Wildlight (31 page)

Tom rolls up his jeans, makes his way across shallows to the rocks beneath the headland. Another time this ocean would pound around the corner, laden with weed, sending up spindrift.

At the northern end of the beach, Zulu plays out a cycle of run, stop, squat, bark. Squawks from irritated gulls.

The water is clear, a bed of rippled sand. A school of fish zigzags by. Lettuce seaweed turns and folds as delicate as tissue. Tom thinks on Marcie, Stephanie. A note he never saw, torn to strips. Too late now for might-have-beens.

He feels a churning in his gut, his mind sliding into feckless gear. He hasn’t smoked a reefer in years but keeps a small stash in the glove box. Call it a tribute to his youth, a small rebellion against the upright citizen he claims to have become. The cigarette paper feels fragile from heat and age, weed and seed heads dry as desiccated coconut. In its prime a joint like this would have worked some magic. Now it probably won’t hold a kick.

At the touch of the match it sizzles and flares, burns down too fast. Tom draws smoke into his lungs, takes a long deep breath, the heat cloying on his throat. He coughs, puffs through to the end, thumps his chest to clear his throat.

Squat.

He rolls another, draws it deep into his chest.

He searches out to sea, his body sliding with the drift.

Tom sways toward Marcie, trawls through ripples of red hair and regret. Was he hasty? Did he make the right decision? He sees her walking naked to the ocean, trying, trying to lure him in. He shakes his head. She played him. All that time she knew about the note. The signal flags he gave her—a kind of coveting, wanting someone else’s life.

He fixes his focus on ocean. He rocks toward the rhythm of a dislocated dare knocking at his groin. His body grows urgent with desire. He pictures a woman naked in the water, tall, slender, turning and laughing, reaching for his hands and pulling him in. The two of them pressed together, their skin yellow through a river of black tea. Everything he’s lost is in the water. Tom pulls his belt loose, looks down at his jeans and underwear pushed down around his ankles. He tears at the snaps of his shirt and hears them pop. He hears himself snicker.
Butt naked. Tom-Tom goes the ocean.

Tom dives, the crown of his head bruising sand. He surfaces and heaves at air, waiting for a numbing sting of cold. Warm water envelopes him, silky as a robe. He swims toward the deep, stopping once to check that he can touch the bottom. He angles out across the bay, his arms leaden as sinkers. He turns to watch the lighthouse, sees a slender figure standing on the balcony. Stephanie? He gives a manic wave, feels to be grinning like a clown. No one waves back. Tom turns, swims on.

He stops to catch his breath. He floats on his back to rest, his ears immersed in water. He can hear each intake of air, his heart thudding in his ears:
Brother. Brother. Brother.
The old people filled the Three Brothers with legend. Each brother taken by a witch, buried where each mountain stands. Tom’s Brother. Stephanie’s Brother. A witch of an ocean; one Brother spare.

Tom closes his eyes against the moment when sun slides across his face. This is where he wants to be: far enough from shore to escape the shadow of land. He hears submarine trills of moving water, terrestrial squawks of gulls. A dog barking, far, far away. He feels Frank close by.
Hup you come.
The pair of them together in the dinghy, bobbing in a sea of fog. Tom sees the prop fouled with tangled line torn from pots. He feels Frank shiver from the dampness of the air. His brother steels himself against the press of cold. He watches Frank pull on Tom’s red float coat and try to work the faulty zip. Good luck with that, matey. Too tight to fork out for a new one. But look, Frank. In the bottom of the boat: Tom’s orange knife. Another handy discard. He hears Frank cackle with relief. Frank takes the knife from its sheath and here is his chance, sawing at those loops of rope, forged on by indignation at this unwarranted predicament, abandoned by a shit of a kid brother to whom Frank Forrest had given all but his life, shortly to settle the balance. Tom feels the set through the fog and tries to warn Frank,
Look out! Sit tight!
A triple, a quintet rolling through in quick succession, overturning the dinghy and upending Frank into the water. Frank, Frankie, hold the dinghy’s keel. Don’t waste your lungs cursing your good-for-nothing little brother who wasn’t there to render assistance the one and only time he was required.

Brother mine, the cold would have got you first, it wouldn’t give a rat’s arse for how tough and nuggety you were within that fiefdom of a wheelhouse. Wooden fingers. No amount of bullying would stop your grip loosening from the boat. Frank Forrest cast adrift like all the craypot buoys he’d ordered cut. A surrender to the whimsy of the ocean. His brother bobbing in a dirty undone float coat labelled with his useless brother’s name.

Tom rolls in the water, onto his front, he forges forward, pushing back tears in his throat and the burning in his arms. He savours a mouthful of salt, the tanginess of ocean. He stops to purge the next. With each new wave of shuffled thoughts Tom slows to rest. He is partway to an island glistering with sunlight—a perfect place, a perfect girl, all beyond his reach. He feels to be a vast way out from shore, his dog a moving, barking blur on a scalloped frill of beach. Zulu. She’ll be fretting something awful. I’m sorry, little dog.

A life for a life. His dues to the ocean. Tom floats on his back, ready, now, for sleep to pull him down. ‘I’m sorry, Frank.’ Tom’s voice warbles through the water. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Across his face a lapping wash of peace. His debt to Frank made payable in full.

*

Tom gasps awake. A flash of black cuts through water at his side. He inhales ocean, retches in a fit of coughing. Pain slashes at his back. He can hear panicked cries, around him the water inking violet with his blood. Tom’s arms flail, he thrashes to escape the tearing at his back. He swings to face the set of razored teeth. Instead a dog, a billowing of black and white.

Zulu’s eyes bulge, her shrill cries the pitch of a terrorised woman. Her legs thrash in frenzy, her nails tear his throat and shoulders, he feels razors down his sides. She swims in desperate circles, her coat a skirt of bull kelp fanned across the surface. She tries repeatedly to board his back as if he were a raft. Tom fends her off. All this way from shore. ‘You idiot dog,’ he growls. She seems to calm at the reprimand. His dog looks to breathe again. She turns toward the shore, whimpers, looks across to check that he is there. Tom pictures the scene from above: a thrashing dog, a wounded master, a berley of freshly pumped blood. There is the definition of panic. There is the will to go on. ‘In we go, girl. In we go.’

*

Steph takes a last wander along Wash House Beach and Pilot Beach before locking up the pilot station. She carries her bags to the car, slows beneath the grove of casuarina to watch a nesting pair of tawny frogmouths, still and quiet in the branches. Empty, worse than if she’d never come at all. She drives into town to leave the keys. Tuesday. She has a whole day to fill.

Her map shows a coastline of lighthouses from New South Wales to Queensland’s border. She drives past convivial seaside towns with charming names: Lake Cathie, Bonny Hills. The signboard at a community hall makes her look again and smile:
Spring Into Song Weekend
;
USB Thumb Drive Found.

Holiday homes punctuate forested hills and towering timber country, the bush tinted and lush with flower. Rolling pastures, contented cattle, gardens an impossible green after years of living in a landlocked desert. The world feels off kilter, as if only the outline of her has arrived, the rest far behind in no-man’s-land.

Tacking Point Lighthouse stands proud at the end of the road, set upon a cleared nub of headland. A family seated on a bench looks out to froths of white kicking up the ocean. ‘Humpbacks,’ says the woman. ‘They’re breaching.’ She hands Steph her binoculars. ‘It’s a mother and a calf.’

The lighthouse is newly painted with accents of blue, brilliant in the light. It could as easily watch over the Aegean Sea, its short tower offset by a low arched roof: more Greek Orthodox chapel. She tries the door. Locked. Eighteen seventy-nine. It’s nothing like Maatsuyker.
You can’t wind back the clock.

Steph finds her way into Port Macquarie, her eagerness to look around subdued. She eats a sandwich at a cafe, messages Lydia:
Lost cause. Back in Sydney in the morning. Could only get on late night train.
All this way for nothing. She hasn’t even gained a proper sense of Tom.

She drives north, deliberates on whether to take the dirt road all the way in to Smoky Cape. She strums the steering wheel. She has hours before the train.

She parks beside a Hilux ute, the only other vehicle in the car park. Kangaroos graze on the grass. They raise their heads, chewing as they watch her.

A red quad bike sits outside the cottages, its makeshift trailer piled with linen, a vac pack and mops. The caretaker hauls a tub of laundry on the back. ‘Sorry, love,’ he tells her. ‘Not today. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we run the tours.’

The top door to the lighthouse is open. ‘Would it be possible for me to take a look? I won’t be too long.’

He thinks a moment. ‘Close the bottom door behind you so others don’t follow you up.’

She passes by a worn old jacket slung over a post. Something about it makes her think of Tom.

A Fresnel lens, a working lighthouse. Newly painted. Not a skerrick of rust. That would please her mother. She and Dad are somewhere in the Kimberley, celebrating her father’s retirement from the ABC. Steph has to work to imagine the time before he was a producer in WA, when he read the news on air. She keeps an old cassette recording, with no device to play it on, of when his voice was smooth. Steph texts them a photo.
Hi from Smoky Cape. How’s the Kimberley?
The message fails. No signal. She climbs the spiral stairs, steps out through the upper doorway. She stands on the lighthouse balcony, unprepared for this giddiness of feeling. A sweep of wild beaches north and south. A pacific ocean faithful to its name.

She spends time gazing at the ocean. A long way out a movement. A whale? Dolphins? A raft of birds? She loses track of it. She scans the ocean. There. A ruffling. A swimmer, bold, alone, gliding through the water.

Steph moves around the balcony, the flat of her hand against brick and mortar—a texture that feels a part of her. She presses her ribs against the round of the wall, tilts her gaze to the catwalk’s latticed steel, the windows of the lantern room. The platen murmurs, air curls around the lighthouse like a whisper. Place. Memory. Love. Loss. All the forces that shape a person—not into the neat, symmetrical vessel she thought her life would be, but this, the past pulling at the edges, knotted strands of that long-ago girl wound within the woman. Steph feels a ruffle of oceanic air, cool and clean. The scent of the bush. This. Her homeland. A future of her making stretching out before her. Through her hands and chest the humming of the lighthouse. A small, determined light warming her with readiness.

*

Steph punches numbers on her phone. ‘It’s not too late if I call by now?’

She has the address on the card, but dutifully scrawls down Annie’s directions. ‘Town side of the Camden River,’ Annie says. ‘One click on from Tom’s. Hang a left as soon as you cross the bridge.’

Steph drives south, glad to leave the highway for meandering roads through tall timber forest, rolling hills of pasture.

She drives over a rise that looks down upon a bend of the river, a large array of greenhouses. She slows the car, pulls off to the gravel shoulder.

Steph stands against the padlocked gate. Acres of steel framework, multi-spanned greenhouses encased in heavy plastic. The leap between the boy back then and this. She hadn’t pictured anything as grand. A rusted mailbox, belonging to a different time, sits nailed to a post beside the gate.
T. L. FORREST
punched from tin. Why would such a simple rustic thing seize her with emotion? Steph touches the roughened surface of the letters.

She turns to leave before anyone should catch her, like some skittish animal slinking off into the night. She changes her mind and pulls her sketchbook from her bag. She sits in the passenger seat and draws an outline at the corner of the page, adds a dotted beam of light. She writes the date.
Dear Tom.
A line thrown out.

Seeing this old tin box with your name brought to mind a plaque I made when Mum and Dad and I left Maatsuyker, all those years ago. Remember the Lighthouse Tree? (Remember the leeches!) I expect the plaque is still nailed to that tree, rusting with age like all the keepers’ names and dates of service that surround it, only this was a tribute to the memory of your life. If that makes no sense, too mixed-up for words, perhaps you will begin to understand my reaction to discover you here, alive and well.

I’ve been in two minds about whether to contact you. I do not wish to intrude on your life, or cause you any problems. This afternoon I stood on the balcony of Smoky Cape Lighthouse and thought about Maatsuyker, how that special place, that fragile time, shaped the person I’ve become. I saw a ruffling in the water, a long way out. It took a few moments to even find it again and to realise the movement was a person, completely on their own, swimming across the bay. Surely the worst decision would be to catch sight of someone after all this time and then to turn away.

I imagine a vastness of ocean between that long-ago time and the lives we lead now, but should you ever feel inclined to talk, without expectation or obligation, my contact is below.

Whichever path you take, whatever you do, I wish you love and joy.

In friendship,

Your Stephanie