Inheritance (21 page)

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?

Ann / Jeanie

A
nn 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 fresher, 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.

Stuart laughs then, makes a remark that infuriates Teo. Jeanie can’t hear what is said, but Stuart’s tone is scornful, taunting. Again that triumphant edge. She’s sure he doesn’t see her. Teo leaves his fiancée and stands facing Stuart who has his shorts up now and seems bent on a fight. He half runs over the sand, kicking over a bucket of palolo, barrelling into Teo and throwing him bodily into one of the paopao. Jeanie is terrified for Teo – Stuart is very violent when angry. He stands now over the sprawling Teo.

‘Think twice before touching my wife again,’ Stuart growls, ‘or I’ll do your precious village virgin again. And again! She’s very tasty.’

Jeanie closes her eyes in shame.

There is no need to fear for Teo. He rises from the canoe in a red rage, brandishing a bush knife. Silently, but with a fine accuracy, he slashes at Stuart, slicing at an ear and then a hand, grunting with each cut, before tossing the knife high in the air and away. The rising sun catches the turning bloody blade.

Teo stands over the stricken Stuart. His eyes are bright. He pants out his words as if he’s been running.

‘You have raped the taupou of this village,’ he says, every word clear in the early dawn light. ’If they hear of this, they will kill you. Without doubt they will kill you.
I
should kill you – and would probably be excused by any Samoan jury. If you breathe one word of this, I will certainly denounce you. And so will she. One word!’

Jeanie remembers thinking how quick he was to recover; how quick to plan ahead. Stuart groans on the
sand, his face a sheet of blood, holding the ruined hand with his good one.