I CYCLE OUT of the strip of souvenir shops and cafés, but a minute later end up down a dead end at a dusty parade ground. There are Second World War–style huts, and I half recall being told that Italian prisoners of war were interned on Rottnest Island. This train of thought conveys me to Richard Cheeseman, as so many trains of thought do, these days. My fateful act of vengeance in Cartagena last year didn’t so much backfire as explode with horrifying success: Cheeseman is now 342 days into a six-year sentence in the Penitenciaría Central, Bogotá, for drug trafficking. Trafficking! For one little sodding envelope! The Friends of Richard Cheeseman managed to wangle him a private cell and a bunk, but for this luxury we had to pay two thousand dollars to the gangsters who run his wing. Countless, countless times have I ached to undo my rash little misdeed but, as the Arabic proverb has it, not even God can change the past. We—the Friends—are using every channel we can to shorten the critic’s sentence, or to have him repatriated to the U.K. at least, but it’s an uphill struggle. Dominic Fitzsimmons, the suave and able undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice, knew Cheeseman at Cambridge and is on our side, but he has to act with discretion to avoid charges of cronyism. Elsewhere, sympathy for the lippy columnist is not widespread. People point to the life sentences doled out in Thailand and Indonesia and conclude Cheeseman got off lightly, but there’s nothing “light” about life in the Penitenciaría. Two or three deaths occur in the prison every month.
I know, I know. One man alone could extract Cheeseman from his Bogotá hellhole and that is Crispin Hershey—but consider the cost. Please. By offering up a full confession, I’d be facing prison myself, quite possibly at Cheeseman’s current address. The legal fees would be ruinous, and no friendsofcrispinhershey.org would procure me a private cell, either—it’d be straight to the piranha tank. Juno and Ana?s would cut me off forever. So a full confession would be tantamount to suicide, and better a guilty coward than a dead Judas.
I can’t do it to myself. I just can’t do it.
Beyond the parade ground the dusty track fizzles out.
We all take a few wrong turns. I turn my bike around.
THE AFTERNOON SUN is a microwave oven, door wide open, cooking all exposed flesh. Rottnest is small as islands go, only eight square miles of naked rock and baked gullies, twists, and bends, ups and downs, and the Indian Ocean is either always visible or always around the next bend. Halfway up a hill I dismount and push. My pulse bangs my eardrums and my shirt’s sticking to my unflat torso. When did I get so sodding unfit? Back in my thirties I could’ve streaked up this slope, but now I’m so knackered I’m nearly puking. When did I last ride a bike? Eight years ago, give or take, with Juno and Ana?s in our back garden at Pembridge Place. One afternoon in the holidays I made an obstacle course for the girls with plank ramps, bamboo-stick slaloms, a tunnel out of a sheet and the washing line, and an evil scarecrow to decapitate with Excalibur as we cycled by. I called it “Scrambler Motocross” and the three of us held time trials. That French au pair, I forget her name, made ruby grapefruit lemonade and even Zo? joined the picnic in the fairy clearing behind the foaming hydrangeas. Juno and Ana?s often asked me to set the course up again, and I always meant to, but there was a review to write, or an email to send, or a scene to polish, and Scrambler Motocross ended up being a one-off. What happened to the kids’ bicycles? Zo? must have disposed of them, I suppose. Disposing of unwanted items proved to be her forte.
Finally, gratefully, I reach the ridge, remount my bike, and coast down the other side. Iron trees untwist from the beige soil around gloopy pools. I imagine the first sailors from Europe landing here, searching for water in this infernal Eden, taking a quiet shit. Yobs from Liverpool, Rotterdam, Le Havre, and Cork; sun-blacked, tattooed, scurvied, calloused, and muscled as all buggery, and—
Suddenly I’m aware that I’m being watched.
It’s strong. It’s uncanny. It’s disturbing.
I scan the hillside. Every rock, bush …
… no. Nobody. It’s just … Just what?
I want to go back to the beginning.
AT THE NEXT turnoff, I follow the road to the lighthouse. No spray-cloaked monarch of the rocks, this; the Rottnest Light is a stumpy middle finger sticking up from a rocky rise, grunting, “Sit on this, mate.” It keeps reappearing at odd angles and in wrong sizes, but refuses to let me arrive. There’s a hill in Through the Looking-Glass that does the same until Alice stops trying to arrive there—maybe I’ll try the same. What’ll I think about, to distract myself?
Richard Cheeseman, who else? All I wanted was to embarrass Richard Cheeseman. I’d pictured him being held for a few hours at Heathrow airport while lawyers scrambled, and a much-humbled reviewer would be released on bail. That’s all. How could I have predicted that British and Colombian police were enjoying a rare season of cooperation that might result in poor Richard being arrested at Bogotá International Airport, preflight?
“Easily,” my conscience replies. And yes, dear reader, I regret my actions very much, and I’m aiming to atone. With Richard’s sister Maggie, I set up the Friends of Richard Cheeseman to keep his plight in the news—and, lamentable though my misdeed was, I’m hardly in the Premier Division of Infamy. I’m not a certain Catholic bishop who shuffled boy-raping priests from parish to parish to avoid embarrassment for the Holy Church. I’m not ex-president Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who gassed thousands of men, women, and children for the crime of living in a rebel-held suburb. All I did was punish a man who had smeared my reputation. The punishment was a little excessive. Yes, I’m guilty. I regret it. But my guilt is my burden. Mine. My punishment is to live with what I’ve done.
My iPhone trills in my shirt pocket. Needing a breather I pull over into the shade of a shed-sized boulder. I drop the phone and pick it up from the bleached grit by the Moshi Monsters strap that Ana?s attached to it. Appropriately, it’s a text from Zo? or, rather, a photo of Juno’s thirteenth birthday party at the house in Montreal. A house I paid for, owned by Zo? since the divorce. Behind a pony-shaped cake, Juno’s holding the riding boots I paid for, and Ana?s’s pulling a goofy face while holding a sign saying, BONJOUR, PAPA! Zo?’s contrived to get herself into the background, obliging me to guess at the photographer’s identity. It could be a member of La Famille Legrange, but Juno’s mentioned some guy called Jerome, a divorced banker with one daughter. Not that I sodding care who Zo? puts it out to, but surely I’ve a right to know who’s tucking my own daughters into bed at night, now their mother has decided it won’t be me. Zo?’s attached no message but the subtext is clear enough: We’re Doing Fine, Thank You Very Much.
I notice a handsome bird on a branch, just a few meters away. It’s white and black with red cap and breast. I’ll photo it and send it to Juno with a funny birthday message. I get out of MESSAGES and press the camera icon, but when I look up I find the bird has flown.
TWO BIKES ARE leaning against the lighthouse when Crispin Hershey finally arrives, which displeases him. I dismount, sticky with sweat, my crotch saddle-sore. I walk out of the nuclear brightness to the shady side of the lighthouse—where, oh, great, two females of the species are finishing a picnic. The younger one’s wearing a faux Hawaiian shirt, knee-length khaki shorts, and daubs of bluish sun-block over her cheekbones, cheeks, and forehead. The older one has earth-mother tie-dyed clothes, a floppy white sun hat, unruly black hair, and sunglasses chosen for maximum coverage. The younger one leaps up—she’s still a teenager—and says, “Wow. Hi. You’re Crispin Hershey.” She speaks in estuary English.
“I am.” It’s been a while since I was recognized out of context.
“Hi. My name’s Aoife, and, uh … Mum here’s actually met you.”
The older woman stands and removes her sunglasses. “Hello, Mr. Hershey. There’s no reason in the world you’d remember, but—”
“Holly Sykes. Yes. We met at Cartagena, last year.”
“Wow, Mum!” says Aoife. “The Crispin Hershey actually knows who you are. Aunt Sharon’s going to be, like, ‘Whaaa?’ ”
She reminds me so much of Juno that I ache, a little.
“Aoife.” There’s a note of maternal reprimand; the megaselling Angel Authoress is uneasy with her fame. “Mr. Hershey deserves some peace and quiet after the festival. Let’s get back to town, hey?”
The young woman swats away a fly. “We only just got here, Mum. It’ll look rude. You don’t mind sharing a lighthouse, do you?”
“No need to rush off on my account,” I hear myself saying.
“Cool,” says Aoife. “Then have a seat. Or a step. We saw you on the ferry to Rottnest, actually, but Mum said not to disturb you ’cause you looked dead beat.”
Angel Authoress seems keen to avoid me. How rude was I to her at the president’s villa? “Jet lag won’t take ‘please’ for an answer.”
“You’re not wrong.” Aoife fans herself with her cap. “That’s why Australia and New Zealand’re, like, invasion-proof. Any foreign army’d only get halfway up the beach before the time difference’d kick in, and they’d just like whoa, and collapse in the sand and that’d be it, invasion over. Sorry we missed your event earlier.”
I think of Aphra Booth. “Don’t be. So,” this is to her mother, “you’re appearing at the Writers Festival too?”
Holly Sykes nods, sipping from a bottle of water. “Aoife’s doing a sort of gap year in Sydney, so this trip tied in nicely.”
“My flatmate in Sydney’s from Perth,” adds Aoife, “and she’s always saying, ‘If you go to Perth, you got to go to Rotto.’ ”
Teenagers make me feel so sodding old. “ ‘Rotto’?”
“Here. Rotto is Rottnest Island. Fremantle’s ‘Freo’; ‘afternoon’ is ‘arvo.’ Isn’t it cool how Australians do that?”
No, I’d ordinarily reply, it’s baby talk for grown-ups. But, then, whither humanity sans youth? Whither language sans neologisms? We’d all be Struldbrugs speaking Chaucerian.
“Fancy a fresh apricot?” Aoife offers me a brown paper bag.
MY TONGUE CRUSHES another perfumed fruit against the roof of my mouth. I throw away the apricot stones, thinking of Jack’s mother throwing away the beans that’ll turn into the beanstalk in the morning. “Ripe apricots taste exactly of their color.”
“You talk like a real writer, Crispin,” says Aoife. “My uncle Brendan’s always teasing Mum, saying now she’s this famous author she ought to talk posher, not all, ‘Watch yer bleedin’ marf or I’ll clock yer one, innit.’ ”
Holly Sykes protests, “I do not talk like that!”
I miss Juno and Ana?s teasing me. “So what’s this ‘sort of’ gap year of yours about then, Aoife?”
“I’ll be studying archaeology at Manchester from September, but Mum’s Australian editor knows a professor of archaeology at Sydney, so this semester I’m sitting in on the lectures in return for helping with a project at Parramatta. There was a factory there for convict women. It’s been amazing, piecing their lives together.”
“Sounds worthy,” I tell Aoife. “Is your dad an archaeologist?”
“Dad was a journalist, actually. A foreign correspondent.”
“What does he”—too late I spot the “was”—“do now?”
“Unfortunately a missile hit his hotel. In Homs, in Syria.”
I nod. “Excuse my tactlessness. Both of you.”
“It’s eight years ago,” Holly Sykes reassures me, “and …”
“… and I’m lucky,” now Aoife reassures me, “ ’cause there’s, like, a gazillion interviews with Dad on YouTube, so I can go online and there he is, chattering away, large as life. Next best thing to hanging out.”
My dad’s on YouTube too, but I find watching him makes him deader than ever. I ask Aoife, “What was his name, your dad?”
“Ed Brubeck. I’ve got his name, too. Aoife Brubeck.”
“Not the Ed Brubeck? Wrote for Spyglass magazine?”
“That’s him,” says Holly Sykes. “Did you know Ed’s writing?”
“We met! When was it? Washington, about 2002? My former wife’s brother-in-law was on the panel for the Sheehan-Dower Prize. They awarded it to Ed that year, and I’d done a reading in town that day, so we shared a table at dinner that evening.”
Aoife asks, “What did you and Dad talk about?”
“Oh, a hundred things. His job. 9/11. Fear. Politics. The pram in the writer’s hallway. He had a four-year-old back in London, I recall.” Aoife smiles with her whole wide face. “I was working on a journalist character, so Ed let me quiz him. Then we emailed from time to time, after that. When I heard the news, about Syria …” I exhale. “My very belated condolences, to both of you. For whatever they’re worth. He was a bloody good journalist.”
“Thank you,” says one; and “Thanks,” the other.
We gaze out across eleven miles of ferry-plowed sea.
Perth’s dark skyscrapers stand against the light sky.
Twenty paces away, a medium-sized mammal I cannot identify lollops out of the scrub and down the slope. Chubby as a wallaby, reddish-brown, kangaroo forepaws, and a foxy wombat face. A tongue like a finger slurps the apricot stones. “Good God. What is that?”
“That charming devil is a quokka,” says Aoife.
“What’s a quokka? Besides a hell of a Scrabble score.”
“An endangered marsupial. The first Dutch who landed here thought they were giant rats, so they called the place Rat’s Nest Island: Rottnest, in Dutch. Most mainland quokkas got killed by dogs and rats, but they’ve managed to survive here.”
“If the archaeology falls through, there’s always natural history.”
Aoife smiles. “I Wikipediaed them five minutes ago.”
I ask, “Reckon they like apricots? There’s a squishy one left.”
Holly looks dubious. “What about ‘Do Not Feed the Animals’?”
“It’s not like we’re chucking them Cherry Ripe bars, Mum.”
“And surely,” I add, “if they’re endangered, they’ll need all the Vitamin C they can get.” I lob the apricot to within a few feet of the animal. It waddles over, sniffs, chomps, and looks up at us.
“ ‘Please, sir,’ ” Aoife does a trembly Oliver Twist voice, “ ‘can I have some more?’ How cute is that? I’ve got to take a photo.”
“Not too close, love,” says her mother. “It’s a wild animal.”
“Gotcha.” Aoife walks down the slope, holding out her phone.
“What a well-raised kid,” I tell her mother, in a low voice.
She looks at me, and I see the signs of a full, fraught life around her eyes. If only she hadn’t written a book full of angel bollocks for gullible women disappointed with their lives, we could be friends. It’s a fair guess that Holly Sykes knows about my daughters and my divorce: the ex–Wild Child of British Letters may not be famous enough to sell books, but Zo?’s huge “I Will Survive” splash for the Sunday Telegraph gave the world a very one-sided version of our troubles. We watch Aoife feed the quokka, while all around us Rottnest’s bleached slopes buzz and whistle with insects, tinnitus-like. A lizard crosses the dust and …
The feeling of being watched comes back, stronger than ever. We aren’t the only ones here. There are lots. Near. I could swear.
Acacia tree to wiry shrub to shed-sized rock … Nobody.
“Do you feel them too?” Holly Sykes is watching me. “It’s an echo chamber, this place …”
If I say yes to this, I say yes to her whole flaky, nonempirical world. By saying yes to this, how do I refuse crystal healing, pastlife therapy, Atlantis, Reiki, and homeopathy? The problem is, she’s right. I do feel them. This place is … What’s another word for “haunted,” Mr. Novelist? My throat’s dry. My water bottle’s empty.
Down on the rocks blue breakers flume on rocks. I hear the boom, faint and soft, a second later. Further out, surfers at play.
“They were brought here in chains,” says Holly Sykes.
“Who were?”
“The Noongar. Wadjemup, they called this island. Means the Place Across the Water.” She sniffs. “For the Noongar, the land couldn’t be owned. No more than the seasons could be owned, or a year. What the land gave, you shared.”
Holly Sykes’s voice is flattening out and faltering, as if she’s not speaking but translating a knotty text. Or picking one voice out from a roaring crowd. “The djanga came. We thought they were dead ones, come back. They forgot how to speak when they were dead, so now they spoke like birds. Only a few came, at first. Their canoes were big as hills, but hollow, like big floating rooms made of many many rooms. Then more ships, more and more, every ship it puked up more, more, more of them. They planted fences, waved maps, brought sheep, mined for metals. They shot our animals, but if we killed their animals, they hunted us like vermin, and took the women away …”
This performance ought to be ridiculous. But in the flesh, three feet away, a vein pulsing in her temple, I don’t know what to make of it. “Is this a story you’re working on, Holly?”
“Too late, we understood, the djanga wasn’t dead Noongar jumped up, they was Whitefellas.” Holly’s voice is blurring now. Some words go missing. “Whitefella made Wadjemup a prison for Noongar. F’burning bush, like we always done, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. F’fighting at Whitefella, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. Chains. Cells. Coldbox. Hotbox. Years. Whips. Work. Worst thing is this: Our souls can’t cross the sea. So when the prison boat takes us from Fremantle, our soul’s torn from out body. Sick joke. So when come to Wadjemup, we Noongar we die like flies.”
One in four words I’m guessing at now. Holly Sykes’s pupils have shrunk to dots as tiny as full stops. This can’t be right. “Holly?” What’s the first-aid response for this? She must be blind. Holly starts speaking again but not a lot’s in English: I catch “priest,” “gun,” “gallows,” and “swim.” I have zero knowledge of Aboriginal languages, but what’s battling its way out of Holly Sykes’s mouth now sure as hell isn’t French, German, Spanish, or Latin. Then Holly Sykes’s head jerks back and smacks the lighthouse and the word “epilepsy” flashes through my mind. I grip her head so that when she repeats the head-smash it only bashes my hand. I swivel upright and clasp her head firmly against my chest and yell, “Aoife!”
The girl reappears from behind a tree, the quokkas beat a retreat, and I call out, “Your mother’s having an attack!”
A few pounding seconds later, Aoife Brubeck’s here, holding her mother’s face. She speaks sharply: “Mum! Stop it! Come back! Mum!”
A cracked buzzing hum starts deep in Holly’s throat.
Aoife asks, “How long have her eyes been like that?”
“Sixty seconds? Less, maybe. Is she epileptic?”
“The worst’s over. It’s not epilepsy, no. She’s stopped talking, so she’s not hearing now, and—oh, shit—what’s this blood?”
There’s sticky red on my hand. “She hit the wall.”
Aoife winces and inspects her mother’s head. “She’ll have a hell of a lump. But, look, her eyes are coming back.” Sure enough, her pupils are swelling from dots to proper disks.
I note, “You’re acting as if this has happened before.”
“A few times,” replies Aoife, with understatement. “You haven’t read The Radio People, have you?”
Before I can answer Holly Sykes blinks, and finds us. “Oh, f’Chrissakes, it just happened, didn’t it?”
Aoife’s worried and motherly. “Welcome back.”
She’s still pasty as pasta. “What did I do to my head?”
“Tried to dent the lighthouse with it, Crispin says.”
Holly Sykes flinches at me. “Did you listen to me?”
“It was hard not to. At first. Then it … wasn’t exactly English. Look, I’m no first-aid expert, but I’m worried about concussion. Cycling down a hilly, bendy road would not be clever, not right now. I’ve got a number from the bike-hire place. I’ll ask for a medic to drive out and pick you up. I strongly advise this.”
Holly looks at Aoife, who says, “It’s sensible, Mum,” and gives her mother’s arm a squeeze.
Holly props herself upright. “God alone knows what you must think of all this, Crispin.”
It hardly matters. I tap in the number, distracted by a tiny bird calling Crikey, crikey, crikey …