1929

She had not known a body could keep walking after such a thing.

All morning she had felt herself separated from the world, as though some sheet of old window glass had been lowered between her and everything that remained. The minister’s mouth had moved above his black collar. The women had wept into handkerchiefs scented faintly of lavender and camphor. The men had stood with their hats held hard against their chests, their faces turned away in that helpless manner men had when grief entered a place and there was no rope to haul, no net to mend, no plank to plane, no engine to coax back into life. Earth had struck the small coffin with soft, shameful sounds. And still the sky had been blue. Still the gulls had wheeled above the cemetery. Still the sea had flashed beyond the hill as though it had not heard.

Her daughter was in the ground now, beneath the thin East Coast soil and the roots of the grasses that bent in the sea wind. Soon the granite would claim her. The rain would claim her. The salt would claim her. In time she would be swallowed by Bicheno as surely as her father had been swallowed by the sea.

And then, perhaps, she would become Bicheno.

A part of the bay and the gulls and the winter storms rolling up from the south. A part of the she-oaks whispering above the cemetery hill. A part of the granite older than memory and the tides older than grief.

The town would hold her daughter as it held all its dead.

Not gone.

Simply returned.

The words did not belong to any language she knew. They sat inside her like stones taken from the Rice Pebble Beach, cold and salt-dark, impossible to swallow, impossible to set down. Her daughter, who only a fortnight before had sat in the kitchen doorway with her doll tucked beneath one arm, scolding the chooks as if they were unruly children. Her daughter, who had carried shells from the Gulch in her dress and secreted them beneath her pillow. Her daughter, who had coughed first as though clearing laughter from her throat, then harder, then in great tearing spasms that bent her small body double and left her blue-lipped and terrified, eyes wide with a question no mother should ever have to answer.

Whooping cough, the doctor had said, though everyone already knew.

Everyone knew that terrible intake of breath after the coughing fit, that long crowing gasp, that desperate, animal sound, as though the child were being dragged back from under deep water.

For five nights she had sat beside the bed and counted the pauses between breaths.

For five nights she had begged.

Not loudly. Not with dignity. She had begged into blankets, into the damp curls at the nape of the child’s neck, into the dark hollow of her own hands. She had begged her dead husband. She had begged God. She had begged the sea, which had already taken one and might surely be persuaded, by any mercy left in the world, not to take another.

But the sea made no bargains.

At the cemetery, after it was done, people had touched her elbow and spoken her name. Their mouths formed kindness. She could not bear kindness. Kindness was unbearable because it proved that what had happened was real. Mrs Beattie pressed something wrapped in cloth into her hand. Bread, perhaps, or cake, or one of those ordinary offerings the living brought to the newly broken, and told her she must eat. She had nodded. She had thanked them. She had watched herself thanking them from a great distance, a woman in a black dress with a face like driftwood.

Then, without deciding to, she walked away.

Down past the houses in Champ Street, past paling fences greyed by salt in Jetty Road, past small gardens of cabbages, nasturtiums and struggling roses, past water tanks on stands and sheds smelling of rope, diesel, fish scales, damp timber and old bait.

Bicheno in 1929 was no more than a handful of buildings holding themselves against wind and weather, a town of hard hands and lowered voices, of women who boiled copper tubs on washing day and men who read the sky before they trusted any forecast. News arrived late and left early. The world beyond the East Coast seemed distant, though already money was tightening, coal and wool prices were falling, and men in rooms far away were making decisions that would find their way even here, into flour tins and unpaid bills and fishermen wondering whether kerosene could be stretched another week.

But that afternoon none of it mattered.

The gravel road fell toward Waubs Bay, and with every step the sea widened before her, bright and indifferent, its colour so beautiful it seemed almost cruel.

The tide was low.

Waubs Bay lay open in the afternoon light, a long curve of pale sand held between granite and sea. The water near the shore was clear enough to see dark weed moving below, slow and sorrowful, like hair combed by invisible hands. Further out, the bay deepened into green and blue, and beyond it the open sea shouldered itself against Governor Island, breaking white on the rocks. The smell of kelp lay thick along the shore. A cormorant stood on a reef with its wings spread like a black cross. Somewhere at the Gulch a halyard tapped against a mast, again and again, a small, foolish sound continuing in a ruined world.

She stepped from the road onto the sand.

Her boots sank slightly. Each footprint filled at the edges with water. She looked back once and saw the trail she had made, a dark line behind her, already softening. For a foolish moment she thought of Elsie’s feet, bare, quick, always dirty by noon, crossing this same sand the previous summer. A child did not walk along a beach. A child scattered herself across it. She ran to shells, to cuttlefish, to stranded jellyfish, to the smallest glitter of mica in the sand. She had once carried home a crab claw in both hands as if it were treasure.

The woman stopped.

The sound that came out of her was not a sob. It was not speech. It rose from somewhere below language, from some animal chamber of the body where grief lived before grief was given names. The wind took it. The bay took it. Nothing answered.

She walked on.

Behind her, Bicheno sat white and low against the lookout rocks, its houses bright in the afternoon sun, its chimneys and sheds and fences holding themselves together as though order were still possible. Smoke lifted from a few kitchens. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere a hammer struck timber. Life, in all its ordinary cruelty, continued.

Twelve months earlier they had brought her husband home from the sea.

Not whole. Not as he had left.

There had been weather that week, a hard southerly pushing up from the ice, the kind that made old fishermen glance at the horizon and say little. He had gone out before dawn with two others, the lantern swinging from his hand on the walk to the Gulch, his shoulders hunched against the cold. She had stood in the doorway with Elsie on her hip and watched him go. He had turned at the gate and lifted one hand. That was all. No final speech. No warning. Only that lifted hand, ordinary and beloved, disappearing into the dark.

By noon the wind had risen.

By evening everyone knew a boat was overdue.

They found wreckage near the rocks beyond the Gulch. A spar. A length of broken plank. A cray pot rope floating free. Two men were found in the following days. Her husband came later, delivered by the same sea that had taken him, laid upon wet sand as if asleep and ashamed to have caused such trouble.

After that, people said she was strong.

She hated them for it.

Strong was what people called you when they did not know what else to say. Strong meant you had not yet thrown yourself into the grave. Strong meant you still boiled potatoes, still mended socks, still answered when spoken to. Strong meant you had learned to carry the impossible in public.

And then Elsie had begun coughing.

She reached the northern end of Waubs Bay, where the sand gave way to granite and the coastline changed its mind. Here the land grew harder. Granite rose in worn apricot hued forms, rounded and ancient, its surfaces patched with orange lichen and black seams where the sea had worried at it for longer than any human sorrow could measure. Peggy’s Point lay ahead, low and stubborn, pushing into the water as though the earth itself refused to yield.

She climbed carefully.

Her black dress caught on tea-tree and coastal grass. Once she slipped and struck her palm against rock. The pain was clean and small and almost welcome. Blood appeared in a bright bead below her thumb. She stared at it with dull surprise. So, she thought, there was still blood in her. So some part of her continued.

The wind strengthened at Peggy’s.

It came off the sea with salt in its teeth, flattening her dress against her legs and pulling strands of hair loose from beneath her hat. She took the hat off and held it by its ribbon. Let it go, she thought. Let everything go. But her hand would not release it.

Below, the water moved among the rocks, surging into narrow channels and withdrawing with a hiss. Kelp rose and fell, dark and shining. Out beyond the point, the sea opened eastward, vast and heaving, the horizon a hard blue line no prayer could cross. Somewhere beyond it were other lands, other sorrows, other mothers kneeling beside beds, listening for breath.

She sat on a granite boulder warmed by the day’s sun.

For the first time since morning, she allowed herself to think the child’s name.

Elsie.

The name entered her and broke what remained.

She bent forward until her forehead touched her knees. Her arms folded around herself, not in comfort but in containment, as though without them her body might split open and spill its grief onto the rock.

Elsie.

Elsie with solemn eyes and sudden laughter. Elsie with jam on her chin. Elsie asleep with one hand above her head like a tiny queen. Elsie coughing until there was no strength left even to cry. Elsie turning her face toward the wall in the hour before dawn, when the room had grown strangely peaceful and the woman had understood, with a terror too large to be felt, that the child had begun to leave.

She had put her hand on the small back.

She had felt each breath arrive from farther away.

Then no breath came.

There were things a mother’s body knew before the mind would accept them. The silence after a child’s last breath was not empty. It was enormous. It filled the room. It pressed against the walls. It entered the cups on the shelf, the folded clothes, the doll beneath the chair, the little shoes by the door. It made everything accuse her by continuing to exist.

The woman lifted her head.

The sun was lowering behind the town now, sending long bars of light across the bay. The white buildings glowed. Windows burned gold. The sand had turned the colour of old bone. A gull hung motionless above the point, balanced on wind, its wings barely moving.

She remembered her husband teaching Elsie to say the names of things.

Granite. Kelp. She-oak. Abalone. Gull.

The child had loved the word abalone, though she could never say it properly. Abba-loney, she called it, and he would laugh, and the woman would pretend to scold them both for foolishness while her heart filled quietly with the knowledge that this, this small kitchen, this man, this child, this smell of salt and woodsmoke and bread, was happiness.

How little warning happiness gave before it ended.

She looked out toward the place where his boat had vanished from sight that last morning. For a year she had thought of the sea as his grave, but now it seemed too large for one man. It held everyone. It held the drowned, the unborn, the forgotten, the ships gone down, the seals on their rocks, the bones of whales, the old fires buried beneath the dunes, the names spoken before any map named this coast. It held her husband and refused to return him. It had not taken Elsie, not in the same way, yet somehow the sea seemed present in that death too, in the whoop and gasp of breath, in the drowning sound of the cough, in the blue shadow that had come over the child’s lips.

She hated the sea.

She loved it.

She could not separate the two.

A wave struck the outer rocks and burst upward, white spray catching the last light. For an instant it looked like torn linen. Then it fell back and was gone.

She stood.

The wind had dried the tears on her face, leaving the skin tight with salt. She felt very old, though she was not yet thirty. Old as the granite. Old as the stories beneath the grass. Old as every woman who had walked away from a grave with empty arms and been expected to return to a house.

The house.

She thought of it waiting above the bay. The unmade bed. The cup with Elsie’s lip mark still faintly visible in the glaze. The small cardigan hanging from the chair. Her husband’s coat still on its peg because she had never found the courage to remove it. Two ghosts in three rooms. Three, if she counted the woman she had once been.

The light was going.

She began the walk back from Peggy’s Point slowly, one hand trailing along the granite for balance. At the edge of the beach she paused. Her footprints from earlier were almost gone. The tide had crept in while she sat grieving, quietly taking back the marks she had made.

For a moment this seemed another cruelty.

Then, strangely, it did not.

The sea erased everything and kept everything. That was its nature. It took the print and held the memory of pressure. It swallowed the boat and carried the name of the man. It received the cry and gave back only waves. It was merciless. It was eternal. It was the only thing large enough for grief.

She stepped onto the sand.

Across the bay, the first lamps were being lit in Bicheno. Small yellow squares appeared in houses where families were preparing supper, calling children in from yards, setting plates on tables. The sight nearly undid her. Yet she kept walking.

Not because she was strong.

Not because she had accepted anything.

But because the body, faithless and loyal, continued. Because night was coming. Because somewhere in the kitchen there would be a fire to light. Because in the morning the tide would be out again, and the gulls would cry, and the town would wake as though the world had not ended.

She walked beneath the dimming sky with the bay beside her and the darkening granite ahead, carrying her dead as the sea carried its drowned, invisibly, endlessly, without release.