Thirteen Pearls (2 page)

Tash couldn't stand it (she was always mercy-lending me clothes so I didn't look so povo and so she didn't look bad by association).

Happily I knew she 'd never lend me the X-rated corset she was whipping up now. Tash was sewing in a zillion lace holes and bone tunnels to impress her boyfriend on Christmas day. Jason was twenty and worked at a car-parts dealership and had already saved enough to buy her a sapphire ring to match her eyes. The ring was no surprise because Tash told anyone who'd listen. But there was one thing she only told me – her Christmas present to Jason would be . . . herself.

It wasn't Jason's fault that he had a rash of pimples starting from his temples and peppering all the way down to the corners of his lips; two red gashes marking him out from a distance as an unlikely Indian brave. Frankly, the thought of their Christmas day together made me queasy.

I watched Tash now – never the most patient of souls – painstakingly thread a bone into the corset, then double-stitch the end. It was weirdly Freudian. I wondered if, with every flexible piece of plastic boning she poked in – Tash was imagining what it was going to be like.

I'd known Tash since kindy. She 'd pulled my long brown ponytail. I'd stamped on her foot. She 'd grabbed my faded purple koala – Yaya – and I'd pinched her hard. She 'd scratched my arm and the scratches had infected. I still had faint silvery scars. She 'd had a packet of mixed Tiny Teddys, plain and choc-flavoured, for morning tea. I'd had a pear and a homemade muesli slice. We 'd swapped. And been best friends ever since.

It was amazing how different we 'd turned out to be. In high school, Tash had become
numero uno
hot girl – big blue eyes, waterfall of shimmering blonde hair and a gravity-defying Barbie doll figure that made guys turn in the street. It would be boring to recite her list of conquests in Cairns. So why she 'd chosen Jason to ‘bestow her goddess self on' was a mystery.

By contrast, I was thin and pale with wild, tangling dark hair, and had far more modest successes. That's if you counted a school Formal pash with Darren Monk and a fleeting hook-up with Bradley Everest, not to mention Kevin groping me with his garlicky fingers. Earlier this year, Alex West had trailed after me in school until I'd finally given in just before Easter holidays. We'd gone out twice. Tash had loaned me her hair straightener and eyeliner. For a split second, while I'd been outlining my eyes big and wide, I flirted with the possibility of flaunting my inner goddess in the way Tash did. Cairns offered plenty of opportunities in the tourist season. Scandinavian gods wandering along the Esplanade, blue-eyed Irish guys hanging around the backpackers bars, Japanese divers . . .

And with these thoughts, Alex West had suddenly seemed very young and unformed. And he had a mole on the side of his nose. I'd been so ashamed of myself for being so superficial that all through dinner with him I'd made a genuine attempt to divine the depths of his soul. We went to Buckin' Mex and I listened to him blather on about his air force cadetship (yawn) over burritos. Boys, men . . . I wasn't ready. Seemed easier to avoid the whole issue and sail around the world by myself.

‘What do you think?' Tash asked. She held up a scrap of red lace.

‘Slutty,' I said, doodling a design for a wind vane onto the textbook margin.

Tash grinned. ‘Perfect!'

Tash's honey-gold skin still looked beautiful in the horrible flickering light. Her limbs were perfectly proportioned. Her eyes were kitten-cute and she had cheekbones like cut glass. I sighed, ‘But why . . .
Jason
?'

Tash erupted into that wonderful, wicked throaty laugh: a laugh that always made male teachers, even our doddery old librarian, stammer and blush.

‘Practice,' Tash said lightly. ‘Practice.' She pointed an impeccable passion-pink fingernail at my misshapen creation, now lying in a discarded heap on the floor. ‘Safety harness or chastity belt?'

‘Both.'

‘Here comes my favourite kid.'

‘Your only kid,' I retorted, rounding the back of our tumbledown Queenslander past a riot of purple bougainvillea that twisted through palm trees still dripping from the afternoon's monsoonal shower. A Ulysses butterfly's iridescent blue wings fluttered from sight.

As ever, my heart thumped; my own
Ulysses
already had its tarp pulled aside and puddles had collected in the crumpled folds. White paintwork glistened with rain.

‘Come here my little darling! We 've missed you so.' Dad, in his patched paisley shirt and stovepipe jeans, beard flecked with raindrops, opened his arms wide.

I dipped my head to avoid copping scratchy beard and Indian-beady breath. Dad used to play with his facial hair a lot – sharp sideburns, a tuft beneath his bottom lip, mutton chop whiskers. Then he gave up and settled for a full, bushy, nicotine-stained beard. I hated it.

‘You'll get lung cancer and slide towards a tortured death,' I said, grinding the still-glowing stub into the sodden grass. ‘And I'll be too busy sailing around the world to look after you.'

Dad shrugged. ‘Stress relief. Would you prefer I die of high blood pressure or emphysema?'

‘Gee,' I said, fist under chin in classic thinker pose. ‘Tricky decision.'

‘Exactly. So I'm going to do the one that gives me most pleasure. Now,' he withdrew his tattered accounts notebook, ‘you're $367 in hock to me, kiddo. Had to get more marine ply.'

Damn.

‘Pity it didn't work out at the kebab shop. Looks like you might have to get another holiday job.'

‘You're joking, right?'

‘Nope. You owe me.'

‘I mean about the kebab shop. Mr Halabi. The man fired me when it should have been that revolting, tabouli-brained creep.'

‘Edie, you knocked the guy out. Poor lad will have a scar and a lifelong phobia about iceberg lettuces.'

Although I glowered, I was pleased Dad had actually listened to my foaming story of outrage.

‘If you're serious about sailing this baby around the world by yourself,' he continued, ‘you're going to have to toughen up.'

‘Bit of moral support might be nice.'

‘Sweetie pie, it's going to come down to you and the voices in your head. That's who you'll be sailing the high seas with. You need to start practising now.'

‘Right now the voice in my head is saying, “Where the hell am I going to get the rest of the money to finish my boat?”'

‘I believe there may be a toilet cleaning position coming up at the uni,' Mum sang down from the verandah. She appeared above the spiky vines, wild-eyed and tangle-haired, like a princess waking from a hundred-year sleep. As she emptied Polly's birdcage, a snow of bird crap and seed shook down over us.

I scratched my head and squinted up at her. ‘Sorry, did I mention the words “moral support”?'

‘Good physical work, toilet cleaning,' Dad said. ‘Strengthens your biceps. Good for rope work.'

This was how it was at my house: we all acted out defined roles – with the most points going to the one with the wittiest repartee or best deadpan banter.

I moaned. ‘So how much more money will I need?' The
Ulysses'
shell was complete. We'd even already bought her an auxiliary motor from eBay. But what no one had told me when I'd embarked on this crazy adventure three years ago at the tender age of fourteen was that when you start a building project you need to take the estimated cost, double it and add half again!

What I
had
learned, however, repeatedly, was that owning a boat was like pouring money down a sinkhole. In which case, does the money swirl clockwise in the southern hemisphere?

Apart from Tash, the hardware store had become my worst best friend. I could often be found wandering the barn-like building, aisle after aisle, in an anxious daze. Dad sometimes came with me to make sure I found my way out of the store after literally hours spent gazing at all the things I couldn't afford.

‘About four grand, I'd say.'

I spun around, my breath catching.

Dad was staring up at the boat, his eyes narrowed, deep in mental calculation.

‘You're kidding?'

He shook his head. ‘Nope. Maybe give or take a few hundred bucks.'

‘Where am I going to find that?' I wailed.

Dad shrugged. ‘I'd like to help you out, Edie, but what with your mother still
farting around
with her thesis . . . ' Another sprinkling of bird droppings drifted down from the verandah. Mum re-appeared over the railing. ‘I heard that.'

‘Good,' Dad said. ‘Maybe you should be the one getting the loo cleaning job.'

Mum's kinky red hair flamed out from the pale blur of her face. The thorny bougainvillea vines framing her were so out of control they made her look more than ever like a princess in a tower from a fairytale. A deranged princess. ‘Your financial support of my work is contributing to the world's understanding of eighteenth-century female spinning and weaving factory workers.'

‘Right,' Dad said, smacking the side of his head. ‘Couldn't deprive the world of that. Vital stuff. Consider my salary a grant.'

I glared at them both. Dad would never force her to get a job while she was obsessing about the plight of eighteenth-century female textile industry workers and that meant he would never be able to afford to loan me four thousand dollars on his crappy public servant salary. He 'd once even calculated that, in terms of government benefits, we 'd be doing better financially if he pushed Mum down the stairs and became her full-time carer.

Impasse again. I thought of Mr Halabi so unfairly firing me and took great satisfaction in imagining his big bum side-by-side with Kevin's skinny butt slowly turning pink on the meat rotisserie.

Tomorrow, first thing, I'd go shop-knocking. Even if I did have to clean toilets or mop up spew and bilge water out of the tourist dive boats, I'd do it.

Later that night, as I tossed and turned on humidity-sticky sheets, I remembered something my kooky grandmother on the Sunshine Coast had once said. My Mum's mum. Nanna (she had wanted me to call her Wendy because she was too young to be a grandmother, but Mum had insisted I call her Nanna to annoy her) had once pulled me into a surprise embrace, an incense-burning haze of uncharacteristic grandmotherly goodwill and, while I'd struggled to breathe through the fumes, she 'd told me that if I really wanted something, it was all very well looking on the outside, but what I should always do first was look inside. If I found it in my heart, then the object of my desire would always
find
me
(even if I spent all week wrapped up in a doona refusing to get out of bed).

In the mornings I ran; ran away from Mum's appalling macadamia, linseed, amaranth, chia, and sunflower seed muesli creations. I ran through the Botanic Gardens, over footbridges spanning croc-infested tidal tributaries, and up Mount Whitfield.

I started out by sweating. And that was just waking up. The heat in the wet season was revolting. It would have been okay if it were dry heat. But it was often one hundred percent humidity, as though the rain wanted to fall, but instead got stuck in a rancid grey sky that clung to everything it touched, covering it in a slimy film. It was moist and hot and mushroomy, and the walls got mildewed and washing acquired that vomit smell because it never fully dried. Fungus grew beneath my fingernails and there was the faintest trace of mould on my cheeks . . .

There had been a special on air conditioners at all the local retailers last winter. I had dreamed our house could be like Tash's. Everything crispy clean and chilled. Mum had pored longingly over the sales catalogue instead of her photocopied excerpt on lathing styles for spinning rods. She 'd grown up in Melbourne and drooped in the Cairns heat like a wilting petunia. Nanna had made clucking noises over the phone from Caloundra and had even offered to pay for three air conditioners – one each for our bedrooms and one for the living room.