by Bronwyn Sell
As he fired up, his posture relaxed, not that he’d been tense in the first place. Passion was such a turn-on, and he had so much to be passionate about. He lived in a paradise where he did measurable good. What good did she do? Her job was to protect the arses—well, the wallets—of her clients, which were mostly big corporates, aside from the odd charity pro-bono to ease her conscience and boost the firm’s PR. Sure, the income was good but she’d been saving large chunks of it for her wedding, and so she could pull things back for a few years to have a couple of kids before it was too late. The idea of commuting to work every morning without that plan in front of her, without that other dimension in her life … And worse, would she have to return to dating? She’d have to plunge straight in, if she was to stay the course. Internet dating? Wednesday night speed dating at the Strawberry Alarm Clock? She shuddered.
‘Cold?’ he said, sounding surprised. ‘We can shut the windows?’
‘Not at all. Just … empty.’
‘Back in Sydney? Pub quiz?’
‘Speed dating.’ He opened his mouth for a follow-up so she added, ‘Don’t ask.’
Was it such an absurd thought that she could move up here and devote her life to ospreys and turtles? Maybe if she played it right, chose a better moment to discuss it with Harry than one minute after leaving the resort. Other people made spontaneous changes like that all the time.
They emerged from bush onto a scrubby plateau. A cloud of dust rose from the track ahead—a smoke signal heralding the approach of a four-wheel drive painted in the same turquoise. Harry moved the ute to one side and slowed to a stop. The car came alongside, so close that Sophia shrank sideways, and idled.
‘Hazza!’ declared the other driver, a woman with blue-black spiky hair, heavy blue eyeliner and a nose ring.
‘Sophia, meet my little sister, Lena. Lena, this is Sophia. She’s staying in the Frangipani Villa.’ His voice was heavy with warning, but which one of them he was warning and about what, Sophia couldn’t tell. ‘How was the base?’ he asked Lena.
‘I can see I’ll have to keep a close eye on operations there.’
‘Operations? Or personnel?’
‘I could ask you the same question.’
Harry looked at Sophia and flinched when he found her looking right back. Where did he think she’d be looking?
‘Bye, Lena.’ He drove off, leaving Lena slowly shaking her head.
‘Base?’ Sophia said. ‘As in?’
‘A military base.’
‘On the island? That wasn’t on the website.’
‘It literally popped up overnight. I’m still trying to get my head around it. My nan ambushed us today with a signed contract with the navy. It wouldn’t be my first choice as an income-generator but I didn’t get a say, and we do need the money.’
‘The cyclone?’ She’d read plenty about that.
‘Yeah. The resort was lucky to survive it. Lotta places had to sell up, especially after the downturn. Lots of ghost resorts out here.’
‘Ghost resorts?’
‘Roofs still blown off, pools turned green, furniture lying where the wind tossed it, vandalism. We managed to reopen after a few months, but it hasn’t been a cheap exercise. People think that because we own an island, we must be rich but holy shit—excuse the language—the cost of maintenance and repairs and infrastructure, and all the rest.’
‘I can imagine. I don’t mean to play the poor-little-rich-girl violin, but I grew up in a heritage-listed mansion outside Sydney. The amount my parents spend on upkeep …’
‘Do they get an income from it?’
‘People pay silly money to get married in the gardens, though I think it’s weird to get married at someone else’s house. And they have a couple of cottages they rent out, and it’s sometimes used as a movie and TV set but mostly it’s a money-sucking folly.’
‘Were you going to get married there?’
‘Yep. And coincidentally, it’s where I was dumped. Full circle. Except without the circle.’
‘Not a circle at all, really. Semi-circle?’
‘More of a dot. Never took shape.’
‘Sucks.’
It was sucking marginally less right now. Distraction, see? That was all she needed. She sneaked another look at him on the pretence of checking out the ocean view from his side of the ute. He didn’t need to know how short her focal distance really was.
Given the chance—and there wouldn’t be one, seeing as he’d carefully pointed out this was not a date—how far would she take this distraction? To the tried and true method of getting over a break-up? Not that she’d ever done it that way. Not her style.
In the console between them, his phone dinged—the same tone as her phone, which was switched off and buried in her suitcase. She looked at the screen without thinking.
LENA: It’s the idea of you she’ll fall in love with. It’s not you.
Sophia could almost hear the clunk as her stomach dropped. Harry reached for the phone and she turned her head 180 degrees to look out her window into the scrub. He scoffed quietly. A rattle suggested he’d dropped it back into the console.
That scoff—there was context to it. The message had to refer to ground he and Lena had previously covered. Did they think she was some sad cliché? A jilted bride who would latch onto the first eligible man she found?
But then, she was and she had. Perhaps he just had a weakness for rescuing helpless creatures. She closed her eyes, her mood deflating. That was the thing with distraction. The second it passed, reality thwacked you right in the face.
And just like that, she was right back at I shouldn’t have come—with him today or on honeymoon—and she should pack up and go straight home.
‘You know, I’m thinking I might hang out at the café,’ she said, keeping her voice light. ‘Sounds nice.’ She could organise transportation back to the resort from there, or even a helicopter to the airport with a quick stop to collect her luggage.
‘Oh.’ He sounded surprised. The pathetic part of her wanted to interpret it as disappointment but she refused to indulge it. ‘If you’re sure?’
‘I am,’ she lied as emphatically as she could manage. She wasn’t sure about anything, and that was the problem.
9
When Sophia opened her eyes, she and Harry were at the other end of the plateau, where an amphitheatre of granite cliffs held the forest at bay. In an overgrown paddock, a big old veranda-wrapped Queenslander sat high up on stumps, gazing out to the ocean. Or it would be gazing, if its windows weren’t shuttered and boarded. It might once have been white, but time had scoured away all but a few flecks of paint. Rust streaked its roof from gables to gutters, collecting in the corrugated tin valleys, giving it a stripy look. Out front, the stringy remains of a hammock drooped between two palms, like the cobweb of a long-dead spider.
‘Wow,’ she breathed.
‘Yep. My favourite view on the island.’
She realised he was looking out over a bay stamped with triangular sails. ‘Well, yes, that too,’ she said. ‘Stunning. But I was talking about the house. What an incredible place to live, though I’m guessing no one’s lived there for a while?’
‘Good guess.’ She waited but he didn’t elaborate.
‘Looks like it could use some love.’
He laughed, short and sharp, not the easy chuckle of earlier. ‘It definitely could.’ Again, he didn’t offer details. He’d been so forthcoming talking about his work, or about her. Maybe he was one of those people who had the appearance of being an open book but after you started reading, you discovered half the pages were stuck together. She looked back at the house.
‘Rundown houses always make me feel sad.’
‘Know what you mean,’ he said after a few seconds.
‘Human nature, I guess,’ she said, filling the space. Like his earlier comment about trying to make a relationship work, there was something more to this. ‘A house is a symbol, isn’t it? Life, family, children, belonging
. So a neglected house is—what? Loneliness, neglect, emptiness, even death? Maybe that’s why home reno shows are so addictive. They’re like a metaphor for the restoration of life.’
‘Hmm,’ he offered. A thoughtful hmm, not a dismissive one, but still he wasn’t biting.
A scene came to her mind, fully formed. She was sitting on the front veranda—repaired, painted white—in a turquoise Adirondack chair, watching the sun set over the water. Or would it rise over the water? Her sense of direction was screwed, and it was approaching midday, so the sun’s position didn’t help. Ah, but the green woolly humps of a national park on the mainland were visible, so the house had to be facing west. Sunset it was.
She closed her eyes and breathed in the fantasy, which was now bathed in golden light. She caught Harry’s scent, a beeswaxy sweetness mixed with the earthy, salty, briny scent of the ute, and the virtual camera angle adjusted and suddenly he was sitting beside her on the veranda. They clinked glasses and she sipped a chardonnay so buttery she could taste it on her tongue in real life, the sun warming her legs—
‘Not feeling car sick?’ he said. ‘These gravel roads can be rough on the guts.’
Her eyes flicked open. The car had turned so the sun in fact was warming her legs. ‘Not at all.’ Though, now that you mention it …
‘You look a lot happier than you did earlier.’
‘I’m feeling it, though that’s not a high bar. Between last night and first thing this morning, you’ve seen me at my worst.’
‘Does that mean the worst is over?’
‘You know what? Maybe it does.’ Yesterday, before her drinking spree—and during, and after, to be fair—she’d feared there would always be a rock sitting on her chest, but what do you know? It had lifted, thanks to the scenery, the company and the fantasy. Until today, her only fantasies while on honeymoon had been about doing nasty things to Jeremy—and not good-nasty. ‘Who owns the house?’
‘The island and everything on it, including the resort and the backpackers, is owned by the family, but effectively Nan controls everything. She calls it a democracy and goes through the motions of involving us, but in reality, it’s an evil dictatorship. Hence the pop-up military base.’
‘Do you think she’d rent it to me?’ Sophia said, without thinking. Whimsy! Spontaneity! Again, she pictured herself on the veranda, this time alone with a laptop. Fantasy Harry must have been out communing with eagles.
‘The military base?’
‘The house.’
‘No.’
Again, Sophia waited. Again, he offered nothing more. His answers weren’t rude, just abrupt. He seemed more comfortable talking about her situation than his, but maybe if she opened up, he would follow. There were hidden depths behind his laidback veneer, and she wasn’t the type to leave uncharted territory unexplored. Especially when it was this picturesque.
‘No as in she wouldn’t rent it to me, or no as in you’re about to give me the speech about how I need to get back to my life?’
He laughed—the easy laugh again. ‘Both. Even if it was habitable, Nan has other plans for it, and you do need to get back to your life.’
‘You know what? There’s nothing I’d rather do than go back to my life, but to the life I had two weeks ago.’ She twisted her engagement ring, the emerald and diamond and gold catching the sun. It was meant to be complemented by the wedding ring—a matching heirloom duo. They’d been designed to spoon each other, and now the engagement ring looked incomplete. ‘You complete me,’ Jeremy had said when he proposed. Why was she even still wearing it? Whose property was it now?
‘Maybe if I moved in and renovated it for her?’ Sophia said. ‘I renovated our Victorian terrace in Sydney. Well, I managed the renovation.’ Our. Now that there was no longer a we, what would become of the our? She could buy out Jeremy’s half if she spent her baby savings and got a whopper of a mortgage. But she didn’t get a swell in her heart at the thought of living there alone, not like she had at the thought of starting a family there—the two upstairs rooms in their dove grey with white trim, waiting for their beginner humans.
She realised Harry had been watching her for a while. Not that she could judge him for staring.
‘It needs a lot of work,’ he said. ‘New joinery, roof, interior walls, kitchen, bathrooms, plumbing, wiring. And half the weatherboards would have to go. It has a lot of original features you could salvage, and the floors and stumps are sound, but it’d take a shit-ton of work to restore it all. And you can’t just pop into a hardware store out here, or call a tradie to do the hard yakka—not easily, anyway. Everything has to be barged over from the mainland. At the moment, all we can do is try to stop nature from completely reclaiming it. I’d like to get a new roof on there, at a minimum, to shore it up, but even that isn’t possible right now.’
‘Sounds like you’ve looked into renovating it.’
The skin above his sunglasses bunched for a second. She waited but again, nothing. Yep, there were pages stuck together.
‘How did they build it in the first place?’ she said, trying a neutral, open-ended question. ‘It must be a hundred years old.’
‘Older. It was the homestead back when the island was a sheep station. They used local timber they’d cleared away for grazing. Everything else came from the mainland by ship and was hauled up by horse-drawn wagon. They built it bloody solidly, which is the only reason it’s survived. And you think your family home is a folly.’
She tried to picture the website’s history page. ‘It was your family who built it?’
‘That’s a complicated question.’
‘How so?’
‘It all went south a decade or two later when my great-great something-something grandmother fell in love with a farm labourer from Samoa.’
He fell silent again. Good grief. Would she have to surgically remove every sentence from him? ‘You can’t just leave a story like that there. Come on, distract me.’
He laughed. ‘Fine. The story goes that her husband—who had inherited the island—drowned himself after she gave birth to a baby boy who clearly wasn’t his. She took off to Samoa and the island was abandoned and stayed like that for decades. But the boy was their only child and his paternity was never officially challenged so he inherited the island plus Stingray Island to the south. That’s where we’re going out to on the boat, you can just see its “tail”.’ He pointed to a white sandspit that arced through marbled blue and turquoise water, just visible beyond the hills of Curiosity Island.
‘Both of the islands stayed in the family until his descendant—Nan’s father—came back to settle on Curiosity Island in the 1930s. So my family aren’t related by blood to the family that first developed the island but we are the legal descendants. And the house has been home to cockies and geckos longer than it was ever home to humans.’
‘That’s quite an epic. And you’ve looked into renovating it?’ The question was worth another shot while he was on a roll. Tricky questions were always worth another shot—you just had to choose your moment and come at them from a different angle.
He did the scoff-laugh. Damn—he’d read her game. ‘Sophia, let’s make a pact. Today is not a day for the past or the future. Every time you find yourself going to that pub quiz or speed dating or your terrace house, pull yourself back to this primo day right in front of you.’ Your terrace house. He’d noticed that the reminder of it had blown a cloud over her mood. A regular Mr Nice Guy. ‘Take a break from all that, a holiday, even. Now, there’s a novel idea. And if I see you going back there, I’ll use a code word. Uh … goanna.’
‘Goanna?’
‘Goanna. Unless that has associations for you. We could do spangled drongo?’
‘I have no strong feelings about goannas.’ Except that now the word would make her think of the old Queenslander with its sightless windows, sleeping until its resurrection day. Which meant thinking about both the past and the future, so doubly breaking the pact.
‘Ripper. G
oanna it is.’
She looked back but the house was screened by a cluster of tufty pines. Her stomach fell again—with gravity, this time. They’d plunged downward, almost vertical. She grabbed the handhold above the door and jammed her feet to the floor, swallowing hard. The ute descended fast to sea level, bumping hard along the track, now more rocks than gravel, Harry swerving left and right as if it were a slalom course. She slapped a hand over her mouth, just in case. At the movement, he glanced at her, frowned, and eased off the accelerator.
Something told her it wasn’t her past he wanted to avoid discussing.
It’s the idea of you she’ll fall in love with. It’s not you.
Had someone else fallen in love with the idea of him? She almost asked the question aloud but remembered just in time that she wasn’t supposed to have seen Lena’s message—which was doubly fortunate because if she had gone ahead and said it, it’d sound like Sophia was in love with him, which she obviously was not. The theory made sense though—he’d had a tough break-up from a woman who’d fallen in love with the idea of him. And she could understand a woman falling in love with the idea of him. She was starting to see how a woman could fall in love with the reality of him, too, the little she could see of it.
‘You know what?’ she shouted over the whining engine. ‘You’re right, I could use a holiday from my holiday.’
‘So we have a deal?’
‘Deal.’ She crossed her fingers where they clutched the handhold. She’d draw him out on what the house meant to him when she got the chance. But he had a point. She could use a break from obsessing over the events that had led to her solo honeymoon and what the hell came next. But if her mind crossed back into what-if territory, she wouldn’t be pulling herself back to cobalt sky and sparkling ocean, but to a harmless fantasy involving chardonnay, Adirondack chairs, a veranda and a man who smelled of beeswax and earth and salt.