Forever Shores (9 page)

He cleared his throat. ‘What are you doing?' he said. They looked at each other, then at their mother.

Lauren shook her hair back. ‘Making spears,' she said matter-of-factly. Her face was flushed from the heat.

‘Oh,' he said.

Garth sat at his desk, staring vacantly through the window of his office. Brisbane was a grey mirage through the rain, wavering and indistinct. There was no movement anywhere beyond the pelting water. With an effort he pulled his gaze down to his desk.

The work was almost done.

Shuffling through some papers, he extracted one and began reading by the dim light that filtered through the window.

The guinea grass in the front office rustled, and he stiffened. ‘Who's there?' he called hoarsely.

A small furry shape dashed across the doorway and vanished. An animal, maybe a bandicoot. He sank back in his chair, feeling his lips twitch nervously. Lucky for it the twins weren't here. He picked up his biro and began making notes.

The phone rang. He snatched at it.

‘Who's there? I mean, Lorgan and Associates,' he said.

‘Garth. How are you?' Jonathon's dusty voice was unmistakable.

‘Jonathon, it's good to hear from you,' Garth said, trying to make his voice sound warm.

‘I wasn't sure that you'd be there,' Jonathon went on.

‘Certainly wouldn't be anywhere else, not when there's work to be done,' Garth said heartily. ‘I'm glad you rang, I've got great news. We've just about wrapped up the submission, and we're looking forward to showing it to Mr Bedlow just as soon as—'

‘That's very good,' Jonathon interrupted. ‘But unfortunately there has been a change of plan.'

Garth's face went cold. ‘Well, we can accommodate any of Mr Bedlow's changes,' he said. ‘We're nothing if not flexible here. That's the beauty of a small business. Flexible.'

‘You don't understand,' said Jonathon patiently. ‘Mr Bedlow has instructed me to tell you that the project is off.'

‘Off?' Garth was bewildered, the word making no sense.

‘Yes. Owing to your continuing inclement weather, Mr Bedlow doesn't believe there is much future in an ecological resort at that particular location. Mr Bedlow is looking elsewhere.'

‘But surely our work will be relevant, wherever it is,' said Garth desperately. He was surprised to feel hot tears stinging his eye-lids.

‘Elsewhere is overseas,' said Jonathon. ‘Thank you for your involvement and commitment. Goodbye.'

There was a click on the line, then a hissing, as if all the rain in the world was falling through it.

The dog seemed not to have moved from its spot near the sink, where the heat from the constant fire radiated warmly. It opened its jaws, tongue lolling, as Garth entered, staggering under the weight of a brimming cardboard box.

He put the box on the kitchen table and collapsed into a chair next to Lauren, who was grinding seeds in a bowl with a smooth rock. The reddish firelight jumped and flickered uncertainly, casting deep shadows that swayed back and forth across the walls. His clothes felt hot and heavy and he slowly undid his shirt buttons. Lauren looked up from her work and nodded to him. Her skin was white and water-wrinkled, and strangely attractive.

Emilyjane and Melisah were together on the floor. Melisah's face was drawn into a frown of concentration as she sat drawing intricate designs across Emilyjane's cheeks and breasts with a marking pen, to match the ones on her own.

He looked away. There was a pyramid of tin cans arranged against the far wall that hadn't been there earlier, he was sure, and the girls' spears lay close by. The sharp tip of one was still shiny with blood.

Rain rattled inexorably on the roof.

‘Here,' said Garth. He pushed the box of A3 envelopes containing Bedlow's project across the table towards Lauren. She smiled at him, and rose to add them to the fire.

Glimmer-by-Dark
Marianne de Pierres

I drifted back to Carmine Island on a whim, a fragment of memory, like a warm current. A means to float, no matter how much I wanted to drown.

Years before, families had clustered there, hungry for the sparkling water and unstained sand. In those days, ferries scurried like schools of busy reef fish to and from the mainland, their patrons littering the island with holiday trash, scarlet coral cuts and the agony of sunstroke, oblivious to the spirit winds.

Now only one barge still ran. A tired, flat-backed Beluga, wallowing its way through its last days. My custom had been to ride the stern. But I was a different person now. Worn by heartache.

The other passengers, I noticed, wore their own badges of disappointment. Some dressed in casual wealth, some in gaudy rags. I slumped among their fedoras and sarongs, sipping margaritas in the bar, while the wind whipped a whisper of life against my skin.

Their incurious glances lulled me. Perhaps Carmine Island would heal my pain where time and neuro-feedback gongs hadn't.

An hour on the barge saw one aspect of Carmine rising from the sea. Despite myself I strained to catch the view: turquoise water shimmering before black reef mirages, the gauzy web of spores buoyant on The Bara.

The spores had settled a decade ago, a freak of nature blown in from deeper waters, settling like a veil over Carmine, bringing with them fierce irritations and allergies. The residents who couldn't afford the expensive immunosuppressants suffered the exotic, often terminal, afflictions of the spores. Holiday-makers deserted but those resolute in their seclusion stayed. Tourism confined itself to the indolent young rich, clutching the antidote Tyline, searching for the hint of danger to shift their inertia.

My supply of the antidote was tucked in the waterproof pocket of my spray jacket. Half a year's worth—the last of my savings—buying isolation.

The floating pontoon undulated as the barge sighed alongside. Unsteadily—was it the margaritas?—I stumbled along it and caught the trans-island commuter. It dropped me in front of the realtor's, a flat beach house on Mariners Drive with its stilts rooted deep in the dune.

I scanned the window ads, scrolling quickly to what I could afford. Only two properties for rent, a unit at Los Nidos and a shack on the beach at Glimmer-by-Dark. I paid a month for the shack, leaving my palm print, the code to my savings account on the mainland.

‘Have you got your Tyline?' asked the golden-skinned girl at the desk.

I nodded, not one for unnecessary words.

The bridge of her forehead bulged slightly, her watery eyes changed to startling aqua by the spores. She ticked a box on my profile and sighed, ‘The whales sing on the full moon. The Sapphire Lounge and Bara Beach are off limits to tourists. Enjoy your stay.'

The sigh, I guessed, was about the Tyline. I was another tourist, when the locals had dwindled to so few.

I took the map she offered, and walked to Glimmer-by-Dark through the dunes. The spores danced above me in a riot of cerise hues, interconnected by an ephemeral webbing, filtering the sun so that everything seemed bathed in rarefied light. In the distance, waves crashed rhythmically in a gentle tattoo.

Avoiding the tourist path, I laboured like an initiate in an alien land. At the top of the largest dune, a gasp escaped me. Immense rose-tainted sandcastles scattered the length of Bara Beach, rising like palaces—the work of the mysterious spores, bringing recognisable form to random matter. Although wind and water had blunted turrets and collapsed rampart walls, somehow they survived the tidal ebb, soldiers in a perennial last stand. Rocky headlands buttressed them, cloaked in brilliant splashes of algae. The vibrancy of the colours bruised my eyes, forcing me to turn away and seek the rocky tourist path toward Glimmer-by-Dark.

The shack was sparse and austere, an unconsciously appropriate choice. I dozed in a chair on the deck, exhausted by the walk and the decision that brought me to Carmine.

‘It's the spores, you understand. They're tiring at first.' The soft, cultured voice stung me out of my lethargy like gunshot. A man, younger than me, bare-chested, slightly built and smiling. Handsome.

‘Mills-Thomas. Charlie, actually. Semi-retired journalist.' He thrust out a hand.

Reluctantly I took it. Younger men ignored me now. I wasn't sure how to act.

‘Tinashi.'

‘Pretty. Like its owner.'

The easy flattery confused me. I closed my eyes hoping that the man would vanish as he'd appeared.

‘We're having a meal at my place tonight. Glimmer beach folk only. Even Katrin. Come along before dark, second beach house before the breakwater. Meet the crowd.' He squeezed my shoulder lightly. A friendly gesture.

I shuddered at it, fighting my instinct to draw away from his touch. Instead I drew a tight breath. ‘Thank you.'

‘You're lucky. It's a glitter-rose dusk tonight,' he said with a mildly quizzical look, and left.

I stayed in the chair, then, alert for other intruders, but no one came near me. In the distance I saw a figure on the beach, well past the line of tumbled shacks, almost to the crook of the next rocky headland. Tall, I guessed. Long, sweeping hair like wings. Engaged in a frenzied pacing.

Eventually I tired of my observations and went inside to unpack my bag. The cupboards remained sadly empty afterwards. Traversing the tiny rooms I noticed a bowl of island fruits on the table, and in the fridge a bottle of pink champagne, somehow spirited there before my arrival. Biting into a sweet, velvety pai, I returned to the deck and resumed my vigil over the beach. But the strange figure had gone and eventually I dozed again.

The growing shadows of dusk disturbed my dreams, turning them gloomy. I awoke with a start, mouth dry, and staggered to the kitchenette. The water still tasted crystal clear, an alluring island feature from bygone days. Dragging my fingers roughly through my hair, and nursing several pieces of fruit in the crook of my arm, I hurried from my shack towards the breakwater.

Party lights and laughter guided me to the young man's house.

‘Tinashi. Join us,' Charlie took the fruit, touching my arm again, like an old friend. He wore a printed floral shirt soaked with the scent of jasmine.

I pasted blandness to my face to disguise my anger at being forced into such artificialities.

‘Meet the crew. Geronimo, deep-sea fisherman moonlighting with the local whale-song eco-exploiters; Lauren and Quentin Carson, on honeymoon for a year; Armagh and his daughter Jaella—Armagh teaches divinity at the school, and Jaella works at the store; and Professor Arthur Wang, our resident Professor of Marine Biology, on sabbatical.'

I flickered a tense smile at them.

Apart from the enormous Geronimo, whose mohawk glistened like bunched, wet seaweed, they seemed unremarkable. Lauren and Quentin, smoothly blonde and elegant, held hands. Teenage-thin Jaella fidgeted, bored by the whole thing and embarrassed by her father, Armagh, whose eyes were half closed in what I took for prayer or meditation.

‘Aren't you going to introduce me, Charlie?'

I stared past the curious faces to the shadows at the end of the room. A tall, lean figure stepped from them, thick hair like wings hanging to her hips.

‘Katrin.' She introduced herself with a strange grin, hovering like threat. ‘Always the last. They think I'm a witch,' she said.

In the light she seemed older, but quite beautiful, brimming with a vitality, and restlessness. Her eyes were black—no—dark violet. Spore eyes?

Charlie giggled. Nervous and high, like a young girl. ‘Katrin likes to joke.'

I studied her face, distracted momentarily from my despondency and the difficulty of new people.

Katrin posed, one way and then the other, like a photographer's model, face tilted, chin high and confident. ‘Seen enough?' she asked me.

I felt warmth in my cheeks.

‘Ignore her. She'll soon stop.' Arthur Wang sidled up next to me, barely reaching my shoulder.

Before I could reply the others were moving, scooping up glasses, turning to the beach, laughing off the moment with chatter. Charlie slipped a flute of pink champagne into my hand.

‘Tradition,' he said. ‘Pink at glitter-rose.'

I sipped it quickly, avoiding his hopeful, eager smile and jasmine-scented warmth, and stepped out onto the patio between Geronimo and Arthur Wang.

Their murmur washed over me as we waited.

With the last of the sunset The Bara breeze dropped to a breath, and a strange phosphorescence claimed the sand. Colourless at first and rapidly changing to a carpet of tiny, shining, rose-coloured grains. Something about them seemed to compel me to hasten to the beach and run them through my fingers and toes.

I must have stirred, because Geronimo and Arthur Wang each laid a hand on my arm.

‘The spores are active,' Arthur Wang explained. ‘Walking the beach during glitter-rose can be—' he trailed off.

Geronimo took it up, his voice a quiet boom. ‘What the Prof is saying, Tinashi, is—if you walk on the beach at glitter-rose, you might as well feed your Tyline to the fish. You don't know what the spores will do, how they will change you. Everyone is different. The locals, I mean. Some things you can see, like the eyes and the water retention in the forehead. Others it's only on the inside. They're the ones to watch. You never know about them. By heaven, it's tempting though.' His voice brimmed with emotion in that last sentence, like a man at the limit of his endurance.

I glanced among them then, and saw his feeling mirrored in the others' faces. Longing. And fear.

I gulped my pink champagne deeply and felt the tingle waken dead places in me.

That's when I noticed Katrin watching me, her strange smile hovering. ‘Come walk with me on the beach, Tinashi,' she teased.

I opened my mouth to speak and found my voice had deserted me.

Charlie grasped Katrin's shoulder and shook her. ‘Leave her alone,' he said.

Katrin stroked his face, almost lovingly, and laughed. A sharp, derisive sound. ‘Poor broken Charlie's got writer's block. Can't get the words out any more. Can't save the world. Or can he?'

Swallowing the dregs from her flute, she danced down the steps toward the radiant beach.

Charlie's face whitened in fury.

Next to me Arthur Wang shook his head sadly. ‘She loves the danger.'

‘No,' Armagh burst out. ‘She does it to taunt me. The devil has her.'

He seemed distraught, as if he might follow her, but Lauren Carson placed a soothing hand on his arm. ‘It's to taunt all of us.'

Glitter-rose dusk lasted another hour, before, like city lights doused by timers, the carpet dimmed.

Arthur Wang walked me to my shack. ‘We think the spores reproduce on certain tides. The colour is a bit like coral spawning. A bloom of reproduction. It only seems to happen on the beach at dusk. Sometimes at dawn as well. Once the colour fades it's quite safe.'

‘So the spores are not just those you can see in the sky?'

He shook his head in warning. ‘They're in everything. Don't forget your Tyline, Tinashi, unless, of course … you want to.'

‘Like Katrin?' I asked.

‘Like Katrin,' he said, and bowed politely into the dark.

The morning renounced the previous, strange dusk—a sharp, crisp salt-air day, sun shining through the barely visible gauze of spores. I walked to the shop wondering if perhaps I had imagined them all.

Then I met Lauren Carson, her sleek blonde hair tucked neatly under a broad brimmed straw hat, sunglasses wide and dark. She carried a basket of bread and pai fruit.

‘Come for a cup of tea,' she begged, moving too close to me. ‘Quentin's gone fishing with Geronimo. I get so lonely. We're the second shack past the professor's away from the breakwater, toward the headland. Come soon. I'll be waiting.'

I purchased some food from Jaella who, thankfully, showed no interest in conversation. As she packed my provisions, her gaze strayed back to the coastline as if she was watching for something.

I nodded thanks and returned to my shack where I lay on my bed and considered sleeping again. Only lingering shreds of civility dragged me to Lauren Carson's for tea.

‘Black.' It was a statement.

‘Thanks. How did you know?'

We sat inside. She wore her sunglasses like a reluctant movie star, while she poured from a cottage-shaped teapot. ‘It's my talent. Sensing things about people. Of course I don't get much practice here. Now I know most of our neighbours.'

I feigned interest.

‘Take Geronimo. He grows tropical orchids. Don't let his mohawk distract you. And the professor, he likes to gut things.'

She chatted on about the residents of Glimmer-by-Dark in the sort of tedious detail that shrivelled my soul—Jaella's rebelliousness, Wang's insomnia, Geronimo's fondness for chemical abuse, Armagh's obsession with saving Katrin's soul.

I escaped, eventually, and spent the rest of the day in my shack, sleeping and brooding.

At sunset, as The Bara gusted its last for the day, I took a plate of cheese and bread and the last pai and sat on the patio to watch. In the distance I recognised Jaella's solitary, young form, curled, waiting above the waterline. Out to sea a small boat cut steadily toward her.

Geronimo and Quentin returning from a day out?

As the boat crested the shore-breaking waves, Quentin Carson leapt from the boat and waded in. Jaella ran to his waiting arms.

Geronimo turned the boat towards the breakwater for mooring and left them on the beach passionately entwined.

Did Lauren know about them, I wondered? The self-professed intuit. Surely she could see them from her patio?

Unwillingly, I felt myself becoming seduced into their paltry intrigues.

‘She should kill him, you know.' A voice serrated by madness.

I hid my fright. ‘Hello, Katrin,' I said smoothly.