by Sara Foster
What about Kate?
The question sneaks up on him, making him miserably aware of his feelings. For nearly ten years he has deliberately avoided anything but casual fun. It has worked so well that he has begun to inwardly scorn the traditions that so many of his friends have fallen for – blokes who are now saddled with children and mortgages and never stay out past ten. His feelings for Kate are all the more startling since he has known her for less than a month, but he fears that the course of his life has taken an irrevocable turn. Because if she were here now, leading him away from the research boat at the dock – from his dream job – he had a good idea of which way he would go.
There had been plenty of girls over the years – ‘conquests’, his father had called them recently in the midst of an unsettling question: ‘When are you going to stop all these conquests and settle down?’ Jackson was pretty sure it had been Kate who brought the question on. His father had doubtless seen her scurrying back to her tent early the same morning. Jackson had only laughed and turned away, and yet Kate had been on his mind for the rest of the day – that lively face with cerulean eyes, the gentle sand-spun curls in her hair. She was gorgeous, but what really made his head whirl was the way a conversation went with her. When he told other girls what he did for a living, he could predict their excitement. A man who swam with sharks – even filter-feeding, harmless ones – was a catch, and most didn’t care that he wasn’t a keeper. Their responses were along the lines of ‘Wow, how exciting!’ or ‘That’s really brave’, or sometimes, from the plucky ones, ‘I’d love to do that’. But when he had told Kate what he did, she had said, ‘You’re a lucky man, Jackson.’
She had turned up in Lovelock Bay late one night, when most people had already pitched their tents and settled in for the evening. Charlie had brought her across. ‘This girl here is asking about Desi,’ he’d said, and marched off again, leaving Jackson struggling to apologise for his father’s rudeness.
‘My sister isn’t around at the moment,’ he’d answered carefully. ‘Can I help you?’
Kate had shrugged. ‘I wanted to look her up. She’s my aunt – or as good as.’
‘Well,’ Jackson had laughed, ‘as far as I know, she only has one brother, and that’s me … are you sure you don’t have something to tell me?’
She had grinned at that. ‘No – I’m Connor’s niece.’
Jackson had stopped smiling then. To hide his surprise he had asked if she needed help pitching her tent, and by the time they had finished it had grown dark. He’d invited her to share the drinks in his van, and they’d sat outside, breathing in the scent of eucalyptus and listening to the camaraderie of the other campers while they got to know one another.
They had bonded quickly over their mutual love of the ocean. She told him about working as a dive instructor in Asia, and how long it had taken her to save enough to get to Australia. So the next day he had called in a favour from a friend, borrowed a boat and taken her diving. She hauled equipment around with ease, managed to swim like a mermaid even with a tank on her back, and knew instinctively where they might find small fish and invertebrates hiding. Best of all, she seemed to genuinely enjoy hearing him talk about whale sharks. In no time at all, a week had passed with a similar pattern to each day, and then one afternoon he had accidentally pulled her over as he tried to help tug her out of her wetsuit. She had hit the deck hard, and he had been down on his knees straight away, making sure she was all right. And then he had taken a risk, leant in and kissed her. After that, they had been inseparable for another fortnight, until the day he left.
Jackson gets to his feet, trying to shake off his thoughts. Less than five metres from him, the iguanas barely move. They are remarkably different to Australian reptiles, which he usually encountered only as frantic rustles in dry leaves, or on a bandy-legged sprint towards the bush. This lot are a little too relaxed, he thinks, picking his footing carefully around a few of those closest to him.
After that, it is an easy climb up over the rocks onto the road leading to town, but he’s grateful that it’s still so early and the place is empty. He’d rather not have to offer explanations to anyone. The town of Puerto Ayora is small, his hotel only minutes away, but Jackson isn’t surprised that his inebriated self had chosen the beach for a bed. It has always felt more relaxing to him to sleep and wake beneath the stars than beneath a cold white ceiling. It reminds him of Lovelock Bay, and the nights spent in swags on the beach with Desi when he was a child.
When he thinks of Desi back then, the memories seem so old now. They have worn and warped, and are harder to recall with certainty. Her smile – the genuine one – has been absent for a long time. Way before she went to prison. Now Pete is bringing her home, and he tries to imagine what will be happening there. He is half-sorry and half-relieved to be missing it.
He also wonders if anyone has told Desi about Kate yet – because, although Jackson is smitten, it is Desi that Kate has come halfway around the world to see.
All these questions, all these worries, and nothing he can do about any of them while he is here. He continues along the road, reaching the first small tourist shops. Soon afterwards he passes the fish-cleaning area, where yesterday he’d witnessed three sea lions battling over discarded entrails, tourists snapping away, while under a bench two marine iguanas, supposedly herbivorous, played tug of war with intestines. The sun has barely risen, but already there is a sea lion asleep on one of the benches, lolling like a drunk sleeping off the night’s excesses, presumably waiting for an easy breakfast. Jackson thinks of taking the opposite bench and curling up there himself – what a great shot it would make for some early-rising tourist. But instead he breathes in a few deep lungfuls of stale fish and finds himself hurtling to the railing, splattering his stomach contents onto the ground below. Another group of iguanas tilt their heads, then a couple begin a low-bellied amble over the rocks, eyeing up this unexpected delicacy. Further out, brown pelicans and blue-footed boobies are busy diving, repeatedly forming themselves into streamlined darts that hurtle from sky to sea faster than his eye can follow, bobbing up a moment later, casually shaking the water from their feathers. Nearby, on another rock, a few birds that have taken their fill wait patiently with wings stretched wide, drying themselves in the morning sun.
As Jackson stands watching them, despite his nausea, he has an unfamiliar rush of pride and validation. Everything he has done since he was seventeen has led to this moment. When he had first bought the old ute and made plans to travel north, his father had been apoplectic. ‘I’d thought better of you than to follow your sister,’ he had said, adding as he turned away, ‘That man has ruined this family.’ Which meant Connor, even though Connor had been gone for nearly ten years by then, and Desi was back living in the shack, and she and Charlie were no longer speaking. But Jackson had gone anyway, and spent most of the first six months pestering tour operators in Exmouth to give him a try – until they caved, as he likes to think of it, although he knows the transient nature of the industry now. Jackson has seen many people come and go, but for the last ten years, weather allowing, every day between May and July he has gone out on a boat with a group of excited, nervous tourists, to see the beautiful Ningaloo Reef, and meet its most impressive resident, the whale shark.
His father had been right, in a way: it was Connor who had first introduced Jackson to this gigantic fish; who had driven them from Monkey Mia to Exmouth when he was seven, and bribed their way onto a spotter plane, from where they spent the day observing whale sharks surfacing, feeding and diving. But, unlike Charlie, Connor hadn’t been thinking of Jackson’s career prospects – he simply wanted the boy to have a great day. And surely, in hindsight, Charlie couldn’t complain, because, for the nine months the whale sharks aren’t feeding along the reef, Jackson is back in Lovelock Bay, helping run the caravan park, doing all the jobs his father’s arthritic hands are no longer capable of.
Focus, he tells himself, as he sees his hotel in front of him
. He just has time to run in and shower, grab his bags and hurry to the dock. He keeps his head down as he goes through the small lobby and up the stairs. There’s a moment of panic that he might have lost his key, but it’s in his pocket, and he lets himself in to his small room. A shower is all-important – to clear his mind, and to get the grime off him before a week on a boat where the water will be rationed and quite possibly stone-cold.
He turns on the taps, steps under the stream, and cannot help a recent memory resurfacing. He sees Kate standing there with him, the water running over the curves of her body before he pushes against her, his face buried in her neck, their hands slipping over each other’s skin. Later, he had tried to tell her how he felt, that he didn’t want to leave her. He still wasn’t sure what her laugh meant. Perhaps it was designed to reassure him, but it made him uncomfortable.
‘It’s an amazing opportunity,’ she’d said with a shrug and a smile, when he had finished apologising.
‘Will you come back?’ he’d asked, hoping he didn’t sound as lovelorn and foolish as he felt.
‘Of course. I still haven’t met Desi.’ She had smiled at his expression. ‘Of course I will come back and see you, Jackson.’
Before he could say anything else that made him seem idiotic, he had pulled her to him and kissed her, hoping to convey that this was too good to leave behind. But now, as he hastily towels himself dry half a world away, her kiss, her words and her email address all seem far too insubstantial. He can only hope he hasn’t made a huge mistake in letting her go.
5
Desi
Desi wakes on the beach at dawn, and trudges back to the shack. After fifteen months sleeping on a lumpy, cold mattress in a small, stifling room, she can hardly believe she is home. The shack is Desi’s anchor. Whatever has happened, wherever she has gone, she always ends up here again, as though she too has her foundations buried beneath the earth. While she loves her brother dearly, the shack is full of her earliest memories, when she’d had her mother all to herself. While Charlie was on his boat or down the pub, Hester sang, baked, and became so proficient at growing a wide array of vegetables that she was always giving extras away to grateful neighbours. And best of all, as far as Desi was concerned, in one corner of the garden there stood a motley collection of cages, where Hester nursed small, injured animals back to life, tending to them until they could be released. There were a few permanent residents in those early days: Chuckles, a one-winged kookaburra; Tilly the blind cockatoo; even a three-legged possum. Her father ignored them, but endured this quirk of his wife’s character. Desi and Hester loved them all.
She peeps in the front window and sees that Pete is still fast asleep on the sofa. She doesn’t want to wake him, so she tiptoes around the rear of the house. It reminds her of one of her earliest memories. She had been searching for her mother in the small garden, swatting at the flies that clustered around her face, determined to get inside her mouth and eyes. She had been hurrying, in case hungry snakes were waiting in the bushes, wincing as the spiky grass stabbed the soft soles of her feet. The air was shrill with hundreds of screeching white-tailed black cockatoos raucously stripping the nearby casuarina trees. And it was then that she had seen the strangest sight, next to the washing that flapped and twisted violently on a line strung between the house and the water tank: an enormous silver fish with a crescent-moon tail.
It had been hanging by a hook from the tank, a tea towel brushing it now and again as it waved in the wind. It was surely twice as long as three-year-old Desi, its mouth gaping as though still in its last gasp for life, its large, round, vacant eye searching heavenwards. She had been mesmerised, stalking it across the grass, as though it might still move. Gingerly, she had reached out to touch it, and rapidly snatched her hand away from its hot, drying body. As she studied her fingers, she saw they were covered in tiny silver flecks, like magic.
When she was older, she had witnessed her father posing proudly in the garden for photographs with the largest of the fish he had caught. Kangaroos came to graze on the lawn every night, until they grew too clever at getting into the vegetable patch and a fence went up around the property. They had stayed visible on the other side for a while, but she hadn’t seen a kangaroo near the house for years. The snakes and flies were still around, of course, but the cockatoos had dwindled into small groups that sometimes flew overhead.
It is so still nowadays in comparison, she thinks, as she closes the back door quietly, and makes her way to her own bed. And so quiet, except for the cicadas’ ceaseless, chirping calls for a mate.
Once in bed, Desi falls asleep again, and when she wakes up she is alone. Pete has crept out quietly, leaving the blankets neatly folded on the sofa. She checks the clock and is surprised to see it’s nearly ten. It is time to find Maya, and she gets ready in a hurry, ignoring the deepening bite of nerves.
On the drive between Two Rocks and Lovelock Bay, the ocean disappears from sight. The view becomes a carpet of bushland spreading to the horizon, growing taller and denser the further Desi goes. The dull greens and browns are occasionally splashed with the vibrant orange flowers of an Australian Christmas tree, but otherwise all is concealed. Desi has long understood the illusion. She knows that life scuttles and scurries beneath branches or leaf piles, or rests until the heat of the day has passed. That stillness only truly exists once the developers have reached the bushland, and swept it all away in the path of progress. But here human influence has not yet extended beyond fragments of sheared tyres and the empty bottles and cans that mark the route.
When she reaches the turning to the bay, she sees that nothing has changed. A small sign for the caravan park marks the start of the unsealed road. Over the years the track has hardened, but there’s still a good few kilometres of corrugated dirt ahead, and she hopes that Chug will make it after having spent so long idle. Her palms are clammy on the steering wheel as she takes the turn.
The first time Desi’s parents brought her out here, she was sixteen and Jackson was four. She had heard them talking in whispers after she went to bed. She knew her father’s hands were getting worse, and he wouldn’t be able to keep crayfishing for much longer. What she didn’t realise was how much her parents longed for isolation again, to retreat from the vibrant tourist town that Two Rocks had become; not until they had taken her along this dusty old track, their car bumping and pitching until Desi’s head throbbed. At one point, an emu had run out of the bush, its long neck twitching, startled eyes registering them, before it bolted away, two bandy-legged youngsters scrabbling in its wake. From that moment they had Jackson’s approval in the bag, but Desi regarded the empty landscape with dismay. The only redeeming factor was the beach – an endless stretch of unblemished white sand in both directions.
She remembers how her mother put an arm around her, while Desi tried hard to keep the tears at bay. ‘There will be a house by the time we get here. Your dad is making a tidy profit on the boat. It will be much bigger than the shack.’
‘I love the shack.’
Hester sighed. ‘And you’ll love it here, I promise, when we’ve set up the campsites and the holidaymakers arrive.’
‘I’ll be trapped, so I guess I’ll have to.’
‘Perhaps you could stay with Rebecca now and again,’ Hester said.
Desi had looked hard at her mother. Was she really that naive? Whenever they saw Marie nowadays, she barely said a word. And she wouldn’t sit still, always jumping up to make tea or clean up, even in other people’s houses. Although Desi hadn’t witnessed any more violence, now and again she couldn’t miss the bruises, concealed beneath sleeves that were repeatedly tugged down. Since Desi had given her word, she and Rebecca had never spoken openly of Rick’s temper. However, to keep her dreams alive she would have to find somewhere to stay in Two Rocks, because she needed to be close to Atlantis.
Atlantis Marine Park had opened to huge fanfare in the early eighties, and quickly garnered a reputation as one of the state’s premie
r attractions. It had transformed the town from a sleepy fishing village to a hub of bustling tourism. It had won awards and drawn numerous celebrity visitors, from Rolf Harris to Torvill and Dean. It had an aquarium, a boating lake, a huge novelty clock and a seal show, but that wasn’t why it held Desi in its thrall. She had been working in its fast-food kiosk for a while now, but she cared about nothing except its dolphins.
There were three males – Rajah, Frodo and Nero – and four females – Mila, Rani, Lulu and Karleen. These seven dolphins were the undisputed stars of the park. Desi had followed their progress from the moment they arrived, driven one by one to their new home, in specially designed slings on the flatbed of a ute. They had been caught locally, and her father had been commandeered to help as they were lowered carefully into the water. Desi had gone to numerous shows, sitting first at the poolside and later in the grandstand, as the costumes, the tricks and the backdrops became increasingly elaborate. She had been invited to stroke their streamlined bodies, finding them like wet silk, and had gaped awestruck as they leapt through metal hoops that were raised higher and higher, sailing straight past one another, always perfectly centred. One dolphin could swipe a ball so hard with his tail that it flew over the top of the grandstand, out of sight. Together, they took paintbrushes in their mouths and daubed primary colours on canvases. If conducted, they sang strange squealing songs in chorus into a microphone. They danced on their tails, their gleaming bodies shimmying above the water. They played catch, and put hoops through their beaks and towed boats carrying children. The trainers could even hold on to their fins for a ride, and as a finale the prettiest girls would stand on their backs and wave as the dolphins swam around the pool. They were incredible, and Desi longed more than anything to be part of their lives.