by Jenni Ogden
“Tom, gidday,” Jack yelled. “Just telling this young lady about your rodeo. She thought she’d like to go for a ride on a turtle while she’s here.”
Cheeky sod. I wonder which he thinks is more amusing, the ‘young’ or the ‘lady’?
“Hi Jack, any time, tell her. Does she want to come for a ride now?” the diver was shouting back, his black wetsuit glistening in the sun, his hair springing from his head in wet spikes. I tried to appear nonchalant as I stood there gripping the rail, my heart pounding as I looked down at the dinghy. I could see them all grinning at me, and I was glad I could hide behind the enormous pair of D&G sunglasses Fran had given me as a going-away present.
Jack’s arm shot out and landed around my shoulders, pulling me towards him. I could feel myself tensing as his hot breath exploded on my cheek. “This is Anna Fergusson. She’s going to be looking after Jeff’s campground for a year.” His free hand gestured sweepingly towards the dinghy. “And this daring fellow is our resident turtle whisperer.”
The man in the wet suit dipped his head and raised his hand in a desultory wave. “These are my two research assistants, Bill and Ben,” he said, still grinning.
Am I meant to return their banter? “Hullo,” I said creatively.
All three of them nodded at me and I tried to make my face look pleasant.
“So, do you want to come on board?” asked the diver. “We’ve about finished the rodeo for the day—one more turtle, perhaps—so we’ll be back at the wharf by the time Jack’s got your gear to your place. Blow the smoke out of your lungs.”
“Thank you,” I said, knowing how stiff I sounded. “But I don’t think I’m dressed for it.” I felt ridiculous in my long black pants and blue shirt, even with the top buttons open and the sleeves rolled up.
“No worries, another time maybe.” His grin flashed again and his eyes crinkled in his young brown face. I smiled back at him without thinking. It was impossible not to. I realized I had taken off my sunglasses and our eyes were connecting. Then their motor roared and they sped away as I hurriedly replaced my glasses, hoping jolly Jack hadn’t noticed the heat in my face.
The smell hit me first as I stepped off the small wharf and onto the brilliant white sand. A hot, dry, musty smell. Not unpleasant but definitely not lavender. Then the sound of birds, hundreds of them. I looked over to the green rim of trees bordering the twenty meters or so of sand; black- and-white birds were flying in and out, busy as bees. The heat rose up from the sand, and I was glad I had put a pair of shorts in my bag. I nearly hadn’t, as my legs hadn’t been exposed to the elements for at least twenty years. The shorts were another present from Fran.
Jack’s son had disappeared into the interior of the island as soon as we tied up, and Jack had already dumped my one suitcase and computer bag onto the sand. He was now carrying off armloads of banana boxes stacked three high, his biceps distorting a labyrinth of tattoos. Numerous food boxes, seven of them mine, food and supplies that had to last for two weeks minimum until Jack came back from the mainland with the next food haul. An old tractor with a trailer behind it was now chugging through the gap in the trees and down to the wharf, driven by Jack’s son. I stood and watched as they rapidly loaded all the boxes, my luggage, large gas bottles, enormous tins with DIESEL written on the outside, and various other things onto the trailer. I made a weak attempt to help but was obviously in the way.
“Come on, I’ll walk you to your cabin. Nick will drop your bags and food off in a bit.” Jack walked towards the gap in the trees and I followed him, increasing my stride to keep up. He was a broad man, and must have been well over six feet. My feet felt hot in my well-worn hiking boots. I nearly tripped over a group of the busy birds that seemed to be chattering to one another on the sand. They were so pretty. A neat, soft black body with a perky white cap. Big black feet and a black beak completed them perfectly. Jack looked back as I stopped.
“They’re white-capped noddy terns. Not so many here yet, but there’ll be hundreds of thousands in a few weeks, and all these trees”—he waved a hand at the large-leaved trees we were walking through—“will be loaded with their nests.”
“They’re beautiful. There seem to be an awful lot here already.”
“Wait ’til you see their babies. They must be the prettiest little birds alive.”
We continued walking.
“The other bird we have here in the thousands is the wedge-tailed shearwater. Ghost shearwaters, we call them, because of the howling noise they make. Once they’re nesting it’s almost impossible to move without stepping on a bird or collapsing one of their nesting tunnels. Even sleeping is difficult with the racket they kick up.”
I felt a strange sensation in my belly and chest, a sort of bubbling. Excitement, that’s what I was feeling. Pure excitement.
My cabin was even smaller than I had envisioned. “Minimalist living” would be putting it mildly, but that was fine by me. I was a minimalist from way back. Jack stopped long enough to demonstrate the vagaries of the enormous and scarily ancient-looking gas fridge/freezer and the even older gas stove. Next came the shower, an ingenious contraption that involved filling a bucket with water from the taps over the large sink, hauling it up to the ceiling of the shower cubicle on a rope pulley, and then, by pulling on another rope, tipping it over so that it emptied its load into a funnel that filtered down to a large shower nozzle. The water that spurted from the taps was disgusting—full of black bits and smelling slightly off. Jack grinned when he saw my expression and suggested that I boil it before drinking it. The only fresh water on the island came from rainwater tanks fed by roof water thick with the droppings of thousands of birds, especially foul following a downpour after a long dry period. I silently thanked Jeff—alias Lazylad—for his wise counsel when he helped me buy my food supplies on the mainland, especially his insistence that I fill two banana boxes with plastic bottles of drinking water.
The power came courtesy of two solar panels on the roof, stored in batteries under the cabin and converted from 12 volts to 240 volts by a humming piece of equipment in a cupboard. It hadn’t even occurred to me that power might be a problem, so I felt a jolt of simultaneous horror and relief. Perhaps I could have coped without my iPod, but I would have had to turn right around and go back if I couldn’t use my Kindle and computer. I had brought a universal plug adaptor with me, of course—part of my overseas conference travel kit.
Jack disappeared, and Nick arrived on his tractor, dumped my bags and boxes on the deck, and with a “See ya round, mate,” roared off. I returned to the kitchen end of the cabin and opened the few cupboards and checked out the mis- matched crockery, glasses and cutlery. A blackened kettle sat on the stove, and an equally blackened fry pan and a couple of battered saucepans hung from large hooks suspended from the low ceiling. I looked at the few photos stuck on the walls with tacks. One of them was a picture of Jeff and another man, both dressed only in shorts, standing in the shallow water, an enormous turtle between them. When I first decided to take the cabin, Jeff had been going to meet me there and show me the ropes, but then he decided to meet me on the mainland and introduce me to Jack, who did the regular supplies run once a fortnight. Jeff would be in Sydney now, and soon on his way to the UK and a trial run living with his girlfriend for a year. He’d told me all this while we shopped and then had fish ’n chips in a local café. I looked again at the faded photo and peered at the other man in it for a few seconds before realizing it was the turtle whisperer. He looked different without his wetsuit. Both men had that Australian look, rugged and brown. The turtle whisperer—Tom, I think Jack called him— had quite a lot of dark-blondish hair. I’d got the impression that it was black when I saw him earlier, because it was wet I suppose. He was grinning his infectious grin, and his dark eyes were almost hidden in the crinkles of his smile. Both men had nice faces, open and friendly. Tom’s was sort of lopsided, but perhaps that added to his attractiveness. How old would he be? Jeff had let slip that he was th
irty-five—the right age to settle down, as he put it—so perhaps Tom was about the same age. I’d meant to ask Jack why he called him the turtle whisperer, but hadn’t in the end. I suppose it’s another Australian joke because of this turtle rodeo thing he does—the exact opposite of a turtle whisperer, if you ask me.
I finally got around to emptying my case into the small wardrobe and tallboy. I thought about putting my shorts on, but decided on my light safari pants and a T-shirt instead. The shorts would have to wait until I’d shaved my legs; the poor things hadn’t seen a razor since my student days. I went brown quite easily as a kid, so fingers crossed I still would, and the Australian sun wouldn’t burn me to a cinder.
After burying my black trousers and blue shirt at the back of the wardrobe and swapping my boots for sandals, I felt much better. I unpacked the food boxes and squashed the packs of rapidly defrosting meat into the freezer box, and the other refrigerator stuff into the fridge part. I managed to find space in the few cupboards and on the open shelves above the sink for the rest of my food, and hoped it wouldn’t soon be infested by god knows what creepy crawlies. I made a mental note to beg, borrow, or steal some plastic containers from somewhere. I had a few scary moments lighting the gas hob, but finally managed to boil some of the bird-shit water and make a cup of tea. It had a very peculiar taste but I was cautious about using my precious bottled water except for drinking it cold.
I took my cup of musty tea and a plate of biscuits and cheese out on to my deck—I was already thinking of it as mine —and sat in one of the plastic chairs. It was still and hot and all around me were scuffles and birds calling, and through a gap in the trees was the white sand and then the blue sea, now with bits of coral sticking up in it as the tide went out. I sat there not believing it was me, and that I was there for a year with nothing to do but write my memoir—not that anyone else would give a damn if I did or didn’t, and right then nor did I.
What on earth would I do for a year? Surely the campsite I was yet to see wouldn’t take much of my time? Luckily my Kindle was stuffed with at least sixty books and my iPod loaded with my favorite music. And I’d better at least make some attempt at the memoir just to keep my brain ticking over.
After a while I got up, reluctantly, and followed a sandy path around the side of the cabin and through some trees for about two hundred meters. Jack had told me the campsite was back there. And there it was, quite a large sandy, grassy area with trees all around but with a gap showing the beach and sea. A wooden building near the edge turned out to house a toilet that looked fairly unsavory when I looked down it, but didn’t seem to smell. Thankfully I didn’t have to deal with it. A man called Basil, whom I was yet to meet, apparently did the honors. On the outside wall of the toilet was a shower like mine. A little way from that was a large open shelter with a concrete floor and a wooden picnic table in the middle. A gas barbecue and a couple of gas bottles took up one side. A guttering around the roof of the shelter led into a pipe connected to a water tank on stilts, and at the base of that was a concrete tub with one tap. A notice stuck to the tank said that the water was undrinkable without boiling and to use sparingly.
All in all a very pleasant spot, but obviously not on the main backpacker trail, as there was not a single tent to be seen. Keeping an eye on this should be an easy job. I wandered out onto the beach, where even more coral was now exposed, and looked both ways. I thought I must be in the middle of the long part of the oval island. Looking to my right, back towards my cabin, I could see the wharf where we had landed, with Jack’s boat and a few others bobbing alongside it. Jack had explained that there was an artificial deep water channel there that the original occupants of the island—that is, the European occupants—had made with the help of a few sticks of dynamite. In the other direction the beach stretched for a few hundred meters before disappearing around the corner.
The light had become softer and the blue of the sky had taken on a sort of transparent luminescence. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see that it was five o’clock. I’d already been here four hours. Basil could wait ’til the morning. Basil Brush. I grinned as an image of the unknown Basil, complete with bushy red hair and tail, flashed in my head. Perhaps all Australians have these sweet, old-fashioned, simple names. Bill and Ben the flowerpot men, Jack and the beanstalk, Tom, Tom the piper’s son . . . Christ, I’ll never remember who is who. I wonder when I’m going to meet Waltzing Matilda? That’s if there are any females here. Not that I’m likely to have anything in common with them.
Acknowledgments
This novel was my first attempt at writing fiction, and after years in the bottom drawer, has morphed into a very different book. Thank you to the editors who read drafts and gave me insightful and generous feedback: Lesley Marshall, Jenny Argante, Philippa Donovan and Rebecca Horsfall.
I devoured many newspaper and magazine articles, videos, and books about Hurricane Katrina and her human cost in my efforts to do justice to the people of New Orleans, and especially the medical staff and volunteers who put their own lives at risk to save others. I found particularly helpful and moving Leave No One Behind: Hurricane Katrina and the Rescue of Tulane Hospital by Bill Cary; Code Blue: A Katrina Physician’s Memoir by Richard E. Deichmann, M.D.; and 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, by Chris Rose. While I have been to New Orleans many times, pre and post Katrina, it is impossible to imagine what it must have been like, especially for the people who call New Orleans home. All errors and misinterpretations of the reality are my own.
Thank you to Brooke Warner, publisher of my debut novel, A Drop in the Ocean, to my sisters at She Writes Press, and to the many other writers I have come to know in this fascinating world of writing fiction, especially those generous authors who took time out from writing their next book to read mine, and pen a blurb. Your ongoing friendship, support and your books transform my solitary writing space into a team endeavor.
I look back with gratitude over my long career as a clinical psychologist, neuropsychologist and observer of neurosurgical operations. The experiences I survived during those years now provide much of the bedrock of my stories.
To my four children: thank you for teaching me about parenting when you were kids so that I could later write fiction about parent-kid relationships–and for continuing the lessons now you are adults! And of course, I thank John for putting up with my obsession with stories and books—my own and others’ —for so very long.
About the Author
Jenni Ogden and her husband live off-grid on spectacular Great Barrier Island, 100 kms off the coast of New Zealand, a perfect place to write and for grandchildren to spend their holidays. Winters are spent near a beach in Far North Tropical Queensland. Jenni’s debut novel, A Drop in the Ocean, won multiple awards and has sold over 80,000 copies. As a clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist, she is well-known for her books featuring her patients’ moving stories: Fractured Minds: A Case-Study Approach to Clinical Neuropsychology, and Trouble In Mind: Stories from a Neuropsychologist’s Casebook. Please visit her author website (www.jenniogden.com), sign up for her e-newsletter, and friend and follow her everywhere!