Free In the Mouth of the Tiger by Lynette Silver

loved to peep over the edge of the bunk to satisfy my curiosity. But I was a good girl in those days and resisted the urge. Either that or I was too frightened of what Mother would do if she caught me peeking.
    The best times were in the evenings, when the grown-ups went down to dinner, surrendering the brightly lit decks and public rooms to the children on board. We would raid the smoking room to steal left-over crisps and stuffed olives, and to search for half-empty wine glasses, making faces at the awful taste. And then run squealing around the boat deck, exhilarated by the wide starlit sky and the swooping of the ship as it pitched gently in the mid-ocean swell.
    By the time we disembarked in Melbourne, Mother, Robbie and I had become used to being a family. We ate together at every meal, went everywhere together, and thought of each other as extensions of ourselves. For me it was a lovely feeling, and I think Robbie enjoyed it too. With Mother I am not so sure. She sometimes became irritated at our togetherness: ‘For God’s sake, Nona, stop tripping over my feet! Can’t you go somewhere else and play?’
    The high point of our trip was a visit to Canberra to see the opening of the new Parliament House. I remember that while the road into the new capital city had been made green by miles of staked pine trees, Canberra itself was little more than a dusty brown paddock. I can’t remember the actual opening of Parliament House, but I do remember a picnic just outside the city, when friends we had met taught us to catch yabbies by dangling a piece of meat on a string into the Cotter River. We boiled the yabbies in a pot suspended over the picnic fire, and ate them with mouthfuls of buttered bread.
    I also remember that one yabby escaped and was noticed only when it had climbed onto Robbie’s knee as he reclined by the fire. Robbie had leapt to his feet, beating at the poor creature with his hat as the children present screamed with laughter.
    Poor Robbie. It had been so unfair of Mr Mayhew to imply such awful things about him. Robbie had been a lovely, kind and gentle person whose only fault had been that his sense of adventure had betrayed him, luring him well out of his depth. He had been a successful tea merchant in Mincing Lane in London until well into his forties, when he had visited the Far East and fallen in love with the huge tropical moon, the colourful villages, the talk of gold mines deep in the jungle – and my mother. The Far East, and my mother, swallowed him up whole and then spat him out, leaving him to die of blackwater fever, alone and bankrupt in the middle of the Pahang jungle.
    My walk had taken me to Victoria Quay, the embarkation pier where street traders and food vendors clustered to serve those boarding or disembarking from the ships lying in the Roads. I felt hungry and bought satay from one of the vendors, sitting in the shade under an awning and scooping up the mild curry from its coconut-frond pouch with my fingers. My mother would have been outraged. Europeans were not supposed to touch food from the street vendors. It was seen as a first step to ‘going native’.
    After my satay I bought a handful of syrup ice – a ball of crushed ice flavoured by a squirt of syrup. This was real rebellion: Mother would have disowned me on the spot if she had seen me, knees apart, my skirt rucked upto avoid being stained, and my face deep in the soft, strawberry-flavoured ice.
    â€˜Good morning. Or is it good afternoon?’
    I looked up to see the carrot-topped young man from the chummery in Argyll Street grinning down at me. He lifted his solar helmet politely. ‘You do look as if you are enjoying yourself.’
    I nodded vigorously, unable to speak because my mouth was full of ice.
    â€˜I’m down to greet some chums off the China ,’ he explained. ‘The lighter is on its way in from the ship, actually. They’ll be landing directly. I say, you