Thirteen Pearls Read online

  In the mornings I ran; ran away from Mum’s appalling macadamia, linseed, amaranth, chia, and sunflower seed muesli creations. I ran through the Botanic Gardens, over footbridges spanning croc-infested tidal tributaries, and up Mount Whitfield.

  I started out by sweating. And that was just waking up. The heat in the wet season was revolting. It would have been okay if it were dry heat. But it was often one hundred percent humidity, as though the rain wanted to fall, but instead got stuck in a rancid grey sky that clung to everything it touched, covering it in a slimy film. It was moist and hot and mushroomy, and the walls got mildewed and washing acquired that vomit smell because it never fully dried. Fungus grew beneath my fingernails and there was the faintest trace of mould on my cheeks . . .

  There had been a special on air conditioners at all the local retailers last winter. I had dreamed our house could be like Tash’s. Everything crispy clean and chilled. Mum had pored longingly over the sales catalogue instead of her photocopied excerpt on lathing styles for spinning rods. She ’d grown up in Melbourne and drooped in the Cairns heat like a wilting petunia. Nanna had made clucking noises over the phone from Caloundra and had even offered to pay for three air conditioners – one each for our bedrooms and one for the living room.

  But I’d jumped on my renewable resources moral high ground and refused and Dad had backed me up. He’d rigged up a cold shower outside instead. Our dump of a house had cobweb-shrouded fanlights and big cracks in the weatherboards that encouraged any tiny little wisp of a breeze that managed to wheeze its way up from the mangroves. It also encouraged mozzies. Which was why I slept beneath a mosquito net. Which made the bed a whole lot hotter: the whole vicious circle thing.

  But the bigger vicious circle, it seemed to me, was that we were the ones causing global warming right now. And we were making it happen faster with air conditioning!

  Dad had supported me, ‘Everyone needs to toughen up. Can’t spend life scuttling from one artificially refrigerated building to the next.’ All very well for him with his cushy glacially chilled office. Although, I confess, I had been fond of the kebab shop’s coldroom, which was why Kevin had known exactly where to corner me . . .

  Kevin’s garlic-’n’-sesame-seed-stinking mullet, four thousand dollars still needed to finish my beloved boat, possible toilet-cleaning at the uni . . . yuck. I pulled on my singlet, wiggled into my running shorts and grabbed my iPod to listen to some tunes. My music tastes were actually quite trashy. But I couldn’t let Tash know. Instead, I pretended to listen to opera and classical music; it was part of my friendship duty to maintain the stiff upper highbrow.

  Cairns was asleep. I imagined people writhing in soupy sheets, clinging to cool dreams in an attempt to resist the relentless heat. The murky sky was a fish belly glimmer across the mudflats. I dashed out along the Esplanade, then turned in through the Botanic Gardens, enjoying the thump thump thump of my runners on the narrow metal footbridges, ever hopeful to spot the driftwood bump of a croc snout.

  No such luck. I took a deep breath as I slid into Mt Whitfield’s rainforest skirts. The stones were slippery with humidity and pungent with the stink of leaf. Above, the canopy was dappled with deep and shallow greens. I inhaled it all and, smiling wryly at the interpretative signs (they always amused me: how to interpret frog; how to interpret butterfly; how to interpret fig tree) started up the zillion steps on the Red Arrow circuit.

  I hadn’t always been a runner. I only took it up after Dad commented, while I was whingeing about having to haul the shopping up the rickety stairs to our kitchen, that I’d never be any good as a solo sailor if I was going to be such a whining weakling. Sailors needed strength and stamina. He ’d even grabbed my pathetic skinny arms and pinched them, testing for non-existent muscle.

  He’d earned a semi-kick in the groin for that. I didn’t feel too bad – he was the one who taught me that particular self-defence technique. Everyone had picked on him at his redneck outback school because they’d thought he was gay. Sensitive, able to talk to girls without staring at their breasts, artistic, a good listener, a witty communicator – yep, had to be gay. So when the simian son of the town’s leading farming family paid him out, Dad had figured he had nothing further to lose if he fought like a girl. He ’d delivered some pretty hefty scratches, hair-pulling and knee-groining, and subsequently scored the prettiest girl in town (who’d just won the coveted title of Sheep Festival Queen) as his date into the bargain.

  The day after Dad had bagged me out for being a weakling I’d set my alarm and taken myself on a humiliating run. More like a stagger. I was out of breath before I’d turned the corner. And my body had screamed every time I’d limped up the school steps for three days after.

  Now, I could run eight kilometres without having to stop. I knew it was eight kilometres, partly because there was a sign saying the Blue Arrow track circuit was 7.2 kilometres, but mostly because I’d pocketed the pedometer from the breakfast cereal box at Tash’s. None of Tash’s family would ever dream of walking the four hundred metres down the block to the local shop. They always drove.

  Right now I was panting louder than my music, but I was on my way. Inside the forest I felt as though I had entered a fairy world, where butterflies with red, yellow and green wings like traffic lights drifted through stands of bamboo, and big, draping tree roots coiled around stones and snaked across the path. Once on the Blue Arrow track I pushed myself all the way to the lookout shelter. From here, Cairns lay flattened out like a map with the long grey curve of the Coral Sea sweeping up to the Trinity Inlet and the range beyond.

  I pictured my boat out there. The Ulysses: the gracious arc of her sails as I tilted into a south-easterly wind; my heart bursting with the thrill of adventures to come. Only I was four thousand dollars away from my dream. Give or take a few hundred bucks. Nanna’s words floated back into my head. Did I have to go out and make this thing happen? Or could I just want it so badly that it would come to me?

  The town was waking up. Down below there ’d now be posses of serious joggers in lycra shorts and middle-aged power walkers with supernaturally white sneakers, as well as that old guy who shuffled through the forest with his shirt off, exposing little sagging breasts and a hairy belly.

  I jogged back down the twisting track, breathing the cool green air, forest-filtered for my delectation.

  Before leaving, I’d gulped down a couple of glasses of apple mango juice. Now, my bladder felt as if it would burst. Casting a quick glance behind me, I darted into the bush, far enough from the track that I wouldn’t be surprised by the old guy or the white sneaker people, mid-squat, shorts around my ankles.

  I’d only just pulled my shorts up when a loud crashing blasted through the music. I pulled out an earpiece. Sticks cracked and leaves rustled in dense green foliage only metres away. Probably a wallaby. I stuck my earpiece back in and pushed both palms against a tree, extending my left leg behind to get a good calf stretch.

  I swapped legs then froze, mid-stretch.

  From out of the forest, emerged a bird – a very tall bird, taller than me. It picked its way through the vines, pearly blue and scarlet feathers glowing against the undergrowth.

  The cassowary stared at me with burning amber eyes.

  There was no point in running: a cassowary could run fifty kilometres an hour. The signs below warned to avoid nesting cassowaries because they could be aggressive – which had to be the understatement of the year.

  People had died from cassowary attacks. Tash’s cousin, Jen, grew up on a cane farm and she reckoned that her dad wouldn’t go anywhere near the cane fields that bordered cassowary habitat without being on one of the tractors. The cassowary’s modus operandi was to give a savage kick and rake the victim’s belly with razor-sharp raptor claws, vestiges from dinosaur times . . .

  From this cassowary’s intense orange glare, I wasn’t sure if it wanted to kiss me with its sharp beak or kick me to death.

  I instinctively pulled my belly in and mad
e a lightning-fast calculation. If I tried to run, it might startle and attack and it could move forty-three kilometres an hour faster than me. If I tried to sidle behind the tree, it might also attack. Being kicked and clawed to death by a cassowary wasn’t on my list of preferable deaths. Not that I really had a list, but in my darker moments I’d imagined a perfect storm style wave rushing over the Ulysses. This, however, was ridiculous; I was on land! Civilisation was only ten minutes away.

  So I did all that was left to me – I stared into the creature ’s avian eyes. These birds were relics, the latest evolutionary update on dinosaurs, with their swaying neck and humped, feathered back, and those long, muscular legs sprouting talons.

  My kooky grandmother had once said that nature offered up little oracles if we were willing to see them. A butterfly coming to rest on my shoulder might bring ‘a missive from the realms beyond’. I didn’t want a cassowary landing on my shoulder if it had a message for me. And then, just before the bird broke eye contact and retreated behind a leafy screen, I realised that it had been completely unexpected. Perhaps nature was trying to tell me that something unexpected was coming my way. Either that or if I didn’t look out I’d get my head kicked in.

  ‘I nearly got killed by a Cassowary,’ I said, still panting, while I stumbled up the splintery verandah steps.

  Mum nodded. ‘Red’s on the phone.’ She didn’t look up from a pile of scuffed photocopied pages as she furiously squeaked a pink highlighter over them.

  ‘It almost ripped my guts out with razor talons.’

  Mum continued highlighting while she took a swig of coffee. The table was leopard-spotted with brown ring marks.

  ‘But admittedly,’ I said, stalking past her, ‘it wasn’t as if I’d been sliced to ribbons by a wool-carding machine, or garroted by a malfunctioning spinning jenny. Next time I’ll try to make my near-death experience more interesting for you.’

  ‘You’d better hurry; I told him you’d be back any minute. ’Bout ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Which Red? Red, as in Blue? Or Red, the guy from the paint shop, or Red, who reconditioned the bilge pump?’

  ‘Redmond.’

  ‘Your brother? The one you haven’t spoken to for the past five years?’

  ‘Uh-huh. He’s calling from a satellite phone so you might want to hurry up.’

  ‘It’s great that you’re so excited to hear from your brother. It gives me a warm cosy feeling knowing how tight-knit our family is. Especially with me being an only child. It’s lovely to have that sense of security that if anything should ever happen to you both and I was left an orphan, I wouldn’t be alone – I have family who truly care.’

  Mum finally glanced up. ‘Hardly my fault that your father’s sperm swims in circles.’

  I thrust out my palm to ward off this gem. ‘Please, Mother. Too much information. Did you chat with Red?’

  She shrugged. ‘He wanted to speak to you.’

  A jump-starty sensation revved my heart. To me? Uncle Redmond, Red, was the solitary white sheep of my mother’s family. As in, unlike his hopeless older sister and brother, destined to spend their lives on Austudy or the dole (or in gaol), he had gone off to work on an oil rig at sixteen. Bought his first house at eighteen. And then paid off his very own beach-front apartments at twenty-eight. He had hammered on, at the one disastrous Christmas lunch at Nanna’s, about no-good greenie, hippie, tree-loving, dole-bludging, arty farty types. And he voted National Party.

  I dashed inside and picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Edith?’

  How could they have cursed me with such a name? I’d once asked my parents if Dad’s sperm hadn’t swum in circles, and they’d bred up a tribe, would the rest of my unborn siblings been named Marjorie, Alfred, Gladys, Cecil, Beryl and Mavis? Why couldn’t I have been named Jessie? To which Mum had replied that I’d been named after Edith Sitwell, a famous poet. Which had made me feel better about being lumped with such a clunky, old-fashioned name, until I’d wikkied it only to discover that Edith Sitwell had had a spinal deformity and spent her girlhood in a body cage and then moved from home to a life of poverty and unrequited love with a gay Russian painter. Thanks Mum.

  Dad had said that Mum had been on a potent cocktail of painkillers at the time of my birth, and he had always thought of me more as an Edie. Like Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians who’d made an album called Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars. I’d wikkied Edie Brickell too and she was much better looking.

  ‘Edie,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Er . . . Edie. How are you?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘How’s school?’

  ‘Okay.’ I could do a mean impression of being my mother’s daughter. Although I was secretly excited by this unexpected contact, it wasn’t enough to forgive him years of pathetic, non-existent uncling. Not even a lousy card on my birthdays. Though we did get a postcard last year after he ’d married Lowanna, a Thai woman who, to her credit, had briefly tried to rebuild some familial ties.

  I threw him a bone. ‘How’s Lowanna?’

  He coughed and there was a crackle of static on the line. ‘She ’s great. Ah . . . actually she ’s away at the moment. Gone back to Thailand to look after her mother. The mother’s got some kind of bone condition.’

  I waited.

  ‘I sold the apartments and bought an island,’ he announced, suddenly. ‘In the Torres Strait. Got a pearl farm now.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Maybe he’d send me a string of pearls for my eighteenth.

  ‘Got a couple of lads working as oyster hands, but it’s a bit tough with the boy and all.’

  ‘What boy?’

  ‘My son.’

  I dropped the phone, then scrambled to pick it up.

  ‘Edith? Are you still there?’

  I had a cousin! I squeaked out a reply. ‘You have a son?’

  He had the grace to sound embarrassed. ‘I meant to get around to telling you, but me and your mother we never . . . ’

  ‘What about Nanna?’ I demanded.

  ‘Her either,’ he admitted.

  ‘So you’re telling me?’

  Red grunted. ‘Life just seemed to run away with me. Got so busy. Never seemed to have the time.’

  ‘You didn’t have the time to call your own mother to tell her she had a grandson?’

  ‘Steady on. The boy’s Lowanna’s. From a previous . . . ah . . . relationship. I guess I just forgot to mention it.’

  Forgot to mention it? Hid it from us, more likely. I felt a wash of warmth about being who I was with the parents I had. We might speak like characters from a sitcom, but we always told each other the truth.

  ‘So how old is he?’

  ‘Aran?’

  ‘Yeah. Is that his name?’

  ‘Yeah, Aran. He’s four.’ Red broke off. I glanced at the doorway, half-expecting to see Mum standing there. He started up again, his tone desperate. ‘I’m not great at handling a kid, Edith – Edie. And this is a busy time at the pearl farm. I rang because I uh . . . I need a babysitter while Lowanna’s away. I didn’t just want to get in anyone from the island. I want someone I can trust. Family.’

  He hadn’t seen me for eight years. How did he know I wasn’t some self-cutting screw-up?

  ‘Are you on school holidays yet?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Nope. Three weeks of school left.’ Three-and-a-bit weeks of guilt-free air conditioning and unofficially doing nothing. Then six sweltering weeks of officially doing nothing.

  ‘So there ’s no chance of you coming up straight away? I’d need you until at least after New Year.’

  Hold your horses, mate. I hadn’t even agreed to go up. I remained silent.

  ‘I’ll pay you,’ he said.

  Yeah? How much? I thought about Tash and how she was with Jason and any of the other three hundred boys after her. Play hard to get. ‘Actually, I kinda had plans and I don’t know if . . . ’

  ‘How much do you want?’ Uncle Red demanded.

 
‘Four thousand dollars.’ I said. ‘Cash.’

  There was a sharp indrawn breath from the other end of the receiver.

  I thought – give or take a few hundred bucks.

  He grunted. ‘Three weeks is a bit far off. How soon can you get here?’

  I should have added that few hundred. My exams were over. ‘Should be able to get up there on Wednesday.’ I didn’t want to give him any reason whatsoever to back out.

  ‘I’ll book your flight.’

  It was only afterwards, as I jumped up and down screaming so much with elation that the floorboards bounced and the whole falling-apart house shook on its stilts, that I remembered about nature ’s oracle.

  This had been most unexpected.

  ‘YOU’RE NOT SERIOUSLY GOING ARE YOU?’ Mum toyed with a limp strip of tempeh before plunging it back into the stir-fry and fishing out a water chestnut instead; it was Dad’s night to cook. ‘You’ve never even looked after a child for an hour, let alone two whole months.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, feeling not fine. I had been dazzled by the prospect of easy money – the exact amount I needed to finish building my boat. But now that the flights were booked and I was definitely going, I was secretly packing it. It was one thing to take Uncle Red’s money and do a good job; another thing entirely to go up there without any babysitting skills whatsoever. The last time I’d interacted with a small child had been a week ago when I’d pushed in front of it to grab a Weiss bar from the ice-cream freezer. What would Aran eat? Did I have to teach him things? Would he talk? Would he be able to wipe his own bum?

  ‘Don’t make her doubt herself, Coral,’ Dad said, shaking half a bottle of tamari onto his rice. ‘This will be character-building for Edie. Besides,’ he whistled through his teeth, ‘four thousand smackeroos . . . I’ll tell you what kiddo. You stay here and type up forms to deal with waste-of-space boyfriends in unsuitable living arrangements and I’ll look after the kid.’