Ember Island (2 page)

“Go on, then.”

“I’m not a roofer. I’m not even a builder. I’m an okay handyman, I guess.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I assumed you were the builder my mother called.” Perhaps that’s what Mum had been trying to tell me when the mobile signal fizzled out.

“It’s a coincidence that I arrived when you were here.” He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket. “I was going to let myself in. I used to work here. For George and Kay.”

“I see.” George and Kay were the bad tenants who owed me
thousands. I took the keys from him. “If you were going to let yourself in, I presume you needed something.”

“I have a locker back in the office with some of my books in it.”

“Sure. Go through. Take what you have to.”

I remained in the living room while he went through to the office. George and Kay had lived here on the premises, but the furnishings were all mine, left here by the previous owner who couldn’t face moving beds and sofas off the island by boat. I unfolded the pages in my pocket and skimmed the first few lines of Eleanor’s diary. It was childish but lively. She had always written, it seemed. Not like me. I had come to writing late, reluctantly. That’s why I was having so many problems finishing this book, meeting this ever-encroaching deadline. I simply wasn’t a born writer.

Joe reemerged with a cardboard box full of books. “Thanks for that. Do you still want me to come back and fix your roof? It might take me a bit longer than a real roofer, but I’m not afraid of hard work and . . . I kind of lost my job when George and Kay shot through.”

I pocketed the diary again. “What sort of work did you do for them?”

“I took people on tours. I’m a marine biologist. Or at least I will be once I finish my PhD.” He nodded towards the books in the box, and I noted they were thick texts with titles such as
Migratory Cetacean Behaviour
,
Genetic Ecology of Whales,
and
Cyamid Ectoparasites
.

“Wow,” I said. “Not light reading, then?” I always felt awed and a little embarrassed around very intelligent people. I’d spent a lifetime in the shadows my terribly bright sisters cast.

“It’s been a long time since I sat down with a novel. You’re a novelist, right? Kay told me.”

“Yeah. Right.” I regarded him a moment and tried to think in
the straightest line I could. There was something appealing about the way he looked. Sure, he was handsome, but it was more than that. No artifice, no pretension. Just a warm, masculine energy as natural as the sand or the sea. Did I want to give him work so he could do some work for me? Or so I could admire him? Because that wouldn’t end well. I had made a very recent vow to be more careful with my heart.

But this man had cared enough about Starwater to put a tarp on the roof; he was strong and capable and he’d recently lost his job. “So,” I said, “if you need the money, you can fix my roof.”

The slight release of tension in his shoulders was almost imperceptible, but I saw it. “You don’t have to be here on the island,” he said. “I can do it and send you photos every day so you know I’m not taking advantage.”

“I’m certain we can work something out.”

He moved towards the door, then turned around and seemed to be about to say something.

“What is it?” I asked.

He laid the box on the battered mahogany coffee table. “I just remembered. My dinghy’s in the boat shed.”

Not comprehending, I shook my head.

“I have to take a little motorboat across and back to the mainland to pick up Julian, my son. I’ve been keeping it in your boat shed.”

“I have a boat shed?”

“Yeah, it’s about a kilometer’s walk back down the hill, near the jetty.”

I vaguely remembered seeing it on the plans when I’d taken possession of the house.

“Anyway,” he continued. “I just gave you back your keys, including the key to the boat shed.”

I picked up the keys and offered them to him. “Look, take the boat shed key and hang on to it. You can use it for as long as you like. I’m unlikely to ever have use for it.”

“You may want to store your boat in it,” he said with a grin, unhooking the key from the ring.

“I don’t have a boat.”

“George and Kay left theirs behind. Depending on how much rent they owe you, it might be yours now.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do with a boat,” I muttered, but made a mental note to ask my friend Stacy, a solicitor, about it.

He picked up his box again. “I’m going over to the mainland tomorrow to have a meeting at the university. I’ll ask around about suppliers and come back in the afternoon with some ideas about how to get this damage fixed. How does that sound?”

“Yes, that would be great.”

“Is it okay if I bring my boy with me? I’m a single dad. But he’s a good kid. Can entertain himself.”

“He’d be very welcome.” Now I was bristling with questions. Single dad. Had his wife died or was he just divorced? How old was his child? How young must he have been married? As I was somebody who had married, disastrously, at nineteen, I was always interested to meet a kindred traveler on that path. Luckily for me, there hadn’t been children involved. Not for want of trying; but I had a medical condition that meant I wasn’t destined to be a mother. Something I thought I’d made my peace with long ago.

I waved Joe off and then stood on the verandah for a while, gazing out over the island. In the south, the big flat grassy areas played host to Ayrshire cattle. To the east, facing the mainland, were miles of mangrove forest: an impenetrable swamp. Behind, where I couldn’t see, was the raging Pacific Ocean, crashing
against rocks, occasionally withdrawing long enough at low tide to reveal a narrow sandy beach. The afternoon breeze was fresh and tangy, cooling off the moist heat of the day. All across the island, as far as my eyes could see, white and purple crocuses bloomed wild. Over a hundred years ago there had been exactingly maintained English-style gardens around Starwater. Female prisoners had been pressed into service as gardeners to the superintendent. The gardens were long gone, but the crocus seeds had spread everywhere on the gusty sea winds and, year after year, bloomed again, remembering their history.

No traffic noise, no phones ringing to remind me how far behind I was on my work. No running into Cameron and his pregnant girlfriend. Just the sound of the wind in the trees and the ocean.

I went back inside. The lounge furniture was dated, but comfortable. The fridge hummed and the microwave blinked the correct time. I could turn a mattress and put fresh sheets on a bed. George and Kay had even left half-empty bottles of shampoo and body wash in the bathroom.

I decided to stay a few nights.

•

Night came softly and slowly, the blush of pink behind the palms slowly fading to blue-gray. I sat on the front steps of Starwater in the balmy evening warmth, watching the stars come out, reflecting on how little time I spent outside when I was home in Sydney. My apartment, which had cost a small fortune, had views all the way to the honey-colored spires of St. Mary’s Cathedral; but they were city views and the stars were dim or invisible against the bright lights of Sydney. In happier times Cameron and I would sip an evening gin and tonic on our penthouse deck. Since the
split I’d spent most of my time inside the apartment, locked in my office writing, or trying to.

The first mosquito bite sent me back into the house. I closed the screen and turned on the lamp in the lounge room. I approached the fireplace and ran my finger up the crack as far as I could reach. No more secret stashes of paper with Eleanor’s handwriting on them.

I turned, surveyed the room. The original brickwork was hidden beneath plasterboard and wallpaper. Then I remembered the office had one exposed brick wall, so I switched on the lights in there and began a slow walk from one end of the room to the other, carefully scanning the bricks for any unmortared gaps. My fingers traced the patterns on the wall, which was cool and rough. I found nothing. Even if I found something, it would probably be more of Eleanor’s childhood diary. But hope had been renewed. I might yet find the papers that I dreamed of finding, the ones that could change everything for me.

Eleanor’s writings had come to our family when my grandfather died ten years ago. A great big moldy smelling trunk filled with letters and lists and ramblings and stories and poems. No diaries, which made it odd that she kept one as a child. At the time, my sisters were both too busy to go through the papers and my mother didn’t have the patience with the tiny inky scrawl on them. I was twenty-five, recently separated, and between jobs at fruit shops and day-care centers—
again
, as my mother had pointed out—so going through the papers had been my task. I’d read them all. Everything. I’d grown to love Eleanor through this insight into her agile mind, her imaginative turns of phrase, her honesty and sometimes ribald humor.

When I bought Starwater, before the renters moved in, I’d combed the house for more writings and found an old suitcase in
the attic. Mostly poems and short stories. And I’d believed then that I must have exhausted all chances of finding anything else she wrote. But tonight I wondered what else might be stashed around the house in nooks and crannies, behind modern renovations, under carpets and floorboards. Eleanor had lived here until her death at the age of seventy-nine. What else might she have written?

Frankly, I was desperate to find it all.

One room after another, I went through the house. Starwater was a rambling T-shaped building: the central column made up of lounge room, dining room, and kitchen; the west wing of three bedrooms and a bathroom; and the east wing of rooms that had been converted to the whale-watching office. The whole house was surrounded by wooden verandahs, open to catch the breezes on hot summer days. I assessed cornices and skirting boards, lifted a loose tile in the bathroom, peeked under lino in the kitchen, knocked the bedroom walls listening for hollows. Then finally admitted I didn’t know what I was doing and was unlikely to find anything, and wound up back in the office. I sat at the largest desk. A desk calendar sat open at July the thirty-first. Perhaps that had been the last day George and Kay had been in the office, before hastily packing their things and fleeing their debts. It had also been the date my next book was due. A missed deadline, now ten weeks in the past. I experienced that familiar feeling in my guts of tightening and hardening, and had to breathe through it. “It’s writer’s block,” Mum had said, and Marla and my sisters and Stacy and even Cameron, when he’d come by with a trolley to take the last few things in my apartment that were his. But there was no way such a simplistic name could be applied to the problems I was facing getting the words down.

I went back to the west wing and chose a bedroom. I think it was the guest room. I didn’t want to go to bed in George and Kay’s room and lie there all night wondering how many conversations they’d had in there about their failing business and mounting debts. I had plenty of anxieties of my own to keep me awake.

I
woke to a deep quiet. It took me a few moments to remember where I was. The only sounds were the distant ocean and the chirp of sparrows in the trees. I rolled over and looked at my phone. The SOS signal was gone and I could see I had one tiny bar of reception. Fearful that my agent, Marla, would call me, I switched it off.

It wasn’t the lack of traffic noise and joggers’ footfalls that made the morning quiet: it was that there was no way to download e-mail or take a phone call or post cheerful responses on my Twitter stream. I was unreachable. Nobody could expect me to respond to anything.

I hadn’t felt this relaxed in years.

And that’s when I had the idea: I wouldn’t go home. I wouldn’t even leave the island. I’d get Stacy to brave my mother’s house on the mainland and bring my suitcase over here for me. I had my laptop in my satchel. I could write. The world would go away. It would be me and the story and I would
somehow get it done before the new deadline—just two months away—swung around.

I was so excited, so certain, that I practically jumped out of bed and switched my phone back on. One bar of reception became two out on the verandah and I dialed Marla’s number. It was ringing before I realized it was six in the morning.

“Hello?” she said, warily.

“I’m so sorry, Marla. Did I wake you?”

“Of course not. I was up at five for a jog.” Marla was a ridiculously fit woman of an unguessable age, who seemed to run on coffee and leafy greens. “Why are you calling so early? Do you have good news?”

“I think so. I’m here at Starwater, my great-grandmother’s old house. And it’s perfect for a writing retreat. I know I can finish the book here.” My resolve wavered on the last sentence. I hoped I’d hid it well.

“Hm, really?” Marla sounded skeptical.

“Absolutely. There’s nothing at all here to distract me. It will be me and the laptop. Nothing else.” Nothing else. Nothing at all else. I gulped a breath.

“Nina, sweetie, I don’t want you to push yourself too hard, but you know the publishers are breathing down my neck. There’s only so many excuses I can make for you. Are you sure this time? Wouldn’t you be better down here in Sydney where I could keep an eye on you? Where I could hold you to some weekly goals?”

And risk seeing them again? No, no, a thousand times no. “I know this is the best decision I could make,” I said as forcefully as I could.

She said something but it cut out and cut back in so I didn’t quite catch it.

“Sorry, I have really bad reception here,” I said.

Then the line dropped out altogether.

“Damn,” I said, shaking the phone as if it could help. I grabbed my satchel from behind the door. I’d seen a pay phone down the hill.

The morning was clear and cool, with dew on the grass and damp smells in the air: seaweed, cow dung, muddy fields, the vanilla sweetness of gardenias blooming in front gardens. The unsealed road led down the hill and through pastureland—cows behind wire fences on both sides—and past the old stockade building, which had been converted to shops: a convenience store that doubled as a post office, a craft shop that also sold some tourist wares, and a café. They all stood closed. Only three hundred people lived on Ember Island, most spread out over farms, so trade was slow and sporadic. Six a.m. was far too early to be open.