Bob, his trouser legs rolled, walks towards me. He seems relaxed, in a good mood, and when he's close enough I smell the reason. A familiar scent, faint under the sea spray, but insidious. The cheap perfume that Charley's girls wear.

I paste on a welcoming smile. Tell him about the pup, the visit from the schooner and the brief anchorage of the man-o'-war. He blinks in the cloud-silvered light. Even the scarred side of his face seems to have been on a holiday. But what's that saying about being lulled into a false sense of security?

'Do ye think a man's got money to burn? Why did ye put double postage on the letters ye gave me?'

I open my mouth to defend my heinous crime, but Percy appears before I can speak. The two men exchange a few words about last night.

Bob's reaction is predictably defensive. 'It's a f.e.c.king dog, that's all.' And my dog, no less. No wonder he doesn't care.

I leave them to it: Bob asking blunt questions; Percy reorganising the tobacco in his pipe with the end of a match. I grab an orange from the box on my way and put my nose to its pitted skin. Then I breathe in deeply.

I know Bob won't quickly forget his grievance about the extra stamps. It will save him feeling guilty about his trip to the bawdy house.

It's three days later and I realise Percy's right. It's difficult for us to be alone with Bob on the island. The smokehouse seems the only spot where he doesn't often go.

A nauseating soupy steam of fish and red mangrove hits the back of my throat. The men have been fishing again since the trip to Cooktown. The wire racks from floor to ceiling on either side radiate heat from fires that have just been lit beneath them. The hut's rapidly filling with smoke that will soon make breathing impossible. Dozens of slugs are laid out on the racks. When they've finished curing, they'll be the size of dried sausages. They'll rattle like walnuts.

Percy tells me the co-ordinates for the light signal. Sweat streams from his nose, his chin. 'Don't write them down anywhere. Keep them in your head.'

My head? It's about to explode. 'I have to get out of here.'

I push the door open and stand, woolly-brained, for a second, breathing deeply the clean sea air.

A minute after I've started towards the house, I hear the door creak open again. Percy, leaving. I glance back. He's heading in the opposite direction, north, down along the beach. Carrie's at the sh.o.r.eline, dangling her toes in the water, one hand holding up her dress. Percy lifts an arm towards her. She waves back.

Bob's rummaging through a box of fishhooks in the corner when I walk into the dark house. He straightens up. Sniffs the air. 'Have ye been in the smokehouse? Ye stink of wood smoke.'

The bruise on his forehead from the most recent fist fight with Percy has faded to faint yellow. His eyes glitter in the shadows.

'I wanted to see inside. You've never shown me.'

He crosses the room in three big steps. 'Leave out of it. The heat drops ten degrees when the door's ajar.' Then his mood abruptly changes. I can smell arousal on him, just as surely as he can smell mangrove smoke on me. 'Mind ye, if it's hot slugs ye're curious about ...' He rubs himself against me. The medicinal b.a.l.l.s in his pocket clink.

Carrie appears in the doorway, unannounced.

Bob steps back, exhaling loudly. I straighten my ap.r.o.n.

His eyes are on Carrie's b.r.e.a.s.t.s as she stretches to place her hat on the high hook.

Come evening, I hand him a plate of stew. Without rice. Let him dine on the weevils in his damper instead. He doesn't acknowledge the food, just picks up his fork and starts mindlessly eating.

Across the table, Percy is reading the Cooktown Herald. He's taken a dip in the sea; everything, including his hair, is washed free of the smokehouse.

Bob wipes the rough bread around his plate. He watches Carrie across the table, soft in the lamplight. Watches her mouth as she chews. Watches the food travelling down her soft throat as she swallows.

I put down my fork, feeling sick. I know what he'll want from me tonight. And straight from the brothel, his body will have a punishing edge to it.

The rum on his breath is cloying as he pulls me towards him in the bed. I offer no resistance when he unb.u.t.tons his trousers. I open my legs, not willing to give him the pleasure of forcing them apart. I look over his shoulder, eyes open, as he grunts in my ear. I move only once, when his full weight is on my lungs and I can't breathe.

'Can't ye wriggle a bit?' The words are ground out of him in short, sharp bursts.

'Like Charley's girls do? Would you like me to wave my legs in the air as well? I know you've been whoring. The smell was all over you when you got back.'

His thrusts become more painful and I bite down on my bottom lip. I feel something tear inside me. Please G.o.d, let it be my own flesh and not the contraceptive sponge.

After an age, he rolls off me and turns away. Over his shoulder, he mutters, 'Who wouldn't need a live woman after pounding a corpse.'

37.

Old fishermen have their stubborn lore.

From the secret diary of Mary Watson 23RD JULY 1880.

Two days before the drop. Somehow, Bob has to be off the island on the night of the twenty-fifth. Percy told me to leave it with him. But there's constant acid in my stomach.

After dinner, I sit in the corner, sewing up a pair of Bob's long johns. He, Percy and Porter are playing poker. The bad side of Bob's face, with the lamplight shining on it, reminds me of a mine collapse. Porter's his usual calm self: deep cheeks, watchful eyes. And Percy, when he turns so I can see his features, is cool. Too cool. The flame in the middle of the table flaps side to side like a bright fish, beached and dying. Porter adjusts the wick and it settles into a single, glowing pear. They're talking weather. My needle dips in and out, pulling the fraying threads together as best I can.

'Mackerel sky at sunset,' Bob says. 'I won't go out tomorrow.'

Percy puts three cards on the table, face down. Bob, as dealer, unfurls three more to replace them.

'We'll have to fish the day after that, unless you want to go native: eat grubs and goannas,' Percy says.

'No point fishing in bad weather. Ding Petrel and you'll pay to fix it.'

'Come on, man. When did you get so scared of a few clouds? It's not cyclone season.'

'Don't call me a coward, or I'll spoil yer face.'

Percy is hardly moved to trembling by the threat. The tip of his tongue probes the top row of his teeth for an errant shred of meat. He inspects his cards, then rearranges them in his hand.

'We should stay overnight and pick the bones clean: clear the patches around the Lizard before we have to move on, find another station. Unless you'd rather leave them to grow fat for the next fisherman who tries his luck on your old patch.'

'What makes ye think I'd want to keep a lazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d as a partner next time?'

The lamplight deepens the furrows on Bob's forehead. His scar's a dark fissure. His left hand finds his pocket and he grunts. The medicinal b.a.l.l.s are more articulate, beyond his bluff and bl.u.s.ter. He's thinking over Percy's suggestion.

Porter intervenes, ever the voice of reason. 'What about the blacks? If we go out overnight, they'll know Mary and Carrie are here on their own.'

'Ah Sam and Ah Leung will be with me,' I say. 'And I know how to shoot.'

Percy's lopsided smile twists like a finch gliding on one wing. 'True. I've seen Mary hit a shilling halfway down the beach from the sandhills.'

Bob's impatient. 'It's yet to be proved the blacks are even around.'

Porter's still frowning.

'You mustn't worry,' I tell him. 'I'm used to looking after myself.'

'Ah, so a man's not good enough to look after ye?'

Belligerence has crept back into Bob's voice. But I won't antagonise him, no matter how much he might desire it.

'Not at all,' I say evenly. 'I'm just not helpless.'

I put down the material and walk over to the basin. It still holds a few inches of liver-coloured water. I've no particular pa.s.sion for washing up, and I could leave the dinner dishes for Ah Sam in the morning, but it's an opportunity to legitimately turn my back on Bob and stare at the much more interesting view of the closed shutters.

A few seconds' silence in which the wind could change in half a dozen different ways, few of them good. The three go back to talking business. I'll have to leave it to Percy. Nothing I say to Bob makes any difference.

I look down to the basin. In the half-light, my hands seem luminous. Attached to them ten white baitworms dive beneath the surface, then come up again for air. I slowly wash the plates with a piece of rag, thinking ... sink or swim. With the extra ballast of my wedding ring, it could go either way.

One of the dogs growls in the distance. The pigs start up their clotted snorting. I look over my shoulder. Porter looks at Bob. Bob looks back down to his cards. Carrie's having a nightmare behind the curtain, a series of small yelps.

'I'll just go out and check,' Porter says. He picks up a spare lantern and a rifle from the corner behind the door.

'There's no f.e.c.king blacks on the island, I tell ye.'

I wait for one of the others to offer to go with him. When they don't, I wipe my hands on a dry cloth. 'Be careful, Porter,' I say.

He's back in half an hour. With a shrug, he rests the rifle in its usual spot, places the lantern on the bench, and then comes to sit at the table so the game can resume.

'Nothing, so far as I can see,' he says.

Bob grunts and picks up the deck even though he dealt the last hand. He starts to distribute the cards with supercilious flourishes of his wrist. Porter opens his mouth, probably to call him on his error, then closes it again.

'Next time, ye might listen to what a man says.'

Porter doesn't reply.

I, for one, have had enough of listening to Bob. I stand and head for the bedroom.

'Goodnight all.'

'Goodnight, Mary,' Porter's smile is gentle. The other two don't even look up.

The next morning Bob's sitting on a stump outside the house, hammering the soles back onto a pair of reef boots. The thin strands of what's left of his hair wave slightly in the breeze. The rest of his balding head is pink in the sun. Lizard-mating weather: that's what he calls these days when a dry storm shines pale and watery as an old man's eye on the horizon and the wind shuffles down the iron slab of the sky.

Just be pleasant to him a bit longer, I tell myself, as I pick up the egg basket. Carrie's collecting sh.e.l.ls. Ah Sam's clearing around a stand of palms near the privy. Ah Leung's at the farm. The black boys are chopping wood.

I feel his eyes on me as I pa.s.s. And pa.s.s I must. There's no other way to get to the poultry pen. Instead of meeting his gaze, my glance flits over his fishing pants with the hole at the knee. Then his faded shirt. 'Playing cobbler, are we?'

I turn away, as though the churned-up ocean's suddenly caught my attention. It's foaming in spots, like soap's been added to the usual mix of water and weed. This morning, when I took an early stroll, jellyfish like peg bags full of Reckitt's Blue strings dotted the waterline.

'Aye, if we're going out overnight, we'll want the gear first cla.s.s.'

'Yes, of course.'

I move away, thinking I've got off lightly. But he catches my skirt with his hand.

'How about a wee kiss?'

I bend down and kiss him on the cheek.

'That's a grudging peck ye might give an old aunty.'

Just keep the peace. I kiss him, full on the mouth this time, tasting tobacco.

'Need some mending done?' He winks with his good eye.

I think of the lizards I've seen mating over near the panda.n.u.s patch. The flattened female under a wrinkly monster jabbing and jabbing. His rotten-meat breath in her ear. Filthy claws digging into her sides.

'Maybe,' I say, my heart heavy. 'If you clean your teeth and scrub that muck from under your fingernails.'

'I'll catch up with ye later then, when there's no one else around.'

My fate impending I smile thinly and indicate, by lifting the egg basket, that there's work to do before he has his fun.

The tone of my day is sealed when I find what's left of two dead ducks in the fowl pen: a trail of blood and feathers and all the eggs gone. There's a hole torn in the wire above my improvised barrier of logs. I stalk back towards the house, the hot sting of tears in my eyes, something on fire in my head. By the time I reach the flat ground near the homestead, my blood l.u.s.t has cooled a little, but my frustration hasn't.

Bob and Darby stand behind the house underneath the outstretched wing of a sail draped over a makeshift wooden frame. They're looking for small tears in the material by inspecting places where the sun shines through. I put down the sc.r.a.ps dish and egg basket, and look up at another eagle flying overhead. Against a brilliant sky, it's just a moving patch of shade with serrated edges. I've decided there must be an eyrie in one of the rock overhangs on the far side of Cook's Look.

Bob apparently sees what he's looking for in the canvas. 'Get me the sail needle and thread. Quick fella.'

'Yes, boss.'

Darby scurries out from under the sail and runs towards the house. Bob slips out and into the sun, his palm still under the offending tear. He concertinas the sail against his chest while he waits.

'We've lost two more ducks to goannas,' I tell him, trying to control myself. 'I don't know how to keep them out of the pens.'

'I have enough to worry about without yer blasted poultry. Daft idea using my good mangrove logs. I could have told ye it would never work.'

My hands clench into fists.

Darby's back, panting. He hands the needle and thread to Bob, who pulls the patch over his knee. Darby bends double to get his breath back. From above, his hair is a forest of curls.

I pick up the sc.r.a.ps. 'Thanks for the help. I'll just figure it out for myself, shall I?'

Bob looks up coldly, all trace of his earlier amorous mood gone. 'I thought ye were clever enough to work anything out. Ye certainly knew how to manoeuvre a man into marriage.'

My heart stops for a few beats. He can't know, surely. It's just his self-regard talking.

'Exactly why would I do that, Bob? Why would my life's ambition be to live on a G.o.d forsaken island with a cranky Scot who is never grateful for anything I do?'