Pandora Jones: Deception

by Barry Jonsberg

  Pan sat next to Jen who stared ahead, occasionally glancing behind to check the wake and make small adjustments to the wheel to keep the boat straight.

  ‘You know the other disadvantage, Jen?’ said Pan.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We have no idea where we are. This could be the Pacific Ocean for all we know.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, although I wasn’t great at geography, I do know there are vast areas of the Pacific that are full of . . . nothing. We could sail for days, weeks and never see land.’

  ‘You’re a pessimist, Pandora.’

  ‘I don’t fancy dying of thirst out here, that’s all.’

  ‘Hey, don’t worry about it. A storm’s bound to get us first.’ Jen laughed. ‘Come on. If we don’t see anything in a couple of days, I’ll get on that radio, set off the flares. Someone’ll find us, even if it’s The School.’ She yawned, stretched and turned off the engine. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry and tired. Why don’t you see what you can rustle up for food and then we can grab a coupla hours’ sleep?’

  The thought of sleep was appealing. Pan had no idea how long they’d been awake, driven purely by adrenaline, but her mind and body craved rest. She yawned, too, and then went down to the cabin.

  The galley was tiny, but designed for efficiency. Pan opened one of the cupboards and found a variety of soups and tinned meats. In another cupboard there were two small pans and some plastic bowls and forks. She chose a couple of tins of soup and, after some searching, found a can-opener. The stove had only one ring. She had to stay crouched over since the cabin’s roof was low, but she managed to heat up the soup in a matter of minutes. Then she ladled it into two bowls and took them on deck. Jen was slumped, her back against the mast, her eyes half-closed. She opened them, however, when the smell of hot food hit her nostrils.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever smelt anything so good,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t know about the taste,’ Pan replied. ‘I didn’t dare check the use-by date.’

  ‘Who cares?’ said Jen, grabbing the bowl. ‘It could be covered in fungus as far as I’m concerned.’

  The girls ate quickly and then licked their bowls clean.

  They agreed they would take it in turns to nap. Pan volunteered to take the first watch. She propped herself up and stared at the ocean. Her eyes closed and she snapped them open a couple of times, then gave in to sleep. When she woke, darkness was falling.

  Chapter 20

  Pan went through a series of warm-up exercises. She’d slept in an awkward position and there was a sharp pain in her neck and along her right shoulder. The rest of her body wasn’t in much better shape. The climb, the flight, the swimming, the adrenaline had kept her body loose. But after a few hours’ sleep, her muscles had tightened and aches and pains were now clamouring for attention. Jen also moved gingerly as she got to her feet. She glanced over at Pan and joined her in the stretching exercises.

  ‘I feel like shit,’ she muttered.

  ‘I must look like shit,’ Pan replied.

  Jen chuckled. ‘Just as well there’s only me to impress, then,’ she said.

  ‘So what now?’ asked Pan, stifling a moan as she touched her toes. ‘Sail on through the night or wait till morning?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Jen. ‘There’s fuel for a coupla days, I reckon. I found a full spare can, but I haven’t a clue how fast this baby drinks, so don’t quote me on it. When it’s light, it’s probably an idea to see if we can figure out how to work the sail before our fuel runs out.’

  ‘Okay. But the question remains. Drive or drift?’

  ‘If we keep going,’ said Jen, ‘we may find land quickly. Or not. There’s a compass on board, but it doesn’t help when we’ve no idea where we are to start with. And it might not be such a great idea to hit land in the dark. I reckon we wait until light, get as much rest as we can.’

  ‘Inaction, Jen?’

  ‘A decision to do nothing is an act in itself.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘You’re right. So what do you think?’

  Pan went to the boat’s prow and untied her clothes from the wire. They were slightly damp from spray, and stiff with salt. She rolled her pants in an attempt to loosen the fabric.

  ‘I agree. We stay here,’ she said. She dropped the blanket to the deck and pulled her pants on. They felt scratchy against her skin and she noticed, even in the fading light, a large bruise on her left hip. She had no idea how it had got there, but it had been some time since she had worried about bruises. ‘I want to eat properly. A decent meal. I want to stuff myself, so I feel like throwing up.’ She found her boots inside the cabin where Jen had slung them after they’d hidden from the helicopter, but she left them off. When she tried to pull fingers through her hair, she found it was so matted and stiff with dried salt that she couldn’t do it.

  ‘Okay,’ said Jen, following Pan’s lead and dressing herself. ‘A huge meal it is. Maybe we can convince ourselves we’re on a fancy cruise. All we need is some dude with a six-pack and a bow tie to serve us drinks and we’d be set.’

  ‘You’d be welcome to him,’ said Pan. ‘Anyway, that’s more likely than one of your other suggestions. A good conversation? I don’t want to have to talk to myself.’

  ‘Oh, bitchy,’ said Jen. ‘Excellent. You know something, Pandora? A few weeks of this and we might start to like each other.’

  ‘Doubtful.’

  ‘True,’ said Jen. She smiled. ‘Fancy cooking up a storm, girlfriend?’

  A few hours later, the cloud cover dissolved and the soft scarf of the Milky Way draped itself across the night sky.

  The girls had found two tins of chilli con carne and a small packet of rice, so dinner hadn’t taken long to prepare. Though Pan’s memory of such things was becoming shaky, she knew the food was a pale imitation of a proper chilli, the kind she’d had in restaurants. But it tasted glorious. Afterwards they lay side by side on the deck and stared at the stars.

  ‘You know all that stuff about watching the sky and feeling small, Pandora?’ said Jen.

  ‘Yeah.’ Already Pan was feeling sleepy.

  ‘I never felt like that,’ said Jen. ‘I’d look up at the stars and think I was the centre, that it all revolved around me. I don’t mean that, like, in an arrogant way. Just . . . I don’t know, that I was important. Am important. Does that make sense?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘But out here, looking up at all that. Well . . . I see what they were going on about. I mean, how many stars are up there? Millions and millions.’

  ‘More like billions and billions. More than the human mind can understand.’

  ‘Yeah. And this sun of ours, it’s just one of those, right?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘So, we can’t be the only intelligent ones in the universe.’

  Pan rolled onto her side and looked at Jen, who kept her eyes fixed on the lights above.

  ‘I didn’t have you down as a philosopher, Jen,’ said Pan. ‘Soon, you’ll be talking about how we, as a race, are less than the tiniest microbe compared to the vastness of time, space and the teeming nature of life in the universe.’

  ‘Yeah, take the piss, Pandora, but . . . well, that’s it, I guess. I mean, The School says we’re stuffed. Humanity is basically gone. But does it matter? Maybe we’re just another failed species like all the others that’ve disappeared. Dinosaurs, for example. Move on. No one cares.’

  Pan let her talk. Jen had never talked about stuff like this.

  ‘So our world is just one world, turning around an unimportant star,’ Jen continued. ‘We might think we’re hot shit, but we’re not. We’re less than trivial. We’re not even close to trivial.’

  Pan said nothing for a while. She rolled onto her back again and watched a shooting star blaze a trail across the sky. It was followed by another and then another.

  ‘Birds,’ she said finally.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Birds. Th
e dinosaurs didn’t die out. That’s where the birds came from. Life changes. It doesn’t die out. People change, perhaps more than any other species. We’ve got taller, we live longer. And that’s just in the last hundred years or so. Who knows what we might grow into, given time? Maybe in another hundred years we’ll be out there, spreading across the universe. Maybe it’s what we were destined to do.’

  ‘Jeez, Pandora.’ Jen got to her feet, put her hands on her hips and stretched backwards. ‘And here was me thinking I was full of shit. You want some water?’

  ‘Please.’

  Jen returned with a couple of mugs and sat cross-legged next to Pan.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m done with philosophising. Probably for life. Let’s talk about something else. Like you, Pandora.’

  Pan laughed. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Hey, I know squat about you, apart from you’re from Melbourne. I’m guessing Grade A student and if you slipped to a B, then, shit, the world fell in. Am I close?’

  ‘Not even.’ Pan thought. She hadn’t been aware of it, but the past was something she had deliberately closed off. Maybe all the students in The School did that, as a means of self-protection. They had to live in the here and now, because there was no alternative. Now that the question was asked, she wished it hadn’t been. She remembered herself in better times. Her friends. The day-to-day stuff. Assignments. Her Facebook page. Danny and Mum. A lump came to her throat. A small part of her wondered at it. She’d always thought a lump in the throat was a figure of speech, not a physical sensation. But her throat was constricted and she had difficulty drawing breath. Mum and Danny. The little things. The way her mum twisted her mouth when she was annoyed, her habit of whistling tunelessly while she did housework. Danny and his hair that would never stay in place, no matter what her mum did to it. The way he said ‘Oh, please’ all the time, the syllables drawn out melodramatically. I do not want to think about these things, she thought. I’m not sure I can bear it.

  ‘You okay, Pandora?’

  Pan shook her head to clear it. Then she realised that the gesture could be interpreted a different way.

  ‘Yeah. I’m fine. It’s just . . . It’s hard to think about the person I was. I’m not sure I know her anymore.’

  ‘Were you happy back then? Back in the real world?’

  Pan considered the question. Another shooting star blazed across the sky and left a trail of light behind it.

  ‘I guess so. I just never realised it, I suppose.’ She shrugged. ‘There was nothing special about me, Jen. Just a schoolkid, thinking I knew a lot, but actually knowing nothing at all.’

  ‘So The School’s done you some good, then?’

  Pan turned to her friend. She wasn’t sure if surprise showed on her face but, inwardly, she felt a surge of emotion.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It has. It’s taught me I’m okay.’

  ‘Okay?’

  ‘When everything else is stripped away, I’m all right. I like myself and I’m not sure that I did in the past. Okay, I know many students at The School think I’m weird, maybe mad. But I don’t care what they think. For the first time in my life, I reckon I’m comfortable with who I am.’

  Jen laughed. ‘You’re starting to sound like a self-help book, Pandora. Be careful.’ She drained her mug and lay down on her back again.

  ‘All right, Jen,’ said Pan. ‘Your turn for show and tell. Give it up. Tell me about your past.’

  ‘Hey, you know the important stuff. Never knew my father. Never really knew my mother, though she hung around like a bad smell. Petty crime, juvie. Just a life, no biggie.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Pan, ‘but that’s what happened to you. I mean you as a person. When you look inside yourself, who do you see?’

  ‘God, Pandora, what do you want to be when you grow up, an agony aunt? Give it a rest. When I look “inside myself” . . .’ – out of the corner of her eyes Pan caught Jen’s wiggling fingers, tracing invisible speech marks – ‘. . . I see someone getting by. Nothing special, just another life.’

  ‘That’s depressing.’

  ‘That’s real.’

  ‘What about love?’

  Jen groaned. ‘Jeez, what about it, Pandora?’

  ‘Why don’t you call me Pan?’

  ‘Because I like to call you Pandora. It is your name.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever loved someone?’

  ‘I’m tired. I want to go to sleep.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  But for the longest time, Pan thought she wouldn’t. All she heard was Jen’s soft breathing competing with the murmur of the sea. After a couple of minutes she thought Jen had fallen asleep.

  ‘There was someone once,’ said Jen. ‘But it didn’t work out.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘I met her in juvie,’ said Jen. ‘Then she was released and I stayed inside. When I got out she’d gone. Tried to find her, but couldn’t. Too bad, so sad. Never mind.’

  Pan said nothing for a minute.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said finally.

  Pan turned on her side and watched Jen’s profile. For a moment she thought her friend was crying, but then realised it was laughter. Helpless laughter. Jen wiped tears from the corners of her eyes.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ said Pan.

  ‘You.’ Jen dissolved into another gale of laughter. When she spoke again, her speech was disjointed as she tried to get the words out. ‘Pandora Jones, with the hot-shit intuition, and she couldn’t figure out I’m gay.’ She choked and wiped once more at the tears running down her face. ‘I can find things! Well, you hadn’t found that and it was staring you in the face. Gaydar rating: zero, Pandora.’

  Pan smiled. ‘I didn’t think about it.’

  Jen’s laughter increased. ‘And now you’re thinking, Oh my God, she saw me naked. Back at The School. Even today on this boat. I had no idea! That cracks me up. But don’t worry. You’re not my type.’

  ‘I’m not worried.’

  ‘No, course not. You’re a middle-class Melbourne schoolgirl. You’ve probably given oral presentations on the evils of homophobia.’

  ‘Actually, I did once.’

  Jen roared with laughter. She sat up and held her stomach with both hands. Pan laughed too. When Jen finally got control, she turned to look at her friend.

  ‘What mark did you get? For the presentation?’

  ‘An A. I’m pretty sure it was an A.’

  ‘Naturally. A teacher couldn’t give a presentation on homophobia a B. What kinda message would that send to your students?’

  Pan frowned.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘It was a good presentation, thank you very much.’

  ‘Pity you didn’t know me back then. I could’ve been your token lesbo friend. Your mates would’ve been so jealous.’

  They lay together for another five minutes without speaking, lost in their own thoughts and memories. When Jen broke the silence, her voice was thick with sleep.

  ‘If The School’s right and it’s down to us to repopulate the earth, then it’s kind of ironic that some of the survivors are gay, don’t you think?’

  ‘Being gay doesn’t mean you can’t have kids,’ said Pan. She too could feel her mind drifting lazily, and her eyes were beginning to close.

  ‘Of course,’ said Jen. ‘I’m having shitloads of kids. Gays included, so that in a generation or two they can tell the straights they’re evil and can’t get married. I’d love that. Yeah. Eight or nine tackers at least.’

  ‘Jeez. Are you some kind of masochist?’

  ‘Maybe, if I knew what that word meant.’

  ‘Would you like me to give you an oral presentation on the subject?’

  But there was no reply, just the steady rhythm of Jen’s breathing. Pan listened to it for a while and then fell into her own deep sleep.

  Pan was woken by a sharp tug on her arm. She woke instantly and, before she was even aware of it, was on her feet.

  ‘What?’ she
mumbled, wiping at her eyes with a sleeve. Jen was standing by the side of the boat, staring out. ‘I think we’re in deep shit, Pandora,’ she said. ‘Look.’

  Chapter 21

  The night was clearing into day, but visibility was poor. For a moment, Pan didn’t understand what Jen was talking about. She wiped at her eyes again and peered into the gloom.

  It was the lightning that made everything click into place. One moment it was dark, the next the world became a photograph, frozen in a flash. For the briefest second there was a white gash on the fabric of the world and then it went out, leaving only a burning afterimage behind the eyes.

  ‘It’s heading our way,’ said Jen, but she didn’t move, as if waiting for the next flash, which happened only seconds later. This time the fork flickered off to their right, and it lasted long enough for them to see the sky and the heaving sea. Black clouds hung above them, roiling slowly and with a palpable sense of menace.

  Jen suddenly unfroze and rushed over to the engine. In a matter of seconds the boat rumbled to life and Jen steered them away from the approaching storm. Pan hurried to her side.

  ‘We’re going to try to outrun it?’ she asked.

  ‘Unless you’ve got any better ideas,’ said Jen.

  ‘Can we outrun it?’

  ‘You forget I have no experience of the sea. Hell, the only time I’ve been on a boat is when I got the Manly ferry, and to be honest I wasn’t paying attention. So I have no idea, Pandora. But I doubt it.’

  Pan scrambled to the back of the boat and watched the storm gather and chase. The wind had picked up and a fine spray of seawater stung her eyes. It took her a while to realise this was not good news. In her position, facing away from the direction they were travelling, she should have been protected from spray. The wind was blowing directly into her face. It would help them make better time. But it was also pushing the storm front towards them. Another bolt of lightning struck the surface of the sea, only a few hundred metres behind. Pan had never thought about lightning striking the sea. Did it boil the water where it struck? Didn’t lightning tend to strike anything that was elevated? Trees and towers. And what was the only thing that broke the monotonous level of their watery landscape? The twin masts of their boat. Was it possible to take down the masts?