by Jenni Ogden
I finally got around to emptying my case into the small wardrobe and tallboy. I thought about putting my shorts on, but decided on my light safari pants and a T-shirt instead. The shorts would have to wait until I’d shaved my legs; the poor things hadn’t seen a razor since my student days. I went brown quite easily as a kid, so fingers crossed I still would, and the Australian sun wouldn’t burn me to a cinder.
After burying my black trousers and blue shirt at the back of the wardrobe and swapping my boots for sandals, I felt much better. I unpacked the food boxes and squashed the packs of rapidly defrosting meat into the freezer box, and the other refrigerator stuff into the fridge part. I managed to find space in the few cupboards and on the open shelves above the sink for the rest of my food, and hoped it wouldn’t soon be infested by god knows what creepy crawlies. I made a mental note to beg, borrow, or steal some plastic containers from somewhere. I had a few scary moments lighting the gas hob, but finally managed to boil some of the bird-shit water and make a cup of tea. It had a very peculiar taste but I was cautious about using my precious bottled water except for drinking it cold.
I took my cup of musty tea and a plate of biscuits and cheese out on to my deck—I was already thinking of it as mine—and sat in one of the plastic chairs. It was still and hot and all around me were scuffles and birds calling, and through a gap in the trees was the white sand and then the blue sea, now with bits of coral sticking up in it as the tide went out. I sat there not believing it was me, and that I was there for a year with nothing to do but write my memoir—not that anyone else would give a damn if I did or didn’t, and right then nor did I What on earth would I do for a year? Surely the campsite I was yet to see wouldn’t take much of my time? Luckily my Kindle was stuffed with at least sixty books and my iPod loaded with my favorite music. And I’d better at least make some attempt at the memoir just to keep my brain ticking over.
After a while I got up, reluctantly, and followed a sandy path around the side of the cabin and through some trees for about two hundred meters. Jack had told me the campsite was back there. And there it was, quite a large sandy, grassy area with trees all around but with a gap showing the beach and sea. A wooden building near the edge turned out to house a toilet that looked fairly unsavory when I looked down it, but didn’t seem to smell. Thankfully I didn’t have to deal with it. A man called Basil, whom I was yet to meet, apparently did the honors. On the outside wall of the toilet was a shower like mine. A little way from that was a large open shelter with a concrete floor and a wooden picnic table in the middle. A gas barbecue and a couple of gas bottles took up one side. A guttering around the roof of the shelter led into a pipe connected to a water tank on stilts, and at the base of that was a concrete tub with one tap. A notice stuck to the tank said that the water was undrinkable without boiling and to use sparingly.
All in all a very pleasant spot, but obviously not on the main backpacker trail, as there was not a single tent to be seen. Keeping an eye on this should be an easy job. I wandered out onto the beach, where even more coral was now exposed, and looked both ways. I thought I must be in the middle of the long part of the oval island. Looking to my right, back towards my cabin, I could see the wharf where we had landed, with Jack’s boat and a few others bobbing alongside it. Jack had explained that there was an artificial deep water channel there that the original occupants of the island—that is, the European occupants—had made with the help of a few sticks of dynamite. In the other direction the beach stretched for a few hundred meters before disappearing around the corner.
The light had become softer and the blue of the sky had taken on a sort of transparent luminescence. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see that it was five o’clock. I’d already been here four hours. Basil could wait ’til the morning. Basil Brush. I grinned as an image of the unknown Basil, complete with bushy red hair and tail, flashed in my head. Perhaps all Australians have these sweet, old-fashioned, simple names. Bill and Ben the flowerpot men, Jack and the beanstalk, Tom, Tom the piper’s son … Christ, I’ll never remember who is who. I wonder when I’m going to meet Waltzing Matilda? That’s if there are any females here. Not that I’m likely to have anything in common with them.
THREE
Basil showed up around nine o’clock. I’d been up for hours after a hot and sleepless night tossing and turning on the hard mattress, trying to block out the phenomenal noise of thousands of shearwaters as they made their ghostly howls at each other. Jeff had warned me about this, but it had to be experienced to be believed. At times, as I dozed, it almost sounded like an orchestra, but then a small gaggle of the birds sitting right on my deck would start up—whoooo up the scale and then hoooo down the other side, followed by their mates’ slightly higher whoooo-hoooo, and so on around the entire gaggle, firmly banishing the orchestral illusion. At one point I stumbled out on to the moonlit deck to chase them away, but apart from doing a short sideways shuffle, they ignored me, and continued to whoooo-hoooo. Fortunately for them they were decidedly lovable, and quite impossible to kick—large and soft and dark gray, with a bumbling gait when on land and when landing. Every few minutes there would be a loud swish as another bird hurtled out of the sky, skidding along the ground when it hit dirt. Then it would waddle slowly off to its nest—a hole in the sand, under a tree root, under the cabin, or sometimes right in the middle of the sandy path.
When, at six o’clock, I finally gave up on sleep and made myself a cup of tea, the noise stopped—of course—and, going outside, I saw the last bird waddling rapidly along the track before taking off like a drunken jet plane and spreading its great wings, soaring up over the low trees and out to sea. There, it was in its element—one of the greatest fliers in all the bird kingdom. The sacrifices a parent will make for its babies—not that I would know, but it awes me anyway.
Basil seemed like a nice chap, in his sixties I would guess, and a true-blue Aussie like everyone I’d met so far. Bald as a baseball. He didn’t say a lot, and what he did say I had a bit of trouble understanding as he didn’t open his mouth very wide, but his eyes had a blue twinkle and his grin was friendly. He indicated that he’d empty my rubbish bin as well as the ones in the campground, and he would clean the toilets once a week. He gave me a large book and a small metal box with a lock; the book to record campers’ names and payments—$5 per adult per night and $2 for kids; and the box to keep the loot in. He turned the small key and opened the box to display a pile of notes and coins—change, he said, in case a camper didn’t have the right amount. Most of them would be university students who would come on their summer holidays from mid-November to the end of February, and would stay for two weeks, between Jack’s boat trips.
“What do I do with the money?” I asked.
“When it gets too much to fit in the box, stick it in a plastic bag and give it to Jack. He’ll deposit it in Jeff’s bank account back on the mainland. He’ll take cash checks as well, if you’ve been paid that way, and he can cash your own checks too, if you need any money.”
“He’s the island banker as well as the transporter, by the sound of it,” I said.
“I suppose so. Someone’s got to do it. Give him your grocery list and a blank check as well when you want more supplies. You have to be organized, though, because you won’t get them until he comes back two weeks later.” He looked at me doubtfully, as if he thought I wouldn’t cope with this.
“Thanks. Jeff explained about the grocery thing. I’ll soon get the hang of it, I think.” I grinned to show him I wasn’t being sarcastic. “What about phoning out? Is that possible?”
“Yeah. I have an old computer and satellite broadband—it’s pretty slow—and so does Tom Scarlett.”
“Tom the turtle whisperer?”
Basil guffawed, his mouth opening at last, exposing a crooked row of nicotine-stained teeth. “That’s him, the turtle whisperer. But his place is on the other side of the island. My place is closer, the next house just up the track a bit. If you need
to e-mail anyone or phone out on Skype, or in an emergency, just drop by.”
“Thank you. But I’ll try not to impose. To tell you the truth, I’m rather looking forward to a life free of e-mail and the Internet.”
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG TO SETTLE INTO A SORT OF ROUTINE. At first I did find myself worrying about being out of contact and a couple of times had to stop myself from asking Basil if I could use his computer to access my e-mail. But by the end of the first week, I couldn’t give a damn about it. By now I could just about sleep through the ghostly night chorus, and I often rose early and spent an hour walking on the beach before coming back and eating a bowl of muesli and luxuriating in a cup of real coffee, brewed using crystal clear bottled water. The aroma as my little espresso machine farted happily over the gas flame was the aroma of happiness. If I was still hungry I made toast under the efficient gas grill, inevitably burning a slice or two in spite of standing over it. I ate breakfast on my deck, with my Kindle in hand, and it was pure bliss.
It took great strength of mind to close the Kindle after an hour or so of sloth and replace it with my laptop. Then I settled down to writing my “memoir,” as I thought of it. This was usually painfully slow, but on rare days the words fairly flew out of me. I found that my early-morning beach walks were the perfect time to reminisce about my past life—my life, that is, as a researcher. My “memoir” was to be about that. I decided to begin at the beginning—that is, when I landed my first job as a junior researcher in the Huntington’s lab not long after completing my PhD. Then I would write about my rise to senior researcher and becoming the head of the lab in the space of just six years. It bordered on exhilarating, remembering those heady times when I was full of passion for my research, with ideas tumbling over themselves. Writing a cutting-edge research grant was a breeze back then—well it seems so now, looking back—although I also recalled bouts of despair and even depression, not to mention night upon night burning the midnight oil.
I’d stop my memoir writing for a sandwich or piece of fruit when I was hungry, and allow myself another hour of reading, sometimes lying on the bed trying to catch any tiny breeze from the wide-open sliding doors that stretched across the entire front of the cabin. Of course, more often than not, my eyes refused to stay open and I woke hours later feeling hot and sticky and annoyed with myself. But a walk on the beach as the evening began its tropical journey through every shade of yellow, orange, red, and pink soon revived me, and I would sometimes veer off the beach onto one of the meandering tracks through the center of the island, marveling at the thousands of birds chattering and calling as they flew about their business, and breathing in the balmy air with its musty, birdy smell. Dark fell quickly and early, and if I forgot to take my torch I would find myself stumbling over tree roots as I made for the lighter sky reflecting off the sea and, once on the beach, found my way back to the familiar track leading to my cabin. By the time I’d negotiated the intricacies of the shower, concocted something for dinner, and eaten it, sitting as always on the deck—a complete absence of flies, mosquitoes, and other biting insects being one of the glories of being on a tiny coral cay on the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef—I was well and truly ready for bed. The solar-powered lights were hardly bright enough to read by anyway.
In that first week I often went all day without speaking to a single soul. Occasionally when I was walking I would see someone on the beach and nod a greeting, but apart from that the only human I saw was Basil, who wandered past on the track about once every two days. He’d grin and raise his battered hat with its shady Aussie brim, but often he wouldn’t actually utter a greeting. But I didn’t feel in the least lonely. No campers appeared wanting to put up their tents—I supposed they were most likely to arrive when Jack’s boat returned—so I was truly in a honeymoon period.
Ten days after my arrival I set off for my hour-long morning walk around the circumference of the little island a little later than usual, heading in the direction away from the wharf. On the home stretch, just as I was coming to the wharf, I saw the turtle boat leaving. I watched it head out over the reef flats and then walked farther along the beach so I wouldn’t be so noticeable. I must have sat on the sand with my binoculars glued to my eyes for two hours, ghoulishly fascinated by the dinghy’s crazy zigzagging and the diving cowboy catapulting himself into the sea before the dinghy had skidded to a halt, bringing turtle after frustrated turtle up to the side. Jack had explained that the turtles were mating, the male on top, allowing the diver to grab the poor thing and measure it.
By the time the boat turned to come in, I could see a small group of people down at the wharf, two of them clearly children by their small size. Probably too small to be in school yet. I did know there was no school on the island, and that the few houses were mostly holiday homes, occupied only in the school holidays. I considered wandering back to the wharf to introduce myself but then felt stupidly shy. I was hopeless with children, and I couldn’t imagine what I would say to the turtle whisperer.
Back at my cabin, I looked at the faded photo on the cabin wall again. I could almost hear Fran’s admonishment—“He won’t bite, you know. Just go and say hi. You’ll have to talk to him sooner or later on an island as small as that.” But it was another two days before I purposely decided to take a casual late-afternoon stroll along one of the tracks that ran across the center of the island to the other side, passing within about fifty meters of the small house nestled in the trees that I had noticed before on my walks. I had seen no other buildings on that side of the island so I figured it must be the turtle whisperer’s home. My legs were already becoming quite tanned, and they were now as smooth as a baby’s bum, but even so I pulled on my light long pants; I wasn’t quite ready to expose myself to that extent. As if the turtle whisperer would even notice the skinny legs of a middle-aged spinster.
My heart sped up as I neared the turnoff to the house, and I walked right past it and onto the beach a little farther on. I stood for ages gazing at the reef, bits of coral sticking out as the tide receded, and the turquoise sea farther out. I told myself that he probably wasn’t there anyway, and turned back along the track. This time I took the side path to his house and as I reached it I could hear him whistling. He sounded as if he were around the back, so I tiptoed past the front of the house with its wide deck, rehearsing what I’d say when I saw him. I was just walking past and heard you whistling so thought I’d call in and say hi. Then I was around the side of the house and he was only a couple of meters in front of me, oblivious to my presence and still whistling. He was standing under an outdoor shower attached to the wall, and was stark naked. He had his back to me and was vigorously soaping his body, his towel hanging between us on a large hook high on the wall. I began to tiptoe quietly backwards, praying he’d keep whistling, but before I’d taken three steps he reached up, switched the shower off, and turned around.
“Sorry, sorry,” I mumbled, my entire body flaming as I almost fell over in my hurry to back around the corner.
The turtle whisperer grinned and reached up and grabbed his towel, wrapping it around his waist in one smooth movement. “Gidday,” he said. “Don’t run away. Anna, isn’t it? It’s nice to see you again. I was wondering what had happened to you.”
I stopped and managed to look at his face. “I’m so sorry. I heard you whistling and it never occurred to me you would be … it wouldn’t be convenient.”
“Well, you weren’t to know I’d be starkers. Don’t be embarrassed. Look, give me five to get something better on than this towel, and we can have a drink.”
I must have looked strange or horrified because his face lost its smile and he added, “I hope I haven’t offended you? Perhaps you don’t drink? That’s okay. We can have a cup of tea or coffee if you’d rather.”
“No, no, I do drink,” I said. “Well, socially only. I’m not a big drinker but I like a wine, or a beer is good too if you have no wine.” I burbled on but he was smiling again now.
H
e walked past me around the corner of the house, and I followed.
