The Turning Tide Read Online Free Page B

Anna had a new boyfriend, an RAAF pilot. ‘She got sick of last month’s sailor then?’ I said.
    Mum said, ‘She should concentrate on her studies.’ Dad touched her hand and she smiled wryly and a look passed between them. They’d always been intensely close, playing fiddle music together, seeming to understand each other’s thoughts, laughing at the same time without a word. As a child I hated being excluded that way, but Mum would say they’d been together for so long they could read each other’s minds. I didn’t understand, then, how rare their bond was.
    ‘And Liam’s having his first big exhibition in Perth next month,’ said Mum. She adored my brother Liam, even though he was actually my dad’s son from before they got married. A boy at school said Liam was a bastard so I beat him up, but not too much because it was true.
    ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear about the Egawas now?’ said Dad in his soft Irish accent, carving the roast for the main course.
    ‘How are they?’
    ‘Old man Egawa’s still at the boat repairs, though he must be over seventy. And Yoshi and Mary had their twenty-fifth anniversary a few weeks ago. And a very good party it was too.’
    ‘Dad.’
    He chuckled. ‘Oh, you mean the youngsters?’
    ‘ Dad .’
    ‘They’re both around.’ His smile faded and I saw concern in his eyes. ‘But not for long. They’re going to Japan in a few weeks. Ken wants to join the army. Betty’s going because Yoshi thinks she’ll be safer there.’
    ‘Safer?’
    Dad sighed. ‘Ah, son, the odds of war with Japan are getting greater every day. If it came to that, what do you suppose would happen to the Egawas?’
    ‘Nothing! Mary and the kids are Australian, not Japanese. You don’t think anyone would hurt them?’
    ‘Not in Broome. But governments usually lock up enemy citizens in time of war. That’s what Yoshi’s afraid of.’
    I was silent with shock.
    Mum leant towards me. ‘Sweetheart, Betty hasn’t changed. But Ken … he fell in with some nationalists and now his head’s full of rubbish. He wants to fight the Koreans, the Chinese, anyone, everyone, for the glory of that awful emperor.’
    I looked at her, amazed. Even before I’d gone away to university I’d heard of the horrors the Japanese army had inflicted on China. My old friend Ken wanted to be part of something like that?
    I’m sitting in the Union cafe, avoiding colleagues and trying to catch up on a research paper I should have read a week ago. I look around and think how it would have shocked my grandparents’ generation: young people from every country under the sun together, queuing, eating, laughing. A group of animated Asian kids are at the table next to me. I notice a ray of light refracting into tiny spectra on one girl’s glossy black hair.
    I used to see that iridescence in Betty’s hair too, though I didn’t have the words then to understand it: it was just some magical thing that happened in the sunlight. I remember her sitting beside me on a seat near Town Beach, facing onto quiet Roebuck Bay. We were waiting for Ken, who was splashing in the water with friends.
    ‘I don’t want to go to Japan, Mike,’ she said, looking down – that’s when I noticed those little rainbows. ‘But my father is determined I should experience some Japanese civilisation, he calls it, with his family. At least until the threat of war has passed.’
    ‘That could be a long time, Betty,’ I said, unable to keep the dismay out of my voice.
    After my affair with Kitty I saw Betty with new eyes. Still the gentle, amusing friend she’d always been, but different too; she’d grown up while I was away. She looked at me. Gleams of light turned the brown of her eyes into velvet and her lashes and eyebrows were like charcoal feather strokes against her skin.
    ‘You’ve been away a long time, Mike. Everything has changed. Ken became friends last year with a new diver who used to be in the Japanese army. Now all the