Thirteen Pearls Read online

  ‘Edie?’

  ‘Uncle Bill!’

  He beamed and gave my arm a friendly squeeze. ‘How you doing at that Thirteen Pearls?’

  ‘Yeah it’s great,’ I lied.

  Bill’s grin threatened to crack his sun-baked face. ‘You going to introduce me to your friends?’

  ‘Kaito,’ Kaito said before I could speak. He gave a slight bow and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, Uncle Bill. You’re a legend round here.’

  Uncle Bill chuckled and ruffled Aran’s hair. ‘And who we got here?’

  To my astonishment, Aran grinned back.

  ‘This is Aran,’ I said. ‘He ’s my uncle ’s— um . . . he’s my cousin.’ It was surprising to hear the words come out of my mouth. I was related to the kid!

  ‘We still got a date to go fishing?’ Uncle Bill asked.

  ‘What is it with men and fishing around here? You’re all obsessed.’ When they stopped laughing, I said, ‘Actually, it’s pretty hard for me to get away, what with Aran and . . . ’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that. The boy’s welcome! I been talking to Sally and she wants you to come for a cook-up over on Hammond.’

  Kaito stared as if I’d suddenly sprouted a gold crown. ‘Maybe we could go this time next week,’ I ventured.

  Uncle Bill nodded. ‘You’re a good girl.’ He looked pointedly at Kaito. ‘A gentle girl. Got a good heart.’

  I smiled, feeling as if I should cross my fingers behind my back. He hadn’t seen me bulldozing tinned spaghetti into Aran’s gob.

  We said a reluctant goodbye and continued on our way to the cargo depot. After a few minutes, Kaito emerged from the office shaking his head.

  ‘What is it? Where ’s the pump?’

  ‘It hasn’t arrived yet. Won’t be in until this afternoon.’

  ‘But Uncle Red said it was already here.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what he thought, but things work on a unique time schedule around here. It’s called ailan tim. Which basically means that nothing ever happens as quickly as you want it to.’

  ‘So what should we do? Wait or go back?’

  Kaito smiled. ‘We do what any self-respecting islander would do – we go fishing.’

  It wasn’t difficult to hunt down Uncle Bill – he was dozing on the same bench beneath the mango tree. Uncle Bill said fishing sounded like a grand idea and then he hobbled over to the hostel to talk to a cousin of Aunty Sally, who made a call to Hammond Island to let her know we’d be coming over and that we ’d be bringing lunch.

  WITH UNCLE BILL ON BOARD, Kaito must have felt more secure about letting me steer the boat. It felt good to have the tiller thrumming in my hand. Under instruction from Uncle Bill, I brought the tinny to a gliding halt to the north-west of T.I. at what was apparently the ideal spot for catching coral trout.

  The tinny bobbed gently like a big cradle and I succumbed to the soporific heat of the sun. Dazzling diamonds of light made me dizzy. I loved the clean, bright smell of salt water and its endless sweep. Being in a boat was the feeling I associated most with freedom. Not just the adventure of roaming a vast ocean, but liberation from manmade things (except the boat, of course). Out on the ocean there were no signs or ads or distractions to pollute my daydreams. I could be calm, my thoughts all contained in clear blue space. I guessed this must be how birds felt in flight while soaring above the earth. Or how dugongs and dolphins and fish felt riding the currents below. Or how Kaito felt, finding emptiness in his bamboo flute.

  Beneath the boat, a school of parrotfish with curiously beaked noses, flicked and swerved. Kaito shifted to sit beside me and showed me how to thread the bait (a half-thawed pilchard from Uncle Bill’s freezer) onto the hook. Then he dropped the line over the side and asked me to putter the boat for a moment. When I turned off the motor, he handed the line to me and told me to settle in.

  ‘That’s it? This is fishing? I could have figured that much out by myself.’

  Kaito threaded a chunk of bait onto a hook for Aran to hold a line. ‘That’s the easy bit.’

  ‘So what’s the hard bit?’ I was unimpressed.

  ‘Waiting.’

  Uncle Bill got the first bite. He delicately rolled the line back onto the spool, periodically allowing some slack then firmly tugging and winding again. As the line got shorter, a flipping fish emerged from the blue-green shadows.

  The water broke with a small splash and the fish twisted in the air, in an arc of pink scales with brilliant blue spots, before landing in the bottom of the tinny, gasping. Uncle Bill took a serrated fishing knife out of his pouch and cut its throat.

  Aran watched, fascinated. What was he thinking? Had he seen this before, too? Maybe that hill-tribe fairytale-telling great grandfather of his had taken him out in a canoe?

  Fishing was like a treasure hunt, only much more boring, but when a faint nibble finally pulled my line tight, I tugged it excitedly. Instantly, the weight on the end of the line vanished. I reeled the line in and saw that the hook was baitless.

  Threading another pilchard onto the hook, I determined to be more like the others and patiently bide my time. We ’d stopped speaking some while ago: each contented to retreat to our own private world. Even Aran was entirely focused on the line he dangled overboard. The boat drifted gently on the current, moving further and further from the island.

  Dad had once told me that the reason he went fishing was to meditate.

  ‘You meditate on what it’s like to be a fish?’ I’d retorted.

  Dad had shaken his head like I had some incurable case of cretinism. ‘Nah. It’s just somewhere to sit in nature and shut up. Millions of blokes all over the world take their rods and lines and meditate whenever they can.’ At that exact moment Mum had screeched down that she needed help with the printer. ‘Probably to escape their womenfolk,’ he ’d said with a wink.

  Entire schools of vividly striped fish darted beneath the boat. Why weren’t they going for my bait?

  Finally, I felt another tug, less powerful than the first. I pulled the line back with exaggerated gentleness, then, slowly began to wind it around the plastic spool. Every now and then I gave it a little slack, just as I’d seen Uncle Bill do, before carefully and steadily continuing to wind.

  The fish that emerged was less than a quarter of the size of Uncle Bill’s.

  ‘Better throw that one back,’ Uncle Bill said.

  As I attempted to separate the hook from the fish’s mouth, it writhed and bit me with sharp little predator teeth.

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Use the knife to cut the hook free,’ Kaito instructed.

  I grabbed the knife and cut the line. The fish dived straight out of my hand back into the sea.

  ‘That’s so horrible,’ I said, ‘leaving a hook in its mouth.’

  ‘The hooks are barbed,’ Kaito said. ‘If you try and pull them out it can do far worse damage.’ He fell silent, obviously feeling a nibble, and hunkered down to the serious business of hauling in a massive coral trout.

  When we puttered into the lagoon at Hammond Bay, we had four fat, pinkish-red fish, two loaves of crusty high top bread and a tub of butter. Yep, real butter. Real melted butter that sloshed inside the plastic tub like soup.

  The bay was a shallow sweep of white sand with a jewelled spectrum of aquamarine water that intensified into turquoise and sapphire blue. A palm-thatched cooking hut on the beach and white-hot sunlight made this the perfect tropical island postcard scene.

  Aunty Sally lifted her orange muu-muu to reveal slender brown calves that tapered into broad flat feet with delicate pink soles. She waded out to meet the tinny and opened her arms wide to receive Aran, who flung himself into her embrace as if she were his long lost grandmother.

  ‘My nephew, George, just came round,’ Aunty Sally said. ‘Cray boat’s back from sea – full catch. More than enough to share round.’ She pointed to the strip of white sand where a man stood under the palm shelter. Trails of steam curled out of a huge aluminum cooking pot. He rais
ed a pair of silver tongs and waved them in greeting.

  When George trudged down through the sand with a tray of steaming lobsters, Aunty Sally said, ‘Best to eat in here, no mess that way.’ Chuckling, she took her crayfish and sat in the shallows, tucking her dress beneath her so that it didn’t float up.

  Aran needed no cajoling whatsoever – he gave a whoop and splashed in after her.

  Kaito stripped off his T-shirt, revealing the beautiful dark pearl that nestled against his smooth chest, and waded out in his trousers.

  I hesitated. I’d worn my bikini top instead of a bra. I didn’t know whether to take off my shirt or leave it on. My clothes had long since dried after my unscheduled rescue of Aran and his elephant and although they were stiff with salt I was enjoying not having to squelch around. Finally, after Aran kicked a spray of ocean into my face, I stripped off to my bikini. At this rate I was going to get soaked all over again.

  I folded my arms over my chest, uncomfortably aware of Kaito checking me out over the cracking of lobster shells. It wasn’t that I wanted to have the coconut-sized cleavage of Aunty Sally, but in the great DNA lottery it would have been nice to have been given a little extra something rather than a depressing A-cup. I blamed my parents. They were both straight and skinny, like me. Together we looked like a preschooler’s drawing of a stick-figure family – right down to the big eyes, button noses and crazy hair.

  I cracked the shell of a lobster leg with my molars and sucked out the sweet meat while Aunty Sally and Uncle Bill told stories about the good old days. Uncle Bill said that there used to be hundreds of Japanese living or working around the island. ‘I used to work with them. Good divers they were, but not as good as us.’ He grinned and puffed out his scrawny chest. ‘Island people are big breathers.’

  ‘So where are they now?’ I asked. During my brief visits to Thursday Island, I hadn’t seen many Asian faces.

  Kaito’s expression was unreadable. ‘The Japanese were interned after Pearl Harbour was bombed,’ he murmured. ‘My grandfather had returned to Japan to care for his elderly father, but some of my grandfather’s friends were rounded up and put under guard at a stockade.’

  Uncle Bill waved his hand in the direction of T.I. ‘It’s the Wongai basketball court now.’

  ‘They got sent to South Australia and put in camps,’ Kaito continued. ‘Thursday Island is very close to Papua New Guinea. Even though they had lived and worked in Australia for years, the Japanese people were considered spies.’

  ‘The Japs bombed Horn Island, but they never bombed Thursday Island because people reckoned there was a Japanese princess buried here,’ Uncle Bill said.

  ‘You should take Edie to see the Japanese Cemetery,’ Aunty Sally said, neatly separating segments of white meat from a lobster tail. ‘Hundreds of pearl divers’ graves there. Died from the divers’ disease.’

  ‘Decompression sickness.’

  ‘Yes.’ Kaito looked at me speculatively. The whole time he’d been talking about the internment of the Japanese, he ’d been weirdly detached. As if he were talking about other people, another race. What would it be like being the child of two such different cultures that had once been at war? I’d been surprised that Kaito spoke with a regular Aussie accent. But there were identifiable Japanese elements to his personality and manner too – the ritualistic way he poured tea, the emptiness flute . . .

  I wanted to ask Kaito more about the internment camps, but he tilted his head back to the sun and closed his eyes as if to avoid my questions.

  ‘Is it dangerous diving for pearls?’ I asked.

  Uncle Bill whistled through his teeth. ‘You don’t want to stick your hand into one of them giant clamshells. Lose your arm or foot if you’re lucky and some other fella’s with you. Drown if you’re not. But there ’s nothing like finding abalone or harvesting wild oysters, always hopin’ there ’ll be a pearl inside. Like finding treasure at the bottom of the sea.’

  I started, causing an exodus of tiny fish that had been nibbling my feet. That was exactly what I’d thought about fishing!

  I’d always loved diving. I liked the swaying underwater world of bright fish and seaweeds, towering coral gardens rising up in the blue. I liked turning into mysterious cracks and crevices and listening to my breathing through the mouthpiece. What would it be like to seek rare and valuable pearls?

  ‘Can I go free-diving here?’

  Kaito looked at me through a sweep of dark lashes, assessing. ‘Maybe we could go out next time Red lets us have some time off.’

  That would be never, I thought sourly. But, after seeing the expression in Kaito’s eyes, I felt something warm hum through me.

  After lunch, when we’d washed our sticky hands and faces with seawater and Aunty Sally and Uncle Bill had taken Aran to see where a goanna lived, that strange, humming feeling returned.

  ‘You’re getting sunburned,’ Kaito said.

  I put my hand self-consciously up to my nose. It was always the first place to go beetroot pink – my Rudolph nose.

  Back at the tinny, I rifled through my bag for the tube of sunscreen. Thankfully Aran hadn’t managed to squeeze it all out and I smudged some onto my nose before squeaking up the sand to the slender bars of shade cast by the palm trees. I dropped and pressed my belly to the sand. Instantly its warmth sent a wave of relaxation through my limbs that made me sleepy, and I realised how, since arriving on Thirteen Pearls, my body had been on constant alert. Maybe I’d have post-traumatic stress disorder when I returned.

  ‘I’ll do your back,’ Kaito offered.

  The cool cream soothed my hot skin as Kaito swept from the small of my back to my shoulders with long, even strokes. There was something sensuous and deliberate about his touch that made me start to feel anxious. I kept my face buried in the crook of my arm. When he finished I felt him settle in the sand beside me. He was lying so close my little fingernail (the only nail to have survived a biting frenzy since I’d arrived up here) could have bridged the distance. But soon, accompanied by the gentle lap of the sea, came even, regular breathing. It sounded as if he was having a siesta.

  My own breath seemed swift and shallow and my heart beat fast. The way he had rubbed the sunscreen in, it had seemed as though he was being more than friendly. But I couldn’t be sure. I lifted my head.

  He was watching me. He didn’t look away.

  I mustered the courage to hold his gaze. He had the softest lips. Not sun-chafed and white like Uncle Red’s, but smooth and full and . . .

  Kaito kissed me. I tasted seawater and cool air. He didn’t dive his tongue in straight away. Instead, he bit my bottom lip softly and kissed my cheeks and temples before returning to my mouth.

  (Okay – a moment of strict and excruciating honesty. My first kisses – all four of them not including this one – weren’t great. Maybe it was my expectations, waiting for the violins to kick in, or maybe it was the fact that just when I was really, really enjoying that warm feeling of ANTICIPATION swirling through me, the kiss, the real thing, with lips and tongues and teeth to coordinate, had shocked me into reality. Tash had told me in no uncertain terms to get over it. She reckoned the real thing was the best bit. But I’d disagreed. Yet this kiss was different . . . )

  White-hot sunlight kept me glued to the ground. A sea breeze wafted between our baking bodies. Kaito didn’t try and paw me like the others had. He left a knife-fine space between us. Emptiness. And it felt good.

  After a few minutes, it was me who moved closer. Me who put my hand against his bare chest to feel the steady thump of his heart beneath, and me who toyed with the black pearl against his smooth skin.

  Kaito slid his arm around my back and traced little circles along my shoulders, down my spine.

  I shivered and pushed up closer.

  He smoothed a stray lock of my sweaty hair. ‘No hurry, Edie,’ he murmured. ‘We ’re on ailan tim.’

  Aran’s shout made me spring to a sitting position. I watched guiltily, my face bright with mor
e than sunburn, as Aran burst from a path leading out of a clump of mangroves, with the old people following behind.

  Aran thrust a woven palm-leaf fish at me, beaming with pleasure. I scanned Uncle Bill and Aunty Sally’s faces – surely they knew? Is that why they’d taken Aran for a walk? But their smiles were as warm and open as ever. ‘He got to see that pesky goanna run up a tree,’ Aunty Sally said. ‘Been eating my chook eggs and we set a trap for it, didn’t we?’

  Aran nodded, eyes shining. Well, at least it was a goanna and not a swarthy bad guy.

  When my heart finally stopped thumping, I allowed myself to meet Kaito’s eyes. He smiled and mouthed a word that sent chills dancing up my arms and legs. ‘Later.’

  ‘Where the hell have you lot been?’ Uncle Red lumbered down the jetty, making the wooden slats reverberate in his wake.

  ‘We had to wait for the pump to arrive,’ Kaito replied serenely, as he threw the rope around the pylon and knotted it tight. ‘Didn’t come in until the afternoon. I tried to call.’

  I kept my gaze fixed on the apricot shimmer of sunset on the sea, not wanting my guilty expression to betray him, us. As far as I knew, he hadn’t called at all.

  Aran leaped off the boat and rushed at Red. Throwing his skinny arms and legs around my uncle, he looked like a monkey clinging to a tree trunk.

  Uncle Red was taken aback. A mix of emotions played across his face – surprise, pleasure, concern, then suspicion. He gave the boy an awkward pat on the shoulder and then unpeeled him, limb by limb, and handed him back to me. Leon sauntered down the jetty. On Thirteen Pearls, any arrival or departure was a big event. Something to fill up a conversation for entire minutes . . . He stared at Kaito, then me, and frowned. I swear, he almost – sniffed. Uncle Red might be oblivious, but there was something feral about

  Leon. His animal senses had told him that something was different.

  I squirmed from his hard stare. Leon had his supermodel Danish babe waiting for him and it was none of his business what happened between me and Kaito, but I had the distinct feeling that Kaito and I had crossed a line and our merry little evening trio would no longer be so cheerful and relaxed. I knew from hanging out with Tash and Jason that the saying: ‘two’s company, three ’s a crowd’ was especially true if there was a couple in the equation. And I was right, because later, after Aran had been tucked up, still clutching his damp elephant, and I’d emerged to lounge around the citronella candle and slap mosquitoes, the atmosphere was palpably different, strained.