Thirteen Pearls (22 page)

Aran helped me pick scarlet and orange hibiscus flowers and the sole yellow frangipani that struggled out of a sad-looking stump, and we arranged them on the table (petals distinctly limp and brown-edged by the time Aran was through with them). Kaito used paper napkins to make origami elephants with sticky-up trunks for each of us.

When we gathered at the table I felt weirdly maternal, like a proud Mamma surveying her brood. Aran's hair was combed and he was wearing the one pair of shorts he possessed that didn't have holes and tears in them. Leon and Kaito had spruced up too – right down to their newly washed thongs, and I wore the solitary frock I'd brought up with the rest of my gear – a white cotton sundress with spaghetti straps and scarlet cherries splashed all over it.

‘You look pretty,' Leon said, as he carried out the platter of lobsters. I was glad he was too busy finding a place to put them to see my blush.

‘Merry Christmas!' we chorused as we tucked into the seafood. It was sweet and salty and fresh – as if we'd just plucked it from an underwater garden. I'd scrounged for chook eggs to make devilled eggs and there was a salad courtesy of IBIS: iceberg lettuce and diced unripe tomato.

Everyone pulled the crackers and Aran was thrilled when Leon gave him the expanding lizard. The boys drank stubbies. Leon sculled his down because he reckoned that the humidity made the beer go flat. I had a beer too. I wasn't used to drinking, and in combination with the heat and eating too much it made me feel sleepy and spacey, just like a real Christmas!

Aran was the only one of us still full of beans. When Leon pulled out a bulky, badly-wrapped present from underneath his chair, Aran jumped up and down. He ripped it open to reveal a shiny blue scooter with an orange running board.

‘Come on, Aran,' Leon said, ‘let's see how well that scooter works.'

Aran tore around the paved outdoor area under the home– shed awning, round and round, like one of those wind-up toys with extra long lasting batteries. When he finally stopped for a rest, Kaito gave him his present: a small flute. It had been fashioned from a piece of irrigation pipe with the finger holes cut in and a mouthpiece shaped from what looked like bees wax. Aran immediately blew into it – awful noises that grated my ear drums. (Really, I'm surprised they didn't bleed.) But he was ecstatic.

I woozily led him out to the back of the home–shed, with Leon and Kaito in tow.

Admittedly, the construction wasn't my finest effort and it could definitely have benefited from the unlimited access to power tools I had back home, but it was still pretty good. Aran had already seen it, of course, but now I finally let him climb the yellow rope ladder up into the tree house. It was shaped like a boat with two platforms, a main deck resting in the crook of the mango tree with two branches poking through the middle like masts, and a higher-up observation platform, railed like an old-fashioned poop deck, with little offcuts nailed into the tree for Aran to climb up to it. Through the leaves, Aran could look out to sea and all the way over to one of the other islands.

We all clambered up and the three big people sat on the bottom deck, scrunched together, while Aran scampered up to the lookout and tore leaves from the overhanging branches.

‘Great tree house, Edie.' Leon leaned against the trunk and closed his eyes.

‘I was going through building withdrawal. Needed to make something or I would have gone nuts.'

‘You've done a good job with him,' Kaito said as Aran pushed past us to monkey down the rope ladder and back to his scooter. ‘He 's not easy.'

‘Yep. No thanks to Super Nanny we're doing okay.' I lowered my voice to a whisper, so that Aran, riding in rings around the trunk below, wouldn't hear. ‘Can't help feeling sorry for him. He didn't ask to be dumped here, especially with someone like Uncle Red.'

Kaito took my hand. I was surprised and uncomfortable with this show of affection in broad daylight, in front of Leon. We were all just hanging out together in the tree house and it felt as though Kaito was staking a claim.

‘Will you be all right with Aran while I give Edie my present?' Kaito said.

Leon shrugged. ‘Sure.'

Was I imagining it, or did those gold-green eyes say the
opposite?

I followed Kaito reluctantly down from the tree and along the dirt path to the mangroves. There was something in Kaito's soft tread, the straightness of his slender back, as he led me along the broken-up jetty into the filmy sunlight that made me long to go back and hang out with Leon and Aran.

Kaito slid his arm around my waist. His eyes were, as usual, dark and unreadable. He leaned forward to kiss me. We were exactly the same height. I kissed him back, but I felt far away, my mouth dry.
Did I really want this? Did I want to be with
Kaito?

Kaito pulled away. ‘I wanted to give you something special.' He slipped off the strap from which the gleaming black pearl nestled in the hollow at the base of his throat, and placed it around my neck.

I stepped back, stumbling on the cracked concrete. It was as if the pearl had burned my fingers. I had admired it and been fascinated by the story of how he had found it in the wild, but it felt as if he was giving it to me now to bind me to him because I was drifting away. I struggled to think clearly in the moment. A little kid part of me bluntly saying,
Don't
want it
, while the grown-up part was making excuses and trying to analyse why exactly it didn't feel right. Was there any way it could be
made
to feel right?

But the little kid part of me was alive and well, kicking and screaming like Aran. I knew I couldn't keep the pearl. It was like a test in a fairytale. I wanted to deserve it. I wanted to be part of the magic of this smooth and unknowable, princely boy. I wanted to be a princess who was given the magical gift of a black pearl. But I didn't love him. So I couldn't accept it.

If Kaito hadn't given the pearl to me maybe I could have floated along, almost in a dream, pretending to myself, but aware that, in less than a few weeks, I'd be flying home to my real life and it would all just become a story I could tell Tash.

Instead, I pressed the pearl back into his palm. ‘I can't take this.' And then I ran along the jetty to where I could hear Leon and Aran laughing together beneath the mango tree.

Kaito didn't return to the home–shed until it was dark. At some stage I thought I heard the faint, melancholy strains of the shakuhachi.

By the time I had put Aran to bed (he 'd chattered away merrily in completely incomprehensible bursts of Thai), Kaito was in the kitchen drying up while Leon washed the dishes. I couldn't meet Kaito's eyes. Instead, I rabbited on mindlessly, trying to fill up any awkward silences. The awkwardness was mainly mine. Out on the jetty I'd been cowardly; executing the most non-breaking break-up in history.

Leon noticed a difference (I saw him checking us both out with a puzzled expression), but he didn't say anything. And he didn't comment either when it was Kaito who said he was heading off to his tent, without looking at me.

‘Going to be some wild weather tomorrow, the radio reckons,' Leon said. ‘There was a storm warning. A low coming down from New Guinea. We better get down to the plant first thing and secure all the lines.'

Kaito's dark eyes were shuttered, as if he couldn't care less.

‘Tell me about pig shooting,' I said to Leon, once Kaito had left.

He narrowed his eyes as if trying to work out if I was winding him up. ‘It's pretty gory. Chicks don't normally want to know that kind of stuff.'

‘Why do guys get so obsessed with it?'

‘It's a bloke thing. A hunter thing. We 're genetically hardwired. And it's not like I don't care about animals.'

He grabbed a handful of peanuts and tossed them in one-by-one.

‘But when I'm pig-hunting it's a fair battle. I've got a dog and a knife and there 's three hundred kilos of muscle and gristle and razor sharp tusks bearing down on me. It's a total buzz. It's like you both know that one of you is going to die and everything goes calm and clear. Everything feels real. The colours are brighter; you can hear your own breathing. It's like a dance.'

I nodded, not sure if I understood. Did I have a killer instinct? Not for the sake of it, no. But if it came down to me and a full stomach or starvation, I'd do it in a heartbeat. At school, when we'd had to dissect a sheep's lung, half the class had walked out and a few had even thrown up, but it hadn't bothered me. What it did make me think, listening to Leon, was how similar and different we were. I'd never grown up with a brother so boys were a mystery. They seemed like a different species, but then they'd do something that was exactly the sort of thing I'd do. Maybe it hadn't helped having a dad who was more like a mother than a father.

We raved on until Leon gave me a hug when Aran started his nightly cry and I said goodnight. It was a friendly hug and Leon smelled of beery goodwill. In some ways I wished it had been a little less matey . . .

C
HRISTMAS DAY WAS BUSINESS AS
usual with no sign of the storm the radio had predicted, but on Boxing Day, Leon reported that we might still be in for rough weather. The morning began as every other one had – hot and grey. Aran and I played in the tree house and then we left his elephant to keep guard on our pirate treasure (a small pile of shells) while we wandered down to the processing shed to see how the boys were getting on.

Leon and Kaito were out on the tinny securing lines for the oyster frames. The water was already rougher than I had seen it previously, with gusts of wind whipping up white caps on the murky grey sea.

I took Aran back to the home–shed and switched on the radio. Among the usual static-filled white noise I finally found an update: storm warnings for the Cape York peninsula and Torres Strait.

Back in Cairns, I loved storms; I was thrilled by the violet forks of lightning and brilliant flashes that illuminated the mountains behind us. Mum always got a headache just before a storm and had to lie down. I was the opposite; I was completely hyper. But this felt different. I didn't get that electric feeling of anticipation so much as a nagging sense of foreboding.

With Aran in tow, I systematically scouted around, collecting anything outside the shed that could get blown around and trashed. We dragged the plastic table and chairs in under cover and stacked them tightly against the shed wall. By the time the boys returned for lunch, soaking and traipsing puddles of seawater into the shed, the brooding black clouds erupted, pelting sharp needles of rain against the windows in horizontal sheets.

Wind arrived like a whirling dervish, howling around the home-shed and rattling at the windows. Every now and then there 'd be the thump of something I hadn't secured was tossed against the tin walls. I'd left the radio on, but now it was impossible to hear anything resembling a voice, only a wall of static.

‘Some storm.' I pressed my nose against the fogged-up glass door to peer into the swirling grey-whiteness before a loud crash made me spring away.

Leon stopped towelling his hair. When he looked up, my heart quickened. If anyone was going to be casual about a storm, it would be him. But he wasn't.

‘Did you hear any more weather warnings, Edie?'

I shook my head. ‘The radio cut out. Last bulletin said that the storm would pass by us and head out to sea.'

Something shattered outside, making me jump. Aran raced into my arms, his eyes big and startled.

‘Problem with cyclones is that they can change course just like that.' The click of Leon's fingers inside the confines of the shed was suddenly far more sinister than any of the groans and thumps and bumps coming from outside.

‘What do you mean cyclone?' I demanded. ‘No one said anything about a cyclone!'

My voice was shrill. Aran started to cry and babble in Thai. I knelt to look into his eyes. ‘It's okay,' I assured him. ‘It's okay. Just a silly storm.'

‘There're severe and non-severe cyclones,' Leon said.

‘I know that!' I snapped. Since planning my sailing trip, me and the Bureau of Meteorology website were second-best friends. So I also understood the significance of Kaito murmuring to Leon, ‘When's high tide?'

Something icy numbed my spine. It was foolish, but I crept to a window, inching over as if the bad thing outside would somehow see me and swipe me with its claws. Through rain and salt streaked glass I saw branches flying through the air. I ducked just as one barrelled towards me and speared into the window. The glass shattered, showering me with tiny shards.

‘Shit!' Leon yelled. He was beside me in two leaps. He grabbed my arm and yanked me into the centre of the room. An oyster shell flew in through the jagged gap where the window had been. ‘Okay, everyone into Red's room. Now!' he ordered.

We hastened into Red's corner. I saw immediately why Leon had chosen it. There was only one small sliding window that was on the leeward side of the gale. We pulled the mattress onto the floor. I sat Aran on it and told him it was a new game and he had to stay there. Then I stripped the remnant cushions from the sofa while Leon and Kaito collected the mattresses from my cubicle.