Ember Island (3 page)

I found the phone box and pushed the coins into the slot. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used a pay phone. It seemed a practice that belonged to a more innocent time. At the other end the phone rang and Marla picked it up quickly.

“What kind of a place has no mobile signal?” she asked, without saying hello.

“An island in the middle of a bay where I know I’ll get some writing done.”

“Hm. Well. I was just saying, I’ve been trying to get hold of you. I had an offer for you to go to Singapore, all expenses, business class. There’s some kind of international symposium on Middle Ages in film and literature. They want you to talk about the research you do.”

My Widow Wayland books were a series of crime novels set in the 1320s, with a clever widow as the detective. The BBC had adapted two of them for television. I had sold nearly twelve million
books. These things should have happened to somebody else, not me. I was incredibly grateful for my success: you’ve no idea how grateful. But
one thing I hated more than anything was being asked to speak about my historical research. “No, I’m too busy.”

“It’s after your deadline.”

“No. I don’t want to.”

“Fair enough,” she said in her usual efficient way. “I’ll turn them down nicely. Now, how about you send me what you’ve written so far?”

My throat tensed. The first half of the book, which I had staggered through somehow, was awful. I kept telling myself I would fix it in the edit, but anybody who had come to love the Widow Wayland would surely be disappointed. I couldn’t let Marla read it until I’d fixed it somehow. I wound the phone cord around my fingers, clearing my throat. “As soon as I can access my e-mail I’ll send it to you,” I promised, knowing it was a promise I wouldn’t be fulfilling.

Marla wasn’t stupid, but she didn’t push the issue. “I’ll expect something from you in a few weeks then,” she said in a brusque, businesslike tone. Then she softened. “Darling, is this about Cameron and Tegan? Is that why you don’t want to come back?”

“No, no, that’s not it at all. I wish them well, you know that. I just want to put my head down and finish the book. I’m so far behind, I feel like I’ll . . .” I was going to say
I feel like I’ll never catch up
, but it wasn’t wise to say that to my agent. “I feel like I’ll get some good work done here.” I leaned my back on the glass and glanced around me, at the shops and the yellow grass and the pale morning sky.

“All right then. You know yourself best, dear. Take care.”

I hung up the phone and stood there a while. Cameron and Tegan. I said her name aloud, “Tegan.” Yes, that still hurt.

Tegan, who lived two floors below us. Who had been at our dinner parties. Sweet-faced and young, tanned skin and immaculate blow-dry. Everything I wasn’t, with my mousy tangle of hair, my limbs freckled by a Queensland childhood, and my furrowed brow from years of being far too serious. Nonetheless, I’d liked Tegan. For all that her rich daddy had bought her apartment for her and she’d never worked a real job in her life, there had been a softness about her, a girlishness that was appealing.

I’d like to be able to say that Cameron and I had had six good years together, but we didn’t. We had one good year, one hopeful year, then four fraught years as he tried to convince me to try IVF, adoption, surrogacy, anything. Anything that would make him a father. In my previous marriage, my inability to fall pregnant was suspected, diagnosed, then never mentioned again. I’d stopped having fantasies of chubby-armed babies, and replaced them with reassurances to myself that I would perhaps travel more, or have a couple of big dogs one day. So by the time I got together with Cameron, my emotional pain didn’t arise from the idea of ghost children we would never have. It arose from the constant feeling that my body was somehow not right, not good enough for him.

I looked at myself in the reflection of the café window opposite. No curves. Small firm breasts, hips that looked great in skinny jeans. There was nothing womanly about me and I’d never minded before. But those years with Cameron had undermined me. My constant refusal to “investigate possibilities,” as he used to say, had eventually become too much. I ended the relationship, telling myself it was for his sake. So he could find somebody else. It was difficult. Cameron was a writer too, we shared a publisher, we would cross paths from time to time and chat brightly across the surface of dark, unspoken feelings. He seemed to find comfort in writing after our split, publishing two
collections of poetry within a few months of each other. I was stymied, unable to focus, lived in fear and horrible stasis.

And then one day, ten months after he’d moved out, I was coming back from the café in the foyer of my apartment building—this was my ritual, one of my only journeys out of the flat: coffee at ten—and the lift doors had opened and inside were Cameron and Tegan. Their hands intertwined. Her belly pushing softly against the silky material of her designer maternity blouse.

“Nina,” Cameron had said, surprised. Awkward.

Tegan smiled sweetly, compassion in her eyes. “Nina, I’ve been meaning to catch up with you.”

In that second, I had to decide whether to put my skinny, barren body into the lift next to her juicy roundness. And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t ride the fifteen floors up in hot silence with them. So I turned and ran.

I’d ended up on Ember Island just four days later.

•

I had to get serious about my work. I couldn’t keep trying to write through this thin fog of remorse and despair. I spent my time choosing a desk in the office. There were two: one with a view into the garden beds and tree branches, and another with a view over the island and out to sea. I sat at one, then the other, then decided the tree view would distract me less and plugged my laptop in there and made tea while it booted up. This time, this time I was going to write. I was going to do it.

I sat down, opened the file, and looked at it. Black words, white page, just as all the other books had been. This was no different. It would be fine. I could ignore the empty space where my confidence
should be. The cursor blinked. I put my hands on the keyboard and wrote,
Eleanor examined the dead man’s fingernails.

Eleanor was the Widow Wayland’s name, like my great-grandmother. She had found a body. The Widow Wayland was always finding bodies, often through luck or coincidence; it was a wonder nobody suspected her of murdering them. In this story, the dirt under the dead man’s fingernails was the key to discovering which farm he had been snooping on before being struck on the head with a blunt instrument, in a story about a fourteenth-century parish priest who was having a steamy affair with a local wife. This was classic Widow Wayland material: passions, murders, corrupt churchmen, and wily women. It would work, it had to work.

I stopped. I wasn’t sure what to write next. I finished my tea. I stared out the window. I remembered I hadn’t messaged Stacy yet. My phone had one bar of reception. I quickly tapped out a message. It didn’t send. I tried again. Tried again. Waited five minutes. Tried again. Made more tea. Tried again. This time it sent. My phone also told me I had one voice-mail message: they must have called while the reception was down. I dialed into my voice mail to hear a soft female voice.

“Hello, Nina, it’s Elizabeth Parrish here from the
Sydney Morning Herald
. Just following up something with you. Can you call me back, please?”

That was the journalist who had come to interview Cameron last year. I remembered her name because she’d written a piece that was as unflattering to me as it was flattering to Cameron. She had actually asked him what a serious, multiaward-winning poet was doing in a relationship with a best-selling hack like me. Well, perhaps not in so many words, but her contempt was between the lines. Cameron had told me I was being too sensitive; his own ego had been polished to such a bright sheen that it blinded him.

Did she want to interview me now? I deleted her message without responding. I didn’t like to talk to journalists at the best of times.

Now I was distracted. Where was I? But what was the point of writing? Stacy would get back to me and interrupt my flow. Instead I read through parts of what I’d already written and grew despondent.
Maybe I had been angry with Elizabeth Parrish because she revealed the truth: I wasn’t an artist. I’d always known that.

I couldn’t sit here and feel this way. I needed bread and milk and something for lunch, so I locked the house and walked down the hill to the shops.

The usual noise in my head followed me.
You can’t do it. You should pay back the advance and pull out. You can’t do it, so why do you keep pretending you can?
Deep breath, steely resolve. Smile for the woman behind the counter, grab a basket and buy eggs and bread and cheese and a tomato and whatever else could be made into easy meals.

“Hello, love,” the woman said, wiping work-gnarled hands on her blue apron. She looked at my purchases, piled up on the counter. “You over from the mainland for a few days?”

“Yes, actually. I own Starwater House. I think I’ll be here for a couple of months.” I took a deep breath. “I’m Nina Jones.”

“Nice to meet you, Nina,” she said, shaking my hand firmly. “Donna Franks.”

Thank God. Thank
God
. She didn’t know my name; she wasn’t going to ask about my books, about when the next one was due to be published. She ran my purchases through and packed them into bags for me. “We’re really just a convenience store for last-minute things,” she said. “Most people do their weekly shop over on the mainland. I don’t have much beyond the basics, I’m afraid.”

“Thanks. I’ll remember that.” But I was determined not to set
foot off this island until the book was done. If that meant living on toasted cheese sandwiches and spaghetti omelettes, that is what I would do.

At home, I cleared the cupboards of George and Kay’s things and packed away my groceries. They’d left their crockery and cutlery, and I tidied it all up, made the forks face the same way. Then it was close to lunchtime, so there wasn’t much point to get started writing, so I made a sandwich and sat out on the step watching the palms sway in the wind.

By now I knew I was procrastinating and my stomach knotted up. With determination I placed my empty plate in the sink and returned to the desk. But Stacy had finally written back with some questions, so I engaged in an hour of to-and-fro text messaging with her, struggling against the poor reception.

Finally I looked at my work again. Sighed. Shut the laptop. Friday was a bad day to start a new regime of good work habits. Stacy would arrive tomorrow morning and I really should prepare the house for her stay, so it could wait until Monday. On Monday things would be different. Tension slid off my shoulders. I could breathe again.

For now, it was more important to settle in. George and Kay had kept a tidy house, so there was no need for me to scrub out cupboards or knock down spiderwebs, so I settled for rearranging furniture. I was in the process of turning my desk away from the window when there was a knock at the door.

Curious, I went to answer it. Joe stood there, with a skinny dark-eyed boy.

“Joe?” I said. “Is it that late in the day already?” Had I really spent a whole day procrastinating and rearranging furniture? Was time really that easy to lose?

“Sorry, I can come back another time if it’s not convenient. I’ve
got my ladder here, though. And my dad’s chainsaw.” He indicated the equipment he’d left lying across the dirt driveway.

“No, no. It’s convenient.” I smiled at the boy. “You must be Julian. I’m Nina.”

“Pleased to meet you,” he said.

“Would you like some afternoon tea? I have milk and biscuits.”

Julian glanced at his father for permission and Joe nodded.

“Yes, please, Nina,” he said.

“Great manners,” I said to Joe.

“He’s a good kid,” Joe replied.

“Why don’t you sit out here on the verandah and wait, and I’ll fetch you something to eat,” I said to Julian. “That way you can watch your dad while he works.”

The boy sat down on the stairs and I went inside to pour him a glass of milk and grab a packet of biscuits. He looked nothing like his father, who was fair-haired and blue-eyed. Even though I’d worked with children, I was not naturally good with them. I was awkward, sure they could tell I was boring or couldn’t communicate with them properly. I gave him his afternoon tea and went inside, leaving both of them to it.

I went back to moving furniture, but somehow didn’t have the heart for it anymore, so I sat on the sofa and listened to Joe walk around on my roof. I heard the chainsaw start up and logs of sawed-off Moreton Bay fig branch hitting the ground one after another. After about an hour, he was at the door again.

“Knock, knock,” he called.

I went out to greet him. I was struck by the smell of him. Soap and washing detergent and light perspiration: a warm, spicy, intoxicating male smell. I took a minute to gather myself. “What’s the damage up there?” I managed.

“The tarp should keep you dry unless there’s a massive
deluge . . . which, unfortunately, is always possible at this time of year. But I think it’s beyond my capacity to fix the damage to the chimney. You should call somebody on the mainland.”

“Do you know anyone?”

He nodded slightly. “You want me to take care of it? Find a roofer for you? I can do that.”

His willingness to help, his lack of self-interest, struck me strongly. “I would be so grateful.”

“Consider it done.”

“Look, do you want a cup of tea?”

“Coffee?”

“I don’t have any. Sorry.”

“I thought all writers drank coffee. And scotch.” He smiled. He had a lovely smile, earthy and knowing, and I felt an embarrassing stirring of desire. Luckily, I’m not a blusher.

“I never drink either of those things,” I laughed. “I will have to get some coffee.”

“Tea will be fine. Julian’s outside climbing the tree. I hope that’s okay.”

“Of course. Is it safe?”