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.
We each get a little turn at life, and if this ends up being how my turn went, it will still have been worth it.
Other blokes might take advantage, but to Tom, the idea of honor was a kind of antidote to some of the things he’d lived through.
You have only to forgive once. To resent, you have to doit all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things” Frank to Hannah Roennfeldt.
It’s a hard job, and a busy one. The lightkeepers have no union, not like the men on the store boats – no one strikes for better pay or conditions. The days can leave him exhausted or sore, worried by the look of a storm front coming in at a gallop, or frustrated by the way hailstones crush the vegetable patch. But if he doesn’t think about it too hard, he knows who he is and what he’s for. He just has to keep the light burning. Nothing more.
As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or a daughter. That seemed odd. As.
There had never been guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length. Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making. Look inside the cover of any family Bible and you’d see the facts. The graveyards, too, told the story of the babies whose voices, because of a snakebite or a fever or a fall from a wagon, had finally succumbed to their mothers’ beseeching to “hush, hush, little one.
Tom rarely thought of the house in terms of rooms either. It was just “home.” And something in him was saddened at the dissection of the island, the splitting off into the good and the bad, the safe and the dangerous. He preferred to think of it whole.
Don’t get confused between a thing itself and the first time you come across it.
You never know what you’re going to be grateful for.
You always imagine you’ll get the chance to say what needs to be said, to put things right. But that’s not always how it goes.
Pride of Birmingham foundered on the greedy rocks in daylight. In such a ship the light itself had later been brought from England, proudly bearing the name Chance Brothers, a guarantee of the most advanced technology of its day – capable of assembly anywhere, no matter how inhospitable or hard to reach.
The forest sings to him: the rain tapping n the leaves, dripping into puddles, the kookaburras laughing like madmen at some joke beyond human comprehension. He has the sensation of being part of a connected whole, of being enough. Another day or another decade will not change this. He is embraced by nature, which is waiting, ultimately, to receive him, to re-organize his atoms into another shape.
Anyone who’s worked on the Offshore Lights can tell you about it – the isolation, and the spell it casts. Like.
If Tom is to take his leave of the world, he wants to remember the beauty of it, not just the suffering.
Why won’t you talk about it?” “I’ll tell you if you really want. It’s just I’d rather not. Sometimes it’s good to leave the past in the past.” “Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.
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.
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.
Of course, the losing of children had always been a thing that had to be gone through. There had never been guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length. Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making.
Lives gone, traces left. And he wondered about the despair of the man, destroyed by grief.
He sat down to write, before realizing he had no idea what to say. He didn’t want to say anything; just send her a smile.