The White Pearl (61 page)

‘Connie, I will not let Takehashi take your son, I swear to you.’

He pulled her to his chest and wrapped his arms around her, pinning her there until her struggles ceased. ‘Without a boat,
we’ll have to walk. Tonight we won’t make it across the island by dawn, which means we’ll have to hide again during daylight
hours tomorrow and look out for Nurul the following night.’ He pressed his lips to her forehead. ‘We will make it.’

Connie’s mind started to function. His voice, with its calm certainty, quietened her, as his hand stroked her hair. There
was a sudden sound in the forest and he drew her deep into the mangroves, as two sentries inspected the shoreline, cursory
in the darkness. They were careless because they believed they had already flushed all the rats from the island.

‘Fitz,’ Connie whispered in his ear, ‘I know where there is a boat.’

‘Hardly a boat,’ Fitz remarked under his breath.

‘It will do.’

‘It will probably drown us.’

‘I’ll take that chance.’

It did look precarious. It was a dugout canoe, the ancient one that Teddy and a friend had been sheltering under when she
came to confront her son about taking payment for reading to the other children. It was well weathered and somewhat chewed
around the edges, but it was still in one piece and looked watertight. Together they manoeuvred it to the river’s edge and
Fitz made Connie clamber in front, while he slid
himself in behind her with a grimace of pain. For paddles they made do with two pieces of split bamboo that had been blasted
onto the shore by the bombs that fell.

Without a sound and carried by the current, they steered downriver. They could see the bulky outline of the big khaki tent
onshore, but Connie turned her head away immediately, refusing to look at it. She made herself concentrate instead on keeping
her makeshift paddle dipping in time with Fitz’s smooth stroke. The hulks of burned-out boats loomed out of the darkness and
their shallow canoe dodged between them, but when the clouds closed in over their heads, Connie didn’t begrudge the loss of
moonlight. It made it harder to navigate, but she was willing to risk that danger in exchange for the cloak of invisibility
that the night now draped over them.

They didn’t speak for fear the sound would travel over the water. But the silence was more than that, more than the need to
elude any sentries that may be posted along the riverbank. The silence climbed out of the water and slid into the canoe between
them, making the space feel small and cramped, not big enough to contain the turmoil of emotions. But her only thought right
now was to find her son before General Takehashi did.

When they approached the mouth of the river and the water grew choppier, Connie felt the swarms of mosquitoes fall away, as
intimidated as she was by the booming of the sea’s breakers. The canoe seemed far too frail, far too shallow to survive the
pounding ahead of it, yet she made no sound, fighting down her dismay. But unexpectedly a warm hand lay on her back, rested
against her spine and seemed to speak to her on a level far deeper than words. She leaned back against it, and for a brief
moment the paddles paused.

The sea stretched out in front of them, a vast black sheet in constant motions.

‘We have to keep up our speed.’ Fitz shifted his weight forward. ‘It will help us ride the tops of the waves. Less danger
of getting swamped,’ he told her. Again his hand in the centre of her back, anchoring her, holding the disparate parts of
her together.

‘Now!’ he said, and they spurted out of the mouth of the river.

Maya kept hearing a drum.
Boom-boom-boom.
But each time she twitched her head to find the noise, she realised the drum was inside her own ears.

Jo-nee had gone to talk to the man. ‘This can’t go on,’ he’d said as he
strode over to crazy Madoc. They argued, and crazy Madoc pointed the gun at him too. Maya had covered her eyes and tried to
shut her ears to their words.

‘Stop this idiocy, Madoc. At once,’ Jo-nee had said, but Maya could hear that his voice was all wrong. Slow and firm, like
he would speak to a child. ‘You are committing a serious criminal offence – piracy and the kidnapping of British citizens.
You must stop now, for God’s sake, man, and hand over to Nurul. We won’t report you to …’

Crazy Madoc didn’t like the voice, and shouted bad words at Jo-nee, but his wife didn’t join in. She looked as if she’d swallowed
a snake by mistake, her face tight, her mouth pinched shut. The weapons of the crew had all been gathered in a pile and bound
together into a spiky bundle of rifles and knives at Madoc’s feet, while the single black eye of the gun in his hand stared
unblinking at Nurul’s chest.

‘I have no charts for sailing to India,’ the pirate bleated.

‘So navigate by the stars, damn you. There’s the Southern Cross. Use that. It’s due west to India. Simple.’

But when Maya looked up at the black sky she could see no cross, just millions of eyes. The moon was sliding uphill to watch
crazy Madoc as well, and it sprinkled its light on the pale, upturned face of the little Hadley boy. He was standing in front
of Madoc and begging him to turn the boat around, tears on his cheeks. It made the booming in Maya’s head grow louder. She
scuttled to the long pointed nose of the boat where Razak was doing something to one of the foresails. She wanted comfort
from her brother.

‘Our mother is dead,’ she told him. ‘
Mem
Hadley will be dead too if we hide here and do nothing.’

For a moment he was silent, staring down at the rope looped in his hands. ‘Do you care so much?’ he asked softly.

‘Yes, Razak, I care.
Mem
saved my life. My spirit now walks step by step with hers. I cannot run from her, any more than I can run from you, my brother.’
She heard a shout come from crazy Madoc’s mouth somewhere in the darkness. ‘Help me, Razak,’ she whispered.

Without a word Razak lifted his tunic, revealing the black bulk of a gun tucked into his waistband. Maya reached out and touched
it. It nudged her fingers, as though wanting to talk to them. She snatched it from him.

‘No, Maya!’

Yes, Maya. Yes, Maya.
That’s what the gun said. It was heavy.

She sneaked back through the darkness to where the crazy man – who was leaving
Mem
Hadley to die – was standing, his back to the sea. He still held the big ugly pistol pointed at Nurul, and she could see
his eyes darting all the time over the crew. But he didn’t imagine that Razak had a gun from the island, and he didn’t take
any notice of Maya because she was a no-notice mouse who scurried around in the dirt.
Well, crazy Madoc, you will notice me now
. She had seen men in Palur with guns before, and she knew about safety catches, so she crept behind him in the dark and pointed
it at his crazy back. She shut her eyes and pulled the trigger.

The gun roared in her hand. The explosion knocked her to the deck and the gun leaped away from her as though it were finished
with this no-notice mouse and wanted someone else. Teddy pounced on it and picked it up, waving it immediately at Kitty Madoc
who rushed forward with a roar of rage, but Maya didn’t care because her own wicked hand was shaking so violently. She stared
at her fingers as if they belonged to someone else, and possessed a will quite separate from her own.

But her eyes still did what she told them and they looked across at the body of Madoc lying on the deck in what looked like
a pool of oil. Crazy dead Madoc now. His wife had turned him over and was cradling his head on her fat thighs, leaning over
him and dabbing with her hair at the black trickle of blood that oozed from between his lips. As she kissed his eyelids and
his sharp nose, she was making a strange, mind-numbing noise that pierced Maya’s head and became trapped there.

But still the drumming grew louder.
Boom-boom-boom
inside her ears.

Maya followed Jo-nee around the deck of the pirate’s boat the way a cat follows a piece of string, trotting behind it, ears
pricked. But every now and again she would pounce forward and lay her paws on him. She knew now that she was
astonishingly brave
. Jo-nee said so. So it must be true.

‘Brave and bold,’ he had said.

She wasn’t so sure about
bold
. She thought it sounded dangerous.

The boat was not a nice boat, not like
The White Pearl
. Only fit for sea scum. It was lying offshore, muttering and grumbling to itself in the night wind, waiting for Fitzpayne
and
Mem
Hadley to leap up out of the water like dolphins, but Maya was cross with Nurul. How would
mem
know that
Tuan
Teddy had sailed around to the other side of the island?
Mem
would be upset. Very upset.

‘She’s dead,’ Razak insisted. But he spoke behind his hand, so that the boy wouldn’t hear.

‘No,’ Maya scolded. ‘
Mem
and Iron-eyes will stick bayonets into the yellow-bellied soldiers.’

Razak stared at her as if she had gone mad. ‘Did you see how many Japanese there are on the island? There’s no hope for
mem
. This waiting is dangerous, as well as a waste of time when we could be sailing away to …’

‘To where?’

‘To India.’

‘Where is India?’

Razak waved a hand vaguely at the expanse of blackness behind him. ‘Over there somewhere.’

Maya scowled. ‘I like white people.’

‘There are many white people in India.’

‘How do you know?’

‘
Tuan
Hadley told me.’

‘Crazy Madoc wanted to go to India too.’

At the mention of Madoc, Razak looked warily at his sister and gave her a cold little smile. ‘He isn’t able to want anything
any more.’

The way he said it scared her. ‘Razak,’ she said desperately, ‘you are still my brother. I am your blood.’

‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘you are my blood.’

‘Jo-nee says I am brave,’ she told him.

‘My sister, if you had not put a bullet in Madoc, we would now be far away from here. Safe from this danger. It is not brave
to throw us into the path of the Japanese soldiers. It is,’ he hesitated, looked at her face and swallowed the words that
were on his tongue, ‘not wise,’ he finished more gently.

She was grateful. She did not want Razak to hate her. Already the fat wife of crazy Madoc had poured bad words on her head,
words that still buzzed like trapped flies in her brain. In the middle of the night Jo-nee had given the dead man
a decent burial at sea
and had read out words from their holy book, but to Maya it seemed more like chucking his body overboard in the dark to feed
the sharks. Kitty Madoc was trembling. But she didn’t cry, not one single tear, as if the shame of what her husband did
blocked their path. Yet Maya saw the way her hands clenched and unclenched, mute shrieks of pain, and the way her body seemed
to crumple inside.

Afterwards, when Kitty Madoc poured the bad words on Maya, that was when Jo-nee told her she was brave. But in her heart she
didn’t feel brave. She kept staring at the hand that had held the gun and wishing it belonged to someone else.

The wind was fresh in Connie’s face and the canoe rocked violently as she struggled to keep her rhythm. Salt from the sea
spray had coated her lips and given her a raging thirst. The waves slammed against the bow, knocking it off course, and it
was her job to bale quickly with cupped hands. They were rounding one of the island’s rocky claws, where the wind was at its
strongest, but Fitz had promised her easier-going on the leeside of the island. He was right. It was as though a curtain had
dropped, as abruptly the sea became steadier and the paddling smoother.

They travelled fast now, and Connie’s hopes rose. However much she doubted Nurul’s constancy, it was as if the sound of the
waves drumming on the hull of the canoe washed away her conviction that the
Burung Camar
had made a run for safer waters. As the tumult inside her grew calmer along with the seas, she gained an awareness that it
wasn’t the sound of the waves that caused her to believe in Nurul. It was the sound of the man behind her – his steady breathing;
the determined rhythm of his strokes through the water. The way he spoke to her, punctuating her thoughts with short comments,
to keep her believing.

‘Teddy will be relieved to see you again,’ Fitz said when the waves grew rough. ‘He’s probably sick and tired of playing pirates
by now.’

She had smiled at that.

As they rounded the claws: ‘Connie, we will have to paddle out deeper to reach the
Burung Camar
when we get in sight of her, as she can’t anchor in so close – there are all sorts of hidden rocks.’

Life is full of hidden rocks.

And later: ‘We’re making good time.’

But once, when she turned, she caught him glancing to the east,
keeping a sharp eye on it. They both knew that the moment the sun painted the horizon gold, the
Burung Camar
would hoist sail and leave.

How could she find it in herself to hate this man she loved so much?

Maya watched the moonlight dodge in and out of the waves and dance in the rigging. It made her nervous. Jo-nee said that the
Japs would have scout planes patrolling the area at night, and even though the
Burung Camar
carried no lights, in the moonlight it was a sitting target. The thought of more bombs made Maya’s knees loosen and her mouth
taste of seaweed. She tucked herself in a ball behind the little hut at the back of the boat –
aft
– that’s what
Tuan
Teddy told her it was called – and listened hard.

Maya was good at listening. She collected words for Jo-nee. He liked it when she informed him that she had heard the pirate
with the pig’s belly tell Nurul that they should wait no longer for Fitzpayne, so now she crouched in a squat black shadow
and listened to Kitty Madoc and Nurul talking inside the hut. Kitty Madoc’s voice sounded strange, as if her tongue wasn’t
working straight. It sounded broken, like Jo-nee’s shoulder. It hurt Maya’s ears to listen to the woman’s voice, and after
only a short while she slipped away and instead found Jo-nee with Razak. He liked speaking with her brother, she could tell
by the way his handsome smile hovered around his lips, waiting to spread its wings. A tiny pain between her eyes jumped into
life each time she saw it.