Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
He trots out.
I take a look around the cramped and crooked room. Low ceilings with heavy wooden beams. Stone walls and floor. A thick wool rug, wardrobe and bookcase both full to bursting. The window is small, the sky too glary for me to see anything and after a glance I don’t want to, it makes my head pound.
The kid returns with vodka and I get drunk. It helps with the pain, not with the memories. He’s also brought me a Vegemite-and-cheese sandwich on bread that isn’t entirely defrosted and a cup of tea with long-life milk and about sixteen sugars, by the taste of it. It’s all very unpleasant.
When I’ve finished I lie still, so little energy in my body I can do nothing but watch the shadows move on the walls. Orly carries on chatting about seeds. It takes a long time for night to fall. I wish the minutes away.
“How long have I been in this bed?” I ask the boy at some point.
“We found you last night. You’ve kinda been coming in and out of consciousness. You don’t remember?”
I shake my head. Just a man’s face in the dark. “What’s actually?… what’s happened to me?” There is flickering candlelight and I need a break from the seeds, I need to understand what’s going on under these bandages. I am afraid to look, afraid not to.
“You mean…?” He gestures to my body. “You had hypothermia, that was the main thing. It was crazy, you were hardly breathing. And you got scraped up pretty bad. There’s a bunch of rocks offshore, the waves dragged you over them to the beach. You’re lucky, though. If the Drift current had got you, you’d be dead, no questions asked, dead.”
“No questions asked, huh.”
“The Drift is merciless. Instead you got Fen.”
“What’s Fen?”
He grins. “My sister. She swam out and got you, pulled you to shore. She’s the best swimmer you’ll ever meet. Born for the water, Dad says.”
“Was there…” I stop. Best not to ask too many questions. If they’d found a boat, the boy would have told me. “You should get some sleep, kid.”
“Yeah,” he agrees, and then he curls up at the foot of my bed like a dog and nods straight off. I stare at him in disbelief and then I finish the vodka and roll over. The room is spinning and I think getting drunk was a bad idea because it feels like the rocking sea and the boat, it feels like his voice calling out to me only I can’t find him and I know he’s gone now, the Drift must have got him, and it was my desire, my arrogance, the stupidity of this quest that drowned him.
His name is Yen. He is the only one brave enough or mad enough to take me, I’m told. Don’t even bother asking anyone else. He used to be a whaler. He doesn’t ask me questions about why I want to be taken to a mostly uninhabited island so far away, he just asks me how much money I have, and when I tell him he nods once and says we will be fine if the weather holds. I ask him what will happen if it doesn’t and he says the sea will decide, which is an irritatingly sailor thing to say.
He doesn’t talk to me much on the four-day journey, but I will remember his voice. I will remember the sound of it calling my name and the way that name was swallowed by wind and waves.
I wake in the deep night with an aching need to do a wee. I don’t know how long it’s been since I went, but as I’ve been lying here for a couple of days now it’s a fair assumption that some poor person has had to
clean up after me. It hurts to sit upright. The pain feels both deep and also right at my surface. I don’t make a sound, terrified of waking the boy and having to talk to him again.
My head spins and I’m not sure my wobbly legs will carry me. The house is dark. And odd. I flick light switches but they don’t work, the power’s been shut off. The staircase has a wooden banister to cling to. The walls seem to be curved and there are a lot of stairs. I don’t have the time or the desire to poke my head through every door I pass, looking for a bathroom, so I go to the ground floor and stagger out what looks to be the front door (there are coats and boots beside it, I pull both of these on) and into the night.
I gasp. Blinded by the sky.
The stars are electric and so dazzling I sink to the ground, unable to catch my breath. The cold is a blanket, wrapping around me and sinking within, and these pajamas aren’t mine, they are too small, and even with a coat they are nothing against the bite of the air. I need to move but I can’t. It is too beautiful.
When finally I get to my feet I see the building behind me, the lighthouse without a light, and before me is a hillside of long silver grass swaying in the starlight. Bits of me are going numb so I drop my pajama pants, but since there is no way my trembling thighs will lower me into a squat, all I can do is spread my legs wide and hope.
“What are you doing?”
I look over my shoulder. The kid is standing in the doorway, watching me.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“A wee?”
“Bingo.”
“Why are you doing it out here?”
“To make sure I wouldn’t be bothered.”
“Oh.”
He stays.
I finish my wee, then pull my undies (mine, thank god) and pants back on. The effort causes me to tilt sideways and then, almost slowly, I am back on the ground.
“Are you okay?” the kid asks.
I blink through my spotty vision and wait for my head to stop spinning. He pulls on his gumboots and coat and bounds out onto the grass. I don’t have the energy to move again and, since I guess he doesn’t know what else to do, he just sits down beside me. Together we gaze at the windswept hills before us.
“So this is Shearwater, huh?” I say.
“Sure is. One hundred and twenty kilometers squared. We’re a tundra climate with mostly mosses and lichens, and over forty-five vascular plant species, and we have over eighty thousand seals on the island, as well as the last colony of royal penguins in the world, and over three million breeding seabirds. And we’re a UNESCO World Heritage Site because we’re the only place in the world where the earth’s mantle is pushing up and being exposed.”
I can’t help smiling. “You get all that from Wikipedia?”
He shrugs. Which I guess means yes.
Orly points toward the ocean. “That’s where Raff and Fen are, down on the beach.” Before I can question what his brother and sister are doing on a beach in the middle of the night, he points what I assume is south. “Down that way is the seed vault. Where Dad is.”
“What’s the seed vault?” I ask, already knowing the answer but curious about what he’ll say.
“It’s where the world sends its seeds to be stored in case we ever need to rebuild a population of something.”
“Why’s it all the way down here?”
“To protect it. The permafrost keeps the seeds cold and it’s too far away for any people to reach.” He looks at me. “Seed banks aren’t a new thing, you know.”
“Okay.”
“It’s just that this is one of the last. And it has the largest collection of seeds from all over the world. A whole lot that don’t exist anywhere else-rare and endangered and even extinct in the wild. And it doesn’t just have agricultural seeds either, it has everything.”