Page 8

The baby in my belly is so hot it has begun to burn my whole body. I curl myself over it, holding my stomach and trying to soothe it through the walls of my skin. I breathe all the cold air I have, hoping to cool it, and see that it is no longer inside me, no longer a baby at all but the blowball of a dandelion, and with one breath it erupts, it flies, it disintegrates—

Rain falls hard on my face.

Not rain. A shower. I am lying in a bathtub with a shower battering me, and the fever has returned, I am so hot. There is a person crouched beside the tub but it isn’t the boy. It is a girl, I think. She strokes my burning forehead and tells me the water will help cool me. I think I fall back to sleep because the next time I open my eyes I am being lifted, naked, out of the tub, by warm strong hands, at least six of them, and then my body is dried gently, tenderly, and it’s just the girl again, she is carefully toweling me down and then wrapping me once more in bandages. I still don’t know what’s beneath them. She helps me step into underwear and clothes, moving my limbs like they are a child’s, guiding me through leg and arm holes. My eyelids are so heavy it is difficult to keep them open. I ask her name as I lean on her.

Fen , she says. The girl who swam out to save me. She helps me back to the bed and makes me swallow painkillers before she lets me sleep.

Some time later I wake enough in the dark to listen to the voices. I can’t see them, and I don’t turn my head to look.

“Do you have enough layers? Take a few more blankets down.” A man, voice deep and scratchy.

“I have enough.” The girl, Fen.

“You don’t sleep on the beach, alright, you sleep in the boathouse.”

“I know, Dad.”

“Easier if you just stay here the night.”

I hear a movement, and then Fen’s voice telling him firmly, “I’m going, Dad. I have to.”

There is a silence, and then the man says, “You’re safe here.”

“I know,” she says too quickly, and I hear her leave.

I keep my eyes closed, aware there is a man in this room with me, one I can’t see and don’t know. I consider speaking to him—there are things I need to know—but I’m so tired.

The next time I wake it is morning and the fever has broken. I am sweaty and need the bathroom again. It is less difficult to stand and walk this time, and when I reach the hallway there is a near collision with a small darting figure.

“You’re up!” Orly declares.

“Can you show me to the bathroom?”

“No way, you’re supposed to stay in bed.”

“And how am I meant to go to the toilet?”

“I didn’t ask and I don’t want to know,” he says, then bounds off down the stairs. I limp my way down and around, considering that each step will be one I must climb back up. The bathroom, I discover, is on the ground floor.

I try a tap and find that the plumbing works. But the light doesn’t and there is no window in this bathroom, so it’s only a shadow woman who stares from the mirror, and she looks mad. She looks frightening. Hollow eyed and thin cheeked. The space is so small I can barely turn without knocking an elbow, but I painstakingly remove the pajamas that aren’t mine. The mirror woman becomes an Egyptian mummy wrapped in bandages. I am scared of what lies beneath but I have to get them off.

I go slowly at first, unwinding and rolling, but it’s taking too long and my heart is leaping forward, the thrumming is building in my chest, I start pulling at the bandages, and I’m not even really finished with one before I’m pulling at another and everything is getting tangled, and this is how he finds me.

With no warning at all there is a man in the tiny bathroom with me. We stare at each other, shocked by the other’s presence. I have seen this man before, I think I have dreamed of him.

As he takes in the state of me his expression changes. There are no clothes but the undies. There are bandages, but these are half unraveled. One breast is covered, the other hangs out. He is not looking, he is turning to go. “Sorry.”

“Can you help me.” I am dismayed at the break in my voice.

Slowly he turns back. His large hands unroll the remaining bandages until I am revealed. It’s both worse and better to see what’s beneath. Strangely, the damage has been contained to my left side. Some of the wounds are deep chunks of flesh either gone or sewn back onto me with clumsy black stitches. Others are shallow grazes. There are dark, sickly bruises blooming in a few places. It is frightening to see so much damage.

I sink onto the closed toilet seat and rest my head in my hands.

“It’s just a body. They either hold on or they don’t.”

I look at him.

“Yours did,” he clarifies.

“It doesn’t feel like it has.”

“And yet here you are, though you should be dead.”

This man, whoever he is, is looking at me, at my body in pieces. He has seen me come apart, tried to put me back together again.

“Who are you?” I ask.

He looks surprised to be asked the question probably hovering on his own tongue. He is very tall and his chest and shoulders are wide, but he is quite lean, his strength sinewy. He looks nothing like his son, who is fair; this man has dark, short hair, a short beard, and dark eyes. There are deep lines around these eyes and wind marks on his cheeks. “Dominic,” he says, his voice rough as though he doesn’t much use it. “Dom. Who are you?”

“.” I watch for any sign the name rings a bell.

“Where’d you come from?”

Where did you come from. Meaning, what are you doing here.

I tell him I don’t know.

I eat a little, take more painkillers, and then sleep again, but this time it is different, it’s unburdened by fever or dreams, and when I wake I know the worst of the illness has passed. The wounds will take longer to heal but the pain of them feels less overwhelming. Mostly it is a deep muscle ache, a sense that my body has taken a battering and needs to move slowly for a while. I borrow some clothes from the wardrobe, pulling pants and a jumper carefully over the bandages that will need changing again soon. I need to find the kitchen—I’m famished.

Downstairs I take in the lighthouse with clearer eyes. The cozy lounge I slept in but did not really see sits in the main circular area of the building and has the dark-green velvet couch, bookshelves, a thick furry rug. There is a fireplace all boarded up in favor of an electric heater. Everything looks very old, as if nothing has been replaced in a long time. I step into the adjoining kitchen to be met by a wall of light. Above the sink is a long, wide window. It faces the sea, though this is really only a smudge of gray in the distance, down beneath the fall of the hill we sit atop. The sight of it sets my insides rolling and I think I will be sick.

I feel for the chair behind me and sink into it, breathing through the nausea.

“Sea legs.”

“ Jesus Christ .” I spin around, clutching my chest in fright. There is a boy, another one. He’s sitting at the long timber dining table.

“Sorry,” he says.

He is tall like his dad, blond like his little brother. I’d pictured all three kids around Orly’s age, but this boy is a teenager, and so was Fen. He has a couple of textbooks open in front of him, and a giant bowl of cereal he’s working his way through.

“You lot are all the same,” I accuse. “Lurking around.”

He has a spoonful.

“You’re Raff then?”

A nod. “Takes a while for your body to forget being on the boat.”

“When did I get here?”

“Week ago.”

One week. I’ve lost days, somehow, lying in bed, mostly unconscious. Many things have likely happened during this week, but still there has been no mention of a boat, or of Yen, and I guess I know what that means. The pit in my stomach opens again.

“Can you point me to a bowl of that?” I ask, of his cereal.

Raff unfolds himself from the chair—he is much taller than I realized, his head automatically ducking for lights and doorways. He returns with a big jar of muesli and a carton of long-life milk, then passes me a bowl and spoon to make my own. I wolf it down, I can’t get it into me fast enough, it is the best thing I have ever eaten. The boy watches me. “Feeling better then.”

I finish the bowl and make myself another.

Raff points at the coffeepot on the stove, and I nod, and he makes me a strong dark coffee that sets half the world right. As I sip he doesn’t try to make conversation, just gets back to his textbooks. He is slow, meticulous. His finger moves beneath each line, lips silently mouthing the words as he goes. I notice him going over the same line half a dozen times before he moves on. I crane my neck to see what the subject is, and make out Year 9 Standard English . He looks a lot older than year nine.

“You’re doing distance ed?” I ask him.

Raff nods. “Summer holidays now but I’m already behind.”

“How long have you been out here?”

“Eight years.”

I stare at him. “You’re kidding.”

He stares back. He is not kidding.

My eyes travel around the little room, the cluttered but very clean kitchen, and through the arched doorway to the old-fashioned lounge. It feels warm and lived in; there are home-drawn pictures stuck to walls and art and craft supplies scattered in one corner, half-finished projects in another. A Lego sculpture takes up half the living room. The normal detritus of children. But there is little modern tech—I can’t see a television or a computer, no speakers for a sound system, no phones . Maybe I haven’t looked closely enough, but from where I’m sitting now, the lighthouse could belong to another time. Another world entirely. I think of the fathomless sky above and the gaping black space around this little building, I think of the days it took me to get here, on an immense and lonely ocean. I think of eight years. Not unreasonable for an adult wanting solitude, wanting wildness. But for teenagers? I can’t wrap my head around what the isolation might do to them.

At the whim of my curiosity now, I get up and poke my head into the storeroom. It is long and dark and cool. There are dozens of shelves holding containers of dry goods. Someone has labeled and measured everything: a container of flour has a line for every week marked across six months. Every container and jar is the same. Rationed. I think how spartan and disciplined a person must be to live here.

“Is this how often the supply ships come?” I ask Raff through the door. “Every six months?”

He nods.

“Bloody hell. What if you run out of something?”

“Then you run out of it.”

“What about medical supplies?”

“There’s a mini hospital down at the base, it’s pretty well stocked. If you had a serious emergency, you could call for an evacuation.” Under his breath he adds, “Might take a while.”

“What’s the base?”

“The research base?”

We study each other. In this look I realize he is quite shrewd. He is letting me reveal how much I know about this island and in doing so explain whether I meant to be here. I give him nothing. I wait.

“Down in the pinch,” he explains. “There’s a research base, usually full of scientists.”

“Usually?”

“They’re gone now.”

“Gone where?”

“Home.”

“All of them?”

He nods.

My pulse thuds, loud. “You mean there’s not one other human being on this island, except you and your family? The four of you.”

Raff nods. But he is looking at me and he can hear my disbelief. My confusion.

“Why?” I ask, forcing my voice calm.

“Shearwater’s being closed down.” He thinks better of that wording and tries again. “People can’t live here anymore.”

“Why?” I ask again.

“It’s too dangerous. The island’s disappearing.”

“Then why are the four of you still here?”

“We’re just the caretakers, we’re finishing up. We leave at the end of this season.”

“Which is when?”

“About six weeks.”

No way. If there really is no one else on this island, then I will not be staying for six more weeks. “Can you show me to your communications? I need to radio for an evacuation.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Or did your dad already do that?”

Again, no reply. Raff just eats his cereal and I don’t like it one bit.

“Raff, has anyone been notified that I’m here? That there’s a boat missing? They’ll need to send search and rescue for Yen.”

“We have your boat,” a voice says, and I turn to see Dom in the doorway. Watching me. The hairs on my neck stand on end; there is something nerve-racking in their caginess. In their vagueness.

“Where is it? Is the captain…?”

“We’ve found no body,” Dom says. “But he’s dead.”

God, the flat way he says it.

“Where is the boat?” I ask.

“It’s in pieces at the end of the Drift.”

The Drift. Orly mentioned that, didn’t he? A current. A boat in pieces. I’d known, of course.

Dominic comes into the room and guides me to a chair, helps me sit. I shrug his hands off me.

“You said there was one man on board? The captain?”

I nod faintly. “Yen.”

“And you.”

Another nod.

“Were you coming here, ? To Shearwater?”

I lift my head to look him in the face. His eyes, which I thought were dark brown, are actually a greenish gray; I can see them in the light from the window.

A sense of danger prickles my skin. All my life I have had more than a healthy dose of fear working at my edges, but I am also good at reading people, and there are things this father and son are not saying, something they are bristling with, a tension I have not imagined.

“No,” I say, and with it I feel some of that tension seep away and know I am right to be wary.

“Then what on earth were you doing down here?” Dom asks, sounding genuinely confused.

I ignore the question and ask my own. “Who have you contacted?”

“No one.”

I shift uneasily on the seat. “Okay. I’ll go with you. We can go now.”

It triggers a kind of shutdown in him. He looks done with the conversation, and with me. Dom leaves the kitchen without another look, only a quick directive: “Get some rest.” I have been dismissed, and with that I am in no doubt that he doesn’t plan to radio anyone.