CHAPTER 58
I hugged him hard, almost bursting in my love of my son. That phrase bubbled up again: ‘This one is mine; I made this’.

“We’ve got a couple of boat rides coming up, son”

“The Reef?”

“Second one, yeah. I want to try a quieter one with LC first, let her get used to stuff before she goes all the way out there. Now, what looked good at this Italian place?”

What looked good also tasted delightful, and the staff were more than happy to cater for our seven-year-old aestivator, who had recovered her energy as soon as we were out of the apartment. For mains, I went for a calzone, while Ish and Maz each had a bowl of tagliatelle loaded with the obligatory mix of tentacles, none of which looked either rugose or squamous, while LC had a small spicy pizza of her own. Maz finished with tiramisu, but the rest of us opted for ice cream tartufo ‘bombes’, which brought another little flicker of boundary-pushing from our girl, who gave us all a guilty look before licking the last of the ice cream and chocolate from her plate.

The bus was waiting for us just after we had finished breakfast, which was excellent timing.

“Are you going to be playing games again, darling, or will you be telling us where we are going?”

“Me? Play games? Heaven forbid!!”

I got a growl from all members of my family, even LC attempting to snarl, though hers came out as more of a squeak. Our driver took us on a meandering route through Cairn to pick up a host of other customers before reaching the Bruce Highway, where we picked up speed through what looked like mile upon mile of newbuild housing We eventually escaped the sprawl, heading past more agricultural land with the occasional mini-ribbon development against a backdrop of a strikingly triangular hill.

“Dad?”

“Son?”

“The map says there’s a memorial of some kind coming up. What’s blackbirding?”

Maz answered for me.

“What was done to me and your sister, darling. Slaving”

“Oh”

He tapped away at his phone, and groaned.

“Oh. OH! Sugar plantations…. Oh god. Sorry Mum. Didn’t realise”

“No worries, darling. It’s over, in both senses. We’re living in the day, this day. We won’t forget, but it’s over”

Won’t forget, or can’t? No matter; we were pulling off onto a smaller road, so we were nearly there. Let that subject die, quietly.

“Dad?”

“Son?”

“Frankland Island Cruises?”

“You’re too good with that device, boy”

“You’re just too old to learn, you mean”

Mood broken.

We disembarked by a muddy-looking river, earlier warnings about salties twitching in my mind, but it was to board a sizeable boat resembling a scaled down Rotto ferry, and after an all too familiar safety briefing we cast off and went with the river. Maz, of course, was straight out on deck with her bins, as the banks were thickly forested and full of birds. Eventually, we arrived at the river’s mouth, where we threaded a couple of sand bars before heading straight out to sea, the boat finally picking up some speed.

“Where are we going, Dad?”

“To an island, love”

“Will we be coming back? I didn’t bring Kawan”

“Yes, love, we’ll be back later, but we’ll have a meal here later”

“Okay”

She didn’t sound too sure, so I suggested Maz take her into the toilet/jakes/head whatever the proper term was and get her changed into her costume. That seemed to calm her, as did the ritual application of sunscreen, until our destination became apparent.

It was like something from a cartoon, a low-lying island almost covered in tropical greenery, surrounded by golden sand and with one rocky hump clouded with seabirds. All it needed was a single palm tree to tick all the cliché boxes.

“Bridled terns! This is lovely, darling! Where are we going?”

Our helmsman answered that one by running straight into the beach, where the crew unfolded a set of steps over the bow before leading us to a shelter in the forest, where there were abundant picnic tables and benches.

“This is where we’ll be serving lunch, ladies and gents, which will be at twelve thirty sharp”

He rattled off some more times, for an island walk and rides on a glass-bottomed boat, and then the crew started to hand out masks and snorkels.

“How well can you swim, little darling?”

Maz held up our girl’s flotation jacket.

“We’ll be staying with her, but she is used to water. We live next to a beach”

“As long as you’re happy, then. Which reminds me. LADIES AND GENTS, ONE MORE THING! Well, a couple, actually. You all look like sensible folks, but every now and again our shit-for-brains filter fails, and an idiot slips onto the boat.Do NOT stand on the coral outcrops, and don’t even touch them: sunscreen is a killer for the creatures that live there. Got no fire coral here, so we can’t gloat. Oh: the first sizeable outcrop off the beach, don’t get too close. There’s a moray living there, and you all know the song”

Several people I suspected were regular or repeat customers chanted “What song, Ben?”

“Oh, that old Dean Martin thing: when you swim in the sea, and an eel bites your knee, that’s a moray!”

I led my family to the beach before he got worse. We sat in the edge of the lovely water to fit fins and masks, talking LC through the use of her snorkel.

“Now, bare feet for you, love. Just walk out with me, and then bend forward. Put your face into the water… That’s it!”

We walked her round the edge for a minute or two as she got used to the kit, then towed her out, supported by her baby lifejacket. I spotted the famous ‘first outcrop just as a black ribbon with an awful lot of teeth darted out and then straight back in. I had been expecting something around six feet long, but this was a baby. I felt vaguely cheated, right up until the green turtle swam past us.

That set the mood of the day, as we toured a little cluster of coral heads, spotting all colours of fish, a couple of giant clams and two more turtles. The beach had a shallow enough angle so that LC could rest easily, but that was something she clearly didn’t want to see. I flashed back to her first day on a beach, asking about having to wear goggles, and her mother’s quiet explanation about finding ‘pretty shells’.

“Maz?”

“Uh-uh?”

“Just thinking how far we’ve come since finding that abalone shell”

“Full width of the country, darling”

“Oh, you’re as bad as Ish sometimes!”

“You can talk. Anyway, none of us will ever outdo Kul”

“Fair point fairly made, Mrs MBR”

“I thank you, Mr MBR. Now, are we bothering with this glass bottom boat thing?”

Ish called across the water.

“I asked that Ben, Dad. It just cruises over the same bits we can see already. Feels more real this way”

Maz had a hand up.

“I would like to do the walk, though. See what birds there are, she says, to no surprise on anyone’s part”.

We all did the walk, in the end, after a typically Aussie cold buffet lunch, heavy on the seafood. Partway through it, ‘That Ben’ announced that we would not be served with what he called an ‘alleged delicacy’ that he would show us on the walk.

Birds. Lots of shrubs and trees, including ‘pandanus’, which was an odd affair that looked like one of the cable-stayed sections of the new Severn Bridge. Maz asked if that was the delicacy in question.

“No, love. You had some of that in the buffet. Just a bit further, and---there you are, in the shallows there”

There were three wrinkled black stick things, and it was one of the other passengers who put a name to them.

“Sea cucumbers?”

“Yes, mate! Very popular in China and South East Asia. So bloody popular we get poaching. So much poaching we have to root out entire settlements sometimes. More than a few entire villages set up by poachers up the Top End. Big money, those things, and the rarer the species, the higher the price”

As I had come to expect, he then launched into a hard sell on conservation before leading us back round the tiny island to our dining shelter, where LC was almost running to grab her buoyancy aid. The cruise back coincided with twilight, and the different angle of the sun let me spot the very clear change in water colour where the river’s outflow was finally stopped by the sea’s presence. We were halfway up the river, moving very slowly, when the announcement came over the tannoy.

“There’s a croc on a sandbar ahead of us, caught a turtle”

People rushed forward in excitement, but after a couple of minutes of confusion, the tannoy delivered Ben’s laughter.

“Sorry, folks, but the tide’s a bastard here, and we needed to trim bow-heavy to get over a mud bar. That’s the quickest way we know to shift the load forward. She’ll be right now”

Maz was chuckling happily.

“Cheeky sod, but I don’t mind. That’s a superb view of an osprey, just there by the bank!”

We had to carry LC upstairs at the apartments, she was that tired. I put her in bed, before three of us slurped down some instant noodle soup and then followed her example.

The next day was one for bimbling, splashing around in the artificial 'beach', touristic-style shopping and eating ice creams as Maz obsessively surveyed every scrap of mudflat. LC's healing was pushed a stage further, when she not only asked very directly for her own mask and snorkel, but insisted on trying them out in the artificial lagoon without her buoyancy aid. She wasn't swimming that badly now, so when Ish did the old trick of swimming under her as she floated face down, her emergence from the water was with a shout of laughter. I picked her up for a cuddle, and sked the obvious question.

"Hands and feet... and?"

"HANDS AND FEET AND SNORKEL!"