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DANIELLE WOOD was born in Hobart in 1972. She has a degree in English from the University of Tasmania and is completing a PhD in creative writing through Edith Cowan University. She has worked as a journalist in Hobart, Perth and Broome. The Alphabet of Light and Dark is her first novel.
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First published in 2003 Copyright © Danielle Wood 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Wood, Danielle, 1972– . The alphabet of light and dark. ISBN 1 74114 065 X. I. Title. A823.4 Set in 11/15.5pt Caslon by Asset Typesetting Pty Ltd Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For John and the seagull
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1982 Cape Bruny
lmost dusk, fish-catching time. But Essie has left the hooks of her handline bare. They are silver and shining, suspended in dark glassy green. On the sea floor an octopus attaches itself to her sinker like a drawstring purse. She tows it slowly to the surface, where it lets go in a pulse of indigo. Her grandfather reaches into a metal bucket, half full of the half-moons of dead flathead, their bodies webbed with mucus. He lays out a fish on a board filmy with clotted blood and runs a flat blade up its white belly. Then he flips the fish over and slides the blade up the back, slicing off a folded fan of spines. His knife twists and severs the backbone. To finish, he stabs the fish through the centre of its map-of-Tasmania head and tears the translucent flesh out of the skin with a fork. ‘Thirty-nine he was when he went to the lighthouse. Not a great age by any means, but he already had the look of an old man …’ Essie hears him without listening. She’s heard the
A
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story of his own grandfather a thousand times before, and knows she will hear it a thousand times more in her life. Her bare heels beat a soft rhythm where they hang against the powder-white hull of the yacht. ‘… shrunken as a salted Yarmouth herring, as if so many years at sea had left him pickled …’ Often her grandfather’s stories wash over her. It’s as if there’s water in her ears and the words float on it, half heard. ‘… lost the better part of his voice in an illness, and a skipper’s not a skipper with no voice to shout “clew up the forecourse” over the top of a howling gale …’ The triangle of a fish head lands on the water beyond the stern. It’s like a kite trailing streamers of guts and raspy skin. Gulls squabble. Essie observes instead the soft bristling fair hairs on her legs and arms. Her ankles have grown beyond the frayed cuffs of her jeans and the skin is covered with small scales of sea salt. ‘… his whole life over again. Thirty-nine years, he lived here.’ Her eyes skim the still water, climb the corroded pillars of the cliff face up to the lighthouse — its white surface bright in the horizontal light of the late sun — and then return to the patch of water framed between her feet. From the corner of her eye she sees him draw the blade of his knife across the fabric of his trousers, leaving behind a cluster of scales. He pushes the blade into a canvas scabbard edged with the vees of his neat glove stitch. The
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galley of his yacht is hung with many such scabbards and pouches and Essie likes to think that it is within them that he keeps his stories, tucked down inside with whittled knife blades and oilstones impregnated with years of spit. He looks at her now with that look he sometimes has, with the sad little fold of skin that puckers up between his eyes. When he looks at her like this, she knows he is thinking that her face is like her mother’s. And sometimes she will see the fold twist itself into a knot, and she knows what that means, too. That he’s seen drift across her face an expression belonging to her father. Sometimes he even says it. You look like your father when you do that. And the disapproval stings like salt. But she does it anyway, presses her lips together into a straight line and blinks, slowly, her eyes perfectly still, keeping the lids closed for just a heartbeat too long. She knows that he sees her father also in her strong legs, growing so long now. She knows that he wishes he could tear that part out of her. Her grandfather calls himself Pop to her, but in her mind she calls him by his first name, Charlie. Charlie singes her waist-length hair with a hair drier held too close if she looks like going outside with it slightly damp. He winds her about with scarves, duffles her in coats, suffocates her in his great, woolly, overbearing love. She submits to all of this, patiently, because she knows that the best love is rough sometimes, and scratchy against the skin. • • •
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‘Catchin’ anything darlin’?’ She shakes her head. ‘No? Mustn’t be holding your mouth right.’ He pulls his face into a stupid grin as he flings the other line over the side, baited with thick discs of fishflesh. And then he’s reeling in, hand over hand, a sandy fish shimmying in the strange thinness of air. He laughs his big laugh, his great big guffaw which comes out with spittle and all. He has to drag the back of his hand over his chin to wipe it off. ‘Got to hold your mouth right, lass.’ She stares at the fish on her grandfather’s hook. Its concertina gills pump a panicked rhythm. She wonders if the fishes left behind, the ones still in the water, are sad for its loss. Charlie and Essie go away together on Kittywitch often, but this is the first time that they have come as far south as the lighthouse. Earlier today he showed her the curve of Lighthouse Bay on a chart, explaining how the cape would shelter them from the wind this night. The chart was not like other maps. All the contours and markings were given to the sea, and the land was a featureless expanse of pale yellow. She had traced with her finger the outline of the island, inscribing its two halves, the narrow join of the isthmus between them, the heel of the peninsula where the lighthouse kept watch. She studied the chart and saw the truth of it. On the
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island there had once been a triangle-shaped house made of wood, with a family that had a mother as well as a father. But now, just like on the chart, her memories are fading into blankness. I am an island too, she thinks. Half her life she has lived without words, with a blue moat of silence all around her. Charlie’s knife comes back out of the scabbard and the last fish, still alive, squirms on the board as the silvery tip goes through the thin resin of its skull. Charlie scrapes and cuts and slices. There is the crunch of spine. His hands are covered with nicks and blood and scabs on old wounds. Essie looks away, to the shore, comparing the outline of Bruny the way it had looked on the chart with the huddled-beast shapes of its headlands. Looking at the island makes her feel strange, almost like the bottom of her stomach has fallen out. It’s the same kind of feeling that she gets when she wants something to be true but she already knows that it isn’t, the same feeling she has when she lies in bed half awake at dawn feeling the dream-thing she holds in her hand begin to dissolve into nothingness in the light. She peels off the clothes she wears over bathers stiffened from sea salt, and dives off the side of the yacht. Swimming down, hands then arms, torso then thighs, calves then feet, piercing the cold layer of water beneath the sun-warmed surface. She forces the pressure out of her ears with small flexes of her jaw.
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She loves the cool touch of the water; feels herself becoming nothing more than a membrane of skin, water both inside and out. She swims under the water, away from the yacht, scissoring her long legs through the water. She loves to swim. Essie’s a fish and the cat’s got her tongue, the girls at school chant, sucking in their cheeks to make their lips into the two soft globes of goldfish mouths. She surfaces quite a distance from the yacht circling gently at anchor. Drifting, hands fluttering at her sides to stay afloat, she can see so much of the open ocean to the south that she can sense the curvature of the globe, almost feel the earth cranking another notch away from the sun. The sun is a pink crescent on the edge of a mountain. Then the earth turns and it disappears, making dawn somewhere else. And at exactly that moment, high on the cliff, the lighthouse opens its eye to keep watch through the dark. The beam makes its first pass over the water, and is gone. The dusky dimness has fifty seconds, just less than one round of a clock face, before the light returns. The water of the channel feels deep beneath her. She knows what’s down there. Down deep are the wide ribs of ships and whales, and skeletons in chains. And there are the bones which drift, through the layers of the currents, in perfect formation of human hands. She knows the story of the hands, has read it in a book in the high school library that is full of grown-up books about History and other things. In this story there are four hands, belonging to two young men who went to a
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white man’s camp to tell a woman that it was time to come home. The white men wanted to take the woman in their boat, and although the two young men didn’t understand all of the white words that were spoken, they understood the cruel shapes of the white men’s mouths and the slavering of the tongues within, and they didn’t allow the woman to go alone. The boat sailed and the men were afraid. They sat in the small vessel, feeling the thinness of the planking which was all that lay between themselves and the dark, the deep, the water. And then they felt hands on them, and a spinning within themselves as their bodies were wrestled over the side. And then all they felt was water and fear all around. They were dipped in it, drenched in darkness but holding on still to the light of the sun. Their wrists, their hands still reaching up, up, holding fast to the gunwales of the sailboat. It was the woman (soon to be spread, pinioned, beneath the gash-mouths, the slavering tongues) who saw it through her screaming, the savage curve of the blade falling; the red spray, the thick droplets, the brown starfish of hands jittering in the bottom of the boat before the toe of a boot flicked them over the side. When Essie looks down, there they are, hovering beneath her feet in the inky depth. They are like white stars floating, five points of fingers and thumb. Naked bones, radiating spokes, the narrowing metatarsals spaced apart by muscle and tissue long decayed.
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The lighthouse beam passes overhead, drizzling her with a fine mist of light downcast in the loom. She floats on her back and begins to feel in her body the time it takes for the light to return, searching, sending itself out over the rocks and the water. Flash, eclipse, flash, eclipse. She knows the things that the light can’t see, the things beneath the surface that pull and suck.
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1996 Green Gorge, Macquarie Island
lone in the hut, waiting, he warms tomato soup in a pot on the gas stove, stirring in white swirls of milk until the liquid is a dark, uniform pink. Out the window penguins whirr, beaks to the sky, and seal pups open their sink-like mouths to each other as they roll their blubber on the grating, grey volcanic sand. The air in the hut is still, but cold. He hasn’t turned on the heater, or the lights. His feet in wet boots are cold, so cold that he can no longer be certain that the message he is sending to his toes — scrunch — is being obeyed, or even received. He longs to unlace his boots, unpeel the double layer of sodden socks and massage the feeling back into the white blocks of his feet. But if he takes them off, he will never put them back on again, and the day’s work is not yet over. He pours the soup into a mug, sips its chemical sweetness and waits.
A
At dusk Pete feels something inside himself brace. This next hour of the day is a violent one. Across the island, he
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knows, there are claws and feathers and teeth and blood and beaks and tails tangled up in the fierceness of life and death. He imagines the scent of the bait, drifting across the terrain, low, inviting. He pictures the predatory slink through the tussock, and wills it to be so.
Pitch dark now and the only light is from a faraway fishing boat making a slow traverse of the bay. It rolls with the swell, the bright green of its starboard lights leaving behind the faint trace of sine waves in the night sky. Pete closes the hut door behind him and the cold grips his face like a vice. An ice-cream headache shoots up beneath his brow like a cold blade. He zips his coat up under his nose and exhales down into the fabric cave to make warmth. He readjusts the rifle on his shoulder, and puts his head down to the wind. The cage trap is up on the plateau, on a known route, where it’s been every night for six weeks now. It’s sheltered from the wind and the worst of the rain. He walks and wills it to be so. He passes through tussocks, ankle-turning country, cursing as his boot disappears into a puddle he knows will be foul with the flaking skin and faeces of the seal cows. He begins to climb, scaling a steep slope upholstered with the furred leaves of mega-herbs, his breath misting out in front of his eyes. From inside the pitted earth all around and beneath him come faint sounds; the black curtains of
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wings folding for the night, the click-clack of beaks, large and small. He imagines the soft, warm nestling of a downy burrow. He is on their side. He is on the side of good. When he is near to the place, he flashes his spotlight. He thinks he sees a green haze, like vapour, but he doesn’t dare hope. Not yet. Closer, and he presses the spotlight’s trigger again. Twin flashes of bright green. Eye shine. He flashes again. Yes. He’s sure. His blood is up, thumping away in his ears. The cold is gone now, his muscles shot through with electric force. He can smell the cat’s fishy stink, its breath and coat reeking of the oily seabirds on which it preys and the marine detritus on which it scavenges. He gets close enough to see all of it, its tabby fur sticking out like it’s a cartoon moggy shot through with five thousand volts. ‘You little beauty.’ It’s female, and lactating too, its undercarriage hanging down loose with little pink teats. Bonus. Somewhere a litter is already beginning to starve. ‘You little … fucking … beauty.’ The cat’s in a frenzy, flinging herself around the inside of the cage as if her weight could bust it open. Pete nudges the cage with the toe of a boot and she jolts away, clinging on to the mesh of the far top corner of the cage with desperate claws. Teeth bared, hissing, eyes saucers of luminous green in his torchlight.
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He points the muzzle of his .223 through the mesh. ‘Here kitty kitty kitty,’ he calls. He holds the rifle still and waits for her to move. He’ll just stand here and wait until she passes beneath the muzzle of the gun. He always aims to hit between the shoulders, to send the bullet directly into the body cavity. It makes them drop instantly, still and soft. It amazes him that he has the power to extinguish it, whatever it is that has this cat sprung so tight that it can cling upside down to the roof of the trap. In just a minute, he will be able to pick up its limp, warm carcass, touch if he wants to the benign white points of its teeth, the delicate translucent curls of its claws. ‘Here puss puss puss.’
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I
Island
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April, 1999 Bruny Island
runy Island follows Tasmania like a comma, a space for pause. The ferry chugs towards it, along the dotted line that is drawn on maps across the channel at one of its narrowest points, leaving behind the town of Kettering and its harbour cross-hatched with jetties and the masts of yachts. On the crossing, the locals stay in their cars. They sit and read newspapers rested against steering wheels, or talk to their neighbours through wound-down windows. But Essie steps out of Charlie’s ute and threads through the parked cars, brushing against their still-warm metal, making her way to the rail of the upper deck. Straight ahead, down the gullet of the two shores, she can see only as far as the place where the channel twists out of sight, leaving a deceptive horizon of opposing folds of land. But she still remembers what lies beyond: how the dividing stretch of water widens and narrows as it fits itself to the jigsaw puzzle shapes of headlands and inlets, how it thins out over the wide, pale sand of a bay
B
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belonging to the isthmus which holds the twin nuggets of the island in balance, how it diverges and converges around small satellite islands, forks off into a river and, finally, opens its mouth wide to the Great Southern Ocean. It’s this opening which is watched over, from high on a cape on the island side, by the lighthouse.
Leaving, returning, there is always a crossing; a stretch of time and distance between shores. Perhaps I am even invisible … she remembers thinking on the day that she left Tasmania behind. Bass Strait was calm between its bookend islands. From the deck of the tall white ship, she watched the sandy rim of the northern coast slip away, and felt herself become as featureless as the pale grey water all around. She was in the centre of a great circular horizon of sheeny grey, a circle sliding north over the curve of the hemisphere. And she was alone, nineteen years old, and tingling with the possibilities of her own blankness. The ferry touched land and in her small white car Essie drove west. The road took her into red dust and heat, into a parched emptiness both foreign and familiar, an Australia she knew only from images. Somewhere between a tumbledown corrugated-iron town and a rustcoloured roadhouse, she pulled over and got out to breathe it in. She had never felt heat like it. It was not only on one side of her face, or on her back. It was all over, beating down from the sky, radiating up from the earth to
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the undersides of her outstretched hands, filling every crevice of her skin. She looked around her and saw that there was nothing but the slick empty stretch of bitumen, rolling east-west like a conveyor belt, and the red earth, and some small desperate plants rattling their dried seed-pods in the hot wind. And then there was the single fly that found her, darting in to try to drink from the corners of her eyes, the corners of her mouth. She could have travelled by aeroplane, placed nothing more than a silver capsule of hours between her origin and her destination. But standing in the humming heat, she knew why she had driven. To feel every inch of the distance. In passing through those days of nothingness she had taken herself so much further away. It felt like escape, as if she was passing beyond consequence. She drove until there was no more land, until her car reached a high retainer wall, beyond which there was only sand and water. The sun eased down into the ocean and, in the dimness, she saw the shallow contour of Rottnest Island on the horizon. Her toes delved into the plush grass, the green of the city, a manicured meridian strip laid down between the expanses of desert and sea.
She was looking for a place that was unhaunted; a place without undertow. And she found it in a city too new, too clean for memory. In Perth, Western Australia, the houses,
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the river, the sky, all shone with the unnatural gleam of a fresh-minted coin in your change. Where she had come from, money expressed itself in the solid weight of sandstone blocks, of years stacked one on top of the other. In the west, it glittered. Perth city at night made her think of a jeweller’s window full of bright rhinestone strands. In Perth she found nothing of Hobart’s Gothic dark, no sandstone cracks breathing out old ghosts. This was a city of surfaces and reflections. As she walked its streets, she flickered over the glass and chrome panels that held her for no longer than the time it took to pass. This city was resistant. Passers-by bounced off its angles. Even if you pressed your body against it, waited for a bright flash of sun, there would be no image, the plate would remain blank. This was not a city for the enduring. This was a city for illusions, full of skyscrapers of make-believe money. Even after ten years, she still takes relief in the strange beauty of its denatured landscapes: the port’s orange-red cranes against the aqua sea, the brassy palms lining the foreshore of the river. She likes the way the eye skates over the hard, glinting surfaces, that there is no undertow.
This is the first time she has come home. She took the night flight, got a window seat without having asked, and was grateful. Even a pitch-dark porthole would provide escape from the person in the next seat. She hoped it would not be a grandmother with snapshots. Or a
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salesman with a fat handshake and a deck of business cards in his breast pocket. The air in the plane was full of low noises and static, the synthetic notes of a sentimental song barely covering the mechanical rumblings of engines and air conditioners. Her hair, electrified, clung to the nylon antimacassar. The tail end of a late-night queue plumped up with pillows and doonas squeezed down the aisle, but the seats beside her remained blissfully empty. It was not a holiday flight. When the plane took off into the night sky, Essie didn’t feel the way she usually did — like an arrow being shot out of a bow, into the unknown. She felt none of the exhilaration of flight, of speeding between two points while seeming not to move at all; of being suspended in the air for those hours of pure present tense, elevated above what has already gone and what is to come. She felt cold and heavy, as if a dense pool of mercury was collecting in the space beneath her heart. She arrived at the hospital after breakfast, shaky with tiredness. The corridors echoed with the chink of plates being stacked on trolleys by ladies in pink. In the Intensive Care Unit, Charlie’s life ran in a thin red line across a screen, punctuated by the small spikes of his pulse. His face was slackened under its plastic mask, almost ugly without the grin that usually animated it. He was covered in a gown as thin as paper and she tried not to notice all the things that his body, so helpless, could usually keep to itself. She
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held one hand, so clean it looked dead, touched the freckled skin on his forehead more tenderly than she ever would if he were conscious. Her grandmother told her that he had laughed at his heart surgeon. Come ’round this side of the desk and tell me they’re good odds, he had said, chortling. Fifty-fifty was the best they would give him. Her grandmother massaged his cold, yellowed feet, driving her knuckles into pressure points in an effort to wake him. A brisk, red-haired nurse checked her fob watch. ‘Shouldn’t be long now.’ The nurse smiled with her mouth, but not with her eyes. Essie knew he should have been awake over an hour ago. ‘Come on Charlie,’ she whispers to him. ‘Sun’ll burn your eyes out.’ As it turned out, the bypass surgery was considered a success. The surgeons were pleased. Four strands of vein harvested from his thighs, stitched neatly into his heart without a glitch. Except that Charlie Westwood never woke up again. The heart that failed him all his life had ended it with a beat too strong. A CAT scan showed the blood vessels in his brain, frail tubes as thin as discarded snakeskins. The first great red throb through his new plumbing had exploded inside his skull, flooding his brain with blood. They unhitched him from the respirator. His brain gone, it took his stubborn old body three more days to follow.
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To her right there is the lacy white train of the ferry’s wake spreading out over the surface of the water. To her left is Bruny, reaching out with a green finger into the teal-blue water of the channel. This is how she wants it to feel when she arrives: as if that green finger of land is curling like a fiddlehead of bracken, closing around her, enclosing her. She wants it to feel as if the island has slipped its moorings and begun to drift out into the ocean. She wants to step onto it and have it take her away, over the blue curve of the world.
The dawn of the day of the funeral was so soft and still that Essie could hardly bear to disturb it. She rowed gently, regretting the small whirlpools that flew off the ends of the oars, the wake spreading in diagonal impulses from the stern of the dinghy. At least, she thought, water mended quickly when cut through. Not so quickly as air, but much quicker than snow, or skin, or stone. When she reached the yacht, she pulled in the starboard oar and drifted, careful not to bump the prow of the dinghy against the hull of Kittywitch, swinging in a gentle arc on her mooring. On the deck, in the stillness of Bellerive Quay, she felt as if she could pull the soft, pearly greyness of the early morning around herself, make a small cocoon of comfort for as long as everything — the
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dense, diamond-pleated expanse of cloud, the colourless undulations of the water — would hold still. But there was to be no period of grace. A fisherman ruptured the surface of the water with a bucket of scraps — the swollen, slithery ropes of stomach, the bright cushions of heart and liver, heads and tails joined by segmented lengths of bare spine — and seagulls materialised, their beaks forked in the shape of a shriek. A gust of wind came through into the quay followed by the hollow, arhythmic peals of halyards against aluminium masts. Kittywitch’s decks were scrubbed clean, her mainsail furled around the boom and laced into its canvas cover, her tiller tied down with a white sailcloth hood over its Turk’s head handle. Shrouded. She looked, Essie thought, shrouded. She would think that, on this day. Later in the morning there would be the veneered doors of the crematorium sliding discreetly closed, there would be the muted clutches of arms, shoulders, hands, there would be platitudes, mouthed right in her face — circled by the cerise lips of the women, fortified by elastic pillars of spittle between the lips of the men. Then there would be sandwiches with the crusts cut off, casseroles with worms of salty beef, then the tightness in the throat, the headache at the end of it all. Essie turned a key in a salt-whitened padlock. She slid out the plywood cover to the hatchway below. Nothing had changed. There were still tin kettles on the gas hobs, gimballed for rolling seas, the small round basin and pantry
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cupboards with false floors, shapes cut out for the tea pot, the cups, the sugar, salt and pepper. There was the musty carpet mat covering the engine well, the saloon table with its drop-leaf wings. In the space between the tiny gas heater and the radio her grandfather once placed a small, brass plaque. As a child, Essie read into its engraved type a serious meaning, but one she had been too young to divine: THIS VESSEL IS OPERATED FROM THE CAPTAIN’S SEAT ONLY. ANYONE NOT LIKING THE MANNER IN WHICH IT IS RUN WILL KINDLY NOTE THE MISTLETOE ATTACHED TO THE SKIPPER’S COAT-TAIL.
In the galley, she struck a match and held it to the hob. Prongs of blue flame clutched at the base of the kettle. She frowned at the cheap, no-label tea Charlie kept aboard, spooned it into a battered tin tea pot with a bakelite handle. There was a bag of small plastic cups of UHT milk, sealed in with foil lids. Charlie had been given to swiping handfuls of these from baskets on tables at functions, pocketing them in his big overcoat. It wasn’t that he was mean. Meanness and small-mindedness he hated. It was just that there was a part of him which was still nine years old, dirt poor and hungry, climbing fences to pinch great red globes of apples, the forbidden fruit from rich people’s trees. She smelled the briny scent of the sail locker, where she used to sleep on the starboard bunk underneath the strong, exposed ribs of the decking.
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Mr Nelson was the company’s principal low comedian, that’s what they called him … It was a favourite story of Charlie’s, saved for chilly nights aboard Kittywitch that were warmed by the flames of the cooker and the square panel of the gas heater on the wall. … on this day he set out to sail the length of a river in a common washing tub, propelled by six real geese, a fiddle stuck under his chin … Fragments of it came back to her, mixed with the remembered smell of burning gas and the faint aftertaste of flathead. She felt her way around the empty space in the shape of him, touched the indentation in the red vinyl of the skipper’s bunk. During the funeral she stayed close to her grandmother, holding her arm to steady her against the tide of emotions at the crematorium, taking the brunt of the platitudes — time heals all wounds Molly, he had a good innings, he wouldn’t have wanted to be an invalid. Later, Essie held the trays of tiered sandwiches and heated up the salty beef casseroles. She watched her grandmother move through the crowd in her neat mulberry suit, the convenient curtain of her silver bob falling over one side of her face. She loved her gentle grandmother, but it was different from the love she had for Charlie. Her Grandma’s love was smooth as cream, it was a tide that flowed out over
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everyone evenly. Friends, relatives, the babies in their mothers’ arms in supermarket queues, stray cats and dogs. But Charlie was a hard bastard as far as the world was concerned, and the softness he held in store for his granddaughter was one of the only things Essie possessed all for herself. In return, Essie had loved him fiercely, and sometimes she had hated him nearly as much. Even when she grew up, he always held her too tight. The struggle to get loose hurt them both. But he had still been there, her only fixed point, something which had no right to change.
The ferry’s ramp tilts and clatters as the Friday afternoon traffic files onto the island. The cab of Charlie’s yellow ute smells of the mouldering bluey jacket wedged behind the passenger seat, of the oily rags dripping out of the glove compartment, of him. On this side of the channel, the light is different. Late afternoon sun touches on a single face of the few homesteads alongside the road, making them blush. It brushes an antique copper wash over the eucalypts and the pastures spotted with black and white cows. The road narrows to pass through the thin length of the isthmus called the Neck. At the back of Essie’s throat is the chalky taste of pinkish dust thrown up by the cars ahead. She stops in a place where the dunes are low and the sandy earth is still marked by tyres, the tussocks
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flattened in places. Surfers stop here, she knows, to look for waves. She gets out of the ute and crosses the dunes down onto beach, her blue clogs breaking through a thin sandy crust marked by the small fans of webbed feet. She sits above the high-water mark, picking up pancakes of crusted sand and feeling them disintegrate between her fingers. The pale sweep of Neck Beach stretches away, a long walk in either direction, but only one part of the greater curve of Adventure Bay. She pictures how the whole bay looks on a map, like the female part of a jigsaw puzzle piece; the two capes — Fluted and Queen Elizabeth — forming the extrusions that would lock the matching piece in place. A receptacle it had turned out to be, for Dutchmen, for Frenchmen, for Englishmen like Captain Cook, like Captain Bligh and his apple seeds. High above the water she sees the streaking comet of a yellow-white bird. Divedownfishydin-din bird. It is a word unthought-of for years. It reminds her of sitting on the cold sand of a beach on this island, safe between the brown bends of her father’s knees, watching with him the blue crests of waves falling into tumblings of white foam. Look, her father would say, pointing at a tern plummeting into the water beyond the breakers, divedownfishydin-din bird. It was a word from their own language, a private lexicon they spoke in their family, just the three of them. And now she remembers ruffletrace, for the flounder which left the faintest sandy outline of itself on the sea floor; and voompah, for a wave which joined with the
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backwash of another to explode on the rocks, flinging greenish froth high into the air. And she remembers now that for dead they said fleetwing. That was a word she had made herself, from the sound she imagined the soul would make leaving the body on soft beating wings. Fleetwing divedownfishydin-din bird, they would say when they found a limp, eyeless cormorant in a tangle of catgut netting on the sand. These words were lost in her years of silence. When words came back to her, dribbling down the dry creekbed of her throat, these were no longer among the ones she owned.
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he moon-faced man on the television has been reading the evening news for as long as Pete can remember. His voice, as even and sedative as the mid-blue studio backdrop behind him, flows around the edges of reports about house fires, parliamentary rorts, industry closures and thefts. It’s a voice so pacifying that Pete doesn’t register the intro to the story at first. The Bruny Island ranger’s face is filling the screen before he realises what it’s about. Rachel Dobson her name is; a thickset young woman with dense butterscotch-coloured hair that grows just a bit too low on her forehead, making her look slightly simian. She’s someone he knows well enough to greet with a finger lifted off the wheel when their cars pass on the island’s narrow roads. The lads at the bar catch sight of her on the television that is wedged into a shelf high in the corner of the room and a few beery cheers go up for the local girl. ‘Well, it’s a bit disappointing.’ She’s nervous, her eyes flinching away from the camera. A bit disappointing. Pete likes that, smiles over
T
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the top of his beer. So bloody Australian. The Yanks would say it was shocking, the Poms would say it was a disgrace. But Rach says it’s a bit disappointing, meaning no one particularly gives a fuck. Now here’s the television reporter with her shiny blonde bob and cat’s eyes, pretending that she does. She’s standing on the timber platform up at the Neck, gesturing to the bare sandstone plinth. There’s a close-up of the scars left on the soft stone by a crowbar. ‘Yet there are those among the state’s Aboriginal community who say the theft of the bronze plaque should come as no surprise.’ Her voice clambers up and down the crests and valleys of her news reporter’s inflections. The picture changes to the face of a man with café latte skin and a fierce look in his incongruous green eyes. ‘Someone’s just had enough, gotten jacked off with this attitude that we’re all dead and gone. They walk no more upon this isle, stop and meditate awhile. That’s what the plaque said. Well, do I look like I’m not here to you? Do I?’ The report ends with this Do I? that echoes for a minute in the bar before the drinkers start up with their underbreath muttering, re-forming themselves into huddles, none of which include Pete. He wonders why he comes here to the Alonnah pub on a Friday night. It must be his small genuflection towards the working week. It can’t be just to sit here and drink alone.
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‘Wish I had a lick of the fucken tar brush, I tell you. Never have to do another day’s work in me fucken life!’ It’s a young fisherman with windblown cheeks and a scrappy, reddish beard. The older men around him laugh. Pleased with himself, he sticks a cigarette in his smuglooking mouth. Pete reminds himself that this is why he comes here, to listen to wankers like this one. It’s like taking a social pulse. Live in your own head with your own logic for too long, he’s discovered, and it starts to become implausible that they even exist. He likes to remind himself that they’re out there. Pete watches the young bloke suck on his cigarette until his cheeks are convex. The old salt next to him is a smoker too, and his mouth caves inwards in colourless pleats of flesh. He’s glad he’s given up. Caroline said that people who smoked did it because they hated themselves. After she said that, Pete started to look around, and after a while he saw that it was true. Even as they drew in, the muscles of their faces tightened in a kind of flinch against the smoke. He started to feel it when he smoked himself, seeing pictures of cloudy poisons drifting around inside his lungs, encircling his heart, wafting in thin streams into his blood. Then he almost enjoyed giving up. He watched his resolve steel and grow, got a kick out of the dictatorial power of self-mastery. Now it’s something about himself that he knows to be true, that there’s no going back on promises to himself, that he always does what he says he will do.
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‘Reckon I could get away with it? All I’d have to do is tell some fucken minister my mother’s mother’s mother was a boong and they’d give me all the cash I fucken wanted!’ The men laugh again, but half-heartedly. They’re tiring of him on centre stage now. Pete drains his beer and nods neutrally to the barman, who fills his glass again and replaces his five dollar note with a small stack of coins. ‘Can I’ve a million bucks, Sir? Sure, son, just don’t top yourself next time you’re in the nick!’ Pete recognises it as another test of will; to listen to this sort of shit without raising so much as an eyebrow, let alone a fist. Once he would have laid the prancing little fucker out. Now, he just breathes in and out, and lines up his coins on the bar, from the biggest to the smallest, like a family of ducks.
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t’s low tide on the wide, shallow bay on the channel side of the neck, and in the falling light wading birds move like puppets against the glistening wet sand. Essie drives south, past the turn-off to the township of Adventure Bay, around a curve towards Alonnah, with its clot of dated buildings that form the administrative centre of the island. The gas strut on the glass door of the pub wheezes and gives in; the door swings closed and seals her inside. The carpet is red and musty, and the air is dense with cigarette smoke and the soporific heat of the open fire. There’s a huddle of men drinking at the bar, looking up at a television screen, intent on the blue hieroglyphs of a weather map. There is a moment of hush, and the flicker of curious glances from all but one man, who is drinking alone. His attention is focussed between his hands where he is balancing a coin on its rim on the dark timber bar. ‘What’ll it be, love?’ The barman has a deep voice and a pillowy gut. ‘Shandy thanks.’
I
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Half and half, beer and lemonade, because she only half-wants a drink. Without looking directly, she watches the men, the corners of their eyes creasing as they draw on cigarettes, their heads nodding in agreement, fair weather coming for the weekend, cold but clear. Although it was Essie’s father who loved the island most, it was on her mother’s side, through Charlie, that the generations snaked back to the lighthouse tower. Some of the men here have the Westwood jaw, their faces shortened into squares by right-angled bones. Some of these men are distant cousins, one or two sharing with her a particular paleness to their blue eyes, but she doesn’t know any of them by name. One who must be a Westwood is a young man with shallow water-blue eyes and a blue smudge of pool-cue chalk on his cheek. Although his hair is a salted sandy colour, the fine curling wisps of his beard are a fierce orange. She sees the way that he is not yet part of the easy circle of the older men, the way he quivers with attentiveness, like a nervous dog, looking for the gaps in the conversation that give him an opportunity to be noticed. The barman gives her the diluted amber froth in an eight-ounce glass, girl-sized, much smaller than the ones he pours for the men. She takes her drink into the lounge bar, wondering if it is still there. And it is. Hanging above the bar, next to a picture of the lighthouse itself, is a photograph of the seventh keeper of the Cape Bruny
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Light. His name is written in squared capitals beneath his sepia image. CAPTAIN WILLIAM WESTWOOD. His mouth is a shadow where his white frizzled beard meets with his moustache. His skipper’s hat has a shining badge and a trim of braid on the peak that shadow his pale, horizontuned eyes. She thinks of the spider’s web strands of lives that have struck out across divides — knitted together, frayed and tangled — and of the fact that somehow, through whatever convolutions, she and the young man with the red beard are linked. The shandy is nasty with sweetness. She leaves it mostly full on the bar behind her.
Coming around the last bend in the road, there is the blue sea and the tawny scrub and the sheer faces of the cliffs that separate them. But the thing that snags Essie’s attention is the scar of a white gravel road. It leads her gaze up and around a hillside to the base of a matching white tower. At the cape, it is only the man-made things that are at right angles: the white column of the lighthouse on top of the hill, the set-square houses at the bottom, the new automated beacon in its square white pillar on the cliff edge. The cliffs, formed of densely packed pillars of dolerite, slope into the ocean where, just out to sea, shards of them rise up again like ruined castles, turrets and columns broken and leaning. Not even the plants can grow straight here. Underneath the scrubby pelt that covers the
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cape is a tangle of woody limbs, blown prostrate by the prevailing sou-westerlies. The place that is to be hers is the white place, Lightkeepers’ Quarters II. It pulls its large corrugated-iron roof down low over four fibro walls, keeping out the panorama of ocean and sky. Its wide, enclosed verandah faces the carpark, not the view. Essie moves through corridors, exploring rooms full of bare wooden bunks. The house feels cautious, like a place where too many people have lived for a short time. It feels like a place where people have been lonely, where there has been little love. She forces open doors, sending daddylong-legs scarpering across walls and ceilings on their articulated stilts. The only window that looks out over the ocean is in the laundry, and then only if she peers over the tin roof of a shed in the back yard. Whoever built this house presumed that the people who were to live in it would rather not be here. With this in mind, they had built a house in hiding, an entire house without a view. The largest room in the house is both kitchen and living room. All its furniture looks to Essie as if it has been retired, hurt, from somewhere else. There is a linoleum-topped table surrounded by orange plastic chairs that someone has tried to make more comfortable with a hodge-podge of flattened and faded floral cushions. There are two orphaned portions of a Berber modular lounge and a gas heater, its metal bars bound up
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with woolly threads of cobweb and dust. There are two posters on the mustard-coloured walls. One shows a penguin strangled in a ring of plastic, the other a perfect boot-print in the middle of a hooded plover’s nest on the sand, with juvenile feathers, beak and shell mixed together in the tread. Out the back a Hills hoist planted in a cracked concrete slab is repatriating itself to the wild, its trunk leaning over, its wires snapped and curling away from the spars. A timber fence rather pointlessly sections off a square of grass not noticeably different from the rest of the paddock carved out of the sloping scrub above the beach. She slips through a space made by two missing palings and finds that if she stands just so, she can keep the sad white house and all its accoutrements of fence and shed and washing line behind her, out of view. And if she angles herself right, she can keep the empty red brick place next door, Lightkeepers’ Quarters I, out of her peripheral vision too. The whole human mess is at her back, invisible, only the sloping hill and the sea in front of her, a solemn conference of animal-shaped capes and headlands away to the east. She watches the ocean, the Great Southern Ocean. There are more than a thousand unbroken kilometres of it between herself and the Antarctic ice shelf. The bright blue water that fills up the windows of her apartment in Perth, they call the Indian Ocean. But Essie thinks it’s odd to
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name oceans. Since water finds its own level, there must be only one, a single enormous ocean cupping the jutting continents and filling up the bays and bights of the globe; one and the same body of water lapping, aqua-clear and warm, on equatorial beaches, and beating against the coasts of the hemispheres’ extremes. A huge watery animal, feeding itself on the dense salty cold of the poles, regulating itself through currents like blood vessels. She watches the ocean breathe, out and in. Out and in. Exhaling its breath in a film over the sand of Lighthouse Beach, swelling into a rounded shape as its sucks each wave back into the fold. On the other side of the channel is a row of peaks and the sun sinking behind them. At the moment that the crescent sun disappears, she looks to the lighthouse on the top of the hill. Sailcloth blinds are drawn inside its cylindrical glass eye. But out on the cliff ’s edge, inside the new automated beacon, an invisible switch is flicked. A globe fills quickly with light and begins its nightly patrol of the cape.
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e catches half of the story on the Radio National bulletin as he drives home on the south-bound road. A plaque commemorating Truganini and the Aboriginal people of Tasmania has been stolen from a monument on Bruny Island. The Minister has described the theft as a shocking act of vandalism … The radio begins to crackle as he turns into Blythe Road, deteriorating into a blur of static as he swerves around the stand of trees in the middle of the road just before his driveway. He likes this about his house, that it is out of range, just out of touch. He turns the radio off and smirks to himself. A shocking act of vandalism. It had taken more than a month for anyone even to notice it was gone.
H
His dog is straining at the end of her chain, half yipping, half choking in the near-dark. He releases the clip from her collar and she leaps up to land a dripping tongue on his face. ‘Get down, you demented fleabag.’ She is still leaping on him when he reaches the porch. He scrapes his feet on the WELCOME mat, its fibres
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already beaded with dried mud, and growls at her again, in earnest this time, and she adopts the grovelling attitude of abject sorrow that makes him immediately regret it. Inside, he’s met by the emptiness of it. The inadequacy of it. That’s how he feels when he’s honest, when he’s not trying to count up the good things about living alone again. He bought the A-frame house in the scrub cheap, since it was run-down, but it didn’t look to him as if it had ever been well built. Probably the timbers had been too green. The planking had shrunk and warped, opening up spaces through which the outside chill enters in small, vicious puffs. It doesn’t have much in the way of interior walls, being what they call open plan. He’d liked that when he first found it, but later he realised that there was no closing himself off from the emptiness of it. There was no getting away from the fact that he had to fill the space — the big open room below and the draughty mezzanine bedroom above — with just himself, and an ill-bred kelpie he didn’t even want. When he first bought the place he’d set a few things out on shelves, on the mantelpiece, in a pathetic attempt at homemaking. They’re all masculine things, relics, sharing a certain quality of batteredness. A very old tobacco tin — empty now and pitted with dents — his ancient flare gun with its enormous round muzzle, a globe of the moon that he found at a flea-market stall, x-marks for the spots where various spacecraft had ploughed into its surface. He looks
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at this display of objects, but all he sees is the unfilled spaces between them. He feels faintly depressed by the mismatched rugs that are rumpled and dirty and only partly hide the concrete floor, by the fur-covered army blanket that serves as Scully’s bed, and by the ugly family of couch and chairs that cordon off a kind of living room. This is just the way things are, he tells himself. In his mind he slams a door on all his pointless thoughts about aloneness and loss. He imagines it as a metal door, thick, with solid square panels. Scully snouts around her bowl. There’s nothing in it but a crusted rim of Pal specks. Pete knows he really ought to wash it out. She threads herself between his legs, looking imploringly up at him, and for a minute he wants to kick her, give her a really good boot in the ribs. He hates the guilt she ekes out of him with the hapless, helpless look of her and the blind unconditional love she lays at his feet. ‘Promised myself I’d never have another woman in my life and here you are,’ he accuses her. She tilts her head to the side in an effort to understand him. He took Scully on in a moment of stupidity. A young cousin of his picked her up from a sheep farmer for nothing. Probably because she was inbred and ugly as sin. This cousin of his taught her nothing useful, and left her at home to yap and dig and tear clothes from the line. For which he’d flogged her, hard enough to accentuate her kelpie’s tendency to cower.
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‘She’s got to go, she’s as thick as,’ the cousin had told Pete. Discarded himself, Pete felt something for the cringing scrap of red fur. He brought her home to the island in the back of his ute. And she’d yapped and dug and torn clothes off the line. And he’d come close, more than once, to putting a bullet in her. But she’d always looked back at him, uncomprehending, with that daft innocent look of hers and he’d had to drop his rifle, ashamed. Now the dog sits with ears pricked, trying to be appealing enough to be fed. She only looks as gormless as ever with her too-close eyes and undershot jaw. ‘You’re an ugly mutt, honestly.’ He spoons out some intestinal-smelling Pal into the still-crusted bowl. For himself, he pulls a saucepan out of the fridge, peels off the clingwrap and puts his nose to it. ‘Might as well eat your slop, eh fleabag?’ He twists the top off a beer, drinking and stirring while the days-old bolognaise sauce heats through on the hotplate. He can’t be bothered doing the spaghetti to match, so he gets two cardboard squares of frozen bread out of the freezer and sticks them under the grill. In a precarious pile in the middle of his table is a tattered orange envelope full of photographs that he knows he ought to get around to framing. He got as far as getting them enlarged, but a year later they’re still lying here gathering dust. He pulls them out of the envelope and flicks through them while he eats. None of them are
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of people. They’re all of places, extreme places, desert or ice. Most of them are of Macquarie Island: slate blue and deep green divided by grey slabs of volcanic sand. In one photo are the great blubbering jellies of sleeping elephant seals, in another a rearing bull fur seal, its chocolatebrown pelt clotted with fighting blood at its throat. On the fringe of a beach is something rusting, robotic, leaning over as if sinking into the sand. One of the digesters. In the early days, when the sealers ran out of seals, they moved on to penguins. Just herded them up and loaded them into these metal tanks and boiled them down to oil. Such trusting birds, it would have been so bloody easy to do. Pete had often sat down quietly and let the penguins gather around him, keeping still while they stuck their necks right out to have a good gander at him. We’ve changed, as a race, one of the young biologists on the island claimed. We wouldn’t be able do that sort of stuff nowadays. Pete knew that wasn’t true. He could have said, but chose not to, it was only that most people had never been desperate enough to find out how cruel they really were. And, besides, cruelty took many forms. These days, the oceans were littered with fishing boats that ripped the shit out of the fishery and starved the seals. It was just another way of doing the same thing. His best souvenirs from the island are above the fireplace. Two tanned cat skins, nailed taut on the splintering wall. There is a large tabby, its coat thick and glossy, the timber showing through the small, uneven slits where its
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eyes would have been. The ears are still perked up, the lay of delicate tawny fur undisturbed on their insides. The other pelt is smaller, ginger. One of its ears is torn, and the furless skin has puckered up like a sphincter. The orangey hair that once covered the spinal ridge is so sparse and brittle that it might almost have been burned. Mostly they chucked the cats in the sea, or left them lying around for the skuas to pick on. But these two he brought back to the station slung over his pack. Skinning them was just something to do on his days off, he told anyone who asked why. But it also cemented his reputation as one of the best. He knew that some of the others thought he was a sick bastard, but they also knew he was bloody serious about killing cats. A knife-blade of earth jutting out of the Great Southern Ocean, Macquarie Island had left a small, cold piece of itself lodged in his flesh. He thinks about it often. Distanced from it now, it has become as surreal as the moon, a place he can hardly believe he’s been. He remembers how it was when he first got there, the flock of king penguins in the water off the stern of the great orange ship, their heads like so many umbrella handles in the freezing chop. How quickly he got used to stepping over elephant seal weaners in late spring, even on the main ‘street’ of the station. The Jurassic-looking plants, megaherbs with their huge cabbagey leaves; the southern giant petrels that danced spectacular duets in the sky. The nights
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of walking, over ridges, along beaches where the wind sand-blasted the skin on his face, across the coastal plain they called the featherbed, feeling it undulate under his weight, nearly losing his boots in peat bog up to his thighs. Then there was the life in the mess, the cross-dressing parties at mid-winter, the cat tally on the whiteboard, the blokes who handled it, the ones who got lost in the wilderness of it all. It was coming back to the city that did him in. Forgetting to look both ways before crossing a street he nearly got barrelled over more than once. Completely failing to see red lights when he was driving. Walking into Coles and getting an armload of stuff and just walking out with it, through an empty checkout lane, as if he was just picking some gear up from the storeroom. A smug security bastard had apprehended him in the street outside. Pete had held up some tins of baked beans and asked, You think I’d risk getting nicked over these mate? The last two years he’d applied to go back down south again, but the Department knocked him back both times. They chose to see the shoplifting thing as evidence of ‘failure to readjust’. Maybe this season, they’d told him. Late September. This year could be the year when they shoot the last one. He’s heard it’s getting on for two months between animals now. He’d give anything to be there for the last season, to put the bullet in the last cat. He’s got his application in, but he doesn’t know whether he should waste his time hoping. • • •
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It was a man’s world down south. There were some women who stayed for the winter, but not many. But then, that wasn’t hard for Pete; for most of his life, women had been luxuries anyway. For special occasions. There was his mother, of course, but after his father had left there had been other men, quite a few of them. When the men were around, her affections were tied up in the way they always are at the beginning of things and his mother’s relationships rarely got much further than beginnings. Sometimes, if he was alone with his mum, he would get as close to her as he could without touching. Maybe sit on the floor, leaning against the base of her chair. Although if she actually touched him, if she ruffled his hair or squeezed an arm around his shoulders, he’d flinch away. The proximity was all he was after. The scent of touch. In his early twenties, Pete went bush. He took himself away from Tasmania, into all the hot, dry creases of the big island to the north. He worked jobs that chewed on him hard for four, five weeks straight and then spat him out, pockets full of cash, into the closest town. These towns were places built for men on leave. They had big, shady, two-storey corner pubs that took shifts with their liquor licences so that you could get a drink any time of the night or day from a barmaid in a G-string and a bra. Just to see women in the streets was a shock after the man’s world of the work camp. He liked the sight of people’s wives, with their neat, ironed shirts and blow
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dried hair, towing their toddlers, shopping on the main street. It made life seem normal for a minute. In the work camps, you could go one of two ways. Get an interest, or get on the piss. Pete got fit. In the hours before and after work, he ran over the hot, cracking earth. He ran so hard he could feel the red stringy strands of his muscles stretching to breaking point over the bones of his legs. When he came to town, he liked to take a girl out to dinner. But it was easier said than done. The girls he asked looked him up and down as if he were a pervert, told him they knew what he was after. After a while it made him shy of women, and angry. Conceited little bitches. All he wanted was to have dinner, and talk to someone who was not a bloke. Someone for whom he’d be able to clean up his language and polish his thoughts. What he wanted was a rest from the all-knowing oneupmanship of the company of men. Down south on Macquarie, he was one of the blokes who coped. He coped because he knew how to keep himself even. He knew how to be the same person every morning he walked into the mess, spearing crisp scraps of bacon and fat frisbees of poached eggs onto his plate. He was the same person when he got back to the station after a twelve-day slog around the island. The same person whether he had a cat slung over his pack or not. A modest yeah, picked one up, if he had. A matter-of-fact nah, no luck mate, if he hadn’t. The same person when he’d had a few
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beers even. He was the same person when he came out of the little beige room adjacent to the mess, the one with the telephone, out of which other blokes came elated or brokenhearted or homesick as hell. He was only slightly different when he was alone, out there in that trackless landscape, on top of a ridge-line with the wind blowing its guts out. That was the thing about the island. It felt like the wind could just blow you off it, or the sea could just send in a long blue hand and pluck you off the face of it. There was nothing in the earth that could hold you fast. And that was what he really loved about the place. No history. There were some sealers there for a while, and a few ships that got blown up onto its shores by accident. But for the rest of time it had been a place for birds and seals. No treading in the footsteps of ancestors, no imagining what’s happened to some poor bastard on that square of earth. It just stretched back trackless, empty except for the birds and the seals.
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n her first night at Lightkeepers’ Quarters II, Essie claims the space by making tea. The tap water is rainwater, pleasingly chilly. While the kettle boils she does battle with the retractable blind at the kitchen window which retracts not at all. When she rolls it up and wedges it between its railing and the wall, she finds that the window gives a view of nothing but the dirty corrugations of the water tank. A raven launches itself from the top of the tank, the tip of its midnight-blue beak hammering the glass, then sliding sideways over its surface, a small black eyeball flattening against the pane. The haphazard collection of mugs in the cupboard are ribbed inside with tarry rings of coffee residue that look as if they would never come off. But she has brought her own tea pot and cup, all the way from Perth, wrapped in tea towels inside her pack. The tea pot is china blue, painted with cottonwool puffs of cloud. The matching cup is the shape of a single hemisphere, the milky white of its inside marked with a delicate mosaic of shatterlines. She found the pair in a second-hand shop, and liked
O
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the way the wide cup fitted into the curve of her palms. The gathering clouds on the blue backdrop made her think of a storm in a tea cup. She turns the tea pot three times clockwise and three times widdershins on the linoleum bench. She pours her storm in a tea cup, watching the steam rise in small twists from its surface. She thinks of the weeks, twelve of them, that stretch out in front of her like a blank page. There was something to be said for tight budgets and leave without pay.
Each day in her life in the west, she would drive north through the endless, franchised suburbs to the Institute of Oceanography where she worked, researching a small piece of an infinite puzzle. Essie chose science because it seemed to offer certainty. She liked its laboratory tidiness, the appearance of objective proof and repeatable outcomes. Its clean white lines of logic looked like something that she could follow, that would keep her focussed, eyes straight ahead, never looking back. Even the gracious sandstone campus of Essie’s university had managed to shed any sense of accumulated years, appearing for all its age as if it were built yesterday. Since the cutbacks, only Greg, Iain and she remained. The three of them rattled around in wide corridors of grey lino squares. Their year was transected by twelve neatly spaced points, their monthly voyages out to the continental
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shelf. On the day of each voyage they would meet on the wharf at Hillary’s Boat Harbour in the light chill of dawn. Essie and Iain would load the small charter boat with collection bottles and lengths of hose. Together they would lift the heavy blue box of electronic equipment out of the back of the ute and into the vessel. It always gave Essie a faintly pleasurable sense of predictability, all the unrolling and connecting of cables that she would disconnect and roll again at the end of the day. Greg would always arrive late, balancing three lidded polystyrene cups of hot chocolate in one hand, carrying a white stack of buckets in the other. Iain would use his hot chocolate to wash down the Kwells that would not stop him from throwing up his breakfast. Later in the day, Essie would make circles on the back of his jumper with the flat of her hand while he leaned over the side and cursed his choice of career between spits. On these voyages they traced the Leeuwin Current, tracking it by temperature and salinity. Leeuwin: lioness. A contrary current. She should have been a cold upwelling flowing north, like the west coast currents of Africa and South America. Instead, she was a jet stream of warm water travelling south. Beneath was the Leeuwin Undercurrent, the counter-current, cold, driving north. Essie liked to think of the two layers, geomorphic, their surfaces mingling down there in the colourless deep. One of Essie’s tasks was to extract life from water, lowering a weighted hose into the water column and
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pumping the brine through a filter. She tweezed out from the filter small discs of paper saturated with invisible living things and folded them into collection jars. Later she used them to calculate the fluorescence of the water, the amount of small life. Back at the Institute they pored over pictures, paisleys of blue and green drawn by satellites. The pictures showed the current’s Mandelbrot-set meanders, which sometimes pinched off into eddies, small warm circles drifting out into the open ocean to the west, gradually fading into nothing. Against these pictures, the oceanographers tested their data, matching their numbers for warmth, salinity and fluorescence against the shades of blue and green and aqua. In the evenings of her bright white life in the west, Essie swam. In the pool she would thread her body along the inch-thick line of white tiles on the blue mosaic floor, scissoring her long legs through the chemical blue, feeling the muscles of her legs work against the resistance of the water and the mechanical tilt of her torso that came with each breath. In the sea, she would swim perpendicular to the swell lines that roll in from the ocean. When she closed her eyes, there was only the sensation of rising and falling, of waves rippling the length of her body, the alternating touch of water and air on her arms. Sometimes she would allow herself to float and to feel the depth, the enormous weight of the water beneath her.
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She would imagine the planet, hanging in space, herself lying slightly curved on the blue line that is the very outside of it. She could be vertical, the water behind her, facing straight out into space. Always then, the planet would begin to tip, tilting over until she was the pole, the pinpoint at the very bottom of the earth, holding on with her back, face turned downwards. It felt as if, at any moment, gravity could simply let go, and she would drown in the deluge, in the weight of all the water behind her pouring off the face of the Earth. For a while, but not for over a year now, she shared her bright white apartment on the coast with David. David was a geologist. He had dark gold hair and olive skin and a voice like Berber carpet, and after their first night together, her skin felt lightly grazed. On their last night together, she sat on the window sill and watched while he erased himself from her life, folding shirts, sorting books, coiling into neat bundles the black tangling cords of all his appliances, all the things that had made noise in her quiet life. She felt so detached that the sill might have been a canoe, drifting out into the dark evening sea. Essie’s apartment had bright white walls and one of everything. One bedroom, one bathroom, one kitchen, one living room, one large window filled with the ocean’s blue. On this coast, walls had been built to keep sand and people in their places. In the well between her fifth-storey
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flat and the sea wall was a sunny strip of paving and a passing parade of rollerbladers and cyclists, young fathers in running shoes pushing three-wheeler racing prams with one hand, and smiling golden retrievers with yellow plastic bags for picking up their shit tied like bows on their collars. In part, her tendency to own very little was inherited from her father, with his ascetic’s suspicion of ownership. But she had her own reasons for taking into her life nothing more than she could manage. It was enough of a struggle to keep herself whole, without the dispersing effect of clutter. It seemed to her as if each unnecessary possession had the power to claim a part of her, however small. She wondered how people lived in houses full of clutter. Perhaps, she thought, they had more to give than herself, and could afford to spread themselves out over the surfaces of bookshelves and mantelpieces and delicate nests of tables. Those few things she did own, she liked to match. All her clothes were either pale blue, or cream. She owned two pairs of shoes: walking boots and soft-blue suede clogs with sensible high arches. Her scrubbed-pine bookshelf held unsentimental books about oceanography, ecology and natural history. She liked a simple thread running through everything; her reading material and her appearance, the orderliness of her surroundings and the clear, prepared state of her mind. Simplicity. Consistency. These were her conscious ways of being in the world.
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• • • But for all her ruthless insistence on present tense in her bright white life in the west, Essie had not severed every connection to the past. She had retained one thing and made it into the single image that she kept on the walls of her apartment, framed simply in a sandwich of glass planes. Originally, it had been a postcard, and enlarging it to poster-size had left it distinctly pixelated. If Essie stood too close to it, she could reduce it to a dot-map of sepiabrowns. But when she stood back from it, she saw a girl sitting on the edge of a beached dinghy. The girl’s feet in high lace-up boots were splayed out to the sides, heels flat against the clinkered timbers of the small boat, which had a thick hairy coil of rope at its gunwales. A rivulet flowed from the right-hand side of the frame, carving through sand, disappearing behind the dinghy. On the other side was the neat peak of a wave preparing to break. The girl wore a white shirt with a square sailor’s collar and a long, dark skirt with a high waist.The collar was flying up in the breeze, as were some escaped tendrils of her long, whitish hair. The sky behind her was cloudy, but a shaft of sunlight fell in a slant across her hair, across the midsection of the boat. She had a skipper’s hat perched on her head. The hat was too big and she held it on with one hand. It pleased her when visitors mistook the picture — of Charlie’s aunt, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter — for a photograph of herself.
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Charlie had always been wanting Essie to understand that the way things are now rested on the way things were. Like a balancing act, lass, he would say, or layers of paint. Mostly, it wasn’t nostalgia that drove him. He wanted her to understand about progress, about how far the world had come. Essie’s grandmother wasn’t interested in history. Molly Westwood was the first among her friends to own a microwave oven and, later, a mobile telephone. She moved through her life looking forward, the benign planes of her beautician’s face catching in full the bright light of the future. Nightly, she erased the day, smoothing creams and lotions over the soft skin of her face and hands. ‘Give the child a rest, Charles, she doesn’t need to know all that rubbish,’ her grandmother would say when he had Essie pinned down to a lesson about the reclamation of the waterfront, or the genesis of the motor vehicle. ‘Someone’s got to tell her,’ he would argue. In one of his history lessons he drove her in his new yellow ute across Hobart to a road which unfurled itself down the foothills of Mt Wellington. ‘This ute is an automatic,’ he told Essie. He chose an automatic, he said, because automatics came after manuals. ‘You can’t tell me that things aren’t improving all the time,’ he told her, wrapping both his thick hands firmly around the steering wheel.
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The road he took her to was bordered by the deep cleft of a creek, its steep banks littered with crushed cans and broken glass and plastic shopping bags snagged on twigs and shredding in the breeze. They stood on the pavement and looked at a cottage, belonging now to someone else. He pointed,remembering aloud.Other people’s clothes flapped on the line in the front yard and Essie had been embarrassed. He had brought with him a small, unframed painting. He placed it in her hands and told her to look up at the mountain. His sister May had painted it, when they were both children and living in this cottage with their grandparents. There in her hands was the purplish curve of the mountain, the corrugated face of the organ pipes looking just so, exactly as they did from the street. The painting showed her the outline, the pure shape that was beneath the scab of bitumen and brick and tile that was creeping up the slope. ‘That’s how it used to look, when I was your age. Can you imagine?’ It was the year that she was twelve years old, the year that he took her on Kittywitch all the way to the lighthouse, that he also took her to visit May. Widowed early, May had moved to Bruny Island and built herself a home that overlooked a headland named Two Tree Point by Captain James Cook. Charlie told Essie this as he took Kittywitch wide around the southern coast of the island, and up its east coast into Adventure Bay.
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As they paddled ashore he showed her that Captain Cook’s eucalypts were still there. They looked to her like Siamese twins, their roots entwined, their pale trunks diverging to make room for separate plumes of leaves. May’s house was made of stone, with huge panes of glass to take in the view. She came to the door, a tornado of yapping black and brown fur at her feet. She hugged Essie like a bird might, squeezing her quickly against her thin body, which was all ribcage. Her voice was like a bird too, slightly raspy, accelerating until it gained so much momentum that it took off into the upper registers, beating soprano and allegro against the ceiling. Charlie’s and May’s words and laughter were two streams, overlapping, merging. May went into the kitchen to make tea, and Charlie followed her. Coming out through the door was the sound of their talk and the shrill of the kettle, the yaps and whines of May’s dogs, the ascending scales of her endearments to them. The mantelpiece in May’s living room was covered in dusty photo frames containing pictures of Essie’s distant cousins, graduating from one frame to the next through their school years. There were also frames with oldfashioned pictures of men and women in wedding clothes, posing with the serious sepia faces of history. And there was the picture of the girl sitting on the side of the clinker-built dinghy. It drew Essie’s eye as seductively as a distant mirror. They were each of them at the tail end of childhood, this
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girl and herself, their ankles and wrists growing out of the confines of their clothes. Essie looked at it, and looked away. She didn’t think that she could be wrong. The girl’s broad forehead, the straight nose which was just a bit too big for the rest of her face, the straight pale lips, were all hers. The only difference was in the eyebrows. Essie’s were darker than her fair hair. This child’s were invisibly white. May came back into the living room with a tea tray and Essie flushed, caught out. ‘It’s a postcard. “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter” it was called. Almost famous. She went all over the world.’ May compared the two faces. Essie knew this was something great aunts did. They searched your face, your movements, they took hold of your hands and examined the shapes of your fingernails for traces of other people. They observed you, wanting to know which parts you had got and from where. ‘Yes, you are cut from the same cloth, aren’t you?’ It was the first time Essie had heard this phrase. She imagined shears gliding through soft, cream-coloured calico, doll-like legs and arms laid out on a sewing table. ‘You’d like to have it, wouldn’t you?’ May asked, smiling, slipping the postcard out of its frame and pressing it into Essie’s hand. As they paddled back to Kittywitch, anchored in Adventure Bay, Charlie told Essie a story about a face which came back years after it was thought to be lost forever.
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She had the kind of face which could say more than one thing without moving a muscle … It was all a matter of the angle at which you caught her, and also partly to do with her eyes. Inside her eyelids was a smooth carved surface. No pupils, no irises. Nothing but the narrow stripes of the timber’s grain. They were the kind of eyes that followed you around, even though it was impossible for them to move … It was a story that pitched and heaved on ocean swells, and was washed up finally on distant shores that had coconut palms and nimble dark-skinned men who climbed them. But Essie wasn’t listening to it. She was tracing with her finger the long white plait belonging to the girl in the picture, and chewing on the salty tip of her own.
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ete wonders what the thought of a walk smells like to a dog. He imagines that it would smell earthy, like the liver-coloured pads of Scully’s paws. All he can smell himself, clinging to the wool of his coat, is the filthy cigarette stink from the pub earlier in the night. It’s almost midnight now and Scully’s sleeping form on her blanket is surrounded by a rusty halo of her own shed hair. Even though Pete hasn’t yet moved in his armchair or reached a hand towards the remote control of the television gibbering to itself in the corner of his living room, Scully’s nose has begun to twitch. Pete thinks of the beach on this still, cold night. It must be a salty thought, rich with the tang of rotting seaweed and the promise of dead, stinking birds to roll on. He hasn’t moved a muscle yet, but Scully is up out of her bed, making the seamless dog transition between sleep and full alert. These night walks are his insomniac’s tonic. They don’t make him sleep, but they’re better for him than drinking. He walks the distance between his home and
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the cape, one or two hours each way depending on the route that he takes. They pay him to go down there and clean the lighthouse tower each week, but he would probably do it for nothing just because he likes the slow ritual of sweeping, dusting, mopping, polishing. As he sets out for the cape this night, he anticipates the pleasure of being alone in that circle of motionless air. He walks fast, his body warming inside layers of clothes. He makes a rhythmic stride for himself, a rhythm that banishes thought and fills up his whole mind with nothing but the tempo of his gait. Even before he reaches the shore he hears the sound of small waves collapsing in what could almost be relief on the shore. Jetty Beach is a shallow arc broken only by a single gum tree in the centre which leans over, brushing its leaves on the sand. In the sheltered hook at the far end of the beach is what’s left of the jetty. Once, supplies for the lightstation had been delivered there. Now it’s just a derailment of timbers warping itself into the sea, its ribs sprung loose on one side from thick, rusted bolts. From the base of it a track leads off, making a loop around the Labillardiere Peninsula. His father used to bring Pete fishing here, in the time when he still came for weekend visits, before he disappeared for good. He remembers his father telling him that this was where they killed Truganini’s mother and sister, just up here on the peninsula. Later, the man she was promised to, and his mate, were drowned by the bastards
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just out there in the channel, chucked over the side and their hands lopped off at the wrists while they were hanging on to the edge of the boat. His dad used rough words to tell him what happened to Truganini next. They were words Pete would have been too embarrassed to use in his father’s presence. He sees now that his father wanted to make a man out of him, to make him as angry as he was himself. The track winds through the moonlit scrub and lands him on the sand of Butler’s Beach. A strange beach, forming the tip of the peninsula, its curve is convex instead of concave. It looks out over a shallow channel, on the other side of which is the flame-shape of Partridge Island. He remembers that island, the way its fringe of native bush hides a secret heart of old English trees that used to seem innocent to him. He reaches the cape, and sees the way the white petals of the arum lilies catch the light of the moon. Death lilies, Pete remembers them being called. They have found something in this place on which to thrive. All the death in this place, drawn up into their furled, funereal petals. Wherever there has been disturbance, lilies have put down their roots. Now they are what remains after so much else has crumbled, marking out the dimensions of cottages that have been gone for fifty years or more. Near the duck pond at the base of the lighthouse hill is the impossibly small square of an assistant keeper’s
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cottage, its floor plan drawn in the grass by an eroded rim of foundation stones and lilies. In the moonlight, Pete sees the way they cluster in the places where there would have been doors. He imagines them lying in wait at exits and entrances, craning forward with their gaping white mouths and obscene pollen-coated tongues. Once, they would just have been flowers to him, the same way that pines were just trees, and cats were just animals. Now he notices them, sees the way their glossy, turgid stalks and flowers mark them as exotics. Since he has learned about such things, he has seen the whole world as rampant with small invasions. He sees native plants overtaken by blackberries, riverbanks bound up in rice-grass, sea floors eaten bare by sea stars, the orange roof tiles of new suburbs spreading out over hillsides. And all of it incurable, irreversible, too late. That was the seduction of Macquarie Island: the possibility of return. It seemed real, achievable. He and the other rangers shot cats to rub away at time. They worked to erase even themselves. In the summer, near the end of Pete’s stay, a fat antenna repairman had come to the island on a turnaround. Unlike all the other bright newcomers that clambered off the inflatables awestruck and gushing, the fat man came because he was forced to. He was loud and a Pom, and said loudly in the mess in his Stilton-ripe Pommy accent that there was no need to come to a place like this one. It had nothing he hadn’t already seen on the television.
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Pete had been in charge of taking the fat man into the field, all the way to the southern outpost where his services were required. He had walked behind the tottering, inflated shape and been irritated by its metronomic wheezing. Pete remembers one particular day, the way the slowness of that walk had made frustration bubble up in his blood, how ready he’d been to drive the point of his rifle into the doughy folds of the fat man’s back to push him along. They’d had to spend a night in a field hut. Even by going to bed early, Pete couldn’t avoid the fat man entirely. There was still dinner to get through. The fat man found the stores cupboard, and the table and sink became littered with tins, roughly serrated lids lifted, thick dribbles of various juices down their sides. ‘Won’t work y’know,’ the fat man had said, sticking a fat finger into a simmering pot. ‘What’s that, mate?’ ‘Even if you shoot every last bloody cat, won’t change anything.’ ‘Righto. Whatever you reckon, mate.’ Pete was trying to read, trying to squeeze his attention down into the black gutters of the type on the yellowed pages of a cheap novel. ‘Won’t make it so as everything’s right again, y’know. It’s all done now, there’s no changing it. No such thing as a Year Zero. That’s bloody Pol Pot stuff, that’s George Orwell. That’s what that is.’
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Pete was hating the fat man. He wanted to squash his fat words like so many bloated leeches. He wanted to upturn the fat man’s bubbling pot of muck right over the wobbling flesh of his ugly face. ‘They’re animals, mate. Seals and birds. They don’t know whether it’s Year Zero or Year Twenty Thousand and fucking Three.’ ‘Maybe so, but you’re not doing it for them, are you?’ That question had followed Pete when he went out into the field that night. It drifted above and behind and before him when he walked the tracks of the island. It hovered above the butt of his rifle where it rested next to the spotlight on his pack, the two instruments synchronised, honing in on a slinking feline shape.
For the most part, nobody even goes into the lighthouse tower between Pete’s visits. It’s almost never other people’s mess he’s cleaning up, just the residue of time. He can measure seven days in the small increments of dust and tarnish that he wipes away. Sometimes he wonders how much a week would weigh, if he could collect it up and put it on a scale. This night when he arrives to clean the tower there is a yellow ute in the carpark, and the windows of Lightkeepers’ Quarters II are brightly lit. Rachel the ranger had mentioned someone, some woman doing a family history or something. He wonders which mob she
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belongs to. There’s every chance it’s the Chalk-Baudinets. They bred like rabbits down here, could have any number of curious descendants who would come sniffing out the stuff of their lives. In the shed on the hillside below the lighthouse, Pete fills a mop bucket with hot water that steams in the cold air. He fills his pockets with Brasso and rags and heads up the hill. As he lets himself into the tower, Pete remembers a list of keepers that used to hang up on the wall. It must have been taken down, he thinks, with the paintings and the plaques. Pete used to linger over it, reading down through the names and dates, adding and subtracting like they were on gravestones. Some stayed only a year or two, others for long spells. One bloke stayed thirty-nine years; must have been just about a fossil by the time they packed him off. Pete feels for the weight of thirty-nine years, seven years more than his entire life. He’ll be thirty-three by the end of the year. He used to think about it when he was a kid, how old he’d be in the millennium and what he’d be like. It seems funny to him, the kind of grown-up-ness his kid-self thought he’d have by now, a kind of seriousness, a knowing, a certainty about things that’s never turned up. At school they’d led him to believe that life was a set of train tracks, and that all you had to do was the right subjects to get yourself onto them. Then life would take care of itself, chugging along through the inevitabilities of growing up. That was how it was supposed to work. It did,
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for a while — apprentice, tradesman, the secure label of diesel mechanic. In the workshop there were older blokes who gave each other nicknames and called out that it was beer o’clock at four every afternoon. They called their wives ‘handbrakes’ and lived for the weekends, and shook their heads and cursed when they heard on the radio news that some little girl, somewhere, had been raped and killed by some sick fuck. Pete observed them carefully, learning the part. Then everything took a turn to the left. He got on the piss on a Friday night with a mate and at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam it was decided. Get a couple of motorbikes and head for the mainland. When he found himself on the boat headed north two weeks later he felt wobbly and sick, like he didn’t know what he was doing, like the train tracks had veered off towards the future and he’d somehow been tipped off them. Mine-site Dogsbody. Process Operator. Pearl Shell Chipper. Truck Driver. Farmhand. Mineral Sample Collector. Furniture Removalist. Shearer. Loader Driver. Killer of Insects in Rambutan Orchard. Road Worker. Shooter of Feral Cats. If it was a track, he kept turning off, until the roads were dirt, branching off into blankness. What would he call himself now? Sculptor? Artist? He’d only been paid for two things so far, not counting the things mates had bought or traded. There was that piece of public art for a suburban park; and the wrought-iron base for a garden table belonging to the
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wife of a Sandy Bay doctor, a woman who struck Pete as simply having run out of things to spend money on. Maybe Welder is more accurate. Blacksmith, perhaps. Surfer. Dole Bludger. Useless Cunt. Thirty-nine years. He feels again for the weight of that much time, the amount of years that lighthouse keeper had spent here. He thinks of his own thirty-two years as a series of phases, marked out from each other by a location or a job. It wasn’t until each one had finished that these chapters got a special feel to them, something he could label them by but never find the words to describe. He could summon them up, these separate feelings, but more often they came to him unexpectedly, with a certain taste or smell. The harmless globes of tinned potatoes could bring up Macquarie Island. The poisonously sweet stink of mosquito repellent summoned the tropical heat of wet season in the Territory. The resiny smell of good mull could give him his year on the mine at Mt Tom Price. There was only one chapter of his life with a woman as its defining feature. The feel of the Caroline years is sick with sadness now. It’s got the smell of crushed lemon-scented gum leaves, the feel of hot skin inside pilled flannel sheets, the numbness of cold noses and ears on open-air nights, and the cold white glare of a crescent moon coming in through a window and lighting up one side of a stack of sealed packing boxes. • • •
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Almost done, Pete backs out the door, wiping away the last traces of his footprints with the mop in front of him. Outside a fine drizzle is falling. Small rivulets run through the stubble of his hair and down the channels behind his ears. He sees that the lights are still on in Lightkeepers’ Quarters II, and hopes that the woman won’t be staying too long. He likes things the way they are between him and time: it trying to lay itself on thick and him wiping it away each week and making it begin again.
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n the morning, Essie follows a path down the slope to find the sand of Lighthouse Bay laundered smooth and white by the night’s high tide. As long as she doesn’t look back over the sand marked by her own footprints, it is still perfect. The sea is flat calm, almost pink under the dawn clouds. She reaches the place where a tannin-stained rivulet snakes down towards the surf. Out of the thick-grained sand it makes small temporary banks that the next high tide will knock over and erase. I’ve brought you home, she thinks to Alva as she unrolls the pale blue lambswool jumper she’s bundled for protection around a pewter picture frame. Alva’s thumbnailsized face in the postcard is much sharper than in the enlargement on the wall of Essie’s apartment in the west. She holds up the frame and compares the shapes of the hills at the end of the beach to the blurred shapes in the picture’s horizon. There is a similarity, but nothing conclusive. There is no point comparing the profile of the rivulet, its shape and flow having been altered on each of the days that lay between the taking of the photograph and this one.
I
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In the cold air Essie’s eyes feel more open than they have ever been, as if there is a stretched white space around her irises that feels the touch of light and air for the first time. Her wide eyes take in the shades of the tawny pelts of the headlands, the sandstone slab of the beach, the teacoloured trickle of the rivulet making its way to the sea. They are colours that belong to no other place on earth, as does the feeling that is swelling beneath her ribs. The place pulls at her, as if gravity were just a little stronger here than anywhere else on the planet. Even now, even after all these years, this island makes her feel things, still makes her want something that she can’t have. On her way back she crosses the slope beneath the houses where, on a flattened terrace of turf, a rim of cut stone slabs emerges from the grass, moss-covered and rounded by decay. A small, hand-painted sign staked into the earth reads ‘Superintendent’s Cottage, built 1838’. Essie traces the grid of stones, balancing on them, heel to toe, heel to toe. She makes out the tiny rooms. He didn’t come until the 1870s, but this would have been his home. Her great-great-grandfather and mother and their children. She wonders which of the rooms would have been Alva’s. She decides it would have been the smallest one, its perimeter of stones marking out a space just wide enough to accommodate a small cot, its walls so close together that if Alva had reached out with each of her hands, she would have been able to lay her palms flat on cold plaster.
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Essie is separated from her by time, but in space, she is intimately close, patrolling her walls, stepping through them like a ghost. It makes her feel giddy. She has to sit down on the cold stone, drop her head between her knees to stop herself from fainting. She has felt this before, holding in her hand a slice of petrified wood, as dense as stone, its rings of life compressed into a black heart. Iain had handed it to her one day at work. Just think, he said, dinosaurs nibbled the leaves off that plant. It had almost made her faint.
She had felt it another time, too. In Scotland. She had gone with David to a conference in Glasgow. On the way, they had stopped in the city of Edinburgh and walked the steep streets up out of the cavity of the railway station into the city, dense and blackened with age. She looked down and there, carved squarely into the paving stone beneath her feet, was the inscription: This is my own, my native land. — Walter Scott Essie had needed to reach out to David to stop herself from falling into the Alice-hole that opened up there in the pavement, a core cut through centuries of Picts, Celts, Angles, Norsemen, all the way to infinity. Imagine that kind of belonging, she had said to David, breathless. He had not understood.
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The core of her own self was shallow by comparison, and when she stared into it, looking for the place where she began, there was nothing but a rift, distorting. There was a shadow somewhere between the beginning and the self that stood on an Edinburgh street, trying to still a vertiginous desire to fall. In Glasgow, she made use of her rail pass. While David was at the conference, she caught trains all the way to the ends of their lines. Sometimes she got out and other times she just stayed in the carriages and waited for the trains to shuffle back along their tracks, their ends becoming their beginnings. She caught trains west and east and south, just to watch the countryside flick by outside the windows, to hear the accents of small children standing up on the seats to glimpse the sea, the trills of choral singers returning from a performance. Even the voice of the trolley boy bringing artificial tea and plastic packets of sandwiches with tuna and cucumber and cress was rich and strange. The borderlands were vast expanses of green and the sheep had tails. The stone buildings of towns and small cities clung to the steep coast in the east. In the west, the sea water was a glacial aqua, with milky whorls for the sand bars in the shallows. To get to the coast, the train snaked around the base of impossible mountains with weatherscarred peaks, past deep blue lochs with tiny islands clustered with stands of tall trees, through one of the last tracts of untouched Scottish vegetation — or so she heard
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the English ornithologist behind her say to his wife. He sounded authoritative. He had binoculars on a tartan strap around his neck. Essie became entranced with the possibilities of the train lines. She loved the deceptive orderliness of the mapdiagrams, of the dotted towns spaced at regular intervals along straight lines. She loved the ways the different coloured lines intersected, making connections that multiplied to almost endless possibilities of destination. One morning she left the hotel room even before David was dressed. She took a shiny fast train south across the border into England. It stopped only at the largest of the dots. She stepped off at one of them and crossed the platform, sliding herself inside the curving perspex doors of another train just before they closed. She didn’t know where it was headed. Five stops and she stepped off, crossed the platform and stepped onto another train. All morning she stepped off and on trains, the working commuters around her transforming into pensioners with wheeled shopping bags and young mothers with prams. Successive stations diminished in size like the gauges of railway tracks. Essie felt herself disappearing into the finer capillaries of the network. Her path led her south and east until she found herself in a place where she could backtrack and make another choice, or continue onwards on a dark blue line with a blunt bracket at its end. The last stop, the end of the line, was the city of Great Yarmouth … shrunken as a salted
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Yarmouth herring … The words drifted back to her like a taste or a smell; words from one of Charlie’s stories. This is a place that has something to do with me, she thought, as she followed the path from the train station to the medieval marketplace, a wide expanse of cobblestones surrounded now by shops with cheap shoes and books and clothes. She followed her nose through the town centre towards the sea, passing terraced B&Bs, their classic faces painted up in garish colours like old women wearing too much rouge. On the promenade a vicious wind blew, cutting through Essie’s layers of clothes and rattling the plasticpink flamingos above a fun parlour, their necks drooping in sympathy with the shoulder-season tourist trade. This is a place that has something to do with me, she thought, as she walked beside a remaining span of the city wall. It had been fortified at one stage by the ruins of a monastery, its rubbly surface studded here and there with the blackened faces of gargoyles. A laminated panel in the wall held an etching of the flatlands of the Denes as they had once been, spread with fishing nets, bordered by a sea cluttered with fleets of herring boats. In the midst of it all stood Britannia on a tall white column, staring out over the seas from beneath her curving helmet. When Essie looked out over the Denes, she saw that Britannia on her greyed column was now overlooking a sea of grey industrial roofing. On the river side of the city Essie slipped into a tour
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party. The guide in his green blazer, too polite to ask her to pay, compensated by pretending she wasn’t there. He explained to the rest of the party that where they stood had once been a procession of streets so narrow that facing neighbours could pass things to each other between upstairs windows, and doors had been made to open inwards to avoid accidents with passers-by. They were called The Rows, mostly known by numbers, but a few by name. The narrowest of all was Kittywitches Row. The Rows had become slums, but the British Government had been relieved of the bother of dismantling them by airraids during the war. This is a place that has something to do with me, she thought as she followed the tour party into a merchant’s house in one of the Rows still standing. When the tour party departed, she stayed behind, standing for a time beside a cold fireplace surrounded by blue delft tiles painted with ships and mermaids and whales and serpents. The woman behind the desk at the Great Yarmouth Public Library had a broad accent and a bored expression. ‘It’s a bit much, coming here for one day and expecting to find what you’re looking for. Most people allow a week if they’re doing up their histories,’ she had said, irritated. She told Essie that there was a single census year, 1851, that had been transferred to computer database. Essie entered Westwood in the search field. She found him. William Westwood, her grandfather’s grandfather. A boy of thirteen years. In 1851 he lived with
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his mother, a widow and milliner; and his sisters, at school; and lodgers, three of them, all women. She imagined William and his seafaring fantasies trapped in a narrow house full of hats and high feelings. She printed out the entry. She felt the thinness of the rectangle of white paper, but it was solid enough. It was something she could fold into four and slip into her pocket, something she could hold and touch, that couldn’t evaporate like flawed memories. In the Yarmouth churchyard cemetery she looked up at a black and white Tudor house where a famous book was once written. She searched the crumbling stones for the name Westwood. She found nothing she recognised but the arched span of a bridge carved into the top of a curving headstone. It was the grave of a precious child, who passed away in a terrible accident. Nearly eighty people drowned all told, Charlie used to say, and as for the fool and his geese, he never performed again, not as long as he lived. Pictures were forming, shapes meshing in her mind. But the shops were closing and the light was fading and it was time for her to leave. The wind from the sea blew through the train station, riffling the pages of magazines inside their wire cages, nipping her face and hands where she sat on a cold metal seat waiting for a train. It took hours to retrace her journey. As the evening drew on, the spaces between trains increased. With the single coin she had in her purse she telephoned David at the
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hotel in Glasgow. The line cut out with a clunk before she had a chance to speak. When she got back, the hotel room was dark, but filled with angry silence. She slipped into bed beside the bare arch of David’s turned back. She could feel his sleeplessness, his restless desire to resolve things, or at least to fight. She remembers thinking that he should have known that in a game of silence, he could never win.
Essie walks up the hillside from the perimeter of stones to a place on the saddle of the cape where she can see the silver-water of the channel separating the two shores. She thinks of Scotland, and of David, and of that wordless night inside the dusky pink box of the hotel room when she had foreseen the impossibility of them. And yet they had gone on; in fact, they had dug themselves in deeper. He had moved in to her bright white apartment by the sea, and they had talked in vague terms of a continuous future. Now she smiles at the reckless optimism, or the wilful neglect of intuition, that is a hallmark of the beginning of things. In the kitchen she makes tea and, while she waits for it to cool, unfolds the sturdy cardboard flaps of a carton that arrived by post at her grandmother’s house. The carton was imprinted with the logo of a firm which made glass laboratory equipment, and the address label was made out to Essie in Iain’s elaborate handwriting. A letter
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slipped under the label wishes her well at the lighthouse, but between the lines she reads again its carefully worded warning: We shall miss you. Three months will be interminable here without you, but I am pleased that you seem finally to have taken my point that there is something of value to look for in the past. The books are on loan only, of course. I only point that out for the sake of clarity, as I am certain that they will be returned in due course, and equally certain they will not come to any harm in your hands. She smiles, thinking of the tussle there must have been between the opposing forces of Iain’s natural generosity and his collector’s possessiveness. It was a ritual that began shortly after David had packed his things and moved out. Each Monday morning, Iain would say, with his customary formality: ‘Valerie has asked me to let you know that, if you have nothing planned for Wednesday night, you would be most welcome for tea. She also asked me to say that you needn’t feel obliged, of course, if you have something more interesting to do.’ It was couched in these terms always, that she would be doing them a great honour by coming to tea. It was never intimated that they worried about her being alone. Iain and Valerie’s three children were grown up and scattered across the globe in merchant banking, engineering, accounting. Their house in the northern suburbs was as comfortable as their marriage, padded with plush carpet and heavy drapes and enveloping recliner
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chairs. Valerie cooked solid, old-fashioned meals and served them on china plates that she pulled out of the sideboard for Wednesday nights because she knew that Essie liked them. It was a strangely treasured moment in Essie’s week, standing at Valerie’s sink after dinner, caressing dry these fragile plates with a soft tea towel. She luxuriated in the warmth of the house, and in Valerie’s unexceptional stories that came from telephone calls to her children and her day at the office. She was comforted by Valerie’s motherly smell: something faintly floral underpinned by something faintly antiseptic. After dinner, Essie would sit in one of the plush recliner chairs while Iain read to her from his library. His books, meticulously catalogued on index cards, ran ceiling to floor on three walls of his study and had begun to colonise a bedroom that had formerly belonged to his eldest son. Iain had a passion for square-rigged ships, and for lighthouses. He read to Essie about the Marie Celeste, about the races between the last of the great clippers Thermopylae and Cutty Sark. On the desk in his study was a model that he had built himself of a vessel named Cecile Herzogovin. He loved to read to her about the early days of oceanography, especially about the voyage of the Challenger, which crossed the world’s oceans for five years with its dredging nets and naturalists. He loved the idea of discovery, of the nets coming up full of strange creatures: ornate crusted invertebrates, fish with bulging
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eyes and monster’s teeth, colossal squid squirting gallons of dark ink. ‘I sometimes think everything is down there,’ he often said. ‘All the remnants of the evolutionary process. A dark place to keep everything that we have ever been, everything that has ever been cast away or forgotten. Fanciful, I know.’ He was alive, electric, when he spoke of these things. Essie knew that she was his once-a-week audience for theories with which he had worn out the patience of his wife. Willingly, she played his adversary, arguing against the ability of history to teach her anything. The present, she would tell him, was challenge enough to understand. Sometimes the tea-coloured inch of whisky in his glass doubled or trebled, and he read poetry in Gaelic. She closed her eyes and let the words drift over her. Although the words were foreign, she experienced a kind of understanding, as if through another sense. It was like drinking words, tasting them. She told Iain that there was a lighthouse in her family history and he researched it for her, unasked. It was a mission he tackled with relish. It gave him an excuse to comb anew the shelves of a favourite second-hand bookshop, to write away to his old bibliophile haunts across the country and overseas. In the mail came tattered old volumes in parcels postmarked in London and Boston, the cheaply printed self-published works of lighthouse fanatics, and a pair of large, brand-new books he’d ordered on the
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internet, full of detailed specifications of lighthouse operations. As the books arrived, he read to her about the various lanterns the Cape Bruny Light would have housed over the years, about the gradual transition from whale oil to electricity, about the ships wrecked in the waters nearby. He showed her a photograph in the shiny slab of pages in the middle of one book, of a marble mantel clock that was presented to her great-great-grandfather after he saved a crew from the wreck of their vessel. He had packaged the books, all those that he thought would be useful to her, into the carton now lying empty on the floor. Essie takes each volume from its carefully folded tissue-paper wrapping. She lines them up, spines in descending order, on a shelf of the kitchen sideboard. There is one other thing which remains to be unpacked, a gift from Charlie. Ship’s papers, it would have held, once. The folded parchment treasure of charts, inky records of storms and sails and sightings of land. It’s quite small for a sailor’s sea chest, made of mahogany, carved hearts of whale-ivory affixed to the cleats. It had belonged to her grandfather’s grandfather, the sea captain, later the lighthouse keeper. He would have made the beckets, the rope handles, himself. Strands age-fused, the ropework seems more sculpted than woven now. The herringbone sennit, the intricate turbans of Turk’s heads, the star knots: the marks of the old man’s handiness with a length of rope.
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Thirty-nine he was when he came to the lighthouse, not a great age by any means, but he already had the look of an old man. Shrunken he was, a salted herring, as if so many years at sea had left him pickled. And he would live his whole life over again, thirty-nine years, keeping watch over these waters. Or so Charlie would have begun the story, once. She can hear it even before she unhitches the clasp of the sea chest. It is the rustling of paper against stone, the whisht of velvet on tin, the whispering fragments of a story. Even before she opens it, she knows what it is that he is asking her to do. She imagines Charlie packing it, a case for the afterlife, knowing that she would open it when he was dust in a silver letterbox in a rose garden overlooking Cornelian Bay. She takes the objects out of the chest and spaces them out across the surface of the linoleum table in Lightkeepers’ Quarters II. She measures the distances between them with spans of her hands. There is an old lighthouse log book with thick blue pages. He would have laid it in the base, tucked these folded papers and a map of the world inside its covers. He would have wrapped in a scrap of dark red velvet this paper nautilus shell with its delicate seashore ripples. Laid down on its side this bottle, of bird shit in effect. Layers in every shade of brown through beige to pure white. She wonders how long it would have taken to trickle in the grains to spell out LADY ELLIOT ISLAND, 1869, in white guano on deep brown. There is also a stone, round and grey and ordinary, except for a bright orbital seam of quartz and mica, studded
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in turn with misshapen hearts of garnet. A wedding band of rose gold, three stars etched into its curve, a tiny diamond at the heart of each. A coconut. She holds it in her hands, feeling the robust roundness of it. Peeled smooth, it’s no longer husked and hairy, but as dark as the mahogany of the chest itself. Around its circumference are four circles, scratched in with a sharp tool. In one is carved an anchor entwined with rope, in the next a tree with branches seeming to sprout flying fish, in the third, a curious blank-eyed woman with long waves of hair, and in the last, a verse, carved in clumsy capital letters. IN BATAVIA I DID GROW UPON A TREE SO HIGH THE BLACKS CUT ME DOWN WILLIAM WESTWOOD DID ME BUY HE ATE MY FLESH AND DRUNK MY BLOOD AND HOVE MY CLOTHES AWAY AND HERE MY BODY DOTH REMAIN A TOKEN TO THAT DAY, 1866
And this has a verse too, this painted biscuit tin. Its carnival colours are fading, its letters rubbing off to leave gaps for guessing. Mo day’s ch s fai f ace, it says beneath the cherubic blondie with apple-red cheeks. Wednesday’s child has big fat tears bursting from behind the fists that are clenched fatly over her eyes. Sunday’s child takes up the entire lid, wearing a pale blue dress and wide-brimmed hat. She tilts the tin, listening to the sound of something
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soft touching the sides. She cannot prise off the lid with her fingernails. She uses a knife-blade instead, breaking apart the rusty crust between the lid and the rim of the tin. And inside is a brittle bird’s nest of human cells. Hair. Pale hair, dry as tinder, in a long coiled plait. The feel of it against her fingertips is like a nail down a blackboard. Whose? Why? Resting in the hair is a tiny sliver of metal. It’s a coin, although it’s buckled, misshapen and covered with a milky film of nacre … Found inside a Cloudy Bay oyster, it whispers. But that is all. The great web of Charlie’s stories, in her memory, is a net full of holes. I have repairs to make. How can she stitch them back together, these solid things, using only the fragile wisps of story she has left? She takes the map of the world, thinned and faded at the folds, and spreads it across the other half of the table. She puts down her cup of tea in the middle of Russia, and wonders where to begin. You might as well ask where the ocean begins … A simple answer is that the ocean begins where the land ends, but each of us has walked a separate path to the sea, and a story cannot begin in all those places at once. It might begin on the native shore of her grandfather’s grandfather, although if it did, it would be difficult to pinpoint where, exactly. Since the East Anglian coast is a curve drawn in silt, shifting and changing with the tides, it would be difficult to drive a flag into the sand and say here, here is the place where it began. In that part of the world, the
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sea and the land have enacted countless transactions, backwards and forwards. Over a lifetime, the sea ate away at a church, until sand lay where the grass had between headstones, and the shallows lapped inside the step of the arched doorway to the tower. The sea swallowed peninsulas and headlands whole, and then returned them over centuries, granule by granule. And what has he left for her, to tell her where to begin? Almost nothing in the way of words. In her great-greatgrandfather’s curling hand, there are some fading accounts of shipwrecks written on thinning blue paper. In her greatgreat-grandmother’s hand, there is only a signature and four words. ‘Between Heaven and Hell’ she wrote on her marriage certificate for the place of her birth. She meant Knoydart, a peninsula pinched into the west coast of Scotland by blue pointed fingers, the sea lochs of Nevis and Hourn, Heaven and Hell. To its west is the Sound of Sleat and the scattered crescent formed by the islands of Skye, Rhum, Eigg, Muck and Canna. To its east are the dense-pleated peaks of the Highlands that were once all but cleared of their human clans, replaced by sheep of a higher yield. Perhaps the story could begin there, since here in the chest is a piece of it that she can hold in the palm of her hand, the sparkling stone she remembers her grandfather telling her was knotted into his grandmother’s skirts on the day she was forced to leave her home. Perhaps, though, the ocean begins at none of its edges, but at its heart. She wonders, tracing her finger across an
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expanse of blue, whether her great-great-grandparents sailed, unknowing, across the beginning of the ocean on their voyage across the world. Whether invisible grid lines transect, out there in the blue, marking a place for her to begin. Her finger glides over the blue that lies to the west of Australia, past the city where she lives in a bright white apartment by the sea. She feels for the hooks catching on her heart as she thinks of it. There is not a single one. Her finger rounds Cape Leeuwin, crosses the Great Australian Bight. And it is here, at the place where her great-great-grandparents’ journey ended, the point where her finger comes to rest, on the southern tip of an island at the bottom of the world, that she knows it must begin. The notebook Essie has brought with her is a special one. She spent a long time in the stationery shop choosing it. It was expensive, because of the weight of the creamy textured pages, and because of the soft cornflower-blue suede of the cover. It has decorative endpapers with a marbled pattern and its spine makes a new-book sound as she bends it open. Essie loves new stationery. She loves the omnipotentiality of a blank page. She is a terrible waster of paper, being the kind of person to tear a page out of an exercise book once it is marred with a crossing-out, and begin again. She wonders if she can trust herself to write on paper so beautiful. The fountain pen was expensive too, black and cigar-shaped. She has fitted it with an ink cartridge of
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brownish-black. She hovers the nib over the page, not wanting to touch it to the paper just yet, because as soon as she does, the possibility of perfection will be lost. She will have begun, and then she will no longer be right at the beginning. She traces with her eyes the spaces between the objects laid out on the table in front of the sea chest. Can I do this? Can I fill in the spaces of all the things I have forgotten, or never knew? Inside her frame of pewter lilies, Alva’s postcard face is as blank as the page. Essie remembers that in stories it is often the silent who end up with the task of the telling. Perhaps it’s because, undeafened by the sound of their own voices, they’ve heard so much more. They’ve been quiet enough to hear hearts beating ever so slightly faster in fear, to detect the split second of a caught breath in which a lie is composed, to listen to the invisible thoughts of all the things that live and love and breathe.
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hen I say that I was the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, Essie writes, it is both true and false. For a while I was almost famous. My face crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian, on postcards dog-eared from so much rough handling into mail bags. The passages were long in those days, and I like to think of the various voyages of my face, tucked as it was into sausages of canvas, stowed inside timbered hulls. I like to think of it cresting and falling with the ocean swells, rounding Cape Horn in a gale, languishing in the Doldrums, or passing by the sun-scorched cliffs of countries I would never visit in the flesh. I even like to think of those ships which foundered with my face aboard; to imagine my image floating, just beneath the surface, drifting amid the debris of broken vessels, my paper features dissolving in the salt. Perhaps you have seen me. You might have seen my picture tucked into black paper photo-corners in some Edwardian lady-collector’s album, laid out in a museum case alongside her mangy fox furs, silver lockets and crystal perfume bottles. Or you might have flicked past it in a shoebox of old postcards on
W
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the counter of an antiquarian bookshop: the picture of a girl of no more than twelve, leaning against a beached dinghy, the gunwales of which are rimmed with a hairy coil of sisal rope. And, had you idly picked out that particular card and flipped it over, there beneath the rusted loops of some long-ago traveller’s handwriting you might have seen printed in small type the title, ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter’. That was me. I was ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter’.
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he globe that hangs from the roof of the shed is larger than normal, and so dim that Pete can clearly make out the glowing trapeze of the filament inside the glass. He likes the way its limited power shrinks the corrugatediron interior of his shed to a comforting sphere. He also likes the way it touches only lightly on the rusted metal, suggesting to him the possibilities in the different parts. In and behind the shed, Pete struck metal. It had been a reason for buying the property, the big tangled pile of engines and parts and pipes out the back, the smaller pieces in a pile inside, left behind by an old bloke who’d retired to the island, then been carted off again to a hospital to die. There was something with rusted circles threaded onto a warped metal bar that might once have been a plough. Inside the shed there were old wooden apple crates full of smaller things: horseshoes and nails, bolts and cogs and the thin bones of the arms that turned them. One day he had picked up a weighty ball of metal. He had looked into its cavity, scoured by the twisting of the part that once fitted inside, and through the bolt-hole in
T
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its far side. It had looked back at him with a sad, distant gaze. He fired up his welder and began to make a man. The face had come first, the contours of its features easier in some ways than the curvature of the skull which followed. The regularity of it demanded exactly the right piece, time after time, and the floor of the shed became littered with metal in the search. He liked building the torso, making his man strong and muscular with some of the bigger pieces: cogs and wheels, connection rods, sharp-edged plough blades cut to fit over the curve of the metal back to form wing-shaped shoulder blades. Tonight he’s looking for something that might be part of a hand. He stands and looks at the pile of rusted metal under the dim, orange light. It will need to be both angular and curved, quite solid, to make the part which runs down from the base of the thumb into the narrow hinge of the wrist. He rummages through boxes, turns over various pieces in his palms before he finds it. A scrap of old cast iron, broken off from something larger. It has a twist to it, which makes it perfect, gives it the bulk he needs. He positions the piece alongside the rest of the hand, poised on the workbench on its fingertips like an unbalanced spider. He lowers his helmet and the blue flame leaps out of his welding torch. His ears fill with its sparking cracks. It drowns out the sound of rain on the roof, falling not in a regular patter but in great drifts of droplets that come with gusts of wind from the southwest. He weaves molten metal across the two surfaces,
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pleased with his practised skill, watching as the different metals begin to melt and flow into each other, making a slightly upraised seam. When the hands are finished, Pete arranges them on the workbench relative to each other. He likes their articulate digits, the way that they look as if they might even move. Side by side, their symmetry is sufficient, but by no means absolute. He remembers that this is true of the human face, recalling the biology textbook pictures of a face halved, of the eerie result when each half was paired with its simulated perfect opposite. Resting on the window sill behind the hands, the plaque catches his eye. A circular slab of bronze, it could almost be a gigantic coin. Unbalanced, though. It’s got three heads on one side, but for tails it’s blank.
He didn’t go to the Neck that morning with the intention of taking it. He was on his way to the city, had thrown his wetsuit and board in the back of the ute in the hope of getting in a dawn surf before the ferry, but when he got there the sea was calm, its rhythmic advance and retreat over the sand no higher than the soles of his boots. There was still an hour before the ferry. The monument was on top of the highest point of the isthmus, at the top of a raw pine staircase with badly proportioned steps. Pete found the rises painfully low, but the treads too broad to allow him to take the steps two at a time.
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Below him on the ocean side was the Neck beach. He could see on the sand the elliptical track of his bootprints down to the water’s edge and back. To the south, the bay swept around in a deep curve to a series of headlands, overlapping like a hand of playing cards, the last of them the flared shape of Fluted Cape. On the channel side, a fortified road snaked along land’s edge, a man-made bank of reddish gravel dropping away to an expanse of shallow water dotted with black swans and waders. To the northwest was Mt Wellington, its mounded head lightly icing-sugared with snow. The bronze plaque was countersunk into the sandstone, its coin-like face carved with someone’s little nursery rhyme, ‘They roam no more upon this isle, stop and meditate awhile’; and with the heads of three Palawa people, their profiles overlapping like the headlands across the bay.
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vernight rain lies in puddles on the ground and the gravel of the carpark oozes oily rainbows beneath Essie’s feet. A day-pack full of books and a thermos bumps hard into her spine as she walks. On the other side of the gravel, before the hill begins its ascent, is a stretch of green grass and a pond edged with thin reeds. On the still circle of water an emerald-headed drake preens his sheeny feathers. The leaves of grevilleas bordering the concrete path that leads up the hill vibrate with the quick, invisible departures of small birds. Later today tourists will come and follow her steps. They will come, with their hands strapped safely into the padded handles of their video cameras, to see the lighthouse, a giant gravestone to itself. It lies dormant now, its function taken over by an automated beacon on the cliff ’s edge. The blinds drawn inside its cylindrical glass eye sadden Essie, making her think of a sheet drawn up over a dead face. That is what the lighthouse is now — dead, but perfectly preserved; a monument marking the intersection of nature and man’s attempt to tame it.
O
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Once, a lighthouse would have been as far as a man could go before he entered the world of the sea, with its own rules, its unfathomable shiftings. Lighthouses looked so brave, white soldiers against a vast ocean; they were visible guardians, unlike the intangible grid of the GPS and the star-remote satellites that now purport to keep the world safe. She places her hands on the cold surface of the tower, feels beneath her hands the countless layers of white paint which cover the circumference of rock and rubble. The tower is closed to everyone now. Everyone but the ranger and the caretaker. When the lighthouse was decommissioned, the ranger had explained to her on the phone, the last keeper was retired, replaced only with a caretaker. He came once a week now to go into the old tower to sweep the silent floors and polish away the tarnish, which kept coming back as if nothing had changed. The ranger had told Essie where in Lightkeepers’ Quarters II she could find a key to the lighthouse, in case she wanted to have a look inside. Just be a bit discreet, she had said. The tower’s black, arched door is like a mouth, locked shut with a sliding bolt and padlock. It’s too early for the tourists and the carpark at the bottom of the hill is empty except for her yellow ute. The first door opens into an arch-shaped antechamber, as wide as the thick walls, the second into the circle of the tower. It’s like being inside a shell. There is the whiteness of it, and the helix-curve of the stairs. Her breaths move through the still air. They touch off the rounded interior wall,
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making the same circular sea-sound that air makes in a shell against your ear. She takes off her shoes to keep the quietness, and climbs the stairs in her thick wool socks. The lower deck is emptier than she remembers. The circular wall is bare except for the daisy-shapes of the brass vents, and an old-fashioned black telephone on a timber mount. The paintings and the tributes to keepers past that she remembers seeing here have all been removed. She climbs the last short flight of stairs, reaching the lantern room. It is a cylinder made hexagonal by the six drapes of heavyweight calico hanging from ceiling to floor. She pulls aside one of the blinds, and beyond the window sees the crenellated cliffs of the cape and the tiers of foam rippling over each other into Lighthouse Bay. The water stretched tight across the mouth of the channel is treacherously puckered around the rocks of Actaeon Reef. On the channel’s other shore is the snout of South East Cape and the blue folds of land embracing Recherche Bay. And to the south is the great slice of open ocean. The scene is as it would have been when it was watched over by her grandfather’s grandfather, the seventh keeper of the Cape Bruny Light. The lantern in the centre, so obviously created for movement, stands perfectly still. In this silence, time itself might easily have stopped. There is only the flickering, as she moves around the banks of concentric lenses, of rainbow-coloured light over their surfaces. The elongated
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globes within are distorted. Here they are smaller, then here larger than life, now both smaller and larger at once in images once, twice, thrice reflected by glass planes. Inside the globes are delicate black and red filaments, coiled in perfect stasis. Did it begin here, the Westwood obsession with light?
Charlie’s house, his fortress on the hill, was easy to pick even from a distance. By day, it was a square stack of brick and tile, the plain sister dumped down between lacy Federation mansions. By night, you could tell it apart by the sheer candle-power lighting its windows bright yellow-white. Fluorescent tubes lay faintly buzzing beneath each solid timber pelmet; bulbs were hung, wallmounted, bayoneted into the standing lamps that stood behind each chair in the lounge. Underneath the purpleveined foliage of plastic plants on the hearth were the tubes of bright light that made them glow. Once she heard her father, his voice turning tight and nasty, say that the old man had a mania as well as a heart condition. A mania for power, her father said, of the hydroelectric kind. She remembers him saying that her grandfather would dam every last river in Tasmania if it would mean a brighter light. A light bright enough to flood the poverty of his childhood. Charlie wouldn’t let her read under anything less than a 100-watt globe. He even went into her father’s house
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and took the lightbulb in her bedroom out of its socket with the crumpled handkerchief that was always in his pocket, replacing it with a stronger one. Always clear, never pearl. Then there would be a fight. Doors would close and there would be shouting behind them. I’m not having my granddaughter kept in the bloody dark! And now she’s even bringing home her school books with those bloody No Dams stickers all over them! Christ! She didn’t know him when he was like that, a man amongst men, all his gentleness tucked inside his thick hide. Drowning possums my arse! he would shout. He would only swear if he thought she couldn’t hear. She’s just a kid and you’re filling her head with all your greenie bulldust! It was Charlie’s view that there could never be too much of anything, especially hydro-electric power; he believed that even before the fight over the Franklin River split the state in two. In Charlie’s mind there was never any contest between the flow of a wild river and the intense brilliance of electric light. Behind his house on the hill was the electricity tower itself, silver arms akimbo. Some of the residents in the street called it an eyesore and wanted it moved. Better than living in the bloody dark, cock, Essie once heard Charlie say to a neighbour with a petition on a clipboard. Charlie made his money from aerial spraying crops with chemicals now banned and, later, from quarrying stone in fragile labyrinths of limestone karst. The poisonous seepage was of no concern to him. He couldn’t
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believe that there were people who cared about the thinning of eggshells, the extinction of blind fish butting away in the limey darkness of caves. He had fought to survive himself. Like an aged bull seal, slowing, bearing the scars of his fights, he could not afford sentiment. Essie’s bedroom in her grandparents’ house was filled with stifling warmed air that came through ducts in the skirting boards. When it was her mother’s room, it had a wicker pram full of porcelain dolls in the corner and timber window frames. By the time it was Essie’s room the dolls were chipped, some eyeless and balding, and the window had brand-new aluminium frames surrounding its view down over the city. At night the Savings Bank of Tasmania sign lit itself up in red globes and turned on its axis. Usually it was her grandfather who put her to bed, who sat on the white candlewick bedspread and stroked her hair. Mostly he told stories, or sang as makeshift lullabies the old, crooning songs he only knew the choruses for. But at the end of it all, he could never help himself. As she was falling into sleep, he would have to remind her. Essie, darlin’, you don’t ever want to know what it’s like to be poor, he would say. To go to school with newspaper up your jacket to keep you warm, newspaper down the toes of charity shoes that are too big for your feet, to come home to a house where there’s no light but a dirty old candle. It was his sermon. He spoke it from ramparts he had built in bricks and mortar, stocks and shares, to protect first his wife and his daughter, and now his granddaughter.
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Perhaps it was growing up in that house that made Essie’s mother the way she was. Even in photographs she looked luminous, as if she had been infused with too much light. Static separated out the bright, fine filaments of her hair. In the long school holiday hours when her grandfather was at work, it was her grandmother who would pull the projector out of the cupboard, and draw the heavy drapes across the windows of the brick house on the hill. In the wedding film there was no sound except for the rattly hum of the projector and the slapping of the loose end of the film against the still-turning reel. Essie loved to see her mother blowing a pale pink kiss to the camera, a circlet of daisies set in the curling fleece of her fine white hair. She loved the crazy angles of the tall women with long hair and heavy blue eyelids, dancing in the aisle of the church and throwing flowers under her mother’s feet. And there were the two men, doll-sized in the background. The father of the bride, red-faced and bullnecked, shouting. The groom, his hands clasped before him and turned slightly upwards. It was not until much later that Essie recognised herself in the tight white silk across her mother’s belly, and understood that as the cause of the shouting. Her mother, then, must have found chinks of shadow, even under the harsh scrutiny of all that light. Charlie would never have liked her father, could never have taken to the look of him, the way his face held
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the contemplative stillness of the surfer or the saint. But the conception of a child, out of wedlock, must have put a seal on Charlie’s hatred. Sometimes Essie thinks of her mother as a moth’s wing in a mortar and pestle. It was loving her husband and her father that had worked her into a fine powder of flight-dust, as fine as her ashes, which Essie and her father had together scattered around the garden of the splintering house in the island scrub.
Outside, beyond the white circle of the tower, there is the crackling of gravel under tyres. Essie gently plucks a fingerful of calico blind to look down over the carpark. It is an Econovan, painted with the striped emblem of a thylacine. The tour guide steps out in her neat black uniform and opens the sliding door for a group of greyhaired tourists in bright plastic parkas. The tourists gather on the grass at the bottom of the slope, staying within a tight radius of the guide, as if on leashes. Essie lets the blind fall as they begin to walk up the path, the men in bright white sneakers and carrying cameras and video cameras to dutifully record the visit. She thinks of the open padlock on the lighthouse door, the bolt slid across, and hopes they won’t notice. She tells herself it’s unlikely that they will. More likely they will come up to the top of the hill, and listen to the tour guide give her practised speech. They will look up at the
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tower and out to sea, and for a moment they will imagine. Imagine what it would have been like, husbands will say to wives and wives to husbands. Imagine the cold, the loneliness, they will say to each other. And then they will grow bored and begin to think about the warm bus and Devonshire tea at the Penguin Tearooms. Essie peeks out from behind a blind on the other side of the lantern room, looking out over the ocean. It’s raining out to sea, a vague margin of grey mizzle joining sea to sky. She unpacks her day-pack and folds it in half to sit on; some protection at least from the cold grid of the wroughtiron floor. Voices drift up from outside, in through the daisy vents in the lower deck. The tour guide is telling them about the ships wrecked in these parts and Essie knows they will be imagining the Antarctic-cold of the water, the height of the waves, the massive bulk of those pleated cliffs when seen from the sea. On the floor is her suede-covered notebook and the tightly sprung black plastic box that contains her fountain pen. There is the old lightstation logbook, its covers of thick card laminated with thin paper in a marble design, its spine held together with thin, fraying strands of green binding tape. Inside, the pages are a thick, gritty blue with columns listing the quantities of colza, kerosene and wick consumed during each night of the lantern’s use written in her great-great-grandfather’s hand. There is a collection of documents tucked into its covers, fragile oblongs of brownish paper, some marked
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with shattered crescents of red sealing wax. She unfolds them and lays them about her where she sits cross-legged on the wrought iron. Certificates of births, marriages and deaths. She picks them up, each in turn, and adds and subtracts. She spaces out in her mind the years between births and marriages, marriages and deaths, matching them each to the chronology of the lighthouse itself. By the time she stands up to stretch her cramped, cold body, the shiny Econovan is no longer in the carpark at the bottom of the hill. It has left behind only a curving mark in the dark gravel. Essie looks into the lantern, set in the centre of the room like a jewel. Each prismatic face holds shards of rainbow, flickering and shimmering as if the entire structure was alive. Did Alva stand here, in her thick stockings and boots and her long serge skirt with the high waist and pleats, staring through panels of glass into the heart of this lantern? She must have done. She would have been a young woman when the new Chance lantern arrived. It is, in essence, the same lantern that sits in the tower now, although each louvred pane of glass would have been smashed and replaced several times over the century, and the workings inside have been changed from kerosene to electricity. Did she stand here and watch her father light the delicate webbed mantle? Was she amazed by it, the impregnated fabric burning up in the flame, leaving behind a glowing globe of a substance which ought not hold together at all? A ball of thorium oxide inside Mr
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Chance’s glimmering cage of lenses and prisms emitted ten times the candle power of the previous lantern with its silver parabolas and glass chimney lanterns. Essie holds her hands out to the lantern, as if she expects to feel heat on her open palms. Did Alva watch the lantern revolve on its planetary table while, outside, the stars made their slow traverse of the night sky? Did her father show her how to wind the small handle, pressurising the paraffin, sending it seeping through a valve as vapour to feed the delicate sphere of the mantle? Did she stand here and listen to her father’s tales of storms, and shipwrecks and figureheads lost and found again in the seas of the world? Essie settles herself back on the floor and opens her notebook, scoring the fold of a fresh page with a thumbnail down the ridge of the spine.
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hey came into being almost simultaneously, as it happens, although the events which led to the creation of the lighthouse were somewhat more momentous than those which led to the creation of my father. While the lighthouse sprang up directly in the wake of a famous shipwreck, in truth it owed its life to the great tide of colonisation itself. It was completed in the year 1838, just one of the beacons erected to mark out in light the oceanic highways of the British Empire, to keep the light of the Empire burning wherever night fell on it. Imagine the year 1835 on an April night on this treeless cape on a southern coast. The waxing moon made a circle of pale light in the sky, its own flattened disk at the centre, the periphery filled with swirling cloud. The light would have been enough to make out the saw blade of peaks on the larger island to the west, and the smooth curving water of the channel’s mouth. It wasn’t a wild night, not at all the sort of night on which you would expect a shipwreck to occur. Sailing into the mouth of the channel was George III, the small stars of her lanterns hanging, swinging in her rigging.
T
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She rounded a headland, sailed past the opening of the safe anchorage of Recherche Bay, heading for Hobart Town. Another captain would have taken his ship around the cape, around the south of the island and into Hobart through the wide, deep expanse of Storm Bay. But the captain had been swayed by his surgeon, one Mr Moxley. He had a ship’s hospital full of convicts, racked with scurvy and dying by the day. By taking his ship through the channel, he told the captain, they could save days and lives. The captain had his vessel under close-hauled sail, and ordered the helmsman to keep well off the land. Somewhere on his port side was a reef, named Actaeon for just one of the ships that had foundered there. The captain navigated his ship safely past the reef, only to plough her into a submerged rock to its north. The sound of splitting timbers would not have reached the cape, nor the sounds that would haunt the surgeon — a compassionate man, it would be written — for the rest of his natural life. On the cape you would not have heard the knocking, the thumping, the drumming of the convicts bolted below decks who died while the free settlers and soldiers took to the lifeboats. Nor their pleas of ‘Mr Moxley, Mr Moxley, you promised you would stand by us.’ Nor the two gunshots that, it is said, were fired into the hold to quell the rising tide of prisoners who would be left behind when the lifeboats made their way to the shore. Now imagine it is two years later, at the same cape at low tide. High and dry were the muscular tubers holding the kelp fast to the faces of the cliffs and, out in the channel, a white rim
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of surf circled a rock named George III. At the highest point of the cape, a tower was rising. Almost day’s end, and the workmen had limped down the hill to their rough camp. He alone, the convict overseer, stood to survey it, this shell, this near-circle of rock and rubble high on the cape. It seemed to him that it was more of a ruin than something being built. His mind had become untamed here, leaping out ahead of him beyond life, beyond death to decay. He no longer knew if he was building a tower — to ascend, a free man — or a marker for his own grave. There was no ball and chain at the cape, just the waves breaking themselves apart on the cliffs, the cold snapping at their heels, clawing at their backs through their thin shirts. It was March 31 of the year 1838 when the new Lieutenant-Governor, Sir John Franklin, sat down to put pen to paper. ‘The lighthouse’, he wrote, ‘on the extreme point of Bruni Island is now completed and the light is most favourably spoken of by masters of all Merchant ships since arrived, for its brilliance.’ Lieutenant-Governor Franklin would write many more letters of great importance to the colony over five years, until he was recalled to Britain to fulfil a quest. The Northwest Passage was the trophy he sought. And the history books would say that he found it, that he forged the final link of it with his own life. My father, on the other hand, owed his existence to the rather more conventional tide of matrimonial relations. It was a
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union which took place in a public house named the Pot in Hand, in King Street in the city of Great Yarmouth. It was the publican himself, one John Westwood, and his wife Phebe, whose coupling produced a boy child on March 31 of the year 1838. It is the nature of waves that they have peaks and troughs, and so it is in the Westwood family that a love of the sea struck, but not in every generation. It is not a mild thing, this love of the sea. It is not the passing thought that the ocean looks pleasant enough when you see it lying like a great tin plate, catching the drips of the sunset you are watching. It can be fierce. With it comes a certain restlessness of spirit, a feeling of something big and heaving inside your chest. When you have it, there is nothing that can be done to get rid of it. John Westwood, the publican, was a landlubber. A man with green thumbs and roots for toes and a mortal dread of the sea. His father, however, was a seafarer. He joined the Navy and served in the Phaeton Frigates before becoming master of the HMS Barracouta. He would be quite an old man when his vessel, in company with the HMS Highflyer, was engaged in the search for Sir John Franklin in the Arctic. Subsequently, when that search proved fruitless, the Barracouta was employed in suppressing piracy in the South China Sea. About the city of Great Yarmouth where my father, William, was both conceived and born, this much can be said. The land on which it was built was a gift from the sea. Over centuries, the sea brought sand. It brought it
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grain by grain — by way of reparation for thefts elsewhere — into the wide open mouth of the Yare. It brought sand until it made an island around which the river flowed in two arms to the sea. Still it brought more, until it had sealed the island on one side to the shore, making a peninsula onto which people could walk and build a city. And people came and built the city of Great Yarmouth on the flat, silty land, and enclosed it with a wall of red and brown stone, knowing that a sea that gives can also take away. They shaped their wall to the thin triangle of the peninsula, and spaced along it eleven towers with turrets herringboned and chequered in coloured stone. On the inside of the wall, near to the northeast tower, you will find a blackened face, its eyes closed, eager lips thrust forward, cheeks stretched with the effort of pushing through stone. It is the face of Willem Five, who stole three fish and two candles and was for his crime exiled from the walled city. Each time he crept back inside the walls, he was caught and thrown out again. He lived in a shelter of canvas and fishing baskets leaned up against the city wall, the materials begged, borrowed or stolen from the ships of the herring fleet. The story goes that his charred face appeared on the inside of the wall on the night that his shelter burned to the ground, when he made his last desperate attempt to return home. There should be another face pressed into that wall. Not on the inside like Willem Five’s, but on the outside, pushing through stone to look out over the Denes, the sand and tussocked flatlands spread with the drying nets of the
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fishermen, over the beaches where the herring were salted and barrelled beneath pressing, noisy flocks of buyers and gulls, over the shifting sandbanks of the Yarmouth Roads inside which was the tall forest of masts belonging to ships that sailed the world. It would be a small face, sharpish, squared by a strong jaw and blade-like cheekbones — the face of young William Westwood. Father recalled almost nothing about the first eight years of his life, except that perhaps he was not so cold, nor so often hungry, as afterwards. Details were eclipsed by an event, both tragic and bizarre, which involved the coming of a circus to the city of Great Yarmouth. In advance of the circus’ premiere there was to be an event, an advertisement of sorts, on the River Bure, which bordered the city gates. It was to be performed by Nelson, the company’s principal low comedian. The wiseacres of the town shook their heads and prophesied disaster when it was announced that this event was to take place on a Friday. It was a seafaring town, full of superstitious men who knew better than to set sail on that day of the week. The handbills, in a medley of types, informed the townspeople that Mr Nelson, ‘the modern Yorrick’, planned to sail along the river in ‘a common washing tub, drawn by four real geese, elegantly harnessed and caparisoned’, and begged the question ‘IS IT TO BE A PUBLIC BENEFIT OR NOT?’ Carrying a violin, Nelson placed himself in the tub, eighteen inches deep, and began a journey, apparently
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propelled by the harnessed geese, that was scheduled to conclude at the Vauxhall Gardens. Later, the coronial inquiry would reveal that the tub was not in fact propelled by the birds, but by a small sailboat which preceded it at some distance down the river — largely unnoticed by the crowd which had gathered on the riverbanks to watch the fiddling fool — by means of a weighted cable beneath the water’s surface. The illusion was not a new one, having been performed many times upon the Thames; but the citizens of Great Yarmouth who gathered to watch were unworldly folk, and too hungry for spectacle to note that the geese were often pulling in contrary directions, sometimes even swimming upstream against the direction of the clown’s passage. High on his father’s shoulders, young William felt the swirl and surge of the crowd beneath and all around him, could smell the feral scent of high spirits in the air even above the perpetual stench of herring. Beneath him were faces he barely recognised, as he had never seen them laughing. As the clown quavered downstream, towards the convergence of the rivers Bure and Yare, the two halves of the crowd on the riverbanks flowed simultaneously onto the suspension bridge which spanned the water. Children pushed forwards, squeezing through the gaps in tight-pressed bodies, between the trunks of adult legs, to watch the spectacle sitting with their feet dangling over the bridge’s edge, holding on to the railings. William held fast with his knees as his father jostled, pushing to the front to gain a box seat in the bridge’s centre. Then somewhere a coin flipped, high on its arc. The
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silvered edge was so narrow that it seemed to William that for just a moment he saw both faces of the disc at once, or at least one so soon after the other that the impression of the former lingered, and the two merged in his mind. They did not seem so different, having at least the same quality of excess, of collectivity; the infectious, inflatable joy of the carnival, then the wave of panic. Held so high, William himself was thrown clear when the congregation all on one side resulted in the bridge folding into the shape of a coal scuttle, pouring four hundred spectators into the water of the Bure. The strong tide caught up the crowd, and held them fast against the dangling iron net of the bridge, the strongest of the drowning holding themselves up by pushing down on the nearest heads. William felt a deathly, deep blue vortex opening, given depth by the unheard sound of grown men screaming. All told, seventy-nine people were drowned, most of them children. The body of William’s father was large among the small human shapes that were unthreaded from the iron diamonds of the bridge railing when it was hauled out of the river. The circus did not perform in Great Yarmouth and Nelson the Clown never performed again. By the age of fifteen, William had begun to think of little but his desire to escape the thick medieval stone walls of Great Yarmouth which penned him in. The world beyond spun like a globe, wheeling on the axis of this pinprick of a city on the East Anglian coast. Oceans, continents, islands, poles flashed
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by and he wanted to hold them in his hands. He had sailed in small boats, but never far enough. He longed to lose sight of land, to cut himself adrift from the anchor of earth. Shortly after his fifteenth birthday, a letter came for William. It contained the news of his grandfather’s death, details of the location of his grave on the shores of the River Min, and the magnificent sum of thirty pounds. Within days of the letter’s receipt, the magnificent sum was in the pocket of the skipper of the brigantine Highlander, and William Westwood had bound himself apprentice to the sea. Later, when my father would recount the tale of the circus in the foc’s’les of various ships and, later still, to his children in the lighthouse tower, he told it with a dark comic turn, adding a broken violin floating past him as he swam to the safety of the shore, and concluding by saying, mysteriously, ‘History has not recorded the fate of the geese’.
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t seems to Pete that sleep lies at the bottom of a clear, pebble-lined pool. To reach it, he must lie on his back and allow himself to sink, his limbs heavy and relaxed, down to its depth. But he is too buoyant. Night after night he tries to force himself to sink, to fight himself down into sleep. And often, of course, he fails. In the early hours of a chilly morning, he gives up and gets out of bed. He climbs into the cold cocoon of clothes left crumpled on the floor and goes outside. The sky above him is clear, telling him that the front that was due to pass overnight has again skirted around his part of the island and failed to bring him rain. He taps the side of his water tank, and the result is as dismal as he suspected it would be. It was something he didn’t think of when he bought the Aframe house: that his total water catchment was the meagre square-metreage of the shed roof and of the roof of the small kitchen affixed to the back of the house. Inside the shed, he flicks on the gentle orange light that only barely stuns his eyes. On his workbench is the robotic face of his welding helmet. He uses his fingers to wipe the
I
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dust from its small rectangular window and the whorls of his fingerprints leave rainbow-coloured smear-lines on the dark glass. And the memory comes, as he knows it will. Of a bright green crescent sun, late in the afternoon. Of a concrete verandah with pots of rubbery cacti and a swan carved out of an old tyre, the weight of them both on that precarious striped banana lounge, her thick brown curls on his chest, the dry-mouthed fug of being too stoned, sharing the welding helmet to safely watch the solar eclipse, taking turns to look through the dark glass at the shadow obscuring the green disc of the sun. He wonders how long it will be before these triggers fail, before the connections rust. He believes he ought to be able to break them himself, and it makes him feel weak that he can’t. Fuck her. More than anything, he resents that Caroline made him waste that time down south on Macquarie. Now he doesn’t know if they’re ever going to let him go back there. If she’d had more guts, if she’d told him straight away, rather than waiting until he got home, he could have used that time. He could have used all that walking, that ball-breaking pain. He could have slogged her out of himself, marching through sub-Antarctic winter nights, worn her out of himself crossing the featherbed, with each step down to his thigh in a thick layer of peatbog that rested on metres of clear water beneath, each step a fight against the relentless suck on his boots. He could have used those nights, so cold he could barely find his shrunken dick to take it out for a piss. He could have used
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the waiting, sitting quiet and still with spotlight and rifle, watching for cats too clever by half. Caroline had sauntered into his life with her easy stride, rolling on the balls of her feet. A mung bean straight out of Queensland, not used to wearing shoes. She’d moved into the sleep-out, the smallest room in the share-house he lived in, had draped its walls with brightly coloured sarongs and filled up its air with puffs of exoticsmelling incense. She smiled at him over breakfast, chattering to him while he hunched over his sugary bowl of Cornflakes. It was his feet that she touched first, one night in the living room, when there was a bunch of people over, drinking beers and talking about this and that. Uninvited, she’d grabbed one of his big boots and pulled it off, then the other. She’d started working her strong knuckles and fingers into his soles through the thick, pilled wool of his socks, still talking away, as if this touching was nothing. It made blood pump to his face, to his groin. The pleasure of it had almost hurt. When everyone left, he’d fucked her on the floor. He couldn’t pretend to himself that it was anything more than that, the first time. He felt his whole body painfully taut, the edges of it slicing into the dough of her woman’s flesh. That was their beginning. A beginning that each of them knew better than to try to romanticise later. It was an aberration they allowed to slide, an event that had no place in the soft-whispered memories that would later
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make up their own private mythology of the beginning. That would be made instead out of sleepy weekend mornings in his man-like bed with its unmatched flannel sheets and saggy mattress, and of late nights when she came home after closing time at the pub where she worked with her hair smelling of cigarette smoke. And of the weeks that it took her to knead all the parts of him, to work her knuckles and elbows and knees into his body until she turned him from high-tension wire back into skin, bone and muscle. When he thinks of those early times he thinks not only of the den-like scent of those flannel sheets, but also of the numb touching of noses on cold mornings in the bush, the lemony smell of crushed leaves between her fingers with their perpetually dirty nails. She took him bush, to places he’d practically been brought up in, with his uncles shooting rabbits, possums and roos. She tried to get him to see these places with her eyes. She used words like beauty and magic for scabby old gum trees as common as muck. And he had scoffed at her, called her a mung bean, until he felt a stab through the heart, through an old wound, like memory. Love he’d forgotten about, flowing like sap. And the forest stopped feeling like the outdoors. It began to feel like the most perfect of rooms, carpeted with moss or litter or grass, everything — trees standing or fallen, dead or alive — in exactly the right place. It was a passionate conversion. He found that there was a place for him in the fight Caroline was always on
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about. He could make things, build things, fix things and, when necessary, break things in the most subtle of ways. During one campaign he’d built a platform in the branches of a gargantuan eucalypt that was marked for felling. He engineered a pulley system for raising and lowering supplies. He remembers the weeks up on that platform as the best of times; just the two of them, talking, playing euchre for hours with a pack of damp sticky cards, waking up in Arctic-weight sleeping bags under the beautiful olive canopy of the tree. It felt good to be fighting a war knowing you were on the right side. There was even a role in the war for a man handy with a gun. Down on Macquarie Island, shooting cats. That was why he went. To do something good. He thought she would be proud of him. He had believed her when she said she would wait. Other people did it. Other men, they left their wives and small children and travelled south to the continent. The Division gave her forms to fill in as well, sent her pamphlets about the counsellors she could call if things got tough. On the forms she had written de facto in the space left for ‘relationship’. At the time, he was stupid enough to believe that they were words that meant something. A year he was away. He did a winter, earning the right to think of summerers as soft-cocks. He tried not to talk to Caroline on the phone too much. It didn’t do him any good, just messed with his head. At the end of his time, it took four nights and three days to get home. It was like
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coming back from space through the great blue marbling of sea and sky. His cast-iron gut turned to water on the ship, all weak and liquid with just the thought of her being there on the wharf. He’d catch himself smiling stupidly to himself in the mirror of the bathroom. He even got a mate to shave his hair close. He wanted to look good. Fuck her. She’d brought out things in him that he didn’t know were there, and now he couldn’t stuff them back down inside himself. Three years now he’s been lugging around this big, billowing parachute that he doesn’t know how to pack down again. He didn’t know he’d ever have to try, until that day at the wharf. He saw her as the big orange ship pulled alongside. She was wearing a blue top with marks where the dye had streaked out of it. The mass of her curly hair was all limp, her face half-turned away from the docking ship. He noticed that she was standing by the edge of a puddle that was slicked with rainbow, and it looked as if all the life and colour had just leaked out of her onto the concrete. When they got home, he found that she’d already packed, and was just waiting until he got back before taking her things away. On the first empty night in the house, they slept on a bed surrounded by packing boxes. The moon came through the window, and she had cried and said, You were just gone for too long. I’ve lost the feeling and I can’t make it come back. It was irreversible, too late. If I’d known, I would never have gone, he told her.
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I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. All at the same time he had wanted to hit her and he had wanted to hold her and stop her from crying. Now he has to try to do his forgetting here, on another island. But there’s no walking like that any more, and he’s so fit there’s hardly anything he can do that hurts enough, that makes enough pain to fill every last cul-de-sac of his mind. Walking still feels like levitating without the heaviness of a gun and a pack on his back. The only thing that gives him any relief is this pile of metal. He doesn’t sleep much. He spends his nights out here in the shed with the blue breath of the welder, the flow of the molten metal, connecting piece to piece.
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here is a set of identical, bright winter days. The air and the colours at the cape are flint-sharp, the sun on its lower arc making the surrounding waters a flat, hard blue. Then comes an afternoon when the white flourishes of mares’ tails appear in the late morning sky. In the lantern room of the lighthouse, mercury shrinks inside a narrow cylinder of glass and Essie watches the sky while wispy tendrils of cloud drift eastward. Behind them, out to sea, a bulkhead of dense cloud is darkening. The hot tea from the thermos stings Essie’s hands through the plastic cup, her skin reddening and swelling with the threat of chilblains. Through the curving glass of the lighthouse window, she watches the storm. She watches the wind blow the sea into a violent meringue of grey and white peaks. Rain and waves together wet down the razorback rocks that lead out into the water off the cape, making them slick and black. The shapes of the land across the channel to the west disappear in greyness. When the squall hits the cape, it’s as if the lantern room is the eye of the storm. Outside there are the
T
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rushing gusts of wind, and the sounds of waves smacking harder and higher on the faces of the cliffs; but inside the tower Essie feels nothing but the dead weight of cold, unmoved air. Essie remembers the sound of the wind against the timbers of the A-frame house where she lived with her parents as a small child. The wind outside was something huge and shaggy, sniffing around in the darkness, hurling itself against the fragile house which cowered and swayed. It could get its fingers in between the cracks in the timbers and Essie felt small inside her bed, small enough to be picked up and stolen away through a gap between warped planks. She remembers a time when her father sat by her bed and stroked her hair while the wind howled and blustered. Even when it thundered into the house with its balled fists of air, he wasn’t afraid. He must have been about as old as she is now. Not quite thirty. She remembers his young face — oval, monkish in its stillness — and wonders at the trust she placed in him at an age when she herself still feels so formless, not strong enough even to break the fall of a solid nugget of child’s faith. The tenderness of him, enveloping the curve of her head with his big hand, is enough to hurt her now. After her mother died, Essie’s childhood became a chequerboard, her weeks split into two colours, the
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opposing camps of her father and her grandfather. There were other children at her school who lived week-about with their separated parents. In their homes there were step-parents, and brothers and sisters, stepped or halved. She was the only child she knew who lived one week with her father, one week with her grandparents. Everything in her grandparents’ home was warmed, softened. There was heating in the floors and, it seemed, in the double-bricked walls too. The toilet set had a fluffy pink covering that matched the mat at the base of the pedestal. For dessert, every night, there was the warm pulp of stewed fruit in a bowl with sweet custard. Essie’s uniform, pressed, hung on the back of her bedroom door. Her school bag was packed the night before, always. Her father’s house by the river was not unlike the Aframe house in the island scrub. It too had thin walls and window panes that shuddered with each breath of wind off the water. The towels were scratchy and the cold lino of the bathroom floor stung Essie’s bare feet. In the kitchen and in the living room, on each table and next to each sagging chair, were stacks of books and papers. Her father taught at the university. The world is full of educated derelicts, Charlie would sometimes say, and although Essie didn’t know exactly what that meant, she knew it was to do with her father. Essie felt the demands of his students pressing on her father when he sat up through the night slowly moving the piles of paper from one side of his chair to the other
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across his lap. Mornings were a scramble. There was wet hair and cold toast in the car on the way to school. When she thinks of him during this time she thinks of weariness, both his and hers. She remembers the way he would take off his glasses and lay them on the arm of his chair, and push into the sockets of his eyes with his knuckles. She remembers the heaviness of the house, of him, weighing down on her. Aged seventeen — afraid, but determined to conceal it — she moved by herself into a tiny West Hobart bedsit. It had a view of the city from the toilet window. You’re like a bloody rat in a trap here, Charlie had said, fearing rapists and thieves. He fitted an extra lock to the flat’s front door without asking the landlord. She finished her final year of school while living there, surviving on packet soups and noodles. The end of her schooling was a milestone for her father, too. Soon after, he left his job and the country. Still a traveller, these days her father exists for her only on oblongs of pale blue paper that are covered with his slanting handwriting. His letters come to her from hot, poor places where there have been tidal waves, earthquakes or wars. Natural disasters are his particular interest. He has filled many pages with the topic, seeming to take a bitter pleasure in the death tolls from famine, flood, fire; in the proof of nature’s unwillingness to support the plague of humanity. After reading about events at Port Arthur, he wrote to her that he had decided to reclassify massacres as natural disasters. Cannibalism,
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he wrote, devouring each other, as any species will when it has run out of room. Although it is convenient to think of it as a widower’s curse, she knows that the coldness about him was a permanent fixture. Even in the days when they sat on the island’s beaches together, when he smoothed her hair on squally nights, his face was like marble, a mask with two eyeholes, filled with the sea. She was only a child, but already a weather forecaster, trained to catch in his eyes the frozen moment which meant the turning tide, from bright-blue calm to grey-blue overcast, or the crackling aqua-blue of his anger. Essie sets Alva’s picture down on the metal catwalk of the lantern room. She glances at the pale face inside the pewter frame. In her notebook, the words she has already written have dried into the weave of the paper. The fresh words she writes beneath them appear slick and dark on the page.
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n fact, Father was not the lighthouse keeper. He was the Superintendent of the Cape Bruny Lightstation, which you will find on a southern tip of an island off an island, one of the last before the southern hemisphere rounds itself into a cup of ice. As Superintendent he was not required to keep watch in the tower. The head keeper and two assistant keepers were employed for that. Nevertheless, each Sunday he took the noon ’til four o’clock watch, directly after the church service. Trinity House rules, which covered life at lightstations throughout the colonies, specified that keepers were ‘to attend a place of worship upon each Sunday, and when this rule should, by reason of distance, be incompatible with the performance of the lighthouse service, the Superintendent should, at least once in every Sunday, assemble his own family and his assistants and their families, in his own dwelling or other convenient place and there read to them the church service for the day, also a sermon or homily from the volume provided for this purpose’. Father had been almost twenty-five years at sea before taking up his post at Cape Bruny, and from his travels around the world he had been exposed to a tantalising mixture of
I
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evangelical styles. These he mixed into his sermons and homilies, which we strained to hear, since Father had lost the better part of his voice in an illness which curtailed his career as a ship’s captain. Frequently, he eschewed the homilies provided, preferring anecdotes with a maritime theme. Often, however, when he came to the point where the moral of the story ought to have been, it was found to be missing. Father was not a religious man in any orthodox sense of the word, but if he believed in anything fervently, it was in the golden beam of light which nightly washed the waters and rocks of the cape. I would still be dressed in my best clothes when I walked the path up the hill on Sunday afternoons to visit Father in the lighthouse, his true place of worship. ‘The essential fact of a beacon,’ he would say to me each Sunday, ‘is that it must always be there. It must never fail. The lives of mariners are in our hands and we must never be found wanting.’ Each lighthouse has a distinct pattern of flash and eclipse that enables mariners to identify it. This cycle of light and dark is described as the ‘character’ of a lighthouse. ‘If only,’ my father would sometimes say, ‘it was so easy to tell the character of a man.’ The interior of the lighthouse was a circlet of stillness. Cold, gleaming white. I would stand just inside the door in my pressed white shirt with the sailor’s collar, my pleated skirt and black stockings. Looking up, I could almost see my breath ricocheting around the tower like a moth, darting in and out of the snail’s shell of wrought-iron stairs which curled upwards
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into a pinpoint of perspective. Climbing slowly, although I tried to be silent, my boots would clang on the metal steps that led in a spiral past three windows. On the outside of the tower the windows were rimmed with black paint like three buttons on a gentleman’s dress shirt. At night, their centres glowed amber from the light inside the tower. At the top of the stairs was the lower deck, an anteroom to the lantern chamber. There was a small wooden cot for an offduty keeper to lay down his head. On the curving wall there were paintings of ships labouring in rough seas, hung there as reminders of the solemnity of a lightkeeper’s duty. Through the core of the ceiling a column of lead weights descended, hung in counterbalance to the lantern above. On the ultimate level was the lantern itself. I thought it was a beautiful thing, shining and complex. It had three faces, each with seven silver dishes set in a diamond formation: rows of two, three, two. In front of each dish was mounted a small light with a glass chimney. The entire contraption turned upon a planetary table, each revolution taking two minutes and thirty-nine seconds. A mariner on the sea would see the light flash for three seconds, followed by an eclipse of fifty seconds as the three panels of light presented themselves in turn. I was well versed in the accomplishments of the Frenchman Mr Argand and the Englishman Mr Hutcheson, as Father spoke of them often. He showed me the concentric rings of the wicks invented by Mr Argand, circles of cotton webbing that allowed air to pass on both sides of the flame, making it brighter and cleaner and keeping the glass chimneys largely
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free of soot. He demonstrated the clever curve of Mr Hutcheson’s silver dishes, and told me how Mr Hutcheson had experimented with a bowl full of putty studded with shards of mirror and discovered that a curve shaped just so would catch up all the radiance of the flame and send it out in brilliant parallel lines. Daily, the keepers circumnavigated the lantern with fine French chamois cloths, polishing each silver parabola until it shone, and then polishing it one more time for luck. Nightly they fed the lantern’s needs, keeping up to it the less viscous colza oil that had replaced the oil from the sperm whale. Father was one of those involved in the search for the new oil. Clearly, the ocean’s supply of whales was not going to be sufficient to maintain the lighthouse lanterns, the small stars of the British Empire that sparkled wherever darkness fell on the globe. Even when I was a child, there were very few whales left, although a sperm whale did beach itself one year in Lighthouse Bay. During the hot summer morning, while the men of the station decided how to approach this boon, the whale died slowly. Its black skin puckered and shrivelled in the heat. I remember that taut, peeling skin with bloody sink-holes in it where the gulls were already beginning to feed. Every now and then there would be a small explosion as the pressure of the fermenting flesh caused an eruption of blood and tissue through the skin. Muttonbird oil was among those they tried, but it smoked too much and left the glass chimneys covered with soot. In the
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end it was colza they settled on, an oil pressed from the seeds of a wild cabbage. These, and many other things, Father would tell me on Sundays. If it was cold and wet, we would confine ourselves to the lantern room. Father loved to polish the brass vents and fixtures, to watch the tarnish come up as green froth under his fist. I believe that he found this task meditative, that it transported him back into his sailor’s uniform, toiling aboard the deck of a ship. If the weather was fine, we could be found on the balcony which circled the lantern room. Father’s eyes drank the blue. He gripped the rail as if holding himself fast against the pull of the ocean, his hands bent and clawed, with freckled skin as crisp as dried fish skin. It is a view that is too large to tire of. No amount of staring into that hemisphere of sea and sky and land could inure you to it. I remember the first time I was tall enough to place my chin on that railing and see the view beyond clearly. Before that I had seen it only through the wrought-iron curlicues set under the railing, beyond the stalactites of hardened white paint dripping from their curves. To the south was a great wedge of open ocean. To me it was a gigantic stage across which the weather moved as if in a pantomime. On that particular day gruff, steely clouds thundered in, only to be speared by sunlight. Rain fell in grey curtains on either side of the scene. The blue-metal bar of the ocean horizon seemed straight and true, but it held secrets. Father would sometimes set up the telescope and put down a crate for me to stand on. With one eye squinted up tight, I would lean forward carefully and look
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into this perfect circle, punched out of the distance and brought close for inspection. Inside it was an iceberg, or so it seemed. A jagged white shape, its triangular peaks like the crown of a queen. But it was an iceberg which never melted or moved. It was the island of Pedra Branca, white from the droppings of the birds. Once each year at Cape Bruny Lightstation, and usually on a Sunday, came the Vice-Regal visit. The Governor and his wife and their friends would join us for our modest church service, and undertake the obligatory inspection of the lighthouse. Afterwards they would walk the narrow paths of the cape, prodding the undergrowth with their sticks to make the birds fly about so that they could point at them and argue about the colours of their caps or throats or underwings and, if they won the argument, tick them off their lists. It was the year 1892, in which I was twelve years old, that the photographer Mr Beattie was numbered among the ViceRegal party. It was his obligation to take flattering photographs of Lady So-and-So striding fearlessly in her long skirts through the vegetation, and of Sir Whatsisname posing Vice-Regally alongside a bemused-looking Father at the base of the lighthouse. As we did each year on the day of the Vice-Regal visit, Father and I went into hiding. That particular day we slipped, in perfect complicity, down one of the paths that cut through the scrubby hillside all the way to the shore. We often walked that way together, emerging from the path onto a
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terrace of fist-sized stones. Waves pushed up under the stones and I loved the sound of the water seething and crackling as it was sucked back out into the sea. We crossed the stones and came to the beach, on which Father always walked with his speckled hands folded neatly as a pair of gloves behind his back. I flew along the beach, breathing in the tang of salt and rotting seaweed. I raced towards the rivulet which carved a tannin-coloured path through the sand to the sea, next to which was our dinghy. Clinker-built, it had washed ashore, largely intact, during a storm, and Father had attached a painter to the ring-bolt at the front and secured it to an anchor high in the dunes. When the tide came all the way in, it floated. When the tide was out, it rested on the sand. Sometimes we would sit in that dinghy, myself hauling on the salt-bitten timber oars, while Father told his tall tales of shipwrecks and sirens and storms. On that day, the surface of the water was covered with veiny patterns of bubbles which broke apart and re-formed in the chop of the waves. In the place where the faint but insistent push of the rivulet met the fringes of the incoming waves, the bubbles had rafted up into an eiderdown of dirty foam. I knew immediately what it was. It was a mermaid, or at least what was left of her. Her skeleton, perhaps, made up of hundreds of perfect round bubbles. I knew what it was because I had read in my big blue-bound book of fairy tales that mermaids lived three hundred years, but did not possess an immortal soul. When they died, they became foam, floating on the surface of the waves.
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Coming up behind me, Father saw her too, and squatted down beside me to look more closely. He took a stick and probed the mass of foam, an amateur naturalist at work. I think now that he was most probably humouring me. But then, I thought he was trying to identify the parts, to locate the tail or the head. I remember watching his progress sceptically. I was fairly certain that mermaid skeletons weren’t like other skeletons. They wouldn’t have parts, like the tiny hinged bones and fragile skulls that were left of seahorses, or the fetid ribs of a whale after flensing. Crouched there by the rivulet, we watched over the mermaid for a long time. We watched as the tide came in, observed the uneven increments of the waves as they began to take our mermaid apart, each wave carrying a single globe of her skeleton out into the deep of the sea. And that was where the photographer Mr Beattie found us. He must have been relieving himself in the dunes, as he was doing up the buttons of his flies as he emerged onto the beach along the bank of the rivulet, the black box of his camera swinging on its neck strap and banging into his chest. Perhaps he understood what it was that absorbed our attention. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he was not watching the dissolving mermaid, but only composing in his mind the photograph he was about to take, fitting together in his mind the shape of the dinghy and that of the white-haired girl with her father’s cap on her head. But nevertheless, he watched with us while the sea washed clean the place where the mermaid had lain, watched while it smoothed the banks of the
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rivulet, until there was nothing left but the clear lap of shallow water on sand. So, should you ever chance upon the postcard titled ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter’, look closely at the space between the stern of the dinghy and the edge of the frame. You will see that there is no longer anything there.
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II
Isthmus
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May
emo sibi nascitur. It was her school motto, embroidered in scarlet thread on the pocket of her blazer. No man is an island. She remembers seeing the translation written as the title of a print in a gallery. No, man is an island, it had read. She had smiled at the subversive power of a single comma.
N
There is at the cape a piece of land that both is, and is not, an island. From the base of the lighthouse tower it looks like nothing more than the next crest in a sine wave of landforms. But from the lantern room Essie has seen the narrow channel separating the sloping shape of it from the cape. Court’s Island, the maps call it, made of different stuff from the cape, covered in a plush mossy pelt of a more vivid green. From the tower, she has over the shortening days observed the falling tides, and seen a narrow isthmus of stones exposed, making the island part of the cape. And she has watched the tides return, separating it once again. Today she takes the track that begins at the base of the tower, winding through the scrub in the direction of
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the island. The track is narrow and in the dried mud are the fat, rounded stars of cat prints, as well as the long, leafy marks of wallaby tracks. The path continues out onto a promontory, narrowing to form a bridge over the grey turbulence of the sea. She crosses and scrambles down the shale-littered drop to the base of the slope, holding on for balance to the prickly branches of the sparse shrubs. This is where the path should end, here at the water’s edge. But the tide is going out, and as the water surges away she sees the isthmus rising out of the waves. Its round, wet stones roll together beneath her feet. The same stones make a fringe for the island, above which its emerald slopes rise up. When she reaches the other side of the isthmus, she sees the covering is not moss, but wind-sheared scrub, waist-high. She follows the wave-washed skirt of stones around the island, and after a while the round stones give way to serrated rock she has to scrabble over. She walks until her way is split by a deep cleft where water has cut the stone. Waves hammer into a narrow channel, removing the land particle by particle. She thinks of the deep ocean where it rains pieces of everything: small nuggets of mountains scoured away by crystal-hard streams, the red and brown dust of earth blown and then washed away,fragments of dead things that lived in the upper layers of the sea. Great, blind fish live in this constant drizzle of stone and dust and bone. She thinks of the tremendous age of the stone beneath her and remembers a question her father had asked.
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Do you know the name of the island we live on? She was very young, still a child with a mother. Until the moment he asked, she had known the answer to that question, known the island’s name as well as her own. But just the fact that he had asked had disordered her thoughts, made the name dart to the back of her mind like a blenny fish under a rock. Her toes squirmed into cold sand, and then she remembered. Bruny! she had said triumphantly. But he had shaken his head, and it was as she had expected: his question was a trick, and she was wrong. Then he had taken a quill, a blanched length of driftwood with a point, and written on the tide-smoothed canvas of sand. He wrote in flowing cursive, buttermilk-coloured grains piling up in rims around the perfect curves and angles of his letters. Lunawanna-Alonnah The first people who lived here called the island Lunawanna-Alonnah, he said. And she had understood then that she would never be as clever as her father, knowing everything, making letters in the sand all sized the same and angled just so.
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ete fills his days with work. He makes a wrought-iron staircase studded with stars and moons for the children’s floor of an ostentatious holiday house being built on the island. He turns out a rose-trimmed garden seat for a couple just moved to the island from Sydney. An expolitician and a lawyer, they wanted something on which they could sit and look over their organic vegetable garden while congratulating themselves on their escape. Pete’s mate Gibbo gets him a couple of weeks’ work fencing for one of the cattle farmers on the island, cashing in on an old talent for making fences taut with an elegant Spanish windlass. With his white blond hair and his little freckled snub nose, Gibbo’s the kind of bloke who’s always going to look like a kid, even now that he’s getting a decent spare tyre round his gut. ‘Heard about Kinross?’ the farmer asks at morning tea. Pete knows the property he’s talking about. Prime sheep country, with fifteen kilometres or more of coastline. He remembers it kitted out with all the latest gear, the shearing shed painted crayfish red with Kinross in big authoritative letters across the huge expanse of the corrugated-iron roof.
P
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‘What about it?’ he asks. ‘Sold.’ ‘Be buggered,’ says Gibbo. ‘Thought that farm was the old man’s pride and joy.’ ‘Boys’re running the business now. Think they can do more with five million bucks.’ ‘Five mill, eh? Not bad.’ ‘Never guess who bought it, though.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Abos.’ ‘Abos? Well fuck me.’ ‘Some mainland mob. Buy land for Abos who can’t prove Native Title. Fucken oath. Course they can’t prove Native Title. Not even fucken native.’ He’s a nice bloke, this farmer. Pete knows that he’s on all the committees, president of the Rotary Club, spends his evening cutting stamps off envelopes to raise money for little kids in poor countries to get immunisations. Got a lovely wife, soft creases in her face, makes nice fruit cake. Pete watches crumbs of it tumble down the farmer’s face, watches him brush it off with a solid forearm forested with dense creamy-white hair. Amazing the stuff nice blokes will come out with. ‘Black my arse. They’re as black as bloody you or me.’ He laughs goodnaturedly. Then something registers and his face clouds over. ‘Oh Jesus, sorry, Pete.’ ‘What for?’ ‘Sorry, mate, I clean forgot.’
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‘Forgot what?’ ‘I’m sorry, mate, I clean forgot you was one of them.’ Gibbo looks down as if the straw on the mess room floor had suddenly become interesting. Pete drains his tea, shrugs in a way that could mean anything, and heads back out into the paddock. One of them. He wishes he knew how that would feel.
Pete’s father had allowed him and his brother to believe that he could part the waters, just like Moses. Pete remembers this each time he looks across from the lighthouse to the low green mound of an island to its south, especially when the tide is low and great leaves of kelp dangle limp from their rubbery tubers. In his memory, it took minutes, not the hour it must have actually taken, for the tide to recede. It had seemed, back then, that the pathway rose up out of the water to make a fringe of white waves on either side. The path was made of round shining stones and crossing it felt like something you weren’t supposed to believe was true. He remembers that the green covering on the earth was like the material on a bumpy old couch and that there were holes in the earth with tufts of tussock around their openings. His dad was crouching down looking at them. ‘Here, mate, try that one,’ he said, pointing, whispering loud.
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Pete would have been eight, nine maybe, and hadn’t known what was wanted of him. ‘Stick your hand in it,’ his dad said, as if it was obvious. ‘That’s right, stick your arm down there, right up to your armpit.’ All around his arm and the sleeve of his shirt was the feeling of dirt and thin, tangled roots. His fingers were all tensed up, feeling for something, but he didn’t know what it was. ‘Watch there’s no bloody snake in there,’ his father whispered, and then threw his head back and laughed when Pete’s arm shot out of the hole. The laugh made Pete wish he’d stayed at home. He was cold, and hungry. ‘She’s right, mate, there’s no snakes here. But there might be other places, gotta be careful. Feel for the heat, that’s safe.’ Pete’s hand quivered in open space. His fingers couldn’t tell hot from cold. ‘Go on, bit further,’ his father urged him. The bird’s beak pecked his finger quick and hard. The sharp beak hit out in a rapid-fire rapport, knocking against skin, bone, nail. His arm recoiled again, and tears fizzed up inside his eyelids. ‘Jesus Christ, you have a go, Jake,’ his father said. Pete had stood, heartbroken and useless while Jacob flattened himself against the earth, pushing until his shoulder disappeared into the mouth of the hole. His brother’s dark eyes started smiling first, then his mouth
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got all big and happy-looking too. From the hole his brother pulled a greyish mass of feathers. ‘That’s a muttonbird, boys, a moonbird. Jake, give it to your brother.’ Pete held the downy bird, felt its immature wings making feeble gestures at flight. ‘You kill him, mate.’ Its eye was like a little black button, its hooked beak opened and closed. ‘Go on, like this.’ He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to say no either. The tears leaked, snot dribbled out of his nose and he sucked it back up again. He can still remember the feeling of the baby bird’s neck: a thin cord like electrical flex inside a tube of soft skin and feathers. He remembers the ease of its breaking, just the way his father showed him. Flick, snap. His thumb pushed up under its skull, the convulsing body, black shiny eyeballs clouding over. He remembers now all the birds that day, the sharp stick they drove in under the beaks and through the backs of heads. It was later that week that his dad left, for good, and took Jacob with him. Not him. Not both of them. Just Jake. It was because of the muttonbirds, he knew, and every other thing he’d ever stuffed up or not known how to do right. Pete remembers a night when his mum sat ashen-faced and chain-smoking in the living room and his nanna came around to comfort her. ‘We always knew what Jim was, Sue-Ellen, always
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knew he had a touch of it in him, but he never used to go on about it until he went and did that teaching course. Peter will be all right, thank heavens, but I hope Jacob’s got enough sense not to start going on about it,’ he heard his nanna say from where he stood out in the kitchen, the fridge door open, looking for something to eat. Inside the fridge there was a deep enamel plate with two plucked birds sitting on it; little crouched shapes covered in thick layers of yellowy fat all criss-crossed with veins.
In lieu of sleep, he works on his man. He joins the hands to the stumpy wrists and makes adjustments to the large, skeletal feet. He forms ears from the small circles and hexagons of nuts and washers that fill the old jam jars lining his narrow shelves. When it seems to be almost finished, he finds, in an old apple crate, something that interests him, something that begs for a place in the sculpture. It’s a strange irregular piece of cast, its top edge curving, its bottom edge straight. It has a hinge on the shorter side. He tries it on his man in various places, but he can’t find a place for it. Then he holds half of the hinge in one hand and opens and closes the piece as if it were a tiny car door, and has an idea. With the flame of an oxy-torch, he cuts a hole in the metal flesh beneath the pectorals, slightly to the left. He places the part over the top to be sure it fits, then makes a single bead of weld joining the left-hand edge only.
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When the bead cools he tests it, opening and closing the tiny door. He makes a latch using a small ring-bolt and a bent nail from a horseshoe. Now all he has to do is decide what it will open to reveal in this empty space where the heart should be. His notebook is really a school child’s exercise book, with bright cartoon characters on the cover. He picked it up from a newsagent’s bargain bin, years ago. It’s been everywhere, even went down south with him. Its cover is rippled with water damage, and the ruled blue lines have dissolved and formed themselves into a curving tide-mark about an inch in from the top corner of each page. What’s inside is messy and random. Sort-of poems begun in one pen and picked up in another when the ink’s run out, a different colour overwriting colourless channels of letters scratched into the page. He gets a secret pleasure out of putting words down, lining them up against each other and seeing how they fit. He doesn’t know who it is that’s talking in his head when he writes. Words come out of his pen that would never come out of his mouth. He loves these sentences he makes, repeats them over and over, rolling their unusual shapes around inside his mouth. For a while he even thinks they’re pretty good. Until he thinks of showing them to anyone else. He used to keep the notebook tucked in between the mattress and the base of his bed, or shoved in a drawer, covered over with woolly rolls of oddly paired socks. Now
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that he lives alone, he’s careless with it. It’s come to live out here in the shed, where the gutters of the pages get filled with iron filings and rust-coloured dust. On a new page he begins to sketch. The pencil is stubby with a blunted tip of soft lead. He tries out a perfect three-dimensional heart, a Valentine’s heart, but it seems too sentimental. Below it he draws a time-bomb, a ball in thick black lines, with a wick. But to make the point, the wick would have to be lit, permanently sending out a shower of sparks. Then he thinks of building another piece entirely. He sketches a vulture, imagines the hinged opening filled with its harsh, gobbling beak. It’s almost dark outside now and he pulls the thin length of cord that switches on the dim light bulb. On the window sill is the bronze plaque he took from the Neck. Just sitting there gathering dust. He touches the overlapping heads, feels the textured metal of the closecropped hair of the woman. Clean forgot you was one of them. His man stands up on a disk, stabilised by a rod up his back. Unfinished, the hinged part allows a view into the cavernous space, lit by the orangey light that pours in through the holes in the middle of washers and nuts, through the spaces between the parts. Most nights, before he begins his futile wrestle with sleep, he showers. He makes the dribbling clots of water scalding hot to make up for their lack of pressure.
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Standing in the steam he worries about water. Sometimes he squirts a small amount of hair conditioner into the palm of his hand to smooth the mechanical process of divesting himself of built-up sexual tension. This is how it is then, he tells himself, and this is how it’s going to be. He tells himself he might as well get used to this soulless release. He tells himself that he might as well stop thinking about how it used to feel with Caroline, how it might feel with that cat-eyed, blonde girl on the television news. But this only makes him think about it more. He remembers the way Caroline had been something of a performer in bed. The actress in her escaped at the moment of orgasm with shrieks and moans that had embarrassed him. Even before orgasm, she’d been given to a certain theatricality in her threshing and thrusting. It was a kind of fake, lurid eroticism and it had always worried him that she did it because she thought he liked it, but he could never quite bring himself to lay that thought bare in words. Thinking about that takes time, while water spirals down the plughole and makes him worry about the cost of getting a tank of water delivered. He tries to think instead about the times he liked best, those times when he could calm her, still her, and just concentrate on the simplicity and sincerity of skin against skin.
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t’s something else she’s forgotten during her years in the west, just how fast weather can change. In Perth, her body merged with the rhythms of summer’s ceaseless blue days. But on every day here at the cape, the sky clouds and clears as quickly as time-lapse footage. The nights are no different. Sometimes she wakes to the sound of wind or rain, imagines the barbed lines of cold fronts and the mobile concentric rings of isobars inscribed on the dark, swirling sky. Earlier this night, there was drizzle and the glass of the kitchen window was marked with pinpricks and driblets of silvery water. The sky, and the pane of glass, cleared before a hail storm began, small marbles of ice ricocheting off the kitchen window. But now the night is clear, and quiet again, and the only sound is the faint zinging of the fluorescent tube of light uncovered on the ceiling. Essie’s hands are hot and red in the suds of the dishwashing water, and she can feel the two glasses of wine in her blood. The light inside the room makes the kitchen windowpane a black mirror. Essie’s face swims over the surface of it. But it is only a
I
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version of her face. There is no colour, no texture — it is simplified down to bone structure and smooth, unmarked planes of skin. It’s like a photographic negative. Not truly her face, just a blueprint for it. Invisible beyond the window is the cape, and beyond that, the ocean breathing out and in, out and in. Essie flicks her hands dry and turns away from the sink, the photo-negative face slipping off the black surface of the glass. She steps outside into the coldness of the back yard, her pupils yawning for light. Above her the black sky seems to be flickering with whiteness, swatches of light strobing in the sky. It takes a moment for Essie to realise that it isn’t her eyes playing up, but an aurora. She tilts her head, looking upwards, until her neck hurts. And then she lies on the cold concrete path, resting the back of her head on her hands. Light pours into invisible cul-de-sacs, retracts, vanishes, then appears again, spilling into new sectors of the sky. Lying there in the black and the quiet, Essie feels her aloneness, and wonders how far in each direction a line would travel before it met with another person. She wonders how great is the diameter of her solitude. This night, it feels vast. In the bright white apartment in the west, it was impossible to feel alone like this. There she was enclosed in one honeycomb cell with its frail dividing walls. Above and below, to the left and to the right, there were other cells with their nucleus of human life. She would sometimes stand at her sink and let her mind multiply the factors
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exponentially. Each cell, each person at the centre of a web of friends and relatives and loves and losses. It went on forever. Through the walls she could hear the faint humming of it. For a while, when David lived in the apartment, she, too, was part of it. Into the mix they added the stories they told to learn each other, pulling out of their stores of knowledge only the pieces that shone most brightly, putting down the bedrock of their relationship with small offerings of insight intensely given and received. There is a theory that the moon was calved from the earth, he had told her. These were the days when they would lie together in a rumpled bed and talk long after it was time to be asleep. As he spoke, he would trace the blue lines on her lunar-pale skin. At some time in prehistory, he had said, when the surface of the earth was molten, the entire outer layer of the world rose and fell in waves with the magnetic force of the sun. These waves, made up of soupy stuff which would one day be metal and earth and stone, grew larger and larger, threatening to unbalance the world. Until a colossal wave let go of the earth altogether, lurching off into space, spinning itself into a globe. It became the moon, a satellite child caught in the orbit of its parent. He told her about the scar on the surface of the earth that might be proof, the Pacific Ocean basin, missing the very elements which make up the moon. The moon came in through the window of the bright white apartment,
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and he told her how the sun never left her. How it used the moon, its reflector, to deploy this beam of gentle light. A night-light, he said, to sleep safely by. Tonight, the moon could almost be shaking out her white sheets in the black night. Tell me, she remembers saying to David in these first months, tell me what you hate about me. And he would say nothing, nothing at all, thinking that it was the right answer. It wasn’t. She wanted to be hurt, cracked open, with the most painful and cruel truths that he could think of her. If he could see the darkness in her, it would be proof that it was actually she that he saw when he looked. And as if there was supposed to be an answer, she asked him once, How close are you supposed to get? To another person, I mean. Because there was always something left in between, even when she tried to lay herself bare. Still, they bought a double bed and he moved into the bright white apartment. They added to the humming of the world their evening summaries of working days, the asides offered to each other during the news bulletin or over the crackle of newspapers in the morning, the low quiet talk that belonged to the bedroom, the sounds of David’s CDs in his stereo that jarred Essie’s nerves, the occasional quartets of laughter when they had another couple over for dinner. It was always her preference, though, to make love in silence, with her eyes closed. And if she could manage it, with her ears blocked. She would push one ear hard against
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the bed and, if it could be done without being obvious, place a hand close enough to her other ear to keep out sound. She found that this trapped all the pleasures inside, intensified them. Inside her cocoon she felt herself becoming molten. She didn’t like it when he talked to her, when he went on with meaningless smutty gibberish that took her concentration away from the process of melting. Why had David left? Because she asked him to. And why had she done that? ‘It’s all right to feel alone when I am alone,’ she had tried to explain. ‘But when we are so close I can’t bear it.’ She had lain beneath him the night before, listening to the small sounds of his pleasure, and realised that they had nothing to do with her. She felt herself become a hologram in his arms. ‘You don’t know anything about me, not really,’ she had said, the hollowness of her explanation echoing in her head. ‘What is it that you want?’ he had shouted at her. ‘I want to know,’ she had said, trying to simplify, ‘when you look at me, who it is that you see.’ She wasn’t even certain whether or not it existed, the kind of knowing that she wanted to feel. She only knew that it was something that could exist without words, in silence. She thought of an analogy that the geologist in him ought to have been able to understand. A cross-sectioned heart, layered like so many millennia of carefully folded
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rock. Her history, the things that made her just the way she was. And all those layers unexplored by him. ‘You want me to know you, but you never tell me …’ he had said, angry. ‘You never talk about … about where you come from, about your mother. You’ve never told me any of it. How can you expect me to know?’ ‘It’s not about that, it’s not about what I can tell you,’ she had faltered. The bewilderment on his face made her feel hopeless. It told her that she was asking for the impossible. So it was true. This was how people lived, on the surface, just the tips of icebergs touching, the bulk of themselves submerged. She would rather be alone. Yes, she would rather be alone. She would rather this pure aloneness at the centre of a circle of sea and land and sky at a cape at the bottom of the globe, than the aching, gaping aloneness you could feel in someone’s arms. The aurora wanes, and grey clouds drift in like soft closing curtains. Returning indoors, Essie’s eyes sting from the sudden flood of white light. With cold hands, she pours more wine. She is pleased she brought with her to the cape nothing that makes noise. The days lengthen, hours and minutes stretched by their emptiness, and the nights are longer still. In an armchair by the gas heater she reads over the words she wrote the day before in the lighthouse tower. Now that she reads it again, all in one piece, she
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notices the recurrence of a name. Franklin. She knows it to be an insistent sort of name, attaching itself like a burr to so many Tasmanian things. Over time it claimed one of everything — one town, one river, one city square, one mountain, one wharf. And now here it is, weaving itself into the braid of her story. Essie finishes her glass of wine and pours another. The images of Sir John Franklin that she has in her mind are mostly from history books. Here he is proclaiming the brilliance of the lighthouse. Here he is on Flinders Island, dispensing his benevolence to broken Aborigines branded with absurd classical names like Alpha. And here he is dying in the permafrost, his bones sought out by so many ships, among them one captained by her grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. And here he is as a rotundity of bronze, his head dribbled with pigeon shit, standing above the plinth where, during high school, she used to sit and wait for her school bus. There is another story she remembers, one that has the name Franklin stuck in it like a thorn. The story lies behind a painting, one that Essie had seen in the museum, a painting of a child in a red dress. The child’s eyes were dark, and large enough to melt the heart of Lady Jane Franklin. The story went that Lady Jane and Sir John took the child to live with them at Government House, a palatial sandstone residence with green gardens that were filled with strange-smelling flowers and trees which shed their leaves in russet drifts each year. Lady Jane would have explained
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about deciduous trees to the child as they walked together through the gardens. Deciduous. It was just one of the very many strange words that Lady Jane would have cut out with her sharp lips and dropped, in small neat pieces, into the cupped hands of the child. Syllable was another. Pronounce each syll-a-bull. Essie imagined the child trying to swallow these small pieces of words, to please Lady Jane, even though they tasted sharp and bitter to her palate. At the sandstone palace there would have been parties. The child, Essie imagines, was passed from lap to lap, peered at by women with half-moons of glass perched on the ends of their powdered noses, by men whose mouths breathed out the smell of the sticky red liquid in the beautiful cut-glass bottle on the sideboard. The child’s enormous eyes took in the piqued glances of curiosity, the tilted heads and raised eyebrows of pity. Lady Jane had the child dressed in silks and satins and velvets. In the evenings before parties, Lady Jane allowed the child to sit in her room and watch while she was laced and tucked and primped, her chestnut ringlets arranged just so at her temples, her bosom dusted with puffs of scented powder. Lady Jane clasped around the neck and slender wrists of the child small circlets of links, golden and silver. A pearl is made from the tears of an oyster, she might have told the child as she tightly screwed into her tender earlobes little teardrop pearls. The child loved the red dress best of all; she sat in a chair and stared into the depths of the fabric where it dipped into
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a pool between her knees. It was in this dress that she was made to sit for hours while a solemn man with a paintbrush made her image on a canvas. Later it was to be trimmed, framed in gilt, and hung in the drawing room of the sandstone palace. Our darling, our little dusky darling, Lady Jane said to her visitors, who peered at the child made of paint, hanging above the one made of dark-coloured flesh. And then Sir John and Lady Jane went away. He went to search for a passage through islands and continents covered in ice. She went back to the country of her birth, where the climate, it was said, would not be suited to the dark-skinned child. Lady Jane, it was said, was devastated. The child, almost a young woman by this time, was sent to an orphanage, and then to a place full of haunted people who had seen hell, and been brought back from its gates. On Flinders Island to the north they had watched the people they loved succumb to the sicknesses of body and soul. She was afraid of all the dark eyes full of visions of death, of the diseased bodies reeking of poisons. These people looked like her people, but she no longer recognised them. The only solace she could find was in the sticky red liquid that looked, inside a bottle, almost as beautiful as the lapful of red satin of her most beautiful dress. And this was how the story ended, with her bruised face falling into the shallow waters of the Oyster Cove Creek, into which the contents of her stomach flowed, into which her life seeped out, trickling down between its banks into the channel.
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• • • But of course, Essie knows, Lady Jane was not like that. She was neither a priss nor cruel. Essie remembers her history lessons, about the woman with the fine mind who cared for the Aborigines and championed the cause of women and instituted agricultural projects for the good of the poor, and no doubt had delicate and subtle conversations with visitors to Government House, revealing her delicate and subtle mind. No, Essie can’t help it, she will not like her. She doesn’t like her for leaving behind a child she once cosseted and dressed in red silk. Climate was a lazy excuse for abandoning a child.
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e walks to the Cape in the morning’s earliest hours, under a sky alive with the darting lights of the Aurora Australis. For a while, he sits on the soft sand at the high water mark of Butlers Beach to watch, and keeps his hands warm by burying his fingers in the dense fur of Scully’s coat. There is no man-made light to interfere, only starlight and moonlight and the aurora’s erratic pulses of electric white. And for a moment he sees what he so often dreams of: the world as it was before. He wishes for the power — even just for a moment, if that’s all he would be granted — to erase cities and see the shapes and forms of the land beneath them, recarpeted with vegetation. To see harbours stripped of concrete wharves, their hard angles replaced with the curves of coast. He arrives at the lighthouse well before dawn. He loves these hours, with their heightened solitude; the way their emptiness seems to stretch them out to their full length. As a child he would creep out of his bed well before the light and go into rooms made unfamiliar by their stillness and the dark, imagining animals in the huddled shapes and shadows of furniture.
H
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It was a time for reading by torchlight, or quietly dipping into boxes of sugary breakfast cereal. It was empty, stolen time. And into adulthood he has retained the sense of stealth that is involved in being awake before dawn. In the lighthouse tower, his feet in thick socks slide over the metal steps. Even though he is alone, he feels the need to move softly, silently, to preserve the frozen nature of the sleeping world. But soon the thin greyish fingers of first light reach in through the windows of the lighthouse to steal his solitude, and join him with the rest of the world and all its comings and goings. When the sun rises, Pete looks down to the automated beacon on the cliff ’s edge and watches as it retracts its thin pencil beam like a Jedi’s sabre. As daylight intensifies he can see in the brass the traces of the circles he has made with his cloth and, behind them, a blurred reflection of his own face. The floor of the tower is swept and mopped, small streaks of water slowly evaporating. But he cannot make the tower feel empty. He cannot erase entirely the sense of the visiting woman that lingers in the tower, more elusive even than a scent. Outside, the morning is pewter-coloured, cold against the skin. The water in his bucket is cold now, and dirty. His pockets bulge with the Brasso tin and stained rags. The sea around the cape looks still, but is not. He can hear the slack, collapsing sound of waves against rock. As the path narrows, he is listening to the domino-impulse of a wave
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gradually breaking around the contours of the cliffs, which is why he doesn’t hear the sound of her feet until she is in front of him, a tall woman in a soft-looking pale blue jacket zipped up around her chin. ‘Hello,’ she says. ‘G’day.’ They must each turn sideways to pass. The surface of the murky water tilts as he swings the bucket away to the side. As it tilts, the water crests the metal rim on one side, flinging out an arc of droplets. For a moment they are facing each other in the narrowness of the pathway. It’s not her voice, but a gesture that reminds him. As his gaze grazes over her face, she reaches one hand to her forehead, scooping up a stray strand of hair and tucking it down behind one ear. The image leaps across the gaps between synapses, searches for its match in his memory. But by the time it is found, her shoulder has turned and she is gone, around the corner out of sight. Essie Lewis. The last time he had seen her, he would have been about sixteen, and she didn’t see him. She was sitting on the edge of a fountain, at the centre of which was the statue of Sir John Franklin, his bronze-sculpted head streaked white with pigeon and seagull shit. She was in a private school uniform, waiting for her bus, knees and Bata-scout feet together, hands clasped in her lap. He had been down near the public toilets, sucking on a roll-your-own cigarette that burned the back of his
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throat. At his school there wasn’t a uniform as such, just a windcheater with a school emblem. His was ratty and old, the cuffs marked with burns from gobs of solder he’d dripped in metalwork class. He remembers saying something crude about her to his mates. He’d been in love with her in a hopeless kid sort of way. The girls from her school wore hats and held their school bags over the crooks of their arms. They had uniform hair, fawn-coloured shoulder-length bobs or glossy black ponytails tied with ribbons. But she had hair that looked as if it had never been cut, long and albino-white, woven into a plait that thinned down to a fraying rope at the end. All the other girls had their pleated skirts rolled up at the waist to shorten them, but she wore hers nearly to her ankles. She might almost have been a statue herself, her face was so still. Her only movement was of a hand reaching up to tuck a strand of hair down behind her ear. He whistles to his dog, who is stalking the huddled shapes of stones in the grass, skittering away in fright each time she gets too close. Scully appears beside him and he bends down to pat her. Her soft, damp head fits inside his hand. Her skull feels as small and fragile as a bird’s.
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he first thing Essie remembers when she recognises his face is the cream-coloured concertina door between the living room and the kitchen of his mother’s house. She remembers that its surface was ashen with the cigarette smoke of his father, long after his father had gone. She remembers the worm-shape left in the residue by her fingertip when she drew it across the fake leather surface. She remembers the cartoon cleavage of a buxom woman on a rude television show she’d never been allowed to watch before, and the worn spots on the velour pouffes they used to sit on to watch it. She remembers the low, puzzled sound of his mother’s voice behind the concertina door, and sometimes her tears. She remembers the smoothing sound of her father comforting his mother. On nights when her father stayed over at that house, Essie had to stay too. She slept in the bunk beneath Pete, in the bunk that had belonged to his big brother, gone too. The sheets were boy’s sheets, printed with racing motorcycles, and the coverlet was too thin to keep her
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warm. His mother made toast for her, scraping margarine and jam on squares of white bread, the jam the same pinky-red colour as her chipped nails. Her own mother had never allowed white bread, or long fingernails. Pete had teased her, poked and prodded with the cruel words only children use. Your mother’s dead. She was poisonous, he had taunted her. Essie coiled like a sea animal into the shell of her silence, only thinking the things she might have said. Your father ran away, and running away is cowardly. She knew something else about his father, too, something she had heard Charlie say. That bastard was white, until he went to university and found out there was money in being black. The house Pete lived in was covered in a false-brick cladding. It was only a short walk to a playground with rusting monkey-bars and swings made of rubber rectangles and two lengths of chain. It was a cold park, lined up to catch the winds that came down off the mountain bringing fine traces of snow. Once, she remembers, he caught a seagull there. It had a broken wing. At home he squashed the bird down into a shoe box and wrapped it tight with packing tape. He punched holes into the sides of it with a pair of scissors. Inside the bird squawked. Essie imagined the shape of its bright red beak like the forking blades of the scissors. He had tried to impress her, telling her he was going to take it to school to use it as a footy with his mates. She had cried, and tried
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to wrestle it away from him, but he was older, stronger. Later, she found him nursing the bird in his bedroom, holding it in his arms and talking low and quiet to it, a messy-looking sticky-tape splint on its broken leg. ‘I didn’t mean it, you know. I wouldn’t have hurt it, I promise.’ Peter Shelverton. She looks out the window of the tower and sees him walking with his red dog beside him. He is tall, and there is a starched roominess in the clothes. He could almost be the frame — made from some lightweight, superior metal — for something larger than himself. It takes a moment to find room for this new idea of him. A man. A man with a dog and a life, a story outside her story. In the lighthouse tower Essie reads, peeling apart delicate yellowed pages written in her great-great-grandfather’s hand and following his convoluted copperplate as his vessel crosses an ocean studded with icebergs. She follows the ship as it scuds around Cape Horn in a westerly gale, taking on deck enough blue water to smash the thick bubbled glass of the skylight and flood the lower saloon. Rounding the tip of the cape a young sailor falls from his place beside William on the t’gallant yard and is reduced to a skin-sack of fragmented bones when he hits the timbers of the deck. Beside Essie, on the floor, a neat stack of pastry-thin pages grows.
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In another story, from another ocean of a lighter hue, a typhoon bursts upon his vessel with a cannon-roar and blows the sails to smithereens. Essie sails with him through the confused sea of the aftermath, past several junks, bottoms upwards. On the upturned reddish hull of one junk are two Chinamen and a monkey. Her great-greatgrandfather heaves a rope to one of the men. The man catches it, but cannot make it fast. Only the monkey is swift enough to make his passage to safety along the taut rope, and William is forced to leave the men to their fate. He names the flea-ridden monkey Hardcastle, and teaches him to effect a tune on a small squeezebox. She turns to the last of the pages, which has only a narrow band of script at the top. I have been shipwrecked no fewer than four times, and each time I have been fortunate enough to escape with my life. I put it down to the little cherub that sits aloft that seems always to have kept a weather eye out for me. She wonders how many of his tales are true. As a teller of stories, her own grandfather was always very careful with the truth. Too much of it, Charlie said, was a dangerous contaminant to a good story. The truth was like salt, he said, you could always add more later. Ancient tales, Charlie told. Tales that had for centuries floated on the waves, breaking apart and re-forming with their motion. Tales with parts invented in different tongues, parts lost and sunk and found again like treasure on the seabed. Most times, though, he told them as if he
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had been there and seen their events with his own eyes and, as a child, Essie believed him. There was one, from his seafaring days, in which he was sailing through a region known for sirens. To save his crewmen from certain death her brave and ingenious grandfather stopped their ears with wax, and tied himself to the mast. Later, she was disappointed to learn that someone else had thought of that before. Sometimes, she remembers, he would begin a story and then stop, dissatisfied. Let’s go back to the beginning, he would say. And he would lower his hooks deeper and fish out another, earlier beginning to make a story with a shape and length that pleased him. Perhaps William was the same. Perhaps, Essie thinks, rolling her fountain pen between her palms, Alva learned from William the same fact that Essie learned from Charlie. That stories are not things which emerge complete, sufficient unto themselves. She thinks of seeing Peter Shelverton on the path outside the lighthouse and remembers that all stories are threads, attached to threads, attached to threads.
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Th e Fa c e o f I s a b e l l a B r o w n y father’s stories were threads that he spliced endlessly together, that bound him in the seamless circle of his former life at sea and, when he told them, I knew that it was only ever his body that he had brought to live ashore. The story of Isabella Brown I heard many, many times. In the retellings of it, I noticed a phenomenon to which I believe stories are often subject. Over the years, I watched the tale attain a certain symmetry which it certainly never had in the beginning. Each telling buffed off a little more of its irregularity. Each time it was told, it was polished smoother, until eventually it was a perfect globe shape, and shining. I have often wondered if this refining makes a story less or more true. Whether in becoming less factual, it became more truthful. Whether, irrelevancies sloughed away, what was left was, if not the actual truth, then the essence of the matter. Or perhaps it is a type of evolution, a survival mechanism of the story. Perhaps it is only by forming itself into a pattern, a symmetrical shape, that a story can be certain of being fitted into the pigeonholes of our memory.
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• • • Isabella Brown was a ship, a brigantine of modest proportions. ‘A most suitable colt,’ Father always said of her, ‘for the guano trade.’ In the year 1859, when Father joined her as Mate, she belonged to the A.A. Guano Company. (Occasionally, tellings of the story would here digress to the fact that the A.A. Guano Company later made the news of the colony with all that business regarding King Billy’s head. But more often he would not, perhaps because the matter of inserting a white man’s skull into the fleshy case of a black man’s head was not the most appropriate subject matter to discuss with a girl of my age.) ‘Do you know what guano is, lass?’ he would ask. ‘Of course you do. It’s the droppings of the birds. White as snow and as smelly as the breath of a seal.’ The Isabella Brown sailed between Launceston and Lady Elliot Island, or Wreck Reef, which Father said was a better name due to the number of vessels lost thereon. The task at Lady Elliot was to load the guano from the island onto the ship using the boats. Since it was no easy job with the vessel rolling at her anchors in the open waters, Father and the captain took the decision to warp the Isabella Brown inside the reef and moor her a few cables-length from the island. Turning out of the reef, the task complete, she struck coral. Luckily, it happened to be soft coral so no damage occurred, but that was not the end of the troubles for this most suitable colt. On the return voyage, Father was of the opinion that the vessel had been overloaded as she seemed to labour more than
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formerly when she encountered bad weather. She made only an average passage to Kents Group, where she fell in with a strong westerly gale and a very confused sea. And then she made bad weather of it, shipping a deal of water. Father suggested to the captain that they run round Babel Island and come up the eastern side of Flinders Island and Cape Barren Island and make the passage via Banks Strait. ‘And you know about Banks Strait, do you not, lass? To this day, Lloyds of London will not insure a ship to pass through that graveyard of a place,’ he would always say. He would describe it as a place of running tides, of islands that came and went in an instant when the waters changed their direction. On this occasion his suggestion to run the gauntlet and pass through the strait was followed, although in the finish he had plenty of cause to regret it. The squalls off the land were very strong and the vessel must have crept to windward off her course, and it was near to the middle of the night when she struck the rocks of Cape Barren Island with terrible force. Father ran for’ard and saw the rock just level with the ship’s rail, the vessel herself resting on a submerged shelf. There was a great panic to get all the boats lowered and manned, and once this was done the crewmen pulled for their lives to the shore. It is hereabouts in the telling of the tale that Father would remember to mention that Isabella Brown was the name not only of the vessel, but also of her figurehead. And he would go on to say that for a figurehead, she was not at all usual for her time. Far from being painted up in garish colours, with bright
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lips and yellow hair, she was left in the clothing of her natural timber. The whorls and knots of the timber grain were clearly visible on her cheeks, her hair, her bodice. Her exterior had bleached to pale grey in the sun, but if you had cut her deeply enough, you would have discovered the pale lemon colour, the sweet light-wooded scent that would have told you she was crafted from huon pine. At daybreak of the morning after the shipwreck, Father saw that the vessel was still above water and called for volunteers to row out to her. He found the vessel still on the shelving rock, but full of water with decks submerged. He rescued ship’s papers, a chronometer, some of his clothes and some of the captain’s, as well as some food, including a small pig that was stranded on a hatch cover. No sooner had he pitched the pig into the boat and followed himself, than he saw that it was indeed time for him to leave. He saw the warning on the huon pine face of Isabella Brown. She had the kind of carven face which expressed more than one emotion while remaining perfectly unaltered. It was a matter of the angle at which you caught her, and also partly to do with her eyes. Inside her sculpted lids was a smooth carved surface. No pupils, no irises. Nothing but the narrow stripes of the timber’s grain. Now her blank eyes told him that the vessel would at any moment slip off the shelf and founder. ‘Pull for your lives,’ he shouted, knowing the men would have to pull hard to escape the vortex. The ship lifted forward, as if the figurehead was taking a deep breath before plunging headfirst into a dive. As the fore
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topsail took the water it pulled the main mizzen topmast over the bows, and when the vessel had settled on the bottom the fore royal mast remained just above the water like a flagpole. This was the first of four times that Father would be shipwrecked in his sailing career. The fact that he kept his life throughout these adventures he put down to the little cherub that sits aloft and keeps an eye on those who sail the sea, and also to a pig bone hook he wore on a thin leather thong around his neck. It was a charm against drowning, carved by a native of Pitcairn Island, a descendent of Fletcher Christian. On this occasion he reached safety by rowing for the better part of two hundred miles, across the unpredictable waters of Bass Strait, his boat fetching up on the shore beneath the Eddystone Light. And it is here that you might expect the tale of the Isabella Brown to conclude, with Father safe on land and her handsome huon pine face beneath the waves of Banks Strait. But the story continues, taking up again eight years later on the decks of another ship, this time the stately barquentine James and Mary, loaded with Newcastle coal and bound for Singapore. She had made her passage up the eastern seaboard of Australia, turned at Torres Strait and was on course for port when, one morning, her skipper came on deck and remarked that the barometer was falling. In his seafaring stories, Father was most particular about the configuration of sails and the times at which matters occurred, and even the exact readings of barometers. I followed him quite well, as I knew the difference between a brig and a
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barque. With his telescope, Father showed me all the rigs as ships rounded South East Cape to come up into the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, or put in to Cloudy Bay. Also, he drew for me in my scrapbooks diagrams of rigging, naming each of the yards and each of the sails and all of the lines which operated them. He would devise quizzes for me. He might, for example, say, ‘ You are sailing a brigantine, with a freshening breeze of about fifteen knots aft of the beam. Which sails should you be flying?’ And pride would shine in his eyes if I pointed on his diagrams to all the fore and aft sails — the mainsail, the inner jib, the outer jib, the flying jib, the main staysail and the knock staysail — as well as the square sails on the foremast, and indicated with the angle of my hand that they should be sharp up to the breeze. Father loved a beautiful ship as much as he loved the sea. In his mind’s eye he sketched over and over the subtle angle of a bow cleaving a wave into two perfect flourishes of water. He felt the power in a bolt of canvas, took pleasure in the perfect curve of a taut sail. The watch on deck of the James and Mary received orders to clew up the main top gallant sail and to send yard and mast down. The wind at the time was a smart breeze, but the clouds were working in an opposite direction. Soon the cry was, ‘All hands to shorten sail and be quick about it.’ The appearance of the sky by that time had changed to a dark leaden blue. The crew were all young men, smart and active, and the vessel was soon under a close-reefed main topsail and brought to the
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wind; all the other sails were well furled and secured, but not one minute too soon, for the typhoon burst on the ship like the roar of a cannon or a clap of thunder. The main topsail was blown to smithereens and the vessel nearly thrown on her beam ends, but righted again quickly. The vessel lay to well and tended the sea splendidly for a few hours, when suddenly a tremendous wave came along and struck her, throwing her fully on her beam ends. This time the ballast shifted, so the James and Mary was fairly helpless. This time she did not right herself. Men were thrown into the water, and drowned as they became entangled in the nets designed to save them. Father would say he must hereabouts have been struck on the head, for he could recall little beyond the strange warmth of the water all around him and the ferocious howl of the wind. The next thing that his memory retained was the gritty feel of sand beneath his cheek and the searing sensation of salt water and bile coming up from his stomach. It was the blacks who hauled him by the arms up the beach to the shade beneath a palm tree, who gave him the name of the shore on which he lay. Batavia. For the price of a pouch of tobacco he purchased from these men a coconut. He drank the milk of it to slake his salted thirst, and ate the meat of it, sucking out of the white cubes whatever moisture he could. He walked along the beach until he found a suitable place in which to sit and place his head in his hands, and contemplate what he was to do next. He rested against a fallen log, grieving for the loss of his crew-mates, and unable to see
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how he should ever find a way out of his predicament. Despairing, he laid his head upon the fallen log and saw, there in front of his eyes, a carven hand. He followed the hand to a wrist, and up an arm to a shoulder. And there, in amongst a tumble of timber hair, was the handsome blank-eyed face of Isabella Brown. Or at least half of it. In the tellings of this story I remember from childhood, Father would explain that Isabella must have met with rough treatment on her mysterious voyage from Banks Strait to Batavia. Was she salvaged and affixed to another vessel? he would wonder aloud. Or did she come loose from the Isabella Brown, the most suitable colt of the A.A. Guano Company, and make her own way north to the tropics? Whichever way, he said, she must have run foul of a reef, the sharp coral tearing away at her beautiful face, leaving half of it featureless. But as I got older, the story changed. In his later years and mine, Father would forget the detail of her damaged face. In his mind, or in his story, he restored Isabella Brown and made her whole again.
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n the ferry crossing Pete listens to the radio news and watches the tourists in their bright raincoats leaning out over the rail. Up in town he calls in to the Department to check on the progress of his application. He wants to know whether he’s going south in September, or not. If he’s not, he wants to know now so he can put his hopes out of their misery, put a bullet in them and bury them in a shallow grave. The Lands Building makes him uncomfortable with its yellow-carpeted cubicles, its over-clean smell and the way the air seems to hum with the electrical charge of computers and printers and faxes and phones. The woman he has to see has hair wound up into a shiny black cone and is always busy. She bustles around her cubicle while she talks to him, stapling piles of paper and putting them in filing cabinets with her tiny tapered hands, or running the blunt end of a pencil down a row of figures at the same time as saying I see and ah hah as her half of their conversation. Above her wall she has pinned a poster of a tiny tabby kitten clinging precariously to a branch, with
O
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a lime green speech bubble that reads ‘Oh shit’. He suspects that she is one of those people who doesn’t approve of shooting cats, who thinks feral cats are just unlucky pets that could be restored to lap-sitting and purring with the right measure of love and good food. ‘No news yet, Peter,’ she says from under her shiny black cone as he approaches, without having seemed to have seen him. ‘Perhaps next month.’ He drives out into the northern suburbs, past the house where his brother lives. He tries to deceive himself that this slowing down as the car passes the house, this silent brushing up against his brother’s life, is close enough to visiting. The house conforms with its red brick and quiet lawns, but through the arched windows he sees the dumpy shuffling shape of the Down Syndrome girl and the parked bed on wheels that had been made to fit the cruel, twisted shape of the guy with cerebral palsy. He prefers to visit at night, when the only one awake is a carer sitting in the dim light of the living room with the television turned down low. Pete thinks the carers might actually be aliens. There’s something so different about them, as if all their edges have been softened or smudged. Even the blokes emit a kind of tranquillity that makes Pete feel lightly drugged. They make him cups of watery Milo and tell him what his brother’s been up to. They speak of Jacob fondly. Pete can’t get comfortable with the way they describe his activities as if he were a fully cognisant person,
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and not the soul-sucked man shell that Pete sees when he looks at him. But he takes their anecdotes as more evidence of their extra-terrestrial powers, and his own inadequacy. He would be just as happy to leave after the Milo and the quiet talking in the living room. But once he had gone that far, he was obliged. He couldn’t disappoint the carers, not after the way they tried so hard with him, encouraging his feeble efforts at being a good brother, smiling and rewarding him with sugary praise as if he were a child learning to speak. They would usher him into Jacob’s bedroom and leave him there to sit by his brother’s bed and watch him sleep. When Jacob was asleep the slackness in his face didn’t seem so strange or stupid or sad beyond all belief. When he was asleep it was possible to imagine that he would wake, run his hand over his dark hair and grin; that he was still the big brother who had once confided his show-off tales in him, who had once said with his eyes glittering, You know the really terrible thing about heroin? It’s just so … fucking … good. Sitting at Jacob’s bedside Pete always thinks about the superhuman effort it must have taken to breathe life back into the folded corpse they pulled out of the dunny of a St Kilda pub. And then the thought comes to him — the one where he wishes they’d failed, or hadn’t even tried — and he feels guilt strong enough to tie his guts in a knot for having had that thought so close to his sleeping brother’s head.
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• • • His mother is not at home, but the spare key to her house is still beneath the same rock in the same garden bed. When he picks it up it leaves behind a key-shaped mark in the dirt. This is the house he grew up in, but for Pete it holds no sense of home. In the kitchen the sink, the stove, the fridge are all decorated with his mother’s bright trinkets. There are crossstitched verses in plastic frames, magnets in the shape of a wedge of cheese, a cross-sectioned carrot, half a tomato. A tissue box is dressed up with floral fabric and lace. He is pleased she’s out. Seeing her, with her collapsing shoulders, her tightening mouth, the too-bright pinkish orange that covers the grey of her hair, and listening to her litany of complaints and judgements, leaves him dulled with guilt and sadness. In her living room everything is neat, but indefinably shabby. All the picture frames hold photographs of other people’s grandchildren, except for the ones that hold photographs of Pete and his brother when they were boys. Pete, with his fair skin, looks jaundiced, but Jacob’s dark olive skin looks healthy and vivid. Pete has to look away from his brother’s bright oil-slick eyes, from the endearing bloody grin which Jacob had always known would get him anything he ever wanted, which had made him everybody’s favourite. The bunks are gone now from the room they used to share, replaced with a single bed covered with a floral
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bedspread and a flounce of porcelain dolls. But the air in the room is still thick with cold dust and the spores of sadness. That much is the same. In the top cupboard he finds what he’s looking for amid a tangle of old sports bags and a gauzy hat jammed down over the skull of a polystyrene head. It’s a box of photographs, the rejects that never made it into his mother’s albums. Somewhere among them there should be a stack of polaroids, thick and square like individually wrapped slices of cheese. His mother bought the polaroid camera the summer after his father left, convinced by the advertising that it came guaranteed to turn out nothing but happy memories. That was the summer she came, the pale satellite of the new man who began to sleep in his mother’s bed. She must be in some of the photographs that they took that summer with the clever new camera that whirred as it ejected its slices of frozen moment. She must be here somewhere. He wants to see her again as she was then, to sharpen the edges of the blurred pictures that have come to him since he saw her on the lighthouse path. He rifles through the box, through square slabs of muted colour with their old-fashioned rounded edges. There is a clump of photos stuck together by the faint stripes of gluey residue from photo album pages. These his mother must have removed, taken them out of her official account of things. They are all of his father. Pete unpeels them from each other and sees that they
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have been taken at all the times when photos are supposed to be taken: with old cars on the days they were sold, with new cars on the days they were bought, with impressive bleeding fish on hooks, in Speedos on the beach. And one is a close-up, black and white, showing everything right down to the stretched pores of his swarthy skin, the streaking white in the wild crop of his dark curls. His Dad left the state, taking Jacob with him, and went off to the Northern Territory; to get lost inside its borders. It was easy to do, so Pete found out when he went up there himself. The Territory was a kind of end point for fugitives of all kinds. No one asked where you were from, what you’d done before, what you were running away from. Jacob didn’t last long. Two years maybe. He came home when he was sixteen to tell how their dad had got married to an Aboriginal woman, and was a teacher at a community school. He told wild stories about pig hunting, showed off a cruel curving blade he said he’d stuck into a feral boar, twisting it right into its heart. He got pissed and drove cars too fast, rolled them and bent them and broke his bones. He fought with their mother, called her a white cunt and then cried in her arms because he was so sorry. He was the white cunt, he said, not her. He was twenty when he started using, twenty-two the day he stuck a needle in his arm and erased his confusion permanently. • • •
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When his father left, Pete tried to think of it as a death. His brother would be home for holidays, his mother told him, but his dad was gone ‘for good’. Pete had been through a death, his grandfather’s, and that hadn’t been so bad. His grandfather, his mother’s father, had been a gentle old man with magpies for pets. There was a succession of these birds, each called Maggie. Pete liked the birds but he was a little afraid of their sharp beaks and their sharp wits and the way you couldn’t force them to like you. They shuffled sideways from his grasping hands, seemed somehow to know that he didn’t deserve their trust. Pete remembered Pop on his rickety old knees, his back yard full of tomato vines and runner beans, planting seedlings in a row in the earth. Silently, one of the Maggie succession followed him, yanking the tender green stems out of the ground with its clever beak and laying them on the ground. You little minxie! his grandfather had growled, when he finally noticed an hour’s work ruined. But there was a smile mixed in with his growl. There must have been more times, more things that happened, but once Pete’s Pop died, that afternoon was the only one he could replay in his head. Pete didn’t know exactly what his grandfather had died from, only that it was something to do with being very old and broken down. He was sad for a while, and missed Pop and his carolling black and white birds. But soon, life closed up around the gap that he had left, and things went on as normal. Nanna still stood in the kitchen in her
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slippers and made butterfly lamingtons with mouths full of whipped cream. When his father left, Pete thought it wouldn’t be long before his father’s memory became as benign as the image of Pop in a frame on Nanna’s mantelpiece. But it didn’t happen like that. The sick, dead feeling didn’t go away after a couple of weeks, or even a couple of months. It filled up the house from the floor upwards, like a gas leak. His mother grew two different faces. There was the slack, colourless one she wore around the house, and the shimmery, copper-toned one she took out the door to work or out at night, with everything she needed to keep it intact tucked into a black Glomesh purse. She kept her sparkly self for other people,as if there wasn’t quite enough to go around and she couldn’t afford to waste it on her son. Pete knew there were times when she wished his father had taken everything, including Pete himself, and given her a chance to start again. She worked at the university library, repressing daily her bitterness towards beautiful young people flaunting their opportunities in her face. She worried about money, and it made her angry sometimes, and unpredictable. ‘Peter!’ she would shout, unleashing her frustrations. Once she called him into the toilet where he had just been. She held the cardboard tube from the middle of the toilet roll under his nose. There were another two the same in the cane basket at her feet. ‘You’ve started eating this stuff, have you? Tastes good, does it?’
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She was withering when she was like this. She pulled a new roll from under the skirts of a doll on top of the cistern and unravelled a swathe of it, dropping it into the toilet bowl. She flushed, and sent handful after handful of fresh toilet paper down into the toilet’s swirling waters. ‘Well that’s money, Peter, that’s money just going down the toilet!’ Later she would be contrite, overly sweet. He didn’t know which was worse. She was this saccharine person when men were around, too. Pete found he had a kind of power over his mother’s boyfriends. Most of them wanted to befriend him, muss up his hair with a manly tousle, matily slap him on the back. He knew he was proving ground for their worthiness, and he knew, too, that he could deflate them with the tiniest darts of sarcasm and disinterest. In the stack of polaroids he can find only parts of her. Here, there is a flash of bright white hair, there a pale hand wrapped around a plastic mug. There is a small white sandshoe with glittery blue laces that he is almost certain was hers, left lying on the beach. He remembers her in the surf, quick and bright as a fish. She’d go deeper and further than he would, stay in the water long after he was cold and bored. He remembers being cruel to her in the way that small boys often are. He had wanted to make her squeal or bite or laugh, but she would only close her eyelids over her pale
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blue eyes and retreat deeper into some place all of her own. When he thought of that place, he imagined it was made of white marble. He goes through the photographs again, like a deck of cards that might suddenly reveal the ace. But nowhere is she whole. Nothing can confirm the memory that has been visiting him, drifting in and out of focus, stirring up feelings of wanting. In this memory there are tears, but not the cause of them. He is crying hot little boy’s tears full of frustration and spite as quietly as he can, choking them into the suffocating stink of an old rubber pillow. And then there is a pale hand gripping the top rung of the ladder between the bunks, and then a white shape slipping into the bed beside him. Her skin is as cool to the touch as the white cotton of her nightdress. He feels it as she slides her arms around his body, as he absorbs the calm, silent comfort of her and the faintly sweet smell of her breath.
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he stone is grey, the size and shape of an egg, but marked out by a Jupiter-stripe of bright quartz and mica. In the midst of the sparkling stone are cloudy pink nuggets of garnet. The stone belonged to a woman she can only define in the way women so often are defined — by relationship to others. She was Charlie’s grandmother; and the lighthouse keeper’s wife. She was Essie’s own great-greatgrandmother. She was Alva’s mother. Essie turns the stone in her hands and tries to remember a story of Charlie’s. … knotted into her skirt on the day she was forced to leave her home … It’s the only part she can remember. She writes it at the top of a page in her cornflower suede notebook. One half of a sentence is all that she has left to understand this woman. That, and the inky scratches of a few words on her wedding certificate. Essie finds it among the papers inside the cover of the log book and unfolds the fragile oblong of browned paper.
T
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Lydia Arneil. Her maiden name; the name she still had before she was the lighthouse keeper’s wife, before she was anyone’s mother or grandmother. The one she used when this stone was tied up in the hem of her skirt. Lydia Arneil. In the space left for her place of birth she has written not Knoydart, but Between Heaven and Hell. She looks at the handwriting of her great-greatgrandmother, wondering what might be ascertained, what truth might be staring at her in the form of loops and curls. Essie thinks of the women — dental nurses they were mostly, or hairdressers — who kept over from high school a fashion in handwriting, making round chubby letters that pushed against each other in their appointment books and ledgers, little circles making up the dots of their ‘i’s. The writing of her great-great-grandmother is too old to reveal anything to Essie. Years have made it a code that it is beyond her means to crack. Hours are lost to her wondering, and the page in front of her remains blank. Today, she is expecting a visitor, her great-aunt. May will drive from her stone house overlooking Two Tree Point down to the lighthouse to see her. Charlie’s only sister — his only sibling — May is the closest thing Essie has to him now. The signature May Fenwick appears in the corners of her paintings in perfect imitation of the woman — a small
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feathery whirlwind. Her paintings are seascapes, summertime washes of aquamarine and yellow, framed in driftwood. May has silver hair now, but Essie knows she will never think of her great-aunt without her flounce of red hair and swipe of coral lipstick. At Charlie’s funeral, Essie had touched her hand to the silvered bob, and May had laughed through her tears. ‘Been fake for a long time now, darling. About time I had the collars and cuffs matching again I thought,’ she had said. She arrives at Lightkeepers’ Quarters II in the late morning. There is a band of woven wool fastened tightly around her ears against the cold. At the door she embraces Essie. It is not her usual flighty hug. ‘I miss him, I just miss him,’ May says over Essie’s shoulder. ‘I do too,’ she says, holding her great aunt tightly. In the kitchen they drink tea and May talks. She wants to talk, to remember. Her sentences accelerate, words blending together at their edges. After these weeks of solitude, Essie feels a little like a nocturnal animal: wideeyed, trapped in the bright intensity of her great aunt. ‘We weren’t as poor as some of the other kids. We had shoes, and we had jam sandwiches wrapped in newspaper to take to school, and these two things marked us as a rung above the truly poor children. Charlie was a funny little boy, with those freckles, and he had that stutter. His
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teachers tried to cure him by standing him up in class and making him read long passages from the Bible. H’s were the worst. “Thou, fool, shall be in d … danger of h … h … h … h … hellfire.” Poor old Charlie. At home, he was the one who had to feed the horses, and the dogs, and each night Dad made him clean the family’s shoes, and line them up by the fireplace to be inspected. He was only allowed to do his homework after the daylight chores were done. I remember him throwing a candlestick through a window one night when the candle burned out before he’d finished his sums. ‘He went down to the water on the weekends, looking at all the clinker-built dinghies and sailing boats. He had to say no when he was offered a sail down the river. If he was found out, Dad’s boot would connect with his backside quick smart. “Get a trade, boy! Don’t muck around with the bloody sea. The bloody sea’ll kill you.” That’s what Dad used to say. He was terribly hard on Charlie.’ ‘And on you too?’ ‘I was the girl. It was different. A motherless child, other people always wanted to touch, to pat almost.’ Essie detects the pause, the attempt to swallow her sadness so that when she speaks again it is matter-of-factly. ‘There was Charlie, and there was me. And there was going to be a third child. Well of course they were poor, and I don’t know how happy they were in their marriage. One of my aunts told me what happened, not in so many words
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of course. I hate thinking of my mother on that abortionist’s table. Gangrene, it was, that killed her in the end.’ There is nothing, Essie knows, that would be useful to say. Instead she freshens the tea pot with boiling water, turns it three times clockwise and three times widdershins, the base grating over biscuity crumbs on the tray. ‘You know, I’ve often pondered the mystery of the perfect cup of tea,’ May says with a small burst of forced laughter. ‘Why it is that you can make a cup of tea exactly the same way each time, but it only occasionally turns out to be that “sage, sober and venerable liquid”. You know the saying, you’re a cup-of-tea-Annie. You can warm the pot, and the cups, measure the tea leaves to the gram, turn the pot, do all that, but the result is still variable.’ Essie pours the tea with one finger underneath the spout, balancing. ‘You know, you do that just like your mother.’ She doesn’t think it shows, but May has seen it. She reaches out and takes one of Essie’s hands. May’s hands are like Charlie’s, only smaller. Their fingers have the same blunt tips. ‘I know, darling, I know.’ May holds her hand tightly. It feels nice, May’s warm papery skin against hers. It also hurts, makes a vein of sadness to her heart. ‘I was only a baby,’ May says. ‘I don’t have any memories of my mother. Nothing at all. Sometimes I think I can
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remember a shape, or a feeling, something motherly in the dark. I knew how it was for you, Essie, all those years when you didn’t say a word. Such a lost little soul. Your grandfather was beside himself.’ The hand is not loosening its grip. Essie wonders how long before it would not seem rude to pull her hand away. She feels as if her heart is filling through the vein of sadness in her arm, as if it will burst if May doesn’t let go.
In the afternoon they walk the path to the lighthouse together, and May tells Essie about Peron, the Frenchman who fell in love with a black woman, Arramaieda, out on the peninsula that now bears the name of another Frenchman, Labillardiere. Bewitched by her beautiful voice, May says. She tells Essie about the lighthouse keeper that came after William Westwood, who kept himself busy with needlepoint, filling the long hours with the tiny units of his stitches, even winning a prize at the Royal Show. May rattles off long and complex histories of island families, and Essie cannot follow her through their convolutions of aunts, husbands, sisters, nephews, cousins, wives and in-laws. Essie waits for May to mention the Shelvertons, to recount their history of births, deaths, marriages and divorces. But instead, May is distracted, telling Essie now about the child buried on the hillside, the daughter of one of the lighthouse keepers, drowned in the waters of the cape.
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‘You must have seen the grave? No? Good God, girl.’ May takes Essie along the rutted, muddy road to the beacon on the cliff ’s edge. Part way along, forking off to the right, is a path through dense, ferny scrub. A little way in, there is a deep ditch, cut through at the bottom with a single silver thread of water. May climbs down and up its banks rather than risk the rotting timbers of the small bridge that crosses it. She places her feet carefully, cursing the fragility, the fear of falling, that comes with her years. She pushes her way into the scrub, parting the foliage which is beginning to join in an arch, wiping from her face the clingy strands of spider webs spanning what remains of the thoroughfare. Essie follows her towards two rectangles of white pickets, flaking paint. The process of reclamation is advancing, fingers of green pushing through the spaces in the fence, tendrils winding around the pickets. Plants push from beneath the sandstone slabs, shoots working their way through the cracks in the moss-covered stone. The smaller one is the grave of a child named Miranda Farley. Drowned. Only ten years old, the child of a lightkeeper. Essie thinks of blue water fighting with air for the small amount of space inside her little lungs. She follows May as she steps over the picket fence, onto the larger grave. May brushes the dried moss off the face of the arched headstone, and with her little finger carves out dirt that has gathered in the channels of the letters.
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ELIZABETH ANNE WESTWOOD DEARLY LOVED DAUGHTER OF SUPERINTENDENT WILLIAM AND LYDIA WESTWOOD BORN 1863, DIED 1880
The letters are round, with elaborate faceted serifs. The stonemason must have struggled with spacing on his longest line, the letters of the word Superintendent huddling together to fit. There is another inscription. Chiselled in a different hand, the letters smaller, more precisely measured. In Loving Memory of LYDIA WESTWOOD BORN 1844, DIED 1912
‘My grandmother, Lydia. Your great-great-grandmother. Lizzie was her eldest. Then there were the twin boys, Robert and Thomas. Stayed on the island, both of them. All the island Westwoods are from them. Alva and our dad didn’t come along until years later, until Lizzie was grown up, till she died really.’ Essie stands on the grave and thinks of the white bones in the earth. An image comes to her, unbidden. A house, surrounded by the straw-coloured dryness of summer. She’s running with the other children and a
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blind cocker spaniel with black ringlets full of burrs. Essie is the smallest child and she runs behind them across the bridge over the dry creek bed and back towards the house. In their hands they hold squirming sun-warmed skinks and Essie’s drops its tail right onto her palm. There are trees with sour plums, and orange and red striped apples you have to eat in the daytime if you want to avoid biting into a grub. There is her mother’s bonyhipped cow, and the cool of the kitchen and the cow’s funny-tasting milk in a big blue china jug with a little beaded doily on top. It is the year of the mouse plague. There is a mouse so hungry that it stands on a still-warm hotplate tugging at a corn fritter in a frypan. There is a party. There are always parties in this house. There are men with guitars and tipsy grown-ups who Essie and the boys tease. They drop the skinks down their shirts and then run away. The women stand together in the kitchen and make coleslaw, and the men smoke and drink beer and play their guitars until they run out of songs they know the words to. It gets dark and the children fall asleep under the table. Then Essie wakes, in a bunk, in the darkness. She climbs out of bed with her heart in her mouth, creeping past her father asleep upright in a rocking chair. She stands with her hair all wild and knotted in the kitchen doorway. Her mother and the mother of the boys are cleaning up. Her mother is wiping down the sink with a striped cloth, wiping away her own tears
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which fall one after the other onto ripples of stainless steel. I’m not ready to die yet, her mother says as the tears fall down onto the sink. May puts an arm around Essie’s waist and holds her tight. Essie allows herself to lean, just a little, against her great aunt. They stand on the grave for a time, quietly. She sees the lighthouse tower on top of the hill, and imagines just beneath the grass, in the brown earth, a great tangle of blanched bones, like the wreckage of so many ships.
The smallest thing in the sea chest is a wedding band made of rose gold, three stars etched into its surface with tiny diamonds at their hearts. There is an inscription engraved inside the ring: April 12, 1970 in tiny even letters. But although she knows it must be her mother’s, Essie can’t remember ever seeing it on her hand. She can only remember bare fingers, as thin as living bones. A ring is like a story inasmuch as you can choose where to say it begins and where to say it ends, but that is not to say it does. There are stories in the rings which encircle the heart of a tree. They tell not only of age, but of experience: when there was drought, when there was fire. She remembers now that it was May who told her, when she was a child, that the rings on a woman’s fingers were just like the rings of a tree. They were the stories of
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her mother and grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts, the stories of her loves and disappointments. And it was May who once said that memories are the safest keepsakes. She said it to soothe her, after Essie’s mother died and after her father threw everything away. No one can take away from you the things that are locked up safe in your heart and mind, she had said. May’s hands were richly encircled with gold. There was a ring for each of her decades, and one for all eternity. Essie remembers her holding out her blunt, freckled fingers, and naming them each in turn. On the ring finger of her left hand was a proud sapphire in a clutch of golden prongs, the engagement ring that came twenty years too late. When there was money, she said. On the ring finger of her right hand was a plain gold band made from one which had been cut off the age-swollen finger of a dead woman, an almost-maiden aunt who had been known as Lucky, and who was not. She married a man the week before he went to a war from which he didn’t come back. Essie threads the small gold band from the sea chest onto the plain chain she wears around her neck. There is a fairy story, one of the many about girls with absent mothers, in which a foolish girl slips her dead mother’s wedding ring onto her finger. Essentially, it is the same story as the one in which the girl leaves behind her glass slipper on the palace steps. In yet another version of that story — the one that was printed onto the thick yellow pages of the blue-bound book Essie had when she
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was a child — a hazel sapling is planted upon the grave of the dead mother, and grows out of her bones into a beautiful wishing tree which rains down exquisite shoes and dresses, and triumph and revenge of an equally perfect fit. In that way, her own mother had been of no help to her. When she was a child she put it down to the fact that there were no bones in the earth. Just a scattering of fine dust. Her father backed the car up to the door of the splintering house in the island scrub. Into the boot went armfuls of clothes, strings of necklaces and costume jewellery, delicate pieces of a tea set that had once belonged to a great-grandmother or a great-great-aunt, the china painted with daisies and rimmed with gold. A big silvery key with a 21 on it, tied through its eye with a piece of yellow ribbon, scrapbooks with tearing fringes of yellowed newspaper. Everything went in unpacked. Things were smashed and broken, creased and tangled up together. While he was inside, gathering more armfuls, she retrieved things. The packet with the little tin carousel in it that she was allowed to help set up each Christmas. It was hung with reindeers and stars and tiny tubular chimes that tinkled when the whole thing turned in the breeze. A string of freshwater pearls, a pale grey cashmere cardigan that felt soft in her hands, soft like her mother’s hair. Essie had stood by the car and held these things up to his face. He had grabbed her by the wrist, the naphtha-flare of anger in his eyes, aqua against blood red.
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Little girls who are greedy and grabbing get nothing. Do you understand? Things mean nothing. Do you understand? She knew the tears she cried later on her great-aunt’s shoulders were bad tears. Tears of greediness, of wanting, not pure tears of sadness for her mother’s death. Memories are the safest keepsakes, May had said, kissing the top of her hair. But she knows now that even if they couldn’t be stolen, they could be lost. The only way to find them was to begin at the beginning, to keep threading together these strands of words on the pages of her cornflowercoloured notebook. To search between the lines of these stories of loss and wanting to find, if not the truth, then perhaps the essence of things. To write, if nothing else is possible, someone else’s memories of their own mother. Again she picks up Lydia’s stone with its bright Jupiter stripe, turning it over in her hands and thinking of a molten vein setting into this crystal seam.
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he first memory I have is of Mother at prayer. She kneeled by the side of her bed, her fair hair loose to her waist, knotted hands pressed into her forehead. She could almost have been a child herself except for the strands of silver at her temples and the corona of lines about her eyes which ended where the skin stretched, shiny and pink, over the wide curves of her cheekbones. She spoke the words of her prayers softly, her Scots’ burr so gentle that if you could have caught one of those words as it drifted towards Heaven, caught it and held it fluttering between cupped hands, you would have felt the soft rasp of peach skin against your palms. I had felt a shudder of sadness ratchet down the spine of the island. Mother was still, so still that she could not have felt it. Yet it woke me. I stood in her doorway in my nightgown. The nails of my fingers and toes were blanched even of their halfmoons by the cold. I watched the pale circle of her lips form the words of her prayer. I watched the words come out of her mouth and float upwards on the drift of her breath. Among them was my name — Alva. ‘Lord, help me to love Alva. Show me how to love this strange, cold child you have given me.’
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I would not wish for you to think that I was a nice child. I was not. Mother called me a storm child. A foundling, she said, washed up on the beach beneath the lighthouse in a storm, without so much as a scrap on my little body. She looked as if she wished she had left me there. If she cut me, she said, I’d bleed icy-cold salt water all over the floor. Once, she said that she was only waiting for the tide that would come up high enough to wash me back out into the sea where I belonged. But other times she told a different story, one in which I was born in 1880 at the Superintendent’s Cottage on the slope between the lighthouse and the beach. There was a storm; that much is the same. During the night, the winds brought snow from the south. Snow is rare here, too fragile for this place where the cold lashes and blasts, hunts you on fierce, hungry paws. Nevertheless, on that June morning — the day that I was born — there was a thick, white blanket ready to wrap me up. The lighthouse looked as if it had spread a white cape over the hill to match its own gleaming surface. The sea lay still throughout the morning while the dripping diamonds of icicles melted off the wind-sheared heath, then it took up its wild ways again. Even when I was a baby, I frightened Mother. She was chilled by my blue lips and aching white skin. The palest pale blue eyes I was born with never darkened or warmed. They were her husband’s, but she loved them less in my face. His had seen many horizons, mine were merely blank. Mother called me her miracle child. The one she had when she was nearing forty, when her other three were almost grown. But then she
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had another, a year after myself, so I was only a miracle for a very short time. My new brother Jack was round and brown and freckled, with dark curls and hazel eyes. He loved earth and Mother and, to her joy, was afraid of the sea. Mother was born on the shores of Loch Nevis, which is in truth only another tendril of the sea, and the sea, of course, is a pathway to everywhere at once. Loch Nevis is dark, and its waters are filled with jellyfish, spectral things, their transparent domes set with four small luminous circles. Mother was born on Knoydart, the peninsula that lies between Loch Nevis and Loch Hourn, between Heaven and Hell. She was one of the Arneils, and her name was Lydia. When she told the story of leaving her home, which was not often since it made her sad, she told it this way: By the time the sun fell, she said, the human cries had died down. By the time darkness came there was only the lullaby of waves against the clinkered boards of the hull inside which they huddled and, beyond that, the hungry sound of burning on the shore. There was the occasional crash of a flame-chewed rafter falling into a stone shell that would, after this night, no longer be anybody’s home. There had been clearances on Knoydart before, but not in her lifetime. Her family was lucky; they had a fishing boat to give them shelter. Others died from the cold that night. Her mother held two of the smaller children while Lydia herself, nine years old, cradled the baby. She held the swaddled weight of it against her chest with one arm, and felt with her free hand for the heavy egg-shape of her stone. It was still
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there, solid inside the wet folds of fabric at the hem of her skirt. She had found the stone on an ice-blue summer day, high on the slope from which she could see her family home and make out the pattern of the sandy floor of Loch Nevis by the shades of deep blue that faded in the shallows to milky green. From up there it looked as if Gripper, her father’s small fishing boat anchored in the bay, had been hooked like a fish by a curling barb of land. Up there, she could feel her toes sink into the earth beneath the heather and the bracken, feel them gnarl and lengthen as they wound down, drawing up nourishment from her native soil. She would be the last of us to belong, to properly belong to any place. On that day, a ladybird landed on her white sleeve, settling her red shell-wings together in their neat spotted dome. Then another landed close by, then another, and many more until the white of her shirt and the fair skin on her forearms were speckled red and black. Lydia knew that it was bad luck to brush away a ladybird, and had no wish for the compound ill fortune of brushing off a whole swarm. She began instead to climb. She climbed until the zigzag path petered out into bare rocky outcrops and a close hide of moss. Still, her legs were springs, she felt their coiled energy, as if she could climb forever. As she went higher, the ladybirds began to fall away, but her body kept moving, scrabbling with her fingers and the toes of her boots over a loose rocky face of scree. When she could go no further up, she stopped and watched the last ladybird become a blurring red speck in the air. When she looked down, she saw the stone at her feet, its two grey halves melding with the
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surrounding scree, its sparkling seam reflecting bright shards of sunlight. If Lydia — who was the second child, not even the eldest or the youngest, nor the one precisely in the middle — was noted for anything, it was for being good. She learned her Commandments well, and enjoyed the knowledge that there was a straight rule by which to measure herself. She took pleasure in sacrifice, had come to enjoy the taste of martyrdom on her tongue, tart as a gooseberry. She tried hard to be modest, ordinary and plain as grey stone. But there was something else in her, something which burned with the same pinkish-red as garnet nuggets, that shimmered like the crystals of quartz and the slivers of mica. It was a type of wanting, that was neither honouring her mother and father, nor counting up her blessings, even though it was hard to say precisely what it was that she desired. On this night, within the hull of Gripper, she wanted nothing more than to hear the sound of her father’s oars dipping into the water, pulling him closer to them. He had gone ashore to see who needed help, to bring back to the small fishing boat those who had no roof over their heads. Lydia moved closer to her mother, whose body enclosed as many of her wet and shivering children as it could, and whose voice emerged, low and warm, reaching out to embrace the rest. The baby mewed in Lydia’s arms. ‘Whisht, child, whisht …’ she whispered to it, an incantation against her own fear. The words came out in a voice like a chord and she heard her own mother in the base notes. Clear and calm and strong her mother’s
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voice was, even on that evening filled with the shouting of bailiffs and the hired soldiers, the screaming and pleading of their neighbours, the crackling of lit thatches. The sound of her mother’s voice mixed in with her own made her more afraid, since she felt none of its calm or strength within herself, and if she did not, perhaps her mother did not either. Her father did not come. Not ever again. Her mother went to the city with the babies, her brothers went to the sea. Being neither the oldest nor the youngest, nor the one right in the middle, Lydia went to live with her mother’s people on the island of Lewis, one of the so-called Charmed Islands. The shores of Lewis and the Shiant Islands were washed by a stretch of water named the Minch. It was also called Struth nam Fear Gorm — the Stream of the Blue Men. Some said they were fallen angels. Their sins too mild for Hell, they lived instead in underwater caves. They could be seen in foul weather, and perhaps were even the cause of it, stirring the water with their incessant swimming. They could swim with their bodies out of the water to the waist, pursuing ships at speed with the powerful kicks of their fishtail legs, trailing drifts of their long white hair and beards against the blue of the water and the blue of their skin. Sailors feared them, and would avoid the Minch if they could, because the blue men had the strength to pull a sailing ship down beneath the waves and break it into pieces that they would deliver as gifts to the people of the land. On Hallowtide, Lydia walked to the shore with a lit candle in her hand, guarding the small golden tongue of flame
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against the gusting of the wind with the curve of her hand. Lydia’s uncle, her mother’s brother, carried an earthenware pitcher of new ale. They walked across the soft, giving sand around a cove to a rock which fell away in a sheer drop to the sea. Her uncle lay on his belly and leaned out over the edge of the rock, pouring the ale, making an amber-coloured stream run into the deep blue sea. For observing this custom, he told her, he would be rewarded. The stretch of beach near his croft would be piled high with kelp and seaweed to make his soil rich, and the pickings of shipwrecks would be delivered to him. ‘Sin sibh féin, a dhaoine còire, boinne gasda …’ he whispered to the lightly ruffled surface of the sea. ‘There you are, my good men. A fine drop …’ The howling of the grey seals on the tip of the outcrop mixed with the empty sound of the wind. Lydia felt brushing across her face the thinned veil which was all, on the night of Hallowtide, that separated this world from the other. She felt, too, the thinness of the membrane that lay between fear and pleasure as a long, cold shiver coursed up her spine. Who would come to her from the otherworld? The fear that she invited into herself seeped down the columns of her bones, drew pictures along the insides of her eyelids, ghostly images of those she had not seen since that morning when they went ashore again at Knoydart. Old Ben, his mouth frozen open in his sleep. Mary in the charred remains of her home, the bloodied crown of her new baby’s head making a big round O of the space between her lifeless legs. All those that she loved were in other worlds now, her
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family broken apart by the clearance. Her father might be dead, or he might have been among those herded by men with sticks, herded like the black-faced sheep that had taken their place on the land into a ship bound for another world, the new world of America. It was said that the Scottish landlords had taken money from landowners in that world for men like her father. Her mother and the younger ones were in the other world of the city of Glasgow, her sisters scattered about other branches of the family, her older brothers at sea in the fishing fleets. Her uncle watched the surface of the water as if he expected one of the na fir ghorm to emerge with a long blue face and mouthful of new ale. She felt inside herself the glinting hardness of the wanting, the waiting for something to happen. She remembered her mother, who had grown up on Lewis, telling the tale of Kelyer, the rich merchant’s daughter who conjured a blue man with seven salt tears measured into the ocean on a spring tide, and took him as her faery lover when he appeared. She almost felt, this night, as if she could cry now, as if she could blink seven perfect droplets into the shushing water below. As if she could give herself happily to a faery lover, no matter what the consequences. A ship rounded the headland to the north, a clipper ship rigged all the way up to her moonrakers, their canvas catching a little of the light from the pale disc in the sky. ‘That captain will be wanting to keep his Gaelic close handy tonight,’ her uncle says. It was known that a captain might save his ship from an attack by the blue men if he could answer the questions of their chieftain. Though he would need
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to have more than a scrap of Gaelic about him, and something poetic in his soul, as only rhyming couplets of sufficient wit would keep his ship afloat. Next morning, the clipper ship was at anchor in the deep harbour of the island. The glittering red nuggets burned inside Lydia, making her face flame. On the top of a hill she stood with a basket of kelp in her arms, watching men crawl like ants over the ship as they prepared her for sail. She edged down the slope, towards the clipper ship all done up in the immaculate green livery of the White Star Line, until she stood on the wharf, until there was nothing but water between herself and the hull of the gleaming vessel. The sky above was split in two, blue with light puffs of cloud to the north, a bank of indigo to the south. The sun shining from the fair portion of the sky made the clipper ship glow copper against the darkening south, and picked out the gilt-etched letters of her name on the sternboard: The Wave of Life. There was a shadow on the face of the navy-coated man, the skipper of the southbound vessel. ‘Have you any Gaelic, lass?’ he asked of Lydia. ‘Tha mi ’ga bhruidhinn mar gum biodh mo chraiceann gorm,’ she replied. ‘I speak it as if I had blue skin.’
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he new owners of the Lunawanna shop have tizzied it up, painted big blue-green murals on the walls and put in tables and chairs for a cafe. And they’ve renamed it the Mangana Shop, for Truganini’s father. As the bells behind the door clatter and knock together, Pete wonders what the old bugger would have made of that. It does its best, the shop, to meet the unpredictable urgent needs of the locals. It’s got toothpicks, envelopes and paperclips, cheap novels and mosquito coils, greeting cards and custard powder, paracetamol and a handful of videos to rent. There are onions and tomatoes and carrots and potatoes in a rustic stack of baskets, and kitsch clockfaces mounted onto misshapen slabs of native timbers that are, presumably, souvenirs. The couple running the place could almost be twins. They’ve got the same mousy cropped hair and blue eyes, the same earthy clothes and air of distracted purposefulness. Pete’s seen them on the one day a week they take off from the shop building a stone wall around their house near the lagoon, to-ing and fro-ing like a pair
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of birds nesting. He watches her now, behind the counter briskly wiping out the bain-marie, obstructed by her nearterm pregnant belly. ‘G’day Pete,’ she calls out to him in a sing-song voice. It’s part of the business, knowing everyone’s name. He can’t remember hers, although he knows it’s something plain and harmless like Linda or Jill or Jan. ‘Yeah, g’day.’ He gets a basket and collects milk and dog food and toothpaste, picks out the least limp head of broccoli and chooses a dozen apples, even though he can already imagine their insipid floury taste. Linda or Jill or Jan hands him a bundle of mail while she rings up his purchases, her hands flying over the old-fashioned pushbutton cash register. His letters are bound together with a thick, red rubber band. He pulls them out one at a time and turns them over to see if they’re worth opening. Usually, he stands by the old yellow bin outside the shop to open his mail. It’s the best place to do it since it stops the leaflets and mailorder crap and bank statements telling him nothing he didn’t already know from getting to his house where they multiply on the bench around the phone. He’s looking through the stack for an envelope in the grainy grey stock of the Department and marked with the small circular thylacine emblem of the state government: the envelope that would contain the letter telling him yes, or no. That he’s going south in September, or he’s not. But
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in the stack are only window letters, invitations to enter raffles and a postcard from his dentist with a fat grinning cat on the front reminding him it’s time for his annual parting with about a hundred bucks towards the dentist’s new Merc. ‘That’s thirty-five fifty thanks, Pete. Looking for something special?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says, but in a way that ought to discourage any further questions. ‘If you tell me what it is, I’ll keep an eye out, give you a call when it turns up.’ He sees she’s actually curious, as well as compulsively helpful. ‘It’s all right. It won’t make it get here any quicker.’ ‘Suit yourself. You look after the old lighthouse, don’t you?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Would you mind, next time you’re down there, delivering this to Miss Lewis? Don’t know her first name, do you?’ He feels a flush creeping up through the three-day stubble on his neck as he shakes his head. ‘She hasn’t come in for a couple of weeks. Think she must have brought just about everything with her. She bought candles the last time she came in though, lots of candles.’ Pete glances at his shopping to see if there’s anything embarrassing or revealing.
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‘D’you mind?’ He takes from her a blue envelope, plastered with numerous small purple stamps from another country. It’s addressed to Essie in Western Australia, but that address has been crossed out. In the space beside it someone’s scribbled the words Lunawanna Post Office, Bruny Island. ‘And give her one of these,’ says Jill or Linda or Jan, waving at him a flier for some local shindig next month. ‘What’s this?’ A circus, he reads, answering his own question. ‘Honestly! Where have you been? On Mars? What do you think everybody on this island has been doing for the last six months?’
He drives the road to the lighthouse, aware of the reflection in the corner of his windscreen made by the pale blue envelope on the dash. He’s been to the suburb where Essie lives, a seaside neighbourhood of Perth. He can picture its primary-colour brightness, the blue and yellow awnings of fish and chip shops, its weekend people all tanned and lazy; it’s not a scene in which he can easily place her. The dirt track is spotted with puddles from rain earlier in the day. He finds himself wanting to open the letter, to scour its contents for clues to her. The stamps are from Central America but there is nothing on the back of the envelope to tell him who it’s from — a lover, perhaps, or
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even a husband. He can picture him, serious and intellectual and earnest. Although surely a lover or husband would have known she was here, wouldn’t have written to her in Perth. Unless of course they were separated and she has come to the island to retreat. This letter could even be a plea from the husband or lover to reconcile. Pete has to remind himself that it has nothing to do with him. In front of Lightkeepers’ Quarters II is a low wire-mesh fence with a small square gate that he steps over rather than opening. The door is surrounded by a small portico of spray-spotted glass and peeling white weatherboards. Beneath it is a narrow space through which he could easily push the letter and the flier, but he knocks and steps back to lean on the frame of the portico. After a minute he sees movement in the textured glass beside the door, the blurred shape of her coming down the hallway. He gets a rush of fear up into his gut. He hasn’t planned this, doesn’t know what he’s about to say or do. The look on her face when she opens the door is part concerned, part curious, the look of someone very surprised to hear a knock on her door. He notices the pen wedged behind her ear and the small glistening glob of dark ink resting on a few strands of her pale hair. He notices her lambswool slippers and the way the sleeves of her top, striped in two shades of blue, come down to the knuckles on the backs of her hands. ‘Hello? Oh, hello.’
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It seems to him that there is something inevitable about her face, as if her combination of features was somewhere set down in a template. It’s so symmetrical it might have been cast out of a mould, and fixed as it is now it reminds him of the face of a sculpture or a painting, something that could sit in a gallery and withstand years of scrutiny without yielding anything more. He feels the heat rise up his neck again and wishes he had her talent for blankness, not a face that continually gave him away. Her expression has shifted now, but he cannot read the new one. ‘I wasn’t sure, the other day on the path, whether you remembered me. I didn’t … until I’d passed you,’ he says, aware that he is stumbling. ‘It’s been a very long time.’ She says this not in a way intended to excuse him, or herself for that matter, but as a simple fact. And then there is a silence, a precarious silence that he rushes to fill with the shape of the envelope in his hand. ‘Delivery for you,’ he says. ‘The woman at the shop said she hadn’t seen you for a few weeks. Thought it might be important.’ He watches for her reaction to it, but there is next to none. There is no excitement in her demeanour, nor surprise. If anything, there is a slight sigh and a lifting of one of her eyebrows, a few shades darker than the white of her hair. ‘From my father,’ she explains. He finds himself being pleased.
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‘What’s he up to these days?’ ‘Saving the world, I believe,’ she says flatly. ‘You live here now then?’ ‘Yes, just up the road a bit. Are you here long?’ ‘Another month or so.’ ‘Writing,’ he suggests. She looks at him, puzzled. ‘The pen,’ he says, gesturing to the side of her face. ‘Oh, yes.’ He feels Scully’s nose push between his calves, then her whole body ooze through behind it. The dog looks up at Essie, her tail wagging against Pete’s legs. ‘Hello,’ Essie says, crouching to dog level. ‘That’s Scully.’ ‘Hello Scully,’ she says affectionately, rubbing the dog’s soft ears. Scully looks back at Pete with an attitude of bliss. ‘Take a lot of that, won’t you, mongrel?’ ‘She’s beautiful.’ ‘She’s ugly as all get out, look at her,’ he says, nudging the dog with his boot. ‘No, you’re beautiful, aren’t you?’ He pulls the flier out of his back pocket, unsure whether to give it to her. He wouldn’t want her to misconstrue it as an invitation. ‘I’ve also got this for you. From the woman at the shop.’ Essie stands up again and takes it from him. ‘A circus? Here, on the island?’
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‘So they say.’ Scully leaps up on Essie, putting muddy paw marks on her blue top. ‘Geddown, Scully! Sorry. I’m sorry, she’s …’ ‘No it’s fine. Really, it’s fine.’ ‘You, in the ute,’ he growls at the dog. ‘I’d better get going, got to do the tower.’ ‘Thanks. For the letter.’ ‘No worries.’ ‘See you then.’
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hen Essie opens the door to the lighthouse tower in the afternoon, it still smells of Pete’s lemony disinfectants. The brass daisy vents on the wall are bright, new-minted and the louvred glass of the prism has been cleaned of its layer of dust. She has brought with her Charlie’s old-fashioned map of the world. On this map, the countries of the Empire wear their uniform pink. It is marked with places called Ceylon and Formosa. She unfolds it on the catwalk floor and thinks of intersections, of places where lives cross over like the lines of latitude and longitude. She thinks of a globe and the way all its lines of longitude rush together to a point at the poles. She thinks of Peter Shelverton, and remembers the time he had a tooth extracted. He might have been ten years old. He brought the tooth, wrapped in a tissue, out of his pocket to show her. It was a molar and it had bits of dried blood embedded in its surprisingly tree-like roots. The side of his face was swollen and sore, and perhaps that’s why, on that afternoon, they lay together on
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the green-patterned carpet of his bedroom and covered sheets of paper with their intricate maps of a tooth-fairy’s city. She had drawn palaces with minarets, and fountains of pearly milk-teeth. He had drawn turrets and castle walls studded with pointed incisors. She had drawn small, translucent fish in the waters of his moats. On the map, she tracks the voyage of the clipper ship The Wave of Life. She imagines Lydia boarding the ship, climbing the rope ladder from the tender, her pale blue skirts bell-shaped in the breeze, observes her taking in the oiled timbers and hairy ropes. From the Hebrides the ship would have sailed south, across the English Channel, down the western coast of Europe. Essie’s finger leaves the southern tip of Portugal and makes its way south into the Horse Latitudes. With so much space, so much open water, the lines of longitude spread out. And even though they are fewer now, still there are places where two lines come together, looping around each other like strands of string on the back of a parcel before continuing on in their separate directions.
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outh past the coast of Portugal, westwards a little, south a little more, and there you will enter the windless belt of silken blue they call the Horse Latitudes. There is more than one story telling how this region, this borderland of the Doldrums, came to have that name. Since there is no saying which is true, it must be up to you to decide which you prefer. Perhaps the region is named simply for its proximity to the Golfo del Mares, ‘the Gulf of Mares’. Or perhaps it is named for the horses, bound from Spain for sale in the West Indies, whose bones may still litter the sea floor in these parts. When large vessels were becalmed hereabouts, and their voyages prolonged, the water supply could not be guaranteed to sustain both horses and crew, so the equine passengers would be led from the hot, still air of their shipboard stables, and forced over the side. There is still another story of the naming of the Horse Latitudes, concerned not with horses, but with the nature of sailors in port, and their tendency to consume their advance wages in dockyard taverns. Oftentimes when they set sail on long voyages, it was a month before they had worked out the
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wages they had already drunk, approximately the same time it took during an average passage to reach the latitudes of which we speak. And this month, it is said, was known as the ‘dead horse month’, because a skipper might just as well flog the proverbial as get a good day’s work out of his crew for its duration. And so, right on time, a month into her voyage, The Wave of Life sailed into the Horse Latitudes. The sea turned a flat mid-blue beneath a cloudless sky. The sailors on deck were as listless as the mainsail making its useless flip-flop sound. The passengers wandered aimlessly about the decks, the heat causing the ladies to allow their standards of buttoned-upness to ease. The days stretched out, hot and blue and full of sameness. Even the cook was infected with the general lassitude of the ship, serving up the same meal of meatballs each evening for seven days straight. But to my Scottish mother, the Horse Latitudes were strangely beautiful. Resting her arms on the rail of the foredeck, she saw a pod of porpoises pass beneath the becalmed bow of The Wave of Life. She saw clearly the pale grey suede of their skins as their bodies arched out of the water beneath the carved bosom of the emerald-clad figurehead. She had never felt warmth like this before, had never felt the sun’s heat uncut by a sharp breeze off a mountain. This heat was encompassing, enveloping, making her slow and dreamy and lazy. Perhaps the ship had been becalmed for a fortnight, when she sensed a change coming. It was not in the weather. There
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was still no sign of a breeze, nothing to ruffle the smooth sheet of blue water all around. It was aboard the ship. The movements of the sailors, engaged in cleaning brass or varnishing timbers, once again picked up in pace. The crewmen began to wear secret smiles. Straw was carted from the section of the hold where the livestock was kept. In the galley, preparations were being made. Notices appeared, meticulously handwritten, tacked on to the deckhouse doors. The Procession of the Horse, they announced. All passengers and crew to assemble on the foredeck shortly before noon. The captain and the officers were a regiment of uniforms, navy blue and shiny-buttoned. The crew flanked them in two banks of pressed shirts and trousers, neat ties at their throats. They waited in stillness for the passengers to arrive and then to fall quiet. He emerged through the hatchway in the foredeck, top hat first, followed by his ruddy face and bold, striped waistcoat — the Master of Ceremonies, also the ship’s cook. A nautical tradition, he explained to the crowd. Very fortunate they were, he said, to witness this particular ceremony. ‘And now, bring on the horse.’ It came from behind the assembled crowd, galloping up the deck, manoeuvred around the obstacles by a brightly dressed jockey. The horse’s uneven hessian girth sprouted spikes of straw, its straw-stuffed head wobbled weakly at the neck. Its tail was a length of rope unravelled and frayed, its facial
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features scraps of leather fixed on with the boatswain’s large, strong stitches. ‘And I should like you to meet the jockey.’ He had been chosen, no doubt, for his size. A small man in overblown white jodhpurs stood astride the hessian horse in the centre of the crowd, a short riding crop in his free hand. ‘Shortly the jockey will take charge of the horse on its final run, for this horse is not long for this world,’ shouted the Master of Ceremonies. ‘But first …’ A chant came up from the assembled sailors. ‘The jockey must have a wife, the jockey must have a wife.’ Lydia knew before it occurred. At least that is the way it seemed to her later. That although she lowered her gaze, the jockey would manage to catch it just before it fell all the way to the deck. He made a low bow, wildly exaggerated in its courtliness. Time jagged on this moment of his entreaty. It gave her time to trace over his sharp, square face, notice the curious paleness of his blue eyes, give in to his twist of a grin, commit it all to memory. But of course, this is a story of a first meeting. And when you are dealing with stories about first meetings, you must remember this: that the significance of the moment can never be fixed. It is all a matter of balance and weight. The weight of the years that follow that first moment of meeting seep backwards into it, swelling the significance of it, until the two quantities balance. Supposing nothing of consequence had ensued, then Lydia might have remembered only the romping lap around the deck
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of The Wave of Life, the way the laughter of the gathering caught them up and transformed their clumsy gait into a gallop, the following band of musicians on pipes and whistles, the fall of the riding crop thwacking sometimes against the hessian, sometimes against her own skirts where she rode behind the jockey on the straw horse. The rest — the sailor’s blue eyes, his grin, the courtliness of his low bow — might all have drifted away, meaningless, on the tide of forgotten moments. ‘And now’, said the Master of Ceremonies, ‘the horse must die.’ A drum roll commenced, and again the sailors began to chant. And they say old man your horse will die And we say so and we hope so One month of hellbound life we’ve led While ye have laid in a feather bed. But now your month is up, old Turk. Get up, ya swine, and look for work. We’ll yank ye aft by the cabin door An’ hopes we never sees ye more After hard work and sore abuse We’ll salt ye down for sailors’ use Hoist him up to the top of the sky Drop him down to the ocean bed. And they say old man your horse is dead Poor old horse
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The Master of Ceremonies looped the noose about the horse’s neck, watched as the derrick was raised and the horse lifted over the rail to hang, twirling on its noose, above the surface of the water. ‘Old man, your horse must die. Old man, your horse must die.’ It was the cabin boy, the youngest aboard as tradition dictated, who held the knife in his hand. He stood upon the railing of the becalmed ship. The sailors chanted to him, their faces red and vehement. ‘Old man, your horse must die.’ Lydia was still standing next to the sailor they called the jockey. She watched his face as he chanted, noticed the way that it had changed, grown fixed and closed. She saw that the chant was a circle, and she was outside it. She felt there and then, but chose to ignore, the first inkling of a fact: that he was part of something she would never understand. The knife sawed through the rope and the horse hit the water, its hessian sides splitting in parts, pieces of straw straggling over the water’s still surface.
William Westwood and Lydia Arneil were married in earnest in the April of 1862 in St David’s Cathedral in the city of Hobart, the final destination of The Wave of Life. As it seemed a step towards a life on land, William accepted a position as Head Lightkeeper on Goose Island, a crescent of land flush with the waters of Bass Strait. It was so small that
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when the need came upon Lydia to walk, she had done the length of the island in half an hour. There was not so much as a hedge or a hillock behind which one could be out of sight. The island was populated by an assistant keeper, his sour wife and a malnourished child that was forever sucking at whatever barren objects it could get its mouth around: a finger, a knuckle, a stone, a wad of dress or shirt. The rocky flats of the island were littered with marine rejectamenta and blotches of succulent plants which once a year turned into carpets of sticky pink-purple blossoms. The island caught the full weight of the Roaring Forties, which blew through Bass Strait largely uninterrupted. The low stone garden walls, cobbled together from beach rocks and debris, struck Lydia as brave, but pitiful. Goose Island was too small to support any life, except that which could fly away. It was named for that great grey battleship of a bird, the Cape Barren goose, which bred there. One had to be capable of extraordinary feats to survive, and Lydia watched the geese turn salt water to fresh, flicking the salt crystals out from the nostrils in the luminous green ceres at the tops of their beaks. She watched the shearwaters come to nest and the gulls hovering over the shoals offshore, and wished for wings. Ships paused often at Goose Island, bound for Port Melbourne or Sydney. William was garrulous when the small harbour was full, smoking with the sailors and holding court with his tall tales of seafaring life. When the ships sailed, he was listless and despairing, finding mindless consolation in the cleaning of the scores of lenses fitted upon the Goose Island
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Light. In the storeroom Lydia discovered the nature of the chaos from which she was expected to produce meals. She found a scrap of a cat and her kittens at home in a box of salt, and bins of flour overtaken by weevils. On that flat crescent of earth and stone in Bass Strait, William was a husk of himself aboard ships. His wife smiled across the gulf of what was missing of him, but did not know the way to cross it. If you had asked Lydia during this time whether she was happy, she would have been unlikely to say that she was. And yet these were the days — these days filled not with luxury, but with no real privation either, filled just with the two of them and the simple fact of their togetherness — that she would look back on as the happiest of her marriage. These days she would look back on as her own Horse Latitudes, as a calm, windless belt of silken blue.
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June
aptain Bligh is on a unicycle. His cheeks are painted as red and glossy as the oversized apples he juggles. The single wheel of his cycle jags backwards and forwards under his weight as his red and yellow banded legs pedal wildly to create enough momentum to keep him upright. A grey wig with small pigtails capsizes over his forehead. We have no bananas, we have no ba-na-nas today … There is a choir of red-jacketed sailors behind him, juggling in unison, slinging apples between them in slowmotion arcs high overhead, sometimes catching them inside their Admiral Nelson hats. The interior of the Alonnah Hall is draped with bolts of brightly coloured cloth to make it resemble the inside of a big top. It’s warm with the radiance of stage lights, the heat of crammed bodies, and the dry barnyard smell of the hay bales that mark out the circus ring in the centre. In the audience there are families with cushions and pillows, clusters of girls with glitter on their cheeks and on their eyelids, bands of loose-limbed boys in dark baggy clothes.
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From where she sits, Essie can see the gully between seating banks where the stage manager stands with a clipboard and an usher’s torch, counting the number of legs waiting in line beneath a collapsed parachute of grey silk. Outside the ring, a group of costumed children are rehearsing with a small black stallion wearing a headpiece of crimson plumes. Earlier, Essie stood at the bathroom mirror sectioning her slippery-clean hair with the handle of a comb. She had woven the long strands into a complex braid, examining her motives for smoothing a little bit of makeup under her eyes, rubbing gloss on her lips, for going to the circus at all. She had cordoned off the plait with an elastic band and turned her head each way to check its symmetry. And then it had all seemed too obvious and she had pulled the elastic band out of her hair and shaken loose the weave, tying her hair instead into a single, neat ponytail at the base of her skull. There are whistles and applause as Captain Bligh descends from his unicycle to take a deep bow, producing from his pockets real apples that he tosses into the crowd. Inside the ring the parachute inflates to become a whale swimming in blue light. A cherubic child sings to it in a sweet, faltering voice … the magical whale can be seen in the bay, he comes gliding towards us from oceans away … Once, it was said, you could have crossed the channel by foot on the backs of whales, there were so many of them.
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Captain Bligh, then the whale — the island’s chronology. But here in the circus ring the stories are spliced together tightly, leaving no space for the brutal chapters that lay before and between them in history. After interval, acrobats in sequined pants make pyramids with their bodies. Two halves of a horse discuss the meaning of love. In the crowd Essie sees families in mismatched clothes and with tangled hair, their youngest children held loosely on laps. They are European families, come to the island to make their lives in its hideaway rainforests. There are other families, altogether more austere, in plainer clothes and with hardened faces. The old families, the fishers and farmers. Their children remind Essie of an overgrown garden full of tall weedy plants fighting each other for space and light. Blue-spangled girls perform a jazz ballet routine. Essie watches a girl with long fair hair, noticing the way she takes a tuck of silver-painted lip beneath her teeth as she concentrates. She is twelve years old, maybe. Even taller than Essie would have been, and thinner too. A Westwood, no doubt. Her face is another of the same pale kind as Essie’s, only this one has slid down another rope-ladder of the family genes, been planted more firmly in the island soil. The circus ends and, after the applause, the bright pool of stage light is replaced with the harsh, uniform radiance of civic hall lights. It shows up the makeshift nature of the
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seating banks, tacked together in raw pine and plywood. It takes the gloss off the props and undoes the circus tent illusion of the draped lengths of cloth. Groups of people talk, men in black clothes coil enormous lengths of electrical flex into bundles and pull jewel-coloured gels from stage lights. Essie should have left by now, poured out with everyone else into the surprise darkness that fell while they were otherwise occupied. But she sits waiting, watching as performers return to the ring, plain-clothed now, their cheeks and foreheads reddened from rubbing away the thick grease of stage faces. A claw-foot bathtub is brought in, full of ice and drinks. A man in red patent leather clown shoes pops the cork from a bottle of champagne. Someone hands Essie a plastic cup full of fizz. Teenagers filch bottles of beer from the bathtub. A girl with spiky red hair throws her head back and laughs. Her face is so pretty that it cannot be spoiled by the thick black rims of her glasses. Against a wall the girl with Essie’s face and a lanky boy experiment with surreptitious means of touching. She sits and waits until she sees Pete join a group of black-clad men from the stage crew, and sees that he sees her too. Outside there is a forty-four gallon drum full of fire. Orange coals and meteor showers of sparks are visible through rust holes in its side. Without remarking on it, she and Pete each rotate their bodies as they talk, alternating
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fronts and backs to the fierce heat of the flames. They talk about places to describe the intervening years of their lives. She tells him about the city in the west. ‘It’s like a billboard for the Great Australian Dream. The kind of city you’d buy brand new out of a catalogue,’ she tells him. He tells her about the island in the Southern Ocean and there is a kind of formality, courtliness almost, in the way that he talks, as if he is choosing carefully his best words to share with her. He moves his hands as he talks, and she notices how the blue and black checked cuffs of his shirt protrude from underneath the ribbing of the sleeves of his jumper, the margin identical at each wrist. The skin of his hands is weathered and freckled, a rough terrain of snaking, veiny ridges. She can still see the child in his adult’s face, but it is darkened, deepened and hollowed in places. There is something gaunt, almost skeletal, around his eyes. As well as the toughness, she sees the gentleness in him, and is reminded of the little boy sitting tucked up in a shed, an ungrateful squawking flap of feathers in his lap, soothing it with a low voice. Closing her eyes against the sting of the smoke from the drum full of fire, she pictures him walking on the black sand that he says lies on the island’s beaches, through a carnival crowd of penguins. She can see him, the mechanical precision of his long strides as the dark beach reels by beneath him, the pleasure that he takes from these wild birds, almost tame in their trust of him.
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He tells her about the cats. ‘It was like takeaway food for them. The island’s covered in burrows full of soft, slow birds and their chicks,’ he says. He describes the offshore sea-stacks, columns of stone with small cushions of vegetation on top, where the rest of the birds had retreated from the cats, hanging on against extinction. He tells soldier stories about tracking cats to their caves, finding piles of tiny bones and feathers and beaks. He tells of chasing them down into rabbit burrows and burying them alive with toxic tablets that reacted with water to produce a deadly gas. And he tells about cold nights with a spotlight and a rifle, watching, waiting, alert for the green flash of eyeshine. He tells her how close they’ve come, and how all this work will be wasted if they leave even a pair, or a single pregnant female. She recognises his search for something perfect, blank if necessary. In Perth, she had been looking for her own terra nullius. ‘I’ll get back there,’ he says. She sees how important it is to him and it surprises her that she feels a little sting of disappointment. She sees his independence, the tempered-steel strength of it. Usually, she stays away from men who are too independent, knowing there is no getting any purchase on a man with no needs. She sees that he is made of something strong, something that she could never bend. Something sharp, too, that might even pierce the surface of her.
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ete throws more chunks of four by two into the fire drum. The new wood catches in the bed of coals, sending up a flare that lights the pale skin under Essie’s chin. Then she asks a question that sets off a small, warm firework inside him. ‘Did you ever find your father?’ she asks. It is a question that tells him she remembers, that makes him feel real to her. ‘I went to the Territory. That’s where he went. Still there probably. But no, I didn’t find him. It would have been against the spirit of the place. Most people up there are running from something. Wouldn’t have seemed fair to humbug him with the past.’ He tells her about the mine he worked at. Dirty work it had been, too, lead and silver. He went underground and came out at the end of every shift feeling a little bit more like a pencil than he had the shift before. He tells her about the waterholes in the crevices of the cracked red earth, about dry seasons full of bushfires, about the wheeling kites that picked off the small animals running
P
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from the flames. He tells her about the thunderstorms in the wet, about drenched roads leaping with frogs. In the Territory, Pete had lived in a mining town south of Darwin. He had a motorbike and the dingy cube of a men’s-quarters donga to call his own. Someone took the trouble of noticing the Tasmanian plates on his bike. It was a new kid at the mine, from Tasmania, green as grass, who hadn’t registered that the done thing was to keep to yourself. This kid settled himself on the small porch outside Pete’s donga, a six-pack at his feet, rolling a pinch of Dr Pat into a fold of paper, keen to reminisce. He wanted to know which suburb, which street, which school, what years. ‘D’ya remember the museum? They took us there when we were kids at school, eh? Spooky bloody place, that skeleton of that Abo woman just hanging there in that glass case.’ Pete did remember the museum. He remembered its polished floorboards and its waxy smell of death. He remembered a phonograph and a big round plastic button you could press to make sound come out of its cracked brown flute. What came out was horrible. It was the distorted voice of a black woman singing, like a wail of pain straight out of the past. He doesn’t remember a skeleton, because there wasn’t one there. Not by then. He knew the story because his
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dad had told him. They took Truganini’s bones down in the 1940s and put them in a vault. It was another thirtyodd years before they brought them out again in a plain pine box that was nothing like a coffin. It was small enough to be carried between a man’s hands to the place where she would be cremated, a hundred years after she died. Pete could have told the kid that he was dreaming; that what he was remembering came from pictures, or something he was told, not something he’d ever seen. But he’d let it ride, looking at his watch to give him the idea it was time to leave. ‘Best thing that could’ve happened to them though, eh? Getting wiped out, I mean. You’ve got to think that, eh? When you see these other filthy fuckin’ cunts up in this part of the world, I mean.’ That, Pete couldn’t let ride. His fist had come up with a piece of the kid’s broken tooth wedged into the skin of one knuckle. He turns over his right hand now, and touches a finger to the scar on his knuckle that was left behind by that stupid kid’s tooth. It had turned into a nasty, infected wound, the human mouth being a cesspit of bacteria. His hands. What a bloody mess, cross-hatched all over with little scars to remember things by. The index finger on his left hand is pointy where he sliced off some meat on a blade in a carpentry shop, and the underside of his
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forearm’s all puckered skin graft where he got burned in a fire on a prawn trawler up in the Arafura Sea. If he had nine lives, he used up one of them then. The dodgy old trawler listing around in the milky blue ocean with no radio until some Asian blokes stumbled across it and were convinced to take the crew on board. He likes to think of the tattoo on his chest as a scar too. It’s what he’s got left to show from so many years of anger. A skull and crossbones, huge as a breastplate across his whole chest. It took three sittings of clenched teeth from the irritating, constant pain of the needle. But it was a beauty, the porous bulbs at the end of the crossed bones meticulously picked out; the skull drawn with deep, haunting eye sockets and a pattern of fine cracks all over the brow. Caroline had hated it. She hated seeing it when they were making love, said it felt like death was staring straight into her heart. She brought home a pamphlet about getting tatts removed. In all the ‘after’ pictures there were still blurry shapes and upraised welts of damaged skin. That was the thing about trying to erase the past; no matter what you did, there were always marks.
‘Remember the museum?’ he asks her. ‘Museum?’ She had been in the midst of a thunderstorm, driving a night-time road with its surface alive with a slick
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of frogs. She opens her eyes to see him facing the fire, his hands making black shadows against the red of the fire. ‘You know, the Tasmanian Museum.’ ‘You lost me. I was still in Darwin.’ ‘Sorry. Train of thought must have jumped the tracks.’ He taps his forehead with his fingertips. She notices his receding hairline and observes that he will almost certainly go bald. He rubs his hand across the dark stubble of his hair as if he had read her thoughts. ‘The museum? Yes. I remember. They took us just about every year at school.’ ‘I can imagine. Hats and gloves, of course.’ She wonders if this is just mockery, or if there is a trace of bitterness about her private school education. ‘Straw hats in summer, velour in winter,’ she says, deciding to make light of it. ‘The teachers would make the boys tuck their shirts in, and try to straighten out their cowlicks with water on a comb.’ They talk about the museum, about the animal room that was the antechamber to the other displays. In it, stuffed kangaroos and possums posed between dusty tufts of tussock. Echidna and platypus pelts were nailed to the wall to touch. He tells her how the echidna’s spines were exactly like the tips of his nanna’s tortoiseshell knitting needles. She recalls the thylacine, his false pelt mangy and orange, his eyes the same glass beads that were stitched into the head of the teddy bear which used to play a tinkly lullaby until it got stuck and skewed.
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She remembers the time they went to the museum for convicts. Suspended on chains in a dark corner was the dunking box. It was for dunking naughty prisoners, dunking them right down under the water until they almost drowned. Some of them did drown. She imagined being inside those rotting timbers, the water rushing in through the holes in the sides, the box filling up with frothing, blue-green fear. He reminds her about the year the King Tut exhibition came to town. There was a sarcophagus which opened up like a beautiful, golden wardrobe. Photographs in the display showed bodies that had been unwrapped after years of being dead. Yellow distorted faces stared with empty eye sockets, screamed with mouths dried in the shape of pain.
There is movement in the nearby hall. Lights flicker off, keys turn in locks. A noisy group, not done with the party yet, makes its way towards the fire. Essie catches snippets of German, of French, of English where it is used to glue the conversation together or include another person. A small man in a houndstooth cap sings the melody of Captain Bligh’s banana song in a woman’s voice, forming its lyrics from a language Essie cannot place. The man in red patent leather shoes merrily pours champagne from a magnum bottle into Essie’s plastic cup. As the group clusters around Essie’s and Pete’s fire, Essie catches Pete’s
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eye and sees that, for now at least, their conversation has been extinguished. The heater in Charlie’s ute blasts circles of clarity onto the misted windscreen. The circles expand and stretch into oval shapes as she drives south, home to the lighthouse, on the winding road. Pete hadn’t mentioned, and so neither had she, going to the museum for Aborigines, who were kept upstairs, painted with spears, sculpted in ebony. The children in Essie’s class copied into their exercise books the equation of death, the comic strip that was nailed to trees by order of Governor Arthur, a message in pictures instead of words that the Aborigines could not read. An Aborigine spearing a white man in a bowler hat equalled an Aborigine hanging limp by his neck from a tree. A white man in a bowler hat shooting an Aborigine equalled the white man hanging, although Essie noticed that the angle of his broken neck didn’t make his bowler hat fall to the ground. In the museum there had been a large cabinet with a life-sized photograph of an old, dark-skinned woman. Laid over the gathered collar of her dress was a necklace of shells, pointy as teeth. Her hair was close-cropped and white, and there were hairs on her chin. She was sitting down, uncomfortably, as if she had been placed in the chair and arranged. Her eyes were slightly crossed under a scowling brow and she looked broken, almost
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demented. There was a placard which said that her father was the chief of the island — of Lunawanna-Alonnah. This old woman, then, with her whiskered chin, she was born on the island too. She was the last Tasmanian Aborigine, the man at the museum told the children. The last of her race. She wishes now she could reach through time and tell her child self the name of the feeling that freezes her heart in the cold, tall room; that she could share the understanding that didn’t begin to articulate itself until she was a woman standing on an Edinburgh street reading the words of a dead Scottish poet. This is my own, my native land, Walter Scott had written, and Essie had read his words and known that it was a kind of belonging she would never share. She thinks of the child Pete, a wild boy with all his love and hate mixed up inside. They had fought, and then they had clung together for comfort. She cannot remember how it began, but she knows that by the time her father ended that chapter of their lives, it had been a habit for them to sleep side by side in the same bed. She thinks of the place on the lighthouse path where her life and his again pivoted and turned. A fulcrum balancing enormous weights of history and … what? Future? As a child, History had seemed to Essie a single far-off country where people fished out dead people’s brains with
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long hooks and munched on human bones with sharpened teeth. And just down the road from pyramids full of slaves and cats buried alive with kings and queens would have been crucifixes, hung with men bleeding from the palms of their hands. Now she imagines history as something taken from a hole in the earth; a core sample, years layered in different shades. And since she passed by him on the path that morning she has been imagining what it would be like to cleave the cape in two and examine the smooth stone wall of its cross-section, to count up the layers with their different colours. To run her fingers over the thin, marbled time lines of her own ancestors, over the countless layers of Pete’s beneath, and over the thin streams of spilt blood pressed in between. Essie wants something from him, something like permission or approval. She is troubled by the way he has begun to invade her mind when she writes; the way he has become her audience whenever the nib of her pen touches paper.
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t was the year 1877, and I was not yet a part of the Westwood family which crossed the D’Entrecasteaux Channel to Bruny Island. Aboard the ketch Derwent Star, Father needed no compass to tell him that the wind blew from the northwest. He felt within himself the slip and spin of the dial, knew true north bodily, as most men knew gravity. The tan-bark sails of the Derwent Star were gently full and their shape pleased him. It pleased him to be upon the water again, although there was about this crossing something of the Last Supper. He would have liked to lose sight of land one last time, but in the channel there was no possibility of that. He had to be content to see it reduced, the green mounds of the opposing shores nothing but smudged bands upon the horizon, fringes joining the broad sheets of sea and sky. Yet it was there that he was to be confined. He had been twenty-five years at sea, but would be a fringe-dweller henceforth. Standing there upon the deck, his small body heavy-hung in blue serge, his face still under his skipper’s cap, there was something of the stopped clock about him. He was thirty-nine
I
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years old. Not a great age by any means, but already he had the look of an old man. A salted herring, as if so many years at sea had left him pickled. He had shrunken and greyed so much in his long illness that he had little ageing left to do. The better part of his voice was lost and, with it, his vocation. A skipper was not a skipper who could not shout ‘pull in the t’gallants’ or ‘clew up the forecourse’ over the howl of a fresh-sprung gale. In the lower saloon the night before, he wrote in a letter to his sister, ‘The time has come for me to swallow the anchor. Wife, self, family and effects aboard ketch Derwent Star for passage to Cape Bruny Lightstation where I shall take up position of Superintendent’. ‘Wife, self, family and effects.’ He knew very little of any of them. His children’s lives had passed as images in an album, separated by the blank pages of his absences. The contents of the tea chests in the hold were to him as mysterious as if they were the contents of his bride’s trousseau which, he recalled, he barely glimpsed even then. A ship had tossed in harbour throughout that night, his first in the marital bed. His own effects totalled a canvas bag of clothes and a sea chest, beckets tied by his own hand, small whale ivory hearts on the cleats. His wife had the wheel of the Derwent Star, her hands upon its spokes cupped by the hands of the amiable Captain Horlock. His daughter had curled herself onto a coiled mat rope on the poop deck, buried her peaky face in the dusty brown fur of the ship’s dog. His boys had climbed aloft, the bolder of the twins in the crows nest, the more timid looking longingly upwards from the ratlines. His wife, his children. He tried to
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secure them, to affix his ownership of them in his mind. During all his years at sea they had existed for him like empty bottles, unfilled categories labelled WIFE and CHILDREN. And now here they were, corporeal, his wife and his daughter a matching pair with their long fair hair and their long proud necks, although he is pleased his daughter does not share her mother’s way of fixing her eyes on him as if he were small and furred, scurrying around the skirting boards. ‘One point to starboard,’ the captain instructed, laughing. He let the wheel drop into the stopper of Lydia’s small hand. Her brow was furrowed but her eyes smiled. She wore the porcelain blue that put her husband in mind of the Madonna, and her Scots’ complexion was flushed a high, wild pink. Lydia reefed the wheel one point, the captain’s guiding hands at the ready should she slip. Her gaze caught her husband’s from where he stood at the rail. It was not only his physical person which had diminished. It seemed to her that the stuff which filled up a human body with life had in her husband shrunk away from the skin, dried up perhaps. His gaze seemed to have its origin not in his eyes, but further away, in a point beyond the back of his skull, beyond even the present moment. She had been married fifteen years, but could count upon her fingers and toes the number of months she had been a wife. This time William had been gone six years, the last of those with no word but a letter from a Sydney doctor saying that he feared the worst. Then William had arrived on the
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doorstep with no forewarning, the vessel in which he arrived being the very same as the one carrying the mailbag in which was the letter saying, ‘We depart for Cape Bruny Lightstation Monday next’. She had not forgiven him. Fifteen years she had been married and for fourteen of those she had wrung and wrung at her resentment, but had never been able to squeeze out the last drops. They had been married less than a year, they had been cast away together on that scrap of land called Goose Island for only eight months, when the barquentine Countess of Seafield laid her pick off its shores. The ship’s tender, plying her way between the anchored vessel and the island jetty, carried two things. It carried a message for relay to Hobart, saying that the Countess’ First Mate was ill beyond the jurisdiction of the ship’s surgeon. And it carried the First Mate, sweating and moaning in his fever, himself bound for Hobart as well. The oarsman pulled away to the ship with the assurance of William Westwood that both letter and First Mate would be delivered to Hobart on the first vessel that passed by the island headed that way. William Westwood farewelled the oarsman from the jetty with a firm, manly wave of his arm. But Lydia saw the look on her husband’s face, saw the way that his toes curled under, making raised lumps in the tips of his leather boots. Go then, if you want it so much, she had said to him. She felt the bittersweet tang of it, of letting him go, of knowing herself to be a wife who was not a ball and chain to her husband. She felt the pride of putting herself second, behind
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his wants and wishes and his love of the sea. Perhaps she thought that, although she had opened a door with her words, he might turn his back on that opening and stay. Certainly she did not expect him to do what he did: to kiss her briskly on the cheek, promise to send wages, and make a neat, shallow dive from the jetty into the aqua sea. She watched him swim with his efficient crawl, catching up to the single oarsman in the tender, hauling his lean body over the side. It was two years before she saw him again, bedraggled and emaciated on a Hobart wharf after being rescued from a shipwreck in Batavia. And nursed back to health, he would leave again, this time for five years, leaving her pregnant with the boys. But all that was to come. First and foremost there was the business of arranging a passage from Goose Island to Hobart for herself and the feverish First Mate of the Countess of Seafield. The journey on the ketch Seymour was a joyless one, during which Lydia nursed the poor sailor, who confused her with a woman named Rosie and reached out in his delirium to try to squeeze at her breasts. During the voyage she nursed her own growing resentment that her husband had left her on a barren Bass Strait island, and when she was carrying his child. She felt the taste of martyrdom alter on her tongue. There was no longer any sweetness to it. It was not exactly servitude, but it bore some resemblance. To the vicar’s wife, Mother became companion and secretary,
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living in a small room in the vicar’s house. Mother’s was a pleasant room with a window that looked out over an English garden with neat box hedges and banks of snapdragons. Beyond the garden, but still within the white frame of the window, was the big blue mountain that glowered over the city of Hobart. The vicar’s wife and Mother called each other Mrs Meredith and Mrs Westwood. It was clear that Mrs Meredith thought of Mrs Westwood, and Mrs Westwood thought of herself, as a widow. In the years that were to come, Mother would pay as rent the intermittent wages that arrived in mail bags from Father wherever on the face of the globe he might be. In the lean times, the Merediths were kind enough to overlook it, and Mother worked harder and more meticulously to ease the discomfort of being beholden to them. When Elizabeth Anne Westwood was born in the September of 1863 the vicar’s wife gave Lydia a gaily-coloured biscuit tin painted with dainty girls at play, and a verse: Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go, Friday’s child is loving and giving, Saturday’s child works hard for a living … Lizzie was born on the Sabbath Day. And everyone could see that she was bonny and blithe, and good and gay. • • •
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William watched his daughter Elizabeth, curled around the dog on the poop deck of the Derwent Star. In his freckled, tow-headed sons he saw something of himself, but Elizabeth was her mother all over again. It was as if her mother’s bearing her alone, rearing her alone, had had the effect of erasing even his genes. He looked away aft, so as not to embarrass her, when he saw her run for the rail. He saw only the pinky-yellow circle of her breakfast as it spread across the surface of the water and joined with the wake of the ship. When he next looked, she was curled again around the dog. He noticed the green tinge to her skin around the places where it was thinly stretched over the bones of her face. Lizzie could taste the acid of her sick in her mouth. She could smell the musty film left on her hands from the dog’s fur and it only increased her queasiness. Still, she held fast to the brown dog. She felt warm along the inside curve of herself where it lay against her. The even rise and fall of its ribcage soothed her. She felt a heaviness on her chest as though something large were sitting there. In Hobart there was school, and church, and helping Mrs Meredith cut her beautiful striped camellias and float them in delicate crystal bowls for the dinner table. Mrs Meredith had begun to talk of taking her on a voyage to England. England lived in Lizzie’s mind as neat and soft and green as Mr Meredith’s garden. A place rich with the frosted Christmases and theatres and palaces of Mrs Meredith’s memories. When Lizzie thought of it, she was
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impossibly homesick for it. But she would never go to England now. Instead she would go to this island, where there would be no school, no striped camellias, no delicate crystal bowls for the table. On the island there might even be savages, although her mother said not. Her mother had pointed out the one they said was the last. She had been sitting up in a carriage outside the cathedral in Murray Street. The skin on her cannibal’s face was brown and creased and waxy, her chin covered in long white hairs. She was dressed like every other woman of the day, except for a blood-red turban, and a possum fur slung about her shoulders. At the time, her mother said that she was the last, absolutely the last. Now, she was dead a year. The news of her death had even made the English papers that Mr Meredith read, months out of date. ‘The last Tasmanian,’ the newspapers said. ‘The last of her race.’
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e could not even pretend to himself that he did it on impulse, that it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. He wrote the words on a piece of paper even before he left the house in the early hours of morning. He folded the paper and tucked it into an envelope even before he walked the distance between his house and the cape. The envelope was there in his coat pocket for all the time that he walked and thought of her standing beside the fire, and pictured again the calm poise of her. He had watched the way she had closed her eyes to listen to him speak, the edges of her mouth turning up into a slight smile now and then, the lines on her forehead twitching faintly as if she saw the images he drew moving across two small screens inside her eyelids. He had closed his own eyes when she spoke. Divorced from her body her voice was a rushing of wind and blue water. He had not been to bed since he came home from the circus, knowing there was no chance he would find sleep this night with his ears still full of it. Will you come for dinner tonight? he wrote on the piece of paper. And beneath the words he drew a map, a
H
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squiggle of thick black lines he hoped would bring her to him. When he tries, he cooks well. It’s another legacy from his days of living alone in remote places where entertainment was scarce. He pictures bowls of some kind of golden curry, plans to light candles to soften the hard edges of the place, imagines her standing by his fire running her hand over the fur of his cat pelts hanging above the mantelpiece. The envelope has been there in his pocket all through this last hour that he has mopped and dusted and wiped and cleaned, all the time thinking of her. Now he posts his letter, sliding it in between the glass louvres of the lighthouse lantern, propping it against the base of the globe in its centre. Her name is written on the envelope in large letters that are faintly reflected in the panes of the prism. She had told him that she came to the tower most days, to read and to write. He is relying on today to be one of those days. And he is relying on an assumption that she, like him, could never visit the tower without spending at least a moment staring into the heart of the lantern.
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he is driving to his place and that is all. The fact that she is driving to his place does not necessarily mean anything. Not yet. She thinks of David and the way they put down the bedrock of their relationship on a pane of glass. In the end, it had slipped off without a trace; there was nothing to hold it in place. She knows that with Pete there is already so much beneath the surface that is twisted and bound, so much that can be understood without needing to be spoken. She has spent the afternoon counselling herself against disturbing all that lies quietly, there in their past. She has spent all afternoon pretending to decide that she wouldn’t go. Even so, she knew that in truth it was already decided, at the moment she opened the envelope in the lantern’s centre, that she would say yes to the question it contained. The mud map he has drawn for her is spread out on the passenger seat. She drives slowly, watching the left-hand side of the road for the turn-off to a gravel track. When she finds it, there is something about the gum trees framing the entrance to the road that seems familiar to her. But she
S
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doesn’t know this part of the island well enough to be certain that it is the turn-off she thinks it might be. She drives on and sees how the eucalypts reach out to each other over the tunnel of road in a way that she remembers, the undersides of their leaves lit up by the headlights. When she was a child, lying on the back seat of her father’s car looking at the sky through the window, the beginning of an arch of trees just like this one had been the way to tell that they were nearly home. In the middle of the road is an island of trees. The dirt track flows around either side of it like two arms of a river. She doesn’t need now to look at Pete’s map to see that she is going to take the left fork, and that when the two halves of the road meet again she will slow and take the first driveway on the right. The pattern of motions is already set inside of her, like train tracks. The trees beyond the windows of the ute turn colourless and grainy. She no longer feels as if she is driving; rather, she is being driven, into the past, or a dream. Stripped of colour by the night, the A-frame house is grey-planked, a ghost house. It has changed, the narrow beds of bright flowers gone from either side of the porch, the child’s swingset removed from the small patch of lawn beside the house. The door is open, a rectangle of dimmed light. His house. Her house. This was the house; the house with so many draughts that her mother made use of them, hanging wind chimes
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by the cracks in the walls. When Essie had lived here it had been full of wire-hung creatures spinning, dizzying eyes; and marionettes of flotsam and jetsam dancing on their cross-pieces of driftwood. She remembers bursting in this doorway, her father behind her, sand between her cold toes. And her mother had stood just across from where she stands now. She had stood behind a timber table that was marked with cup rings and apostrophes of brightly coloured texta. The chipped spout of a willow pattern tea pot rested on her outstretched finger. A carousel of fleetwing seahorses hung on the wall behind her, their sundried bodies shined amber with a lick of varnish. Essie remembers now that on that day she had known her mother was going to die, she had already begun to fade into nothingness. On that day, Essie could see the seahorses through her mother’s body. Not just through the fine wisps of her fair hair, or between the bare branches of her limbs, but through the middle of her, right through the cage of her ribs. ‘Essie?’ Pete’s hands are on her shoulders. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ She can’t answer him. She feels herself begin to choke as her throat slams shut on words. She can’t speak for the deluge of memory. Distantly, she hears a sound coming from herself, but there are no words, nothing will form into any shape that she can recognise. His fingers tighten, she sees the concern in his face so close to hers, but she
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pulls away from him, and stumbles across the gravel to Charlie’s ute. She takes the winding road too fast and cannot avoid the pale, furred shape that appears in the centre of the gravel when she rounds a corner. She brakes too hard and the back wheels slip sideways across the surface of the road. Her stomach buckles with nausea as the front corner of the ute absorbs the impact of the animal’s body. The wallaby is limp and bleeding from the mouth in the puddle of light that leaks from the headlights onto the gravel. Kneeling on the road, Essie takes the creature’s soft, limp head in her hands and cries.
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octors came from Hobart to see why I did not speak. I was eight years old when a certain Dr Fricker came. His passage to the cape was two days and two nights on a small ketch addled by contrary winds. He arrived at our place on the bullock cart coming from Jetty Beach on the lee side of the cape, his doctor’s bag clutched upon his thin knees, his complexion still green about the gills. Father, looking jaunty in his full navy dress suit, drove the bullocks, his mouth set in his peculiar smile, which turned downwards instead of upwards at the corners. He could not help but be amused by the poor doctor, as Father had never suffered a day’s seasickness in his life. Doctor Fricker had discovered since leaving the ketch that the land had started up the most unpleasant pitching and heaving. He steadied himself against the doorway of our house in an effort to keep his feet and his stomach. He followed my mother down the hall, his eyes fixed upon the small vee in the back of her bodice which pointed downwards into her full skirts. The hallway took a sudden yaw to port, then to starboard. The doctor lurched into the wall, surprised to see that the paintings did not swing or the coats on the rack sway.
D
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I was trussed up in frills like a Christmas turkey and told to wait in the front room. The beating of the carpets took most of a day, but not even that and the fire in the grate could rid the front room of its damp smell. Mother’s voice winged its way down the hallway. It was a voice made of richer stuff than usual, saved for Sunday best. ‘And this is Alva.’ I wondered what he thought to do. Check that I could hear no doubt, look to see that my tongue was fitted right in my head. He would find nothing amiss there. He asked me to sit upon the arm of the sofa. First he looked into my ears, and then into my mouth. I opened my mouth wider than was needed, poked my tongue all the way out until it was straining against the back of my throat. I showed him that I was not afraid of him. ‘Alva, can you hear me?’ He spoke slowly, as if I were an idiot. I looked at him blankly, as if I were, too. ‘I see. Alva, how old are you?’ I did not like to hold up fingers, or make signs, and in any case, Mother answered for me that I was eight years old. The doctor began to feel beneath my jaw. His probing fingertips were bulbous, like a froglet’s, and clammy. ‘Does that hurt? No? Good, good. Yes, good.’ I was kicking my feet gently, letting my heels fall against the side of the sofa. I wanted him to know that if he did anything I didn’t like, I would kick him. I saw he was a little afraid of me.
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I believe that Dr Fricker had some kindness in him, but it was a weak thing, half-starved. It was tentative, with a reflex to recoil. I saw that he was a good man, but that his good acts came after reflection and consideration rather than from a wellspring of compassion. He had all the awkwardness of a young man, although his body had seen forty years. He was very nervous, and anxious to please Mother. He looked into my eyes, pulled down my bottom eyelids one at a time. I stared at his greeny-brown irises, which seemed to pulse with his heartbeat, until they flinched away. ‘ Yes, yes … mmmm … yes, I see.’ He saw very little, in fact. He was looking at water; perfectly clear, concealing much. The doctor composed himself, shrugging his shoulders back unconsciously. Mother sat with her benign, angelic head held at an angle, waiting. ‘What I would say, Mrs Westwood, is that the child … what it is that I mean to say is that I do not think, I cannot find any evidence … Yes, it seems to me that physically, at least, there is nothing wrong with her. In fact, I think … my guess would be that perhaps she has in fact chosen not to speak. Am I right, Alva?’ There was a silence. Then the silence began to grow, like something inflating. Outside, I heard the ocean breathing in and out. ‘Tea? Doctor?’ The silence had pushed Mother to her feet. ‘ Yes. Please.’
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When Mother left the room the doctor became fascinated by the items on the mantelpiece. He didn’t know what to say to me and I didn’t help him. He examined the coconut shell Father brought from Batavia. He examined it so closely that I expected him to bring out a stethoscope. Then he looked at the family portrait, taken in the time before Jack and I were born. Mother was seated, while Father stood behind. Father’s body was a neat facade of clothing with his white frizzled head stuck on top, his pale blue eyes staring as ever into the nevernever. The twin boys, with their matching faces and their matching clothes, stood like pillars on each side of the frame, their faces blank with boredom. Only Lizzie was not serious. She leaned against Mother, her head tilted further still to lay her cheek on Mother’s shoulder. The angle of her long fair hair, caught at the temple with a white bow, was matched by the sweep of Mother’s full, white skirt. I could see that she had sucked in her cheeks to keep herself from laughing. ‘Lizzie was born on a Sunday,’ Mother used to say. ‘And she was. Bonny and blithe, and good and gay.’ Mother said Lizzie was in Heaven. Father said she was in the ground above the beach. I was more inclined to believe Father, as there was a grave there on the hillside. It was caged in with a white picket fence which made it look like a cradle. I could see that the doctor still did not understand why Mother married someone so unsuitable, an old man with coconuts for treasure. He did not understand that in her youth she saw Father’s life at sea trailing behind him like a quilt of
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splendid colours. She loved the squares of tranquil azure stitched up against the bolder blue of adventure. She loved the depth of the greens, the feathers of white and the splashes of red, orange, yellow — for the scorched earth of Morocco, the skirts of Spanish ladies, the sun disappearing over the horizon in a bonfire of cirrus. He did not understand that she wished to wrap herself in that cloak, to hoist it up the mast of her own life — her high and dry life — and set sail. The doctor wished the business with me might be over so they might discuss music and poetry, which she must surely be starving for in this Godforsaken place. I wished this too. The ocean and the beach were reduced to two narrow oblongs of window. I could see the terns traversing the bay beneath the fringe of the blinds, their flight broken for a split second by the frame between the panes. Essie is writing fast now. Her hands are still smeared with road dirt and blood and tears. Lines dip and tilt, covering page after page with uneven furrows of scrawl. She writes so fast she barely has time to recognise the doctor in her story as the one with the faint hint of jaundice around the gills, the overgrown Paddle Pop sticks that made her gag, and the back-sloping handwriting that put the words elective mute on a file with her name on the cover. The bird had been not a tern, but a seagull. She had seen it closely enough through the surgery window to see one palsied, crayfish-red leg dangling down limply from its body.
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• • • When I was a child, I would go each day to the water’s edge. To go to Lighthouse Beach, I crossed the sodden grass of the paddocks to the top of a path bordered by thick shrubs. The scrub was woven through with the labyrinthine flightpaths of small birds. Halfway down the hill the vegetation altered, becoming a tangle of trees and ferns — a green place for goblins, pungent with the sweet and dank rotting of leaves. The path wound next into a stand of she-oaks, their widows’ tears falling upon the earth in a drift of needles. Then it brought me to the edge of the beach, sand fringed by black rocks the size of fists. I followed terns to the far end of the bay, into a region of thrashing surf and howling sou-westers. I sang its flight. It was a song of smooth, flat planes, rising upwards with the draughts, dipping down into the breeze. I flew along the beach, letting the wind catch up my dress. I loosened my hair from its plait and let it fly too. If I wanted to, I could get underneath the wind. If I laid myself down on the beach stones, and shaped them to my body, I could worm into that narrow space between the ground and the hem of the skirt of the wind. I would lie, in that still space, my ear pressed to the stones, listening to them whisper their sad tales. Tea-stained water trickled out from beneath the stones, snaking down the beach into the sea. If I could get away unnoticed, I might go to Court’s Island. A sloping slab of land south of the cape, its cliffs face east, while its other side hunkers down against the westerlies. From the
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foot of the lighthouse, you cannot see that it is an island. It is when you pick your way through the dense heath to the cliff ’s edge that you see the narrow channel separating it from the cape. Twice a day, at the low tides, the water recedes far enough to reveal a rocky isthmus joining the two shores. This path is never completely dried by the sun, nor free from the risk of a wave, but it is possible to cross. Once on the island, you can stay for some minutes, or many hours, but for no amount of time in between. I spent whole days there. I knew a cave where I could be out of the wind and rain. I knew the flat slab of rock at the far southern end, which smelled of fish and ammonia like the seals who sometimes hauled themselves upon it. I lay among the succulent and mossy plants and watched the seals somersault in the water. They came ashore black, and slowly turned chocolate brown in the sun. I waited for one to shed its skin on the shore, and emerge to dance in the dusk with a human form. But none ever did. There was a night when I watched the seals on the island until the sun had crossed the channel and fallen behind the mountains on the other side, and I did not see the signs. I did not mark how exposed were the tubers attaching the kelp to the rocks, nor sense in the surface of the sea that suspended moment between the tide. When I returned to my path, it had already flooded. The white fingers of the black waves peaked together in its centre. It was shallow still, but too dangerous to cross. I spent the night in the cave and could not sleep for the bone-aching cold. I thought that I heard Mother and the head keeper Mr Markham calling my name from the cape. At dawn I watched
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for the tides and ran to the shore as soon as the waters parted. I returned home wet and dirty, with matted hair. I was forbidden to go to the island again. I was shut in my room for days and Mother punished me with a freeze as long as winter. The sound of the sea is not only in shells. It is in your own ears, all the time. You only have to cup your hands over them, and there it is, the deep distant hum of it. My room was so narrow that when I lay in my bed I could reach out my hands and, in less than a wingspan, lay my palms flat against the cold, white walls. The room had no windows and no furniture, except my bed and a small chest of drawers upon which were my treasures. There was a seahorse, found upon the beach, dried out by the sun. I loved the delicate carving of its segmented tail. There were shells — Chinaman’s fingernails with halfmoons of pink and mauve, buttery cowries with their mouths full of small, round teeth, a shell from the abalone, slick with an oily rainbow. There was also a paper nautilus shell, found by Father on a Bass Strait island’s beach. Sometimes my sister Lizzie came to me in dreams. She had cut off her long hair, and spiky clumps of white covered her scalp. The sisters of the little mermaid cut off their magical hair to give to the witch of the deep in exchange for a dagger. They swam alongside the prince’s ship, gave her the dagger and told her to plunge it into the prince’s heart. The little mermaid gave her tongue so that she might live ashore. I would have given mine that I could live under the sea.
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In my dream Lizzie was in the ocean, and I stood on the shore. Her mouth was a big, round O crying out to me. I could not hear her voice over the fathomless roar of the breakers. I would go to the water’s edge, but something invisible would push me back. I reached out to her, and she to me, but our hands would never touch. It must have been the year 1890 when the idiosyncrasies of the head keeper, Mr Markham, became something more akin to madness. I can only date it with such certainty because on the day that Father, with a heavy heart, sailed the station ketch to Lunawanna to send word to the Marine Board that a new head keeper would be required forthwith, he returned with the mail and among it was a photograph of myself, made up into a postcard. It was from the photographer George Beattie. ‘Lightkeeping,’ Father admitted, ‘is a solemn task, but one which seldom attracts the soundest of minds.’ Benjamin Markham had been a good friend to Father. They had much to discuss, since Mr Markham had formerly been boatswain aboard the Nova Scotian brig Dei Gratia, which attained a modicum of fame in maritime circles in 1872. It was the Dei Gratia which, in the December of that year, discovered the brigantine Mary Celeste, sailing off the Portuguese coast without a single soul aboard. Mr Markham was among those who boarded her, and sailed her to Gibraltar. A part of him remained ever after in the eerie tableau of the abandoned ship. He could describe the scene
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as if he were walking through it, name each item in turn, down to the plate of half-eaten porridge and the boiled egg with its top cut off which remained on the table of the captain’s cabin. Mr Markham and Father debated endlessly the fate of the missing crew. Mr Markham was known occasionally to note a sighting of the Mary Celeste in the station log. It was when she began to pass nightly, and when Mr Markham’s fluid copperplate overflowed the ruled column set aside for ‘Observations’, that Father decided it was time. Mr Markham’s replacement was Joseph Farley, who came with a wife and two children in reluctant tow and a determination to spend his spare time on the island prospecting. It was in the very fact that the existence of gold on Bruny Island had never been suspected that he placed his hopes of finding it. Mrs Farley had carrot hair and a bright red nose, and one of her eyelids blinked more frequently than the other. She considered herself well-bred, because she concentrated upon the branch of her family tree which sprouted the glossy leaf of a First Fleeter, and not upon other limbs, which might or might not have been bound about with chains. When the Farleys came to the station, Mrs Farley brought a piano, imagining that her genteel contribution to the small community would be teaching the children to play. But she had overlooked the fact that the voyage by sea to the island, then by bullock and cart to the cottage, would leave it horribly out of tune and that piano tuners were not readily at hand on Bruny Island. Mr Farley had a try at tuning, but it seemed that his efforts only made things worse. So we each learned a collection
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of notes that should have culminated in ‘Skye Boat Song’, but instead sounded perfectly random — except for the rhythm which Mrs Farley, even with her syncopated eyelashes, insisted on being absolutely perfect. Mrs Farley did not like me. I knew that even before the day she grabbed the long rope of my plait as if it were the painter of a dinghy she must haul ashore. She strode out across the paddock between our two houses in a striped dress with a bustle that everyone on the station considered absurd. I had on a blue dress and black stockings and I was holding my scalp against the pulling. She walked in through the open door of our cottage without knocking. Father was sitting at his desk, completing the log. After the episode with Mr Markham, Father had taken over the writing of the log entirely. The logs were large, slim volumes, their marbled covers bound with blue or green tape at the spine. The log was required to account for the daily tasks of all employed at the station. It recorded the weather conditions, including the reading of the barometer at daybreak and nightfall. It stated the exact time at which the light was lit, and at which time next morning it was extinguished. And it stated the nightly consumption of oils, and tallied daily the station’s stocks of kerosene, colza and paraffin. He was curling the tail of a y beneath the word ‘sultry’. It was a word he had a fondness for, conjuring as it did for him far-off climes where a hammerhead nimbus, gorged on steaming rain, might flatten a man with its shadow. The tail of the y snaked down the page as he turned in his chair to find Rebecca Farley in his
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doorway with my hair in her hand as if she were a Pacific Islander, and I her trophy. He stood stiffly and turned his chair to face Rebecca, for what he had gleaned was an interview, somehow concerning myself. He sat again, neatly folding his blue serge arms and raising his eyebrows in a question he did not voice. The grip on my hair slackened, but did not release. ‘This girl, has made a … made a, a mockery, of my music lesson.’ I do not think Mrs Farley sounded as forceful as she had expected to sound. I knew my father was put in mind of the irritating sound of a sail without breeze, slatting from side to side. ‘Let go of the child, Rebecca.’ In the sandpaper graze of his lost voice was still the skipper’s ability to command. I sat myself upon his knee. My head felt as if I wore a skullcap of needles. ‘I am sorry to bother you, William, when you are obviously so busy. And I am aware, of course, that a certain amount of extra … of extra, sympathy, is required in Alva’s case, but I will not have her interrupting my classes and encouraging the other children to think that music is not a serious matter. Music has rules, William. You must understand that. Rules.’ ‘What is it that you’ve done, Alva?’ He looked at me softly. I thought of how I disliked Mrs Farley. How I detested the way she fluttered her eyelids together when she sighed in frustration at the stupidity, the downright incompetence, with which she was surrounded.
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How she reminded me of a bat with a broken wing, one eyelid drooping half-closed, the other beating frantically. He smiled. Before the music lesson, Miranda Farley had shown me a rhyme in her autograph book. It was a black book, with giltedged pages coloured like sweets: pink, lemon and lime. Someone had written in round, widely spaced letters: Judy ate jam, and Judy ate jelly Judy went home with a pain in her _______ Belly, I rhymed in my mind. Belly. Was belly rude? I had no idea. Miranda Farley was a priss. She hardly ever went outdoors, and always had rag curls on Sundays — big, loopy corkscrews of hair all shiny from the sugar-water that kept them stiff. Miranda was not even allowed to go as far as Lighthouse Beach. Miranda giggled conspiratorially and secreted the book in her pocket when her mother entered the room, imperiously clapping her hands. Mrs Farley lined us up behind the piano. A note rang out in the air. It was a sick, off-green colour. ‘Miranda?’ ‘Middle C.’ This was easy, she always began with middle C. Another note followed, flatter still, possibly higher. ‘Jack?’ Jack was not interested in the names of notes. He was
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interested in the names of the bones in a horse’s leg and whether or not a chicken’s eyes could still see after the chicken’s head had been cut off. ‘F sharp?’ Sigh. ‘D flat, Jack. D flat. Listen!’ She hammered the note insistently, its wobbly concentric rings cutting through the room at the height of our waists. The next note was indeterminately lower. ‘Lachlan?’ I knew that she wouldn’t ask me. For a while she had demanded that I write the names of notes on scraps of paper. Once I wrote that a note was pale blue. I know she suspected that I was a half-wit, and felt sorry for my dear mother being saddled with a half-wit, and at her age. ‘Lachlan, I’m waiting.’ The note thrummed against the back of the upright piano like a dog’s hind leg upon the floor. Poor Lachlan Dixon. He didn’t even know the name of a note, except middle C and that was already taken. ‘Lower C?’ Sigh. ‘Well, if you children are not even going to try, we shall move on to theory.’ We sat about a table set with stubby pencils and floury pieces of paper printed with staves. Miranda bustled to sit next to me. I smelled her toffee breath above the gritty metal smell of the freshly sharpened pencils. She pushed her forearm close against mine. I didn’t like her touching me. I hated her sticky hand in mine at church services when she sidled close
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and put it there. I knew it was very wicked to push her away in the sight of God. We were the only girls at the station, except for little Lucy Dixon, who was only two, and in Miranda’s mind this made me her friend. I moved towards the other side of my chair, and sheltered my page with a crooked arm. ‘How do we remember the names of the notes on the lines of the treble clef stave? Matthew?’ Matthew Farley recited the mnemonic flatly. ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit.’ ‘Can I’ve an apple, Missus Farley?’ The surface of my brother’s eyes were as speckled as his skin. His close-cropped curls sprang a leak at the front, with a single brown lock on his forehead. ‘Hey, Lachie, one bloke’s got an apple and the other one hasn’t and the one who hasn’t says, “Hey, givvus a bite of your apple”, and the bloke says “Nah” and he says “C’n I ’ave the core then?”, and the bloke says “Nah”, and the other bloke says “Carn, why not?” and the bloke says “Cos there ain’t gunna be no core”.’ Jack creased himself into fits of laughter, until the wooden ruler of Mrs Farley fell upon the table next to him with a crack. ‘“Song of Joy”, children. Write down for me each note of the “Song of Joy”.’ Miranda began to hum as she drew a pattern of circles and lines on the page. I heard the staircase of notes, climbing up and down. My treble clef became a seahorse, my minims grew wings and flew off the perches of the staves. Mrs Farley began
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to sing too, with notes of perfect clarity, if not grace. Above and beyond and beneath their tune, I heard a song that I recognised. The flight of the tern. Up and up and down and down. Not so measured, of course, nor could its notes have been set in black and white. I began to hum it myself. It soared above Miranda’s and Mrs Farley’s song, dipped below it, circled and swooped it. It filled my ears with its drift and plummet and glide. I did not realise I was singing so loudly. Mrs Farley’s shouts did not penetrate my ears until I felt my hair lift up from my scalp with her stinging grasp. Essie can’t remember thinking of Mrs Sullivan or her syncopated eyelids at any time since primary school. But now the music teacher is so close that Essie can even smell her faint traces of menthol rub and naphthalene. Mrs Sullivan had never grabbed her by the hair, only by the hand, but so tightly it hurt. Essie can feel the harsh woolgraze of her ugly grey skirt against the backs of her whitened fingers. She herself had only been able to wish for a father with whom she could share such a moment of complicity. Instead, there had been a school principal who had sat them each down, teacher and student, in the greasy leather chairs in his office. Now, Mrs Sullivan, what seems to be the problem that you’re having with Essie? His sincerity was like toffee and Essie could imagine his bottom stuck down with sweet, sticky strands to the edge of the desk he leaned against.
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• • • Jack was throwing rocks off the Quiet Cove cliffs. He looked for the biggest ones, held them as high as he could and hurled them into the water with the force of all his jealousy. Mrs Farley and Matthew Farley were aboard the station ketch, headed for Hobart. Mrs Farley was to see Matthew settled in at boarding school, and shop for clothes for Miranda. Jack wished our mother was taking him to boarding school instead of smelling his hair and kissing him when she thought he was asleep and looking at him as if he were the only joy in her life. Mother was walking back towards the cottage with Miranda Farley’s hand in hers. She told Mr Farley that I would be delighted to have Miranda to stay with us and share my room until Mrs Farley returned. It seemed to me that Mrs Farley was in Hobart for a long time. Miranda slept next to me in my narrow bed and I became tired from not sleeping. Tired from listening all night to her shallow breaths, from the tightness of keeping myself to one side of the bed. Always her fingers in the bubble I kept about me, always she leaning against it, flattening one side. One morning, horizontal sunlight filled the bight of Cloudy Bay to the east without touching the cliff face closest to the cape. It looked like an invitation, as if the bright light of pirate treasure were gleaming within. Miranda puddled in the duck pond near the assistant keeper’s house, speaking to the ducks in a clucking tone. I saw it, on the face of the sea, that frozen moment. Blue furrows shimmered in the stillness of that single moment, that breath held — the change of the tide.
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In a moment it would begin to come back in. In fluid increments, it would send each wave further up the beach, higher upon the cliff. But if I hurried, I would make the island. I took the lower path to the cliff ’s edge, so that Miranda would not see me go. I scrambled down the goat track, scuffing pellets of earth and small rocks ahead of me, and at the track’s end was the shining black path of the isthmus. As I crossed, a stray wave washed over it. I kept my feet still, perfectly still, until it had come and gone. It is the only safe way. The wet fringe of my skirt stuck to my legs. I made the island and I was alone! When alone, I felt light, as if I were flying. The pair of sea eagles that live upon the cape were in the sky. From the ground I could see their white breasts, the broad white expanse of their underwings. They danced together to a song I heard in my head. It was a song about circles, and spirals. It was a song about the wind, and the sea. I felt so light, so happy, I sang it out loud for the eagles to hear as they tilted against the wind in unison. I sang, and watched them circling not for food, but for the sheer pleasure of touching — of being touched by — nothing. When I crossed back to the cape at evening’s low tide, I dragged my feet home, guilty from the solitary pleasure of the day. I had watched a seal scratch itself with the perfectly articulated digits it conceals within its flippers, felt the ovoid warmth of a penguin’s egg in a burrow. The skin on my face was tightened from the salty breath of the wind, and it burned even in the evening cool.
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I expected trouble. But I did not yet know she had followed me. I expected a thrashing. But I did not yet know that she had heard my song, and followed me. I did not expect the panic in my mother’s eyes when she saw that I was alone, because I did not yet know that a wave had swept the isthmus, that she had not known to keep her feet still. I did not expect to see Mr Farley in our living room with his face in his hands. I had been shut in my room for two days when they found Miranda Farley washed up on Butler’s Beach, some miles north of the cape. Jack told me there were gashes and welts on her blue skin where she had been smashed into the rocks, but that all the blood had been washed away. Even though I suspected such thoughts were evidence of wickedness, I could not help but wonder whether or not she had been nibbled by fishes. There was shouting in the house. ‘What do you mean she meant no harm? A child is dead, William! A child is dead! And she killed her. I had forbidden her ever to go to that island. Death follows that child, hovering at her shoulder. What are we to tell Rebecca? How am I ever to look her in the eye again? There is nothing, William, nothing more dreadful than the pain of a mother when her child is needlessly dead. Nothing.’
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Mother’s sobs and tears came from a terrible dark place, where they had been imprisoned for many years. They came out deformed and twisted and hideous. I believe Mother planned to do this differently. I believe she planned to tell me this when I was fully grown. I believe she planned to tell me gently, with love. Instead, I was ten years old and there was a blizzard in her eyes. It was not the first time I had confounded her plans. It was white. There were waves. It fell across my lap like a dead thing. The woman I had thought to be my mother kept her voice low. Her sentence was tacked down between each word to keep it steady. ‘ You are not my child. You killed my child.’ And then I understood that what I held on my lap was Lizzie’s hair. And that it was my mother, not my sister, who lay in the white cradle on the hillside.
Essie’s own mother’s hair fell from her scalp in sheaves onto white hospital sheets. One morning her mother sat up and Essie saw how some of her hair stayed behind on the pillow, lining the circular hollow where her head had rested. Her balding scalp was beyond white. It was luminous in the bright hospital light. The nurses came in and changed the bed as they did every day, bundling up sheets covered in the fine dust of down that fell from her arms and legs. They took away the
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pillow slip and the bird’s nest of soft, fair hair. They brushed away from her mother’s cheeks the small commas of hair that had been her eyelashes and eyebrows. Someone explained that it was because of the treatment that her mother’s hair was falling out. Essie understood that they dosed her mother with great bolts of light, infusing her veins with its brilliance, trying to chase the sickness from her body. Nobody told Essie when her mother died. She knew from the shouting in the white-tiled corridor of the hospital. There was Charlie shouting about the cold, about draughts through the walls, about poor food. He wanted the cause of her illness to be poverty so that he could blame his daughter’s husband for killing her. Essie’s father was shouting about the power transformer behind the house. He had shouted about power, progress, greed. He had prodded Charlie in the shoulder with an angry outstretched finger. You were the cancer in her blood, he had said. And she had stood between them and felt her throat slam shut, just as she had in Pete’s house when the rising tide of memory threatened to drown her. A child of six, she had stood under the arch of all that shouting and felt all her words begin to drain away, as if they were pouring out of her feet into a huge puddle on the white-tiled floor. Her silence began as an emptiness inside, but over the years it became another kind of presence. It became for her something soft, and white, from which she could weave a kind of cocoon between herself and the world.
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he feeling inside of Pete demands action, but no action that he will permit himself to take. Instead, he spends days feigning normality, going about the business of preparing food and eating it, shaving his face and cleaning his teeth and getting into bed as if to sleep. But throughout each sequence a sense of her clings to him, slowing him, making him more observant of himself, loading every action with significance. A feeling like hunger scours his stomach, scooping up under his ribs to make a cavity there, scraping against the insides of the raw bones of his spine. It’s the kind of pain that he hates most — less valid than true physical pain, with its simple relationship between cause and effect. He knows tangible, bodily pain as an old friend. He likes the pains he can earn — fatigue, coldness, true hunger — and knows they can be used to obliterate this other thing, this invisible twisting of his gut. On a drizzly morning he puts into his tall metal-framed pack everything he will need for several days. When he strides out of his house, making for the road with his dog
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darting ahead of him, he has only two things in mind: to walk until it hurts, and not to go to the lighthouse. He walks east, crossing paddocks dotted with black and white cows, then begins the climb into the rainforested hills. Leaving the defined path behind, he pushes instead through the dense wet scrub, forcing his frustration up against saplings and making them bend. He remembers the last night he spent with Caroline, the night the moon poured in through the windows onto her packed boxes and her intention to leave him. Her face was a mirror and in it he saw how he had changed from something strong and proud to something pitiable. He saw himself diminished, pathetic, shrunken, turned inside-out more or less, all his faults now on show and none of them forgivable. He had trusted that her feelings were fixed, and had nothing to prepare him for their fickleness. He had trusted the love in her eyes when she smiled into his face and had no idea that it could be extinguished so easily. Perhaps her feelings had always been false, and he had been taken in. She taught him that there must be places within everyone, screened away from sight, whole cavernous realms no one else could ever or would ever reach. He thinks of Essie, and how much she could possibly conceal beneath the calm symmetry of her face. But already his life and hers had overlapped and intersected. There was a seductive sense of inevitability about it that he knew could be all too easy to believe.
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Skirting the peaks, he makes for the coast. The dog is streaked with deep russet where her coat is wet from the undergrowth. They follow a creek bed where it runs towards the sea, clambering over and under the thick mossy logs of fallen trees. The decaying timbers are thick with leeches that lean blindly towards the heat of Pete’s flesh. Unfelt, they make their way through the folds of his socks, push with their faceless heads until they connect with his blood. The creek is a tunnel of green that emerges onto a terrace of grey and liver-coloured stones striped with the runners of succulent plants. Pete takes off his shoes and socks and observes the leeches on his ankles bloating, filling up their balloon bodies until they drop away, sated. He eats cheese and biscuits for lunch and watches Scully swim a horseshoe shape in the shallows, her hair spreading out around her like rust-coloured weed. He follows the coast south, sticking to the edges of cliffs when he can, and cutting inland through the bush to avoid the deep gullies between headlands. The sharp edge of a protruding rock slices his trousers and gashes open his calf. He keeps walking, inviting the pain that fans out through his veins. By late afternoon he is tiring, exhaustion pushing the twisting pain in his gut out to a distance where he can only just feel it. He emerges from the scrub onto a surf beach on the south coast. Empty black bodies of wetsuits are stretched out over shrubs to dry and surfers in beanies stand in the
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dunes watching the face of the water. His strides lengthen on the flat, even surface of the beach sand, making his body feel like an unstoppable machine. Scully walks beside him now, her urge to skitter ahead or dart through the bush in pursuit of a scent altogether spent. They walk through coppery late-afternoon light that burnishes the scrub and the feathers of its small birds, and from there into nightfall where a swollen moon rises behind them. He walks, over the undulating mounds of the southern coast, until the moon is high above his head. He stands on a headland at its highest point. From here he can look down over the full curve of Lighthouse Bay, shaped like an old-fashioned champagne glass and filling with tiers of bubbles. On the far side of the bay is the cape and the measured sweep of a beam, catching with each pass on the whitewashed surface of the lighthouse tower, making a brilliant flash.
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night-light, David used to say of the moon. A nightlight to sleep safely by. She thinks of David and of how it had felt to be touched. She wraps her own arms around herself, holding herself tightly as she takes the path to the beach. The water is black but the patterns of foam on its surface are bright white in the full moonlit night. She sits on the fringe of stones at the top of the beach and listens to the sounds of the water, closes her eyes to listen in to its language of crest and collapse, of eddy and swirl.
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She remembers a story, told this time not by Charlie, but by her own mother. Essie had sat on the high white hospital bed, her legs tucked into the soulless warmth of a white cell blanket. Her mother’s eyes were big between their hairless lids and beneath hairless brows. A woman walked the beach on the morning after a storm … Essie can hear the cadence of her mother’s voice, the gentle lilt that came over it when she was telling a sad story. A woman walked the beach on the morning after a storm,
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setting down her feet between the big leather-trees of kelp thrown all over, and between the shards of timber that had once curved around the life of her husband and kept it afloat. She was only young, this woman, and not long married. She walked the beach with salt tears in her eyes, hope already drowned in her. On the sand, she found a child, not a scrap on her little body. The child was very small, as small as a baby, and with the pale blue eyes of a newborn. But she did not have the dimpled limbs of a baby, or the roundness of face. She was a miniature, skin stretched over thin arms and legs, over her tiny torso, the blue map of her blood showing through. In her mouth were the small, rounded pearls of her milk teeth. The woman took the child in her arms, and when the sun touched on the child’s fragile skin, she saw that clinging to her legs were tiny circles with the pale shimmer of milky rainbows caught inside — scales, the size of small coins and the shape of tears. She lifted a scale with her fingernail, and plucked it from the child’s skin. One by one she plucked away the scales from the child, who lay silently in her arms, her eyes fixed on the white strands of clouds drifting through the sky above her. There was no word of a child on any of the ships lost in that storm, and none of the islanders recognised the child, and so the woman kept her. It was not long before she discovered something peculiar. The child never cried. Nor whimpered nor sighed. Not a sound came out of her little mouth. As the child grew, she remained silent, never gaining the power of speech.
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Her hair grew long and fair, although in the sunlight it seemed faintly tarnished with green. She was never seen to play with a single toy, seemed not to know the purpose of the dolls the woman stitched for her out of scraps of calico and linen. There was a single thing which seemed to give her pleasure, and that was a shell which she had found for herself on the shore. It was a large white conical shell which the child placed to her ear. When she did this, the child would drop her fair-lashed eyelids, smile to herself and hum. This humming was the only kind of sound the child was ever heard to make. A queer sort of a sound it was, with no tune to speak of, and a strange quality to it, like a bell chiming beneath water, resonating long after it should have stopped. For all the child’s strangeness, the woman loved her, and turned a deaf ear to the gossip of the islanders, her neighbours. She don’t eat like normal folk, I seen her down on the shore, smashing shells up with a stone and eating the flesh out of them, and cupping her hands in the rockpools and drinking the salty water. Shellfish is one thing, but I seen her eat a fish, sink her little teeth into its raw meat when it was still wriggling and all … I don’t like it, I don’t like the look of that child. Mark how she hides from the minister, and I heard it said that when she was baptised, it sent her into convulsions. You do know, don’t you, she has a fit whenever there’s a storm. This last thing, at least, was true. When the sea whipped itself up, the child herself became a fury. No sound escaped her mouth, but her body became a whirlwind, hair tossing wildly, her small body smashing itself into the walls, into chairs and
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table, making marks on her skin that would later flower into great blue bruises. It would take all the woman’s strength to hold the child while her body shook and raged, for hours sometimes, until the wind and waves subsided; and then the child would hush. The storm child grew tall and slender, her fair hair long and shining and still touched with a greenish, metallic glimmer. She captured the heart of a young fisherman, who would see her from time to time walking in her drifting fashion along the shore, or lying on her belly staring into a rockpool as if she could see the future in it. When ashore, he came to the house, always bringing a gift for the beautiful young woman who had begun to swim through his dreams, and even, so it felt to him sometimes, through the waters of his body. He brought her a great, snow-white quill from a seabird. Having no use for it as an instrument of writing, she put it in her hair, and thought nothing of it when the wind caught it up and drifted it away. During the long nights at sea, he filed away the dark grey layers of shell, hard as iron, inside which was the fingernail-fine layer of pearl, like a milky spill of rainbow. From the nacre, he carved the shape of a fish, etching with a steady hand the fine scallops of its scales. It was a gift which seemed to please her, at least as much as his visits seemed to please her. When the young man was at sea, it seemed to the woman that the child thought nothing about him; and it was not long after he gave it to her that she absentmindedly let the delicate pearl fish drop to the ground where it was crushed underfoot.
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Then came the storm, an equinoctial gale with huge swirls of cloud overhead, bringing lashing squalls of rain and waves that thrashed on the island’s shore. The child became so wild that the woman could do nothing to still her, could not prevent her when she opened the door of the house and ran for the shore. The woman followed her to the beach and watched as the child tore the clothes from her body, letting her skirts, her shirt, fly away with the wild wind. As she rushed for the breakers, the woman saw them again on her skin — scales, growing thicker by the moment, greenish with a tinge of gold, covering her legs. The last thing the woman saw of the storm child as she dived into the waves was the flick of her tail as she disappeared into the sea. She was a storm child, you see, and a storm child cannot be kept from the sea. Essie remembers now the meniscus of tears shivering inside her mother’s lower lids as she finished the tale. Always, Essie had cast herself as the child with rainbow scales found on the beach. But she can see now that it was her mother’s part as well, and that when she told it that final time, she was telling her daughter she was leaving. She had believed then that this story was made for her alone. Now, she knows it to be a story that came first from the islands which rain down on Scotland from the North Sea, a story that travelled across water by word of mouth, through bloodlines, all the way across the world. And she knows it to be a truth she has inherited. That there is for her no belonging, at least not to any shore.
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• • • On the sand she begins to undress, almost changing her mind when she is bare from the waist down. The intense marine scent of the ocean washes over her like a wave, the smell of it strengthening her resolve. She pulls the bulky cocoon of layered jumpers over her head, leaves it on the sand and walks into the water up to her thighs. It could be icy or scalding, the temperature is so extreme that her skin cannot register it. A wave encases her torso with white bubbles, taking away her breath. It takes all her will to dive under, coming up gasping with the unbearable shock to her face, the piercing pain behind the bone of her forehead. When her breathing eases, she begins to swim, out along the moon-path. There is no destination, there is only swimming. In the water, Essie is grateful for the knowledge that endurance is in the mind. She knows how to survive long-distance swims, feeling her body graduate to plateaus of numbness via steep ladders of pain. When she swims, it is all about rhythm, maintaining her own beat in the irregularity of the waves. She finds this in a poem, or a song, feels the sequence of its words buoy her up like a string of floats. She keeps her face out of the bitter coldness of the water, swimming breaststroke. She tries to keep her breathing even, despite the shudders that clatter her teeth together. She thinks her breathing, follows each breath down into her lungs, out into her blood, until it feels as if
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it is only her thoughts, like hands on a pair of bellows, that are making her breathe at all. ‘I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky … And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to sail her by.’ The beacon’s beam passes overhead like a metronome for her rhyme. She tries to make the words so large in her mind that they take up the entire screen, leave no margin for thoughts about cold or pain. She makes the words a confident royal blue, with curlicues. Stroke follows stroke until she emerges on the other side of the pain barrier into a blissful numbness. The channel is deep beneath her when she stops swimming and rolls onto her back. The automated beacon sends out its weak beam of white light into the darkness. She allows herself to think about the volume of the water she is floating in. This very water fills up the deep basins that make the ocean floors, flows through the cavernous trenches reaching down further than the earth’s highest mountains reach up. This very water touches the edge of the white icing of both poles, curves out over the rim of the equator, brushes against a thousand islands, pushes with long silver fingers up into rivers and rivulets, all the way to the tops of mountains. She pictures the layered currents moving against each other, the great conveyor belt of the world’s ocean sucking water down in great internal waterfalls, spouting it back up in columns. She tips her head back, chin pointing at the moon. Water fills her ears, all her senses, with its deep
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churnings. She feels herself becoming soluble, her body thinning out over the surface of the water like a pale slick that undulates with the waves. She listens to the ocean’s deep, formless sounds, the repetition on a grand scale of the fluid movements inside herself. But there is something, a sound from the shore, which will not allow her to simply dissolve.
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orning light touches Essie’s eyelids, but she doesn’t open her eyes yet. Her mind spins like a compass needle, placing the white-painted sill of the frosted window above her head, the tipped-over rectangle of watery morning light on the carpet, the shapes of the furniture she will see when she opens her eyes. She begins to feel the parts of her body with her mind, one at a time. She feels each of her toes in turn and then her fingers. And before she has opened her eyes she fills in the face of the man lying behind her, warming one side of her body, his arm resting in the dip of her waist. Yes, she remembers now; that by the time she reached him standing in the shallows, his boots were filled with water and his trousers were wet above the knee. Her skin had felt raw with coldness and the fabric of his clothes was harsh, sharp even, as if the welted seams could cut her. Inside the house he had run hot water into the candypink tub. And not straight away, but after a while, he had
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taken off his own clothes and slid into the tub behind her, holding her with his arms, his bony knees. The warm water penetrated her skin, but not her bones. ‘I feel as if I’m hung on a skeleton of ice,’ she had said, and he had held tighter. He had poured a puddle of shampoo into the palm of one hand. His hands were rough on her scalp and massaged the strands of her hair all the wrong way, which she knew would make a tangle, but she hadn’t cared. He had rinsed away the suds from the soapy pile of her hair. The strands of it fell down wet and slick over her face and shoulders and the water in the crevices between their bodies clouded over. ‘What were you doing out there?’ he had asked her, holding her tight. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You wouldn’t have lasted much longer.’ ‘I know, I know. You were there though.’ She had turned to face him and seen the tattoo of the skull and crossbones on the skin of his chest. She had drawn the outline of it with her finger. The memory of that touch is in her fingertips. They had not made love, she remembers, only slept, curled together for warmth and comfort. She turns in the narrow space to face him, waking now beside her. A narrow band of his tattoo is visible above the pale blue line of the sheets. She can see the top of the skull, and the beginnings of fine cracks that run like rivers down towards the brow
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line. She wonders if, overnight, any trace of that image has been left on the skin of her back. Could we love each other, do you think? she wants to ask him. She is not brave enough to say the words. She asks him silently, willing him to understand.
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he air in the kitchen of Lightkeepers’ Quarters II is shot through with the smells of phosphorus and gas. Pete flicks the flame from a blackened match and places the kettle on a bed of orange-blue flame. He is slightly cold from the night of holding her, trying to still her shivers, absorbing into his own body some of the iciness of hers. The bath, the sleeping side by side; he tells himself that it’s just like they’re kids again, that it’s innocent. Out the kitchen window, on top of the corrugated water tank, is a raven. It turns its head, capturing Pete inside the blueblack rim of a small eye. He turns away from the bird’s scrutiny, and from the knowledge that he is close, dangerously close, to breaking all his promises to himself. He has wrapped Essie in rugs, and sat her in an armchair in front of the gas heater. He brings her tea, and then eggs and toast. She eats what she can and then gives her yolk-soaked crusts to Scully, waiting attentively by the side of her chair. He watches her and thinks of waking beside her this morning and how, just for a moment, he had been afraid she was dead. But he had reminded himself that she always
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looked that pale, even when she wasn’t cold. When she was a little girl, she had always been all the same colour, her lips defined not by their shade, but by their shape, like marble in bas-relief. On the beach last night, he had run his eyes down her throat, over the twin blades of her clavicles, down over her sternum to the small dent of her navel, measuring the spaces in his mind. He had seen that even her body was all one colour, her nipples the same pale shade as the rest of her skin. ‘Really, I’m all right,’ she says, not for the first time. ‘Just stay there, just for today,’ he tells her. Why won’t she understand? That if she needs him to care for her, he has a reason to stay. That if she needs him, that this will provide something solid between himself and the truth that he doesn’t want to leave, not just yet.
The morning drifts into the afternoon, like a boat without wind. He has noticed on the kitchen table a small timber chest decorated with elaborate knotwork, and beside it a notebook, lying open. The left-hand page is covered with words that he has all day been resisting the temptation to decipher. The right-hand page is blank. ‘This is what you’ve been writing?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘A family history?’ ‘Of sorts.’
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She begins to tell him about her great-greatgrandfather, the lighthouse keeper, and about her grandfather, and the sea chest he filled with the tangible scraps of his stories and left for her to restore. ‘Tangible scraps, what do you mean?’ ‘Open it.’ ‘And?’ ‘Choose something.’ He picks out something which glitters. A stone with a girdle of red and white crystals. ‘That’s the story of my great-great-grandmother, the lighthouse keeper’s wife. She came from Scotland on a clipper ship. From Knoydart, between Loch Nevis and Loch Hourn. That is her piece of home.’ He replaces the stone and chooses something smaller. ‘Is this really a coin?’ he asks, surprised, examining a tiny disc of metal, its edges unevenly scalloped. ‘Yes, a thruppence piece. If you look closely, you can see Queen Victoria. And she’s young too, no double chins.’ The coin is encased in a milky, opalescent resin. ‘What’s on the outside of it? Is it nacre?’ ‘If the story’s true.’ ‘Which story?’ ‘That it was found in a Cloudy Bay oyster.’ This scrap of fantasy doesn’t surprise him, coming from Essie. He loves the difference of her, the uniqueness of her. ‘Who found it?’
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‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘That’s all I can remember. I haven’t found a place for everything. You know how it is, when you take something apart there are always parts left over. I’ve stitched together what I can, but there are still spaces in between.’ ‘I know what you mean,’ he says, and begins to tell her about the pile of tangled metal in his shed, about the man he has sculpted from old metal parts and the pleasure he gets from giving things new form. He imagines Essie in his shed, walking around his man-sculpture, touching its metal flesh. He imagines her opening and closing the door to its empty heart and asking why? He even wants to tell her the answer.
It is early evening when she uncoddles herself from the chair by the heater. In the kitchen, where he is making yet more tea, Pete can sense the end rising up to meet him. He watches her in her white flannel pyjamas, and is almost undone by the stripe of flesh around her middle that is bared when she reaches up to stretch. She comes towards him and then, when she is very close, reaches her arms around his neck. He wraps his arms around her and feels the soft give of her body into his. Her hair is under his nose smelling of something bittersweet. It makes him unbearably sad. Other people had broken hearts, and mended them, and gave them out again. He asks himself why he is
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different. But he already knows; that he can’t bear the powerlessness of it, of something, someone beyond his control being so important. He had no power to stop himself withering under Caroline’s gaze into something she no longer wanted. He knows himself to be the kind of man who can’t keep distances within relationships. He knows that if he is going to continue to hold Essie, he will want all of her, even the secret chambers of the sort where Caroline had begun, unseen, to despise and pity him. He knows it is time for him to leave.
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ssie watches Pete walk up the pathway in front of the house away from her, and feels the connection between them disappearing,as if it was something that had never been true in the first place. She feels it dissolving like a dreamthing inside clasped hands when the morning comes. And when he is gone, she goes back into the house and sees that he has left the thruppence piece sitting on a blank page of her notebook. She takes up her pen and traces around it, leaving a misshapen circle of ink on her page. Whose story is it? Who is missing still? She already knows there is only one answer, and that it is a story about things ending before they’d had a chance to begin.
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Lizzie Westwood stands on the jetty with a family that is not her own. It is another of the lighthouse families, and they are saying farewell to a son. This son, who at nineteen is just two years older than Lizzie, might almost be in an embrace with a spider web. But in fact it is his mother, whose grey hair
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springs loose from its bun in the breeze and catches on the lacy bodice of her white dress. This son has longed to leave the lighthouse, to punch upwards through the tight lid fitted over his ambitions. In his bags he has a little money, enough to begin, and scrapbooks filled with snippets of learning about the healing of sick horses, cattle and dogs. He has a dream to follow, and he is leaving Lizzie behind, at least for now. Lizzie already knows that she has kept one small piece of him. Inside her clasped hand is a thruppence piece. She had been with him when he had found it, seen with her own eyes how he levered the frilled lid from an oyster with a small, sharp rock, intending to eat its flesh with a splash of salt water. There in place of a pearl was a thruppence piece, Queen Victoria’s young face coated with a thin nacreous layer that shimmered like a milky opal. ‘ You keep it,’ he had said to her. ‘ You keep it so that you know I will come back.’ She doesn’t yet know that she has another small piece of him inside her body — a child, who will one day be called Alva, who will take Lizzie’s life with the beginning of her own. The dinghy is held steady by an oarsman with one stocky hand on the timber of the jetty, his other hand fluttering a paddle in the water like the fin of a fish. The son shakes his father’s hand in a manly fashion. To say farewell, he tugs on Elizabeth’s hair, the way he did when they were younger, growing up together at the lighthouse. She lays one hand flat on his chest and says goodbye. With the other hand she holds tight to his promise.
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He passes his bags into the small vessel. His mother pushes her chin up and out, tilting her head as if to shut off a valve in her throat, to stop anything which might be welling up from spilling out. The oarsman pulls away to the small ketch Friendship anchored in Jetty Bay, and the son stands in the stern of the dinghy, making a salute to Lizzie, left standing on the jetty. Essie turns the coin over in her hands, and wonders whether Alva’s father ever came back to find Lizzie buried inside the white picket fence on the hillside. Or whether he never returned at all. She studies the edges of the coin, frilled just like an oyster shell. The coin is perhaps the perfect summary of all Charlie’s clues, she thinks. Like her, like Alva, like all of them, it was not of this place, just irreversibly shaped and altered by it.
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July
n Essie’s last day at the cape, she wakes to find a lacy blanket of frost draped over the lighthouse hill. She folds her clothes away into her pack, bundles up her bedding into a thick plastic bag and ties it off with a neat, definitive knot. She wraps Iain’s books back into their tissue-paper covers and stacks them inside their carton, over and underlapping cardboard flaps to seal it closed. She takes down from the wall Charlie’s map of the world and folds it along its fragile crease-lines, but does not replace the posters of the penguin and the plover nest. These she rolls into a tight tube and places in a cupboard of the kitchen sideboard, pressing the conglomerate blob of Blu-Tack into one of its drawers. Floors are swept and benches wiped down. Furniture is straightened and rugs shaken. She stacks her possessions outside on the porch and observes the way Lightkeepers’ Quarters II regains its blankness. Lastly, into the sea chest she replaces each of Charlie’s remnants and clues, thinking of his own dust in a small silver drawer in a brick wall near a rose garden. The only
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thing she does not replace is the frilled sliver of metal, the thruppence piece with its film of nacre, found in a Cloudy Bay oyster. She wraps the coin in a scrap of paper and slides it into an envelope that she will leave for Pete at the post office. She remembers his passion for metal, the covetous look he had on his face as he flipped the small disc between his fingers. She leaves the scrap of paper blank with a silent farewell. On the slope above the beach her boots make indentations in a delicate crust of frost, and the foundation stones of the Superintendent’s Cottage emerge from the covering, their curved tops retaining only a faint rim of ice. … A thick white blanket, ready to wrap me up, she remembers writing. Even her own birth she had loaned to Alva. During the night of Essie’s birth, snow had fallen in Hobart, first on the mountain, then on the foothills. It had fallen on rooftops and flopped softly over their edges onto suburban lawns, or so Charlie used to say. It had fallen on the gravel carpark of a hospital in the old part of town, a hospital that in summer would have had open windows and new mothers in candy-pink dressing gowns talking together on balconies. In the morning, Charlie’s boots would have pressed into fresh snow as he crossed the carpark, mixing its whiteness with the small grey shards of gravel that lay
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beneath. The tweedy collar of his overcoat would have encircled a woollen scarf tied around his neck in his own special fashion — scarf folded in half, the two ends tucked down through the loop and pulled tight. Essie wants the bunch of flowers in his hand to have had white blossoms to match the snow. Her mother is in a hospital room, but this time she is young and pale pink with hopefulness. Her hair is brushed to a soft fleece over the shoulders of the dressing-gown that at her middle encloses the empty cushion of her stomach. She walks with Charlie down the passageways to a window in a wall. Through it they see rows of cribs with blankets in pink and blue. She points to one of them and he smiles. Inside this moment he is not angry with her any more. When he leaves, the snowdrops he has left in a vase beside the bed — yes, they are snowdrops now — calmly bow their heads. From the beach, Essie looks out to the place where the true horizon is indistinguishable among the bands of lilacs, greys and blues that make the join between sea and sky. Just beneath the place where she sits is the tide line, an upraised lip made of fragments of shell and stone. Operculum: the word, filed at some stage of her studies, appears in her mind as she turns over in her palm the thing to which it refers. A disc of white, one side corallike and pocked, the other side flat and smooth and marked with a small elliptical spiral. It had been the door
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to a shell, once attached to the mucusy muscles of a shellfish and spring-loaded to slam shut against the interference of the world. A useful thing. She remembers the day she began to speak again, the day she peeked out from the shell of her silence. It was her birthday. Her sixteenth. She had driven with her father, south of the city to a place he loved. It was a blowhole, a place where water thundered into a channel it had carved into the rock, echoing in the narrow space. It was a place he liked to bring her, a place that made noise to fill in for her silence. Above the blowhole, the names of a pair of honeymooners were painted in bridal white across the variegated rock face. And beneath their names was a date, a day in the 1960s that they were washed from the cliff by a rogue wave, tumbled under the foaming white water in the crevasse of the blowhole. But Essie and her father walked past the warning signs, out along the ledge opposite the white words. They went as far as they could and then sat with their feet dangling over the edge. There were dark blue bands of swell ridging the sea all the way to the horizon. Around the base of the cliff was a skirt of kelp churned up by the lime-green froth of broken waves. The low winter sun broke the clouds, and they watched without speaking the sets rolling in, the peaks forming and rising, teetering at the rollercoaster cusp of collapse, and then smashing apart on the cliff face below them. One, two, then three, the crescendo, augmented by
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the backwash of the others, a giant explosion sending great fans of spray into the air, moistening their faces with the mist caught up on the breeze. Essie read the painted names of the honeymooners for the hundredth time in her life. They were not real to her. She tried to imagine them, the young couple who would have walked out here, hand in hand probably, perhaps only the day after they were married. She tried to imagine their faces, these two people who thought they were at the beginning, but in fact were already at the end. As always, in her imagination the newlyweds standing on the rocky ledge were her mother and father. And her mother was still wearing her wedding dress, the frothy whiteness of it indecipherable from the white foam that swept her away. Essie watched her father watching the waves. She knew what he was doing: mapping out what he was about to say, following the trail of words through his mind to make certain his sentences were going to end up in the places he intended, and nowhere else. On birthdays he often brought up the subject of her mother, as if it were something he owned, as if it was something he alone could dispense. Her father’s grief was a lagoon, deep and circular, in which he had never allowed her to join him. On the rocky ledge Essie leaned back on the heels of her hands. By the time her father had made his sentence, her hands were marked like fossils by the patterned stone. She heard his intake of breath, but she spoke first. ‘I miss her too,’ she said, in a small, faltering voice.
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And then she had said it again, stronger. ‘I miss her too.’ And then louder, and then again, until she was shouting it over the top of the hammering waves. Her father’s face seemed not to move. The only way she knew that her voice had left her body was the small squint, the wince almost, that momentarily creased the marble of the skin beside his mouth, beside his eyes. On the lighthouse beach, Essie’s hands sift the debris around her. So many things shattered and broken on their way to becoming sand. She looks for the things that are still perfect, still whole. There is a conical shell intact, no longer than one segment of a finger, a line etched in a spiral from its mouth to its tip. She picks out some fragments of weed, pale green branches tipped with white like snowfall, and the jewelled purple globe of an urchin, its empty casing as delicate as eggshell. These things she will take home to remember this beach, this final morning. Her cornflower-blue suede notebook is no longer perfect. Its cover is scuffed and dirtied from so much shoving into bags and resting on stones. Its pages are almost filled. Some pages are filled with neat, even lines of small print. Others look as if words have been spilled all over them. But she has no urge to tear out even a single one. She begins at the beginning and reads every word she has written. In Alva, she sees the way she has created her
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own child self, but wilder and more wicked, the child she was in her secret self. She sees the way she has filled page after page with coils of ink, racing headlong in search of the name of the feeling that attacks and overwhelms her at this cape, on this island. It’s a feeling she once called undertow, but as she reads through her own words she sees that it is nothing much more complex than love, with its terrible proximity to the fear of loss. She knows, too, that this fear is the reason Pete is not coming back. She expected him to come, at least to clean the tower. To begin with she was pulled tight, tense, vibrating with alertness. For days she watched at windows, twitched at sounds. She slept for whole days to avoid the waiting and spent long, slow nights awake in recompense. After a while the hopeful part of the waiting thinned out, and beneath it grew the solid bulk of inevitability, of knowing that hoping was pointless. Now, weeks later, the time they spent together seems to her to be vanishing down a chain of mirrors. She glimpses it as it retreats deeper and deeper inside a chamber of flickering reflections. She wishes that she could keep it, wrap it in a scrap of velvet and treasure it, or press it flat between two pages of the notebook lying open upon her knees. She watches the water moving in the bay, watches the approach of low waves, their whitebubble veins breaking apart and re-forming in the shimmy and slop, and begins the final entry. • • •
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I am thinking of Charlie and of the great web of his stories, and the ways I have patched its holes. In my hands it became more of a garment than a net, something lacy that a woman would wear. It could of course be unravelled and made again and again from the same threads, but in its current incarnation it is almost complete. There is time to finish it now, to weave in one last story, while the island closes this bay around me in a calm embrace. There is more than one way to tell this story. And yet in each of its versions, one thing is the same: in the year she was eighteen years old Alva left the lighthouse and never returned. This is the story which attained the most currency among the ensuing generations of the Westwood family. Perhaps that is because it is the easiest to believe. It is a story which causes those who know it to stare into the face of the girl in the postcard, to search there for the madness — in the pale blue of her eyes, in the ambiguous straightness of her mouth. They like to wonder where it came from, and to speculate where else in the family it might have spread. In this story, there is a long voyage. Alva was sent alone, like a piece of labelled baggage, her destination written out on an envelope in thick black letters. She went first by sea from the cape to the city of Hobart, and from there by carriage along a road which followed the banks of a river. The carriage took her upstream, against the flow of the river which ran fast and dark, back towards the place from which she had come. The road carved into a valley where the land became greener and richer and where the rusty lace of dried hops wound around tall poles.
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Mute, Dr Fricker had written in the letter in the envelope. A single dull, heavy word that fell with a thud from the mouth of a battleship of a woman in white who filled out the admission papers. Alva was led into an echoing room with arched windows painted shut and chairs pushed against the sections of wall between them. And in this place she changed from a girl into a woman, and from a woman into an old woman. Perhaps in this story, her death has not even occurred yet. Perhaps she is alive still, an ancient woman of almost one hundred and twenty years, sitting in her chair in the room with the arched windows. Her hair will be whiter than ever, and so will her skin from the lack of sun. She will be slowly desiccating inside too-large donated floral dresses, and the pastel bed-jackets made by generous ladies from the knitting circle. But this is how I prefer to see her death. I prefer to see her going to the shore at dusk, down through the scrubby forest of the hillside below the lighthouse, through the soft stands of sheoaks and onto the sand. There is a kitchen knife in the folds of her skirt as she walks along the beach. She reaches the dinghy on the shore, beached beside the rivulet which carves its tea-stained veins into the white sand. The oars, their ends gnawed away by salt and years, she throws onto the sand. The knots have been fused by seawater and years, so she uses the knife to sever the painter rope which holds the dinghy fast to the anchor in the dunes. The blade slips, making a wide gash across the palm of her hand like a
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lifeline. Blood drips onto the sand. She wraps her hand in a handkerchief and climbs into the dinghy. Then she waits, waits for the tide to pick her up and take her away. Soon the dinghy floats out across the bay. It drifts out beyond the protection of headlands, and the waves increase in size and strength. The dinghy crabs sideways across the mouth of the channel on the running tide. It is night, and very dark. But now there is a flood of light showing the clinkered timbers of the hull peeling white paint and the lantern hung on the prow, its square-cut panels of glass spotted with crystals of salt. And then the light is gone. Again the waves are black, polished smooth as onyx. They lift and carry the dinghy over the surface of the water. The light washes over the dinghy again. It illuminates the red spots of blood on her white shirt, the pink smear of it where she has touched a hand to her hair. She is lying in the bottom of the vessel, which is beginning to leak. She is rising and falling with the waves. She is thinking of her paper face on a postcard, and the thousand destinations it will reach. She is thinking of her own destination, here and now. And the darkness returns. Now the bottom of the dinghy grazes against a reef. Grazes and then catches fast on a platform of rock. There is the sound of splintering wood, and water pours into the hull of the dinghy, thinning the stains of blood on her shirt, washing it out of her hair. She is floating now, even inside the vessel itself. The light comes and goes, comes and goes. Flash and eclipse, flash and eclipse. From the lighthouse the beam comes, as if it
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is searching for her, sending itself out over the water looking for her, looking for the dinghy that has floated away from the shore. But she knows that it sees nothing. The light is as blind as time itself. With each wave, the dinghy splinters around her, shards of timber floating away. And she, too, is coming apart. She is thinning, spreading out over the surface of the water. She is becoming foam, drifting away, forming and re-forming herself into white patterns on the black. And as the waves take her apart, piece by piece, she watches the message of the lighthouse spelling itself out on the surface of the water. Its message is composed in the alphabet of light and dark. Flash, eclipse, flash, eclipse. If we see only the light, we are blinded; only the dark and we will never find our way.
In the early afternoon Essie closes the front door on the empty shell of Lightkeepers’ Quarters II. Looking up at the white tower on the hill, she thinks of the weight of dust and tarnish he will have to wipe away the next time he comes.
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III
Ocean
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eeks pass and still, whenever he sleeps, he dreams of an ocean without a surface. He is suspended in its limitless blue. He turns himself upside-down, walking a circle through the water as if inside a wheel. It makes no difference. There is no telling which way is up or down or sideways. After a time he remembers to watch the bubbles that come from his mouth, knowing that they will tell him the way. Silvery globes of air come out of his mouth like schools of small fish and shoot upwards above his head. He chases them, swims after them, through layer after layer of subtly shifting shades of blue that go on forever. When he remains calm, he can breathe underwater. It is only when he panics that he begins to drown. Waking hours are no less treacherous. He catches from time to time the lightly acidic, green-apple scent of her as if it were now lodged permanently in his senses, capable of dealing out a chemical stab to the brain that conjures the whole of her. He is restless and irritable, cannot settle to anything. The letter he has been waiting for comes, but this soul sickness of his dulls even his reaction to the news he had
W
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wanted so badly. He is going south to the island in September, for a year. But he no longer wants that last cat with all his heart. The only calm that comes to him is in the subtle orange glow of the light bulb of his shed, where he has begun a new sculpture. This time he has begun not with the eyes, but with the bones. In mild steel he has constructed the armature, a skeletal shape to which he will apply the flesh, the scales, the skin. And this time, he is working only with the smallest of pieces. He knows that the sculpture will take a long time to complete. But that is the way he wishes it to be. He likes the slow, steady progression of joining piece to piece, watching the metal flesh slowly creep over the curves of the frame. Through his welder’s glass he watches the rivers of metal flow into the gullies between the parts. He joins the small hexagons and circles of washers and nuts. He watches the lime-green tendrils of spindrift spiralling up as he weaves the flux gently, evenly, over the two surfaces. Too slow and the work is thick and clotted, too fast and it will not join. He measures his movements by the metronome of his own pulse. His breath mists in the cold of the shed, but he likes the cold; has use for it. The cold feels like an obstacle, something that he needs to overcome or defeat. It is something into which he can press his will, something against which he can push and feel resistance. Beneath the bench where he works Scully curls into a ball to keep
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warm, her tail completing the circle where it wraps beneath her chin. For this new sculpture he picks out pieces with a newmetal shine. Or else he buffs away crusts of rust with a wire brush to make the pieces glow. What he sees in his mind is a shimmering pelt of chainmail, fine enough that it could appear to ripple and move like a wave. He does, and undoes, letting the scalloped patterns of his work expand outwards, chipping them back and beginning again wherever they are less than perfect. This night there is a certain part he cannot get right, a curve that will not fall in the right way. He works it over and over, unwilling to admit that he lacks the skill in his hands to reproduce the vision he has in his mind. With each new attempt the result is clumsier, further from the image in his head and the sketches in the watermarked pages of his notebook. Frustrated, he catches an old familiar wanting in his blood. He feels himself wanting a cigarette, urgently. He wants the feeling of smoke on the back of his throat, the deliberateness of inhaling and exhaling. Even more, he wants something opaque to fill his brain and his lungs, a smokescreen. At the time he gave up smoking he left a single cigarette in a tin in his toolbox as a dare to himself. He remembers it now, and as he opens the tin the dare seems pointless and childish. He flicks open his old Zippo lighter. He is sitting now on the front step of his shed, but the oily smell of the flame takes him to a hundred times and places.
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The cigarette is tinder-dry and the flame races up one side of it. He inhales and white finely ribbed paper browns and disintegrates. The smoke tastes like something dirty in his mouth. His heart beating faster with the first zap of nicotine in his blood reminds him of what a useless, weak bastard he really is. He had thought it possible to separate off the time he spent with her, to round it off into a neat bubble and let it drift off, up and away like a balloon full of something lighter than the stuff the rest of his life was made of. In his notebook he has drawn again and again a diagram of the process he imagines. It begins with the line of time travelling straight ahead. And then the line takes a turn, tracking out into the circle of something unexpected. When that something unexpected is over, the circle is complete, the line meets up again with the place where it began to diverge, and continues straight ahead as before. Time splices and the bubble separates and drifts. But he finds that his diagrams deteriorate, morphing into other shapes that remind him of the arch of her back, or the shallow curves of her long torso. His pencil draws the shape of her moving through water, the sweeping flukes of a tail. He stubs out the cigarette between his feet. On the wet gravel, the unsmoked portion splits open to reveal harvest-coloured leaves of tobacco. He has the urge to walk, to stretch out his legs and consume kilometres of earth with his stride. But he knows from the last time that
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he cannot be trusted to stay away from the lighthouse, from her. Instead, he retreats into his shed. The cone of downward light from the dim bulb is the Brownian motion of dust and metal filings and every other particle, whirling in unseen airy currents. Here he will stay, he determines, until he is cured of it, until September when he will board the big orange ship and head south. But until then, here he will stay, joining piece to piece. He is met again by his failures. On the workbench is the clumsy shape of the curve that will not fall right. He can draw it, see it in his mind’s eye, feel it under the skin of his hands, but he sees now that he cannot do it. It is not within the power of his hands to make these pieces, however tiny, turn into the shape that he desires. On a dusty sill, leaning, waiting, is the bronze plaque he had levered from the monument on the Neck. He takes it in his hands and feels the weight of it, lets it rise and fall the same safe, two-handed way he has seen fathers lift their babies into the air. He runs his hands over the contours of a head, cast in relief on the surface of the plaque. A woman, Truganini perhaps, the narrow stem of her neck curving out into the bulb which is the back of her cranium, and beneath her, in squared-off letters, the words: They roam no more upon this isle, stop and meditate awhile.
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He feels something stab him inside, something that causes the tide of his blood to lift and roll forward. And in the same moment it occurs to him what to do. Transform it, use this piece of the world’s brokenness to make something whole. He pictures the bronze, molten and flowing, glowing with heat. Somehow he will capture it in the midst of motion, and then he will have the long, elegant curve that he needs.
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September
he survey boat rocks gently inside a bay of Rottnest Island. It is midday, hot and hazy, and there is a fine layer of colourless cloud high in the big sky above the Indian Ocean. Essie has been left alone on board, Greg and Iain having stepped overboard into the shallow aqua water and waded ashore. She can see Iain, walking with his hands clasped behind his back, panning the glaring white sand with his beachcomber’s gaze. Greg has long since disappeared over dunes covered with lurid succulent flowers, into the heart of the island. To Essie, this island is nothing more than a saltpan rimmed with greyish reefs. She knows the locals see it through a dreamy screen of summer memories, that to them it conjures hot soles on burning rocks and sand, the smells of sunscreen and cooking fish, long afternoons of adolescent kissing in hidden coves, night walks, cool evening air on raw skin beneath peeling shoulders the same colour as curling crayfish tails. She can see it, but she cannot feel it.
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On the deck beneath her feet, saltwater splashes evaporate into patches of crystallised salt in the West Australian sun. The boat slowly swings on its anchor until the island is behind her. The colourless water stretches out until it meets the continent at the coast, its low line broken only by the thoughtless oblong of Observation City. Further back from the edge of the land, Perth city rises up on either side to the triangular peak of a skyscraper. She returned to the west, not specifically because of her job, her apartment, her car, or any other tangible assets or liabilities of her life, but because she didn’t know what else to do. And since she has returned she has walked over the surfaces of the city, troubled by the feeling that her life here is folding in half as cleanly as a fresh sheet of blank paper. It is only spring, but already summer has begun here. In the hazy heat the edges of the man-made world are blurred. The industrial zone to the south shimmers in the light, the pale columns of the smokestacks that puff and belch appear disconnected from the earth. If Essie halfcloses her eyes, she can make them disappear altogether. She turns her half-gaze to the north and the city, too, is gone.
Often she thinks that she should not have returned. This is a thought which comes to her as she drives through the
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suburbs to the Institute or swims laps in the chemical blue of the pool or passes Valerie’s soft linen tea towels over the fragile lips of china tea cups and plates. And it is always followed by the thought that, perhaps, she should have driven on that last day not to the ferry, but to the A-frame house in the island scrub. Perhaps it would have made a difference if she had gone to him and told him that to love would be safe this time. But then, perhaps not. They each would have known it was not a guarantee that was ever in anyone’s power to give. When she thinks of him, she imagines him as a battered tin chest, with all the knocks and dings and dents that made him just the way he was. The memory of him is something which warms her, although distantly now. It is a keepsake, a talisman that she treasures the same way she treasures the sea chest and all the precious trinkets it contains. For her future she dreams of next-best things. She makes vague plans about travelling to cold and interesting places where she doesn’t speak the language and can drift unnoticed through the icy streets of cities with tall, austere architecture and women to match. She thinks about applying for jobs in outposts on the edge of frozen seas, of living through summers with no darkness and winters with no light. She has a new notebook, this time with covers of a velvety sage green. And in it she writes stories in her own voice. There are stories about her mother, and father, and Charlie. There are stories about herself. There are even
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stories about the draughty house in the island scrub, and the ways in which she and Pete might together have patched up the holes in the walls and made it a house that could hold love again.
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he bright orange bulk of the Antarctic supply ship moves away from the wharf. Paper streamers stretch and snap. There is the sound of the ship’s horn echoed by the honking of car horns. There is whistling and shouting, and the whirr and click of cameras. Pete notices the rowdy young ones — cooks, electricians, doctors — going south for the first time, out of their skins with excitement. And he sees the seasoned practitioners, making stoic, mittened waves to their partners on the shore. The hunters form a group of their own, eyes bruised from too much alcohol and too little sleep. Last drinks at the waterfront tavern the night before had ended at dawn this morning, with several disappointed girlfriends who’d hoped to have their men home for one last night, and a couple of resigned wives who’d known better. Pete had ended up asleep against the bar, his fist in an ashtray filled with the swill of beer and spit and cigarette butts. Aurora makes her way out through the gates of the dock. She’ll sail three days and three nights across the featureless water and arrive, as if by a miracle, at the island. This could
T
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be the season. They’d toasted it at the tavern more than once, glasses full of whisky, Bundy, Captain Morgan, coming together more and more vigorously through the night. The ship makes her way out into the river, colourless beneath the grey morning sky. But Pete is not aboard. He waves to the shrinking shape of the vessel, squeezes the shoulder of the wife of one his mates, and whistles Scully up onto the tray of his ute.
It has just turned into night when the ferry reaches the northern shore of Bass Strait. Pete wakes with a mouth like the bottom of a cocky’s cage and a bursting head. His ute becomes part of a snake of cars crawling in a spiral through the guts of the ship, ejected at the arse end into the floodlights of a sleepless Port Melbourne. He picks up his dog from a trailer of kennels, has an excruciatingly pleasurable piss over the side of a wharf, and threads his way out of the city until he finds the artery that leads west. He makes Adelaide a couple of hours short of dawn, remembering a time years ago when he drove the Nullarbor between jobs and fetched up camping for a night in the middle of the city. That time he’d found a road that led from one corner of Adelaide’s central grid, up a series of twisting turns to a lover’s lookout peering down over the flat bed of the city. He had booted his four-wheel drive up an embankment above the lookout, onto a private little spot where he had rolled out his swag.
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Tonight, the air is still and the city is in stasis. He feels like he is the only man awake in the world as he grids the city until he finds a road that might be the right one. When it starts to climb, he knows he’s got it. It ends in a turning circle where two steamy cars are parked, bonnets angled towards each other as if they themselves were the lovers. Pete kicks his ute up the steep slope behind the cars, up onto his private terrace of earth. Out of the vehicle at last he stretches his cramped limbs and feels the cold air creep into the cavities between his clothes and his skin. The city below him is a map of lights, the land and buildings invisible beneath them. It looks like a 3D circuit board with points of white, red, green. With the sheer dropaway of the hillside, it feels as if he could just step off and fly through the virtual corridors of light. He wishes he had someone to turn to and say, Look, look at this. Scully, squatting to piss on a small bush near the wheel of his ute, won’t do. Next day, the road leads him past glittering pink-purple salt lakes towards Port Augusta, into the flatness and the heat of the centre of the country. The stereo in the ute chews all the tape out of the only cassette he has in the car. Trying to get the crushed tangle out of the mouth of the stereo he pulls too hard and the thin black tape snaps. He gets a flat tyre that costs him two hours and a badly sunburnt neck by the time he’s repaired the seized-up jack. He curses the lack of air conditioning in his ute as he
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drives through dress-circle scarps of hard, red earth and into a mining town where, late in the day, he gets a driedout meat pie from the local servo. He drives on, his eyes gritty with dust and distance. In the last of the light he turns off the highway and finds a clearing in the scrub. There’s sufficient dusty, gutless timber to make a fire of sorts. The coals and low flames attract every insect inside a vast radius of flat, desperate earth. They kamikaze into the heat of the fire, dive into the billy of packet pasta mix that he’s heating up for a feed. He takes one mouthful of pasta, but can’t stomach the crunching carapaces of the bugs. He throws the food on the fire, and then a handful of dust over the top of it and remembers promising himself that he would never drive this stretch of Australia ever again. He laughs grimly at the fragility of his promises to himself, brittle and frail as the blackened twigs poking out of the edges of his dust-covered fire. What is he doing after all? Driving west, towards her. Still a fucking moth trapped in a fucking beam. He thinks of the orange ship sailing south, still only halfway there. Not that he’s decided, not finally, what he’s going to do when he gets there. During the long day and night of driving the cab of the ute was filled with the constant drone of the engine, of tyres on bitumen, and of his own circular thoughts, spliced into a loop. To see her, not to see her. The loop flashed images of his hand touching her face, her quiet pleasure when she first sees the gift he is
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bringing her, of her pale hand with its long fingers and blunt pale nails running over closely wrought metal flesh. And then it wound around to other pictures in which he left the gift at her door, or at a place outside her window where she would see it between parted curtains when she woke in the morning. In these pictures, she was wearing white cotton pyjamas and her straight eyebrows slid closer together on her forehead as she recognised what it was. When she got close enough — standing on the street in her pyjamas, making the traffic slow down and edge around her — she recognised the face of the sculpture as her own. But in these pictures, Pete himself was nowhere to be seen. He had left, he was driving away. He liked the cold, steely feeling of this self-denial, his only pleasure the knowing of how close he had brushed against her life. The next day is hot, searing hot. In the rear-view mirror Pete sees the long pink sock of Scully’s tongue flapping in the wind-rush. He drives a road which, on the map, is a red line slicing off the shark fin of the Eyre Peninsula. It takes him through wheat towns, spaced out by flat squares of growing crops, their entrances identically signposted by the oblong towers of their silos. Moving about the unexceptional streets of the town are its careful people, hoarders of grain. By midday the earth has begun to dry out and the crops have begun to straggle and thin. Road signs announce
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camel, emu, roo, in silhouette against their yellow; the beginning of the Nullarbor Plain. He passes into a place where there is only the white-shouldered tarmac of the road and its white knee-high posts to signal the last year of the twentieth century. Everything else is ancient. The rocky orange earth spreads away, flat, inviting, infinite. It makes Pete want to pull over and begin to walk, to pick a path between the desert’s stubborn, skeletal shrubs, and just keep walking until he is lost. He remembers it from previous crossings of the plain, but even so, the sudden sight of the sea amazes him. The edge of the Bight is a huge mouthy mark that might have been bitten into the land by prehistoric teeth, by giant stone incisors nipping neatly through the layered cake of the continent. It’s impressive, the way that the flat orange slab of the land is there, and then simply is not. No sloping away, no gentle incline preparing you to reach the edge, no interim measure of beach sand — just a straight fall of cliffs like the edge of the world itself. He sees the turn-off from a distance, and the obedient caravans and station wagons blinking orange on their lefthand flanks, following the side track to the coast itself. He finds himself following, pulling into a carpark where people are unfolding their bodies, reaching up with clasped hands above their heads, yawning widely in the fresh air after stifling hours of travel. Three teenage girls in labelled windcheaters and sneakers with no socks walk towards the edge of the land, peer over its lip and skitter
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back, giggling. Men walk a distance, glance back over their shoulders and then assume the stance, feet apart, hands privately at their flies. Pete backs his ute into a space away from the other vehicles and unclips Scully from where she is tied in the centre front of the tray. She noisily guzzles the water he pours into an ice-cream container on the ground. ‘That’s enough, fleabag,’ he tells her, nudging her away with his toe. She looks up at him, dribbling water out of the sides of her muzzle. At the throaty sound of an engine behind him, he turns to see a boxy, pale yellow Ford that appears to be driven by nobody, or to have a limousine’s dark-tinted windows. Then out of its doors piles a family. Mother, father, children have skins so dark they seem to absorb the light. The woman walks quickly away across the earth on her thin legs, but the man crouches down on the earth, facing out to sea, and draws his children to him. He holds the two youngest, one in the crook of each arm. The eldest stands apart, drawing semi-circles in the dirt with the toe of a sneaker. The man speaks to his children in a language that sounds to Pete like flowing water, and Pete feels himself longing to be a part of their circle; wanting to be told, or be telling, the stories of the ancient earth. Pete follows with his eyes the father’s outstretched finger where it points east and then travels in a wide arc to the west. As far as he can see, east or west, there are cliffs making the sudden plunge into the sea. He imagines
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the finite scalloped line being drawn, far from here, with the point of a stick in orange sand, or a fingertip in pale mud. He imagines a gesture, the same words spoken in a hundred languages: and out here, after this, nothing but water. Pete closes his eyes and breathes deeply, trying to suck into his nostrils the salty spray from the turbulent water below. He had tied down the silver-blue tarpaulin when he was still in the driveway of his home on the island, using brand-new white rope. But the rope is red now, coated with dust that has reached everywhere but the very inside of his knots. As the rope falls away, loosened, he sees the kinks with pale interior curves that remind him of armpits, or the backs of knees. He untucks the folds of the tarp, and pulls it away from the sculpture beneath. He touches the warmed metal of her face, notices the fine reddish silt of dust that has crept in beneath the covering. He remembers seeing whales and dolphins carried overland in the backs of utes and trucks, their bodies suspended in slings, clusters of volunteers pouring buckets of water over their suede skins to keep them glistening wet. He feels as if he should be doing something similar, pouring cupfuls of water over this fragile aquatic creature he is carrying in the back of his ute, wetting down the flowing bronze of her hair, the scalloped metal scales of her tail. For a moment he imagines lifting her, pitching her over the cliff and returning her to cold, salty surrounds. He
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imagines the last flick of her lightly tarnished tail as it disappears beneath the foamy water. But he recognises it as the same feeling as the one he gets standing on the edge of a tall building, or by the side of railway tracks: the sensation that seemingly compels him to step forward from safety into danger. What if … what if … It is a fantasy, a fleeting temptation. He knows that, finally, his body will pull him back from the edge of danger and bind him tightly to life. He flicks up the silver blue covering like a sheet in the breeze above the metal mermaid. As it comes to rest he smiles at a small, shimmering detail. A thruppence piece, tangled in her bronzed hair, an accidental jewel that might have been caught there as she swam through the water. And he knows that he will wait to see the look on her face when she comes to understand that in the making of her, he has tried to fill all the spaces between the parts.
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Historical notes and sources
he character of Captain William Westwood is modelled on my great-great-grandfather Captain William Hawkins, Superintendent of the Cape Bruny Lightstation from 1874–1914. Some of the seafaring stories in the novel are based on accounts from his memoir “Reminiscences of an Old Shellback”, which he completed in 1910 at the lighthouse. The sentence on pp. 173–4 beginning ‘As the fore-topsail took the water …’, and a brief passage on p. 175 beginning ‘The wind at the time was a smart breeze …’, are taken from this memoir. The character of Charlie Westwood was inspired by his grandson, my grandfather, Alan Hawkins. All other characters are fictional. The principal source for the folktale of the storm child was a book of Orcadian tales I leafed through in a second-hand bookshop in Edinburgh and couldn’t afford to buy. For assistance with Gaelic translations, my thanks to Professor William Gillies of the University of Edinburgh. The lyric on p. 229 is from Annie Ball’s Whale Song from Justus Neumann’s memorable Circus Bruny. I read about the concept of the
T
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birth of the moon in Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. The poem quoted on p. 288 is John Masefield’s Sea-fever, reproduced with permission from the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield. The work of art titled No, Man is an Island, referred to on p. 139, is a print by celebrated Tasmanian artist Patrick Hall. The words to the sea shanty of the dead horse on p. 224 came from the memory of sea-lore expert Chris Roche, who says the full text can be found in Stan Hugill’s Shanties From the Seven Seas.
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Acknowledgments
or their help along the way, thanks to Edith Cowan University, Perth’s Karrakatta Club, Amanda Curtin, Carmel Macdonald-Grahame, Donna Mazza and Annabel Smith, Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service espeically Geoff Copson, Richard Hawson, Dan Donehue, Bernard Edwards, Nick Mooney, Stephen Harris and Peter Grant, Alan Pearce from CSIRO in Marmion, Captain Tiger Timbs and the crew of Eye of the Wind, the crew of Eda Frandsen, the Robinsons of Doune, Peter and Elva Whitaker, Celia Tyler, Dwellingup artist Carl McMillan, Heather Brown, Irene McGuire, Nelli Noakes, Kate Mooney, Anthea Pritchard, Louise Braithwaite, Claire Moodie and Clive Tilsley. Thanks to the judges of The Australian/Vogel Literary Award 2002: Debra Adelaide, James Bradley, Stella Clarke and Liam Davison; to everyone at Allen & Unwin, most especially Annette Barlow, Christa Munns and Andrew Hawkins. Thanks to Belinda Lee for her gentle and perceptive editing, Ellie Exarchos for her beautiful vision and to Barbara Mobbs for being my mother hen. Thanks to Peter
F
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Jerrim for blowing on a small spark, Marie Traill for sharing her memories, Axel Rooney for his patience, Peter Wood for his gleeful wielding of the blue pencil and Jennifer Wood for so many things it would take a book larger than this one to contain them. If the writing of this novel was a ship, my PhD supervisor Dr Richard Rossiter was her compass and my husband John Godfrey was the wind in her sails.
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OTHER AWARD WINNERS FROM ALLEN & UNWIN
SKINS Sarah Hay WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN/VOGEL LITERARY AWARD FOR 2001 ‘She had been left behind on an island with sealers, men who had their own rules. She felt as though she was on the edge of the world, or perhaps she had fallen off into some halfway place. It wasn’t living and it wasn’t quite hell.’ Shipwrecked off the coast of Western Australia in 1835, Dorothea Newell is marooned on Middle Island with other survivors. Stranded, they seek shelter in a sealers’ camp. The desolate environment of the island camp is a place where men from all corners of the globe struggle to trade seal skins, and the appearance of women-rare commodities in that place and time-opens a further form of trade. As a desperate means of survival, Dorothea is forced into an alliance with the camp’s fierce leader, John Anderson. Skins is the compelling story of Dorothea’s emotional and physical journey back to civilisation. Featuring an immense, wild landscape of ocean and islands untainted by human existence, Sarah Hay writes a remarkable tale of people who have fallen through the gaps of recorded history. ‘Truly very compelling. It really has extraordinary power … Dorothea’s story is quite unforgettable.’ —Gillian Mears ‘An extremely accomplished, absorbing narrative that wears its historical knowledge lightly … the style is skilful, unobtrusive, the characterisation excellent, the themes intriguing. Very impressive.’ —Debra Adelaide ISBN 1 86508 807 2
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Love and Vertigo Hsu-Ming Teo WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN/VOGEL LITERARY AWARD FOR 1999 ‘For the first time in my life, I saw my mother in relation to her family, and I didn’t recognise her any more … These Singaporean roots of hers, this side of her — and possibly of me too — were unacceptable. I was determined not to belong, not to fit in, because I was Australian, and Mum ought to be Australian too. The tug of her roots, the blurring of her role from wife and mother to sister and aunt, angered me.’ On the eve of her mother’s wake, Grace Tay flies to Singapore to join her father and brother and her mother’s family. Here she explores her family history, looking for the answers to her mother’s death. This beautiful and moving novel steps between Singapore, Malaysia and Australia, evoking the life, the traditions and tastes of a forceful Chinese family as well as the hardship, the cruelty and pain. Written in a fresh, contemporary voice tinged with biting humour, this is a story about resilience, a story about migration, but in many ways it is a story about parents’ expectations for their children. ‘An impressive first novel and a poignant study of the effects of migration on a Chinese family. It is also a moving tale of the redemptive powers of forgiveness and love.’ —The Weekend Australian ‘Superlatives are the only way of describing a literary tour-deforce; a novel of such consummate power and sweep that it often left me breathless with admiration … It deserves to be proclaimed from the rooftops as one of the books of the year.’ —The Press ISBN 1 86508 278 3
