‘That was when I moved to New Zealand and got some fake papers and signed up to fight. There was never an easier time to fake your identity. They accepted anyone then. They didn’t pry too deeply. Not that I did much fighting. Was sent to Syria and sat and baked there for a bit. Then Tunisia, for more baking with a bit of actual action thrown in. Saw some things. It was intense. What about you? Did you fight in that one?’
I sigh. ‘I wasn’t allowed. Hendrich thought the combination of science and ideology was the most dangerous thing for us. And he was right, but there were the Nazis, with all their deluded obsessions about creating the perfect race. Their pseudo-science eugenics people were onto us. They’d taken over the Institute for Experimental Research in Berlin and discovered their research into us, into albas, and they were after as many of us as possible . . . Anyway, Hendrich was going through a paranoid phase. He didn’t want any of us involved in the war. And, yes, while you were saving civilisation I was being a short-sighted asthmatic librarian in Boston. I still hate myself for that. I suppose I have tried to avoid love the way Hendrich has wanted us to avoid war. To try to stay alive without any more pain.’
A distant siren wails on a road somewhere beyond.
Omai strokes water off his board. ‘No. Not for me. Love is where you find the meaning. Those seven years I was with her contained more than anything else. Do you understand? You can take all the years before and since and weigh them next to those, and they wouldn’t stand a chance. That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.’ I think of Camille, sitting on the bench in the park, reading Tender Is the Night, as Omai continues. ‘I’ve been trying to find the point of it all. I used to believe in mana. Everyone did in those days, on the islands. I think I still do, you know, in a sense. Not as a superstition but as an idea of something. Something inside us. Something still not explained that doesn’t come from the sky or the clouds or some palace in Heaven but from inside here.’ He pats his chest. ‘You simply can’t fall in love and not think there is something bigger ruling us. Something, you know, not quite us. Something that lives inside us, caged in us, ready to help us or fuck us over. We are mysteries to ourselves. Even science knows that. We have no fucking idea how our own minds work.’
We fall quiet after that.
The drunk man is now lying down, staring up at the stars. He stubs his joint out on the sand.
A minute passes. Maybe two. Then Omai feels ready to say it.
‘We had a baby.’ His voice rolls as soft as the sea. ‘We called her Anna.’
I try to absorb this. The significance of it. I think of Marion. Then it clicks.
‘That was her, wasn’t it? The woman in your house is . . .’
The smallest of nods.
‘She’s not like your daughter. She aged. In real time. She got married. But her husband, my son-in-law, he died of cancer thirty years ago. She’s lived with me ever since.’
‘So she knows about you?’
He laughs. It is, admittedly, a stupid question, but I still find it such an alien idea, that a mayfly could know such a thing about a loved one, and be fine with that, and not feel the risk. Of course, Rose knew about me, and my mother too, but that knowledge was torment, and drove me apart from both of them. ‘She knows. She knows. Her husband knew too.’
‘And the secret didn’t get out?’
‘Who would believe a secret like that?’
‘Some people. Dangerous people.’
The way he looks at me right then makes me feel weak, pathetic. A coward on the run.
‘A wave can kill you. Or you can ride it. It’s sometimes more dangerous to shy away. You can’t live your life in fear, Tom. You have to be prepared to get on your board and stand on your feet. If you are in the barrel of a wave you have to ignore the fear. You have to be in that moment. You have to carve on through. You get scared, and the next thing you know you are off your board and smashing your head on a rock. I’m never going to live in fear. I can’t do it for you, Tom, I just can’t. I have run away too often. I feel at home now. I love you, man, I do, but I don’t care if Captain Furneaux’s ghost comes walking along the sand, I’m not going anywhere with you.’
And then he stands up, and takes the board with him.
‘I’m going to put this right,’ I find myself saying. ‘I’m going to put this right.’
He nods but keeps walking, his bare feet now on the concrete path, and I turn to see the stoner on the beach raising his hand at me and I give a small wave back. I lie back in the sand and think of the war Omai fought in that I didn’t, because of Hendrich. I sense it is nearing my time to fight again. My phone starts to vibrate, buzzing against my thigh like something alive, and I just let it ring and wonder what the hell I am going to do.
I fall asleep on the beach. When I wake up, the morning light is bleeding into the sky and I go back to the hotel and eat and check my messages and find it weird that Hendrich only tried to call once. I go back to the room and have a little trouble with the wi-fi but eventually get online and go on Facebook and see that Camille hasn’t updated. I want to talk to her. I want to message her. But know I can’t. I am dangerous. While I am still a part of the Albatross Society I am the thing I need to protect her from.
I curl up into a foetal ball on the bed and cry shuddering tears and wonder if I am having a breakdown.
‘Fuck you, Hendrich,’ I whisper up to the ceiling. ‘Fuck this.’
I leave the hotel on foot and I keep walking around trying to pace away my tears, and think. I need to think. I walk along the clifftop and along the beach. I head to the Cape Byron lighthouse and stare out at the sea.
I remember staring out at the Antarctic Ocean from the deck of the Adventure, caught up in Cook’s foolish greedy quest for a land larger than Australia.
There comes a moment in every life when we realise there is no land beyond the ice. There is just more ice. And then the world we know continues again.
You sometimes have to look at what you know is there and discover the things right in front of you. The people you love.
I think of Camille. I think of her voice. I think of her head tilting up to the sun. I think of the fear as she fell off her chair.
I suddenly realise it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that we age differently. It doesn’t matter that there is no way of resisting the laws of time. The time ahead of you is like the land beyond the ice. You can guess what it could be like but you can never know. All you know is the moment you are in.