He watches the ocean surrender to night, knowing that the light will reappear.
It’s like I was color-blind before Lucy, and now the world’s completely different. It’s brighter and I can see further. I’m in exactly the same place, the birds are the same, the water’s the same, the sun rises and sets just like it always did, but I never knew what for, Tom.
As Tom wandered back to Mrs Mewett’s, he thought about the little relics at the lighthouse – Docherty’s knitting, his wife’s jar of humbugs that sat untouched in the pantry. Lives gone, traces left. And he wondered about the despair of the man, destroyed by grief. It didn’t take a war to push you over that edge.
Well, you just had to count your blessings and be thankful things weren’t worse.
You could still tell at a glance who’d been over there and who’d sat the war out at home. You could smell it on a man.
He’d been on death’s books for so long, it seemed impossible that life was making an entry in his favor.
The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember.
Christ – the quickest way to send a bloke mad is to let him go on re-fighting his war till he gets it right.
Stick to now. Put right the things you can put right today, and let the ones from back then go.
He had a sense of being waltzed backwards.
Oh well, God comes good in the end, doesn’t he?
Doorways. Always looking both ways, torn between two ways of seeing things. January looks forward to the new year and back to the old year. He sees past and future. And the island looks in the direction of two different oceans, down to the South Pole and up to the Equator.
History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.
You could kill a bloke with rules, Tom knew that. And yet sometimes they were what stood between man and savagery, between man and monsters. The rules that said you took a prisoner rather than killed a man. The rules that said you let the stretchers cart the enemy off from no man’s land as well as your own men.
Tom watches Isabel, waits for her to return his glance, longs for her to give him one of the old smiles that used to remind him of Janus Light – a fixed, reliable point in the world, which meant he was never lost.
There are times I wanted an answer. I can tell you that much. Times I saw a man’s last breath, and I wanted to ask him, ‘Where have you gone? You were here right beside me just a few seconds ago, and now some bits of metal have made holes in your skin, because they hit you fast enough, and suddenly you’re somewhere else. How can that be?
Just like the mercury that made the light go around, Isabel was -mysterious. Able to cure and to poison; able to bear the whole weight of the light, but capable of fracturing into a thousand uncatchable particles, running off in all directions, escaping from itself.
The smell of the eucalyptus had wafted for miles offshore from Albany, and when the scent faded away he was suddenly sick at the loss of something he didn’t know he could miss.
Beside him now on the veranda, Isabel was saying, “even though you hadn’t seen him for years, he was still your dad. You only ever get one of them. It’s bound to affect you, sweetheart.
It is so much less exhausting. You only forgive once. To resent you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering the bad things.