Wildlight (7 page)

‘What will you do? After this.’

He rose to his feet, brushed grass from his jeans. ‘Million dollar question.’

Steph took him back to the house. Her mother gushed. ‘Tom. I’m Gretchen.’ It occurred to Steph that Tom was a novelty: they hadn’t had boys in the house since Callam and his friends. She wore low-cut jeans, a wide belt. Her hair was loose. Everything looked shapely on her mother. Tom seemed entranced.

‘I’ve put coffee on,’ Mum said. ‘Will you have some, Tom?’

‘It smells great.’

‘Actually,’ Steph broke in, ‘I was going to show Tom the lighthouse. He only has an hour or two.’

Tom’s focus remained fixed on her mother. ‘I was speaking to James on the road. He told me you grew up here.’

‘You met Dad?’ Tom didn’t answer. Steph may as well have not been in the room.

‘When I wasn’t at school in Hobart I spent every second on Maat. My father was posted here close to four years.’

‘Was the haulage way in use?’

‘It most certainly was.’ Mum’s hands danced through the air. ‘When I think about the supplies, the gear, the drums of fuel winched up that slope.’ She turned to Steph. She was hatching a plan. ‘The three of us could walk to the end of the road and open the old sheds, show Tom how the whim used to work.’ She turned to Tom. ‘Steph hasn’t been there yet.’

Steph bristled. She’d been to the end of the road. She’d walked the track down to the Gulch.

‘I—’ Tom started. ‘I’m not sure how . . . what are we doing?’ He looked to Steph.

Steph huffed. ‘It’s totally up to you.’

‘Maybe next time,’ he said to Mum. Steph breathed.

‘You two have fun then,’ Mum said. ‘I’ve shown Steph how to run the mechanism. You remember what to do?’

Steph knew better than her mother what to do.

She and Tom walked the road in silence. Cirrus cloud blanked out the sky. Steph couldn’t think of anything to say. The wind felt chill. Tom stopped at the bend in the road to study the lighthouse. ‘It’s squat,’ he said.

‘It has four floors.’ She didn’t mean to be abrupt.

‘Your parents are young.’

‘How old are yours?’

‘It’s just Mum. She’d be pushing sixty. She sews and knits for a living. I’ve never seen her in a pair of jeans.’

‘At least you’re not expected to wear her cast-offs.’

‘Worse,’ he said.

Steph stopped in the middle of the road. ‘What could possibly be worse?’

He lowered his head, turned out the collar of his jumper. Steph brushed his skin.
Thomas Lee Forrest
, read the old-fashioned script of the embroidered label.

‘My mother’s speciality. She still thinks I’ll lose my clothes.’ Steph readjusted his collar, conscious of the line of fine hair, her fingers on his neck. ‘She would have added the phone number if there’d been room.’ Steph’s bad mood vanished with her laughter.

She led the way into the lighthouse and up the spiral steps. They moved out to the balcony. Wind and cloud had turned the ocean dark. They sat on the sheltered side, looking out at the Mewstone. ‘How’d you get out of school for all this time?’

‘No such luck,’ Steph said. ‘There’s three boxes of work up there to get through. Weekly sessions on the radio with a tutor. I have to sit HSC exams at the end of the year. Back in Hobart.’

‘And after that?’

‘Uni. Medicine. If I do okay.’

‘Smart and talented.’

‘Demented.’

Steph showed Tom how to fit the large turn-handle and wind the heavy weights. She loosened the small screw to free the flywheel that set the cogs in motion. ‘It’s basically a large-scale grandfather clock.’ The flywheel gathered speed, Steph waited as she’d been shown. She pulled the lever into gear and the pedestal began to turn.

They climbed the upper steps and Tom helped reach the hook to unclip the canvas curtains. Light and warmth poured in. Even with the thickening cloud, the lens magnified the sunlight and threw a strip of heat across Steph’s jeans. She climbed in and stood on the turning pedestal. She beckoned Tom. The lens shimmered. The lighthouse hummed. Callam’s voice.
Remember this
.

‘Magic,’ Tom said.

The light was more than function. It was ingenuity and art that harnessed light then threw it out across the ocean and far into the night. Steph ran her hand across the central spheres of glass. Concentric prisms fitted one against the other, a planet’s shimmering rings orbiting as one. Every lighthouse lens was distinct, the character of the light a language of itself. ‘I’d like to have seen it in action,’ she said.

‘You should ask Frank. He’s been fishing down here for years.’

A gang of green rosellas landed on the outside railing. Steph watched their shapes dance and jitter through the glass. The rosellas squawked as if demanding to know what they were doing. Tom smiled. ‘Busy body lot.’ His eyes were brilliant green, not the green of the ocean but not the green of leaves either. A colour Steph could spend all her time trying to capture in paint or pastel, never quite succeeding.

They spent the morning talking, laughing. The presence of someone her own generation felt invigorating against a new sting of loneliness when he said he had to go. They walked along the road and rounded the bend to where Steph’s father crouched over the lawnmower, tools spread across the grass. Dad stood up. ‘Tom.’

‘Mower giving you grief?’

‘The usual coughing and spluttering,’ Dad croaked. ‘He’s a piece of work, old Buster.’

‘Buster?’

‘His name, I was told, though right now I can think of others.’

Tom blinked, perhaps trying to make sense of her father’s broken words. ‘Can I take a look?’ he finally said. Tom removed the cover from the lawnmower. ‘Big job, the mowing. You can do without a breakdown.’

‘I’m afraid mechanics aren’t my strong suit.’

‘Might be flooded,’ Tom said. Steph watched as he undid a spark plug and wiped it clean. ‘Leave it a while and see how it goes.’

Dad thanked him. ‘How did you like the lighthouse?’

‘A lot. I’d only ever seen it from the water.’

‘You’ll have to stop by and have dinner with us some time. Let Gretchen wax lyrical about the old days.’ Dad winked at Steph. It was true that her mother went on, as though everything back then was perfect, but Steph didn’t like it when her father spoke that way.

‘I wish I could,’ Tom said. ‘Nights and early mornings we’re shooting pots.’

‘Shooting?’

‘Setting them, pulling them.’

‘Your family one of the local fishing dynasties?’ Dad asked. ‘Saltwater in your veins?’

‘Not a drop. My brother Frank got into it when he left school. Boats aren’t my thing. Not working boats.’

‘Why fishing then?’ Dad asked. Steph could sense Tom tighten. Dad’s voice softened. ‘Then again, how do any of us find ourselves on unmown roads, doing things we hadn’t planned?’ He closed the mower lid and gave Buster a friendly boot. ‘Isn’t that so, you big rust bucket?’

*

Tom stopped ahead of Steph on the way down to the Gulch. He took the VHF radio from his backpack. The aerial was missing. ‘Shit,’ he said, digging for it in the bottom of his pack then winding it back on. He called
Perlita Lee
which appeared briefly, then disappeared from view, beating back and forth across the waves. ‘Frank’s not happy.’ Steph hurried down the track to keep up with him. ‘They had to pull anchor, couldn’t get hold of me.’

Waves rolled in as sets, the largest surging over the remains of the concrete landing. An aluminium dinghy rounded the corner, bobbing in the swell. It looked too rough for such a tiny boat. Tom hitched his backpack high up on his shoulders and clipped it tight. ‘Stay there. No point both getting wet.’

The man in the boat waved. He wore a beanie, his face covered in dark stubble. ‘That’s Habib,’ Tom said. He turned to leave, and then turned back. ‘I wish I could have stayed.’

‘Me too.’

His eyes moved across her face as though he were committing her to memory. ‘Next time?’

‘I’ll be here.’

Tom waited for the set to pass and clambered over slippery rocks. The boat nudged close against the pylon. Tom climbed in and pushed the boat away. ‘Say goodbye to your mother.’ His clothes were drenched.

Steph watched him pull at the zip of his red coat. What was left of a buckle hung loose. She felt like a castaway, scrambling up rocks to watch them pull away. Habib’s voice rose above the outboard, carrying into shore. Amongst the scraps of words Steph heard her name. ‘Stuff him,’ Tom called back to him. He looked to Steph and raised his arm to wave. ‘She’s worth it,’ Steph heard him say.

For a week Steph’s mother had woken in the night to scratching in the roof. Her father was apparently as deaf to the noise as he was to her mother’s concern.

It was so long since Steph had dreamed of anything nice that the interruption to sleep felt all the more unfair. Her mother shook her awake and pulled the covers down below her shoulders. ‘You were laughing,’ her mother said quizzically. A
let me in to your world
.

Callam. They’d been together at Forty Baskets Beach, in front of the house. Callam was belly laughing—splashing a tall figure that could have been Tom who refused to come into the water. Steph grimaced at her mother’s face inches from her own.

‘Stephie, listen.’ Steph blinked. ‘There.’ Mum gestured to a point on the ceiling. ‘Hear it?’

Steph dragged herself to sitting. She checked the time on her phone, gave a throaty grumble. ‘Middle of the night, Mother. Can we do this in the morning?’

Her mother kept her to her word. Steph returned from the nine o’clock weather to find her dressed in an asbestos hazard suit, a disposable bonnet and booties. Her mother had dragged the big ladder inside.

‘What are you doing?’

Mum sighed, as if having to spell out the basics to a dolt. ‘If a pregnant rat or mouse has found its way here, we’re talking environmental disaster. This island has never known an introduced species, let alone a predator.’

Steph looked nonplussed.

‘Think about the birds.’ Mum snapped her fingers. ‘They’d be wiped out!’

‘What about Tinkerbell?’

‘What?’

‘Cats are predators. What about the sheep and goats and chooks and pigs that used to be here? They’re introduced species. And the horses from the old days? And what about the blackberry bushes? And the Montbretia all the wives planted?’

‘Tinks ate a handful of lizards. At the most.’

‘How could a rat even get here?’ Steph scoffed. ‘We’re in the Southern Ocean.’

‘By helicopter,’ her mother said haughtily.

‘Wearing his personal flotation device?’

‘Funny girl. A rodent could find its way into a packing box. There’s myriad ways.’

‘It could mouse paddle.’

‘Go ahead and laugh.’ She motioned to the window. ‘We’re just twelve kilometres from the mainland. A creature could easily hitch a ride on a log, a bit of flotsam.’

Steph went to laugh but the prickle charged through her before the thought had gelled. ‘A snake.’ Steph retreated to the lounge room and clambered from the chair to the tabletop.

‘Honestly, for a smart girl you can be a trifle idiotic. Snakes don’t scratch and squeak. I need your help, Stephanie.’

‘You wouldn’t be so brave if it was leeches. I’m not going up there.’

Mum clucked. ‘No one’s making you. All I need is for you to hold the ladder steady. Can you do that?’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘Working on the drain, I imagine.’

Steph’s mother, cautioned by asbestos warning signs stickered to the wall, pulled on mask and gloves. She sounded as though she was talking through a snorkel. ‘My dad used to scoot up here in his work clothes, sleeves rolled up. No one back then gave a thought to asbestos.’ She switched on her headlamp. ‘Wish me the best of British luck.’

‘You’re Australian.’

Her mother’s booty tapped Steph’s hand on the ladder. ‘It’s a saying. Sheesh. Lighten up.’

‘That’s rich,’ Steph started but Mum disappeared through the manhole. Steph sat down to chemistry. The chapter was hard enough without the stomping going on above her head. ‘Find anything?’ she called. No answer.

The phone rang and Steph raced for it. It had taken all her powers to negotiate the use of the phone. And only if she contributed with the money she was earning from the weather observations. Two calls, hardly more than an hour each, and Steph had used up all her wages while Tessa and Sammie had done ninety-five per cent of the talking. Tessa and Sammie had promised—they’d given her their pledge—to call from their home phones the moment their parents went out. ‘Stephanie speaking.’

‘Stephanie West?’ A woman’s voice. Singsong.

‘Yes.’

‘Whose mother was Gretchen Cole?’

‘Yes.’

‘Cathy Innes here. Your mother would remember me as Cathy Smithies. We were on the lights together, many moons ago. Is Mum around?’

Mum had never talked about other children at Maatsuyker. ‘She’s not available at the moment.’

‘Oh.’ Cathy sounded disappointed. ‘Another time, then.’

‘Can I give her a message?’

‘Just a big hello from Cathy. We saw your photo in the newsletter. What sort of day are you having down there?’

‘Windy. It rained this morning.’

‘My mother used to say we had a lean on us when we left Maat.’ She wanted to chat. ‘Makes me homesick for the old times. The old way of life.’

‘Did you know my grandparents?’ Steph asked her.

‘We overlapped for three or four weeks when we were leaving, yes. In fact, your mum travelled back to Hobart with us on the boat.’

‘You and Mum went to school?’

‘No, dear. Hardly any of the lighthouse kids did. My brothers and I were homeschoolers. Dad had us work like navvies so we could get all our schoolwork finished and help out around the place.’ Cathy had a chuckle that made Steph imagine a round-faced girl.

‘Sounds better than boarding school.’

‘I remember when we left, Mr Cole dressed up the lighthouse with signal flags, had the Union Jack flying. Looked a picture from the water. Made your mother bawl and just about set us all off crying, we were so sad to leave.’ Cathy drew a big breath. ‘All water under the bridge now.’