To the Sea

  ‘Join us, Tony,’ said Con. ‘You can’t go now. The storm’s almost here. You’re going to have to wait it out.’

  Con was right. Tony really didn’t want to be on the coast road in the next couple of hours. The causeways would probably be closed anyway. At the speed at which the storm was coming towards them, it wasn’t going to last long. It was heading north and there wasn’t much at Garnet Point to break its momentum. A loud clap of thunder exploded overhead. Some of the kids squealed and Ben let out a long howl from somewhere deep in the house.

  ‘That was close,’ said Sadie. ‘Con’s right. You’re not leaving now. Come and join us.’

  Tony followed them into the dining room. Matt and Carl were at the front windows looking at the storm. It was almost on them and still the wind hadn’t arrived. It was black outside now. A blue–white flash lit up the sky and the dining room. One second later, the breathless air inside the house vibrated to a shattering thunderclap. Cecile’s two girls ran to John for protective hugs. A couple of the other kids sidled up close to Carl.

  Only seconds later the room and sky again lit up with a blinding flash and another bang exploded all around them. The thunder smothered the house. With this thunderclap came the rain. Huge raindrops spattered onto the verandah and within moments had become a downpour. It was hard to talk above the heavy din of the rain on the verandah roofs.

  Tony stood looking into the thick blackness of the early night. He saw the slow white light of the lighthouse on Slopen Island pierce the darkness. It alone grounded him in a time and place he recognised.

  He could hear the others around him but Tony continued looking out across Driving Sound, invisible in the dark, and down the channel when a white hot spike of lightning darted across the blackness. The sheet lightning was passing overhead and here now was the serious violent heart of the storm. The next thunder burst was deafening. It rattled in Tony’s ears and crackled over his hot skin. He suddenly felt Ben’s warm weight against his leg. Everyone had left the table and was standing at windows watching the storm.

  At the next clap of thunder the lights went out. Some of the kids screamed and at least one of them started to cry. Sadie and Edie were ready with candles and the room was soon backlit by mellow candlelight. The rain was falling in sheets, closing them all into Rosetta. Solid walls of water hung from the verandah roofs.

  For twenty minutes no one could talk over the exploding thunder and heavy rain. Everyone was sheltering. One crash of thunder louder and closer than the others rumbled the house and jangled everyone’s nerves. It took all Tony’s will to remind himself that such intense light and noise was harmless. They were all trapped within the cocoon of noise and light that threatened to break them apart at any moment. The air pressure was dropping. The air was thinning and cooling. The world was shifting. Slowly, the sharp edge of light and noise slipped.

  Finally, half an hour after its first blinding flash, the lightning faded to yellow–pink flickers across the sky in the distance and the thunder rumbled harmlessly. The storm was moving on. The kids were cocky now and dancing around the room, loudly telling everyone how not scared they had been.

  People began opening doors and the cool air brought by the rain slowly seeped into the house. There was still no wind but the rain was torrential and the temperature was free falling. Tony wandered out onto the verandah and put his hand out into the rain. It was cold. The air was freshly washed and the breeze, chilled by the rain, danced across his clammy skin. The heavy air pressure was still falling. The wind was coming.

  Some of the others followed Tony out onto the dark verandah. Next to him, Edie’s son took his hand. Tony held the boy’s sweaty little palm as they both stood perfectly still watching the rain and the receding lightning. Tony felt safer too with the boy’s small hand in his. It was such a relief after the long heat of the day. The only sound was the rain and the faint rumbling of receding thunder. No one was talking.

  Sadie called them all in to dinner. The table was filled with salads and bread and platters of grilled fish and calamari that Matt and Carl had caught earlier that day. Everyone started eating as the rain fell steadily and the house cooled.

  Eva did not join them and no one commented on it.

  The rain and cool air released days of tension in them all. Tony was hungry. He ate and talked and drank along with the others. The heavy rain hemmed them all into the pool of light thrown by the half dozen candles on the table. There was just the table of light surrounded by complete darkness. The meal and the night felt endless.

  Later, the kids wandered away from the table and, as they began to whinge with tiredness, Cecile and Edie led them upstairs with candles. They returned just as the older kids disappeared upstairs to their beds. Once again, it was the people from the lounge room and the earlier conversation sitting around the table.

  There were empty wine and beer bottles on the side dresser next to the table. Tony had had several glasses of wine. He wasn’t drunk. He felt startlingly clear-headed and alive, but he knew he must be over the limit. He poured himself some cold water and looked at his watch. Ten past midnight. The rain had stopped. Still the wind had not arrived.

  John excused himself. It was bedtime for him. Tony stood and said goodbye. As they shook hands, Tony was sad to realise this was probably the last time he would see John Kennett. After John had gone upstairs and Tony was still on his feet, he said his goodbyes to everyone.

  ‘No, no,’ said Con, ‘stay the night. It’s late. Josh can crash in with the girls. You can have his bed in with Matt. You don’t mind do you, Matt?’

  ‘Nah, it’ll be good. We can go for a surf in the morning. There’ll be a big swell. Do you surf, Tony?’

  ‘Not in a southerly storm swell I don’t. No, thank you for the offer but I really need to get back to town. I need to be in the office bright and early.’

  ‘We’ve been very lucky to have had so much of you this past week,’ said Sadie. ‘Thank you for all your efforts.’

  ‘I really wanted to find Zoe and bring her home to you,’ said Tony.

  Everyone was quiet.

  Edie came out of the kitchen with coffee and placed it on the table.

  ‘You are not leaving until you’ve had a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘It’s a long drive on wet roads. Coffee will help.’

  Tony sat back down as Edie poured him coffee.

  When he’d finished, he didn’t allow any more distractions. He left that remarkable house and those people who had brought him into their desperate family. He was sorry to go.

  He drove down the sandy driveway through the blackness. The small candle-lit patch of the dining room wasn’t visible from the back of the house. Only the area directly in front of his car lit up by headlights existed in the dense black of the night. Driving down the track, he came to the narrower path that led off to the right, to the cliff.

  For reasons he could not have explained to anyone, he stopped the car and stepped out into the tarry black. He had a small pencil torch on his key ring. He unclipped it and turned it on and followed its narrow arc of light along the path. The trees above dripped big cold drops onto him. He followed the path all the way until it ended in the sandstone plateau. He knew where he was only by the changed surface underfoot.

  Tony couldn’t see anything outside the thin beam of pale light from the torch. He waved his hand in front of his eyes but the dense pitch of the night did not waver. It was quiet on top of the cliff. The storm had passed. The sea below him was as silent as it had been the last time he was here. He could not feel a swell. He slid his feet across the sandstone as he walked to be sure of his footing. He shone the torch in front of him but the light was eaten by the darkness before it even left his hand. He shuffled closer to the edge. He couldn’t see it but he knew it was one step away. He tossed the torch out in front of him. The light tumbled into the blackness.

  His body was lost in the darkness. He strained to hear. But he was in a black silent world.

&nb
sp; Suddenly he could hear the wind blowing down the channel. Loud and fast. Racing towards him. Chasing the light and noise of the earlier storm. It was still a minute away.

  The air surrounding him eased its downward pressure off his grateful body. His bones returned to their correct density. The thick blackness in front of him moved aside. He could see nothing. But he could feel everything. And there it was.

  The silent song. For him. Come on. It’s awesome.

  Acknowledgements

  THERE ARE MANY TO ACKNOWLEDGE AND MUCH TO BE GRATEFUL FOR IN writing a book. My gratitude to the following people is deep and heartfelt.

  My late mother, for her endless stories which she promised me were true and made my childhood happy and magical.

  Jemma, who as a Police Prosecutor, helped me make Tony and his colleagues as near as dammit to real Tasmanian cops. Their shortcomings are mine, not hers.

  Marris, whose regular talks with me about Nabokov, Orwell, Cummings and others inspired rather than daunted. And I tried to take his advice: don’t write to sell, literary integrity is priceless.

  Tess, for reading and understanding the magic in the early days. Your tears at the sad bits convinced me I had a story worth telling. And yes, it is all about mothers and daughters. Isn’t everything?

  Bice, who wanted no part of any of it because there is truly nothing worse in this world than talking about books. But he saved me and the manuscript many times. You really can’t write a book without good tech support.

  Angela McKenzie and Donald Hine who, over good food and good wine and good friendship, tried to explain to me the ways of winds and waves and tides and a sailor’s hopeless love of them all.

  Lucia Usmiani. I can never be the artist she is but she gave me the confidence to create and damn the torpedos. And yes Lucia, I know why you love Tony.

  Tim Phillips. He knows why.

  There is an endless number of books available on Irish, Celtic, Gaelic and Norse mythology and every magical thing but none surpass David Thomson’s beguiling book, The People of the Sea.

  If you want to understand why those of us sheltered on this remarkable island of Tasmania live in its thrall, then James Boyce is your man.

  I have quoted from the beautiful poem ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ by William Carlos Williams and I thank him for his words. So few and each of them perfect.

  Ireland. My sense of wonder is not enough, I know. To Mayo and its people and its wildness and its stories, I will return as often as I can to freeze in your wind and your fierce snow and take heart from whatever it is that draws me back.

  My editors at Pan Macmillan. A thousand thankyous for your skill in bringing my original rambling manuscript to heel. It needed a firm red pen and you wielded it gracefully. A special thankyou to Haylee Nash for seeing what others did not and to Georgia Douglas who never lost sight of the destination and kept it, and me, from all falling apart at the last desperate minute.

  Ged. He gave me the time to write. If that doesn’t sound like much, then you have never encouraged the one you love to step away from earning the big bucks and follow her dream, when all you want for yourself is to take that same step and follow your own dream of paint and canvases alone in your studio. And I’m guessing he tired of our endless walks around Dublin, long trips down snowy Mayo roads, eerie treks across desolate bogs, more than once being so nearly blown into the surging Atlantic and being the only Australian tourists roaming empty valleys in the dark of an Iceland winter. But that’s just a guess. He never said. He wouldn’t. Thankyou is such an inadequate word.

  About Christine Dibley

  Born in outback New South Wales, Christine Dibley arrived in Tasmania thirty years ago and has been held there ever since by that strange bond islands weave around their inhabitants.

  Christine raised four children while developing a career in the human services, primarily working with children, refugees and aged people. She resigned her position as a CEO in the health industry four years ago to pursue full-time writing. She continues to travel, most recently in Ireland, Scotland and Iceland.

  To the Sea is Christine’s first novel.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.

  First published 2016 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000

  Copyright © CM Dibley 2016

  The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  EPUB format: 9781760551988

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Cover design: Christabella Designs

  Front cover image: © Sandra Cunningham / Trevillion Images

  Back cover image: © Shutterstock

  The extract from Ernie O’Malley’s letter (Broken landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O’Malley 1924-1957, Dublin, 2011) is copyrighted and reprinted here by kind permission of

  The Lilliput Press, Dublin, Ireland.

  The extract of ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ by William Carlos Williams (Collected Poems II 1939-1962, 2000) is copyrighted and reprinted here by kind permission of Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester, UK.

  The author and the publisher have made every effort to contact copyright holders for material used in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked should contact the publisher.

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