Wildlight (21 page)

Late afternoon and the light felt off. It smelled off; an ammonia stink from strands of kelp torn loose in the storm and left to rot on the surface. The ocean had withdrawn, stretches of eerie calm interrupted by sets of long slow rollers that rose out of nowhere and lifted the boat. Fog drifted in and out and the damp air and physical effort made Tom rub at his face with his sleeve.

Beyond the diesel fumes and burring of the engine, the otherworldliness of the surrounds came from a yawning silence. It would forever be this cycle of storm and wind and calm, long after he and Frank were gone. Tom fancied the ocean murmuring:
Get out while you can, mate
. Out before your boat gets heaved on rocks, out before a rogue wave catches you unawares and flips you overboard. The standard joke amongst the fleet: always the deckie, never the skipper, that takes the wave.

Frank was back to harping about being one hand short, all the time Hab was having off when Frank hadn’t had a decent break in years. ‘His missus picks the busiest part of the season to squeeze out her sprog.’ Frank with a mouthful of foulness you couldn’t switch off. Tom emptied the final pot and stacked it at the front.

They were moving across the ocean, through patches of semi-clear then back into fog, veering off course to Bluey MacIntyre’s pots. ‘No.’ Tom shook his head at Frank. He’d had enough of stealing.

I’m in charge
Frank’s face said.
On deck and get yourself ready.

Frank pulled up the boat at Bluey’s buoys. Tom threw out the grappling hook and missed. Frank cursed at him and brought the boat around again. Tom looked at the thing in his hands and couldn’t recall its name. Grail . . . Cradle. To do with struggle. Gravelling . . . Grappling.

He felt it slip, he let it drop, the hook tumbling and bouncing against the lip of gunnel. It wasn’t only his brain refusing to work, he was unable to physically move. Tom wondered if it was conceivable at nineteen to suffer a stroke—his limbs felt leaden. And there came Frank marching from the wheelhouse and shoving Tom off balance and hurling the hook and scooping up the buoy and cutting the pot free without even taking Bluey’s catch. Just to make a point. Show Tom who was boss. The whole thing. He and Frank. Worthless pieces of waste.

‘You’re a girl.’ Frank turned back inside.

They used the GPS to navigate through fog, back to New Harbour—the promise of another evening meal of defrosted chops and instant potato, peas from a tin, a nothingness night.

The days were long—dusk didn’t fall until late. At times the fog lifted enough for Tom to sense that somewhere up there out of reach beckoned clear air and blue sky. Then it closed in and you couldn’t see beyond the bow. Frank rolled out the anchor chain himself; he couldn’t trust his halfwit brother to get it right.

The occasional set rolled in, then the ocean lay as lifeless and flat as a drowned man’s lungs.

Both sat silent through dinner, just the gabble on the VHF sucking air from the galley, the sound of Frank chewing. Tom pushed his plate away, his food uneaten. Frank wiped his mouth on the tea towel and killed the VHF. ‘What’s this about?’

Tom shook his head. It was about every dead-end moment of his life. ‘This,’ he finally said.

‘This, what?’

Tom stemmed the urge to shout at Frank. ‘What we do. This.’

‘Bluey?’

‘Everything. Fishing, the boat, the crap—wrecking gear.’
You
, he almost added. ‘I’ve had a gutful.’

‘A gutful.’ Frank scratched at his head. ‘What are you now, Tom, getting on twenty? How much money you got stashed away since the boat?’

‘It’s about having a purpose. Something that counts.’

‘You know what I was doing at nineteen? What my purpose was?’

Tom made a weary face. Frank reached across the table and grabbed the neck of his shirt. ‘Don’t gimme that attitude, you little prick.’ Tom pulled free. ‘Working my guts out, that’s what I was doing. Two jobs, payments on Mum’s house so the bank wouldn’t take it; school uniforms and sports shoes and schoolbooks and Christmas and all your fucking birthdays. You think Mum did all that on her own?’

It always came to this. Tom stared at the chop bones chewed clean beside Frank’s fist.

‘She been putting ideas in your head?’

‘Mum?’

He nodded out to sea. ‘Her on Maatsuyker with the silver spoon up her bum. You think she’ll hang around waiting for you when she gets back to Sydney? You’re not even in her league.’

‘This isn’t about Stephanie.’

Frank laughed. ‘She’s just a root, Tom. Take what you can and move on.’

‘This isn’t who I want to be.’

Frank chucked the tea towel at the sink. ‘Who are you, then? What could you do without someone to bail you out? Go back to uni? You didn’t even last a semester. You’re unskilled. You don’t have a trade. You don’t have anything. We’ve been through all this crap.’

‘You’re right,’ he said to Frank. ‘I’m unskilled. Maybe I don’t know what I’m going to do. I know this much: when we get back to Hobart I’m getting off the boat. The day Hab comes back.’

Frank’s eyes flickered. He looked pitiful.

‘I won’t leave you short,’ Tom said.

‘You serious?’

Tom felt sick, heroic, exalted. Alone. It was cutting your own lifeline before you knew if you could float.

‘I’ve slaved my guts for you. Christ.’ Frank’s voice high and strange. ‘You can go now.’ He rose from the table. ‘Get your shit together.’

‘What?’

‘I’m taking you in.’

‘What are you on about?’ Tom’s own voice sounded odd.

But Frank was gone, at the dinghy hooking up the hoist with that same fixed expression Tom remembered from years ago when all he’d wanted was for Frank to stop the car at a roadhouse—Tom had had his own money, he’d just wanted something to eat. Back then Frank had thumped the steering wheel and shouted
For Christ sake
, and pulled the car over in the middle of the night to yank Tom from the seat and swing him out on the road like a bag of bait.
I’ve had a gutful of your whining.

Tom gathered up socks, beanie, his Blundstones, he pulled his Gore-Tex jacket off the bulkhead and punched it in on top. He grabbed a box of matches, crammed the pockets of his backpack with chocolate bars and instant pastas from the cupboard. He picked up his toothbrush and put it back down. He wasn’t good at thinking on the run. He grabbed his wallet and pocketknife from the hatch above his bunk.

The dinghy rose on the shoulders of a wave, another and another before the set rolled by. They crept through fog, the throttle of the outboard held back, Frank’s eyes fixed ahead. His brother was giving Tom time to change his mind. For all their differences, they were enough the same that a conversation could be exchanged without a spoken word:

You can’t do this, Frank. You can’t just dump me. You know it isn’t right.

Watch me.

The rocks of New Harbour bay materialised, a skirt of kelp, then slipped from view. Frank slowed the engine.

Give the word and we go back to the boat. We get on with the day and put this all behind us.

They were close. Tom still couldn’t see the beach for fog but he heard water sucking back on sand. Frank swung the boat parallel to the shore and headed left, not this side but the far side of New River that split the beach in two.

You’re a bastard to the finish, Frank.

‘You won’t be taking that.’ Frank motioned to Tom’s red float coat. ‘Property of the boat.’

Tom wouldn’t lower himself to object. He yanked at the dodgy zip to get it loose and placed the jacket on the seat. Through his flannel shirt the air felt sharp. The fishing knife, a gift inscribed to Tom from Frank, hung from Tom’s belt inside its orange sheath. Stuff it. ‘Take your knife back as well,’ he said to Frank. ‘Scratch out my name and cut your own miserable ropes.’

Mist opened to a stretch of sand, the bush behind the beach lustred with wet. Frank pushed the outboard into neutral and coasted in. They were fifteen, twenty metres from shore, the ocean side of the drop-off, the water still deep.

Tom hoisted his pack high on his shoulders, tightened the straps. He watched the water change colour, shallowing to frills.

Frank caught his eye.
You get out, Tom, you’re no longer my brother.

You watch me, Frank.

Tom kicked off his gumboots and stuffed his socks inside; he wedged the boots beneath his arm. He hoicked his legs over the side, felt the boat keel. He slid free, the shock of cold ripping through denim to skin, water tipping his waist.

Tom gripped the gunnel of the boat to steady himself. He wanted to say something big, but Frank had the outboard in reverse and was turned the other way, backing over the drop-off to circle out. Tom balanced his pack on his head, the wash from the dinghy lapping cold against his chest.

He waded in toward the beach, moving slowly so as not to falter. Tom stopped and turned seaward to look but the outline of the dinghy had dissolved into fog. The atmosphere dampened the outboard’s drone.

Tom rolled off sodden jeans and carried them up the beach to where the sand felt fine and squeaky underfoot. Fog had swallowed all but the beach line of ocean. He felt wet, shivery with cold, but he sat on the sand in his underwear and shirt. He waited and looked out at the fog. The call of gulls, dotterels running across the sand, a pair of oystercatchers pecked amongst tossed weed. From somewhere behind him the cawing of a currawong. No whirring of an outboard engine returning to collect him. Soon it would be nightfall.

Tom rubbed his legs to keep his breathing steady but a sound escaped his lungs. He couldn’t hold it in. He was back on the side of the road, a worthless nuisance kid, a set of tail-lights blurring in the distance, tears spilling, a hank of snot hanging from his nose. Tom huddled at the edge of nowhere, a long way from home.

A duet of oystercatchers tottered along the water’s edge. Sunshine. Waterbirds. From the beach of New Harbour, Maatsuyker shimmered as a mirage, the island hovering above the ocean, the lighthouse distorted and magnified, each of the cottages a spangling fortress in early morning sun. Nothing seemed fixed to Tom. Even the rocks at the entrance to the harbour looked to float. He couldn’t see around the corner to know if the
Perlita Lee
was still at anchor. Had Frank taken off before first light? Was he waiting until after breakfast? The tannin water of the river carved the beach in two and streamed out into ocean: Coca-Cola wavelets stretched along the shallows, capped with creaming foam. The bay looked like an ice-cream spider.

Tom had spent a cold fitful night, had downed a Mars Bar for his breakfast. Now in the sun he felt overcome with drowsiness. He lay down on his jacket on the beach, rested his arms across his eyes. He couldn’t still his mind.
Don’t waste more time,
the waves seemed to heckle upon the sand.
No one’s coming back to get you.

*

Tom left the beach and scrambled up the steep track, over logs sopping with moss, the morning brightness dimmed by a canopy of leaves that dripped continually. The rainforest smelled lemony, a soggy crush of humus underfoot. Over the brow of the hill, banksias opened out to scrubland, the track eased to undulations, marked by rusting star pickets staked into the high points. Tom could no longer hear the ocean, only whispers of breeze and the rabble of braided streams—golden syrup water across porcelain gravel plates.

Tom stopped to drink. The thrumming of the stream and the babble in his head was Frank; he tried to block it out. The stretches of bog weren’t anywhere as bad as his brother claimed. The greater the distance Tom put between himself and the ocean the better he would feel.

He propelled himself on, marched through water and mud. With things set in motion he felt stronger and steady—even in gumboots he paced at a clip. He stopped to inspect a small burrowing crayfish resting in a puddle in the middle of the track—a creature miles from the ocean. It reared its claws when Tom knelt down to touch it.

Along the track he passed wombat droppings but no animals to be seen. There was hardly a bird—the only calls came from small knolls of trees. Away in the distance Tom saw where the skin of the bush had been scraped back to flesh: Melaleuca’s airstrip. At the next hill he could make out the windsock, pieces of machinery.

Tom halted at the junction. To his left an easy walk to Melaleuca: sit it out in the hiker’s hut and wait for a plane. To his right a track that wound for kilometres along the coast, through plains of button grass and over mountain ranges.

He knew what to do but still his feet refused, his boots defiant. Two hours to Melaleuca. By tonight he’d be home, showered, fed, asleep in a comfortable bed. Had he known it would come to this? He’d been trying to silence Frank’s abuse since leaving New Harbour.
Too much of a chicken shit
;
you’d never manage on your own
. Seven days, Frank had walked the South Coast Track. Maybe it was six. Tom couldn’t remember how much food he had stuffed into his pack. He had no fuel. No stove. He hadn’t proper footwear, only gumboots and his Blundstones. He had no tent or sleeping bag. Everything was stacked against him, but still he couldn’t will himself to move.

Something deep spoke back.
You have a box of matches, spare socks, you’ve got your Gore-Tex jacket.
Tom could find a length of fishing line, limpets from the rocks for bait, sleep beside a roaring fire.

Tom-Tom, listen to yourself. Without the proper gear? Go left, you dickhead. Admit defeat.

He was every bit as strong as Frank. He was good at making do. Tom’s heart drummed inside his chest. The South Coast Track: the tough way home. His feet took charge and strode out on a mission. He’d show his brother. He’d show them bloody all.

Steph rounded the corner of the house. Her mother was on the ladder, reaching up to clean the outside window. Dad was at the bottom. He looked upset. The phenomenal wind gusts from Monday’s storm had smashed across the island: branches down, bits of gutter swinging loose, windows opaque with a new crust of salt. None of that mattered. Steph was bursting to share her news.