Ember Island

by Kimberley Freeman

  At home, I cleared the cupboards of George and Kay’s things and packed away my groceries. They’d left their crockery and cutlery, and I tidied it all up, made the forks face the same way. Then it was close to lunchtime, so there wasn’t much point to get started writing, so I made a sandwich and sat out on the step watching the palms sway in the wind.

  By now I knew I was procrastinating and my stomach knotted up. With determination I placed my empty plate in the sink and returned to the desk. But Stacy had finally written back with some questions, so I engaged in an hour of to-and-fro text messaging with her, struggling against the poor reception.

  Finally I looked at my work again. Sighed. Shut the laptop. Friday was a bad day to start a new regime of good work habits. Stacy would arrive tomorrow morning and I really should prepare the house for her stay, so it could wait until Monday. On Monday things would be different. Tension slid off my shoulders. I could breathe again.

  For now, it was more important to settle in. George and Kay had kept a tidy house, so there was no need for me to scrub out cupboards or knock down spiderwebs, so I settled for rearranging furniture. I was in the process of turning my desk away from the window when there was a knock at the door.

  Curious, I went to answer it. Joe stood there, with a skinny dark-eyed boy.

  “Joe?” I said. “Is it that late in the day already?” Had I really spent a whole day procrastinating and rearranging furniture? Was time really that easy to lose?

  “Sorry, I can come back another time if it’s not convenient. I’ve got my ladder here, though. And my dad’s chainsaw.” He indicated the equipment he’d left lying across the dirt driveway.

  “No, no. It’s convenient.” I smiled at the boy. “You must be Julian. I’m Nina.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said.

  “Would you like some afternoon tea? I have milk and biscuits.”

  Julian glanced at his father for permission and Joe nodded.

  “Yes, please, Nina,” he said.

  “Great manners,” I said to Joe.

  “He’s a good kid,” Joe replied.

  “Why don’t you sit out here on the verandah and wait, and I’ll fetch you something to eat,” I said to Julian. “That way you can watch your dad while he works.”

  The boy sat down on the stairs and I went inside to pour him a glass of milk and grab a packet of biscuits. He looked nothing like his father, who was fair-haired and blue-eyed. Even though I’d worked with children, I was not naturally good with them. I was awkward, sure they could tell I was boring or couldn’t communicate with them properly. I gave him his afternoon tea and went inside, leaving both of them to it.

  I went back to moving furniture, but somehow didn’t have the heart for it anymore, so I sat on the sofa and listened to Joe walk around on my roof. I heard the chainsaw start up and logs of sawed-off Moreton Bay fig branch hitting the ground one after another. After about an hour, he was at the door again.

  “Knock, knock,” he called.

  I went out to greet him. I was struck by the smell of him. Soap and washing detergent and light perspiration: a warm, spicy, intoxicating male smell. I took a minute to gather myself. “What’s the damage up there?” I managed.

  “The tarp should keep you dry unless there’s a massive deluge . . . which, unfortunately, is always possible at this time of year. But I think it’s beyond my capacity to fix the damage to the chimney. You should call somebody on the mainland.”

  “Do you know anyone?”

  He nodded slightly. “You want me to take care of it? Find a roofer for you? I can do that.”

  His willingness to help, his lack of self-interest, struck me strongly. “I would be so grateful.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “Look, do you want a cup of tea?”

  “Coffee?”

  “I don’t have any. Sorry.”

  “I thought all writers drank coffee. And scotch.” He smiled. He had a lovely smile, earthy and knowing, and I felt an embarrassing stirring of desire. Luckily, I’m not a blusher.

  “I never drink either of those things,” I laughed. “I will have to get some coffee.”

  “Tea will be fine. Julian’s outside climbing the tree. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Of course. Is it safe?”

  “Yes, the lower branches are all fine. As long as we don’t get another storm like the last one, it will still be standing there when we’re all dead and gone. And Julian’s like a monkey. He climbs everything.”

  He followed me into the kitchen, and I switched on the kettle. “So, Julian’s mother . . .” I started.

  “You want the story?”

  “I don’t mean to be nosy.”

  “No, it’s fine. I have no idea where she is. She skipped out before he turned two. Found another man, went off backpacking around the world. Motherhood wasn’t for her.”

  “That must have been very sad.”

  “I was just focused on Julian. He cried every night for months . . .” He trailed off and I realized that his eyes were glazed, so I didn’t push him further. He collected himself. “But that was six years ago and we’re really happy now, and that’s all that counts. She contacts me from time to time, but has never asked about seeing us again. And that suits me fine.”

  I concentrated on making tea, wondering if I’d overstepped politeness by asking him about her, but curious nonetheless. I was intrigued by him. Being in his presence set off all of those deep, primal stirrings I’d been repressing since my split from Cameron. “I wonder why motherhood was not for her. I mean, if she chose to have a child and—”

  “She didn’t choose. I chose for her. Julian wasn’t planned and . . . I talked her into keeping the baby.” He went quiet.

  “Well,” I said, not quite sure what to say.

  “I love kids. I would have liked more. I was an only child and I didn’t want Julian to be as well. But then she was gone.”

  I would have liked more. In a way, I was glad he’d said it. Because it reminded me that I had no place trying to form a relationship with Joe, as kind and attractive as he was. I wouldn’t put myself through that again.

  “This must a lovely place to raise a child,” I said breezily.

  “It is. My parents live here on the island. They have a farm down at the south point. We live in a converted shed on the farm and we’re happy, and I’m nearly finished with my PhD and then things might be different. We won’t be struggling so much for money.”

  I handed him his tea and he leaned his back against the kitchen bench and sipped it carefully. I watched him a few moments, considering the worry on his brow, on his shoulders. And then I said, “I have a proposition for you. While I’m here, the next two months, I want you to work for me a few days a week.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Running errands. Managing the roof and chimney repairs. Getting my shopping from the mainland. I am so far over deadline . . . I can’t set foot off this island now.” The real world would come rushing back in and crush me. “I’ll pay you really well.”

  He put his mug down and spread his hands. “I accept. I accept, so so gratefully.”

  Julian slammed the screen door behind him then and called out, “Daddy?”

  “In here, champ.”

  The child entered shyly. He held out his hand. In it was a gecko. I tried not to recoil.

  “He’s a beauty,” Joe said, kneeling to look at the lizard. Its little heart beat visibly beneath its velvet skin. “But you’d better put him back. He probably wants to be near his dad.”

  Julian ran off, the screen door slammed again. Joe said, “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. It slams behind me too.”

  “Okay, well, I’m going to get started in the lounge room pulling off the plasterboard on the chimney wall. That’ll save you some time and money when I get the roofer for you. Can I move the furniture out of the way?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  He took his mug of tea and left me i
n the kitchen, watching his well-shaped back. Then I told myself that he wasn’t for me, and I shut down the machinery in my imagination that was gearing up to make fantasies about him and me together. He wasn’t for me; I wasn’t for him.

  •

  Back home in Sydney, I always loved it when evening came. It meant the workday could expect nothing more of me, and I could stop procrastinating or worrying about writing and sit in front of the television for a few hours and forget I had problems. But there was no television here, and after my dinner of instant noodles I sat at the dining table for a while staring into space. What now? I had brought nothing to read except my own painfully wrought manuscript, I had no way to access the Internet and spend a few hours looking up reader reviews of my books and being outraged if they didn’t like them, and I’d taken all the games off my phone when I found I spent more hours playing them than I did working on my novel. I felt empty and restless.

  Outside, a rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. I went out onto the verandah to lean on the railing and watch the sky. Great gray thunderheads rolled in, bringing the smell of ozone and fat cold rain, breaking the humid grip of the day’s heat. But I had a hole in my roof, so even with the tarpaulin, it was probably going to rain in my house as well.

  There was nothing I could do. Water had already been in the lounge room and left behind its sour shadow, so I told myself to let go of the worry and get down to the end of the house furthest from it so I wasn’t tempted to check on it all night. I had a cool shower and went to bed early to listen to the storm. It was as I was folding my jeans over the brass rail at the end of the bed that I felt something stiff in the back pocket. Eleanor’s childhood diary. I pulled out the thin sheaf of papers and climbed between the soft cotton sheets, puffed up a pile of pillows behind me, and started to read.

  FOUR

  Stories in the Walls

  September 28, 1891

  Papa intends to hire me a governess. Strictly against my wishes, I might add. I do not need a governess. I was hopeful when Warder Randolph’s wife took sick with diphtheria—and had to be moved off the island lest she infect us all—that she might decide not to come back and I could teach myself. I wouldn’t have wished her dead, you understand. I simply wished her to realise that she was happier over at Victoria Point with her mother, but Papa said she was recovering well and he expected her back soon.

  Then today there was an uproar. The six Randolph children, as you know, diary, have ever been my loathed classmates. Without their very sensible, but quite uninteresting, mother to frown upon them sternly, the eldest two—Anna and Bertie—have been misbehaving most infamously.

  There is one rule on this island that I have been told many times I must obey above all things: children are not allowed near the stockade. Certainly I have been curious in the years I have lived here, especially in the early days when the prisoners were punished with the cat-o’-nine-tails and would make a horrific shouting fuss. But Papa banned that punishment and no man cries out for his Maker when on shot drill: that is a boring and difficult punishment, not one that requires the surgeon to attend.

  So staying away from the stockade has been easy for me. Not so Anna and Bertie Randolph. Rather than practise forming their cursive letters as I had chosen to do—because it was two o’clock and that time of day is always reserved for handwriting—they heard the arrival of new prisoners on the Oracle, and hid behind the blacksmith’s to watch through the window as the new prisoners were riveted into leg irons.

  Perhaps they might have been safe and fine. Perhaps their only crime might have been that they laughed at the lot of those poor souls who have been confined to Ember Island. Papa is always careful to say that the prisoners are here to be reformed, to be helped to see their mistakes, not to be judged by us because the Lord is the only Judge.

  But one prisoner, a hulking man as big as a side of beef, with rotted teeth and fists like hams (I confess I didn’t see him, but the tale is much more colourful with the beef and the ham added), heard the children giggling and it enraged him. He had already been brought low, I imagine, by his arrest, his trial, his sentence, his transportation. To hear children laughing at him was more than he could endure. He went wild. According to Chief Warder Donaghy, whom I overheard reporting it to Papa afterwards, he roared and smashed out with his manacled fists, catching the blacksmith on the chin and sending him crashing to the floor. Then he shuffled to the window of the blacksmith’s shed, dragging the next prisoner on the chain with him, and reached through the window to pull Bertie Randolph up by his scruff. Anna had, by this stage, decided the game was no longer any fun and scarpered. Bertie, legs swimming in the air, screamed for his mama and flooded his pants; the turnkeys in the shed all pounced on the prisoner and it took six of them to take him down, none of them daring to fire a shot lest it accidentally hit Bertie.

  After which, Warder Randolph came to Papa and demanded to be sent away from Ember Island because it was too dangerous for his children. Papa pointed out (I overheard him . . . I’ve found that if I sit behind the curtain in the windowsill of the dining room and press my ear against the knothole between that room and the next, I overhear a lot), that if his children had obeyed the first rule, none of this would have happened, and that two of his men were injured in the fray and he held Anna and Bertie solely responsible.

  An argument ensued, during which Warder Randolph used the most hideous names for my father, slurring his character, his judgement, and his ability to be satisfactory to women (oh, Papa would be appalled if he knew I had heard, and even more so if he knew I understood! Perhaps he ought not have let me read Chaucer). But Papa did not lose his temper; he was as cool as an autumn breeze. Papa is not the kind of man to rage and shout. He is good and calm in all things. He endured Warder Randolph’s tirade, then spoke clearly and slowly.

  “You and your children would evidently be happier on the mainland with your wife. I will sign any paper necessary to see you transferred at the earliest opportunity. Good day.”

  Where does this leave me? The only child on the island, for the first time since we arrived here. Bliss, I thought. I have always held Mrs. Randolph to be a poor teacher. Her knowledge of the medieval period is sketchy and she once spelled “definitely” with an “a,” so it is clear she has no idea about Latin roots: there is no “a” in finis.

  I told Papa that I would prefer to teach myself. I have sufficient books and a good brain. Papa countered with a threat: either I accept the governess or he will engage the chaplain to take my lessons. It is a clever threat and I admire him for it as much as I am constrained by it. Compared to the chaplain, Mrs. Randolph was a genius.

  Papa insists this governess will have to speak French and read either Latin or Greek—both, for preference—have a good brain for figures and have the mythical ability to help teach me to cross-stitch neatly. My hope is that any woman who is accomplished enough to do all those things would not be willing to come to a high-security prison island surrounded by mangrove swamp. My fear is that Papa will then hire whomever is willing, and I will be tied to them for hours every day.

  October 2, 1891

  It is confirmed. I have a new governess and she will be here within a week. Papa has been across to the mainland to meet her and he says that she can do all the things we need her to do and that I will like her, that she has recently arrived from overseas and her name is Chantelle Lejeune. Oh, and that she is young, perhaps only twenty years. I made a cross face and told him again I do not need a governess, but part of me is excited. A young, clever woman: nothing like Mrs. Randolph or the chaplain. I am telling myself to be cautious, though. Why would any well-educated French woman come here and stay? We are all the way at the bottom of the world and then a little too much further. (That is what the colonial secretary’s wife said on the day she visited back in April. “How do you survive,” she had asked Papa, “all the way at the bottom of the world and then a little too much further?”)

  But I have never
known any different. I was born across on the mainland and came here when I was very small. Papa had once lived in England, but it seems a distant and cold place to me. And as for Ember Island being “a little too much further”—well, it isn’t much further. It is less than an hour on the steamer.

  I do hope she is good company.

  October 3, 1891

  I had the awful dream again last night. I hate it because it leaves me cold and empty inside. Mother is sick in it, just as she was before she died. So sick I cannot recognise her and I am frightened to hold her hand, even though she begs me to hold it, with tears in her eyes. But then when I give her my hand, she crushes it tighter and tighter; her own fingers are bones and her skin is sinking until her cheeks are sharp hollows.

  I woke up with my heart thundering, gathered up Pangur Ban, and ran straight to Papa’s bed. At first I thought he hadn’t noticed I was there, but then he rolled over and put his big warm arm over me and kissed the top of my head and said, “What is it, Nell?”

  “Bad dream,” I said.

  “The same one?”

  I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me in the dark. “Yes,” I said.

  He stroked my arm with his thumb and I breathed in the warm scent of him.

  “Papa,” I asked, “did Mama love me?”

  “All mothers love their children. Your mother treasured you dearly.”

  “Why do I keep dreaming that awful dream?”

  “I cannot answer, child. Dreams are only nonsense, they are not to be feared, and they do not tell us any hidden truths.”

  “Did you love Mama?”

  He breathed in sharply. I was afraid I’d hurt him. “Yes, I loved her very much. We were happy, in our time. But all times pass.”

  I burrowed my head into his armpit and closed my eyes. He stroked my hair until I fell asleep. In the morning he was up and dressed and gone to work before I woke.