Wildlight

by Robyn Mundy

  Tom stretched along the back seats and slept the three hours into town. He woke groggy as the coach jerked forward, down Macquarie Street then around to the Davey Street lights. He propped himself to sitting at the sight of Constitution Dock, the Perlita Lee tied up in her usual berth. He didn’t want to think about his brother, he didn’t want to arrive home to Frank perched at the kitchen table with a stubby in his hand. He thought about his mother. She’d be worried sick.

  He and William walked from the bus stop, Tom weary and stiff-kneed, the old man’s hiking sticks still tapping out their rhythmic gait. Tom waited until William’s airport bus arrived, until the hiss of doors forged a clasp of hands and a clumsy hug. There was something tender and sad in William’s palm pressed against the glass as his bus drew away.

  Tom walked home from town. He breathed out when he rounded the corner to their street: Frank’s car wasn’t in the driveway. Tom unlocked the gate—his mother should have been home by now. Tom paced down the side of the house. He stopped at the garden—everything looked parched. He marched to the glasshouse. Withered blooms, sagged leaves; his mother’s African Violets, her pride and glory, dead.

  Tom unlocked the kitchen door. He called. He checked his mother’s room. Rosary beads, potpourri, Jesus in His rightful place, melting from His cross. The house smelled old and sad.

  Tom opened the bread bin and took out the few stale crusts. Lift your game, Mother. He inspected the fridge—the shelves almost bare. She must have snagged a cheap flight and gone to Melbourne to his aunt’s. Tom sniffed the carton of milk and drank what was left. He slathered peanut butter on the crusts and layered them with cheese. He opened the cupboard and pulled down a packet of biscotti. He changed his mind and imagined takeaway chicken and salted chips—a whole barbecued chicken—Tom could taste it. He threw his clothes in the laundry tub and ran the shower. The odd sensation of warm running water, the concentrated scent of soap. He found the nailbrush and cleaned a layer of grime from his hands and feet. He wrapped himself in a towel, trimmed his beard then shaved.

  He found his mother’s first-aid Tupperware box and returned to the mirror to re-dress his wound. All that remained of Frank was a single fluke of anchor. His shoulder no longer looked angry and inflamed. When Tom pressed on the wound it throbbed—something tender that if knocked or scraped could flare again—but somewhere on the track a healing had begun, though such an injury would never be expunged. Tom knew that for the remainder of his life a puckered scar, a broken anchor, would brand his skin to remind him of his choices: Tom Forrest would never let himself be entwined with anyone again.

  Tom dressed in shorts, a lightweight shirt to conceal the wound from his mother. The lemony smell of laundered clothes, the precision of her ironing. He walked into the living room. He halted. Cards on the mantlepiece as cluttered as Christmas. Cards with doves, butterflies, crosses and angels, mournful cards with lilies and roses. Blood drained from Tom’s brain. In Deepest Sympathy. Blessed Are They That Mourn. In Remembrance. At This Sad Time.

  Tom’s hands shook when he opened a card. Your beloved sons. He couldn’t focus. He fumbled. He opened another. Our deepest condolences on the tragic loss of Tom and Frank—Jeannie and John (Bluey) MacIntyre. Part of him wanted to laugh. Tom felt dizzy. Nothing made sense. He sat on the coffee table his mother forbade him from sitting on because it wouldn’t take his weight. A search party, William had said. South West Cape. South West Cape. Where Frank had dumped him. The click of the gate, familiar steps along the path. Tom tried to stand but his legs wouldn’t hold him. The back door, plastic shopping bags set upon the kitchen table. ‘Mum?’ Tom’s voice warbled. He sounded like a boy.

  She didn’t answer. Everything went still. He heard the ragged whimper, he heard her take a step. Tom breathed the tainted air that was different from the old stale grief that infiltrated curtains and elevated his father’s recliner to a monument of loss. Tom’s mind flicked to an image of Frank. He saw his brother turn the dinghy and not look back to Tom abandoned on New Harbour’s shore. The dinghy motoring out through fog, the sight and sound swallowed by the pall. No bearings. No GPS. No line of sight to lead his brother safely to the larger boat.

  The lounge room, the walls and curtains, a knitted sleeve unravelled from its needle—everything began to spin. Tom blinked, he pulled air into his lungs but he couldn’t slow the vortex in his head. His mother filled the doorway, her body stooped. She looked so frail. Her pale face a crumpling of fear, a giddy disbelief. He saw her close her eyes in communion with her Saviour. Then she gazed upon Tom with a look that caused his eyes to swim. Something precious and maternal, something raw and shameful passed between his mother and himself: if a lifetime of abiding faith had earned the chance for even one son to be spared, she had prayed that it be him.

  27

  2015

  The slide toward emptiness is upon her. ‘When will I see you?’ Steph asks, watching him dress. She knows this part, is attuned to the note that creeps into her voice, a neediness that has her lover pause. He studies her with measured patience. Acknowledgment, perhaps, of this small breach between them, the inevitable chafing that comes from talk about the future. In the lamplight his gaze seems parental. ‘I’ll call you.’ He leans down to the bed to kiss her, traces his thumb in a downward arc across her lips. ‘Soon.’

  Her. Him. Two years of this. Does it even rate as love?

  Steph hears the back door close, hears the key he keeps catch the lock. He parks in the darkened lane behind her condo. She waits for the engine to thrum. In minutes he’ll be merging with evening traffic on St Francis Drive. One more commuter heading home from Santa Fe.

  If he ever were to leave his wife, would Steph become the woman waiting?

  It isn’t meant to feel this way.

  *

  Steph paces the glass studio, her senses jarred by reflective noise as she readies herself for work. On these public open days the feel of the hot shop transforms from a foundry to a performance. She’s never been much good at theatre.

  Bryn, on the other hand, gathers up the microphone with gusto, looks to Steph to check that she’s ready. Bryn loves to talk. He knows glass. He is her oldest friend in Santa Fe.

  He roves the floor, Mister Affable chatting easily with art students and customers who visit the studio gallery and stay awhile to watch the co-op of glass artists at work. Five years they’ve been managing this studio.

  Her two assistants wear standard foundry attire: leather boots and shorts, faded black tops. With their tattoos and piercings they remind Steph of theatre nurse goths, anticipating the right instrument to pass her, where on the floor to stand without getting in her way. They may still be students but they’re on the same journey as she is, all apprentices to glass.

  Voices fall away. Bryn introduces Steph and her team. ‘Hot glass,’ she hears him say, ‘or glassblowing, as we often call it, is something of a misnomer for a craft in which very little actual blowing is required.’

  The piece she’s working on glimmers beside the bench, her drawing plans on show. The glass canes she’s made are lined together like a tin of colour pencils. People remark on her oceanic greens and blues—a hemisphere removed from New Mexico’s high-altitude juniper and pinyon, from arroyos milky with snowmelt.

  Bryn calls this unfinished piece her fisherwoman’s basket. Its woven twists and curves remind Steph of tea-tree: an arbor, a craypot. Oceans removed from this landlocked state.

  Bryn runs through the hot shop tools: jacks, pincers, diamond shears. He could be pointing out the workings of a forge. There’s nothing delicate or glamorous in the furnaces around her, in working in heat, her hands perpetually rough, stripes of skin scarred from burns.

  ‘This steel bench we call the marver, used for rolling the molten glass across its surface. The marver, rather than the blowpipe, is the precision tool for shaping glass. The top tool in the hot shop and by far the most difficult to master.’

  The other piece Steph has on displ
ay belies the effort and hours she’s put into it: hand-ground prisms and orbits that fit one into the other, planetary beneath the spotlight. She turns to begin, but something in the way those prisms spear light through the dark grips her mind and curls her in a wave. She’s sixteen again, standing beside the lighthouse lens, her whole life ahead of her. Island and ocean still pour through her glass.

  She takes a heated pipe and rests it on the furnace sill. Steadily, she rotates the pipe and angles it down. ‘Stephanie starts by gathering a measure of molten glass onto the end of the blowpipe. This we call the gather.’

  The liquid is as blinding as staring at the sun. Steph calculates the distance through dead reckoning and feel—a dipper touching honey. Down too far and the weight of molten glass will sit too high, lopsided on the pipe. Heat scorches her fingers. She wheels the pipe once, twice, through a viscous sea of glass. She tilts the far end of the pipe to raise it free. She turns the molten liquid bulbous at its end until spindly trails of glass fall free. ‘A step that may look quick and effortless but one that takes years to perfect.’ Steph paces carefully toward the bench, skirts around the bucket of pipes, her blowpipe angled to the floor. She readies to work the shape, craving the moment when consciousness of self will slide away and she can lose herself to glass.

  Bryn walks before the crowd. A spruiker, holding out a laden tray for all to see and touch. ‘Silica—this simple mineral we know of as sand—is the main ingredient of glass. We use a recipe of silica and chemical ingredients melted in the furnace at 2150° Fahrenheit. Add a mineral such as cobalt and what do we get? That’s right: blue glass. Gold? Red. Those of us in the hot shop still think of it as a special kind of alchemy.’

  A magic that has held Steph in its grip since her student days.

  These hours in the hot shop are all she can name to fill this strange persistent emptiness. At home on her own she’ll picture waking up with someone, walking together across the crowded plaza. In two years they’ve never sat together at a cafe over Sunday breakfast. Never held hands in public. Good things. Normal things. Not this worn-out swaddling of privacy she wraps around her—she’s lost track of the excuses she spins to friends.

  ‘Making a glass sculpture in the hot shop requires a team effort,’ Bryn says to the onlookers. ‘It takes trust, time and expertise.’ Steph pays her assistants a nod. Without their help, none of this would happen.

  Concentrate, Steph. Focus. The times she’s been seared when her thoughts dared to flutter.

  She turns the blowpipe in a steady motion, the gather rolling away across the marver, back, away. She hears Bryn, the musicality of his voice, she thinks about the email waiting in her inbox. A residency. Her old school in Canberra. An invitation she ought to seize. Her mistake was in telling Bryn when they opened up this morning.

  Name one thing to stop you, Bryn had snapped at her reluctance. It was out of character to see him exasperated with her. He shook his head at her silence. But what would I know? Why would you ever want to take up a marvellous opportunity when here in Santa Fe you have a douche bag with a wife and kid to make you perpetually anxious and unhappy?

  She’d felt her face flame. All this time he knew?

  Steph lifts the pipe, turns to make her way toward the glory hole. She catches Bryn—a flicker in his gaze she can’t interpret—and feels a sting that curves toward shame. She steps awkwardly, stumbles, she fails to right herself. Oof. Hard on a buttock amid a clatter of steel, a wounded cry from onlookers. The foundry spins. She feels drunk. What is wrong with her?

  Her assistants retrieve the pipe, the ruined molten glob. Bryn helps her to her feet. ‘Are you hurt? What happened?’

  She grips his hand. She doesn’t want to let it go. She’s exhausted by the woman she’s become.

  28

  Slack-jawed, panting, a life-loving grin that defines a border collie. Tom cups his dog’s chin and she blinks at him adoringly. ‘Zulu.’ He only has to say her name; she knows whose dog she is. He scratches her neck, her body propped against his legs. She balances on three paws, her fourth scratching stupidly at air, sharp little nails catching her side. ‘Shall we get the paper? Shall we, girl?’

  Tom loves the dawn. He savours this break-of-day ritual, he and Zulu pacing the gravel road—two kilometres from house to gate and back—a pot of coffee and breakfast on his deck with the paper and the call of birds.

  The road from his house looks down upon the elbow of the Camden River. A kayak rests on the old wooden landing, beside it a new outdoor setting and matching tan brolly—a step up from the old hand-me-down from William. Not tan, Tom corrects himself. Latte, he’s informed.

  Over the second rise a row of greenhouses and sheds set back from the road, vast to his own eye, a new dam semi-excavated. He’s done with seventy-hour weeks and years of scraping by, selling organic vegetables from a tin shed at his front gate, giving boxfuls away when all the time the reward stared him in the eye, finally coming into focus during a community college business course that his neighbour Annie coerced him into. It was such basic common sense it embarrasses Tom to think he’d been ready to wipe his hands and walk away. Value-adding. A mountain of overripe, blemished and unsold produce that no longer had to be discarded. Relish and chutney recipes, old-fashioned Tomato Sauce for Bottling that he found in a Country Women’s cookbook. Basic recipes, good unto themselves but that lacked an edge until sharpened with his own mix of herbs and spices: home-ground ras el hanout, baharat, an array of Moroccan and Turkish flavours from plants he’d learned to grow and harvest.

  If Tom had known back then all there was to see and learn, he could have made better choices. Frank might still be alive. Habib, unemployed, had urged him to leave, to find something new. He had helped Tom get Frank’s boat ready for sale, the boat keys handed to a sister-in-law Tom would never see again. Leave? He’d been trapped in no-man’s-land. For weeks he drifted without purpose or direction, trying to make sense of what had happened, reliving endless runs of the lead-up to his brother’s death. Tom’s head had pounded. He woke in the night heaving for air, wondering if this was his punishment. He couldn’t even face his mother’s garden. Finally he summoned the gumption to go down to the wharf. He hadn’t seen Bluey MacIntyre or others from the fleet since the funeral. All those fishermen Frank had been a prick to there at the church paying their respects.

  Bluey looked at the testimonial Tom had written: A1 Deck Hand. He gave Tom a look he couldn’t translate. I’m not here for me, Tom quickened to say. I don’t want anything for myself.

  Bluey read over it, said he’d speak with the others. Between them they’d find something for Hab. You? Bluey looked at him hard. What’s your next move?

  The way Bluey said it brought to mind a chess game, the big pieces sweeping across the board, the pawns shuffling one square at a time, next to no use but not to be trusted. He needed Bluey to know he had a clear path. A future of his making. The words spewed out from nowhere. I head off in a few weeks. Fresh start. Do it properly this time, he added.

  That same inexplicable look. Then a broad freckled hand. I wish you well, young fella. A handshake that gripped like a pardon.

  That it could be that swift and easy.

  Twenty years old with a backpack, a Lonely Planet guide and a taped-together map, through Spain to Tangier, Algiers, Tunisia, back up to Turkey, staying longer than intended with Habib’s cousins and cousins of cousins, sharing wash days and meals and special ceremonies. Tom hadn’t understood most of what they’d said, yet somehow the important stuff had been imparted. Tom soaked up hours in the kitchen with Habib’s elderly Nine who punched out flat bread at an impossible rate, who whacked his arm each time he got it wrong, whacked it harder when he finally got it right. Helping out, paying back, was a harder gig than fishing: months of three a.m. starts and in the field to pick produce for drying, the rest driven into market. Exotic patterns, hand-dyed robes, community and culture in forms he’d never been exposed to. He’d filled his days with work; le
ft no room to remember.

  *

  The sliding doors of his house catch the morning sun, an ultramodern Queenslander designed from corrugated iron and a wall of tinted glass, elevated on steel girders. Tom stands on the deck, pours the last slug of coffee. On a clear day, from the top of the hill, a half-moon of ocean shines back. From nothing to now, a life not so much planned as stumbled upon.

  He leaves his breakfast bowl in the sink, cleans his teeth. He can hear Zulu pacing outside, issuing small yelps. She knows the drill. On the front step every morning, c’mon girl, airborne and on the back tray, ears folded down and on alert as his Hilux burbles down toward the sheds and greenhouses. Give her half a chance she’d be over the bridge and onto Annie’s place to round up her goats. But dare Tom whisper bath, take up the garden hose, try coaxing Zulu toward the river on a stinking day of summer: watch her scarper for a mile.

  Tom has the gates and shed doors open before the horticultural crew begins their day. He watches the roof of the first greenhouse slide back. He has a manager he trusts, a good team, but still he gravitates here to walk each row, keep a lookout for disease. He inspects rows of zucchini, chokos, cucumber, spinach, weird-shaped gourds and pumpkins he feels the urge to pat. Randomly he tests the moisture in the planted bags of soil. He’s been around long enough to harbour a perpetual mistrust of automated irrigation. Mister Leave Nothing To Chance, they call him at the showroom to wind him up.

  The largest greenhouse is given to a sea of tomatoes—vines winding up trusses toward exposed strips of sky, rows of leafy tendrils bejewelled with shiny baubles. Tom inhales the stringent smell of fruit ripening on the vine, the cloistered warmth of greenhouse air. Dozens of species of tomato grow elevated along these gridded platforms. Tradiro, Trinidad, Nisha, Oxhearts. A suite of flavours. Tom knows them all. Countless forms and colours, some as fine as sculptures. The old mainstay, Tommy Toe, the nation’s benchmark since before he was born, a perpetual judging favourite. The showroom is packed with crates of fresh produce, packets of organic seeds, display shelves with jars of relishes and chutneys, vinegars and marinades, bottled sauces of a range he’s losing track of. Above, the walls are festooned with ribbons and plaques from agricultural shows. Three years running his sweet and savoury preserves have taken out trophies, won fine food awards as far away as Hobart.