Wildlight

by Robyn Mundy

  They hadn’t talked on the way out to the airport, not with Marcie in the car. She’d felt Tom’s upset—his hurt at Marcie being there, a wedge between them that insured nothing could be said. Perhaps that was why she’d asked the smaller girl. No. Steph had wanted to protect her, had wanted to do something decent and nice and kind. She’d tried to give Tom’s jacket back; he’d insisted that she keep it. But it’s yours, she’d said. He’d pleaded. I want you to wear it. She’d kissed him the way you would to be polite, to thank someone for their help. Marcie had taken to Tom, hugged him like a favourite brother. Now Marcie waited by the helicopter, looking anxious. ‘She thinks you’re mad at her,’ Steph said to her parents. ‘She thinks you’ll send her home.’

  ‘It’s okay, darling,’ Mum called. She drew Steph and Dad together. ‘For better or for worse, Marcie’s here now. She’s in our care and by tonight she’ll be back in town, safe and sound.’

  Dad shrugged in abdication. ‘I have to help the men.’ He strode away to the truck.

  Mum turned into protective dove, her wing folded around Marcie’s shoulder. ‘How about we take you down to the house and get you settled in? Then you and Stephanie can go exploring while I rustle up some morning tea. You like Anzac biscuits?’

  Steph changed into her favourite old shirt and jeans. The smell of Omo, sea air. Wood smoke lingered about Tom’s jacket. Steph resisted the urge to look through the box of mail.

  She did her best to be cheerful and sociable when all she wanted was to curl up in the lighthouse and be alone. She showed Marcie the weather station, checked through the week’s entries made in her absence. Steph pointed out the Mewstone, the Needles. ‘Big pointy stepping stones across the sea,’ said Marcie. Marcie followed along the path, running and leaping, too short to reach the branches of the arbour. Encircling them, embracing them, a living garland wound with tea-tree white and coastal daisy, the bush bejewelled with bells and berries. The air felt cool, alive with birdsong, the drone of insects muddled on nectar.

  Marcie gazed upon the lighthouse. She broke into a squeal. ‘This is just about the best lighthouse ever.’

  Steph opened the lower doors. ‘How many have you been to?’

  ‘Just this one.’

  Steph showed Marcie the canisters. ‘From the light-keeping days. Only one of them still has a signal flag inside. Want to guess?’

  Marcie studied them. She shook the M, the S, the A. She reached for Z. ‘This one.’ She prised open the lid and pulled out the flag.

  ‘Z for Zulu,’ Steph explained.

  They climbed the steps; Marcie stopped at each floor to stand on her toes and peer through the narrow clouded windows. She ran her fingers along lintels gritty with loose mortar. She wiggled her nose. ‘It smells a bit funny.’

  ‘Mould. You get used to it.’

  She stopped at the old kerosene lanterns. ‘We have some like these in the shed.’

  ‘They used them in the old days, in case the light broke down. My grandfather was the light keeper back then.’

  ‘I don’t have a grandfather any more.’

  ‘Nor me. Just Gran. My dad’s mother.’

  Steph gripped Marcie’s hand as they circled the balcony. If Marcie blew away Steph would never hear the end of it. Wind parted the line of tussocks along the cliff edge, laid them flat like crowns of hair, russet and blonde, silky as a pelt. How the island had changed in the space of a week.

  ‘Look. Way out there.’ Marcie pointed.

  Far out past the Needles a bulk carrier ploughed westward. It was only the second big ship Steph had seen. ‘They must have passed by all the time in the old days.’

  ‘Do you think they can see us?’

  ‘With binoculars. If they’re looking this way. At night-time, in the lighthouse days, the ships could see the light all the way from the horizon.’

  ‘Could they see the light from Hobart?’

  ‘Maatsuyker’s too far around the corner.’

  ‘I’m going to be a lighthouse keeper.’

  Mum arrived laden with a basket, a thermos, the old grey blanket. They sat on the lawn shielded from the wind. ‘I spoke to your father, Marcie.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘He was a bit shocked at the thought of you flying off in a helicopter to a remote island. We had a good talk. He’s going to call the school and let them know you’re here. He’s driving down tomorrow to pick you up.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Marcie said. ‘Am I in trouble?’

  ‘No, pet. He just wants to make sure you’re safe. That you’re okay.’

  ‘See?’ Steph said. ‘I knew it wouldn’t be an issue.’ Her mother gave a don’t push your luck look. ‘What’s Dad doing?’

  ‘They’re working on the VHF. Installing a bigger aerial.’ Her mother laid out mugs and a container of milk, a tin of homemade biscuits. ‘It isn’t until we have visitors,’ Mum said, ‘that I see how rundown the place looks. We had a Heritage woman over at resupply recording the cracks in the walls, photographing the plaster. Decrepitude was the word of the day. I couldn’t help feeling a little insulted, as if I hadn’t cared for the place properly.’

  ‘What do they expect?’ Steph said. ‘A house as old as ours is bound to have a few scars and wrinkles. It’s still a great house.’

  Mum blinked. She shook her head at Steph. ‘Who are you? And what have you done with my daughter?’

  ‘I love old houses,’ Marcie said. ‘They have a certain atmosphere.’

  ‘It’s not as if I don’t keep it clean,’ Mum appealed.

  ‘Is there any sugar?’ Marcie asked.

  ‘Steph, can you run up for me?’

  ‘I can get it,’ Marcie offered.

  Steph laid out on the blanket, closed her eyes. ‘Is everything okay?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ She nodded.

  ‘You seem . . . distant.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Did you enjoy Hobart?’

  ‘It was okay.’

  ‘How’s Tom?’

  Steph sighed. ‘Can we talk about something else?’

  ‘All right,’ her mother said. ‘How were exams?’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Then you tell me what I can talk about.’

  ‘How was it here this week?’

  ‘The big flurry of resupply day; after that it seemed extra quiet, just Dad and I rattling around.’

  ‘Who did the weather?’

  ‘We started out doing it together but we could never agree on the clouds, the heights. Dad, bless him, did the early morning shifts and I did the afternoons.’

  ‘I can do the weather now. I want to get back into it.’

  ‘Time’s moving fast,’ Mum said. ‘December, January, then it’s all over.’

  Steph had spent the first month counting off the days. ‘Do you think about Callam?’

  ‘Every day,’ Mum said. She was quiet for a while. ‘You spend your whole time on an island looking out to sea. It’s a kind of meditation. Perhaps what you’re really facing is yourself. I always want to remember, but I want to feel good. I want to feel . . . alive again.’

  She hadn’t said that before. Her mother sat up, stretched her arms; she took a deep breath. ‘I started yoga this week.’

  ‘You haven’t done anything since . . . Callam.’

  ‘It’s a long time since Callam.’

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I won’t get into medicine.’

  ‘You can’t know that. You always do well. It will be another month before you get your results.’

  As good a time as any. ‘Even if I did get in, which I won’t, I don’t want to do medicine.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘I said I would to make you happy. It was your dream. Not mine.’

  Her mother pulled at bits of grass. ‘This isn’t about me. It’s not my life. I’d be unhappy if you did something you didn’t want to do just to please me.’

  Marcie boun
ded around the bend, clasping an eggcup. She skidded on the blanket in a scattering of sugar crystals. ‘Never mind,’ Mum said to Marcie. ‘Isn’t it meant to be good luck, spilled sugar? Or maybe it’s salt. We’ll salvage what we can; the wind will scoop up the rest.’

  There was something timeless about sitting in the shelter of the lighthouse on an old army blanket, dunking Anzacs in a mug of tea. Mum and Marcie chatted, seals bleated, the underlying rumble of an ocean that pushed and pulled and dumped itself against the rocks below. ‘Did your mum say why?’ Mum asked Marcie. Steph tuned in.

  ‘She says it’s lonely and boring and all Dad does is work. She wants to move to the mainland but Dad doesn’t want to sell the farm. I love the farm. What will happen to me if Mum leaves?’

  ‘Well,’ Mum said, searching for an answer.

  ‘What if neither of them want me?’

  Mum shook her head. ‘My guess is your parents need some time to work things out between them. But I can assure you, they’ll both still want you. You’re their little girl. How they feel about you won’t ever change, no matter what.’

  ‘Listen,’ Steph said. She closed her eyes. She heard the lighthouse breathe.

  ‘It’s humming,’ Marcie said. ‘It’s humming like you said.’

  ‘It takes me back to Dad up on the catwalk,’ said Mum, ‘polishing the glass.’

  ‘Was it brilliant? The lighthouse and your own island and everything?’

  ‘It was special. The hardest thing was going back to school.’ Her mother turned to Steph. ‘Your grandmother wanted me to have a proper school education. So I’d have choices. Not that I ever made proper use of them.’ Her mother collected up the mugs. ‘Then it all came crashing to an end. I didn’t even know my parents were leaving until I came down to the island for Easter. They weren’t told until a few days before.’

  ‘Why?’ Steph asked. ‘Why was it so sudden?’

  Her mother sighed. ‘It was complicated.’ She put the mugs on the tray. ‘It broke my heart for Dad. It was more than a job, it was his whole identity. It was that way for all the men—they worshipped the lights. And now it’s gone. Everything automated.’ Mum turned her gaze out across the sea.

  ‘Only the ocean stays the same,’ Steph said. Her mother looked at her enquiringly.

  Mum took the basket. Marcie followed up the path with the empty thermos. Steph gripped the corners of the blanket. It caught the breeze; it tugged and yanked against her hold. Part of her wanted to carry it up the lighthouse stairs and free it from the balcony. Callam and Grandfather would be All Aboard, wheeling off at breakneck speed toward the Mewstone. Steph reined in the corners of the blanket and turned toward the house.

  *

  She stepped into a warm sea of fruity bubbles, wedged her feet against the foot of the bath. The helicopter would be back in Hobart. Right now Tom should be driving Marcie home. Steph reached for the pages on the floor and reread Tessa and Sammie’s letters delivered with the resupply. She tried to concentrate on events and parties and names, a score of make-ups and break-ups. She’d forgotten how intense Tessa could be. The most horrendous evening of my entire life. And now he wants to go out with me again!!!! Sammie had a boyfriend. Daniel Satterley. Six months ago Sammie loathed Daniel. I don’t know how you bear it down there, Tessa wrote. Poor Stephie, Sammie drew a sad face. The edges of the paper were tissue limp from steam and water. Steph let them drop to the floor. The window looked out across ocean to South West Cape, a taper of hills that marked the corner of Tasmania. Mutton-birds rafted on the ocean in steely evening light. Fishing boats were on the move, their pinpoints of light like lantern fish across a watery expanse.

  Steph studied the curves and angles of her body, her legs and feet, her faded tan, templates of milky skin that never saw the sun. Her body was changed, inscribed with adult meaning. It could never go back to being what it was before last night. In something found, a part of her was lost.

  The water, thick and warm, enveloped her breasts and shoulders, coated her arms in warmth. She closed her eyes and sunk into Tom, to the feel of his skin against hers. She let the water envelop her head, felt a swirl of hair across her face. She listened to the drumming in her ears that pulsed like the heartbeat of an ocean.

  She had moved through the day separate from herself. Not until the final minutes, at the helipad, Mum hugging Marcie goodbye, Dad shaking the pilot’s hand, All the best for Christmas and New Year, had Steph been jolted into action. A scrap of yellow graph paper from the glove box of the truck. A chewed tradesmen’s pencil. Come for New Year’s—it’s my birthday. Righteous stands were no match for the forces of your heart.

  The message looked last minute, throwaway. For Tom, she’d scratched in pencil and folded it around a sprig of tea-tree. A line thrown out. She placed it in the pocket of Tom’s jacket. Closed the zip. Passed the jacket to Marcie. ‘Can you give this back to Tom? Tell him to check his pockets.’

  Marcie hugged Steph. ‘I wish I could stay. I wish I lived here.’

  ‘I wish you could stay.’ Marcie climbed into the back seat. Steph helped her with her seatbelt. She bundled Tom’s jacket at her feet. ‘You’ll tell Tom what I said?’

  ‘Cross my heart.’

  19

  Halfway through December, supposedly summer, yet fog blanketed the island, the pall unrelenting. Her father had gone to bed early. It was Steph and Mum in the living room assembling a jigsaw from a box held together with yellowed sticky tape, bits of draft horse and windmill mixed in from other ancient puzzles.

  A thud from a mutton-bird hitting the porch roof. In the fog, the landmarks that guided the way to their burrows now stood as unforgiving obstacles.

  ‘There must be something we can do,’ Steph said.

  ‘What?’ Her mother shrugged. ‘Birds, people, boats—we all bow to the weather. It’s the light and dark of being at this place. You plant yourself on the edge of an ocean and you see how startling nature is, that it’s fierce and beautiful—totally indiscriminate.’

  ‘Was it nature that got Callam?’

  Mum closed her eyes. Her breath came out like wind fluttering a sail. ‘It was Callam being Callam. A precious silly boy who’d lost his way. Who made a terrible mistake.’ Mum wiped her nose with her sleeve. ‘I loved him,’ she said. ‘God knows he drove me round the twist.’

  ‘Callam?’

  Mum kissed Steph’s forehead. ‘I know I don’t always get it right. But I thank the stars for you. Truly.’ Steph couldn’t speak. She pushed back tears. Her mother cleared the coffee cups. ‘I’m off to bed. You’ll switch off the Christmas lights?’

  ‘Mum.’ Steph wanted her to stay. To talk some more. ‘A woman phoned.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Ages ago.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Cathy someone. She knew you from Maatsuyker, when you were growing up.’

  ‘Cathy Smithies?’

  ‘She said something. About Grandfather.’

  Her mother looked wary. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That it was a shame what happened to him. That none of the light keepers were angels.’

  Her mother shook her head. ‘I don’t know what she was on about.’ She looked upset. ‘Cathy Smithies hardly knew us. What was she thinking speaking to you like that?’

  ‘I wish you’d tell me the truth. I’m not a child that needs protecting.’

  Her mother set down the cups. She looked at Steph. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Why they had to leave. What he did.’

  ‘I was only fifteen,’ her mother said. ‘I don’t know all the ins and outs of it. There was tension between the families, the keepers. You could feel it. Mum and the other mothers used to take turns visiting one another’s quarters for afternoon tea. All of a sudden it stopped. Mum wouldn’t talk about it. She’d say she was too busy for cups of tea.’

  Steph waited, to see what else she knew.

  ‘I came down on the supply boat that Easter and there was a new ma
n aboard. We chatted on the way down, he asked about the island, what Dad did. I was so naive. He was Dad’s replacement. Dad and Mum were waiting at the landing ramp with all our boxes packed.’

  ‘Did you find out why?’

  ‘I can guess why,’ her mother said sadly. ‘Dad had a drinking problem.’ Steph was thrown. The bottles of rum her mother had found in the roof. ‘He’d missed one of his shifts. One shift and they claimed he wasn’t doing his job properly. They gave him three days’ notice. For a lifetime of service.’

  Drinking? Steph thought about the plaque. Adulterer, scratched across his name. ‘Was there more to it? The dismissal?’

  Mum blinked, confused by the question. ‘Not to my knowledge. Isn’t that enough?’

  Steph went to speak. She stopped. Her mother didn’t know. But this wasn’t Callam, where speaking out might help, might change the course of things. Who would it serve? Whatever had happened was long ago, her mother still a girl, privy to her father’s drinking; protected, perhaps, from other adult things. Steph backtracked. ‘You always said you had the perfect growing up.’

  ‘I did.’ Mum sounded defensive. ‘I adored my father. He always seemed larger than life, boisterous and happy, always playing pranks and showing off.’ The man Callam would have become. Her mother’s gaze shifted to somewhere in the past. ‘Dad would infuriate my mother. Not me. I’d get a stitch from laughing.’ She gave Steph a sad smile. ‘When you’re a child, so long as you’re safe and loved, the details don’t matter. I wouldn’t have swapped my father, or my time on Maat, for all the riches in the world.’ The cups clanged when she picked them up. She stopped at the kitchen door. ‘I never liked that Cathy Smithies. My father did his job as well as anyone. Better.’

  Her mother came back from the kitchen.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It makes him seem more real.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

  Her mother kissed her. ‘No, they’re not. Far from it. Goodnight, my love. Don’t forget the Christmas lights.’