I took the map she offered, and walked to Glimmer-by-Dark through the dunes. The spores danced above me in a riot of cerise hues, interconnected by an ephemeral webbing, filtering the sun so that everything seemed bathed in rarefied light. In the distance, waves crashed rhythmically in a gentle tattoo.
Avoiding the tourist path, I laboured like an initiate in an alien land. At the top of the largest dune, a gasp escaped me. Immense rose-tainted sandcastles scattered the length of Bara Beach, rising like palaces—the work of the mysterious spores, bringing recognisable form to random matter. Although wind and water had blunted turrets and collapsed rampart walls, somehow they survived the tidal ebb, soldiers in a perennial last stand. Rocky headlands buttressed them, cloaked in brilliant splashes of algae. The vibrancy of the colours bruised my eyes, forcing me to turn away and seek the rocky tourist path toward Glimmer-by-Dark.
The shack was sparse and austere, an unconsciously appropriate choice. I dozed in a chair on the deck, exhausted by the walk and the decision that brought me to Carmine.
‘It’s the spores, you understand. They’re tiring at first.’ The soft, cultured voice stung me out of my lethargy like gunshot. A man, younger than me, bare-chested, slightly built and smiling. Handsome.
‘Mills-Thomas. Charlie, actually. Semi-retired journalist.’ He thrust out a hand.
Reluctantly I took it. Younger men ignored me now. I wasn’t sure how to act.
‘Tinashi.’
‘Pretty. Like its owner.’
The easy flattery confused me. I closed my eyes hoping that the man would vanish as he’d appeared.
‘We’re having a meal at my place tonight. Glimmer beach folk only. Even Katrin. Come along before dark, second beach house before the breakwater. Meet the crowd.’ He squeezed my shoulder lightly. A friendly gesture.
I shuddered at it, fighting my instinct to draw away from his touch. Instead I drew a tight breath. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re lucky. It’s a glitter-rose dusk tonight,’ he said with a mildly quizzical look, and left.
I stayed in the chair, then, alert for other intruders, but no one came near me. In the distance I saw a figure on the beach, well past the line of tumbled shacks, almost to the crook of the next rocky headland. Tall, I guessed. Long, sweeping hair like wings. Engaged in a frenzied pacing.
Eventually I tired of my observations and went inside to unpack my bag. The cupboards remained sadly empty afterwards. Traversing the tiny rooms I noticed a bowl of island fruits on the table, and in the fridge a bottle of pink champagne, somehow spirited there before my arrival. Biting into a sweet, velvety pai, I returned to the deck and resumed my vigil over the beach. But the strange figure had gone and eventually I dozed again.
The growing shadows of dusk disturbed my dreams, turning them gloomy. I awoke with a start, mouth dry, and staggered to the kitchenette. The water still tasted crystal clear, an alluring island feature from bygone days. Dragging my fingers roughly through my hair, and nursing several pieces of fruit in the crook of my arm, I hurried from my shack towards the breakwater.
Party lights and laughter guided me to the young man’s house.
‘Tinashi. Join us,’ Charlie took the fruit, touching my arm again, like an old friend. He wore a printed floral shirt soaked with the scent of jasmine.
I pasted blandness to my face to disguise my anger at being forced into such artificialities.
‘Meet the crew. Geronimo, deep-sea fisherman moonlighting with the local whale-song eco-exploiters; Lauren and Quentin Carson, on honeymoon for a year; Armagh and his daughter Jaella—Armagh teaches divinity at the school, and Jaella works at the store; and Professor Arthur Wang, our resident Professor of Marine Biology, on sabbatical.’
I flickered a tense smile at them.
Apart from the enormous Geronimo, whose mohawk glistened like bunched, wet seaweed, they seemed unremarkable. Lauren and Quentin, smoothly blonde and elegant, held hands. Teenage-thin Jaella fidgeted, bored by the whole thing and embarrassed by her father, Armagh, whose eyes were half closed in what I took for prayer or meditation.
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me, Charlie?’
I stared past the curious faces to the shadows at the end of the room. A tall, lean figure stepped from them, thick hair like wings hanging to her hips.
‘Katrin.’ She introduced herself with a strange grin, hovering like threat. ‘Always the last. They think I’m a witch,’ she said.
In the light she seemed older, but quite beautiful, brimming with a vitality, and restlessness. Her eyes were black—no—dark violet. Spore eyes?
Charlie giggled. Nervous and high, like a young girl. ‘Katrin likes to joke.’
I studied her face, distracted momentarily from my despondency and the difficulty of new people.
Katrin posed, one way and then the other, like a photographer’s model, face tilted, chin high and confident. ‘Seen enough?’ she asked me.
I felt warmth in my cheeks.
‘Ignore her. She’ll soon stop.’ Arthur Wang sidled up next to me, barely reaching my shoulder.
Before I could reply the others were moving, scooping up glasses, turning to the beach, laughing off the moment with chatter. Charlie slipped a flute of pink champagne into my hand.
‘Tradition,’ he said. ‘Pink at glitter-rose.’
I sipped it quickly, avoiding his hopeful, eager smile and jasmine-scented warmth, and stepped out onto the patio between Geronimo and Arthur Wang.
Their murmur washed over me as we waited.
With the last of the sunset The Bara breeze dropped to a breath, and a strange phosphorescence claimed the sand. Colourless at first and rapidly changing to a carpet of tiny, shining, rose-coloured grains. Something about them seemed to compel me to hasten to the beach and run them through my fingers and toes.
I must have stirred, because Geronimo and Arthur Wang each laid a hand on my arm.
‘The spores are active,’ Arthur Wang explained. ‘Walking the beach during glitter-rose can be—’ he trailed off.
Geronimo took it up, his voice a quiet boom. ‘What the Prof is saying, Tinashi, is—if you walk on the beach at glitter-rose, you might as well feed your Tyline to the fish. You don’t know what the spores will do, how they will change you. Everyone is different. The locals, I mean. Some things you can see, like the eyes and the water retention in the forehead. Others it’s only on the inside. They’re the ones to watch. You never know about them. By heaven, it’s tempting though.’ His voice brimmed with emotion in that last sentence, like a man at the limit of his endurance.
I glanced among them then, and saw his feeling mirrored in the others’ faces. Longing. And fear.
I gulped my pink champagne deeply and felt the tingle waken dead places in me.
That’s when I noticed Katrin watching me, her strange smile hovering. ‘Come walk with me on the beach, Tinashi,’ she teased.
I opened my mouth to speak and found my voice had deserted me.
Charlie grasped Katrin’s shoulder and shook her. ‘Leave her alone,’ he said.
Katrin stroked his face, almost lovingly, and laughed. A sharp, derisive sound. ‘Poor broken Charlie’s got writer’s block. Can’t get the words out any more. Can’t save the world. Or can he?’
Swallowing the dregs from her flute, she danced down the steps toward the radiant beach.
Charlie’s face whitened in fury.
Next to me Arthur Wang shook his head sadly. ‘She loves the danger.’
‘No,’ Armagh burst out. ‘She does it to taunt me. The devil has her.’
He seemed distraught, as if he might follow her, but Lauren Carson placed a soothing hand on his arm. ‘It’s to taunt all of us.’
Glitter-rose dusk lasted another hour, before, like city lights doused by timers, the carpet dimmed.
Arthur Wang walked me to my shack. ‘We think the spores reproduce on certain tides. The colour is a bit like coral spawning. A bloom of reproduction. It only seems to happen
on the beach at dusk. Sometimes at dawn as well. Once the colour fades it’s quite safe.’
‘So the spores are not just those you can see in the sky?’
He shook his head in warning. ‘They’re in everything. Don’t forget your Tyline, Tinashi, unless, of course … you want to.’
‘Like Katrin?’ I asked.
‘Like Katrin,’ he said, and bowed politely into the dark.
The morning renounced the previous, strange dusk—a sharp, crisp salt-air day, sun shining through the barely visible gauze of spores. I walked to the shop wondering if perhaps I had imagined them all.
Then I met Lauren Carson, her sleek blonde hair tucked neatly under a broad brimmed straw hat, sunglasses wide and dark. She carried a basket of bread and pai fruit.
‘Come for a cup of tea,’ she begged, moving too close to me. ‘Quentin’s gone fishing with Geronimo. I get so lonely. We’re the second shack past the professor’s away from the breakwater, toward the headland. Come soon. I’ll be waiting.’
I purchased some food from Jaella who, thankfully, showed no interest in conversation. As she packed my provisions, her gaze strayed back to the coastline as if she was watching for something.
I nodded thanks and returned to my shack where I lay on my bed and considered sleeping again. Only lingering shreds of civility dragged me to Lauren Carson’s for tea.
‘Black.’ It was a statement.
‘Thanks. How did you know?’
We sat inside. She wore her sunglasses like a reluctant movie star, while she poured from a cottage-shaped teapot. ‘It’s my talent. Sensing things about people. Of course I don’t get much practice here. Now I know most of our neighbours.’
I feigned interest.
‘Take Geronimo. He grows tropical orchids. Don’t let his mohawk distract you. And the professor, he likes to gut things.’
She chatted on about the residents of Glimmer-by-Dark in the sort of tedious detail that shrivelled my soul—Jaella’s rebelliousness, Wang’s insomnia, Geronimo’s fondness for chemical abuse, Armagh’s obsession with saving Katrin’s soul.
I escaped, eventually, and spent the rest of the day in my shack, sleeping and brooding.
At sunset, as The Bara gusted its last for the day, I took a plate of cheese and bread and the last pai and sat on the patio to watch. In the distance I recognised Jaella’s solitary, young form, curled, waiting above the waterline. Out to sea a small boat cut steadily toward her.
Geronimo and Quentin returning from a day out?
As the boat crested the shore-breaking waves, Quentin Carson leapt from the boat and waded in. Jaella ran to his waiting arms.
Geronimo turned the boat towards the breakwater for mooring and left them on the beach passionately entwined.
Did Lauren know about them, I wondered? The self-professed intuit. Surely she could see them from her patio?
Unwillingly, I felt myself becoming seduced into their paltry intrigues.
‘She should kill him, you know.’ A voice serrated by madness.
I hid my fright. ‘Hello, Katrin,’ I said smoothly.
She stood at the foot of my patio steps, a wine bottle and a single glass in her hand. After a moment she poured red wine into the glass and handed it to me. As I sipped, she swigged deeply from the bottle.
‘She meets him every day. They make love in the dunes below his shack. Her father has no idea. He’s too busy peeping at me through my window at night. I can hear him praying.’
Jaella’s father? Armagh, I reminded myself.
‘And Lauren?’ I listened in dismay as the words tumbled from my mouth—suggesting an involvement I really did not seek.
Katrin swigged again, dashing drops from her mouth in anger. ‘She should kill him.’
I thought of Lauren Carson. Sweet, garrulous, gentle Lauren. The idea was preposterous.
I took an assertive stance. ‘When did you stop taking Tyline, Katrin?’
She leaned in toward me and I felt the weight of her mood. As darkness folded around us, The Bara spluttered one last warm gasp and died. My clothes stuck to my body and I clenched the arm of the chair, trying not to tremble. This was dangerous ground but I felt compelled to let this woman know she could not bully me.
‘Is that what Charlie told you?’ she asked.
I shrugged.
She snatched the glass from my hand, snapping the stem, spilling wine on my shirt. Then she vaulted down my steps like a gymnast, the contents of the fallen bottle draining onto the sand. It was gone in seconds.
So was Katrin.
I took a shuddery breath and levered myself out my chair. Once inside I locked the door and fell onto my bed and into a fitful sleep.
I avoided the residents of Glimmer-by-Dark over the next few weeks, venturing out only to visit the shop for provisions. Jaella’s preoccupations meant our conversation remained indifferent. Thankfully I didn’t see Lauren again so was spared the tedium of her menial observations, and the guilt of my knowledge about her husband’s affair.
But my collusion, even though accidental, nagged at my conscience. By coming to Carmine Island, I had sought to withdraw into a cradle of my own gloom, and instead found myself distracted by unwelcome connections with near strangers.
Like a celluloid soap opera framed by the struts of my beach house balcony, I watched Jaella and Quentin’s infidelity unfold each afternoon; I witnessed Katrin’s wild beach pacing; closed my ears to Katrin and Charlie’s bitter, unintelligible arguments behind my shack in the dunes.
One night, almost a month after my arrival, a loud knocking tore me from my dreams in the early hours of the morning.
I switched on the coloured patio lights and peered through the window. Arthur Wang stood there.
‘Tinashi. You must come. Charlie’s been …’
My heart constricted. Charlie’s what?
I flung the door open. The professor was crying and shivering, dressed only in silk shorts. ‘She killed him?’
Katrin!
‘Where is she? Where’s Charlie?’
‘He’s on the beach. I think she’s hiding there as well.’
‘The police?’
‘Geronimo’s gone to get them. But you have to help me. There’s going to be a glitter-rose dawn. We have to get his body off the beach.’
‘Does it matter now?’ my voice sounded cold, uncaring. But it was fear. I didn’t want to go near the beach.
‘The spores will alter him. His family won’t recognise what’s left …’
The small man began to cry again.
I thought of Charlie handing me pink champagne. His handsome, smiling face. His jasmine-warmth. I shook Wang’s shoulder. ‘Quickly then.’
Arthur Wang had a torch.
The body was near the spot where Jaella waited for Quentin Carson. Where the pair made love.
Scenes ran through my mind as the sky lightened. Katrin taunting Charlie about his writer’s block. A tussle. His neck twisted at an angle. Broken.
Katrin, crazy, hiding, watching us. Now.
We strained, dragging Charlie’s body toward the rock breakwater that ran back into the dunes.
All the while another suspicion played at the back of my mind, refusing to form in the presence of death and my coursing adrenaline.
Over my laboured breathing a thrum started, like a softly plucked string.
‘Can you hear that?’
The professor had stopped crying. His head cocked, panting. ‘Glitter-rose.’
‘We’ll have to leave him,’ I said. Already I could see a faint glow on the sand.
‘No.’
The glow brightened. I dropped Charlie’s arm and turned to run the last distance to the rocks.
Geronimo blocked my way.
‘Thank goodness. Where are the police?’
Geronimo stood squarely, his huge hands outstretched to stop me. Quentin Carson appeared beside him. And Jaella.
I stared at Geronimo’s fingers and my lingering suspicion coale
sced.
Katrin couldn’t have broken Charlie’s neck. She wasn’t strong enough.
‘What about the drag marks?’ Quentin spoke.
‘Tide will wash them,’ shrugged Geronimo. ‘It will look like she pushed him from the rocks and then did herself in.’
She? Me.
Quentin sensed my confusion. ‘We found out that Charlie was writing an article about us, an exposé, and we had to stop him. Jaella checked your background. You’re unstable. Complete breakdown. Out of long-term care. No one will ask too many questions about your motive.’
His explanation left me more bewildered. And panicky. My past distorted to suit their means …
Around us the sand began to change colour.
‘What about glitter-rose?’ I croaked.
The four of them laughed. Geronimo grabbed my arms and dragged me onto the rocks. Quentin forced a gun into my mouth.
My heart beat in painful, furious beats. In seconds I would be dead.
‘But Quentin, you promised.’ Arthur Wang interrupted. ‘You said I could cut him.’
‘There isn’t time,’ said Quentin irritably. ‘And it might cause questions.’
‘But you promised. My conditions were clear. I harvest the spores and package them safely. I get to cut the body.’ He pushed his way nearer to continue his protest.
Those precious distracting seconds bought me my life. A spotlight silhouetted us. Six figures caught in a bizarre play.
‘We’ve got you, Quentin.’
Katrin.
I squinted into the light. I thought I could see Lauren Carson standing next to her. And two others in uniform.
The police took them away. Leaving Katrin and Lauren and I with Charlie’s body. They said they would be back. Would we make sure Charlie wasn’t touched?
I knelt down some distance from the body and let grains of glitter-rose spores trickle through my fingers, mingling with Charlie’s blood. They fashioned themselves into shapes like teardrops.
Lauren and Katrin stood close together, arms around each other.
‘Charlie was writing an exposé. It was going to be his ticket back to his world,’ said Katrin.
I stared at her blankly.
She smiled, strange, but not crazy. Hair like wings.
Forever Shores Page 9