Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“Things affect people in different ways.”
I wait for him to find the words to tell me what’s wrong, or to decide he is sleepy after all.
“This morning,” he says haltingly, “before we went to the boat.”
“Yeah.”
“Rowan was asking me about Hank.”
My stomach plummets and I am back to despising her, for putting him in that position. Then again if we didn’t have anything to hide there wouldn’t be an issue with it, I suppose. It feels like a game of chicken with her. One of us will have to break first and admit we know that something is wrong, that one of us is lying. Or that we both are.
“What did she ask?”
“If you and him were friends. I said no, because you weren’t, right? Even back at the start. Was that wrong?”
“No, mate. It’s fine.” I pull him into me and open the pages of his
comic. “Don’t waste another thought on it.” I ask him to read to me, and while he does I glance at his older brother to see that Raff is awake and watching us. His eyes meet mine, filled with the same sense of impending disaster.
Orly
The buzzy burr, at its heart, is a stowaway.
The dandelion shows us how important plants and their seeds are to the animals around them, but the buzzy burr proves that the opposite can also be true: many seeds rely on animals for their survival.
This buzzy burr’s story starts right here, on Shearwater. It’s a flowering plant, and it looks pretty similar to a dandelion, actually, only its flower is less delicate, more wiry, and a dark-purple color, while its seeds aren’t attached to flying propellers that carry it on the wind. No, the buzzy burr’s seeds are hooked like talons. They don’t fly-they cling. They grab. And they particularly love to clutch onto feathers.
This spiky little seed, you see, is a world traveler, or would like to be. And who better to hitch a ride with than the mighty wandering albatross itself?
The buzzy burr seed, compelled to spread, to propagate, to live on, grabs onto the albatross with its hooks, and one day, when the albatross is ready to leave its chick, it lifts into the air with its impossibly wide wings, wider than any other bird’s, and it sets off on an immense journey around the south of the globe. This albatross doesn’t just circle the globe once, carrying the seed and showing it long stretches of ocean, showing it the world. No, it circles the globe
three times in a single year. Only on this third trip around does the albatross set down on the coast of Argentina, in the alpine reserve among its glaciers and fjords, and deposit the seed into its new home.
Maybe the albatross knows it carried this little life across continents,
across oceans. Maybe its long flight this year was to show the seed as much as it could. Maybe now it says
live well, little flower, as it lifts back into the air on its wide and snowy wings.
Maybe the seed says
thank you, as it watches the bird fly away.
Rowan
I don’t like being in the house alone with Dominic. He is so quiet. The man I lived with for a decade never stopped talking; I grew used to the constant sound of Hank’s voice as a steady hum in the background of whatever I was doing, without much need for me to reply. This silence, with only the wind to pierce it, makes me almost long for the loathsome noise of a TV. I ask Dom what I can do to help out, but he tells me to rest and then doesn’t speak to me again. I find some cleaning supplies in a cupboard and clean the bathroom, which takes all of half an hour, and then I am stumped. I am directionless. Pulled to a painful halt, the momentum I had in getting to Shearwater stalled. With no hope of rescue or escape, I don’t know what to do.
The dining table needs some attention. At least that is something I am capable of. Under the chipped white paint on its surface I can see that it’s actually a rather lovely piece of old Tasmanian oak-whoever painted it should be sent to prison. I raid Dom’s tool trolley for a few different grades of sandpaper, some turpentine, and some tung oil. I can’t find any paint stripper, so I start with a coarse 80-grit sandpaper, knowing this will not be an easy task without a power sander but happy to have something to concentrate on for the next few hours. The paint is so old it chips away easily in most places, especially when I use a metal scraper, but it’s harder to work free in others. I am careful not to apply so much pressure that I damage the wood beneath. The movements of my arm are so familiar to me, the scent of the fine wood dust so visceral that I feel, for these moments in time, unburdened. By memory. By responsibility. By loss. The way it’s always been. A homeplace, working with wood like this.
When the paint is gone, my shoulder and arm are aching but even
this is comforting. I clean the table, then take a medium-grit sandpaper to it, working carefully and consistently. It’s a simple piece of furniture, there aren’t any curves or grooves for me to worry about, no delicate detailing or carving, so it doesn’t take too long before I can move onto the finer sandpaper. The smell again, god, the calm it brings me. But I come all too soon to the end of what I can do today. Once I have wiped the table down thoroughly and applied a coat of the tung oil, I have to leave it to dry overnight before I can do any further sanding and coating. I stand back and look at the table. The pale timber is gorgeous, with its intricate white grain. I force myself to leave it, and then I am back where I started, with too many hours left to fill.
It strikes me that I haven’t seen the kid all day, and-despite having wished he’d leave me the hell alone-I miss him. I also want to check that he’s okay after yesterday. I find him in a fourth bedroom I haven’t yet explored, a study. There are three small desks crammed awkwardly against the curved walls, and here is the tech I wondered about-each desk has a computer connected to speakers, and there is also a phone sitting on a tripod, its camera aimed at a desk. Orly isn’t using any of it, he has a pencil and workbook. Spread before him are dried plants, flowers and grasses he’s pressed between the pages of a book and is now drawing.
“I thought you were on holidays,” I say as I enter the room.
“Summer homework,” he says.
“What’s this for?” I touch the phone on the tripod.
“Our distance ed classes. During term we had to video call in once a week, and there were a bunch of presentations we had to film and send. They’re all dead now, batteries are done.”
I nod, wandering the room idly. Orly watches me. In glances I try to ascertain if he seems bothered at all by having seen a dead body. “Wanna do something?” I ask.
“Like what?”
“Anything. Show me something I won’t see anywhere else in the world.”
“I’m meant to be doing my work.”
“You’re on holidays! Take a break, kid. If your dad asks you can blame me.” Dom already hates me.
“It’s pretty self-serving of you to distract me from my education purely because you’re bored, Rowan,” Orly says.
“Oh.” I am crestfallen.
He laughs. “Just kidding. Let’s go.”
“So what’s going on with your dad and your sister?” I ask as we walk.
We are headed, not down the hill to the pinch and the beach, but inland, into the mountainous center of the southern island. I told Orly I couldn’t manage any extreme hiking or climbing, which means this relatively easy walk is our only option.
He doesn’t seem eager to answer my question. “I don’t know,” he says. Eventually he adds, “They disagree on a lot of things.”
I am starting to worry about Fen. I don’t think Dom should just be letting her live in the boathouse on her own. Something’s happened but it’s clear they don’t want me to know about it, and it’s far from my place to get involved.
Orly leads me up a small incline and tells me to lie down on my tummy and crawl to the edge. Grasses tickle my face as I awkwardly commando forward. After a few centimeters of this it’s too painful and I have to sit up and edge forward on my bum. The ground drops away before us, a series of sweeping hills and valleys. Orly points to the hill directly to our right, its slope intersecting with ours to give us a perfect view of what sits among its silvery grasses.