Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Lucy Clarke 2014

Lucy Clarke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007481361

Ebook Edition © March 2014 ISBN: 9780007481378

Version: 2020-11-10

For James

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Read on to enjoy an exclusive extract of The Castaways

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Reading Group Questions

A conversation with Lucy Clarke

The Story in Photos

About the Author

Keep up to date with Lucy Clarke

Also by Lucy Clarke

Keep Reading

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Pulling his hat down over his ears, Jackson glances at Eva, who is curled in bed, the duvet tucked under her chin. Her eyes stay closed as she murmurs a sleepy noise that means, Don’t go.

But he has to. He can’t lie next to her feeling the way he does. He’s been awake for hours staring into the empty darkness, thinking, thinking, rolling back through his decisions and their consequences. He needs to get out of this house, feel the sting of winter wind on his face.

He lifts a corner of the duvet, just enough to expose Eva’s bare shoulder where he places his lips. He breathes in the smell of her sleep-warmed skin. Then he smoothes the duvet back down, picks up his fishing gear, and leaves.

The beach is wild and empty in the gloom. It’s one of those English mornings he’s still getting used to when dawn never fully breaks and the lamps stay on indoors all day. He paces into the wind, jigging his shoulders to keep warm.

Reaching an outcrop of rocks that stretches right into the sea, Jackson pauses. He watches the waves come plunging and rolling towards the rocks, breaking in an explosion of white water. He waits for a lull between sets and, when it comes, he climbs onto the rocks and hurries across them, making his way towards the very end of the outcrop. That’s where the fish will be biting as the current runs the hardest. He’s nimble-footed from a childhood spent running barefoot on the rocks and cliffs of Tasmania. He used to launch himself from them into the sea, bellowing and whooping before the water swallowed him.

He makes it to the end before the next set hits, the rocks behind him disappearing beneath a surge of foam. Strong gusts whip the spray off the backs of the waves and the air is alive with moisture. He turns from the wind, crouches down and opens his tackle box. Christ, he wishes he’d worn gloves. It’s freezing out here. Spray hits him in the back of the neck and it’s icy. His numb fingers make him clumsy and he drops a lure and has to scrabble between the rocks to get it. Second time around he manages to thread it with more success.

Eventually he casts out. The motion, once familiar and soothing, gives him no relief this morning. His thoughts too closely match the desolate seascape that broils beneath an angry sky. Standing on the rocks – his body starting to chill – he has the looming sensation that everything is starting to unravel. It is as if he’s shedding his skin layer by layer until the sharp bones of who he really is will be visible to everyone.

The vibration of his mobile phone startles him. He holds the fishing rod with one hand while he grapples in his coat pocket with the other. It will be Eva. He pushes away the lethal, dark thoughts, letting his brow soften as he imagines the timbre of her sleep-clouded voice saying, Come back to bed …

Already he’s thinking that he will – that he’ll forget all this. If he jogs he’ll be there in ten minutes. He can slip back into the warmth of their bed, press his body against the curve of hers, and remind himself that it’s real.

But when he presses answer, it’s not Eva’s voice at all.

1

As she leaves the shelter of the headland, the full force of the wind hits Eva. Her hair whips back from her face and she hugs the flask of coffee tight to her chest. Clouds of sand gust along the shoreline, sending a tangled knot of fishing line pinwheeling along the beach.

A woman passes in the other direction, her purple coat flattened to her back by the wind. The fur-trimmed hood is pulled tight to her face, making Eva wish she’d thought to wear a hat. She’d forgotten how raw the weather is on the coast; in London it is muted by buildings and watched from behind windows.

She and Jackson had driven to Dorset last night for her mother’s birthday. It was a rush to get out of the city; Eva had been delayed at the hospital trying to turn a breeched baby, but still managed to wrap her mother’s present and clear the sink of their breakfast things before Jackson barrelled in late and exhausted from a meeting that had run over. The whole week had been like that: grabbing meals at different times, tension from work stalking them home, falling into bed too late and too shattered to talk. She’s pleased to have this weekend just to slow down.

Ahead, the rocks where Jackson will be fishing come into focus. Huge sombre boulders stretch right out into the sea. She wonders if he’s caught anything yet. It wasn’t long past dawn when she’d felt the give of the bed as Jackson slipped out from under the covers. She’d heard him stepping into his jeans, pulling on a sweater, and zipping up his coat. He’d leant over the bed and pressed a kiss on her bare shoulder. Her eyes had opened just enough to see him disappear through the doorway, a red woollen hat pulled down over his ears.

Just beyond the rocks she sees the flash of a boat. It disappears momentarily into a trough and she thinks the conditions are too rough to be out on the water today. She squints against the wind and sees it rise again on the crest of a wave: an orange lifeboat. She wonders whether there’s been an accident, and as soon as she has this thought, a slow trickle of unease seeps through her body.

In her childhood summers when her father was still alive, they would come to this beach every morning to swim together, her father making lunging rotations with his long, bony arms in a backstroke. She had loved those swims when the water was calm and the early sun glanced off the surface. But today the sea is something darker, forbidding.

She scans the rocks for Jackson, eyes watering in the wind. He must be here; it’s the spot he always fishes when they’re visiting her mother. But now all that breaks the grey wash of sea and sky is the lifeboat. Even as she tells herself that it could be on a training mission, her knees are bending, carrying her forward into a run.

The flask bounces against her hip and her boots flick up sand. Her breath comes in warm, quick clouds and she feels restricted by the layers of her clothes – her jeans unyielding against her knees, her coat buttons tight against her breastbone.

When she reaches the base of the rocky outcrop, she finds a dozen or so people gathered there. Her gaze moves over them and then travels up the length of the rocks, where waves charge, tossing white water high into the bruised sky. The air is heavy with the smell of salt.

She can’t see Jackson.

Eva hurries towards a man zipped into a waxed jacket, his steel-grey eyebrows ruffled by the wind. ‘Why’s the lifeboat out?’ she asks, trying to keep the panic from her voice.

‘Someone was swept off the rocks.’

Her heart lurches. ‘Who?’

‘A fisherman, they think.’

For a moment she has a feeling of relief because she knows her husband is not a fisherman: he’s a 30-year-old brand marketer for a drinks company. But then the man is saying, ‘Young, apparently. But maybe he’ll stand more of a chance against the cold.’

Eva feels all the air leave her lungs as if someone has grabbed her hard around the ribs. She drops the flask and yanks her mobile from her pocket, ripping off her gloves to dial. Her fingers are clumsy with the cold but she turns her back to the wind and keys in Jackson’s number.

Pressing the phone to her ear, she paces on the spot waiting for him to pick up.

‘Hi, this is Jackson,’ his voicemail says, and her heart stalls.

Dropping the phone into her pocket, she stumbles towards the rocks. A wide red sign reads DANGER, KEEP OFF. Her scarf flies behind her as she clambers over the wet boulders, the cry of wind filling her ears. Her breath is ragged, and spiked thoughts pierce at her, making her mind whirl. She tells herself to focus only on where she is putting each foot, placing one carefully in front of the other.

Ahead something colourful catches her attention. She picks her way over barnacle-lined rocks until she is close enough to see it.

A green plastic tackle box lies open, wedged between two rocks. She recognizes it instantly: she bought it for Jackson last Christmas to house the lures and weights that were gradually filling up his bedside drawer. Now salt water fills the trays, so that two bright blue lures float inside like dead fish.

There is a loud, shattering boom as a wave smashes into the rocks. Icy spray slashes the side of Eva’s face and she drops to her knees, clinging to the rock with numbed fingers.

‘Hey!’ someone shouts. ‘Get back!’

But she cannot move, cannot turn. She is frozen, fear leaden in her stomach. Her face smarts with the cold and the back of her head is wet. A slow trickle of water seeps beneath her scarf.

Seconds later, she feels the pressure of a hand on her shoulder. A policeman is standing over her, taking her by the arm, encouraging her to her feet. ‘It’s not safe,’ he shouts above the wind.

She shakes him off. ‘My husband!’ she cries, her words coming out in gusts. ‘He was fishing! Right here!’

The policeman stares down at her. There is a patch of dark stubble on his jawline, no larger than a thumbprint, which he must have missed when shaving this morning. Something like fear pricks his features as he says, ‘Okay. Okay. Let’s get onto the beach.’

He grips her arm, helping her stand. Her legs tremble as they move slowly over the wet rocks, him glancing over his shoulder watching for waves.

When they reach the sand, he turns to her. ‘Your husband was fishing here this morning?’

She nods. ‘His tackle box – it’s on the rocks.’

The policeman looks at her for a long moment without blinking. ‘We had a report earlier that a man fishing was swept in.’

Her voice is small: ‘Was it him?’

‘We can’t be sure yet.’ He pauses. ‘But it sounds like it’s possible, yes.’

Saliva fills her mouth and she twists away. The grey-green sea swills with current as she searches it for Jackson. She swallows. ‘How long ago?’

‘About twenty minutes. A couple reported it.’

She turns, following his gaze towards a middle-aged man and woman in dark blue parkas, a golden retriever at their feet. ‘Was it them? Did they see him?’

The moment he nods, Eva staggers past him.

The dog’s tail wags frantically as she approaches. ‘You saw my husband! He was fishing!’

‘Your husband?’ the woman says, distress clouding her narrow face. ‘We saw him, yes. I’m sorry—’

‘What happened?’

The woman twists her scarf between her fingers as she says, ‘We’d seen him fishing when we walked past earlier.’ She glances at her husband. ‘You said it looked dangerous with those waves, didn’t you?’

He nods. ‘When we turned to walk back, we saw he’d been swept in. He was in the water.’

‘We called the coastguard,’ the woman adds. ‘We tried to keep sight of him till they arrived … but … but we lost him.’

They must be mistaken, Eva thinks. It couldn’t be Jackson. ‘The man you saw – what was he wearing?’

‘Wearing?’ the woman repeats. ‘Dark clothes, I think. And a hat,’ she says, touching the back of her head. ‘A red hat.’

*

Sometime later, Eva’s mother arrives. She drapes a blanket over Eva’s shoulders and teases a fleecy hat over her short hair while asking questions in a low voice: How long has he been in the water? What has the coastguard said?

Eva watches the lifeboat making a search pattern, as if drawing a square in the water, and then working outward so the square gets larger and larger until at some point the lifeboat is so far away she wonders if it is even possible Jackson could have swum that far.

She wants to focus on anything but the freezing grip of the sea, so she cushions herself with the warmer memory of Jackson surprising her last month when he’d turned up at the hospital after one of her late shifts, holding a bag containing her favourite dress and a pair of gold heels. He’d told her to get changed because he was taking her out.

She’d slipped into the locker room, her heart skipping with excitement, and swapped her uniform for the black silk dress he’d chosen. She’d dabbed on some lipstick and smoothed back her dark hair, and the other midwives whistled and cooed as she came out, giving a little twirl.

Jackson had taken her to a blues bar in north London where the room was lit by candles and the rhythm of the double bass rocked through her chest. She’d leant her head against Jackson’s shoulder, feeling the atmosphere soak through her, washing away the strains of the day. They drank cocktails they couldn’t afford, and she danced in high heels that gave her blisters, but she hadn’t minded: she loved Jackson for his knack of taking a normal day and carving something beautiful from it.

The loud drone of the coastguard helicopter cuts through Eva’s thoughts. The sea beneath quivers and trembles. The white and red colours look bright, optimistic almost, against the darkening clouds, and a ripple of anticipation spreads through the growing crowd.

The policeman stands alone, rubbing his palms together to keep warm. Sometimes his radio crackles and he lifts it to his mouth. Eva glances over occasionally, studying him, watching for a sign to tell her how this day will end.

Mostly they wait in silence, listening to the waves crashing at sea, frothing white water bowling into the rocks. Her mother keeps hold of her hand and every now and then she says beneath her breath, ‘Come on, Jackson. Come on.’

*

When the last bit of daylight is fading, Eva hears crackling from the policeman’s radio. She turns and watches as he lifts it towards his mouth and speaks into it. He looks out over the water and nods once, solemnly. Then the radio is lowered.

He begins moving towards Eva. She shakes her head, thinking, Do not say it!

‘I’m afraid the coastguard’s calling off the search.’

Her gloved fingers clutch her scarf. ‘They can’t!’

‘The boat’s almost out of fuel and the helicopter’s lost the light. I’m sorry.’

‘He’s still out there!’

‘The coastguard has made the decision.’

‘But he won’t survive the night.’

The policeman’s gaze leaves her and settles on the sand at their feet.

She feels her mother’s hand around her waist, holding onto her, squeezing so tightly it’s as if she’s trying to absorb Eva’s pain.

‘He’s out there,’ Eva says finally. She pulls away and staggers down the beach, where the faint lights of the quay glow in the distance. She hears her mother calling after her, but she will not look back. She knows exactly where she needs to go.

Jackson is her husband and she will not give up on him.

*

The fisherman is just stepping onto the quay when Eva approaches him. ‘Is this your boat?’

‘Yeah,’ he says suspiciously.

She snatches a breath. ‘I need you to take me out in it. I’ll pay.’

‘Love, this boat isn’t going anywhere …’

‘My husband was swept from the rocks this morning,’ she says.

‘Your husband? Christ! I heard about it over the radio.’

She moves right past him, climbing into the boat as if she’s about to commandeer it.

‘Hey, listen –’

‘You understand currents? Tides?’ she says, trying to keep her voice level and focus only on the practical details.

‘Sure, but I can’t –’

‘Please,’ she says, swinging around to face him, her composure cracking. ‘You have to help me!’

Once they reach the open water, the boat pitches and rolls with the waves. Eva grips the side, her fingers aching from the cold. She won’t let herself think about this because if she admits that her feet are numb and that the temperature has dropped so low that she can’t stop shivering, then she’ll also have to admit that Jackson could not survive this.

The rocky outcrop looms like low-hanging fog. When they near it, the fisherman cuts the engine. He shouts above the wind, ‘We’ll drift with the current now.’

He moves towards her holding a yellow oilskin. ‘Here. Wear this over the life jacket.’

The material is rough and cold, the long sleeves scratching the chapped skin on the undersides of her wrists where her gloves end. She glances down and sees a thick smear of blood across the breast of the jacket.

‘Just fish blood,’ he says, following her gaze.

Eva glances around the boat deck, where lobster pots and dark heavy nets laced with seaweed are stacked. There are lights on the boat, but they’re not nearly bright enough. ‘Have you got a torch?’

‘Yeah.’ He lifts the lid of the wooden bench and pulls out a torch with a glass face as big as a dinner plate.

He passes it to Eva, who holds it in both hands to support the weight. She flicks the switch and points it at the black water. The beam is dazzling and she blinks several times until her eyes become accustomed to it.

He fetches a second, smaller torch and begins searching the water beside her as they drift. Dark waves swim in and out of the beam like bodies rearing up, and then recede again.

‘Your husband fish a lot?’

Husband. The word still sounded fresh and sweet. They had been married for just under ten months and the sight of his wedding band still made her catch her breath with happiness. ‘We live in London – so he doesn’t fish as much as he’d like. He used to as a boy. He’s from Tasmania.’

‘Where’s that?’

She forgets that some people know little about Tasmania. ‘It’s an island off south-east Australia. Almost opposite Melbourne. It’s an Australian state.’

As she looks down at the inky sea, Eva’s thoughts drift back through the day. She pictures Jackson trudging up the beach with his fishing gear. Would his head have been fuzzy from drinking the night before? Did he walk along the shore and think of her still snug in bed, or remember their lovemaking last night? Was there any point when he’d considered turning around and stealing back into the warmth next to her beneath the duvet?

She imagines him on the rocks threading fishing lures onto the line with numb fingers, then setting out the catch bucket. She imagines that first cast, the smooth flick of the rod. The surf’s good for the fish, livens them up, he’d told her before.

He knew his fish. His father had run a crayfish boat for a decade, and Jackson studied marine biology. Living in London as they did, there wasn’t much call for marine biologists, but he said he got his fix of the coast whenever they visited her mother. In Tasmania, he owned an old sea kayak and would paddle through empty bays and inlets with a fishing rod hooked at the back of the kayak. She loved his stories of cruising beneath mountains and alongside wild coastline, catching fish to cook on an open fire.

There is a loud splash by the boat’s side and Eva gasps.

The torch has slipped from her fingers, an eerie yellow glow falling through the dark water. ‘No! No …’

She wants to reach down, scoop her hands through the sea and save it, but the light flickers as it sinks, and then goes out.

‘I’m sorry! I thought I had it,’ she says, grasping the sides of the boat, leaning right over. ‘I’ve lost it. I can’t see anything now. I’m sorry … I …’

‘No matter,’ the fisherman says gently.

She hugs her arms tight to her chest. Her lips sting with the wind chill as she stares out into the endless darkness. ‘How cold is it?’ she asks quietly. ‘The sea?’

He sucks in his breath. ‘I’d say it’s about eight or nine degrees at the moment.’

‘How long could someone survive in it for?’

‘Hard to say.’ He pauses. ‘But I’d think a couple of hours at best.’

There’s silence save for the creak of the boat and the slap of waves against the hull.

He’s dead, she thinks. My husband is dead.

We only had two years together, Eva. It wasn’t long enough.

There were still things I was only just beginning to discover about you; that your toes wriggle when you’re nervous; that your standards for cleanliness are bordering on slovenly; that smell is your strongest sense and you sniff everything you buy – books, a new dress, the cellophane wrap of a DVD.

I only recently found the ticklish spot behind your knees that makes you crumple to the ground with gulps of laughter. And I love that my friends think you’re so level-headed and pragmatic – yet you cannot get ready for an evening out without hurtling around the flat performing a circus routine of cleaning your teeth while having a wee, or putting on your make-up in between mouthfuls of dinner.

When we met for the first time and you focused your wide, hazel eyes on me, I felt like I did as a boy – light, hopeful, free.

Like I said, Eva, two years with you wasn’t long enough.

But it was two years more than I deserved.

2

Eva sits on the edge of the bed gazing numbly at the phone in her hand. She’s still in her pyjamas, yet she has the feeling it is nearing evening again. Her mother keeps popping upstairs to encourage her to do things: Take a shower. Get some fresh air. Call Callie. But everything feels so utterly pointless that Eva doesn’t even answer. Instead, she stays in her room waiting for Jackson to walk back in, kiss her on the mouth, and say in his beautiful, lilting accent, Don’t worry, darl. I’m here now.

It’s been four days. The coastguard tells them it is possible his body will wash up further down the coast, towards Lyme Regis or Plymouth, because of the strong north-easterlies. But she’s not ready to think about a body, her husband’s body …

The red woollen hat Jackson had been wearing was recovered. An apologetic policewoman brought it around sealed inside a clear plastic bag. Eva had stared at the condensation forming against the polythene, thinking it looked as if the hat were breathing.

Downstairs she hears the low voices of her mother greeting someone. Her name is spoken and then Jackson’s. She catches the word tragic.

The house has been awash with visitors and Eva finds it odd how similar death can be to birth: the cards propped on windowsills, the bunches of flowers perfuming each room, the food in plastic containers stacked in the fridge. Then the hushed voices, broken sleeps, and the knowledge that life will never be the same again.

She blinks, her focus returning to the phone. She must speak to Dirk, Jackson’s father. She feels guilty that it was the police, rather than she herself, who informed him of what happened. But Eva couldn’t. She just couldn’t find the words.

She glances at the long number written in pen across the back of her hand, then dials. Pressing the phone to her ear, she listens to the foreign ringtone, thinking about the physical distance between them. They are on opposite sides of the earth; there it is morning, here evening; there it is summer, here winter.

She has only spoken to Dirk once and that was before she and Jackson were married. They kept in light contact by writing and she took pleasure in composing those letters on quiet evenings curled up on the sofa. She loved receiving Dirk’s replies, which were written in a spidery hand on airmail stationery and gave her a glimpse of Jackson’s life in Tasmania.

‘Yeah?’ a gruff voice answers.

‘Dirk?’ She clears her throat. ‘It’s Eva. Jackson’s wife.’

There is silence at the other end.

She waits, wondering if it’s a bad connection. She runs her tongue over her teeth. Her mouth feels dry and somehow swollen.

‘Right,’ he says eventually.

‘I … I’ve been wanting to call … but, well.’ She pushes a hand through her matted hair, rubbing her scalp. ‘I know the police have spoken to you.’

‘He drowned. That’s what they told me.’ His voice wavers as he says, ‘Drowned while fishing.’

‘He was swept in by a wave.’ She pauses. ‘The water here – it’s cold. Freezing. A lifeboat came. And a helicopter, too. They searched all day …’

‘Have they found his body?’

‘No. No, not yet. I’m sorry.’

There is silence.

‘They found the hat he was wearing,’ she offers, although she knows this isn’t enough. Nothing – other than Jackson – can be enough.

‘I see,’ he says slowly.

‘I’m sorry. I should’ve called you sooner, not let the police do it, but … I just … I can’t seem to get my head straight.’ She feels tears blocking up her throat. She takes a breath. ‘None of it feels … real.’

Dirk says nothing.

She swallows back her tears and takes a moment to gather herself. Then she says, ‘There’ll need to be a funeral … or memorial service.’ These are words her mother keeps on saying to her. ‘I don’t know when it’ll be yet … after Christmas, I suppose. Maybe you’d like to come over for it?’

‘Right.’ She hears a chair being scraped across a floor, then a clink of glass. She waits a moment.

When Dirk doesn’t say anything, she finds herself filling the silence. ‘I know you don’t like to fly, but if you did want to come you’d be welcome. You could stay at our place … my place,’ she corrects herself. She squeezes the roots of her hair, feeling herself coming undone. Everything she has wanted to say seems to have been tipped out of her brain. ‘Jackson’s brother is welcome. I know things between them were …’ She fumbles for a word, but only comes up with ‘strained’.

‘No, no. I don’t think so. I don’t think it’d work.’

Her throat thickens. She wants Dirk to say he’ll come. She may not know her father-in-law, but they are connected by their shared love of Jackson, their shared loss. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Think about it.’

*

Somehow, time continues to crawl forward. The days pass for Eva in a thick fog of grief. She’ll only remember brief moments from this period: a tray of food untouched outside her door; a dawn walk to the rocks, from which she returns soaked and shivering; a bunch of lilies that drop orange pollen onto her mother’s glass table, which Eva smears with a fingertip.

Now, a month later, she stands in her dressing gown in front of the full-length mirror. In half an hour a car is arriving to take her to her husband’s memorial service. She is 29 and a widow.

‘Widow,’ she says to the mirror, trying out the word. ‘I’m a widow.’

Leaning close to her reflection, she sees how drawn she’s become. The skin around her nose and the corners of her mouth is pink and cracked. She notices the new crease between her eyebrows and presses her fingertips against it, trying to smooth away the frown that seems to have settled there.

Footsteps sound up the wooden stairway, accompanied by the jangle of a bracelet sliding along the banister. Then there is a bright knock at the door and Callie, her best friend, sweeps in, filling the room with her smile.

She lays a dress on the bed, and then she crosses the room to Eva and wraps her arms around her from behind. A head taller, Callie lowers her chin to rest on Eva’s shoulder, so both their faces are visible in the mirror.

In a low voice she says, ‘This is going to be a hard day. But you will get through it. And you will get through the other hard days that follow. And then there will be some days when it’s not so hard. Okay?’

Eva nods.

Callie fetches the dress and holds it up for Eva. ‘I got it from that shop you like near Spitalfields. What do you think? If it’s not right, I’ve got two backups in the car.’

Eva undoes her dressing gown and steps into the heavy black material, which tapers in at her waist. She pulls the zip up her side and then faces herself in the mirror. The dress fits as if it’s been made for her.

Callie smiles. ‘You know what Jackson would’ve said, don’t you?’

Eva nods. Look at you, darl. Just look at you! She closes her eyes, briefly losing herself to the memory of his voice and the image of him taking her hand and turning her once on the spot, making a low whistle as she spun.

Callie glances at her silver wristwatch and says, ‘The car will be arriving in twenty minutes. When we get to the church, you’re just going to walk straight in with your mother. I spoke to the priest about the music. That was fine to change tracks.’

‘Thank you.’

Callie squeezes her hand. ‘You okay?’

Eva tries for a smile but it doesn’t come. Her head throbs at the temples and she feels raw inside. ‘It feels … too soon.’

‘What do you mean?’ Callie asks softly.

Eva bites down on her bottom lip. ‘Four weeks. Is it long enough to wait?’

‘Wait for what?’

She swallows. On the morning of your husband’s memorial service you do not say, I am still waiting for him to come back. So instead she says, ‘It’s just … I can’t picture it, Cal. I can’t imagine my life without Jackson in it.’

*

In Tasmania, Saul unclips his seat belt and leans forward, his thick hands locked together on the steering wheel of his truck. He gazes through the windscreen at the view from the top of Mount Wellington. On a clear day it feels as if you can see the whole of Tasmania from up here, but this afternoon the vista is obscured by the gathering clouds.

Beside him, his father shifts in the passenger seat as he slips a silver flask from his suit pocket. His hands tremble as he unscrews the lid. Whisky fumes seep into the truck.

‘One for courage,’ Dirk says.

Saul looks away, watching instead as the mourners arrive in their dark suits. Some of them are friends of Jackson’s that Saul hasn’t seen in years – from school, or the boatyard – but most are people Saul’s never even met.

Dirk tucks the flask back in his pocket. He sniffs hard, then says, ‘Ready?’

Saul slips the key from the ignition and climbs out of the truck. Sharp mountain air fills his lungs, and his borrowed suit jacket flaps in the breeze. He does up his top button, then bends to look in the dust-covered wing mirror as he straightens his tie.

When he’s done, they walk reluctantly towards the group of mourners. Beside him, Dirk says, ‘No father should have to outlive his son.’ He gives a terse shake of his head, adding, ‘England! He should never’ve bloody gone there!’

‘Will there be a service or anything over there?’

‘Yeah. They’re having a memorial, too.’

‘Who’s arranged it?’

‘His wife—’

Saul stops. He turns to look at his father, who has frozen on the spot, his mouth hanging open. ‘What did you just say?’

Dirk screws up his eyes, then rubs a thick hand across his face.

‘Dad?’

Dirk exhales hard. When he opens his eyes, he looks directly at Saul. ‘You and me, son, we’re gonna need to have a talk.’

3

Eva slots the key into the door lock, then hesitates. She hasn’t been back to their flat since Jackson’s death. She’s been staying with her mother, as she wanted to get through Christmas and then the memorial service before she could even think of returning. Perhaps it was a mistake to refuse her mother’s offer of coming to the flat with her. She’d insisted on doing it alone, but now the idea of going inside fills her with dread.

She takes a deep breath, then pushes open the door, putting the weight of her shoulder behind it to force it over the mound of post on top of the doormat. With her foot, she moves aside junk mail, Christmas cards and bills, and squeezes into the hallway. The air smells musty and stale, and there’s an undertone of leather from Jackson’s coat that hangs on a hook behind the door.

She puts down her bag and moves silently along the hall, peering into each room. She has the strangest sensation that if she moves slowly enough, she may catch Jackson lounging on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table, or see his long back in the shower as water streams down his body.

But, of course, the flat is empty. A deep wave of loneliness storms her. It is so intense and so absolute that it steals the breath from her lungs and the floor seems to lurch beneath her. She leans against the wall for balance, breathing deeply till the sensation passes. She must hold it together. Jackson has gone and she is alone. These are the facts and she needs to get used to them.

After a moment or two, she swallows, lifts her chin, then propels herself towards the kitchen. In a rush of movement, she throws the windows wide open, hearing traffic, voices, the scuffling of a pigeon on the roof. Then she flicks on the central heating and hurries through the flat switching on lamps, radios and the TV. Noise and light and fresh air swirl through the rooms.

Eva keeps her coat on and returns to the kitchen. She will make tea, and then unpack. Kettle. Fill it with water, she tells herself. She curls her fingers around the handle, glancing away from her reflection which is distorted in the curve of aluminium. She carries it over to the sink – and then freezes.

A used tea bag lies there, bloated and dried out, the basin stained rust brown around it. It’s Jackson’s. He had the infuriating habit of dropping his tea bags in the sink, not the bin. Seeing it is such a tiny, inconsequential detail of his life, but somehow the mundaneness of it is what chokes her.

She stands there staring with the kettle poised in her hand, thinking that right now she would give anything to watch Jackson walk into this kitchen, make a cup of tea, and drop the tea bag into the sink with a wet thud.

Eva puts the kettle back and drifts into the bedroom, where the radio is blasting out a tinny pop tune. The electronic beat is like an itch in her head and she snaps it off. She stares at their unmade double bed, biting on her lip as memories filled with warmth and comfort float towards her. Before she can stop herself, she climbs into the bed in her coat and pulls the covers up to her chin.

Grief is physical, she thinks. It feels like something corrosive is burning through her insides, dissolving layers of herself, leaving her raw. She buries her face in Jackson’s pillow, breathing in the faint musk of his skin through her sobs.

*

Eva must have fallen asleep because, when she opens her eyes, the room is in darkness. Her head throbs and her skin feels clammy and hot. She shakes herself free of her coat and sits up, switching on Jackson’s bedside lamp.

His drawer beneath it is ajar and she pulls it wider, her gaze wandering over bundles of receipts, a pair of broken binoculars, a pack of cards, condoms, a book about Henry VIII that he’d never finished reading, two AA batteries, and some loose change.

She slips out a photo of them that had been taken in Paris, where they’re standing overlooking the Arc de Triomphe. Just after this photo was taken, the rain had come down and they’d run into a café, the floor soaked from dripping coats and shaken umbrellas. They’d dried off eating pastries and drinking coffee, and by the time they’d left, the sun was glaring off rain-slick pavements.

As she leafs through the rest of the items in the drawer, she sees an envelope addressed in her handwriting. She tugs it free and finds it is a letter to Dirk. It was her most recent one about a surprise trip to Wales that Jackson had arranged. She’d thought they were going to see her mother, but he managed to distract her so completely that it was half an hour into the journey before she realized they weren’t heading to Dorset at all. He’d booked them into a cosy B&B in the Brecon Beacons and they’d spent the weekend strolling through damp bracken-lined mountains and making love by the open fire in their room.

At the bottom of the letter she sees that Jackson had added his own message asking if his dad had seen many Wallabies games. Jackson always liked to include a personal note and he sent the letters from the post room at work, but he must’ve forgotten this one.

As she returns it to the drawer her fingers meet a second letter, which she slips out. It is another one of hers to Dirk, the date showing the end of August. She scans the contents, which are innocuous: an account of a summer picnic on Clapham Common; a trip to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream; a photo of them at a gig.

She smoothes both letters out on her lap, an uneasy sensation stirring in her stomach as she wonders why neither was sent. She checks through the drawer again but doesn’t find any more. Logic tells her it must have been a simple oversight, yet she can’t help wondering if there was another reason why Jackson hadn’t sent them.

*

A week later, Eva is sitting in a bar with Callie, a bottle of white wine in an ice bucket between them. Callie pours generously and slides a glass across the wooden table to Eva. ‘Drink.’

Eva obeys, taking a large gulp. She had called Callie in tears after her first shift back at the hospital.

‘What happened?’

‘I … I just couldn’t handle it. I left. Ran out.’

‘It was your first day.’

‘I thought I was ready. I delivered the baby and everything was fine – I was focused. I barely thought about Jackson. But, afterwards …’ She shakes her head.

Eva had lifted the baby from the birthing pool and handed it carefully to its mother, a Polish woman called Anka, who looked worn out. The new father had gazed at his son in wonderment, placing the backs of his fingers gently to the boy’s cheek. Then his eyes lifted to meet his wife’s. There was a moment when the room went still. He had said something in a choked voice, the words floating to his wife whose lower lip trembled as she smiled.

Eva hadn’t needed to speak Polish to understand what he was saying. He was telling his wife that she was incredible, that he was so proud of her, that he loved her deeply. It was this look, the intensely intimate moment between husband and wife that followed the strain and exhaustion of labour, that had always made Eva love what she did.

But today, she had felt paralysed by it. She had stared at the couple – who were only a year or two older than her and Jackson – as she realized with silent horror that she would never know what it would be to hold Jackson’s baby in her arms, or to have him look at her in that way, to be loved like this man loved the mother of his child.

Because her husband was dead.

The thought had slammed into her, and suddenly she was backing away and asking the support worker to call another midwife. Then she was sprinting down the corridor, bursting into the nurses’ toilets, and leaning over the sink just in time for bile and tears to be caught in the ceramic basin.

‘I couldn’t stand it,’ she tells Callie. ‘I literally could not stand seeing the husband and wife together. In love. I envied them so much I couldn’t breathe.’

‘That’s how I feel at weddings.’

Eva manages a laugh.

‘I was starting to forget what your laugh sounded like.’

Eva tilts her head to one side. ‘You’re dressed up. You were out, weren’t you?’

‘Only with David,’ Callie replies, waving her fingers through the air.

‘I’m so sorry! He was taking you for dinner. You were going to talk about the Melbourne contract. You told me yesterday. My head’s all over the place.’

‘You did me a favour. He’d booked a table at Vernadors,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘I ate there before Christmas and was in bed for two days. Never touch their mussels.’

‘I remember.’

‘Course – Jackson was there too that night! I bumped into him having a business dinner. God, hardly the way to hook a new client. Give them food poisoning.’

‘He was fine.’

‘Well, yes, but he did grow up eating stuff he’d scraped off rocks.’ Callie takes a drink, then tops up both their glasses. ‘So, tell me exactly where you’re at.’

‘It was a rough day, that’s all.’

‘Cut the crap. This is me. I want to know everything, all the gory, grisly details of how catastrophically bad your life is right now. Spill.’

Eva takes a deep breath. ‘I … I just … I don’t even know where to start.’ She lifts her hands to her head, squeezing her hair at the roots. ‘I can’t bear it. I literally can’t bear it. I miss him so much. I think of him constantly. I mean constantly. I have full-blown conversations with him in my head. Some days it hurts so much, I don’t think I can do it. I feel like I’m just dragging myself forward, when all I want is to close my eyes and sleep. I want to wake up sometime in the future when it is easier, less painful than this.’

Eva swallows and continues. ‘And Mum … she’s calling me continually to ask if I’m okay, telling me I can move back home.’ She shakes her head sharply. ‘And I’m not okay. Of course I’m not! But moving in with her isn’t what I want. I’ll suffocate there. I can’t go back.’ She bites down on her bottom lip and then says, ‘I thought we’d have our whole lives together. And now … he’s dead. I’ll never get to see him again, or hold him, or hear his laugh … or do any of the things we’d planned. And it feels so … unfair. Why Jackson? Why did it have to be him? We were married for less than a year. We had everything ahead of us – and he died!’ She slams her palm down on the table, making their wineglasses tremble. ‘I’m furious with him for being so fucking stupid, for being out there on those rocks in the middle of winter, fishing! And I’m furious with Mum for asking us to come and stay that weekend. But mostly … mostly I’m furious with myself – because if I’d got out of bed a few minutes earlier, or not bothered making a Thermos, then I’d have been there in time. I’d have told him to get off the rocks. And then … he’d still be here.’

Tears roll down Eva’s cheeks and Callie reaches across the table and squeezes both her hands.

‘I hate this, Cal. I hate feeling like this. I’m so lonely without him. The flat … it’s awful. It’s so quiet. It’s like the life has been sucked out. I’m living in a vacuum.’ Eva slides one of her hands free from Callie’s and wipes her face. ‘At night it’s just me in there and our bedroom … it feels so empty … so silent. I sleep with the fucking radio on and a hot-water bottle wrapped in Jackson’s clothes! It’s pathetic!’

Eva reaches for her wine and takes a long gulp, draining half of it. ‘I wanted – needed – to go back to work, to keep myself busy, help me stay sane. But today, God, it was awful. That poor couple.’ She shakes her head again. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready to be back.’

The lights in the bar are dimmed and the music is turned up as the barman sets the ambience for the evening ahead. ‘You’re an incredible midwife,’ Callie says, leaning in closer to be heard. ‘You could open a florist’s with all the bouquets new mothers send. But maybe it is too soon. Give yourself some time.’

‘What would I do with it? I feel so … separated from him. I know that sounds ridiculous, because of course I feel separated – he’s dead! It’s just, there’s no one I can share this with. I’m so grateful to have you to talk to, but what I mean is, there’s no one here that knew him, really knew Jackson like I did. His friends are great and adored him, and Mum liked Jackson, but she’s grieving for me, not him. I feel like I need to be around people that really loved him, like I did.’

‘You mean his family?’

She nods. ‘His dad still hasn’t called back. I keep trying him – but he never picks up.’

‘Maybe it’s too hard for him right now.’

Eva finishes her wine. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she says, running a finger over the stem of her glass, ‘what if I went out there?’

‘Tasmania?’

She nods. ‘I want to meet Dirk. Meet Jackson’s old friends. See where he grew up. We were planning to go together in the autumn. And it’s not far from Melbourne …’

‘So you could come and visit me!’ Callie finishes, a smile spreading over her face.

Callie was due to start a six-month contract there in February but kept on saying that she would cancel it if Eva wanted her to stay in London.

‘I could even meet you in Tasmania,’ Callie says, ‘and then we could fly on to Melbourne together. The company’s paying for my flat. It’s a two-bed place, so you would have your own room.’

‘What about David?’

‘He doesn’t do long haul. Tells me it plays havoc with his sleep patterns. That’s what happens when you screw a 45-year-old.’

Eva tries for a smile, but feels the sadness that lingers around her mouth and in the dark hollows beneath her eyes.

‘Seriously, Eva, why not take a sabbatical? Give yourself some time.’

She nods. ‘I’ve been thinking about it.’

‘Have you spoken to your mum about this?’

Eva shakes her head. ‘She won’t like it.’ Her mother’s life had been punctured by sadness; she’d lost her second daughter at birth and then, twelve years later, lost her husband to a stroke. All her love – and all her fears – were poured into Eva.

‘You’ve got to do what feels right for you, not what your mum wants.’ Callie pauses. ‘What would Jackson have said?’

Without hesitating Eva says, ‘Go. He’d have told me to go.’

We talked about taking a trip out to Tasmania. You wanted to meet my family, go for drinks with my friends you’d heard stories about, see the shack on Wattleboon where I’d spent my summers.

People often think of Tassie as Australia’s poorer brother because the climate is cooler and the cities are smaller and less sophisticated. Its brutal history as Van Diemen’s Land is never forgotten. Yet I’ve always loved it for exactly those reasons – it’s wild and rugged, with a shadowy past, and enough raw wilderness to lose yourself in.

I’d love to have hiked with you in the eerie beauty of Cradle Mountain, where moss drips from the trees, or shown you the wombats that amble on the tracks around Wineglass Bay. We could have been tourists together and taken a boat out along the east coast to see the whales cruising by, or eaten soggy fries and gravy from Buggy’s Takeout in Hobart.

You used to ask me so many questions about Tasmania, as if by trying to understand the place you could piece me together. But there was a lot I didn’t tell you about my life there – whole chunks of time that I left out, people’s names I never mentioned, things I wanted to forget.

I’d’ve liked to have shown you every edge of Tasmania because I know you’d have fallen in love with that little island in the sea. But the truth is, Eva, I never planned to take you there. How could I?

4

There is a bus ride to Gatwick, a long wait in the overcrowded fug of the departures lounge, a plane seat with a dusty headrest, a bleary-eyed refuelling stop in Dubai, a further twelve hours in the same cramped seat, a frantic run to the domestic terminal in Melbourne, and then a smaller plane heading finally for Tasmania.

As they descend through broken white clouds, Eva peers through the scratched window of the plane. The Southern Ocean meets the winding Tasmanian coastline that unfurls in a mass of inlets, bays and wind-ridged channels. She sees farmland, forest, tree-lined hills, and only a scattering of houses. What strikes her is the space. Almost a quarter of Tasmania is classified as a national park, an isolated island wilderness, dropped off the coast of mainland Australia.

She feels the symmetry of her journey, which is unfolding in reverse of the flight Jackson made to the UK two years earlier. That’s how they’d met: on the plane, with Eva boarding in Dubai after spending a week there with Callie, who was working on a shoot.

She had a pounding hangover made worse by the depressing thought of returning to Dorset, where she was still living at her mother’s while she tried to save for a place of her own. She barely registered the man in the seat next to hers as she sank down and took out her book. It was only when he introduced himself that she’d turned and looked at him properly. He had pale blue eyes that were clear and cool against his tanned face, and he smiled as he shook her hand, showing a row of strong white teeth.

‘I should warn you,’ he’d said, the drawn-out vowels of his accent warm in her ear. ‘I’ve a low boredom threshold – and I got on this plane in Australia. If you want to request a seat change, now’s your chance.’

She’d felt herself smile then, and when she glanced down, she saw he was still shaking her hand.

Like any traveller, he didn’t want to talk about where he was from, but where he was going. He asked question after question about England and so she’d told him about the hectic pace of the capital and how it sprawls out for miles and miles. She told him that Big Ben isn’t actually the name of the clock tower, but the bell within it, and that parts of the Tower of London are over 900 years old. She told him what she loved about England: the culture, the history, the mixture of cities and agriculture. And what she hated: the pigeons, the weather, the political correctness gone mad.

In return he told her that he was a marine biologist and she was captivated by his stories about working off a dive boat on the Great Barrier Reef, where he led tourists in coral restoration projects, or the three months he spent teaching teenagers to dive at an outdoor experience camp on the east coast of Tasmania.

After the drinks trolley had passed, he poured her a glass of red wine from a miniature bottle, then leant back in his seat and said, ‘So tell me, Eva, what is it you love about being a midwife?’

She liked the question and the way he listened closely as she answered. ‘Everyone assumes it’s the babies – that all midwives love newborns. But for me it’s working with the women. I get to share one of the most intimate and important experiences of their lives. It’s a privilege.’

Jackson had studied her for a long moment and then his gaze trailed to her mouth.

She had felt heat rise in her cheeks. ‘What about you? Why marine biology?’

He’d not answered right away, just sat there, thinking. Then he smiled as he told her, ‘It was a book that made me want to study it.’

Eva had tilted her head, intrigued.

‘Most Saturday afternoons me and my brother would go to a second-hand shop looking for good finds. Sometimes we’d pick up old reels or bike parts. This one Saturday, I bought an old khaki backpack for a dollar. When I got it home, I found there was a book stuffed inside. It was called The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist. It might sound stupid now, but at the time – I was 13 – it felt like that book was meant to find me, as if it had stowed itself away. I wrote my name in it and read it cover to cover. I swear I looked at the sea differently after that.’ He paused. ‘It seemed like a mystery waiting to be explored.’

It was then, that moment sitting beside him in the narrow space of their plane seats, that Eva felt something sway and tip inside of her.

When they got off the plane in London, they were still talking. They went through passport control in different lines, but met again after customs. Eva was staying the night in Callie’s empty flat, so they shared a taxi through London and he stared out of the rain-smeared window, not hiding his wonderment at the grandeur of the city. Before she got out, he asked for her phone number.

He called her the following morning and they spent the next three days in bed together, only leaving to buy croissants and fresh milk. When she finally returned home to Dorset, it was to pack up her things and move to the city with a man she barely knew.

Falling in love took her by surprise with both its strength and its suddenness, so unlike the steady relationships she’d ambled through previously. It was as if she’d slipped into a parallel world, one where only she and Jackson existed. In those first few months they mapped each other’s bodies, created a dialogue punctuated with their own private jokes, filled a past they hadn’t shared with the sheer and vivid pleasure of the present.

Now Eva feels the bump and jar of the plane as the wheels touch tarmac, wind roaring against the wing flaps.

‘Welcome to Tasmania,’ the captain says, and Eva feels her heart clench.

*

It is only mid-morning when Eva arrives at her hotel, so she dumps her luggage, peels off her winter clothes, and steps into a cotton dress. Her legs look pale and dry as she slips on a pair of leather sandals, then leaves to get her bearings in Jackson’s city.

Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, is set on the banks of the Derwent River, with the foreboding presence of Mount Wellington towering behind it. She heads out along the marina, the warmth in the air easing the tension in her muscles. Expensive yachts and tourist boats are moored beside battered fishing vessels, and shadows of fish circle in small shoals, breaking the surface to pick at sodden crusts of bread.

It’s a Saturday, but there’s still none of the rush or frenetic pace of a city. Everyone seems to be milling around in cafés, men wearing trainers or hiking boots, and women casual in flip-flops and shorts. After London, Hobart feels like a village – small, informal, laid-back.

She drifts on towards Salamanca, where a market fills the street. The air swirls with scents of fruit and sugared doughnuts – the faint whiff of the marina hovering in the background. She barely registers the stalls selling olives, vintage handbags, beaded jewellery, antique books, or the shoppers with colourful bags swinging from their hands. All she feels is the empty space at her shoulder where Jackson should be.

She imagines the warmth of his hand around hers as if they were walking together. She’d have persuaded him to pause at the antique jewellery stall so she could sift through old brooches and beautiful pocket watches, and he’d have wanted to buy her the prettiest one with money neither of them had. As they walked together he would’ve whispered a private joke about the man with the handlebar moustache selling cider, and then tugged her forward to introduce her to a friend he’d caught sight of, proudly saying, ‘This is my wife.’

When Eva looks down, she finds the fingers of her left hand are unfurled at her side as if reaching for him. She quickly stuffs her hand in her pocket and hurries from beneath the canopies and out into the open air.

She lets her legs carry her forward, moving through the modest city shopping centre onto tree-lined residential streets, and eventually into a well-maintained park where groups of young people loll on the grass talking and listening to music, cigarette smoke drifting into the air. Two women in tie-dyed skirts stand beside a table stacked with books, where a hand-painted sign reads: FREE BOOKS .

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 feeling queasy, 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 mobile 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 it. 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 200 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 bathwater. 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 hire car on the opposite side of the street from 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 grey 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 whisky 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 towards 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 releases the breath she’s 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 stands 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 weather-beaten 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 – 19 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 towards 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 coastguard 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 near 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 whisky bottle and pours himself a glass. She can smell the pungent vapour 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 whisky bottle and Eva tries to tell him that she’s driving, but already he’s splashed whisky into her glass and is refilling his own. ‘To Jackson!’ he toasts.

Eva takes a small sip. She’s always hated whisky 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 whisky glass on his knee. ‘He can’t have been more than 8 or 9, 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 prised 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 mollusc 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 whisky causes him to muddle his sons’ names and he tells her Saul was always the traveller, 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.

‘Were Saul and Jackson close once?’ 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 whisky 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 whisky.

*

Jackson had told her that his father liked a drink, but he’d never explicitly said Dirk was an alcoholic. But he is; she can see it in the high colour 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 travelled 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 service 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 whisky, 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 got 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?’

He shrugs. ‘I’d never have seen him again. He wouldn’t have come home when he was married. That’s all.’

Tears burn the back of her throat.

When Dirk turns, his expression has softened and she thinks he’s going to apologize. But then he says, ‘Listen, Eva, I can see you loved Jackson. And I’m sorry for what you’re going through. I am. But my boy’s dead. You being out here isn’t going to make that any better. So I reckon it might be best if you go now, don’t you?’

6

A knot of anger is wedged into the pit of Eva’s stomach as she replays Dirk’s words: You two should never’ve got married. She keeps reminding herself it was the whisky talking, or perhaps the lash of his grief, but the remark has left her unsettled.

She is even more determined now to try to find Saul. As she leans her elbows on the ferry railing, watching Wattleboon Island come into focus, she wonders how Jackson would have felt about her coming here to meet the brother he hadn’t spoken to in over four years. The few times Jackson mentioned Saul’s name, his expression darkened, as if Saul’s betrayal still had the power to wound him.

The island reveals itself by degrees; first the forested sea cliffs rising up in the distance, then the green curve of the hills. Jackson had talked about his summers spent here with a sense of nostalgia, as if the island were both treasured yet also lost to him – a place he could never get back to.

From her pocket she takes out the free visitors’ map she’d picked up at the ferry building and unfolds it, the edges flitting in the breeze. The map shows one road running the fifty-kilometre length of the island, and stemming from it are veins of unsealed tracks and four-wheel-drive routes leading to secluded inlets and bays. Looking at the key, she sees there is a pub, two cafés, a doctor’s office, a general store and a community hall. Most of the symbols denote boat launches, surf spots, camping areas and hiking trails.

She locates Shoal Bay in the south-east corner of the island. While she doesn’t know Saul’s address, with a population of only 500 permanent residents, someone must know which house is his.

The crossing only takes twenty-five minutes, but by the time the ferry docks, Eva feels as if she’s arriving at the edge of the world. The small throng of passengers return to their cars. Engines are started and cars nose forward as the boat ramp is lowered.

Just beyond the dock a hand-painted sign reads: PLEASE REMOVE WATCHES AND MOBILE PHONE BATTERIES. YOU’RE ON WATTLEBOON NOW!

The road is quiet – just the occasional motorhome or truck passes in the other direction, surfboards and bikes strapped to roofs. She drives with the windows down, absorbing the smell of sun-warmed grass and the salt breeze drifting in. She sees two hikers standing before a shallow lagoon with binoculars hanging around their necks, a flock of black swans drifting beyond them.

When she gets to the general store, Eva pulls in. It’s a simple building with a cork bulletin board tacked to an exterior wall, which is filled with handwritten signs about boat trailers for sale, holiday cottages to rent, and two Kelpie pups that need a home.

The door is propped open by a faded ice-cream sign, and inside, a stocky woman with a wedge of yellow hair plants her hands on the counter and smiles. ‘G’day. How’s it goin’?’

‘I was wondering if you could help. I’m looking for Saul Bowe’s place on Shoal Bay.’

‘Well, that’s easy,’ she says, smiling. ‘It’s the only house in the bay. You keep on this road heading south for about five minutes. You’ll pass a berry farm on your right and you wanna take the track straight after that. Leads you right down to the bay.’

‘That’s great –’

‘But he won’t be there now. Saw him launching the boat ’bout couple of hours ago.’ The woman comes around from behind the counter and crosses to the open shop door, from which she peers out. ‘His truck’s still there,’ she says, nodding towards a group of vehicles parked beside a long wooden jetty. ‘Might wanna wait for him there. Tide’s just turned, so he’ll be in soon.’ The woman glances sideways at Eva. ‘Known Saul long, have ya?’

Eva guesses that this is a shop where gossip is traded along with the groceries. ‘I knew his brother.’

‘Brother?’ the woman repeats, eyebrows lifting. ‘Well, I’ll be damned. Never even knew Saul had one.’

*

The jetty is built on thick wooden stilts, and a few fishing boats are moored to its side. She sits in the car for several minutes, but even with the windows down, it’s too hot to stay in for long.

Climbing out, she crosses the car park onto a white sand beach that is peppered with dried shreds of seaweed. The afternoon is clear and still, the smell of fish hanging in the warm air. She slips off her flip-flops and wades into the water. It’s deliciously cool around her ankles and she stays there, lolling in the shallows for some time.

Looking down at the sea around her feet, she tries not to think about the body washed up in Plymouth that is now lying in an autopsy lab waiting to be identified.

Now and then boats drift up to the jetty and people get out to unload their catch, but none of the men seem young enough to be Saul.

She remembers lying beside Jackson one morning, tracing the weave of his chest hair with a fingertip as she’d asked, ‘Tell me about your brother.’

She’d caught the change in rhythm of Jackson’s breathing as he’d answered, ‘Nothing to tell.’

His eyes had darkened and he’d rolled away from her, climbing from the bed.

‘Jackson?’

He’d paused, his posture rigid. When he spoke there was a grave edge to his tone. ‘You can’t trust him. He’s a liar. That’s all you need to know.’

There were other conversations about Saul, including one where she finally managed to get him to tell her why they’d not spoken a word for four years. But after a time, she stopped mentioning Saul’s name, hating to see the way Jackson’s face clouded with hurt.

Feeling light headed from either the heat or the lingering residue of jet lag, Eva pads through the warm sand in search of shade. Her phone rings in her pocket and she slips it out, squinting at the screen in the sunlight. Seeing her mother’s name, Eva freezes. She’ll be calling with news of Jackson’s body.

She stands there, blinking at the phone, heart racing. Eva’s not sure that she wants this news, wants to live with the absolute finality of it.

Finally she answers, pressing the phone close to her ear. ‘Is it him?’

She hears her mother draw a breath. ‘Sorry, sweetheart. It wasn’t Jackson. It’s not his body.’

She blinks.

Her mother says something about the results coming in last night and that she only just saw the light flashing on the answering machine when she woke.

Eva remains silent, trying to absorb what she’s being told.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything before we knew for certain. I just didn’t want you hearing about it on the news, or something dreadful like that.’

‘Whose was it?’

‘What?’

‘The body. Whose was it?’

‘Oh. Yes. It was a man from Worthing. A 45-year-old. Married. He jumped from a bridge six weeks ago.’

Eva swallows. She wonders how his wife must feel right now. Would there be some sense of closure now that there was a body to bury? Perhaps that’s how she herself might have felt. Or maybe what Dirk had said was right: Jackson’s body is better left in the sea.

‘Eva? Are you still there?’

The sun beats down on her head and she feels exhausted, buffeted by her emotions. Her mouth is dry and she can’t remember drinking anything today. She moistens her lips, tries to swallow.

‘Sweetheart? Talk to me, please.’

‘I’m here,’ she says weakly, a feeling of nausea rising up through her stomach. She lifts her gaze to try and focus on something. A blue boat is drifting towards the jetty.

She stares at it unblinking. Then a strangled sound escapes her lips.

There is a man on board who looks so much like Jackson that, for a moment, Eva lets herself believe it is him.

*

‘Eva? Eva?’ her mother repeats with rising panic.

But Eva isn’t listening. She is stepping forward, narrowing her gaze.

The way he stands, one hand slung in his pocket, his shoulders loose, is exactly like Jackson. Dark hair curls down over his ears and he wears a grey T-shirt with shorts, and sunglasses that hide his eyes.

Saul, she thinks. It must be.

There is a second man on the boat, bare-chested and wiry, who leaps onto the jetty and jogs along it towards the parked vehicles. He jumps into a truck and reverses the attached boat trailer down the ramp.

‘Eva? Are you still there?’ her mother is saying. ‘Please, Evie, you’re scaring me.’

‘I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.’

Once the boat is dragged from the water, Eva watches Saul push his sunglasses onto his head and shake hands with the other man. Then he hauls a large cool-box from the boat and walks down the beach in her direction. He stops at the fish-gutting station and sets down the box. He can only be 20 feet from her.

She doesn’t move; her legs feel weak and she tries to steady her breathing, which is coming too fast.

From the cool-box he grabs two silver fish by their tails and lays them on the bench. He takes a knife from his pocket and slices through their pale bellies, then scoops out their guts with his fingers. He works through three more fish and a couple of squid. Eva is used to the sight of blood, yet the dispassionate movement of his hands through the guts makes her uncomfortable.

She goes to turn away, but as she does, Saul looks up.

Eva’s lips part in surprise. His eyes are nothing like Jackson’s. They are dark and intense, not the pale blue of Jackson’s irises, which she’d always loved.

‘You’re Saul,’ she finds herself saying. She steps forward. ‘I’m Eva, Jackson’s wife.’

He stares, his dark gaze pinned to her face. She reads no warmth in his expression. Then he bends down and scoops another fish from the cool-box, slaps it on the bench, and continues gutting.

‘You’ve been fishing?’ she asks ludicrously.

‘Yeah.’

‘Catch much?’

‘Enough.’

She can feel herself sweating beneath her dress. She takes a deep breath. ‘I hoped we could talk.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘About Jackson.’

He glances at her through the corners of his eyes. Doesn’t say anything.

‘I’ve come a long way.’

He sighs, putting down the knife. ‘Look, I don’t wanna be rude, but Jackson and I hadn’t spoken in a while.’

‘I know that,’ she says, failing to hide the anger in her voice. ‘I just wanted to meet you. You’re his brother.’

He looks directly at her, but doesn’t speak.

‘I thought you might want to hear about his life in England. Know what he’s been doing since you last saw him.’

‘Then you thought wrong.’

She shakes her head, astounded. The heat of the sun pounds down and her entire body feels too hot. She should leave now, return to the car, and blast out the air conditioning. But she’s too angry to stop herself from saying, ‘He was your brother. And he’s dead. Is this conversation all he’s worth to you?’

She wants him to have to witness the horror of Jackson’s drowning, make him stand on that wind-stormed shoreline as she had, watching the lifeboat turn empty circles in the water, see the helicopter slicing the freezing sky.

When Saul says nothing, tears begin to sting beneath her eyelids. She will not cry in front of this man, so she turns and begins striding away. Her heart is racing and she finds herself struggling to catch her breath. Clouds seem to gather at the corners of her vision and her legs feel unsteady.

She hears a voice and it is so like Jackson’s that she wants to turn and see him on the beach calling to her. But the voice is so far away, and as she swivels to follow it, she finds her body is suddenly light and loose, but she isn’t turning, she’s fainting.

*

Saul sits with his hands spread over his bare knees. Smears of fish blood stain his fingers, and the undersides of his nails are dark with squid ink. He taps the heel of his boot against the linoleum floor as he waits.

The medical centre is sterile and white, and he feels conspicuous in his outdoor gear. He is sure the smell of fish clings to him. He takes his sunglasses from his head, cleans the salt from the lenses with the corner of his T-shirt, and then holds them on his lap, worrying the arms open and shut.

There is a poster on the wall ahead about alcoholism with a picture of a liver made to look like a ticking bomb. He shifts in the plastic seat, angling himself to face the clock.

Eva’s been in with the doctor for twenty-five minutes. He thinks about the fish he’s left on the gutting station in the early-evening sun. Gulls would’ve had them by now. There’s more in the cool-box and he can’t remember if he left the lid off. If he has, it won’t be long till they’re ruined. He hates to waste fish. He wishes the doctor would hurry the hell up.

He tries to hold onto his anger at the interruption to his day, but his thoughts keep getting back to Eva: the way she lifted her chin when she spoke to him, the clipped English accent, the flare of her nostrils before she strode away with her arms swinging at her sides. And then she had faltered. He saw her hand lifting as if searching for something to grab onto.

He had just stood there, watching as she fainted.

He feels bad about that. Bad for upsetting her. But what else could he say? He doesn’t want her here. Doesn’t want to be involved. Saul is barely holding himself together. Now she’s here wearing her heartbreak on her sleeve and he doesn’t know what to do with it.

The door opens and suddenly Eva is walking out. She looks so small, a fleck of a woman with her pixie-short hair and wide hazel eyes. She goes straight to the desk and pays.

He follows her outside. In her silence he asks, ‘So, what did the doc say?’

Immediately he regrets the casualness of the question.

Eva’s face is pale and her arms hang loose at her sides. She looks shell-shocked.

Her voice is a whisper. ‘I’m pregnant.’

7

She is ten weeks pregnant. Ten weeks a widow.

Her mind spins back through all the clues she had missed: the nausea she’d thought was a reaction to grief; the exhaustion she’d attributed to jet lag; the missed periods she hadn’t even registered in the blur of her loss. She thinks of the evening before Jackson’s death, when he’d turned to her in the narrow bed of her childhood room. He’d pressed his body against the curve of hers and they’d made love with a quiet intensity.

Eva feels the divots and juts of the road jarring through her spine as Saul drives her back to her car. Neither of them speaks. She grips the sides of the truck seat, careful not to put her hands anywhere near her stomach.

Saul cuts the engine.

She looks up, surprised to see they are back at the jetty already. The sun is sinking towards the sea, the heat fallen from the day.

‘I’m a midwife,’ she says quietly. ‘I didn’t even know I was pregnant and I’m a midwife.’

Saul doesn’t say anything.

Her hand moves to her forehead as she says, ‘I … I just can’t believe it.’

‘It’ll all work out,’ Saul says, and she hears the uncertainty in his voice.

They do not know each other, yet he is the only person apart from the doctor who knows she is pregnant.

After a moment, Saul asks, ‘Where are you staying?’

‘I’ll find a hotel.’

‘On Wattleboon? There aren’t any.’

‘Then I’ll go back to the mainland.’

He glances at the clock on the dashboard and sighs. ‘Last boat ran quarter of an hour ago.’

She’s unable to think about this problem; the one inside her is absorbing all her thought.

He grabs his mobile phone from the dashboard and climbs out of the truck, swinging the door shut. She watches through the windscreen as he calls someone, pacing up and down as he speaks into the phone.

Eva doesn’t move. She’s remembering the night she and Jackson spent at a B&B in Wales. They’d been showering, steam curling from their wet bodies. Jackson had run the bar of soap over Eva’s middle, telling her how much he wanted to have children with her. Two, he’d said. Two girls.

There is a strange, incredible irony that, as Jackson was being dragged down towards his death by freezing waves, a new life was being made inside her.

She muses on this idea until the truck door opens and Saul says, ‘You’ve got a place to stay. There’s a shack down my way you can have tonight. The owner’s outta town. We’ll get your car in the morning.’

‘Right.’ She doesn’t know if this is what she wants, but she doesn’t have any other option.

She fetches her bag from the hire car while Saul strides down the beach to collect the cool-box he’d left out.

The truck shifts as he clanks it in the back. Then he climbs in and guns the engine.

*

Saul knocks the truck into a lower gear as he turns onto the track leading to the bay. He sees Eva grab hold of the handhold as they bounce along, evening sun slanting through the thick branches of the gums. He’s supposed to be up at Duneback Point meeting a couple of friends for a barbecue. Saul was bringing the fish. He’ll have to call them, tell them he’s not going to make it.

‘This is it,’ he says, yanking up the handbrake at the track’s end. He climbs out and leads the way through a clearing in the trees onto the beach.

The shack is nestled into the sand, a stone’s throw from the water. It’s been here since he was a boy and he tries not to think about who used to live here. The current owner, Joe, did a bit of work on it a couple of years ago after a big winter gale half buried the place in sand. Joe dug it out, replaced the windows, and made a deck at the front that’s perfect for sinking a few beers on a summer’s evening.

He climbs onto the deck and hooks the key out from under a cluster of pebbles. He unlocks the place and walks in, the smell of mildew and damp salt hitting him. He pulls up the blinds and cranks open both windows to let the breeze in. He hopes Eva isn’t too prissy as the shack isn’t in the sharpest condition. But when he glances around, he sees she’s just standing on the deck, staring out to sea.

He pulls out some of the junk cluttering the living area: canvas chairs, a grill, a fraying windbreak, and puts it all on the deck to make some space. ‘It’s basic,’ he tells her, ‘but there’s a bed in the back room and the sofa folds into a bed, too. There’s a shower – an outdoor one – but the water runs hot. I’m just gonna check the gas is on.’

He goes around the back to the gas locker and is pleased to find it is all connected. He checks the shower, too, and finds a big huntsman spider sitting in the shower tray along with a collection of leaves and sand. ‘Sorry, mate,’ Saul says as he scoops up the spider and chucks it onto the beach.

Back in the shack, he runs the tap and the water tank seems to be working just fine. He offers to bring some food from his place, but Eva says she’ll be okay, and he gets the impression that she just wants to be on her own.

‘I’ll come back in the morning. Run you to your car.’

‘Thanks.’

‘If you need anything, my place is just up there,’ he says, pointing to the other end of the bay.

He says goodbye and climbs down from the deck, relieved to be on his way. Then he remembers he hasn’t checked whether there was any bedding. When he turns back, he sees Eva has already sunk down onto the sofa, her head cradled in her hands.

When Dirk had told Saul what he knew on the bleak afternoon of Jackson’s memorial service, Saul had slumped back in his seat, stunned. He’d said right then that he didn’t want anything to do with it, didn’t even want to meet Eva.

Yet here she is.

He sees her shoulders begin to shake as the tears come. He takes a step towards the shack, then hesitates. Something tells him it’s cleaner not to get involved. So Saul ducks his head and walks on.

*

Later that evening Eva manages to fall asleep, but she wakes hours later gasping into the pitch black. Disorientated, she struggles free of the covers, her skin damp with sweat. She flails for a light switch, but her wrist bone connects with something hard and the crash of broken glass fills her ears.

Finally she finds the light. A glass has smashed, water pooling over wooden floorboards. She can’t place the room she’s in. Her gaze darts around, then halts on a large driftwood mirror at the end of the bed. The image reflected back is of a woman with ghostly white skin, her eyes sunken in shadow, her face gaunt.

Then Eva remembers: she’s in Tasmania.

Jackson is dead.

She is carrying his child.

She leans against the bedroom door, feeling the coolness of the wood through her T-shirt. Her head bows into her hands and she closes her eyes, battling against tears.

The quiet in the shack rolls over her, only the low murmuring of the bay audible. Somehow the near silence feels wrong, smothering. Her jaw tightens as she strains to catch some sound. Anything.

Panic spikes over her skin as she realizes what it is she’s listening for: Jackson’s breathing.

She is expecting to hear the soft draw of air in and out of his lungs, which was the rhythm she fell asleep to every night. The absence of it fills her with a crushing loneliness. She wraps her arms tightly around herself, feeling the rapid thud of her own heartbeat. But there’s no comfort in it, so she crosses the room and digs in her suitcase, pulling out a red-checked shirt.

It was Jackson’s favourite, the one he’d change into when he got home from work, pushing the sleeves up and leaving the collar wide open. It was a shirt so loved that he didn’t mind that it was missing two buttons or that the collar was starting to fray.

She pulls it on now, her fingers drawing the fabric tight to her body, and picks up her phone.

She is contemplating calling her mother. She’d like to hear her familiar voice right now; it’d be mid-morning in England and her mother would be at home, perhaps ironing with the radio on, or putting something in the slow cooker for dinner. But then Eva pictures herself saying, I’m pregnant – and realizes she’s not ready to make that call. Not yet.

She fetches a blanket and walks out onto the deck. The air is cool, scented with salt and a faint tang of wood. There are no lights apart from the stars, and the darkness is unsettling. Looking towards the edge of the bay where Saul’s house stands, she feels a thread of unease snake through her. He is the only one who knows she is here, a man Jackson told her he couldn’t trust. She wishes she hadn’t left her car at the jetty; she would feel safer knowing that she could leave.

She settles into a canvas chair on the deck, the seat damp with dew. The sound of her mobile phone suddenly ringing makes her jump, the screen flashing like a siren in the darkness.

Pressing the phone to her ear, she answers. ‘Hello?’

There is the sound of a connection at the other end, a distant line. But no voice.

‘Hello? Eva speaking.’

She waits, hearing only the bay murmuring beyond her.

‘Hello?’ she repeats. ‘Sorry, I can’t hear anything. Hello?’

Silence.

Then there is a faint noise and she is almost certain that it’s the sound of someone drawing a breath.

A moment later, the line goes dead.

Eva stares at the phone in her hand. The display shows that it was an international call, but there’s no number. She waits, hoping the caller will ring back. She is desperate to hear a familiar voice from home, someone to remind her that she’s not alone.

But the caller doesn’t phone again. Eva draws her knees to her chest, and pulls the long sleeves of Jackson’s checked shirt down over her hands. She buries her face into the open collar and breathes in deeply, trying to draw his scent from the fabric.

But there is nothing.

*

Hazy morning sunlight teases Eva awake and she opens her eyes to the shimmer of the bay. Her clothes feel damp and her neck aches. She rolls her head from side to side to loosen the muscles in her shoulders. The blanket has slipped to the ground and she sees her hands are resting on her abdomen.

She removes them in a flash and holds onto the sides of the chair. She sits like this for a moment, looking as if she is bracing herself.

Then very slowly she draws her hands back to her stomach, sliding them beneath her shirt. Her fingertips move in a slow circle across the warm skin of her lower belly. It is faint, but it is there: the swell of a baby.

Jackson’s baby.

She realizes that a part of Jackson is still here, still living. He has left a piece of himself behind for Eva to nurture. She feels a surge of love for him that enfolds her like an embrace. The corners of her lips lift into a quiet smile as she imagines Jackson watching her as she sits here looking out over the bay, their baby growing in her stomach.

She stays on the deck with her hands on her stomach for some time, letting her thoughts settle around the idea of their child. Eventually she goes into the shack, changes into a pair of shorts and a cardigan, and packs up her bag. She makes a cup of instant coffee and sits on the edge of the deck to drink it, wondering when Saul will come for her. Looking towards the far end of the bay, she can just make out his house. Tall trees clamber up a rocky hill and at the top there is the slant of a roof.

Her gaze sweeps away over the bay, which is glistening beneath a rising sun. There’s an outcrop of dark rocks at the edge of the water, and beyond them the contours of Tasmania are mauve shadows in the distance.

At the edge of her vision she notices someone down by the shore. She shades a hand in front of her eyes and sees Saul at the water’s edge, slipping on a pair of fins. He moves into the shallows and seems to melt into the water, kicking with powerful strokes.

She watches him swim until he’s right out in the middle of the bay. There he stops and floats on the surface, arms outstretched at his sides.

After a minute or two he makes a smooth dive and the sea settles around him as if he had never been there.

Eva waits.

Time passes slowly.

She knows he will come back up, yet she feels her heart quicken.

Twenty seconds, now. Thirty, perhaps?

She becomes aware of her pulse ticking in her throat and the cold Atlantic sea dripping into her thoughts. The flash of an orange lifeboat. The roar of a helicopter in the sky.

Her mouth turns dry as she waits, her gaze pinned to the point at which he dived down. He has to come up. She knows he must. Yet her heart is drilling against the cage of her ribs.

Without thinking, she is suddenly jumping from the deck and jogging towards the water. With each step, she is back on that Dorset beach in December, gusts of sand sheeting along the beach, the wild, grey seascape empty of Jackson.

Eva stops at the shoreline, panting. The sun glances off the water, making her squint as she scans the bay for Saul. But it is mirror flat; there is not a ripple.

Sweat prickles underarm. Could she swim out far enough to reach him? Would it be better to call for help? Would anyone even hear?

More images flood through her mind: a policeman speaking into a radio; a crowd of people huddled together, waiting; a lifeboat making a search pattern in the raging sea.

Then suddenly there’s movement out in the middle of the bay. Saul breaks through the surface. She imagines the water pouring from his face as he gasps for air.

She steps back, the tension in her muscles sending tremors through her body and making her knees shake. She waits for the tide of relief to fill her, but it never comes. Because all Eva is thinking is: It’s not Jackson.

*

When Saul wades in, he finds Eva standing on the shore, her expression taut. He puts down his mask and fins and wipes the salt water from his face. ‘Everything okay?’

She nods quickly. She takes a breath, then asks, ‘Good dive?’

‘Like glass out there.’

She glances over the length of the bay. ‘It’s quiet here.’

‘Yeah, every so often you get the odd fishing boat or kayaker passing. That’s about it.’

Silence follows. A gull soars above, white wings struck with sunlight. They both watch as it glides beyond them, dipping low to the water.

Saul shifts on the spot. ‘The shack all right for you?’

‘Yes. Very comfortable,’ she answers banally.

‘Good.’

‘Thanks for organizing it.’

‘No problem.’

Small talk sets like a cast around the delicate bones of what they’re both afraid to talk about: Jackson.

‘I can run you to your car in a bit?’

She nods. ‘Thank you.’

‘Where’ll you go next?’

‘Hobart, I suppose. Maybe I’ll try and get in touch with some of Jackson’s old friends. I’ll work it out,’ she says with a brave smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Saul thinks about her drifting around Hobart, asking questions about Jackson – and he knows that’s not a good idea. All the tension that his dive had eased now begins to creep back into his body, tightening in his temples and the base of his jaw.

He looks towards the shack, turning an idea through his head. Out here on Wattleboon barely anyone will remember Jackson, as he hasn’t been on the island since he was 15. But in Hobart there are people who know.

After a moment Saul says, ‘The shack’s free for a while. You’re welcome to stay on, if you want?’

You asked me once why Saul and I fell out, so I told you.

But it was only half of the truth.

I was shaving at the time, and carefully smoothed foam over my jaw as I contemplated my answer. I needed to get it right.

‘It was my birthday,’ I began, feeling my heart start to pound. ‘I had a barbecue down on the bluff near where I was living. I didn’t organize many things like that, but I wanted to that year because there was … this girl. Someone I thought was special. I wanted to introduce her to my friends.’

I drew the razor over my cheek, pulling my lips to the side to keep the skin taut as I told you, ‘Saul turned up late – and drunk – but I was just pleased he’d come. I slung an arm over his shoulder and walked him to the barbecue, where my girlfriend stood. Before he’d even said a word, I knew he was gonna make a play for her. I could see just by the way he was looking at her.’

‘Did he?’ you asked carefully, watching my reflection in the mirror.

I laughed, a dark sound. ‘Couldn’t help himself. He always had to get the girl. I saw him with her later that night. Right in front of me – like he didn’t even care. Like he wanted me to see.’

‘I’m sorry.’

I shrugged, tried to brighten my voice. ‘Maybe it worked out for the best. Saul kept on seeing her, so I ended up getting out of Tas for a few months.’

‘That’s when you went to South America?’

‘Yeah. Travelled up through Chile and Peru, then across to Brazil. I surfed, hiked, got some work building trail paths, bought a motorbike in Brazil. It was a good time – a good thing for me to do.’

‘What about when you came back?’

‘She and Saul were livin’ together up north. I stayed down south. We didn’t see each other.’

‘They’re still together?’

‘No. Not now.’

‘And you can’t forgive him?’

I put the razor down and clenched the edge of the sink, lowered my head. ‘He’s a liar. I can’t trust him.’

You crossed the bathroom and placed the flat of your hand in the space between my shoulder blades and ran it in smooth strokes. It was like you were reaching inside me, soothing somewhere that I didn’t know still hurt.

I looked up and our gazes locked in the mirror. ‘Do you think people can change, Eva? Do you think it’s possible?’

I think the intensity of my voice startled you because you dropped your hand and said, ‘Yes. People can change.’

But here’s the thing that terrified me: What if they can’t?

8

Eva drifts through the shack as her mother continues talking. She catches the words scan, due date, trimester – words she associates with work, not her own pregnancy.

She pauses by a photo of her and Jackson she’d brought with her from England. It was taken last summer at a 1920s-themed jazz festival in London. In the picture Eva is wearing a drop-waisted flapper-girl dress and a beaded headband, and Jackson has one hand around her waist, and with his other he’s touching the brow of his black hat, laughing. There’s sun flare behind them and they both look tanned and happy, in love.

Tucking the phone under her ear, Eva takes down the picture. It’s housed in a thin glass frame, and she uses the hem of her dress to clean her fingerprints from the glass. She moves the fabric in slow circles until it is polished clear, and then she sets it back on the shelf.

‘So you’ll be coming home?’ her mother is saying.

‘Home?’ Eva repeats, tuning back in. ‘No. Not yet.’

‘What?’ The pitch of her mother’s voice rises.

‘It hasn’t changed my plans out here.’

‘What about your scan?’

‘They do have hospitals in Australia,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘Anyway, Callie will be out here in a few days.’

Eva doesn’t need her mother to worry about all the details; she just needs to hear someone tell her, This is fantastic news! You’re going to be a wonderful mother, Eva.

‘You’ll worry me to death travelling around out there on your own, pregnant.’ Her mother’s emotional fragility has always meant any problem instantly becomes hers. The pregnancy would become about her anxieties, her involvement, her fears. ‘What about if you have your old room back and I make the spare into a nursery –’

‘Mum,’ she cuts in firmly as she pushes away from the wall and steps out onto the deck. The beach is empty and sunlight shimmers tantalizingly over the bay. She’s been on Wattleboon for three days now and already feels a strangely intimate tie to this island, knowing that Jackson spent his summers here as a boy. He would’ve played on many of these beaches, surfed and dived in the waves, fished from the jetty and from his father’s boat. And now, all these years later, Eva and the baby she carries inside her are also here – walking the same shorelines, seeing the same vistas. It’s as if she can feel Jackson’s footprints still warm under the sand.

She tells her mother, ‘Right now this is where I want to be.’

*

That evening, Eva grabs the bottle of wine she’d bought earlier and sets out along the shore towards Saul’s house. He hasn’t visited her at the shack and has only cast a cursory wave in her direction when he’s been going out diving in the bay. It feels as if he’s purposely keeping his distance.

The smell of seaweed is ripe in the air and crabs scuttle between the tide line and their holes as she passes. At the end of the bay, stone steps cut into a rocky, tree-lined hill. She follows them up into Saul’s garden. Set back in the gum trees is a modest wooden house built on stilts. A wide deck runs along the front and the whole place blends so seamlessly into the surroundings that it could almost pass as a tree house.

She finds Saul gutting fish on an old wooden workbench, beside which is a faded blue kayak. He has his back to her and is wearing a dark T-shirt with canvas shorts, his feet bare. She watches him for a moment, her gaze lingering on the broadness of his neck – the shape so like Jackson’s. Her fingertips twitch as she imagines touching the soft dark hairs at the nape of her husband’s neck, then running them beneath the starched cotton of his shirt collar, where the smell of aftershave always lingered on his skin.

Without realizing, Eva sighs and suddenly Saul’s head snaps up. His hair is mussed around his face, the dark brown sun-lightened in streaks. ‘Eva.’

‘Hi,’ she says, uncertainly. ‘I … I brought this.’ Saul stares at her, then at the bottle of wine in her hands.

‘It’s for you. To say thanks – for the shack.’

‘You didn’t need to,’ he says almost tersely.

Realizing he can’t take the wine because his hands are bloodied from gutting, she draws it awkwardly to her side.

‘Dinner?’ she casts into his silence, nodding towards the fish.

‘Yeah.’ There’s a pause, then, ‘Did you wanna …?’

She hadn’t meant the question as a self-invite and feels her cheeks reddening. Yet at the same time she realizes that she would like to stay – to have a chance to talk. Eventually she says, ‘That’d be great.’

Three lime-green birds burst from a tree behind them. Eva turns, watching their brilliant wings beat at the sky.

‘Swift parrots,’ he says, following her gaze. ‘Arrive every spring. Come over the Bass Strait from the mainland. I think they’re nesting in one of the tree hollows behind the house.’

The birds make a high-pitched piping noise as they disappear into the canopy of another tree at the far side of the garden.

Eva takes in the rest of the surroundings. ‘Lovely place you’ve got out here. This is where you used to come as kids?’

He nods.

‘Where’s the shack?’

‘Used to be right where the house is now.’

‘Oh.’ She remembers Jackson pulling her onto his lap and telling her, ‘Owning a shack is a Tassie thing. They’re bolt-holes, a place to disappear to when you’re craving some space, some wilderness.’ He’d spoken of his plan to one day do up their old shack for his father. ‘Dad loved that place once. Maybe he could love it again.’ Eva had noticed the sadness clouding Jackson’s expression as he’d said that, and realized how deeply he missed his father. She’d threaded her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. ‘What was that for?’ Jackson had asked.

‘Just for being you.’

Saul says, ‘I’m gonna run these guts down to the water. Go in and grab a drink.’

Inside, the house smells new, like freshly sawn wood. The living-cum-dining room has sliding glass doors that lead out onto the deck. In the corner of the room there’s a wood-burning stove and two baskets of kindling and logs. The place is furnished simply with a wide brown sofa, a low coffee table in a grainy wood, and a large bookcase lit by two old fishing lamps.

Photos hang from the walls in glass frames: an underwater shot of sunlight streaming through the sea’s surface; sand dunes so vast and perfect they look like a mountain range under fresh snow; a photo of Jackson wearing a heavy backpack as he stands in front of Machu Picchu.

Saul has a good collection of marine books – The Australian Fisherman, A Biography of Cod, Sea Fishing, A Reflection on Freediving, The Sea Around Us, Knots and Rigs, Shipwrecks of Tasmania – but also a wide range of fiction spanning the classics to modern literature.

Then she sees a name on a book spine that catches her attention: Lynn Bowe. Saul and Jackson’s mother.

She sets down the wine bottle and carefully slides the book free.

Jackson had told her that their mother had been a writer. Apparently she loved coming to Wattleboon because the space helped her think. When the boys were little she’d take them up to a clearing on one of the capes and they’d spend the afternoons reading or drawing while she wrote.

On the inside sleeve there is a black-and-white photo of a graceful woman with long hair swept into a simple chignon. She has the same dark eyes as Saul, large and serious.

Turning the page, Eva reads the dedication: For Dirk. Always.

She tries to place the man she visited with his thinning socks and whisky breath as the beau of this beautiful young woman. She knew from Jackson how devastated Dirk had been by Lynn’s death. She was the head of their family, the sun around which the men orbited.

‘My mother,’ Saul says.

Eva turns, startled.

Saul stands in the doorway, his dark gaze pinned on her. She feels heat rising in her cheeks. ‘She was very beautiful.’

‘Yes,’ Saul agrees. ‘She was.’

She wants to say something more, but then Saul turns and moves into the kitchen.

*

He washes his hands and dries them on a tea towel, then begins roughly chopping red chillies, garlic and a bunch of coriander.

Eva leans against the kitchen counter and offers to help, twice, and the second time Saul tells her she can make a salad just to give her something to do.

He begins stuffing the fish with the chopped herbs and spices, finding it odd having a woman in his house after so long.

Eva asks, ‘Did you catch those today?’

‘Yeah. Aussie salmon. I got out with the spear gun after work. I was lucky – they were just schooling right out front.’ He lays each fish on a large square of tinfoil, thinking of the shoal that had curled above him, their silver tails catching in the sunlight. He’d hovered there, just watching. Some days he didn’t even pull the trigger; he just liked seeing the way they moved through the water, scales glinting. ‘Do you prefer it to line fishing?’ she asks, drawing the knife through the tight red skin of a tomato.

‘Feels like a fairer fight,’ he tells her. ‘You only spear what you can eat, plus there’s no bait involved. If you come back with nothing, well, just means the fish were havin’ a better day than you.’

‘You were diving without a spear gun that first morning I was here.’

He nods. ‘Sometimes I just go out for a freedive. You know, breath-hold diving – no scuba gear.’

‘I’ve seen a TV programme about that. Isn’t it where people are diving down to crazy depths?’

‘Some people are. The record for freediving – and this is without weights or sleds, just literally swimming straight down and then back up on one breath – is one hundred and twenty-one metres.’

‘No? They must have incredible lungs. Do you measure how deep you go?’

He drizzles chilli oil over the fish and squeezes a couple of wedges of lime on top. A nick on his forefinger stings as the lime seeps into it. ‘No, I’m not interested in that side of it. I suppose I like it because there’s no tank involved or gear to mess around with. Plus, you see more. Fish can be put off by the bubbles when you’re breathing off the tank.’

Eva scoops the tomatoes she’s sliced into the salad bowl, then begins chopping the lettuce. ‘What do you see around here?’

‘Wattleboon’s cold-water diving, so it’s different from the tropics. You get rays, tiny handfish, gummy sharks, sea dragons.’

‘Sea dragons?’

‘They’re related to the sea horse family, but the dragons are bigger.’ Saul rinses and dries his hands, then pulls a sourdough loaf from the bread bin and saws hunks from it. ‘Wattleboon is one of the few places in the world where you find them. It’s a good place to freedive.’

‘Jackson said he loved coming out here as a boy.’

There he is. Jackson. Cutting straight back into the centre of Saul’s thoughts like a cool knife.

Saul had been at his father’s house when the news from the police came through. Dirk was watching the television, beer in hand, as he reached for the phone. Saul had felt a shift in the air, as if all the windows had suddenly been closed. He turned and saw his father sitting up rigidly. Dirk’s mouth opened, but he didn’t say a word. He simply held out the phone to Saul, who took it and listened to the distant English voice of a police officer talking about fishing, a wave, an accident. Saul asked where it’d happened, who’d been there, whether a body had been found.

Afterwards he realized that he’d asked more questions in those few minutes than he’d asked about his brother’s life in years.

‘Saul?’ Eva is saying.

He is standing stock-still, the bread knife in his hand.

‘I’m gonna light the barbecue,’ he says quickly. He swaps the knife for the tray of fish, then strides from the room with his eyes lowered.

*

They eat on the deck, watching the dusky pink clouds feather away into night. Saul says very little and Eva picks at the fish, a faint feeling of nausea hovering nearby.

When she’s eaten as much as she can manage, she sets down her knife and fork, then slides her sweater off the back of her chair and pulls it on.

‘We can go inside,’ Saul says.

‘No, it’s nice out.’ She looks up at the emerging stars; there are no clouds tonight and she thinks in another half-hour the night sky will be dazzling. Citronella candles burn at either end of the table, and the air swirls with a lemon scent.

In the quiet she hears the stirring of the bay and the chirp of crickets in the bush. ‘When I met your dad,’ she says, glancing across at Saul, ‘he mentioned he doesn’t come out to Wattleboon any more.’

He nods slowly.

‘Is that … because of your mother?’

Saul leans his elbows on the table and looks out towards the bay. ‘Her ashes were scattered up at the cape. I think he’s always felt guilty about not going there since.’

‘I wish I had Jackson’s ashes,’ Eva says, the admission surprising her.

Saul turns to look at her.

‘It’s just …’ she says, ‘maybe it would help.’ She draws a candle towards her and runs a fingertip around the warm, supple wax close to the wick. ‘A few weeks after Jackson drowned, I walked down to the beach where it happened. It was freezing. There was frost on the sand, but the sun was out and the water seemed peaceful. I remember just standing there, staring at the sea, thinking how impossibly serene it was – yet only weeks before …’ She pauses, swallowing hard. ‘One minute I was standing on the shore, and the next I found myself wading in.’

She feels Saul’s gaze move over her face as she continues.

‘I know it must sound crazy, but I needed to be in the sea to feel what Jackson would’ve felt.’ She’d wanted to feel the water soaking his clothes, the cold turning his muscles to lead, the waves pulling him under.

‘You needed it to feel real.’

She nods, pressing her fingernail into the candle. ‘It’s hard – there not being a body.’ She digs out a warm lump of wax that she rolls between her thumb and forefinger until it hardens. ‘But it’s good to be out here, seeing where Jackson grew up. There are so many things I never asked him – so much I want to find out.’

Two years. That’s all she’d shared of Jackson’s thirty years of life. A fragment. Her hand travels to her stomach and she realizes the need to build a connection with his past is even stronger now.

Inside, a phone rings. Saul looks relieved by the distraction and leaves the deck. She hears him answer, saying, ‘Dad?’

Eva leans back in her chair looking up at the stars, wishing Jackson was with her, wishing she could share the news of their baby with him. Over the past few weeks she’s learnt a lot about loneliness. It isn’t just about remote places or a lack of contact with people – it’s a sensation that something has been carved out of you.

When Saul doesn’t return, she begins clearing the plates from the table, scraping the fish bones back into the foil and then stacking the plates. She carries them into the house – but pauses when she catches her name.

Saul is talking in another room and Eva hovers, listening. ‘She came out here like you said … Yeah, Thursday.’

Saul exhales hard. Then there’s the sound of footsteps pacing back and forth. ‘No. Course I didn’t!’

Eva holds her breath, straining to hear.

The footsteps stop. ‘Just that one time … No, haven’t heard from her since.’

When she hears him finishing up the call, she backs out of the house onto the deck, and returns the plates to the table, pulse racing.

Saul comes outside with his hands dug into his pockets. He shifts his weight as he says, ‘I’ve got a bit of work I need to get done for tomorrow.’

‘Then I suppose I should be going,’ she says curtly.

‘I’ll see you down the steps.’

Before she can tell him that she’s fine on her own, he’s taking a slim flashlight from his pocket and leading the way. He shines the light behind him so that she can place her feet in the beam. ‘Careful,’ he says. ‘Some of the steps are a bit loose.’

They descend in silence, the air growing cooler. When they reach the beach Saul stops to face her. Away from the candlelight, the darkness suddenly feels consuming. She thinks of the strange lie Saul just told his father and a prickle of uncertainty travels over her skin.

Jackson’s voice echoes in her head: You can’t trust him. He’s a liar.

She feels a surge of hurt and confusion over the oddly abrupt ending to the evening. Her teeth clench around the words she wants to say. Yet something pulls her back.

Saul is her – and her child’s – only link to Jackson. She feels the fragility of that connection as if it runs between them like a single fine thread. She needs to hold onto it tightly so it doesn’t slide out of her grasp.

*

Back in the shack, Eva shuts the door firmly and switches on all the lights. She tugs at the cord of the blinds, disturbing a moth that flies straight towards her, its dusty wings brushing at her cheek.

Eva shivers, turning a circle in the room. Alone. I am alone. She tries to keep her breathing level and push away the hollowing sensation of loneliness.

She sucks in a deep breath and crosses the room to the photo of her and Jackson at the jazz festival. She angles it towards the light, longing to be back there with the sun on her skin, hearing the rhythm of the music, feeling Jackson’s arm around her waist.

In the light she can see two marks on the glass either side of the photo. They look to be thumbprints, as if someone has just plucked the photo from the shelf to look at it. Her brow furrows as she remembers polishing the frame this morning, removing every trace of dirt and grease. How can there be thumbprints?

Perhaps she’d made them just now as she’d picked up the picture. Holding the frame, she places her thumbs in the exact spaces where the marks are.

Yet the prints don’t fit; hers are almost half the size.

She brings the frame even closer to the light so that she can be sure. She is almost certain that these are not her thumbprints.

She sets down the photo with a sharp shake of her head. She’s being absurd; they must be hers. No one else has been in the shack.

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