Page 20

The weakest link, of course, is Orly. Keeping the truth of what’s happened from a woman with whom he is hell-bent on spending all his time is not going to be easy. I have a conversation with him about what this means. It means slowing down, it means thinking about what he says before he says it. “Is that sinking in? Say it with me, mate: think about what you say before you say it .”

But it’s not just Orly. We all need to be careful not to slip up, we can’t give her any reason to doubt. And what’s more, we have to keep her in sight.

Unfortunately there’s still the running of the island to deal with, and this morning I need to get a new roof over the remaining solar batteries so we don’t lose what little power we have left.

“I can help,” Rowan says. I must be looking at her in a certain way, because she adds, “I’m handier than I look.”

I consider saying I’ve had well-wishers offer to help me before and each has been a total failure, the struggle to teach them basic stuff chewing up more time than the task itself. But if she’s helping me, I’ll at least know where she is.

I take Rowan to the storage shed, a warehouse down at the base that sits a little higher in altitude than the other buildings and thus isn’t so wet. It takes me a few minutes to roll open the door because there is a particularly large elephant seal lying directly in front of it, and I have to reach awkwardly over him.

Rowan gasps as she sees what’s inside. “Wow.”

I had the same reaction when I first got here. It is easy to assume that a remote island would not be so well stocked, but this is a wild place that houses a couple of dozen people and has to be completely self-reliant—I can’t duck down to the hardware store if, say, a roof blows off a building—so tools are the one thing we do not go without. At one end of the shed are the basics: hammers, saws, screwdrivers, wrenches, shovels, and so on, with a wall of boxes containing any size or type of screw, nail, bolt, nut, hinge one could think of. Then there are the power tools: drills of all kinds, saws of all kinds, routers, sanders, chisels, a jackhammer, and a welding torch. There is safety gear, goggles, gloves, masks, helmets. There are ladders and wheelbarrows. Painting gear. Cleaning equipment. Light bulbs and electrical supplies. A huge area for materials like timber, glass, cement, bricks, steel. I have work benches covered in sawdust and wood chips and metal vise grips. There is a repair pile and a junk spot. And at the other end of the warehouse is the heavy machinery. Our amphibious vehicle—the Frog—lives here, as well as the quad bike and the tractor, with its various arm attachments.

“Oh man,” she breathes. “It must be killing you to leave all of this.”

It really is.

I take an angle grinder off the shelf, place it near the door. A couple of ladders, a couple of drills. Rowan is looking through the screws and bolts, making a selection of what we might need. I feel an urge to double-check.

She sees me looking and shows me. “These okay?”

I nod: she has gathered what I would have collected myself. Next she fills a couple of tool belts with the basics—screwdrivers, hammers, protective wear, and so on—then hands me the belt that is clearly mine, the leather old and soft and worn down almost to felt. She tightens the second, newer belt around her hips.

We put our equipment on the back of the quad bike and I drive it over to the sleeping quarters of the research base. There’s an almost-new metal roof on this building, and no one lives here now, so I figure it’s the best choice.

I send Rowan to one end with a ladder and a large socket wrench, asking her to loosen all the nuts holding the last sheet of metal in place. “You comfortable getting up on a roof?”

She doesn’t reply, just heads that way.

I climb up my end and start working on the nuts. They won’t budge, as I suspected they mightn’t; the salt air here gets into things and rusts them tight. I use my angle grinder instead, cutting through them one at a time, and with each one I am expecting to hear Rowan calling for help. I get through an entire sheet before I stop and look for her. She is at the end, head down, doing something or other. I lower my tools and stomp my way over to her, thinking to tell her not to waste time, there’s other stuff she can be doing, only to see that she’s got a pile of loosened nuts and bolts.

“How’d you manage that?” I ask, stumped.

“What do you mean?”

“Damn things were rusted on tighter than a duck’s arse.”

She frowns. “You asked me to loosen them so I did.” She shoves her hands into her windbreaker pockets but not before I’ve seen that some of her fingers are bleeding.

I stare at her with the creeping realization that I have underestimated her. Beyond my wariness there is a tinge of admiration. My mind darts ahead to all the things I have been putting off, things I could accomplish with the help of someone who knows her way around a tool.

I am also aware that this willfulness makes her more dangerous.

Once we have the roof free, we tie the metal sheets together and attach them to the back of the bike, then begin the slow process of dragging them up the hill over the tussock grass. Rowan doesn’t know how to drive the quad, so I do that while she walks behind, lifting the sheets out of any tussock they get caught on. It’s a painstaking process and she has the harder job. By the time we get up to the solar batteries the day is wearing on, but we stop for a sandwich, both of us ravenous.

“You in construction or something?” I ask her.

“I was.”

“Chippy?”

She nods.

“You don’t meet many women chippies.”

“I’ve met plenty,” she says.

“Was your dad one?” I ask.

“No.” She chews and swallows another mouthful. “I like building things.”

“Fair enough.”

She runs a hand over her short hair, and, watching, I have an urge to run my own hand over it. It takes me by surprise and I look back to my sandwich. Where the fuck did that come from?

“When I was a kid I decided I wanted to build a house,” she says suddenly. “So I did what I had to do to learn how. And then I built one.”

I stop chewing midmouthful. “You yourself?”

“Me myself.”

This casual statement astonishes me. It is the one thing I’ve always thought I’d love to attempt if we ever left Shearwater.

“That must have been satisfying,” I say, and it is an understatement, but I can see she knows what I mean, and that it’s enough, for she smiles and nods.

“How about you? Always been a caretaker?”

I shake my head. “I’ve done bits and pieces of different things. Always been handy, so I take on whatever I can.”

“Jack of all trades,” she comments.

“Master of none,” I finish, and we both smile.

I bite, chew, and swallow, then say, almost reluctantly, “I boxed as a young fella. All the men in my family did.”

Her eyebrows arch. “Where are your cauliflower ears?”

“Got lucky, I guess. My dad and granddad both had beauties.” I smile, remembering their misshapen bulbous ears.

I stand and brush the crumbs off my jeans, reaching for my tool belt. “Anyway. Day’s getting on.”

She hesitates. “I don’t think I should, I’m sorry.”

“Why not?”

She stands and lifts her three layers—wool pullover, shirt, and thermal top—to show me her side. Blood has drenched the bandages around her torso, and I can see it trickling down her hip and under her pants.

“Shit,” I say.

“I guess maybe this body wasn’t as ready to work as I was.” She seems genuinely embarrassed.

“Sit down. Don’t give it another thought.”

“It’ll take you twice as long on your own.”

“Yep. I’m used to it.” I set up the ladder and climb onto the roof to take my measurements. “The worst part is the lack of company, so you can talk and I’ll work.”

I spend the afternoon replacing the roof sheets, removing old screws and bolts and tightening in the new, and she tells me about this house of hers.

She describes the shape of it, and the outlook, how she designed it to have windows that would face the sun no matter the time of day, that she wanted a light palace on the hill that would look down over the mountains and the forest, that in this way it sat above like our lighthouse does. She describes the materials she used and the ways she got around not having the strength of several men, how she came up with ropes and pulleys to serve her, how she would do almost anything before she hired another set of hands for the day. She talks of laying the slab, of framing the walls, tiling the bathroom, carving the kitchen benches herself out of timber from the property. She wanted the house to be so well designed and insulated that it would hardly need heating or cooling, making it as sustainable as possible.

I don’t realize at first that I am smiling as I listen to her voice. There is incredible love in every word, as there must have been in every movement of her hands, every nail she hammered. I am taken from this bleak and stormy island to live for an afternoon among her snow gums, I imagine myself waking to the morning fog and the sun rising over the hills, the glorious view from her bedroom, and before I know it I am in her bed, and then, accidentally, she is in this bed beside me.

I’m uncomfortable with the intimacy of this thought. Haven’t done much thinking of women in that way since I met my wife, and that was a good twenty years ago. Fuck, I’ve been out here alone too long. I don’t even find Rowan attractive.

(Is that true? She wasn’t attractive when she was unconscious and had ribbons scraped off her flesh. You’d have to be some kind of sicko to find that attractive. Nor was she particularly appealing after she took two of my children to look at a dead body. But today she is speaking to me in a language I have not spoken in a long time, my mother tongue, a homecoming. Today she looks long and lean and strong in the sunlight. Maybe the truth is more uncomfortable than I’d like to admit, that I don’t want to find her attractive because I dislike her, because she is a problem, and that I need to be careful of this woman, lest she creep her way into more of the rooms in my mind.)

I ask everything I can think to ask, not wanting her to stop talking, but eventually she says, “Is it something you’ve thought about doing?”

“It is,” I admit, though I’ve told no one else this.

“Tell me about the house you’d build,” Rowan says.

And so we do that instead, I take her to the coast and I tell her of the beach house I have sketched out in my head. I describe its shape and form and what it’s made of.

She says, “It’s perfect.” Then she adds, “But if you build it by the sea, that house will be underwater in no time.”

I give her a lift back to the lighthouse on the back of the quad bike because she is bleeding a lot and I’m not sure she’d make the walk. The ridiculous thing is that I do consider it first. I think of the amount of diesel it’ll take to drive the bike farther up the hill and then take it back down to the warehouse. I think of what that might mean we can’t use it for in future. That’s how obsessed I have become with the rationing. That’s how frightened I am of running out of supplies. Without a radio to the mainland for help, every single decision is weighted differently, every moment I stand on the edge of that drop, so close to falling.

We arrive at the front door. “I’ll get you some fresh bandages. You lie down.”

“I’ll take a shower first. I feel disgusting.”

“Two minutes,” I remind her.

“You’re kidding. All it does is rain in this place—there can’t be a shortage of water?”

“It’s not just the water, it’s also the power it takes to heat the water. Do you need help?”

“No.” She is taking the stairs slowly, with a short rest between each.

“I could carry you, if you—”

“I’m fine, Dom.”

“Righto, give a shout if you change your mind. I won’t peep at you or anything if that’s what you’re worried about.”

She snorts and goes into the bathroom, closing the door.

A couple of hours later I am cleaning the windows. It’s late in the evening but the light carries on for hours yet, and this is a big job, I can’t let it get out of hand. Every bit of glass in this place gets covered in thick layers of salt. This salt gets everywhere, into everything, and cleaning it is tedious beyond belief. Along with the wind, it’s extraordinarily harsh on buildings. It works away at the windows, at their edges, and despite my almost obsessive efforts, there is always wind whistling its way through somewhere.

“Do you have a needle and thread?”

Her voice startles me and I drop my cleaning rag out the window. I watch it flutter four stories down to land in the grass. I turn my eyes to her, unnerved at how quiet she was and wondering how long she’s been standing there. “Yeah, why?”

“Am I obliged to tell you everything I’m doing?”

“Yes.”

“So I’m a prisoner, then?”

I step down off my stool. “Think of the island like a military base. Everyone and everything has to be accounted for. Or it all falls apart. Nobody’s exempt.”

She considers this. “What happens if someone steps out of line? Do you dole out the punishments, Dom? Judge, jury, and executioner?”

I level her with a look. “You’re wasting my time.”

Rowan grins. “God forbid we waste time! Some of my stitches need redoing.”

“And you were just gonna go at it yourself, were you?”

“Yes.”

It is my turn to laugh. “Go and lie down. I’ll be in to you shortly.”

The wound is on her hip, and it’s deep. It is the shape of a bite, a large flap of skin unattached to the rest of her. Dark blood is smearing from it, even still, and I wish she’d told me the stitches had busted—at this rate it’s bound to get infected and I shudder to think how much blood she’s lost.

“Do you know how to sew?” she asks me. She’s leaning up on her elbows, looking at the gash.

We’ve run out of rubbing alcohol—I’ll have to get some more from the base, but for now I dab some vodka on the wound to make sure it’s clean. “I do.”

She winces at the sting. “You ever sewn skin before?”

“Who do you think did all yours? Lie back and don’t look.” Until now there’s always been a doctor down at the base for when the kids needed stitches, and for the one time I nearly sawed off a thumb. Rowan’s wounds were my first attempt and I guess I didn’t do a very good job. It’s not like sewing fabric. Her skin is thick and almost rubbery, and I have to really force the needle through. Rowan makes a sort of growl and reaches for the alcohol.

“That’s not for drinking.”

“Fuck off, Dom,” she says, and drinks it anyway.

When I’ve finished we both look at the Frankenstein patch job.

“Fine, subtle work,” she says, and it makes me laugh.

“You’ll have a scar,” I say, as I smear petroleum jelly over the wound. There’s no avoiding it, given that butt-ugly stitchwork.

“It’s just a body,” she says, and as I dress and bandage the wound, I am all too aware of this body, and of my hands on the warm skin of her navel, her waist, her ribs. The flesh of her, the realness of her. A powerful wanting comes over me and I could lower my mouth to this body right now, I could taste her, and then I think don’t do this, don’t start thinking this way, she’s dangerous , and also she’s married, for god’s sake , and then I think I’m married , except I’m not, am I?

“You’ll need antibiotics,” I say.

“I’ve already been taking them.”

“We’ll remove the stitches when the wound’s closed. You let me know.” I head for the door, taking the medical rubbish with me.

“Thanks, Dom,” she says.

I wasn’t expecting it, or the sincerity of it, and I force myself not to look back at her.

But she ruins it anyway by adding, “And not even one peep! What a gentleman!”

Because we both know I looked.

I wake in the night to the sound of crying. It is not unusual but it kills me just the same. I sit up and put my arms around my oldest son, let him rest his head on my shoulder, and though I love holding him like this, I am panicked at the thought of the inertia within him. If he asks me something, if he wants to talk, I will have no way to help him.

“Let’s get to the bag,” I say.

“I can’t. I don’t want to.”

“Come on.” I pull him up from the bed the two of us have been sharing with Orly; the little fella is still fast asleep as I drag his brother from the room.

It’s very cold in the night; the stairs will do us good. Raff stops twice on the way up, leaning against the wall for support, his grief a physical presence he must fight. “Keep moving,” I order him, and he does so, putting one foot in front of the other until we’ve made it to the top.

His punches are weak and listless and no matter what I say I can’t stir within him the energy it takes to rid his body of the poison. He is too sad, and I don’t know how to help that. I’m good at dealing with his anger, but this sorrow frightens me.

“Dad, I miss him,” he says, forehead resting on the bag.

Panic flails again. If I open my mouth I will make it worse. I need his mother here, she would know how to ease this, but I look and look and can’t find any version of her, and I am useless.

“Keep punching,” I say, and turn for the stairs.

“Dad,” he begs, his voice breaking, but I don’t know what else to do.

I dream of that punching bag, of holding it like an embrace as it swings gently in the wind. Only it isn’t the punching bag I am holding, no, it is a body hanging by its neck from the fuel tanks, its weight almost tender against me as it falls.

I wake a second time to a different son wailing. Raff hasn’t come back to his room—it is Orly who sobs wildly beside me. I shake him gently awake and then hold him close while he cries. I wonder why I am able to do this with him but not with his brother or sister.

“Just a dream,” I tell him. “It wasn’t real.”

“But it is.”

“What is it? Tell me.”

I am expecting a body, eaten by fish and birds. It takes some time to get it out of him, but eventually I am able to establish that he has dreamed of a bushfire, and lost in its flames were animals and plants alike. He’s never had this dream before; I ask him where it’s come from. He explains it is Rowan’s land and house that have burned. And I sit in the dark as every piece of timber she erected turns to ash, and that house I inhabited for an afternoon is gone from around me. Orly says, “Everything will burn or drown or starve, including us.” And it is as though she has brought these deaths with her from a land so hostile I don’t know how I will ever deliver my children back to it.