by Nette Hilton
NETTE HILTON is an established author of children’s literature and has won several awards for her books, which range from early childhood to novels for older readers. Her work includes the forever popular A Proper Little Lady and The Web, both of which have won awards and have been translated into many languages. Sprite Downberry, Nette’s recent novel for older readers, was shortlisted for the 2009 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her work beyond teaching and writing includes regular workshops and author talks at many writing venues, including literature festivals around the country.
GREGORY ROGERS studied fine art at the Queensland College of Art. In 1995, Gregory won the Kate Greenaway Medal for his illustrations in Way Home. He was the first Australian illustrator to win this prestigious British award. His first wordless picture book The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard was selected as one of the Ten Best Illustrated Picture Books of 2004 by The New York Times and shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year Awards for Younger Readers in 2005.
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Pyro Watson and the Hidden Treasure
9781742754024
A Woolshed Press book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
First published by Woolshed Press in 2009
Text copyright © Nette Hilton 2009
Illustrations copyright © Gregory Rogers 2009
The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted.
Woolshed Press is a trademark of Random House Australia Pty Ltd.
All rights reserved.
www.woolshedpress.com.au
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Author: Hilton, Nette, 1946–
Title: Pyro Watson and the hidden treasure /
Nette Hilton; illustrator, Gregory Rogers
ISBN: 978 1 74166 416 4 (pbk.)
Target Audience: For children
Other Authors/
Contributors: Rogers, Gregory, 1957–
Dewey Number: A823.3
Cover illustration by Gregory Rogers
To Brian. With thanks.
– N. H.
For Matt.
– G. R.
Contents
Cover
About the Author and Illustrator
Title Page
Copyright Page
Imprint Page
Dedication
Day One - Wednesday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Day Two - Thursday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Day Three - Friday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Day Four - Saturday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Day Five - Sunday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Day Six - Monday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Day Seven - Tuesday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Day Eight - Wednesday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Day Nine - Thursday
Chapter One, Two, Three and Four
Day Ten - Friday
Chapter One, Two, Three and Four
Pyro Watson clutched his blanket tightly to him. It wasn’t going to change anything, no matter how hard he held on. The old camper still swayed and rocked in the night wind. The ocean still hissed and roared and slugged its waves to the beach. The rocks still shone as darkly and the moon still lurked behind dark clouds.
Auntie Mor and Mr Stig still snored at the back of the van.
And Mum, who said Auntie Maureen could have made things easier if she’d just stopped tripping around for ten days so they could all get better organised, was still all the way across the Nullarbor looking after Nan.
Dad had his hands full of the banking business and couldn’t possibly, he said, take another week off to look after Pyro and Boa. Boa, whose real name is Beatrice, went to stay with Auntie Cos and that would have been all right because Auntie Cos lived next door to a video shop.
But here he was, with Auntie Mor, don’t-call-me-Maureen, and Mr Stig who was Auntie Mor’s newest best friend and had not been around long enough to be called Uncle anything.
And not a video shop in sight.
‘You can call me Charles,’ Mr Stig had said when Pyro turned up at the caravan park with his sleeping bag and his backpack full of treasures and the newest book on pirates that Dad had bought him to while away the hours until Mum came back. ‘Or Chas. My other friends call me Chas sometimes.’
Pyro tried. He even managed to get it right while they were having dinner but now, in the middle of the night in a van that swayed like a ship at sea, he was Mr Stig again.
Mr Stig with a round belly that was not at all unlike Smee’s who sailed with Captain Hook.
Pyro leaned up on one elbow. His head was close to the ceiling in the little pocket that had been especially cleared out for him. It sat above the cabin part of the camper and had a long sideways window across the front. He peered out into the dark night.
Waves.
Moonshadows on the water.
And the horizon way, way ahead of him.
It was a pirate sort of a night. A night when a ship could sail closer and closer and closer to another and then, with one mighty leap, pirates could clash swords with their enemies and take treasures to hide in secret places. Pirates, Pyro knew, weren’t too particular about who was an enemy. They even attacked other pirate ships. The way Pyro figured it, pirates probably didn’t have too many friends, especially ones on other ships.
Pyro searched along the horizon.
He could easily imagine the outline of a galleon silhouetted against the paler dark of the sky.
It was a night when San Simeon, the greatest seafarer of them all, would have taken his good ship Olga out of its hidden cove and into the great unknown of the Tropical Sea. He wasn’t afraid of falling off the edge of the world, or of the great serpents that lay in wait beneath the rolling rips of top
heavy waves. No … he was the bravest of them all and had promised to spend his days, his entire life, clearing the world of pirates and other evildoers.
‘Stand clear!’ San Simeon cried. ‘Stand clear or I’ll have you walking the plank!’
Pirates, armed to the teeth with daggers and swords, swung aloft on the sails and ropes.
‘It’ll be you who’s walking the plank, me hearty!’ Their Pirate Chief, the truly dreadful Roaring Roy Bistro, stood his ground. ‘Come aboard, I dare ye!’
San Simeon turned his back and walked across the deck. His men smiled at each other. They knew that he’d never ever walk away from a dare like that.
‘Scaredy cat!’ cried the dreadful Bistro. ‘Look at that, me lads! He’s a’walking away!’
But Simeon didn’t walk away.
As quick as a flea on a fat dog’s belly, he jumped up and grabbed the longest rope. He hauled it back and then sprang. His feet skimmed the deck as he sailed forward, the rope in one hand, his sword in the other and his dagger in his teeth. At the last moment Simeon was flung out, out, out over the surging waves. Higher he flew and higher. He ruffled the feathers of a passing pelican and then began his descent.
‘Prepare to meet your doom!’ he sang as he landed on the shoulders of the dreadful Bistro.
Roy Bistro slashed at the air with his sword. He roared his rage into the night and spun around trying to rid himself of the brave Simeon.
‘Ah ha!’ sang Simeon. He slipped his arm around Bistro’s fat neck and held tight. ‘I think, me laddie, it’s the cold steel of me dagger you’ll be feeling.’
He lifted his dagger but was stopped by a sound he never expected to hear on this awful, stinking pirate ship.
‘Don’t!’ A fair maiden with long hair that reached down to her bottom held up her arms. ‘Stop!’
San Simeon looked up.
It was a truly desperate sight.
‘Pyro?’ Auntie Mor was holding up a cup of tea. The sun was shining and the waves on the beach whispered to the shore. ‘Get up, lazy bones. There’s a whole day waiting.’
As Pyro Watson stood in the doorway of his aunt’s old camper and looked out at the sea – all sparkling and daytime-bright and ready, and the rocks, slippery but littered with shiny splashes of little pools that begged to be explored – he thought how marvellous this would be if he wasn’t alone.
If Geezer Smith was with him.
Or Jenna.
But he was alone and even pools with the promise of sucky-up anemones and little fish and maybe a sea-slug or two weren’t quite so thrilling if there was no one with you. Sucky-up things were a little bit scary if there was no one to make you do it. Dare you. Laugh at you. Test it out first. Or go and get a jar while you kept an eye on a particular little fish that would look good on the window ledge at home.
A fish in a jar would die before he even got it home.
There was no window ledge in the upstairs pocket of the camper that was his bedroom for a whole ten days.
And rock pools were just plain dangerous anyway.
‘Back that way, ’ Auntie Mor was saying over the rim of her coffee cup, ‘there’s the inlet and a cove and it’s really neat. But if you go this way –’ and she pointed behind her, ‘the inlet sweeps around and it’s quiet and still over there. There’s even a little boat tied up that we can use, if we want.’ She fixed her eyes right on him. ‘You can swim, can’t you?’
Pyro nodded.
Of course he could swim, sort of. You didn’t get to be nine-and-a-bit if you couldn’t swim. Every year at school since kindergarten, teachers had been walking them a zillion miles to the pool and making them learn. He still wasn’t all that good at it, though.
‘Put your face in and blow bubbles. Like this!’ His dad tried hard but the water always seemed to suck up Pyro’s nose instead of bubbling out his mouth. Then he’d choke and that’s not a good thing to do under the water. Eventually he’d have to shoot out of the water gasping and gagging and trying to get his hair out of his eyes so he could see.
‘Maybe if you got a haircut,’ Dad had suggested. ‘When I was kid we used to all surf out off the rocks. You need to be a good swimmer for that.’
Pyro had seen the water out around those rocks. He’d seen the swish and dark blue swirls that lurked under the bright foam. He’d heard that back-breaking slam of waves against the rocks. Even if he could swim the entire coastline of Australia, nothing would ever make him want to swim in that.
‘You used to have long hair back then.’ His mother was good at reminding Dad about things that he had forgotten. ‘What’d you do with it? Wear a bathing cap?’
Pyro would have giggled but it hadn’t been the right time. Not by the look on his dad’s face. It was the same look he’d worn when the swimming carnival was on and Pyro and Geezer came equal last. Or they would have except they had to be pulled out of the pool before they got to the deepest end. Pyro wasn’t too thrilled about deep, deep water.
‘He’ll get there in the end, won’t you,’ his mother always said. ‘Leave him be.’
Dad said that Mum was too soft and if she didn’t watch out Pyro would turn into a proper sook. Pyro wasn’t sure what a sook was, but he didn’t care too much. Just as long as it kept him out of the deep end of the pool.
But they did decide to get his hair cut. It didn’t make all that much difference, except it made his ears feel bigger than they really were. It was probably something to do with the water slapping away at the flappy outside bits.
‘I’m not very good, though,’ he explained to Auntie Mor in case she was deciding to send him off to swim the English Channel or something. Even if he was brilliant he wasn’t going to swim alone in a place where bull-sharks and catfish and eels and probably great big man-eating morays were likely to be lurking.
It’d be different if Geezer was here. The sun was getting warmer by the second and the inlet had taken on a lovely pale blue sparkly colour. Aqua, Pyro remembered from his pencil collection. The colour of water.
‘It’s a nice aqua colour, isn’t it?’ Pyro said.
‘I reckon.’ Auntie Mor shaded her eyes and looked across the grass at the top of the caravan clifftop to the inlet beyond. ‘Aqua means water. Clever, eh! It’s the colour and a name. So, what d’you think, Chas? You ready or not?’
Mr Stig looked like he was sinking down in his chair, which was a bit strange because he was already pretty short to begin with and the chair wasn’t the sort that would let him sink too far. ‘I think it would be better if we waited for a little while.’
Auntie Mor stood up and stretched out wide. Her mouth opened in an enormous yawn and she didn’t cover it up. His mother would be less than thrilled if Pyro had yawned like that. He was sure of it. And then she burped.
Loudly.
The burp twirled around the table and in and out of the breakfast jam and bread and crumbs and cereal and then sank happily onto the prickly beach grasses.
‘Ahhhh,’ she said. ‘Better out than in. And no, Chas, later is not the answer I wanted. Come on. You can’t put it off forever!’
Pyro moved from the bottom step of the camper. It was a bit of a stretch, especially with a cup of tea in his hand.
But he couldn’t help wondering what couldn’t be put off any longer. The question must have been written all over his face, which would have been a bit strange but no stranger than Mr Stig who answered it.
‘I can’t swim,’ he said. ‘Your Auntie Mor is teaching me.’
Pyro would have suggested having a haircut to make him feel better but as Mr Stig didn’t have a lot of hair left, perhaps he would need more help than a quick snip with a pair of scissors.
‘You have to blow bubbles,’ Pyro said.
And was very happy that he wasn’t the one who was going to have to do it. The shallow, sandy pools along the side were going to be enough to blob around in.
They’d be perfect if Geezer was here.
But he wasn’t.
; Day Number One was only beginning. There were a whole nine-and-a-half to go.
Mr Stig wasn’t kidding. He really couldn’t swim. And he hadn’t made much of an improvement by lunchtime, either.
For a little while it looked like he was really catching on. His face was going in-two-three and then turning out-two-three and he wasn’t sinking. He was actually moving and Pyro and Auntie Mor were calling out to keep going and don’t stop.
‘Take your hands off the bottom now!’ yelled Auntie Mor.
Mr Stig said it felt better if he left them there. Auntie Mor told him he’d be in strife if he met a big hole.
‘It’ll be fine!’ Mr Stig called back.
It wasn’t really fine and Mr Stig disappeared for a few seconds. He came up spluttering and splashing about and Auntie Mor said it was just exactly what she was talking about.
Mr Stig said if he was meant to swim he’d have gills, not lungs. And Auntie Mor said that gave her a wonderful idea and she was going to buy him some goggles and a snorkel and some water wings.
‘We’ll buy some for you too,’ she told Pyro. ‘And then you’ll be able to float around and look at the fish.’
Pyro wasn’t sure about fish, especially when they were swimming under him and probably knew a whole lot more about fishy-type dangers than he did.
Like sharks and where they’d most likely be hiding.
Pirates were probably good swimmers. Pyro wasn’t sure. It was something he’d have to find out as soon as he got back home. You’d reckon they would be, he thought to himself. It’d be a bit of a worry if you spent your life on the ocean blue and one slip meant you were in it and gone forever.