Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
Later, once they’ve finished another monotonous day underground, Raff waits outside in the Zodiac for Alex to stuff things into an overnight bag. Naija is teasing him mercilessly and laughing that booming belly laugh of hers and Tom is ignoring the whole thing.
But as Alex goes to leave, he says, “I don’t like the storm, Al.” And coming from Tom, who is an expert on storms, that actually means something. But Alex is already on the train tracks, barreling out of the station. He shoves Tom as he dashes past him.
“See you in the morning.”
Raff drives the Zodiac through raging winds and rain and swell that drenches them, mooring it to the metal steps of the green cabin. They climb up and into the shelter, but before Alex closes the door he looks
back to the red, where he can see his brother in the doorway, lifting a hand. Alex waves back.
The storm grows. They both spend some time watching it through the windows, noting the rise of the sea, acknowledging with wonder how high it’s come, how it smashes against the walls of the huts. They can recognize that the waves perhaps should not be so high or so violent, but they are distracted.
Alex wakes in the middle of the night to a mighty crash. The rain and wind are both so loud he is deafened. Tom is in their room, looming over them, and behind him is Naija.
“Come on, it’s not safe.” His voice is barely audible over the sounds of the storm and the creaking of the cabin pylons.
They don’t need to be told twice. Alex and Raff grab their things and head for the door. They climb down the steps into the Zodiac, battered by the weather. Raff doesn’t wait-Tom and Naija’s Zodiac is here too, they’ll be right behind-he takes off into the waves, headed for the shore.
But in Raff’s Zodiac, Alex turns to look behind, to check his brother is following. Instead what he sees where the green cabin sat only moments before is something different, shapes he can’t make sense of in the dark and the swell. He blinks, squinting, desperately trying to understand, and then the whole shape moves and he realizes what he is looking at: the cabin has come off its pylons and is on its side in the water. A wave dumps onto it, disappearing the entire hut. Alex screams and Raff grabs for him but Alex is swift, he is plunging into the rough ocean, mad with terror and with grief for he already knows, deep down. The waves batter him and he realizes he may have drowned himself, too, but while there is blind hope he will still try to find him, he will kick and struggle against this violent sea, reaching in the dark for Tom’s body.
He loses consciousness for a second or two but revives quickly as he’s pulled back into the Zodiac. Raff’s strong arms have plucked Alex from this maelstrom and the engine is gunning them away from the hut.
What madness possessed him to bring them out here? To this flimsy matchbox house on its toothpick legs? It’s been said for years the green cabin isn’t to be occupied, not since the sea got so high. His brother told him this morning it wasn’t safe.
His brother, whom he has killed.
They do manage to recover the bodies. Dominic and Raff do. They go without telling Alex, and they don’t ever show him what they’ve found, they simply invite him to help bury the sheet-wrapped figures. Alex is distressed-he and Tom have been raised firmly secular and yet he feels a need to wash his brother’s body properly, to give him some sort of ceremonial burial. Instead he shovels dirt onto Tom. A grave down here at the bottom of the world, an unmarked, anonymous grave in the middle of nowhere, without any way to call for help or tell his mom. As he shovels the dirt he thinks of how he has always been trying to catch up to Tom, has spent his whole life chasing after, and how he might actually be able to do it now: in eight years Alex will have closed that gap at last. It is a disaster. It is unbearable.
He finds himself walking north to the isthmus and sitting in that same spot, in the grass overlooking the base, he does this often, no matter the weather. He finds himself looking down at the fuel tanks.
Rowan
His name is Alex, Dom tells me. Raff’s Alex. His voice is soft and aching as he tells me a story of field huts and the sea, and of Alex’s guilt.
“There are two more,” Dom says, pointing farther along the hill. “One for Naija, another for Tom.”
I look at the handsome young face in his seaside grave and what I think is that I have had enough digging. I will disturb no more resting places.
I don’t know what’s happened to my husband but if he is in a fourth grave somewhere here I decide I do not need to find it, or see his face, or know one way or the other. It is possible he has done what Alex did when presented with an impossible life, an impossible choice. Some part of me suspects this and will start building protections against it, but maybe not, this may not be right either, and so I give up, I give over to the tide, to the story I’ve been told that he has left Shearwater and that I will see him again someday. It’s all I have the capacity to deal with.
There’s just one thing I can’t square. One thing stopping me from surrendering to the story.
“Why do you have his passport?” I ask.
Dom and I stare at each other.
He lets out a long breath. “Shit,” he says. “You must have been thinking something really bad.”
I wait.
“I don’t have a good answer,” he warns me. “You won’t feel comforted by it.”
“Just tell me the truth.”
“He left it.”
“Bullshit.”
“I told you it wasn’t a good answer.” Dom rubs his face. “He was struggling. I said that, right? He started talking about letting all the seeds drown. He said we should all just drown. The whole lot of us. Humans, animals, plants.” Dom shakes his head. “I’ve been trying to spare you, but I think he was having a psychotic episode. When he hopped on that ship it was like he was fleeing for his life. He left everything. We went to clean out his room the next day, and it was like he still lived in it.”
“How would he have got through customs without his passport?”
“Fucked if I know. But a navy ship’s not gonna turn around and sail all the way back down here just to get one idiot’s documents, I’m damn sure about that.”
“Why are they hidden under your workshop then? Why not just tell me all of this?”
“I did tell you. But I could see you didn’t believe me, and I knew if you found the passport you’d think something terrible.”
“Why should it matter?” I demand. “What I thought? If it wasn’t true?”
Dom lets out a breath. “It matters to me.”
We stare at each other. I try to read him. His face seems open, regretful.
Maybe it’s because I want to, but I think I do believe him.
It is a gray afternoon by the time we have buried Alex once more. I tell him how sorry I am with every shovel of dirt I heap back over him. This poor boy.
Dom and I make our way to the red field hut-I find that I don’t want to sleep in the blue hut, Hank’s hut-and we collapse exhausted into beds in separate rooms. I expect to sleep for days but I can’t. It is too bright, maybe, even with the blinds drawn. I think of cabins swallowed by waves, I think of a young man in that rough water down there, trying to save his brother. I think of earth, of shovelfuls falling over that wrapped figure, and of his face. I think of the blood Alex must
have spilled in the field hut, his own blood, and what it must have done to Raff to see it lit up in blue. Of Yen’s eaten body in the sun. I think of the whale, of the barnacles on her body.
I think of what my life will become if I ever make it off this island. Of how, by the sound of it, I will be caring for a husband with serious mental health problems, a husband who did not spend a single moment taking care of me when I lost everything.
I must sleep because some time later I am woken and I think I have woken to someplace new.
A few days after the house burned and we were still sorting through the wreckage, Liv came to help, and as she and I surveyed the wasteland before us, she said, “Maybe this could be freeing. Do you feel freed?”
I looked at her in bewilderment, not sure how it was possible for someone to get something so utterly wrong. I felt the opposite. I felt a prisoner of the loss, and of the memories, and of so much time wasted.