The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,133
silence stretches. I can’t comprehend that my mother is dead. I was going to see her this morning. I was going to sit with her and hold her hand. But I’m too late. ‘What do we do now?’ Leon asks. ‘Who do we call?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll find out. Then I’ll come down. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
‘I’ll stay with her till you get here.’
He hangs up and I begin dialling. First Jan, then Gary. Jan is distraught, weeping, hysterical. She’s too late, she says. And I say yes, it’s too late for everything. Gary is more rational. He says he was expecting something like this; Mum looked so terrible the other day. I ask him to find out what to do about Mum’s body. I trip over the words. The body. It’s such a term of separation. The body disconnected from life, separated from contact, from affection. I feel nauseous.
I call Jacinta. She and Alex are on their way to pick up Jan when I tell her about Mum, Jacinta is silent on the end of the phone. It’s as if she has been frozen. I stammer out broken condolences and hang up.
Around me, the day resumes its shape, thick with ludicrous sunshine and wavering shadows. I glance down at the road—the Commodore is long gone. It’s hard to believe Emma and Nick were ever here. It’s all so incongruous: my mother’s death, Emma drunk on my doorstep last night, Nick sleeping in my house. I rest my chin on my knees, hugging my legs tight. Everything looks so normal. The trees, the quivering leaves, the sky, the puffy clouds. How can it be this way? How can everything go on like this when my mother has died?
I stand and walk slowly down the hill with Jess at my heels. We slot ourselves into the car and drive.
On the ferry, I leave Jess in the car and wander to the bow, leaning against the cold metal railing. Beneath my feet, the deck throbs. The light is shimmering on the water. I breathe with the rhythm of the engines, trying to empty myself, to be one with everything, to be non-existent. Wind pours over the bow as the ferry swings around the headland south of Kettering and angles across the channel.
Closer to Bruny, the wind increases and chops the water to small waves, spray hitting my face. In weather like this I should be cold, but instead I am numb. I grip the railing with hard fists, trying to feel some sort of emotion, to feel pain, or grief, or sadness. Anything.
When finally I release the railing and return to the car, my body is rigid, and then I’m gripped by a deep chill that leaves me shaking as if I’ll never stop. I can hardly steady my hands to fit the key in the ignition.
Jess stares at me sadly. Usually she’d jump on the front seat for a pat, but today she sits miserably on the floor. She sniffs the hand I extend towards her and cautiously licks my fingers.
Her tongue is soft and warm and my hands are icy. I tuck them beneath my armpits and gaze through the windscreen. Vapour fog creeps quickly around its edges as I breathe.
North Bruny passes in a blur and I can hardly recall disembarking from the ferry. The sky above the Neck is brooding; no patches of blue or breakthrough shafts of light. It seems appropriate.
I swing around the bends and curves of South Bruny, skipping from gravel to brief breaks of tar and back to gravel, through Alonnah—the school, the playground, the post office—and on to Lunawanna, past the mudflats, thick with mustering gulls. I turn east towards Cloudy Bay, past the store, and then the road sweeps out of town, passing cottages with thin streamers of smoke coiling from their chimneys and washing hung beneath their eaves. When at last I arrive at Cloudy Bay, I pull over in the Whalebone Point carpark and clamber out, unable as yet to tackle that final stretch down the beach to the door of the cabin where my mother’s body lies.
I walk to the edge of the carpark and gaze south where the grey sea travels in between the heads. Those long arms of headland reach to embrace the bay, but fail to curb the magnetism of the ocean. Closer in, the waves are tinged with red. I’ve only ever seen this phenomenon here: the colour of blood in