On a Starlit Ocean

by Charlotte Nash

  She tiptoed down the jetty, heading for her yacht and another packet meal. She only made it a third of the way down the boards.

  “I thought that was you.”

  She froze and spun. He must have come back down the beach, as silent as she had been. The jetty’s spotlight threw shadows across his body.

  “Were you following me?” he asked.

  “No,” she lied. “I was just coming back here.”

  “I see.” He sounded disappointed again.

  And then she smelled the roast. “What exactly do you have there?” she asked.

  He showed her the two foil covered plates. “Oh, just dinner for two. I thought when I didn’t see you up at the hall that you’d be down here. I was happy to share.”

  It was almost enough to forgive anything, but she couldn’t quite forget the shade Gus had thrown on him. “And where exactly were you heading, having given up on me?”

  “Ah … that’s a little secret.”

  Erin wavered. “I don’t really like secrets.”

  “That’s okay … I haven’t really given up on you. Come on.”

  Chapter 7

  He led up the beach, to where the dunes met the resort’s chain-link fence, then followed it east. Erin had a feeling of being back in time, to when she’d gone exploring the island as a teenager. But the resort had always been open, then. It had always had lights, and activity. Now it was all black shapes lanced with shafts of moonlight caught on glass or concrete. It made her sad.

  Alex finally stopped where the fence dived inward around a large palm tree. He reached for a corner of the fence wire and pulled it open. “Ladies first.”

  “We shouldn’t go in there,” she said.

  “Trust me, there’s no one here,” he said. He ducked through the hole, and held it open for her. “But I’m taking the food with me.”

  “Cheater,” Erin said, as she stepped through the gap.

  It took a moment to orient herself. She’d known the resort blindfolded when she lived on the island – its long row of beachside rooms, the pools, the huge central restaurant and entertainment spaces. The other guest rooms were in rows behind. But with the island slowly reclaiming the buildings, the resort was eerie, all the familiar features hidden under vines and shadows.

  Alex touched her shoulder. “This way,” he said.

  She followed under an overpass, the walkway between two wings of the beachfront rooms. They skirted a pool, empty but for drifts of fallen leaves, beyond which Alex picked his way to a stairway in the back of the old recreation wing, now wearing a coat of jasmine. He lit his phone’s flashlight as he went in.

  Erin’s heartbeat thumped as they climbed, sand crunching under her shoes. They reached the first floor, once the resort’s main restaurant. The glass windows out onto the beach were still intact, but the carpet had been stripped, and light fittings hung limp from the ceiling. Alex caught her hand. “Watch the step.”

  Her fingers tingled at the touch. She leapt across a pile of boards stacked in front of the stairs. On the next floor was a bar, now empty of chairs and tables, all the taps gone, but still smelling faintly of sour beer.

  “One more,” Alex said, leading through a much narrower doorway into the roof stairs. Up and up Erin went in the dark, until Alex pushed open the roof door into the deep blue of shadowed moonlight flooding the rooftop terrace. Alex flicked off his light. They were high above anything else in the resort here, open to the sky. In the centre, someone had dragged up two old deck chairs that had once been around the pool.

  Erin smiled in the dark at the clandestine hangout, until she caught a narrow sweep of a light, somewhere down in the complex. “Wait – is that a torch?” she whispered.

  “Security guard,” Alex answered. “Don’t worry, he spends most of the night smoking in a chair over by the construction offices. He’s at least twenty stone, and probably poorly paid. I put his odds of wanting to climb stairs at extremely limited.”

  He sat on a deck chair, and held out one of the plates.

  “A lot of effort just for somewhere quiet to eat,” she said, taking the offering. Man, it smelled good. “And you told me no one was here.”

  “That I did,” he said. “I’d have done worse to spend some time with you.”

  She laughed softly. “You are a bad man,” she said, enjoying herself. It really was like being a kid again.

  He gave her an eyebrow, his smile a little devilish in the corners. “I can be,” he said. “But I want to show you the other reason I come up here.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  Alex checked his watch and said, “Eat. You’ll see.”

  When they were finished their plates, he stretched out on one of the deck chairs, dropping the back so he faced the sky. He gestured for Erin to do the same. “Should be starting any minute now.”

  “What?” she said.

  Then, a brilliant spark burned across the sky. The trail only scribed the length of Erin’s extended palm, but the incandescence of the shooting star pulled a gasp from her throat.

  “Keep watching,” Alex said.

  They kept coming, one after another. Sometimes they would pause for a long silent minute before another cluster began. Erin lost herself in the anticipation, forgetting when and where she was. All she knew was the smell of jasmine and the sky so full of stars. When the shower seemed to be over, she shook her head. “That was—”

  “One more, look this way ...”

  She turned her head to follow where he was pointing, to the west over the mainland. He kept an eye on his watch. “Three, two, one, now!”

  A bright point flared into view a few fingers above the horizon, burning like the brightest jewel in the already sparkling heavens. Erin tracked its arching path, all the way over the main beach, on and on for over a minute, until it finally disappeared right over Bella’s Leap.

  Alex blew out a long breath. He sounded content.

  “What was that last one?” Erin said.

  “The International Space Station. Tonight is one of the best nights this year to see it.” He paused, then said, “It might sound naff, but I like watching the sky. Meteor showers, satellites, or just the stars turning through the night. Something about it keeps me sane on the bad days.”

  They lay unmoving, a peaceful bubble around them. Erin considered what he’d said. She thought she understood what he meant. “Because it makes your problems seem small, at least for a moment?”

  “Something like that,” he said.

  Erin thought of all the times she’d served a night watch under the unspoilt night sky. She’d rarely looked up, then. She needed her attention on the boat’s instruments. But the sense of the space above had always been there.

  “This is what I liked best about living on a boat,” Alex said suddenly. “All the sky, all night anchored somewhere with no one else around.”

  “What did you sail?” Erin asked, her fingers drifting towards the edge of the sun lounge, towards him. She wanted to touch him, to extend this connection she felt between them.

  “Forty-two footer, up north,” he said quickly. Abruptly he sat up, swinging his legs to the side, and the peaceful bubble wobbled. Erin sat, too, one of her knees slipping between his.

  “Sometimes, you can see the waves glowing off Bella’s Leap,” she said. “It’s a bright blue phosphorescence. People say it looks like the galaxy through a telescope.”

  “Really?” He turned his head towards Bella’s Leap, the twist in his body causing his leg to brush against hers.

  “You won’t see it from here,” Erin said, noting that he hadn’t removed the contact. “You have to go up to the cliff top. Or down on the rocks. I took a photo of it once, years ago.”

  Her mouth was so dry, just from how his skin felt, like smooth warm water.

  “Not sure I’d want to be too close, down on the rocks,” he said, but softly. His gaze was fixed on her eyes now.

  Erin grazed her teeth over her lower lip. She could s
mell a trace of his aftershave, something spicy and masculine. She imagined reaching for him with the boldness of a boat captain in a new port, hunting for a bunk companion to obliterate the long time at sea, to blot out the bruises on her heart. But he wasn’t that man, she realised. There was something else here. He wasn’t someone just for tonight.

  “What do you see?” he said.

  She took a moment to answer, the rumours about him briefly flashing in her mind. “I don’t know.”

  He reached out and cupped her face, drawing her towards him, and then he kissed her softly. Erin didn’t need such restraint. The moment she felt his lips on hers, she knew how right this felt. They were soon on the one deck chair, making out like teenagers, not even caring the chair was hard plastic and less than comfortable.

  Their make-out turned into companionable as the hour passed. Alex held Erin against him, both of them watching the sky in between kisses and she had no desire to be anywhere else.

  “You know you can walk all the way round Bella’s Leap to the east beach over the rocks, as long as you avoid high tide,” Erin said eventually, her head resting on his chest. “The tourists used to – everyone wanted to see that beach.”

  “Why?” he said, and the feel of the word through his skin made her feel as carefree as she had on summer nights here growing up.

  “It was in a music video years ago, plus it’s the one on all the resort promo brochures. I always thought the wreck was more interesting. It’s off the far east headland, always underwater, except at a king low tide.”

  “Wonder if Travers has been down there.”

  “Probably,” Erin said. “More than one boat’s snared a keel on it. The waters around these islands have a reputation for things like that.”

  “Is it really as bad as everyone says?”

  “Yeah, it’s tricky. There’s lots of little shallow points. Maps are great these days, but throw in the wind and tide conditions, not to mention the storms, and even experienced sailors misjudge it.”

  “Why here for the storms?”

  “Oh, something about being in the right path for fronts off the mainland. Hot air funnels down the range over there, meets moist air from the sea, and we cop it first. Surf can get really big then, especially on the eastern side. There’s caves in the cliffs around there.”

  “Yeah, Travers mentioned that.”

  Erin turned to face him, playing her fingers through the stubble on his chin, loving the affection he had in his eyes for her. “Did you know Travers before the island?” she asked, curious. “You seem good friends.”

  Alex shook his head. “No. I went looking for him because he’s an ex-medic. Good to know there’s someone around to help, if we ever had an emergency. We just happened to hit it off.”

  The reminder of who Alex was hit Erin unexpectedly hard. She pushed herself up. His hands lingered on her waist, but she felt suddenly miles away from here. Her eyes sought Bella’s Leap, looking for something, anything, to recover the mood from just moments ago. But while the cliff sat quietly in the ocean tonight, the waves barely breaking on the rocks below, the moment was gone.

  “You want to tell me more about Bella’s ghost story?” Alex whispered.

  Erin glanced around. He meant it as a joke, she could tell that. He could sense their connection had slipped, too. She forced herself to smile. “I think we better call it a night.”

  Alex found sleep hard that night, and the next. Erin had left a pleasant and yet complicated trail in his life. He wanted to see more of her; that much wasn’t in question. But he had his own nice carousel of baggage to consider. Things that he wasn’t ready to share and be judged. When she’d pulled back, he wondered if somehow she sensed it.

  He also had more practical problems: every time he tried to find her over the weekend, some medical issue came up, demanding his attention. Tim brought Monster for a paw check-up, which was healing fine, and the two of them bounded off on some island adventure. Then, when he was about to walk down to the jetty, Sandy brought in two backpackers with severe sunburn. Neither of the pair spoke much English, nor seemed to know about the Australian sun. Resorting to drawing pictures and sign language, Alex wasn’t getting far when Sandy dropped in with a French dictionary.

  “I’m pretty sure they’re speaking Spanish,” Alex called after her.

  Although, if it was Spanish, it bore no resemblance to the language Alex had once learned for a trip to South America. Finally, he walked them down to the island store, and pointed out the 30+ sunblock.

  When he walked back ten minutes later, he looked towards the jetty. Beyond Erin’s yacht, dark clouds gathered on the horizon, and the wind had a different smell about it now. Fresh, and a little too cold. He shivered. He knew that smell. Rain was coming.

  He figured he should go down to the jetty and offer to help in preparing for the storm, but when he reached the Fair Winds, Erin wasn’t there. He spun around, checking she wasn’t somewhere nearby. There was an odd qualm in his chest. He remembered Travers saying that Erin was planning on leaving soon. Would he wake up tomorrow and find her boat gone from the pier? Would she leave his life as abruptly as she’d ended their night on the rooftop?

  He didn’t like the idea. He was just striding up the beach again to see if Erin was at Skye’s when Sandy appeared, waving like a troubled swimmer from the top of the dunes.

  “Patient for you,” she said, sounding overly excited. “It’s Helmut,” she added.

  “The Helmut?”

  “Yes, you know he never comes down from his studio. This is quite an honour.”

  Back at the clinic, Alex found a man waiting in reception. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, bouncing a little on his toes, as if examining the desk for its best angle. He was barefoot and tanned, with a scraggly beard and hair, his clothes covered in paint.

  Alex gestured Helmut to a seat and firmly closed the door on the hovering Sandy, half expecting the woman would be listening at the keyhole.

  “Mr Meyer, how can I help?”

  “You know who I am, I think?” Helmut said with a challenge in his voice.

  Alex nodded slowly. “I know your work, at least a little,” he said. “But otherwise I have to tell you I don’t know one end of a paintbrush from the other.”

  Helmut chuckled. “Okay. Then you call me Helmut,” he said. He gestured to his daubed shirt. “Painting is my life’s work. It is, everything. But now ...” He pressed his fingers to his eyes, drawing them away in despair, as though he couldn’t give the problem a name.

  Alex guessed. “Your eyesight?”

  “Ja. The colours are not the same anymore, and in the far away distance, is all a blur. It is like I have something in my eye, some veil. Everything looks like Monet. And when the sun is on the sea, shining like silver, I cannot look at it anymore.”

  “Ah.” Alex ran through a full examination, testing Helmut’s visual acuity, carefully examining the lens and retina, and ruling out neurological issues. He was glad to be fairly sure of the problem.

  “I think you’re developing cataracts. Do you know what that is?”

  “My mother, I think she had this. Clouds in the eyes.”

  “Right. It usually develops slowly, with the lens in the front part of your eye becoming thicker over time.”

  Helmut’s words came tight with worry. “It will worsen then? My mother – she was nearly blind.”

  “Gradually, yes,” Alex said. “But these days it can be easily treated.”

  Helmut’s attention snapped up. “You treat it?”

  Alex shook his head. “You’ll need to see an eye specialist, on the mainland. I’d recommend that anyway – to be sure this is what we’re dealing with.”

  “I do not like the mainland. You said it will change slowly?”

  “Usually. Some things can make it worse. Do you smoke?”

  “I give up ten years ago.” He sounded incredibly jaded about it. “Stella … she is on me all the time about the cigars.
”

  “Good for you – much better for your health.”

  Helmut shrugged. “I admit, it ruins the canvases. And I keep Stella happy.”

  “Do you wear sunglasses? The radiation in sunlight can make cataracts worse.”

  “Never. I like seeing the light.”

  “Start. But you’ll need to make sure you get the right type. I’ll go with you to the shop to see if they have any.”

  “Maybe next time I come down.”

  “Okay,” Alex said slowly, wondering if that would be months away, and thinking what else he should cover now. “I’d also like to run a test for diabetes.”

  By the time Alex finished, Helmut seemed eager to return home, and Alex wondered if he’d done too good a job of reassuring him.

  Helmut paused before he left. “Thankyou, Dr Bell. May I ask your first name?”

  “Alex,” he said, offering his hand.

  “Ah, Alex, this is a good name,” Helmut said, pumping Alex’s hand affectionately. “You visit me next time, ja? Now, I go before the storm.”

  An hour later when he had closed the clinic, Alex stood again at the crest of the dunes. The dark clouds were rolling in now, the wind whipping the palms and driving sand onto his legs. He could see Erin had moved her yacht away from the jetty, its bow attached to a bright orange moor point, a much better place to ride out the chop. Alex felt great relief that she hadn’t sailed away yet; and disappointed that her boat was no longer accessible from the pier. The first raindrops driving ahead of the storm crashed into his forehead, shedding splashes that caught on his eyelashes. The front looked just like one of Helmut’s paintings – all swirling greys and blues, the palate of midnight clouds.

  In that moment, Alex glanced towards Bella’s Leap. A woman was standing on the edge of the cliff, a flowing white gown behind her, staring into the foaming water. Alex’s blood chilled. He blinked, and then he could see only mist and spray. And no matter where he paced down the beach, the image was lost in the rain that came down on the headland.

  Chapter 8

  The storm lasted into the evening. Not long by island standards, and when Erin stuck her head up out of the hatch on Monday morning, damage appeared minimal. One old rotten palm had come down across the beachside path, a few other branches were strewn around, but the sand dunes were intact. She began checking over the Fair Winds anyway.