Wildlight Read online

  The tea-tree branch, propped in a bucket of dirt, consumed the meagre room. The foliage sparkled with scraps of balding tinsel and flaking baubles, cheered by a set of wonky lights whose working bulbs shuddered more than blinked. You wouldn’t call it a glamorous Christmas tree but it was earthy and real.

  Steph wound up the volume on the new VHF. Mutton-birds and boats were out there in the fog, as hidden from one another as they were from the island. Even in Steph’s world, nothing was instantly apparent. She’d believed her mother’s love was all for Callam. But Mum thanked the stars for her—her. A small string of words so pure and unexpected that Steph summoned the echo of them again and again, their meaning washing through her like a cleansing. Only now could she admit to the resentment she’d felt toward her brother.

  She tuned in to the chatter on the VHF amongst the fishermen.

  M’pots have been out since yesterday morning. The air’s so thick it’s like a fuckin Sherlock Holmes movie.

  It’s no Teddy Bear’s Picnic over this way.

  Got any company?

  Jasper’s next door. Not that we can see him.

  Steph collected the packet of booklets and papers Gran had sent with the mail. Australian National University glass workshop. They’d been sitting unread for weeks. She tucked the blanket around her feet. She flicked through photos of the glassworks in the catalogue. Sculptures and vessels, abstract shapes and forms, curves and prisms, sweeps of colours, swirls and patterns locked within an outer seal of glass—how did they even do that? These pieces were the real thing. It wasn’t some dinky student exhibition put on for the paying parents of Steph’s school who gushed over their child’s efforts at art. Steph had seen girls at her school shrink in the presence of their parents, their false accolades an immediate recognition of lack. It was something Steph loved about her parents, especially her father, who would walk around the hall of artworks giving each a respectful airing and finding something, the one original thing—the use of colour, a technique, the choice of composition—that could be remarked upon genuinely, positively. Clever, her father might say quietly in a way that others would look again to see what they had missed. Now, without a voice, her father just looked and blinked as if in conversation with himself, before moving on.

  Steph looked through the catalogue’s pages of artists with their work—students no older than herself. In all the pieces the light seemed to pour like liquid through the glass. Was there any greater contradiction than glass? The ink bottle her grandfather had found had endured for hundreds of years. Had withstood being thrown up on rocks. Had shattered in a second.

  Undergraduate students are introduced to the workshop and develop a sound understanding of glass, its processes and techniques . . . students develop their own artistic identity.

  Steph leafed through panoramas of the workshops, girls and guys, oven mitts and leather aprons, bandanas and Blundstone boots. A cohort of artisans wielding blacksmith tools and shining with sweat, a forgery with molten baubles being turned and teased and shaped with human breath. New voices on the VHF:

  Twenty feet the other way and we’d have deplanked her.

  The only time you’re really vulnerable is when you’re sleeping. The wind moves around and straight away you’re on edge.

  I used to sleep like a baby when I come out with the old man.

  Steph focused on the catalogue. The workshop includes a fully equipped hot shop with tank furnace, colour pot furnace, annealing kilns . . . individual work spaces.

  She flipped through the pages. Visiting artists, field trips. She could stay with Gran.

  It’s not me, but the wife’s at home doing the books and she starts fretting when the money isn’t coming in.

  Selection Criteria, Steph read. A portfolio of drawings and sketchbooks, examples that demonstrate an aptitude for three-dimensional work, motivation and commitment, ability to articulate ideas in a visual form. If she tried, if she was motivated, she could put a tick against every one of those requirements. Her body felt gripped. A heavy door had come ajar, a current of light charging through her.

  How about the sea lice? Soon as it’s dark the bastards’re everywhere.

  You wouldn’t want to be in the pot; there’d be nothing left of you.

  She checked the clock. It was too late to phone Gran. But her grandmother would be up at dawn when Steph was awake to do the early weather. She turned the page: Academic Requirement: Higher School Certificate.

  20

  New Year’s Eve. Steph’s seventeenth birthday. Dad set aside time for her driving practice. Her friends at home would all have their licence, by now some would have their own car. Her father sat beside Steph in the passenger seat, gripping the handhold at each downhill run. Bend up ahead, he’d sing out at any moment. He put Steph on edge. What would he be like when they got back to Sydney, cars swerving across multiple lanes? The little blue truck trundled along like a creaking funicular, wheels locked in the road furrows and not enough speed to even move past second gear. ‘Bend up ahead.’

  ‘I see it, James.’

  Finally the road flattened out and they reached the old helipad at the northern end of the island. Steph brought the truck to a halt, turned off the ignition. ‘Been through your checklist?’ he said in his instructor tone.

  She’d packed the tent, the ground sheet, her pillow, the sleeping bag—’Oh,’ she realised what he meant and pulled on the handbrake. Mum hardly ever used the handbrake but it was wise to keep your parents’ contradictions to yourself.

  Steph unloaded the camping gear from the truck; her father helped set up her tent on the old grassed helicopter pad. ‘Not the middle, Dad, I’ll be trampled by the mutton-birds.’

  ‘It’s an awful night for camping. Nothing’s had a chance to dry.’ Her father suddenly looked as wounded as her mother that she was choosing to spend the occasion without them.

  It’s the new millennium. It’s not as if we’ll get the chance again. Mum had stood at the twin tub pulling work clothes from grey water and dropping them into the spinner. But Dad had emerged from the kitchen to rescue Steph as he slurped on his mug of tea. There’ll be other birthdays, Gretchen, other New Years’ Eves.

  The twin tub had shuddered on its feet, the spinner squealing. The shadow of Callam reared up; Steph nearly changed her mind. She wanted to wake before dawn, she explained, be up to watch the birds take off, be somewhere special that she’d always remember. That was the truth. At least it was most of it. Dad tightened the guy ropes of the tent. ‘You’re all set up for tonight.’

  Steph drove the truck back along the road toward the house. Dad had an uncanny knack of tapping into her thoughts. ‘Are you and Tom still an item? Or shouldn’t I go there?’

  ‘I don’t know what we are. I invited him for New Year’s. I never heard anything.’ Steph told herself it didn’t matter. No looking back, her New Year’s resolution.

  ‘We’re leaving in a few weeks. Don’t go breaking his heart.’ Dad sat with his knuckles taut on the handhold as they jerked along, the truck shuddering with each change of gear. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Mum tells me maybe Canberra next year for you. Off to glass school.’

  ‘Only if they take me.’

  ‘And if they don’t?’ A reference to her mediocre exam results. At least she had passed.

  ‘If they don’t then we’ll both be figuring out what else to do, Jamesie.’

  ‘Touché.’ Dad instructed her to slow down.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Steph.’

  ‘Is it actually legal to maintain a speed of less than ten ks per hour? Doesn’t it violate some international driving rule? People walk faster than we’re travelling.’

  A smile played at her father’s mouth. ‘You’d do well to keep your eyes on the road, young lady.’

  Steph stayed at the house for dinner, she opened her presents, blew out the candles on her cake, she made a wish. It was close to dusk when she left. She pulled on her beanie, zipped her jacket and backpack
. The day hadn’t risen above fourteen degrees. The air felt yanked and jostled. Steph made her way along the road. The sky was vast and wild and commanded that you pause and breathe it in. The sound of ocean and wind played out in her dreams and was imprinted on her senses. Steph believed that if she lived to be one hundred she would still be able to conjure its immensity and summon how it made her feel. This sky, this island and ocean would forever be a part of turning seventeen.

  Seventeen. It was the start of something, a new beginning urging her on as she walked through arbours enfolding the road, the champagne in her pack cold against her back. The stress of high school, exams, deciding on her future was behind her. Gran had phoned through her results after Christmas. Steph had scraped over the line in Maths, but had mostly done okay in other subjects. When she saw her friends from school she wouldn’t get caught up in the I-could-have-done-better-if-I’d-tried routine, because it sounded like a cop-out.

  Between Mrs Burrows at school and Gran in Canberra, they’d cobbled together her portfolio to send to Canberra. She’d had the phone interview on Christmas Eve and the man had asked so much about Maatsuyker and hardly anything about art that when he said, Talk to me about your interest in glass, the image that glanced before Steph was the lighthouse. She explained about the prisms, the tonnage of glass and how the light danced through the Fresnel lens to turn the Needles upside down—a ragged-edged mural as broad as the sky. She heard herself babbling when she’d promised herself she wouldn’t; that at first the glass looked clear but when you really looked it was the most delicate sea green imaginable, each curve infused with hundred-year-old bubbles. The lighthouse glass was sunlight punching through the back of a wave and that’s how she saw it, the swirl and twist and how the ocean’s energy seemed locked inside the glass. Light set it in motion. The third week of January, the man said, one way or the other, she’d be informed.

  An ocean chopped with breeze. Not a boat in sight. The only evidence of fishing boats were necklaces of coloured buoys strung around the raspy throats of rock.

  Steph paced from her tent set up on the old helicopter pad to the repeater antenna. She walked back down. The light was dimming fast. She climbed inside the tent and checked the air bed. She unpacked her backpack: mosquito repellent, pyjamas, water bottle; she inventoried her snacks: corn chips, dried apricots, birthday cake for two, champagne, glasses. She climbed back out. The Perlita Lee could still be up in Hobart. Or Tom might walk straight past the tent and miss her altogether. She checked her torch was working.

  The other boats might have headed back to town. This night was made for celebration. In ten years people would remember where they were when the countdown sang off the old millennium and shouted in the new. A new year so big that every wild dream was possible. She felt a lurch, a voice. Callam had been silent for weeks. Steph resisted his hold. Two years of being torn ragged with the hurt of him; she and her parents clinging to grief. Steph had somehow followed the lifeline of bubbles and made it to the surface. She was a fledgling bird, the readiness of flight upon her as surely as the sky’s creep of darkness, as surely as the first mutton-birds swooping in from sea and returning to their burrows. Steph opened the corn chips. She watched the sky. She waited.

  *

  Tom’s jacket hung on the bulkhead of his bunk. He’d wanted Stephanie to keep it but she’d sent it back with Marcie as if it were a tainted thing. He’d shoved it in the boot of his car, chucked in with boat gear and a stack of hessian sacks that soon enough would stink of stolen crays and grimy payouts. Give anything on this boat enough time and see it turn bad.

  New Year’s Eve and they were off the back of Maat, swinging on the anchor. Below deck Frank was napping. Tom wrapped his hands around a mug of sweetened coffee squeezed from a tube and propped himself on lookout behind the wheelhouse. Maatsuyker’s light had been on for thirty minutes. Further down the hill the grand old light tower stood as solid as a sentinel. Even decommissioned it would outshine all their lives.

  Tom took too big a gulp and felt the coffee scald. He thumped his chest. Back in Hobart he had hinted to his mother about leaving the boat. Not straight out. A few ideas I’m working on, dropped into the conversation. Give his mother time to grow used to the idea.

  She’d spent nights sewing signal flags, not quizzing him initially, but when he said, They’re a present for a friend, he caught her expression of concern. Don’t go getting serious, love. Frank says you have a big, bright future on the boat. Tom guessed Frank had already been in his mother’s ear. He could hear it: She’s filled Tom’s head with so much rubbish he’s no damn use to anyone. She’ll rack off back to Sydney and Tom won’t hear from her again. He wouldn’t give Frank the satisfaction of telling his mother it was over, that Frank was probably right. Tom was leaving the boat. He’d made up his own mind, regardless of Stephanie.

  When he’d collected Marcie from the helicopter and returned her to the boarding school, she hadn’t drawn breath for talking about her big day at Maatsuyker, the lighthouse, her ride home in the helicopter. He’d caught her looking across at him; she’d blushed when he caught her gaze, like a kid with a crush. One day I’m going to be a lighthouse keeper, she declared to Tom.

  It made him smile. That she was a generation too late for a role that no longer existed didn’t factor into the equation. Stephanie happy to get back on the island? he casually asked.

  She was in heaven, Marcie said. She got loads of presents and letters from everyone at home. Tom asked about the jacket. She said she doesn’t need it. She has her own jacket.

  Over one hundred pieces cut out and hemmed. They’d been pinned together, ready for stitching, laid out in his mother’s sewing room the night Stephanie had come to the house. Tom had hurried her past the door, afraid she might walk in and discover his surprise, his grand scheme to slip the new flags inside the old lighthouse canisters, leave a Christmas card beside the lanterns with clues on where to look.

  There was no Stephanie now. No flags. He’d driven to a building site, ready to dump them in a skip bin. He couldn’t bring himself to do it—all the hours his mother had spent, the metres of material she’d bought. Waste on top of waste. Tom toyed with the idea of donating them to the new caretakers, but he would be long gone by the time they arrived. In desperation he’d swung by the boarding school, found the front door locked, asked the woman at the library to hold them. Marcie who? she asked. Tom didn’t know. She was just some sweet little kid with big-arse dreams to be a light keeper. He saw wariness written on the woman’s face. Our students don’t return until the new term. Can I have your name?

  Let the woman think what she wanted. Just tell her they’re from Tom.

  Frank was stirring down below. It would be the two of them working through the night, fuelled on Rice A Riso, mugs of tea and a charge of adrenalin pumped by recklessness and risk. They should have done the decent thing and motored up to Little Deadman’s Bay, celebrate New Year’s Eve with others from the fleet. Insurance, Tom’s first thought when Bluey MacIntyre radioed to include them in the New Year invitation. Tom had looked to Frank, already gauging his resistance, Frank a hardened junkie for the clandestine rush of robbing pots and offloading illegal cargo in the thick of night—the sweeter knowing every other boat would be away. Tom wished Habib were here to fill the void. Hab was still back in Hobart waiting for the baby, his smiling wife as enormous as a try-pot. They’d induce her this week if nothing happened on its own.

  Next round Hab would be back. Two weeks. Tom could stomach anything till then.

  *

  The night sky had cleared, the wind petered out. The Milky Way a spangled sweep of graffiti. Orion. Pleiades. The Southern Cross low down in the sky, her pointers not yet showing. If Tom could name one thing he’d miss when he was gone it would be a starry sky at sea. Their running lights were off, the air thick as pitch, the waning crescent moon a no-show for at least another hour. Frank’s timing was honed to perfection. Only one hitch: the transfer boat hadn’t
shown.

  Frank took up the radio and transmitted another run of clicks. ‘They should have been here half an hour ago.’ They waited fifteen, twenty minutes, the only light Maatsuyker’s beam cutting through the night.

  ‘There she is.’ Tom pointed, a running light rounding the Needles a kilometre away, a pinpoint of promise twinkling through the night.

  Frank moved inside to blink the running lights that echoed as a chequerboard before Tom’s eyes. The transfer boat responded.

  ‘Get them ready, quick smart.’

  Tom hauled the first sack across the deck, twenty-five kilograms of stolen crays, snapping tails, feelers poking through the open weave of hessian and snagging on his shirt. Frank dropped the fenders along the starboard side. The transfer boat was bearing down, the throaty rumble of its engine rollicking across the water. Frank and Tom heaved the sacks into position. His brother halted, his ear cocked, intuiting his surrounds in a way that brought to mind a creature on the prowl.

  Frank’s grunt exploded. ‘Not our boat. Not our boat. Christ. Chuck ’em over.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Police boat. Get ’em overboard. Now!’

  Tom took the neck of the first bag. Frank grabbed the tails of hessian and together they hauled the sack up and over the gunnel, contents smashing on steel in a carnage of legs and shell. Shplosh into the ocean. Frank grabbed the second bag by the neck, Tom the tails, thousands of dollars’ worth of live crayfish scuttled to the deep. Four, five, six bags—four more to go as the police boat bore down like a steam train, engines racing in a whine. A minute more and its spotlight would ensnare them in the act. Tom saw it in a wounded flash: Bluey MacIntyre had tipped the police. Seven bags, eight. Wet hessian snagged on something steel and tore. Tom pulled it free, hauled it up and got it to his chest, his shirt soaked through. Bluey making out that he and Frank were welcome to join the celebration when all the while it was an orchestrated plan to do them in. Counting on the fact they wouldn’t come. Nine. That they’d use this night to do what they were best at. Pirating. Bluey, who’d be first on the radio to help out in a jam, had excised the Forrest brothers like a tumour. Tom burned with the sting of betrayal. With shame. Ten.