Thirteen Pearls (21 page)

‘How long have you been here?'

‘Let's put it this way, this isn't my first time. I've been all around the Top End. Did some jackarooing on Cape York peninsula, worked on a croc farm out of Darwin, got a job laying explosives in the mine at the Pilbara.'

‘I take it you like safe, steady jobs then. What's next – accountancy?'

Leon laughed. ‘I like the adrenaline rush. That's what I hated about school. It was always, “Don't lean back in your chair. Don't talk. Don't laugh. Don't, whatever you do, enjoy yourself or have fun.” All I wanted was to get out of there and be free. We were reading all this stuff in English and writing essays and crap, and none of us were actually experiencing it.'

I nodded. He was preaching to the converted. When we'd had our careers choices day to choose our senior subjects, half my year had been in a total fluster about making sure they got into the right streams so that they could be a doctor, teacher, defence force personnel officer, whatever . . . I'd wanted to do manual arts, textiles and design, and photography. When I'd told the careers advisor that I didn't actually plan on getting a job – only sponsorship so I could sail solo around the world – he 'd shaken his head and made annoying clicking noises with his tongue. He 'd tried to tell me that it was great to have a dream, but it was important to be realistic and plan towards having a sensible job in the meanwhile. Maybe I should consider doing a Bachelor of Education?

I'd wavered for precisely a nanosecond. But actually it was Dad who'd been the most deadset against me being sensible. He'd accepted a sensible job as a stopgap before embarking on his dream of having a private counselling practice. His dream never eventuated because he was sucked into the promise of a big fat super payout. Dad reckoned he was too old and tired now to strike out on his own, and anyway, he 'd pointed out, Mum had sapped the lifeblood out of him with her never-ending PhD which would be unlikely to ever secure
her
a job.

I wondered if it were possible to make a decent career as a dive instructor . . . ‘Do we actually need the wetsuits?'

Leon shook his head. ‘Nah, the water's twenty-nine degrees. Just thought you might be scared of stingers.'

‘But there aren't any here, right?'

‘Hardly any,' he agreed. ‘Much bigger problem down Cairns way.'

‘In that case . . . ' I thought about Kaito's great grandmother. He'd told me that she wore only a loincloth and a net around her waist with a knife tucked into it. Sometimes she 'd worn a nose peg. But for a long time it had been illegal for the ama to wear wetsuits. Sometimes Kaito's great grandmother had worked in freezing waters that could kill a
man
in twenty minutes. ‘I think I might free-dive,' I said, stretching the flippers over my feet.

‘Okay,' Leon agreed. ‘You want me to stay up here to spot you?'

‘Nah. I'll be fine.' I balanced on the edge of the tinny and dropped straight in. The water was warm bliss. I floated on my back for a minute and then flipped over, spat in my mask and rinsed it with seawater before adjusting it to fit snugly over my eyes and nose.

Ages ago, Tash and I had watched
Into the Blue
. It was made before we were born, in the 1980s, and nothing much happened, but I'd loved it. It was about this guy who wanted to free-dive, but one of the things he loved about it was the possibility of never coming back. Every time he dived deeper and deeper, there was always a chance he 'd fall unconscious. But before fainting there was an addictive euphoria. That was what drowning was meant to be like – euphoric.

Dad had nearly drowned in a river once when he and his mates were swinging off an old rope above raging floodwaters. When it had been Dad's turn, he'd lost his grip on the rope and fallen in. He reckoned that just before he'd blacked out, he'd seen his whole life flash before his eyes and it was the most peaceful he'd ever felt. Then one of his mates managed to snag his shirt with a stick and reel him in.

Below, the seabed was a dark blue shadow. I flipped down, enjoying the sensations of undulating like a fish as I approached a bommie. In the sand beneath it, strewn with dead coral, was a glimpse of electric blue – a giant starfish.

I stayed down for as long as my lungs could handle it and then shot up towards where a pair of flippers gently trod the pale water.

I erupted to the surface in a mantle of bubbles and sucked in air.

‘How was it?'

‘Great.' I spluttered as a wavelet slapped into my face, making me swallow a mouthful of saltwater.

Leon laughed. ‘Where 's the tucker?'

I shook my head, still coughing out the water. ‘Unless you wanted a starfish for tea.'

‘Looks like I'm going to have to go get it myself.' He executed a neat dive and vanished.

I took a deep breath and plunged below to follow. We were halfway down when Leon pointed. A giant hawksbill turtle glided ahead of us, its flippers like stubby green wings lazily flapping through blue space.

Leon shot forward with a few powerful thrusts and caught the back of the turtle 's shell. It turned its head and gazed at him with wise before-the-beginning-of-time eyes. Leon held on and hitched a ride before breaking off and kicking up to the surface.

When I met him back up there, I saw that the sadness he'd been holding onto about the break-up with Kristiana had vanished from his clear, green-gold eyes. ‘That was amazing!' he said. ‘I reckon I could have hitched a ride all the way to Papua.'

I nodded, understanding his exhilaration. It's how I'd felt when I'd seen the cassowary and it hadn't ripped my guts out but instead watched me, decided I wasn't a threat and turned back into the forest.

‘Some time I'm going to abandon the peopled world,' Leon said dreamily as he trod water. ‘I'm going to live with the animals. I always got told I had a knack. You know when I was a kid, if a dog or cat didn't come home their owners would get me to find it. Or a cow would get stuck in the river and I'd be able to coax it back out.'

‘You're a cow whisperer?'

‘Very funny. I like animals. They make a whole lot more sense to me than most people.'

‘I like animals too,' I said. ‘Especially eating them. Are you going to get us a Christmas feast or what?'

In just over two hours, Leon had found three crayfish, and five abalone, and I was thrilled to discover a little nest of oysters that I chipped off a rock with a knife.

Leon wouldn't let me open them straight away because he said it would spoil the meat. I grudgingly agreed and only stopped sulking when his cap fell in the sea.

On the way back to Thirteen Pearls, I sat on the back bench next to him, which made the tinny's bow stick further up in the air. It was like doing wheelies on a BMX. We chatted about laying explosives in the Pilbara, the time Tash and I ran away from home (Tash had no reason to go and I'd had to bribe her with twenty dollars) and Leon's life growing up on a cane farm: how his Italian mum, sick of living in a packing shed with four kids, had paid for their house by growing tomato crops while his Dad was busy going into debt for a sugar cane farm. Leon's full name was Leone Vittorio McFerran.

‘Is your Dad blond like you?' I asked.

Leon shook his head. ‘Black hair, black eyes. He looks way more Italian than Mum. She 's from Sicily, from Palermo, and reckons that heaps of the people there have blonde hair and green eyes.'

I told Leon how my mother was doomed to a lifetime obsession with the injustices the industrial revolution had perpetrated on the female textiles industry and how my dad had sold his soul for a government job and superannuation. And now he was trying to vicariously live his dreams through me. I felt a twinge of disloyalty, but it was what Dad often said about himself. I explained to Leon that it reminded me of Robin Lee Graham in
Dove.

‘Who's Robin Lee Graham?'

‘He sailed around the world by himself – with two cats – in the 1960s when he was only sixteen, and he met a girl, Patty, in the South Pacific and she got pregnant and he wanted to stay with her, but his dad pushed him to keep going. Robin Lee Graham really resented his father for it and after he finished the circumnavigation he and Patty sold the boat. And he was so over the whole sailing thing that they bought land in Montana and built a log cabin and lived with bears and moose instead. And he never wanted to sail again.' (I'd found that out when I'd googled
whatever happened to Robin
Lee Graham
– partly because he was completely hot when he was a teenager and I'd had a massive crush on him the whole time I was reading the book and was wishing I could be Patty, without the pregnancy.)

‘That's sad,' Leon said. ‘To have the thing you love get shoved in your face so much that you hate it.'

‘Yeah,' I agreed. ‘That's why Dad has tried to put strict parameters around his involvement. Basically, he 's helping me to build the
Ulysses
and because he 's good at writing grant applications he's helping me look for sponsorship. But the deal is if I get to somewhere like Fiji and just want to laze around a beach and eat coconuts then he won't hassle me.'

‘What about your mum?'

I shook my head. ‘Useless. Unless it comes to the stitch type used for sail-making.'

Leon grinned. ‘Sounds like your folks are very different from mine.'

I sighed. ‘It wasn't easy growing up as a doted-upon only child whose every dream was nurtured and indulged.'

Leon punched my shoulder lightly. ‘They sound like good people.'

‘They are,' I agreed. ‘I'm lucky. What do your parents think about you and all your gallivanting?'

Leon steered us around a tiny rocky outcrop, bringing us face-to-face with a vivid, flamingo-pink sunset. ‘Mum misses me. But as the oldest son I can do no wrong. She still makes my bed when I go home. Dad thinks I should be helping on the farm, but I can tell he 's proud of me too. Sometimes when we used to camp out on a pig-shooting trip he 'd tell me about the days before he met Mum and settled down. He 'd done this big road trip with an army mate. Met girls, caught monster fish. Saw the country. Really lived it up.'

‘Do you reckon we're going to be like that one day too? Middle-aged and talking about the glory days of our youth?'

‘Depends,' Leon said thoughtfully. ‘I always liked hanging out with my Nonno. He had this way of taking out a little knife and peeling an apple so that the skin would come off in a perfect snake. And then he 'd slice it into little boats, and we'd eat them one at a time and it would take us about half an hour just to share an apple. Nonno never stressed like my dad. All the things he 'd had to worry about had already happened – births, deaths, marriages, making a living – so he was just kicking back and enjoying it all.'

For a moment, I wished that I'd had grandparents too. I had one of course, but Nanna didn't count because she was rarely around when I was growing up. It always threw me when Tash said she couldn't hang out on the weekend because she was going to visit her Nan and Pop. One time I'd asked what she did over there and Tash was vague and said, ‘You know, homey stuff, baking and sewing and gardening.' I didn't know and this ‘stuff ' was so un-Tash-like I wasn't sure I'd heard right. But Tash loved it. Wouldn't even let a party get in the way of seeing them . . .

Whenever my mum spoke about Nanna it was with an exasperated sigh. As if to say:
What are we going to do with
her
? And Nanna had only been interested in me as an audience for her Swami Somethingorother philosophies.

The sky had turned the colour of the hibiscus flowers outside the shed on Thirteen Pearls and the sea lapped around us in shifting silvery-pink pools. Leon cut the engine so that we could drift without sound. I breathed in the soft, salty air and the fairytale swirl of colours and felt like there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be. And, I realised, as Leon gazed at the horizon with me, our legs lightly touching, there was no one else I'd want to be here with either.

T
HE NEXT DAY WE HAD AN EARLY CHRISTMAS
. The seafood would have gone off if we hadn't eaten it and it hardly mattered that it wasn't actually Christmas day – we were so cut off from the wider world that dates were meaningless, melting off the calendar, square by square.

I made Christmas bonbons with Aran. It hadn't been hard getting enough toilet paper rolls because Aran used practically half a roll every time I made him visit the composting loo.

We stuffed the little toys I'd bought from the newsagency into the toilet rolls – a bouncy rubber ball (like the ones you get from the two-dollar bubble machines at shopping centres), a four-leafed clover scratchy ticket, a fake skull-and-crossbones tattoo and a snot-green lizard that was meant to grow over twenty times its original size when you stuck it in water. We added folded up paper crowns, and scraps of paper with the cheesiest jokes I'd been able to find on the internet. Then we covered them in gold wrapping paper and tied each end with foil ribbon.