Wildlight

by Robyn Mundy

  *

  Tom wakes on the beach, stiff-necked, pins and needles in the arm crooked beneath his head. Sun drills his back. He stretches, scratches sand from his hair, he clears away the remnants of the fire. He gathers up the rug, a row of empty stubbies.

  The cottage stands empty, the covers of the bed thrown back. He sees Marcie at the lighthouse, her hair aflame in morning sun. He dumps his jacket on a post, climbs the hill.

  A magazine rests on her lap. ‘You’re up early,’ he says.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep.’

  He slides down beside her. ‘You okay?’

  She shakes her head. He loops his arm around her shoulder, she rests her head against him. She starts to cry. ‘Last night. I’m sorry.’

  He pulls her in. ‘You have no reason to apologise.’

  ‘I drank too much.’

  They could keep going, coast along for months, years. ‘What you said was honest. It was real.’

  She looks to him expectantly.

  ‘Marcie, you deserve someone who will give you what you want.’

  He sees her face deflate. ‘I don’t want someone. I want you. I’m happy to wait.’

  ‘It isn’t fair to make you wait. You said it yourself.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m happy. It wasn’t fair rushing you, putting pressure on you.’

  Tom stands at a precipice. ‘It isn’t about needing more time.’ The truth of it shears off as he speaks. ‘It doesn’t feel right. Not the way it should to build a life together.’

  He feels her tremble. Her voice remains resolute. ‘We’re meant to be together, Tom. I’ve known that from day one. The day you drove me home. The signal flags.’

  Togetherness staked on a haphazard gift. ‘Listen. When I gave you those flags I was happy for you to have them. I was. But that gift was not intended for you, at least not to begin with. You need to understand that. I was nineteen. You were a kid. It was not some grand offering of love.’

  ‘It was for someone,’ she says.

  He doesn’t dare respond.

  ‘You think that because I was younger than you I didn’t see or understand?’

  ‘I wasn’t saying that—’

  ‘I knew the flags were for her. To put in the lighthouse. I knew back then.’

  He scratches at his head. ‘Then I don’t get it. You made out they were some kind of cosmic sign. The universe throwing us together.’

  Marcie collects her magazine, rolls it up. For a moment he thinks she’s going to swat him. A florid mottling creeps like tide across her throat. ‘You have blinkers on. All you see when you look at me is a stand-in for some idealised concept.’

  ‘I see more than you give me credit for.’

  She gives a quiet scoff. ‘Do you? Back then? Before you lit that match?’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘It pays to be observant, Tom.’

  Nothing slips by Marcie. ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘I saw her write it. I watched her fold it up and put it in your pocket. A note you tore into pieces and put a match to.’

  ‘Stephanie? A note that said what?’

  Marcie stands to leave. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she says, the blade of triumph turning. ‘It wasn’t meant for me.’

  32

  Tom hammers down the highway, his brain grappling with the sequence of events. Last night they were sitting happily by a fire on a beach. This morning he had his arm around her on a lighthouse balcony. This afternoon she’s gone, a goodbye at the airport that arced into tears and accusation. Tom pulls in through his gate—one day early. He wants to shut himself inside his house, bunker down, write off this fucked-up day.

  His Hilux climbs the second rise toward the house, slowing and meandering to avoid the worst potholes. Tom catches a movement in the rear vision, Zulu bounding up from the sheds in pursuit, an escape artist with her collar and lead somewhere back down the hill. He pulls in beneath the house and readies himself for the onslaught. No second-guessing with a dog. When he pulls his keys from the ignition he sees the second pair clipped to the ring. Smoky Cape. The caretaker’s keys. Good one, Tom.

  Zulu licks his face, tail beating, quivering with exhilaration. All grievances absolved. Tom dumps the esky, a box of uneaten food, slings his bag on the verandah.

  He grabs the spare lead and shakes his car keys. ‘C’mon, girl.’ Zulu looks momentarily confused. ‘Hup.’ She leaps from the step onto the vehicle tray.

  Down the hill, past the sheds where Yvette and the horticultural boys stand in a pocket of shade, slugging on coffee and cigarettes. Tom gives a half-wave. He’s in no mood to stop and chitchat. He turns the car north, back to Smoky Cape.

  He apologises to the caretaker. Not a problem, just drove in myself. Tom makes his way back down the path. It’s late enough in the day that the same long shadows stretch across the car park, the same family of kangaroos grazes on the grass, careless of Zulu tethered to the tray. They scarper when a youth with dreadlocks appears from the beach track and slinks toward Tom’s car, the only vehicle remaining in the car park. Tom pats his pocket to check his wallet. The boy stands in conversation with his dog whose tongue laps at air. ‘You picked yourself a dodgy saviour,’ Tom mutters to the air. The boy catches sight of Tom and saunters off along the road.

  Tom feels wired, onion-raw, unready to climb back in his car and face the long drive home. His brain is tired of slapping around the failures of his life. He pokes around the old light keepers’ stables adorned with signal flags and information signs: historic photos of the lighthouse, pictures of Dunghutti women and their dark-eyed daughters digging pipis from the beach.

  A memory: being led by the hand by a small Aboriginal girl—strong for her size. When Tom first moved to Camden Haven, he talked to old William about that spirit girl, about waking in a cave atop the Ironbounds. When I found you, mighty, you were off with the pixies, you didn’t know which way was up. Why then this knotted scar on his shoulder, this remnant scrap of anchor? Tom had held a blade to his arm in his effort to expunge his brother. He remembers that small girl crying, No, Tom. She called him by his name.

  He’s had a gutful of his head. He pulls a ziplock bag from the glove box and locks the car behind him. He leads Zulu down the beach track, unclips her lead. Tom kicks off boots and socks and dumps them on the boardwalk. The air smells floral with spring pollen, thick with sea salt. Tom sets off across the sand while Zulu races in the opposite direction, rounding up seagulls, regularly diverting up the beach lest her paws be wetted by the smallest lapping wave.

  Beyond the point a reef break, a haunt for surfers when the swell is right. A runabout fangs north across the ocean, home to South West Rocks, the day of fishing done. Above the headland, the lighthouse gazes down.

  No one up here would credit the swells he and Frank worked in. Not a skipper to compare to his brother behind the wheel, a sorcerer’s magic against a witch of an ocean. Tom paces over sand the same buff colour as New Harbour, as Louisa Bay, as any stretch of beach along that wild angry coast. For his whole time on the boat Tom lived in fear of a malevolent ocean. He dreamed and dreamed again of swallowing the sea. Tom it had spat onto a beach. All the while it had lain in wait for Frank.

  He’s spent years questioning why he, Tom—destined to be taken—should be the brother spared. His mother’s answers came straight from books in her Bible; Corinthians, John, the Book of Revelation: she cherrypicked them all. Tom wants someone—anyone—to acknowledge that he was a player in his brother’s death. He’s never again set foot in the ocean. Never swum, never kayaked on the river with Marcie. Just hung back on the old wooden landing, his toes dragging in the water. His brother would be the first to say it: Too much a coward to let the ocean take another bite at you.

  No one left to call him Tom-Tom now.

  Tom rolls up his jeans, makes his way across shallows to the rocks beneath the headland. Another time this ocean would pound around the corner, laden with weed, sending up spindrift.

 
At the northern end of the beach, Zulu plays out a cycle of run, stop, squat, bark. Squawks from irritated gulls.

  The water is clear, a bed of rippled sand. A school of fish zigzags by. Lettuce seaweed turns and folds as delicate as tissue. Tom thinks on Marcie, Stephanie. A note he never saw, torn to strips. Too late now for might-have-beens.

  He feels a churning in his gut, his mind sliding into feckless gear. He hasn’t smoked a reefer in years but keeps a small stash in the glove box. Call it a tribute to his youth, a small rebellion against the upright citizen he claims to have become. The cigarette paper feels fragile from heat and age, weed and seed heads dry as desiccated coconut. In its prime a joint like this would have worked some magic. Now it probably won’t hold a kick.

  At the touch of the match it sizzles and flares, burns down too fast. Tom draws smoke into his lungs, takes a long deep breath, the heat cloying on his throat. He coughs, puffs through to the end, thumps his chest to clear his throat.

  Squat.

  He rolls another, draws it deep into his chest.

  He searches out to sea, his body sliding with the drift.

  Tom sways toward Marcie, trawls through ripples of red hair and regret. Was he hasty? Did he make the right decision? He sees her walking naked to the ocean, trying, trying to lure him in. He shakes his head. She played him. All that time she knew about the note. The signal flags he gave her—a kind of coveting, wanting someone else’s life.

  He fixes his focus on ocean. He rocks toward the rhythm of a dislocated dare knocking at his groin. His body grows urgent with desire. He pictures a woman naked in the water, tall, slender, turning and laughing, reaching for his hands and pulling him in. The two of them pressed together, their skin yellow through a river of black tea. Everything he’s lost is in the water. Tom pulls his belt loose, looks down at his jeans and underwear pushed down around his ankles. He tears at the snaps of his shirt and hears them pop. He hears himself snicker. Butt naked. Tom-Tom goes the ocean.

  Tom dives, the crown of his head bruising sand. He surfaces and heaves at air, waiting for a numbing sting of cold. Warm water envelopes him, silky as a robe. He swims toward the deep, stopping once to check that he can touch the bottom. He angles out across the bay, his arms leaden as sinkers. He turns to watch the lighthouse, sees a slender figure standing on the balcony. Stephanie? He gives a manic wave, feels to be grinning like a clown. No one waves back. Tom turns, swims on.

  He stops to catch his breath. He floats on his back to rest, his ears immersed in water. He can hear each intake of air, his heart thudding in his ears: Brother. Brother. Brother. The old people filled the Three Brothers with legend. Each brother taken by a witch, buried where each mountain stands. Tom’s Brother. Stephanie’s Brother. A witch of an ocean; one Brother spare.

  Tom closes his eyes against the moment when sun slides across his face. This is where he wants to be: far enough from shore to escape the shadow of land. He hears submarine trills of moving water, terrestrial squawks of gulls. A dog barking, far, far away. He feels Frank close by. Hup you come. The pair of them together in the dinghy, bobbing in a sea of fog. Tom sees the prop fouled with tangled line torn from pots. He feels Frank shiver from the dampness of the air. His brother steels himself against the press of cold. He watches Frank pull on Tom’s red float coat and try to work the faulty zip. Good luck with that, matey. Too tight to fork out for a new one. But look, Frank. In the bottom of the boat: Tom’s orange knife. Another handy discard. He hears Frank cackle with relief. Frank takes the knife from its sheath and here is his chance, sawing at those loops of rope, forged on by indignation at this unwarranted predicament, abandoned by a shit of a kid brother to whom Frank Forrest had given all but his life, shortly to settle the balance. Tom feels the set through the fog and tries to warn Frank, Look out! Sit tight! A triple, a quintet rolling through in quick succession, overturning the dinghy and upending Frank into the water. Frank, Frankie, hold the dinghy’s keel. Don’t waste your lungs cursing your good-for-nothing little brother who wasn’t there to render assistance the one and only time he was required.

  Brother mine, the cold would have got you first, it wouldn’t give a rat’s arse for how tough and nuggety you were within that fiefdom of a wheelhouse. Wooden fingers. No amount of bullying would stop your grip loosening from the boat. Frank Forrest cast adrift like all the craypot buoys he’d ordered cut. A surrender to the whimsy of the ocean. His brother bobbing in a dirty undone float coat labelled with his useless brother’s name.

  Tom rolls in the water, onto his front, he forges forward, pushing back tears in his throat and the burning in his arms. He savours a mouthful of salt, the tanginess of ocean. He stops to purge the next. With each new wave of shuffled thoughts Tom slows to rest. He is partway to an island glistering with sunlight—a perfect place, a perfect girl, all beyond his reach. He feels to be a vast way out from shore, his dog a moving, barking blur on a scalloped frill of beach. Zulu. She’ll be fretting something awful. I’m sorry, little dog.

  A life for a life. His dues to the ocean. Tom floats on his back, ready, now, for sleep to pull him down. ‘I’m sorry, Frank.’ Tom’s voice warbles through the water. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Across his face a lapping wash of peace. His debt to Frank made payable in full.

  *

  Tom gasps awake. A flash of black cuts through water at his side. He inhales ocean, retches in a fit of coughing. Pain slashes at his back. He can hear panicked cries, around him the water inking violet with his blood. Tom’s arms flail, he thrashes to escape the tearing at his back. He swings to face the set of razored teeth. Instead a dog, a billowing of black and white.

  Zulu’s eyes bulge, her shrill cries the pitch of a terrorised woman. Her legs thrash in frenzy, her nails tear his throat and shoulders, he feels razors down his sides. She swims in desperate circles, her coat a skirt of bull kelp fanned across the surface. She tries repeatedly to board his back as if he were a raft. Tom fends her off. All this way from shore. ‘You idiot dog,’ he growls. She seems to calm at the reprimand. His dog looks to breathe again. She turns toward the shore, whimpers, looks across to check that he is there. Tom pictures the scene from above: a thrashing dog, a wounded master, a berley of freshly pumped blood. There is the definition of panic. There is the will to go on. ‘In we go, girl. In we go.’

  *

  Steph takes a last wander along Wash House Beach and Pilot Beach before locking up the pilot station. She carries her bags to the car, slows beneath the grove of casuarina to watch a nesting pair of tawny frogmouths, still and quiet in the branches. Empty, worse than if she’d never come at all. She drives into town to leave the keys. Tuesday. She has a whole day to fill.

  Her map shows a coastline of lighthouses from New South Wales to Queensland’s border. She drives past convivial seaside towns with charming names: Lake Cathie, Bonny Hills. The signboard at a community hall makes her look again and smile: Spring Into Song Weekend; USB Thumb Drive Found.

  Holiday homes punctuate forested hills and towering timber country, the bush tinted and lush with flower. Rolling pastures, contented cattle, gardens an impossible green after years of living in a landlocked desert. The world feels off kilter, as if only the outline of her has arrived, the rest far behind in no-man’s-land.

  Tacking Point Lighthouse stands proud at the end of the road, set upon a cleared nub of headland. A family seated on a bench looks out to froths of white kicking up the ocean. ‘Humpbacks,’ says the woman. ‘They’re breaching.’ She hands Steph her binoculars. ‘It’s a mother and a calf.’

  The lighthouse is newly painted with accents of blue, brilliant in the light. It could as easily watch over the Aegean Sea, its short tower offset by a low arched roof: more Greek Orthodox chapel. She tries the door. Locked. Eighteen seventy-nine. It’s nothing like Maatsuyker. You can’t wind back the clock.

  Steph finds her way into Port Macquarie, her eagerness to look around subdued. She eats a sandwich at a cafe, messages Lydia: Lost cause. Back in Sydney
in the morning. Could only get on late night train. All this way for nothing. She hasn’t even gained a proper sense of Tom.

  She drives north, deliberates on whether to take the dirt road all the way in to Smoky Cape. She strums the steering wheel. She has hours before the train.

  She parks beside a Hilux ute, the only other vehicle in the car park. Kangaroos graze on the grass. They raise their heads, chewing as they watch her.

  A red quad bike sits outside the cottages, its makeshift trailer piled with linen, a vac pack and mops. The caretaker hauls a tub of laundry on the back. ‘Sorry, love,’ he tells her. ‘Not today. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we run the tours.’

  The top door to the lighthouse is open. ‘Would it be possible for me to take a look? I won’t be too long.’

  He thinks a moment. ‘Close the bottom door behind you so others don’t follow you up.’

  She passes by a worn old jacket slung over a post. Something about it makes her think of Tom.

  A Fresnel lens, a working lighthouse. Newly painted. Not a skerrick of rust. That would please her mother. She and Dad are somewhere in the Kimberley, celebrating her father’s retirement from the ABC. Steph has to work to imagine the time before he was a producer in WA, when he read the news on air. She keeps an old cassette recording, with no device to play it on, of when his voice was smooth. Steph texts them a photo. Hi from Smoky Cape. How’s the Kimberley? The message fails. No signal. She climbs the spiral stairs, steps out through the upper doorway. She stands on the lighthouse balcony, unprepared for this giddiness of feeling. A sweep of wild beaches north and south. A pacific ocean faithful to its name.

  She spends time gazing at the ocean. A long way out a movement. A whale? Dolphins? A raft of birds? She loses track of it. She scans the ocean. There. A ruffling. A swimmer, bold, alone, gliding through the water.

  Steph moves around the balcony, the flat of her hand against brick and mortar—a texture that feels a part of her. She presses her ribs against the round of the wall, tilts her gaze to the catwalk’s latticed steel, the windows of the lantern room. The platen murmurs, air curls around the lighthouse like a whisper. Place. Memory. Love. Loss. All the forces that shape a person—not into the neat, symmetrical vessel she thought her life would be, but this, the past pulling at the edges, knotted strands of that long-ago girl wound within the woman. Steph feels a ruffle of oceanic air, cool and clean. The scent of the bush. This. Her homeland. A future of her making stretching out before her. Through her hands and chest the humming of the lighthouse. A small, determined light warming her with readiness.