by Lucy Clarke
Feeling the wooziness of jet lag suddenly overtaking her, Eva finds a bench in the shade of a large gum tree and takes a moment to rest. Eating nothing but plane food for the last thirty-two hours has left her nauseous, and she thinks she’ll buy some fresh fruit and then return to the hotel and give in to sleep.
First, though, she takes out her cell phone and tries Dirk. She wasn’t able to get a hold of him before she left England, and as the phone rings and rings, she pictures a man standing with his hands in his pockets, a slight stoop to his posture, watching her number flashing up, but not answering. With a stab of frustration she ends the call, deciding she will go to his house instead.
She is slipping the phone back into her pocket when it suddenly rings.
“Yes?” she answers, expectant.
“You’ve landed?”
“Oh. Mum,” Eva says, pushing a hand back through her short hair. “Yeah, a couple of hours ago.”
“How was the journey?”
“Long. But fine, really.”
“Are you at the hotel?” her mother asks, a slight shrillness to her tone.
“No, I’m sitting in a park. I went for a walk.” She glances at her watch and realizes that if it’s midday here, then it must be midnight in England. “Mum,” she says, suddenly wary. “What is it?”
There’s a pause. She hears her mother draw a breath. “Oh, sweetheart,” she begins. “They’ve found a body.”
EVA RUNS A DEEP bath, pouring in a miniature bottle of the hotel’s bath oil. Steam swirls in lemon-scented clouds as she peels off her clothes and steps in, hot water creeping over her ankles and shins. She lowers herself down, leans back against the tub and groans.
A body.
It washed up two hundred miles along the coast, just beyond Plymouth. It was on the late news this evening, her mother told her. They’re doing tests to confirm the identity and should know the outcome in a few days.
Eva had wanted this news.
But also not wanted it.
She bends her knees and slides under the surface of the bath water. Her short hair fans and swirls around her face. Warm water fills the pockets of air in her nose and ears, popping and tickling, pressing against her eyes and the seal of her lips. Underwater she’s aware of her pulse amplified in her ears.
She makes herself open her mouth. Water spills over her tongue, the insides of her cheeks, the roof of her mouth, the back of her throat. She wants to sit up, cough, open her eyes—but she holds herself still.
Her lungs begin to ache and she feels the weight of water holding her down. Her body fires out panic signals, sparks of pain shooting into her nerve endings.
She thinks of Jackson beneath the cold, brutal waves, his large hands flailing for purchase, the weight of his clothes and boots dragging him down. She pictures his eyes bulging in terror, salt burning them as he fights to live.
Then she imagines that moment when there are no more sips of oxygen to absorb, and he inhales—freezing salt water sucked deep into his lungs.
She bursts from the bath, water sloshing over the tiled floor, her mouth wide open, gasping.
This is how it felt, Eva, when I went under. The icy shock of that sea was immense. My whole body contracted: my heart squeezed tight, my muscles clenched, my tendons constricted. With that first smack of water, all thought was flushed out.
The sea was bitter and relentless—shifting, pulsing, whirling, gripping me, yanking me under. An attack from all directions. My clothes became a fishing net, tangling me further. I kicked and thrashed, my breath ragged, limbs turning hopelessly. It was like no sea I’d ever known.
I don’t know whether it was minutes—or even just seconds—before the water started to numb me to the bone. My body convulsed with shivers, the fear of death ballooning in my brain.
I fought for as long as I could, your image bright in my mind. But gradually all the pain and struggle seemed to slide away with the heat of my body, the fight in my muscles—and I gave up.
That’s all I can tell you, Eva: eventually I gave up.
5
Eva parks the rental car on the opposite side of the street to Dirk’s house but doesn’t get out. Her palms are damp from where she’s been gripping the steering wheel and she wipes them against her jeans.
She studies Dirk’s house, which looks tired in the afternoon sunshine. Red flakes of paint peel away from the blistered siding revealing a white undercoat. The front garden is overgrown and two plant pots lie broken on their sides. The curtains are open, which she hopes is a sign that he is in.
Feeling queasy with nerves and expectation, she climbs from the car, crosses the street, and walks the short length of the pathway to his front door. There is no bell, so she knocks, then stands back with her arms at her sides. She hopes Dirk will be in; she’s eager to hear his voice, to see Jackson in his face.
She wonders what they’ll talk about, whether there will be any common ground beyond Jackson. She tries to remember the walks Dirk mentioned in his letters, or the name of the book he was enjoying when he last wrote, but her mind feels permeable, facts and information draining away. She’d like to establish a connection, something enduring so that they can have a reason to keep in touch.
She hears movement from inside, as if a chair is being scraped across a floor. A moment later the door is opened by a man wearing a flannel shirt tucked into belted jeans. He has no shoes on and his gray socks are thinning at the toes.
Her breath catches as she sees clues of Jackson locked within the angle of the man’s nose, the line of his brow, the shade of his eyes. “Dirk?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m Eva Bowe. Jackson’s wife.”
His brow furrows into rows of deep creases. He rubs a large hand across his forehead, as if he’s trying to release a memory of this arrangement. The skin on his cheeks is bright red, broken capillaries spreading like a map over his face. “What . . . what’re you doin’ here?”
“I tried calling.”
He looks past her as if he expects to see more people. “You’ve come from England?”
She nods. Her toes squirm in her sandals as she tells him, “I flew in three days ago. I . . . I wanted to come to Tasmania. See where Jackson was from. See where he grew up. Meet you.” She is babbling and stops herself.
Dirk stares. “It’s a long way.”
“Yes,” she says.
He steps back from the doorway. “You’d better come in.”
He leads her into a small living room where a timeworn green sofa faces the window. A whiskey bottle and glass stand on a side table and a television plays on silent, some daytime game show with an overdressed host. A pile of videos is stacked at the bottom of the unit, and somehow the sight of these relaxes her: Dirk is a man who still hasn’t made the switch from VHS to DVD, despite having had more than a decade to do so.
“Sit yourself down,” Dirk says, pointing toward the sofa.
“Thank you.”
He switches off the television and stands in front of it, wiping a hand over the sides of his thinning steel hair. He rolls his shoulders back and stretches his chin away from his neck. He’s a big man, tall and broad. She imagines that once he’d have had a muscular build, but now it seems as if all the muscles have sighed, slumping comfortably into old age.
“So. You’re Eva.”
“Yes.”
He digs his hands into his pockets. “Wanna drink?”
“Water would be great.”
He trudges out of the living room and she lets out the breath she’d been holding. From the kitchen she hears a cupboard being opened, the clink of glass, the whir of a tap.
While she’s alone, she takes in the room. There are no paintings on the off-white walls, and the carpet is thin underfoot. A brass barometer stands on the windowsill next to a model boat with a broken mast. On the dust-filmed coffee table a bunch of dead lilies stand in an empty glass, and she wonders whether they’ve been there since Jackson’s death.
Dirk brings in two glasses of water on a tray. He sets them down beside the flowers and his hands shake as he passes Eva her glass. He looks older than she’d imagined, more weatherworn and tired around the eyes.
He remains standing, saying, “Bit of a shock, this.”
“Yes, sorry. I did call, but there was never any answer. I couldn’t even leave a message. I thought about writing . . . but I wasn’t sure a letter would reach you in time.”
“You’d be better off sending a pigeon,” he mocks. “What is it you’re doin’ here?”
“I . . .” She falters, the abruptness of the question throwing her off her stride. She moves her thumb back and forth across the cool curve of the glass. “Jackson and I had planned to come out here together in the autumn, so I thought . . . well, I thought I’d come anyway . . .”
Eva shifts on the sofa, unsure what else to say. Her eyes dart around the room and fall on a photo that’s tacked to the wall. “Jackson,” she says, her head swimming with the pleasure of seeing his image here.
Dirk turns to look at the photo. “Australia Day that was taken. Nineteen he was.”
In the photo Jackson looks fresh-faced and tanned, free of the creases that were beginning to branch out from the corners of his eyes and mouth. He is half smiling, his lips turned up toward the left. He’s standing on a sun-scorched lawn wearing a blue vest that swamps him. His hair is chin length, longer than she’s ever seen.
Eva leans closer, noticing something else. In his right hand he’s holding a half-smoked cigarette, his easy grip suggesting a comfortableness that comes from habit. She had no idea he used to smoke. She feels oddly exposed by this lack of knowledge. She wants to ask Dirk how long Jackson smoked for, yet knows there would be something humiliating in the question.
She pulls her gaze away from the cigarette and focuses on Dirk, who is saying, “I miss him like hell.” He carefully lowers himself into the chair opposite her, asking, “What happened that day? Can you tell me about it?”
“Yes. Of course.” Eva puts down her water and locks her hands together in her lap. “We were visiting my mother for the weekend. She lives on the south coast, in Dorset. Jackson had got up early to go fishing.”
“For what?”
“Bass or pollock,” she answers, pleased by the question. Dirk was a fisherman once. “He was casting off some rocks—but it was a rough day. Strong winds, big swell. He got knocked in by a wave.” She twists her wedding ring around her finger. “A lifeboat came out and the coast guard helicopter. They searched all day . . .”
“He was always a strong swimmer.”
“The water temperature—it was only about eight or nine degrees. He was in winter clothes. It would’ve been hard for anyone to swim.”
Dirk shakes his head, saying, “After all these years running boats, I never lost anyone. And then Jackson”—he sighs heavily—“he’s just line-fishing and goes down.”
“His body,” Eva begins, then hesitates. She is still waiting for confirmation that the body washed up in Plymouth has been positively identified as Jackson. In a matter of days she will know. Finally know. And then what? If it is him, will she fly home—have some sort of funeral service so the body, or its remains, can be buried? She realizes there’s no point telling Dirk about it yet, not until she has the facts. “I’m still hoping his body will be recovered.”
“Don’t matter to me,” he says with a shrug. “The ocean’s a good place. I’d rather him be in it, not buried in some bloody awful coffin stuffed in the ground for the maggots to get.”
Eva thinks about this for a moment and wonders if maybe he’s right. Perhaps Jackson would’ve preferred that. She finishes her water and says, “The memorial service for Jackson was beautiful. A lot of people came.”
Dirk nods.
“There was a guest book. I haven’t brought it with me—but if you’d like to read it, I could send it to you?”
“Nice of ya to suggest it.” He reaches for the whiskey bottle and pours himself a glass. She can smell the pungent vapor as he lifts it to his mouth. “We had a memorial here.”
“Did you?” she says, surprised. “Where?”
“Top of Mount Wellington. Just a few of us.” He takes another drink, emptying the glass.
She’s hurt that she didn’t know about this, wasn’t invited. She would like to know who came to mourn him, what was said, whether there was a burial of any personal items, but Dirk is up on his feet, saying, “I think we should have a drink to Jackson.”
He leaves the room and returns a moment later with a spare tumbler. He grabs the whiskey bottle and Eva tries to tell him that she’s driving, but already he’s splashed whiskey into her glass and is refilling his own. “To Jackson!” he toasts.
Eva takes a small sip. She’s always hated whiskey and the taste turns her stomach. She breathes steadily through her nose until the nauseous sensation passes, then discreetly slips the glass aside.
As they continue to talk, Eva watches the alcohol working through Dirk. He becomes more expansive, sip by sip. “I remember Jackson diving for his first abalone,” Dirk says, resting the whiskey glass on his knee. “He can’t have been more than eight or nine, and he dived right down to this shallow ledge. There they were—all the abs just lined up—so he found himself a sharp stone and he prized the biggest one of them all right off the rocks. Came up grinning, holding it in the air like a trophy. He was too excited to stop diving, so he slipped it in the pocket of his swimming trunks and kept on going.”
Dirk asks, “You ever seen an abalone?”
She shakes her head.
“They’re as big as your hand, shell on one side, and a dark tough mollusk on the other. When Jackson was done, he ran up the beach to show Saul and me, trying to pull this ab from his pocket. But it had suckered onto his thigh so hard that he had no chance of getting the thing off. I yanked his chain for a while, telling him that it’d take a month of being out of salt water for the ab to loosen its grip. Should’ve seen his little face! Course, in the end it came off. But it left a big old bruise that lasted the summer. We used to tease him that it was a love bite,” he says, his face creasing into a smile.
As Dirk continues to talk and drink, his eyes become glassy and she catches the beginnings of a slur to his words, but still she listens closely. Even when the whiskey causes him to muddle his son’s names and he tells her Saul was always the traveler, Jackson the Tassie boy, she doesn’t interrupt. Eva will do nothing to stop his flow, because she is just grateful to hear the words of somebody who loved Jackson as deeply as she did.
“Did Saul and Jackson used to be close?” Eva asks.
“Tight as a mussel. Did everything together. They were an enterprising little duo. Used to get up early and snorkel off the jetty down at Wattleboon, looking for lost squid jigs to sell to the tourists and make a bit of extra pocket money.”
“But they haven’t been close for a while?”
He shakes his head sharply.
“Is Saul still living in Tasmania?”
“Yeah. Works over at the university in Hobart. Doing some big project on cephalopods. That’s squid to you and me.” He takes a glug of whiskey and she sees him wince, placing a hand over his stomach.
“Hobart. Is that where he lives?”
“No, no. Moved to Wattleboon Island. Built himself a place out in Shoal Bay.”
Eva’s head tilts. “That’s where you used to have a shack, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, beautiful place.” Under his breath he adds, “But too many bad memories for me.”
“I’d like to meet Saul.”
Dirk’s expression turns wary. “Why?”
“He was Jackson’s brother.”
“Nah, don’t think he’d be too keen.”
“It’s important to me.”
He looks at her closely. “Sorry, Eva, but I think you’d best forget about the idea.” He lifts his glass and downs the whiskey.
JACKSON HAD TOLD HER that his father liked a dri
nk, but he’d never explicitly said Dirk was an alcoholic. But he is; she can see it in the high color of his skin, the broken veins across his cheeks, and the way his fingers cling to the glass. It hurts knowing Jackson left out this information, as if he didn’t trust her enough to show her the darker corners of his family life.
She wonders how Jackson would feel now if he could see his father getting steadily more drunk after Eva has traveled thousands of miles to meet him. A quiet anger simmers inside as she thinks about her countless calls that went unanswered, and the invite to the memorial she’d extended to him—but that wasn’t returned.
It feels like a personal affront to Jackson, and before she can check herself, she is saying, “You didn’t come to our wedding.”
Dirk shrugs. “England’s a long way. A lot of money.” He pours himself another whiskey, the neck of the bottle clattering against the glass. He swirls it around and then takes a slug. Is that his third or fourth since she’s been here?
“Weren’t you interested in seeing who your son was going to marry?” she presses Dirk, wanting to understand his absence.
“Y’know what?” he says, and there’s something in his tone she doesn’t like, a loosening, as if whatever he’s been holding back is beginning to spill out, dragging with it the sharp edges of his thoughts. “I wasn’t interested. Because I didn’t want him to marry you.”
Her eyes widen.
“I thought he was bloody mad! And I told him.” He shakes his head. “You two should never’ve gotten married.”
She feels as though she’s had the breath kicked out of her. “What?”
Dirk runs a thick hand down the length of his face, exhaling loudly. Then he gets to his feet and crosses the room unsteadily. He sets his hands square on the windowsill and looks out onto the street.
“Dirk?” She shakes her head back and forth. “Why are you saying this?”
