WHILE JACK WAS waiting for the sharks to disappear and hoping that he could fix his rudder and worrying about Nim, he saw a ship.
Jack danced a jig and sang a song because he wanted to get home even more than he didn’t want to be rescued. His song didn’t rhyme and it didn’t have a tune, but it said:
‘I’ll be home soon!
I’ll see Nim tomorrow!
The plankton can wait
And everything will be all right!’
The ship came closer.
It was a cruise ship. A pink-and-purple cruise ship.
It was the Troppo Tourists.
Jack stopped dancing and stopped singing, his face was pale and his stomach was sick, but Nim had been alone too long and he knew what he had to do.
In the cabin he found the flags he’d never used: one with blue-and-white checks and the other striped; when he put them up together they said SOS: Come and Rescue Me! to any sailor who saw them.
Then he waited. The longer he waited, the more he didn’t want the Troppo Tourists to see the island; he didn’t want to talk to them and didn’t want them oh-ing and ah-ing and taking pictures of his home, but the longer he waited, the more he didn’t want Nim to be alone.
The sad flags fluttered from the mast, and he went on waiting.
But the Troppo Tourists sailed out of sight.
EARLY NEXT AFTERNOON, when Nim was sitting in a palm tree to watch for Jack, the ship came to the island.
Just a speck in the distance, so Nim cheered and thought how she would run to the furthest point of Keyhole Cove, and blow her shell-whistle and shout:
‘JACK NEEDS HELP! LOOK FOR A BOAT WITH A BROKEN RUDDER!’
Then, through the spyglass, she saw the colours and she knew that she could never ever call out to this ship. Because no matter how much she wanted Jack to be home now, what she wanted even more was for him to be happy, and he’d never be happy if the Troppo Tourists came to the island.
And even though they didn’t know it was Jack’s island, if they passed the blue waters of Keyhole Cove or the peaceful sands of Turtle Beach, they’d know it was the most beautiful island in the world. They’d come back with curious tourists, and fill up the island with holidays and noise.
‘Oh, no they won’t!’ said Nim.
She raced to the hut and turned on the laptop.
To: aka@incognito.net
Date: Tuesday 6 April, 14:14
Dear Alex Rover
I hope it’s okay to write so early but could you please tell me right away what your Hero would do if the Bad Guys were coming to his island and he wanted them to go away and not notice it.
From Nim
From: aka@incognito.net
To: jack.rusoe@explorer.net
Date: Tuesday 6 April, 9:17
Dear Nim
It’s okay to write any time (and it doesn’t even have to be about coconuts!) – unless your parents have another rule.
When my beautiful Lady Hero was escaping from Bad Guys in Sands at Sunset, she disguised herself in old clothes and grease, till she looked so ugly they didn’t notice her. But a whole island is trickier!
Somehow the Hero would have to make the rocks seem more dangerous, the reef more terrifying, the pale sands bleak and lonely – make the whole island seem like a creepy, scary place.
This sounds like an exciting game!
Your friend, Alex
The ship was coming closer. Nim would have to work fast to disguise the island.
The sea lions were on their rocks, coughing, barking, honking, all the usual sea lion conversation, but Nim interrupted, shouting and waving her arms. Selkie swam after her, barking reproachfully.
The ship came closer still. It was slowing down – it had seen the island. ‘Bad boat!’ Nim screamed.
Selkie looked confused. The other sea lions stared.
‘Shoo!’ Nim shouted. ‘Get off the rocks!’
Grumbling and grunting, they slid into the water. Nim dived in after them, but Selkie blocked her before she’d gone three strokes.
‘I’ll go back,’ Nim pleaded, ‘if you stop the boat.’
So when Nim was safely on the shore, Selkie headed the other sea lions out to the reef.
The ship stopped, and lowered a small boat down to the water.
Creeping low, out of sight of snooping binoculars, Nim jumped into the tidal pools and snatched up armfuls of the iguanas’ favourite seaweed.
The small boat cast off with a snarl of its motor, and the king of the sea lions bellowed back.
If a boat found its way in through the maze of the reef, Shell Beach would be the first thing it would see.
Crawling across the pebbly rocks and sharp white shells, the blood flowing red from the cut on her knee, Nim threw handfuls of seaweed from one end of the beach to the other. Fred followed, nibbling as fast as she could put it down.
‘You can have coconut,’ she promised him, ‘if you’ll bring all your friends to the beach.’
Fred looked at her. ‘As much coconut as you can eat,’ Nim said.
With a sneeze of surprise, Fred scuttled away – from rock to rock, tidal pool to sea – until the beach was covered by spiny iguanas munching free seaweed. From the reef it would look like a beach of bumpy grey rocks.
And maybe they would turn around before they saw Turtle Beach.
Nim sneaked back to her Look-out Palm, shimmied to the top and clung high and still.
The boat had nearly reached the first gap in the reef. It was close enough for Nim to see the people inside, wearing pink T-shirts and purple caps with a stuffed fish on top.
Suddenly the gap disappeared, in a swirling, thrashing sea lion storm. The boat idled on past, looking for another place to get through – but the sea lions followed. The king roared his roar and the others bellowed; the splashing sprayed higher and the boat rocked wildly, and was slowly, ferociously, pushed out to sea.
From her tree, Nim could see something else. Galileo was circling the boat.
Galileo had never seen pretend-fish before. Galileo’s rule was that if it looked like a fish, it was a fish, and if someone else had that fish, Galileo would steal it.
He called to his mate, and they dived together to snatch two fish-caps from the heads in the boat.
The people screamed and swore, throwing their arms over their faces, but the giant birds only cared about the caps. They spat the first ones into the sea, and snatched two more to see if they tasted better.
Now the boat jolted, tipping hard as if it had hit a rock.
‘Please don’t get hurt!’ Nim begged the sea lions.
The boat steadied. Its engine roared and shot it back across the water.
The tide was going out. By the time the little boat had been lifted onto the ship, the reef was jagged above the water.
So the Troppo Tourists cruised on past, but they didn’t go away. They went as slow and as close as they dared, past Turtle Beach and round the point of Frigate Bird Cliffs.
Nim crept down to the beach and tried not to cry.
Chica lumbered up from the water, a smug look on her face and purple paint across her shell. Nim remembered the jolt. ‘Did you hit them?’ she asked, scratching under the turtle’s chin.
Chica looked smugger.
Everyone tried but me, thought Nim. It stinks!
Turtle Beach stank too; stank worse than a bad day at the Hissing Stones. ‘Yuck!’ said Nim.
Half a dead shark had washed up in the tide.
‘No one would land if they could smell that!’ said Nim, and wondered if Alex Rover’s Hero would use a rotten shark to fight for his island.
She sprinted to the hut and grabbed her wagon; dumped in the shark, slimy and rotting. It was a long, puffing haul to the Hissing Stones but Nim would have pulled it to the top of Fire Mountain if she’d had to.
The steam was drifting out to sea. It wasn’t an extra-stinky day, but, ‘I’ll fix that!’ said Nim.
She dragged the shark out of the wagon and across the biggest vent, where steam hissed out between the stones.
The steam stopped coming out, and the shark didn’t smell any worse than it had before.
‘What else stinks?’ Nim wondered.
Sometimes seaweed washed up on the Black Rocks. If it didn’t dry out and it didn’t wash away, after a while it began to rot. Nim scrambled up and collected shirt-fulls of putrid sea-muck. She poked her head around the point. The ship was cruising past the breakers where the Black Rocks met the reef.
Nim clutched her seaweed and tumbled down boulders to the Hissing Stones. The shark smelled so bad now, she wanted to vomit, but she dumped the seaweed onto the steaming vents and ran back to hide, out of the stench and out of sight.
For a long, long moment nothing happened. Nim had dumped so much muck that no steaming stink could escape.
It was too late to do anything else.
The ship was across from Sea Lion Point, right in line with the Hissing Stones.
The shark exploded.
The rotting seaweed fountained.
The built-up steam sprayed bits of rotten shark, seaweed and Nim-didn’t-know-what in a rushing geyser far into the air. The gentle breeze wafting out to sea turned into a grey, choking, sick-making fog.
The ship turned and steamed out of sight.
THAT EVENING NIM was so tired she couldn’t eat. And she felt so cold and empty inside, and so hot and itchy outside, that she took her torch and towel and went up to the pool.
Nim loved the ocean because it was always there, wherever she looked and as far as she could see, but it was too huge and powerful to understand and too dangerous to trust. The pool was easy to love, because it was so small that she knew every rock in it, and so peaceful she could float peacefully as the sky got darker and the moon and stars came out, while the muck and muddling washed away.