Beneath the Wild Fig Tree, page 13
‘We thought he was kind when he helped Mrs Cunningham next door whenever something needed fixing. Later, we wondered.’
Just like I wonder, when I’m in bed at night, about Freya and that uni guy, especially since Rob had dinner with us.
She folded her arms around her knees and rocked slowly from side to side. We fell silent. The sky deepened and the stars took up their positions. Mount Naturaliste and the distant islands were mere suggestions in the darkness. I studied the sky, hoping for an aurora, or a star to fall.
‘And then he vanished completely.’
‘Maybe Anneke knows where he is?’
‘No idea.’
‘Don’t you wonder whether he’s still alive?’
‘He’s buried down deep in my memory. I’d prefer he stayed there.’
A silence welled around us as we contemplated this statement from our different perspectives.
We leaned against each other, and I took a deep breath of the warm fragrance she was wearing.
‘Do you miss Anneke?’
‘I do. I worry about her. And you know, I once made her a promise. It wasn’t a sensible thing to do in retrospect, but I made it and I’m bound by it and I’d like her to come and release me from it.’
‘Was that the promise to keep writing to her?’
She hugged me. Kissed the top of my head. ‘If only.’
‘You’re not going to tell me, are you?’
She squeezed me again. ‘You’re the first person I’d tell if I could.’ Which was nice of her to say, and evidence that she’s the best mother, and also my most trusted friend.
‘Are you going to wait with me for the penguins to arrive?’
‘Thanks, Nicky, but I want to check if your dad is home. I wish he’d said where he was going.’
I could tell from her voice that she was worried. ‘I think he went up the mountain.’
‘No. He said he’d do that with us.’
She hugged me again, and kissed me goodnight.
I wriggled into my sleeping bag. I hoped Dad was all right wherever he was. I opened my field guide to calm my anxiety and began reading about penguin lifestyles.
I’ve observed different architectural designs around here, from shallow scallops of sand beneath outcropped rock for the relaxed, self-assured, or just plain lazy, to the metre-deep tunnels preferred by those with troglodyte tendencies. The only new thing the book told me was that fishermen once slaughtered penguins and used them as cray bait. What is the matter with people? Maybe Bert once fished for cray this terrible way! He’d admitted to using gannet.
I’d dozed off when twitterings began to rise from the burrows, followed shortly afterwards by calls coming over the dunes. I wriggled outside and surveyed the beach. The torchlight merged with the glow of the waxing gibbous moon and caught and held in its path small bodies bobbing on the water. Some headed straight for their burrows and called at the entrance before entering. Others did a careful inspection, gave the entrance a quick spruce-up or stood outside their homes, whistling and calling, necks back, beaks directed at the moon.
There were flirting penguins in my tent. It was damp, fishy, and scuffed with sand. I longed for my bed, but if I’d returned, Dad would have called me a wimp. I encouraged them out and zipped up the flap. Outside the wailing grew. Yet over the noise, close by my tent I heard footsteps stop. And then continue. Maybe Dad on his way home, or a curious wallaby. Or, just maybe, Len.
23
Bass Strait (Verloren Island) 1984
Not Mr Popular
I woke at sunrise and lay in the tent reading and watching cormorants fishing before going up to the house. Kes was sleeping on the kitchen steps, and Dad said Mum had already gone down to South Verloren. Over the radio we heard a crew member on the Freak, a scallop boat out of Whitemark, say that their engine had failed; they might need assistance.
‘Good thing they’ve got calm weather,’ said Dad.
He made me brekkie and said he and Kes had reached the mountain summit yesterday, but it had taken considerable bush bashing. From the top the ocean looked like liquid opal reeling below, and the mountain tapered down like scales along a dragon’s back until the island narrowed away to nothing. Sea eagles were circling, and the islands were spread out in every direction.
Instead of doing the maths he’d given me, I wrote down my latest dream for Dorothy, because in it I know I’m on the island even though there are icebergs and many more islands. Verloren is an outcrop on a grassy plain and there’s a tree growing through our wrecked Sophia. A group of us watch a curl of smoke hanging in the distant sky, straining to work out the meaning. A stance stiffens, a mouth tightens, someone frowns, voices are lowered. A small boy sits on the ground. We are all family. We wear animal skins and move across Country, always watching – the horizon, the sea, the sky, but one by one people disappear and finally there is only the little boy and me, walking hand in hand.
We stop eating. When smoke hangs in the sky we watch it with dread, sitting on a beach, filmy-eyed, until, past hunger, we follow a splashing stream up the snowy mountain to a cave.
It’s icy in there. The little boy’s sobs fade away. A white silence permeates everything, eating up sound and even, eventually, the shallow rhythm of my breathing.
~
I tracked Dad to where he was diving and sat on the rocks with my schoolwork, and when he bobbed up we talked about how we might be able to save the Sophia if we get a good spring tide. I really love these moments with my dad.
‘Come on, girl. Orate your discoveries.’ And he got out and cracked open a beer and listened to me talk about the things I’d found and the clues he’d left on his way down here.
That’s school on Verloren Island.
The other day Dorothy delivered letters from my friends, along with one from Mrs Porter. I didn’t tell Dad – she sounded concerned I was falling behind the class – but as we sat there I mentioned Sally’s.
Hello Nicky!
Guess what??? I’ve got a boyfriend!!! You don’t know him, but I met him at Cheryl’s party. And here comes the sad bit – she hooked up with Sam Doody! Don’t worry! He is such a waste of space! He acts like he’s got a crush on her but then he wants to know all your news, so who knows!!! You have missed out on two parties but until I met Danny I’d have swapped them for the island.
Mr and Mrs Jones will let me visit in January, so now my task is to make sure they don’t come too …
I’m in exile, Sam Doody is a jerk, but, I said to Dad, at least Sally still wants to visit, even though she’s got a boyfriend.
‘I feel so left out,’ I confided.
Once I’d believed my parents that we’d be home by December. But just when I felt like they were the best parents in the world again, and that we were happy, I discovered that Dad was not Mr Popular because Mum wanted us to fly back to Hobart so I could touch base with school. She told me living on the island was more expensive than Dad had calculated. We couldn’t afford a trip back and she was so upset about this that I began to wonder if school was the only reason why.
24
Peramangk and Kaurna Country (Adelaide Hills) 2000
Bass Strait (Verloren Island) 1984
Coastline, Moon, and Stars
Steve’s voice drifts towards me from the garden gate. Warm, understanding Carla, raven-haired and large-eyed, is leaving, and keen for an update on Freya, I join them.
Her expression is calm, her voice low as she discusses the decline she’s noticing, and she shares some suggestions for making Freya more comfortable. Steve, visibly anguished, disappears inside. I linger and when Carla finally leaves, I feel deeply the lack of someone to talk to. Sally is in Adelaide, and I know would drop everything, but I feel overwhelmed by listlessness.
I lean against the gate twirling the moonbird feather I’d found in a box, then I make cups of tea for us all, and return to my editing. So great is my need for distraction that I immediately dive into a letter written on 17 September, before turning to my journal.
… A curious thing, Anneke – I’ve noticed the dunes are being undercut by spring tides and storm events, particularly where there is marram grass. That might be bad news for dune-dwelling animals. It may mean the sea level is rising, a sign that the climate is changing. I spoke about this to a visiting yachtie who happened to be a geologist. Across the sciences, our impact on climate and habitats is a growing concern.
Anyway, my eye for detecting artefacts is improving. I found a scatter of worked quartz flakes and tiny thumbnail scrapers, probably used for cleaning skins. I record them and leave them in place but the pleasure I get from this work has been falling away. When I encounter issues, there’s no one to discuss them with. I miss my colleagues.
Today, as we stood near the lighthouse watching gannets dive, I asked Wheeler to show me the mountain cave, but yet again he decided the sea was calling, so Nicky and Kes came along. Nicky led me there so easily it was as though she’d visited it before. When we came level to a cliff face, we had to sidle along while a raven watched us from a nearby tree.
There was the cool smell of earth and rock, and the exhilaration of tiny ferns growing in damp corners. There were moss banks, and a risky bend to negotiate before reaching the entrance. The cave felt sacred. Smoke stains the ceiling and a fire had been made there recently. Nicky didn’t like the raven’s undulating caw in the silent forest and she wanted me to hurry – she soon disappeared along the cliff face and when I left, the raven flew away, its wings whipping the air, so close it fanned my face, kind of eerie! Will continue this letter later.
The cave really had creeped me out so I chose to stay in the house that night and we played Canasta, while outside the wind wailed and the surf roared. Later, in bed, I watched the beam flick through the darkness and thought about the sea floor littered with corralled bones, and pearly eyes – yes, I’m reading The Tempest and sometimes I feel like I’m living it.
After the storm the morning sea and sky were pearlescent, the waves subdued. Mum and I went beachcombing. On Restless the beach had eroded, all the way down to the rocky reef. The sea had swept thousands of tonnes of sand away, and poking out of the dunes was what looked like part of a decrepit wooden wreck, re-exposed.
Mum hopes it’s the Britomart, a trading ketch that wrecked somewhere in the islands in 1839. She’s found shards of pottery that the moonbirds kicked up to the surface in the process of burrow-making last year and says maybe the crew salvaged some of the cargo and camped behind the beach. She looked at the wreck and its old rusty nails then went up to the house for a camera and notepad. It was spooky on the beach alone, like the crew were still there, staring down at me.
After she’d made notes and taken a sample, we meandered along the dense wrack line. In amongst the tangles of seaweed, we found cuttlefish carrying goose barnacles and sponges that Freya called dead man’s fingers.
‘Strange story,’ said Freya, picking up a barnacled twig. ‘During the Middle Ages, in some parts of Europe, people thought these barnacles were the fruit of the trees that washed up on beaches and that the barnacle goose hatched from them.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘Linnaeus thought swallows buried themselves in lake floors over winter and popped up with the arrival of spring.’
‘That’s crazy!’
But I wasn’t really listening. I was wondering where Len was. He might as well have been buried in a lake floor for all I’d seen of him.
25
Bass Strait (Verloren Island) 1984
Encounter at Honeymoon Cove
‘There’s a yacht at Honeymoon,’ Mum told us, as Dad and I studied a map. Verloren Island’s moonbird community is homeward bound across the vast Pacific Ocean and we’ve been applying our dodgy formula for tracking their 21,000-kilometre journey.
‘There was a woman on deck,’ she said. ‘We looked across at each other and waved, and she was going to untie her tender and come on over. I could really have done with a chat, but …’
‘But what?’ I asked, not looking up.
She went and put on the kettle. ‘Well, there was something about her that brought Anneke to mind, and I felt depressed and carried on walking, having a long conversation with her in my head.’
‘Yacht might still be there tomorrow,’ I said.
‘We don’t know what the wind will be doing,’ Dad said, returning to our map. ‘All we know is that these birds travel at about forty knots, three to fifteen metres above the sea.’
Still, we’ve been noting dates and marking tentative positions. Mr Napper, once the lighthouse-keeper here, didn’t know his migratory route roughly duplicated that of the moonbirds when he brought his family from Alaska to this island. He lost two children to sickness, one to snake bite and his wife to the ocean. Mr Napper left Verloren alone one April. The winds are quieter then. It’s when the adult moonbirds fly north to Alaska.
When we still had them positioned off the New South Wales coastline, Bert radioed to say they’d been sighted east of Wilsons Promontory.
In a week they’d be home, these remnants of the great flocks that once blotted out the sun.
~
It was my turn to leave a note on the kitchen table. I packed a bag, wrote ‘Gone to Honeymoon Cove’, called Kes and set off.
It was a low neap tide, the weather perfect. I marched with the soldier crabs across Emita and gave the oystercatchers a wide berth, not wanting to interrupt their foraging. Kes was ahead of me, his tail carving circles of happiness. There were pelicans on the water and a trail of moon snail egg masses along the wrack line.
Together we clambered over the orange-lichened boulders on the point and walked along the narrow path beneath the casuarinas to where the path ceases above the beach. The yacht Mum had mentioned was still there. I looked down into the cove and saw a dinghy, a towel and an umbrella. A woman with long, black hair lay beneath it reading a book and eating an apple.
She had no clothes on.
I backtracked as quietly as I could, but it was no good. Kes was down on the sand, eager to make a new friend.
‘Where did you come from?’ She sat up to give him a scratch and then looked up and laughed. ‘Oops!’ she said and wrapped a sarong around herself in far too leisurely a fashion.
I stayed exactly where I was. ‘Are you alone?’ I asked.
‘Just me, and only briefly. A pity. I love this place. Come on down.’ She walked towards me, smiling, an arm outstretched.
I quite liked the idea of somebody new to talk to, and so I jumped down onto the beach and placed my things at a little distance from hers, near the southern rocks. Kes wanted her to throw him a stick and while she obliged, I slipped off my sandals and went down to feel the water. It was incredibly cold, but the cove was sheltered.
‘We haven’t introduced ourselves,’ she said, as we stood on the swash. ‘My name’s Yolla.’
‘Yolla,’ I said wonderingly. ‘I’m Nicky from the lighthouse.’
‘That’s my favourite name.’
She waded in deeper, her back towards me. She was tanned, a little bit of flab hung below her shoulders, and she was wearing big loop earrings. She stood there in silence, holding up the bottom of her red sarong, then over her shoulder she said, ‘And where is your family right now?’
‘At the lighthouse.’
She walked back up the beach and settled herself beneath her umbrella. ‘Bring your towel over here so we can talk.’
Soon we were into a deep conversation. She told me how from time to time she’d spent months here, but it was unfortunate that the last time her path crossed with ‘the grumpy little farmer’.
She described herself as a freelance photographer and artist, and of all the adults I’ve ever met, she was easily the best listener. She was interested in me, and I was interested in her because of the stories I’d heard.
She wanted to know about my childhood, about school, about everything.
‘What’s the worst thing that’s happened to you?’ she asked.
‘When Dad fell over a cliff, and I thought I’d killed him.’
‘And the best?’
‘Hobart, my Nan and Sally.’ I looked at the sea. ‘I love this island and my parents are the best, but I hope we go home soon.’
She nodded. ‘There are costs attached to moving a lot. I know because I’m something of a nomad myself.’
Kes was lying beside me panting. I’d forgotten to bring him water. Sometimes he gets dizzy when he’s thirsty, walking like he’s drunk, then falling over.
‘I’m glad you’ve got caring parents. When I was young my parents’ divorce was catastrophic. But the worst thing that’s happened to me was giving away my baby. One moment this tiny being you feel drenched in love for is snuggled in your arms, the next …’
‘I can’t even begin to imagine. I’m so sorry.’
‘You never get over it. But a boat, a dream and this island helped me find a new sense of direction.’ She pointed at the mountain. ‘Dreams pour out of the cave up there.’
‘I know! Every night!’’ And I told her that the previous night I’d dreamed I was sitting near the lighthouse, a hot wind blowing, and a fisherman walked up from Sunlit Cove to get water. Mr Napper, the lighthouse keeper, told him that he’d have to go to the farm to fill his pail because they only had a teaspoon left, and when the fisherman got angry, Mr Napper showed him the boulder closest to the veranda, and tapped it. A bead of water appeared on the surface, and he said, ‘It used to flow sweet as a stream. Now it sweats if we’re lucky and it’s powerfully salty. We’re getting awfully thirsty.’
