Ember Island

by Kimberley Freeman

  No traffic noise, no phones ringing to remind me how far behind I was on my work. No running into Cameron and his pregnant girlfriend. Just the sound of the wind in the trees and the ocean.

  I went back inside. The lounge furniture was dated, but comfortable. The fridge hummed and the microwave blinked the correct time. I could turn a mattress and put fresh sheets on a bed. George and Kay had even left half-empty bottles of shampoo and body wash in the bathroom.

  I decided to stay a few nights.

  •

  Night came softly and slowly, the blush of pink behind the palms slowly fading to blue-gray. I sat on the front steps of Starwater in the balmy evening warmth, watching the stars come out, reflecting on how little time I spent outside when I was home in Sydney. My apartment, which had cost a small fortune, had views all the way to the honey-colored spires of St. Mary’s Cathedral; but they were city views and the stars were dim or invisible against the bright lights of Sydney. In happier times Cameron and I would sip an evening gin and tonic on our penthouse deck. Since the split I’d spent most of my time inside the apartment, locked in my office writing, or trying to.

  The first mosquito bite sent me back into the house. I closed the screen and turned on the lamp in the lounge room. I approached the fireplace and ran my finger up the crack as far as I could reach. No more secret stashes of paper with Eleanor’s handwriting on them.

  I turned, surveyed the room. The original brickwork was hidden beneath plasterboard and wallpaper. Then I remembered the office had one exposed brick wall, so I switched on the lights in there and began a slow walk from one end of the room to the other, carefully scanning the bricks for any unmortared gaps. My fingers traced the patterns on the wall, which was cool and rough. I found nothing. Even if I found something, it would probably be more of Eleanor’s childhood diary. But hope had been renewed. I might yet find the papers that I dreamed of finding, the ones that could change everything for me.

  Eleanor’s writings had come to our family when my grandfather died ten years ago. A great big moldy smelling trunk filled with letters and lists and ramblings and stories and poems. No diaries, which made it odd that she kept one as a child. At the time, my sisters were both too busy to go through the papers and my mother didn’t have the patience with the tiny inky scrawl on them. I was twenty-five, recently separated, and between jobs at fruit shops and day-care centers—again, as my mother had pointed out—so going through the papers had been my task. I’d read them all. Everything. I’d grown to love Eleanor through this insight into her agile mind, her imaginative turns of phrase, her honesty and sometimes ribald humor.

  When I bought Starwater, before the renters moved in, I’d combed the house for more writings and found an old suitcase in the attic. Mostly poems and short stories. And I’d believed then that I must have exhausted all chances of finding anything else she wrote. But tonight I wondered what else might be stashed around the house in nooks and crannies, behind modern renovations, under carpets and floorboards. Eleanor had lived here until her death at the age of seventy-nine. What else might she have written?

  Frankly, I was desperate to find it all.

  One room after another, I went through the house. Starwater was a rambling T-shaped building: the central column made up of lounge room, dining room, and kitchen; the west wing of three bedrooms and a bathroom; and the east wing of rooms that had been converted to the whale-watching office. The whole house was surrounded by wooden verandahs, open to catch the breezes on hot summer days. I assessed cornices and skirting boards, lifted a loose tile in the bathroom, peeked under lino in the kitchen, knocked the bedroom walls listening for hollows. Then finally admitted I didn’t know what I was doing and was unlikely to find anything, and wound up back in the office. I sat at the largest desk. A desk calendar sat open at July the thirty-first. Perhaps that had been the last day George and Kay had been in the office, before hastily packing their things and fleeing their debts. It had also been the date my next book was due. A missed deadline, now ten weeks in the past. I experienced that familiar feeling in my guts of tightening and hardening, and had to breathe through it. “It’s writer’s block,” Mum had said, and Marla and my sisters and Stacy and even Cameron, when he’d come by with a trolley to take the last few things in my apartment that were his. But there was no way such a simplistic name could be applied to the problems I was facing getting the words down.

  I went back to the west wing and chose a bedroom. I think it was the guest room. I didn’t want to go to bed in George and Kay’s room and lie there all night wondering how many conversations they’d had in there about their failing business and mounting debts. I had plenty of anxieties of my own to keep me awake.

  THREE

  The Deep Quiet

  I woke to a deep quiet. It took me a few moments to remember where I was. The only sounds were the distant ocean and the chirp of sparrows in the trees. I rolled over and looked at my phone. The SOS signal was gone and I could see I had one tiny bar of reception. Fearful that my agent, Marla, would call me, I switched it off.

  It wasn’t the lack of traffic noise and joggers’ footfalls that made the morning quiet: it was that there was no way to download e-mail or take a phone call or post cheerful responses on my Twitter stream. I was unreachable. Nobody could expect me to respond to anything.

  I hadn’t felt this relaxed in years.

  And that’s when I had the idea: I wouldn’t go home. I wouldn’t even leave the island. I’d get Stacy to brave my mother’s house on the mainland and bring my suitcase over here for me. I had my laptop in my satchel. I could write. The world would go away. It would be me and the story and I would somehow get it done before the new deadline—just two months away—swung around.

  I was so excited, so certain, that I practically jumped out of bed and switched my phone back on. One bar of reception became two out on the verandah and I dialed Marla’s number. It was ringing before I realized it was six in the morning.

  “Hello?” she said, warily.

  “I’m so sorry, Marla. Did I wake you?”

  “Of course not. I was up at five for a jog.” Marla was a ridiculously fit woman of an unguessable age, who seemed to run on coffee and leafy greens. “Why are you calling so early? Do you have good news?”

  “I think so. I’m here at Starwater, my great-grandmother’s old house. And it’s perfect for a writing retreat. I know I can finish the book here.” My resolve wavered on the last sentence. I hoped I’d hid it well.

  “Hm, really?” Marla sounded skeptical.

  “Absolutely. There’s nothing at all here to distract me. It will be me and the laptop. Nothing else.” Nothing else. Nothing at all else. I gulped a breath.

  “Nina, sweetie, I don’t want you to push yourself too hard, but you know the publishers are breathing down my neck. There’s only so many excuses I can make for you. Are you sure this time? Wouldn’t you be better down here in Sydney where I could keep an eye on you? Where I could hold you to some weekly goals?”

  And risk seeing them again? No, no, a thousand times no. “I know this is the best decision I could make,” I said as forcefully as I could.

  She said something but it cut out and cut back in so I didn’t quite catch it.

  “Sorry, I have really bad reception here,” I said.

  Then the line dropped out altogether.

  “Damn,” I said, shaking the phone as if it could help. I grabbed my satchel from behind the door. I’d seen a pay phone down the hill.

  The morning was clear and cool, with dew on the grass and damp smells in the air: seaweed, cow dung, muddy fields, the vanilla sweetness of gardenias blooming in front gardens. The unsealed road led down the hill and through pastureland—cows behind wire fences on both sides—and past the old stockade building, which had been converted to shops: a convenience store that doubled as a post office, a craft shop that also sold some tourist wares, and a café. They all stood closed. Only three hundred people lived on Ember Islan
d, most spread out over farms, so trade was slow and sporadic. Six a.m. was far too early to be open.

  I found the phone box and pushed the coins into the slot. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used a pay phone. It seemed a practice that belonged to a more innocent time. At the other end the phone rang and Marla picked it up quickly.

  “What kind of a place has no mobile signal?” she asked, without saying hello.

  “An island in the middle of a bay where I know I’ll get some writing done.”

  “Hm. Well. I was just saying, I’ve been trying to get hold of you. I had an offer for you to go to Singapore, all expenses, business class. There’s some kind of international symposium on Middle Ages in film and literature. They want you to talk about the research you do.”

  My Widow Wayland books were a series of crime novels set in the 1320s, with a clever widow as the detective. The BBC had adapted two of them for television. I had sold nearly twelve million books. These things should have happened to somebody else, not me. I was incredibly grateful for my success: you’ve no idea how grateful. But one thing I hated more than anything was being asked to speak about my historical research. “No, I’m too busy.”

  “It’s after your deadline.”

  “No. I don’t want to.”

  “Fair enough,” she said in her usual efficient way. “I’ll turn them down nicely. Now, how about you send me what you’ve written so far?”

  My throat tensed. The first half of the book, which I had staggered through somehow, was awful. I kept telling myself I would fix it in the edit, but anybody who had come to love the Widow Wayland would surely be disappointed. I couldn’t let Marla read it until I’d fixed it somehow. I wound the phone cord around my fingers, clearing my throat. “As soon as I can access my e-mail I’ll send it to you,” I promised, knowing it was a promise I wouldn’t be fulfilling.

  Marla wasn’t stupid, but she didn’t push the issue. “I’ll expect something from you in a few weeks then,” she said in a brusque, businesslike tone. Then she softened. “Darling, is this about Cameron and Tegan? Is that why you don’t want to come back?”

  “No, no, that’s not it at all. I wish them well, you know that. I just want to put my head down and finish the book. I’m so far behind, I feel like I’ll . . .” I was going to say I feel like I’ll never catch up, but it wasn’t wise to say that to my agent. “I feel like I’ll get some good work done here.” I leaned my back on the glass and glanced around me, at the shops and the yellow grass and the pale morning sky.

  “All right then. You know yourself best, dear. Take care.”

  I hung up the phone and stood there a while. Cameron and Tegan. I said her name aloud, “Tegan.” Yes, that still hurt.

  Tegan, who lived two floors below us. Who had been at our dinner parties. Sweet-faced and young, tanned skin and immaculate blow-dry. Everything I wasn’t, with my mousy tangle of hair, my limbs freckled by a Queensland childhood, and my furrowed brow from years of being far too serious. Nonetheless, I’d liked Tegan. For all that her rich daddy had bought her apartment for her and she’d never worked a real job in her life, there had been a softness about her, a girlishness that was appealing.

  I’d like to be able to say that Cameron and I had had six good years together, but we didn’t. We had one good year, one hopeful year, then four fraught years as he tried to convince me to try IVF, adoption, surrogacy, anything. Anything that would make him a father. In my previous marriage, my inability to fall pregnant was suspected, diagnosed, then never mentioned again. I’d stopped having fantasies of chubby-armed babies, and replaced them with reassurances to myself that I would perhaps travel more, or have a couple of big dogs one day. So by the time I got together with Cameron, my emotional pain didn’t arise from the idea of ghost children we would never have. It arose from the constant feeling that my body was somehow not right, not good enough for him.

  I looked at myself in the reflection of the café window opposite. No curves. Small firm breasts, hips that looked great in skinny jeans. There was nothing womanly about me and I’d never minded before. But those years with Cameron had undermined me. My constant refusal to “investigate possibilities,” as he used to say, had eventually become too much. I ended the relationship, telling myself it was for his sake. So he could find somebody else. It was difficult. Cameron was a writer too, we shared a publisher, we would cross paths from time to time and chat brightly across the surface of dark, unspoken feelings. He seemed to find comfort in writing after our split, publishing two collections of poetry within a few months of each other. I was stymied, unable to focus, lived in fear and horrible stasis.

  And then one day, ten months after he’d moved out, I was coming back from the café in the foyer of my apartment building—this was my ritual, one of my only journeys out of the flat: coffee at ten—and the lift doors had opened and inside were Cameron and Tegan. Their hands intertwined. Her belly pushing softly against the silky material of her designer maternity blouse.

  “Nina,” Cameron had said, surprised. Awkward.

  Tegan smiled sweetly, compassion in her eyes. “Nina, I’ve been meaning to catch up with you.”

  In that second, I had to decide whether to put my skinny, barren body into the lift next to her juicy roundness. And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t ride the fifteen floors up in hot silence with them. So I turned and ran.

  I’d ended up on Ember Island just four days later.

  •

  I had to get serious about my work. I couldn’t keep trying to write through this thin fog of remorse and despair. I spent my time choosing a desk in the office. There were two: one with a view into the garden beds and tree branches, and another with a view over the island and out to sea. I sat at one, then the other, then decided the tree view would distract me less and plugged my laptop in there and made tea while it booted up. This time, this time I was going to write. I was going to do it.

  I sat down, opened the file, and looked at it. Black words, white page, just as all the other books had been. This was no different. It would be fine. I could ignore the empty space where my confidence should be. The cursor blinked. I put my hands on the keyboard and wrote, Eleanor examined the dead man’s fingernails.

  Eleanor was the Widow Wayland’s name, like my great-grandmother. She had found a body. The Widow Wayland was always finding bodies, often through luck or coincidence; it was a wonder nobody suspected her of murdering them. In this story, the dirt under the dead man’s fingernails was the key to discovering which farm he had been snooping on before being struck on the head with a blunt instrument, in a story about a fourteenth-century parish priest who was having a steamy affair with a local wife. This was classic Widow Wayland material: passions, murders, corrupt churchmen, and wily women. It would work, it had to work.

  I stopped. I wasn’t sure what to write next. I finished my tea. I stared out the window. I remembered I hadn’t messaged Stacy yet. My phone had one bar of reception. I quickly tapped out a message. It didn’t send. I tried again. Tried again. Waited five minutes. Tried again. Made more tea. Tried again. This time it sent. My phone also told me I had one voice-mail message: they must have called while the reception was down. I dialed into my voice mail to hear a soft female voice.

  “Hello, Nina, it’s Elizabeth Parrish here from the Sydney Morning Herald. Just following up something with you. Can you call me back, please?”

  That was the journalist who had come to interview Cameron last year. I remembered her name because she’d written a piece that was as unflattering to me as it was flattering to Cameron. She had actually asked him what a serious, multiaward-winning poet was doing in a relationship with a best-selling hack like me. Well, perhaps not in so many words, but her contempt was between the lines. Cameron had told me I was being too sensitive; his own ego had been polished to such a bright sheen that it blinded him.

  Did she want to interview me now? I deleted her message without responding. I didn’t like to talk to journalis
ts at the best of times.

  Now I was distracted. Where was I? But what was the point of writing? Stacy would get back to me and interrupt my flow. Instead I read through parts of what I’d already written and grew despondent. Maybe I had been angry with Elizabeth Parrish because she revealed the truth: I wasn’t an artist. I’d always known that.

  I couldn’t sit here and feel this way. I needed bread and milk and something for lunch, so I locked the house and walked down the hill to the shops.

  The usual noise in my head followed me. You can’t do it. You should pay back the advance and pull out. You can’t do it, so why do you keep pretending you can? Deep breath, steely resolve. Smile for the woman behind the counter, grab a basket and buy eggs and bread and cheese and a tomato and whatever else could be made into easy meals.

  “Hello, love,” the woman said, wiping work-gnarled hands on her blue apron. She looked at my purchases, piled up on the counter. “You over from the mainland for a few days?”

  “Yes, actually. I own Starwater House. I think I’ll be here for a couple of months.” I took a deep breath. “I’m Nina Jones.”

  “Nice to meet you, Nina,” she said, shaking my hand firmly. “Donna Franks.”

  Thank God. Thank God. She didn’t know my name; she wasn’t going to ask about my books, about when the next one was due to be published. She ran my purchases through and packed them into bags for me. “We’re really just a convenience store for last-minute things,” she said. “Most people do their weekly shop over on the mainland. I don’t have much beyond the basics, I’m afraid.”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember that.” But I was determined not to set foot off this island until the book was done. If that meant living on toasted cheese sandwiches and spaghetti omelettes, that is what I would do.