Thirteen Pearls

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Thirteen Pearls Page 5

by Melaina Faranda


  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.’

  Leon snorted. ‘More like you’re teaching Red than the other way round.’ He gave a languid, big-cat stretch as he yawned. ‘I’m earning a ticket to go see my girl.’

  Lucky girl, I thought before I could censor it. It was almost impossible to remove my gaze from those beautiful biceps and that strong square jaw.

  Out loud, I said, ‘I’m beat. Got to hit the sack.’ I’d been here fewer than five hours and I was already flattening my vowels and talking like a ‘dinkum Aussie’. Mum would be appalled. I was starting to sound like Leon. Welcome to Far far North Queensland.

  Like a sleepwalker, I navigated my way back into the shed and crashed on my own bed. At some stage during the night, I woke for a second time. From outside came the soft rhythmic shushing of the sea. The heat inside was stifling and a mosquito buzzed around my face.

  From Aran’s bed came a whimper, then another, and he began to sob. Sighing, I reached down, bundled up his skinny body and hauled him up into my narrow bed. I tucked an arm around him and used my spare hand to wipe his forehead, just like Dad used to do with me when I was sick. Instantly, he stopped crying. He tucked his thumb into his mouth and nestled against me.

  I was surprised by how tender this made me feel. Perhaps I’d been wrong and he wasn’t the monster I’d imagined him to be only hours earlier. Maybe he was frightened about having someone new come into his life, especially with his mother so far away. I decided that I’d been wrong about the kid. Tomorrow we’d wake up, I’d forage around to make him a relatively healthy breakfast and then we ’d spend the day searching for shells and making cubbies in the mangroves and playing pirates and explorers.

  AN EARSPLITTING – COCK-A-DOODLE-DO reverberated inside my skull. (Roosters were meant to be a delightful nursery rhyme creature that welcomed the day beneath a big smiley-face sun, but to me the crowing was far more malevolent.) It was still practically dark, for heaven’s sake.

  Aran slept soundly through it, and the next siren blast.

  COCK-A-DOODLE-DO!

  I groaned and rolled over into a warm, smelly puddle. I patted it gingerly. Not exactly a puddle, more of a soaked patch reeking of ammonia.

  I instantly recalled Leon’s confiding whisper last night, ‘Aran wets the bed.’

  Fantastic. There were clumps of dried spaghetti in my hair, patches of mangrove mud on my legs, and now I smelled like one of the winos in Fogarty Park.

  I pulled a sarong around me, ripped back the curtain and stumbled into the kitchen to wash my hands, only to stop short from slamming straight into Kaito.

  For a moment I watched through bleary, sleep-deprived eyes as Kaito made tea. He was using real tea leaves and not just dangling a teabag like Tash’s mum did (my mum only drank coffee). Instead, Kaito swirled hot water from the kettle into a waiting cup to warm it; the only cup not crawling with unmentionable micro-flora and -fauna.

  He poured the tea with mesmerising precision with a series of small pauses, as he tilted back the battered aluminum teapot and then allowed the steaming liquid to flow freely into the cup again. When the ritual was complete, he offered me the cup.

  I shook my head and croaked, ‘Water.’

  Kaito searched about helplessly for a glass that wasn’t clouded with milky residue or covered in greasy finger marks.

  At this hour of the morning, I could never do niceties. ‘Where ’s the shower.’

  He pointed. ‘Out through that door, behind the bamboo screen. It’s not really a shower. More of a bucket situation.’

  My arms and legs goose-pimpled as I scooped ice-cream container after ice-cream container of water out of the plastic drum, sluicing off wee and mangrove mud and spaghetti. Finally, when I smelled and felt clean, I towel-dried my hair with the sarong before wrapping the damp rectangle of fabric around me, and returning to the shed.

  I was human again. But when I looked at the kitchen my heart sank. I had no idea how to tackle such foul detritus. I mentally attempted to clear some bench space on which to stack things to rinse and . . .

  ‘Who used up all the water?’ Uncle Red stomped into the shed, his face thunderous. ‘I’d just filled a whole drum.’

  I gulped. ‘Um, me. Sorry. Aran wet the bed.’

  Red stared.

  ‘My bed,’ I clarified. ‘Is there a water shortage on the island?’ I came from Cairns: water was never an issue – six months of the year it rained. How was I meant to know it would be a problem up here?

  ‘Yes,’ Red said coldly, ‘There is a water shortage on this island. Even though it’s the wet season, we’re in a rain shadow from the bigger islands. In the future, you’ll need to keep your water use to a minimum. We can’t afford to run out.’

  I fought hard to not collapse into a quaking schoolgirl. I could understand now why Mum hated him – he was a bully.

  And I wouldn’t be my mother’s daughter if I didn’t counter: ‘What about washing? I saw the heap of Aran’s wet sheets. They look as though they’ve been piled there for weeks.’

  At least Uncle Red had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘You’ll have to hand wash them. The machine uses too much water.’

  ‘And all this washing up?’

  It was weirdly pleasurable to see him on the back foot. But he wouldn’t meet my eyes. ‘Things got a bit crazy here after Lowanna had to go. She did all the female jobs. Obviously you’ll need to use water for that.’

  I could almost see my mother fainting and falling from our rickety verandah at this crude demarcation. Pink jobs and blue jobs. Dad would have shaken his head, wondering how two such different people could have come from the same family. My mother never washed up. She said it gave her eczema, but I’ve yet to see a rash on her lily-white hands. Basically she just resented the whole business. Said it was pointless – all the dishes clean and gleaming and then they got mucked up again the next day and the day after that.

  I pressed on. ‘Does Aran actually talk?’

  Uncle Red shifted his tree trunk legs (it was a wonder the concrete didn’t crack beneath them) and his eyes darted from one side of the shed to another, glancing anywhere but at me. ‘He and Lowanna used to talk in Thai.’

  ‘Y
eah, but does he speak any English?’

  Uncle Red’s gaze alighted on a spanner half-buried beneath a pile of rolled socks, old tobacco papers and a beer coaster. ‘There it is! Boys need it down at the plant.’ He strode over, grabbed it, and stumped out.

  I watched, mouth open, fascinated by this act of unapologetic subject-avoidance. If I’d tried that on with Mum and Dad they would have hunted me down and badgered me for an answer. Or I would have hunted them down – bursting into the bathroom while Dad was shaving his sideburns, or interrupting Mum mid-typing to get the answer to my question. And just imagine trying to do that in school!

  I took a deep breath. Four thousand dollars and the Ulysses would be completed. Well, complete enough for me to sail enough to get my sea legs at least.

  I ducked into our bedroom partition. Aran was still sleeping in the patch of wee – poor kid. I’d let him sleep and then wrangle him out later to the blue shower drum. I tugged on a singlet and shorts and for good measure grabbed my iPod too. Then I doubled back to run a brush through my hair and tie it in a ponytail so that strands wouldn’t flop in my face while I tackled THE NIGHTMARE BEYOND THE CURTAIN.

  There was no discernible mirror, which was good in terms of vanity, but unnerving too, with two disturbingly cute guys around and no way at all of knowing if there would be spaghetti in my hair. But it didn’t matter what I looked like because the boys were down at the plant.

  I surveyed the towers of stacked skanky plates and knives crusted with stuff that had stuck like cement, the festering little mould farms in the bottoms of bowls, something that smelled nauseatingly like off milk, and the piece de resistance – a drowned mouse in a frying pan partly filled with water that shimmered with oily globules.

  The greatest thing about music is that even the most dire situations can be rendered cool and manageable, if the right track accompanies it. When I was younger I could barely listen to music because it all sounded like white noise. Then something happened and music turned into lyrics with big, symphonic swells of emotion. Something I could get lost in. I’d found Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians’ Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars (Dad said she was big when he was a teenager) on iTunes, and as a bonus I could even make out her lyrics!

 

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