Wildlight (12 page)

Tom saw their escape from the storm as a warning. Every fisherman knelt to the sorcery of the ocean, the witch who kept watch and would bide her time for the moment to take back.

Come dawn they’d be out shooting pots again. This foreboding, his hatred of Frank, would dissipate like any passing storm. Yet something had been set in motion. Something visceral, winding like a clock key quarter turn by quarter turn, tightening Tom’s ribs at the base of his chest. Tom had seen Frank scared. His tough-as-steel brother. Hab, whose life before Australia Tom had never much considered, had countered Frank’s abuse with quiet resilience. Tom remembered what Hab had said about that first new sheller casting off its shell.
Brother, him.
Hab had prodded the soft new membrane then stepped back and put his hand to his heart in a way that endeared him to Tom.
New country. New big work. Habib New Shell Yılmaz
.

Nineteen wasn’t old-old. There were other things Tom could do. It wasn’t too late to cast off the old, start life anew. He’d tried explaining something to Habib but had given up, the point lost in language. He’d tried telling Hab it was the crayfish’s
struggle
to free itself of its old shell, the energy required, that triggered the crayfish to take up water and expand to something new. Tom couldn’t explain the physics of that weird osmotic process, but he knew it to be true.
Couple of months
, he’d said to Hab,
that new shell will harden up and fit you right
.

Steph was out of bed in a flash. She raced for the phone, ignoring the small voice that said it was way too early to be any of her friends. Steph grabbed the receiver and winced at the shrill fax tone.

She propped herself at the kitchen bench, yawning and barefoot in pyjamas. Pages stuttered from the fax machine, grinding through rollers impregnated with years’ worth of compressed lint. At the top of the second page:
For Weather Girl
. Gran’s new name for Steph. Gran. In motor drive before anyone was awake. A handwritten page for each of them. Steph switched on the kettle and found her mug.

How’s life in the wilds, Weather Girl? What a treat to have a fax from you. We’ve had a week of late frosts here. More like July weather than November.

You sound fed up with your studies. It must be hard keeping up the motivation, especially when you’re away from your friends. Try not to worry, love. I know you’ll succeed in whatever you choose to do. (Gran’s wise words.)

All well at this end. Yoga, Probus, Library morning. Busy, as always. On Friday Helen and I went to the Open Day at the ANU Glass Workshop. Helen brought her granddaughter, Lucy – did you meet her last time? Lovely girl, arty like you. I’ve popped the catalogue in your Christmas parcel, with a few bits and bobs you might find of interest.

The whole world’s in a panic over gearing up for the millennium bug. I don’t think anybody really knows what’s going to happen.

Love and hugs. Gran x

PS: Casper’s laid out by the heater commanding me to give him his morning cuddle. ‘Dogs have masters, cats have staff.’

The sky was already bright when Steph began the weather observations. Dawn was earlier, the days growing longer. At home they’d be preparing for exams, talking about the holidays, about Christmas, about plans for next year. Normally Steph’s friends were away on her New Year’s Eve birthday. This birthday she was being robbed of the most important celebration of her life. Turning seventeen on the eve of the new millennium. Her friends, everyone from school, all of Sydney would be congregating in the city to watch the fireworks, hear live music, dance and party through the night.

Beyond the Mewstone the morning sky looked petal pink. Steph stood at the cliff top. The paddock was edged by a perimeter of soil undermined by burrows. Steph always woke too late to see the mutton-birds fly out to forage for the day.

A pair of unfamiliar motor launches chugged back and forth below. Yellow, red, white and orange buoys dotted the water below the cliffs. Steph drew in the scent of the bush, the smell of mutton-bird, the sweetness of freshly cut grass. The mowing never stopped. Endless lines back and forth, her father stopping only to wrestle with the lawnmower. Give it a pep talk.
Come on, Buster. Nearly there, boy
.

Already the soft dawn colours were being bleached by the day, the light turning crisp. The ocean barely drew a breath. Out there was a shimmering lake that melted into sky. For every stretch of howling wind and rain, Maatsuyker delivered a day of perfect weather—two if they were lucky. A reward, Steph thought, that could lull you into thinking this place was special, something you might not easily forget. She wished her cousin Lydia could be here for a day. Not Tessa. Not Sammie. Those two would have made faces at one another to show that they were bored.

Today Steph refused to lock herself inside a perpetually cold house, wrapped in a blanket and hunched over dreary studies while an army of blowflies buzzed at the window or dropped dead along the sill.

The ocean sparkled. Down at the Needles, a small white launch motored in close. Steph’s only contact with Tom, a week ago now, had been a brief, disjointed conversation. He was different on the radio, stilted, more conscious than she of others listening in. It left Steph disappointed. It made her unsure. Really, she hardly knew a thing about him. Or his brother Frank. It was weeks since she’d seen their boat working on the water.

Steph logged off the weather computer. A pair of green rosellas squawked and flew off from the outside railing. They’d be inside the weather office in a flash if she forgot to shut the door. She angled down the paddock. At the top of the lighthouse, a currawong surveyed its domain, perched on the prongs of the lightning rod.

Steph pulled back the lighthouse door to air the tower. She scaled the stairs and tied back the top door that opened to the balcony. The tower wasn’t singing. It wasn’t even humming. Among the palette of greens below was a dusting of white: the first tea-tree flowers. Steph raced back down the spiral staircase, giddy by the time she reached the bottom.

An overgrown path led her down toward the headland. She was wary of her footing where the path meandered near the edge. She was forbidden to come down here in the wind. She wound beneath branches, past the dainty violet flowers of dianella, past stalks of Christmas bells that rose toward the dappled light, the first red flowers as shiny as glass.

Steph felt a freedom in knowing that a rustle in the scrub belonged not to a snake but to a small bird or skink. The foliage opened out to waist-high shrub and the pungent scent of flowers. Flies droned around newly opened daisy flowers. Steph paced downhill through a carpet of pigface.

She stood on a platform of rock within reach of the ocean. Bull kelp rose and fell in tangles. Skirmishes and growls reverberated from the colony of fur seals sprawled across Seal Rock. The rock was painted white with excrement.

She heard the hum of a compressor from the motor launch anchored close in to the rocks. A Hookah line trailed across the water. A person worked on deck. Somewhere below would be an abalone diver. It was from these rocks that her mother would pick abalone when the weather was calm. Grandfather would throw in a crayfish ring.
He had to pull it up quick fast. Dad was very skilled.
One time, her mother said, she and her father had almost been washed off. Steph could see how. She had become so accustomed to looking down upon the ocean that standing here, staring out, it was as if the surface of the ocean was above her.
A big roller
, her mother said,
that kept coming up and up and up. Finally it slid away, combing back the kelp and taking Dad’s cray rings with it.
Steph’s eyes followed the flank of the island. This was how Maatsuyker looked from a boat: scoured rocks and cliff faces, a moat of kelp, jagged skerries as impenetrable as razor wire.

Steph climbed back onto the headland and chose a place to lie down among the pigface. She sunk into the spongy green, her fingers brushing fine pleated petals. The more time she spent at Maatsuyker, the more she got to see her mother idealise the past. Callam. Her mother’s parents. Steph felt to be at the eye of a cyclone holding all the world’s secrets. She hadn’t spoken to Mum of the phone call from the woman. How to broach the subject of the name scratched across her grandfather’s plaque?
Was something going on between Grandfather and someone else’s wife?
Instead she’d asked her mother:
What made them leave here?

They didn’t have a say in it
.
You worked on the lights. You came and went as you were told. It killed my father, it literally did, being shipped back to town. He lived for the lights.
Mum told her how the men took shifts in the tower: four hours on, eight hours off.
Fifteen minutes before dusk the light went on, and it burned through to dawn. Mornings they worked together painting, mowing, polishing, servicing all the equipment. I remember having to tiptoe around the house when Dad was sleeping.

Steph tried to visualise her grandfather pumping kerosene bottles every half-hour to keep the light going, winding heavy weights each and every hour of his shift. The keepers kept logs for everything, a log for all the passing ships. Weather observations six times a day.
I’d hear Dad on the radio send a string of numbers back to Hobart. Then there’d be a crackly voice you could barely understand talking back at him. Dad had bread to bake, beer to brew. In summer the men kept fire watch along the mainland coast. Their work never ended.

Steph pressed her mother.
Was there some kind of trouble between the families?

Trouble? Why would you say that?

Steph backpedalled.
I just wondered why he had to leave when he didn’t want to.
She’d seen her mother flinch.
Chill out, Mum. You’re paranoid.

Steph shielded her eyes from the glare. The flannel of her sleeve felt warm and stiff and smelled of sun-dried laundry—not aloe-scented from the dryer. Steph drifted in and out to the rhythmic drone of the Hookah compressor. The cry of gulls. Seals groaning and squabbling. Far away she heard her name. She felt Callam beside her, keeping pace, the two of them swimming out from the beach, turning and rolling like dolphins. Steph slowed—she didn’t like the deep, the patches of weed below—but Callam kept swimming, out and out. Her brother turned and she thought he was coming back.
Stephanie
, he shouted.
Stephanie
, he beckoned. Callam never called her Stephanie. He shouted something else across the water,
Mongrels, the pair of them
. Steph woke to a whistle. She searched around. She heard her name. She looked to the lighthouse. Up on the balcony. Tom!

Tom yanked the outboard into life, reversed the dinghy in an arc and motored out from the Gulch. Stephanie sat perched at the bow, gripping the gunnel and looking back at the hill from where they’d come. ‘It’s like a big scar through the bush,’ she called to him above the motor.

She meant the haulage way. He felt her watching him. Tom’s stomach churned in equal proportions of zest and anxiety.
Yes!
she’d squealed when he’d told her the plan. She’d raced from the lighthouse, changed her clothes and was waiting with her backpack before he’d had a chance to properly chat with James, assure her father she’d be safe.
Have you packed a towel?
her mother called after them.
Did you get the bread, Steph?
Tom wanted today to be good. Let it be good.

The
Perlita Lee
bobbed at anchor, water shimmering, her red and white paintwork gleaming in the morning light. Frank was out on deck cleaning salt from the wheelhouse windows. Habib had moved all the pots to the bow. The day off was a bonus that Tom couldn’t fathom—halfway through a fishing stint—he’d grabbed it just the same; he’d run with Frank’s idea.
Invite her aboard, make a day of it, we’ll run over the other side for a look-see. Any place you want to go.
Frank. Some weeks on top of the world, dealing out benevolence like a croupier with cards.
We deserve a day off,
Frank had said. That they did. Night and day, working the outside of South West Cape up to Port Davey, two, three shots a night. His brother ought to be stoked: four days and the tanks were three-quarters full with top-dollar fish.

Frank had changed from his track pants with the tear in the bum. He helped Stephanie aboard. ‘Hi, Frank,’ she said without waiting to be introduced. ‘Hi, Habib.’ Frank gave a nod of approval. Habib bowed and shook her hand and took her pack.

The wheel was Frank’s throne, but once he moved the
Perlita Lee
away from the island, the GPS set for Louisa Bay, he motioned to Tom. ‘You take her, mate. I’ll sort a few things below.’

Stephanie was seated behind the wheelhouse talking to Hab. She turned to smile. The rumble of the engine vibrated through the metal floor, through Tom’s legs and arms. Frank had dismantled half the engine before he’d found the fault. Since he’d put it back together it hadn’t missed a beat. Trust the boat, Tom told himself. His mother would say,
Don’t think badly of your brother. Look at everything he does for us.
Perhaps this time she was right.

Tom pushed the throttle hard and felt a surge of power, the same charge he remembered as a boy when Frank had first started on the boats. Back then Tom would blink awake to his Christmas sack hanging off his door. It made Tom squirm to think how quickly he could set his mother’s gifts aside. Waiting in the lounge room was something she could never afford to buy.

His brother had a sixth sense, as if he knew before Tom exactly what a boy his age would want. His first bike a dragster with blue and black stripes. The next year a skateboard. Then the CD player for his bedroom. The mountain bike whose picture Tom had clipped from a catalogue and taped to his bedroom door months before, hoping Frank would find it. Frank’s benevolence enveloped the house. A ham on the bone that filled a shelf of the fridge. Crayfish. Chocolates. A crate of Tom’s favourite soft drink. A carton of fresh sweet cherries for their mother. One Christmas Frank staggered in from the garage with a new TV. He’d knocked his knuckles manoeuvring the box through the door.
Frankie
, Mum cried.
Oh, Frank
. She’d grown quiet, the way she sometimes did at Christmas. Perhaps the price tag of Frank’s generosity and all that abundance amounted, in her eyes, to a hard-fisted reminder that her sons had been robbed of the singular gift every child deserves.