Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Once upon a time, she thought she understood the ground was solid. That life had an arc, a flow that could be relied upon. Like the rising of the sun and the afternoon sea breeze that moved her mother’s sheets on the line. The air contained the sweet smell of the honeysuckle that grew on the fence along the shipyard. Would it forever hold her in this place, in this moment? A sense of sadness. A feeling of being alone. Of being left. The smell of his aftershave was leaving her, she felt around the back of her neck where his hand had been as he drew her towards the ship porthole to kiss her. He said he would write as soon as he got to Fremantle. She knew everyday, as she walked to the post office to see if there were mail, she would be here again – alone watching the ship move out beyond the headland. She would feel this mixture of loss and anticipation. Fremantle. Fremantle. It was an unknown word, in another language, it was a place she could not know. It was time to be getting back home. There was the normal life of the house to continue. Her mother, her father, the family business. The bigness and smallness of her life – the only arc she had known.
Days alone, amongst the normalness of her life, turned to weeks. Each day she carried the hollow of loss and anticipation somewhere in her chest. He would write. He would write soon. One day, when walking along the cliffs, she thought she saw him, his shoulders, walking along the road into town. She called his name and in her mind she started to run. He Turned. She wasn’t running but standing, fixed, not breathing, her hand in the air. He smiled, but it was not his face, his smile. Embarrassed she dropped her hand and turned. Because of that moment, the next day she couldn’t bring herself to walk the familiar path of her childhood to a town, which was all she knew – her life had gotten smaller.
She’d taken the sheets out of the copper and was adjusting the posts that held the line up. Nick, the young constable from town, appeared at the fence. He looked down at the ground and asked would she come into town. There had been news. But he didn’t really know much about it. If she could just come with him, everything would be explained at the station.
The ground, her new ground, was gone now. Because of that news she would be in black now. She would not know Fremantle. Her hands would grow old here and finally she would be buried on this island, like her mother would be buried here and all the mothers before. Men left the island. They were poor, but a window on the world opened sometimes, just a slither, and it allowed a man to squeeze through if he was game. Sometimes the world just swallowed them whole. Sometimes they found new land, a new place to bring others too. But this would not be her story now.