Margie, unable to sleep, climbs out of bed and wraps Dave’s dressing gown around herself, tying the cord in a tight bow. She grabs a banana off the kitchen bench and eats it in the time it takes to heat a cup of milk in the microwave. She notices the answering machine light flashing frenetically, and presses play. How could she have forgotten to check the messages? It seems the more anxious she is, the less functional she becomes – even if that means failing to check whether Dave has called, the very thing that could calm her overtired, harried mind.
The sound of static fills the kitchen and Margie wonders if the machine has malfunctioned. But then she hears Dave’s voice. With the interference, it’s difficult to decipher what he’s saying. She holds her ear close to his voice, imagining him beside her.
‘Margie, we’re…doi…fine. It looks li…South Africans are com…to our aid to br…this bullsh…to a close. Any moment…heading back ho…Can you pleas…Trish…William is okay? Love you…Please…Bonnie…cuddle for me.’
‘Thank God,’ she says to the empty room as the answering machine clicks off and whirs in rewind mode. Her body aches with the weight of days of tension. She needs a hot shower, something to smooth out the muscles across her neck and back that have forgotten how to relax. Something that will help her surrender to sleep. She makes her way to the bathroom and turns on the shower taps above the bath, undressing as she waits for the hot water to come through. Her skin tingles in anticipation before she dives under the rush of warmth as though she is letting herself be soothed in Dave’s embrace.
Standing under a warm shower gives her as big a lift as any yoga class or meditation practice, she thinks. If they weren’t on tank water, there are times when she’d be tempted to stay under the shower all day. Joan told her once that the rush of water creates a source of negatively charged ions in the air, and that it’s those ions that make people feel so wonderful—creative even. Who knows if it’s true. Joan says the same thing happens at the bottom of a waterfall. It seems strange that negatively charged ions can make someone feel good, but she lets herself be swept along by the mysteries of the universe.
From the shower, she looks through a tall double-glazed window to the flashing light of the Iron Pot Lighthouse on an outcrop at the mouth of the Derwent River, warning boats away. Her mind returns to Dave at sea. She lifts her face into the spray of water and lets it wash away her worries. She is wasting water, but isn’t ready to leave the sanctuary of its warm caress.
To hell with it, Margie thinks as she takes the bath plug between her toes and slots it into the plughole. She leaves the shower running and also turns on the bath taps. The spent water can be re-used on the garden, Margie tells herself.
She opens a dusty jar of dried flowers and berries, which she had kept, largely for decoration, beside the bath, and sprinkles them onto the water’s surface. The earthy sweet scent, mellowed with age, is subtle and pleasing. If the flowers block the drains, so be it. Dave can deal with that when he gets home—his penance for putting her through all of this. When the bath is full, she turns off the taps, and leans across to take a box of matches from the bathroom drawer. She lights the row of candles that sit along the Huon pine shelf, and traces the wood’s pale vanilla growth rings with her finger. How old was this tree before its wood became this piece of bathroom furniture, she wonders. Some Huon pines can live for a thousand years, each growth ring a memory of a distant time. She marvels that one of these rings might have formed in the same year that the Battle of Hastings took place. Another will correspond to the year that Captain James Cook sailed into Botany Bay. A number of growth rings away would be wood that formed at the same time that Tasmania’s notorious Port Arthur jail impounded its first convicts; and, later, the month when armed soldiers and settlers marched together, in what was to become known as the Black Line, down the same colony in an effort to herd its first occupants —its Aborigines—onto the Tasman Peninsula at the southern tip of the island. How strange that times past are captured in a block of wood in her bathroom, Margie muses. She thinks of Dave building the bench, a project to occupy his hands and his mind after Sam died. He’d said Huon pine was perfect for using near water. It’s what boats were once built from.
Lavender petals and juniper berries kiss Margie’s legs as she lowers herself into the bath. She can soak in here as long as she wants tonight, she thinks. These moments of inner quiet are to be celebrated and savoured. She knows that now.
She focuses her mind on relaxing every inch of her physical self. She remembers Dave’s request to phone Trish, and makes a mental note to do it first thing in the morning. ‘Relax,’ she reminds herself. Trish won’t be sitting by the phone, waiting for her call. She’s the sort of person who seems to go through life blissfully unaware of potential tragedy. Margie envies her.
She squashes a juniper berry between her finger and thumb and rubs the juice onto her stomach and across the caesarean scar through which Sam was removed from her womb twenty-six years ago. She remembers the first time she saw the curved scar in the mirror. It seemed to be smiling at her. Without too much imagination, her torso morphed into a whole face. Her breasts became the scar’s eyes and her naval its nose. But seeing it now from above, the scar resembles a downturned mouth—forlorn. Without too much imagination, her wrinkled knees become frowning eyes, warning her to seize life, this moment, for it will pass like a ship in the night. She touches the scar of Sam’s birth and imagines, for a moment, that her baby is still safe inside her. He will always be with her, she thinks as she leaves her hand there. He was made of her, after all. Her blood, her flesh, her bone. Nothing can take that away.
She thinks of Dave and how losing Sam has changed him, too. How he is more likely now, than before, to tell her that he loves her. Perhaps some good can come from bad. But still there is the pain of what can never be. She has seen the sadness in his eyes when he sees young children and is reminded that he will never have grandchildren of his own. Perhaps they’d been jumping the gun, but they had thought they’d come close to it with Sam’s girlfriend. Sascha had been almost part of the family until just before the accident.
Margie thinks of Sam’s face the day he told her that Sascha had broken up with him. It was so different from his face the day before, when he confided that he was about to ask her to be his wife.
Margie pushes the flowers around on the surface of the water, making patterns out of the chaos.
Sascha still hasn’t been back to the house since the funeral, and Margie couldn’t face her that day. If she is honest, Margie would say that she blames Sascha for the accident. If Sam had been thinking straight, he would have seen the P-plate driver coming. And, within months of Sam dying, to add insult to injury, Margie learned from a friend that Sascha was pregnant to her new boyfriend. The news came as a betrayal. How could Sascha, whom she had welcomed into the house like a daughter, have moved on so quickly? Did Sam, her first love, mean so little to her? At least Sam never knew of the pregnancy, Margie thinks. It’s a small blessing.
A heavy drop of water falls from the old brass tap into the bath and Margie lets the sad thoughts of Sam slip away. She sinks her head under the warm water, and looks up through the scatter of flowers on the surface, thankful that the aged pot pourri has lost any capacity to sting her searching eyes. As she releases her breath, bubbles rise and push the petals around like small painted boats.
When she comes up for air, Margie bids a fond farewell to the soft light of the candles, luminous on the bath’s edge. She begins to blow them out, but the last one resists. It flickers but then stands tall. It’s as if it doesn’t want to go out. Margie opens the window slightly and lets the cool, dark wind from the Southern Ocean extinguish it.
She stands and runs her fingers over her scalp, studying herself in the mirror. With the petals and berries in her hair and her skin turned red from the heat, she is a human echo of an overcooked crayfish. She laughs out loud, picking the flotsam and jetsam from her body. If it were a fancy restaurant, the sort where they serve toothfish but call it something more exotic, like Chilean sea bass, they’d say she’d been slow-cooked and served with lavender essence and juniper jus. She turns the shower on hard and lets the water pummel her head, teasing out the spent petals and berries. Her mind again flies thousands of nautical miles west to Dave at sea. She imagines his fingers massaging her. Is it possible (she asks herself, or God, or whoever is listening) that Dave – stubborn but honest, hard-working and hers—was placed on this earth at the same time as her to share life’s experiences, some good and some so terrible that no human being could endure them on their own? But that would suggest that life is fated, and that Sam was always going to die. She’s not sure she can believe that. Still, no one else understands her as well as Dave, and that, she decides, is enough. He accepts her as she is, her ups and downs, her need to paint and to sometimes disappear for a whole day on a local bushwalk to combat her grief. A doctor had warned them to keep talking to each other after Sam died, and they did—every day.
As she turns off the shower, Margie wonders how Julia Pereira de Sánchez is faring. Her email response had been brief and Margie wonders if she should warn her about the involvement of the South African navy. Perhaps it would help ensure that the Uruguayan master surrenders peacefully, no guns fired. It doesn’t feel right to have extended the hand of cooperation, friendship even, to another woman, and then to have withdrawn it just as quickly when circumstances turned in her favour. She thinks of Dave telling her she’d have made a good Catholic, with her guilty conscience. He’s probably right.
Margie wraps a crisp white towel around her torso and winds another one, turban style, around her faintly silvered hair. She’d escaped grey hairs completely until Sam died and then managed to produce a small shroud of them almost overnight.
No, she decides as she rubs moisturiser onto her face, she won’t warn Julia that the navy are on their way. Who knows, the information could start another chase, making the situation worse for everyone. The important thing is that the hot pursuit, as the government insists on calling it, is drawing to a close. It’s what she and Julia both wanted. Margie unwraps the towel from her hair, takes the blowdryer from the drawer and bathes her head in its warmth. Finally her body feels ready for sleep.