Chapter 22
CHAPTER
‘Good morning, Mrs Albatross.’
The female wandering albatross perched on a rock twenty metres away has a white head, neck and body but darker plumage on her breast and upper back.
Her yellowish-pink beak is large, and she has a wedge-shaped tail.
There are only six pairs of albatrosses on Morrison and as the species is endangered, every pair counts.
Wandering albatrosses have no natural predators out here because of their size, but as they eat fish and cephalopods like cuttlefish and squid from the surface of the ocean, they can get caught in longline nets trawled behind fishing boats.
For now, the albatross and her mate’s priority is their nest, a concoction of mud and vegetation built on an exposed ridge with majestic ocean views.
Albatrosses have a chick every two years.
The parents take it in turns to sit on the egg, and then the chick, while their mate hunts.
It’s Mr Albatross’s turn to go out today.
A fixed camera monitors this nest and many others on Morrison, but since Clarissa suggested I spend two nights on the most westerly side of the island, it’s a chance to observe them firsthand. I store my camera and check my watch.
‘Flick!’ Angelina is ten minutes early.
‘Coming!’
The better I get to know Angelina, the better I appreciate that she’s not only funny and sociable but smart and industrious.
It can’t be easy to position scientists and their invariably complex and often obscure research interests in a way to make them not only worthy of funding but newsworthy, and that’s what she does.
She drops her pack at the field hut door and hugs me. ‘How is Tweety Pie?’
I laugh. ‘The chick will hatch late January.’
The timber hut is five metres by five metres, with a bunk bed, table, two chairs, a kitchenette with a stove, and cupboards stacked with tins and other equipment you’d take on a camping trip.
For power, there’s a generator. Once my hands have thawed out, I pour the tea while Angelina stacks containers.
‘Jerry sent spaghetti bolognese you can heat on the stove tonight. Also—’ she holds up a bag, ‘—brownies.’
Still rugged up, we sit inside to drink our tea.
‘Not too lonely out here?’ Angelina asks.
‘This is a good way to demonstrate my competence, and I have birds to keep me company.’
‘It’s freezing.’
‘I have some photos for you.’ I hold up my phone. ‘I used this as well as the camera.’
‘I don’t suppose you took selfies?’
‘As if I’d do that.’
Angelina rolls her eyes then takes a photo of me with her phone. ‘The trouble with your photos is that you’re not in any of them.’
‘I’m wearing six layers and I have hat hair.’
She blows a kiss. ‘Your hair is great, your freckles are adorable and your smile is a million watts. I got stunning shots of with you the penguins last week.’
‘The penguins have to be the focus.’
‘You do the birds, leave socials to me.’
‘Everything okay at the station?’
‘Same, same. Dougie said to say hello. I don’t know what Clarissa was thinking with this trial, but he’s definitely a fan.’
‘Did he send you out here today?’
‘He wants me to report back on how you’re getting on, not that he thinks you’re a risk. On that …’ She grins. ‘Any word from Seb? I’ve had a few calls from Casey.’
‘About your social media push?’
She tips her head to the side. ‘And you.’
‘What does he say?’
‘He’s totally upfront, telling me you don’t want to engage with him, so he has to ask me how you’re faring.’
‘He uses those words?’
She laughs. ‘More like, “Felicity is pissed” and “Is she safe?”’
‘Better.’
‘He doesn’t like that you’re here all by yourself, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t rate you. He’s not all bad.’
‘You keep coming back to that. You like him, don’t you?’
‘Romantically? He’s made it clear that that’s not going to happen. You, on the other hand, could—’
Whatever she sees on my face cuts her sentence short. She taps a painted nail on the table. ‘You’re avoiding him.’
‘On reflection, I concede that Sebastien talking to Clarissa about the flights and ship was reasonable—in an evacuation, I’d have to be managed.
But telling her about Matt and how I was affected in the immediate aftermath was wrong.
If he thought she should know about it, which he obviously did, he should have given me the opportunity to explain it myself. ’
‘I can see how that would be hurtful, particularly as you trusted him to look after you on the ship.’ She smiles as she draws a heart in the air with her finger. ‘But his feelings for you, to quote Mr Darcy, haven’t changed one little bit.’
‘Given what he does, where he lives …’ I make an effort to keep my hand steady as I sip tea. ‘How Sebastien feels about me, how I feel about him, we can’t allow either of those things to mean anything.’
The sun pushes through the clouds before hiding again.
Shoulders stiff from watching the albatross, I clamber off my perch on a boulder and take the now familiar route to the field hut.
One more night and I’ll be back at the station.
Robin will welcome me with red frogs. Professor Johnson and the others will be happy to see me too.
When the satellite phone buzzes in my pocket, I turn my back to the wind and fumble to take off my gloves.
‘Flick Atherton.’
‘Seb.’
‘Oh.’ I clear my throat. ‘Hello.’
‘Angelina said you needed support, not criticism.’
‘From whom?’
A brief hesitation. ‘Me.’
‘Is that why you called?’
I hang onto the phone as I wait for his reply.
‘There’s a problem with the ship,’ he finally says. ‘Another week to ten days.’
Seven to ten more days of fighting not to miss him. ‘Right.’
‘I told Clarissa not to make a decision about your trial until I get there.’
So now I have a four-week trial? ‘You said you weren’t involved in her decision.’
‘I wasn’t, but she’ll listen to me.’
My feet are frozen; I stamp them. ‘I’ll prove myself.’
‘Will you call me when you get back to the station?’
‘What about?’
‘Anything.’ There are shouts in the background. His line crackles and cuts out.
I check the generator, put on lights, warm the spaghetti bolognese that Jerry cooked and Angelina carried all the way out here.
I’m not hungry like I was an hour ago, but force myself to eat.
And, just as I’ve done in the past three days, I rug up and go outside the hut to use the toilet (such as it is) and search the sky for Mr and Mrs Albatross.
They don’t care about day or night. Do they worry one of them might not make it back safely?
I’ll prove myself. It’s what I said to the board that released me from juvenile detention and the university I wanted to attend even though I didn’t have the marks.
I told Dougie I had to prove myself, and now I’ve said the same thing to Sebastien.
I’ll prove myself all over again but will there ever be a time when I don’t have to do that?
The waves rumble against the base of the cliff as I climb into my sleeping bag and adjust layers of clothing.
Wearing Sebastien’s jumper, whether he knows about it or not, is intimate.
Listening to him brushing his teeth on the ship was intimate.
We kissed in the park in Hobart and that was intimate too.
Sharing a bed on the ship, even though nothing really happened until that last night, when I kissed him, was the most intimate thing I’ve ever done.
Sex? It’s never been intimate, not for me.
By the time I’d changed my mind about having sex with Will, there was no escape.
He was older than I was, one of the pilots Matt had worked with.
I’d imagined dating him would get me closer to Matt.
It had at first, because he talked about how Matt loved flying more than anyone he’d ever known, and how talented he was.
I was eighteen. Will had made a picnic and we ate it on the banks of a river.
After the sun went down, the families and other couples enjoying the river drove away, but Will topped up my glass, gin with something sweet.
He tidied the remains of the picnic and spread out a second blanket.
He said he had a condom, but I had no idea whether he’d used it or not, so for the next few weeks, I thought I must be pregnant.
I didn’t see Will again, but there were others eager to take his place.
None of them meant anything to me and I meant nothing to them.
That’s why it was painful and then uncomfortable and then … nothing.
Pumping. Grinding. Sweat. Disgust.
Nothing.
In detention, I was trapped in a cage I couldn’t get out of. Now I was out, but I’d made another cage. I searched for Matt through the memories of his friends. Party and drink. Sex. Make up for time I’d lost while I was locked up. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
I’m not sure how Beau D’Arcy found out what’d been going on, but he never said a word when he pulled me out of the back of a car and told whoever I was with that I was leaving.
Beau took me to his mother. I couldn’t have cried for the whole time I spent in the tiny spare room, crammed with a rickety bookcase of children’s books, Beau’s skateboards under the bed and footballs in a basket by the wardrobe, but that’s what it felt like.
Crying all day and all night, then all day and all night again.
The wind whistles around the hut but with gloves, a beanie, Sebastien’s jumper and my other clothes, I’m warm in my sleeping bag.
The first time I saw a psychologist after Matt died, I was in detention.
Before I was released, Mandy, wise, calm and non-judgemental, suggested I go to Sapphie, a school teacher in Horseshoe Hill who ran horse therapy sessions for kids at risk of getting into trouble, kids in trouble and kids who’d been in trouble before.
With thick brown hair and the darkest blue eyes I’d ever seen, Sapphie was physically beautiful (her mother had been a famous model) but she had scars like the rest of us.
She didn’t lecture or boss us around but showed us that, if we were angry or anxious, the horses would sense that and avoid us.
If we wanted to be with the horses, we had to regulate our emotions and calm down.
When I told Sapphie what’d happened with Matt’s friends, she didn’t say a word, but she hugged me. Then she pulled back and cried. When she could get words out, she told me that something like that had happened to her.
I must’ve told Mandy about the cage I’d built, because we used to talk a lot about that, how I’d fight to let birds out of cages but locked myself up.
Mandy showed me I hadn’t had the strength to open the cages when I was a child and had relied on Matt to do it for me.
Tears would stream down my face. ‘He did, didn’t he?
’ Mandy reassured me I was now strong and resilient.
‘You can put your arm through the bars,’ she’d say. ‘You can open the cage by yourself.’
My fear of flying. My mother.
I’m not done with cages yet.