The Light Between Oceans

by M.L. Stedman

He blinked, and shook his head quickly. He was nearing a vortex, and to pull himself back he paid attention to his heartbeat, felt his feet on the ground and his heels in his boots. He drew himself up to his full height. He picked a point on the door of the light tower – a hinge that had worked itself loose – and resolved to start with that. Something solid. He must turn to something solid, because if he didn’t, who knew where his mind or his soul could blow away to, like a balloon without ballast. That was the only thing that had got him through four years of blood and madness: know exactly where your gun is when you doze for ten minutes in your dugout; always check your gas mask; see that your men have understood their orders to the letter. You don’t think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation.

Isabel herself could hardly have put into words the new feeling – excitement, perhaps – she felt every time she saw this man. There was something mysterious about him – as though, behind his smile, he was still far away. She wanted to get to the heart of him. If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn’t safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did.

‘That’s a dangerous game to play, Isabel. You shouldn’t go running around kissing blokes out of the blue. Not unless you mean it.’ ‘But I do mean it!’ Tom looked at her, her eyes challenging him, her petite chin set firm. Once he crossed that line, who knew where he would end up? Oh, bugger it. To hell with good behaviour. To hell with doing the right thing. Here was a beautiful girl, begging to be kissed, and the sun was gone and the weeks were up and he’d be out in the middle of bloody nowhere this time tomorrow. He took her face in his hands and bent low as he said, ‘Then this is how you do it,’ and kissed her slowly, letting time fade away. And he couldn’t remember any other kiss that felt quite the same.

There are times when the ocean is not the ocean – not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. Those are the nights the light is needed most.

The old clock on the kitchen wall still clicked its minutes with fussy punctuality. A life had come and gone and nature had not paused a second for it. The machine of time and space grinds on, and people are fed through it like grist through the mill.

History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame.

Trust your gut, Blue.’ He hesitated. ‘But it’s not always plain sailing, even when you’ve found the right girl. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul. You never know what’s going to happen: you sign up for whatever comes along. There’s no backing out.’

For the first time he glimpsed something beyond the stony exterior and, just for an instant, he could imagine a man of high principle, hurt by a woman he loved, but unable to show it.

Tom stood, absorbing the words that hurt more than the blows. He searched her face for some hint of the love she had sworn for him over and over, but she was full of icy fury, like the ocean all around.

The island swims away from them, fading into an ever more miniature version of itself, until it is just a flash of memory, held differently, imperfectly by each passenger. Tom watches Isabel, waits for her to return his glance, longs for her to give him one of the old smiles that used to remind him of Janus Light – a fixed, reliable point in the world, which meant he was never lost. But the flame has gone out – her face seems uninhabited now.

The ones to fear most stay still, unnoticed, their defences undetected until you trigger them by accident. They make no distinctions. Eat the pretty heart-leaf poison bush, say, and your heart will stop. Such things are only trying to protect themselves. But Lord help you if you get too close. Only when Isabel Sherbourne was threatened were her defences awakened.

We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.’

She remembered the look on his face the first time he had held his daughter, as though she had presented him with the whole of heaven and earth in that pink blanket.

If he is going to have to live his life without her, somehow it makes it easier to let go, to let things take their course. His mind wanders into memory. The woomph of the oil vapour igniting into brilliance at the touch of his match. The rainbows thrown by the prisms. The oceans spreading themselves before him about Janus like a secret gift. If Tom is to take his leave of the world, he wants to remember the beauty of it, not just the suffering. The breaths of Lucy, who trusted two strangers, bonding with their hearts like a molecule. And Isabel, the old Isabel, who lit the way for him back into life, after all the years of death.

light rain wafts the steam of forest scents into his cell: the earth, the wet wood, the pungent smell of banksias with their flowers like big, feathery acorns. It occurs to him that there are different versions of himself to farewell – the abandoned eight-year-old; the delusional soldier who hovered somewhere in hell; the lightkeeper who dared to leave his heart undefended. Like Russian dolls, these lives sit within him. The forest sings to him: the rain tapping on the leaves, dripping into the puddles, the kookaburras laughing like madmen at some joke beyond human comprehension. He has the sensation of being part of a connected whole, of being enough. Another day or another decade will not change this. He is embraced by nature, which is waiting, ultimately, to receive him, to re-organise his atoms into another shape. The rain is falling more heavily, and in the distance, thunder grumbles at being left behind by the lightning.

Izzy, love, I hope you’re all right, and keeping your strength up. I know your mum and dad will be taking good care of you. Sergeant Knuckey’s been good enough to let me write to you, but he’ll be reading this before you do. I wish we could talk face to face. I’m not sure if or when I’ll be able to speak to you again. You always imagine you’ll get the chance to say what needs to be said, to put things right. But that’s not always how it goes. I couldn’t go on the way things were – I couldn’t live with myself. I’m sorrier than I’ll ever be able to say for hurting you. We each get a little turn at life, and if this ends up being how my turn went, it will still have been worth it. My time should have been up years ago. To have met you, when I thought life was over, and been loved by you – if I lived another hundred years I couldn’t ask for better than that. I’ve loved you as best as I know how, Izz, which isn’t saying much. You’re a wonderful girl, and you deserved someone a lot better than me. You’re angry and hurt and nothing makes sense, and I know what that feels like. If you decide to wash your hands of me, I won’t blame you. Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did. All I can do is to ask God, and to ask you, to forgive me for the harm I’ve caused. And to thank you for every day we spent together. Whatever you decide to do, I’ll accept it, and I’ll stand by your choice. I will always be your loving husband, Tom

‘I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.’

‘But it’s not that easy.’ He smiled that Frank smile. ‘Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.’ He laughed, pretending to wipe sweat from his brow.

‘I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a very proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No,’ his voice ...

Tom still feels the touch of Isabel’s wet skin, even though the cell is now drained, his clothes dry, and his reunion with her yesterday evening just a memory. He wants it both to be real, and to be an illusion. If it’s real, his Izzy has come back to him, as he prayed she would. If it’s an illusion, she’s still safe from the prospect of prison. Relief and dread mix in his gut, and he wonders if he will ever feel her touch again.

Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream. The pain on her mother’s face, the hurt in her father’s eyes, Lucy’s distress, the memory of Tom, handcuffed: she tries to fend off the army of images, and imagines what prison will be like. Finally, she has no more strength. No more fight in her. Her life is just fragments, that she will never be able to reunite. Her mind collapses under the weight of it, and her thoughts descend into a deep, black well, where shame and loss and fear begin to drown her.

‘The first time I saw you, it was because you came to save me. When I was a complete stranger, and you owed me nothing. That counts for something, I suppose. And I know that if you hadn’t found my daughter, she would have died. I tried to remember that too.’ She paused. ‘I don’t forgive you – either of you. Being lied to like that … But I’m not going to get dragged under by the past. Look what happened to Frank because of people doing that.’ She stopped, twisting her wedding ring for a moment. ‘And the irony is, Frank would have been the first one to forgive you. He’d have been the first one to speak in your defence. In defence of people who make mistakes.

His arms still feel the tiny weight of Lucy’s baby, and the sensation unlocks the bodily memory of holding Lucy herself, and before that, the son he held in his arms so briefly. How different so many lives would have been if he had lived. He breathes the thought for a long while, then sighs. No point in thinking like that. Once you start down that road, there’s no end to it. He’s lived the life he’s lived. He’s loved the woman he’s loved. No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on this earth, and that’s all right by him. He still aches for Isabel: her smile, the feel of her skin. The tears he fought off in front of Lucy now trail down his face.

There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory. Isabel is part of him, wherever she is, just like the war and the light and the ocean. Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone. He watches the ocean surrender to night, knowing that the light will reappear.