Wildlight

by Robyn Mundy

  ‘Does Mum?’

  ‘In her own way, I think she does. Steph, I wish we could have done better. It wasn’t fair on you.’ Her father’s face looked thinner, he’d lost some weight. ‘I know you and your brother were close, but you were so different from one another. Right from the start.’

  ‘Different, how?’

  Dad thought for a moment. ‘Cal thought himself invincible. He thrived on risk, on stretching the rules. Ever the showman, sad to say.’ What did that make Steph? Conservative? Dull? As if tuning in to her thoughts, Dad met her gaze. ‘You were the one we never had to worry about. Accepting of people, their differences. The little girl with a big curiosity for the world. You could never get enough of learning.’ Steph couldn’t even conjure an image of that person. Dad tapped her schoolbooks. ‘Now look at the pickle we’re in.’

  Steph released a huff of tension. The mood between them lifted. ‘Gloom Central around here.’

  Her father gave a smile. ‘I’ll leave you to talk to Mum about medicine.’

  *

  The rain gauge had overflowed into the outer cylinder. Steph measured the plastic beaker, emptied it, filled it with the excess and added up the total. Thirty-two millimetres since nine o’clock. Rain trickled off her hood, polished her waterproofs. She wiped a drip from her nose and checked the thermometers. Twelve point five degrees. She recorded the figures and closed the screen door, dropped in the nail to secure it. All second nature now.

  She surveyed the thinning stratus, the outline of a weakened sun trying to shine through. Far across the water the clouds had opened to glimpses of blue sky that felt like a reminder of a larger world in motion. Rays of light glossed the tip of South West Cape and turned the ocean pewter.

  Inside the weather office she took up binoculars and measured the sea state. She could estimate visibility without checking the map. She knew how far off each mountain stood, the distance to each bluff and bay.

  She keyed the data into the laptop, then recorded it by hand in the old-fashioned log, the way her grandfather and all the other keepers at Maatsuyker had done. The final column was where the observer wrote a general note about the day. Some were formal, others conversational. She leafed back to Lindsay and Brian’s pages: Wild and woolly; Cleared by afternoon; The Southern Ocean going off; Blue skies—a cracker-jack day.

  Wildlight, Steph wrote. A shiny, wet Maatsuyker day, thinking as she did that that’s how Gran would look upon this day. Gran, who found the good no matter how bad, who, after Callam, had driven up from Canberra and stayed with them for months. She was still there in February when Steph came home late and dishevelled, knees scraped, her new school uniform stained with dirt and gravel dust. Steph ignored Gran’s pent-up worry, she couldn’t tell Gran where she’d been. Somehow Gran knew not to ask. Throw your uniform in the laundry, love; I’ll rinse it out tonight, she said, then went back to cooking dinner.

  The place that all their lives she and Callam had been banned from going. She’d walked there after school, the streets, cars, shimmering with summer heat. She’d climbed through the gap in the fence as her brother had done, crouched at the edge of the stormwater drain. Heat pulsed from the cement. He was always up for a dare. She’d never have had the guts to leap across a chasm of slippery drain. Steph forced herself to look, to see her brother teeter, water coursing at his feet. If he hadn’t turned to face his friends, if he hadn’t been distracted by their awe.

  Steph crawled in through the tunnel of the drain. Gravel pierced her knees. She gave no care to her school skirt or new leather shoes. The air in the shadows felt cool. Steph was beneath the road, encircled by concrete, engulfed by a fresco of graffiti. She shivered in concert with the tremors from cars passing above. She moved toward the beam of daylight, tracing her brother’s last moments of life. The torrent of silty water that would have carried and jostled. A ride that tore at skin and battered limbs. Steph breathed his struggle for air.

  She reached the crisscross of light, the two of them together now, escape blocked by a grate bolted and padlocked. She was no longer in or of herself, separate from fear, from grief, a sister looking down at the build-up of dust and filth, cans and syringes, a rag of underwear. And there, within her reach, a desiccated bird, the wing bent back, its head and neck jammed through the lattice of steel.

  16

  ‘Watch it,’ a voice cautioned. Steph pulled back from the kerb as cars swished by. The lunch hour glared with traffic and fumes and sharp grating sounds. She had woken at dawn at Maatsuyker. Now, standing in a crowd at traffic lights, Hobart felt alien.

  Everyone around her maintained a certain space but still Steph felt squeezed and jostled by the proximity of people. City workers waited with intent, their eyes set ahead. She watched a guy on a bike, a faded backpack slung over his suit, one hand on the handlebars, checking back for traffic as he snaked across the lanes. The Walk sign rat-tat-tatted. Steph joined in the line of shuffling feet and tight sombre faces. She melded into the congregation of students that moved to a silent dirge along the footpath to the steps of the exam hall.

  Steph clung to the thought, as she walked the aisle of the hall and took her place among the screech of chairs, that by lunchtime her first exam would be over and then there was nothing anyone could do to change the outcome.

  She used every minute of the allocated time and still she didn’t finish all the questions.

  Afterwards, Michelle, the ranger from the Parks office, drove Steph through the city, pointing out bus stops and landmarks on the way to Mum’s old boarding school. Steph would board there for the week of the exams.

  She spent the afternoon at the school library with other boarders, everybody cramming. Her brain physically ached. She drifted, reading the same passage of text without digesting the meanings. She felt displaced, disembodied, on the verge of nausea. She took an audible breath, took a walk outside. Back on Maatsuyker, they’d have finished the resupply. There’d be mail waiting, gifts for Christmas, fresh fruit and groceries ordered from the supermarket. There’d be treats, her mother had promised. She’d stood at the helipad teary-eyed and clasping Steph like she was leaving for a year, not five days, saying how it wasn’t right that she, her mother, couldn’t go as well. We can’t leave one person alone on the island, Michelle said kindly. Dad squeezed Mum’s shoulder. Steph’s a big girl. She’ll be okay.

  Too big for her boots, thinking she could manage Year 11 and 12 studies in the same year, and nail her Higher School Certificate. Earth and Environmental Science—she hadn’t read the last two chapters of the book.

  The boarders’ dining room felt warm and airy, not the spartan hall her mother recalled for her. Boys and girls her age filled the tables near the window, younger groups congregated according to their age. Steph sat with a small girl at the only empty table. ‘Are you new?’ the younger girl asked.

  ‘I’m just here this week. Exams.’

  The girl nodded knowingly. ‘Everyone’s going home at the weekend. The little kids have left already.’

  She looked so small herself. ‘When do you go home?’

  She counted with her fingers. ‘Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Mum’s driving down to pick me up.’ Her name was Marcie, a chatterer, and though she was small she ate a mountain of mashed potato. Marcie slowed at the other vegetables, nailing one at a time with her fork, peas inadvertently pinging off her plate. ‘Are you the girl that lives in the lighthouse?’

  ‘Beside the lighthouse. It’s just me and my parents on the island.’

  ‘I’ve seen a lighthouse but I’ve never actually been inside a lighthouse. Does it shake in the wind?’

  ‘Not at all. It hums when the wind blows. Sometimes it sings.’

  Marcie blinked. She picked at the remaining peas with her fingers.

  Steph stood in line to rinse her dishes and stack them in the dishwasher. A duty team of students wiped tables clean, put the food away.

  Silent study time began at seven. The dining and common ro
oms transformed into workstations for Year 7s, 8s and 9s. Marcie waved to Steph from the far table and put on a tortured face. The residence supervisor, mug of tea in hand, moved between the two study rooms. Year 11s and 12s, he explained to Steph, had the option of studying in their rooms.

  Steph moved past student rooms, moons of light spilling beneath the line of doors. She passed through the deserted foyer and felt looked upon by decades of bygone boarders whose framed photographs covered every wall. She trailed back through photos and years until she found her mother’s era. Steph had to trawl through printed names to recognise her. She looked as small and sweet as Marcie, swamped by a uniform large enough to see her through.

  Steph moved out into the courtyard and sat at a bench in the shadow of the light. The air around her feet felt cold. She checked her mobile, brightening at the promise of a message. Telstra: a reminder that her phone plan had expired.

  Steph had been allocated a bedroom in the Nan Chauncy wing. Heated air pumped through the vent. She clicked on the bedside lamp, threw off her jumper. The room was cheerful enough, a bright doona cover and curtains, a desk and work chair. But the window was permanently sealed—there was no escape from manufactured air. A boarding school did its best, Steph supposed, but here you were watched over, wound in a swaddling of sign-in sign-out safety and parent-endorsed care that, for all its good intentions, offered a hollow imitation of home. She thought of Marcie, counting down the days until home—Steph’s mother would have been no different, she had lived for the promise of Maatsuyker, school holidays scudding by like a storm front of clouds.

  Steph unpacked her bag. Between the layers of clothes she found a sprig of tea-tree Mum had wrapped in kitchen paper. It smelled of Maatsuyker. It smelled of fresh salt air. Steph laid it on the bedside table. She changed into a T-shirt for sleeping. The sheets felt stiff, stamped at the edge with the name of the school. All the hopes my mother had by sending me off to school, Steph’s mother once told her. And all the time I couldn’t wait to finish. Then after Dad died, I didn’t care about a career, what work I did. All I could think of was leaving home, going somewhere new. At seventeen Gretchen had moved from her home in Melbourne to Sydney, hardly older than Steph was now. Her mother hadn’t known anyone. She’d worked as a receptionist then met and married Steph’s dad. Her mother was beautiful. She was brave.

  Steph’s eyes felt gritty. She fought to finish the chapters from her textbook. Twenty past ten. Perhaps it was enough to get her through. It wasn’t. She propped the pillows, blinked herself awake and leafed through her notes, through doodled arches and whorls running down the margins that brought to mind the lighthouse glass. Steph still hadn’t confessed to her mother that she wasn’t going to do medicine. If she didn’t pass at all, what would she be qualified to do?

  She thought of Tom, loyal to his brother as she had been to Callam, trapped in a job he didn’t like. Steph wished she hadn’t jeopardised her chances. They weren’t so different, she and Tom: their futures teetered on the knife edge of other people’s expectations.

  She opened the curtains, she set her phone alarm early, to study, knowing she would wake an hour before, conditioned as she was to get up for the early morning weather.

  She tried to block out the strident noises of the street, cover them with wind squealing up the hill and buffeting the house, with mutton-birds calling and cooing, settling down into their burrows for the night. She masked her eyes from the headlights of passing cars and searched for a single beam of light sweeping past the window. The room smelled of disinfectant. Steph pushed back all but the sheet, kicked it loose around her feet. She turned her back on the heated room, flushed by the weight of three more exams, her head pounding with facts and numbers and the lifeless cloying air.

  *

  A group of girls squealed and hugged. Two boys perched at the hall steps like groomsmen at a wedding, high-fiving each student as they emerged from the final exam. A stranger patted Steph’s back. ‘Well done.’ She felt vacant and stunned from concentration, but she turned and smiled, the thrill and relief and all these happy faces contagious as she made her way to the street. It was over! The kerb had turned into a taxi rank of parents’ cars, eyes searching expectantly, an arm beckoning, a mother clasping her daughter, a father ruffling his tall boy’s hair. A shimmer of goodwill radiated from the crowded square. The prospect of summer holidays rose like a weather balloon.

  Students peeled away. You could sense the buoyancy in the way people walked and talked and how riffles of laughter split the air. Even those leaving on their own punched trills of numbers into mobile phones, backpacks bobbing down the street.

  Steph made her way down to the water. She was off to Salamanca to eat lunch, to window shop, to celebrate. She’d find a public phone and call her parents. She had some money to phone her friends at home.

  A refrigerator truck pulsed a warning as it inched back toward the edge of the wharf. Below, men from a cray boat hauled up heavy crates. Steph recognised two blue boats tethered side by side. Here, at the fringe of this small city, the rainbow of coloured hulls clashed with the image of vessels pitching and tossing through cascades of spray. Pockets of conversation from tourists glanced through the air, some in different languages. Passers-by slowed to inspect the flotilla of working boats, to photograph handmade craypots and cages crammed with fishing nets and buoys—mementoes from an ocean that in this tranquil setting gave no clue of hard-bitten lives. Steph’s focus sharpened on the curve of red, the white of the wheelhouse: the Perlita Lee was tied up to a second wharf beyond.

  Tom wore white rubber boots, an old T-shirt and jeans. Steph waited on the wharf as he finished hosing down the deck. He clambered up. He still hadn’t seen her. He stood at the tap gazing up toward the mountain. She covered his eyes. ‘Guess who?’

  Tom turned. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘I was thinking about you. Right then. I didn’t think I’d see you again.’

  ‘Had enough of me?’

  ‘I meant after last time. I meant—what are you doing in town? How long are you here?’

  ‘I’ve just finished exams. I’m hitching a helicopter ride back with the Tasmar Radio guys. Tomorrow.’

  ‘When tomorrow?’

  ‘Early, if the weather holds.’

  ‘Are your parents here?’

  ‘Just me. I’m staying at Mum’s old school.’

  ‘We just got in last night,’ Tom said. He looked dazed to see her.

  ‘Lots of crayfish?’

  He gave a wry smile. ‘Never enough, according to Frank.’

  Steph looked about. ‘It feels a bit strange.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being here instead of there. With you.’

  ‘Can you wait?’ he said. ‘While I finish up?’

  ‘I’m totally free.’

  ‘No hot dates?’

  ‘Never know your chances in the big city.’

  He beamed at her. ‘Would you still let me cook for you?’

  Steph affected casual disinterest. ‘Depends what’s on offer.’

  ‘Wood-fired pizza? Tom’s Garden Restaurant.’

  ‘I’d need to phone my parents. The school won’t let me out without a leave pass.’

  Tom helped her down onto the boat. ‘Mum’s in Melbourne for the week.’

  No need to tell her parents that.

  17

  Tom watched Stephanie fold her arms around a small freckled girl with red plaits, huddled on the front step of the boarders’ house. ‘You sure you’ll be okay, Marcie?’ she said gently. The girl nodded. She’d been crying.

  Stephanie got into his car. As they drove away she turned back and waved. ‘Is she all right?’ Tom said. ‘Does she need a lift?’

  ‘She was meant to go home today. There’s some trouble with her parents and now Marcie doesn’t know when they’re coming to get her.’

  He’d driven Stephanie home from town two hours before, then dashed home to shower and change and shop for dinner. In those
two hours she’d changed into someone older. Her legs looked longer in tight jeans. She wore makeup and earrings, she looked different with her hair tied up—she looked much like her mother.

  Perhaps it was the change in pitch from afternoon to evening—colour speared across the sky—that made Tom feel alive with promise. They’d spent the afternoon along the waterfront walking, talking; he’d blinked himself back into being when she’d pointed to yachts sailing on the water, a dog wading in the shallows, barking at the seagulls. Tom had been locked in a bubble of disbelief that she was there beside him, talking and laughing, her fingers snagged in the belt loop of his jeans as if nothing, nothing at all, had shifted in the way she felt toward him. They’d danced around talk of the boat; he hadn’t mentioned Frank and she hadn’t asked. Now, here in the car, the night sky charged with indigo, Tom felt renewed, a second chance that glistened like a cliff face after rain. ‘How long do you have?’

  ‘My leave pass expires at midnight.’

  ‘Cinderella,’ he said. The sky was clear, the forecast good. Tom spoke to make conversation. ‘How’s it looking for the morning?’ He’d already checked the weather. He already knew the answer.

  ‘They rang just now. Seven-thirty at the heli place.’

  ‘Ships in the night, you and me.’

  She kissed his hand. ‘There’ll be a next time.’

  ‘Can I drive you out there?’

  ‘Really? You want to get up that early?’

  ‘I’m awake at four. Once a fisherman—’ He stopped. Every word counted. Everything felt breakable. Beneath his skin Tom felt bruised and weatherworn. It was more than the physical aftermath of heaving across an ocean, growing wet and cold then thawing out with a deck shower whose water never grew hot enough. Putting on the least rank of your work clothes. Tom was tired of crap tinned soup, he was tired of baiting and stripping and shooting pots. Baiting them again. A kind of fatigue that went beyond flesh and bone: it came from tight-lipped days and restless nights of trying to withstand the final stretch with Frank.