The Lightkeeper's Wife

38



Jan decides we should scatter Mum’s ashes at Cape Bruny—a surprising suggestion given her aversion to the place. Maybe Mum’s death has softened her, smoothed her jagged resentful edges. Gary and I quickly agree to the proposal. It will be good for all of us to get some closure.

I suggest we invite Leon along, given his presence at Mum’s death. But Jan says she doesn’t like the idea of including a stranger. I insist that Leon was Mum’s friend, not a stranger, but Jan won’t budge, and Gary thinks it’d be an intrusion too.

We make the journey to Cape Bruny in Gary’s new car complete with spoiler and shiny mag wheels. He isn’t keen to take his pride and joy on the corrugated Bruny roads, but Jan refuses to go in my old car and there’s really no other option. I leave Jess at home, whimpering at the gate, and I join my brother and sister in the car. It amazes me siblings can be so dissimilar and feel so disconnected.

The trip is long and quiet. Jan sits rigidly in the passenger seat beside Gary while I relax in the back, savouring the space and the lack of conversation. Even Gary doesn’t seem tempted to break the silence. He’s probably afraid of sparking Jan off, or setting her going on some tirade about how the past weeks would have been handled differently if she’d had her way.

At the light station, Gary swings his car into the carpark and switches off the engine. It’s an average early winter’s day, overcast and windy. I feel right at home. We ascend the hill in single file: Jan in the lead, me deferentially just behind, and Gary labouring at the back, undertaking the most exercise he’s attempted in years. He hobbles up the hill like a lame old bear, puffing and grunting. I wonder if he remembers the buoyant way he bounded up here when he was young.

By the time we reach the lighthouse, he has dropped back a good fifty metres. Jan and I shelter on the leeside of the tower out of the wind and wait for him.

It’s been a long time since I was here—ten years, maybe twelve—and it’s good to feel the wind raking over the heath. The tower is pretty much the same, despite a few chips of peeling paint, a few salt stains, a bit of rust on the lock. Back when I was a kid, they were always slapping whitewash on the walls, always cleaning the windows, polishing the brass fittings inside.

Gary arrives, panting. ‘Some climb,’ he gasps. ‘I think I need to join a gym.’

‘Not a bad idea,’ Jan says. ‘You might live longer.’

Gary’s face is flushed an unhealthy red and his chest heaves. ‘So what do you reckon? Where should we unleash the ashes?’

Jan squints across the hill. ‘How about over there, near the new tower.’

Gary shakes his head. ‘No, Mum wouldn’t want that. She always said Dad detested automation.’

Jan sighs. ‘You’re right. She’d hate us to do it there. It’d be disrespectful to Dad.’ It’s the first time I’ve ever heard Jan admit she was wrong. ‘But I don’t want to spread her ashes right here,’ she says. ‘I don’t like to think about people walking on her . . .’ She trails off, voice quavering.

‘We could wander down the hill a little and go off along that grassy track,’ I suggest, pointing. ‘That’d take us away from the tower and the tourists. I bet most people just follow the path up here and then go straight back down.’

Jan agrees and we walk slowly downhill, each of us meandering somewhere in memory. When I stop halfway across the slope, Jan comes up alongside me. Her face is almost soft. She waits for Gary to join us before handing me the little china urn.

‘Here, you do it,’ she says. ‘You love this place more than any of us.’

‘Just be careful to check the wind direction,’ Gary cautions. ‘I’ve heard of people wearing ashes all over them.’ He laughs stiffly.

‘It’s a sou’westerly,’ I say. ‘The wind’s almost always from the south-west at this time of year.’

I take the lid off the urn. Honeyeaters dip and flutter over the heath. I wave Gary and Jan behind me, then lift the urn high and trickle Mum’s ashes out into the wind. Grey dust catches and drifts and spirals. I toss the rest up as far as I can and stand back to watch the last grey flushes disappear among the bushes.

We stand for a long time, breathing quietly.

‘Well, I suppose that’s it then,’ Gary says after a while.

We start back across the hill to the path, where Jan decides she’s going down to talk to the caretaker’s wife. Gary wants to sit on the bench seat at the top and look south at the view. I give him my rain jacket as some protection from the wind and then I follow the track down towards Courts Island.

I haven’t been this way in years. When I was a child, I used to scramble down here all the time. Each day after lessons, I’d race up past the tower and down the slope to see if the tide was far enough out so I could scoot across the causeway. Back before I was born, they sometimes used to deliver mail in the sheltered area between the island and the cape. Someone from the light station would scrape down to the pebbly cove and grab a few supplies from a dinghy launched from the boat.

Today, I pause as the track steepens. Around the craggy coast, I see coloured buoys floating on the swell, marking craypots. I climb further down, and the causeway comes into view. Waves run across it from two directions, meeting in the middle, but the rocks are still exposed and it’s shallow enough to cross. The track becomes rocky and I pick my way down carefully.

The route has changed since I was young—it’s eroded now from use by too many people. Before I was born, people used to flock here during mutton-bird season. They’d park their cars along the road behind the cottages and rush up here to wait for the official opening hour. Then they’d cross to the island, no matter what the tides, to drag chicks from their burrows. Mutton birds were supposed to make good roasts, but Mum said the meat was oily. I never tried it, and then the harvest was banned. So that meant Courts Island was a sanctuary for me, a place to watch birds excavating their burrows at the beginning of each breeding season, their feet scraping, dirt flying. Later in the season the eagles would come, perching on rocks or low scrub, waiting for an opportunity to carry away a fat chick for a feast.

I scrabble down the last precarious section of track onto a stony beach strewn with clumps of kelp and stinking seaweed. After picking my way over rocks, I stride across the causeway through shallow lapping waves. On the other side, I climb the steep track among succulent pig-face and iceplant. The musty smell of bird is thick in my nostrils. Small animal paths crisscross the slope marked by webbed footprints. Dark round holes plunge beneath the vegetation, their openings lined with feathers. As I wander over the spongy ground, a wedge-tailed eagle with a blond mane takes to the air, flapping up slowly from a rock splashed white with guano. I stop to watch him as he rises in a lazy spiral and floats effortlessly higher, cruising over the green dome of the island.

When I was young, I came here once at dusk to be among the mutton birds returning to their nests. I crossed the causeway early, when the tide was out, and waited in the approaching dark until the birds started coming home. Out on the water in the fading light, I saw them floating in large groups, rafting on the tide. When the first bird returned to the colony it came to ground with a thud and scuttled into its burrow, clacking as it reunited with its chick. Then more birds came slamming home, diving out of the darkening sky. Soon the air was thick with them—hundreds of flying projectiles bursting out of the night, crashing awkwardly to the ground and scurrying off into burrows. Some impaled themselves on vegetation as they came in to land. There was blood, cries of pain.

Then the pain was mine. A plummeting bird thumped heavily on my back, raking me with its nails. More birds fell on me, their beaks like spears. I crouched, cowering, arms over my head. When finally there were no more birds cascading from the sky, I struggled downhill, sobbing, and waded across the causeway. The water was up to my thighs, deep enough to be dangerous, and I limped across the beach and then home, facing years of nightmares, of black shrilling birds plunging at me out of the night.

Now, as I sit among the pig-face, remembering, the wedge-tailed eagle rises further above me in ascending circles and disappears to the south of the island. My presence has unsettled him and I should remove myself so he can resume his solitary perch on the rocks. I pick my way back, wandering towards the eastern cliffs.

Finding a sheltered nook, I squat there, watching black waves surging against the cliff walls and shattering themselves on the rocks below. Kelp swirls and kinks, and I sink into the rhythm and movement. The regularity soothes and cleanses me. The roar and drone of the sea.

Beneath my skin contentment settles. My mother is dead, yes. She’s gone. But this is her place. She found happiness here, and peace. Her history was written here, her life bending and twisting and folding, like these great lumps of rock—going through a journey of creation, just like the earth and sky and sea and waves. Nature repeating itself over and over.