Free Fishing for Stars by Bryce Courtenay Page A

was known as Vleermuis . I had renamed the yacht Madam Butterfly , the nickname I had given Anna at sixteen, so very long ago when we had been out hunting butterflies and life had been so simple. Ironically, Madam Butterfly, in a bizarre twist of fate, had transmogrified into Anna’s professional name and that of her nefarious house of bondage.
    Anna, rested and smiling, had appeared at five o’clock wearing white shorts, a light blue shirt and, hanging from her shoulders, a white sweater, the arms of which were tied loosely below her neck. We’d talked at some length, over an afternoon tea of sponge cake cook had baked, about my need to live in the islands to run our shipping and war salvage business and she asked, ‘Is it to be forever? Will you not eventually return to Australia, Nicholas?’
    ‘There would have to be a damn good reason,’ I grinned, looking directly at her. ‘With the exception of boarding school in Brisbane, you will recall I was brought up first in Japan, then on the island of New Britain, the son of an Anglican missionary. I am more familiar with the jungle than Queen Street, Brisbane. I guess I’m an island person.’
    Anna sniffed. ‘When there is no more scrap metal what will you do? This doesn’t seem a place where you can make real money.’
    ‘Ah, it depends on how much,’ my hand swept over Beautiful Bay, ‘and what you want in life.’
    Anna’s English deteriorated and I could see she was upset. ‘Life? Ja , I have already two lives, Nicholas. One is goed , when I was growing up in Batavia. Then come the Japanese . . .’ She didn’t complete the sentence, jumping to the next. ‘Now I am lucky so I have another life, another chance, I must be sure.’
    ‘You mean security? If we stay together, there is always going to be enough, Anna. After the war salvage scrap runs out, Joe Popkin, Kevin and myself are starting a small inter-island shipping line, people, parcels and produce.’ I laughed. ‘What Joe calls “freight and fright”! The leaky and unseaworthy vessels doing this now are always overloaded and carry twice the passengers they’re laughingly licensed to take on board. If a big storm happens out to sea it usually spells disaster. There’s a great need for a decent service and we already have a small fleet of vessels, and they’re a damn sight better than most of the leaky tubs sailing between the islands right now.’ I admit I said all this in an attempt to impress her, show her we were not sitting on our hands and were seriously planning for the future.
    Anna seemed to deliberately ignore or dismiss what amounted to an informal proposal from me . . . well, a toe in the water anyway. Her speech was slowly reverting to normal. ‘Property? It is expensive here?’ she asked.
    ‘No, not really.’
    ‘And when Port Vila grows, will property values increase?’
    ‘Who knows? The natives are beginning to talk independence, though it’s years off yet, more a whisper than a demand. That is, if it ever happens. The various colonial powers are doing a pretty good job of keeping them in the dark.’
    ‘ Ja , the Dutch also, but in the end it happened there.’
    ‘Yes, perhaps, maybe, who knows? The New Hebrides is a condominium, jointly ruled by the French and the British. This island is a bureaucratic nightmare; for a start, there are two sets of rules regarding property and that’s only the beginning of the complications.’
    ‘What about industry? Cheap labour? This is a tax haven?’
    ‘Nah, too far from anywhere, but you’re right, real-estate development is usually connected with industry and in terms of exports here on this island, as on most of the others, it’s coconuts and coconuts, coffee, cocoa and a bit of mining, with Nauru and its deposits of bird poo the exception. Although Port Vila as a tax haven has some small attraction to overseas buyers.’
    ‘ Ja , Java is also an island. After three hundred years it was still coconuts and