Thirteen Pearls (7 page)

I almost felt sorry for him, cowering behind a hibiscus. But not sorry enough to stop from scooping him up, hefting him against my hip, and hauling him back to the kitchen, where I turned on the tap and gave his spaghetti face a good dousing, before plopping him back down on the floor.

‘What are you doing?'

I swivelled.

Uncle Red glared at me over a grocery box of (let me guess) more tins of spaghetti and condensed milk.

‘Washing spaghetti out of Aran's ears,' I snapped. I was tired, still half in shock, and desperately wanting to peel off my rotten-egg stinking jeans and get the spaghetti out of
my
hair.

‘I thought you said you knew how to look after children.'

Actually, I'd said no such thing. I had accepted his job offer, that's all.

I remained silent while Aran set up a piteous whimpering on the kitchen floor. When Uncle Red turned to put down the box, I pulled Aran back up onto my hip.

‘Um, where 's Aran's bedroom please?'

Uncle Red grunted something unintelligible and stalked back out into the night.

Okaaaay. Guess it would be far too difficult for him to do anything like . . . make my first night here easier.

I flicked open a curtained-off partition in the far corner of the shed. Double bed – tangle of greying sheets and a half-empty bottle of Scotch precariously balanced on a shelf bracket screwed into the corrugated-iron wall.

On the opposite side of the shed, behind another curtain, was a narrow iron bed with mismatched faded sheets. Down on the floor, less than an arm's width away, was a trundle bed with a stale-smelling mattress and a stuffed elephant with a sticking-up trunk. Someone had once told me that elephants with sticking-up trunks were lucky.

Aran wriggled out of my arms, took a running leap, scooped up the elephant in one slick move and landed on the bigger bed. I paused. There was something worryingly wrong about this picture . . . Two curtained off partitions, three beds. Surely I didn't have to sleep with the kid as well?

As if in answer, Leon called from behind the curtain, ‘Knock, knock,' and came in behind me, lugging my pack. He swept an expansive arm from one crappy bed to the other. ‘Home sweet home.' He took a step back. ‘What's that in your hair?'

‘Spaghetti.'

Leon laughed.

Aran jumped on the bed, hammering its rusty springs before bounding into Leon's arms.

Leon turned Aran upside down and tumbled him over his shoulder like an acrobat.

‘Where are your pyjamas, Aran?' I asked.

The little boy stopped shrieking and giggling. His dark eyes shuttered over.

‘Um. Yes,' Leon said, gently setting Aran back down on the bed. ‘Just a mo' bro'.' He pulled me back out into the living area and whispered, ‘Aran wets the bed.'

Wow. The night was just getting better and better. ‘So where does Unc— Red keep the spare sheets?'

Leon shook his blond mane. ‘He's kind of dropped the ball. Hasn't done any washing in a while. It's all piled up out the back. Kaito and I raided Red's sheet supply to make up your bed.'

I was torn between being touched by this gesture and appalled by Red's neglect. Dad would practically have a heart attack – this was the kind of stuff DoCS pounced on people for.

‘So what do I do?' It was mortifying to hear my question come out as a whine. I didn't want Leon to think I couldn't cope.

Leon shrugged. ‘Improvise. That's what Kaito and I do. Don't tell your uncle I said so, but this place is falling apart. Kaito heard on the T.I. grapevine that Red kind of lost the plot when his wife left.'

‘Left?'

‘She had to go see her mother or something. The kid's been crazy ever since.'

I felt a brief stab of compassion for Aran, just above the place where he 'd kicked me in the ribs.

It took me two hours to wrestle Aran into bed. And by then we'd both fallen asleep. I was woken later, face pressed to the narrow stinky mattress, by the sound of flute music. I eased myself away from Aran, his skinny little arm still clutching the stuffed elephant.

It was dark. I staggered up, stumbling over the iron bed end, and smacked into the curtain. Swaying back and forth, I finally unpeeled it from my sweaty body.

In the living area, Uncle Red stared zombie-eyed at the blue flicker of the television screen. He didn't look up as I walked past and out the sliding glass doors.

Feeble candlelight glowed between the two tents. I could make out shrubs and bushes. There was no light pollution here like there was in Cairns and the night was thick with stars. I stumbled in the opposite direction to the tents, found a bush, and squatted.

I'd only just straightened when a dark shape loomed close.

I jumped and promptly fell into a bush.

‘Don't have a heart attack, will you,' It was Leon. ‘Kaito and I wanted to know if you'd like to have a beer with us?'

I picked myself up, brushing leaves from my T-shirt. ‘And here I was looking forward to scintillating evenings of philosophical conversation and witty repartee with my long lost uncle.'

I could practically hear Leon grinning in the darkness. ‘Nothing much to talk about here, not after a while anyway – it's like groundhog day. And the heat gets to you. Turns you troppo. Kaito and I ran out of stuff to say nineteen days ago. Told each other all our secrets. Told each other our stash of jokes too. Three times. We need fresh blood.'

‘So I'm to be your victim then?'

Now an ambling silhouette ahead of me, Leon made a half-grunt that could have been the verbal equivalent of a shrug. ‘Mate – you should be so lucky. Couple of handsome guys like us.'

Cocky. But the alternative was a depressing curtained-off cubicle, and being kicked by a sweaty little four-year-old. Or Uncle Red, sprawled like a Neanderthal in front of the TV.

‘Okay then, I've got a joke,' I said. ‘But it's a lame one.'

Kaito tucked a bamboo flute beneath his chair and pulled out another camp chair for me. He wore a light cotton V-necked shirt that revealed a thin leather strap from which a single dark pearl glinted against his chest.

I launched into my lame joke. ‘Two cows in a meadow. One says, “Have you heard about mad cow disease?” The other one says, “I don't have to worry about that: I'm a duck.”'

The boys laughed way harder than the joke deserved; they
had
gone troppo.

Only metres beyond, the sea sifted through stone- and shell-pocked mud. Crickets called from the bushes with a deep sweet thrum. I realised how tense I had been ever since meeting Red, and I deliberately stretched my legs and leaned back in the camp chair to lap up the occasional breeze.

A natural silence rose between us. It felt comfortable. I scanned the night sky for Orion's Belt. Tash's family called it ‘The Saucepan'.

‘Why did you come up here?' Kaito asked.

‘Money,' I said bluntly. ‘I need four grand to finish building my boat and that's just to get it seaworthy for day trips in the bay. If I want any fancy equipment or a half-way decent satellite system, I'll have to try and get sponsorship. But then I'll need to set some sort of world record.'

Leon whistled. ‘Where are you planning on going?'

‘I want to circumnavigate the globe solo, like Jesse Martin and Jessica Watson. Only I don't want it to be non-stop like their trips. I reckon I'd go mad. I want to cruise past all the islands and hang out with the people.'

The boys nodded and I felt a flare of pride. They were taking me seriously. When I tried to explain my dream to people in Cairns I got a lot of ‘yeah rights', as if no one believed I'd get it together to really go. Tash was clearly bored out of her brain whenever I raved about reefing points and running rigging. But Leon and Kaito seemed to take it for granted that I was going.

‘What sort of boat is it?' Kaito asked.

‘A twenty-nine footer Norwalk Islands Sharpie ' ‘And you built it all yourself?' Leon sounded doubtful.

I nodded. ‘Yeah. I learned how from the internet. Nah, seriously, my dad taught me how to read plans and use tools. He's a stickler for getting it right so if I stuffed up he'd make me start all over. I'm helping him live his dream too. He always wanted to do something big, have adventures, but he met my mum when they were young and they had me and then he got sucked into her PhD vortex.'

I stared back up at the stars – they were huge and thick and twinkling, spilling all the way to the inky horizon. ‘Dad taught me celestial navigation too. So even if the GPS system packs it in, I'll always know where I am.'

‘This guy's named after the stars,' Leon said, slapping Kaito's leg.

Kaito nodded. ‘My name in Japanese is a joining of the words for ocean and Ursa Major. I learned how to navigate by the stars too. My father likes all the old ways of doing things.'

‘His old man lives in the dark ages,' Leon agreed. ‘Spewed when Kaito said he wanted to go to uni. Didn't he?'

‘He doesn't think it's necessary,' Kaito said. ‘He thinks that I'll learn better by working on the pearl farms. That's partly why I'm doing this. So he 'll keep paying my fees.'

‘Yeah, tell the truth mate,' Leon teased. ‘It's cause you're gonna get a pearl empire at the end of it. You'll be a rich head-honcho employing lowly guys like me.'

‘How does it work?' I asked. ‘I mean the whole pearl industry thing. I always thought people just found them wild. I'd never even heard of a pearl farm until Uncle Red called.'

Kaito's dark eyes gleamed in the candlelight. ‘We 've got a long tradition of wild pearling in Japan. My great grandmother was an ama.'

‘What's an ama?'

‘The ama are Japanese women divers. They've been diving for two thousand years, without air tanks or masks or flippers. They dive deep in cold waters and gather pearl oysters and abalone from the arame seaweed beds.' Kaito smiled. ‘People said they were like mermaids; they used to wear only a loincloth.'

‘I wouldn't mind seeing that,' Leon butted in.

‘Man, this is my great grandmother we're talking about. She was still diving when she was eighty-five.'

Leon frowned. ‘Maybe not then.'

I was intrigued. ‘How come women? Was it only women?'

Kaito nodded. ‘Women have more body fat to keep them warmer and they can hold their breath for longer. But it's a dying art now, especially since pollution causes red algae tides that wipe out the seaweed beds.'

‘Yeah, you said it,' Leon agreed. ‘Everything good – humans stuff it up. It's the same with the oysters here. It's why we have to clean them all the time and check if they're diseased. They're like canaries in a mine. Any kind of crap goes in the water and they cark it. Kaito reckons that there was a big oil spill forty years back that wiped out the Queensland pearl industry.'

‘That's why my father has pearling stations all over northern Australia,' Kaito agreed. ‘To spread his risks. We still wild-harvest too, but it's a much harder job finding them.'

‘You know what?' Leon said. ‘I'm sick of talking about stupid oysters. I want to learn something new. Change of subject. Edie, you want to teach us some new tricks about navigating by the stars?'

The citronella candle emitted a lemony stink and sputtered whenever moths flew into it, while I told Leon how to calculate the stars relative fixed position. Kaito chipped in with Japanese words for some of the terms, explaining how the translations changed the meaning slightly, but that the principle was the same. I slapped a mosquito off my leg. Balmy air lifted strands of sweaty hair from the back of my neck. It wasn't exactly a cool breeze, but it was the least claustrophobically hot I'd felt since arriving.

‘Well, what
I
can tell you about the stars up there,' Leon said, ‘is that the islanders reckon there's a massive constellation with this super warrior Tagai and his crew in an outrigger canoe. You want to hear the story?'

I murmured agreement.

‘The story goes that Tagai and his crew were fishing and Tagai went out onto the reef to find more fish. He was gone for ages, and even though the crew were hot they didn't dare drink the water in the coconut shells hanging off the canoe because it belonged to Tagai. But eventually they were so parched they couldn't wait any longer, so they drank. When Tagai returned he lost it, and killed twelve of his crew. Then he chucked them back up into the sky and now they're the Pleiades. They were meant to stay in the northern sky only they keep coming back. When they appear in the eastern sky, there 's usually thunder and lightning so Tagai slips below the western horizon. And that's how the islanders know when the rains are coming.'

‘That's cool,' I said. ‘Wouldn't it be great if
we
learned everything from stories? It would be so much more interesting and easier to remember. Dad had to drill me on navigation because it was so dry.'

We lapsed back into silence until Leon said, ‘Okay, now that Edie 's here, let's do our top ten deserted islands.'

Kaito groaned, but Leon persisted. ‘You're stuck on an island, Edie, and you're only allowed to bring ten things. What are they?'

‘Okay then. Hmmm . . . A fishing line, my iPod, a telescope, a hairbrush, sarong, snorkel set, machete, bucket, a length of rope and, um, maybe a never-ending tin of organic cocoa. What about yours?'

‘Just one item,' Leon said. ‘Return ticket with Barrier Reef cruises.'

‘That's not fair. You never said anything about being allowed to bring a boat. Or that the island was on the reef.'

Leon smiled. ‘Life isn't fair. Besides, we 've suffered from being here for much longer than you. It sinks your standards.'

‘So why are
you
here then?' I demanded.

‘Experience,' Kaito said. ‘Getting up close and personal with molluscs. And to learn more about other pearl farming techniques.'