Wildlight Read online

  Scrub thickened to rainforest; the light grew dim. Tom tried to set a faster pace but run-off cascaded down the track, every handhold and foothold wet and slippery, the mud the worst so far. The track was criss-crossed with slimy tree roots ready to catch his leg or trip him up and catapult him forward. Long deep steps jarred Tom’s body—steps that would be hard in good weather, in decent light. His pace slowed. His limbs felt weak and shaky. His feet slipped from under him and he landed hard and slid. He gathered himself together, surveyed the torn pocket of his jacket. Thirty metres on he fell again, his foot catching on a tree root and twisting back his leg. If he sprained or broke something, what use would he be? Rain fell constantly. Tom was too tired to think. He remembered a clearing. His head felt foggy. A campsite, a planked bridge above a creek. Was that today? He had to go back up, he had to shelter for the night. He’d cook something hot, warm himself by the fire. No coals, Tom-Tom. He couldn’t right his brain, the bush around him skewed and crooked.

  *

  Tom sat upright, the plastic sheet wrapped around him. For some reason his trembling had eased. He didn’t feel warm. He didn’t feel cold. The night sky had cleared to pockets of cloud that raced across the moon. There was an urgency about this evening. He should be some place else but Tom couldn’t think where. He felt the urge to laugh out loud. Everything but Tom was in a hurry. He thought he heard a woman laugh but when he listened there was nothing but trills of wind singing through the branches. He gathered up a leaf, held it by its stem. The shape looked identical to the feather of a bird. Why, when leaves don’t fly? Tom couldn’t fathom it and then the thought slipped away. The full moon flooded the slopes below, the sand of some faraway beach glittered like a necklace of shells. The moon blackened the valleys and made the ridges stand in bas-relief. Tom felt himself rocking. Was he aboard the boat? Was he in his bunk? Where was he? Grass, the sound of rushing water: a small rough campsite. His left side felt bruised and inflamed from where he’d fallen on the track. His shoulder felt as painful as a tattooist’s needle. He ought to heat a stick in fire and sear the skin, eliminate his brother from his life. Would it blister? Would it hurt? The conversation in his head made no sense at all.

  Far away a beam of light blinked. He was staring across the water; he was looking at Maatsuyker. Tom cast about. He stared down at his feet. He was standing on an edge of rock. Below him, nothing. He felt wind against his face but had no sense of cold. His gumboots were gone, only filthy socks with a hole in each big toe. His mother would darn those, if she were here. He should bathe, rinse his socks, renew himself. He could hear a creek. Come back, it beckoned. He looked around, searching for the sound. The small light blinked in an oceanic rhythm. He felt a little seasick. ‘Frank.’ Tom heard himself say the word aloud.

  Tom sat. He took off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, extracted his arm and pushed up the sleeve of his T-shirt. Frankie anchored on his shoulder. An ugly tainted layer. Tom opened his pocketknife and scraped the blade across his shoulder. Blood beaded like dew drops on a leaf. Stop, the same voice called. Tom, don’t. A small figure walked barefoot from the bush: a girl, a shaven head. She knelt beside him, rocking on her haunches and looking out across the slopes. She sounded out the rhythm of the lighthouse. Her breath whistled with the wind. She was sequined with scraps of twig and broken leaves. Tom brushed her with his fingers and she leaned her head against his hand. Her eyes were amber, forlorn as a seal pup’s. She motioned that he pack away his knife. Then she helped ease his arm inside his sleeve. She was small. Her skin was the tannin of the darkest creek, glaucous as if she’d smeared herself with ointment. He studied her fingernails and toenails, thick and nacreous as seashells, chromed as the moon. She crouched behind him, knees either side. She levered her arms beneath his, grunting as she strained to pull his body up to standing. He didn’t have the energy to help. Really, he didn’t want to move. ‘Just leave it.’ He listened to her small pitiful grunts that sounded out her struggle. He felt annoyed. ‘What does it matter?’ The small girl put her hand in his and drew him back along the ridge.

  25

  Steph’s last days on Maatsuyker Island drifted without will or direction, her mind and body dislocated. After each weather observation she returned and sat beside the VHF, her tea growing cold as she listened for news of the Perlita Lee and scrawled in her art pad. When Steph thought about time, how it could thrust you forward or drag you back, these months on the island had been a continual push and pull. Now time ebbed. The clock on the wall seemed never to change, every minute a drag through the waiting, the ticks clicking through the air and grabbing at her skin, leaving her clammy and jittery and unable to settle. Her stomach felt empty but she had no appetite for food. She was unable to think beyond the room or concentrate on packing, on anything connected with the future. There was no future: no more Maatsuyker, their home in Sydney to be sold off and with it everything of Steph and Callam. Her parents would begin a new life without her, far away. Everything precious was being taken from her. Tom. She couldn’t think of him without weeping. She couldn’t not think of him. Her whole body, the inside of her skull, seemed bruised and tender to the touch. She was held in limbo, waiting for news. For something to happen. Anything. She kept a vigil by the radio.

  Rain fell in a monotonous cycle: angled sheets easing off to drizzle, escalating to a downpour. Each morning and afternoon a currawong appeared on the aerial, forlorn beneath its water-beaded coat. Her world and everything within it became a mindless pattern. Even Tasmar Radio’s unanswered calls came in a futile cycle. Crew members from the Perlita Lee. Crew members from the Perlita Lee. Crew members from the Perlita Lee. Do you receive? Each call made her pen bleed into paper.

  ‘It’s midnight. Try and get some sleep,’ her mother said as she did each night. Her parents looked haggard with worry, as much for her wellbeing as for Tom and Frank’s. Steph dreaded sleep, she had no control over fitful dreams of being stranded on the lighthouse roof, about to fall, her voiceless call for help, Tom, it’s Steph. It’s Stephanie. Do you receive?

  From the house the search helicopter appeared as an indiscriminate dot trapped in the interstice between an angry ocean and a glowering press of cloud. It stayed low because the weather was so bad. The land party confined their search to South West Cape, the taper of coast so rough it was rarely visited by recreational hikers. Steph pictured the party wet and clambering through scratchy bush, scouring every lonely cove and beach. At night she heard their weary voices on the radio. Fishing boats set aside their work to look—Bluey MacIntyre, others in the fleet. At the end of the week the sea search was scaled back, the hope of anyone surviving in cold water extinguished, though no one said those words aloud. Gradually fishing boats resumed their work. Hikers turned for home. Everything but the inside of this house seemed reset to normal.

  Steph woke in the morning to static and the sharpness of a voice: All Ships. All Ships. All Ships. Calling for any boats in the vicinity of Telopea Point who can assist the police to monitor an item. Item? They’d found the dinghy a week ago.

  A gruff reply. This is Sea Echo again. We’re still waiting for someone to show up at Telopea. How long before the police boat gets here? Steph sensed the man’s distress. She’d missed hearing something vital.

  ETA midday. Tasmar Radio spoke evenly: Sir, are you in a position to remain and assist?

  Steph felt the weight of the fisherman’s reluctance. A spear of indignation moved through her. What would it cost him to help?

  All right, he finally said. You could tell he didn’t want to.

  Sir, can you give me the coordinates?

  Mate, it’s a body, not a craypot. What’s left of it.

  Steph rose. She knocked her tin of pastels from the table; coloured sticks rolled across the carpet, beneath the chairs. Her limbs turned wooden. She studied the map on the wall. She couldn’t focus properly. Telopea: halfway between the tip of South West Cape and New Harbour Point where the dinghy had been found. The ocean
had dragged a body all that way. Steph halted. She tuned back in. Red float coat, the fisherman said. It’s got the kid’s name on it.

  Tom.

  *

  By evening the room was filled with radio talk, a medley of fishermen’s voices.

  You couldn’t tell from looking at it, Dave said. Something had a meal.

  Crayfish finally got their own back.

  Steph grimaced. She thought she might throw up.

  Poor bastard.

  Poor Dave.

  Someone else broke in. Do they know which one?

  Younger brother, they think. Had a tatt on his shoulder. They picked up his jacket nearby.

  He had no shirt on?

  Dunno the full story. Might have got knocked about against the rocks. Police have taken him back up to Hobart for identification. Dave’s on his way up. Coroner’s problem now.

  Fuckin ’ell, who’d study dead people for a living?

  Have they told the mother?

  You think they’ll find Frank?

  I hope to Christ he doesn’t turn up in one of my pots.

  Someone scoffed. Steph winced before the words were out. Free bait.

  Ease up. Bluey MacIntyre. Frank gave me enough grief to send me to my grave. But no one deserves what those two got. Especially young Tom.

  There but for the grace of God . . . said someone in a pious tone.

  God, fate, call it what you like, Bluey said. Perhaps just being at the wrong place at the wrong bloody time. Jeannie’ll visit the mother this afternoon. See what can be done.

  I’ll get Ange to call a few of the girls, check on Frank’s missus.

  She’d know there isn’t a hope in hell. Still, until they find something.

  Bluey, what’s the story with the boat?

  Everything in order. Sitting on its anchor. Police took it up to Hobart.

  Any idea what happened?

  Dunno. Retrieving a pot. Checking something. We’ll never know.

  You think his missus’ll put the boat on the market?

  Give her till the day after the funeral, that one.

  Wouldn’t be a bad buy, right price.

  You’re a callous prick, Wattsie.

  I’m just saying . . .

  *

  Steph walked the road to the garage, found two offcuts of tin. She used a punch to form the names. James & Gretchen West, Stephanie West, Sept 1999–Jan 2000. She started on the second. Tom Forrest. Every hole a puncturing of sorrow. No dates; she wanted something timeless. Not Fisherman. Tom was of the land. Tom was being outside and sniffing leaves and growing vegetables and cooking homemade pizzas on a fire. Tom was digging wild potatoes. She took up the punch. Friend of Maatsuyker Island.

  She tried to imagine talking to Tessa and Sammie. Telling them of Tom. But this wasn’t some holiday fling to be chalked up and gossiped over. There was no neutral space, no words for someone as indefinable as Tom. They were two people who’d shared something special and real. People fell in love at seventeen. Steph tried to muster energy for her old life, her friends. It would be easier to say nothing. She studied the plaque. She ran her fingers over the name punched in the tin. Tom Forrest. Who hadn’t come back at New Year’s to see her. Who hadn’t called her on the radio. Perhaps it hadn’t meant as much to him.

  On the final afternoon her parents joined her and they hiked to the Light Keepers Tree, her mother constantly checking for leeches. Her father nailed the family plaque to the crowded trunk. ‘Chosen somewhere for Tom?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Next to ours.’

  The plaques were in place. No one spoke. It was just breeze through the crowns of trees, birds flitting and calling, the lushness of tree ferns, the dampness of shadows. Her mother knelt beside her father’s plaque. ‘Oh, Dad.’ She rubbed at the graffiti scrawled across his name. ‘That’s a disgusting thing to do to someone’s plaque.’ She turned to Steph with new understanding. ‘You knew.’

  Steph nodded.

  ‘You wanted to protect me.’

  ‘I can make a new one. We have time.’

  Her mother studied the plaque. ‘No,’ she said. ‘This was our plaque. I know he was a good man. That’s all that counts.’

  *

  The helicopter took off to the south. It flew them low around the Needles for a final view. Steph felt heady and strange, separate from her body. She wanted to go. She wanted to stay. Over the lighthouse whose prisms and windows threw back a piercing blue sky. The breath held in her chest felt tight enough to break her ribs. Leaving. Forever. Part of Steph was still down there, winding through the tea-tree, along the length of road. They flew over the cottage and weather station where the new caretakers stood with arms stretched toward the sky, their new fluoro jackets shining. Steph wanted to cry out, have them turn the helicopter around. She wanted to be set down among the green so she could race to the lighthouse—her lighthouse—and clamber up the stairs and look out across the ocean.

  The island looked slender, velvet folds of green draped across its spine. Steph breathed. The cliffs dropped away to a ruffle of white, a chain of buoys; a small fleet of working boats sitting at rest. Across the way South West Cape tapered long and low. Land ended and the ocean ran on, assuaged and still.

  26

  Tom woke. His shoulder throbbed. He forced himself to swallow—his mouth, the inside of his throat gravel dry. His head pounded. His eyes adjusted to the dark. Was he dead? He squeezed sleep from his eyes. He tried to rearrange the smell permeating his senses into something recognisable. He sensed more than saw the shaft of light—above him? behind?—a mosaic of leaves thrown like a hologram upon a textured wall. The ground beneath him crunched like cornflakes. His stomach belched; even his bile tasted of starvation. Tom raised himself to sitting and knocked his head hard. He shrank back down, rubbed his wounded skull. His fingertips felt slimy: he licked the taste of blood. Where was he? He ran his hand across a ceiling of rock that rained grit upon his face and hair. He rubbed his watering eyes, blinked, blew a string of gritty snot. He waited for the stinging of his eyes to pass. He sniffed his finger. Old—no, ancient traces of charcoal, tree sap. Others had used this place; he felt it with certainty. At the far corner of his memory he caught an image of a girl with shaven hair, smeared with white, her heels cracked beyond their years. Tom, she whispered—then she was gone. Tom drew his legs up to his chest. His gumboots were gone. His pack. He searched around, fingered at the texture thick and warm upon the ground. A downy quilt of leaves, dried moss that crackled and crumbled on touch. Tom turned. He winced. The glare. He raised his hand to shield his eyes. His focus sharpened. Sunlight. An opening. Daytime. Alive. Entombed inside a shallow cave.

  He pushed feet first, angled his shoulders to slide through the curved exit of rock. From the outside you’d never know the cave was here. The air felt sharp. Tom’s eyes smarted with light; the day felt onion raw. He stumbled through scrub—his soles tender and tingling, his stockinged feet not lifting properly though his eyes registered the obstacles. He reached an outcrop of rock and stopped to rest. His breath was laboured, his fingers coated in soot, a smear of blood. He followed the line of the ridge until he found the track. He panted with each step, light-headed with weakness. A saddle. An open plain. The air was still. He stopped at a planked bridge and a creek that he’d seen once before. Nothing made sense. Behind his eyes the light throbbed. He knelt at the water and slurped handfuls of liquid so icy it hurt to swallow. Tom drank and drank but no amount of liquid quenched his thirst. His belly felt distended—a waterlogged buoy that gurgled and sloshed with each intake of air. He thought he might be sick. He moved back up the track, out into the open. He found a slab of rock. Sun warmed his back, heat spread through his clothes. He didn’t feel inclined to move. He imagined himself as a lizard basking in the sun. He needed sleep. He wanted food and heat. He curled foetal on the rock, his hands tucked beneath his groin, his back angled to the sun.

  *

  Mighty. Hey. Mighty. Wakie, wakie. A voic
e nudged through Tom’s dream clips of boat, lighthouse, his mother knitting, Stephanie’s laugh, a small dark girl. Mighty?

  Tom opened his eyes. Sunlight. A glare of sky. A silhouette hovering. ‘Frank?’

  ‘You scared me there. Thought you were a goner.’

  ‘Frank?’

  William, the voice might have said, though it sounded more like Willem. ‘Let’s get you upright, get a brew into you. Where’s your pack, boy? Your boots? You whacked your head?’

  Tom watched wordlessly as the old man pulled a thermos from his pack and poured tea in jerky movements. As much steaming liquid spilled on the dirt as in the cup. ‘Which way you headed, mighty?’ Matey, he was saying with an accent. He sounded European.

  Tom slurped warm sweet tea. He downed the remainder. ‘Cockle Creek. Hobart.’

  ‘Have some of this.’ William handed him a plastic bag with chocolate, nuts, a rainbow of dried fruit and boiled lollies. The lining of Tom’s mouth drooled in anticipation. ‘At least you’re a few days ahead of the swarm. The rain’s held them back. The old days you wouldn’t see a soul along this track.’

  Tom’s senses drowned in an aroma of flavours. He had to stop himself from shovelling chocolate and lollies and dried fruit into his mouth all at once. William watched. His eyes shifted to Tom’s socks, his mud-caked jeans. Tom bit into a licorice coin. His face puckered.

  ‘Double salt.’ William spilled more tea. ‘Acquired taste.’ The old man’s shake was fierce.

  ‘You walked the track before?’ Tom said. His voice sounded brittle, like old netting you could put your hand through.

  ‘I come down this way in summer. Look on it as a bit of a pilgrimage.’

  Tom spoke with his mouth full. ‘Why?’

  ‘Part of it’s the challenge. The weather. The mud. The first time you do it you swear you’ll never step foot on it again. Half an hour later you’re not so sure.’ William gestured to the path. ‘This is the crux of it. Down the other side you’ve got a lovely stretch of coast ahead of you. That’s the reward.’