policeman, ‘is mosquito room. Where you and boss have sleep. Afternoon time.’
Maisie steadied herself on the back of a chair. So, this is when it would happen. The consummation of her marriage would be this afternoon – in the mosquito room – with Duc listening in.
Duc explained that the quasi-dormitory area was enclosed by fine steel mesh to keep out the biting insects. Full-length iron shutters protected the space from the elements.
‘And do you have a room in the house, Duc?’
‘I’s live at back near to boss fella’s room.’
Maisie was shown a further small verandah at the back of the bungalow that faced the garden, which Duc told her was his space, or words to that effect. At the back was also a small shuttered area the boss used as a second home-based office, and a large storeroom, which housed an impressive larder of canned food.
‘The three of us will be totally self-sufficient if the sky falls in!’ She laughed.
Duc looked at her with a broad grin, his eyes wide with hope.
‘What you say you teach me cook, Mem, so we okey-dokey when sky falls in?’
THE SEAFARER’S REST HOTEL, built of iron and wood and overlaid with latticework, sat on a rise at the Japanese end of Royal Avenue, its elevated position giving it a good vantage point over the rest of the town. Buccaneer Bay had no high street in the traditional town-planning sense. There was no nucleus to the collection of buildings that had grown up behind the coastal sand dunes. As far as Cooper could tell, its only excuse for existence was that its inhabitants all shared the same unshakeable belief that there was a fortune to be made from pearl shell and another from the occasional treasure within. It was why he, too, was there.
It was ‘lay-up’ in Buccaneer Bay, a season of unrestrained madness. The lugger crews had lived and worked for nine months of the year in conditions in which even the most placid dog would have savaged its handler – and school was now out. Captain Sinclair had billeted both of his new employees, William Cooper and John Butcher, in the Seafarer’s, and the rent would cripple them until they could get out to sea and start hauling the pearl shell. The Englishmen found themselves hunkering down among men of every nationality who were steadfastly working their way through their pay. Drinking or gambling were the preferred nightly pastimes. There was little else to do.
Cooper paused now on the doorstep of the hotel and lowered himself gingerly onto the pale cane seat. His head ached in pulsating waves. The previous evening was a queasy blur. Between sunset and sun-up, he had held centre stage in the bar among Filipino, Koepanger and Malay residents, playing poker and matching their drinking, glass for intoxicating glass. Early in the evening, he had accepted a glass of potato-gin from a middle-aged Filipino man everybody called Slippery Sid.
Taking an eye-watering sip of the noxious liquor, Cooper leaned forward. ‘How many luggers are in this place, Sid?’
‘Mebbe more than three hundred.’
‘Does each one have a different owner?’
‘Nope. Some mebbe two, mebbe three. Big Tuan boss Mayor, he has lots, mebbe twenty.’
‘Captain Sinclair has how many?’
Sid took a swig of gin and held up three fingers.
‘How many men on each lugger?’
Sid explained that each lugger held two divers: a number-one diver – usually Japanese – and a trial diver, who was less experienced than the principal. They dived in turns. The diver had a man on board who tended his equipment, which made a total of three diving-related people. A common crew comprised the cook, four men to man the air pumps in shifts throughout the day, and the shell-opener, swelling the number to nine. Sometimes the owner-captain worked on board too. So, as far as Cooper could make out, there were generally nine or ten people on a lugger.
‘Does Captain Sinclair go out to sea?’
‘Him’s no sea legs.’
Cooper chopped at his windpipe and contorted his face. ‘Is the diving dangerous?’
Sid laughed. ‘You’s a scaredy-cat?’
Cooper shook his head. ‘No. The diving I’m used to is much more dangerous than here.’
‘Japanese dive best.’
‘Why?’
‘Have lotsa guts.’
‘And the best crews?’
‘All mix-up. Then no fighting.’
‘And do the Aborigines work on the boats?’
‘He no work on boats. White man don’t like blackfella.’
‘Why not?’ Cooper knew that imported labour was an issue in Buccaneer Bay, but not to use the abundant local workforce seemed like lunacy.
‘Blackfella scared of diving gear.’
‘So, the crews do not originate from here.’
‘All crew come work for three years then go home again. All very snug.’
Somewhere close to midnight, Cooper fell asleep over a glass of rum. Someone shook his shoulder and hefted him up the stairs to his balconied second-floor room, and he had woken the next morning at nine o’clock, slumped across the edge of the mattress, one leg tucked underneath him, still drunk.
He squinted at his watch. Captain Sinclair wanted him at his office before ten. The initial meeting with the captain on the steamship had made him jumpy. He’d been expecting a big welcome party, along the lines of the fanfare at Port Fremantle, but the captain had barely acknowledged him and had completely blanked John Butcher. Cooper had accepted the four-page contract from his poker-faced employer but had refused to sign it unread. The captain’s pale grey eyes had not been friendly. Perhaps Cooper was misreading it. After all, the man could not have known of Cooper’s attraction to the woman he’d watched the captain wed or that his bride looked like she’d made a dreadful mistake.
Cooper leaned back in the wicker chair and began to roll a cigarette, booze-shaky fingers making heavy work of the task. He licked the sticky edge of the cigarette paper and placed one end of the slim tube, pointed like the sharpened lead of a pencil, between his lips and lit up. He shook out the match, inhaled deeply and crossed his legs, shutting his eyes against the glare of the morning sun.
‘The view isn’t up to much, is it?’ a young-sounding female voice said.
Cooper cranked open his eyes, his roll-your-own smoke dangling from his lip.
‘Black mud and luggers. That’s all you can see during the lay-up.’
‘I wasn’t really looking at the view.’ He struggled to his feet.
‘I’m Dorothea Montague.’ She held out a gloved hand.
Cooper
