around when she was small.’ Pearl sighed. ‘But I was restless. I could never settle in one place for very long. She always wanted a dog and I was forever telling her we couldn’t have one. She wanted a father, too. And she couldn’t have that, either. You know, even when you’re a parent, Ruby, you don’t lose being your own self. Part of me knew it would be better for her if we settled down somewhere permanent, but I could never manage it. I’d feel this wind inside. See, moving on was how I felt settled. She had this one friend in a place we stayed for a while, Sally. They got on so well. They had mulberry trees in this town, all over, and Sally and your mum got to keeping them. Once a year these little eggs would hatch and you could love something into life for a while. We kept those eggs in a box as we moved around each year. When we came here and after Jack died, for the first time in so long I didn’t feel like going anywhere. In fact, I haven’t left this place since. I saw all these mulberry trees and it reminded me of Jan. And I understood what she must have felt,’ she paused. ‘She came home from school, once, and her homework was to draw our family tree. She was supposed to put her parents in the trunk, her grandparents in the roots and her siblings as the leaves on the branches.’ She laughed but it was the sound of someone trying to maintain a veneer of indifference. ‘I always told her she had no grandparents. After what they did to me, I didn’t think,’ she stopped and cleared her throat. ‘I found her piece of paper screwed up in the bin. Two names don’t make much of a tree. When I asked her what she handed in for her homework she opened the silkworm box and said . . .’ Pearl genuinely laughed, ‘she said “I told the teacher we fed our family tree to these worms”.’
Despite the years of pain and complications Pearl had just revealed, I smiled and we laughed together. ‘Your mother could be as hard as nails,’ she said. ‘I loved her spirit, Ruby. I always hated the trouble she caused me but I loved her spirit.’
Pearl and I settled into a comfortable rhythm. We had the silkworms and the leaves, we played cards and drank tea. Each morning we strolled into the markets. I began to understand what Pearl loved about those worms. I could see them growing bigger each day. I fed them, changed their baskets, watched them shed their skin and grow. My goodness how they grew.
We began anticipating the day they would start to change and Pearl was visibly excited by the prospect. Her face glowed.
One morning when we went out into the silkhouse to check on the first basket, we realised we wouldn’t be waiting any longer. We took the first basket from the shelf and the fattened worms were still and slow. Some of them had their heads raised up. Their heads moved slowly as if they were looking for something above them.
Pearl quickly took them from the basket and placed them into the spinning baskets she had made ready on the other side of the room. It took us all day to check through the baskets, taking worm after worm from their home of leaves to their new place where they would begin to spin. I hardly had time to watch the progress of the ones that had started, so busy were we with transferring the worms. We didn’t want them spinning their cocoons in the feeding baskets. Rather we wanted them spinning at a place where their initial silk would form a stable, flat platform to encourage a perfectly rounded, perfectly moulded cocoon. We took a break to get something to eat and drink, though we were quiet.
I remembered what Pearl told me about those two seasons when something went wrong and the worms spun flat half-formed rods instead. I hadn’t thought of Sally all that much since I’d been there, certainly less than I had been doing before I arrived, but it had been a year since the accident and now she came back to me.
I had this new image of her driving home, one hand on the steering wheel and one hand on her stomach where there was a small and expectant life growing beneath her skin. I would so love to have known where she had been, what she had been thinking and why she was coming home. But I would never know. Something went wrong and she swerved off the road, lost control and wrapped her car around the tree. If she had put off coming home just one more day, one more week she might have made it.
I was fascinated by the progress in the silkhouse. I lit a kerosene lantern and sat beside the worms as they turned their faces upwards, making slow and steady figure eights above them, pulling that beautiful thread from their bodies into a cloak around themselves. I wished Sally was there with me, both of us together. Two wings of the one moth.
For days we watched those beautiful creatures complete their cocoons, each of them becoming slowly invisible. We were surrounded by thousands of golden orbs that, to the outside world, appeared inert and lifeless. But it was as though I could almost hear them, feel them, deep inside. Where everything was changing.
Pearl brought me tea and toast with jam to eat and, though she said nothing, I wondered what she thought of me. I had been there beside them for days. Rarely leaving, just watching and keeping silent vigil. To anyone else it would have appeared as though I had lost my mind. But those golden cocoons, with their almost life inside were, to me, my Sally. Every last one of them.
I wasn’t there with Sally in those days I should have been. I wasn’t naive enough to think it would have mattered much to her, but her baby was alive in the same way those babies were alive. They were not fully changed, or emerged, nor were they unliving. It should have mattered to me that I was with Sally and her baby for all the moments it was possible. I had spent so many years longing to be with her, wanting her back and I gave up those last days. Perhaps I was like her after all. Perhaps I was just like my own dear Sally after all.
‘I suppose you think I’ve lost the plot,’ I said to Pearl who joined me.
‘Nah. I’ve seen stranger things.’
‘I can’t explain it.’
‘I know.’
‘We have to do it soon,’ Pearl said.
I nodded. Because I didn’t trust my voice to respond.
‘I can do this part alone. I don’t mind.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I have to.’ Inside my head I was telling myself to stand up and choose the first basket at random. But I was rooted to my chair.
Pearl stood. ‘How about I start and you join me when you can.’
I nodded, thinking it sounded like as good a plan as any.
Pearl moved to take one of the baskets. ‘Not that one,’ I said, instinctively reaching out my hands towards it. ‘Not that one.’
‘Okay,’ she said slowly. She moved to take another one but I couldn’t let her. ‘No, not that one either.’
‘Ruby,’ she said slowly and lovingly.
‘I know, I know,’ I said.
I felt Pearl standing behind me. She rested her hands on my shoulders. ‘You know how many people never get to say goodbye to those they love? You got to see her, you know. You held her hand.’
‘You’re right,’ I said.
‘We should attack this differently. How about you go inside and call that Barry of yours and I’ll make a start in here. Join me when you’re finished and tell me everything he says.’
So, I either chose that
hard thing or another equally difficult thing. It was hardly a choice.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Actually,’ she said, her voice tinged with a tone of confession. ‘I’ve already called him. I told him to wait while I went to get you.’
I didn’t know if she was telling the truth or not but I wouldn’t have put it past her. ‘But how did you find his number?’
‘Your phone.’
‘But how did you call him, I mean the cost of it?’
‘My dear if I let you stay in here protecting these worms any longer, you’ll cost me a great deal more than a long-distance phone call.’
‘But it’s been over a year since I’ve spoken to him!’ I jumped off the chair and ran inside, too many thoughts coursing though my mind. What on god’s earth had Pearl told him? What would she have said?
I almost tripped on the doorstep into the house, catching the doorframe in time to avoid a tumble on the floor. My heart was pounding as I looked over into the kitchen and saw that the phone was off the cradle, the spiral cord swinging between the handpiece on the bench and the phone fixed to the wall. I rushed to pick up the phone. ‘Hello,’ I said too loudly. ‘Hello?’
‘Ruby? Is that you?’
‘Barry?’
Slight laughter.
‘Oh my god. I’m so sorry. My grandmother. She found your number and called. I’m going to kill her. I am going to kill her for doing this to me. I’m really sorry.’
‘It’s all right. It’s so good to hear from you.’
‘Really?’
‘Where are you? The line sounds shaky.’
And so while Pearl began unwinding the first fragile thread in the silkworm house, I tested the fragile connection between Barry and myself.
I found Pearl busy in the silkhouse. In the container of boiling water at her feet bobbed a cluster of golden cocoons, twirling and swirling in the water as she fished out the end of the silk strands with a wooden spoon. Catching them, she pulled them long and threaded them onto a set of spools and wheels. She wound the wheel, unravelling their golden robes. On the wheel the fine silk threads clustered into an expanding, glowing hank of silk. She finished one batch of cocoons, removed the hank of silk, binding it carefully, and placed it into an open box. She looked up, seeing me enter, and smiled.
I didn’t say anything – intending to punish her with my silence – and dug my hands into the pocket of my jeans. She moved to the pot of boiling water and scooped out what remained of those worms.
I knew why it had to be done but all the same it seemed so cruel and unusual to me. That we fed those little beings, we doted on them for so long, only to take their silk long before they’d ever fly free. In the wild, silkworms will fully transform inside their cocoon, then eat their way out of one end. For a brief time they will mate and lay the eggs of a new generation. But the means of their escape destroys the single, unbroken thread that has formed the silken womb of their protection.
‘So,’ said Pearl. ‘What did he say?’
I sat down on my chair beside the baskets of still intact cocoons and folded my arms. I considered holding my tongue for hours. I knew she was dying to hear the details of our conversation.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘Oh well. Perhaps I’ll line you up with a nice Tongan boy. They’re not all bad, you know.’
There had been a steady stream of boys sniggering at me since I got there. They’d brush past me in the street or the markets or cluster together on the edge of our grass. I tried to ignore them as much as possible but, truly, their attentions were relentless.
‘They think Western girls are easy. Here there’s a fairly strict protocol between the sexes, but the general impression of the West is unrestrained sexual expression,’ she laughed. ‘My friend, Luisi. Now her son is a darling.’ She looked at me. It’s like she was sizing me up. ‘Yes, I think he’d do nicely. So he’s not Barry,’ she exaggerated his name. ‘Who knows. Maybe he’s even better.’
I tried not to look at what she was doing with the remains of the half-transformed worms. I felt queasy just thinking about it. It didn’t seem to bother her, though. She scooped them out and tossed them into another basket without any hesitation. Perhaps years of this ruthlessness had accustomed her to the brutality of it. Or then perhaps I was being overly dramatic.
Despite my resolve – thin as it was – I relented. ‘He wants to see me.’
Pearl took another cluster of cocoons into the water and fished among them with her spoon for their end. I glanced at the thousands of cocoons waiting for the same procedure and thought it would take us weeks to get through them all.
Pearl huffed triumphantly and looked at me again. ‘You got them inside your chest?’
‘What?’
She pointed towards me with her spoon. ‘Moths.’
I shrugged sheepishly and nodded.
‘I knew it.’ She put the spoon back to work among the cocoons. I crossed my arms self-consciously. It was as though the feeling was louder now that Pearl had pointed it out. I did have moths inside my chest. A thousand of them. Drumming with their insistent wings, thumping inside my heart. It was the feeling of something struggling to get out, to fly free. To wrap themselves around that one person in a cocoon of their feathery affection. Love is a thing like that, fragile and light. No wonder it rests upon our hearts in intangible moments, bids us follow fleeting thoughts and ideas and pursue our abstract imaginings. This feeling warmed me, radiating along the inside of my limbs. It spread and bled into my skin, flushing through my face and my mouth, lifting it into a smile.
Those cocoons were like golden moments, every last one of them. Not every one makes it out, or finds love and hope outside their own small shells. But there, among the thousand chances, is but a few who could. And who would.
I had spent the past year holding on to one thought above all else, something I had buried down deeply inside myself. The insidious thought that I should die to everything I loved because Sally could not live. Her death wasn’t fair. I wanted to scream to an angry god that he should have taken me. She was better, she was lovelier. I had less to lose. I thought back to that night I arrived in Tonga the first time, Pearl crushing me to her, wet as I was with that coat across my legs, living those moments that were hers all those years ago.
I closed my eyes and Pearl began humming. I heard the sound of her spoon moving through the water and had the image of her running through the back door of her house outside in that cold Sydney air. The water in the washtub bleeding red. Her coat bundled and stuffed into the dye, pushed around the tub with her mother’s heavy hand on the long wooden paddle. So much of our life is bound in moments over which we have no control. I would not have been there without the determination of that sixteen-year-old girl and the love she had for the boy next door and the baby she carried.
We are, all of us, tied to the simple threads that stitch our lives together, patches sewn and fused to the fabric of our existence. We are grown from the generations before us, grafted, for better or worse, to our family tree. And we are born of moments of love, however forbidden, precarious and unlikely, and, if you think about the unlikely event of our own beginning, is it any wonder we are here to love and live at all? How far do genetics go? That is what everyone wants to know. Because Sally and I were identical in every physical way, we shared the same womb, the same egg, the same mother and father. We even loved the same boy. For whatever reason, whether it was a time bomb ticking away inside her that chose at that moment to erupt or whether it was the accident, a red cocoon formed and broke inside her brain, and she died. But I did not.
I couldn’t stay with Pearl until the final cocoons were spun and wound, bundled and packed. Together we spun our way through most of the cocoons, but I had to get back home. Pearl promised to take photographs of the silkworms that we had left to grow and change and hatch. Those moths would m
ate and lay the eggs of the next generation.
On my last night with Pearl, she invited what felt like half of Tonga to my farewell. For a whole day the house was involved in preparing the food and umu. The men prepared the fire pit early in the day, digging a great hole in Pearl’s backyard. The hot stones were laid down and covered, left to smoke and heat throughout the morning. When the food was prepared and wrapped in banana skin or foil, we took the parcels on trays out into the yard. The pit was uncovered and all the food placed inside. We placed banana leaves on top, then dirt. The food was left in its cocoon to smoke and cook all day.
The silkhouse was left idle for the entire day while we chatted – I could make out a few words here and there – played cards, ate and drank. I was hugged and presented with so many flower leis and pieces of tapa, I was barely visible beneath all the foliage. Plant my legs in the earth and I could have been the Faraway Tree itself, bearing flowers and foliage of every colour, shape and variety, my arms reaching out towards a distant future full of expectation and imagining.
In the evening, when the food was brought out of the house and out of the ground, Pearl stood to address the crowd. She cried, unashamed tears rolled down her withered cheeks, her belly rocked as she sobbed. I could not understand most of what she said, though I picked up on her sentiment and found tears coming to my own eyes. I felt a sense of peace inside my soul. Contentment in where I was, where I had been and a longing, all the same, to go back home. I stood and Pearl embraced me before ordering everyone to eat.
When the meal finished I was dragged to my feet and made to dance. I protested, knowing my body could never make the graceful and artful movements I had seen. But I was ignored, made to bend my knees, hold my hands out and follow the other girls. Despite my awkwardness I laughed and pretended to know what I was doing. Singing a tune I did not know, words I did not understand, in a body that looked completely unsuited for anything that poised.
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