Blood Bond

by Green, Michael

  ‘Let’s go forward and discuss the options,’ he suggested to his father.

  ‘There are no options. We have to go back for them.’

  Steven handed the helm over to Penny, jumped up on the cabintop and motioned to Mark to come forward to continue the discussion.

  ‘Dad, I know you’re angry. I’m angry at Luke and Robert, too. But it would be madness to try to get them back now.’

  ‘I didn’t mind losing one of them but we can’t afford to lose them both. Apart from anything else, we need the Daltons’ genes. We’ve already lost Adam.’

  ‘We’ve still got Fergus. Anyway, we know Corky’s determined to defend his patch. He’s undoubtedly got a lookout point. He’ll be watching us like hawks.’

  ‘We’ll lay offshore for a couple of days and sneak back at night.’

  ‘Dad, he’ll be expecting that, and he’ll be prepared. If we go back, we risk losing more than we’ll gain.’ Mark was silent and Steven sensed he was winning the argument. ‘Anyway, even if you find Robert and Luke, how can you be sure they’ll co-operate and come back with us?’

  ‘I won’t give them any choice.’

  ‘If they put up a fight, it will add to the risk. Let’s leave them where they are for now. At the very least they’re going to add to the gene pool in Australia. If your argument is valid, that’s as important as increasing the gene pool in New Zealand. We can come back and retrieve them later. I’m sure they’ll be more co-operative once the novelty’s worn off.’

  Mark stared ahead at the horizon. Deep down he knew Steven was right. The risk of returning was great, and he was torn between the sense that he should go back and rescue the two lads and his desire to press on to New Zealand.

  ‘OK,’ he conceded finally. ‘We’ll do it your way. You reorganise the watches. I’ll quiz the two women and see what I can find out.’

  Mark found the two Aboriginal women sitting alone in the saloon, dressed in the clothes Allison had provided for them. They were both more generously built than the other women aboard, and the clothes were too tight. They were drinking tea, and Mark helped himself to a mug from the pot.

  ‘What are your names?’ he asked as he sat down opposite them.

  The taller woman spoke first. ‘Lily.’

  ‘Sophia,’ said the shorter woman.

  ‘And I’m Mark. I’d like you to fill me in on what happened in Australia after the pandemic struck and how you came to be living with Corky.’

  Lily explained that she and Sophia were cousins who had lived most of their childhood in a small Aboriginal community called One Mile, on the outskirts of Dunwich on North Stradbroke Island. The settlement of One Mile was exactly a mile from the post office — in the early days, any Aborigine caught within a mile of the post office after dusk was likely to be shot. As a result, an Aboriginal settlement had sprung up at One Mile.

  In the early 1900s, most of Queensland’s Aborigines had been rounded up and sent to designated settlements such as Cherbourg, some two hundred and fifty kilometres northwest of Brisbane. The North Stradbroke Island tribe had escaped that fate, partly because their land wasn’t coveted by the white settlers, and partly because their labour was needed to help run the Dunwich Asylum — Queensland’s equivalent of the British workhouse.

  At the time the pandemic broke out, North Stradbroke Island was home to some three thousand people, of whom over five hundred were of Aboriginal descent. While Lily was involved in the island’s tourist industry, Sophia had been lured by the bright lights to work as a hotel cleaner in Brisbane.

  ‘Brisbane was one of the first Australian cities to be hit,’ Sophia said, peering into her mug. ‘It was terrible.’

  Because she was working in a hotel, Sophia had seen the arrival of the super-SARS virus first-hand, when a guest from Singapore had come down with the disease. Within days the disease had been rife at the hotel and the city. The same kind of chaos that Mark and his family had experienced in Auckland, and his relatives had seen in England, quickly ensued, and she had fled back to North Stradbroke Island. Faced with a situation of anarchy there as well, with gun-battles breaking out over food and other supplies, Sophia, Lily and a group of older Aboriginal women and their children left their male relatives to fight it out and ‘went bush’, heading away from major settlements and towards old tribal areas in the north.

  ‘And how did you get on?’ Mark asked as he refilled their mugs with tea.

  ‘We were fine,’ Sophia explained. ‘Two of the women we were with, Granny Isabel and Granny Agnes, really knew their stuff. We never went hungry — we hunted turtles, pounded and roasted fern root, fished with nets and gathered oysters. We even captured a couple of dugong.’

  ‘So how did you end up with Corky?’

  ‘We stayed bush for three months,’ said Lily. ‘Then some of the women wanted to go back to their husbands, so we began the trek back to Dunwich. Granny Isabel didn’t make it. It was as though she knew she’d taught us all we needed to know. She just lay down one night and didn’t wake up.’

  ‘Granny Agnes said she didn’t want to come back to Dunwich either, so we carried Granny Isabel’s body to the old mission station cemetery at Moongalba and buried her,’ Sophia said sadly. ‘We left Granny Agnes there, sitting beside the grave. She assured us she would be OK, but two weeks later when we came back for her we found she had died too.’

  ‘When we walked back into Dunwich it was deserted — there were graves all over the place and lots of skeletons. It was eerie,’ Lily said.

  ‘We’d seen smoke before we reached the town,’ Sophia continued, ‘so we expected to find our menfolk still alive. We’d already guessed that members of our tribe were the only people to have survived the pandemic.’

  ‘You can imagine the surprise we got when we walked into town and found a white man camped in the main street,’ interrupted Lily. ‘He told us his name was Corky. We asked him where the rest of our people were, but he said he didn’t know.’

  ‘Liar,’ spat Sophia. ‘We searched for them for days, and then we found their bodies in a room in the back of the Little Ship Club down at Yabby Street. They’d been shot.’

  ‘And the corpses weren’t that old — it can’t have happened long before we got back. Then Corky changed his story and told us they’d been murdered by a madman who had left town, but we’re sure he killed them himself.’

  ‘And that,’ Lily sighed, ‘is how we ended up with Corky. Later he persuaded us all to leave Straddie and move across to Manly with him. He said he would look after us.’

  ‘What a joke — we ended up looking after him,’ concluded Sophia. ‘He’s a bad man, a violent man — that’s why we asked to come to New Zealand with you.’

  Mark nodded. He recognised a familiar story. On a previous visit to Brisbane he’d visited the tiny museum at Dunwich. The displays documenting the history of the Aboriginals of North Stradbroke Island told of how, on the arrival of the white man, they had been described as a ‘tall, muscular and athletic race’ who were living well. Following the passing of the inappropriately named Protection of Aborigines Act, the island’s Aboriginal population had been herded into the Moongalba Mission, where they grew to rely on the weekly delivery of rations. Thanks to the so-called ‘protection’ of the white man, they had moved from self-sufficiency to a cycle of dependency.

  And now it seemed that not only was Corky a bad man, he was clearly also totally ruthless. Steven was right. It would be madness to try to rescue the Dalton boys in the short term. He only hoped they could hold their own against Corky until he had a chance to come back for them.

  Despite the problem of Corky, Mark was excited. Nothing in Sophia and Lily’s family history suggested that they had Chatfield blood. For the first time since the onset of the pandemic, it appeared that people other than the his own family had survived.

  Lily and Sophia had a natural humour, a freedom of spirit, a presence that changed the atmosphere on Archangel. Mark found himself enjoying their
company — the first people he had interacted with since before the pandemic who were not his relatives.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Allison said suddenly when she and Mark were alone on watch the second night out from Brisbane. ‘If you try to mix your genes with Aboriginal genes, it’s the end of our relationship.’

  ‘What in heaven’s name are you talking about?’

  ‘Do you think I haven’t noticed the way you look at them?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t act dumb.’

  ‘I’m not interested in them.’

  ‘Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I don’t know how obsessed you are with genes?’

  She stared at him, challenging, and Mark had no choice but to look away.

  The following day Mark sat hunched over the single-sideband radio for over an hour. It was noon Gulf Harbour time.

  Standing at the helm, Steven heard the words drifting up from the nav station below: ‘Gulf Harbour, Gulf Harbour, this is Archangel, do you read?’

  As his father’s tone became more desperate, Steven handed the helm to Penny and went below.

  Mark looked up. ‘They should be able to pick us up by now,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘Jane might be busy working, looking after the children, whatever.’

  ‘She promised me she would be on the set at noon.’

  ‘It’s fifteen months since we left Gulf Harbour. She would have expected us back at least six months ago. Perhaps she’s given up.’

  ‘She promised me she wouldn’t.’

  ‘It could be the set.’

  ‘You rigged up a second set, and you showed her how to switch the system over.’

  ‘Maybe the solar panels have been damaged.’

  ‘If they had, the wind generators should have cut in.’

  Mark seemed to have a negative response for each of Steven’s potential explanations.

  ‘Stop worrying. There’ll be some simple reason. We’ll be home in less than a week.’ Even as he spoke, Steven knew his words had a hollow ring. He was worried too.

  At that point, Allison emerged from the foreward cabin. ‘Sophia and Lily are ill.’

  Mark and Steven hurried forward.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Mark asked, looking down at the two women. They were sweating profusely and were obviously very ill. Sophia shook her head wearily, then Lily leaned over and vomited down the side of the bunk.

  ‘You’d better leave them to me,’ Allison said. Mark and Steven backed out of the cramped cabin to let Allison back in, carrying a bowl of water and damp cloths.

  ‘What do you think it is — super-SARS?’ Steven asked his father once they were in the cockpit.

  ‘It’s too fast for super-SARS symptoms to have developed. Anyway, they survived the pandemic — they must have immunity. It must be the disease we caught in Cape Town.’

  ‘But we disinfected the water tanks.’

  ‘Maybe the water wasn’t the problem after all.’

  Allison had a more disturbing theory when she joined them in the cockpit after what had seemed an age.

  ‘Yes, I think it’s the same disease we had after leaving Cape Town. And I think it might be typhoid. It’s one disease I know that can be transmitted by an asymptomatic carrier.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Someone who carries the disease without displaying the symptoms yet is able to infect others.’

  ‘Never heard of that,’ challenged Mark.

  Allison stood her ground. ‘The best known case was a woman called Typhoid Mary in the United States in the early 1900s. There was also the case of forty-odd carriers who they locked up in a British asylum as late as the nineteen-forties.’

  ‘If you’re right, who’s the carrier?’ asked Steven, but Allison just shrugged.

  ‘Well, at least we all recovered,’ said Mark, trying to sound positive. ‘And this time we have a fit nurse. Lily and Sophia will be all right.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’ Allison didn’t sound so confident. ‘How long before we arrive in Gulf Harbour?’

  ‘Another week or so — providing the weather holds.’

  ‘I think you should delay our arrival,’ Allison said thoughtfully as she went back down below.

  Despite having been delirious for much of her own illness, Allison was acutely aware that Lily and Sophia’s symptoms were far more severe than those suffered by Archangel’s crew. Their abdomens were distended and very painful. Allison recognised the developing peritonitis and subsequent septicaemia as the bacteria spread into the women’s bloodstreams, and they became extremely agitated. To add to her patients’ misery, the weather deteriorated and the seas built up.

  Mark had no compunction in changing course to reduce the rolling. For several days, Archangel sailed away from New Zealand. Towards the end of the third week of her illness, Lily died. Mark and Steven wrapped her body in a sheet, and the crew held a short service before her body was slipped beneath the waves. Sophia clung to life for a further forty-eight hours, then she too succumbed.

  Despite the fact he had known the two women for only a short while, Mark felt a huge sense of loss and an even greater sense of responsibility for causing their deaths. He had also lost the genetic diversity they had promised.

  ‘You should never have taken them aboard,’ Allison said as Sophia’s body was consigned to the deep. The rebuke only added to Mark’s misery.

  Despite the deaths of Sophia and Lily and the ongoing radio silence, the excitement aboard Archangel grew as the yacht neared the New Zealand coast. So, unfortunately, did the foulness of the weather. The seas were huge and every day the sun was obscured by cloud.

  ‘I think that’s North Cape,’ Steven said, peering through the binoculars at a dim headland far to the south. ‘But I can’t be sure. It’s four days since I got a sight.’

  ‘We’ll hang well out to the east, run down outside the Hen and Chicken Islands and then come in towards Auckland.’

  ‘What happened to the good weather you promised us?’ complained Allison. She was sitting in the cockpit, huddled up against the bulkhead and trying to avoid the worst of the lashing rain.

  ‘You’ll see — it never rains long in Auckland. Just short, sharp showers.’

  The short, sharp shower lasted another thirty hours. Still there was no sun.

  Mid-morning on the second day, the cloud lifted momentarily. Steven raced for his hand compass and took a bearing on the unmistakeable summit of Little Barrier Island. He just had time to take a second bearing, of Mitre Peak on Kaikoura Island, before the weather closed in again.

  ‘At least I now know where we are,’ he said triumphantly, the relief evident in his voice. He plotted a course on the chart to clear Horn Rock and called out a new compass bearing to Mark. ‘We should be at Gulf Harbour by late afternoon,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope the weather clears.’

  But the weather didn’t clear. With the wind astern, they raced down Steven’s dead-reckoning course, peering nervously ahead into the gloom.

  ‘Let’s reduce sail,’ Mark suggested at three o’clock.

  Steven nodded. He had plotted a conservative course to bring them between Tiritiri Matangi Island and The Noises, but due to the driving rain and low cloud he had seen neither. Nervously he called another change of heading and then took the helm himself.

  ‘If my calculations are right, we should see Gulf Harbour dead ahead any minute now,’ he said eventually. Everyone was now on deck, trying to catch a glimpse of land. Mark and Allison moved forward to the pulpit for a better view.

  ‘Not long now,’ Mark said to her. ‘You’re going to love Gulf Harbour, I promise.’

  ‘Look, there’s land,’ she said, pointing to the dim outline of the coast. Mark recognised the buildings on the cliffs. He raced down the deck to Steven and slapped him on the back. ‘Not bad — you’re about a mile out. We’re halfway between Okoromai Bay and Gulf Harbour Marina.’

  Grinning with relief, Steven swung the wheel to port and
Archangel reached along, parallel with the coast. At last the weather began to lift, the dim outline of the cliffs becoming more conspicuous. Ahead they could pick out the distinctive outline of Kotanui Island, in the bay outside Gulf Harbour Marina.

  Mark peered excitedly ahead: a few more minutes and the masts of the marina would come into view. He returned to Allison on the foredeck and she put her arm around his waist. He loved her for the gesture. Everything would be fine now they were home.

  Part 2

  15

  Things had not gone well at Gulf Harbour since Mark and Steven’s departure fifteen months earlier. Without clear leadership, tensions in the community had quickly bubbled to the surface. The first major sign of dissent came when Jane announced that she was going to move into Mark and Steven’s house.

  The community had been spread over three townhouses: Jane and her three children, eleven-year-old Zach, nine-year-old Nicole and baby Audrey, shared the centre house, which also contained the communal kitchen and lounge. Before their departure, Mark and Steven had occupied the townhouse on the seaward end of the block of three, while the third house was occupied by Mark’s brother Christopher, his two daughters and their children. The lounge of this house had been set up as a schoolroom and the dining room as a library.

  ‘We should move into your father’s house,’ Christopher’s daughter Katie said quickly once Jane announced her plan. ‘We’re overcrowded in ours.’ Katie, tall and elegant with her curly, shoulder-length hair, was a direct contrast to Jane’s practical nature and looks. There had already been tension between them over the amount of time Katie spent on her appearance at the expense of domestic tasks. ‘You can move into my house,’ Jane replied.

  ‘It’s illogical — why make two moves? You stay there and I’ll move in next door.’

  ‘I have the right of first choice,’ Jane shouted suddenly. ‘My family set this complex up.’

  Christopher raised an eyebrow. When Mark and Steven had rescued him and his family from Wellington eighteen months previously and brought them to Gulf Harbour to live, they had been welcomed with open arms. This was the first mention of ownership or hierarchy. ‘Jane probably needs a change of scenery,’ he said, keen to diffuse the situation.