The Pearl
Geoffrey Knight
Gay Romance
Release Date: 01.25.17
BLURB
The Top End of Australia—a tropical paradise filled with beauty. Wonder. Danger.
For two young boys growing up in the Northern Territory—half-Aboriginal Jarrah “Jad” Yindi and his best friend Luke Lawson—the remote beaches and aqua waters of the Top End are a playground of adventure. And as two best friends become young men, true love washes over them like the sea upon the sand.
But life is full of challenges and change, and if Jad is to discover who he really is, he must piece together his ancestral past, his dream-filled present and his uncertain future to become the man he was always destined to be.
Through water and fire; through love and loss; through the days of youth to the stories of the world’s oldest living culture, journey across the heart of Australia to discover what’s in the heart of one young man.
I’ve always thought of the Top End of Australia as the true definition of paradise—aqua seas, hot days, starry nights, jade waterfalls, white beaches, canyons carved by none other than the Rainbow Serpent. But like any paradise, temptation and danger lurk everywhere. In the dry season—when the crystal waters are most tempting—the seas are filled with sharks and saltwater crocodiles, while the freshwater crocs inhabit the inland rivers and waterholes. The canyons and gorges are swarming with death adders, taipans and western brown snakes. And then there’s the wet season, with its lightning storms, flashfloods and the occasional cyclone.
I hadn’t seen much of the world before I turned eighteen, but there was one thing I knew—Darwin was one of the most dangerous, exotic, wonderful, wildest places on the planet. A cultural melting pot, part Aboriginal, part modern Australian, part Asian, but all of us ruled by the earth, the weather, by nature itself.
It was also home.
Because it was where I met Luke.
Luke had grown up on his family’s property south of town but north of Kakadu. He was a land baby.
Me, I grew up in a tiny shack on the beach just west of Darwin. I was a water baby.
But land and water met when we were both six years old, attending our first day of school in Darwin. He was the blond-haired out-of-towner. I was the half-blood Aborigine with no shoes. I gave him half of my sandwich because he told me his housekeeper was away and his dad had forgotten to make him lunch. He beat up a bigger kid for calling me a creamy. We didn’t even ask each other’s names that day. All we knew was that we were friends. And maybe deep down on that stormy afternoon at the end of the wet season, those two six-year-old boys knew they always would be.
It was the next day he shook my hand. “My name’s Luke Lawson. I brought two sandwiches today. I made ‘em myself. To pay you back.”
“What’s on ‘em?”
Luke opened a brown paper bag and lifted a piece of bread off one of the sandwiches.
There was butter … and tomato sauce … and nothing else.
“Looks delicious.” We sat together and ate. “I’m Jarrah Yindi,” I eventually said through a mouthful of bread and sauce. “But everyone calls me Jad.”
“I don’t mind that you’re half Aborigine, you know.”
“That’s good, ‘cause I don’t either.”
We shared both his lunch and mine in silence, sweltering in the heat and watching the other kids shout and play and push each other around until the afternoon storm rolled in from the sea and drowned us all as we bolted for the classrooms.
“How come you have a housekeeper, anyway? Why doesn’t your mum make your lunch?
“She died when I was born.” Luke said it with a shrug.
The storm had rolled away and school was done for the day and Luke told me if he missed the first school bus heading south out of town there was another one at five. He told me this because I had told him about the pearls. And his eyes lit up.
“Where do they come from?”
“The sea,” I told him. “Some tiny bit of the sea gets in the shell of an oyster, and it makes a pearl. My old man says it turns something imperfect—perfect!”
“Will I find one?”
I shrugged this time. “I doubt it. One in a million!”
Luke smiled confidently. “I’ll find one.”
Geoffrey Knight is the author of more than 30 gay fiction novels, novellas and short stories, ranging in genre from gay adventure, gay romance, gay suspense and gay comedies. He is the recipient of two Rainbow Awards including Best Mystery Winner and Best Overall Gay Fiction Runner-up. His work has been featured in several anthologies including Best Gay Erotica 2013, and he appeared as Guest of Honor at the inaugural Rainbow Con in Florida, 2014.
Geoffrey has worked in advertising, politics and journalism, but nothing is as fun as telling stories. He lives with his partner, their baby daughter, two dogs and two cats in a rambling old house in North Queensland, Australia, where the paint is fraying and life is good.
