Yamashita's Gold

by Phillip Gwynne

  Had I got this totally wrong?

  Would I have been better off just sitting in the hotel lobby until she returned?

  I’d been to Sealands quite a few times – what Gold Coast kid hadn’t? – and seen the dolphin show quite a few times – what Gold Coast kid hadn’t? – and it was pretty much the same as it had always been: there was dolphins going backwards on their tails, dolphins hurtling through the air, dolphins doing the things that dolphins do, or had been taught to do.

  Look, I’m not anti-dolphin or anything. I mean, if I had to make a choice between a world with dolphins and a world without dolphins of course I’d choose the former. It’s just that I think they’re a teeny weeny bit overrated.

  So when Miss Saffrron, the trainer, stood at the side of the pool and yelled out, ‘Putih! Putih! Putih!’ and a little white dolphin poked its little white head out of the water I didn’t exactly join everybody else there and go ape; my applause was more modest. I didn’t even feel the need to record this momentous event on my smartphone, either.

  Saffrron then told us how she’d been there when Putih was born, how it’d been the most extraordinary experience of her life. How after that she’d changed her name from Saffron to Saffrron, the extra letter symbolising the extra dimension that Putih had brought to her being.

  More applause. None of it mine. More smartphone filming. Not mine, either.

  ‘And now who in the audience would like the opportunity to get up close to our star?’ she said into the mike.

  Various hands shot up, including quite a few that belonged to elderly Yamba residents.

  But I guess they were never going to choose somebody with a Zimmer frame.

  ‘The boy with the green cap in the front row,’ said Saffrron, pointing.

  There was applause as he made his way poolside, and you could see he was the type of kid who doesn’t mind a bit of the old applause. Who always hammed it up during the school play.

  ‘So where are you from?’ Saffrron asked.

  Green Cap couldn’t wait to get his hands on that mike, but just as he took it, somebody ran out from the audience – messy blonde hair, singlet and shorts, barefoot – and snatched it from his hands.

  The words in my head just had to find a way out. ‘It’s Salacia, the Goddess of the Sea!’ I said, in a very loud voice.

  ‘You don’t say?’ said the lady with the Zimmer frame.

  ‘Wild animals should not be kept in captivity,’ Sal yelled into the mike in that mongrel accent of hers.

  When Saffrron tried to grab it from her, Sal easily evaded her grasp. Green Cap tried to regain the spotlight by trying to lay a tackle on her, but she skipped out of the way and he ended up hitting the concrete hard.

  Chanting, ‘Wild animals should not be kept in captivity,’ Salacia ran around the perimeter of the pool.

  A lot of the people in the audience were booing but a few other, mostly younger, kids were clapping; maybe they thought it was part of the act.

  ‘Somebody put a bullet in her scone,’ said Zimmer-frame lady thoughtfully.

  It took five security guards to corner Sal, turn off the mike, and cart her kicking and screaming away.

  That seemed to be the end of the show because a pre-recorded voice, all honey-dipped, came on, ‘And ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we have the full range of Putih merchandise available on your way out. And don’t forget our cheeky new range of Putih lingerie.’

  As I jumped out of my seat people were already scrambling out of theirs, keen to get their hands on a Putih T-shirt, a Putih G-string. I pushed through them, managing to just catch sight of the rapidly disappearing security guards. My hope was that they were just going to boot Sal out, but they didn’t seem to be making for the entrance.

  In fact, they were headed in the opposite direction.

  As I followed them past the shark enclosure it was shark-feeding time; I could see a huge isosceles triangle slicing ominously across the water’s surface.

  ‘That’s Cedric,’ said the trainer to the onlookers. Okay, Cedric’s a pretty amusing name. Like Basil. Or Baldrick.

  But when the trainer threw a tuna into the water and Cedric lifted his enormous head, showing jaws crammed full of teeth, it wasn’t so amusing any more.

  ‘Ohmigod!’ somebody said.

  Shocked, appalled and poo-your-pants-scared ohmigod.

  The trainer just raised her eyebrows as if Cedric was some sort of try-hard show-off and said, ‘He’s the biggest white pointer in captivity in the world.’

  After the shark enclosure I hit a dead end – a CCTV-ed steel-gated multi-locked dead end.

  I knew Salacia was on the other side, but how to get to her?

  I looked at the CCTV.

  The CCTV looked at me.

  I waved at the CCTV.

  The CCTV looked at me.

  I made various other hand signals at the CCTV.

  You guessed it – the CCTV looked at me.

  But a female voice came over a speaker, ‘Yes, can we help you?’

  ‘That girl you have inside there,’ I said. ‘She’s a friend of mine.’

  I could hear some sort of conversation going on and then another voice came over the speaker, a male voice.

  ‘Well, that girl is in serious trouble,’ he said, his voice half-headmaster half-policeman.

  If it had been months ago, if it had been before The Debt, I would’ve probably backed down then. But something happens to you when you’ve come that close to being sashimi-ed by an oil tanker, when you’ve climbed over the wall of the Colosseum, when you’ve been shot at several times.

  ‘Hey, mister,’ I said, drawing myself to my full height, looking the CCTV firmly in its electronic eye. ‘My friend did nothing wrong except to say something she believes in. Which, if I’m not wrong, is pretty much a right in this country. So if you don’t let her go right now, I’ll exercise another right, which is to ring the police and tell them you’ve kidnapped her.’

  The CCTV kept looking.

  A plane flew overhead.

  The speaker crackled.

  And three figures appeared on the other side of the gate – Salacia and two members of that de-evolved species Guardias securitas.

  From a distance one of them looked disturbingly familiar. When they got closer, I could see why. It was him, the Buzz Lightyear lookalike, the security guard from the Diablo Bay Nuclear Power Station. Clearly, after it had been decommissioned, he’d got himself a job here. If he recognised me, he gave no indication of it.

  The gate was opened; Salacia walked through, and straight past me.

  ‘A “thank you” would’ve been nice,’ I said, catching up to her.

  ‘Have you been stalking me or something?’ she said.

  A kid walked past, clutching a Putih soft toy.

  ‘Wild animals should not be kept in captivity,’ said Salacia to the kid.

  ‘Why did you leave that letter at my place?’ I said.

  Salacia stopped and glared at me, hands on her hips.

  For a second I thought I was going to get a bit of the old ‘wild animals should not be kept in captivity’ myself.

  Instead she glared at me some more and said, ‘If it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t have come all the way to this stupid country and spent weeks searching for some stupid treasure that doesn’t exist and my mom wouldn’t have got sick and had to go to the stupid hospital.’

  Okay, there was a fair bit to unpack here – like when my mom came back from her weekly supermarket shop with bags and bags of stuff.

  I know I should’ve asked about her sick mum, I know that’s what a normal decent human being would do, but it’s not what came out of my abnormal indecent mouth.

  ‘You’ve been searching for weeks?’

  ‘All because of you!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Diabolical Bay!’

  It’s like in primary school, where they’re picking teams, and nobody picks you, except it was about a billion times worse
than that.

  They’d left me out!

  They’d started without me!

  After all I’d done for them!

  ‘Sorry, is your mum okay?’ I eventually said.

  ‘No thanks to you,’ she said, and then she added, ‘But at least we’re going home now.’

  ‘You’re going home? But when?’

  ‘As soon as possible, I hope,’ she said, and then she took off, running quickly away.

  For a second I thought about chasing after her, and explaining everything to her. But I knew that in order to do that I would have to explain everything to myself first.

  Saturday

  To the Island

  When I got back home the whole family was sitting around the kitchen table.

  Mom and Dad on one side, Miranda and Toby on the other.

  It looked suspiciously like a family meeting to me, one that I hadn’t been told about.

  Like I said once before, we weren’t the sort of family that was big on family meetings, not like the Silversteins, who were always having family meetings. Somebody didn’t replace the toilet paper? Call a family meeting. Light left on? Family meeting. No, a family meeting was a big deal for us.

  ‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ said Dad but there was nothing you’re-in-big-trouble about his voice. ‘Sit down.’

  But where? Yes, there were spare chairs next to Toby and Mom, but if I sat in one of them it would make the whole thing uneven.

  Suddenly I had this feeling of being excluded, and it was a horrible feeling, like someone had hollowed out my guts.

  Excluded from my own family.

  And why? Because of The Debt, of course.

  And though I certainly didn’t think so at the time, I was grateful that Mr McFarlane, my English teacher, had spent a whole double lesson explaining irony.

  ‘This text,’ he’d said, ‘is replete with irony.’

  Well, Mr Mac, my life is replete with irony.

  And here was the latest example: The Debt was about paying a family debt, but by paying it I was losing touch with my family.

  Miranda pulled out the chair next to her, indicating it with a nod of her head.

  I hesitated.

  ‘Sit down, Dom,’ said Mom. ‘I’ll get you a coffee.’

  I sat down. Mom got me a coffee. The world was a better place. For now.

  Once we were all settled again, Dad said, ‘We have some great news.’

  He looked over at Mom, did some of that wordless communication that parents are so good at.

  She responded by saying, ‘It really is great news.’ Though there was plenty of enthusiasm in her voice, there wasn’t much in her face, and I wondered how ‘great’ she really thought this particular news was.

  I looked over at Miranda.

  She shrugged. She obviously had as much idea as I did what this great news was. Or maybe she was still angry at Mom for being a ‘snob’.

  I did the same with Toby. Same result.

  So they were as out of the loop as I was, which made me feel sort of okay.

  ‘We’re going on a family holiday!’ said Dad.

  ‘All of us together?’ said Miranda, glaring at Mom.

  That I got – she probably thought Mom was getting her away from Seb. And it didn’t seem such a bad theory, because there was something weird about this sudden holiday. And then I remembered something else.

  ‘But Mom, weren’t you supposed to be going to Beijing?’

  ‘We’ve postponed,’ she said, and there was something in her voice that told me that she wasn’t entirely happy with this.

  ‘I’m taking a whole week off work!’ said Dad.

  This hadn’t happened in such a long time, since we were little kids.

  Yes, we went on holidays, and Dad would join us for maybe a day or two, but then he always had to go back to work, so a whole week was something special.

  Yes, it was a family holiday.

  Yes, there was definitely something weird.

  But the next question was where?

  Toby was already ahead of me. ‘Please tell me we’re going to Paris,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Tokyo,’ said Miranda. ‘Or Seoul.’

  ‘Disneyland?’ I offered, displaying a pretty breathtaking lack of imagination.

  ‘We’re going to keep it domestic,’ said Dad, looking over to Mom for some support.

  It took a while to come. ‘Very domestic.’

  ‘So we’re going to the beach house?’ said Miranda, not bothering to disguise the disgust in her voice.

  Beach was so her kryptonite.

  ‘No,’ said Dad.

  ‘Sydney?’ said Toby.

  Another response of the ‘no’ variety.

  ‘Melbourne?’ I ventured.

  Yet another.

  ‘Not the outback?’ said Miranda.

  If beach was her kryptonite, then outback was her bubonic plague.

  ‘No, we’re going to fly to Reverie Island!’ said Dad, looking directly at me. ‘We’re swapping beach houses with the Jazys.’

  To say that the collective response from the Silvagni children was underwhelming is a bit like saying that poo smells.

  The Silvagni children were so underwhelmed that they said nothing. Just sat there, mute, in their underwhelmedness.

  ‘Isn’t that just great?’ said Dad, and again his focus was on me.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Mom.

  I just knew by the amount of energy she was putting into this that she didn’t think it was great either.

  What was going on here?

  Why were we going somewhere where none of us except Dad wanted to go? And why did he want to go there, anyway?

  I thought of what he’d said about giving yourself a kick up the bum.

  ‘I’m not going,’ said Miranda.

  ‘Neither am I,’ said Toby.

  At last, some sibling solidarity.

  Reverie Island, miles and miles from Diablo Bay, from where E Lee Marx was currently searching for Yamashita’s Gold, was the last place I needed to be.

  Count me out too, I was about to say, but I bit my tongue.

  Reverie Island was where I’d learnt all about Yamashita’s Gold.

  Dad took out a piece of paper, slid it along the table towards me.

  I caught the word at the top – PADI – and immediately got excited.

  ‘I’ve booked you into a diving course,’ said Dad.

  Suddenly Reverie Island and Diablo Bay moved even closer together.

  Dad pulled out a box and slid it along the table to Miranda.

  ‘We thought this might keep you busy.’

  Miranda looked at the contents, a tablet.

  I could see Mom and Dad exchange glances – had they misjudged this?

  But then Miranda smiled and said, ‘It just might work.’

  Which left Toby.

  I had a feeling that a new, even more improved egg whisk or the latest cookbook just wasn’t going to do the trick – they needed to come up with something pretty spectacular to clinch the three-kid deal.

  Toby sat there, arms folded over his belly, with a show-me-what-you’ve-got look on his face.

  Mom took out a brand-new Kindle Fire and put it on the table.

  ‘It’s got five hundred classic cookbooks loaded onto it,’ said Dad.

  ‘Elizabeth David?’ said Toby, looking at it dubiously.

  Dad look at Mom.

  ‘Yes, Elizabeth David, and Claudia Roden and …’ said Mom, reeling off the names of a whole lot of people I’d never heard of.

  ‘Okay,’ said Toby.

  That was it, the clincher. We were going to Reverie Island.

  I have to admit, it was some pretty stunning work from the parental units, especially the male one.

  ‘Oh, and we’re going to have some visitors,’ he added.

  Nobody said anything, but our faces must’ve all been asking the same question, because Dad said ‘Yes, it seems like Imogen and her mum might co
me and stay for a couple of days.’

  Not possible, I thought. Imogen’s mother never went anywhere to stay for a couple of days. But hard on its heels was another thought: Imogen is going to be there! Imogen!

  This was already the weirdest holiday we’d been on, anybody had been on, and we hadn’t even packed our bags yet.

  Tuesday

  Girly Swot From Hell

  Two days later, we’d touched down at the tiny airport at Reverie, the same airport that the Zolt and I had taken off from at the end of the very first instalment. As soon as I’d stepped outside, I could feel it in the air, this electric sense of expectation. That devastating nobody-wants-me-in-their-team feeling I’d had after the conversation with Sal had gone. They needed me, they just didn’t know it. But the first step to them needing me was for me to learn to dive.

  When we’d arrived at the Jazy house Miranda had gone straight to her room, the Bali room, to do stuff on her tablet. Toby had gone straight to his room, the Goa room, to do stuff on his Kindle Fire. Mom had gone straight to the entertainment room, and put her DVD on, the first season of the TV show Homeland. I’d previously decided to keep a low profile, so I re-read a couple of E Lee Marx’s books.

  The next day Dad drove me into town.

  ‘You want me to hang around?’ he said as we pulled up outside Reverie Diving.

  ‘No, I’ll be fine,’ I said.

  I saw a flicker of disappointment on Dad’s face.

  ‘Hey, maybe you should do the course with me?’ I said, perhaps overcompensating a bit.

  ‘I could, couldn’t I?’ said Dad.

  I’m not sure why, but I really didn’t want him to do the course with me. ‘Yeah, you could,’ I said. ‘It’s a pretty intensive course, though.’

  ‘Three days, right?’ said Dad.

  I nodded.

  Was he really considering it?

  ‘And the final day is out on the boat?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  He was actually going to do it!

  How dumb had I been encouraging him?

  Dad’s phone rang, and for perhaps the first time in my life I was grateful that it had.

  ‘Rocco,’ said Dad. ‘I’ll get back to you in five.’

  Dad wished me luck, gave me a quick hug, and I was able to walk into Reverie Diving by myself.