Wildlight (6 page)

Steph stepped inside the central mount. Looking out through the lens was like peering through a magnifying glass. The focus sharpened on individual threads from canvas curtains covering several of the windows. When Steph stepped back the focus blurred while the magnification increased. Another step and the rocks of the Needles inverted; they looked immense. She pulled on the heavy lens as you might to set a children’s roundabout in motion. The surrounding prisms moved slowly. Steph scanned the empty ocean. Across the stretch of water she watched a coastline of headlands and cliffs, tantalising beaches, countless indentations. Fractured images streaming by.

She heard the rattle of the lower door. Her mother padded up the stairs as lightly as a cat. ‘There you are.’ She followed Steph out to the balcony. ‘Taking a break from studies?’ Her mother extended her arms and gave a curtsy to the ocean. She looked serene. She looked beautiful. ‘My dad would sometimes send me down here. I even lit the light, when he was indisposed. I used to imagine being an actress, this balcony my stage.’ Her mother tucked Steph’s hair behind her ear. ‘Coming back to Maat feels like rejoining the circle. Does that make sense, my darling?’

Steph saw a line of red moving on the water. Tom’s boat. Her mother waited for an answer. She should reassure her, offer affirmation. She shrugged, willing Mum to leave, fighting her own meanness. Who’d been there to comfort her when Callam died? There were so many things about being a daughter—worse with Callam gone—that seemed upside down.

Mum spoke too brightly. ‘Lunch is ready. I thought we could eat outside.’

Steph listened to her footsteps on the stairs, counted the seconds until her mother started up the road. Steph dashed in and looped binoculars around her neck. She returned to the balcony and focused on the boat. Two of them at the front beside the stack of craypots, Tom’s red coat. The other man cuffed his head. Tom was looking this way, watching Steph watching him through his binoculars. He lifted his arm and gave a slow wave. Steph raised her arm until the boat disappeared from view. She circled the balcony to catch another glimpse. She slowed at the sight of her mother on the road looking back at her. Her mother turned and walked on. You didn’t need binoculars to see she was upset.

The rusted gantry at the Gulch’s landing looked set to collapse. Tom stepped over remnant wooden sleepers; the remains of the old haulage way extended as a scar up the slope, the bush slowly reclaiming it.

The sun had tracked above the island, a pale yellow orb spreading meagre warmth on and through him. A group of silver gulls patterned the rocks above the landing site, uniform bodies angled to the sun, feathers ruffling in the breeze. If you ignored the mindset that they were lowly seagulls squabbling about the boat for scraps, you might think them handsome, their red beaks brilliant, birds standing proud and sassy on those matchstick legs. A carpet of pigface fringed the rocks. The fleshy leaves were soft enough to squash between your fingers, yet the plant held its grip against six metre-swells that rollicked in to slap the coastline white with salt. In morning light, glossy flowers buttoned the succulent foliage, pleats of pink open to the sun.

Tom slowed at the terraces to search for ancient shards of abalone shell, opalescent, glinting in the dirt. It was the task of the aboriginal women, he’d read, to fish and feed their families when hunting was poor; women, centuries ago, who would paddle twelve kilometres from the mainland and dive all day in frigid water. How often were they stranded here? Or did bad weather wait until the paddle home to catch them at the point of no return? He pictured that line of women and girls in their rolled bark canoe, heads dropped, shoulders taut, arms on fire with the effort of reaching the safety of shore.

Tom climbed the narrow path, the vegetation thickening to bushy scrub. Crescent honeyeaters, silver eyes and scrub wrens flitted and bounced; the hillside was alive with tiny birds. Higher now, Tom moved through taller foliage. Wind rushed up the valley, the raucous shriek of cockatoos cascaded down.

He checked his watch. Early still. On a clear morning he’d be pulling pots in the dark, the first hint of dawn the eastern horizon purpling to a bruise. Before the sun tipped above the ocean, the promise of light would amplify the sky—a curtain turned blood orange, the Mewstone toy-like against its breadth. Tom might look up to the island to see a solitary light—a figure at work inside the weather station, or pacing to the weather screen. Below the main house stood the grand old lighthouse, regal in contrast to the automated light.

Tom relived the morning’s stilted radio conversation. Every cray boat within range would have pricked their ears at a posh female voice. In the galley, Frank had stuck out his bum and pouted.
Maatsuyker returning to standby.
She made a change to the usual carry-on.

Tom-Tom has a sweetheart,
Frank had smirked. There’d been no getting out of explaining Stephanie West to Frank and how they’d met.
So that’s why you packed a set of good clothes this trip
, his brother said knowingly. You couldn’t slip anything past him.
A looker, is she?

Tom had done his best to sound casual.
She’s all right.
He couldn’t ignore Habib’s grin.
What?
He’d felt himself colour, folded his arms.
I don’t even know her.

Have a shower, Tom-Tom. Get yourself spruced up. Can’t go calling on your chickadee stinking of fish bait and seaweed.

They’d had a full month of fishing down here on their own, trying to stay under the radar. The grand sum of radio traffic had been the occasional yacht beating its way around South West Cape to Port Davey, a lonesome helmsman relaying his boat’s coordinates to Tasmar Radio, or requesting updates on the weather. Now that the fishing season was officially underway, the volley of chatter between the cray boats seemed as boisterous as the furries sprawled across Seal Rock.

You mind what you say
, Frank warned when Tom left the boat to come ashore. How easy it would be for Stephanie to let slip some innocent remark over the VHF, to confirm what half the fleet would already suspect: they’d been fishing illegally for weeks. There was no way Tom could think to caution her without implicating himself. He scuffed his boot across the track. Nineteen years old: he couldn’t play the minor any more; he was every bit as liable as Frank. It would do their mother in to know the half of it.

A large iron wheel—the whim—sat rusted in the bush. It came from a time when horsepower meant just that. The light keeper’s nag would have paced an endless circle whenever the supply ship called, turning the whim that drove the winch that wound the cable that inched the laden trolley up and down the slope. Worthless now; the horse retired when diesel power took over.

The track from the Gulch emerged at the northern extent of the road. Wet grass clippings coated Tom’s boots. He crossed to an old shed and peered in through clouded glass at a large diesel engine and capstan. Even diesel proved a short-lived reign, a blink when you considered the human history of this place. Haulage way, trolleys and whim—the whole shebang shut down and engines left to seize and rust when helicopters superseded boats to resupply Tasmanian lights.

Tom recalled an old black and white photo of women seated in an open trolley being winched up the haulage way, scarves knotted beneath their chins, heavy skirts and pants, their shoes wedged against the backboard as casual as you please. Those lighthouse women entrusted their lives to the workings of the whim, the weight of their faith balanced on a single steel cable that held the trolley taut. One failure, one breakage—
snap!
—they’d all have toppled down. Tom’s stomach turned at the prospect of mechanical failure, the thought of
Perlita Lee
pushing into heavy weather, her engine whining under strain.

Twice on the boat and once at home in Hobart Tom had had the same strange dream, had woken with bursting lungs from the sensation of swallowing the ocean.
Sleep apnoea
, his mother called it.
Bad dreams, cold sweats, Lee used to suffer the exact same thing.
Lee, she called his father, like the mention of a family friend.

It seemed to Tom that his enslavement to his brother Frank played out as a lesson he was yet to comprehend. Tom knew only what he didn’t want, that the prospect of fishing all the days of his life—his only compensation a wallet full of cash and getting trashed the nights they were in port—was a form of living death. It wasn’t the money that held him, not the way it had Frank by the throat. Tom felt rudderless. He had no wheel or sail or course to follow; he had no fucking clue. He wished someone as solid as Bluey MacIntyre would turn to him and say,
See there, son, that track along there? That’s the way you’re meant to go.

Tom had been only a few days old when his father died, he had no sense of him at all. All Tom saw and felt, all he smelled and tasted when he squeezed his eyes shut, was Southern Ocean and salt-cracked lips and shreds of torn weed. His days rolling and pitching across its belly, his nightmares drowning in it.
Little-boy fear,
Frank’s smirks said.

Those lighthouse women, sassy as seagulls. Tom envied their strength. It took rigid faith, or trust, or maybe it was bald-faced arrogance, to lean back in a wooden trolley and relish the view while being winched, near vertical in places, up four hundred metres of precipitous slope.

Tom looked taller. He’d brushed his hair. He waited at the flyscreen door, hands in pockets, trying not to appear as he did: tense and awkward. They’d spoken on the radio but all Steph could manage was a flaky, ‘Hi there’. She chose to overlook his home-knitted jumper, the neatly pressed jeans. The girls from school would have carved him into pieces with their laughter.

‘Mum wants to meet you. She’s having a shower right now. We could take a look around.’

Tom followed her through each room of the house. Steph had to slow and wait. At each stop he gazed around, turned his eyes to the ceilings, soaked in the surrounds. ‘This must have been top-notch in its day. A haven from the elements.’

Top-notch. No one said that. Steph tried to see it through his eyes. Fix up the cracks, ditch the carpet, new kitchen, appliances, laundry, bathroom, heat the place fifteen degrees—maybe. She’d tidied her room, made her bed, Blu-Tacked her illustrations to the wall. Tom studied the details of the lighthouse. ‘You do these?’ Gran was the only person who took an interest in her art.

‘For a model I’m going to make.’

He studied each drawing in turn. ‘They’re good. Really good.’

He wasn’t the kind to say things to be nice. An expression glanced through Steph’s thoughts that reminded her of things not right about her school: the snobby girls who looked down on her, who whispered slurs behind her back.
Free ride
, they called Steph’s tenure at the school that relied on a scholarship now that her father wasn’t working. Those girls would know, the moment Tom uttered a word, would broadcast with looks amongst themselves, that Tom wasn’t from a private school, that even if he was rich he wouldn’t be the right kind of rich, that in his home-knitted jumper and carefully ironed jeans, Tom Forrest, gorgeous as he was, was
most definitely and categorically
not the kind that counted. Not long-term.
Flotsam
they’d call him to be kind;
Scum
, behind her back. Even the imagined voices of their disparagement, all these miles from home, held the power to subdue.

They walked around the outside of the house and stopped at the picket fence that overlooked the bay. The ocean shimmered in the sun. Steph saw the long band of cirrus cloud sailing in from the horizon. Soon the sunlight would be gone. A sea eagle glided overhead, criss-crossed high above them. ‘Look at that,’ Tom said. ‘How good is this place?’

Steph nodded as you do before you’ve fully thought about the truth of things. ‘You think?’

‘All this?’ He held his arms out to the view. ‘I’d swap you.’

Steph avoided taking him past the bathroom—she could do without his first impression of her mother being one of a woman over forty parading naked before the window.

They angled up the grass behind the house. She showed him to the weather office and went through what she did each day. New Harbour. Mt Counsel. Louisa Bay. The Ironbounds. Tom knew all the landmarks along the coast that Steph used to measure visibility, the heights of cloud. They sat on the grass behind the office, sheltered in the sun.

‘How did you learn about all this? The weather. Clouds.’

Steph confessed. ‘I only know enough to get by. It’s getting easier. You start to see a pattern.’ She handed him binoculars and pointed to Moderate and Heavy Rocks, used to gauge the ocean swell.

‘They look minuscule from up here.’ He pointed across the bay. ‘We’ll be somewhere over there tonight. New Harbour, probably. You might be able to see our light.’ Then he nudged her. ‘We’ll definitely see yours.’

A Dad joke but still it made her laugh. ‘What’s it like?’

‘Over there? Cliffs, coves, beaches. You never see anyone. Creeks the colour of black tea.’ He stopped. ‘Maybe we can get you over there.’

‘Serious?’

‘I could check with Frank.’

Steph closed her eyes to the cry of birds, the dips in light, the rush of cold when clouds skidded across the sun.

‘You like doing the weather?’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said, realising in that moment that she did. ‘Other than getting up in the dark. Dad insists on setting his alarm, just in case.’

‘Mum’s the same.’

So he lived at home. ‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen. You?’

‘Seventeen. At the end of the year.’

‘What does your father do?’

‘He reads the news on Radio National.’ Steph rested on her elbow. She didn’t want to talk about her parents. ‘You like crayfishing?’

‘Has its moments. On a nice day, when it’s calm and sunny. For the most part it’s cold and wet and the wind’s howling. You wouldn’t want to be doing it forever.’