Marine

They lunched on a beach with the odour of dead birds in their nostrils, an equivocal relish to the soft white Vienna loaf, browning avocado, vintage tasty cheese and quartered hard green apple. Drinking water flavoured with rose geranium leaves. Shoals of tiny crimson spiral shells lay in drifts in sand hollows. Pellucid water, a desultory surf, waves overlapping like the passing minutes. In the tide wrack, the keel of a shearwater, the carapace of a crab. Thirteen godwits flew across the sea: nine adults, four young, landing to graze the beach among piles of weed while they ate, slapping at the stinging flies and feeding them to a golden-flanked lizard. At Wreck Bay, in the odour of dead birds.

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In the Botanic Gardens they circumambulated a purple lake, in whose darker depths the long-necked lizard lives. A fringe of sand the colour of white ash, specked with black detritus. Red carnivorous plants grew in amongst the cropped grass of lawns where a plaque was set in a boulder. The farm had belonged to a maker of pianos. He had visited only rarely. Stock languished, pasture withered, men ran away into the bush until only an illiterate boy named Riley was left, whose fate is not otherwise recorded. On gravelled paths, sprays of water from circling sprinklers spotted their clothes. They chose their moment and ran laughing through the spangling light. In the pavilion, the ghost of a house they would never live in built itself around them. Outside time, at ease, they watched the agitation of wind in an horizon of trees across the lake, as if on every other evening of their lives together in this place.

+ + +

Another afternoon they parked the car at the end of a road and walked through tunnels of scrub to the ruined lighthouse. The echo of the tower falling still hung in the air. The stones immemorial in their disarray. It had fallen out toward the sea, the highest point landing just inside the cliff-edge fence. A snake coiled in the shade of the keystone. What light had shone in the dome, who tended the fire, who brought the fuel? At the apex of the pile they took turns looking through binoculars at the opposite headland where another lighthouse stood, flashing its beacon at intervals of five-five-five … fifteen … five-five-five … fifteen when shadows turned blue on the moon-coloured sand. A sea eagle passed over the roofless ruin, the graffiti-ed walls, the fire-blackened grate, as if over a temple from which the goddess had departed.

+ + +

Again the odour of dead bird. Surf curling between crumbled headlands, pale lilies sticky with nectar at the margins of the yellow sand, cuttlefish transparent under the hammer of the sun. Sculpted mauve plants in a rock pool, iridescent blue lichens, cockabullies speckled into the camouflage bottom. From one end of the half moon they turned to see a man on the rocks at the other make of his body a Y. The horizon a turbulence of distant swell on salt-scoured eyes. He hurled himself shoreward on a long exhalation of the ocean, roaring, blind, an arrow of flesh up the tremendous beach. While she sat mute in shade near the broken albatross, lily flowers in the black band of her sun hat.

+ + +

At night the walls of the tent were shaken by wind. Rain a faint braille on the nylon. Asleep in the air bed, they built a labyrinth of dreams. In lost corners sand drifted, the shells of days whitened. They heard the tongues of lizards speak a language in which each word was a pebble, each pause the pulse of a heartbeat under scaly skin. The cries of birds skirled halfway round the world to vibrate the delicate bones of their ears. Stars circled and blazed, an intaglio of light on the black. When they found each other, he placed his hands on her neck where the gills had been, feeling her blood sigh within. Her mouth made an O, she bent her head until her lips touched skin. Salt dissolving in saliva, a taste of smoke, eucalypt and dust. It was to remember these things that they had come. Waking, they drifted up into the waters of another day.