Page 28

I have an idea, based on the fact that there’s a lab at the base. When you have watched a million hours of TV you know what luminol is. I don’t know if there’s likely to be any in this remote lab but I’m hoping the attitude to stocking it was the same as for the warehouse: prepare for anything.

Orly chats while we walk, babbling on about the plants in Tasmania, while I stay focused. Try to stay focused. I must be cold. Because if I am right, there can be no more of this chat, no more laughter. I can’t enjoy his knowledge or his passion, his sweetness, his tiny hands, I can’t enjoy him. I can’t be warmed by Fen’s open smile or her courage or her freckles. I can’t feel worried about Raff’s temper or moved by his violin. I can’t think about the salt on Dom’s neck or the way his beard might feel against my cheek or his secret gruff kindness or the way he loves lighthouses. I can’t do any of that anyway—I have always prided myself on being loyal. But if I’m right about them having caused harm to my husband, then I really can’t do any of it.

I feel quite sick as we walk, actually, and the pain seems to have returned to my body.

“Are you okay?” Orly asks on a rare break from his litany. I think maybe he is anxious about something and it’s why he can’t stop talking.

I nod, but my teeth are gritted.

“Are you gonna leave?” he asks me suddenly.

The question annoys me. “How am I meant to do that, Orly?”

“But would you, if you could?”

I look at him, wondering if he’s lost his mind. “Yes. Of course.”

“Oh.” His eyes drop to the ground as he walks.

Don’t console him, I tell myself. Don’t explain it or make excuses. It will be easier on him in the end if he doesn’t start to hope.

I try to figure out how to ask him something without scaring him. I shouldn’t be asking him anything, he’s nine years old and there’s that common sense to be remembering, I ask anyway, I’m desperate. “Hey, you know how your dad and Hank didn’t get along?”

“Yes they did.”

“You told me they didn’t. That Dom saw through him, remember?”

“Oh, well. Yeah. But Dad doesn’t really make friends.”

“Okay.” I try to reframe my question. I get the feeling he’s been told not to talk to me about any of this. “Do you think your dad might have been angry with Hank, for any reason?”

There is a look of genuine panic on his face. “No, why?”

“Is your dad an angry man?”

Orly stops walking. “Why are you asking that?”

“Sorry.”

“He’s not angry. You don’t know him at all if you think that.”

I meet his eyes. “I’m sorry, mate. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

I turn back to the grassy path, thinking that maybe Orly will go home now, but I hear his footsteps behind me.

“We’re looking for something called luminol,” I tell him as we go through the lab stores. There are three elephant seals inside the lab building—whether the door was left open or they pushed their way in, I don’t know—but they barely glance at us as we pick our way around them.

“What’s that?” Orly asks, reading the labels of jars and jugs in the dim light. Even during the day there’s not much sun creeping through the small windows.

“It’s a chemical you can use to detect other things.”

“Like what?”

I shrug. “Copper or iron, I think. Cyanide.”

“And why do we need it?”

Because it also detects blood.

“Less chitchat, more looking.”

I find it eventually at the back of a cupboard, already in a spray bottle. I’ve got no clue if it will work, but I’m going to give it a try.

As we emerge into the sloshing seawater my eyes catch on something in the distance. Way out in the ocean is a splash, a kind of spray. “Look,” I say, pointing.

He squints. It happens again. “Whales!” Orly cries. “Come on, we gotta tell Raff.” He sprints off up the hill, vanishing into the tussock, and I am left to trudge after him.

Now that I have what I was looking for, I need a way back to that field hut. I will have to prepare myself to make the walk alone, but it’s going to be hard to explain why I need to. Maybe I could just go. I certainly can’t risk anyone finding out what I intend to do there.

It’s the smell of bleach. It was so strong. It’s been bothering me.

And I am trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for why Dominic has hoarded all of Hank’s personal possessions, the things he would need, were he to have headed home as they told me. But I knew it the moment I met the guy: Dom’s lying to me. And maybe it’s not as bad as I have started to fear but either way I need to find out.

Raff is already pulling on a wetsuit when I finally stagger back to the lighthouse, luminol tucked away in my pack.

“What’s happening?” I ask, hovering by the door to the boys’ bedroom.

It’s Orly who answers, as Raff is busy gathering what looks like audio equipment. “Raff records whale sounds.”

“Did you see a dorsal?” Raff asks his brother.

“Too far away.”

“How many blows?”

“Two? No, three.”

“Was it tall or low and puffy?”

“Tall. But a bit puffy. Actually maybe it was low.”

Raff laughs. “Thanks for your specificity.”

“How do you get to them?” I ask as he thunders down the stairs.

“I’ll take the Zodiac out.” He glances back at me. “Want to come?”

God no. Going out on that little boat again is the last thing I want to do. But maybe I can convince him to take me back to the field hut. The trip’s much faster by boat. “Okay.”

“You’ll be cold. We might be out there awhile.”

I hurry to pull on every layer I can find, including the waterproof outer layers. “My clothes” are a cobbled-together wardrobe of extras from Dom, Raff, and Fen, which was generous of them, given they don’t have a whole lot of clothing themselves, and I appreciate it immensely, but nothing fits me properly and I am only just starting to figure out what layers and items are required for which activities. For this one, I’ll need just about everything. Dressed this way, it’s boiling hot inside, so I head for the front door.

“Where are you going?”

I look back at Dom, who is peeling a mountain of potatoes at the kitchen table.

“There’s whales!” Orly tells him.

Dom grunts in understanding. “And he’s taking you?”

I nod. I think I am surprised there is no protest, no reminder of the chores Raff and I should be doing. Maybe whales trump the rest.

“Can I go too?” Orly asks.

“I need your help with the soup, mate.”

Orly’s shoulders sag but he doesn’t complain, plodding over to lift a second peeler.

Dom glances at me again, maybe he can feel my frostiness. He says, “You watch out for my boy, alright?”

“I think he’ll be watching out for me.”

“All the same.”

I swallow and nod. I will try.

Back down the hill we go. God I am over this hill. It’s not just that it’s a hill, and it’s painful to go both up and down. It’s also that it’s so loud. It is a tunnel for the wind to shriek along and the more I traverse it—the more familiar my feet become with its lumps and grooves, its gullies and ditches—the louder it gets. I find myself dislodged, lifting my eyes to orient myself with the sea. I find myself hearing movement behind me and turning to see nothing but rustling tussock. I wonder if this is how it started for Hank. I wonder if everyone on this island is descending steadily into a shared psychosis.

Fen doesn’t come—she is on seal pup duty—but she waves to us from the other end of the beach. Raff and I head out in the Zodiac. I sit at the back this time, where there is less spray and movement. Still, I feel a low queasiness at the thought of how close the ocean is, how flimsy this craft.

“What do you think it could be?” I ask Raff.

“I’ve learned not to trust Orly’s clues,” he says with a quick smile.

“But what are the options?” I press, wanting to get him talking.

“Plenty of things.”

“ Oh , I see, fascinating.”

He relents. “Down here we get a mix of toothed and baleen whales. We’ll look at where the dorsal fin is, that’ll help identify it. Any markings on the skin, if it’s smooth or wrinkly. What its blow is like. How many there are. Certain whales travel in large numbers, others like to be solitary.” He adjusts his trajectory, eyes scanning. “Pilots for example are pack whales—they follow a single leader, and they’re so loyal they’d even follow it to their deaths.”

I think now that he’s started, he’s quite enjoying talking about them.

“Orcas are matriarchal—they hunt in packs and come up with intelligent ways of herding their prey into danger zones. It won’t be a beaked whale, I don’t think. They’re very elusive, and most of what we know about them is from dead ones. Same with sperms. It could have been a fin or a minke. Or a sei, or a right. I dunno, there’s loads.”

“What are you hoping it’ll be?” I ask.

He shakes his head as if refusing to jinx it. “They’ve changed their routes a bit in the last few years,” he says. “I’ve noticed they come in closer than they used to.”

“Less food for them, maybe.”

I realize belatedly that we are heading straight out to sea, directly away from the island. Things inside me go to liquid. I grip the rope handles with white knuckles and force my mind away from the great expanse of ocean beneath me.

“There,” Raff says, pointing, and I follow his finger to a smattering of dark, swift birds flying low over the water.

“What are they?” I ask.

“Sooty shearwaters,” he explains. “They often follow whales to feed.” Then he adds, “They breed in huge colonies, but they’re smart—they don’t visit their nests unless it’s a moonless night, so they don’t lead predators to the babies. Sometimes they’re called moonbirds.”

“You kids are all certainly full of interesting factoids,” I point out. “You’ll be good on trivia nights.”

Raff thinks about this. “Yeah. I guess Dad’s always tried to encourage us to be curious about the world.”

I watch the moonbirds. They fly fast and low over the water, and their crisp, sharp wings dip from side to side, almost cutting through the waves. Beneath them I glimpse a number of fins emerging smoothly.

“Fin whales,” Raff smiles. “They travel in huge numbers.”

He is right, there seem to be dozens of them. The clear blue ocean is broken all over by sliding backs and dorsals and pectorals. Raff keeps steering closer to them and my excitement shifts to fear.

“Stop,” I say. “Don’t get too close.”

“They won’t hurt us,” he says.

“Maybe not intentionally!”

Raff ignores me and my heart is lurching as he guides us into the pod. A fin rises up beside us, like a wave. I gasp, peering over the edge at the sight of thirty or forty enormous whales swimming beneath and around us; one of them glides directly below our boat, tilted so I can see that the underside of its mouth is pale and striped, and it’s opening that mouth wider and wider to swallow what must be tons of water and krill. Raff gets his recording equipment and holds the microphone under the cold water. The terror does not leave me—any one of these creatures could breach a fraction too close and we will be capsized and I can see our tiny bodies down there among their enormous ones, I can see us battered and crushed into the depths. But they don’t harm us, whether by luck or design, they swim on and away, and soon they have left us, and Raff doesn’t chase after.

“You don’t want to follow?” I ask.

“Sometimes I think it’s better not to bother them too much.”

In their absence he goes quiet. The joy seems sucked out of his face, leaving him tense.

“Are you okay?”

He starts the engine and steers back toward land.

I will only have minutes now. “Can you take me to the seed vault, Raff?”

“Why?”

“I want to see where my husband worked.”

“Dad already took you, didn’t he?” There is that shrewdness again, he is dissecting me with his eyes. Suspicious.

“I saw something I didn’t like down there. Your dad ignored me, but I need to take another look.”

“What was it?”

“I’ll show you.”

“We can’t go south without letting them know,” he says.

“Do you think he’ll let you?”

Raff considers me for a good long while. Then without a word he changes course.

“It’s called concrete cancer,” I explain, pointing to the flaky patch on the vault wall. “It means water’s getting in around the steel reinforcing, which is rusting and expanding and weakening the concrete. It’ll be worse than what we can see. This entire wall is about to come down.”

“This wall here?” Raff repeats, pointing at the eastern wall of the seed vault.

“That wall.”

“But that’d cave in the whole place.”

“Yes.”

“You told this to Dad and he didn’t care?”

“He’s hoping the ship will arrive before that happens.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I dunno.” I stretch my aching legs as we peer at the wall.

I can’t imagine how Hank could have worked here every day and not have noticed this issue, and if he did, I can’t imagine how he would just up and leave the seeds here to drown.

We stay the night in the field hut. Raff wanted to head home, but I convinced him it wouldn’t be safe to travel at night and I guess I was right because he conceded. We didn’t bring any food and the hut has been cleaned out of everything except a few muesli bars, so we sit, hungry and cold, watching the long twilight.

“Remind me why this was a good idea?” I ask through the chattering of my teeth.

He grunts.

I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to spray the luminol. I guess I am waiting for him to fall asleep, but he is upset about something. I can see the whites of his knuckles, the clenched jaw.

“Orly mentioned your friend,” I say. “Alex.”

Raff doesn’t react.

“Do you miss him?” What a dumb question. Raff doesn’t bother answering it, which is fair enough. “Is he your boyfriend?”

“We weren’t together.”

“Oh sorry. I got the wrong idea.”

He shakes his head, frustrated. “It’s just we never talked about that. It seemed too… small.” Like an explosion he is up and pacing the tiny room.

“Talk to me,” I say.

“I just need the bag,” he mutters.

The punching bag. “Why do you need that?”

“For when the poison comes. You have to punch it out.”

I frown, searching his face. “That’s what your dad taught you?”

Raff nods.

“Okay. Well. We can just talk. It might even be better.”

He is silent for what feels an eternity. Then he says, “Dad doesn’t like to talk.”

“About what?”

“About anything that matters.” He thinks and then amends, “About anything that hurts.”

I consider this. “Your dad’s from a generation of men who were taught that speaking about their feelings was a weakness. Which means they didn’t really learn the skill. And it is a skill, you know. Figuring out how you feel and then articulating it. It’s not easy. But I think it’s important to try or you just… there’s too much to carry on your own, you know? Especially when you’re bereaved.”

“What’s bereaved?”

“When you’re grieving. When you’ve lost someone.”

“When I think about her,” he says, and I can hear his voice wavering, “when I see something amazing, I feel this rage. That she doesn’t get to see it. She would have loved those whales. It isn’t fucking fair.” Without warning his fist slams into the glass of the window and leaves a snaking crack down its center. I watch him warily, but that seems to be the end of it. He rests his head on the glass and breathes deeply.

After a few minutes have passed, he dashes the tears off his face but can’t look at me, mortified by the display. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to… I don’t want to frighten you.”

“This isn’t gonna work for you. You can’t just punch things,” I say. “You have to find something else.”

It unsettles him, the thought that I could be giving him contradictory advice, and maybe Dom will be angry with me again but right now this kid needs help.

“I want you to know something,” Raff says suddenly, and a hardness has come over him, and he is looking at me directly now, almost provocatively. “My family has been really lonely. My dad in particular. So you need to be careful with them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they might be inclined to trust you.”

My heart picks up. “Why shouldn’t they?”

“Because you’re married.”

I stare at him, confused. “Are you… Do you mean you’re worried about us getting too close?”

“Orly’s always wanted a mum.”

“Oh Jesus.” Something in me rears back in horror. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m not built to be a mother.”

“And Dad?”

“What about him?” I know he’s trying to piss me off, to push me away, that the intimacy of the last few minutes is more than he knows how to handle—I’m aware of this but it’s still working because I think he’s hit upon a genuine nerve.

“You’re not planning on seducing him?” Raff asks me.

I burst out laughing. “Piss off, kid. You need to get off this island.” I go into Hank’s bedroom and close the door, and I am astonished to see that my hands are shaking.

I love my husband. I do. Trying to distinguish between loving him and being in love with him feels petty. I see his faults and I see what we lack. I can see that we fractured, and I know we both feel betrayed by the other. There is distance between us now and distance is like concrete cancer. With time it’s fatal. I may not know what will become of us, but that does not mean I plan on “seducing” anyone else.

It does not mean I don’t care if he’s been murdered.

I wake in the night from another dream of the child’s footsteps running away from me, disappearing between the floorboards where I can’t reach him. The fact that I’ve dreamed the same thing twice in this room is as disturbing as the dream itself.

I take the spray bottle out of my pack and creep into the kitchen. Raff is asleep in the other room, but I don’t make a sound in case he’s a light sleeper. I look around at the space, not knowing where to start. The bleach smell is pretty much gone now. I spray the sink first but the luminol sits invisibly on the surface and then evaporates. I spray the bench tops, same again. But when I spray the floor, the liquid turns a bright, luminescent blue. I spray and spray, and the blue gets brighter and thicker and covers the entire kitchen floor and I realize I am wiping my tears with one hand and squeezing with the other, and I stop only when the chemical has run out.

“What’s this?” a voice says, and I whirl in fright. Raff is standing in the dark, staring at the blue floor. “What is that?” he demands.

My mind races, trying to think what to tell him, but I can’t come up with a lie fast enough and then I think fuck him and fuck Dom.

“It’s blood,” I say.