Stars Over the Southern Ocean

by J. H. Fletcher

  She needed to walk, to breathe the air. Above all, to seek the love that meant more to her than all the world. Feeling his presence was impossible on the houseboat because it was there she had first heard of Grant’s death, so she arranged for the shikara to take her up-river through the city. She travelled along the narrow waterways between the buildings, looking up at the carved wooden facades of the houses. They passed the restaurant where they had eaten so recently. Grant was with her every foot of the way. He was in the air, the water, the sunlight, the harsh cries of traders, the other boats they passed, the buildings reaching high over her head. He was in every inch of her, every breath and pulse and every drop of blood in her body. He was in her mind, in her aching heart and the tears she fought unavailingly to prevent.

  Even to breathe was a challenge. They passed a landing and by gestures she asked the boatman to put her ashore. If she could walk, see things in stalls and shops, mingle with crowds, she might find, if not peace, then at least some sort of accommodation with what had happened.

  She put a silk scarf over her hair, as the women did in that place, because it seemed to her right that she should do so, too. She walked down arcades and covered walkways. Children trailed after her, their curious eyes attentive to this strange being; shopkeepers emerged from their shadowed caverns to offer spices and dubious jewels—sapphires and rubies, blue tourmaline from Afghanistan. A man selling coats made from supple suede spoke to her, offering a special price for the memsahib. It did not help. Grant was here, too, he was everywhere, in the shadows and the light, in the darkness and the sunshine. She turned back the way she had come.

  That was the last time she tried to find what could not be found. She had nothing to keep her here any longer, nor any inclination to continue her wanderings around the Subcontinent.

  No; that part of her life was over. Now she would seek what consolation she could find and do everything in her power to resume her life. She would go home.

  To Tasmania.

  She went to Delhi. She packed up her few belongings. The property agent, instructed by Mrs Kumar, accompanied her. To make sure, he said, that she took only those things that were hers.

  ‘Theft is commonplace in such circumstances,’ the agent said.

  Tamsyn had thought to take a keepsake, something of Grant’s she could treasure, but it seemed Mrs Kumar had no interest in keepsakes. Broken-hearted Tamsyn was unsure of her legal rights, which she was in any case unwilling to pursue, and was too dispirited to fight.

  ‘I have my memories,’ Tamsyn said. ‘Those, at least, she cannot steal from me.’

  ‘No question of theft,’ the agent said. ‘Mrs Kumar is a righteous lady. And slander is a serious offence in India.’

  The journey back to Australia was the worst experience of Tamsyn’s life, not because it was arduous and seemingly unending—although it was both, the plane breaking down in Bangkok and again in Singapore—but because with every mile and every hour it seemed she was shutting the door on what had been joy, the fulfilment of loving and being loved.

  Both awake and in the brief intervals of exhausted sleep, her mind was filled with memories: Grant laughing, Grant loving, Grant being forever by her side.

  Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;

  Ae farewell, and then for ever!

  The couplet was not hers, nor was it true, but Robert Burns’s words drummed in her head all through the journey. By the time the plane finally touched down in Melbourne, despair had become deeply rooted in Tamsyn’s soul.

  Marina met her, something she had not dreamt might be possible, and the emotion of the meeting brought the tears that until then she had been able to hold back. Now, as on the houseboat, they poured down her face as though they would never cease.

  Mother and daughter clung to each other; Marina, too, in tears as she held her wounded daughter closely to her heart.

  ‘I know how terrible you feel,’ Marina said. ‘I know you think nothing in your world will ever be right again, but time will help. It is an easy thing to say but the day will come when you’re able to live your life again.’

  Too wretched to argue, Tamsyn said nothing, but she did not believe she would ever truly get over what had happened.

  A week after arriving back at Noamunga she wrote to Esmé. A friendly, chatty, loving letter. She had no reply, nor did Esmé write to her. She wrote several times more; she sent a Christmas card; she heard nothing. Esmé had become her lost child, as Grant had become her lost husband.

  It was over, finally all over, yet in her heart it was not. Emotional wounds were not so easily healed and in her heart’s blood Grant remained and would remain, she believed, forever.

  1993

  CHAPTER 11

  Marina had never been one for slouching in bed.

  Lulled to sleep by the creaking of the shingle under the concussion of the waves, she was out of bed when it was barely light. She sloshed water on her face, flung on her tatty jeans and a heavy shirt that had seen better days and, with a gulped coffee warming her innards, was soon scrambling along the black wet rock draped with seaweed that made up the littoral along that section of the coast.

  Prospecting for her breakfast, she found it in a small rock pool teeming with whiskery prawns hiding under stones. Marina wanted her breakfast; so did the prawns, and greed would be their downfall. She prised a couple of limpets off the stone wall of the pool, ripped out the flesh and threw it into the water. Before the ripples had subsided, the prawns were there. So was Marina with her scoop net. Within minutes she had caught enough for breakfast and maybe lunch, too. Leaving the survivors of her raid for another day, she went back to the house. She cooked up the unlucky prawns who had feasted on their last limpet, served them elegantly on an old tin plate, added another slice of the French loaf with a pat of butter, and went and gull-perched on a handy rock, an old favourite, to look at the sea while she ate.

  She wondered; freedom gave that most valuable of gifts, the time to wonder about things big and small. About the state and future of the world, of the planets and all the wonders of the stars and what astronomers told them lay beyond the stars, the life that might be out there and might not and whether, in practical terms, it mattered either way; also, she had the time to wonder what she was planning to have for tea tonight. Tomorrow night. All the nights she might still have. Trivia? No; trivia did not exist. All of it was important or none of it was. Living in this place gave her that: the freedom to choose. To sit here, on this rock, and wonder or—like Piers the Plowman, in the famous medieval poem—to get off her backside and go wide in the world wonders to hear.

  There was another thing about this place, she thought, that was replicated nowhere else on earth. Each rock and salty puddle, every blade of grass in every paddock, every beam of wood in the storm-defiant house, bore the imprint of the man with whom she had been united over half a century before. The man who had cartwheeled her out of the forests of the Western Tier mountains to bring her to Noamunga, his family holding in the wildness and isolation and grandeur and joy of Tasmania’s west coast. To make love and babies and a life.

  A life that might have been lost even earlier and almost had been, had she not succeeded in coaxing him not to use the pistol with which he had, perhaps, planned to end his suffering. He had dragged himself through unimaginable pain to find once again the safe harbour that she had constructed single-handedly about the ruin of what had been her strong man.

  The phone rang. She went indoors and lifted the receiver.

  ‘Settled in okay?’

  Tamsyn.

  ‘Fine. Wreaking havoc on the crustacean population.’

  ‘Shame on you. Poor prawns.’

  ‘Breakfast was calling, so what’s a girl to do?’

  ‘Are you really feeling okay?’

  ‘Really and truly, I feel fine.’

  ‘Is Sunday still on?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I thought you might have decided to tackle the south-west wild
erness track, or something.’

  The track was one of the toughest walks on the island, if not in the whole of Australia.

  ‘What a splendid idea!’

  ‘What are you giving me for lunch?’

  ‘I haven’t thought about it. I hear seaweed is very nutritious.’

  ‘Want me to bring anything?’

  ‘No; I’ll think of something.’

  ‘Prawns?’

  ‘You never know your luck.’

  ‘You haven’t heard from Charlotte or Greg?’

  ‘No. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t phoned them either. But Charlotte’s out so much and I thought Gregory was probably in bed with his latest bimbo.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to interrupt that.’

  ‘I don’t know where he finds the energy.’

  ‘He’s still young, Mum. Young and careless.’

  ‘That must be the reason.’

  Conversation finished, Marina broke the connection and for a moment looked thoughtfully at the receiver before replacing it on its stand. Young and careless … For careless read irresponsible.

  Tamsyn had said nothing specific. There hadn’t been even the slightest hint of a hint, yet Marina’s senses were as finely tuned as the antennae of the most sensitive prawn in the ocean, and she had picked up the faintest dissonance in what Tamsyn had not said.

  She thought over the brief conversation. She came up with nothing and decided she was imagining things. Going gaga in my old age.

  And did not believe it, even for a second.

  It was Monday; Tamsyn was coming Sunday. Later in the week she’d drive into Boulders, the little town that was still so little that there were times—when the gales howled and the rain thundered on its roofs—when she wondered how the place survived at all, but there were always people about: farmers, fishermen and vagrants of a hundred different types who came in from the neighbouring countryside, from miles away some of them, one or even two hours’ drive over lurching, puddle-strewn tracks, to come to what?

  Half a dozen streets; a petrol station and school; a war memorial bearing the names of those killed in the Great War; a fire station and a pub older than history; the general store that Janet Hancock, the owner, liked to call the local supermarket. A handful of dilapidated houses, their heads bowed to the buffeting wind, the rain that fell incessantly from the cloud-shrouded sky. Strange how the hinterland was as grey as a burial ground, whereas here on the coast the clean air blew, the clouds parted to a golden sun. Every morning she opened her eyes to a silver dawn, while at night the stars shone diamond-bright over the Southern Ocean.

  At first the town had been too small to be a real town at all. It had barely been a settlement. It had seemed to cling to life by its toenails yet had survived despite all. It had been where it was for over a century and a half, since the first prospectors had fought their way past bogs and granite crags and an eternity of lonely miles to fossick here for gold, copper, tin. At first they’d found precious little of any of them, barely enough to keep hope alive, and then Walter Wyebrow had found the rich Gaffer lode. Tin in quantity, pure enough to be almost solid metal, and the precarious settlement had survived. The Gaffer lode had long been played out, but supported by the dribble of pence and sovereigns and later still pounds from the wild families of the mountainous countryside, Boulders survived still. From its earliest days the town bore the name the first arrivals had given it. Boulders; how well it deserved that name.

  Half a century in the district, Marina Trevelyan was still a newcomer to the ancients propping themselves like folded umbrellas in the corners of the decrepit bar. Bullet holes in walls and ceiling were reminders of the wild days when the tinners had come to town and respectable women had bolted the doors of their houses until they left.

  And here she was, with her two hundred acres of pasture, sown with rocks like the teeth of a hundred dragons, three dozen or so sheep in paddocks enclosed within dry-stone walls, each with its rusting gate under a birdsong sky.

  It was a strangely shaped holding; Marina had long ago given up trying to work out how that had happened. A flat-floored valley, little more than a ravine, divided the property as neatly as a blunt knife so that in essence it was two properties or even three: the valley open to the sea between the areas of high ground fronted by basalt cliffs that otherwise presented a solid face to the ocean and flowed north and south along the coast. She’d read that the valley had been created by movements of the earth’s crust a billion years before, leaving a level plateau at its eastern end. She was the legal owner of all of it, but it was the coastal strip climbing to the ridge overlooking the valley that held her house and her heart. From the house she couldn’t even see the valley but the track went that way, scribbling its way over the high ground until the bitumen started three kilometres outside Boulders. The town was still small but was the gateway to the rest of the island and the world, because from Boulders the road ran to Strahan where the highway took over, barrelling past mountains and forests to Hobart in the south-eastern corner of the island.

  Quite a few in Boulders didn’t know their fathers; virtually no one could trace their blood back beyond three generations. They lived in a lonely place, in history as well as geography. It meant that no one really knew who they were; without identifiable roots who was anyone, after all?

  Marina was in a marginally better position; at least she could trace her ancestry back to Jethro Fairbrother, who’d arrived in chains from the old country and after serving his time had established a home on his own land high in the forests of the Western Tiers range.

  As far as she knew there’d been no incest or inbreeding in her line, which she thought must make her a rarity; in tiny settlements with little contact with the outside world there must have been plenty of both. Why Jethro had been sent out she had no idea. He could have been a murderer or cutpurse or smuggler. Or even an innocent: there’d been a few of them, too, although she suspected not many. If she’d bothered to dig deep enough she would likely have discovered the truth—the old convict records still existed—but when it came to the point she hadn’t cared to; at the end of the day the man was dead and it didn’t matter what crimes he’d committed.

  Her detached attitude had made it easier to break away when the right man came, and come he had, when she was seventeen and as ready as she was ever going to be.

  Memories … Past and future united in the present.

  She decided she would do her shopping on Thursday: why do today what you could put off until tomorrow or, even better, the day after tomorrow? She would never have thought that way once, but age brought resignation, if not wisdom.

  The tide was out; she would lay a long line parallel with the shore, each end anchored securely to a rock and the dozen or so hooks baited with limpet flesh. With any luck she’d have caught enough fish for supper by the time she got back, because that day she had decided she would go walking along the coast.

  Do what you can as long as you can: that was a motto that she intended would be her pole star during the weeks and months ahead.

  She packed bread, a flask of water and a cut of the stinky cheese into her backpack. She hoicked the pack onto her shoulders, snapped the waist band tight to hold it firm, and walked. Or rather marched, challenging her body and the terrain to dispute her right of passage.

  It was odd to know she was walking on what, legally speaking, was her own land, because every bead of blood and sweat, every muscle and sinew, knew that such a claim, were she to make it, would be upheld in the courts but would remain nonsensical. The opposite was the truth. She did not own the land; the land owned her. Not far from where she walked were strata of exposed rock that the geologists said were the oldest on the planet; the valley that cleft the land behind her had been laid down in a cataclysm of fire and molten rock over a billion years before. It might well exist for billions of years into the future. How was it possible for any human being to own it? No, no, no. In months or years to come, her blood wo
uld enrich the soil; she would become the land, indistinguishable from the grass and scrub that fought the wind about her. The concept was the closest she could get to a vision of eternity, a vision that would remain until the dying sun engulfed them all—earth, vegetation, bones, the planet itself—and drew them mercifully and at last into the infinite.

  She walked, feeling rather than thinking her thoughts, as with every second, every step, she grew closer to what would be her own participation in eternity. Or at least oblivion.

  Up the rise Marina went, legs strong, breath easy. Down into a shallow trench where sparse trees struggled and up the other side. She walked along the cliff edge where, far below, the white breakers pounded the resolute land. At the top of the rise she stopped and sat for a space, chewing on a crust of bread anointed with a slice of cheese.

  ‘I have never felt stronger in my life,’ she told the world.

  It was true. She listened to the quiet sufficiency of her body, the heart behaving itself, her brain whirling its Catherine wheel of thoughts, sparks flying, but that was normal, a part of her like the heart that would never be still, questing as always beyond the darkness that the damned doctor had told her would soon become permanent.

  Into the eternal dark … Now there would be an adventure. But was there any chance the doctor could be wrong? Not likely; the pain had been real, God knew. Even the memory of it made her sweat.

  One day at a time was the only way. Live every minute to the full and when she stopped, she’d stop. She was happy with that scenario.

  ‘I haven’t stopped yet,’ she told the world. Would have shouted it from the tip-top of the tallest tree, had there been a tall tree to climb. Instead she shouldered her pack and walked on, feeling the concussion of the waves through the soles of her boots, edging the black cliffs that stared across the waste of seas towards invisible South America.