Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“So it’s shit either way.”
Fen smiles. “We’ll be okay. There’ll be somewhere else.”
But will there ever be, he thinks, another home for the four of them to share? The second they leave Shearwater, Fen, who is younger than Raff but who has finished school years ahead of him, is going to leave them to start her new life, and Raff doesn’t know what he can do to stop this. It has always been his job to keep them together, to keep them strong.
“What if Dad won’t go?” he asks.
“We have to make him,” Fen says.
That’s all well and good but there’s no making Dominic Salt do anything he doesn’t want to do. Stubborn is too small a word for what he is.
“I know you’re sure that leaving Shearwater will fix the problem,” Raff says, the problem being their mother. “But what if she just goes with him?”
Given that Claire is not an actual ghost but their father’s grief and loneliness made manifest, this seems likely to Raff.
Fen looks at her brother, shakes her head. “No, Shearwater is a bridge.”
He is impressed by her certainty, but then she’s always been this way, sure of things, sure of herself. She has a pure and simple belief that there are ghosts on this island. Orly’s the same. He doesn’t know what goes on in his dad’s head but he’s heard Dom talking to thin air. Sometimes Raff feels like the only sane person here.
Orly arrives first, barreling into Raff so their bodies go down in a tangle. Raff laughs as his brother tries to pin him. Fen comes to his aid, wrestling Orly onto the sand, tickling the boy mercilessly. All three stop and brush themselves off when Dom arrives. He looks very serious this morning. What, Raff thinks warily, has gone wrong now?
“I’ve learned something about our guest,” he says calmly. It seems to take him forever to go on. “She’s Hank’s wife.”
Fen looks startled and it reminds Raff of how their dad always says this expression is their mother’s. Claire wore a look of perpetual surprise. Raff doesn’t remember that, but he remembers his mum’s hands very well, the neatly manicured half-moon nails and the slender length of her fingers, even the smell of the hand cream she used to wear. He thinks of this, right now, in this moment, as a way of not spiraling into panic.
“Why’s she here?” he asks.
“She’s come looking for Hank. I don’t know why.”
Fen sinks to the ground and rests her head in her hands. “Oh my god.”
“It’s alright,” Dom says. “It doesn’t matter. We carry on.”
“What if-“
“All we need to do,” he says, “is keep our mouths shut.”
Raff marvels at his dad’s even keel. He is always even, always calm. Raff knows, in this moment, the way he sometimes knows what his sister is thinking, that Fen is imagining the same thing he is: that sudden, calm violence Dominic Salt is capable of, and the damage it can do.
Dominic
The weakest link, of course, is Orly. Keeping the truth of what’s happened from a woman with whom he is hell-bent on spending all his time is not going to be easy. I have a conversation with him about what this means. It means slowing down, it means thinking about what he says before he says it. “Is that sinking in? Say it with me, mate:
think about what you say before you say it.”
But it’s not just Orly. We all need to be careful not to slip up, we can’t give her any reason to doubt. And what’s more, we have to keep her in sight.
Unfortunately there’s still the running of the island to deal with, and this morning I need to get a new roof over the remaining solar batteries so we don’t lose what little power we have left.
“I can help,” Rowan says. I must be looking at her in a certain way, because she adds, “I’m handier than I look.”
I consider saying I’ve had well-wishers offer to help me before and each has been a total failure, the struggle to teach them basic stuff chewing up more time than the task itself. But if she’s helping me, I’ll at least know where she is.
I take Rowan to the storage shed, a warehouse down at the base that sits a little higher in altitude than the other buildings and thus isn’t so wet. It takes me a few minutes to roll open the door because there is a particularly large elephant seal lying directly in front of it, and I have to reach awkwardly over him.
Rowan gasps as she sees what’s inside. “Wow.”
I had the same reaction when I first got here. It is easy to assume that a remote island would not be so well stocked, but this is a wild place that houses a couple of dozen people and has to be completely
self-reliant-I can’t duck down to the hardware store if, say, a roof blows off a building-so tools are the one thing we do not go without. At one end of the shed are the basics: hammers, saws, screwdrivers, wrenches, shovels, and so on, with a wall of boxes containing any size or type of screw, nail, bolt, nut, hinge one could think of. Then there are the power tools: drills of all kinds, saws of all kinds, routers, sanders, chisels, a jackhammer, and a welding torch. There is safety gear, goggles, gloves, masks, helmets. There are ladders and wheelbarrows. Painting gear. Cleaning equipment. Light bulbs and electrical supplies. A huge area for materials like timber, glass, cement, bricks, steel. I have work benches covered in sawdust and wood chips and metal vise grips. There is a repair pile and a junk spot. And at the other end of the warehouse is the heavy machinery. Our amphibious vehicle-the Frog-lives here, as well as the quad bike and the tractor, with its various arm attachments.
“Oh man,” she breathes. “It must be killing you to leave all of this.”
It really is.
I take an angle grinder off the shelf, place it near the door. A couple of ladders, a couple of drills. Rowan is looking through the screws and bolts, making a selection of what we might need. I feel an urge to double-check.
She sees me looking and shows me. “These okay?”
I nod: she has gathered what I would have collected myself. Next she fills a couple of tool belts with the basics-screwdrivers, hammers, protective wear, and so on-then hands me the belt that is clearly mine, the leather old and soft and worn down almost to felt. She tightens the second, newer belt around her hips.
We put our equipment on the back of the quad bike and I drive it over to the sleeping quarters of the research base. There’s an almost-new metal roof on this building, and no one lives here now, so I figure it’s the best choice.
I send Rowan to one end with a ladder and a large socket wrench, asking her to loosen all the nuts holding the last sheet of metal in place. “You comfortable getting up on a roof?”
She doesn’t reply, just heads that way.
I climb up my end and start working on the nuts. They won’t budge,
as I suspected they mightn’t; the salt air here gets into things and rusts them tight. I use my angle grinder instead, cutting through them one at a time, and with each one I am expecting to hear Rowan calling for help. I get through an entire sheet before I stop and look for her. She is at the end, head down, doing something or other. I lower my tools and stomp my way over to her, thinking to tell her not to waste time, there’s other stuff she can be doing, only to see that she’s got a pile of loosened nuts and bolts.
“How’d you manage that?” I ask, stumped.
“What do you mean?”
“Damn things were rusted on tighter than a duck’s arse.”
She frowns. “You asked me to loosen them so I did.” She shoves her hands into her windbreaker pockets but not before I’ve seen that some of her fingers are bleeding.