Thirteen Pearls (14 page)

Edie.

Dear Dad,
(I hesitated, thinking carefully about what to say – if I gave Mum too much ammo against Uncle Red, she 'd insist I come home. The one time they'd called, I could only speak to them for a minute; Aran had just broken a bottle and shards of glass had scattered on the floor and up onto the kitchen benches. And I was paranoid about broken glass because Dad's cousin had died from swallowing glass from a broken pickle jar when he'd coughed during the operation to extract it.)

Things are great up here. How is
Ulysses
? Have you had a chance to put sealant on the ply I left under the house? How's Mum's research on the 1837 pay cuts for mill workers going? Love,

Edie.

btw: do you have any info on parenting and anger-management?

I left the computer reluctantly; it had felt like a lifeline to the real world, to my world.

Outside the bakery, Aran was running up and down the beach, generally going crazy from a doughnut overdose.

Kaito glanced up from beneath a palm and scanned my face, perhaps wondering about my mystery hour. ‘The pump hasn't come in yet,' he said.

‘So what do we do now?' I asked.

Kaito shrugged. ‘May as well go shopping.'

The air conditioning inside the supermarket was amazing, the most delicious sensation imaginable, putting me into a type of trance as I scanned the shelves. There wasn't a vast selection, but for me it felt as if I'd been let loose at the top of the Faraway Tree in the Land of Goodies. This time, however, there would be no Sippahs or M&Ms or other junk. We filled two trolleys, with Aran firmly mounted on top of a box of tins, and then Kaito packed the shopping for a later pick-up.

Muggy air drooled over us as we left the icy pleasure of the store with a cruel sliding shut of the electronic doors. Beneath a massive mango tree, teeming with green and orange fruit, a man lounged on a bench. His familiar brown face crinkled into a wreath of pleased wrinkles.

‘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.

W
ITH 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 raised 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.