The Pacific Room

by Michael Fitzgerald

  Jotting the names down in his notebook, he imagines the contents rubbed on skin or passing between lips, down throats, to coat the lining of stomachs and intestines; the exigencies of this house of bodies. Lewis can sense a quiet cry for help from these unopened bottles, as if a kind of sickness lingers there, waiting to be released into the mountain air.

  He thinks of these little bottles sitting there, waiting for the household to be cured. So what really ailed them that spring in 1892, when the Italian painter arrived on their doorstep? What was it that made them so uncomfortable within their own skins?

  Lewis scans the medicine cabinet and imagines all the powders and cures distilled into a single pill, rectangular in shape, the colour of a painted sky. Taken once daily, with food, it could paper over the cracks and conjoin this house of bodies, making it whole.

  Was it something his mother ate during pregnancy, or perhaps inherent in his father’s sperm, that saw the embryo cleft in two?

  For Lewis, neither science nor philosophy can properly explain the mystery of what went on in his mother’s womb. Their birth had been explained to the young boys in the kitchen one day after school, as their mother prepared a sponge cake. She had held out the mixing bowl as if it was the most natural thing in the world – that freshly broken egg with its trembling double yolk. Still, she’d looked baffled when Garry, always bolder than Lewis, asked whether for the cake recipe it counted as one egg or two.

  Later, when the biological details of their reproduction were satisfactorily explained, their father had shown them their X-ray photo at ten weeks’ gestation. He’d pointed at the grainy black-and-white image with his pipe, the smoke seeming to animate it: ‘See, the two little spines.’

  No doubt even then they were wrestling in the womb, fighting to be the one. That was to be Lewis’s curse, coming head first; Garry was breach. Right from the start they kicked and screamed with their competing claims of uniqueness.

  As it turned out, they were identical only in body. At school Lewis was quiet and inward; his brother, exuberant. And then slowly these differences became inscribed on their faces, not only with the scars of their playground fights, which had a ferocity that terrified even their father, but with the tiny self-assertions of character. So the permanence of Lewis’s furrowed brow was inversely reflected by the astonishment of his brother’s smile. Only at night, deep in dreams, with their faces framed by pillows, were these differences erased.

  Garry beat him to puberty. In a month he shot up. Soon Garry was befriended by a pack of pretty girls from dancing class, and he quickly left Lewis behind.

  It was around this time that Lewis began to experience pains of separation, a little spurt of jealousy that soon dropped, like his voice, into a bodily ache. When Garry was sent to hospital to have his wisdom teeth out, Lewis’s jaw locked with pain. The next morning the softest wisps of hair appeared across his chin. Within a month he was shaving.

  Such were the psychic pushes and pulls that kept the brothers together even when apart. So much so that for Lewis there persisted the fear that, without Garry, he would be forever anaesthetised, without feeling. As it transpired, the very opposite was true and, until now, decades after the crash, a little pill had softened the sharpness of separation, keeping the terror of uniqueness at bay.

  For Lewis, every mountain is a tomb, imbued with feeling. Looking up from Vailima’s bathroom window he sees not only the Scottish writer’s final resting place but the grave of his distant childhood. It’s what he saw from the airport bus in the delineation of dawn, and now more clearly in the slow burn of the afternoon.

  Across the buffalo grass outside he walks, slowly at first, then faster. The museum’s white walls and blood-red roof are almost too bright to behold, moiré patterning in the heat of the day. Once again he feels a swiftness of sensation, a giddiness, but any warning call grows fainter until all he hears is the forest, the thrumming of its distant heart.

  Turning his back on the house, he looks for an opening, a chink of light between the trees. A fleck of red from the aitu he knows is dwelling there.

  Tomorrow, he thinks, tomorrow I’ll come back to climb the trail in the coolness of dawn.

  Chapter 13

  THE STEPSON

  He sets it up three-legged on the buffalo grass, a dark-skirted creature that lets in the light. Doubling himself over, the stepson stoops, adjusting his centre of gravity before entering the darkness enfolded within. It is felted and hot, smelling vaguely of dried shark’s fin and onion, and for a moment he can hear the sounds of the island outside.

  ‘Master!’ From across the lawn comes an excitable shout. It is Sosimo – he can tell just by the kink in his voice – perhaps back from the forest with some wild bananas for the cows.

  The camera always seems to have a curious hold over the Islanders, the stepson thinks. A devil’s box, they had called it on Apemama three years before, believing it to contain a sorcerer’s circle of pearl shells – not this turning mechanism for catching the light.

  And here at Vailima another spirit box has claimed their attention. Hauled up from the harbour, it carries the height and width of a man, this iron-box safe parked inside the house. All the way from San Francisco it has travelled, and in a swirl of superstition it is said to harbour the bottle imp, just waiting to rush out and take strange shape in Vailima’s three hundred and fourteen and one-quarter acres of murderous green.

  He rests his knees on the cushioned grass, feeling his body expand, relaxing not fighting the dark confines, and looks out. What now will be released in a photograph?

  Through the viewfinder the house is only just held by the frame. Already spilling out to the left is the great hall, as if the house is reflecting a mirror image of itself, dreaming of wholeness. Looking out he can see the writer’s prayerful mother, newly arrived from Edinburgh, in her starched white widow’s cap. On the upstairs balcony she is seen to pace in prayer, as if willing the new wing into being. He wants to call out, to quell her utterances, but he is muffled by the felted darkness.

  The camera had been his mother’s idea. It was to be a spirit catcher, to preserve on photographic plate their vaporous trails across the ocean. Avoiding the lens herself, she was only too willing to direct from behind the camera. And as they happily island-hopped, pushing the edges of the Pacific north and eastward until they seemed to enter a dream, she had called them ‘the photographers’, he and his stepfather, putting to plate what Tusitala couldn’t manage to put to paper.

  But today he has no one to direct him. His mother has taken once more to her bed, closing the door to the sounds of his stepfather dictating passages to his sister. It is like a prayer, he thinks, this strange call and answer, call and answer, between his stepfather and sister. It echoes in all of them, this story being put to paper upstairs.

  Spawned these past weeks since the painter’s arrival is the strange tale of ‘The Beach of Falesá’. In words slung from his study they have heard the voices of the dead, conjured by a con artist named Case, through a spirit machine they call a Tyrolean harp. Not even Tusitala’s educated Scottish accent could disguise the realness of these voices.

  ‘Where is this beach?’ they had asked him, sensing the source of the story to be close to home.

  ‘Climb to the top of Mount Vaea,’ he had cryptically replied, ‘and look around you. You’ll see the string of sand circles forever.’

  ‘Master!’ This time Sosimo’s voice is louder, as if determined to coax him out and into the light. But for the moment the devil’s box has got hold of him, this container of unruly spirits with its little window on the world. There is a comfort in looking out at the same time as looking in.

  He finds this easier than writing. All he has to do is frame the image, release the shutter and let in the light – not unlike blinking. By contrast, writing is about closing your eyes, he thinks, clenching them as tightly as possible, and to slowly make out what is writ in the darkness. ‘Slinging ink’, as his stepfather call
s it, doesn’t quite describe the mental handwringing of the exercise.

  ‘Master!’ Sosimo is closer now, his voice breaking free of the forest behind them. Looking out, the stepson prefers this image of the house, perfectly framed by the viewfinder, made whole, to that which is carried by the growing anxiety of Sosimo’s voice. If only the felted skirt of the camera could insulate him from that sound and keep his view of the house so perfectly aligned.

  Thankfully a camera cannot capture this disquiet, the stepson thinks, this thing that is passed from one human being to the next. Sometimes he wonders if it is the portrait’s doing – this restlessness of spirit, this whirl of words from the study upstairs. It is as if the painter has opened the door of this house in the forest and let the story of Falesá out. And still his mother sleeps on, her night cries muffled by her veils of mosquito netting. Sometimes he wonders if they are all living her nightmares, and yet they are even more fearful of the moment when she wakes.

  Is it his dead brother she sees as she wrestles in her bed? The calm eyes holding hers as he slowly bled to death? Hervey was four, three years younger than him, when his sickly condition worsened in the winter they spent in Paris. He remembers them watching as Hervey’s little life ebbed out onto the blood-stained sheets. ‘Blood, Mama, get the things – wait till I am ready.’

  Perhaps it had started back then in Paris, this descending disquiet he now feels on the edge of the forest, laid dormant all the while, waiting for the right moment to reappear. It had been distracted at first by the child his mother had inherited for herself – a child with a grown-up literary reputation. And then outwitted by the speed of the adventure she had set in motion for them all. If they were the photographers, she was the director.

  As long as they kept moving, crisscrossing the Atlantic and then the Pacific, they wouldn’t have to face this thing waiting for them to be still. This disquiet which waited all the while for a shape to fasten itself onto.

  Samoa was not meant to be the end but, rather, a swift stepping point to Sydney and then home again to Scotland. Once the breadfruit plantation was up and running, and Vailima more or less self-sufficient, they would be off, a smudge of steamer smoke on the horizon. But something had festered all the while, made mouldy like their mother’s little white ankle boots. Their departure had been put off by the building of the new wing, and the new wing by the start of rainy season. An Italian painter had arrived in their midst and their life had slowed to a stop.

  His mother, with her knack for premonitions, was the first to sense it, and now her fear seems to be taking shape around them, suspended in a shared stillness, as heavy and humid as the mountain that hovers over them like a noose.

  ‘Master!’ There is no denying Sosimo this time. Not even the felted darkness can insulate that sound. With his dancing hands he has wrenched back the camera’s skirt and let in the light.

  After the expansive view of the house, what is presented to him now is rendered in extreme close-up. Framed by the viewfinder, Sosimo’s usually soft face is set like a trap. A film of sweat has varnished it, and his dark eyes still hold the fear of the forest. It makes the stepson think of the writer’s famous book and the horror of Henry Jekyll ‘knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye’.

  There is an uncertain pause. Then Sosimo cannot contain the rushing words: ‘Master, you must come with me. It is as clear as the sound of a gramophone and only you can make it true and go away.’

  Sosimo is already tugging at him, pulling him free of the camera’s skirt as if he were something caught in the surf.

  But the stepson is still liquid-limbed from the dark confines of the camera. He can’t find his centre of gravity and is soon caught, topsy-turvy, in a wave of bright green light. Sosimo is under him as he falls to the ground. Over both of them the camera hovers, just as Sosimo is straightjacketed by the stepson’s superior height and weight. Face to face, they are without words. The moment stretches on, with these two men lying on top of each other on the grass, each animated by the breathing from the other.

  It is a new sensation for the stepson. What strikes him at first is the difficulty of domination, for a body to hold down another with such resolution. It is a feeling you must give in to, like riding his stepfather’s pony, Jack.

  Quickly he is up. He is strangely suspicious of himself, how easily his body gave in to the sensation, lulled by the scent of coconut on Sosimo’s neck.

  Now he towers over him, sending an unambiguous shadow over the servant boy. This time he is the one tugging at the other, and soon he has Sosimo back upright, barefoot on the buffalo grass.

  ‘You are not making sense to me,’ he says, for he has little patience for what can’t be grasped in a single sentence or registered as an object on a photographic plate. He stands with his arms crossed, his chin nudging the light. ‘What is it that you have seen?’

  ‘Master, it was the aitu, as clear as I see you now. Her hair was red and as long as you are tall. She was calling out to the Italian gentleman. Calling out from the rock. Quickly, we must hurry.’

  The stepson’s arms unfurl, only to tighten again in a knot behind his head. ‘Where?’ For still it hasn’t registered, the singing spirit Sosimo has seen in the forest.

  ‘The swimming hole.’

  The stepson knows it as the place, rarely visited, where the writer practises his flageolet each afternoon, so clear and contained are the acoustics – a folly of sorts.

  Sosimo’s earlier words return to him: ‘Only you can make it true and go away.’ But this time the words sweep him up, drawing him to the horizon line of trees – but not before he has gathered up the camera, to clatter like an unruly child at his hips.

  Sosimo does not speak as he leads the way through the forest. It is still mid-morning and the sun has yet to eke its way through the foliage to steam in the shadows. Yet the effort of carrying the camera through the looping threads of vine and across muddy puddles brings a prickling heat to the surface of his skin. All he can do is focus on the backs of Sosimo’s calves, shiny with a smudge of tattoo, and a tendril of hair that has escaped the coiled bun on top of his head. As Sosimo pauses to signal the approach of the swimming hole, he can feel the warm release of sweat down the length of his spine.

  They have approached from the top, screened by the wild orange trees. It is a higher ledge of rock, a perfect viewing platform, and as Sosimo pulls back a branch for him to plant the camera, it is as though he is the stage manager of the scene, that he has somehow choreographed the two bodies entwined on the rock below.

  There is a weft and weave of skin – of fine and freckled, and olive – and the long red hair has managed to wrap itself through the tangle of limbs, so at first it is difficult to discern what is male and what is female.

  Looking at the two sleeping bodies through the frame of his viewfinder, the stepson wonders what they have wrung out of each other to be so exhausted and now dissolving into one. Through the bearded man’s pink mouth he can hear the zephyr of a snore. Pinker still and throbbing with sensation in the centre of the picture is Mary’s ear.

  He is moved beyond words at the sight of them, not yet shocked. From his mother and stepfather he has grown used to the idea of bodies at war, not so much against each other but against themselves – soused in laudanum or hemorrhaging from within, blooming with eczema or other unseemly disfigurements of the flesh. These days his parents sleep in separate quarters as if in other countries, like a soul torn in two.

  Not this sweet communion of flesh before his eyes, like a dream which Sosimo has awakened in him, and which only he can make true and go away.

  Resuming his place within the cocoon of darkness and shutting out the sounds of the island outside, the photographer pauses. It is his favourite part, this instant before a picture is taken, inhabiting both that moment and a point slightly into the future, as the entwined bodies sleep on, laced by the sun on their ledge of rock.

  It is a moment around which everything coalesc
es: the prayerful widow pacing the upstairs balcony, his mother wrestling with her dreams, and his sister putting to paper the strange tale of his stepfather. Soon the pair before him will wake up, dazzled by the morning light.

  But the photographer’s work is already done. The image is imprinted on the photographic plate.

  Chapter 14

  WILHELMINA

  Teuila lets her hand drop to the floor, following the waves of her hair which pool at the foot of her bed. Here next to the ashtray is her phone. While she retrieves it, the screen briefly reflects her unmade face, colourless like something glimpsed under water, before she manages to punch out the number with her thumb. In a whisper she says: ‘Wilhelmina, I think I’m drowning.’ As if grief is a body of water.

  By the time she comes to, Wilhelmina’s taxi has driven a good way up the front lawn, its headlights casting the darkened room in a strange pinky glow. The wind has died down and the temperature still has a midday intensity to it. Teuila’s forehead bursts with pinpricks of heat and then she is suddenly shuddering with cold.

  At least the weight has lifted from her chest, and Teuila manages to prop herself up with a pillow for the arrival of her guest. At the doorway, Wilhelmina’s silhouette hovers like a balloon about to be released into the sky.

  She fumbles for the switch. Then the single globe overhead floods Teuila’s room with light. It’s as if all the wigs, baubles and gowns that drape the dressmaker’s mannequin are being woken from their hibernation. Pinned above the door is Teuila’s Miss Tutti Frutti sash.

  Behind Wilhelmina looms another figure, anxious to get in. Tall with her towel-turbaned head, she appears imperious and, like Wilhelmina, virtually expressionless as they enter Teuila’s room.

  The visitors absorb the room’s visual clues: the crystal ashtray overflowing with half-smoked Consulates, the large bottle of Sprite standing barely touched. But it is the absence of music and Teuila’s puffed and unseeing eyes that give her away. Her skin is the colour of ash.