Thirteen Pearls

by Melaina Faranda

  THIRTEEN

  PEARLS

  The Girlfriend Fiction Series

  1 My Life and Other Catastrophes Rowena Mohr

  2 The Indigo Girls Penni Russon

  3 She’s with the Band Georgia Clark

  4 Always Mackenzie Kate Constable

  5 The (not quite) Perfect Boyfriend Lili Wilkinson

  6 Step Up and Dance Thalia Kalkipsakis

  7 The Sweet Life Rebecca Lim

  8 Cassie Barry Jonsberg

  9 Bookmark Days Scot Gardner

  10 Winter of Grace Kate Constable

  11 Something More Mo Johnson

  12 Big Sky Melaina Faranda

  13 Little Bird Penni Russon

  14 What Supergirl Did Next Thalia Kalkipsakis

  15 Fifteen Love R. M. Corbet

  16 A Letter from Luisa Rowena Mohr

  17 Dear Swoosie Kate Constable & Penni Russon

  18 Thirteen Pearls Melaina Faranda

  www.allenandunwin.com/girlfriendfiction

  THIRTEEN

  PEARLS

  MELAINA FARANDA

  First published in 2010

  Copyright © Melaina Faranda, 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Australia

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from

  the National Library of Australia

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  Cover design by Tabitha King and Bruno Herfst

  Text design by Bruno Herfst

  Set in 12.5/15 pt Fournier by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  www.allenandunwin.com/girlfriendfiction

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  LET ME BEGIN BY SAYING that it started with a dream.

  My dream. I wanted to sail around the world like that guy, Jesse Martin, on the Lionheart. Or that girl, Jessica Watson, on Ella’s Pink Lady. Solo. Did it matter that my name wasn’t remotely Jess-ish and that before I’d started building my boat, I couldn’t tell a clew from a luff? Or that I’d never been fishing in my life? In my dream I planned to live on sachets of lemon pepper tuna and tins of organic cocoa. I’d sail around the South Pacific, berthing in blue lagoons, swimming with dolphins, trading packets of lemon pepper tuna for coconuts and paw paws. My pale skin would somehow become magically bronzed and my dark hair would turn straw gold beneath the red-hot kiss of ozone-free sunshine.

  What would I do at night?

  That’s what Tash wanted to know. That’s all she ever wanted to know. Would I smuggle a cute stowaway aboard? A smooth, muscled-up islander, the colour of steaming organic drinking chocolate, and with a sharp white smile to dash my heart against?

  I’d be listening to my iPod, composing guitar tunes from the only four chords I knew – G, C, D and E minor (Bob Dylan eat your heart out) –, be keeping an enthralling, witty log book (with a view to eventual publication) and reading. Get that – Tash? Reading. R-E-A-D-I-N-G. You should try it sometime . . .

  This was muttered over the multiple hum of sewing machines and annoying reverb from Amber’s MP3. Mrs Templeton looked up and frowned over her Dame Edna reading glasses. A reindeer badge drooped mournfully from her blouse: shapeless, crush-free poly-cotton, ugly plastic buttons (it wasn’t a shirt or top – it was definitely a blouse). Her face was grey-green under the flicker of the faulty strip light.

  I tugged a section of nylon through the sewing machine and heard the needle snap.

  Mrs Templeton heard it too. She put down the textbook and sighed. ‘Edie. How many needles does that make it now?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘And what is so difficult about lifting the foot on the machine?’

  ‘It’s the nylon ribbing,’ I complained. ‘It’s so thick.’

  Mrs Templeton rolled her eyes. Her green eye shadow looked like smears of Incredible Hulk paint and did nothing for her general pallor. ‘I did warn you it would be difficult,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘I think that’s enough sewing for you today, Edie. You can do some theory instead. Copy all of pages 63 and 64 from Industrial & Non-Apparel Textiles.’

  I ripped the plug out of the wall and stomped over to the bookshelves. When I had first approached Mrs Templeton with my idea for sewing a safety harness to hang from a line on a small yacht, she ’d said that it was a ‘commendably ambitious and innovative project’. She ’d even commented on it to Ms Dutton, who’d come in to hunt down a missing stash of pinking shears.

  Well that had all changed now. I wondered if I should have played it safe – stuck to a piece of clothing like, say, a life jacket. Ha ha.

  ‘You still cut that Mr Hubbabubba fired you?’ Tash said, not looking up from neatly running a seam along shiny black satin.

  ‘Mr Halabi,’ I corrected.

  ‘Yeah, same thing.’

  One of the many things I liked about Tash was her blithe lack of political correctness. I had to be politically correct because my father was a left-wing social worker at the Department of Community Services and my mother was a post-doctoral candidate. Which meant that when Mr Halabi had fired me, my parents had gone out of their way to justify his actions: it was because of the economic downturn; it was the wet season and there were fewer tourists; his poor wife was practically having a mental breakdown with her sixth child on the way (Dad breached confidentiality to mention that one); the whole retail sector of Cairns, especially eateries and restaurants, was doing it tough . . .

  Neither of them wanted to hear how unfair Mr Halabi was being by firing me and not Kevin! It was Kevin who’d bailed me up in the coolroom over a Styrofoam box of iceberg lettuces and grabbed me, wet dog’s breath hot on my neck as he whispered that he wanted to look at my ‘treasure chest’.

  Eew.

  I’d crowned him with a glass bottle of tahini yogurt.

  My satisfaction at seeing tahini yogurt dripping down Kevin’s dandruff-flecked mullet was swiftly demolished by being sent packing, with no pay, for the three shifts I’d already worked because Kevin had been there for four months and he was strong enough to lug the rotisserie meat around.

  The incident, and subsequent firing, had left a great, glaring gap in my savings plan. For three years I had scrimped and saved to buy materials to build my boat.

  Tash couldn’t stand it (she was always mercy-lending me clothes so I didn’t look so povo and so she didn’t look bad by association).

  Happily I knew she ’d never lend me the X-rated corset she was whipping up now. Tash was sewing in a zillion lace holes and bone tunnels to impress her boyfriend on Christmas day. Jason was twenty and worke
d at a car-parts dealership and had already saved enough to buy her a sapphire ring to match her eyes. The ring was no surprise because Tash told anyone who’d listen. But there was one thing she only told me – her Christmas present to Jason would be . . . herself.

  It wasn’t Jason’s fault that he had a rash of pimples starting from his temples and peppering all the way down to the corners of his lips; two red gashes marking him out from a distance as an unlikely Indian brave. Frankly, the thought of their Christmas day together made me queasy.

  I watched Tash now – never the most patient of souls – painstakingly thread a bone into the corset, then double-stitch the end. It was weirdly Freudian. I wondered if, with every flexible piece of plastic boning she poked in – Tash was imagining what it was going to be like.

  I’d known Tash since kindy. She ’d pulled my long brown ponytail. I’d stamped on her foot. She ’d grabbed my faded purple koala – Yaya – and I’d pinched her hard. She ’d scratched my arm and the scratches had infected. I still had faint silvery scars. She ’d had a packet of mixed Tiny Teddys, plain and choc-flavoured, for morning tea. I’d had a pear and a homemade muesli slice. We ’d swapped. And been best friends ever since.

  It was amazing how different we ’d turned out to be. In high school, Tash had become numero uno hot girl – big blue eyes, waterfall of shimmering blonde hair and a gravity-defying Barbie doll figure that made guys turn in the street. It would be boring to recite her list of conquests in Cairns. So why she ’d chosen Jason to ‘bestow her goddess self on’ was a mystery.

  By contrast, I was thin and pale with wild, tangling dark hair, and had far more modest successes. That’s if you counted a school Formal pash with Darren Monk and a fleeting hook-up with Bradley Everest, not to mention Kevin groping me with his garlicky fingers. Earlier this year, Alex West had trailed after me in school until I’d finally given in just before Easter holidays. We’d gone out twice. Tash had loaned me her hair straightener and eyeliner. For a split second, while I’d been outlining my eyes big and wide, I flirted with the possibility of flaunting my inner goddess in the way Tash did. Cairns offered plenty of opportunities in the tourist season. Scandinavian gods wandering along the Esplanade, blue-eyed Irish guys hanging around the backpackers bars, Japanese divers . . .

  And with these thoughts, Alex West had suddenly seemed very young and unformed. And he had a mole on the side of his nose. I’d been so ashamed of myself for being so superficial that all through dinner with him I’d made a genuine attempt to divine the depths of his soul. We went to Buckin’ Mex and I listened to him blather on about his air force cadetship (yawn) over burritos. Boys, men . . . I wasn’t ready. Seemed easier to avoid the whole issue and sail around the world by myself.

  ‘What do you think?’ Tash asked. She held up a scrap of red lace.

  ‘Slutty,’ I said, doodling a design for a wind vane onto the textbook margin.

  Tash grinned. ‘Perfect!’

  Tash’s honey-gold skin still looked beautiful in the horrible flickering light. Her limbs were perfectly proportioned. Her eyes were kitten-cute and she had cheekbones like cut glass. I sighed, ‘But why . . . Jason?’

  Tash erupted into that wonderful, wicked throaty laugh: a laugh that always made male teachers, even our doddery old librarian, stammer and blush.

  ‘Practice,’ Tash said lightly. ‘Practice.’ She pointed an impeccable passion-pink fingernail at my misshapen creation, now lying in a discarded heap on the floor. ‘Safety harness or chastity belt?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Here comes my favourite kid.’

  ‘Your only kid,’ I retorted, rounding the back of our tumbledown Queenslander past a riot of purple bougainvillea that twisted through palm trees still dripping from the afternoon’s monsoonal shower. A Ulysses butterfly’s iridescent blue wings fluttered from sight.

  As ever, my heart thumped; my own Ulysses already had its tarp pulled aside and puddles had collected in the crumpled folds. White paintwork glistened with rain.

  ‘Come here my little darling! We ’ve missed you so.’ Dad, in his patched paisley shirt and stovepipe jeans, beard flecked with raindrops, opened his arms wide.

  I dipped my head to avoid copping scratchy beard and Indian-beady breath. Dad used to play with his facial hair a lot – sharp sideburns, a tuft beneath his bottom lip, mutton chop whiskers. Then he gave up and settled for a full, bushy, nicotine-stained beard. I hated it.

  ‘You’ll get lung cancer and slide towards a tortured death,’ I said, grinding the still-glowing stub into the sodden grass. ‘And I’ll be too busy sailing around the world to look after you.’

  Dad shrugged. ‘Stress relief. Would you prefer I die of high blood pressure or emphysema?’

  ‘Gee,’ I said, fist under chin in classic thinker pose. ‘Tricky decision.’

  ‘Exactly. So I’m going to do the one that gives me most pleasure. Now,’ he withdrew his tattered accounts notebook, ‘you’re $367 in hock to me, kiddo. Had to get more marine ply.’

  Damn.

  ‘Pity it didn’t work out at the kebab shop. Looks like you might have to get another holiday job.’

  ‘You’re joking, right?’

  ‘Nope. You owe me.’

  ‘I mean about the kebab shop. Mr Halabi. The man fired me when it should have been that revolting, tabouli-brained creep.’

  ‘Edie, you knocked the guy out. Poor lad will have a scar and a lifelong phobia about iceberg lettuces.’

  Although I glowered, I was pleased Dad had actually listened to my foaming story of outrage.

  ‘If you’re serious about sailing this baby around the world by yourself,’ he continued, ‘you’re going to have to toughen up.’

  ‘Bit of moral support might be nice.’

  ‘Sweetie pie, it’s going to come down to you and the voices in your head. That’s who you’ll be sailing the high seas with. You need to start practising now.’

  ‘Right now the voice in my head is saying, “Where the hell am I going to get the rest of the money to finish my boat?”’

  ‘I believe there may be a toilet cleaning position coming up at the uni,’ Mum sang down from the verandah. She appeared above the spiky vines, wild-eyed and tangle-haired, like a princess waking from a hundred-year sleep. As she emptied Polly’s birdcage, a snow of bird crap and seed shook down over us.

  I scratched my head and squinted up at her. ‘Sorry, did I mention the words “moral support”?’

  ‘Good physical work, toilet cleaning,’ Dad said. ‘Strengthens your biceps. Good for rope work.’

  This was how it was at my house: we all acted out defined roles – with the most points going to the one with the wittiest repartee or best deadpan banter.

  I moaned. ‘So how much more money will I need?’ The Ulysses’ shell was complete. We’d even already bought her an auxiliary motor from eBay. But what no one had told me when I’d embarked on this crazy adventure three years ago at the tender age of fourteen was that when you start a building project you need to take the estimated cost, double it and add half again!

  What I had learned, however, repeatedly, was that owning a boat was like pouring money down a sinkhole. In which case, does the money swirl clockwise in the southern hemisphere?

  Apart from Tash, the hardware store had become my worst best friend. I could often be found wandering the barn-like building, aisle after aisle, in an anxious daze. Dad sometimes came with me to make sure I found my way out of the store after literally hours spent gazing at all the things I couldn’t afford.

  ‘About four grand, I’d say.’

  I spun around, my breath catching.

  Dad was staring up at the boat, his eyes narrowed, deep in mental calculation.

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nope. Maybe give or take a few hundred bucks.’

  ‘Where am I going to find that?’ I wailed.

  Dad shrugged. ‘I’d like to help you out, Edie, but what with your mother sti
ll farting around with her thesis . . . ’ Another sprinkling of bird droppings drifted down from the verandah. Mum re-appeared over the railing. ‘I heard that.’

  ‘Good,’ Dad said. ‘Maybe you should be the one getting the loo cleaning job.’

  Mum’s kinky red hair flamed out from the pale blur of her face. The thorny bougainvillea vines framing her were so out of control they made her look more than ever like a princess in a tower from a fairytale. A deranged princess. ‘Your financial support of my work is contributing to the world’s understanding of eighteenth-century female spinning and weaving factory workers.’

  ‘Right,’ Dad said, smacking the side of his head. ‘Couldn’t deprive the world of that. Vital stuff. Consider my salary a grant.’

  I glared at them both. Dad would never force her to get a job while she was obsessing about the plight of eighteenth-century female textile industry workers and that meant he would never be able to afford to loan me four thousand dollars on his crappy public servant salary. He ’d once even calculated that, in terms of government benefits, we ’d be doing better financially if he pushed Mum down the stairs and became her full-time carer.

  Impasse again. I thought of Mr Halabi so unfairly firing me and took great satisfaction in imagining his big bum side-by-side with Kevin’s skinny butt slowly turning pink on the meat rotisserie.

  Tomorrow, first thing, I’d go shop-knocking. Even if I did have to clean toilets or mop up spew and bilge water out of the tourist dive boats, I’d do it.

  Later that night, as I tossed and turned on humidity-sticky sheets, I remembered something my kooky grandmother on the Sunshine Coast had once said. My Mum’s mum. Nanna (she had wanted me to call her Wendy because she was too young to be a grandmother, but Mum had insisted I call her Nanna to annoy her) had once pulled me into a surprise embrace, an incense-burning haze of uncharacteristic grandmotherly goodwill and, while I’d struggled to breathe through the fumes, she ’d told me that if I really wanted something, it was all very well looking on the outside, but what I should always do first was look inside. If I found it in my heart, then the object of my desire would always find me (even if I spent all week wrapped up in a doona refusing to get out of bed).