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ISLANDER HOSTEL was ‘carbolic clean’ (as Mum would have said) and cheap, with meals included. Aunty Sally served up a stew that would have kept me stodged for three days if I hadn’t made a swift trip to the bathroom to instantly expel it after she ’d explained that the lumps of sweet meat were dugong.
    I wasn’t going to blow my fifty dollars straight up so I told her my uncle would pay tomorrow morning. Aunty Sally seemed unfazed by this, and after my reaction to the mention of dugong, she was anxious to make amends. When her nephew came in with a catch of crayfish, their legs still clacking, she laughed.
    â€˜You come back here again and I’ll take you to my island and cook you up some cray. It’s the most beautiful island in all of the Torres Strait.’
    Sometimes, when Dad had finally triumphed over a client’s waste-of-space boyfriend, he ’d take us out to Charlie ’s Seafood all-you-can-eat buffet. There were crabs and prawns and oysters, but never lobster.
    Aunty Sally told me about the neighbouring islands, especially hers – Hammond Island – where the sand was white and the water was so blue it could fool fishermen. On her island, she ’d cook up the crayfish and ate them in the sea, letting the juices run straight into the water and tossing the cracked shells to flotillas of tiny fish.
    My stomach audibly rumbled.
    I nodded. ‘I’d love that.’
    The buzzer rang from out the front and Aunty Sally smoothed out her dress, a big blue muu-muu with pink frangipanis, and went to see who it was.
    â€˜Grab your stuff. Got to get back before dark.’
    Startled, my head snapped up from my weak cup of tea.
    A big, freckled, sunburned man with a strawberry blond crew-cut blocked the doorway, jiggling his leg and rapping the wall with a set of keys.
    â€˜Uncle Red!’
    â€˜You ready?’
    â€˜I didn’t know where to find you!’
    He frowned. ‘I told you to wait at the wharf.’
    â€˜I don’t remember you saying that.’
    He loomed forward and glared into my face. ‘While you’re working for me you’ll listen to what I say. It’s life or death out here. Life on Thirteen Pearls is like being on a ship and I’m the captain. You do what I say.’
    Behind him, Aunty Sally rolled her eyes, exactly like Tash, as if to say, ‘Whatever.’
    I tried not to giggle as I scraped back my chair. Or what – you’ll make me walk the plank?
    Uncle Red hefted up my backpack, reached into his wallet and slapped the other sort of lobster on the table before storming out.
    I followed behind, feeling like a naughty child even though he must have said something about the bakery because otherwise I wouldn’t have even known to go there.
    I was his niece and we hadn’t seen each other for over eight years, and he couldn’t even be civil. No wonder Mum couldn’t stand him.
    But there had to be something redeeming about him. Tash hated this about me; she believed it to be yet another sign of hippie tendencies. Unlike Tash and her family who believed that rapists should be castrated and murderers should be hung, drawn and quartered, I tended to follow my parents’ party line that people start off good and stuff happens to them along the way that twists them up. And all it takes is, say, twenty-nine years of government-funded therapy, to make them human again . . .
    So the question gnawing at me as I stumbled after Uncle Red, marching past the coconut trees on Victoria Parade, was – what was eating him?

    The outboard’s droning saved me from having to make conversation with Uncle Red. Instead, I sprawled in one end of the tinny and trailed my fingers in the sea. The water was warm and felt like jelly just before it sets. It was a relief to escape the mugginess of the island and feel the soft breeze against my cheeks.
    Sunset had turned the islands into velvety black hunched