Thirteen Pearls Read online

  How did it work? If I kept it in the dark would that conserve its glow factor or did it work the other way around? Where was Wikipedia when you needed it?

  Aran yawned and snuggled against me. It was cooler out at sea and I pulled his head onto my lap and encircled the rest of his curled up body with one arm so that he could sleep. I kept my eyes peeled until it grew too dark to see.

  Then my concentration swung to sounds.

  Only the quiet lap of the ocean against the boat and the occasional splash as a fish leapt from the water and plunged back in again. I thought about what would happen if Leon didn’t make it into shore. Or, if he did, whether they would find us. What would my plan be? There were no oars to row (not that I had a hope of rowing to Thirteen Pearls with the size of the tinny and the strength of the currents). And even though I could get my bearings via the stars, I didn’t have any maps to make sense of them.

  I remembered reading how, about sixty years ago, this Norwegian guy who’d wanted to prove that the South Pacific islanders originally sailed from South America had built a traditional raft out of balsa logs with only a single square sail made out of materials from pre-Columbian times. His crew sailed over four thousand miles in a hundred days and they all survived.

  I figured that, with the groceries (now I was wishing I hadn’t bought so much fresh food, but lots of stuff with additives and preservatives in it instead), Aran and I could go for a couple of weeks easily. I could use food containers to catch rain for drinking water, and as long as the cardboard didn’t get too soaked I could fashion a makeshift shelter out of the boxes.

  There would be people searching for us. There were satellites and search planes, and T.I. had a military base so there’d be plenty of manpower. This thought cheered me until I thought again about Leon swimming through the dark water towards an island he wouldn’t even be able to see by now.

  Perhaps we were going to die. I tried to think some profound thoughts – is there a God? Was this my destiny from the moment I’d entered earth? Or was it a kind of Sliding Doors scenario like in that movie where you get to see what would have happened if the main character had made it through the sliding doors of the train; how life would have unfolded if she ’d arrived home at a different moment. What if I’d stayed back on the island with Kaito? Or what if Kristiana had sent her evil email a day later and Leon hadn’t insisted on going for a swim over at Prince of Wales so that we ’d had enough petrol to make it back to Thirteen Pearls?

  I reached down into one of the boxes again and scrabbled around for the packet of salt and vinegar chips Leon had stuck in. I tore it open and stuck a chip in my mouth. Crunch. Last meal. I mindlessly shovelled them in, one after the other, as if I was watching a dumb DVD with Tash. That was a weird thing about potential disasters – it could all seem so normal, almost boring. Right now we were very possibly headed on a collision course with slow dehydration and painful death. Yet here I was, drumming my fingernails, mindlessly munching chips, and waiting for the interesting bit.

  If I’d had a pen and paper I could have written some sort of farewell letter. Not that I knew what I’d say – something wise and loving to my parents and Tash and the world at large that would be printed in the Courier Mail and rank number five on Yahoo Mail’s Top Ten news stories. ‘Tragically lost at sea . . . ’

  And it would be accompanied by one of those video montages with weepy background music as the images fade into each other. Me and Tash splashing each other at the Esplanade swimming pool. Me with a big white smudge of sunblock on my nose, holding two nail guns up in the air, either side, like some deranged cowboy. A soft-focus glamour shot of me in a black dress at the Cairns Yacht Club dinner dance . . . Surely there had to be some better shots? I wanted there to be little wobbly, wind-buffeted thirty-second clips of me hauling in a massive fish. Me sitting with my arms wrapped around my knees, windblown hair, gazing into an endless ocean sunset. Me mobbed by twenty Fijian kids with laughing eyes and huge white smiles. Me battling a wave of green water crashing down on the Ulysses. Okay, maybe not that one. But the point was – I hadn’t lived enough yet. I wanted better photos for my montage.

  I hadn’t lived enough yet? What about Aran? He was only four. What would his video montage be? Riding on elephants through a parting of jungle vines, sitting on a bamboo woven mat spellbound by his great grandfather’s stories, being reunited with Lowanna and clinging so monkey-tight a crowbar couldn’t part them. Aran grown up and a senior diplomat for the international peace process. Aran in fits of laughter telling his kids the ingenious ways he tortured his one-time babysitter. All those hours I’d spent fruitlessly attempting to scrub the pink dye out of the sheets – I laughed aloud. Aran stirred and nuzzled into my stomach like a baby animal. And then I felt it – a shock of love. A sudden burst of fierce, protective love. I would not let him die.

  Suddenly, I heard a sound that wasn’t the sea. In the distance was a pinprick of light. I willed the tinny to stop drifting. The light pulsed – shrinking and flaring like an aperture in the darkness. I held up the soccer ball (now at pathetic half-glow) and shouted myself hoarse.

  The boat went straight past, its long, triangular beam of light missing the tinny by what felt like a heartbeat. I willed it to turn. The boat kept going, then in a sweeping arc circled around the other side of us.

  It had taken too wide a berth; it was going to miss us again. I screamed over the drone of its engine and threw the ball into the air towards it. It landed with a thwack against the black water and drifted away.

  Suddenly, the other boat’s engine cut out. A long low ‘Coooooeeeee!’

  ‘Over here!’ I screamed, my throat raw.

  The boat started again. This time it made smaller and smaller circles until finally the tinny was caught in the glare of its beam. The boat putted up alongside us. Kaito was steering, and Leon, still soaking wet, threw me a tow-rope. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  WE TOLD THE STORY FOR the fifth time. Each time it grew in size and severity until Leon had been forced to punch a Great White on the nose in his quest to reach Thirteen Pearls, and Aran and I had been almost washed up on the coast of New Guinea . . .

  One thing no one mentioned, but which we were all relieved about, was that Uncle Red wasn’t around. Actually, he would have been the biggest element of danger. He ’d have gone completely crazy.

  Aran was sound asleep, worn out, in his trundle bed, and Kaito padded around the kitchen making us all cups of exquisite tea.

  Somehow the three of us found that easy friendship again, like we’d had that first week before Kaito and I had hooked up. And the good thing about Leon’s unexpected swim (apart from minor stuff like rescuing us from drifting for days without water in the baking sun) was that he didn’t seem to be brooding about the breakup with the Danish supermodel. If anything, he seemed more cheerful than ever. ‘Best swim I’ve had in ages,’ he said, flexing his shoulders.

  We sat together companionably on the beaten-up lounge, our feet propped up on the battered coffee table and watched a DVD that involved a whole lot of people trying to kill one guy who had a secret that could bring down a major company. Original, I know. That’s Uncle Red’s taste for you. I hadn’t been quite so aware of how suffocating his presence had been until he was gone. It was as if we were all able to be bigger, to stretch our arms and legs more, breathe deeper – a dark thunderous cloud had lifted.

  Halfway through the DVD, Leon stood, stretched, and left the shed. He was back a few minutes later with a book.

  ‘Watcha reading?’ I asked.

  He flashed me the cover. Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo.

  Kaito caught my surprise. ‘Leon came top in his school,’ Kaito said. ‘The principal cried when he left.’

  Leon glanced up from where he was rifling through the well-thumbed pages. ‘I should never have told you that story. It was tears of joy, mate. Tears of joy.’ He turned to me and rolled his eyes. ‘See? Told you we’d already run out of things to say.’ H
e added with a quiet fierceness, ‘I might be a tradie, but I’m not stupid.’

  I hadn’t thought he was dumb for a minute. But neither had I thought that he was the kind of guy who’d prefer to read a nineteenth-century French novel than watch an action movie.

  ‘Yep. I’m a Victor Hugo fan.’ Leon said through the whirr-click of my brain recalibrating as I struggled to fit this new gem into my assessment of his character. ‘What do you like to read?’

  Here’s my big confession. Even though I bagged out Tash for never reading, I actually wasn’t much of a reader myself. In terms of novels that is. At home, every room was crammed with books, and technically I recognised most of the authors. The house smelled of silverfish and dust, it came with the sociopolitical territory. Mum was an unemployed smart person and Dad had discovered reading when he realised he had very little in common with his peers in his one-horse–many-sheep country town. Dad read proper novels incessantly, and Mum always had her nose buried in a sheaf of papers or an obscure clothbound book that was falling apart at the spine.

  I had learned to be snobbish about readers and non-readers. I had been taught that I should admire people who had Jane Austen and Dostoevsky and Noam Chomsky on their shelves and feel superior to people who had fat hardcover blockbusters with bright covers that featured author names three times the size of the title.

  That meant judging people like Tash’s family. They had one tiny little shelf, and, amid a stack of Reader’s Digest abridged editions and That’s Life with half-completed puzzle page, the only two books were The Da Vinci Code and 1001 Jokes To Read On The Toilet. Okay, I made up that last book, but that’s where the joke book always was, down near the stack of toilet rolls. In contrast to that puny little shelf, they had an entire DVD and computer games library. Which meant, according to my inherited wisdom, they were trashy. They ate meals Mrs H microwaved in packets and the TV was never ever switched off. But here ’s the thing: they were all laid-back. Tash included. She didn’t for a moment think she had to do something extraordinary to justify her existence on the planet. Neither did her brothers or her parents. And they were happy.

  I had always secretly thought of myself as better than people from book-poor backgrounds. But the secret truth was that my preferred reading material was The Australian Sailor Magazine and non-fiction accounts of great sailing voyages around the world. I was a fraud – a fraud impressed by Victor Hugo.

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘The sea,’ Leon said. ‘And a man who is prepared to sacrifice his life for a woman who doesn’t deserve it.’

  Ouch. Good thing Kristiana was a hemisphere away.

  I changed the subject. ‘What do you guys want to do for Christmas?’

  ‘We could go over to T.I.?’ Leon suggested. ‘Sink a few beers, play some pool.’

  Kaito wrinkled his nose. ‘Doubt anything would be open.’

  ‘Anyway, there ’s Aran,’ I reminded them.

  ‘He could play pool,’ Leon said. ‘The kid’s got good motor coordination skills.’

  I pictured the virtual bad guys body-count and winced. ‘We could do something for him here. It’d be great to do a big seafood feast, then we could all go out and scuba dive.’

  Leon and Kaito exchanged glances

  I added hastily, ‘Or free-dive?’

  ‘Red would have a fit if he found out we took the boat out for that,’ Leon said. ‘But then again . . . what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him, right?’

  ‘Right.’ I could barely contain my excitement. I hadn’t been diving for a couple of months and here were two experienced divers to learn more from. Besides, I was secretly hoping I could find a wild oyster with a pearl inside. Chances of that were probably as good as winning the lottery – well, actually, a little bit better because I didn’t have a ticket in the lottery. Ever since Kaito had spoken about his great grandmother, the diving mermaid, I’d been having dreams about collecting treasure from the sea.

  From behind the curtain came a wail. The mysterious nightmare had reared again. I said a swift goodnight to the boys and crept in to cuddle Aran back to sleep.

  ‘Watch it!’ I warned Aran as he narrowly missed being donked by a swinging plank of wood. If I didn’t give him a job to do soon he’d get bored and that’s when he was at his most destructive. But I was balanced in the crook between two branches and it was more dangerous to have him up with me than it was to have him tottering around beneath.

  With a sigh, I swung to the ground, landing with a dusty thump. ‘Should we go water the garden?’

  Aran nodded so eagerly my heart wrenched. If he ’d been my shadow before Uncle Red had left, for the past three days he ’d stuck to me like chewing gum. Though I’d tried limiting his drinks after dinner and taking him out to wee on the hibiscus just before getting him off to sleep, the bed-wetting was chronic. In IBIS, I’d found nappies for older kids. They were disposable and no doubt responsible for half the landfill in Australia, and while my eco-self was dismayed, when I’d convinced him to wear one, the nappy had been soaked, but nothing else, including me! I was learning that childcare was one long, helpless slide into compromise and forsaking principles for moments of peace (and dry linen).

  Aran hadn’t liked the nappy and had kicked and screamed while I’d patiently explained that if he could wake up dry he wouldn’t have to wear them anymore. And in the meantime it meant I didn’t have a lovely bunch of wee-soaked bed sheets to wake up to each morning. It also meant my skin had gone back to smelling more like me – salty, sunlight-soapish and reasonably clean.

  The nightmare, whatever it was, happened around about the same time every night. Aran would start to moan, then cry, and then he ’d find his way blindly up to my bed where he’d press against me like a hot water bottle – not what I needed in the muggy tropical heat.

  Mum’s flaky friend Akasha had four kids and let them sleep with her on a huge king-sized futon. She was always banging on about how sleeping apart has been the greatest social experiment for the past hundred years. Before that, humans always slept in the same spaces, just like any herd animal. She said it was unnatural to put a baby or small child in another room at night. Which made sense. Only I was completely grossed out after Mum told me Akasha had also breastfed her oldest kid until it was four . . .

  In a way, it suited me that Aran needed someone with him at night, because it gave me the perfect excuse not to have to sleep in Kaito’s tent, which might have been expected now that Red was away and there was only Leon to judge us.

  Aran pressed the hose nozzle into my hand. I found the other end, attached it to the tank and turned it on. I scraped back the sheet of iron that formed the gate and Aran trotted proudly along our meagre rows of plantings that had struggled to life as flimsy sprouts.

  As I watched him watering the plants, making sure he didn’t accidentally trample anything, my thoughts turned to Kaito. It was confusing – I honestly didn’t know how I felt about him. He was so . . . elusive. I felt as if I couldn’t get to the heart of who he was. It was almost as if all emotions slipped off his flawless skin, flowing around him like a rock in a stream. Did he absorb anything? Or was he empty? Secretly, I hoped for a more passionate demonstration of his need for me, but he remained calm and steady as ever.

  Once, I’d broken away when were kissing and asked, ‘How would you feel if I wasn’t here?’ (Subtext: would you miss me?)

  ‘The same as before,’ he ’d said.

  That was it? I knew it wasn’t worth getting all hoity about it because it wasn’t as if I was pining for him either when he was down at the plant, washing off oysters and cleaning the racks. But the whole thing just seemed too convenient. For both of us. I liked the way he touched me, but then I liked getting massages too (especially from Akasha, who was a lomi lomi masseur).

  The main problem with being stuck on a tiny island was that it made little things big. Every single thing that happened or didn’t happen seemed hugely significant because nothing else was
happening. There was so little that was new in each day and there was no escape beyond one hundred metres, where the ocean lapped like a watery prison wall.

  A boat was like a tiny island as well, of course. But there was one critical difference – a boat was a tiny island that moved.

  My thoughts were turning round and round in circles. I blamed it on the heat. Not dry desert heat, but more like the heat we got in Cairns – one hundred percent humidity where the air was like a hot doggy tongue. Overhead the clouds glowered, but never delivered the longed-for rain.

  When Leon loped over to take Aran fishing off the new jetty, I sought out my special mangrove spot and sat on the crumbling concrete jetty, dangling my toes in as baby shark bait and welcoming the shady canopy’s soothing magic. I was restless, bored. I’d crested my learning curve and I craved a new challenge.

  I wished I could be more like Tash and her family or Uncle Bill and Aunty Sally, chilled out and happy to flow with whatever the day did or didn’t bring. I wished I could groove with ailan tim. But I was starting to chafe. Aran’s present was almost finished, I had the cooking and cleaning under control, I had explored every single inch of the island and I wanted something to happen.

  That something I yearned for so desperately came two days before Christmas. I’d been snappy with Kaito when he dumped tea leaves in my sink and didn’t wash them down the drain, had narrowly restrained myself from slapping Aran after he ’d emptied a jar of instant coffee on the clean washing, and had almost bitten off Leon’s head when he’d innocently asked what was for lunch . . .

  ‘You need to get out of here,’ announced Leon. ‘Time to go diving.’ He turned to Kaito. ‘Kaito, you lazy bugger, I’m going to take Edie out diving this afternoon. Yours is the only wetsuit that’ll fit her. Can you look after Aran?’