Wildlight

by Robyn Mundy

  Tom’s mother had stood beside him and he’d heard her gasp with surprise when the cloth was pulled away to reveal her name, Perlita, beside their father’s, Lee, flourished in large white script across the boat’s stern. Perlita Lee. Had it brought bad fortune, Tom would later wonder, to give a boat a dead man’s name?

  As thwarted as a beauty queen stripped of her rightful title, Cheryl had heaved that bottle of champagne against the timber bow with a force that caused the boaties at the boatyard to wince. Frank would have paid for his loyalties when he got home that night.

  ‘If it isn’t old Hab,’ his brother spoke to the compact figure climbing up from the bunkroom. ‘Did we disturb you with the motion, precious? Ready for a nice cup of tea?’

  Habib checked his watch. ‘Early time still.’ His English still wasn’t the best but Habib had been deckie long enough to withstand Frank’s deprecating humour. He pulled on bib and braces, stepped into rubber boots.

  ‘We’ll shoot the pots then anchor off Maat,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll cook up a big greasy breakfast and Hab can brew his special coffee. How’s that sound, me hearties?’

  Tom and Habib grunted the obligatory approval. In different ways they both owed Frank. Each observed the other’s indenture in silent resignation. Tom wondered what Habib might choose to eat at home, how much he shared with his new wife, in the privacy of language, about his work aboard Perlita Lee.

  *

  Frank’s wife had equipped the cabin galley with a gleaming set of melamine plates and bowls, hardly touched when Frank was camp cook. Here they were in a swanky cabin—stainless steel oven and stovetop, microwave, fridge, DVD player, full-sized bunks—seated around the booth and eating straight from the pan. You might ingest a shock of saturated fat from one of Frank’s fry-ups, but you could never complain about an excess of washing up. A congealment of chewed bones and bacon rind sat piled on newspaper.

  Habib held up his coffee mug to Tom. ‘You like?’

  ‘Best yet.’ Habib’s coffee was brilliant. He blended and roasted his own beans at home; he’d shown Tom how. Tom poured himself and Hab the remains of the coffee pot. Frank was as happy drinking instant; as long as it was hot his brother didn’t care. Cascade beer, the local Hobart brew, was the only drink Frank swore allegiance to. Offer him a Boags from the state’s northern brewery and expect a clout around the ears.

  ‘Time for a kip, eh, Tom-Tom? Hab, you get the new lines made up, those couta heads ready for afternoon.’

  ‘When do you want to get away?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Three, four o’clock. Do an early pull while the new shellers are on the run, set them inshore before dinner. Two shots if the weather holds.’

  Another long night. Tom assessed his brother’s mood. ‘All right if I go ashore for a while?’

  ‘How many frigging potatoes you planning on digging up this time?’ Frank’s scowl eased. ‘Go on, you daft idiot. Hab’ll run you in. Take a radio and for fuck’s sake turn it on. I want you back here pronto if the wind gets up. You understand?’

  Tom did. It didn’t pay to get it wrong.

  6

  The gully was delineated by tall trees: tallow wood, peppermints, the gnarly trunks of banksias. Somewhere here, Steph’s mother said, had been a pigeon coop, years ago. They waded through chest-high bracken, avoiding stinging nettles. Their sleeves caught on the canes of wild blackberries. Without gloves the bush would have torn their hands to pieces. Her mother stopped to search. ‘Everything looks different.’

  The valley grew steep. Her mother almost slipped. Steph could hear a surge of waves being heaved against the rocks below. ‘I think we should stop,’ Steph said. Her mother agreed. They climbed the hill and picked up the track. Her mother was going on about the old days, homing pigeons flapping their way across the ocean. ‘They say only one in three ever made it.’

  ‘Isn’t that exploitation? Cruelty to animals?’ Steph said. ‘How did they know to fly from here to some place in Hobart?’

  ‘That’s how they’re bred. The keepers tied a message to their leg. To let Hobart know everything was fine—or not, as the case might be. Hobart would send a return message: sending medical assistance, when the supply boat would call, et cetera.’

  ‘Why bother flying back here?’

  Mum gave her an exasperated look. ‘Birds know their way. They have an innate ability. Look at the mutton-birds.’

  ‘Short-tailed shearwaters,’ Steph corrected her. Again.

  ‘Every year,’ her mother ignored her, ‘almost to the day, they come back all the way from Siberia. You wait. You won’t credit it’s the same place.’

  Steph tried to picture a squadron of 800,000 pairs of migratory birds winging south. Crossing the equator. A pit stop at Papua New Guinea. A fly-by over Sydney Harbour Bridge. ‘Do they stop to eat and drink?’

  ‘They’re seabirds. They can stop any time they like.’

  They started back. Dad was hunched over the drain at the upper edge of the road, all gangly limbs, oblivious to Steph and her mother. The kneepads of his new work trousers were scoured black, the back of his shirt stamped with muddy handprints. He tugged at a handful of grass sprouting from the ditch, growling like a sea lion.

  ‘James.’ Steph saw her father jump.

  ‘A little warning would be nice.’

  ‘Darling,’ her mother said. ‘You’re turning a basic clean-up into an archaeological dig.’

  He dumped a handful of goo upon the road.

  ‘It’s just a drain.’ Her mother looked tense. ‘It only has to . . . drain.’

  Dad thumped the rock with his fist. ‘This drain, this entire length of road,’ he swept his arm, ‘is a monument to back-breaking labour and perseverance. Cut and fill.’ Her father’s halting voice was as bad as ever. ‘A century ago some industrious team of workers sculpted it from bedrock with nothing more than picks and shovels. A stick or two of dynamite. It might have been good enough in your father’s day, but you can bet the original vision wasn’t a waterway clogged with all this rubbish.’

  Hair blew around her mother’s face like tulle. It didn’t mask her irritation. ‘It’s going to take you months.’

  He nodded. ‘I have months, Gretchen.’

  It wasn’t like Dad to be snide. Steph couldn’t tell if he was upset at being exiled to this island or at being banished from the ABC—enforced sick leave to sort out the problem with his voice. The change in her father’s speech didn’t faze Steph as it had the radio listeners who’d phoned in with complaints of the newsreader being three sheets to the wind, or on the verge of a nervous breakdown; some accused him of laughing at a private joke while covering important news headlines. Dad attacked the drain with a long-handled spade and scooped out a mound of fetid sludge. Steph held her nose. The change in his voice was neurological, her mother said, an intermittent wiring fault like a blinking fluoro light.

  *

  It was late morning, the sun shining through after days of rain, when Steph put away her schoolbooks and pulled on gumboots. She walked to the vegetable garden to collect spinach for her mother, the bush glistening with damp, Pearl Jam pumping through her earphones. Last Kiss, Steph sang along, which, depending on her loneliness scale, could work to make her cry.

  Steph reached the terraced beds and shrieked at the movement: a figure crouched on haunches. A boy—man—fell back on his hands. ‘What are you doing?’ she cried. Anyone could see he’d been surveying the seedlings she and her mother had planted. He stood and brushed dirt from his hands. He was tall, angular, and though it was still wintry, his face looked tanned from sun.

  Steph’s alarm seemed to trigger his. ‘I wasn’t taking anything.’ Her eyes fell to the lumpy hessian sack bulging at his feet. She prickled. The sort you heard about, filled with unwanted kittens. Or snakes. Steph yanked out her earphones. ‘Who are you?’ She stood her ground.

  ‘Tom.’ He sounded meek, like someone who knew he was in trouble.

  ‘Obviously.’ She nodded at his
coat.

  He looked like a castaway in his grimy red coat with Tom printed in texta, patched jeans, his dark hair sticking out in all directions. He gestured toward the ocean. ‘Tom Forrest. I’m off the Perlita Lee.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The cray boat.’

  ‘The red boat?’

  He nodded.

  He looked older than her. ‘We’re the caretakers.’ Steph spoke with an authority she didn’t feel. ‘Stephanie West.’

  ‘Stephanie.’ He picked up the sack and eased it behind his back. ‘I met Lindsay and Brian a few times.’

  She relaxed at the mention of their names. ‘What’s in there?’ Steph nodded to the sack.

  He glanced over her head like a cornered animal. She was blocking the exit between the garden beds. He opened the bag and reached down inside. Steph stepped back, pictured the headline: Maatsuyker Massacre: Caretakers Bludgeoned. He pulled a potato from the sack. ‘They grow wild in the bush. I didn’t think anyone would mind.’

  A potato poacher. Steph laughed aloud. Tom Forrest’s brow knotted, then he smiled. He had green eyes and perfect white teeth. ‘They’re all over the joint,’ he said. ‘From the old light-keeper days.’

  ‘They’re probably heritage-listed, like everything else around here.’ She caught his look of concern. ‘I’m kidding,’ she said.

  He offered her a handful. ‘They’re good roasted. Or cut into wedges. Chuck them if the flesh is green.’

  He cocked his head at the rumble of a boat engine below the cliffs. Steph heard static from inside his jacket, three bursts of transmission, another three. He pulled out a handheld radio, the aerial bowed. She watched him give three clicks in return. ‘Best get back to it.’

  ‘Are you the cook?’

  That made him smile. ‘Deckhand. For my brother Frank. It’s his boat.’ Tom looked a bit whiskery, a sack on his shoulder, but he didn’t strike Steph as being a fisherman. What would she know?

  Tom had almost reached the road when Steph called to him. ‘Are you coming back again?’

  ‘Probably. When the weather’s good.’

  ‘I’ll show you the lighthouse. Next time. If you want.’

  He was the sort who thought on things. He nodded. ‘I’ve only ever seen it from down there.’

  ‘Hey.’ Steph pulled her mobile from her pocket. ‘Do you get a signal out there? On your boat?’

  ‘Wouldn’t know. Never needed one. I doubt it. Not down here.’

  ‘You don’t own a phone?’

  He shrugged at her astonishment. ‘You can get us on the VHF when we’re in range. Channel seven two. I could radio you next time we’re coming in.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She waited until he’d gone. Steph broke into a skip and ran back past the house. A congregation of tiny skinks basked amongst the rookery and on the concrete steps, feet set apart, heads tilted to the sun, their closed eyes adding to their yoga-like worship. Steph slowed as she passed but still they scattered into crevices. The path that led from their house to the lighthouse was encased by tea-tree, dappled with light.

  She reached for her sunglasses. Sunlight glared off the lighthouse. The day was dry enough to wedge the doors open and slow the process by which mould populated every surface of every dwelling in this place. Steph wouldn’t have altered a thing about the lighthouse but her mother liked to point out the rusting ironwork, paint flaking from the walls. The way they’ve let it go.

  Rain had leaked in through the window frames. A line of buckets, with rags acting as wicks, drained much of the water. Steph emptied the buckets over the balcony. Tom Forrest would be on his way down to the Gulch, the island’s singular landing site accessible only on days when the weather was calm. If the Perlita Lee passed by he might look up to the light.

  Steph took out her sketchbook and traced a curve of glass. Her science and maths subjects she had to force herself to work at, but with art she could lose a whole day. Her parents had been called in to school to go over Steph’s study plans for her time on the island. Steph had not expected to be lavished with praise when they got home. Her mother had mimicked Mrs Burrows’s warbling voice. Stephanie has the academic ability, and the discipline, to try for medicine, if she so chooses. Medicine? It wasn’t even on Steph’s radar. Her mother looked so disappointed when Steph shook her head. Why not? Mum pleaded. You’re already a year ahead of other girls your age. Mrs Burrows says that if you study hard and do well in your HSC you could start a medical degree next year. Later that night Steph overheard her father on the phone, praising her to Gran. In the top ten per cent, Mum. Who knew? Steph had gone to bed inflated with her parents’ praise—since Callam she’d tried extra hard but they barely noticed anything she did. If it were Callam he’d only need to put the bins up on the road without being asked three times, or get a decent mark for an assignment that Steph had helped him with, and her mother would go into worship mode. Mum had seemed blind to the changes in her brother and the way he played her. On that parent-teacher night Steph had lain awake, weighed down by her parents’ expectations. Who, at sixteen, knew sweet fuck all? All anyone wanted was to live life without the stress of planning it all away. Medicine. Steph had rolled the thought around for several days until all the rough edges smoothed into something she’d polished on her own. A decision could be agonising or could be clean-cut as glass. Steph phoned Gran in Canberra. I’ve decided to try for medicine. Normally Gran was so upbeat. Medicine? Gran said, nothing more.

  Steph drew back at her sketch of the lens. She could recite the facts: Australia’s most southerly lighthouse. Replaced by an automatic light in 1996. The last light station to be de-manned. But alongside statistics was a ton of things she’d never understand. The colossal weight of hundreds of glass ribs embedded in an iron frame. How had they hoisted it up here in the days of horse and cart, set it down with perfect precision? Ask Mrs B and she’d give you her trusty formula for every life achievement: in breathtaking proportions of ambition, ingenuity and determination.

  Steph stepped inside the central mount. Looking out through the lens was like peering through a magnifying glass. The focus sharpened on individual threads from canvas curtains covering several of the windows. When Steph stepped back the focus blurred while the magnification increased. Another step and the rocks of the Needles inverted; they looked immense. She pulled on the heavy lens as you might to set a children’s roundabout in motion. The surrounding prisms moved slowly. Steph scanned the empty ocean. Across the stretch of water she watched a coastline of headlands and cliffs, tantalising beaches, countless indentations. Fractured images streaming by.

  She heard the rattle of the lower door. Her mother padded up the stairs as lightly as a cat. ‘There you are.’ She followed Steph out to the balcony. ‘Taking a break from studies?’ Her mother extended her arms and gave a curtsy to the ocean. She looked serene. She looked beautiful. ‘My dad would sometimes send me down here. I even lit the light, when he was indisposed. I used to imagine being an actress, this balcony my stage.’ Her mother tucked Steph’s hair behind her ear. ‘Coming back to Maat feels like rejoining the circle. Does that make sense, my darling?’

  Steph saw a line of red moving on the water. Tom’s boat. Her mother waited for an answer. She should reassure her, offer affirmation. She shrugged, willing Mum to leave, fighting her own meanness. Who’d been there to comfort her when Callam died? There were so many things about being a daughter—worse with Callam gone—that seemed upside down.

  Mum spoke too brightly. ‘Lunch is ready. I thought we could eat outside.’

  Steph listened to her footsteps on the stairs, counted the seconds until her mother started up the road. Steph dashed in and looped binoculars around her neck. She returned to the balcony and focused on the boat. Two of them at the front beside the stack of craypots, Tom’s red coat. The other man cuffed his head. Tom was looking this way, watching Steph watching him through his binoculars. He lifted his arm and gave a slow wave. Steph raised her arm un
til the boat disappeared from view. She circled the balcony to catch another glimpse. She slowed at the sight of her mother on the road looking back at her. Her mother turned and walked on. You didn’t need binoculars to see she was upset.

  7

  The rusted gantry at the Gulch’s landing looked set to collapse. Tom stepped over remnant wooden sleepers; the remains of the old haulage way extended as a scar up the slope, the bush slowly reclaiming it.

  The sun had tracked above the island, a pale yellow orb spreading meagre warmth on and through him. A group of silver gulls patterned the rocks above the landing site, uniform bodies angled to the sun, feathers ruffling in the breeze. If you ignored the mindset that they were lowly seagulls squabbling about the boat for scraps, you might think them handsome, their red beaks brilliant, birds standing proud and sassy on those matchstick legs. A carpet of pigface fringed the rocks. The fleshy leaves were soft enough to squash between your fingers, yet the plant held its grip against six metre-swells that rollicked in to slap the coastline white with salt. In morning light, glossy flowers buttoned the succulent foliage, pleats of pink open to the sun.

  Tom slowed at the terraces to search for ancient shards of abalone shell, opalescent, glinting in the dirt. It was the task of the aboriginal women, he’d read, to fish and feed their families when hunting was poor; women, centuries ago, who would paddle twelve kilometres from the mainland and dive all day in frigid water. How often were they stranded here? Or did bad weather wait until the paddle home to catch them at the point of no return? He pictured that line of women and girls in their rolled bark canoe, heads dropped, shoulders taut, arms on fire with the effort of reaching the safety of shore.

  Tom climbed the narrow path, the vegetation thickening to bushy scrub. Crescent honeyeaters, silver eyes and scrub wrens flitted and bounced; the hillside was alive with tiny birds. Higher now, Tom moved through taller foliage. Wind rushed up the valley, the raucous shriek of cockatoos cascaded down.