‘Whisky?’ Connie asked the men. ‘The pearls will buy the ten crates of whisky.’
There was a collective murmur.
‘Whisky it is,’ Fitzpayne responded. He waved a hand, and two men disappeared into the wet night to fetch the crates from the Burung Camar’s hold. ‘Let’s have some music,’ he shouted. ‘Come on, Wong Yee, give us a tune. Chop-chop.’
A young Chinese woman detached herself from the cooking pot, bowed politely over her hands and let out a short burst of Cantonese that Connie didn’t understand. She was wearing a long dark dress, and from within its folds she drew out a nose flute. She fitted it with deft skill to her left nostril and began to breathe. A thin silvery sound filled the room and hung suspended on the night air as the notes rose and fell in a haunting melody. Razak stripped off his shirt, stepped forward and began to dance, a slow, graceful flow of movement with hands and fingers curved backwards as they wove capricious patterns in the smoky room, creating a story. His naked skin glistened like polished amber in the lamplight. All eyes focused on him, hypnotised by the beauty of it.
While everyone was watching Razak, Connie detached Badan’s fingers from Maya’s hair and slipped the noose off her neck. Fitzpayne removed the necklace from the pirate’s arm and folded it out of sight in his palm.
‘These are payment for the whisky, Badan,’ he said.
‘Pearls worth more than your swamp whisky,’ Badan snapped.
‘The deal is done.’
‘Bajak laut!’
To Connie’s astonishment, both men burst out laughing. Instantly the tension and hostility dissipated, and when the pirate removed his spectacles to clean them, Fitzpayne gave him a comradely slap on the shoulder. Without a backward glance at Maya, as though the fuss had been over nothing, Badan ambled off towards the fish stew.
‘What does it mean?’ Connie asked quietly. ‘Bajak laut?’
He looked at her, but the laughter was gone. ‘It means pirate.’
‘And is it true?’
‘That I’m a pirate?’
‘Yes. Are you one of them?’
He leaned close, a brief moment of intimacy in the crowded room.’If I weren’t one of them,’ he said in a low tone, ‘you would all be dead by now.’
‘Would he really have hanged Maya for so little?’
‘Of course.’
32
On the island, Connie felt her mind slowly unhitch from the orderliness of her previous existence. Days passed; she wasn’t sure how many. She grew lazy. And she went native. She donned the short oriental trousers that Fitzpayne supplied for her, and a drab green shirt that she wiped her fingers on whenever they were muddy – which was often. Around her head she twisted a strip of muslin from her skirt which kept the sweat out of her eyes and made her less conspicuous among the dark-haired islanders.
She stood for hours looking out at the rain. It came down in great lashing torrents day after day, wrenching branches from trees and silencing the bickering of the gibbons. It dislodged her thoughts. It swept away images of her past, flushed them out of her mind, so that she had difficulty recalling the exact shade of brown of Nigel’s hair, or the smell and texture of Sho Takehashi’s pale skin, both of which she thought were indelibly imprinted on her brain. But this strange green world seemed to swallow her, to spill into her head. It swamped her old world in a way that at first startled her, but then pleased her.
Her anguish over past mistakes faded, and when she rested her head against the door frame of her hut up in the trees, and came eyeball to eyeball with a speckled brown spider the size of her fist, she discovered that another kind of anguish had also faded. She knocked it onto the walkway outside and watched it run from the bombardment of raindrops.
She slept on her mat whenever she felt like it during the day, or found a trail alongside the river when she wanted to walk, but otherwise she just stared out at the rain. She lost the rhythm of her days. She didn’t go down to the Kennel for evening meals but someone – Teddy or Maya – always brought her something from there: a chunk of fish, a scoop of rice or an otak-otak, which was new to her, delicious spicy fish patties wrapped in banana leaves and grilled over a fire. Sometimes she ate the food, sometimes she didn’t.
Each morning she made an attempt at pursuing Teddy’s schooling – a regime of reading, writing and arithmetic – but as they bent over the books together, their eyes would meet in silent collusion and the lessons grew shorter and shorter. He would kiss her cheek, hug her fleetingly and dart down the bamboo ladder with Pippin in his basket, with an alacrity that should have made her worried, but didn’t. It made her happy. Happy that he was happy. Every day more garments or sheets of canvas were brought to her to mend, but they gathered in a pile which grew steadily higher. Pippin curled up on it at night.
Slowly, a little more each day, Connie’s past ceased breathing down her neck. As she lay awake on her mat listening to the rain or to the night murmurs of her son, she allowed nothing but the present inside her head.
‘Are you sick?’ Fitzpayne asked.
‘No.’
‘Are you hurt?’ He stood in the doorway of the hut.
‘No.’
Connie was stretched out on her mat in her shabby shirt and trousers, enjoying the sensation of the hut swaying in a high wind, forty feet above the ground in a tree in a storm.
‘So what’s the matter?’
‘What makes you think anything is the matter?’ she asked.
‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘As if that is important here.’ She rolled her head to the side and looked out through the window hole, where the green light outside looked fractionally brighter. ‘Noon?’ she suggested.
‘It’s time you got up.’
She laughed. The figure of Fitzpayne was backlit in the doorway, so she couldn’t make out his expression but his voice sounded amused.
‘You haven’t touched the sewing,’ he pointed out.
She closed her eyes. ‘I’m …stopping.’
‘Stopping what?’
‘Stopping being Constance Hadley.’
A silence filled the hut, a silence so huge she was astonished it didn’t shoulder the roof off and leave them defenceless in the rain. Her eyes remained shut, and she didn’t hear his feet cross the boards, but she caught the scent of his wet hair and the faint sound of his breath, so she knew he had moved closer.
‘I rather liked Constance Hadley the way she was,’ he told her quietly.
‘She’s gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘She has gone …’ she almost said to be at Nigel’s side under the sea where she belongs, but she stopped herself. ‘Gone to find The White Pearl, to play Happy Families on it.’
Suddenly his foot nudged her ribs, startling her. Her eyes popped open. He was standing over her, a tall, powerful figure. ‘So who is this?’ He nudged her again with his foot. His face still lay in shadow. ‘Who is this lazy creature, too bone idle to lift a finger?’
She smiled up at him. ‘This is Connie.’
‘Hello, Connie.’
‘Hello, Fitz.’
‘Are you the one who owns the kid who is running around like a savage and making the other ignorant urchins pay him in gifts to read stories to them?’
Connie leaped to her feet, eyes wide in horror. ‘What?’
‘Hah! I thought that would get you out of bed.’
She found her son. And she found his stash. He was crouched with his new friend, the tall skinny lad named Akil who had caused him such grief that first day in the Kennel. They were under an old dugout canoe that was jammed over a cleft between two rocks, forming a shelter of sorts. She spotted them only because Pippin’s black tail was swishing through the wet sand.
‘Teddy! Come here at once.’
For a moment she thought he was going to disobey her but eventually, with a sullen droop of his head, he squeezed from under his hideout and faced her squarely. She took his arm and marched him out of ear
shot of the other boy.
‘Teddy, what are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I’ve heard that you are charging to read stories to the other children.’
He scuffed his feet in the dirt.
‘Is it true?’ she insisted. ‘Tell me.’
He shot a glance over towards Akil, who was now squatting under an umbrella of broad spiny leaves about ten feet away, a frown on his face.
Reluctantly Teddy nodded. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘But I deserve it. I translate stories into Malay for them because their English is so bad.’
‘Teddy, these boys have so little. It’s wrong to take from them.’
He pulled his shoulder from her grasp. For the first time she noticed the muscles developing under his skin, the thickening of his upper arms from the physical work he was doing here, and she wanted to squeeze him to her and hold him tight. But she remembered the words she’d said to Fitzpayne about the old Connie, so instead she stood back, looked down at his bedraggled mop of hair and spoke in a stern tone.
‘Show me,’ she said.
‘Show you what?’
‘What you’ve taken from them.’
His shoulders slumped. ‘You’ll confiscate them.’
One of his father’s words.
‘Maybe. Maybe not. Show me.’
He trotted off ahead of her, bare limbs streaked by the rain, and led her to an old metal box that he had hidden in the hollow of a fallen tree. Flakes of orange rust speckled his fingers like measles as he opened the lid. Inside lay a miniature morgue. A small bat, two chameleons, several geckos and lizards, horny black beetles and even a yellow and red moth larger than her hand. No birds, she noticed.
‘Teddy, why on earth have you acquired such a macabre menagerie?’
‘To dissect them, of course.’
‘Is this all you took from the boys?’
‘Yes.’
But she knew her son too well. ‘Don’t lie to me.’ She held out her hand. ‘What else?’
Slowly, miserably, he drew something from his back pocket and placed it on the flat of her hand. It was a shiny gold guinea. They both stared at it. He was his father’s son when it came to business. Connie knew she couldn’t take it from him.
‘Teddy, do you like it here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
He scratched at his wet hair. ‘Because I can choose what I do.’
She examined his face intently, and felt a small but permanent crack open up between them. ‘So why the sad face?’
He lowered his eyes. ‘I feel bad.’
‘Why bad?’
‘It’s complicated.’
Another of his father’s phrases when he didn’t want to explain something.
‘Try me.’
‘I’m only free because Daddy’s not here.’ His voice grew small.
Gently she stroked the wet strands from his face. ‘There is always a price to pay for freedom, Teddy.’
He kicked at a log and dislodged a beetle, which he stared at with interest.
‘You may keep the coin,’ she said. ‘But in exchange, there’s something I want you to do for me.’
‘Good God Almighty! What kind of place is this?’
Madoc stood on the deck of The White Pearl and looked around him while the rattle of a chain sounded in the stern as Nurul dropped anchor. The busy walkways enclosed under the tree canopy made him think of the inside of a beehive, but this one was a strong, dense green, humming with energy. It was almost dark now. The sun had slid gracefully behind the island’s hunched back as they entered the shadowy inlet.
‘What do you think?’ Kitty asked at his side.
‘Interesting.’
‘See the rifles?’
Up in vantage points in the trees men stood watching their arrival, rifle barrels resting on their forearms. ‘Quite a welcoming party.’
‘I warned you,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘We should have made a run for it when we could.’
He flicked a ragged moth from the tangle of her hair. ‘I admit I didn’t expect this place to be so … organised.’
‘Madoc,’ Kitty turned to face him, and her whisper felt warm on the damp skin of his cheek. ‘Let’s go tonight. Take the boat. They won’t be expecting that.’
‘Smile nicely, Kitty. Our friend is here to greet us.’
She swore and glanced over to the riverbank, where Fitzpayne was standing, arms folded across his chest. He wore a knotted scarf around his head, gnarled leather boots up to his knees and, though Madoc could see no gun, a heavy parang hung at his side. The White Pearl made the other boats look as dull as turtles, her elegance drawing envious eyes from among the trees.
Madoc slipped his arms tightly around Kitty’s ample waist and together they studied the shore, conscious of Fitzpayne’s gaze. ‘We won’t be here long, I promise you that. It occurs to me that there are people who would pay top dollar to know that this hideout exists.’
She leaned her weight against him. ‘Take care, Madoc. Look at that bastard. Don’t imagine that he won’t have thought of that.’
‘That may be.’ Madoc could not resist a note of satisfaction in his voice. ‘But he doesn’t know that I’ve discovered from Farid – Nurul’s poker-playing pirate – where Fitzpayne hides a secret short-wave radio on board the Burung Camar.’
The strength of her smile made Madoc decide that the loss of his wedding ring had been worthwhile.
‘So you’re still alive, I see.’ It was Fitzpayne.
‘Still alive and kicking,’ Madoc responded.
‘What about the Jap pilot? Killed him off yet?’
‘Your friend Nurul certainly had a good try a few times, but no, he’s still with us.’
‘More bloody mouths to feed! I’ll tell Nurul to throw him in the hold of the Burung Camar.’
‘Quite a set-up you have here in the trees,’ Madoc remarked.
But Fitzpayne turned on his heel and strode off into the gloom of the forest, leaving Madoc and Kitty to follow behind. The evening air was thick with mosquitoes, and felt like soup in Madoc’s lungs after the clean breezes of the open seas, but he was too intrigued by what he was seeing around him to care about the discomfort. His eyes darted everywhere. Someone had designed a clever fortress here. Sentries loomed above him armed with rifles and sharp eyes. Kitty nudged him in the back from behind as if to say I warned you. Fitzpayne was prepared for everything.
‘How long has all this been here?’ he called out to Fitzpayne as they fought for footing on the muddy trail.
‘Long enough.’
‘I’m surprised I haven’t heard whisper of it before. Such places are hard to keep secret.’
‘We have a way of keeping it secret,’ Fitzpayne said over his shoulder.
‘What’s that?’
‘Anyone who talks is killed.’
‘Jesus Christ! Simple but effective.’
‘I advise you to remember that.’
As he continued to walk behind Fitzpayne, Madoc let his fingers crawl over the Tokarev pistol tucked in his waistband, hidden away under his shirt. Something else that was simple but effective.
‘I haven’t seen any workshops,’ he said, peering into the gloom. ‘To repair the boats in. Where are they?’
Fitzpayne stopped so abruptly that Madoc almost crashed into him. ‘The trouble with you, Madoc, is that you ask too many questions.’
‘No harm meant,’ Kitty intervened pleasantly. ‘We’re curious, that’s all.’
‘Haven’t you heard that curiosity killed the cat?’
With a sweep of his hand, Fitzpayne pushed aside the dense curtain of overhanging foliage that obscured the clearing beyond and led them up a set of steps into a long meeting hall.
‘This is the Kennel,’ Fitzpayne announced. But as they ducked their heads to walk through the doorway he lowered his voice and added, ‘Watch yourself here, Madoc. These are not men who take kindly to an intruder with a gun stuck down
his trousers.’
Kitty grabbed a handful of Madoc’s backside and squeezed it so hard that it felt like a damn dog bite. ‘Stupid shit,’ she growled at him, and pushed past into the dimly lit chamber.
The shutters were closed, and a handful of native women were tending a fire to cook the evening meal. There were huddles of men seated on the floor, playing cards and mah-jong or whittling shapes out of drift-wood. But most of them just sat and smoked rough cigarettes or strange-smelling clay pipes, and drank Tiger beer by the gutful. There was no welcome for him and Kitty; just the usual hard-eyed stares and suspicious muttering. That was OK. He didn’t intend to hang around any longer than was necessary.
Down the far end, a bunch of kids sat in rows, dirty knees akimbo, reciting in unison something they were being taught. He spotted the Hadley boy among the dark heads, and Razak as well, but his attention was taken by the way Fitzpayne slipped easily into the inner life of the hall, greeting, laughing and offering smokes. He became a part of it all as effortlessly as chameleons ripple up and down tree bark, almost invisible.
‘Madoc.’ It was Kitty.
She thrust a sheet of cardboard into his hand. He squinted at it in the poor light and saw that it was a list of rules. He scanned them, came to the ban on use of guns and swore under his breath. He frowned at Kitty, but she wasn’t paying attention. Instead she was staring open-mouthed at the children.
‘Just kids,’ he said.
‘Look at their teacher.’
He looked, indifferent at first, at the slight, graceful figure sitting so relaxed on the floor in front of the children. She was leaning over one of them, listening with a solemn expression to what the urchin had to say. A length of soiled material was wound around her head, and she wore clothing that was too big for her. It was only when she raised her head to attend to another child that it dawned on him who she was.
‘Constance Hadley!’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘She has changed.’
‘That’s an understatement,’ Kitty chuckled.
‘She’s cut her hair.’
‘She looks … not European. Her bones all flow together, not stiff boards, like the colonials. We’ve seen men go native out here, losing their Western ways, but never a woman.’
The White Pearl Page 40