Pearls (37 page)

'I wish I wasn't a girl. I wish I was a boy.'

'It's nae place for a boy either.'

'Assan's a boy. He's not much older than me.'

'He's Malay. Besides, he can cook.'

'I can learn to cook.'

'Aye I wish you would.'

'Please let me come!'

Cameron stopped and looked down at her eager, pixie face. 'Elvie, you cannae come and that's it.' He swung the kit bag over his shoulder. 'I'll be back before you know it.'

'No, you won't, you'll be gone for months and months. You'll stay out till Christmas, I know you will.'

'Maybe this time I'll find my pearl.' He sighed and squatted down on his haunches. 'Come here, Elvie,' he said gently. He lifted her back on his shoulders and carried her as far as the foreshore camp.

She wished he was like the other pearlers, who stayed home in their offices and their pearling sheds, checking the lay and drinking gin at the Continental. But then she supposed he would not be her pa.

***

The Essex was parked above the foreshore. Kate Niland stood next to it, staring at the whaleboat waiting for him in the shallows, two Malays at the oars.

'Right up until today I was hoping you'd change your mind, Cam.' She looked at Elvie, watching them, with her schoolbag thrown over her shoulder. 'So she's back to boarding with the nuns. She must hate that.'

'Aye she does. But I've told her this is the last time.'

'What if something happens to you? What's will become of her, then?'

'Nothing's going to happen to me, lass. I've too much to live for now.'

'You're not God, Cameron McKenzie. You don't get to decide these things.'

He shuffled his feet, eager to be on his way. He hated drawn out goodbyes. 'Jamie's out with the fleet already, I hear.'

'He left yesterday.'

''He has Wes with him.'

'Did you organise that, Cam?'

'Might have done. Told Wes it was my last year and he might want to settle in with another employer. He'll make sure the boy comes to no harm.'

'Come back to me, Cam.'

He grinned at her. 'I always do, don't I?'

***

Elvie stood on the beach all morning, watching the
Roebuck
until it weighed anchor and sailed out past Entrance Point. She waved until the mast disappeared over the bright and blue horizon of the sea and then she sat down on the strand and cried.

Chapter 66

King Sound

Jamie sat at the rail of the
Rose
, opening shell with an old table knife with a twine-bound handle. It was an unpleasant job, any small seed pearl or baroque had to be bitten away from the oyster after he had cut the muscle from the shell.

They were on good shell in ten fathoms. Wes was sitting on the boom with the lifeline braced across his thighs, one of the Malay deckhands taking up the slack in the air hose. They were astern first with all sails furled and a stockless anchor, the chain hitched over one fluke, slowing the drift.

The days were endless. He had never expected the work to be so monotonous. He had brought his Malay and Japanese language books along so he could learn some of the crew's jibber, as Wes called it. But most of them talked too fast for him, and he after weeks he had still only picked up a few words. It was clear that Ramatzu and the number two diver hated him. He had heard talk that they were actually reservists in the Japanese Navy, some pearlers even called them 'Jap spies'. Spies or not, they were very brave men.

'Jap diver different from whitefeller,' he said. 'You try to dive like dem yellahs, you die fer sure.'

'What about Mister McKenzie?'

'Da skip different from most whitefeller too. But he doan die no mo. Got the sickness.'

Wes quoted McKenzie - 'da skip' - all the time. One of his favourite sayings of Cameron's was:
If you don't know how to do a job yourself, you'll never know if the other man is doing it right and doing it true.

He planned to spend ten day of every fortnight out with the fleet, then go back with the supply schooner and spend the rest of the time at the office and in the stores. That way he could keep an eye on every facet of the operation, according to McKenzie's credo. He checked all the diving gear himself and the shell was packed and weighed under his supervision in the Niland and Company sheds. When he was at sea, he opened all the shell; that measure had alone increased the take of pearl and baroque fivefold in the first few weeks. He hated was the office work, but he forced himself to learn how to read ledgers and balance sheets, even to work the adding machines in the office.

But the work was long and monotonous and the conditions at sea primitive. He could not understand why his father and McKenzie loved the business so much. He discovered his father now earned rather less in wages than a teacher in the local school. Perhaps if he had been around in the Roaring Days ...

***

They had just one diver today. Ramatzu had diver's sickness and was groaning and tossing in his bunk, though he wondered if Ramatzu's reluctance to dive was because of bends or their location. They were off Dead Man's Rocks, and some Japanese said it was considered an unlucky place. Years ago a diver had died here and some of them thought his ghost still patrolled the reef.

His number one diver, Suzuki, had gone down without protest at first light. He was bringing up good shell. Jamie opened another, throwing the oyster's slimy flesh into the water. A copper fish, bloated and fat on the easy pickings, golloped it down, before lazily re-attaching itself to the hull.

Suddenly Wes shouted a warning and began to haul on the lifeline. Jamie threw down his knife and ran to the port gunwale.

***

Suzuki was shaking by the time they got him onto the deck. He couldn't even speak until they had him out of the suit and sat down on the little stool by the mainmast, a lighted cigarette in his hand.

'No more dive,' he gasped. 'Bad luck too much down there. Bad spirit.'

'What is it?' Jamie asked him.

'Monster fish.'

'What sort of fish? A shark?'

'Not shark. More bigger than shark. Bad spirit fish. No more dive.'

'Did it attack you?'

'No more dive,' Suzuki said. 'Maybe dead man in fish. No more dive.'

Jamie couldn't get any sense out of him. He turned to Wes, leaning on the port rail. 'Damn! We're on good shell, too. Best patch we've had all season.'

'Mebbe, dat's da reason.'

'You mean it's so good down there he's going to leave it for Tanaka's boats?'

'Mebbe.' Wes shrugged. 'Mebbe not. When I sail wid da skip, he say he find a real big daddy grouper roun' here some place. We lose diver hyar, nearly lose da skip also. Bad place hyar, I reckon.' He touched the ju-ju at his neck.

Jamie shook his head. It wasn't like Wes to be so gloomy. 'All I know is it's the best patch we've found all season.'

Jamie beat the palm of his hand against the rail. Out on the horizon a fleet of six luggers were moving towards them, on a slow drift. What was he to do? Leave the shell for some other, less superstitious divers? Last night had showed him the truth of what Mackenzie had told him; if you wanted men to follow you, you had to get their respect. If the Japanese wouldn't go down, then he would get the shell himself.

'Get Ramatzu's suit,' he said.

'You ain't goin' down, boss?'

'The shell's there for the taking.'

'Mebbe so, but you be a try diver two year befo' you can take shell like Ramatzu and Suzuki hyar, and den only if you a Japan feller. Doan you be foolish now.'

'Who's master here?' Jamie said.

Wes's eyes flashed. Even the skip had never imposed his position on him; and now this pup of a boy thought he knew it all. 'Dis hyar's dangerous waters, young Jamie. Only two tings can happen. Mebbe you doan find shell or mebbe you die down dere.'

'Get the suit!'

Wes made the sign to ward off the evil eye and went below.

Chapter 67

Jamie tugged once on the lifeline to tell Wes he'd touched bottom and then adjusted his air valve to the greater pressure of the water, as Wes had shown him. Almost immediately he found himself walking forwards. The strong tide was like an invisible hand pushing him in the back.

He was breathing much too fast, too shallow, because of the cold and the fright. He had never imagined it like this. Air bubbles gurgled from the valve at the back of his helmet. The smell of engine oil sucked down his air hose made him nauseous.

He concentrated on trying to slow his breathing.

A huge sawfish, perhaps as much as half a ton, swam suddenly into his vision. Jamie froze. Its saw was longer than he was. Then it vanished into the green mist.

A small fish pinged against his helmet and darted away. A thick jelly-like mass of shark eggs, glued by silky thread to a long tangle of sea grass, drifted past on the current. His lifeline played out and the tide dragged him forward.

He heard another sound then, like the tolling of a bell.
Dead Man's Rocks.
Wes had told him the legend about the huge submarine boulder that rang like the clapper of a bell with the motion of tide and current. He had thought it was just another of their tall tales.

A dark cliff loomed ahead of him, tiny emeralds winking along the face. As he came closer the emeralds were transformed into the tiny eyes of rock lobsters.

Where was the shell? When Suzuki was down, he had been sending up a full bag every half hour. He could not see anything. He knew he could not come up empty-handed, that would be too humiliating.

He groped on through the gloom. He spotted, briefly, the luminous and doleful eyes of an octopus, deep in its lair.

The tide was getting stronger, he felt as if he was walking down a steep hill; it was getting harder to check his own movement. He felt a sharp tug on his lifeline and brought up sharply. He thought the signal came from Wes and stopped but the pressure on the line did not slacken.

He turned around.

Oh, dear God.

His lifeline and air hose had snagged around a coral niggerhead. He jerked on the lines to dislodge them but they were drawn tight as bowstrings on the tide. He tried walking back to the niggerhead but the current was too strong. It was like walking into the teeth of a gale.

He looked up at the copper green hull of the
Rose.
She was stopped also, held against the fast running tide by his own lifeline. How long could it hold?

Wes warned you, he thought. Why can't you ever listen? 'No,' Jamie shouted into the echoing vault of the copper helmet.
'No!
'

***

Wes felt the sudden tension on the line and knew what it meant. He started screaming orders to the crew. They had to turn the lugger about and beat back against the tide and they would have to do it fast.

'Up mainsail! Heave up jib! Up foresail!'

Chain rattled out of the stern and splashed into the water as the drag anchor went out. Wes tried to ease the strain on the lifeline, the muscles bunching in his giant's arms. But the tide was too strong for him. The line went slack in his hand and the
Rose
surged with the tide. Then the air hose parted. Wes grabbed a lead line, made the end fast to a watertight tin, and heaved it overboard.

It was a futile gesture, a bobbing headstone for another man's underwater grave. Jamie was alone now, in sixty feet of water, and in a few more minutes he would be dead.

'Jay-sus! Oh, Jay-sus ...' What was he going to tell the skip?

Chapter 68

Cameron had been fishing King Sound for almost a week. He dreaded the tides and currents and whirlpools of these dirty waters but it was it another bad season and desperation had driven him here.

He had spotted the solitary lugger an hour before, as he beat to windward. As he got closer he saw it was the
Rose
. He had intended to heave to, before he sent his divers down, to if find out if they were on shell. He was about half a mile away when he saw the black flag hoisted on the mainmast. They had lost a diver.

As they sailed alongside Wes hailed him from the deck. 'It's Jamie!' he shouted. 'He broke his lifeline!'

Jamie? What in the name of God was Jamie doing in the water?

He screamed at his crew to break out the diving dress. He remembered Mitsura, and the giant grouper tearing at his body inside the diving dress.