Beth hears Val trying to sound casual and so she can’t resist: ‘What boat?’
Val raises an eyebrow. ‘You know, Beth, the wooden one. It’s been there all week. You swim every day, how could you not see it?’
Beth grins. ‘Why ask me then?’
The two of them have circled each other all week, as if some unspoken truce had been reached: only talk about Clem and Eva or school, nothing else. But here’s Val changing the rules again.
‘Have you met him yet?’ she says.
‘Who?’
Val puts her hands on her hips. ‘This Pirate everyone is talking about.’
‘Have you?’ says Beth.
‘No. Seen him though. Easy on the eye.’ She gives a wink and Beth laughs with surprise. ‘Under all that hair, anyway. I know Jim, though. Nice enough, compared to most of the expats here. He’s been coming for years.’
‘Really?’
‘Yep, got a wife here: Rejoice. Young kids too: Joseph in Year Three and Jana in Year One are his. There’s also a younger one.’
‘So where are they? Where do they live?’
‘Rejoice’s home village is down the highway but she lives here, near the hospital. Jim comes once a year or so, sometimes stays a few weeks, sometimes longer.’
Beth had seen him when she walked to the beach for a swim. He was dragging a dinghy to the water. Even from a distance she could see the leathering of him, his skinny bowed legs.
‘He’s old,’ she says.
‘He’s male,’ says Val, shaking her head and taking the soup bowls to the table. ‘And you see it all the time up here, these old expats and their young local wives.’ Val turns to look at her. ‘So. Back to the question: have you met him yet?’
‘Nope. When would I get the chance? You work me too hard for that!’ Beth feels a smile spread across her face. ‘Plus, I have been slightly obsessed with a thumb.’
And Val laughs.
But Beth has seen him: in Lim’s buying rice and noodles. She was walking in as he stood waiting at the checkout; their eyes had met fleetingly and she’d felt a rush surge through her. She’d looked to the floor and kept walking.
*
The day is waning and Beth walks quickly through the mission to the wharf. Kids call out as she approaches. Dennis and Abraham shout and somersault off the pier into the water, then come up splashing and waving. Synchronised somersaults, now there’s an Olympic sport this country could nail. Beth laughs and waves back. When she finally gets to the wharf and kicks off her thongs, the kids start swimming away towards a finger of rocks jutting out into the bay. When she’d first started coming here she’d yelled after them: I don’t mind ... please, please, no problem ... swim here too. But they’d simply yelled back: Nogat white masta. Yu swim hia.
Beth doesn’t bother calling now. Every afternoon, she dives in and feels the tropical water take her. It’s not the shocking cold of the Indian Ocean; this water is much kinder. It feels thicker too. Got more guts or something, Clem would say. She scoops it away from her, breaststroking out, out into the bay. She turns onto her back and floats, spreadeagled, then runs her fingers through her thick curls swimming around her: entangled in ribbons of sea grass. She looks above and knows she doesn’t have much time. She needs to walk back through the mission soon because here dark comes urgently, unlike the creeping dusk of home. For once, there are no storm clouds thickening above. Held by water under a clear sky, Beth soaks in this feeling of aloneness. She thinks of Clem, imagining him coming in from work, lighting the fire, cooking sausages; he’d think it unreal she was swimming in August. And before she can stop, she sees Sam: in their kitchen, making pizza dough, flour all over the bench, precisely sliced mushrooms, onions and salami off to the side.
Abruptly, she turns onto her front and furiously kicks off into freestyle, refusing to come up for breath, tearing a crooked line further out into the bay. Her eyes stinging, her throat razored, still she keeps going. Breathless by the time she finally stops, she treads water, panting. She hates that even out here, thousands of miles from home, he still reaches her.
The kids are now on the shore and, her breathing steady, she heads toward them: big, long strokes, testing herself to see if she can make as few ripples as possible, slowly, purposefully sliding toward land. Imagining in that moment she might not exist at all.
1976
A couple of weeks after the fire, Clem comes around the corner of the chook shed to see Rose under the hills hoist, clutching her belly, bent over and retching violently. He races to her and helps her stand upright. Her face is bleached, her curls clumped with vomit.
‘Oh love,’ he says gently. ‘You okay?’
Rose huffs. ‘Never better, Clem.’ Then silence. She closes her eyes, takes a few long breaths. ‘I’m okay now. I just felt a bit crook.’
Clem wracks his brain. ‘Do you think you’ve eaten something? Picked up a bug or something?’ But even as he says this it doesn’t add up: he feels fine and they’ve eaten the same things, plus Rose is never ill. When the whole shed comes down with flu, she doesn’t even sneeze.
‘Clem.’ She leans into him. ‘I’m pregnant.’
The wind is knocked out of him. He stands there, big mouth gaping, staring at her. ‘A baby?’ His eyes are shining.
‘Well, I bloody hope so!’ says Rose.
‘Oh Rosie,’ he says, hugging her. ‘You just keep getting better and better, don’t you?’
They stand there, hens clucking, chicken shit and vomit filling the air, crying and laughing, hugging and crying.
*
Rose is lucky. The nausea usually subsides by noon. Clem brings her tea and toast in bed each morning, and she waits half an hour before she stands, ready to start the day.
‘I was like it all day and night,’ Eva says, bustling through the door with chicken soup. ‘Clem ruined me. Never could endure it a second time.’
‘Clem was a blighter all right,’ wheezes Tom, shuffling in behind her. ‘Talk about kick, he couldn’t wait to get out.’ He looks over at Clem, who has his arm slung round Rose’s shoulders: ‘God Clem, yer happy as a pig in shit, aren’t ya son?’ He steadies himself against the kitchen table, looks at the pair of them, eyes glistening. ‘I reckon it’s terrific.’
Rose’s parents had said, congratulations. At least that’s what she’d told Clem they’d said on the phone. And then she’d kissed him, held him close. You’re my family, she’d said. You and this baby we’ve made. And then she’d kissed him again.
Pirate sees Beth before she sees him. She’s stooped over piles of small green mangoes and over-ripe bananas lying end to end. Then she stands and heads for the line of fish sellers. He rakes a hand over his hair, pats down his ponytail and when he lifts his eyes, she’s watching him, then abruptly turns away, pointing at a parrotfish for sale. Pretty fish and good eating, he thinks, then pulls himself up. Christ. He’s turning into Roo. He swings around to pick up his bilum filled with vegetables, gets distracted by a boat tearing in: young men waving foot-long silver fish in the air and shouting out the price, locals rushing to meet the boat as it barrels onto the stony shore.
‘Hey there.’
He swings around to see her, all brown-limbed and blue-eyed.
‘Hello,’ is all he manages to say.
‘You been watching me?’
He reddens, and it surprises him.
And she’s laughing now. ‘I’m Beth,’ she says, her Australian accent soft. ‘And you must be Pirate.’
‘Apparently,’ he says. ‘No idea where they got that from.’
She laughs again. ‘And you live out on that boat with Jim, right?’
‘Yep,’ he says. ‘When he’s not with Rejoice and the kids.’ She has little beads of sweat above her top lip. ‘And you work at the school, don’t you? The one their kids go to?’ She nods. ‘And you swim every day round four.’
She blushes. ‘God, you have been watching me!’
‘Well you’re kinda hard to miss
. Even with your tan, you’re practically fluorescent compared to everyone else here.’
‘Yeah, good point,’ she says, and smiles. She shifts her bilum—it’s bulging with vegetables and fruit—from one shoulder to the next, yanking her hair out from under the strap, brown curls spilling over her shoulder.
‘Looks like you got quite a load there,’ he says. ‘Put some in here, I’ll help you carry it home.’
She runs a hand over her head, seems off balance.
‘I’m not a stalker,’ he says quickly. ‘I’m one of those good pirates, you know, with really dumb jokes: To err is human to arrrrr is pirate.’ And he sticks his hand out, index finger crooked, and waggles it in front of her.
‘Mmmm, a good pirate,’ she says. ‘Slightly crazy, though.’
‘And in exchange for my brute force and chivalry, you can tell me more about this place.’
She looks away, then down at the ground. He’s surprised how much he wants her to say yes.
‘Why not?’ she says.
They head south along the waterfront, past the church and up the belly of the mission. The jungle provides little escape from the midday heat and they walk around raintrees, pawpaw trees and spindly palms before they reach plots of aibika, pumpkin and beans.
‘I love how haphazard it is,’ says Pirate. ‘None of those soulless designer gardens you see in other countries.’
‘Permaculture paradise,’ Beth says.
Single file they head over slippery planks of wood crossing drains, then reach another stretch of jungle. Beth tells him about town, Val and Saint Mary’s, some of her students. Then suddenly she says: ‘Clem’d call you a bitsa.’
‘Who’s Clem?’
‘My dad.’
‘He’d call me a what?’
‘A bitsa, you know, a mongrel. Your accent’s all mixed up.’
‘Canadian father. English mum.’
‘It’s more than that.’
‘Well, I’ve travelled for years and lived in some crazy places, so maybe that’s it. Some weird hybrid.’
‘Sounds cool, though, sort of lyrical.’ She’s walking in front of him and he wishes he could see her face.
‘Your accent’s softer too.’
‘The west coast usually is.’
He’s about to ask more but she quickly says: ‘This is it, where we all live. Val’s place and Ruth’s, Lena’s, then mine.’
He surveys the white houses raised on stilts. A high barbed wire fence runs around the lot.
‘What’s with the fence?’ he says.
‘Security. I grew up on a farm; it’s taken ages to get used to this.’
‘I thought the island was safe. Jim always says so.’
‘Compared to the mainland and Moresby, it probably is. Plus you’re a bloke and things are different. I haven’t had any trouble though. But Ruth here ...’—she points to the second house—‘had a bush knife held to her throat when she walked home from church a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Shit!’
‘Yeah, she gave them a mouthful and hit them with her bilum and they cleared off!’
He laughs. ‘Mental note: make friends with this Ruth meri.’
‘Definitely recommended,’ she says, and smiles. And then, her voice quieter: ‘Would you like to come in for a drink or something?’
‘That’d be great,’ he says, wishing he could. ‘But Jim and I are heading off to do some work down at The Lagoon. Just for the afternoon. Plumbing or something.’ ‘Oh. No problem,’ she says, cheeks turning pink. ‘I’d really like to.’
She looks away. ‘Well, some other time. I have a hectic social calendar here, as you can imagine, but you know where I am now so ...’
‘Cool. And thanks for the tour,’ he says. He takes the pumpkins and eggplants from his bilum and loads them into hers.
‘Tenkyu tru,’ she says. ‘Not sure about the pirate bit but you make a good pack horse.’
He starts for the beach, then turns around, knows he’s about to set something in motion and probably shouldn’t. She’s almost at her house when he calls out: ‘We’ll see each other soon, I’m sure of it.’
She doesn’t look back.
1976
By the time Tom’s cancer comes back, there is no more treatment, just the long drawn out shutting down of a life. Everyone feels robbed: on the one hand a new baby, on the other a life wasting away.
‘It’s just how it is, love,’ Clem says to Rose one night in bed. ‘A bloke might get all twisted and angry and try to figure it all out. I could be like Mum at church every five seconds, praying things were different. But all she’s got is sore knees and a dying husband anyway.’ Rose softly kisses the palm of his hand, puts it on her belly. ‘There’s no use trying to think it could be different. You see it with sheep, cows, the chooks, hell, even Dog’ll go soon. It’s the ebb and flow, it’s divine, whatever you want to call it. It just is.’
Tom shrivels and Rose blooms.
Rose imagines the wily little cluster of cells clinging to her insides, multiplying each day. She sings to the baby: old songs she remembers from primary school, or from the rare occasion her mum sang to her. She talks to the baby, tells stories about Clem, about the farm, what they’ll do when the baby can crawl, walk, run. At night, Rose sits at the old Singer, whipping up tiny singlets and squares of terry towelling for nappies. She chooses bold, earthy reds, browns and greens for the baby’s first patchwork quilt. She puts them all in a box with the crocheted yellow bootees, cardigan and pastel blanket that Eva sends down from the hill.
The first time Rose feels the baby, she’s lying on a blanket under the weeping willow, trying to decide where to put the old bath. Even without soil it weighs a tonne, and she knows she has to get it in the right place first time. She can already see the parsley and chives growing in it, maybe a tomato bush, reaching up and up towards the light. She lifts her old yellow work shirt up, places her hands on the tiny mound of her taut belly, veins like rivers in the sunlight. All of a sudden, it feels like bubbles inside her. The nibbling of a little fish. A broad smile stretches across her face: she knows that the baby is safe. As her belly grows, she finds she can hug herself, hug all those Sydney years away, promising that this life inside will be better. Clem, home from harvesting or fencing, often finds her at the sink, out at the clothesline, amongst the fruit trees, both arms draped over her belly, swaying gently, humming.
And finally, when he comes in with two rabbits from his trap near the creek, blood smeared down his trousers, he feels it too. He puts his ear to Rose’s belly and listens. The gurgling of her stomach and through that, the electric jolt of his baby. His baby. And tears trickle down her belly, and then over the rabbits, tears and blood dripping on the floor, and Rose combs her fingers through his hair and rocks him.
Every chance they have, they drive up the hill to see Tom. Clem feeds the chooks grain and scraps, puts fresh water and meat out for the dogs. He helps Tom to his feet, and they hobble to the verandah where they sit, father and son, looking out over the paddocks that turn more golden each day. They begin by talking about Clem’s work, the baby, the jobs that need doing, a memory from Clem’s boyhood, but in the end, they always finish in silence. Tom wheezes too much, gets exhausted quickly, stares at the hill past the dogs pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, two sentinels keeping watch. And Clem is grateful for the shrieking pink and greys that dull his thumping heart.
One night a flock of red-tailed black cockatoos break the quiet as they charge up from the creek, right over the homestead, then down the hill towards Clem’s house.
‘They’re my favourite, you know, of all the birds, they’re the best,’ comes Tom’s raspy whisper.
‘I know Dad,’ says Clem. ‘You always say.’
‘They’re majestic, dramatic. You wouldn’t argue with one.’
It’s just coming light when Beth hears the clanking of the padlock at the front gate. She’s been awake half an hour, focusing on the drone of t
he fan, hoping it might lull her back to sleep.
‘Beth!’
She throws back the curtain and through the louvres sees Pirate standing at the gate.
‘Do you know what time it is?’ she whispers.
‘Time we get going,’ he says.
Beth looks at her watch. Six.
‘Pirate, it’s a Sunday, for God’s sake.’ But she’s already off the bed, padding through the kitchen and unlocking the front door. ‘Get dressed,’ he says. ‘You can’t wear that.’
She looks down at her daggy nightie, blushes, and asks: ‘Where am I going exactly?’
‘A surprise. Just bring your swimmers and a towel. I’ll wait out here.’
Beth wrestles into her bathers, still damp from yesterday’s swim, and throws on shorts and a shirt. In the bathroom she splashes water on her face, hoping it will startle the tired eyes that look back from the mirror, twists her hair in a bun, grabs her bilum and water bottle, heads out.
‘I like a woman who’s fast,’ says Pirate. He sees Beth’s expression and rushes on: ‘You know, quick. Christ! At getting ready!’
She likes that he’s flustered.
‘Where are we going?’ she says. She glances at Ruth’s house. No doubt Delilah will be watching.
‘I said it’s a surprise, but let’s go this way,’ he says, and they head toward the beach.
Locals, walking home from their early wash, greet her, while some stare at the ground. Others dressed in their best gear are heading toward church, three hours early.
*
Pirate pushes the dinghy into the water.
‘Quick!’ He reaches for her. ‘Jump in!’ She takes his hand, leaps over the side, gains her balance, then sits herself on the wooden plank.
‘Still not telling me, are you?’
‘Nope,’ he says. ‘Just relax. Trust me.’
‘Never say that to a half-intelligent woman.’
He smiles, shakes his head. ‘Beth, just sit and enjoy the ride.’
They head north past Jim’s yacht and then on to the market. The salt air freshens her and she looks back at the island, lined with jungle, dotted with bush huts, so different from her Australian life. It’s six thirty on a Sunday morning and she’s skittling along the skin of the sea with a man she met only yesterday. Different, all right. They head past the main wharf and Chinatown, and fifteen minutes later the bungalows of The Lagoon come into sight; long legged spiders holding up their skirts, stepping over waves.
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