The White Pearl (51 page)

‘She hang,’ Badan stated. It was said to the men in the room.

Connie could smell their hunger for the girl, more overpowering than the stink of the fish stew. Their murmurs sounded like
the growls of wolves, striking terror into Maya’s young heart. Connie felt a wave of fury so fierce it made her hands to shake.
Badan saw it and smiled with satisfaction because he took it for fear. Already someone was reaching up with a pole and unhooking
the rope.

‘Mr Badan,’ Connie said, carefully emptying her voice of the anger, ‘be reasonable. None of us knew of the fire Rule then.
It was a mistake for which we – and Maya – are deeply sorry. It will not happen again, I promise you. It was just to make
a cup of tea on the little stove that we brought in our box of provisions.’

She turned her attention to the line of ten men.

‘I have whisky in my provisions box,’ she announced, and smiled at them.

One man wearing a dark green bandana stepped forward, breaking ranks. ‘How much whisky?’

‘Only one bottle. But it’s good Scottish …’

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Badan take hold of the rope. On the end was a noose.

‘And these,’ Connie said loudly.

Her hands went to her throat, and detached the string of pearls that she always wore round her neck to keep them safe. She
trailed them through her fingers so that they clicked gently and caught the light, glinting like milky stars.

‘They will buy you whisky for all.’ She turned to Maya, took her trembling hand and slowly poured the pearls into it. ‘Maya
would like you to have them as an apology for her actions.’

Maya stook rigid, teeth chattering.

‘Nod to them,’ Connie muttered.

Maya nodded.

‘Say sorry,’ Connie urged.

‘Sorry.’ The word was the croak of a tree frog.

Connie saw the men’s eyes fix on the set of perfectly matched pearls. ‘Agreed?’ She smiled at the faces, her pulse so loud
in her ears she couldn’t hear their words, but saw their lips moving and their heads nodding. She drew Maya towards her.

Badan snatched her back. ‘She broke Rule,’ he shouted, and slipped the noose over the girl’s neck.

Razak started to shout something urgent in Malay, but it was Johnnie Blake who stepped forward with an air of reasonableness
and said pleasantly, ‘Look, old chap, I know your Rules are important. You have to make sure any passing aircraft or boat
doesn’t spot smoke on the island, but the poor girl didn’t know that she wasn’t allowed to light a measly stove.’ He spread
his smile to include the other men. ‘Let’s be fair about this. She was just making me a cup of tea.’

Badan tightened the noose and Maya screamed. The air seemed to thicken, and there rose a strange sound that resonated in Connie’s
head. It came from the crowd of men, shuffling their feet up and down on the dusty floorboards, and even the group of children
huddled in a far corner had stopped their play and risen from their knees to do the same. She had no idea what it meant, but
it felt bad.

‘Stop it, you fools.’

It was Fitzpayne speaking. He sauntered across the room, as though the matter was of no great moment. He was wearing a dirty
shirt, a strip of soiled cloth wound around his head, so that he looked more like one of them, an island pirate, than the
skipper of
The White Pearl
.

With an easy grin to the ten men, he said, ‘But I have ten crates of whisky aboard the
Burung Camar
, just ready and waiting for a buyer.’

‘Where’s it from?’ someone shouted. ‘We don’t want monkey piss.’

‘No, it’s from a white man’s cellar. He was stupid enough to take it away with him on his fine schooner on the Indian Ocean
and …’ his grin widened, ‘I decided to relieve him of the burden of it out of the kindness of my heart, to enable his
yacht to sail away faster from the Japs.’

Someone laughed. Someone else shouted, ‘I want to see the girl hang.’

A rumble of dispute rippled around the room. Badan gripped the girl tighter. ‘She hangs.’

‘Very well,’ Fitzpayne said, unconcerned, and lit himself a cigarette. ‘You choose.’

He flicked a glance at Connie and the pearls, then walked over to the
wall, picked up a purpose-built wooden box lying there and dumped it under the roof beam where the rope was attached.

‘Go ahead. Don’t let me spoil your fun,’ he said. ‘But ten crates of whisky would entertain you all night instead of for five
minutes.’

Connie immediately moved closer to the pirate in spectacles, removed the string of pearls from Maya and slipped them around
his arm, fastening the gold catch so that they hung like a loose bracelet on the hand that clutched Maya’s hair. A moment
of silence took the room by the throat.

‘Whisky?’ Connie asked the men. ‘The pearls will buy the ten crates of whisky.’

There was a collective murmur.

‘Whisky it is,’ Fitzpayne responded. He waved a hand, and two men disappeared into the wet night to fetch the crates from
the
Burung Camar
’s hold. ‘Let’s have some music,’ he shouted. ‘Come on, Wong Yee, give us a tune.
Chop-chop
.’

A young Chinese woman detached herself from the cooking pot, bowed politely over her hands and let out a short burst of Cantonese
that Connie didn’t understand. She was wearing a long dark dress, and from within its folds she drew out a nose flute. She
fitted it with deft skill to her left nostril and began to breathe. A thin silvery sound filled the room and hung suspended
on the night air as the notes rose and fell in a haunting melody. Razak stripped off his shirt, stepped forward and began
to dance, a slow, graceful flow of movement with hands and fingers curved backwards as they wove capricious patterns in the
smoky room, creating a story. His naked skin glistened like polished amber in the lamplight. All eyes focused on him, hypnotised
by the beauty of it.

While everyone was watching Razak, Connie detached Badan’s fingers from Maya’s hair and slipped the noose off her neck. Fitzpayne
removed the necklace from the pirate’s arm and folded it out of sight in his palm.

‘These are payment for the whisky, Badan,’ he said.

‘Pearls worth more than your swamp whisky,’ Badan snapped.

‘The deal is done.’

‘
Bajak laut!’

To Connie’s astonishment, both men burst out laughing. Instantly the tension and hostility dissipated, and when the pirate
removed his spectacles to clean them, Fitzpayne gave him a comradely slap on the
shoulder. Without a backward glance at Maya, as though the fuss had been over nothing, Badan ambled off towards the fish stew.

‘What does it mean?’ Connie asked quietly. ‘
Bajak laut
?’

He looked at her, but the laughter was gone. ‘It means
pirate
.’

‘And is it true?’

‘That I’m a pirate?’

‘Yes. Are you one of them?’

He leaned close, a brief moment of intimacy in the crowded room.’If I weren’t one of them,’ he said in a low tone, ‘you would
all be dead by now.’

‘Would he really have hanged Maya for so little?’

‘Of course.’

On the island, Connie felt her mind slowly unhitch from the orderliness of her previous existence. Days passed; she wasn’t
sure how many. She grew lazy. And she went native. She donned the short oriental trousers that Fitzpayne supplied for her,
and a drab green shirt that she wiped her fingers on whenever they were muddy – which was often. Around her head she twisted
a strip of muslin from her skirt which kept the sweat out of her eyes and made her less conspicuous among the dark-haired
islanders.

She stood for hours looking out at the rain. It came down in great lashing torrents day after day, wrenching branches from
trees and silencing the bickering of the gibbons. It dislodged her thoughts. It swept away images of her past, flushed them
out of her mind, so that she had difficulty recalling the exact shade of brown of Nigel’s hair, or the smell and texture
of Sho Takehashi’s pale skin, both of which she thought were indelibly imprinted on her brain. But this strange green world
seemed to swallow her, to spill into her head. It swamped her old world in a way that at first startled her, but then pleased
her.

Her anguish over past mistakes faded, and when she rested her head against the door frame of her hut up in the trees, and
came eyeball to eyeball with a speckled brown spider the size of her fist, she discovered that another kind of anguish had
also faded. She knocked it onto the walkway outside and watched it run from the bombardment of raindrops.

She slept on her mat whenever she felt like it during the day, or found a trail alongside the river when she wanted to walk,
but otherwise she just stared out at the rain. She lost the rhythm of her days. She didn’t go
down to the Kennel for evening meals but someone – Teddy or Maya – always brought her something from there: a chunk of fish,
a scoop of rice or an
otak-otak
, which was new to her, delicious spicy fish patties wrapped in banana leaves and grilled over a fire. Sometimes she ate the
food, sometimes she didn’t.

Each morning she made an attempt at pursuing Teddy’s schooling – a regime of reading, writing and arithmetic – but as they
bent over the books together, their eyes would meet in silent collusion and the lessons grew shorter and shorter. He would
kiss her cheek, hug her fleetingly and dart down the bamboo ladder with Pippin in his basket, with an alacrity that should
have made her worried, but didn’t. It made her happy. Happy that he was happy. Every day more garments or sheets of canvas
were brought to her to mend, but they gathered in a pile which grew steadily higher. Pippin curled up on it at night.

Slowly, a little more each day, Connie’s past ceased breathing down her neck. As she lay awake on her mat listening to the
rain or to the night murmurs of her son, she allowed nothing but the present inside her head.

‘Are you sick?’ Fitzpayne asked.

‘No.’

‘Are you hurt?’ He stood in the doorway of the hut.

‘No.’

Connie was stretched out on her mat in her shabby shirt and trousers, enjoying the sensation of the hut swaying in a high
wind, forty feet above the ground in a tree in a storm.

‘So what’s the matter?’

‘What makes you think anything is the matter?’ she asked.

‘Do you know what time it is?’

‘As if that is important here.’ She rolled her head to the side and looked out through the window hole, where the green light
outside looked fractionally brighter. ‘Noon?’ she suggested.

‘It’s time you got up.’

She laughed. The figure of Fitzpayne was backlit in the doorway, so she couldn’t make out his expression but his voice sounded
amused.

‘You haven’t touched the sewing,’ he pointed out.

She closed her eyes. ‘I’m …stopping.’

‘Stopping what?’

‘Stopping being Constance Hadley.’

A silence filled the hut, a silence so huge she was astonished it didn’t shoulder the roof off and leave them defenceless
in the rain. Her eyes remained shut, and she didn’t hear his feet cross the boards, but she caught the scent of his wet hair
and the faint sound of his breath, so she knew he had moved closer.

‘I rather liked Constance Hadley the way she was,’ he told her quietly.

‘She’s gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘She has gone …’ she almost said
to be at Nigel’s side under the sea where she belongs
, but she stopped herself. ‘Gone to find
The White Pearl
, to play Happy Families on it.’

Suddenly his foot nudged her ribs, startling her. Her eyes popped open. He was standing over her, a tall, powerful figure.
‘So who is this?’ He nudged her again with his foot. His face still lay in shadow. ‘Who is this lazy creature, too bone idle
to lift a finger?’

She smiled up at him. ‘This is Connie.’

‘Hello, Connie.’

‘Hello, Fitz.’

‘Are you the one who owns the kid who is running around like a savage and making the other ignorant urchins pay him in gifts
to read stories to them?’

Connie leaped to her feet, eyes wide in horror. ‘What?’

‘Hah! I thought that would get you out of bed.’

She found her son. And she found his stash. He was crouched with his new friend, the tall skinny lad named Akil who had caused
him such grief that first day in the Kennel. They were under an old dugout canoe that was jammed over a cleft between two
rocks, forming a shelter of sorts. She spotted them only because Pippin’s black tail was swishing through the wet sand.

‘Teddy! Come here at once.’

For a moment she thought he was going to disobey her but eventually, with a sullen droop of his head, he squeezed from under
his hideout and faced her squarely. She took his arm and marched him out of earshot of the other boy.

‘Teddy, what are you doing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I’ve heard that you are charging to read stories to the other children.’

He scuffed his feet in the dirt.

‘Is it true?’ she insisted. ‘Tell me.’

He shot a glance over towards Akil, who was now squatting under an umbrella of broad spiny leaves about ten feet away, a frown
on his face.

Reluctantly Teddy nodded. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘But I deserve it. I translate stories into Malay for them because their English
is so bad.’

‘Teddy, these boys have so little. It’s wrong to take from them.’

He pulled his shoulder from her grasp. For the first time she noticed the muscles developing under his skin, the thickening
of his upper arms from the physical work he was doing here, and she wanted to squeeze him to her and hold him tight. But she
remembered the words she’d said to Fitzpayne about the old Connie, so instead she stood back, looked down at his bedraggled
mop of hair and spoke in a stern tone.

‘Show me,’ she said.

‘Show you what?’

‘What you’ve taken from them.’

His shoulders slumped. ‘You’ll confiscate them.’

One of his father’s words.

‘Maybe. Maybe not. Show me.’

He trotted off ahead of her, bare limbs streaked by the rain, and led her to an old metal box that he had hidden in the hollow
of a fallen tree. Flakes of orange rust speckled his fingers like measles as he opened the lid. Inside lay a miniature morgue.
A small bat, two chameleons, several geckos and lizards, horny black beetles and even a yellow and red moth larger than her
hand. No birds, she noticed.