The Lightkeeper's Wife (34 page)

Shouting and banging noises are coming from inside Laura’s house. I wait in the car for a few minutes, unsure. Then I go to the front door, which is open. Laura is in the hallway holding onto the wrists of a large dark-haired man. He’s clearly resisting her and his movements are strong and wild. He’s very upset.

‘Mouse,’ she says, not in the wispy fragile voice I’ve heard before, but loudly. ‘Mouse. You stop that right now. Put your hands down and listen to me.’

The man sees me in the doorway and drops to the floor like a frightened animal. He cowers against the wall, his hands covering his face. There’s blood running down his forearm.

‘Please go back to the car.’ Laura’s face is tight. ‘He’s not used to strangers.’

I go back into the cold night and open the back door on one side of the car. Then I turn on the headlights and the interior light. If this man is afraid, he might not want to climb into a darkened car. It might be less intimidating if he can see where Laura wants him to go.

Five minutes pass and exhaustion threatens to swamp me. I couldn’t sleep in my own bed, but here in the cramped discomfort of the car, sleep rises unbidden and tries to claim me. Finally, I see the shadows of Laura and Mouse outside the house. I can hear Laura coaxing him. She tells him he’ll be all right if he gets in the car. That he’ll be safe. She’s taking him to get his arm fixed. To stop the blood.

Then they’re both sitting in the back seat. Laura pulls the door shut and locks it. I drive as smoothly as possible along the road and around the bends and twists of the cove towards the highway. In the rear-view mirror, I can see Laura’s brother crouched beside the door moaning while she strokes his head, humming to soothe him. Streetlights intermittently flash on her face, but her features are blank and featureless. I see no fear in her. No self-pity.

By the time we reach Hobart, she has her brother’s head hugged to her chest and her eyes are closed. Small whimpers come from his lips. There’s blood on both their faces. She keeps his eyes covered as we stop at traffic lights. When we pull up outside the emergency department, Laura speaks quietly from the back. ‘Could you please go in and get some help? I don’t think I can do this bit alone.’

Lights illuminate the hospital entrance into a blinding white. The duty nurse at reception listens to me unmoving and then lifts a telephone. Within minutes four large men have come out to talk to me, their faces serious and attentive. They follow me to the car. There are cries and a scuffle in the back seat. Laura yells out, her voice edged with pain, and there’s an awful growling and howling. I stand back while the men wrestle Laura’s brother out of the car and restrain him. They bundle him quickly through the no-public-access doors, Laura close behind. Then I’m alone outside, blinking in the bright lights.

I linger on the pavement, waves of shock pulsing through me. Jess crawls from the car like a liquid shadow and shivers at my feet. I had forgotten she was there, huddling on the floor. She must have been terrified—first Mouse and his animal-like cries, then the four men leaping into the car, the shouting, the struggle. I bend and stroke her quivering head, guilt now mingling with my horror. I should have left her at home. But how could I have known?

The hollow siren of an approaching ambulance startles me. I scoop Jess up and deposit her on the front seat, then start the car. We’ll go home now, slowly, and sit quietly in the dark.

25

I always go for a walk early in the morning; it’s fresh and cool and quiet. This morning I particularly want to do normal things for Jess after the horror of that trip to the hospital last night. Like me, Jess is a creature of routine, and she takes comfort from these rituals.

We never usually meet anyone on our dawn jaunts, so it’s a surprise to both of us when we see Laura wandering along the bush track ahead. She floats through the scrub, her gaze focused somewhere out over the channel. I slow down, hoping to avoid her, but she hears Jess rustling in the grass and she turns.

‘Oh, hello.’ She doesn’t smile and her face is drawn. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t expecting to see anyone.’ She waits for me to join her. ‘You walk often?’ she asks.

‘Most days.’

She nods and I follow her onto the beach.

‘Is Mouse okay?’ I ask.

‘He’ll be all right. It was pretty horrible, though.’ She stops walking and sighs. ‘I didn’t sleep much.’

I hesitate, unsure whether to push on with my walk or whether I should wait for her. Jess trots along the beach and up into the grass along the shore, sniffing animal trails.

‘I didn’t stay at the hospital,’ she says, staring across the water. ‘There wasn’t much point. Once they sedated him, he slept. And they said they wouldn’t let him wake properly for a while. So I caught a taxi home.’ She turned to look at me. ‘I don’t like seeing him like that.’

‘No.’ I thrust my hands in my pockets.

‘He has paranoid schizophrenia,’ she says. ‘I thought he was taking his medication, but apparently not. After I got home last night I found a pile of pills stashed in one of my pot plants.’

‘Will he be home soon?’

‘Not for a couple of weeks. They have to wean him off sedation and then stabilise him on medication before he can come home.’ She looks up at me and I notice dark patches under her eyes. ‘Thank you for what you did for us,’ she says.

‘That’s all right.’

She glances at Jess snuffling up on the bank and then she gazes along the beach. ‘Do you mind if I walk with you?’ she asks.

I’d rather be alone, but what can I say? I shrug. ‘Okay.’

We wander along the sand, not exactly walking together, but not completely apart. Laura strolls along, distracted. At the end of the beach, she follows me up along the cliff trail. I feel a bit awkward, but I try to pretend she isn’t there. Unperturbed by the addition to our party, Jess trots quietly ahead.

The bush along the cliff is drier and we see thornbills and scrub wrens. A butcherbird chimes from high in a straggly eucalypt. I keep hoping Laura will turn back, but she comes all the way to the next beach and we walk back together along the road. At my driveway, I bid her farewell, but she stops and looks at me.

‘That was nice,’ she says. ‘Can we do it again? Maybe tomorrow?’

‘I’m not sure what I’m doing tomorrow,’ I say. What if Emma’s here? Laura could go walking by herself. She doesn’t need to come with me.

‘I’ll look out for you if I’m up,’ she says. ‘Walking’s good for me. I feel a bit better already.’ She stares down at her house where it snuggles behind a string of tree ferns. ‘It’s so quiet without Mouse,’ she says. ‘I suppose I should enjoy the break.’ She smiles at me sadly and I feel the weight of her loneliness.

‘I’d better go,’ I say. ‘I have to get ready for work.’

‘Thanks again for last night,’ she calls after me.

When I leave the garage that afternoon, the car is in a rush to get to the antdiv. I try to slow it down, but it takes corners recklessly and drives too fast along the highway towards Kingston, swinging into the carpark.

As arranged, Emma is waiting on the pavement in front of the building. But there’s a complication: Nick is standing there too. He’s standing too close to her, staking his claim. What did she say about him not owning her? I stop the car at the far end of the carpark, about fifty metres away, and sit, watching them converse. Neither of them has seen me yet and I’m unsure whether to stay or go.

Nick is leaning in towards Emma as they talk, and even from here, I can see him gazing at her intently. They look accustomed to being in each other’s space. Their body language makes my suspicions harder to deny. I want to think of Emma as my girlfriend, but really, I have no idea what goes on during the day when she’s at work. For all I know, she could go home with Nick at lunchtime. There are many hours in a day during which Emma could explore options other than me. I’ve been a fool to imagine that Emma could be mine. A few dinners and a night away together and I’m gone.

Finally, I move the car forward. I might be outshone by Nick’s predatory masculinity, but I won’t sit by watching like this. Emma asked me to pick her up. And if she asked
me
, then she didn’t ask him.

Nick notices the Subaru before Emma does, and scowls when he sees me behind the wheel. He murmurs something in her ear. She turns and looks at me, her face flushing pink and her body tensing. The intimacy between them is erased as she pulls away, holding him off with her hands. ‘I’m going with Tom,’ I hear her say.

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

Scooping up her backpack, she bounds towards the car, pulls the door open and flings herself inside, closing the door with a thud. Nick bangs the top of the car with the flat of his hand. He bends down to stare in the side window at Emma, his eyes possessive.

‘See you for morning coffee,’ he says. ‘The usual. In the café. Nine o’clock.’ He mouths something else, but Emma is already looking away from him. She’s looking at me, it makes my skin tingle.

‘Rescued,’ she says with a laugh. ‘He’s persistent, isn’t he?’

As we drive home, unspoken questions are thick between us. I want Emma to negate Nick. But she keeps her thoughts hugged close and prattles on instead about tidying her office and a trip she’s planning up north to visit her family. She’d like to see them again before she goes back south, and now’s the time to do it, before the frenetic pre-expedition rush begins. Her sister has two kids and she’s only seen them once or twice. Perhaps she should take a gift for them, but she doesn’t know what to buy. She doesn’t know much about kids, she says. In fact, she knows more about penguins.

I tell her we have something in common—I know more about birds than about people too. The look she casts my way is tinged with annoyance. She was only joking, she says. Of course she knows more about people than penguins. She was just speaking figuratively.

I don’t know what to say after that. All I can think of is Nick, and yet I can’t bring myself to say his name aloud. I can’t make myself ask her what’s going on between them. I’m afraid she’ll admit everything and then ask me to turn around and take her back to the antdiv. I couldn’t bear it. Last night after the hospital, I lay awake in bed thinking of her. Remembering the feel of her skin against mine. Trying to recall the smell of her hair and the curve of her smile. Trying to convince myself that Nick doesn’t exist for her.

At home, I light the fire and boil the kettle.

Emma doesn’t give me a chance to pour tea. She descends on me with a look of fierce determination. I wanted to allow room for discussion, but with her hands and eyes on me, it’s impossible to resist, and I submit willingly. This is what I’ve been wanting, after all—Emma’s lips on mine, her body against me, tight with need, her hands gripping me close.

It’s desperate love-making. All my unasked questions slip away, knocked aside like vases of flowers spilled in our wake. We grasp each other in the kitchen, tumble into the lounge room then make our way slowly to the bedroom, peeling off clothes, sliding shivery beneath the doona, feeding off the combined warmth of our bodies.

After a makeshift dinner, Emma pulls a bottle of whisky from her backpack with feigned stealth and a provocative smile. ‘Leftover duty-free,’ she says. ‘I brought it back from down south.’

I shake my head. ‘I’m no good at whisky.’

She strokes the stem of the bottle with a finger. ‘Let’s see if we can help you to become friends.’ She finds ice in the back of my freezer, cracks several cubes into a couple of tumblers and pours a generous shot into each, then passes me a tumbler. ‘Cheers. And hey, we’re having a party on Saturday night. Eight o’clock start. Will you come?’

‘I’m not good at parties either.’

‘You’ll be fine. Bring your own grog.’

We sit down together in the lounge room. The fire burbles quietly, the flames licking at the glass, the muffled crackle of burning wood. Jess is curled up in the corner on her rug. It’s dark outside, and here in our circle by the fire, all is cosy.

‘Drink up,’ Emma insists.

I take a reluctant sip and brace myself as the whisky burns down to my chest.

‘Good, isn’t it?’ Emma smiles. ‘Have some more.’ She jiggles the ice around her glass and takes a gulp, sighing with pleasure.

Mincingly, I sip a little more, preparing myself for the shocking burn.

‘Not like that,’ Emma says. ‘That’s pathetic.’ She crawls forward across the couch and takes the glass from me. ‘Tip your head back. I’m going to teach you how to take a proper mouthful.’

She pours a slug of liquor into my mouth then covers my lips with hers and kisses me, forcing me to swallow. I gasp as the whisky scalds its way down. It doesn’t take long to feel a creeping warmth oozing through my body. Emma pours more whisky into my mouth, kisses me again, teases me with her tongue and with her hands, then passes whisky from her own mouth into mine and forces me to swallow that too. She sits back laughing, and the room is warm, and my body is comfortable and growing looser by the minute.

‘You need this.’ She smiles at me persuasively. ‘You’re so tied up inside. Here.’ She sloshes more whisky into my glass. ‘I’ll just get more ice.’

I sip obediently while she fetches the ice tray and drops a handful of cubes into my glass. She tops up her own glass and then switches off the light as she sits down. Now the room is dark except for the dim glow from the lamp, and the rosy shimmer of the fire.