Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
Is this how it will feel when the world starts to crumble? Like you can’t see where you’re going, and at any moment you could lose your people and be left to wander alone?
We hear the sound before the lighthouse appears. The long, slightly
mournful notes of a violin drifting through the fog to us. Not a light, but a song to guide us home.
“He’s playing!” Orly exclaims and runs inside.
Dom pauses to listen, and I stop close behind, still scared of getting lost even within sight of home. We stand in the white and let his son’s music wash over us; it is beautiful and strange and familiar. It takes me a little while to identify the sound it calls to mind: it’s whale song.
I am about to say something when I catch sight of Dom’s face and see that he has tears in his eyes, and I am so frozen, so mortified to have trespassed into this private moment that I am unable to speak or move for fear that he will remember I’m here.
But he looks at me. Shakes his head, and offers by way of explanation, “I wasn’t sure he’d play again.”
The eerie sounds continue and we stay to listen. It is a searching call and within the notes I can see the whale, swimming a deep and endless ocean, seeking another of its kind. I think Dominic Salt will stand here for as many minutes, hours, days as his son plays. That bond I can see in the man’s eyes, that love, the universe of it: I have chosen not to know that.
I thought I had made peace with that fact-I thought I
wanted it that way-and then I came here.
Dominic
What I miss most is not any of the things I expected. It’s having someone to talk to about our children. The hilarious things they say and do, the insights with which they blow my mind and the ways they change frequently and without mercy. I need her to help me process and deliberate and delight in. I want to laugh with her. To be awestruck with her. I want her to look at me in wonder, acknowledging what profound creations we have made together.
What I miss is having someone to look at in moments like these, someone who understands not just the talent or cleverness of our children but the wisdom, the immensity of feeling they hold within. Instead I marvel at them alone.
Raff
He plays for his sister, because she asks. He doesn’t want to, might even be a little frightened of it, but the truth is he would do anything for her.
He sits by his bedroom window to tune the fiddle quickly and with an ear honed over years of practice. He tightens the bow strings. He doesn’t hold the instrument high under his chin but rests it almost lazily on his shoulder. And then he plays.
Fen is sprawled on his bed to listen. Raff tries something upbeat at first, because the point of this is to make her worry less about him, but soon the music overcomes, it sweeps him away and morphs into something else, an expression of something obscured. He is powerless to it, in the same way he is powerless to his anger. He wonders if this is what he is, all that he is, a leaf battered by one wind or the other.
While he plays, as if conjured by his song, a thick fog rolls in from the ocean, closing them off from the rest of the world. Fen sits up to watch it, but Raff keeps playing. He doesn’t need to see them to know where they are. The fuel tanks.
There is no fog on the day it happens. Which makes the sight visible from a great distance; you can see the fuel tanks the entire walk down the hill. He makes this walk alone. Numb. Eyes on the swinging body.
When he gets to the bottom, he doesn’t know what to do, can’t make sense of the problem, so he sits on the grass beneath Alex.
It takes a little while for his family to reach him. Just Dom and Fen; they have left Orly at the lighthouse. Both his father and sister try to hold him, but he can’t, he can’t be touched. He just needs their help
solving this problem because he can’t move either, can’t make his mind work.
It is Dominic who sorts it out, as he sorts out everything. For a moment Raff reflects on the feeling of safety this has always provided him with, the knowledge that his father can solve any problem, is capable of anything. Except that he can’t bring back the dead, can he. There is that. And from this loss, Raff will never feel safe again.
Fen climbs up the metal ladder to the foot railing. She gets down on her hands and knees and reaches with her Stanley knife, and she starts to saw through the rope.
Dom is waiting on the ground, ready to catch Alex. There is only about a meter drop from boots to shoulder, but that will feel like a lot with the entire weight of a body bearing down on him. There is no other way to get him down; he is far too heavy to try to pull back up by the rope, by the neck-
“Here it goes, Dad,” Fen calls.
And it’s this image that will stay with him. The sight of Alex’s body hanging at a distance as Raff made that long, long walk-that will linger for a good while too, it will be there when he closes his eyes, but it will eventually fade. While this moment, right now, will remain vivid until his last breath. The sight of Alex’s body slumping down onto his father, who reaches for it, who takes the weight of it upon himself, and Raff can see that Dom is trying to be so gentle, that it is like an embrace, and it’s this that sets Dom off balance, that makes his knees buckle under the weight, and they go to the ground, cradled together.
Rowan
It is nice to have Fen here for dinner tonight, but almost as soon as we’ve finished eating she picks herself up and draws on her cold-weather gear. I admire the obstinacy of it-there’s not much that could get me out into that wind at this time of night.
I look at her father, who is watching his daughter with an expression of longing.
Say something, I will him.
Reach for her.
Ask her to stay.
It’s Raff who says, “Sleep here, Fenny.”
Fen glances at her dad, then smiles and shakes her head. “I get so antsy up here now. It’s the walls. They make my skin crawl.”
“Go straight to the boathouse,” is all Dominic says.
She nods and then she’s away.
It isn’t long before Dom goes elsewhere too, leaving his sons and me to do the washing up. When we’ve finished cleaning, the boys do some schoolwork. The fog has cleared and the evening is long and violet, and I have nothing else to do so I sit and listen as Orly helps Raff with his readings. He has an
L
-shaped card that he uses to block out everything on the page except the sentence he’s focused on. Orly reads it to him aloud and then Raff follows suit. He highlights or makes a note beside the text. It’s very slow.
On one sentence Raff stumbles, misreads the words, and stops, frustrated.
“You’re doing so good, Raffy,” Orly tells his big brother, patting his hair like a dog, and it makes Raff smile, and the moment is so tender.
I wonder at the resources Raff’s missing out on, the support systems he can’t access on Shearwater. Although, to be fair, you could do worse than have Orly as your teacher.
I go into the lounge and sit on the rug to stretch my muscles. They
feel tired and stiff after a rugged two-day hike, and the movements pull at the scrapes and cuts, but I know I will feel worse tomorrow if I don’t do this now. My thoughts drift around the lighthouse to each of its occupants: to the boys engrossed in their work, to the man somewhere above. They dart down the hill to the beach, to the girl among the seals. I think of parents and children and the choices they make. I think of my mother. I dream of her often, but I don’t usually let myself think of her. Right now I can’t help it, because I know what it’s like to have a parent who chose an unusual place for your childhood, who chose to expose you to something strange. Once, I thought our houseboat was an adventure. I thought we were lucky to chug up and down rivers and along coastlines, to see country and city alike, to explore bays and harbors but also village ports and stretches of forest. But these moments, in reality, were far rarer than the ones we spent moored in smoggy loading docks among freight ships and shouting cargo workers. Far rarer than the ones we spent alone on a cramped and cluttered boat, waiting for our parents to come back from work or making our way to and from school along busy highways, only me to keep the four of us safe, and me not much older than the others. For a while, I looked back on those years and told myself they were idyllic, that we were lucky. But the haze eventually cleared and I saw it for what it was: survival.