‘You’ll be right,’ he said.
I took a quick sip and looked down at Barney – who was staring reproachfully at me from beneath the seat.
‘Oh stop it,’ I said to him, ‘as if you haven’t done worse,’ and Will Barton let out a bark of laughter.
‘Duncan told me you were funny,’ he said.
Oh God, I thought, what else had he told him?
Then the familiar lines of Willow Island came into view – at first a smattering of casuarinas, then, through their fringes, a small, rocky bay and then the long wooden dock visitors hauled their luggage along.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ Will said, ‘I never get tired of this place.’
‘Mmm-mmm,’ I said through the water bottle, still raised to my lips. I felt I had already committed enough indiscretions on this trip, and I saw no need to add vomit breath to them.
Will idled the boat, cut the engine, and threw a rope around the cleat. Then he hoisted my backpack on one shoulder and stepped onto the dock.
Barney had already jumped ship and was running up and down the shoreline before disappearing entirely up a sandy path.
‘Barney!’ I called after him. ‘Come, come back!’
‘He’ll be right,’ Will said, and I wondered for a moment if this was his answer to everything.
He put my bag on the old-fashioned wooden luggage trolley, and walked beside it until reached the end of the dock.
‘I’ll walk you up to the house, if you like,’ Will said, ‘it’s not very far.’
‘No, thank you, I’ll be fine from here, I’ve got a map,’ I said, taking out the piece of paper Andrew Lyons had given me, and, seeing Barney come bounding back into view, adding, ‘and it looks like my wolf knows the way.’
‘Okay,’ said Will, ‘but I might check in on you a bit later, see how you’re settling in.’
‘Great, thanks,’ I said, my voice high and suddenly not my own. ‘I’ll see you later, Will.’
A sliver of a thought came: First time I said his name.
I began to walk up the path, feeling the eyes of the island on me, some of them, I imagined, peeking through twitching, netted curtains.
Duncan, Will had told me, had remained uncharacteristically tight-lipped to the rest of the Willowers about what he was doing with the former WIASA headquarters, and who was going to live in it.
As a result, who I was had become part of an island guessing game – some Willowers said it was one of Duncan’s former wives, others said a mistress. One of the wilder theories was that it was his little-known, horribly disfigured brother sent to live on the island away from cruel stares and prying eyes.
‘You didn’t believe any of it, did you?’ I’d asked Will.
‘No,’ he answered, ‘I believed what Duncan told me.’
‘Which was?’
‘He said he bought it for you because you were his friend,’ Will replied, ‘and Barney’s godmother.’
Now Barney and I had come to the visitor’s board, as marked on my map.
Willow Island, the sign said, was officially known as Casuarina Island, after the she-oak, or horsetail casuarina trees that studded its dunes, but locals had adopted the name Willow in the early 1950s for the way the trees bent over, a lifetime of winds forcing them to bow to the inevitable. However, the notice jauntily reminded visitors, Willow Island was not a place to weep, but rather celebrate the strengths of the casuarinas, still standing strong against the winds that buffeted them.
Bloody hell, Duncan, I thought, how many messages can one man send from the grave?
The island, the sign noted, was sixty-three kilometres long and fifty-seven kilometres wide, and currently home to roughly 376 permanent residents – the number written in chalk for easy alteration – although its ranks swelled on weekends and holidays.
I reached for the stub of white chalk to change the number to 377 – 378, I thought, if I included Barney – but then I put it back in its place again.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, Tallulah, I thought, taking Barney’s lead.
I followed him as he loped down the path, more subdued now, no more scrabbling through the bushes or darting ahead of me. I walked behind him, ducking my head under branches, hearing the whipbirds from somewhere within them and taking in the sharp, wet air, and the long drag line of a snake’s belly on the sandy path in front of me.
Putting my hand up to hold my hat down against the wind, I tramped after Barney, then stopped outside the high, curved rock wall he had led me to.
Avalon Road – home to the former WIASA, and now to Barney and me.
Barney pushed open the wooden gate with his bullet head, then began to run up the path towards a white house, which was perched like a drunken ship pitching a little to the left. I began to run too, backpack bobbing against my shoulders, towards the house with three roof lines like sails against the sea.
Barney had pushed open the unlocked front door and was sitting on the grey slate tiles in the hallway waiting for me when I arrived panting behind him. I took my shoes off so I could feel their coolness on my skin, and then began to wander through the house, and the whitewashed rooms that filled it.
They were generous, airy spaces, with timbered windows and rough, concrete floors, a kitchen with a pitched roof and a long table, big enough for a dozen people to eat at – ‘If we knew a dozen people here, Barney,’ I said – its cupboards, I saw, already stocked with essentials.
I made a cup of tea, my hands groping about the unfamiliar drawers and cupboards for mugs and sugar, and feeling ridiculously triumphant when I found them.
I felt better with the tea in my hand, and padded down the three stone steps into the lounge room, where two fat overstuffed sofas sat beside a bookshelf that ran along an entire wall, crammed with books.
I ran my finger along their spines, smiling as I realised they belonged to Duncan, who had loved books and wanted everybody else to as well.
My eyes took in his favourites and I saw him pressing his nose deep into their folds, looking up at me and saying, ‘Sometimes, Lulu, I just can’t get close enough.’
Barney was nudging me, also impatient to get on, to lead me up the stairs to the bedrooms – six of them, I counted. I’d never fill them, surely.
Then we climbed some steeper, smaller steps to another bedroom, a storage space that had been converted into a loft, which Barney claimed for both of us by performing his customary three complete circles before collapsing on the rug he had decided was his bed.
‘I don’t know, Barney,’ I said, ‘those stairs could be a problem for you, mate.’
He looked at me with watery eyes, snorted something disgusting out of his mouth, and immediately fell asleep.
Well, I thought, so much for the ludicrously expensive Snoozy Paws custom-made dog bed I’d brought him for his new home.
I lay down on the bed that felt like the house beneath it – big, white, billowing – and listened to the sounds of my new home, Barney’s snores, the she-oaks creaking against the window, the rumble of the ocean, and then, making me sit up in bed, a knock at the door.
Barney stirred, shot skitter-pawed down the stairs, and sniffed at the gap underneath the door.
‘Who is it?’ I called.
‘Julia Bendon, your neighbour.’
I opened the door to a tall, beanpole of a woman carrying a warm dish covered by a tea towel.
‘Hello,’ she said, holding it out. ‘I’ve brought you this dinner to welcome you to the island, and also because I wanted to come and have a sticky-beak.’
I laughed, taking it from her, absurdly happy to meet someone who lived nearby on the island.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least you’re honest.’
‘Not always,’ said Julia Bendon.
Later, when our friendship was as robust as the dinner she ha
d brought over that first night, Julia would tell me how she had indeed watched me through her window that afternoon.
‘I’m not usually a curtain twitcher,’ she would say, ‘but Duncan had made you so damn mysterious I couldn’t help myself!’
She would also confess she had been a little disappointed at what she saw.
‘Because I didn’t have a hunchback, you mean?’ I asked.
‘Or at least a small limp,’ she replied. ‘Boris’ – Julia’s husband – ‘kept trying to get me away from the window – ‘“Leave the poor girl alone,” he said, “give her a chance to settle in.”’
‘What did you say?’ I asked her.
‘I said I was giving you an hour, then I was taking you up some dinner.’
We would both laugh, remembering, but that first afternoon was far more awkward, loaded with polite questions that fell from my lips as if it was a job interview: ‘And what is your husband’s name, Julia?’
‘Boris’ – Boris? – ‘And do the two of you work on the island?’
‘Not anymore, both retired, we were in retail over on the mainland.’
Julia, showing admirable restraint, hadn’t asked me too much about myself, but later she would also tell me how she had collared Will on the beach that afternoon to pump him for information.
Will, she reported, had said I seemed ‘nice’, which was, Julia sighed, just what a man would say. ‘So unobservant,’ she’d sniffed.
But Will was not as unseeing as Julia thought.
He did, I was to discover, know everything about me, including the fact that, for a girl who’d arrived on the island with only a backpack, I was carrying a lot of baggage.
Oh well, at least I’d thrown up some of it on the way over.
*
My first few weeks on Willow were lazy ones, spent exploring the island with Barney, reading Duncan’s books, and getting to know some of the people who lived there.
I had saved up quite a bit of money, and had no real need to start looking for work yet, and although I knew, somewhere between walks through the rock pools at Lonergan’s Bay, and throwing a stick again and again to Barney on Spanish Beach, that this indolence could not last forever, in the meantime I was enjoying the sensation of treading water.
Julia was becoming a friend, and a guide to the island, and most days, when the sting of the sun had waned, she and I would walk the steep path to Racey O’Leary’s seat, Julia sometimes taking a cloth to polish its olive-tinged copper plaque.
In 1902, it said, Douglas O’Leary had run all the way up here to light a fire to guide any survivors of the famous Brereton Venturer shipwreck to Willow’s shore, and by the time he got back down again ‘Douglas’ had been dropped for ‘Racey’, and an island legend had been born.
Racey O’Leary had been only ten years old at the time, and Julia liked to sit on his seat and imagine him all those years ago racing through the scrub, the pepper trees scratching at his face, dragging the branches through the spindly grass, making his big fire and not stopping until he had it raging, then collapsing beside it, his face blackened and his tiny rib cage heaving from exertion.
‘How are you, Racey?’ she’d say. ‘It’s Julia, just stopping by on my way to the lookout to pay my respects.’
I never added anything to these pleasantries, but instead listened to Julia, who said it was important to let people know they were still thought of after they went, wherever it was they had gone. Racey eventually raced off at the age of eighty-five when he was still, as the plaque proudly noted, making his way up this very track almost every day.
No, Julia had said, just because people no longer walked the paths, it didn’t mean you couldn’t feel their footprints beneath you.
Like Duncan’s.
I thought of him constantly – and Josh and Annabelle, the two of them somewhere overseas, trying to get their marriage on track after its false start.
That’s what Harry had called it, as if the three of us were swimmers lined up on the blocks, and one of us had accidentally tumbled into the water.
My cheeks still burnt every time I thought of them, and a hard little ball of anxiety would gather in my throat, but Duncan had known what he was doing when he’d sent me to Willow, neatly rendering them mostly out of sight and out of mind, ‘like people in Tasmania’, I could hear him boom.
When I could bear to think of them, it was mostly to wish them well, and hope that whatever damage I had done was not permanent. Now that his breath wasn’t on my skin, or his voice against my ear, without the distraction of him, I could think about Josh with a clearer head, and realise he belonged to Annabelle; the two of them, I had come to see, were far better suited than Josh and I ever had been.
I would never have been enough for him – even Annabelle in all her brightness struggled to keep him in her light.
‘He’s a crack slipper,’ Duncan had told me one day at Lingalonga, just after he’d imparted the rather startling information that Josh had once visited him there.
‘What? Josh came here? Why did Josh come here?’ I’d asked, my voice rising.
‘Because I invited him,’ he’d answered maddeningly.
Duncan was still quite well then, padding about the kitchen, making tea, getting out biscuits and saying, ‘I could see the way the ship was sailing, and I wanted to have a little talk with him, man to man.’
Josh’s visit, which neither of them had mentioned to me at the time, came not long after the Bloom exhibition, and Duncan had taken it upon himself to ‘have a chat’ with the bloke he said he knew was trouble the moment he spotted him.
‘Not the teeth thing again,’ I’d begged.
Duncan had ignored me, then continued, explaining he’d asked Josh over to Willow ‘for a bit of fishing’.
‘Reeled him right in,’ he’d smirked.
They had shared a beer on Josh’s arrival, and then headed down to the beach to cast their lines.
‘If you want a man to talk,’ Duncan said, ‘you shut up, so I did.’
Josh, he said, had been edgy, finally filling the silence by asking Duncan what he was really there for, and Duncan had answered, ‘Well, it’s certainly not for your fishing prowess, mate.’ Then, Duncan recounted, he had warned Josh off. ‘I told him I knew all about him – old man shooting through, mother chain-smoking her way through his childhood, barely noticing if he was coming or going . . .’
I winced. I had not told Duncan any of this for him to recite later in ‘Duncan McAllister – Monologue on a Windy Beach’.
‘The thing is, Lulu, growing up like that, you can’t help but become a crack slipper, someone who just slips through the cracks of other people’s lives, you know, riding your pushbike around the neighbourhood, always looking for somewhere to park the bloody thing, someone to let you in.
‘Someone like you, Tallulah, with your ready-made family sitting around the table eating one of Rose’s roasts, Harry cracking a beer and pouring the gravy, Mattie and Sam kicking each other’s shins under the table.’ Duncan sighed. ‘If Josh had been smart, he’d have stayed there forever, and he might have been happy, but he didn’t – and do you want to know why?’
‘Why?’ I asked automatically, rolling my eyes.
‘Because, Lulu, I’ll tell you what I told Josh – men like us: we can’t leave it alone, because deep down we can’t believe that girls like you would want someone like us. We know we’re not good enough, never have been good enough. My old man shot through too, remember? He left when I was twelve, just walked out the front door with a bag in his hands, and when I said, “Don’t go, Dad,” he said, “Nothing here to stay for.”’
Duncan shrugged his shoulders.
‘And the only time men like us do feel good enough, Lulu, is when we’re finally in bed with a woman we never in a million years thought we could have. We’re skirt chasers, Lulu, not a ver
y honourable profession, and not a very smart one either.
‘I told Josh: “I’ve got four marriages behind me, four good women let down who didn’t deserve to be. I’ve got kids running from one end of the beach to the other and some days I can’t remember which mother they belong to . . .”’ Duncan sighed again. ‘I told him it was a bad show, I told him to give it up, to give you up, or Annabelle, or both of you, before he did something just to see if he could.’
‘Bloody hell, Duncan,’ I said, ‘you said all that?’
‘I did,’ he smiled. ‘More tea, vicar?’
Now Duncan was gone, having once again been proven right.
Josh and I had never discussed his trip to Willow; somehow I had managed to put it from my mind after Duncan told me about it, and Josh, well, who knew what Josh had thought of it.
It certainly hadn’t stopped him.
Thinking about Josh and Annabelle and Duncan constantly sometimes made me feel like I was sharing the former WIASA headquarters with three ghosts – perhaps not, I realised after a few weeks, the healthiest of living arrangements.
So I picked up the phone to ask Harry and Rose over, and invite a little bit of my present into my past.
‘Your mum will be thrilled, Lulu,’ Harry said. ‘She’s been champing at the bit to get there, you know, and Sam and Mattie would love to come too, they were just saying the other day they haven’t seen you since they got back from Canberra.’
I’d hung up the phone and glanced at the enormous kitchen table, happy that at least some of the places at it would be filled. Then I began to get the house ready, plumping pillows and opening windows, setting up the spare bedrooms and stocking the shelves in readiness for my brothers’ gargantuan appetites.
They came on a Sunday morning and stayed for three weeks that melded effortlessly into each other, days into nights and back again.
I had not spent so much time with my brothers since they were small boys; now they were young men, rising early to go out with Will to collect the crab pots, haul them in and sell the crabs to Willow’s fishmonger. They would usually return just as Harry and Rose and I were sitting down to lunch, full of stories and laughter, flicking each other with tea towels and reverting to calling me childhood nicknames.
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