The White Pearl (29 page)

‘Tell me what you’re worried about.’

Harriet looked up from the ace of spades, pushing her fringe off her face, her brown eyes suddenly amused. ‘It would be quicker
to tell you what I
don’t
worry about.’

At least Harriet was engaging in conversation. ‘All right, so what it is you
don’t
worry about?’

Her friend propped her small chin on her hand and considered her answer for a full minute before she said, ‘I don’t worry
about my marriage.’

Such easy words. They made Connie want to lay her head on the table and weep with envy.

‘Lucky you,’ she smiled.

Henry Court could be loud and pompous at times – in fact he often reminded Connie of a cockatoo, the way he liked to stick
out his chest and ruffle his hair into a crest – but his heart was in the right place: deep in Harriet’s pocket.

‘Come up on deck,’ Connie invited.

‘No, thanks.’ She shuffled the pack. ‘Tell me more about your Mr Fitzpayne.’

‘He’s not
my
anything. We’ve hired him for the boat, that’s all. I know nothing of his background.’

‘Maybe you should find out. He doesn’t look much like hired help to me.’

‘No,’ Connie said thoughtfully. ‘He doesn’t.’

‘So why is he doing this?’

Because I asked him.

‘Who knows?’ she said lightly. ‘I think he just likes boats.’

She stood up, tucked the biscuits back in the tin and left Harriet to her cards, while she went in search of the binoculars.

Their cabin was small but gleamed with the same shiny mahogany as the saloon. For a moment Connie placed her palm on one wall
and felt it vibrate with life. She kept her hand there to stave off the sudden shocking mental image of Sho lying in the sun
with a pillowcase over his head.

She fought down the familiar nausea, and hurried to the small locker on Nigel’s side of the bed. She knelt, and found the
binoculars in their
case easily enough but when she shut the locker she remained where she was, on her knees. She let her forehead drop onto the
bed she shared with Nigel, as though the thoughts inside her head were too heavy for it.

Time passed. She had no idea how long, but she continued to kneel there in silence.

Maya wanted to die.

Had a knife been within reach, she would happily have slit her own throat. She was lying on her front in a stinking black
hole, and inside her head her spirit was weeping and begging to leave. Beside her in the dark lay Razak. His arm was around
her shoulders and the side of his head was pressed tight against her, anchoring her to him, refusing to let her tiptoe out
of this life and into the next.
Oh my twin brother, that is unfair. Let me die.
But he possessed half her soul, and he was refusing to let it go. She made no sound, so that even her breath left no trace
in this world, but she was shivering violently, worse than when she had the fever.

She knew what this was. It was a punishment. All the time Razak had been right and she had been wrong.
Piss on her spirit.
Those were the words she had uttered about her mother, as carelessly as she would throw out the night slops on a rainy morning.
Piss on her spirit.
Aiyee! Such words of shame. She had shown no respect to the dead, and now her mother was taking revenge.

Mama, forgive me.

Claws seemed to rake her gut, and she had to squeeze her eyes shut to keep in the tears. Her mother’s spirit was disembowelling
her, making her suffer torment. She smelled the filth of her own vomit, and begged again for forgiveness.

Never would she have thought her mother’s spirit was so powerful, that one so useless in life could inflict so much pain in
death. Terror nudged against her like a stray dog, but she couldn’t kick it away.
I will avenge you, Mama. I swear on my life. Not for money, but for you, Mama. I was wrong to laugh at your curse.

The moment the words formed in her head, daylight swept into the stifling hole like the breath of an angel. A voice said,
‘Good God, what have we here?’

It was the white lady. She dragged them across a room and up some steps, a smile as big as a slice of melon on her face. Why
wasn’t she raging
at them? Why did she laugh? The brightness of the day jumped on Maya’s eyes, forcing her to close them after all that darkness.
But in the split second that her eyes were open, she saw enough. Terror took a bite out of her throat.

‘Razak,’ she whispered, and sought her brother’s hand.

Water swirled all around them. They were bobbing up and down on the wide river, the land on each side just a thin green strip
in the distance. That’s why the lady laughed. She was marching them to the edge of the boat, she was going to throw them head-first
into the brown waves.

‘No!
Tidak
!’ Maya whimpered. Not to the lady, not to the greedy spirit of the river. But to her mother. ‘I’m sorry.’

Immediately the white lady stopped pulling them across the deck, and the man from The Purple Pussy, the one who was
mem
’s husband, was sitting in front of them.

Mama’s spirit is powerful beyond imagining.

‘Look who I found stowed away in the aft locker,’ the white lady announced.

Faces came and peered at them, so many faces. Maya wanted somewhere to run but there were no backalleys on a boat, so she
stood staring down at her feet, feeling the rolling movement beneath them as though she were riding on the back of a whale.

‘Maya ill,’ Razak said urgently. ‘Need help.’

‘Oh, Maya.’ It was the white lady, her voice soft. ‘Here, drink this, you’ll feel better.’ She thrust a flask into Maya’s
hand.

Water. It touched her lips and Maya could not stop herself; she gulped it down. Her insides begged to drown in the stream
of water, but abruptly she stopped drinking and looked at the smiling lady with horror as she felt her stomach heave. She
rushed past the husband to the rail of the boat and vomited up the water into the river.
Poison?
She clutched her stomach. Behind her, someone laughed and she looked round into the face of Iron-eyes, the man who had come
to find them in the jungle. He steered a huge upright wheel with one hand, his large mouth open and making a big laughing
noise at her.

‘The girl is seasick,’ he said, ‘and we haven’t even reached the sea yet.’

Maya squatted down in a patch of shade. She was sitting on the warm boards with her back propped against the side of the boat,
feeling its leaps and shudders and shakes as it stamped its feet on the waves. Her
chin was perched on her knees and her arms encircled her waist, holding herself delicately together. Death wasn’t dancing
so close any more, so she studied the boat and its passengers through half-closed eyes.

It was no different from The Purple Pussy, she decided. A huddle of people pushed together, eyeing each other uncertainly,
while above them the giant white wings of the boat muttered and talked to each other like an audience, even clapping lightly
at times. Except that in The Purple Pussy the hunger in the room was for sex, but here on this water-house the hunger was
for something far more dangerous. It was for a future. Didn’t they know that you had to get through today first, and then
tomorrow? And before you knew it, the future was behind you. So what was the point of worrying about it?

Maya tipped her head forward and let her hair fall across her face in a long black curtain. She knew the other passengers
were casting suspicious glances at her, as if they wanted to rummage around in her head: the golden-haired one with the bandaged
shoulder and the mask of laughter, the stocky one with the red cheeks who didn’t like boats but liked his own voice. Only
Tuan
Hadley wouldn’t look at her. But he had summoned Razak from her side, and was teaching him a game played with flat round
counters on a black and white board. The little son, the one who wore his young heart on a thread around his neck for all
to see, was standing next to Razak’s shoulder, whispering urgent advice. All three spoke in Malay. She felt left out.

But it was the man with the iron eyes of a hawk that made her nervous. He stood at the large flat wheel, in control, and seemed
to grow bigger and bigger the more she looked at him, until he filled the whole boat.

‘Biscuit?’

The boy was holding out a small brown rectangle. Maya looked at it with distaste.

‘It’s a Bourbon,’ Teddy said. ‘They’re my favourite.’ He noticed her reluctance to take it and added shyly, ‘If you don’t
have one now, Mrs Court will eat them all down in the saloon.’ He gestured towards the black hole, and steps that led downstairs.

Dimly Maya recalled a woman when
mem
had hauled them out of their hiding place and through the shiny wood room. The laugh of a monkey had fluttered from the table
and a face, with dark hair cut like
a helmet, had stared at her with the look that Maya was used to from Europeans. As if they’d just stepped off a clean pavement
into horseshit.

‘She eats,’ the boy said.

‘Don’t you?’

‘Not like she does.’

What did he mean? That this woman eats with tiger teeth, or rips her food apart with her fingers?

He squatted down in front of her and balanced the biscuit where her chin had lain on her knee. ‘So you’d better eat it now.
Understand?’

‘Yes.’

She had no idea what he was talking about, but took the biscuit anyway. It had writing on it that she couldn’t read. She sniffed
its edge and it smelled sugary. The thought of eating it made her stomach turn.

‘You like the boat?’ she asked, to take his mind off the biscuit.

‘Yes, she’s beautiful.’

‘She?’

‘All boats are called
she
.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ He frowned, creating the same crease between his eyebrows that his father wore. ‘Maybe because they’re pretty.’

Maya stared around her. ‘Pretty? How is it pretty? It is wood and rope. And white sheets. It does its job. Like a servant.’

‘Some servants are pretty.’ Teddy grinned at her. ‘You’re pretty.’

She scowled at him. Either he didn’t know what pretty was, or he was lying. ‘Razak is pretty,’ she said, and for some reason
she didn’t understand the boy laughed till he tumbled over on his back. He righted himself again and started telling her what
everything on the boat was called: the bow, stern, aft, hatchway, anchor buoy, cabin, bilge, galley, boom, sheets, forestays,
hawsers, halyards, a hank and a hound and a helm …

She put her hands over her ears. He laughed and tugged them away.

‘A yacht can be gaff-rigged or bermuda-rigged –
The White Pearl
is bermuda-rigged.’ He pointed up. ‘See? A triangular sail without a top spar.’

She covered her eyes.

‘There’s the bobstay and the bowsprit,’ he told her, turning away to point forward.

She threw the biscuit overboard behind her.

‘And the lavatory is called the head.’

He turned back, noticed the biscuit had vanished, so produced another for her from his pocket. It had a coating of fluff.

‘Good, aren’t they?’ His eyes were bright with friendship.

She put the biscuit in her mouth. He watched her chew and swallow it, but was called back to the black and white board by
his father, so scampered off. Maya clamped both hands over her mouth to hold everything in and heard a deep chuckle up ahead.
It was Iron-eyes. Standing beside the wheel – what did the boy call it … a hank? Or was it a helm? – he was laughing to
himself and watching her.

The boat gave a sudden lurch. Maya leaped to her feet and vomited the biscuit over the rail, then sank to her knees, head
in her hands, and moaned. A gentle hand started to stroke her back and
mem
’s voice murmured something soft and comforting that made the clenched muscles of her stomach start to relent. The pain eased,
but the stroking of her back continued and she let it go on and on, despite the howls of protest in her ears from her mother’s
spirit.

In the tropics, the sun sets like a stone. The sky can be on fire with scarlet flames torching the clouds, but the next moment
the blaze has been doused and only grey ash remains. It was a daily disappointment to Connie that the display was so brief.
On the water it was even more spectacular, the way the waves caught fire around the boat. She leaned over the rail, feeling
the wind freshen, watching them flicker and fade. A flock of large bats darted over her head and swooped low over the water
on the port beam. She followed them, mesmerised by their agility through the air, and tried to imagine what it must be like
to possess that kind of effortless freedom.

‘You’ll get bitten by mosquitoes if you stay there,’ Fitzpayne’s voice warned her.

The other passengers had gone below for their evening meal of fresh fish, mushrooms and fried rice prepared by Harriet, but
Connie wasn’t hungry. She was too on edge. Fitzpayne stood at the helm in front of the tiny open-ended chart-house – she was
beginning to think he was welded to it – letting the boat run downriver. The staysail, mainsail and mizzen were set close-hauled
to the easterly wind, and as she glanced at him over her shoulder, his broad shoulders were silhouetted against the darkening
sky.

‘We could heave to,’ she suggested. ‘It would give you a rest.’

‘I thought you hired me to get you to Singapore as fast as possible.’

‘I did.’

‘So we sail on.’

She didn’t argue, but neither did she go below.

‘She’s a delight to handle,’ he told her with a smile of pleasure, as his experienced eye scanned
The White Pearl
’s sails. ‘In a reasonable wind like this she is lively and fast, light on the helm.’ He laughed, an intimate sound that she
knew was meant for the boat, not for her. She could see how much he loved it, the way he ran his hands over the wheel.

The silence of the approaching night hung over the water like mist, with just the soft hiss of the bow through the waves and
the rustle of the rigging above. For a while she didn’t speak, letting the tranquillity of the evening and the gentle motion
of the boat seep into her mind. For the first time in a year that had been savaged by nightmares and self-recrimination at
what she had done in a hut in the jungle, she felt a thin membrane of peace wrap around her thoughts.