Wild Dark Shore

by Charlotte McConaghy

I hear Orly say, “We aren’t going that way, I promise.” I look back at him, thinking he must be talking to me, but I see him gazing into the sky and something about it chills me.

“Dad doesn’t like to talk.” “About what?” “About anything that matters.” He thinks and then amends, “About anything that hurts.”

His name was River, my little brother.

We were wild, every one of us, often unclothed because it was easier to dive into the water and swim like fish, then swing on ropes to get back aboard. I held him in my arms most of the time, I swam with his face by my shoulder, his little hands curled against me. I made sure he didn’t fall, but it was wild, I said it was wild, didn’t I? I loved him, and he drowned while I was meant to be watching him. That’s what I dream of. His tiny bare feet on the deck, pitter-pattering toward me, and his laugh as I catch him.

On the beach she has a small campfire that she tries to keep lit. To this she adds driftwood and the kelp she has been drying to make a bonfire. She gathers the items from her boathouse and lays them all out on the black sand, looking at each. She has a moment of uncertainty. The memories she has of her mother wearing these things are precious to her, and undoubtedly Dom has more of them, memories tied to every single thing here, and without the items will those memories disappear? Is that what Fen wants? All she knows is that her dad must be freed of his ghost. So, one by one, she starts placing her mother’s belongings on the fire.

“Why?” he asks Fen. “To free you,” she answers. Raff isn’t sure his dad will reply. He doesn’t for a long time. Then Dom says, “I had no idea you had such cruelty in you.” Fen’s face falls, tears flooding. Dom sinks to the ground and rests his head between his raised knees, and he weeps. He didn’t do this when Claire died. Not that Raff ever saw. He never broke, not once. Now he is asunder and Raff doesn’t know what to do.

“There was so much that she loved in there,” he says, of the bonfire. “I know about things burning,” I tell him, and he looks at me for the first time. “I know about sifting through ash to try and find anything that survived. They’re just things, and you don’t need them, but it’s okay to grieve for them.”

But as night falls and we all slide wearily into bed, I hear the patter of small feet and there is a boy climbing in with me, and he tells me the story of the dinosaur trees. And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.

Wollemi pines.

Now the seeds we have of the Wollemia nobilis sit in aisle G, row 12, and they are not on Hank’s list.

see Dom reach for his daughter’s hand and spin her, I see him dip her low and I see her laugh. I close my eyes, drinking it all in, knowing it is a place in time that I will never forget. The world is dangerous and we will not survive it. But there is this. Impermanent as it may be. I am certain I’m not the only one who feels the presences on the wind. All the hungry ghosts of Shearwater Island, come to dance with us on the hill.

To live for your children seems a normal thing, a respectable one; to live because of your children is something else. Mine are the blood of me, and the oxygen in that blood, the airflow and the neurons firing and the stretch and release of muscles in limbs, they are the foundations that make up my skeleton, all the collagen and calcium upon which I stand and fall, and the pulse and the flow and the beat. But I think maybe this is too much for them to be. The breath of a man. The life of him. I think it is too heavy a thing for children to carry.

have felt this kind of frenzied focus before. But the end of all that effort came to nothing. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t save my home. We were forced to flee, Hank forced me to flee. And I saw, in my effort—and Hank’s lack of effort—a simple truth I did not want to acknowledge. He did not love our home like I loved it. Not even the garden we grew together. He did not love it like it was his body back up on the hill, burning.

I look at this whale’s skin, all the scratches and barnacles I can recall so clearly in my mind. I place a flat hand on her body and I try to feel the beat of her heart. “I washed up on this beach,” I tell her softly. “My body was brought here by the sea and lived. Yours will too.”

I don’t want to go to the baby. I can’t bear the thought of it, have been trying to pretend it’s not even here. But I think this mother needs me to and I think I would do anything for her. So I walk over to this smaller whale and I place my hand gently on its head, near its open eye that is looking at me. “Little one,” I say softly. “You’re not alone.”

But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.

Soon they are dead. Naija and Tom first, and then Alex. And my children and I are digging graves and keeping our prisoner alive, and we are barely holding our heads above water and that’s when a woman washes ashore, seeking to find this man and set him free.

“Where will all the animals go?” he asks me. “When the island’s gone?” I think of Ari and Nikau and their egg. I think of King Brown and his harem of mother seals and their babies. I think of the thousands and thousands of penguins. “They’ll find another,” I tell him. But we both know there is no island like this one.

It will never be real. It will kill her, when she knows what you’ve done. You will have killed us both.

banksia

The banksia’s seeds, which take a long time to mature, are held within a hard, woody capsule that has two valves. These valves will open to release the seeds only in extremely high temperatures, like those you get in a bushfire. The banksia will wait, and wait, and wait for this fire to come. Only with flames and smoke licking at everything around it will it open its valves and let its seeds be taken on this hot, burning wind. Only to black ground, only to ash, will the banksia give its seed. And only within this scorched wasteland can it survive and find a way to thrive. From beneath the carpet of ash—which the untrained eye would look at and see death—comes life, bursting free.

I can feel in it a farewell. He knows something. He might be planning something. He has done bad things. It doesn’t matter. I put all of myself into this kiss, I cling to him. If this is our last, I hope he feels within it the days, hours, minutes left in my life, I hope he knows I am giving them to him, every one of them.

“If you do this,” I say clearly, “if you make me part of it, there will be nothing left for you and me. Do you understand? We won’t come back from it.” His eyes close as though he is in great pain. “Row,” he says. He looks at me. “I’m sorry. Truly. But I have to protect my daughter.”

He has to swim down the tunnel and through the vault. The power is out so it is dark and cold, and it is very, very scary. He thinks he will drown down here. But he knows that at least he will not be alone. His friends are always here to keep him company. You’re doing so well, they say, their voices in harmony with the rushing water, their voices are the water, as they are the island, every blade of grass and shard of rock and the wind, always the wind. Just a little farther now, not long to go. Mind the container there, move to your left, that’s it, straight ahead now, keep going. “It’s so cold,” he tells them. There is a colder place than this. Don’t let it find you. Keep swimming. So he does. They make him brave.

“Thanks, kid,” his old friend Hank says. “I need you to climb down that ladder now. Wait there. Someone’ll come for you but I need a head start before you tell anyone I’m out.” Orly is confused. He doesn’t understand what’s happening, knows only that he is being shepherded onto the ladder. “Good boy,” Hank says. “You’ll be okay. Climb down there and wait. Your dad’ll come.”

And then the door is closed and locked, and he is alone in the long thin shaft, clutching onto the ladder. He thinks, too late, what he should have said, what he might have explained if his head wasn’t spinning. The vault is flooding. It’s very difficult to get through the tunnel. Soon it will be impossible to reach this room. They don’t know I’m here, they won’t get to me in time. I was trying to save you.

the impression of him, of how he looks in the rain as he tries to save his son, will stay with me always.

I am done with that man, a man I do not know. Maybe I never knew him, if he is capable of this. Maybe I have never known myself.

“Do you understand?” he asks me. “People find a way to survive no matter what, we’ll figure out the food, we always do, but the plants won’t, they will go, and so will the animals that need those plants, so we have to help them.” I nod, I can’t speak. Because I should have guessed. That the seeds he would choose to save are the strange and the unlikely. The species we don’t need, the ones we don’t want, cannot eat. That Orly would choose these because no one else would.

She is gripping at the rocks with frozen fingers. She doesn’t know what to do, how to help them. She loves them but she doesn’t think she ought to die here because of that love. Once, not so long ago when she was a child, she might have thought that the noble thing to do. Now she feels very far from a child, and if nearly being murdered has taught her anything it’s that she wants to live long enough to get off this island. The salt of it lives in her veins; it is such a part of her that it is slowly killing her.

me. I tell this thing—my ghost, my haunting—very clearly. I will not be a prisoner of this choice any longer. I will love my son expansively, and I will feel no guilt for it. I will miss my wife, always. And I will be free of you.

“Wombats have a thing they do in fires. They take their families underground, into their burrows. They have tunnels under the earth, and they go down there to take shelter, but they don’t just take their families, they also take other animals down there. They save everyone they can. And then the mum and dad wombats stick their bums up into the entrances of the burrows to block the fire and the ash from coming down. And their bums get burned, and sometimes they die, but they protect the others.”

“They were down there. A whole group of them, huddled together. The wombats had saved a dozen little creatures, there were lizards and frogs and possums and a wallaby, and there was a koala, too, and they were all alive.” He is smiling now too. “And those mum and dad wombats that stick their bums up to save their family, that’s your mum and dad,” I say, and we are both laughing, knowing it’s true. “So I wanted to ask if you guys would like to come and live there with me?” I say. “When we’re out of here.”

I think of River, in these last minutes. I let myself remember him, and for the first time in a long time I take pleasure in the memories. He was a gorgeous, smiling boy. He made the world richer for having been in it. I look at the little boy above me. “Hey, Orly.” “Yeah?” “I love you.” He puts his little hand on my head, like a pat. “Love you too, Row.”

I have drowned once before. I thought of my mother, then. It was strange to me that I should think of her at the end, after years of trying to convince myself I hated her. Untrue of course, but armor against the way she blamed me, the way she couldn’t stand to look at me. I have been so angry with her—even after she died I have held on to that anger and it has made me fearful—but being a parent is complex and it is altering and being the parent of a lost child is something no human should have to contend with. I forgive the distance she imposed between us to try to survive. I think instead of the love she had for us in the beginning, and of my sisters and our boat.

I think I finally understand your words. It’s just a body. They hold on or they don’t. You’re right, it’s nothing to be frightened of. Mine will become the salt of this water. And every time you swim it will be me upon your skin.

and I am falling. But there is someone here. A woman. Down here in the dark with me. She catches me and holds me so tenderly, and I know her. She is his mother, and she died so he could live. I understand it so simply now, it is a love that lives in the body but unlike the body it never dissolves. It lasts forever.

“Rowan really wanted to see this,” Orly says. It’s the only thing any of them says.

I think of how you returned my children to me, each one of them.

I will go back to your body now. This beautiful body. This strong body that endured all it could. I will stay with it, I will wash it and wrap it and hold it as we leave this place. I will carry it across the sea, and I will return it to your land, to live among the snow gums. It is just a body but it was yours, and beloved.

I wondered if you might be a part of that now. If that’s where you’ve gone. I hope so.