I was in my favourite place, and one of my favourite people, Mrs Fox, beckoned me over.
“Did you know, Remi,” she whispered, parting the branches of her old apple tree, “that Australian wildlife is some of the most hollow-dependent anywhere in the world?”
I shook my head, peering into the small space she’d made with her gloved hands. In there, I saw an old nesting box, lovingly painted with some of Mrs Fox’s own designs – birds, clouds, mountains, the moon and sun. “Because hollows take almost one hundred years to form,” Mrs Fox added, “and we’ve been losing so many old trees to bushfires and logging, putting nesting boxes up is one easy way we can help our native animals survive.”
With a finger to her lips, she inclined her head, telling me to take a peek inside.
Standing on tiptoes because the nesting box was up high to keep the animals that lived inside safe from predators, I caught a glimpse of tiny grey-brown bodies, all tumbled together. Feathertail gliders! Miniature possums, small as mice, with feather-shaped tails; they mostly lived in the trees, feasting on nectar, pollen and tiny insects. There must have been at least five of them in there, fast asleep. I wished I could hold one, but Mrs Fox shook her head, letting the branches fall back over the nesting box.
“Rem!” Mum called from the other side of the huge, rambling garden, leaning tiredly on her rake. “Time to go! The Foxes need a rest from the Chan family.”
Mrs Fox, the ends of her long, curly white hair blowing around her face, laughed and said, “The Chan family is family. Come back again soon, Remi? When the weather’s good and you’re not too tired from school? We won’t start harvesting the coast wattle seeds till you get here, I promise.”
I’d nodded eagerly, because I loved coming to help out in the Foxes’ magical garden with my parents.
Dad’s friend, Mr Fox, was the keeper of the southernmost lighthouse on mainland Australia. His family had been there since before Dad was born, and he’d known Dad since he was a kid.
Mr Fox’s job was super important – especially now that the seas are so unpredictable and there’s a huge offshore wind farm generating green energy for millions of homes around the country. Mr Fox’s lighthouse helped keep big ships, turbine service vessels and people safe in the treacherous strait between mainland Australia and Tasmania.
Mrs Fox was just as important. She looked after the old lighthouse keeper’s garden that she’d really made her own – taking the bare bones laid down in the 1850s and turning all the green spaces between the lighthouse, the keeper’s cottage and guest cottages into a wonderland that was different at every turn. There were nooks and benches for sitting and resting, groves of small and hardy fruit and native trees, low-growing shrubs and beds of bush foods by the score. She also looked after the paying lightstation guests who sometimes came to stay, and welcomed all the tired walkers doing the three-day Lighthouse Circuit walk with hot tea and home-made biscuits, topped with her own preserves.
But what she was really known for – Mum said she was even a little bit famous for – were her beautiful oil paintings. Big and complicated landscapes, as if seen from on high by a white-bellied sea eagle. Woodland and heathland, waterholes and creeks, mountains, coastal saltmarshes, wetlands, headlands, grasslands and rainforests. All the things that surrounded her home. Her paintings hung on walls around the lightstation, and in homes as far north-east as Sunday Island and Port Albert. Even galleries and museums in the city had them, Mum said.
A sudden gust of wind snatched my cap straight off my head. I chased it almost to the edge of the cliff, which was also the edge of the lighthouse keeper’s garden. Dad yelled at me to Let it go! and I watched my faded blue cap fly straight off the edge of the world, carried high above the raging seas below. Mrs Fox immediately took her old and floppy bucket hat off her head and placed it on mine, pulling the drawstring tight under my chin.
“I’ll bring it back next time I come,” I told her, barely able to see out from under the brim. She’d laughed and said, “Keep it! Just promise me you’ll grow things or make things or paint things, always, when you have it on. It’s a hat for changing the world.”
Dad and Mum had taken off their gardening gloves at that, and stored their tools in the shed before coming over to give Mrs Fox a hug. They were both covered in soil, burrs and grass stains, and Mum had twigs caught in her bun.
Mrs Fox gave me a hug big enough to lift me off my feet, then set me down with a gentle push. “It’s going to take you over four hours to get back to Telegraph Saddle car park and the rain’s coming. Mr Fox and I will both be waiting for you the next time you come to visit.”
The three of us had shouldered our packs and started walking. As we’d turned on the rise, Mrs Fox was waving both arms above her wild and woolly hair, beaming from ear to ear, her old gardening clothes splattered with paint and mud.
I didn’t know it then, but it was the last time we would ever see her.
I live in a tiny coastal town called Rabbit Inlet, which is on an isthmus – a place surrounded by water on two sides. Sometimes three, when the floods are very bad.
We run our own drone fleet, and floating robots, to help warn us when the seas are going to rise, or when the bad weather is coming, or when the algal blooms are out of control after a cyclone or flood. When those things happen, we sometimes have to stay indoors if we have trouble breathing, or close the beaches and stop fishing or harvesting shellfish for a while, because the toxins in the water and in the sea spray could make us sick.
We got our own drones and robots after the sea walls were torn down. The high barriers were built to protect our homes from flooding, but they were also moving the problem water, and heavy waves, up the coast. And we missed seeing the sea. It felt all wrong to be right next to it, to be able to hear waves crashing, but only see concrete stretching up into the sky.
After the walls were torn down, we started building a living shoreline of oyster and mussel beds, and growing salt marsh plants. We’re building rain gardens around the houses on the edge of town too – big “bowls” of dirt, sand and mulch filled with small salt-tolerant plants – to help drain our excess sea and rainwater. Some days, our town is more like a wetland reserve than a town. Some of the outlying streets still get covered in water after a heavy rain, but we love it. On the way to school, we can pass flocks of waders, terns, gulls, stints, plovers and red-billed oystercatchers all splashing around. Maybe a rare white-bellied sea eagle might pass overhead.
Our local biodiversity team – we call ourselves the Wildecrew – is made up of kids and parents, teachers, rangers and old folk. Pretty much everyone living in Rabbit Inlet, Population: 261.
Some people run the drones, some people paddle out in their kayaks or dinghies to check on the floating robots, and all of us take turns caring for the living shoreline and the rain gardens, or take part in the rewilding projects around the place. There are new projects all the time.
My teacher says it’s a full-time job, just living in Rabbit Inlet.
“Despite everything, rabbits survive and so do we, Remi,” Mum always says, in the only guaranteed French accent for hundreds of kilometres around.
Rabbit Inlet is the last town now before the Promontory: the hook-shaped peninsula that’s the southernmost part of mainland Australia. The Promontory is where Mr Fox is the lighthouse keeper.
“It’s one of the last great national parks left on Earth,” Mum said once. “It’s had good guardians who knew how to care for something this precious.”
“Sacred Country,” Dad had added. “First Nations Country. Always was, always will be. Since time began, love.”
That’s why Mum moved here all those years ago. She said a small voice inside told her to leave Paris – which was already boiling hot, overcrowded and starting to collapse – and find a new home as far away as she could manage, near the wildest body of water she could find.
She thought the biggest island in the whole world – Australia – would probably have lots of wild water. And she was right. Dad drove past her in his rusty truck – she was trudging down the Promontory Road towards Tidal River in a bad storm with one hundred kilometre-per-hour winds, her hair stuck all over her face, wearing everything she owned at once to protect her from the elements. And that was it.
“My person,” Dad always says, beaming as he remembers.
“My person,” Mum always responds with an answering grin.
“Middle of nowhere,” they always chorus, “in the most beautiful place on Earth.”
They’re a bit sappy, to be honest.
Dad’s Chinese-Australian. His family’s been here since the Gold Rush days, the 1800s. But out-of-towners think he’s like Mum. From somewhere foreign. Until he starts talking, that is. We always have a giggle about it.
Dad knows all the history of the area. He says Rabbit Inlet has already had to relocate twice in the last fifty years. His dad’s dad was still around to help with the first move, and Dad’s own dad helped with the second. They put the wooden houses on flatbed trucks and just drove them away, because the whole town had to shift inland, west, by a kilometre when Duck Point and the caravan park and holiday cottages went underwater. Then parts of it had to shift south and a bit east, later, when Shallow Inlet stopped being shallow.
Mum and Dad say there were once other small towns on either side of us, but now they’re abandoned. Mostly drowned.
“The whole shoreline’s changed, love,” Dad often tells me, pointing out of the windscreen when we do errands, his hand wiggling to show me where some cliffs used to be, or a set of sand dunes – now long scattered by the sea – that he remembers rolling down when he was very small.
Our homes are kind of strung out now, in loose rows, down the middle of a skinny band of land, less than three kilometres wide, that’s only getting skinnier by the day. There are dozens of abandoned buildings between us and both coastlines, and it’s one of the Wildecrew’s ongoing projects to reclaim them for marine and plant life, or bees, insects, birds and small animals.
In the last ten years, Dad says, people have really started to leave coastal cities in droves – moving into the overcrowded urban centres up north where at least it’s mostly dry. Those of us who are left have built our houses high up on stilts, because we’ve lost too many things to too many floods.
On nights when the elements are raging, and our little stilt house is shaking from side to side, Dad, Mum and me look out towards the lighthouse at the very end of the peninsula.
It always makes us feel safe to see Mr Fox’s bright light burning all through the dark night. But we worry about who keeps Mr Fox safe now that Mrs Fox isn’t there to look after him any more.
Not long after we were last there, Mrs Fox fell in the garden and had to be carried inside by Mr Fox. It had something to do with her brain. He drove her almost three hundred kilometres to get help from the very best doctors at the big hospital in the city, but she was gone a few days later. She never walked in her garden again.
Mrs Fox noticed a lot, and she really listened. And when you were with her? You just felt calm inside.
“Not many people can do that,” Mum said through her tears, when we heard the awful news from Mr Stanley at the General Store. “Bring calm. It’s a gift.”
Mr Fox got special permission to have her buried in the small graveyard on the outskirts of the lightstation. Friends from Rabbit Inlet, and coastal towns even further north, west and east, were invited to walk through Mrs Fox’s beautiful garden to choose a bud, fruit, seed pod or flower to place on her grave. I chose a pomegranate, Mum a banksia seed pod, but Dad brought his favourite paintbrush from home because he said she would need one, where she was going. Everyone told Mr Fox that she still lived on in all the vines and fruit trees she’d planted, in all her perennials and natives that bordered almost every walk around the lightstation. But Mr Fox just cried and cried.
Looking after the lighthouse, and the lighthouse keeper’s garden all around it, is a huge job. Only the occasional outside volunteer makes it as far south as our lighthouse these days, perched as it is right on top of blustery Bass Strait, higher even than all the giant, gleaming wind turbines far out to sea. That’s why Dad, Mum and I would often trek the nineteen kilometres from Telegraph Saddle car park to the lighthouse, to see the Foxes and bring supplies, company and muscle to help with the lightstation’s upkeep.
“People don’t volunteer much any more,” Mr Fox told Dad once, when Mum, Dad and I were there helping in the garden. “Not when there’s so much going on in the world; when it’s so hard just to put food on the table, you know?”
Between them, the Foxes used to grow enough fruit and vegetables – bush foods and just about every other thing you could think of – to regularly fill a shop. Sometimes, when Mr Fox had to run errands, he’d bring boxes of fresh-grown produce into Rabbit Inlet for people to share. Carrots, silver beet, tomatoes and potatoes: things that city people have trouble getting a good supply of these days. But also things that only grow out here, like coast wattle seed for our cakes and biscuits, and bags of seaberry saltbush – the leaves and the bitter dark-red fruit – and white elderberries, sour but delicious eaten raw.
“The Foxes aren’t well off, but they share everything they have,” Dad said once as we gratefully took a sack of food from Mr Fox’s truck.
Now Mr Fox lives all alone in the lighthouse at the end of the mainland. It’s been almost a year since Mrs Fox died, but we never see him driving through town any more in his old truck, handing out home-grown produce. These days, he has his staples – things like tinned beans, lentils, tomatoes, spam, bags of flour and small tins of tea – delivered once a month to Telegraph Saddle car park so that no one has to go to too much trouble. Mr Stanley, at the General Store, says he never lays eyes on Mr Fox now. He just leaves a covered wooden crate by the broken bubbler, the old drinking fountain in the car park that doesn’t work any more. A day or two later, it’s gone. When Mr Fox needs something else, the crate appears again, empty, and Mr Stanley fills it with whatever Mr Fox messages ahead that he needs.
When it floods sometimes, the only way to reach Mr Fox is by boat, but he never sends for help. He probably just goes hungry as he waits for the waters to recede. Then the crate reappears in the car park as if nothing has happened.
“He’s out there on his own little island, trying to keep ships and people safe and forgetting to look after himself,” Dad says one evening as we peer out through the darkness at Mr Fox’s light. “I’m going to walk out and see him tomorrow,” he declares. “It’s Saturday. Going to be a beautiful one, too.”
“I’m coming with you,” I reply, heart leaping.
I want to see Mr Fox again, and his magical lighthouse keeper’s garden. I wonder if it’s how I remember it – bursting with fruit and flowers, and manna gums and paperbark trees that have grown bent and beautiful from the monstrous winds. I want to see Mrs Fox, too, with all my heart. But I know that won’t be possible, and I still can’t believe she won’t be there.
The Wildecrew first banded together during the terrible floods of 2043. A few people died in their homes because they refused to leave. After that, everyone promised each other that they would never let that happen again. When the waters receded – revealing devastated shops and buildings, and leaving history and memories covered in a foul-smelling sludge – the locals who had the heart to stay banded together to rebuild homes and other useful things that no one thinks about till they’re gone: footbridges and park benches, footpaths and a small hall for people to gather in. Everyone reclaimed pieces of metal, stone, brick and wood from the mud and turned them into buildings and structures that looked kind of new and crazy, but also like they’d been there for ever, washed into place by the raging sea. And people who’d never had a scientific thought in their lives started to research the best ways to hold back the water. The Wildecrew made plenty of mistakes in the old days, pouring lots of concrete into huge barriers only to see them crack, or turn the sea into a battering ram that made the storms and flooding worse.
Our whole school got roped in at first to help with the general clean-up, and to check on the frail and elderly locals who were trapped indoors because of floodwater, or by intense summers plagued by power cuts in the days before the Great Southern Wind Zone was built. But the Wildecrew turned into a permanent team of volunteers who started to meet regularly, planning, building and planting in the hope that all their hard work would make life a little easier, a little greener, around Rabbit Inlet. And maybe stop more of our coastline from washing away.
Once a week, real early, kids and their carers, locals and rangers – First Nations ones as well as others from as far as the Nooramunga Marine and Coastal Park – would head out to a chosen local site to replant it with drought-hardy, pollution-absorbing, flood-defending native plants that can take care of themselves, or to build wildlife shelters, or plant butterfly or wildflower meadows. The hope was always to bring corridors of salt-tolerant green, and thriving native animal and insect life, back to our surroundings. And, with it, better health and happiness for all of us. And it’s worked. Years later, we’re still doing it, even though sometimes the sea or the rain just washes the project we’re working on away the next day. But we keep trying.
“It’s hard but hopeful work,” Dad reminds me, as we begin walking from Telegraph Saddle car park the next day. It’s just before sunrise, the sky still dark as night and the air hushed, the peace hardly broken by the scratch and skitter of mice, wombats, wallabies or possums in the underbrush.
Dad’s carrying some plant cuttings, seeds and hand tools in his pack – a trowel and hand shears, and a small lopper with extendable handles. He’s also got a bag of good coffee and some honey from a roof hive in town for Mr Fox. I’m wearing Mrs Fox’s old bucket hat and carrying our water flasks, two sandwiches and small bags of trail mix in my backpack, plus an all-weather torch that you can wind up in case the battery dies – although the tech’s so good these days it still hasn’t – and my satellite watch, because Mum worries about not being able to contact me whether I’m standing on the top of Mount Oberon or using the old wooden toilet at Roaring Meg Hikers Camp.
Dad and I take the Telegraph Track without stopping to detour to Mount Oberon like we usually do. We both hold on, even though we’re already busting, till we reach the old toilet at Roaring Meg’s. We then veer onto the left fork of the track, crossing Picnic Creek and First Bridge Creek, marching till we hit the old and treacherous South East Walking Track. The sun is high now as we break through a dense stand of eucalyptus and twisted coast tea-tree and coast banksia near the hill, the headland beginning to shimmer and burn as the old granite lighthouse comes into view in the distance. The last bit is so steep that it’s hard going, but we finally make it onto the end of the peninsula that the lighthouse stands on.
Dad reaches down and jams my bucket hat even harder on my head, then adjusts the drawstring on his.
I think Dad and I both gasp at the same time as we round the corner.
The garden.
Mrs Fox’s garden that was all around the lighthouse.
It’s all gone.
Well, it’s sort of still there underneath.
But it’s gone completely to seed – its once lush beds of flowers, shrubs and fruit trees are now thickets of prickly spear-grass, coast sword-sedge, tussock and weeping grass, tangled bedstraw, fireweed and scrub nettle. Dad points out all the species to me, one by one, as we navigate the main footpath to the base of the lighthouse. Sharp, spiky grasses prick our calves. The loops of running vines catch at our feet and ankles as we wade through the green towards the lighthouse keeper’s cottage.
Dad and I step onto the fenced veranda through the little wooden gate, and he bashes on the thick wooden door like he usually does when he comes to visit. But nothing happens.
There’s no sound from inside, nothing moving around the lightstation.
We look up at the circular balcony that runs all the way around the lighthouse beacon, but Mr Fox isn’t there waving down at us, like he’s done before.
It feels … abandoned.
But we know that Mr Fox would never abandon this place, no matter how sad he’s feeling, because he’s a protector. It’s in his blood. It’s his history.
He’s got to be inside the lightstation somewhere, maybe up in the lighthouse, which is lit by the glow of a work lamp, fixing the beacon. But he doesn’t want to see us, even though we’re his friends.
Dad sighs, leaving the waterproof lunch bag containing the jar of golden, cloudy honey and the sack of coffee at the base of Mr Fox’s front door.
“Come on, Rem,” he says, opening the gate and stepping back down onto the overgrown footpath. “Time to get to work while the rains are holding off.”
Being part of the Wildecrew has taught us all how to be good guerrilla gardeners – when we see a bit of neglected space that could support something living, we get to work seed-bombing, digging, planting and pruning.
Dad and I guerrilla-garden for the next five hours, barely making a dent on one small bed that surrounds a weed-choked desert lime tree. We move all the weeds and cuttings into Mrs Fox’s old compost pile around the back of the two guest cottages, and plant drought-tolerant, edible things around the lime tree like old man saltbush, sea asparagus and sea kale.
We stop from time to time to take our hats off and wipe our foreheads, drink water or eat sandwiches or trail mix, but we don’t see or hear Mr Fox anywhere. Though it feels as if he’s close.
“It doesn’t matter, Rem,” Dad says quietly as he jams his horrible old gardening hat back on his head and picks up his trowel. “He knows we’re out here – that’s all that matters.’’
Just after one p.m., we brush off our gear and pack everything up to go because we know it will take us over four hours to get back to Telegraph Saddle car park. The wind is really rising now. The clouds are racing across the face of the darkening sky, and I imagine that I can see the massive blades of the wind turbines, standing in shining rows off the coast, actually picking up speed.
“Can we come back the next time the weather’s good?” I ask Dad as we turn to leave.
We take one last look behind us. The lighthouse is silhouetted against the overcast sky, outlined in threatening light. I’m glad the first bit of our long walk back will be downhill.
Dad nods. “We’ll bring Mum and maybe Mr and Mrs Manos with us next time, hey?” he says. “They’re fruit tree whisperers. I think the orange trees are on their last legs.”
For the next few months, we guerrilla-garden around the silent lighthouse whenever we can. Sometimes others join us, but mostly it’s just me and Dad. We don’t go every weekend, because one time there’s a bushfire up near Halfway Hut. Another time, a heavy storm causes the Darby River to flood the main road into the Promontory and no one can get in or out except by helicopter or boat.
On another visit, I find the old painted nesting box smashed to pieces on the ground under Mrs Fox’s old apple tree. I hope the storm that caused it didn’t harm any of the creatures that might have been sheltering inside.
Mr Fox never comes out of the lighthouse when we’re there. But one week, when Dad and I turn to take one last look at the garden taking shape behind us, we catch sight of a lonely figure seated on the wooden bench at the base of the lighthouse, bright silver hair shining in the sun.
Dad’s face lights up, and he raises a hand, but Mr Fox doesn’t move, and finally we trudge down the track until we’re out of sight.
“It’s a step,” I tell Dad, who looks sad. “Soon, when he comes down out of his lighthouse, he won’t see prickly weeds and something half finished any more, he’ll see beds of fat hen, bower spinach and saltbush that he can eat. And wildflowers and pruned trees and a garden that’s beautiful to look at again, and to walk in. It won’t be as good as when Mrs Fox looked after it, but maybe we can make him remember how much he loved the garden, and being outside, with her.”
“Maybe,” Dad murmurs, shouldering his pack a little higher. We keep walking across the blustery headland, finally turning left for Telegraph Track and home.
All week, I’ve been making a nesting box for wildlife at school. It’s a bit wonky, but it’s tall and roomy with a little place to perch at the front. I remember Mrs Fox telling me how nesting boxes are supposed to act like a natural tree hollow for endangered animals that need somewhere safe from predators. Mr Fox himself told me once that following bushfires and floods and hundreds of years of colonization, the native animals that have to share our world with us are really suffering, and simple things like these can help save them from extinction. When I take the box home to show Dad, his face lights up. “Mr Fox will love it!” he says. “And we know the perfect spot for it – in the branches of Mrs Fox’s apple tree, exactly where hers used to be.”
But the weather forecast for the weekend is bad.
Before we even set off, Mum frets. “Maybe you should wait a week, ma puce,” she says to me. But Dad and I are so excited to put our first DIY nesting box up in the lighthouse keeper’s garden that we practically run to the truck, me cradling the wonky grey wooden nesting box against my chest.
The wind is howling as we bump along Darby River bridge in the darkness. Dad peers out through the windscreen with a frown as the downpour begins. By the time we get to Telegraph Saddle car park, the rain is so heavy it’s like a sheet of water coming down from the sky.
“Stay or keep going?” Dad shouts over the rain hitting the roof like hailstones.
Lightning illuminates his face in little flashes as I rummage around in the gap beside my seat for our packs and wet-weather gear, the nesting box resting precariously on my lap.
“Keep going!” I shout. “We’re Wildecrew! We can do this!”
Tying our rain hoods tight around our faces, our headlamps switched on, we climb out of the truck and start plodding.
Time seems to slow to a tenth of its usual speed. The first creek we have to cross – McAlister Creek – is like a raging torrent. It already feels as if it’s taken all day just to reach it.
Our legs, clothes and spirits are heavy as branches and undergrowth lash us in the wind and rain. My fingers feel frozen inside my gloves and, once, near the turn-off to the Waterloo Bay Walking Track, I drop the nesting box on the ground and scream, thinking it’s broken.
The rain’s so heavy now that Dad just picks it up, spins it around in his gloved hands and gives a thumbs up, indicating with a grimace to keep walking.
We’re tempted to wait it out when we finally make it to Halfway Hut Campsite, but we both agree that we need to move. Halfway Hut is exactly that.
I can’t feel my face when we reach the turn-off at Roaring Meg’s to use the toilet.
“There’s still seven kilometres to go!” Dad yells above the wind. “A lot of that exposed!” He shakes his satellite watch in my face. “Mum says we should wait it out here because at least there’s shelter!”
I shake my head as I put my gloves back on and take the nesting box out of Dad’s frozen hands.
“We’ve come this far, Dad!” I shriek. “And we’re doing this for Mrs Fox!”
I’ve never been afraid of the cold. I live in a place surrounded by water. But the last seven kilometres to the lighthouse are the worst and hardest walking I’ve ever done. It’s dark as night, and even more frightening.
As we battle the last uphill stretch that will take us onto the lighthouse plateau, it feels as if the cutting wind will lift us off our feet.
Dad shields my head as a huge branch comes crashing down inches from the track.
When we reach the top of the climb, we’re both almost crawling, Dad pushing me and the nesting box from behind.
We glimpse the lighthouse on the turn, its great beacon shining through the storm, and something in my heart lifts.
When we reach the edge of the lighthouse keeper’s garden, the wind seems to triple in strength because we’re suddenly out here, without cover, in the kind of ferocious winds that can power whole cities.
I hand the nesting box to Dad with shaking hands, barely able to stand.
“Make for the veranda!” Dad screams. “There’s a bit of cover there, at least!”
Shielding our faces, Dad hugging the nesting box against his chest, I grip the edge of his wet-weather jacket so that I don’t lose him, or my footing.
When we reach the veranda, the granite bulk of the low, stone cottage protects us from the force of the wind a little, but the keening and wailing seem louder, the tin roof rattling crazily in the heavy gusts.
Dad sets the nesting box down on the first step, his frozen fingers barely able to open the gate latch.
The lighthouse keeper’s cottage is in darkness. I think of Mr Fox up in the lantern room of the lighthouse, and hope that he’s safe and dry, sitting high above the elements like an eagle.
Dad and I make for the bench beside the front door.
He takes one look at my face and says, “Rem, pass me a sandwich, will you?”
Exhausted, I hand him my entire pack. “My fingers aren’t working,” I say. I’m ashamed to feel my eyes well with tears. “How can you even eat at a time like this, Dad?”
Dad looks at his satellite watch, tapping in a quick message to Mum: We’re safe, we made it, we’re sitting it out at Tony’s.
“It’s one o’clock,” Dad shouts, biting into his sandwich and offering me the other one. “There’s nothing to do but eat.”
We watch glumly as a small sheet of iron peels itself off the roof of one of the guest cottages, taking out a small stand of rock banksia that Dad and I planted a few weeks ago.
“We might be stuck here for a while, Rem,” Dad shouts as he breaks open a small bag of trail mix, tipping half of it into his mouth. “The last time it was this wet, a third of the year’s entire rainfall came down at once.”
I take the half-finished trail mix from him and put it back in my pack.
“Better save this for later then!” I tell him, shrieking in shock as a light suddenly comes on over the front door, which opens.
There’s a dark shape silhouetted in the screen door.
Dad and I sit up very straight, exchanging glances.
Mr Fox.
Still not ready to talk. But at least he’s here.
So, over the sound of the wind and the rain, I do the talking. I tell him what the Wildecrew have been up to around Rabbit Inlet, the things that have held on and the ones that have been washed away. I get him up to speed on the work Dad and I have been doing around the lighthouse garden – as if Mr Fox wasn’t right there the whole time – and how it’s still weeks away from being finished yet. “Especially if the weather is this bad!”
The dark shape in the door shifts. I’m scared he’s going to turn around again and shut us out.
Dad jumps in too, saying, “If you liked the honey, Tony, I can get more. And the coffee. We’ve only got this for you today,” he adds, laughing, holding up the wonky box that we’ve lugged with us past granite tors, through forest, marsh and wetland. “A nesting box! Perfect for today’s conditions. If you’re small enough to fit, that is.”
There’s a sudden creaky noise and I realize that Mr Fox is … laughing. It might be the first sound he’s made since Mrs Fox’s funeral.
Mr Fox opens the screen door to me and Dad, the faint light from his hallway spilling out over the threshold.
As I step inside, I promise Mr Fox that the garden will be done before winter really hits, and that the last thing we’ll put in might be a bed of correa, because Mrs Fox loved correa.
Maybe for the first time in weeks, Mr Fox clears his throat. “Common everlasting, I think,” he replies in his still-creaky voice. “Common everlasting.”
I look at Dad in confusion. Dad’s face suddenly clears as he explains, “Golden-yellow flowers, like a field of bright buttons on slender grey-green stems.”
I hand Mr Fox the soaked and wonky nesting box, looking around the cottage and seeing Mrs Fox in every surface, in every plain and cared-for thing in the rooms we pass, in her bright and far-seeing paintings crowding every wall.
And I suddenly understand that common everlasting is like the nesting box in Mr Fox’s hands. It’s like Rabbit Inlet, the lighthouse, the Promontory. It’s everything we could hope for in life – to have everything be both common, unmissed, just there, but also for it to last for ever.
Mr Fox is staring down at the nesting box now and I’m not sure if it’s rain on his cheek or something else.
“As soon as it clears, Mr Fox,” I say softly, “we can plant it together.”
“I’d like that,” Mr Fox replies, turning and adding over his shoulder, “Now all I can offer you, I’m afraid, is coffee and honey.”
Walking up that hallway, at the centre of Mrs Fox’s garden, we all laugh, feeling joy.