Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I stare at her with the creeping realization that I have underestimated her. Beyond my wariness there is a tinge of admiration. My mind darts ahead to all the things I have been putting off, things I could accomplish with the help of someone who knows her way around a tool.
I am also aware that this willfulness makes her more dangerous.
Once we have the roof free, we tie the metal sheets together and attach them to the back of the bike, then begin the slow process of dragging them up the hill over the tussock grass. Rowan doesn’t know how to drive the quad, so I do that while she walks behind, lifting the sheets out of any tussock they get caught on. It’s a painstaking process and she has the harder job. By the time we get up to the solar batteries the day is wearing on, but we stop for a sandwich, both of us ravenous.
“You in construction or something?” I ask her.
“I was.”
“Chippy?”
She nods.
“You don’t meet many women chippies.”
“I’ve met plenty,” she says.
“Was your dad one?” I ask.
“No.” She chews and swallows another mouthful. “I like building things.”
“Fair enough.”
She runs a hand over her short hair, and, watching, I have an urge to run my own hand over it. It takes me by surprise and I look back to my sandwich. Where the fuck did that come from?
“When I was a kid I decided I wanted to build a house,” she says suddenly. “So I did what I had to do to learn how. And then I built one.”
I stop chewing midmouthful. “You yourself?”
“Me myself.”
This casual statement astonishes me. It is the one thing I’ve always thought I’d love to attempt if we ever left Shearwater.
“That must have been satisfying,” I say, and it is an understatement, but I can see she knows what I mean, and that it’s enough, for she smiles and nods.
“How about you? Always been a caretaker?”
I shake my head. “I’ve done bits and pieces of different things. Always been handy, so I take on whatever I can.”
“Jack of all trades,” she comments.
“Master of none,” I finish, and we both smile.
I bite, chew, and swallow, then say, almost reluctantly, “I boxed as a young fella. All the men in my family did.”
Her eyebrows arch. “Where are your cauliflower ears?”
“Got lucky, I guess. My dad and granddad both had beauties.” I smile, remembering their misshapen bulbous ears.
I stand and brush the crumbs off my jeans, reaching for my tool belt. “Anyway. Day’s getting on.”
She hesitates. “I don’t think I should, I’m sorry.”
“Why not?”
She stands and lifts her three layers-wool pullover, shirt, and thermal top-to show me her side. Blood has drenched the bandages around her torso, and I can see it trickling down her hip and under her pants.
“Shit,” I say.
“I guess maybe this body wasn’t as ready to work as I was.” She seems genuinely embarrassed.
“Sit down. Don’t give it another thought.”
“It’ll take you twice as long on your own.”
“Yep. I’m used to it.” I set up the ladder and climb onto the roof to take my measurements. “The worst part is the lack of company, so you can talk and I’ll work.”
I spend the afternoon replacing the roof sheets, removing old screws and bolts and tightening in the new, and she tells me about this house of hers.
She describes the shape of it, and the outlook, how she designed it to have windows that would face the sun no matter the time of day, that she wanted a light palace on the hill that would look down over the mountains and the forest, that in this way it sat above like our lighthouse does. She describes the materials she used and the ways she got around not having the strength of several men, how she came up with ropes and pulleys to serve her, how she would do almost anything before she hired another set of hands for the day. She talks of laying the slab, of framing the walls, tiling the bathroom, carving the kitchen benches herself out of timber from the property. She wanted the house to be so well designed and insulated that it would hardly need heating or cooling, making it as sustainable as possible.
I don’t realize at first that I am smiling as I listen to her voice. There is incredible love in every word, as there must have been in every movement of her hands, every nail she hammered. I am taken from this bleak and stormy island to live for an afternoon among her snow gums, I imagine myself waking to the morning fog and the sun rising over the hills, the glorious view from her bedroom, and before I know it I am in her bed, and then, accidentally, she is in this bed beside me.
I’m uncomfortable with the intimacy of this thought. Haven’t done much thinking of women in that way since I met my wife, and that was a good twenty years ago. Fuck, I’ve been out here alone too long. I don’t even find Rowan attractive.
(Is that true? She wasn’t attractive when she was unconscious and
had ribbons scraped off her flesh. You’d have to be some kind of sicko to find that attractive. Nor was she particularly appealing after she took two of my children to look at a dead body. But today she is speaking to me in a language I have not spoken in a long time, my mother tongue, a homecoming. Today she looks long and lean and strong in the sunlight. Maybe the truth is more uncomfortable than I’d like to admit, that I don’t
want to find her attractive because I dislike her, because she is a problem, and that I need to be careful of this woman, lest she creep her way into more of the rooms in my mind.)
I ask everything I can think to ask, not wanting her to stop talking, but eventually she says, “Is it something you’ve thought about doing?”
“It is,” I admit, though I’ve told no one else this.
“Tell me about the house you’d build,” Rowan says.
And so we do that instead, I take her to the coast and I tell her of the beach house I have sketched out in my head. I describe its shape and form and what it’s made of.