Page 25

For long disorienting moments as I wake this morning I think I am in my bedroom in the Snowy Mountains. I wait to hear the song of the kookaburras, the magpies, I breathe in for the scent of eucalyptus and wattle. Decide I will go down the hill and feed the wallabies before the mist clears, will have my coffee down by the stream and greet the ducks, maybe catch sight of the platypus. And then I wake properly, I open my eyes and find myself a world away, and remember that those creatures are dead.

Orly crashes into my room and starts twirling around—trying to make himself dizzy? It works, and he dive-bombs onto the floor in a burst of giggles.

I stare at him. “You right?”

“Get up, come on.”

“Why? What’s so urgent?”

“Nothing, can’t you just come and watch me do my school?”

I rub my eyes. “As riveting as that sounds, I’ve been given tasks.”

“Ohhh. You’re one of us now.”

Raff stops by the door on his way downstairs. “Yeah, you’ll never get another minute to yourself.”

The boys do an imitation of their dad. “Hurry up! Hop to! Jobs, jobs, jobs!”

“What do you do around here for fun?”

Orly shrugs. “Watch movies I guess, but only at night when we’ve finished everything else. But there’s no power now, so…”

“Jobs, jobs, jobs!” Raff booms.

“Hurry up, you lot!” comes the real voice of Dom from downstairs, which makes all three of us dissolve into laughter.

We spend the day doing chores. While Raff and Orly do schoolwork (they do an awful lot of schoolwork for kids who are meant to be on holidays), I’m asked to wash the clothes. It dawns on me only as I stare at the dead washing machine what washing the clothes means without electricity. I have to handwash every item, including all the stinky adolescent boy clothes and, worse, my bloodied bandages, which are stained beyond repair no matter how hard I scrub and beat. I rinse everything thoroughly (while also somehow making sure I don’t use too much water, as instructed by Dom) and then hang it all out to dry. There’s not a skerrick of sunlight so it’s likely to hang there awhile. Next I chop vegetables to get the soup on the stove. Have some lunch. Spend the afternoon helping Dom repair a broken window, and then watch him and his boys do their daily exercises, body weights for strength, running up and down the steps for cardio, then boxing at the bag for both. I am dizzy just watching them. But honestly it’s been a good day. I like having things to do, I like to feel useful instead of just being an extra mouth to feed. The simplicity of it reminds me of life on the houseboat, of a family apart from the world, toiling away together, and I wish Liv and Jay were here. Although they both hate chores with a passion, so would probably loathe life on Shearwater.

Finally we eat dinner and then Raff says he will take a plate down to Fen.

“We’re going with him,” I tell Orly. Because these kids haven’t had a single moment all day to enjoy themselves.

“Dad too?” Orly asks.

I think about how much I want Dom to join us, and say, “He’s not invited.”

We pick up Fen on the way, giving her only a few minutes to eat her dinner and then tugging her along. We stop off at Dom’s workshop to scavenge a few tools, which horrifies the kids—“We have to ask before we use any of this stuff!”—and then the three of them follow me around the coastline to the second bay, to the penguin barrels.

I hand out the shovels and hammers so each of us has a tool to hand. Then I look at the huge rusting barrels. “I think these have possessed this beach long enough.” I swing my shovel hard into one of the old rivets, making an echoing clash of the metals. The penguins hovering around decide to move a little farther away but don’t seem overly bothered by the noise.

“These are historical artifacts,” Raff protests.

I hit the thing again. And again. There is a rush of power in my hands. An old familiar elation at the thought of building, of creating. I hit the metal until the rivet pops and the two sheets of steel are unhooked from each other. I start taking out each of the joins until I have them completely apart. “You guys get started on that one,” I instruct of the second barrel. “I want the sheets separated.”

“Why?” Orly asks.

“Quicker you do it, quicker you’ll know.”

They get to work.

“And while we’re at it, let’s curse the pricks who made them to begin with,” I say, and hear them giggle.

It’s hard work because the bolts and screws are so rusted, but I love it, I love the feel of the tools in my hands, I love the manipulation of the materials. When there’s time, I have always made art, from little drawings of botanicals to metalwork sculptures and wood carvings; I’ve come to understand that it’s good for my mental health but also, more than anything, I just find it fun. Once we have the metal in pieces, I stand back and look at each, taking in the lines and curves, letting it form itself. They take on a new space, they become. I move pieces to make this new shape. “As we do this part,” I say, “we put all our gratitude into it. We put every good feeling into the metal, and we think about the creatures on this island and how much their lives matter.”

They move forward, eager in a way I wasn’t expecting, and I’m glad for the long bright evenings because soon we have built something new. Something to sit on this beach that doesn’t hold death within it, that hasn’t been used to commit atrocities.

It is a huge, rudimentary, metal penguin. It is cute and sort of funny, really, which I suppose is exactly what penguins are.

“They’ll love it,” Fen says proudly, and I know what she means: there is a call in this sculpture, a kind of reaching back for all the penguins who came before, for all the little creatures killed. A message to them.

“I don’t think they’re bothered by this barrel,” Raff says. “You see them hanging about here. We’re the ones bothered by it.”

“Good,” Fen says. “That they don’t know. Kinder if they don’t know.”

I don’t tell them I think trauma lives on in animals the same way it is shared through generations in people. I don’t say I think everything on this island knows what these fucking barrels were for.

“It won’t stay standing,” Raff says as we walk home. “Not in Shearwater weather.”

“Not unless we weld it,” I agree.

“Dad has stuff for that. We could ask him.”

“He’d just say it was a waste of time,” Fen says. “And then we’d get in trouble for taking his tools.”

“Well, he’d be right about the first part,” Raff mutters. He has his father’s work ethic. All work, no play. Which I guess is fine if you’re a man in your forties or fifties or however old Dominic is. It’s not fine if you’re eighteen.

“What do you plan to do when you leave here?” I ask them.

Nobody answers. I wonder if it’s because they don’t know, or because they’re scared to say their desires aloud.

Into the silence Orly says, “I’m going to visit Mum.”

“She’s in the cemetery at the top of the hill,” Fen explains, which could be anywhere.

I reach for Orly’s little hand. He holds on tight.

My intention is to return Dom’s tools, carefully cleaned of any evidence of use. But as I near the entrance to his workshop I see movement and freeze.

The rolling door is open and Dom’s bustling around in there. I’m about to hurry in the opposite direction, thinking to stash the shovels and hammers somewhere until he’s gone. But something stalls me. He is bent over the floor. I glimpse a trapdoor. He’s putting something in an underfloor cavity.

I wait around the back of the big building until I hear him walk away, then I wait a little longer to be safe—I have to roll open the door once more and I know he can hear the scrape of metal from quite a distance. I duck under a small gap and close it behind me. It’s dark inside and it takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust. Shapes appear. The scent of woodwork, more familiar to me than any other smell. I can see he’s pulled a trolley of tools over the trapdoor, which makes my heart thump a little more quickly. Why cover it like that unless you mean to hide it? I slide the trolley out of the way and open the hatch. It’s difficult to see. A pile of things. Papers, I think. Books. And sitting on top is a phone. I’m fully expecting it to be dead, so this doesn’t surprise me.

It’s the phone case that stops my lungs.

Decorated with pressed and dried botanicals preserved between plastic. “Bit on the nose, Row,” he said when I gave it to him, but I knew he liked it. I recognize his laptop, too, and there, among the pile of my husband’s belongings, his passport.