'Yes, we can. For a while longer, at least. Just one more drop. The operation will be finished then.'

'He'll be impossible to live with.'

'No, he won't. He's a bully. Once bullies are bested, they pull their horns in. He'll go off for a while then come back as though nothing's happened.'

I'm not convinced.

Bob slinks back at dinnertime. He doesn't speak. Just heads for a flagon in the corner, and a pannikin. He sits in the rocking chair in the shadows.

I set the table. My body feels like a coiled spring. Even the soft clink of cutlery seems too loud.

Percy must have spoken to Porter. Both men come in for dinner, hats in hand, their movements excruciatingly ordinary. Ah Sam hurries in with the stew. I spoon some food onto Bob's plate, take it over with a fork. He ignores me. Keeps rocking without looking up. His medicinal b.a.l.l.s clatter and clank unsteadily in his pocket. The flagon is already half-empty.

I take the plate back and put it on the table.

Porter watches me push the same piece of potato around with a fork. 'You're not hungry, Mary?'

Bob gets up, his centre of gravity unsteady. Bangs into the corner of the door as he wanders outside. I hear a long stream of p.i.s.sing. A few unintelligible words. I look down at the table, not wanting to meet the other men's eyes. I sneak a look at Bob as he staggers back towards the rocking chair still b.u.t.toning his pants up. There are wet spots on his crotch, down the left leg. Old memories of Papa flood back with a vengeance.

I look over to Carrie. She looks at me. I wonder if we're both thinking the same thing.

How could I be so stupid as to put us both back where we started from?

Porter breaks the silence first. 'Are we going out tomorrow, Bob?'

I hear the tinkle of rum splashing into an empty pannikin. The rocker squeaks a few more times. 'Aye.' Nothing more.

My head throbs. It's the child locked in the cupboard behind my forehead, banging her fists on the door to get out.

42.

G.o.d looks after drunks

and, just sometimes, their wives.

From the secret diary of Mary Watson 11TH SEPTEMBER 1880.

At eight o'clock, Bob sinks sideways in the chair. By eight thirty, he's almost slithered to the floor. At nine, Porter and Percy half-carry, half-drag him to bed. I hear him fall with a solid thump onto the mattress.

Porter smiles wanly when they come back. 'You're better off with him this way, rather than argumentative.'

'He might wake up later. I'm not off the hook yet.'

He goes over to the flagon, picks it up and shakes it. 'No, he won't stir this side of sunrise. He's swallowed enough to put an elephant in a trance.'

'Poker?' Percy suggests. He's already cleared the plates. He shuffles the battered deck, then cuts and flicks them together.

'Sorry, old boy. I think I'll call it a night. My teeth are playing up.' Porter yawns, exposing two rotten molars at the back of his mouth. I've noticed him from time to time rubbing clove oil gingerly on his gums.

'What about you, Mrs Watson?' Percy asks. 'You want to turn in with hubby, or can you spare the time for a quick game?'

I glance at the bedroom doorway. 'Just one game. Then I think I'll sleep in the rocking chair.'

Porter waves from the doorway and disappears with a lantern into the inky night.

'Just let me check on Carrie,' I say.

Behind the curtain, her back is to me and she's breathing deeply. The sea is calm tonight, rocking itself to sleep.

Percy looks up and smiles. 'Out like a snuffed gaslight?'

'Yes. I'm sending her home as soon as I can. This is no place for her. It's the kind of atmosphere I was trying to get her away from.'

When I don't elaborate, he c.o.c.ks his head towards the corner. 'Would you like a drink?'

I shudder.

'Oh, come on. You won't turn into a boozer with just a few nips. And you need to relax. You're like fence wire pulled too tight.'

He fetches two pannikins and pours an inch in each. The first swallow stings my throat. The sensation, not the flavour, reminds me of the drink I had in Captain Roberts's room at the back of the pub in Townsville.

Percy laughs at my expression. 'Now the area's numb, try again.'

'I've experimented with that strategy before. It doesn't work.'

But I take another sip regardless. With hardly any food in my stomach, it's enough to make my head feel like a kite in an updraught. I flinch at a rough-sawn snore from the bedroom.

'Why did you bring Carrie here?' Percy asks. 'You knew she'd be one more complication.'

I run my tongue along my bottom lip. 'I told you in Brisbane why I left home. When I went back to Rockhampton just before I married Bob, I learned my father had started drinking again. I was afraid for her.'

'So you brought her here, to live with another drunk?'

'I know how it sounds. I didn't know what he was like. I thought I could handle Bob.'

I push my mug across the table for more rum.

'Now, now, Mrs Watson, not too much or you might accuse me of taking advantage of the situation. I have my principles. You are another man's wife.'

My mouth twists. 'In name only. Are you going to take advantage of the situation?'

My words come out less crisply and dispa.s.sionately than I would have them. I blink slowly as I study Percy's face in the lamplight. The green of his eyes would be indistinguishable at night but for the sparkling gold flecks.

He pulls out his pipe and a plug. When he lifts a hand to tamp the tobacco, the light picks up the sinews at his wrist. 'Is that an invitation?' he asks, looking into my eyes.

The taste of rum is drying to a bitter paste on my tongue.

A sudden gust of wind under the door wobbles the lantern flame for an instant.

Then, somehow, he's behind me. I feel him against my back. He's undoing the b.u.t.tons of my dress one by one. His mouth is on the side of my neck. The dizziness in my head turns into heat that moves down my backbone.

'Come with me. Back to my hut. Away from him.'

I close my eyes. The room still spins. 'What about Carrie?'

'He won't wake. She won't wake,' he murmurs into my neck. 'I promise.'

'All right.'

My voice is thick, my nose filled with the sharp aroma of his smouldering pipe, an inch from my face.

Outside, the night rustles its silks. The moon hangs suspended in a gelatinous sac.

His door creaks open. He sits the lantern on the floor. Hastily sweeps away the newspapers on the bed. He seems so much larger in the small s.p.a.ce. The lantern paints him in shadow as a hunchbacked monster gliding across the ceiling.

I turn to face him, and he finishes pulling off my dress. The material falls at my feet. I kick it out of the way. The camisole and petticoat are next. Then I sit on the bed while he unlaces my boots.

'Look at your poor toes.'

I glance down at them. They almost all have hardened calluses. A combination of neglect and the filing-down effect the sand seems to have on everything.

He eases me back on the bed and kneels over me, undoing his trousers. 'There's a storm coming, hear it? The wet season will be on us soon.'

As he speaks, I hear a low rumbling in the distance. And then he's on top of me, whispering something I can make nothing of. His muscular thigh between my legs. I open my mouth on the small, sweaty hollow of his shoulder, where a single cord pulls tight, releases, pulls, releases.

Now the lantern on the floor paints our movements on the wall next to his bed. The hunchback's gone. He's a silkworm. One long hitch-and-slide after another, moving forward and back, forward and back, trying to shake off a coc.o.o.n.

But my legs wrap tight around him. They'll have none of his attempts to escape.

43.

The care of a good man always brings solace.

From the secret diary of Mary Watson 2ND OCTOBER 1880.

Percy's been ignoring me for three weeks. Coolly, politely. Firmly.

I've no appet.i.te. My dresses are loose. My wedding ring slipped off at some stage of the morning last Wednesday. I found it again in the bread box at dinnertime.

I've caught Porter watching me, frowning. Sometimes his gaze falls on my reddened fingers with their chewed nails. Sometimes he stares at the slight hitch I can feel at the corner of my mouth.

'I've brought you something,' he says now.

I'm kneading bread dough at the table: earthy spores of yeast up my nose, the peach light falling in segments through the shutters and onto the dirt floor. He pulls a hand from behind his back. It's a cream-smooth nautilus sh.e.l.l with tiger-striped markings.

He's apologetic. 'Not as big as some of them can get. Up in the Strait, they can grow to a foot.'

'It's beautiful.'

The sh.e.l.l is cool and slick. I peer into the open cavity and up an endlessly twisting staircase.

'The animal grows outwards from the sh.e.l.l, sealing each chamber behind it. The last fully open chamber is the living one.'

'So it just closes all the old doors behind it?'

His glance grazes my face. 'Yes. Wouldn't it be marvellous if we could do that?'

I'm caught by surprise, distracted by his hands gathering up both of my own; the mausoleum-cool sh.e.l.l in the centre of our four warm palms. His eyes have a patient question at their centre.

'What is it that you want, Mary?'

'Right now?'

He nods.

Want, as opposed to need? I fix on a specific, tangible target. Something that's not so big as to yawn like a cavern when I approach it.

'I want Carrie off the island, away from here.'

'Is that all?' He lets my hands drop.

I don't know what else to say that won't betray me. He looks at me for a long moment then nods once, slowly.

'I'll go over with Bob when he next takes the slugs to Cooktown and see what I can do about getting pa.s.sage home for your sister.'

And then he's gone and I'm alone with the creaking house, the sh.e.l.l and the dough.

A week later and I'm staring at the sh.e.l.l again. So long, this time, that its stripes shimmer in the afternoon sun, orange into cream, until the surface looks like the mandarin dainties Grandfather Oxnam used to bring back in brown-paper packets on his weekly trips in the buggy to Truro. The taste of a miniature boiled-sweet sun is on my tongue. Saliva squirts into my mouth.