 Chapter
One
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The summer
she
turned seventeen, Grace spent a lot of her time dreaming. She sat for
hours on the shadowy verandah fanning
herself, gazing absently out at the garden where
the trees flamed and glittered in the heat.
Sitting there in the
shadow she could hear the walls of the house cracking as they dried
out, and
the weathered ironwood had the resinous, slightly acid smell she had
associated
since childhood with hot langorous days dreaming
on the sofa , the faint stirring of some
indefinable longing. She had lived
there with her mother for years, the mynahs squawking outside in the
trees and
Te Rua Manga in the distance like a magic mountain rearing up above the
jungle. There was something beautiful
and momentous abut the place – the wild clearing, the graceful,
derelict house
had an ease and unconstraint about them which
always touched her imagination. It was a
setting beyond the bounds of ordinary life,
and to her the
green peaks of the mountain on the horizon, the tangled garden were
nostalgic
images of freedom and possibility. She
liked the sombre peace of the sky there, the heat and silence of the
valley,
the fact that the house was still as it had been since they’d found it.
It was
her favourite place for dreaming and that summer she sat there day
after day,
trancelike, as if she were travelling slowly through landscapes so
compelling
she had to give all her attention to them. ‘So what are
you
going to do with your life?” her mother Mara asked in the middle of
summer. It was one
of those sweltering sweaty afternoons
and the kitchen was swarming with flies. She was sitting drinking at
the table,
beautiful, her hair twisted carelessly in a knot at the back of her
head,
violet shadows under her eyes from a lifetime of sleepless nights. “I might have
mentioned this before Grace, but you’re so creamy and thuggish at the
moment I
feel as if I ought to watch you for my own safety. For years if
necessary.” There was a man
there of course, Raoul the Frenchman. He said apologetically, “Mara, I
don’t
believe it’s necessary to talk like that to a teenage daughter. She’s
only
growing into a beautiful woman, that’s
all. There’s no mystery about this.” “Ah yes,” she
said, giving him a considering look with her tired, tired eyes.” But a
change
like that is not as simple as it sounds. Some of them have to feed on
their
mother’s flesh to get exactly the right texture to the skin. “ Raoul closed his
eyes in pain, shaking his head slowly. “Ah, Mara.
Tch,
tch, tch,” was all he could say darting a look at Grace as if afraid at
what
he’s see. “I am
actually
here,” Grace said. “If that were
truly so, Grace,” her mother said. She
glanced at Raoul’s sorrowful face. ‘It’s all very well for you, Raoul.
You
don’t actually have to live with her. Look at her there, so innocent it
could
melt your stony heart. She has all sorts of secrets she doesn’t want to
share
with me now.” “But Mara,”
he
said doggedly “that’s no way to talk to your daughter. You’ll never make me believe this, that talk like that is
good for her.” “It’s a
pathology
to do with living in the jungle,” Grace said.
“Isolation, treachery,
you name
it. She has this dangerous gift for words and no outside influences.” Raoul got up
to
find another drink. He was the nervous
about the wild talk going on around him. Balding, anxious, sweating ,
he was a
civilised man who only wanted a little kindness. “So are you
enjoying your job?” he said , his voice
scratchy with trying to please. “Yes she is,”
Mara said after a short silence. “She loves it, don’t you Grace?” She
began to
sing in her lovely booze-cracked voice “Oh
Paradiso! Oh, come to me.
The
sleep of death brings you always closer!” “What do you
mean
, brings you always closer?” Grace asked. She was
extremely tired. “It
sounds
all wrong.” She was
making
inroads into life even if her mother hadn’t noticed.
Her dreaminess only camouflaged intense mental
processes. Her
allegiances were to a private self that she never revealed to anyone, to the place where she was born and to certain
people in her life. Sometimes
late at
night she looked at herself secretly in the mirror, watched her eyes
and skin
so closely that each feature lost context and became a map of unknown
territories. Gaping pores, the cataclysmic beginnings of a pimple on
the corner
of her mouth, her eyes liquid and shining with the light of
consciousness
riding like quicksilver in their sockets. Saliva
bubbling on the roots of her tongue, hair
sprouting like straw on
her cheeks , her teeth close up a dirty yellow. The ugliness gave her
something
definite, it made her able to see her own physical particularity. Lying on the mattress she felt her breasts,
slipped one hand tenderly between her soft thighs and touched the rough
hair,
the wetness inside. It gave her a powerful feeling of understanding, as if she
had known all along about the
mysterious processes going on in her, spreading like bubbles through
her blood.
At times like that she was preoccupied with
monitoring herself , listening for signs, she heard voices, her blood
singing
in her veins, the quiet formation of intricate tender structures going
on
inside her. She looked at her face in
the mirror, her eyes gravely staring back at her and felt the power of
her own
existence stirring. She said to
herself, testing, “An old women at seventeen,” because she wanted to
see her
own answering amused smile, feel the comfort of her existence, the
perfect
understanding between her and her mirror self. It was the
same
with her daily life, her job at the Paradise Bar, her long walk home
each night
along the Ara Tapu, with the rustling jungle around her and the sound
of the
sea as regular and familiar to her as her own heartbeat. She felt all
the
silent awareness of an animal as it stands alert for danger, dissolving
itself
into the leaves if need be. Because that
was
her life, the jungle round the house, the night walk through lonely
roads, a
huge black fish swimming silently beneath her, rasping her back as she
floated
in the dark, men calling to her hungrily, the long
vigils in private places. And there was
also her mother and the legend of her. The mother who arrived in
Rarotonga
years ago, stepping off the boat with her husband, was so beautiful that the entire wharf came to a standstill. Her husband a Land Court judge , was newly
appointed but there was no interest in him that morning.
Everyone had eyes only for her, his young
wife, that stunning languid beauty on his arm . With those startling
blue
eyes like reflections of the sea, hair
down to her waist, dreamy, preoccupied with her own secret thoughts,
she was
like a vision to their sleeping town. Grace had
always
been able to see her vividly, that golden girl as she stepped off the
wharf
into the crowd of waiting admirers, like a princess going to the
scaffold. Again and again in slow motion
she
imagined her until the scene dissolved
into the pure wash of the Pacific air. A halo of gold for her hair,
china-pink
for her cheeks and dress, blood-red for the ring on her finger. Grace still saw everything as simply and
clearly as she did when she was first told the story as a child. But
she soon
realised that not many daughters had childhood legends of such richness
and
cruelty to feed them and also disentangle themselves from. “It’s not as
if I
haven’t tried,” Mara told her once when she was too small to understand. “It’s not my fault if circumstances
were against me. I’ve always done my
best, Grace. I can’t help it if the Lord’s given me such an unruly sex
drive.” She had burst
out
laughing at the time and Grace joined in out of love. It was just after
they’d
been thrown out of their rented house. The landlord had found Mara in bed with the Congregational minister.
Someone had told them about a house abandoned in the jungle , so they
moved in
that day and had been camping there ever since.
They slept on mattresses, there were some Island
mats scattered
around, Mara’s books, a cooker, the TV for Mara’s videos, a feeling of
dusty
peace in the rooms. That was their life
together. Mara occasionally went up to the shop looking like a decrepit
duchess, her dress dirty around the hem and covered with strange
maplike
stains, everyone calling her a whore and a drunk behind her back. Not
that she
cared, she never judged herself by other peoples’ standards. Her life had been a tour through the
underside of the polite society of their town for years, so she had no
illusions. Being fawned over and
ridiculed was all the same to Mara, nothing ever stopped the secret
pilgrimage
of men to her bedroom window. With her
crazy sardonic courage and her arrogance there was nothing she was
scared of. It wasn’t the
same with Grace, she knew she had none of that life-burning charisma,
none of
the wicked qualities which would make people change their lives and
follow,
dazzled down her path as they did with Mara. She was too quiet to
attract that
sort of attention. Her mother was no help to her because she had her
own daily
lifetime predicaments to handle, with little energy left over for
anyone else. “Now listen,
Grace. I have to be honest, I don’t know who your father is. There were
so many
of them around at the time. It’s shitty for you, Grace, I know, but all
I can
do is narrow it down. And that’s a dangerous exercise,” she told her. An unknown
father
wasn’t news to Grace but it still wounded her. When
she came home from work and sat alone in her bedroom, the
heavy scent of frangipani wafting through the open window, she wrote
poems to
her lost father, a big glittering piece writing spreading like a sheet
of ice.
On the other side of the house, the cold blue light of the video
flickered on
her mother’s unconscious face, her snores rocked the foundations. On
those late
sweet nights Mara slept the deep sleep of the righteous, her snores
echoing
like the roar of a lion. It was a sound as comforting to Grace as the
sea.
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