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.
40
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.
‘Come here, Maya.’
Jo-nee held out his hand to her and when she took it, he drew her to stand in front of him on the deck. She was glad it was night-dark. So he didn’t see her cheeks turn to fire.
‘What has my little blackbird been up to now?’
‘Listening.’
Blackbird? Black and ugly. Pecking at crumbs.
He laughed. ‘What did you pick up this time?’
She saw the way Razak looked at Jo-nee, and the way that Jo-nee looked at Razak.
‘Nurul think Mem Hadley is dead,’ she said cruelly, to see Jo-nee’s face turn as white as milk in the moonlight.
Yet when he stroked her hand, she wanted to snatch back her words. ‘But Kitty Madoc says mem too tough to die. She want to wait here long time for mem.’
‘Mrs Madoc is a strong woman. Despite her grief, she has her head screwed on right.’
Head screwed on?
‘She say she sorry crazy Madoc use radio.’
Jo-nee’s grip tightened, and his blue eyes ate her up as if she had hit him with one of his cricket bats.
‘Radio?’ he demanded. ‘What radio?’
‘On boat.’
‘What? There’s a short-wave radio on this boat?’
Maya nodded, pleased that he was squeezing her hand.
‘Do you know where it is?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
Of course she knew. She had sniffed around the boat after Nurul.
‘For heaven’s sake, Maya, why didn’t you tell me earlier? Take me to it at once.’
‘Crazy Madoc used it and Japs came. You no use it, Jo-nee. More Japs come.’
He dropped her hand. ‘Good God, girl, don’t be foolish. It’s our only way out of this unholy mess.’
The moon surprised them. It slipped away from the grip of the clouds and trickled a thin, luminous sheen across the waves.From the back of the canoe came Fitz’s grunt of disapproval, but Connie welcomed it. The darkness had been claustrophobic, jamming her thoughts in a perpetual circle.
‘Fitz,’ she asked suddenly, not breaking the rhythm of her stroke, though her arms ached. ‘What did you think? When you came to my house. Did you hate me?
’
She heard his breath stop. After a long moment, it started again.
‘Yes, I hated the concept of Mrs Constance Hadley, the woman I was certain had destroyed my brother. But,’ his voice altered, softened, ‘I never hated you, Connie.’ He gave a strange, low laugh. ‘God knows, I tried. I tried so damn hard to hate you that I nearly wrenched my guts out. But I didn’t stand a chance. I tried staying away from you, and then I tried hanging around so much that I could discover all your weaknesses and dislike you.’
‘And did you?’
‘Learn to dislike you?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
His hand lay on her back once more. The canoe veered off line as both paddles lost speed.
‘I grew to love you so much it nearly killed me. Seeing you with your husband each day was torture. Sometimes I even imagined that it was Shohei’s revenge on me for not avenging his memory.’
She swung around to face him, sending the canoe into a dance that both ignored. ‘Yet you betrayed me to General Takehashi. And you betrayed my son. How can that be love?’
He shipped his paddle in a brisk, angry movement, but his voice was gentle when he spoke. ‘Connie, when the Japanese troops captured you, I could have stayed hidden, I could have waited for Nurul and sailed away that night. I didn’t. Because a life without you would be no life.’
She laid a hand on his as a wave splashed over the side, leaving their fingers fused together in the wet and the dark.
‘The only way I could save you, Connie, was by summoning up the name of the great General Takehashi. It scared the pants off the local troops, and they sent a message to him in Okinawa. He flew down immediately. The rest you know.’
The canoe was drifting, a dark speck on a faceless sea. Connie tightened her hold on his hand.
‘And that scene in the tent? Was that real?’
‘Oh, Connie, my love, how can you ask?’
‘It felt real.’
He leaned forward in the dugout until his face was only a hand’s width from hers, a slow deliberate movement that felt to Connie as if the lines between them were blurring. There was no longer an end of her or a beginning of him. Something important was changing.
‘You were breathtaking,’ he whispered. ‘I never loved you more than when you knelt before my adoptive father. Your courage was beautiful.’
She could hear the smile in his voice, smell the sea in his hair.
‘You were cruel,’ she told him.
‘I know.’
‘Why should I forgive you?’ She meant her words to sound angry, but her smile crept into them as he drew her forward and kissed her salty lips.
The canoe rolled dangerously, and Fitz snatched up his paddle.
‘Now,’ Connie said, ‘now find me my son.’
*
Don’t leave me. Maya shouted the words so loud in her head that she thought Jo-nee would hear her. Don’t leave me.
He was arguing with Nurul. In the broad back end of the boat, Nurul kept pointing to the thin ribbon of gold on the eastern horizon and shaking his head. He wanted to leave. The wind was tugging sharply at the rigging, adding its voice to his, eager for the Burung Camar to be off. Nurul was angry that Jo-nee had used the radio. He had smacked Maya for showing it to Jo-nee, but she didn’t care because Jo-nee had kissed her cheek and told her she was a godsend.
‘What would I do without you?’ he had asked.
She was about to tell him that he didn’t ever have to do without her, when he called out to Teddy on deck that an aircraft was coming to pick them up. Maya almost laughed out loud. An aircraft? Where could it land? But Teddy believed him.
‘No,’ Teddy said. Very stern. Very sad. ‘I won’t go. I’m waiting here for my mother.’
‘Teddy, Nurul is taking the Burung Camar and leaving,’ Jo-nee explained so gently. ‘We’ve been here for four nights. I’m sorry, old chap, but the best we can hope for now is that she will turn up in one of the Jap prisoner-of-war camps.’
Teddy looked sick.
‘We need to be back home to hear news of her,’ Jo-nee urged.
‘I have no home,’ Teddy blurted out.
‘There’s always England, Teddy,’ Jo-nee reassured him and put an arm around his shoulders. ‘England will always be your home.’
Jo-nee is good man. But we must stay here for mem.
They all stared out across the waves at the island, hunched in the darkness like a black crab. The shifting moonlight made it look as though it were crawling closer.
‘What kind of plane?’ Teddy asked. He couldn’t resist it.
‘Thank God, there’s a Short Sunderland on reconnaissance patrol on the lookout for Japanese submarines in this area. To drop depth-charges on them. It should be here within half an hour – before the Japs can pinpoint my radio signal.’ Jo-nee hugged the Hadley boy. ‘Then we’ll be gone.’
Gone. Gone. Gone.
Don’t leave me.
Maya edged closer. ‘What is Short Sunderland?’
‘It’s a flying boat.’
For one delicious moment she thought the whole thing was Jo-nee joking. He did that sometimes. ‘How can a boat fly?’ She imagined The White Pearl with wings, and laughed.
Jo-nee frowned at her. ‘It’s a plane designed to land and take off on water. The Sunderland is the military version of the C-type flying boat, which flies passengers long distances all over the world.’
He didn’t like her to laugh at his planes. He gazed up at the night sky, a blur of black clouds and stars. ‘Listen for it – as well as for Japanese aircraft,’ he warned, and went over to argue with Nurul, who was preparing to hoist sail.
How could she listen for it when all she could hear was her heart crying?
‘Fitz, will General Takehashi come after you when he knows you tricked him?’
‘I have no doubt of it.’
A noise had made them stop paddling. They listened intently to the darkness. It was the sound of an airplane somewhere in the distance. Connie had swivelled round, her knees touching his, and she looked down at his bandaged leg but could see no fresh blood.
‘Connie, I didn’t betray Teddy.’
Fitz’s voice sounded sad. That she could think that of him.
‘I always knew that I could reach him first,’ he said. ‘That he would be safe from General Takehashi’s vengeance. I would make sure of that.’
He stroked her hair. Touched her lips.
‘I couldn’t let him shoot you, Connie. To offer him Teddy was all I had, but it was never a real offer.’
He raised her chin so that he could look into her eyes. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Fitz. I know that.’
The noise of the aircraft approaching shattered the night’s silence, stirring the waves so that the canoe rocked and rolled, eager to turn turtle. Fitz reached for Connie, and drew her back against him in the cradle of his arms.
‘General Takehashi is here sooner than I thought,’ he whispered into her wet hair.
The moon had dodged behind a cloud once more, and in the complete darkness they couldn’t see the plane or the island – or any sign of the Burung Camar. They were isolated in a non-world. They paddled hard together, aware of how fragile this moment was, how it could be snatched from their grasp.
‘Fitz, what will we do?’
‘Don’t think of it, Connie.’ He ran a hand up her arm, caressing its exhausted muscles. ‘Think of now. Of this time.’ His head rested its weight against hers.
‘I didn’t mean what will we do when General Takehashi captures us.’
‘What then?’
‘I meant, what will we do when we get away from here? Where shall we go?’
The soft, joyous sound of Fitz’s laugh echoed through the night. ‘My precious Connie, I love you. More than you’ll ever know.’
It was a monster plane, big and fat like a whale, its body dark brown and green. The roar of its four engines was enoug
h to wake up the world and it buzzed in Maya’s brain, but she remained huddled in the attap hut, unable to bring herself to say goodbye.
Jo-nee was excited, she could see him through the open end of the hut. Excited to be leaving her. The rowing boat was lowered to carry them across the water to the monster flying boat-without-sails and everything was rush-rush.
Kitty Madoc seized Jo-nee’s arm to anchor him in one place, right next to the hut. ‘I’m not going with you,’ she said. Her voice was still as dead as her husband. ‘I’ve decided to remain on this boat instead. I’ll take my chances here.’
‘Mrs Madoc,’ Jo-nee said quickly, ‘we can’t delay, but please reconsider. It’s not safe in these waters. Come with us, at least as far as …’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure. I would rather sail than fly.’
‘With Nurul?’
‘Yes. With Nurul.’
Nurul was shouting for them to be quick.
‘Goodbye then, Mrs Madoc,’ Jo-nee said kindly. ‘I wish you luck. I’m sorry our acquaintance was so …’
‘Goodbye, Flight Lieutenant,’ Kitty Madoc interrupted with her dead voice. ‘Tell that little chit of a girl who shot my husband that I hope she drowns.’ Her footsteps marched away across the deck.
Jo-nee ducked his head into the hut, and Maya put her hands over her ears because she didn’t want to hear him say she should drown. But instead he reached in and pulled her hands away with a big hello-smile.
‘Coming, little blackbird? Are you ready to fly?’
Connie and Fitz heard the plane hit the water.
‘A bomber down,’ Fitz muttered.
‘Let it be one of theirs,’ Connie said with sudden anger, ‘not one of ours.’
But as she spoke, a boisterous tidal wave surged from the impact, spreading wide and swamping the bow of the canoe. Fitz was a man with boats and seawater in his veins, so he kept his balance and steadied Connie, who was in danger of tipping into the sea. She turned in the canoe to thank him and as she did so her heart suddenly thumped against her ribs.
‘Look!’ she cried.
Moonlight had spilled over the sea, and not far away they could make out the huge bulk of an aircraft.
The White Pearl Page 48