Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I shake my head. “You’re fine. You’ll be fine.” We are quiet a moment, and I think about her question. “The world’s not a good place for a child.”
She frowns. “That’s not true. Look around.”
I do. And wonder what she can see that I can’t. What I can see is an ocean rising so swiftly that this extraordinary island, this home, will be gone in the blink of an eye. A place so unsafe that most of its occupants have already fled.
I meet Fen’s gaze. She is all the hope and wonder and optimism of youth, and that’s good, I guess, maybe she should try to hold on to that for as long as possible, until the world and other people take it from her. But I find myself wanting to warn her of what I wish I’d known. “It’s not a good idea to fall in love, okay?” I say softly. “Not with people, and not with places.”
Fen looks surprised by this.
“I loved a landscape and watched it burn,” I say. “This island, you can see what it will look like, there’s a film over everything. You can see it disappearing. There’s no stable ground. Not here. Not anywhere else.”
“And you’d want to try and survive all of that on your own?” she asks.
“What that instability does to relationships-what constant danger does to them-is devastating. It’s unraveling.”
I can see she doesn’t believe me but I don’t push the point. She will see, one day. Loving a place is the same as having a child. They are both too much an act of hope, of defiance. And those are a fool’s weapons.
“Your dad,” I say. “He’s pretty tough, huh?”
Fen nods.
“What’s his deal?”
“Like why’s he so strict?”
I mean I guess he is and he isn’t. He has strict routines for his kids, he works them hard, but he also lets them roam, he lets Fen live down here. It’s a contradiction, but rather than trying to articulate this I just say, “Yeah.”
“He just?… It’s not easy to raise three kids alone on an island,” Fen says.
“So why is he doing it?”
“He was pretty messed up when Mum died. I think he wanted to be somewhere he felt he could contain things.”
“He made it so hard for himself.”
“Well, he had me and Raff. We helped with Orly a lot. And we had systems, you know. You all just have to stick to the systems and things hang together.”
“Sounds boring.”
She smiles. “It is.”
“Is that why you’re down here now? Is this your youthful rebellion? Running away from home?”
“It’s not much of a rebellion, right?”
“It’s pretty good, given the circumstances.”
“What was yours?”
“God it feels like a long time ago. I didn’t really have one, I don’t think. I couldn’t; I was too busy looking after my sisters.”
“Oh.”
“Any rebellion I had was just this?… quiet anger. Always swallowed down.”
“Who were you angry with?”
I recall those painful years. Feeling either invisible to her or hated by her. “My mum,” I say.
Fen’s head tilts to the side. “I don’t know much about that.”
“But this stuff going on with your dad. It’s all the same. Parents. Trying to impress them or enrage them.”
She is quiet for a moment, and then she says, “I know Dad loves me. I just don’t know if he can see me.”
Raff and Orly tumble down beside us and we eat the fish with our fingers; it falls apart, moist and rich and full of flavor, and the sky is enormous and pricked with stars, and I think it is an astounding life he has brought them here to live, and a lonely one.
I walk the boys back up to the lighthouse and it seems wrong to be leaving Fen on her own. I can see that it pains Raff, too, but he doesn’t say anything and so neither do I. When it’s just the three of us, struggling our way up the hill in the dark, he says, “She’ll go to the boathouse. She’s not allowed to sleep outside.” Which makes me feel a little better.
It’s the first time I make the walk up the hill. So far I’ve had the quad bike to carry me but tonight Raff doesn’t offer it and I don’t ask. I just take one plodding step after another. And with each of these steps I feel a sense of achievement. It hurts, and I can barely breathe, but I’m going to make it. It’s not going to kill me.
Because it’s late and Orly is tired, Raff carries him the last part of the journey, and then up the lighthouse steps, and I watch from their bedroom doorway as he settles his little brother into his own bed. “He sleeps better when he has company,” Raff explains, though I didn’t ask. I am well acquainted with Orly needing a bed buddy.
“Night,” Raff adds, dismissing me, and I make my way carefully up a few more stairs to Fen’s room. It’s dark, and I don’t bother turning on a light, I just unbutton my jeans, intending to fall into bed.
A voice clears its throat and says, “Sorry.”
I jump halfway out of my skin.
“Sorry,” Dom says again, but he doesn’t sound it.
It annoys me-I don’t like feeling as though he could enter my space whenever he wants. “You don’t need to sit by my bed anymore, okay?” I say. “I’m alive. You want to talk to me, you knock.”
He nods, an acknowledgment.
As my heart slows, I sink onto the end of the bed. He is mostly in shadow. There is something coming, he is building to it. An admonishment for distracting Orly from his schoolwork today, maybe? Something about the dining table?
He says, “We had Raff and Fen quite young.”