Mother of Pearl

Jo lowered herself from the jetty one foot at a time, leaning forward and wobbling to the bow with her belly hanging round and heavy. She watched Sal hop in, then Maureen — who first passed down the rope, bucket and knife, then angled the tiller and set her gaze — the island shrinking behind her and the swells of land slipping and shifting on the river.

Jo had arrived six months ago, on a grey day with the river swept back, crabs pock-marking its bed and oysters shredding its edge. While her dad mingled with the other passengers waiting for the ferry, she’d scuffed at bluestone and watched the trains flash behind trusses as they crossed the river, then skirted the land where it rose on the other side. In between was the island, its twisted ribs and tin roofs meshed with green. She spotted Maureen from the ferry, a faded blue blur with dark hair and dark boots waiting on the wharf, reaching down now and then to pat the orange smudge leaning against her legs. Jo had turned away from the island then, and watched the pale grazes on the undersides of the cliffs, where the sandstone had most recently shed. When she stepped off the ferry Maureen and her dad were shaking hands, both grim until Maureen saw her and softened, pivoting and tilting her chin towards the path. Jo had passed her dad as he tapped a cigarette from its pack and lit it, nodding that he’d follow, and settled in behind Maureen’s lunging uphill pace. The red cattle dog Ruby padded between them, turning to check that Jo was following as they curved past ferns and gums, everything damper than she’d expected. The trees weren't grey-blonde and split-dry like back home. Some of their trunks were straight and glowing white, smudged green where fog had clung; others were chalk pink with bruised bulbs, swelling where they bent. Where the path flattened she turned and looked back. The ferry was moving back across the river with her dad on board, drifting smoke with his back to her.

In those first few months after she arrived, sallow in the winter light, the bump that was just starting to show under Jo’s jumper played tricks on Maureen, turning her into the same pot-bellied and long-limbed child of a decade ago. As Jo’s belly grew Maureen thought she looked younger still. A whole spring and summer out on the water had browned Jo’s skin, but not made it any warmer. Maureen saw her own cool tones reflected under Jo’s jaw and in the insides of her elbows — not the golden, speckled tan of the other women on the island, or the ruddiness of the men, but the muddy side of silted ridges in the shallows, soaking up light. In the months since she’d been living on the island, Jo had learned the river’s confluences and fissures so well that as she leaned back now in the tinny and closed her eyes, she was sure she could feel the tug of the tide at her back — could pinpoint the cracks where the narrow creeks sucked at the wide river.

Jo knew they'd reached the cove when the motor idled and stopped, and she turned with Sal to watch the illusion of a solid bank break — as unreal every time as the first — the rock sliding and opening as they drew near. Maureen had picked out this spot three years ago. The sandstone cliffs folded away from the river so that the fresh water ebbed past — not pausing to round the corners in its rush out to sea — but the salt water found its way in easily, flushing the cove on the turn of the tide. Hardly anyone came deep enough in, close enough to the walls of stone and gums — towards which Maureen, Jo and Sal now floated — and at just the right angle to see the opening to the second, smaller cove, its banks flat enough to clear a spot for a shed. Once Maureen had found her spot, unpeopled and salty, she built everything she needed. She’d had to load up the tinny every day before dawn, unload her materials and tools on the sandy bank, and then make it back to the island before the others were even starting out. When the oyster farmers arrived one by one at the jetties with the sun rising behind the island, she’d pretend to start her day all over again — nodding good morning, loading up the regular gear, and motoring out to her usual spot to tend to her rock oysters. In the late morning she’d head back over to the cove to start building, going the long way round to confuse the gaze of anyone watching.

When Maureen had finished building the shed, the wire growing baskets and the racks over the water to hang them from, she ordered the first package. She picked it up from the post office across the river; she couldn’t risk having it delivered with the weekly post, with half the island’s residents crowded on the wharf. There wasn’t a reasonable enough lie for the heavy box with FRAGILE and THIS WAY UP crossing its sides. Sitting at the back of the ferry with her eyes closed and the sun flashing red-yellow-white, she picked at the tape all the way back to the island until the words were no longer legible, picturing the pearl oyster larvae hidden inside and hoping they’d stayed cool and damp enough to survive. Safe inside her kitchen, she sliced open the box with two deft strikes of a stanley knife so the cardboard fell away from the white bucket inside, and gently scooped out a handful of the oyster spat. They were four weeks old, their shells only just formed. When she balanced one on her pinky it barely covered half the nail, mirroring the miniature moon that rose from her nail bed. In the box alongside the bucket was a plastic case holding the round beads that she’d seed the oysters with once they’d grown as broad and flat as her palms. She held one now, heavy and cool in her hand as she sat with Sal and Jo in the shed in the cove, and worked her blade into the gap where the oyster’s lips met.

It hadn’t taken long for Jo to pick up how Maureen’s status worked — how she inspired the right mix of trust and fear in her neighbours. Most of it had to do with knowing the river so well and watching the weather so close that her predictions were almost never off. The rest was rationed silence, unnerving enough to thrill her listeners before bringing them back into the mundane. The women of the island would arrive each week on a rotating roster, carrying eggs or sandworms or herbs — whichever they supposedly had so much of at the time that they couldn’t use it all up, and so were forced to make the journey by foot up the spiralling, crumbling bitumen to Maureen’s place. Jo was amazed by the ritual, and the way the women played along so shamelessly. There was always the right amount of polite small talk before the conversation would turn to the weather, its most recent oddities, what it all meant and what they could expect next. Maureen and Jo ate herbed eggs every morning, and never had to go worming.

One night a few months back, instead of the usual soft knock on the door frame, Maureen and Jo were startled by a rhythmic banging that rattled the aluminium screen, and didn’t stop until Maureen opened the heavy wooden door. She left the screen door closed, its filigree shadowing the drunken face of Rob Bailey.

“We never shoulda bloody trusted you”

Maureen tilted her chin, managing to look down on him despite being a foot shorter. Rob started again–

“Last week you threaten Sal and now–”

“I don’t do threats–”

“–we wake up to this! Half our stock fucken ruined but I bet yours is alright? You poison us? Picking us off one by one? I fucken told Sal–”

“I warned her.”

“What?”

“I didn’t threaten Sal. I warned her. About you, you cold-blooded old fool.”

As soon as she’d spoken Maureen wished she hadn’t. Rob stiffened and a shadow shifted behind him. His teenage son wavered at the edge of the light spilling out from the kitchen, arms folded and head turned away. Jo had spoken to him down at the jetty and he’d been shy and sweet. She peered out from behind Maureen and thought he looked more ashamed than threatening.

Rob breathed heavy through his veiny nose. On the surface Maureen was still, but her blood rushed fast under her skin. Jo and Ruby moved closer to flank her, Ruby’s nose pointed forward and her teeth bared, a low rumble threatening to break into a snapping bark. The last time Sal had come around, a few months back, Maureen had slipped her an offer in the disguise of an omen — a hint of darkness that she’d hoped said she could handle whatever Sal needed to shed. She liked Sal. She bothered less with the small talk, listened closer to the weather. She’d only been there a year and Maureen had seen her grow thinner and wander aimlessly, sometimes perched on the same rock watching the river for hours at a time. She’d thought of the gold locket the police divers had pulled from the water out near Rob’s farm — the chain snapped and the case filled with mud, the search for his first wife called off after only three days — and she’d looked at Sal.

She’d stayed quiet long enough to make the next words sink and settle.

“When you watch the weather you notice people too. They’re out there, doing their thing, and you get to know a lot more about them than what they’d think, or like to think. I reckon there’s nothing you could tell me about anyone on this island that would surprise me.”

Sal had held her hand across the kitchen bench and looked out the window and didn’t say a word.

Rob laughed and slapped his hands on the doorframe, leaning his head against the screen. Ruby started but Maureen held out a finger and she grew still, eyes darting from Rob to Maureen. Rob’s son tugged at his shirt and he shook him off, sniffing and broadening his shoulders, shaking his head but finding nothing to say. When they’d turned and left, and the two women and the dog had watched them disappear into the darkness, Maureen lunged for the phone to call Sal.

That night Jo lay awake for hours, watching the shadows on the trunks outside her window sharpen and darken as the moon brightened. When she finally slept, she dreamt of the pie shop her parents used to stop at on the old winding highway driving north for the school holidays, before the new freeway was cut straight through the rocks. The shop perched on a bend where the road widened out into a rudimentary car park, the bitumen crusted over sloping rock. In her dream she wandered away from the shop and the voices of the other restless kids, to a corner of the car park where the ledge dropped away behind the dented metal crash barrier. She couldn’t see the bottom of the gully, but in the quiet between each car that slowed around the bend she was sure she could hear water down there, in the dark space choked by the road’s edge and the wall of scrambled bush. She stayed there for a long time, listening for the water until a breeze picked up, swirling cold eddies at the back of her neck that made her twitch and hunch, and she turned to hurry back to the shop and her parents.

When she woke her room was bright with moonlight and she was alert, breathing fast with the feeling that someone else had been in the room moments before; the air cooling and the floor readjusting where their weight and warmth had been.

Two summers after putting her first batch of larvae out in their baskets to grow, Maureen completed the first seeding on her own. Working by torchlight in the shed, she ruined the first five oysters, snapping their hinges when she pried them open too fast. She slowed down, cracked the next open only the tiniest bit and waited for its hinge to adjust and relax before working a wooden peg between the lips. She lined up twenty on the bench next to her this way, then one by one she placed them in the metal clamp positioned at eye height, sliced the flesh in two places, and inserted into each a slip of mantle and a polished bead. She wriggled the pegs out and let the black lips purse, and tucked them into the pouches she’d knotted with ropes over wooden frames. Then she waded out and strung them from their racks in the dark water. Each night she grew swifter and within a month she’d seeded every oyster from the first batch that had made it to maturity. The next year, with Jo there to help, they’d started the second seeding. The first round still hadn’t been harvested, so they had no way of knowing if their hours of work would all be in vain, and it was slower going; they now had the matured and seeded oysters to watch over, and another batch of larvae to tend to.

When Sal turned up on Maureen’s doorstep the night after Rob’s visit, a duffle bag at her feet, Maureen asked if she could keep a secret. Sal hung her head and picked up her bag, said she was done with this island and with secrets. But Maureen reached out and held the strap of her bag, and the two women stood there on either side of the door frame, shoulders squared and gaze steady with the bag hanging between them.

“Who would I be keeping it for?”

“For me. And Jo. And for you if you want in.”

Jo watched Sal closely those first few days. One night not long after Sal came to stay, Jo woke and crept down the hall to the kitchen, skating in her bed socks to avoid the creak of the old floorboards. She filled her glass at the sink slowly, turning the tap to find the sweet spot just before the pipes would shake and hum, and stood looking at her own reflection in the window. She focused on the darker patches of her hair and jumper and let her eyes go fuzzy, picking out the snaking branches and glint of water below until the warm image of the kitchen blurred and she could see past it to the black and blue swaying night. Crumpled white shapes bobbed at waist height just past the verandah — the glowing heads of wild iris, their spiked bodies dark and rustling underneath. Standing among them was Sal, her hands held out so that the flowers head-butted and kissed her knuckles and wrists, and Jo couldn’t have said why but from then on she trusted Sal, and started looking at her straight on instead of sideways.

As spring ended they worked together. Every day they’d check that the seeded oysters were snug in their pockets, turn the young larvae gently in their wire baskets, and make sure everything was submerged at low tide. In the weeks before Christmas they finished the second seeding, just in time to start the first harvest.

The three women had let the tide nudge them onto the sandy bank and carried the first rack into the shed, where they sat now, listening to the lapping of the rising tide against the tinny. That morning when Sal and Jo had wandered sleepily down the hall, Maureen was already at the kitchen bench with her calendar and notebook, muttering and frowning. Neither Sal nor Jo had learned to decipher Maureen’s calendar. Pencilled scribbles waxed and waned across the month — circles and curves and stacked lines — and notes cramped the boxes; second king tide this month, jelly swarm, unseasonal algal bloom. So instead they watched Maureen, weaving around her while they put on toast and spread lime marmalade and poured tea, raising their eyebrows at each other over her bent head. Maureen came up for breath once, took a big gulp of tea and descended again, tapping her pencil against her temple. Eventually she straightened, clapped her hands and smiled at them.

Their gear was ready by the door, ropes coiled neat in buckets and knives rattling in the bottom as they curved along the path towards the other side of the island, Ruby trotting alongside. The sun had cleared sea-level and lit the sky, but the air was cool — still shaded by the land where it rose at each bend along the river between the island and the sea. Yellow light seeped down the pale tree trunks as the three women leaned back into the steep path down to the jetty, and was sparkling on the water by the time they’d set off. Now the sun streamed through the window in their shed, warming Maureen’s hands and glinting off her blade.

Maureen looked across the workbench at Jo — who sat with her breath held high in her chest and her eyes on the blade, belly round against the bench — and at Sal, jaw jutted and eyes squinting. She counted to three silently, nodding the tiniest bit each time, then breathed in and twisted the knife. She went gently — if she took care, each oyster could be reseeded — letting the shell open slowly. The flesh covered the inside of both halves, and when she lay it flat they could see the two round bumps where the pearls had grown. Maureen pushed at one with her thumb, rubbing it clean as it emerged and holding it in her palm for Sal and Jo to see. It was almost perfectly round and silvery green. They passed it between them, each turning it gently in the sun to see its lustre, then they laughed and breathed, held their faces in their hands and rested their heads on their forearms before jumping up to fill their buckets.