The Pacific Room by Michael Fitzgerald

Author:Michael Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transit Lounge

Chapter 16

THE HYDROGRAPHER

Even before it comes, Teuila can feel the rain. For her, December is always like this – a time of sea and sky melding, of lives emerging from and retreating into water, a return to the sea. It’s a sea that can’t be swept across, as the windsurfer of her memory did. It’s something to be weighed down by and suspended in, to – hopefully – survive.

Almost three o’clock in the morning. She sits cross-legged on the blue-patterned floor outside her bedroom, waiting for him. It’s her father’s vestibule, a room without clutter. She has preserved it like this for nearly six years – an empty vessel, and all the better to harbour the stray souls of her memory and will. She feels suffused with the spirit of Sosimo now, full of the sweetness of his song and the strength of his limbs. It’s at this hour of the morning that she is most comfortable in her skin: I desire only him.

Rising to her knees, she rolls out the fine mat that leans patiently by the door. She only has to give a little nudge for it to spread itself into the centre of the room. Slowly she gets up and begins to circle it. Fringed with red parakeet feathers, the mat is fine in every sense. The weave is almost imperceptible, but at a certain angle or when she stoops to lift a corner, the pandanus glows a dull gold with tiny pinpricks of light. Despite its fineness, when she sits down she can’t feel the hardness of the linoleum underneath.

The mat was bought for Henry’s wedding and should carry a painful memory. Instead, when she stretches along it she feels she is floating. Down the length of her body she looks, down past her toes. As her eyes begin to water the rim of red feathers advances and retreats like blood welling.

It’s her mat of atonement. In some villages, when a crime has been committed the chief will kneel outside the house of the family wronged and ask for their forgiveness. Teuila thinks of Henry’s family now – not just its isolated members, each wrapped in their own shame, but as a collective thing, a living organism growing into the community, an aiga. Despite the way she has been mistreated, Teuila kneels on Henry’s mat and prays for them, because their loss is also hers.

The mat contains her. It’s as if her world has shrunk to these last few woven strands. She could be on a raft or an island – or so she imagines as she lies waiting for her hydrographer.

She’s thinking this when the rain finally comes, first pitting the leaves of the moso‘oi bush outside, then lashing its branches against the window in wave on wave of drenching sound. The smell is of the ocean, and the sound carries with it an ocean’s distance. How easy it is to imagine the island returning to the sea.

Waiting for Henry, she counts the raindrops one by one.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.