Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“What kind of house?”
“Just a house. My sisters helped a bit, but mostly I did it myself. It
took a long time, a lot of years. It had a garden.” I stop, because I don’t know how to talk about this garden, or really this house either. My life.
“Where was it?” he asks, his eyes alight at the mention of a garden.
“In the Snowy Mountains.”
“Were there snow gums?” he demands.
I smile. “Yeah, there were snow gums. There were a lot of things. It was more of a wildlife corridor than a garden, I guess. We did a lot of work, but there were parts where you just stood back and let nature do its thing. The plants and trees were so varied that it meant the patch of land was full of animals. There were emus and dingoes, those were the ones everyone used to get excited about, but I really loved the platypus in the stream, and the family of wombats that had dug their burrows just outside my bedroom window. They have square poos, did you know that?”
He laughs. “No way.”
I nod but I am finding it hard to keep my voice steady and it occurs to me that maybe this isn’t the best thing to tell a nine-year-old about.
“What happened?” he asks.
“A bushfire came through.”
We are both quiet for a while, thinking through all that that means.
“Was there?… much left?” he asks. “The house?”
“No.”
If I look up into the sky now I will see the way the ash fell like snow in the night, swirling and delicate.
The crazy thing is that I’d engineered the house to be as fire resistant as possible, I’d thought I was being silly, and then a fire comes along that reminds you that you know absolutely nothing about what nature is capable of, the power of it is ludicrous, beyond your capacity to prepare for, and everything-
everything
-burns if it’s hot enough.
“The animals?” Orly asks. “The snow gums?”
I don’t reply because he already knows the answer, I can hear it in his voice. “It was hard to be cheerful after that,” I tell him.
“Will you rebuild?”
“No. There’s no point in rebuilding. It’ll go again, another fire will come.”
“Because of climate change,” he says, working it through.
“That’s right.”
“Will we die of climate change?” Orly asks, sounding more curious than scared.
“I dunno.”
“But if you had to guess.”
He’s pushing me. I’m not sure what answer he’s hoping for. What are you meant to do with kids? Protect them or be honest? I shrug, tell him what I think is true. “One day soon enough, everything is either going to burn, drown, or starve, including us.”
He stares at me.
I spread my hands. “You asked.”
We walk in silence for a bit and I start to feel guilty. “I’m only joking,” I say feebly, but I don’t think he’s listening.
Orly asks, “So what will you do? If you won’t rebuild.”
I think about having nothing and what that can do to you. How it can paralyze a person. I was paralyzed for a while. Deep in my cells I was inert, I was lost. Until I got on that boat to come here. And now it feels like if I stop moving, even for a second, I will perish.
“Did you get to know any of the scientists who lived here?” I ask Orly a little later.
He nods. “Raff’s friend Alex. He came up to the lighthouse for dinner a lot.”
“Oh yeah? What was his job?”
“He was studying the fur seals. Do you know sealers nearly wiped them out? Thousands and thousands of them. Back in the 1800s. But people like Alex have been bringing them back.”
I think on this. Leaning against my walking stick. A whole population of animals, clubbed to death. I can see the beach now, stretching below us. I can picture the ship, anchored a little way out. Can see their dinghy rowed in, men climbing out onto the black sand. Surrounded by such astonishing creatures, and, what’s more, by the miracle of their
trust. Animals who had never learned to fear humans. I feel sick, actually, and the vividness of the vision feels beyond me, it feels outside my body, like something I am being shown. I have a sense, now, of why this place feels so?… creepy. It hangs upon the air, the memory of this violence.
“Who else did you know?” I ask him. “The base leader?”
“No,” Orly says. “Not really.”
But he answers too quickly.
“You didn’t have anything to do with him? Didn’t ever cross paths?”
“I mean, a little.”
“What was he like?”