by Robyn Mundy
Tom wouldn’t lower himself to object. He yanked at the dodgy zip to get it loose and placed the jacket on the seat. Through his flannel shirt the air felt sharp. The fishing knife, a gift inscribed to Tom from Frank, hung from Tom’s belt inside its orange sheath. Stuff it. ‘Take your knife back as well,’ he said to Frank. ‘Scratch out my name and cut your own miserable ropes.’
Mist opened to a stretch of sand, the bush behind the beach lustred with wet. Frank pushed the outboard into neutral and coasted in. They were fifteen, twenty metres from shore, the ocean side of the drop-off, the water still deep.
Tom hoisted his pack high on his shoulders, tightened the straps. He watched the water change colour, shallowing to frills.
Frank caught his eye. You get out, Tom, you’re no longer my brother.
You watch me, Frank.
Tom kicked off his gumboots and stuffed his socks inside; he wedged the boots beneath his arm. He hoicked his legs over the side, felt the boat keel. He slid free, the shock of cold ripping through denim to skin, water tipping his waist.
Tom gripped the gunnel of the boat to steady himself. He wanted to say something big, but Frank had the outboard in reverse and was turned the other way, backing over the drop-off to circle out. Tom balanced his pack on his head, the wash from the dinghy lapping cold against his chest.
He waded in toward the beach, moving slowly so as not to falter. Tom stopped and turned seaward to look but the outline of the dinghy had dissolved into fog. The atmosphere dampened the outboard’s drone.
Tom rolled off sodden jeans and carried them up the beach to where the sand felt fine and squeaky underfoot. Fog had swallowed all but the beach line of ocean. He felt wet, shivery with cold, but he sat on the sand in his underwear and shirt. He waited and looked out at the fog. The call of gulls, dotterels running across the sand, a pair of oystercatchers pecked amongst tossed weed. From somewhere behind him the cawing of a currawong. No whirring of an outboard engine returning to collect him. Soon it would be nightfall.
Tom rubbed his legs to keep his breathing steady but a sound escaped his lungs. He couldn’t hold it in. He was back on the side of the road, a worthless nuisance kid, a set of tail-lights blurring in the distance, tears spilling, a hank of snot hanging from his nose. Tom huddled at the edge of nowhere, a long way from home.
22
A duet of oystercatchers tottered along the water’s edge. Sunshine. Waterbirds. From the beach of New Harbour, Maatsuyker shimmered as a mirage, the island hovering above the ocean, the lighthouse distorted and magnified, each of the cottages a spangling fortress in early morning sun. Nothing seemed fixed to Tom. Even the rocks at the entrance to the harbour looked to float. He couldn’t see around the corner to know if the Perlita Lee was still at anchor. Had Frank taken off before first light? Was he waiting until after breakfast? The tannin water of the river carved the beach in two and streamed out into ocean: Coca-Cola wavelets stretched along the shallows, capped with creaming foam. The bay looked like an ice-cream spider.
Tom had spent a cold fitful night, had downed a Mars Bar for his breakfast. Now in the sun he felt overcome with drowsiness. He lay down on his jacket on the beach, rested his arms across his eyes. He couldn’t still his mind. Don’t waste more time, the waves seemed to heckle upon the sand. No one’s coming back to get you.
*
Tom left the beach and scrambled up the steep track, over logs sopping with moss, the morning brightness dimmed by a canopy of leaves that dripped continually. The rainforest smelled lemony, a soggy crush of humus underfoot. Over the brow of the hill, banksias opened out to scrubland, the track eased to undulations, marked by rusting star pickets staked into the high points. Tom could no longer hear the ocean, only whispers of breeze and the rabble of braided streams—golden syrup water across porcelain gravel plates.
Tom stopped to drink. The thrumming of the stream and the babble in his head was Frank; he tried to block it out. The stretches of bog weren’t anywhere as bad as his brother claimed. The greater the distance Tom put between himself and the ocean the better he would feel.
He propelled himself on, marched through water and mud. With things set in motion he felt stronger and steady—even in gumboots he paced at a clip. He stopped to inspect a small burrowing crayfish resting in a puddle in the middle of the track—a creature miles from the ocean. It reared its claws when Tom knelt down to touch it.
Along the track he passed wombat droppings but no animals to be seen. There was hardly a bird—the only calls came from small knolls of trees. Away in the distance Tom saw where the skin of the bush had been scraped back to flesh: Melaleuca’s airstrip. At the next hill he could make out the windsock, pieces of machinery.
Tom halted at the junction. To his left an easy walk to Melaleuca: sit it out in the hiker’s hut and wait for a plane. To his right a track that wound for kilometres along the coast, through plains of button grass and over mountain ranges.
He knew what to do but still his feet refused, his boots defiant. Two hours to Melaleuca. By tonight he’d be home, showered, fed, asleep in a comfortable bed. Had he known it would come to this? He’d been trying to silence Frank’s abuse since leaving New Harbour. Too much of a chicken shit; you’d never manage on your own. Seven days, Frank had walked the South Coast Track. Maybe it was six. Tom couldn’t remember how much food he had stuffed into his pack. He had no fuel. No stove. He hadn’t proper footwear, only gumboots and his Blundstones. He had no tent or sleeping bag. Everything was stacked against him, but still he couldn’t will himself to move.
Something deep spoke back. You have a box of matches, spare socks, you’ve got your Gore-Tex jacket. Tom could find a length of fishing line, limpets from the rocks for bait, sleep beside a roaring fire.
Tom-Tom, listen to yourself. Without the proper gear? Go left, you dickhead. Admit defeat.
He was every bit as strong as Frank. He was good at making do. Tom’s heart drummed inside his chest. The South Coast Track: the tough way home. His feet took charge and strode out on a mission. He’d show his brother. He’d show them bloody all.
23
Steph rounded the corner of the house. Her mother was on the ladder, reaching up to clean the outside window. Dad was at the bottom. He looked upset. The phenomenal wind gusts from Monday’s storm had smashed across the island: branches down, bits of gutter swinging loose, windows opaque with a new crust of salt. None of that mattered. Steph was bursting to share her news.
‘Pass me up the other cloth, James.’
Dad’s voice cracked. ‘Months of loyal service when all he needs is some TLC. It isn’t right.’
‘Who needs TLC?’ Steph said. Mum gave her a beseeching don’t go there look.
Dad motioned to his lawn mower parked on the paddock. ‘They’re shipping Buster back to Hobart when we go. To use as parts. Sending a new one across.’
‘Poor old Buster.’ It was no good reminding her father that even a lawnmower with a name was an inanimate object. Wasn’t a new mower a good thing? Buster was always having some kind of hissy fit, though her father believed they shared a mutual understanding. I decide where we mow, Buster decides how.
‘I have an announcement,’ Steph said.
Mum clasped the cloth. ‘You’re in.’
‘They just phoned. ANU. The glass school. They offered me a place.’ Steph’s legs turned to jelly. She felt giddy. She rested against the wall of the house.
‘I knew they would,’ her mother said. ‘This is your time, sweetheart.’
‘Well done, Steph,’ Dad said wearily.
‘Dad. It’s good. Be happy for me.’
‘It’s tremendous news. Really. It’s going to be a different world. Isn’t it, Gretchen?’
‘I was saving the last bottle of champagne,’ her mother said. ‘We’ll have a toast tonight at dinner.’ She inspected the window. ‘At least you can see through it again.’
‘Until the next onslaught,’ her father grumbled, heading off to Buster w
ith a jerry can of fuel. Since the storm there was nothing anyone could do or say to console him. After months of work Dad had finally finished clearing the drain: two and a half kilometres, all by hand. He’d walked Steph and Mum the length of the road to show it off. Restored to its original tiptop condition. The drain ran twice as deep. Water burbled clear along its course. Nothing to hinder the flow. The whole way through. Right back to bedrock. He’d looked eager for Mum’s praise and she’d linked her arm through his in a way that seemed to Steph motherly and tender. Mum knew. For Callam, her mother said gently.
Dad patted her hand. That’s it. He grew teary. Our boy. We did a couple things right.
We did a lot of things right.
If her brother was looking down, if he did have a say in what happened that night, it seemed all the more vicious. The storm uprooted trees, felled them across the road, stripped buds and new leaves from the island’s two apple trees planted decades ago by the old light keepers. In a single night the sky dumped one hundred millimetres of rain across Maatsuyker Island. Steph understood now what it meant when people claimed they couldn’t hear themselves think. The squeal of moving air, the roof alive with rain, and what sounded like ball bearings continuously fired at the windows—the storm had overwhelmed all conscious thought.
In the daylight her mother’s crop of lettuces was splayed open, torn apart and splodged with dirt like war-field poppies. Tomato branches hung broken-boned and tattered; the stalks of spring onions and parsnips bowed down across a breadth of ruined garden bed, transformed into woven mats. Vines bearing snow peas were chewed into remnants and spat across the grass.
Every dip in the road dammed a reservoir of milky sludge. The immense run-off had unearthed soil, gushed down Maatsuyker’s slopes as unstoppable as the rain that fed it, stormwater amassing mud and guano, leaves and twigs, mutton-bird eggs, carcasses of birds, old bottles and tins, an amputee doll, a baby’s shoe, a vinyl tablecloth, a bicycle wheel—a delta of silt and debris that filled and clogged the drain. Dad had returned from surveying the carnage stooped and defeated.
The lighthouse still hadn’t dried from the deluge that had found its way in through leaking windows and the perished seals of doors, each floor cascading like a fountain. Steph had quite enjoyed being head of a human chain gang: she and her parents emptying buckets and sloshing in gumboots through calf-deep water.
The clean-up from the storm melded into final preparations for next week’s departure. Mum and Steph bleached and scrubbed walls free of mould; the weather office was ready with the next few months ruled up in the logbook, a graveyard of blowflies vacuumed to make way for a new generation. Mum re-cleaned windows. Dad mowed and brush cut. The big paddock was all that remained. Buster’s last stand.
*
The lemony needles of paperbark had paled and desiccated, falling about Steph’s hair and catching in her clothes as she ran from the end of the road back toward the lighthouse. She missed Tom. It made her sad, wishing for a second chance, wishing they could talk. He could have found a way to come for New Year’s Eve. Or called her on the radio. He’d made it clear that it was finished. Over and out.
The tea-tree flowers were blown, daisies past their best. Maatsuyker was reverting to a camouflage of green. This is your time, Mum had said. All that rain and still the fronds of bracken had shrivelled and browned, their once slender stalks now thick and woody with age. Christmas bells had lost their puff and shine, slowly deflating, the petals bruised and tattered from the storm. Steph stopped at the creek that ran through a culvert beneath the road. She stopped here each time she passed, searching for a pair of robins that hadn’t shown themselves for weeks. Had the storm claimed them too? A small plane droned low in the sky, following a triangle along the coast to South West Cape, across to Maatsuyker Island, back in toward the mainland. It wasn’t the usual back and forth to Melaleuca, setting down hikers, flying back to Hobart. Three times Steph looked up and saw the plane cross overhead.
She climbed the lighthouse. She knew every footfall, the number of steps between floors; with eyes closed she could trace the filigree pattern of iron. She felt the chalky cold, the different textured surfaces—crumbling brick to her left, iron railing to the right. She tied the top door open. Above on the hill, Dad and Buster ploughed across the final strip of paddock, stemming the wild. By the time the new caretakers arrived they would be greeted to the illusion of civilised order, not the wild swathe of unkempt grass that Steph loved, swollen with seed heads, buttered with dandelions, liquid in the breeze.
Steph sat on the balcony, her back against the wall. She would have settled in this spot a hundred times, scanning the curvature of ocean, soaking up the shrieks of birds and bleating from the seals. A wash of umber edged the Mewstone; soon the evening sun would turn as coppery as flame.
She caught a distant ruffle on the water. A whale? She tracked the movement as the mass sharpened and expanded, galloping out toward the Mewstone. Steph called to her father but her voice was lost against Buster’s; Dad looked hypnotised beneath his headphones. Steph took up binoculars, set her focus on the ocean. A great cavorting fleet of tails and fins carving through the silk. Dolphins. Adults and calves. Two hundred or more. Dad stopped and looked up to the lighthouse. Steph waved, she pointed. Something inside of her wanted to cry, Callam’s going past! But Dad wasn’t seeing. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief and resumed his procession with the lawnmower.
The mass moved away, a blur dissolving into ocean until the surface resettled to its evening sheen. Steph turned to Dad and Buster, their final march. Her father’s arms were taut, keeping Buster true to course. Steph watched her father slow and pull back on the gear lever before the final downhill slope. The motor whirred, impatient to devour the last unkempt stretch. Dad stood still, searching out toward the Mewstone, at the sliding sun, his face bronzed by precious-metal light. He turned to look back over his shoulder. He pushed back his headphones, gave the lawnmower a nudge, released his grip. Buster inched forward alone, grazing on a final feed of grass. He gathered speed. Steph waited for her father to walk after him, haul him in like an unruly child. But Buster gained momentum, trundling down the hill. Steph tried to call but her breath caught in her chest. Buster continued on, closing the distance to the cliff, bouncing harder and heavier through a track of green like a runaway cart. He met the edge, his motor stuttering; he careened out over nothingness, freewheeling and momentarily weightless. He dropped like a stone.
Steph listened for the crash, the moment of impact when Buster smacked into rock face or ocean, when he burst apart, dismantling himself into a catalogue of useful mower parts.
*
Mum popped the champagne. ‘Congratulations.’ A chink of glasses. Dad downed his in a mouthful. Between bursts of static, Tasmar Radio issued a special land forecast. Expected overnight . . . to five degrees along the coastal region . . . and Melaleuca. Intermittent showers in the . . . increasing . . . ‘We can do without that noise for one night.’ Mum turned off the radios. ‘Finish the mowing?’ She sat down at the table.
‘All finished.’ Her father shook the cask of red wine. ‘Rotgut,’ he said, and poured himself a giant glass.
Mum took the lid from the casserole dish. ‘If we do get delayed by weather I can tell you now I’m not cleaning the windows a third time. And you shouldn’t have to do any more mowing.’
‘He won’t have to worry about that,’ Steph said knowingly, but Dad refused to meet her eye. Chickpea and tinned corn curry. Again. All that was left in the pantry was a seemingly bottomless bucket of pulses, uninspiring tins, rolled oats, salt, a last bag of flour.
‘So,’ Dad said. ‘Canberra in February.’
‘I’ll be home for Easter. For holidays. I’ll have my driver’s licence.’ Plans were darting through Steph’s head. ‘Do you think Gran will let me use her car? She might. It depends. She’s funny about her car.’ She couldn’t stop talking. She was giddy on champagne. In a year she’d be eighteen. In ten m
ore days they’d be back in Sydney. Her mind halted. ‘What about you, Dad?’
‘Dad’s been talking to some of his colleagues,’ her mother said. ‘There’s an opening coming up.’
‘Your own show?’ It had always been her father’s dream.
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Her father sounded wry. ‘Producer for one of the Western Australian regional channels.’
The other side of the continent. Steph sat up. ‘Why not New South Wales?’
‘It’s a case of what’s available.’
Mum went to gather up the plates. ‘You don’t want more, Steph?’
‘What about us? What about home?’
‘That’s all weeks away,’ Mum said airily.
‘Have they offered you the job?’ Steph said to Dad.
‘Pretty much. Steph . . .’
Mum shot him a look.
‘She’s an adult, Gretchen.’ His teeth were stained claret red. He sounded tipsy. Mum took the plates away. Steph could see she was annoyed. ‘When we get back, I’ll shift over to the west, Mum will follow—we’ll put the house on the market.’
Her mother came back with a tea towel in her hand. ‘James, this isn’t how we planned. Not tonight.’
Steph looked from one to the other. ‘Why? Why now?’
Mum sat down. ‘We wanted to make sure you’d be settled before we made any final decisions.’
Steph felt stunned. ‘Do I get a say?’
Her father looked to her mother. ‘None of us do,’ he said. ‘It comes down to financial necessity. Simple as that.’
‘And you’ll be in Canberra, staying at Gran’s,’ Mum said. ‘You’ll just be coming home to somewhere new.’
‘The other side of the country?’
The phone rang in the kitchen. Dad looked at the time. ‘Perhaps it’s Gran.’ He closed the door behind him.
Steph slumped in her chair.
Her mother said firmly, ‘It’s a new beginning for all of us, Steph. Not just you.’