Wildlight (3 page)

Steph stormed into the kitchen. ‘Can anyone get a signal?’

‘You can chuck that thing in the deep blue yonder, the good it will do you.’ Steam fogged Lindsay’s glasses as she topped up the teapot.

‘You didn’t tell her?’ her father said to her mother.

Mum shot him a look.

‘Tell me what?’ Steph said. ‘Mum?’

Lindsay beamed. ‘Ain’t no curv’rage in this purta town.’ She chortled at her own lame performance. Even Dad flared his nostrils with disdain.

Steph took a breath. ‘The mobile tower is at the top of the hill.’

‘Telstra repeater, lovie, for the so-called landline, when it behaves itself. Tasmar Radio repeater at the north end of the island. That won’t help you, neither.’ She looked triumphant.

‘Telstra told us that there is mobile coverage. Didn’t they, Mum?’

‘I thought that’s what they said.’

Lindsay motioned to the landline. She had an annoying habit of turning to Dad when it was something important. ‘Linked to mainland Tassie by a series of VHF repeaters. Bri says the signal won’t even support a modem.’

Steph felt ill.

‘Steph, I know it’s going to be different at first.’ Her mother sounded earnest, wanting to avert a scene. Confirmation that it was true. She’d known all along. ‘There’s a lot to get used to. You can ask your friends to phone if it’s important. They can fax you a letter. When I was growing up here we didn’t have—’

‘A letter!’ Steph slumped into a chair. ‘No one phones a landline from their mobile. You said it wouldn’t be an issue. You said I’d be able to stay in touch. That’s what you said, Mum. You promised. You swore.’ Next thing she’d be blubbering in front of Lindsay. She wasn’t having that.

‘The landline is paid for by Parks,’ Lindsay said. ‘For business and emergency.’

Her mother looked embarrassed. ‘We have to respect that. We can’t go calling Sydney every other day just to chat with friends.’

‘Respect, Mother? How about honesty?’ Mum’s face coloured scarlet. Lindsay looked away. ‘I won’t have any friends by the time I get back.’

‘It won’t be so bad,’ Dad chimed in. ‘What with the weather observations, Year 11 studies—’

‘Year 12,’ she reminded him.

‘You’ll have the island to explore, walking tracks, a bit of brush-cutting, your art always keeps you busy—island time will fly by.’

Steph flinched when he touched her shoulder. ‘Trying to convince yourself?’

‘Come on, Stephie,’ Lindsay said. ‘Not many teeny-boppers can claim their own lighthouse. I bet in your mother’s day—’

Steph clasped her skull. Teeny-bopper? She was almost seventeen. She checked her mobile for a signal. She was on her own, cut off from the world. She turned to her mother. ‘I’ve given up my life for you. Everything.’

Her mother sighed.

‘My friends, my social life, Lydia’s eighteenth, the most important term of school.’ Steph couldn’t stop. ‘And why? To support my
mother
on an island that no one’s ever heard of, where there’s no one but my parents to talk to, no email, no TV, no internet. NO MOBILE COVERAGE.’ She glowered long and hard. The flywire door banged. Lindsay paced along the driveway, intent on whatever food scraps she was ferrying to the compost bin. ‘You never once asked if I wanted to come. What I thought. Did you ask Dad before you signed our lives away?’ Her mother turned her back. She stared out through the window. ‘This is all about you, Mum. Pretending you’re still a girl living at a lighthouse, everything sparkly, as if nothing’s changed, as if Callam were right here, squeaky clean and perfect.’ Her mother bristled—Steph pounced on it: ‘Boys’ pranks. Right.’ The stack of money Steph found in her brother’s bookshelf. Every option Steph had conjured to explain that cash was bad. Dad’s look of bewilderment at the sight of it had slumped to resignation.
Let’s not say anything to Mum
. Everyone tiptoeing around the problem when her brother was unravelling before them. ‘Callam might still be here if we’d dealt with it instead of wishing it would go away.’ The window framed her mother’s back. No response. ‘You got your way, Mum. Five months together in this . . . hovel, so we can all,’ Steph’s fingers marked the air, ‘“move on”.’

Her father’s focus stayed fixed upon the floor. The heel of a hand struck Steph’s cheekbone. It was as much the shock as the strength of her mother’s fury. Steph cradled her jaw. ‘Tenth birthday. Replay.’

‘Fuck you.’ Her mother drew a ragged breath. She never swore. As quickly the savage deserted her, leaving her slack-jawed, her mouth quivering. She looked like a person who’d suffered a stroke. Her father went to comfort her but her mother shoved his arm away. ‘Leave me be, the pair of you.’

Where do you go when you’re marooned by ocean, cut off from help? Steph reached the road, looked in the direction of the helipad, relived the pilot’s disgust and turned the other way. Her face stung from her mother’s slap.

She walked the road between vehicle furrows worn through the grass. All around, tea-trees and banksias were sheared to match the angle of the slope; they leaned in unison like swimmers at the starting blocks, stooped with outstretched arms. Bracken, reeds, creepers, ground covers, thickets of shrubs—everything about the bush looked sharp. You could be exiled in a place you’d soaked up through a lifetime of your mother’s stories, hoodwinked into thinking you belonged. She tore off a twig and stripped it of its leaves.

The road led downhill around a bend, away from the house and the beady eyes of adults. Steph dropped her shoulders, slowed her step.

Her footsteps startled a tiny mouse that darted from the edge of the road and halted a metre away. There were no domestic animals on Maatsuyker Island. Everything was native. Steph lowered to her haunches, expecting the mouse to scatter.
Antechinus.
She ignored her mother’s voice and watched the tiny swamp mouse snuffle through grass, its snout sweeping in staccato until it homed in on a spot just centimetres away. The antechinus burrowed at speed, its slender head disappearing into earth and pulling out the tail of a worm. It yanked, stretching the pulpy segment and reversing across Steph’s gumboot, absorbed by the tug-of-war. The worm pulled free—glistening, beaded with soil; the antechinus swallowed it as swiftly as a string of spaghetti, then scurried to the undergrowth.

The hem of the awful trackpants dragged though wet grass. Steph hoicked them onto her hips and folded the waistband. The ditch on the uphill side of the road looked chiselled from rock. Water burbled along its course and collected in pools dammed by sticks and leaves. When the water broke through she saw it rush downhill, a small raft of debris spinning and toppling. It disappeared into a culvert that ran beneath the road. Steph crossed to where water spilled from its lip to a bank of wet mulch. Darkness threatened to fold around her. She pulled back, tugged at the sleeves of the shirt and wedged her hands in the pit of her arms.

A row of fuel tanks; a damaged wind turbine, one of the blades a broken wing. The roof of the shed was lined with solar panels. Steph opened the large door to generators, a bank of batteries, a workbench, checklists, logbooks, the smell of age and dust and engine oil.

This was the end of the road, the lighthouse all squatness and girth, a round of white bouncing in the sun. Steph shaded her eyes. The lower section of the painted brick remained in shadow, its door tied open with a heavy braid of rope that looked a hundred years old.

Steph circled to the side of the light tower concealed from the road, her back to the ocean so only the Needle Rocks would see her standing chest to mortar, pressed against the round of it, her arms extending across the belly of the lighthouse that felt as solid and unerring as a grandmother. If Callam were looking down he’d say she was acting like some hippie greenie—the kind who’d join a circle to hug some tree in an old-growth forest and sing mournful folksy songs. This was too raw for that. Beneath the flat of her hands, through the texture of brick and mortar, Steph conjured a matriarchy layered with grandmothers and great-grandmothers and all the great-greats before those. She closed her eyes and felt the protrusion of her hipbones, a press of ribs against the structure’s permanence. A flow of air curled around the tower, soughing, lifting wisps of hair and veiling her eyes. The whisper of the lighthouse carried Callam’s voice:
It’s not just Mum’s fault
. She tilted her chin to an expanse as white as an apron. She’d never forgive her mother. Not for hitting her again.

Steph stepped in through the heavy doors. A cylindrical shaft filled the centre of the tower like the funnel of a ship. She turned to a cabinet shaped to fit the circular wall. Each compartment housed a canister, each lid printed with a letter from the alphabet. She shook each one in turn, empty but for Z. She extracted a flag so frail from age that Steph could have ripped the cotton threads. Could have wrecked it there and then. Black, yellow, blue, red: four triangles meeting at the centre. Each signal flag depicted a letter of the phonetic alphabet, each stood for a message in itself that the old light keepers signalled in communication with passing ships. Z for Zulu. The semaphore set they were given years ago.
You Are Coming into Danger
, Steph would signal Callam from the house. He, on the railing of the swimming enclosure:
Altering Course to Starboard
, or whatever other flag he had on hand. Why did he have to change? Steph returned Zulu to its canister.

She climbed the spiral staircase—latticed iron steps that wound around the wall. She didn’t feel fearful of the height because this tower was divided into floors. At the second storey was a table set with three polished lanterns, a visitors’ book waiting to be signed. Each floor felt brighter than the one below, the natural light given by narrow casement windows set deep into the brickwork, by a shaft of light filtering down. Through the pitting and scratches of the glass, Steph spied a band of colour: a red fishing boat moving on the water.

The top steps led to a structure twice her height—the lens rested on an enormous iron cog. Steph ran her fingers over prisms. She pulled back at the disconnect, the moment before your brain makes sense of something, the way you sometimes can’t distinguish hot from cold. It was the contradiction of each rib: the feel of sharp angles against a sweep of soft bowed curves. Steph saw where bubbles had been trapped in the glass. The sensation was electric; she felt it grip her gut; a shard of something vital and prophetic. Steph picked up a cloth. She rubbed at the glass until it gleamed. The keepers—her grandfather—would have taken turns at polishing the glass. The ribs shimmered with rainbow edges. Her mother’s parents were long gone before she and Callam came along. She imagined them as carnies at a fair, packing their belongings and trundling to the next stop. Maatsuyker Light Station had been their final posting before Grandfather died. The single physical link Steph could claim was the ink bottle her mother gifted her when she and Callam turned ten. Callam’s lip had stuck out at the nautilus shell Mum had saved for him. Her brother had no time for shells.

The ink bottle came from Deal Island in Bass Strait, the tiny glass vessel washed up in a storm—
still stoppered and filled with violet ink when your grandfather found it amongst the thrown weed
. Perhaps it had come from a voyage in their
Great Explorers
book. Steph pictured an old wooden ship with Steph herself its figurehead, she and her vessel ploughing uncharted waters.

She’d relented, loaned Callam the ink bottle which he’d soon forgotten and shoved to the back of his desk amongst everything else. She’d gone into his room to reclaim it, lain on his bunk, tipped and tilted the tiny bottle before the light until he’d come in and demanded she get off his bed and grabbed the bottle from her. If she’d had another chance she would have let him keep it. Waited until he’d forgotten it again. Instead Steph fought him—
It’s mine!
—yelling just as many names as Callam called her, he taunting her from the other side of the desk. The slow-motion replay of the bottle hurtling through air—perhaps he really hadn’t meant to let it go. A shock of violet streaked across the doona, the wall, splattered across floorboards and patterned the rug like the tangled tentacles of some mythical jellyfish. Steph was on her knees and picking at glass as if desperation could reverse the outcome. She heard Callam race down the stairs:
Mum, it was her! It was her!

Her mother’s shock at the damage to the room turned to rage when she connected the violet with bits of broken glass.
Thirty years I take care of that bottle and you smash it in an instant with your selfish stupidity.

If Mum had asked, Steph could have explained. But it was like trying to reason with Callam once he’d crossed a certain line. There was no space for anything but the force of her mother’s hand that knocked Steph’s head against the ladder of the bunk. Mum marched her by the arm to her room. The door slammed and Steph curled on her bed. When the light dimmed and she opened her eyes her father was beside her, stroking her hair, sitting her up and prising open her fist.
Why?
he asked. She shook her head. She hadn’t realised she’d been gripping broken glass.

He bound the bloodied hand in a towel and put her in the car. At the hospital she buried her face in the weave of his jacket, tweezers nipping at a dartboard of glass. The pain of turning ten was indelible; Steph opened her hand to a crosshatch of tattooed violet scars.

She moved out to the lighthouse balcony and stepped back in fright. It hadn’t seemed scary from inside. The lawn below edged against the cliff. A long way out to sea a single shark’s tooth pierced up through the ocean, a lone pyramid of rock distant from the Needles. Directly below the lighthouse, Steph followed lines of foam to the red fishing boat. It manoeuvred so near the rocks it looked to nudge them. A figure on deck tossed a craypot overboard. She heard the engine rev and watched the boat swing away as lithely as a dolphin. Clusters of orange buoys trailed in an arc.

The figure looked up to the lighthouse. Steph lifted her arm to wave, grew self-conscious when the person continued looking her way without waving back. Wind ruffled the ocean surface. Beneath the thickening cloud shadows turned the ocean into something menacing. She moved to the sheltered side of the lighthouse.