The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,146

Dad detested automation.’

Jan sighs. ‘You’re right. She’d hate us to do it there. It’d be disrespectful to Dad.’ It’s the first time I’ve ever heard Jan admit she was wrong. ‘But I don’t want to spread her ashes right here,’ she says. ‘I don’t like to think about people walking on her . . .’ She trails off, voice quavering.

‘We could wander down the hill a little and go off along that grassy track,’ I suggest, pointing. ‘That’d take us away from the tower and the tourists. I bet most people just follow the path up here and then go straight back down.’

Jan agrees and we walk slowly downhill, each of us meandering somewhere in memory. When I stop halfway across the slope, Jan comes up alongside me. Her face is almost soft. She waits for Gary to join us before handing me the little china urn.

‘Here, you do it,’ she says. ‘You love this place more than any of us.’

‘Just be careful to check the wind direction,’ Gary cautions. ‘I’ve heard of people wearing ashes all over them.’ He laughs stiffly.

‘It’s a sou’westerly,’ I say. ‘The wind’s almost always from the south-west at this time of year.’

I take the lid off the urn. Honeyeaters dip and flutter over the heath. I wave Gary and Jan behind me, then lift the urn high and trickle Mum’s ashes out into the wind. Grey dust catches and drifts and spirals. I toss the rest up as far as I can and stand back to watch the last grey flushes disappear among the bushes.

We stand for a long time, breathing quietly.

‘Well, I suppose that’s it then,’ Gary says after a while.

We start back across the hill to the path, where Jan decides she’s going down to talk to the caretaker’s wife. Gary wants to sit on the bench seat at the top and look south at the view. I give him my rain jacket as some protection from the wind and then I follow the track down towards Courts Island.

I haven’t been this way in years. When I was a child, I used to scramble down here all the time. Each day after lessons, I’d race up past the tower and down the slope to see if the tide was far enough out so I could scoot across the causeway. Back before I was born, they sometimes used to deliver mail in the sheltered area between the island and the cape. Someone from the light station would scrape down to the pebbly cove and grab a few supplies from a dinghy launched from the boat.

Today, I pause as the track steepens. Around the craggy coast, I see coloured buoys floating on the swell, marking craypots. I climb further down, and the causeway comes into view. Waves run across it from two directions, meeting in the middle, but the rocks are still exposed and it’s shallow enough to cross. The track becomes rocky and I pick my way down carefully.

The route has changed since I was young—it’s eroded now from use by too many people. Before I was born, people used to flock here during mutton-bird season. They’d park their cars along the road behind the cottages and rush up here to wait for the official opening hour. Then they’d cross to the island, no matter what the tides, to drag chicks from their burrows. Mutton birds were supposed to make good roasts, but Mum said the meat was oily. I never tried it, and then the harvest was banned. So that meant Courts Island was a sanctuary for me, a place to watch birds excavating their burrows at the beginning of each breeding season, their feet scraping, dirt flying. Later in the season the eagles would come, perching on rocks or low scrub, waiting for an opportunity to carry away a fat chick for a feast.

I scrabble down the last precarious section of track onto a stony beach strewn with clumps of kelp and stinking seaweed. After picking my way over rocks, I stride across the causeway through shallow lapping waves. On the other side, I climb the steep track among succulent pig-face and iceplant. The musty smell of bird is thick in my nostrils. Small animal paths crisscross the slope marked by webbed footprints. Dark round holes plunge beneath the vegetation, their openings lined with feathers. As I wander over the spongy ground, a wedge-tailed eagle with a blond mane takes to the air, flapping up slowly from a rock splashed white