My mother, naturally, had a hand in the planning. She was head of the Women’s Committee in our nu‘u and our district. But the Masiofo herself headed the enterprise. As head of state’s wife she was determined to leave a monument to women in the new independent Samoa – a place where women from all over the islands could meet, stay, attend sessions on hygiene and baby care, hold performances. Plans were underway at the time to build a new Fale Fono down at Mulinu‘u, so it was only natural that our powerful Women’s Committees should want a prestigious building of their own.
Donations were called for throughout the islands, but the Masiofo wanted a focal event. So the concert was planned. This was to have not only the usual programme of singing and dancing items from various villages, but an ambitious performance of the famous legend of Sina and the King of Fiji. The Masiofo thought I might have some fancy palagi knowledge of theatrical staging. We were together at university in Wellington for a year and she knew that I had briefly joined the drama club there. But Jeanie had a much broader knowledge. She loved the theatre and had been active in her local drama group back in New Zealand. I roped Jeanie in, and together we helped turn the usual simple performance of an old story into a full-scale event with stage lights, scenery, an interval, and a cast of thousands!
Jeanie had such energy at that time! Stuart was back in hospital in New Zealand. Or maybe out of hospital. Jeanie told me she had broken with him; had told him not to come back. She didn’t want him. She spoke so fiercely! The plantation was hers, she said, not his. He had only made matters worse in every way; had hounded her father to his death and beaten her and she never wanted to set eyes on him again. Such a change from before, when she seemed to accept him in a passive sort of way. Perhaps his absence had brought her to the realisation that they were bad for each other. I asked her if Stuart accepted all this. Would he stay in New Zealand?
‘He’d better,’ was her reply.
A fierce little tiger she was!
But she threw herself into the concert. She suggested we borrow lights from the local palagi drama group and string them up in the old, rat-ridden rafters of the Tivoli; we could beg old banana crates from the wharf and build scenery. We could build a long low flat and paint it to look like a canoe, for the scene where the King of Fiji and all his attendants cross the sea. Tiresa and the Masiofo were impressed with all this knowledge and planning and added the full force of their influence to the production.
Any scepticism Jeanie might have had about the dramatic quality of the piece was shattered at the first rehearsal. We were both electrified. Laughing one minute; moved the next. And this was only a rehearsal!
Jeanie grinned over to me in the darkened old theatre. ‘You didn’t say your mother was a star.’
Tiresa had the part of the giant lizard and performed it with relish, wagging her great sacking tail back and forth, snorting and gnashing; the fiercest lizard on earth was my mother, her swollen limb down to half its size by now and giving her so much more movement. She was proud of me over that at least – and proud of her Women’s Committees which had carried out the campaign so fiercely.
Jeanie had worked out an ingenious way, using undulating blue ribbons of ‘sea’, to make the lizard appear to be lifted magically out of the water. Tiresa thought it was marvellous, all the theatricals, and was delighted to be the centre of one of the most dramatic moments. All the animosity had gone by now, with the plantation divided and Teo safely married. She was as pleased with Jeanie’s ingenuity as everyone else.
All the other main parts – Sina, her mother, the king and so on, were of course taken by the highest-ranking women. The two highest masiofo – equal in rank – split the role of Sina, each playing half the show. Most of the cast were over fifty and few under fourteen stone. Jeanie, with her new-found theatrical zeal, looked doubtful when she was introduced to the cast, but she quickly changed her opinion when she saw them perform.
‘They must choose their highest ranking women by the way they sing and dance,’ she muttered to me at one time after a particularly beautiful song.
‘Why not?’ I whispered back. ‘Of course that comes into it.’
Disaster nearly struck when our beautiful cut-out canoe, which stretched almost the full width of the stage, could not fit all the ample behinds of the King of Fiji’s retinue. No matter how much shuffling went on, a paddler stuck out into the sea at each end. Our Masiofo decreed that the two largest behinds would have to go for this scene. Roars of laughter and measuring followed. Jeanie was in stitches. The two women who retired did so with pride – it was certainly no shame to be large.
Jeanie was down at the theatre soon after dawn on the day of the performance. I was there early too. I heard her behind the curtain – so happy, so quick to pick up friendships. Two of the cast were with her – the two who had been ousted from the canoe. All three were laughing and singing together. The women – from Savai‘i – I didn’t know them – had sat on a piece of scenery while they waited to come back on stage and had smashed it to matchsticks! Together with Jeanie they were improvising a replacement with woven palm leaves and flowers. Much nicer than the painted original!
In came the truckloads of leaves and flowers to transform the aging Tivoli into a garden paradise. Women’s Committees from all over Samoa were there, all in their separate village uniforms – a flowery decoration in itself – everyone singing and laughing as they wove garlands and plaited palm leaves. Salamasina brought the girls from Papauta School down to lend a hand. We all shouted with appreciation as the Masiofo arrived with a huge piece of tapa cloth – big enough to hang as a backdrop for the whole stage. A wonderful Tongan tapa. It was the Masiofo’s share of a giant half mile by fifteen foot piece, given by Tonga to celebrate Samoan independence. She was so generous and energetic that day – didn’t turn a hair, later that night, when some performers poked a hole in the priceless piece so they could get a glimpse of the audience.
Tiresa had roped Teo into helping cut and transport the palm leaves. He came with a bad grace, I thought, not contributing at all to the general festive occasion. When he asked for Jeanie, I sent him and his towering pile of fronds in the wrong direction. I didn’t want his frowns spoiling such a glorious day.
Everyone came to the show. The whole palagi population and all the Samoan hierarchy. The Tivoli was packed. Crowds stood at the back and lined the side walls. Frangipani scented the air and our beautiful stage lights turned the garlands and the scenery into a magic grotto. Oh it was all glorious! Jeanie and I hugged each other as the curtain went up and the first beautiful chorus began. The woman who played Sina’s mother took five minutes to die convulsively, a wedge of breadfruit stuck in her throat. It brought the house down. Howls of laughter. Next moment all were in tears – Jeanie and me included – at the sad lament that followed.
The lizard’s rise from the sea – a technical triumph – earned a special round of applause.
Teo was there of course, without Ma‘atoe. He didn’t look any happier. When he approached us at the end of the show, pushing his way through the boil of excited women, I made sure to stick with Jeanie.
‘What’s eating you, brother? Does marriage not suit?’ Then I whispered in his ear. ‘Take your long face away. This is a happy day for Jeanie, she needs this.’
I had a feeling that he would have dashed her spirits. I wonder now whether she was pregnant and had told him. At any rate he pulled a face at me and wandered away. We were free to laugh and dance with the women, to drive out to the Masiofo’s house for a magnificent celebratory supper-cum-breakfast. I drove Jeanie back to her big old house as dawn was breaking. We fell into bed there, exhausted.
Perhaps the happiest day of my life. Surely one of hers too?
PART FOUR
Tapalolo
Ann / Jeanie
Ann enjoys the warm fug of the staff-room. It smells of coffee, apple cores and the peculiar pungency that much-used exercise books give off. Her own office is tidier, the air fres
her, but today she prefers to do her marking at the big table along with the other teachers. She writes what she hopes is not too damning a remark at the end of a particularly silly essay, then looks up at a touch on her shoulder. Laurel Manning, the registrar, wants a word. Laurel jerks her head in the direction of the door. A private word.
‘That man has been around again,’ she says when the door to her spotless little cubby hole of an office is closed. ‘He was harassing poor Dawn for information about you. She came to me and I sent him away with a flea in his ear.’ Laurel rolls her eyes. ‘I told him it would be the police next time. Should I call them now, do you think?’
Ann shakes her head, smiling. She doesn’t trust her voice.
Laurel watches her over the top of her famous flamboyant glasses. Ruby red rims today. ‘Ann, I advise calling the police at once. He looks an unpleasant sort. Dawn couldn’t manage him and she’s usually pretty brisk.’ Laurel herself can be more than brisk and knows it. ‘Quite apart from anything else, we can’t have a nutter snooping around the girls.’
‘You’re probably right.’ But Ann feels uneasy. What would the police want to know?
Laurel lays a large farmer’s hand on Ann’s shoulder. Laurel had run a dairy herd single-handed before she took on office work. This big blowsy woman is surprisingly competent at everything she tackles. Backstage at the school shows she performs miracles. ‘Leave it all to me,’ she says. ‘Police don’t need to know all the details. I’ll just report the nuisance, ask them to check his record, and inform them that they’ll get a ring if he comes here again. You don’t know his name do you?’
Ann shakes her head. ‘No idea. He came to the house too. Thought he knew me from the past. Michael and his dogs sent him off.’
Laurel laughs. ‘That’d be right. He won’t be back there again then.’ She eyes Ann shrewdly. ‘Don’t let him get to you, Ann. That’s what gives them kicks, the sad bastards. Bloody stalkers. There was someone once started following one of my daughters …’
Ann can’t concentrate on Laurel’s story. She’s wishing she could dismiss Stuart as a sad loser. This wretched persistence! Why, after all these years, does he think he has any hold – any rights over her? Any normal person would have got on with his life and forgotten her.
And, if he is so persistent, has he found out about Francesca? She has a sudden picture of the night of the palolo rising, and breaks out into a sweat.
‘Here you’d better sit down,’ Laurel says. ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet.’
The memory of that night – the tapalolo – the beauty and horror of it, always comes back to Jeanie as a series of vivid pictures that jerk one to the next like a badly cut movie. Pieces of what happened have disappeared from her memory; other moments have recurred randomly and often, sometimes terrifyingly, always unbidden.
She remembers the scene on the beach in the dark a few hours before dawn. The heavy scented air, the pulsing cicadas, the excitement of the gathered crowd. Her own tension. Surely there is no need for this expectant quiet– palolo won’t have ears – but all the same people are keeping their voices down; children are cuffed if they fool around. Then a cry from somewhere and they all light their lamps and torches and head out into the lagoon – a bright moving river of reflections, fanning out right and left until the river becomes a miniature lighted city. She has seen glow-worms on a dripping bank trick the eye in the same way; the close blue lights looking like a distant city. Here the lights are warm and yellow in the velvet night. Out on the reef the thin white line of surf breaking is faintly illuminated by a low half-moon. The water of the lagoon, which a few moments ago was utterly calm, is now a boil of people wading, bending low over their lanterns to peer, then moving on, searching for the first wriggling palolo.
She remembers Elena urging her forward and Stuart holding her arm, pulling her back.
‘Who cares about fishy worms?’ he whispers in her ear. His wet hands slide around to feel her breasts, her crotch. ‘Leave the poor palolo to their mating. We can have our own fun.’ He points to a secluded patch of scrub back on the beach, where canoes are tied up. ‘Come on, then.’
But Jeanie pulls away and wades after Elena, who is steaming through the water like a tank, heading for the reef.
Did Stuart follow then? Jeanie doesn’t remember. She looks for Teo – surely he’ll be here – but how would she recognise him among all these bare and glistening brown backs? Ma‘atoe wades past in a dream. Teo’s fiancée. Elena pointed her out earlier. Then she was surrounded with her group of attendant unmarried girls. Her aualuma. Now Ma‘atoe is alone. She carries no light, seems more interested in dipping her arms in the water, wetting her hair and throwing it back in a glistening arc of droplets. Is she trying to attract Teo? It would seem not. This is not flirtatious behaviour, but rather self-absorbed. She doesn’t look around to see who might be following. Jeanie watches her with interest – perhaps jealousy? Teo’s fiancée is a large woman, her big breasts showing clearly through her plastered lavalava. She wades along slowly, humming to herself. Perhaps, thinks Jeanie, she is enjoying a few moments of freedom, without the aualuma, before the duties of a married woman rein her in. Ma‘atoe looks up at the sinking moon. Jeanie has always remembered that dreaming face – so innocent, so unsuspecting.
Then what? Elena, her broad face and beaming smile coming and going in flickering torchlight. Elena favours flaming rags soaked in pitch. A Samoan Statue of Liberty, knee-deep in the lagoon. She hands Jeanie a mess of translucent spaghetti. ‘Try, try! The females are best! Try the greeny ones! Try, Stuart!’
Stuart must have returned. He spits his palolo back into the water. Jeanie tries a couple, tentatively, and is surprised by the salty, creamy taste. Like caviar, but also like oyster. She laughs as Elena picks out another and holds it to her lantern. It still wriggles. ‘Look, a male! Taste this dull fellow too.’
Jeanie obeys, but can’t taste a difference. Now Elena is bending with her torch over the water and Jeanie gasps to see a mass of illuminated wriggling forms, thinner than pencils and about as long, twisting and curling their way towards the light.
‘Scoop! Scoop!’ cries Elena, wading forward and away. Stuart takes Jeanie’s arm again. He wants to go back. Wants more from her. But she is enjoying herself and shakes her head at him. She bends to net the little wriggling things, and remembers netting whitebait on the river banks back home. But this haul is far more plentiful. This richness, this exuberance, she thinks, it’s why I love it here.
Later, Teo is there. He has crept up behind her and, giggling, slides a handful of palolo over her shoulders. They slip down under her shirt and over her breasts. She gasps, looking around, but no one is watching. The feel of those palolo is almost unbearably sexy. ‘Teo,’ she laughs, ‘you’re outrageous!’
He dangles a single palolo over her mouth and she puts out her tongue to accept it. ‘Turn off your torch,’ he whispers. She turns it off. The moon has disappeared below the horizon. There is a faint pale line to the sky in the east, but for the moment they are in blackness. Teo comes in close behind her; slides one wet arm around her and nuzzles her neck. ‘Delicious,’ he says, laughing again, as he licks off a palolo. She can feel him hardening against her and would like to turn around, but they are both encumbered with equipment. He sings something softly, pulling away again to dance around her in the water, showing off, showing his erection, careless, it would seem, of anyone or anything. Jeanie peers into the dark but can see nothing but the points of light some distance away now.
Teo moves in close again. ‘Tapalolo is a night of love for everyone,’ he says giggling into her neck. His jittery excitement puts Jeanie on edge too. She knows this shouldn’t be happening, but perhaps on a night like this it’s acceptable? He pushes up against her buttocks and Jeanie moans. It is beautiful there, far from the shore, deep in the water of the dark lagoon, beautiful. Jeanie remembers that sharp pleasure as a moment of mad sweetness before the storm. Did he lift her up? Did he come
inside her? Jeanie remembers only the excitement, the sweetness.
And the horror that followed. Stuart’s face, lit by his own lantern, silent and intent, watching them. Watching with enjoyment. Could it have been that? Yes, a queer mixture of fury and triumph. He nods at Jeanie then, a threatening, brisk little dip of the head. She understands that look. It means trouble for you later on my girl.
And then the image disappears. Suddenly Stuart’s face disappears as if it has been an apparition – a warning born of her own guilt. But no, she felt no guilt. He must have dowsed his lantern.
Did Teo see him? If so he paid little attention. He bites her neck and dances away through the water, still, it seems, in a state of high excitement. Jeanie smiles to see him prance. That wild, lovely boy. Is he after further conquests? Perhaps Tapalolo is Teo’s stag night!
Was there a gap then, or did the next frightful scene follow immediately? Jeanie only remembers being back near the beach, near the group of canoes. Attracted perhaps by muffled cries. Under a clump of bushes she can just make out her husband struggling on the sand, lying on a woman: his shorts down and bare white buttocks gleaming. The brutal silent heave of his body. The woman’s legs thrash. His hand is clamped over her mouth. Everything about this scene is ugly; Jeanie’s heart beats hard when it replays in her mind – as it does often, both in dreams or when she’s awake.
Teo is suddenly there, growling like an animal. He tears Stuart off Ma‘atoe, heaves him back against the solid side of a paopao. Jeanie hears the crack and Stuart’s curse. Ma‘atoe is crying out, but now it is Teo who holds her and places a hand (more gently) over her mouth. He says something quietly to her and she nods; her cries reduce to soft, desperate moans. Teo speaks again, more urgently. He looks up to see Jeanie, but motions her away. In his face a savage fury. Suddenly the dancing show-off has become serious, capable. Dangerous. He leads Ma‘atoe down to the water and begins to wash her carefully. There is blood on her face. When he reaches her private parts Ma‘atoe pushes him away and cleans herself, moaning with the pain.
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