Act 2

It’s 1995. A five-year-old sings broken lines of Jingle Bells while his father warms him in the night air with big, bear arms. The timbre of the crowd is rich under candlelight. His dad’s oaky rasp chief amongst them. Dominic doesn’t know all the words, but the jingle bells bit is easy enough. He is enthusiastic as any child is at Christmas, his voice coarse as smoky air is sucked down with each inhale.

He doesn’t know it yet, but the world awaits him. So does home.

-

Dom lazes with hunched back atop his stool. A bunch of them have gathered at a bar on Vuna Road, just outside Nuku'alofa. Humidity is at its max and the swelling condensation on his glass saps the cool of his beer. It will soon be 2020. He will soon be thirty. And this far from home, for once, the tropics do not calm his mind. Neither does the flat lager they’ve pumped from the taps.

Fuaʻamotu Airport will be a shit show tomorrow. Customs will have already checked out for the holidays, and foam boxes will be packed to the brink with clam meat ripped out of shells all over the islands. Dom had heard there were sniffer dogs in the States specifically targeting giant clam meat from the Pacific. He wonders how many packages actually get through.

He has his ticket saved on his phone. There is a paper copy in his bag as well, but getting it printed this close to Christmas has been an ordeal. The whole country goes crazy through December. Stores mount piles of plastic water pistols and Chinese bicycles for presents. Queues become crowds, and junk is deposited across a stretch of islands the ocean will one day claim, the neon coloured detritus to replace vanishing corals. In the bluster of expectation, accessing a printer became a near impossibility. Luckily he has friends in most of the Ministries, and their desks will be quiet until well into January.

“I’ll miss you mate.”

Another of the Aussies. There’s a mix of them, along with Kiwis, Poms, a fair representation from the Peace Corps, and a collection of locals who have become friends over the last few years.

“Can’t wait to get over and visit you toko.”

He nods over the rim of his glass rather than answer sincerely.

One of the older guys is staring intently. Salt-preserved and sun-dried, he usually speaks in sarcasm, a language not wholly understood by even those fluent in English. It’s always a witty wink that seems to punctuate his anecdotes. His greetings and goodbyes too.

“Wanker. Piss off then.”

The accompanying pat on the back more blunt than he had tensed for.

“Thanks,” Dom replies with a feigned grin. His best country stoicism bolstering his shoulders.

Goodbyes make meek of him at the best of times. There isn’t much joy in leaving, nor in staying. Not anymore.

Home. Foreign. Harvest will start just after the holidays. A few buckets worth will be cooked into Christmas meals, others providing some colour to the table linens. He’ll be expected to gather them for the extended family. The pear trees will be overgrown this year.

The maketi has bags and bags of pears in from New Zealand. Five pa’anga for four of them, shipped on boats over tumultuous seas, unripe, yet bruised from their ordeal. By the time they had sweated in their plastic sandwich bags Dom could never bring himself to buy any. Not even nostalgia would be hinted at by their softened flesh.

A cloud offshore brings his attention back. Growing against a cobalt sky, it is dark and bulbous, an imminent drenching expected. But the storms here are different to back home, and they only ever frustrate. In his two years on the island he has only once seen lightning. The afternoon release of the skies isn’t routine. The cadence of a thunderclap rumbling is not something he had expected to miss so intensely. Black skies like this came with promise, but absent of punch.

-

Someone had thought to buy him dinner. Of course, it went neglected, and as he drives away it ends up in his lap. He has stacked the containers, but with only napkins as lids they quickly compress into one another. A fool’s error. The resulting warmth runs down his shorts where it pools beneath him. The sensation at first has Dom more concerned for his faculties than what the fish curry is doing to his seat.

As he drives past the palace, at a crawl, inebriation shifting focus from the dashboard to the increasing mess below, he can only mutter in slurred bursts.

“Ahh, fuck. Ahh no. Why? Ahh it’s everywhere!”

One of the patrols on guard watches him pass, an obvious dismissal of his luminescent skin as the tirade of words spill through the window.

The fan belt continues to slip on every corner. As he manoeuvres through town, Dom knows there is no time to deal with this catastrophe. He will just have to leave it. Maybe there would be a little curry left to fill his belly in the inevitable hunger to strike near dawn.

When he arrives at the compound, fence line designated by a hundred mirrored valves of giant clams, a museum of species diversity and size that had since dwindled, one of the mongrels sparks up with a low growl.

“Chh!” He mouths. The sound now a firm part of his vocabulary, and one that will remain as his sign of canine dismissal.

Two years of free labour. Days spent with corals and young clams, hoping they’ll take to somehow replenishing an emptied coastline. Cyclones will still roll in and tear reefs like a felled forest. Fishermen will pluck pennies from what was once rich. White and yellow skin will continue to do everything it can to claim any remaining spoils, and the locals will go about their dreams of a prosperous future. What a note to finish on.

Head underwater, everything was just as clear. The sound of snapping shrimp are flames crackling like a summer bushfire. Everything is being cooked, and as it turns grey and pallid it may as well be the moon. Planting corals and clams in this waste is like sending a man into the desert. A temporal pilgrimage. A life sentence.

This was farming of a kind too familiar.

There is still so much left to do. Tropical dehydration and about a dozen beers has compounded into something neither water or painkillers can do much to mend. As he fumbles with the door handle, forgetting to catch the screen after he enters, the frame cracks against the wall announcing his presence. A flurry of mosquitoes enter with him. All of the housemates have already come home, lights spilling under bedroom doors the only sign of life in the otherwise emptiness of late evening.

When he finally closes his own bedroom door, having somehow managed his remaining responsibilities to the household, he collapses upon the bed. The night air is thick. A couple of the uninvited mosquitoes are here to bid him farewell, none of them above sucking a final slurp of his sap. He just doesn't care anymore.

“Take it ya bastards.”

The pile of clothes by the wall are half rotted. Too much of the tropics decaying them, dog hair and cigarette smoke leaving a lasting scent. They would be discarded come morning. When he realises that his shorts are still covered in curry there is a long pained sigh as he tosses them in the pile. He will have to wear the pants from his backpack tomorrow. Thing is, he doesn’t need the space. He doesn’t collect much anywhere he goes.

After two years in the Kingdom Dom has realised that like everywhere else he’s been, culture is not static. It bleeds across borders, through screens and wires, and most certainly through dreams. People are all the same. What they see in him they reflect, and escaping it is too deep of a self-exercise. Change changes, and he can only watch.

-

“Where the fuck is my passport?”

The housemates have risen to see him off. There is a sudden jump to action when the assumed casual waves as his car rattled off up the lane became a frantic scouring of every nook of the mouldy house.

“I’ve checked the kitchen!” One of the girls bellows.

“It’s not on the patio!” One of the Americans.

He walks in circles. Silent. Lost and listening to everyone around him once more bear witness to his stupidity. He can’t even get the ending right.

Someone mentions the time. The new housemate sinks into the couch, a sneer all too apparent on her thin lips. The problem with palangi here is that there are only a couple of houses they can rent, and this often results in crossover periods of housemates, inmates, at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum.

Then, “Got it!”

He rushes towards the garage, his panic not easing when the sight of his saturated passport is revealed.

“It was in the washing machine. I think you must have bunched it up with your sheets.”

In those few seconds of efficiency he has attempted this morning, moments of service to the house and removal of curry, his passport has become a pulpy mess, dripping with foreign dust and ink from a hundred stamps. As it is handed to him like an old sock he can’t even think about what to do next. It wasn’t in pieces, and perhaps that would be enough to get him on the plane.

Dom is careful not to do any more damage as he sits the passport on the dashboard. He holds his breath as the engine kicks over one last time, muttering a hasty thanks and a diminutive wave. He is embarrassed and so very late.

On the way out of the capital the roads aren’t too congested. A miracle considering the international shuffle of people. He is scooping out the last of the curry with one hand, the other gripping the steering wheel tightly in response to pup and child that dash onto the road every few moments. The scent of fish is in the floor now. In the seat runners, the seams, and steaming into the rest of the interior. There is nothing he can do about it. Someone will pick the car up in a couple of days after the rush dies down. Until then it will have to marinade in this scent. An unfortunate fate, and one that would seal his reputation here.

It’s about a forty minute drive if it goes well. He is supposed to be there already. Like all things, punctuality seems to mock him. It has done so since he was a boy.

They have been calling him back for over a decade. Their faces are lost though. The sounds of their voices too. They don’t understand their fate, or why they cling to it. The world has changed. His arms aren’t big and bear-like. They can’t replace those before him. He won’t be staying there, not anywhere. There is nowhere unaffected. Nowhere unharmed.

The radio is whirring at a low volume. As the houses turn to trees and coconuts once more speckle the sky, the traffic peels away. No one is foolish enough to be this late.

The road is empty now. The sun beats down on the bonnet, on his brow, and peels the corners of his passport. And all the while an island remix of Jingle Bells plays verse after verse after verse, endless, persuading joy, not responding to it. A snow globe of salt and sand and sun and ash.

Chewing the words around, an occasional half-hearted dribble slips his tongue. He is a child. As the sweat beads on his forehead he can only stare out at the road ahead, at how long and potted it has become.