The White Pearl (12 page)

‘Maya, I’m so sorry.
Maaf
.’

The girl murmured something inaudible in Malay, but didn’t look up. Her hand curled tight round the polishing cloth she was
holding. They remained there like that, neither moving. Connie was aware of Harriet watching them, mystified, and of the rattle
of the fan like dead bones in a can.

‘Maya, I could do with your help this afternoon, if you’re free.’

At last. The black eyes flicked up to her face. Cautious.

‘I’ll pay you for your time,’ Connie added.

The small mouth curved up at its corners, but there was no trace of a smile in the eyes. ‘Yes. I help you.’

‘Thank you.’ Connie rested a hand on the girl’s shoulder and felt the heat of her skin under the thin white cotton.

Maya was on edge. She skulked two steps behind Constance Hadley as they walked into the dry-goods store on Marlborough Street.
Walked?
No, this white lady with the pale hair and the ivory skin didn’t walk. Maya watched every step, the way she took possession
of each scrap of ground her foot touched, as though it had been put there just for her. The air seemed to part for her like
a pair of damp curtains and close behind her again, shutting others out. So private. Maya narrowed her eyes. So secretive.

‘Wait here.’

Maya obeyed. She tucked herself against some shelves and tugged the pins from her hair, shaking it into a black veil around
her face. The last time she was in this store she’d been thrown out into the muddy gutter for pocketing a handful of rice.
She ducked behind a tower of canned fruit and stared at the illustration on the labels: peaches. What white-skinned fool would
eat pretend peaches when they could be had fresh in the market every day?

She watched the white lady. Studied her gestures. The way she held her back straight and her neck long. Her smile at the whiskery
man behind the counter. He was in a brown overall with buttons like black eyes down his front. The lady’s easy confidence.
It came to her as natur-ally as a fish to water. She was pointing to a sack of flour and a sack of rice.

‘Shall I arrange to have them delivered, Mrs Hadley?’

‘No, thank you, Mr Endicott. I’ll take them with me in the car. And these.’ She handed him a list.

The man’s cheeks swelled with pleasure as if he’d stuffed his peaches into them. ‘Certainly, Mrs Hadley. Would you care to
take a seat for a moment? A cup of tea, Mrs Hadley, while you wait? My boy could easily drive everything over in the van if
…’

But she dismissed it with a shake of her head. With a pleasant but firm smile she sent him scuttling to his shelves. He glanced
at Maya as he passed but barely saw her, his head was so full of dollar signs. He hustled together packets and cartons, stacked
up on the counter, puffing when he had to climb a ladder to reach for boxes of candles.

Maya couldn’t read words, but she could read pictures. Pictures of cows on the square cans, of pigs on the round ones. They
were tins of meat. Pictures of tea leaves, coffee beans and spoonfuls of sugar on the packets, and biscuits inside big colourful
boxes. She watched jars and bottles and matches being added to the pile, as well as a sack of dried beans and a large block
of salt. The white lady nodded, satisfied, whenever something more arrived.

What was she doing? Was this like the
veg patch
? Far more than she needed because she was too stupid to know better?

‘Maya, come here.’

Maya moved closer.

‘Choose one for yourself.’

Maya looked at her blankly. What did she mean?

‘I’m picking a green one for Teddy. They are his favourite,’ the lady continued with a light laugh.

She was holding a fat glass jar tucked under her arm and it was packed full of brightly coloured sticks. Maya stood motionless,
uncertain what to do.

The lady put her hand into the mouth of the jar and pulled out a green one, wrapped in a sort of shiny paper. ‘See?’ she said.
‘This one is peppermint. The others are different flavours. Which one would you like?’

She was smiling encouragement, waiting for a response. And suddenly Maya understood. This lady was expecting to exchange her
mother’s death for a coloured stick. It pained Maya’s heart not to spit on her pretty white feet in her pretty white shoes.

She thrust her fingers into the jar and yanked out a stick. It was a red one. ‘
Terimah kasih
. Thank you,
mem
,’ she muttered.

‘That’s a blackcurrant one.’

Maya peered at the stick. What was she meant to do with it? Push it down the lady’s throat?

‘It’s a stick of rock.’

Rock?

‘A kind of sweet,’ the
mem
’s words were gentle. ‘I think you’ll like it.’ She rattled the jar, startling Maya. ‘The yellow ones are banana, the orange
ones are peach, the striped one is watermelon and …’ she stopped, her eyes fixed on Maya’s face. ‘It’s nothing, Maya.
Just a sweet.’

Maya nodded. Then she hid behind her hair and slid her hand into the jar’s jaws once more, snatching out a striped one. ‘For
Razak.’

‘Of course.’

The man in the overall and the buttons planted himself in front of them and preened his whiskers like a brown mouse. ‘Is that
all, Mrs Hadley?’

Greedy, greedy, greedy.

‘Yes, thank you. Put it on my account, please.’

‘Is your car outside?’

‘Yes.’

‘Boy!’ he shouted.

A native youth appeared from a backroom holding a broom. He ignored Maya but smiled shyly at the
mem
.

‘Load up, boy,’ the whiskers ordered.

‘I carry rock,
mem
,’ Maya volunteered.

With the jar gripped like a baby under her arm, she followed the white lady out of the store.

Maya sat up front next to the
syce
in the car. He was Chinese, Ho Bah, a thin bony face with grey hair like a bird’s nest under his chauffeur’s cap. His dark
green uniform hung loose on him, as if he hoped one day to grow fatter. He didn’t speak to her. Didn’t look at her. She wiped
her dusty sandals noisily on the nice clean mat under her feet, but still he didn’t glance in her direction. Just a muscle
beside his eye tweaked with the effort of keeping his mouth shut.

The car was American. Big and gaudy, like all Americans. Shiny chrome handles and a long purposeful nose. But she knew its
secret. That
it killed people. However well it hid its claws, she could hear its tiger growl, just as her mother had heard it. Quietly
she dropped her hand between her seat and the door, and sank her nails into its fawn-coloured flank, raking its flesh, hurting
it.

She’d ridden in a car before, in the days when her mother used to sell her again and again. Sometimes white men’s cars, sometimes
black men’s cars. It made no difference to her. With their clothes off in the dark, all men are the same. All men want the
same. Some even did it to her in the car, some with their
syce
watching in the mirror. In a moment of panic she stared now at this silent Chinese driver, but no, she didn’t recognise him.
She was good with faces.

The car swung through the streets of Palur and she enjoyed seeing people turn to stare at the sleek black motor as it purred
past. But instead of taking the road north, up towards the Hadley plantation where Maya thought they were heading, she was
surprised when it left the broad avenues of brick buildings and threaded its way through narrow lanes towards the wharves.
She peered over her shoulder into the back of the car. The white
mem
was sitting on the rear seat surrounded by sacks and boxes, ticking off items on her list. Her thoughtful blue eyes glanced
out of the side window briefly and she paused, pen poised in the air. Maya checked what she was looking at. A ribbon of shifting
brown water was just visible behind the
godowns.
It was the river. Why were they heading down there? To the quays and the shanty town where she and Razak lived?

Abruptly it dawned on her. It was obvious that this
mem
, this white lady, this killer of her mother, was going to help Maya. By giving her all this. She pictured the mountains of
boxes of canned meat in the boot, the sacks of flour and rice in the back, the candles and the biscuits on the seat. She grinned,
she couldn’t help it. She and Razak would be set up for months. But she would have to get one of the local urchins to guard
it while they were out. She’d pay him with sweet sticks. Once word got round what was in their shack …

A bicycle rickshaw swerved in front of their path and wharf coolies carrying rattan baskets on their backs blocked the narrow
route that led to the railway track and the shanty town. She wanted to yell at them. To tell bony-face to blast his horn at
them. The wharf was seething with activity and she could see a lumbering merchant ship with red funnels, busy unloading its
cargo on hoists. Sweat and heat shimmered in the air,
heavy with the stink of the river. She grew impatient and leaned forward as if she could force the car to move faster. Just
then, a gap appeared on the left and she was about to urge the
syce
through it, but he slipped neatly down a side road to the right.

‘No!
Tak
!’ she breathed. ‘No!’

The
syce
looked at her for the first time, his eyes dark slits of dislike. ‘Quiet, gutter-trash,’ he muttered.

She swivelled around on the seat ‘
Mem
,’ she cried out, ‘where we go?’

The white lady lifted her eyes from the notes in her hand and gazed at Maya as though she’d forgotten she was there. ‘To our
boat, of course. To
The White Pearl
.’

‘Fuck!’

The teeth of the saw had slipped.

‘Fuck!’ Madoc swore again when he saw the blood flowing from his knuckles. It stained the timber and dripped onto the ground.

Instantly a shiny bootlace of black flies swarmed all over it. Out here in the jungle cuts didn’t heal, infection set in no
matter how fast you threw iodine over them. Madoc was making window frames for the new casino that he was building alongside
Morgan’s Bar, sawing lengths of timber on the open square of beaten earth that lay between the bar and the jetty. The smell
of sawdust spiced the air and reminded him of his father sawing logs in the backyard when he was a nipper. Beside him, Kitty
was wielding a strip of sandpaper, smoothing the edges of the wood when he had finished with them. As she straightened up
to look at the damage, a pool of sweat sat like a creamy saucer of milk in the hollow of her ample breasts.

‘Oh, Christ!’ she moaned. ‘Come here.’ She seized his wrist and pressed down hard with her fist on the jagged edges of his
flesh. ‘Inside.’

Kitty frogmarched him into their kitchen, leaving him dripping into the sink while she dug out antiseptic and bandage. By
the time she’d finished with him, his hand was clad in white gauze and his empty stomach burned from the quantity of brandy
she’d chucked down him.

‘Better?’ she asked, inspecting him, her hands perched on her broad hips.

‘Much.’

‘No more sawing today.’

‘I have to finish those windows before …’

‘No more sawing.’ She wasn’t smiling.

‘Fuck!’ he swore again.

She stepped close, so close he could smell the tang of her sweat. She patted his cheek and grinned. ‘Not now, tiger.’

He laughed and kissed her full on the lips. ‘Cook me some breakfast and then I’ll go into town instead.’

She pulled away and frowned at him. ‘What for?’

‘Business.’

She didn’t ask further, though her eyebrows lifted and he could feel her disapproval. She turned to the stove. ‘Eggs?’

‘Thanks.’

She was one of the few women he had come across who knew how to keep her mouth shut.

‘I’ll finish the sawing while you’re in town,’ she said cracking eggs into a bowl.

‘No need. I’ll be OK to carry on with it tomorrow.’

She shrugged one fleshy shoulder inside her loose tunic and he knew she’d do the sawing, whatever he said. As she threw a
frying pan on the stove, he came up behind her and kissed her neck. Her skin was the skin of a woman who has spent too long
in the tropics but he loved to feel it, as soft and pliant as the skin on a peach. Even after nearly twenty-five years of
marriage to this woman, he still wanted to touch her.

‘Anything you want in town?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Salt.’

Salt in the tropics was as essential as air. ‘I’ll bring some back.’

She turned to face him, a furrow creasing her brow. ‘Watch yourself, Madoc. In town.’

He nodded. That was enough.

Kitty would be fifty in December, six years older than he was. She may have pigeon-grey hair and wrinkles like lace around
her eyes; she may have lost two back teeth and have a wonky knee sometimes. But she had a will of iron. She’d patched up his
wounds and dragged him out of jail more than once. She’d drunk champagne from a golden goblet with him and she’d eaten bitter
tree bark when there was nothing else. Either way, she’d stuck with him.

He’d watch himself all right. He still had a casino to build for her.

*

His boat chugged upriver, and the water moved like a brown shadow beneath him. Grey mist had swallowed it and was twining
fingers up into the trees, stealing every landmark that would tell him where he was. It was just a shallow native boat, long
and thin, with an ancient outboard engine hitched on the back, but it always got him where he wanted to go and was good when
he needed to duck unseen into narrow inlets or hide out in the mangrove swamps.

The morning had hardly started. He always rose early, beginning work on the building when it was scarcely light. The day was
at its coolest then. But he hadn’t been thinking about windows or door frames; his mind had been sneaking off elsewhere. Bloody
fool. That’s why the saw slipped.

Business in town. In Tampang, seven miles downriver. Something kicked into life in his gut at the prospect. Christ, no. Behave,
Madoc. Just get the job done and get your hide back home. The trouble was that he was never satisfied, not with his life,
not with Morgan’s Bar. He craved more. Always more. He shook his head, hunching lower in the boat, and his eye was caught
by a movement in the water. A snake as thick as his wrist was swimming past. Madoc was tempted to lean down and snatch it
from the murky waters, to take it home as a meal for tonight, but at the last second he came to his senses. He withdrew his
hand and set the boat leaping forward, the old engine complaining at the sudden burst of speed. Kitty knew him too well.
Watch yourself, Madoc.
She knew all about the lure of danger. How it bewitched him.