Wildlight

by Robyn Mundy

  From out here on this clean slate of ocean you couldn’t imagine half the things Steph knew about the island. You wouldn’t know that her father talked to the lawnmower as if it were a living thing. You wouldn’t know all the times her mother spent being sad. You wouldn’t know that every day when Steph tied back the door to air the lighthouse, she would stop to listen to it sing, she would stand with her arms outstretched and feel it breathe and hum through her chest. Every step, every footfall on those wrought-iron steps had become her daily ritual, the tower a refuge. All the times Steph would step inside the lens and put her face against the prisms of glass to look and look and look with the wish that the warped, contorted shapes beyond would sharpen into focus and form a human figure. That there through the glass would stand the world as it once was, that her brother—the boy he used to be—would press his hand to the glass and everything would be mended and whole.

  The boat lifted on a wave. It was pointless wishing for the past. Pointless wishing she’d been strong enough to speak out, to tell her parents that Callam was sneaking out at night.

  Steph looked past the weather office to the anemometer, to aerials and the automated light, to the great stretch of wild hill beyond. The air was so clear you could make out individual trees beneath a billowing of cumulus, the sky swirling to a bruise. Chaotic sky, the Bureau called it.

  Weather girl, Gran called Steph. They kept a secret, she and Gran. Gran had been to a man who looked into the future and saw back through the past. And though that man knew nothing of Gran, he’d seen a pair of twins and told her of the boy caught within the light. Caught? Gran had quizzed him. Held, the man explained, waiting to be allowed to leave.

  The boat motored past Moderate and Heavy Rocks, the landmarks Steph used to gauge the swell. From up there they were specks. From down here they were bigger than the boat. The Perlita Lee moved along the east side of the Needles, past towering slabs of rock, seabirds wheeling overhead.

  They passed a blue cray boat, the greeting from its wheelhouse an angry jab of fingers.

  ‘Pricks,’ she heard Frank shout their way.

  ‘What was that about?’ she said to Tom.

  The blue boat moved away. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Tom pulled out the grappling iron, showed Steph how he’d throw it to snag the line between the buoys. He started up the pot hauler. ‘The craypot rests here on an angle. You slide it down to here, take out your fish, put them in the tank. Buoys in this cage, lines in that one. Bob’s your uncle.’

  ‘You call them fish?’

  ‘Fish, and rats,’ Habib piped in.

  ‘Rats are the small ones that eat all your bait. The ones you chuck back. There’s a reef out there.’ Tom pointed out past the Needles. ‘Locally known as Rat Palace.’

  One of the two cages was crammed with orange buoys, the painted letters chipped and worn. Steph felt the boat lurch, saw Frank yank on the wheel. He looked pissed off. ‘What’s he doing?’ she asked Tom.

  Tom walked to the side window of the wheelhouse. ‘Frank,’ he called in through the glass, the way you’d call your dog if it was about to roll in something putrid. ‘We’re not using it right now. Let it go.’

  ‘Our patch, they know that well enough.’

  Tom spoke quietly. ‘Not now.’

  ‘What?’ Steph asked again.

  ‘Nothing. Don’t worry about it.’ Tom moved into the wheelhouse and rolled the door shut. He turned his back to her. Steph looked to Habib; he gave a shrug. She watched the brothers through the glass, saw the way Tom braced his body, the jerky movement of his hands. Frank shook his head.

  ‘Let her decide.’ Frank opened the door and called to Steph. ‘I was saying Tom can pull one of the pots. Show you how it’s done.’

  Tom looked at her pleadingly.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Steph said, confused. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Come on. A feed of crayfish to take home for Mum and Dad?’

  She looked to Tom for guidance.

  ‘Alrighty.’ Frank took her silence as a yes, his eyes alive. ‘Grab the hook, Tom-Tom. No point wasting time.’

  A sheer wall of rock. Tufts of tussocks growing high up on the ledge. They were directly below the lighthouse. Frank pulled the boat alongside a pair of yellow buoys. Tom waited, a glazed expression on his face. Was he angry with her? He pulled on thick rubber gloves, took up the grappling iron. She couldn’t gauge his face. He threw the iron as deftly as an athlete, hooked the line first go. She watched him drag it in, his actions honed. Tom looped the line around the wheel of the pot hauler, the ratchet of the motor a stuttering of discord.

  Two yellow buoys and lengths of line were sprawled across the deck. Tom’s jeans, his shoes, everything was wet. Steph looked over the side. She couldn’t see the bottom. She held her breath and waited. A shape, a cauldron of bubbles turned the inky water turquoise blue. The craypot emerged like a living, raucous thing, a whoosh of water, snapping tails, the water streaming. She placed her hand against a curve of pot—wood wet and shiny, intricately twisted to a woven basket, a neck of fine cane. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said to Tom.

  ‘Only the best.’

  The pot sounded out a clatter of castanets; she looked in through a weave of wood to a shuffle of bodies and legs, antennae pushing through the open neck, dancing through the air.

  Frank powered the boat away from the rocks. He turned and gave Steph a reassuring nod. She smiled back, a flutter moving through her chest. In that moment he looked exactly like Tom.

  Tom reached into the pot and drew out a crayfish. He gripped it firmly by the back, turned it over, the feelers waving, the tail clacking at the air. ‘Undersize.’ He held it for her to see then threw it overboard. He pulled a larger crayfish. Another. Another. Habib held a wet sack and in they went.

  ‘Hand Tom his knife, will you, Stephanie. Tom, finish her off, mate.’

  Steph took the knife, held it by its orange sheath. The blade was inscribed with Tom’s name. The way he resisted it. The hatred on his face when he turned his eyes to Frank.

  Tom took the knife but then he dropped it on the deck. He grabbed the pot and heaved it out across the water as though it were a tainted thing. The line ran out in chase, whipping water across Steph’s jeans. Tom scooped the yellow buoys, punched them like a ball out across the water.

  Tom and Frank. No words exchanged, but within that loaded silence was an interchange of rage unlike any screaming match she’d had with Callam. Habib stood in silence, privy, Steph supposed, to a history of conflict that she could only feel. She saw Frank’s look of defiance. She glanced at Tom, his back rigid, neck taut.

  Frank punctured the silence. ‘Where to?’

  They all looked to her. ‘I—I should probably get home. If that’s okay.’ She sounded little-girlish.

  Frank nodded. ‘Wind’s getting up. The ocean’s no place for a girl when it gets a temper.’

  *

  Steph clambered from the dinghy up onto the landing. Tom handed her the laden hessian sack. He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t say when he’d be coming back. She watched him motor out. She waited and she waited but he never once looked back.

  She was on the track, hessian knocking at her legs, walking through a patch of waist-high yellow daisies. The island had turned spring. Somewhere ahead a cockatoo shrieked. She thought about the colour of the buoys.

  Steph’s face was wind burned, her arms and legs felt tight from sun, her hair was tangled from salt and wind. She felt worn down, dragged from the certainty of shore by a great rogue wave, left to flounder in the deep before being flung back onto land. Inside the sack crayfish clicked and clacked. It was heavy. She felt marooned, unable to hold her head above the truth of what she knew. It crept along the knuckles of her spine. It wound around her neck and squeezed her throat and turned her breath into a plaintive sigh. The cage of buoys on the boat had been a sea of orange. The yellow buoys from the pot they’d pulled had stood alone. Steph didn’t need to compare
the painted letters and numbers to know that Frank and Tom were stealing someone else’s catch.

  The angry thrust of fingers from the blue boat.

  Frank handing her the knife to pass to Tom.

  Steph stopped to rest, weighed down by tiredness, by a heavy sack of ill-gotten gains. Above in the branches a raven watched. From its elevated height that silken black bird could comprehend the length of track, the patterns of the bush, the cycle of seasons. Ravens were keen-eyed, they’d perch on the lightning prongs surveying their domain. A movement in the grass and they’d swoop from fifty metres to seize a worm. That bird would have seen long before Steph that a rope and its buoys were the lifeline to a craypot. Tom knew when he took the knife what he was being told to do. He knew because they’d done it all before.

  Wind shrilled through the branches. Callam sniggered, Mongrels, the lot of us. He shimmied past, blowing hair across her face.

  15

  Rain. Relentless days of it. It came in waves like movements of a symphony, slowly, gently building to crescendos that pummelled the cement, burbled through downpipes, choked drains, spilled as waterfalls through every rusted gutter. Steph watched the sky empty, watched until it ebbed and eased into a steady drizzle.

  She was on her own in the house, not that you would think it. The room was a crackle of static, a staccato of voices—both radios scanning frequencies—fishermen, Tasmar Radio, Hobart police.

  . . . five dollars’ difference between the brindles and reds. You start knockin’ a couple a grand off a ton, that’s . . . fifteen to twenty-five knots, increasing thirty to thirty-five knots in offshore waters between Rocky Cape and South West . . . log truck overturned on the northbound lane of Huon Highway, five kilometres north . . . the wives’ll have to stop shavin’ their legs because we won’t be able to afford the disposable . . . white Subaru wagon, registration plate . . . if there’s no other calls, Tasmar Radio going back to . . . either way you’re fucked.

  Steph put on her headphones and pumped up the music. It was stupid to listen for Tom. He could be in Hobart. He could be out stealing pots. The table was covered in scraps of recycled paper, a cutting mat and glue. She was working on her papier-mâché model of the lighthouse.

  She turned at the movement. Her father stood at the table, saying something. The hair on his forearms was speckled with iron filings. He smelled of the garage. She hadn’t heard him come in. He pushed the headphones back from her ears. ‘Let’s try again, shall we? I was asking about your study.’

  ‘I’m having a break.’

  ‘And what about the weeding in the vegetable garden that you promised your mother?’

  Steph raised her eyebrows the way her father did to make a point, she motioned to the rain. His face tightened. He left the room. Then he was back. He took her CD player and yanked the cord out. His hands were trembling. He switched off both radios. ‘I’ve had just about enough of you.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Listen to yourself. You’re sullen, moody, you’re rude to your mother and me. You disappear off to your lighthouse for hours on end, last week we had to cover for you again with the weather, you sit here doing your art as if you’re on holiday. As far as I can tell you haven’t done a scrap of study. Your exams are a week away. One week, Stephanie. Are you intentionally trying to sabotage your chances?’

  She shrugged. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything.

  ‘We’ve put a lot of effort and expense into flying you to Hobart at resupply. Your mother’s been on the phone to your school, the Education Department, getting everything set up.’ He rapped the CD player. ‘How do you expect to get into university if you don’t try?’

  She glowered. As if there wasn’t enough pressure. ‘I don’t want to do medicine.’ There, she’d said it. She’d never wanted to be a doctor. ‘Mrs Burrows mentions it and next thing it’s your and Mum’s big dream. No one asked me, as usual.’

  Dad shifted her books from the chair, sat down at the table. ‘What do you want? I’m listening.’

  Steph turned to the window. Rain fell in sheets. A currawong, bedraggled and forlorn, perched on the radio aerial. ‘I don’t know any more.’ She couldn’t think properly.

  ‘Are you worried about disappointing your mother? Is it Tom? We can tell something’s happened.’

  ‘It was a dumb idea coming here. You didn’t want to come. You just sat there at the interview agreeing with everything Mum said.’

  Her father looked away. He took off his glasses. He laid them on the table. ‘I wanted to support your mother. You know the reasons.’

  Her mother had addressed the interview panel as softly as a song. This is my chance to share a special place with the people I love, to give something back. Mum had turned to Steph and squeezed her hand. Steph knew what was expected. Mum’s been telling me about Maatsuyker all my life. I feel as though it’s part of me. She was just as much a part of the performance. Me, Steph had said. My life. They all knew better than to mention Callam. It felt as though her mother’s entire future, her road map back to happiness, rested on the outcome. The interviewers couldn’t see the wreckage.

  Her father rubbed the bridge of his nose. Rain filled Steph’s vision, the noise swamped her head. ‘After Callam, somewhere in all that mess, your mother disappeared.’ He looked at Steph. ‘You disappeared.’ His chin rested on the back of his hands. ‘I thought I could cope. I’d push on, take care of you and Gretchen, get us back on track.’ He shook his head. ‘Gran held it together. For all those months.’ He was looking through Steph, caught in a different time. He sat staring out the window. ‘The rain. You remember?’

  She was Callam’s twin. How could she forget?

  ‘The traffic was a crawl. I nearly didn’t take the call. I couldn’t hear properly for the rain. Police, I heard. And your son. I thought, What’s that damned kid got himself into? I got to the other side of the bridge and waited until they rang me back.’ Her father knocked his chest with his fist. ‘I drove down to the water. Rain on the roof, the bonnet, pouring down the street, you couldn’t see the harbour. I had the motor running, the heater on high—I couldn’t get warm. I curled across the front seats like a little kid. Watching the floor lights dim.’ He turned to Steph. ‘You know what I was thinking?’ Her father’s voice was silk, his words unbroken. ‘You can’t beat German design. Isn’t that an odd thing?’

  ‘You were home when I got there.’

  ‘Steph. It must have been awful for you.’ He rubbed at his face. He looked grey. Her father took out his handkerchief, ironed perfectly into three. Dad wiped his eyes and nose. His voice halted. ‘Poor old Cal.’

  Steph placed her hand on his forearm. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she told her father. But she felt as empty as a sky drained of rain. Rain always made Steph think of weeping. For a long time now she’d trained herself not to cry—their house at home had been ready to subside with the volume of her mother’s tears. What held her to Callam was a confusion of feelings and an inability to express grief as any normal person would. It was a stricture as mysterious and fickle as her father’s strangled voice. ‘When you were talking,’ she said to Dad. ‘Did you notice? There was hardly a break.’

  ‘Go figure,’ he said as if he’d pondered that himself. ‘A dodgy link in the neurological chain. People think I put it on.’

  ‘Will you go back to work?’

  He shook his head. ‘I doubt it. Not on air.’

  ‘Mum says you should have the injections. Then you’d manage.’

  ‘They’re not a cure, Steph. A few months at best.’

  ‘Then you have another one. You’d be fine.’

  ‘I doubt the producers will look at it that way.’ He patted her hand. ‘We’ll see about it all when we get home.’ He inspected her model lighthouse. ‘You’re so creative. Do you know that?’

  ‘Does it hurt to speak?’

  ‘It’s exhausting. The physical effort of forcing out the words. Of having to find words that aren’t a
s hard to say. It’s easier to say nothing.’

  ‘Is that why you don’t talk to us any more?’

  He looked taken aback. ‘It’s not . . . I don’t . . . I have no position.’

  ‘Position?’

  ‘Voice is who I am. Who we all are. Being able to express what we think and feel.’ His hand collared his throat. ‘This won’t let me be me. Perhaps, looking on, it doesn’t seem that big a deal—I’m not even sure your mother understands. I feel as if my whole identity’s been stripped away. At work, at home. Every turn.’ Steph didn’t know how to answer. Her father looked embarrassed by his admission. He took a breath. He checked his watch. ‘Almost time for the weather.’

  Steph collected her socks from the laundry basket. ‘Dad.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I know it’s big. I do. But you’re still you. Underneath. I think you need to figure out how best to manage it. Be open to the options.’

  He gave a flicker of a smile. ‘Are you all right, love? Not just this,’ he motioned to her schoolbooks. ‘Being here. Without your friends. Everything a bit off kilter. It can’t be easy.’

  She couldn’t remember anyone but Gran asking that. ‘Mostly it’s okay.’

  ‘You don’t talk to Mum or me about your brother. I worry for you.’

  ‘You don’t talk about him either. It makes me feel like I shouldn’t. Like we’re all treading on eggshells in case Mum has another breakdown. We’re not allowed a single happy memory. Or to say it like it really was.’ Steph paused. ‘Everybody compensated for Callam. All the time. He wasn’t perfect, Dad.’

  ‘I know he wasn’t.’