The first thing I notice about landing in Broome are the colours. Red, green, blue. From the plane the aqua rivers snake lazily through the green of the mangroves. Walking out of the air-conditioned comfort of the plane, I realize I’m wearing too many clothes. The heat engulfs me. Hugs me like a warm blanket. Covers me all over. I wrench off my jumper and wait.
A tall, half-cast Aboriginal man, with ever-searching eyes just like mine, thrusts a hand out for me to shake.
“Good trip, mate?” Drake says. He shuffles from foot to foot. He looks uncomfortable.
“Yeah, it wasn’t bad,” I say, “Five hours is a long time.”
The car we drive away in is a rusty blue Jeep. It’s covered in a thin layer of red dust- the dust that covers the land and everything on it. The footpath has turned an orangey-red colour, like the spilt blood of the Japanese pearlers from Once Upon A Time. The road has a red line down the middle, instead of a white divider line; where the cars have blown the dust together.
I lean out of the widow on the drive from the airport to our Broome house. My new house. I lean out like a dog and take everything in. It even smells dusty. The Aboriginal people who call this salt-water desert their home look like shadows against the red earth. But there are lots of white people too. Tourists who come here to look for culture.
Drake drives the rusty Jeep around yet another red, dusty corner with a sign that says Forrest St. He changes down a gear and pulls into a fern-lined drive way. The driveway leads to a big yellow and blue thing on stumps that is covered in fly screens. It looks like an alien spacecraft from one of those sci-fi movies that Byron always loved. Outside the front porch are the leaves of a thousand autumn days, a rusty Hills Hoist and a fibreglass shed that I am told is a cyclone bunker.
The front door of the Broome house is brown with a window in the middle. Paint is peeling off it and reveals the pink, chipped plywood underneath. It squeaks as we push it open. The inside is Japanese style panelling, with mustard yellow supports and windows covering most of the walls. The fans are whirring on the buckled ceiling and the neon lights flicker above, throwing shadows on the curtained walls. My Broome house. My new house.
Home Sweet Home.

I was sitting in the corner of my bedroom with my knees pulled up to my chest. I swayed with a rhythm that matched the banging on my door. A line of blood dribbled down my arm and a blue smudge stained my cheek, like dirt. The banging grew louder and Mel’s voice started to yell. I hardly noticed the shaking walls or that Drake’s voice joined Mel’s. The voices yelled in unison, one deeper than the other, like a well-rehearsed choir. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I didn’t want too.
Slowly, steadily, I pushed myself up off the floor. I stumbled towards the door wondering how to escape. My black hair fell across my face like a mask. I stopped in front of the mirror and picked up some scrunched up toilet paper from the floor to wipe the blood away. I had no idea how it had gotten this bad.
The wind raged outside the windows, blowing the bottlebrush against the cold glass. Joining in with the relentless choir inside.

I unpack two pairs of jeans and a few tops into the musty, built-in wardrobe as Drake raps on the door.
“Feel like a swim?”
We drive in the rusty jeep to Town Beach, where the water is a lurid aqua and the sand a grainy, faded red. The mangroves come almost all the way along the beach, and stop just before a café and caravan park, aimed entirely at the booming tourist trade. My skin feels warm in the sun, like concrete after a summer’s day. It radiates out in salty, sun-blocked bursts, like an over-ripe mango. Shell grit sticks to my feet like mosaic thongs and gets in-between my toes. The beach is divided by a boat ramp, with the café on one side and cliffs and more mangroves on the other. Aboriginal kids play on one side of the ramp while their young parents sit under bare trees, listening to American hip-hop screeching from the back of their souped up four-wheel-drives. On the other side of the ramp, old tourists flaunt their wrinkled, cellulite-ridden bodies and the Euro kids stand out against the brick-red sand as they play. An un-registered, un-noticed, un-questioned segregation.
I sit on the tourist side of the ramp, feeling like anything but a tourist and play with the lines of sticks and shells that span the length of the beach, marking the tides. The water is a flurry of blues and silver sparkles where the kids play. Cormorants swoop low over the surging tide, searching for fish. The heat is always there, like a bad mood; it entraps you and doesn’t let up. You can’t escape it. Diving into the cool water only helps for a while and as soon as I wade out, the heat is there again, like a fog, making the horizon waver in time with the ocean. When we go home, I stumble to my room and fall asleep on the bed.

I watched my shoes scuff along the ground as Mel led me through the sliding hospital doors. She stopped at reception and a Malaysian woman in a blue nurses uniform pointed us in the direction of the Burns ward, room 15- Byron Lang. Mel was mumbling to herself as she steered me past waiting patients and lino floors. We pushed through a set of swinging doors and stopped outside room 15. Drake let us in like it’s a swanky hotel room. Mel’s usual mumbling continued as she shuffled through the doors to a bed at the opposite end of the room. I stayed at the door, rigid like a statue until she noticed that I wasn’t next to her. She turned back to glare at me. Drake and Mel ignored each other. The room got colder as I walked towards the bed. The smell of detergent and charred meat mixed with air-conditioning got up my nose and in my mouth, making me sneeze.
“My baby,” Mel whispered at the bed, “My poor baby.”
She patted a bundle of cotton blankets and I suddenly realized that Byron wasn’t there. We must have gone to the wrong room, the wrong ward. The wrong hospital entirely. But then the sheets twitched and a dark, charred arm flopped out and hung limply, fingers scraping the floor. I stood silently at the end of the bed, looking at the hospital chart, the other people in the room, out the windows, at my shoes, anywhere but that blackened, tortured hand. The hand that looked remarkably like my own.
Drake began singing softly, too soft to hear the words, but I knew what the song was- our favourite song. I began to mime along with Drake.  I jumped when the blankets began to twitch more violently and started to scream muffled words. I caught the word Jake in amongst the stifled cries. The Malaysian nurse from reception appeared out of nowhere and began flicking switches and moving things around at the head of the bed.
“I think it’s time to leave now,” she said quietly before calling for emergency.

The wind blows the palms against the window as I lie on the wooden floor in the lounge. A muggy heat had come over the house this morning, it made my skin sticky and my clothes wet. This was after the strange fog that covered everything in a thin layer of salt. After an hour of being out of bed, I couldn’t move. The heat was too much. Drake didn’t seem to notice the sea mist or the muggy heat that made my usually straight hair curl. I guess that was the Aboriginal in him.
He’s a strange man, my Father. When he’s with me, or his work people, or talking to the Spanish lady in the supermarket, he has this way of talking about things; like he actually knows everything in the world there is to know about tomatoes, or blue bonefish, or the weather patterns of South East Asia.
“Well, South East Asia is on a downward spiral where weather is concerned. Because they’re geographically placed on the edge of a tectonic plate, it causes cyclones more frequently than here in Broome…”  
But when he’s with his Aboriginal friends, or that familiar Malaysian woman that always gives him the eye in Matzo’s restaurant, he talks like he never learnt proper English at school, but in the Broome lingo that is so popular among the seagull kids. The street kids. The kids that don’t want me.
“What now bruz, you comin’ fishin’ tomorra? We’re goin’ up Barred Creek ocean side for blue bone. We’ll ‘ave a feed wid da bullas out da block…”
But know matter how Drake talks he is still my father. And still the heat covers me, and the mist leaves a salty, greasy film on my body. The wet season is just beginning. Soon, we won’t be able to leave the house for weeks because of the rain. The mangrove swamps will swell, pregnant with water. The crocs will start to breed and the jellyfish will come closer to shore. Broome only has two seasons.
“Forget about spring and autumn,” Drake says, “There’s only wet and dry here. You’ll see soon enough.”

I heard Mel’s key scrape against the door, searching blindly for the lock. I turned the TV off quickly and ran into the bathroom as Mel stumbled into the hall. She was looking for someone to blame. I didn’t kill my brother, but I knew what Mel thought. She stumbled from room to room throwing open the doors until she came to the bathroom. Mel’s eyes were bloodshot and she launched herself into the bathroom door when the handle wouldn’t turn.
“It’s your fault he’s gone,” she cried hoarsely, “You didn’t even say goodbye.”
I crouched in the dirty bath and waited for what would always come next. The angry words. The violent waving of arms. I heard a loud thump, but didn’t get up. I waited for an eternity for her to come at me. But she never came. Just laid there in a drunken sleep. Oblivious to what she had become. To what she made me become.

I sit in the empty living room, listening to the whirring of the fan above me and the roaring of the planes that fly overhead. I stretch and lean back in my chair and watch the people on the street walking upside-down. The world looks better this way. Blood rushes to my head and pounds at my ears, like an urgent visitor at a door. I wander around the kitchen for a while, in a blurry daze where nothing looks familiar. It’s like looking at the world through someone else’s eyes. When I come back to myself, I’m leaning against the kitchen bench, staring at the palms through the fly-screened window. There are Japanese characters carved into the trunk of the palm and I strain to see what they say, even though I can’t read Japanese.
I go out to look closer at the carving and realize that it isn’t Japanese at all, it says Eve 2001, in a rough, child-like hand. I run my fingers across the dip of the letters and see a heart carved onto the next tree with Simon and Sarah carved inside. The people who used to live here. An urge comes over me to have my name here too. To live forever on this palm. I walk back into the kitchen and search for a knife worthy of taking up this task. I scratch Jake and Byron into the bark, going over the letters harder and harder each time, until the tree begins to weep.
As I’m carving, I realize why I don’t fit in here in Brome. I’m too busy searching to make friends. Searching through my memories for fragments of something special. Like a diver searching for pearls. Hundreds of divers died looking for that giant pearl, that one pearl that was going to change their whole lives. And now I’m here, re-living their history. Diving for pearls of hope inside myself. Trying to savour shiny strands of happiness. Everyone needs something to hope for.

I was sitting on my bed. Mel had gone out and Drake had left. So Byron was supposed to be looking after me. I was reading The Cat in the Hat while Byron was cooking. I smelt burning meat. I yelled out to him, but he didn’t answer. I coughed as I opened my bedroom door; smoke had filled the kitchen. Byron always was a terrible cook. I could hardly see anything in amongst the smoke. I yelled to him again but he still didn’t say anything. He always replied.
My hands were sticky, even though it was raining outside. My feet had a mind of their own. I started to cough. The taste of charred meat coated my tongue. I couldn’t escape it. It stuck to my clothes and got in my hair. For weeks afterwards I would be washing the smell away.
When I came back to myself, I was standing at his feet. His toes had curled into themselves and Elvis Costello wafted up from his earphones.
“With all the will in the world. Diving for dear life, when we could be diving for pearls.”
He couldn’t hear the smoke alarm. I started to shake him. I squatted next to his feet and wrapped my hands around his cold ankles, the smoke made my head spin. I kept coughing and spluttering all over everything. I dragged him backwards. His heavy body made a terrible scraping on the lino. I ran towards the door to open it. I couldn’t see the flames behind me. Everything went black.  

The sun shines through the blinds, leaving patterned light on the floorboards. I hear the seagull kids playing on the road outside. They scream at each other, they must be angry. There are always people yelling here. They don’t seem to like the people they hang out with. I don’t understand how you can have a friend that you don’t like. It seems absurd. I always used to hang out with Byron and his friends, even though he was older than me. I didn’t like the people who were my age. I always felt cut off from them, I felt like they were too stupid for me. Maybe they were just better than I was. And anyway, why would I bother shipbuilding, when I could be diving for pearls, as the song goes. I wander outside to watch the seagull kids.

I push open the bathroom door, readying myself for the worst. As soon as I flick the light on, I know that she’s gone. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, mottled by the swinging bare globe. Black hair falls over those dark, aboriginal eyes that stare back at me. My face is puffy and red from crying. I flinch at the sight of her in the bath. The sight that I knew would come eventually. I know she’s gone as soon as I see the red liquid sloshing against the sides of the bath, like a container of raspberry cordial. It stains Mel’s grey hair a faded pink colour. She looks like a fashionable old lady at the Country Club who puts purple through her hair, trying to reclaim her youth. Her arm hangs limply out of the bath, blood pooling from her fingers. Elvis Costello serenades my dead mother from the next room.
“It’s all we’re skilled in. People get killed in the result of this shipbuilding.”
I knew it was coming, but I wasn’t ready for it. I notice that I’ve stopped breathing. I walk out of the bathroom and close the door on that strange sight, letting the stale air that was in me for so long, pour out, like a baby taking its first breath. The sweet, savoury smell of charred meat and detergent wafts through the windows from next door. I’ve smelt that smell before. It seems like such a long time ago. Someone, somewhere, is having a nice, happy, peaceful family dinner. They don’t know what my mother has done. People are oblivious to what is unfamiliar to them. I pick up the phone and dial the same number three times. The number that can save lives.
The lives of everyone but her.

I sit behind the fence, watching the kids. I’m hidden in the shade of the casuarinas. They kick a beaten up soccer ball and throw angry words to each other.
“Ya fuckin' cunt! Why’d ya kickid over dere?!” says one kid, as another kicks the ball in my direction. He’s wearing a huge Snoop Dog t-shirt that comes past his knees, and sweatbands around his wrists and forehead. The ball rolls along the ground and bounces onto my bare feet- it has a mind of its own. I pick the ball up and feel the sweaty, greasy, dirt grit under my hands. Walking out from my hiding spot, I ask the kids if it’s their ball, even though I already know the answer.
“Yeah its our ball,” says the one in the big shirt, “Ya gonna giveit back or what?” He flicks his head back and twists his hands round, palms up. What now. I toss the ball to him but he fumbles and it bounces off his shoes and rolls back to me.
“Can I join in?” I ask.
They look at each other; one of them raises an eyebrow.
“Yeah, whatever.”