Wildlight
Authors: Robyn Mundy
Wildlight
You spend your whole time on an island looking out to sea. Perhaps what you are facing is yourself.
Sixteen-year-old Stephanie West has been dragged from Sydney to remote Maatsuyker Island off the coast of Tasmania by her parents, hoping to recapture a childhood idyll and come to terms with their grief over the death of Steph’s twin brother. Cut off from friends and the comforts of home, exiled to a lonely fortress and a lighthouse that bears the brunt of savage storms, the months ahead look to be filled with ghosts of the past.
Steph’s saviour is Tom Forrest, a 19-year-old deckhand aboard a crayfishing boat. When the weather allows, Tom visits the island, and he and Steph soon form an attraction. But Tom must conceal at all costs the illegal fishing he takes part in, orchestrated by his tyrannical brother. And he dare not dwell on his fear of the sea or his deep-worn premonition that the ocean will one day take him.
Wildlight
is an exquisite, vividly detailed exploration of the wayward journey of adolescence, and how the intense experience of a place can change the course of even the most well-planned life.
For Ian Templeman, mentor and friend
1938 – 2015
Maatsuyker Island was named in 1642 by Dutch navigator Abel Janszoon Tasman during his exploratory voyage of Australian waters.
‘Mat
sy
ker’ is the common Australian pronunciation.
2015
Stephanie’s focus slides from the sliver of moon to the beacon at the tip of the wing, distant enough to appear as a star. She looks down through the night at a twinkling of lights from some tiny tropical island, barely discernible from this great height. Ferdinand Magellan’s wayward course across the Pacific missed all but two of this ocean’s thousands of islands. Perhaps we navigate life in such a way, alter course at just the wrong moment, blink and miss landfall, pass by unseen.
Steph reclines her seat, tucks the doona around her feet and pledges eternal devotion to Qantas for the upgrade. Behind her the first dusting of snow on the Sangre de Cristos, the wool coat she shrugged off and left on a plaza bench at Santa Fe.
On the far side of the dateline floats an image of Sydney Airport, bittersweet with homecomings, a crowd of expectant eyes searching through and beyond her while those incoming, weary from the long haul home, peel away to waiting arms. The cover of the inflight magazine reins her in: a culinary smorgasbord too glossy for melancholy. Stephanie homes in on the cover’s lavish table setting: glass vessels, ultramarines and aquamarines, the sea greens of the ocean. Blown glass, artworks in themselves.
She raises her seat, riffles through the pages.
Harvest from the Haven
. She halts at the photo of a man, jeans and jacket, his arm resting on a wooden crate of produce. The likeness is uncanny. Mid thirties, three years older than her—even the age would be right. The face seems oddly set, perhaps self-conscious before the camera; oceans more worldly than the boy she once knew. Stephanie studies his hands. She skims the text.
Organic dressings and condiments served in our first-class cabins and Qantas lounges.
A name shimmies off the page, her chest held tight by the words.
Tom Forrest
.
Her first lover.
The boy that drowned at nineteen off Maatsuyker Island.
1999
Steph wheeled through the sky, willing herself to be fearless and free. Then the helicopter lurched and courage dumped her with a reminder that only a shuddering bubble of tempered plastic separated her from the wilderness below.
Before the helicopter had left Hobart she’d been reduced from a sixteen year old to a needy child—
Let’s get you sorted
: the pilot, aftershave overload, threading the seat harness and fastening the convoluted buckle which now Steph wasn’t sure she could undo In The Unlikely Event That The Helicopter Should Be Required To Ditch.
Under an hour, the pilot said the flight would take. Not even halfway there. She’d kept the swirling in her stomach under control, but civilisation was now a light-year behind and they were passing so near the mountainside you could practically reach out and brush the trees. The pilot turned to her and winked and Steph wondered if he’d wangled things so she scored the front seat. She wanted to motion ahead the way her father did when her mother was driving and talking and pointing out things all at the same time, as if to say,
For God’s sake, Gretchen, keep your focus on the road
.
They were lower than both peaks now, weaving around pockets of mist through which the pilot, unless he had radar vision, and Steph hoped beyond hope that he did, could see nothing at all. She wrapped her arms around her stomach which sloshed like a water-filled balloon. Callam would have revelled in this. But her brother was gone, and if anyone remembered the bad things, they didn’t dare talk about them now. Saint Callam, she sometimes felt like saying when her mother went on. If her twin brother really was up there looking down, he’d be laughing his testicles off and going,
Scaredy cat chicken shit you’re gonna crash you’re gonna die
, and plenty more where that came from. Steph’s head throbbed with the glare. Her stomach pitched and rolled.
She glanced back at her father wedged in the far corner, gazing out through the helicopter window as if he hadn’t a care. You’d never guess he was as scared of heights as she was. Perhaps that was the definition of adulthood: you just got better at hiding how you felt.
Why were they dropping? Steph gripped the seat and willed herself to sit statue still, to focus on the waterway below. River? Rivulet? Or a glistening black serpent winding its way to sea? No roads, glimpses of a track; chances were there was nothing down there among those acres of button grass but a wilderness writhing with tiger snakes. And by God, Steph had let it be known, if the island they were destined for harboured a single such creature, her mother would be embarking on this certifiable pilgrimage ALONE.
Her eyes sharpened on the helicopter door, processing upside-down instructions, trying to make sense of the arrows: one of those levers, she remembered, unlatched the door from its hinges and sent it spinning off into the cosmos In The Unlikely Event That The Helicopter Should Be Required To Ditch. The pilot had acted out each step of the safety briefing, bracing as they prepared to crash, beating his arms above his head like a lunatic as the rotors sliced through water. Steph had an image of herself hurled like a plum through blind darkness, the slam of the Southern Ocean smashing her apart. She had nodded nonchalantly when the pilot explained that she would lose all sense of up and down, water flooding the cabin, her survival dependent on holding her breath and keeping her wits intact to unbuckle the seatbelt. Wait for the rotors to stop, follow the lifeline of bubbles from your lungs that lead to the surface.
What then?
she would like to have asked. The one hundred k medley back to Hobart? A bright September morning deflated into grisly ways to perish in Tasmania’s wilderness. They weren’t even over water yet.
The helicopter veered, the tinny muffle of the pilot’s voice crackled through her headset. ‘Precipitous Bluff.’ Steph opened her eyes to a piercing blue and the glare of morning sun. A jackhammer pounded at her skull. The pulsing silhouette of the pilot’s arm gestured to the right. ‘Ironbound Ranges.’
Her mother, seated directly behind, tapped Steph’s shoulder. ‘Look. Down there.’ Her excitement carried through the headphones. ‘Louisa Bay. We’re close.’
Her father reached from the back corner, tapped her shoulder.
You okay?
he mouthed.
Steph shrugged. She felt awful. God, now her mother had the video camera pointed in her face. ‘No,’ she said too sharply. The pilot turned at the commotion. Steph scrambled through the side pocket for a sick bag, a tissue, a cloth—please, anything!—but the projection of vomit filled her cupped hands. Her stomach purged a second round. The smoothie her mother had warned her against ordering for breakfast ran curdled over her jeans and inside her new red gumboots. She felt agitated movements from behind; her mother slid an emergency card beneath her chin to act as a drip tray. Steph pushed her arm away. The rank smell permeated the cabin along with the pilot’s disgust. Steph withered.
From somewhere a towel and water bottle was thrust in her lap. She wiped her mouth and hands, swished water around her mouth, gagged at the prospect of swallowing and drained the putrid mess back into the towel.
If you’ve had enough practice you can stop yourself from crying, but inside this whirring capsule there was no escaping humiliation. She turned to the window to block out the world, her parents’ reassurances,
Almost there, sweetheart. Not long now.
They were over ocean, skirting a large island. ‘Big Witch,’ the pilot called it. Another ahead. Steph squinted at a cove marked with a gantry, a broken line of railway sleepers carved a scar up the slope. The Gulch, the haulage way: she knew those landmarks from her mother’s old photos. The canopy of green was one of those optical illusions that your eyes struggled to make sense of: you might be peering down at treetops, or you might be looking down at barren coastal scrub that barely reached your knees. Her hands felt sticky. They stank. Steph wanted to brush her teeth. She needed to pee. She took another gulp: the water tasted stale.
The helicopter rounded a ridge to where two white cottages nestled side by side on the hill, all country garden with painted fences, their perimeters of lawn keeping the bush at bay. A grass road meandered past the cottages then disappeared into bush. ‘Second and Third Keepers’ Quarters,’ her mother said through the headphones, as if the old lighthouse was still manned. Her voice carried a reminder of whose rightful domain this was. Steph and Dad were the newbies. The helicopter tilted at such an angle Steph had to pull back from the door in case it inadvertently opened and flung her out like a Red Cross rations drop. They passed over the old Head Keeper’s Quarters, a solitary cottage flanked by a paddock that abruptly dropped away. Steph saw where grass met cliff, sheer to the ocean below. She craned to look back at a second roof as tiny as a doll’s house, at a path that led from it to a weather screen. The grass road reappeared, arcing downhill toward the southern tip of the island, indigo lapping cliffs on either side. The ocean looked motionless, tiger-striped with foam, still as a dead boy’s breath.
Beyond the furthest point they circled back beside an ellipsis of rocks: shark’s teeth foaming at the gums where they pierced the blue. The Needles. If Steph hadn’t felt so bad she could have sung the name of those rocks before her mother announced them. They looked like the tail vertebrae of some prehistoric animal. Her mother pointed to the lighthouse perched high above the ocean, shiny, shiny white.