Wildlight

by Robyn Mundy

  Her father peeled back the tape to find the slim black-handled knife. The woman at the store had tried to push the kind Tom used, jammed with nail files and screwdrivers and everything a bloke could want. That woman didn’t know her father. He’d have put it in a drawer with all the other things he didn’t use.

  Dad weighed the knife in the palm of his hand. ‘Look at that. How light it is.’

  ‘I bought it in Hobart.’

  He opened the blade, pressed the tab and clicked it closed with ease. He turned it in his hand, rubbed his thumb against the textured handle. ‘Just the ticket,’ he said, reaching out to hug her.

  ‘And this one’s from me.’ Mum opened the bedside drawer and presented a black leather box. A wristwatch with chunky chiselled edges.

  ‘Italian.’ Mum glowed.

  ‘Waterproof to fifty metres,’ her father read aloud. Her father had never gone deeper than a duck dive. ‘Stopwatch. Dual times.’ A face crammed with numbers, dates and circles he’d never figure out. ‘Darling, it’s perfect.’ He kissed her. Mum looked full of herself.

  ‘Breakfast in bed as well.’ Dad rubbed his hands. ‘Now that’s a treat worth waking up for.’ Her father took a noisy slurp of coffee, tore off a corner of toast. ‘Coffee’s good. I hardly notice the powdered milk any more.’

  Mum sat beside him on the bed. ‘What would you like to do today? It’s awful outside. We could play Scrabble, do a jigsaw, listen to music. I’ll make toasted sandwiches for lunch.’

  He took another slurp. ‘A day off is what I’d like. Maybe I’ll stay in bed and get stuck into a novel. Nothing too cerebral.’

  Her mother shrugged. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  Mum got up to leave. Dad asked Steph, ‘Any news from Tom?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Steph tried not to sound concerned.

  ‘They’ll be anchored over the other side. Watching videos and eating crumpets. The rigours of life at sea.’

  *

  Steph spread six crackers with butter and Vegemite. She sandwiched them together.

  ‘Is that all you’re having for lunch?’ her mother said. ‘You look pale, hon. You want some soup? A toasted sandwich?’

  Her stomach cramped. She felt bloated and fat. ‘Just this.’ There were no bathroom scales in the house to even check her weight. Girls at school, far thinner than her, weighed themselves four, five times a day. They fasted the whole day if they gained half a kilogram. Steph had never had the willpower to get past lunchtime. Tessa’s mother would laugh off the whole idea of dieting. Girls your age haven’t stopped growing. On the scale of things you’re all still tiddlywinks. Alison Tennant the hockey captain wasn’t a tiddlywink. Or the goal-keeper Gemma Sinclair. If you believed the gossip, those two had been having sex for years.

  An aroma of savoury and sweet wafted through the house. Mum was browning chicken on the stovetop. The birthday cake sat cooling on a rack.

  Dad padded across the kitchen in his dressing gown and sheepskin boots.

  ‘There you are, birthday boy.’ Mum gave him a peck. Dad looked longingly at the chicken sizzling in the pan. ‘For tonight,’ her mother tutted. ‘Your birthday dinner.’

  ‘It smells good.’ He kissed Mum’s neck. ‘You smell good.’

  Steph returned to her dreary assignment; she failed to tune out her father’s murmurs from the kitchen, her mother’s titters. They hadn’t been like this forever. Steph tucked a sleeping bag around her legs, pulled on her hat and scarf and crunched a cracker. Her textbooks consumed the dining table and spilled onto the floor. Some she hadn’t opened for weeks. She tried to feel motivated, tried to discipline herself. Her heart wasn’t in it. Dad paced through the lounge room. ‘I don’t know how you stand it.’ He folded his arms. ‘I’m going back to my electric blanket.’ Fifteen minutes later her mother walked by. Steph heard the bedroom door close, her mother giggling. Steph shuddered. She didn’t want to think about her parents in that way.

  The second radio had picked up the police channel. Through the static Steph caught one-sided bits of conversation, a woman issuing directions. Domestic disturbance, Steph heard her say. Hobart seemed a world away.

  Two fishermen were talking on the VHF. Steph cranked up the radio, hoping to hear something of Tom.

  Won’t chance pulling ’em today, Bluey. Leave ’em till the morning and hope to Christ it eases off.

  I reckon we’re here for the duration. Sit it out behind the Big Witch.

  Who you got on deck with you?

  New kid from up north. He’s not bad value.

  Decent deckie and you never have to leave the wheelhouse.

  That’s the general idea. Thought he was a goner yesterday. Big wave come over, next thing he was swimming down the back of the boat. Scared the daylights out of both of us.

  Steph put her plate in the sink and checked through the window. The sea was pouring over Moderate and Heavy Rocks, the swell was pushing partway up the face of the outer Needle. The bay was streaked with foaming rollers that heaved in, one, another, another. They’d be pounding the cliffs below. The windows of the house, the lighthouse, the fence, the walls: every surface was crusted with salt.

  Steph took up the microphone. She hesitated. If Tom was there, they’d all be listening in. She took a deep breath. ‘Perlita Lee, Perlita Lee, this is Maatsuyker Island, Maatsuyker Island. Over.’ She waited. Tried again.

  A gruff voice broke through the crackle. ‘Bluey MacIntyre here. If you’re after Frank he’s nowhere round here. I’m chasing him m’self. They could be up at town.’

  Fishermen on the radio never said Over. They didn’t repeat things the way she’d been taught. They spoke normally. ‘Okay, thanks for that.’

  ‘You one of the caretakers?’

  ‘Me and my parents,’ Steph said. ‘I do the weather observations.’

  ‘That’s the way,’ he said less gruffly. ‘What are you like at reading the swell?’

  He was testing her. ‘About four point five this morning?’

  ‘Be about right. She’d be running bigger now. Five, five and a half.’

  ‘It looks big from up here.’

  ‘You find a sheltered spot and stay the hell out of it as best you can.’

  Steph waited. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘See you, then.’

  ‘You mind yourself around Frank Forrest.’

  ‘It’s Tom I’m looking for. Frank’s brother.’

  ‘Mongrels, the pair of them. Frank’s just the one that pulls the strings.’

  She couldn’t tell if he was serious.

  ‘You see ’em,’ he said, ‘you tell ’em Bluey’s onto them. You tell ’em Bluey’s had a gutful.’ He didn’t sound like he was joking.

  Steph returned to her books. She couldn’t concentrate. A gutful of what? She took up her sketchbook and crayons, drew a curve of glass. She should be studying, not drawing. Raised voices from the bedroom. ‘Callam,’ she heard her mother say. ‘As if I’m not coping if I even mention his name.’ Steph held her breath. A door opened. ‘That’s not it at all,’ her father said. Steph heard the shower run.

  It was pouring outside. She ought to finish her assignment. She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting wrapped against the cold in a sleeping bag. She pulled on waterproofs, stepped into gumboots. Anywhere but here.

  Wind swept up the valley in shrill screams. It peeled back her hair. She passed beneath a tea-tree arbour encasing the road. Beneath the branches and foliage the air was suddenly still, entirely protected. She slowed. Small birds skittered across the grass road, searching for insects and worms. Beneath the arbour you’d never guess a tempest was raging beyond.

  Water raced along the ditch beside the road. The stretch her father had cleared ran uninterrupted. But when Steph reached the crest, where the drain was crippled with debris and silt, stormwater spilled over the brim and flooded the width of the road. It ran through the grass in rivulets, filling the vehicle furrows with puddles and leaves. It occurred to Steph how much her father had
done. The difference it made.

  Rushing water. The downpour of rain. The day she’d missed the afternoon bus and walked home from school alone. Callam had been gone since morning, left her at the bus stop and wagged school with the older boy whose gang he’d started hanging around with. He’d made Steph promise not to tell. A look of pleading that could easily turn to anger was all it took to guarantee her silence. Rain had bounced off the footpath, had poured down the roads, the drains unable to cope with the deluge. She’d diverted down the grassy slope to a walkway that wound past the bay leading to their beach. She’d taken shelter at a picnic table beneath a grove of peppermints. Her school uniform, her backpack and schoolbooks: everything drenched. The roar from the stormwater drain had drowned out the rain. It raged snarling and dogged like a monstrous living thing. Steph had watched the torrent gush from the mouth of concrete, watched it bloom into a bay whose surface was littered with grubby foam and swirls of scum, with leaves and sticks and manmade debris scooped along the way.

  She’d stayed there for a time, watched sediment spread and overwhelm the slaty blue. She’d shivered in wet clothes—it made her shiver now. She’d made her way home, the rain a steady thrum, her feet squelching inside her leather school shoes. She’d heard her mother’s wails before she reached the garage—the roller door left open, her father’s car home early. Guttural moans and heaving breaths seeped from upstairs. It sounded like a distraught beast. It set Steph’s skin prickling. Steph placed her hand on the bottom door, wanting to understand but too scared to go in. She’d put off the moment and dumped her backpack. She climbed the outside stairs. She looked in through a window at her mother in a foetal curl upon the floor. Her father on his knees beside her, rocking like a metronome, his hand limp against her mother’s hair. Steph stepped through the sliding door. Dad? Her father turned. Part of Steph had known. Where’s Callam? she said. Her father’s eyes the murk of the bay.

  Steph raced along Maatsuyker’s road. She slowed at the place where the mutton-bird had burrowed its nest. The drain had turned tailrace, carrying away everything in its course. Surely the bird would abandon the nest, find some better place to go? Steph followed to where the drain met the culvert that ran beneath the road. Thick spears of grass matted the entry to the pipe. She laid belly-down at the edge of the road, ignoring the sodden mat of grass. She dug her hands down through the grass, giving no mind to the gush of water that ran inside her sleeves, up past her elbows. Her fingers touched a soft object. She drew back. She reached for it again: a small limp bundle tangled in a dam of sticks and leaves.

  The bird lay lifeless in her hands, the feathers matted with silt. Wet seeped through Steph’s clothes. Her throat thudded. Within those clouded eyes she saw things about her parents they couldn’t recognise themselves. All of them eddying around the idea of Callam, with nowhere else to go. Her mother pined for a past that could never be returned. And while her father never spoke aloud of Callam, his voice had inextricably faltered, as if grief or guilt had silenced him. The hours her father spent clearing this drain: an act of making good that might release the stagnant dam that held them all.

  Steph carried the small body back toward the arbour. She made her way into the bush, stepping onto tree roots, the fragile ground so undermined with burrows it would have caved beneath her weight. Beneath the ground the soft sound of bird trills, mutton-birds cooing. Steph found a place beneath a bush burgeoning with buds and the promise of yellow daisies. She scooped away handfuls of dirt. She placed the bird within the shallow pit and gently covered it with soil. A pair of robins, one vivid pink, the other pale, flitted and settled on a branch. She could bring Tom here. Steph wiped dirt from her hands, she leaned against the rough bark of the tree and listened to the distant pounding of the ocean. Mongrels, Bluey called them. Steph distanced herself from the awful, ceaseless rain.

  The light had dimmed, the horizon shredded with red. She heard thunder, looked at storm clouds sweeping overhead. She’d missed doing the afternoon weather observations.

  The outside light was on. Through the window Steph could see the table set, three wine glasses, her textbooks packed away.

  Mum stood stiff-backed at the stove, the dinner overcooked and waiting to be served. ‘You knew it was your father’s birthday.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be late.’

  Dad was seated at the table, dressed in a good shirt. ‘Where were you?’ he said quietly. ‘We were worried sick. I went down to the lighthouse. You’ve been gone for hours.’

  ‘Walking,’ she said. ‘Just away.’

  ‘Please tell us next time you’re going to disappear like that.’ His disappointment was worse than if he’d been angry. ‘I did the weather.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She felt meek.

  ‘And you missed your radio session with the tutor. I apologised on your behalf.’

  Her mother set a casserole dish upon a mat and turned to go. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Go and wash your hands please, change your clothes. You reek of mutton-bird.’

  Dad looked defeated and old. Steph felt overwhelmed. She hugged her father. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Dad.’

  ‘Oh, Steph.’ Her father studied her, his halting voice, his eyes slate grey. ‘We’re all sorry. More than you can know.’

  12

  The sou’-westerly doused the wheelhouse with spray. The engine farted and spluttered, ready to stall on them again. ‘Slut,’ Frank snapped. As if fearful of his temper the motor surged into a roar. ‘That’s my darlin’.’

  Dirty fuel, Frank had claimed last week. Now it was air in the fuel line, but bleeding the lines before they’d left the shelter of Rocky Bay hadn’t fixed the problem. Too cheap to have the engine looked at in Hobart before they’d started out. Tom knew some of the short cuts Frank took at the end of a season, arrangements he made with certain mechanics and boat engineers. In kind, the preferred form of payment: a sack of undersize crays, fish from someone else’s pots. Worst of all a catch of berried females, the platelets beneath their tails clustered with eggs. Why fork out ten grand to the boatyard when your papers could be signed for less?

  Maatsuyker’s light blinked. Tom saw the lights of the house. He’d never get the dinghy ashore to visit Stephanie. In the morning he’d call her on the radio. To the west, broken threads of scarlet had deepened into night. Sheet lightning scored the underbellies of thunderheads bullying their way across the sky, puffed up for fight. The caps of waves tore off into scraps streaked white across the water. The Perlita Lee struggled for control as she crabbed up a wave. Frank gripped the wheel as she skittered down the other side and plunged into a trough. The swell was running five metres. ‘It’s not worth ten pots,’ he said to Frank. Gale eater, Bluey MacIntyre once called Frank. Your brother’s got a death wish. All week in Hobart Tom had wanted to get back down here. Now he wished they’d stayed in town. ‘Let’s come back for them when the engine’s sorted.’ Tom didn’t care that he was pleading before his brother and Habib.

  ‘Not at forty bucks a kilo.’

  Frank swung the wheel hard to round the Needles. The water turned into a maelstrom of waves fit to knock each other out. The ocean felt wrong. Frank swore. The Perlita Lee charged over a crest and smacked hard onto the belly of a trough—the slam jolted Tom’s spine. The boat came to a stop. A wave bucketed toward them, a surge that looked taller than the boat. Tom watched in a trance. The roll of water caught them on their hind, punched them sideways, the curl of the wave breaking over the gunnel and dumping a ton of water across the back deck. The vessel lurched, the stern shunted down beneath the extra weight of water. The back half of the boat looked like a swimming pool of bubble bath, the scuppers not equipped to drain such volume before a new wave pushed them under. The corner of the gunnel was flush with ocean. Too much water to even get to the tank boards to open the well. They were gone. They were dead. Tom looked at craypots and orange buoys, a tangle of ropes: everything afloat behind the wheelhouse.

  He heard the engine splutter.
He held his breath. Habib gripped the railing. Tom looked out at a swell that raced toward them. Part of him wanted it. All his imaginings that soured his dreams and left him drowning in the ocean, nightmares from which he struggled to wake. This was escape. The engine coughed and heaved. The world turned slow. He pictured bronze-skinned women in rolled bark canoes. Tom was amongst them, diving for shellfish, kicking down and down, lungs starved of breath and bursting for air and how could any human, no matter how good they were, ever make it back up to the surface? He saw his brother’s forehead beaded in sweat. In Frank’s blanched face, Tom imagined his father at the end, lungs choked of air. Frank caught his look. His brother swore and jammed his hand hard against the throttle. Habib stood owl-eyed. The engine chugged with life and the boat inched forward, dragging itself like a clubbed seal, the back half rendered useless. Come on. Tom’s heart pounded. He gripped the handhold, willing the boat to move. Even laden with water the vessel lifted on the swell. Behind them two waves collided; water rained down on the wheelhouse roof. The Perlita Lee slid away, the water held in the stern cascading down toward the bow. A wall of water pushed against the wheelhouse door, ran in beneath, across Tom’s feet and down the steps into the galley. The bulk of it poured by outside.

  He watched it spew out through scuppers like a strainer. He watched their colander of boat purge itself of water. He felt her pull away.

  Tom blinked to make sense of it. A second chance. The last wave should have sunk them.

  ‘Jesus fuck.’ Frank’s relief sounded girlish.

  Tom couldn’t talk. He sat with his gut in spasm, his limbs trembling, his mind in vivid replay. Tom had welcomed death, a convoluted logic that meant he’d never have to work for Frank again. Tom was an idiot. He didn’t want to die. Out there in the ocean he wouldn’t stand a chance.

  A deep guttural rumble—thunder right above them—put Tom’s skin on edge. He pulled his eyes away from saturated carpet, his brother’s sodden shoes. Beside him Habib stood in a kind of trance.