by Jenni Ogden
Every night after that more and more nests expelled their young. Sometimes I’d be sitting on my deck with the light shining in the cabin behind me, and I’d spy a gaggle of clockwork turtle babies scuttling towards me. Their instinct told them to move towards the light, usually the sea, and on a moonless night the cabin lights confused them. Grabbing my shower bucket, I’d scoop as many up as possible and take them down to the edge of the sea and watch them swim off, either to be eaten by something before they got to the reef edge, or, if they managed to escape that fate, never to be seen again until they were dinner plate size.
Nesting turtles still came up nightly, laying extra eggs in the ancient hope of replacing all the babies that would be lost. All around me, life was exciting. And for once I was part of it. When Polly departed, Tom and I took up where we left off—that is, before our marijuana-fueled lapse into inappropriateness. It was as if that had never happened.
Soon we made a plan for me to go with Tom on one of his trips to Lost Cay, a tiny coral island about an hour’s boat ride from Turtle Island, to do a turtle count. We would camp on the beach for two nights. I was nervous about the boat trip; Tom said it was usually pretty rough careering over the reef in a small dinghy. But he’d also made it clear that I didn’t need to feel nervous about being alone with him on a deserted tropical island. That didn’t stop me dreaming though.
TWO HOURS AFTER MY STIR-FRIED CHICKEN DINNER, I thought I was going to die. Drenched in cold sweat, I crawled into the bathroom and lay on the floor with my forehead on the concrete slab in the shower cubicle. I had no chance of getting outside to the toilet. When the vomit exploded out of me, covering everything in sight, I was barely able to lift my head out of it. The rest of the night I lay on my bed, swathed in towels with a bucket at the ready, and waited for the next wave of stomach cramps to send me crawling outside to the toilet. But I didn’t vomit again. I wondered if Tom would realize I wasn’t doing my turtle patrol, but it seemed unlikely, as I had already collected new data sheets and tags before the stir-fried chicken—the last chicken I’d be eating in a long while. I must have touched my mouth with my fingers before washing them after cutting the bird up. Bad mistake.
I was meant to meet Tom at the wharf at nine o’clock, and by eight I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Although I was over the worst, I felt weak and my stomach and head were still aching. The thought of bouncing over the briny in a small boat was not pretty. Fortunately, just before nine Kirsty came past, whistling as usual, on her way to help out Violet with the cabin cleaning. I called her over and she took about a second to realize I was sick; apparently I was as white as bird shit. She said she would tell Tom to go without me and promised to make him understand that I didn’t want him coming to check on me; I felt far too miserable.
I was boiling some of my precious bottled water for a cup of peppermint tea when he appeared. I was still dressed in the T-shirt and knickers I had pulled on after I’d covered my pajamas with vomit. The T-shirt just covered my knickers, which were plain and beige. I was acutely aware of how I looked, with my hair a wild mess and my face pallid and drawn. Tom had never seen me in anything shorter than my longish shorts. I grabbed a towel that was hanging over the back of a chair and wrapped it around my waist, drawing attention to my mortification.
“How are you feeling?” Tom asked.
I looked at him. He appeared concerned and unaware of my ridiculous behavior. “A bit better. Why are you here? Why haven’t you left?”
“No problem. We can put it off a day or two, until you feel better.”
“I didn’t want you to change your plans. I might not be better for days.”
“Let’s wait and see. If it’s just a tummy bug you’ll be right as rain in twenty-four hours. We’ll plan to go the day after tomorrow. You can get two good nights’ sleep without having to do a turtle patrol.”
I felt the panic rising, and my heart began to pound as I remembered how much courage it had taken to walk up the gangplank onto Jack’s big fishing boat. What had I been thinking, agreeing to go on that tiny dinghy with him? What if it turned over?
“Can I get you anything?” Tom was saying.
“No. Thanks. I’ll just have a sleep I think. When I’ve had this tea.”
“Good idea. You do look a bit under the weather. What do you think it was?”
“A violent reaction to some chicken I ate last night I suspect.”
“Yuck. Poor you. Should you be drinking that tea?”
“I think it’ll be okay. I only vomited once last night, but it felt as if it purged everything from my system.”
Tom was already back out on the deck. “I’ll drop by in a couple of days to make sure you’re ready for the trip. Pat said she’d be by later today. She’ll probably make you soup or something.”
“For heaven’s sake, there’s no need for all this fuss. I’d rather be left alone.” I felt the old irritation with people building inside.
“I know the feeling. But it will be hard to stop Pat.” His white grin flashed. I felt mean.
“Thanks for coming to see me.”
“Right. Look after yourself.” He was off down the track.
I dozed on and off after that with the fan blowing over my hot body, and nightmares of boats and dead turtles lingering on the edge of my memory each time I roused. By midday I felt almost normal, and rather silly. Perhaps it wasn’t the chicken. Perhaps it was psychosomatic, my way of avoiding the trip. I was a master at that—finding excuses not to do things that some part of me desperately wanted to do, and another part of me was too scared of. What if I failed?
Around two in the afternoon Pat showed up and took over. She’d been over earlier in the morning, she said, but I had been sound asleep. Within minutes she had me sitting down to a steaming bowl of the most delicious vegetable broth I have ever consumed. I wouldn’t mind betting that Tom had experienced her ministrations in the past—either that or he’s a good guesser. An hour after the broth I felt much stronger and hadn’t thrown up or had stomach cramps, so she made me a soft-boiled egg and toast soldiers. When she left around four o’clock, I was almost my old self again, and felt an urge to write something. I sat down at the table and opened up my computer.
Toast soldiers with marmite. An egg so soft it was almost not cooked. A coddled egg, Mum called it. A large glass of hot, freshly squeezed lemon, sweet with honey. A fire in the open fireplace in our lounge even though it was not really cold, just one of those early-autumn, dreary gray days London is so good at. The tartan rug snuggled around me as I lay propped up with pillows on the couch, the tray of invalid food on my lap. Mum sitting on the floor, her back against the couch, her face lit by the flickering flames. Her blond hair smooth and shining. I can see her bright red jersey and soft gray wool skirt, her shapely legs, clad in opaque black tights, stretched towards the warmth. I must have been about ten. About two years after she and Dad split up and we’d had to move to the pokey flat above the shop. So long since I’ve thought about those rare good times when I felt that Mum cared about me. I knew she loved me, of course, but I mean cared about me enough to not go to work so she could be with me. She even read me stories that time when I was sick. I’d had measles and was home for two weeks. Mum had to take her annual holiday early to look after me.
Where was Dad then? I can’t remember him ever coming to see me that time. I suppose he was off on his travels writing other peoples’ stories. I remember Mum once calling him a celebrity father when he arrived late to pick me up for one of our wonderful weekend outings. Later I asked Dad what she meant, and he told me that it was because he wrote articles that people read, and he travelled and met lots of interesting people, and that Mum was probably a bit jealous. I was pretty hard on Mum. I know that, but we’re so different. It’s almost funny to think we’re mother and daughter. Nothing she did interested me, and how she looked just rubbed in how I looked. To be fair, she wasn’t one of those mothers who tried to force me to be something I wasn’t. S
he didn’t make me wear fancy clothes or tell me I was plain. In fact, I’m not sure now why she irritated me so much—why I blamed her for everything. I suppose it was just the usual mother-daughter thing, although I thought that wasn’t meant to happen until kids got into their teens. I was a strange kid and that’s all there is about it. A strange kid who grew into a strange adult.
My rumbling stomach stopped me writing any more. So I made myself some more toast and smothered it in the Australian version of marmite. I felt like having a bloody good cry but forced myself to open my Kindle and read something mindless instead.
NINE
There I was, with Tom, on a deserted tropical island. I ran out of excuses and found myself getting into the dinghy two days after my vomiting experience. Tom’s assurance that the sea was as calm as a millpond and the weather report was for hot settled weather for the next week was accurate; the hour-long trip from Turtle Island to the perfect little coral blip in the middle of a turquoise sea was completely smooth and quite delightful.
Tom kept his camping stuff and turtle tagging gear stored in two large tin trunks under the trees. Apart from that the only sign of human habitation was a one-meter-square canvas enclosure that hid a long-drop toilet. As Tom erected the single tent on a flat patch of grass under a Casuarina tree, my heart began to thump. I think he heard it, because he turned and leered at me.
“I never sleep in the tent. If you want to, you can. Or you can sleep under the stars. I’ve got two groundsheets, so our sleeping bags can be as widely spaced as you like.”
“Oh. Do you put your sleeping bag straight onto the groundsheet? Isn’t that a bit uncomfortable?” I was perfectly aware I was talking to cover my embarrassment.
“Good lord, woman. This is luxury accommodation, I’ll have you know. I have nice thick sleeping mats as well. And if it looks like rain I can rig up a tarpaulin overhead. But it won’t rain in the next few nights.”
The campsite established, we walked around the island—it took all of forty-five minutes. Like Turtle Island, the center was covered in Pisonia trees with their sticky buds, every branch overflowing with the squawking nests of noddy terns. Underfoot were the burrows of thousands of ghost shearwaters, and around the perimeter of the central forest, Casuarinas drooped their feathery branches. There was not another island in sight, nor a boat of any kind. When we arrived back at the tent, Tom opened up the insulated cool box he had brought with him—called by the Aussies an Esky, for some reason—and extracted all sorts of goodies. Then he laid and lit a fire in the circle of blackened stones in front of the tent, and within minutes had the kettle boiling. After two chunky cheese, tomato, and pickle sandwiches and some of Pat’s yummy shortbread, I was ready for a nap in spite of two cups of coffee.
“The tide’s not right for a nap,” Tom said. “It will be full out at four o’clock, so if we want to get a dive in, we have to go now.”
“You go. I’ll stay here.”
“Anna, this is one of the most pristine and stunning reefs you will ever have the chance to see. Get your wetsuit on and let’s go.”
“Tom, I can’t dive. All I do is snorkel over the reef flats.”
“I’ll take you out over the reef edge. You don’t have to dive.”
“I’d rather just muck around in the shallows. You go off and dive. I’ll be fine.” And I did, all of a sudden, want to be out there, floating in the blue. But only where I could touch the bottom. I disappeared into the tent and got changed.
The coral was breathtaking—more colorful and many more species than around Turtle Island. I could see Tom out of the corner of my eye, flippering alongside me, as I mooched about over the coral flats. The water was getting deeper as we neared the edge of the reef and I had to slow my breathing. Time to turn back. Then Tom reached out and grasped my hand and I found myself almost pulled along beside him as he kept moving into the deeper water. And then we were over the side and the blue dropped away, down, down into the depths. Giant corals clung to the steep sides of the reef and hundreds of fish, from big to tiny, swam below me and around me. My heart was thumping and I thrashed my feet, trying to pull away from Tom and back to the safety of the reef flat. But he held my hand firmly and continued to pull me along beside him.
We had now turned and were swimming along the reef edge, with Tom on the outside, protecting me from the bottomless sea. With his free hand he pointed to this fish and that, and I looked. I stopped thrashing and hung in the water, the beauty below me making my heart sing instead of thump. I saw Tom forming the okay sign under the water, his thumb and forefinger joined in a circle, and I nodded, then made the sign back. He pointed down, and let go my hand. I watched him as he arrowed into the depths and disappeared into a cave I could now make out far below. It seemed like many minutes before he was at my side again, shooting the water from his snorkel.
We swam slowly along, and in front of us was a silver wall. It parted and formed again as we swam through it—thousands of sleek silver fish all turning as one. A large green turtle swam gracefully below us and then, out of the shadows came the streamlined shape of a small shark. My feet thrashed and I turned blindly towards the reef flat, water sloshing down my snorkel tube, and under the seal of my mask. I felt my hand being pulled back and I turned my head towards Tom. He was holding his fingers in a circle and I stopped thrashing and forced myself to blow the water out of my snorkel. I looked down. The shark was still there gliding below us, but rapidly leaving us behind. I could see the white tip on its dorsal fin. Tom stuck his head out of the water and I heard him say, “Harmless white-tip reef shark,” and my heart slowed down a little.
Tom turned and I turned with him, and we swam back along the edge, Tom diving down every few minutes. But each time he returned he took my hand again. Soon he angled back over the reef flats, where the water was rapidly becoming shallower as the tide flooded out over the edge. I felt as if I had climbed to the top of Everest. That nothing could ever surmount this.
OUR REAL REASON FOR BEING ON THE ISLAND WAS TO carry out a nesting turtle count and tag any untagged turtles. Tom did this once a month during the nesting season. High tide was at ten o’clock tonight and the turtles would be nesting two to three hours each side of that. The previous month, Tom had counted over sixty turtles every night on this tiny island, and he expected about the same tonight. We would be busy. I offered to cook the evening meal but Tom said he had it all planned, and by half past six we were feasting on smoky steak, mashed potatoes, and salad. Four fragrant mangoes and a bottle of very pleasant South Australian cabernet sauvignon also disappeared. We agreed that two small glasses each would not be sufficient to muddy our scientific tagging endeavors. The sun set in a soft rose and apricot sky as the shearwaters flew back to their mates, landing all around us as we sat on a bleached log on the beach. It was dark when we split up at eight o’clock to start the turtle watch, me on the tent side of the island and Tom on the far side.
Tired and happy, I watched my twenty-eighth turtle slipping back into the water as Tom’s slim figure appeared around the curve of the island. It was half-past one in the morning. I managed to stoke life into the embers in the fireplace and boiled the kettle, and we sat, barely speaking, and drank hot tea, contentment shimmering in the moonlit air. Tom spread out a groundsheet and placed the two sleeping mats side by side, but not touching. After changing into clean knickers and a very long T-shirt in the tent, and spreading out my sleeping bag on one of the mats, I wriggled into it. I could hear Tom moving about behind me somewhere, and then he was lying beside me, his sleeping bag unzipped. I turned towards him, feeling hot. I unzipped my sleeping bag, and threw the top aside. I could see Tom’s smile in the moonlight. He had on an old T-shirt and I suppose his underwear, although I didn’t like to look. He leaned over the gap between us and kissed me. His lips felt like a moth’s wing.
“Goodnight, sweet Anna. Sleep well under your stars.”
When I woke, I could feel the heat of the sun on my body. Tom’s
sleeping bag was empty and Tom nowhere in sight. He couldn’t be far. I was bursting, and scuttled off into the bush. When I came back Tom was there, lighting the campfire. After that, the day went by like a dream. This time, when we went out over the edge of the reef, my heart didn’t thump as much and I didn’t thrash my flippers and try to flee even when Tom pointed out an enormous moray eel as it snaked from a hole below us. Before the tide fell too low to get the dinghy out over the flats, we puttered around the island and well out past the reef edge on the other side, where we were permitted to fish. Well provisioned as always, Tom produced a fishing rod for me as well as for him, and showed me how to attach soft baits to catch a fish for our supper. Within two minutes I had a bite, and then a fat coral trout landed flapping in the bottom of the boat. I was so excited, we almost capsized. I couldn’t quite bring myself to kill the jeweled fish; the adrenaline rush from the catch was all I could handle. Tom declared that there would be no more fishing, as we had sufficient for our dinner, and we puttered around the remainder of the island.
Our turtle watch was an hour later than the night before, so we had a more leisurely feast. Over the best fish I have ever tasted, we talked. Protected by the flickering firelight, I told Tom about Dad, and how he died.
When, after completing our turtle patrol, we met up again around two o’clock, it seemed natural to put our sleeping mats close together and lie down side by side with our sleeping bags unzipped. Perhaps the tot of whisky we drank with our tea helped, and when Tom reached for me I moved into the safety of his arms without hesitation. When we were naked, I almost stopped him as he got up to scrabble in his pack for a condom. I didn’t want him to go, even for a moment. But he had more sense. By the time he entered me, it felt as if there was not a centimeter of my body he had not caressed and kissed. I was a touch shyer, but later, after we had slept a little and woken again, our naked bodies a little cold even in the balmy tropical air, I took my turn to explore him. He was beautiful and young and smooth. I felt beautiful too.
