Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I wait around the back of the big building until I hear him walk away, then I wait a little longer to be safe-I have to roll open the door once more and I know he can hear the scrape of metal from quite a distance. I duck under a small gap and close it behind me. It’s dark inside and it takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust. Shapes appear. The scent of woodwork, more familiar to me than any other smell. I can see he’s pulled a trolley of tools over the trapdoor, which makes my heart thump a little more quickly. Why cover it like that unless you mean to hide it? I slide the trolley out of the way and open the hatch. It’s difficult to see. A pile of things. Papers, I think. Books. And sitting on top is a phone. I’m fully expecting it to be dead, so this doesn’t surprise me.
It’s the phone case that stops my lungs.
Decorated with pressed and dried botanicals preserved between plastic. “Bit on the nose, Row,” he said when I gave it to him, but I knew he liked it. I recognize his laptop, too, and there, among the pile of my husband’s belongings, his passport.
Orly
Let’s talk seed intelligence. Yeah, you heard me.
On the southwestern tip of Florida is a mangrove swamp, one of many. This swamp gets fed nutrients by the ebb and flow of the tide, which is one of the reasons it makes such a rich and diverse ecosystem. Its bacteria feed worms, oysters, barnacles, billions of them, and these feed fish and shrimp, which feed all kinds of water birds, as well as the odd crocodile.
The brilliance of this comes down to the intelligence of the mangrove seeds. Unlike most plants, which need soil to germinate, the mangroves have evolved a special way of helping their offspring survive. Instead of dropping the seeds like most plants do, they germinate while still attached to the parent tree (Dad would love this; if he could keep us attached forever I think he would), and then the seedling grows within the fruit, fed by photosynthesis, until it’s ready to drop into the water.
This seed is more buoyant than other seeds. It knows where it’s going and how it will get around: it’s going to use the current. The seed travels along the Gulf Coast, looking for its new home. But something doesn’t feel quite right to this seed, it detects some deficiency in the environment, some warning that the conditions aren’t quite right. So it carries on, traveling around to Louisiana. The marshes here are healthy. The seed decides to stay. It physically changes its density-yep, you heard that right-so that it floats vertically instead of horizontally. This way it has a chance to lodge in the mud and send out roots.
But it doesn’t lodge. It tries, it fails. It carries on. It changes its density back, so that it can float more easily and continue its search.
It has now altered its own form twice, by its own choice, in order to survive.
It travels on, carried by the ocean currents, down into Mexico and farther around the Gulf. At last it reaches the Yucat?n Peninsula, so mangrove rich it’s an oasis for the seed, a place to make a home. The seed changes itself yet again and this time it works! This time its long body is caught in the mud and able to take root. It can grow as part of this new mangrove swamp, which is so crucial to the health of the wetlands. And I think it must be relieved, I think it’s earned its place in this ecosystem, this little seed; after all, it’s been traveling and changing and searching for an entire year.
Is this how you feel after being swept in on a current? Will you change shape and put down roots? Or carry on in search of somewhere better?
Dominic
In some ways, in certain moods, it feels a little like Orly is my first child. I was there with Claire for the birth of Raff and then mind-blowingly soon after for Fen. I was there in the thick of it, for every feed, every nappy change, every illness. Of course I was. But I wasn’t Claire, who knew what cracked and bleeding nipples felt like, who had to sit on a rolled-up towel to avoid putting pressure on the episiotomy stitches in her vagina. And before all that, who endured the morning sickness that lasted six months and made her vomit all day every day. Claire, who felt the postnatal depletion and depression, who was an alien in her own stretched and flabby body, who once shat herself because she couldn’t get her pants off while also holding a baby to her breast, a baby that sucked and sucked and took all her vitality. Claire, who also had the hormones and the deep instinctive body connection and the bond that went deeper than her foundations, who had love like she invented it.
Parenting, for her, was in the body.
Problem is, I thought it was
only in the body, and that’s why she was better at it than I was.
What a mystery it was to me then: how she knew what temperature to keep the room overnight and what to dress the babies in so they’d be warm but not overly so, how she knew when to give paracetamol for a fever, and what times they needed to sleep depending on how old they were, and when to bring them into our beds for cuddles and when to be strict about sleep skills, and what the fuck sleep skills are, and not to use soap in their baths, and to try olive oil for the cradle cap, and which foods were safe for starting solids, and exactly how to serve them. How did she know all of this? It must have been built in, that’s what I thought.
When Orly came along and it was just me, I realized how she’d known. She’d fucking learned. She’d had to, because somebody had to keep the babies alive, and so she bloody well got on with it. And now I was going to have to do the same, except without any backup, and the burden of this division of labor became astoundingly, mortifyingly clear to me. Oh, how I had coasted upon the back of this woman, deep in the trenches with her and also very happy to let her learn all the things and know all the things. How many times did I ask her which sleeping bag I should put the kids in? Or where the swaddles were? How many times did I pass over a crying baby, disappointed but also-come on, let’s be honest-
relieved to know that they just wanted Mum and that I would never truly be the last line of defense?
Then she went.
And here I remained, and it was just me and baby. I did not know how I could ever be enough for him. I thought seriously of finding another home for him. I told myself he would be better without me. That I would break him in some way. Because he had not come from my body, not in the same way he had come from Claire’s, not in a meaningful way.
And then. There they were. Eight and nine years old. Having lost their mother and yet stepping forward to save me, teaching themselves what to do so that I wouldn’t have to do it alone. I knew then that it was not me against the little fella; there were no lines of defense. It was the four of us together, always. Maybe Raff and Fen did more than kids ought to have to, or perhaps it is simply the nature of us, that deep in our cells we are nurturers. They changed nappies and fed bottles, they learned how to clean vomit out of car seats and scoop poo from bathwater, they rocked him burning with fever while I drove, maddened, for the midnight medicine. They figured out how to get him to sleep when he wouldn’t go to sleep. But they also cuddled and played and laughed and sang, they read and told stories and they loved him. Purely and without resentment, and now he does the same for us, he nurtures and loves us. And within the sphere of my children’s courage, of their generosity of spirit, I found a way to be more. To ask of myself more. We forged an unbreakable four.
For the first time in our life together, our life of four, I have started, against all my better judgment, to wonder what it might be like to add another, making five. Would the capacity of that love find its limit? Or would it soar?
Tonight, under the covers with Orly in my arms and his breath tickling my chin, I ask him what he hears in the wind.
“They’re saying we tried to fix something that can’t be fixed. Not without loss.”
I pull away a little so I can look at his face. He is unbothered. This is why I don’t usually ask him what the voices say-because his answers are terrifying.
“Are you frightened of them?” I ask.
He shakes his head. There is that, at least.
“What do they mean, tried to fix something?”
“With Rowan on the beach,” he says, and I can hear the hesitation that means he wasn’t supposed to tell me. “We pulled down the barrels and turned them into something else.”
“What?”
“A big red penguin.”
I find myself smiling, and it hurts, abruptly, that they would not want to tell me about doing that. That they wouldn’t invite me to help them.
“Is Mum here?” Orly asks me.
Perhaps I should lie. Is this damaging him?
In the end it feels cruel to keep her from him. “She’s on your other side. Her hand is in your hair.”
He sighs, letting his eyes fall shut. The wind speaks again and this time I understand it.
You would have to let her go.
Rowan is very quiet over breakfast. I catch her staring at me. The sensation of that gaze is a prickle. She has huge dark eyes and they remind me
of the bottomless eyes of the seals. I find myself imagining again what her hair feels like, I imagine reaching out and running my hand over the short spiky ends of it, right now while sitting here at the brekky table.
“Dad?” Orly asks and I blink.
“Yeah?”
“I think I’ve decided on Tasmania.”
“Huh?”