A Single Breath

Finally she finds the light. A glass has smashed, water pooling over wooden floorboards. She can’t place the room she’s in. Her gaze darts around, then halts on a large driftwood mirror at the end of the bed. The image reflected back is of a woman with ghostly white skin, her eyes sunken in shadow, her face gaunt.

Then Eva remembers: she’s in Tasmania.

Jackson is dead.

She is carrying his child.

She leans against the bedroom door, feeling the coolness of the wood through her T-shirt. Her head bows into her hands and she closes her eyes, battling against tears.

The quiet in the shack rolls over her, only the low murmuring of the bay audible. Somehow the near silence feels wrong, smothering. Her jaw tightens as she strains to catch some sound. Anything.

Panic spikes over her skin as she realizes what it is she’s listening for: Jackson’s breathing.

She is expecting to hear the soft draw of air in and out of his lungs, which was the rhythm she fell asleep to every night. The absence of it fills her with a crushing loneliness. She wraps her arms tightly around herself, feeling the rapid thud of her own heartbeat. But there’s no comfort in it, so she crosses the room and digs in her suitcase, pulling out a red-checked shirt.

It was Jackson’s favourite, the one he’d change into when he got home from work, pushing the sleeves up and leaving the collar wide open. It was a shirt so loved that he didn’t mind that it was missing two buttons or that the collar was starting to fray.

She pulls it on now, her fingers drawing the fabric tight to her body, and picks up her phone.

She is contemplating calling her mother. She’d like to hear her familiar voice right now; it’d be mid-morning in England and her mother would be at home, perhaps ironing with the radio on, or putting something in the slow cooker for dinner. But then Eva pictures herself saying, I’m pregnant – and realizes she’s not ready to make that call. Not yet.

She fetches a blanket and walks out onto the deck. The air is cool, scented with salt and a faint tang of wood. There are no lights apart from the stars, and the darkness is unsettling. Looking towards the edge of the bay where Saul’s house stands, she feels a thread of unease snake through her. He is the only one who knows she is here, a man Jackson told her he couldn’t trust. She wishes she hadn’t left her car at the jetty; she would feel safer knowing that she could leave.

She settles into a canvas chair on the deck, the seat damp with dew. The sound of her mobile phone suddenly ringing makes her jump, the screen flashing like a siren in the darkness.

Pressing the phone to her ear, she answers. ‘Hello?’

There is the sound of a connection at the other end, a distant line. But no voice.

‘Hello? Eva speaking.’

She waits, hearing only the bay murmuring beyond her.

‘Hello?’ she repeats. ‘Sorry, I can’t hear anything. Hello?’

Silence.

Then there is a faint noise and she is almost certain that it’s the sound of someone drawing a breath.

A moment later, the line goes dead.

Eva stares at the phone in her hand. The display shows that it was an international call, but there’s no number. She waits, hoping the caller will ring back. She is desperate to hear a familiar voice from home, someone to remind her that she’s not alone.

But the caller doesn’t phone again. Eva draws her knees to her chest, and pulls the long sleeves of Jackson’s checked shirt down over her hands. She buries her face into the open collar and breathes in deeply, trying to draw his scent from the fabric.

But there is nothing.

*

Hazy morning sunlight teases Eva awake and she opens her eyes to the shimmer of the bay. Her clothes feel damp and her neck aches. She rolls her head from side to side to loosen the muscles in her shoulders. The blanket has slipped to the ground and she sees her hands are resting on her abdomen.

She removes them in a flash and holds onto the sides of the chair. She sits like this for a moment, looking as if she is bracing herself.

Then very slowly she draws her hands back to her stomach, sliding them beneath her shirt. Her fingertips move in a slow circle across the warm skin of her lower belly. It is faint, but it is there: the swell of a baby.

Jackson’s baby.

She realizes that a part of Jackson is still here, still living. He has left a piece of himself behind for Eva to nurture. She feels a surge of love for him that enfolds her like an embrace. The corners of her lips lift into a quiet smile as she imagines Jackson watching her as she sits here looking out over the bay, their baby growing in her stomach.

She stays on the deck with her hands on her stomach for some time, letting her thoughts settle around the idea of their child. Eventually she goes into the shack, changes into a pair of shorts and a cardigan, and packs up her bag. She makes a cup of instant coffee and sits on the edge of the deck to drink it, wondering when Saul will come for her. Looking towards the far end of the bay, she can just make out his house. Tall trees clamber up a rocky hill and at the top there is the slant of a roof.

Her gaze sweeps away over the bay, which is glistening beneath a rising sun. There’s an outcrop of dark rocks at the edge of the water, and beyond them the contours of Tasmania are mauve shadows in the distance.

At the edge of her vision she notices someone down by the shore. She shades a hand in front of her eyes and sees Saul at the water’s edge, slipping on a pair of fins. He moves into the shallows and seems to melt into the water, kicking with powerful strokes.

She watches him swim until he’s right out in the middle of the bay. There he stops and floats on the surface, arms outstretched at his sides.

After a minute or two he makes a smooth dive and the sea settles around him as if he had never been there.

Eva waits.

Time passes slowly.

She knows he will come back up, yet she feels her heart quicken.

Twenty seconds, now. Thirty, perhaps?

She becomes aware of her pulse ticking in her throat and the cold Atlantic sea dripping into her thoughts. The flash of an orange lifeboat. The roar of a helicopter in the sky.

Her mouth turns dry as she waits, her gaze pinned to the point at which he dived down. He has to come up. She knows he must. Yet her heart is drilling against the cage of her ribs.

Without thinking, she is suddenly jumping from the deck and jogging towards the water. With each step, she is back on that Dorset beach in December, gusts of sand sheeting along the beach, the wild, grey seascape empty of Jackson.

Eva stops at the shoreline, panting. The sun glances off the water, making her squint as she scans the bay for Saul. But it is mirror flat; there is not a ripple.

Sweat prickles underarm. Could she swim out far enough to reach him? Would it be better to call for help? Would anyone even hear?

More images flood through her mind: a policeman speaking into a radio; a crowd of people huddled together, waiting; a lifeboat making a search pattern in the raging sea.

Then suddenly there’s movement out in the middle of the bay. Saul breaks through the surface. She imagines the water pouring from his face as he gasps for air.

She steps back, the tension in her muscles sending tremors through her body and making her knees shake. She waits for the tide of relief to fill her, but it never comes. Because all Eva is thinking is: It’s not Jackson.

*

When Saul wades in, he finds Eva standing on the shore, her expression taut. He puts down his mask and fins and wipes the salt water from his face. ‘Everything okay?’

She nods quickly. She takes a breath, then asks, ‘Good dive?’

‘Like glass out there.’

She glances over the length of the bay. ‘It’s quiet here.’

‘Yeah, every so often you get the odd fishing boat or kayaker passing. That’s about it.’

Silence follows. A gull soars above, white wings struck with sunlight. They both watch as it glides beyond them, dipping low to the water.

Saul shifts on the spot. ‘The shack all right for you?’

‘Yes. Very comfortable,’ she answers banally.

‘Good.’

‘Thanks for organizing it.’

‘No problem.’

Small talk sets like a cast around the delicate bones of what they’re both afraid to talk about: Jackson.

‘I can run you to your car in a bit?’

She nods. ‘Thank you.’

‘Where’ll you go next?’

‘Hobart, I suppose. Maybe I’ll try and get in touch with some of Jackson’s old friends. I’ll work it out,’ she says with a brave smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Saul thinks about her drifting around Hobart, asking questions about Jackson – and he knows that’s not a good idea. All the tension that his dive had eased now begins to creep back into his body, tightening in his temples and the base of his jaw.

He looks towards the shack, turning an idea through his head. Out here on Wattleboon barely anyone will remember Jackson, as he hasn’t been on the island since he was 15. But in Hobart there are people who know.

After a moment Saul says, ‘The shack’s free for a while. You’re welcome to stay on, if you want?’

You asked me once why Saul and I fell out, so I told you.

But it was only half of the truth.

I was shaving at the time, and carefully smoothed foam over my jaw as I contemplated my answer. I needed to get it right.

‘It was my birthday,’ I began, feeling my heart start to pound. ‘I had a barbecue down on the bluff near where I was living. I didn’t organize many things like that, but I wanted to that year because there was … this girl. Someone I thought was special. I wanted to introduce her to my friends.’

I drew the razor over my cheek, pulling my lips to the side to keep the skin taut as I told you, ‘Saul turned up late – and drunk – but I was just pleased he’d come. I slung an arm over his shoulder and walked him to the barbecue, where my girlfriend stood. Before he’d even said a word, I knew he was gonna make a play for her. I could see just by the way he was looking at her.’

‘Did he?’ you asked carefully, watching my reflection in the mirror.

I laughed, a dark sound. ‘Couldn’t help himself. He always had to get the girl. I saw him with her later that night. Right in front of me – like he didn’t even care. Like he wanted me to see.’

‘I’m sorry.’

I shrugged, tried to brighten my voice. ‘Maybe it worked out for the best. Saul kept on seeing her, so I ended up getting out of Tas for a few months.’

‘That’s when you went to South America?’

‘Yeah. Travelled up through Chile and Peru, then across to Brazil. I surfed, hiked, got some work building trail paths, bought a motorbike in Brazil. It was a good time – a good thing for me to do.’

‘What about when you came back?’

‘She and Saul were livin’ together up north. I stayed down south. We didn’t see each other.’

‘They’re still together?’

‘No. Not now.’

‘And you can’t forgive him?’

I put the razor down and clenched the edge of the sink, lowered my head. ‘He’s a liar. I can’t trust him.’

You crossed the bathroom and placed the flat of your hand in the space between my shoulder blades and ran it in smooth strokes. It was like you were reaching inside me, soothing somewhere that I didn’t know still hurt.

I looked up and our gazes locked in the mirror. ‘Do you think people can change, Eva? Do you think it’s possible?’

I think the intensity of my voice startled you because you dropped your hand and said, ‘Yes. People can change.’

But here’s the thing that terrified me: What if they can’t?

8

Eva drifts through the shack as her mother continues talking. She catches the words scan, due date, trimester – words she associates with work, not her own pregnancy.

She pauses by a photo of her and Jackson she’d brought with her from England. It was taken last summer at a 1920s-themed jazz festival in London. In the picture Eva is wearing a drop-waisted flapper-girl dress and a beaded headband, and Jackson has one hand around her waist, and with his other he’s touching the brow of his black hat, laughing. There’s sun flare behind them and they both look tanned and happy, in love.

Tucking the phone under her ear, Eva takes down the picture. It’s housed in a thin glass frame, and she uses the hem of her dress to clean her fingerprints from the glass. She moves the fabric in slow circles until it is polished clear, and then she sets it back on the shelf.

‘So you’ll be coming home?’ her mother is saying.

‘Home?’ Eva repeats, tuning back in. ‘No. Not yet.’

‘What?’ The pitch of her mother’s voice rises.

‘It hasn’t changed my plans out here.’

‘What about your scan?’

‘They do have hospitals in Australia,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘Anyway, Callie will be out here in a few days.’

Eva doesn’t need her mother to worry about all the details; she just needs to hear someone tell her, This is fantastic news! You’re going to be a wonderful mother, Eva.

‘You’ll worry me to death travelling around out there on your own, pregnant.’ Her mother’s emotional fragility has always meant any problem instantly becomes hers. The pregnancy would become about her anxieties, her involvement, her fears. ‘What about if you have your old room back and I make the spare into a nursery –’

‘Mum,’ she cuts in firmly as she pushes away from the wall and steps out onto the deck. The beach is empty and sunlight shimmers tantalizingly over the bay. She’s been on Wattleboon for three days now and already feels a strangely intimate tie to this island, knowing that Jackson spent his summers here as a boy. He would’ve played on many of these beaches, surfed and dived in the waves, fished from the jetty and from his father’s boat. And now, all these years later, Eva and the baby she carries inside her are also here – walking the same shorelines, seeing the same vistas. It’s as if she can feel Jackson’s footprints still warm under the sand.

She tells her mother, ‘Right now this is where I want to be.’

*

That evening, Eva grabs the bottle of wine she’d bought earlier and sets out along the shore towards Saul’s house. He hasn’t visited her at the shack and has only cast a cursory wave in her direction when he’s been going out diving in the bay. It feels as if he’s purposely keeping his distance.

The smell of seaweed is ripe in the air and crabs scuttle between the tide line and their holes as she passes. At the end of the bay, stone steps cut into a rocky, tree-lined hill. She follows them up into Saul’s garden. Set back in the gum trees is a modest wooden house built on stilts. A wide deck runs along the front and the whole place blends so seamlessly into the surroundings that it could almost pass as a tree house.

She finds Saul gutting fish on an old wooden workbench, beside which is a faded blue kayak. He has his back to her and is wearing a dark T-shirt with canvas shorts, his feet bare. She watches him for a moment, her gaze lingering on the broadness of his neck – the shape so like Jackson’s. Her fingertips twitch as she imagines touching the soft dark hairs at the nape of her husband’s neck, then running them beneath the starched cotton of his shirt collar, where the smell of aftershave always lingered on his skin.

Without realizing, Eva sighs and suddenly Saul’s head snaps up. His hair is mussed around his face, the dark brown sun-lightened in streaks. ‘Eva.’

‘Hi,’ she says, uncertainly. ‘I … I brought this.’ Saul stares at her, then at the bottle of wine in her hands.

‘It’s for you. To say thanks – for the shack.’

‘You didn’t need to,’ he says almost tersely.

Realizing he can’t take the wine because his hands are bloodied from gutting, she draws it awkwardly to her side.

‘Dinner?’ she casts into his silence, nodding towards the fish.

‘Yeah.’ There’s a pause, then, ‘Did you wanna …?’

She hadn’t meant the question as a self-invite and feels her cheeks reddening. Yet at the same time she realizes that she would like to stay – to have a chance to talk. Eventually she says, ‘That’d be great.’

Three lime-green birds burst from a tree behind them. Eva turns, watching their brilliant wings beat at the sky.

‘Swift parrots,’ he says, following her gaze. ‘Arrive every spring. Come over the Bass Strait from the mainland. I think they’re nesting in one of the tree hollows behind the house.’

The birds make a high-pitched piping noise as they disappear into the canopy of another tree at the far side of the garden.

Eva takes in the rest of the surroundings. ‘Lovely place you’ve got out here. This is where you used to come as kids?’

He nods.

‘Where’s the shack?’

‘Used to be right where the house is now.’

‘Oh.’ She remembers Jackson pulling her onto his lap and telling her, ‘Owning a shack is a Tassie thing. They’re bolt-holes, a place to disappear to when you’re craving some space, some wilderness.’ He’d spoken of his plan to one day do up their old shack for his father. ‘Dad loved that place once. Maybe he could love it again.’ Eva had noticed the sadness clouding Jackson’s expression as he’d said that, and realized how deeply he missed his father. She’d threaded her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. ‘What was that for?’ Jackson had asked.

‘Just for being you.’

Saul says, ‘I’m gonna run these guts down to the water. Go in and grab a drink.’

Inside, the house smells new, like freshly sawn wood. The living-cum-dining room has sliding glass doors that lead out onto the deck. In the corner of the room there’s a wood-burning stove and two baskets of kindling and logs. The place is furnished simply with a wide brown sofa, a low coffee table in a grainy wood, and a large bookcase lit by two old fishing lamps.

Photos hang from the walls in glass frames: an underwater shot of sunlight streaming through the sea’s surface; sand dunes so vast and perfect they look like a mountain range under fresh snow; a photo of Jackson wearing a heavy backpack as he stands in front of Machu Picchu.

Saul has a good collection of marine books – The Australian Fisherman, A Biography of Cod, Sea Fishing, A Reflection on Freediving, The Sea Around Us, Knots and Rigs, Shipwrecks of Tasmania – but also a wide range of fiction spanning the classics to modern literature.

Then she sees a name on a book spine that catches her attention: Lynn Bowe. Saul and Jackson’s mother.

She sets down the wine bottle and carefully slides the book free.

Jackson had told her that their mother had been a writer. Apparently she loved coming to Wattleboon because the space helped her think. When the boys were little she’d take them up to a clearing on one of the capes and they’d spend the afternoons reading or drawing while she wrote.

On the inside sleeve there is a black-and-white photo of a graceful woman with long hair swept into a simple chignon. She has the same dark eyes as Saul, large and serious.

Turning the page, Eva reads the dedication: For Dirk. Always.

She tries to place the man she visited with his thinning socks and whisky breath as the beau of this beautiful young woman. She knew from Jackson how devastated Dirk had been by Lynn’s death. She was the head of their family, the sun around which the men orbited.

‘My mother,’ Saul says.

Eva turns, startled.

Saul stands in the doorway, his dark gaze pinned on her. She feels heat rising in her cheeks. ‘She was very beautiful.’

‘Yes,’ Saul agrees. ‘She was.’

She wants to say something more, but then Saul turns and moves into the kitchen.

*

He washes his hands and dries them on a tea towel, then begins roughly chopping red chillies, garlic and a bunch of coriander.

Eva leans against the kitchen counter and offers to help, twice, and the second time Saul tells her she can make a salad just to give her something to do.

He begins stuffing the fish with the chopped herbs and spices, finding it odd having a woman in his house after so long.

Eva asks, ‘Did you catch those today?’

‘Yeah. Aussie salmon. I got out with the spear gun after work. I was lucky – they were just schooling right out front.’ He lays each fish on a large square of tinfoil, thinking of the shoal that had curled above him, their silver tails catching in the sunlight. He’d hovered there, just watching. Some days he didn’t even pull the trigger; he just liked seeing the way they moved through the water, scales glinting. ‘Do you prefer it to line fishing?’ she asks, drawing the knife through the tight red skin of a tomato.

‘Feels like a fairer fight,’ he tells her. ‘You only spear what you can eat, plus there’s no bait involved. If you come back with nothing, well, just means the fish were havin’ a better day than you.’

‘You were diving without a spear gun that first morning I was here.’

He nods. ‘Sometimes I just go out for a freedive. You know, breath-hold diving – no scuba gear.’

‘I’ve seen a TV programme about that. Isn’t it where people are diving down to crazy depths?’

‘Some people are. The record for freediving – and this is without weights or sleds, just literally swimming straight down and then back up on one breath – is one hundred and twenty-one metres.’

‘No? They must have incredible lungs. Do you measure how deep you go?’

He drizzles chilli oil over the fish and squeezes a couple of wedges of lime on top. A nick on his forefinger stings as the lime seeps into it. ‘No, I’m not interested in that side of it. I suppose I like it because there’s no tank involved or gear to mess around with. Plus, you see more. Fish can be put off by the bubbles when you’re breathing off the tank.’

Eva scoops the tomatoes she’s sliced into the salad bowl, then begins chopping the lettuce. ‘What do you see around here?’

‘Wattleboon’s cold-water diving, so it’s different from the tropics. You get rays, tiny handfish, gummy sharks, sea dragons.’

‘Sea dragons?’

‘They’re related to the sea horse family, but the dragons are bigger.’ Saul rinses and dries his hands, then pulls a sourdough loaf from the bread bin and saws hunks from it. ‘Wattleboon is one of the few places in the world where you find them. It’s a good place to freedive.’

‘Jackson said he loved coming out here as a boy.’

There he is. Jackson. Cutting straight back into the centre of Saul’s thoughts like a cool knife.

Saul had been at his father’s house when the news from the police came through. Dirk was watching the television, beer in hand, as he reached for the phone. Saul had felt a shift in the air, as if all the windows had suddenly been closed. He turned and saw his father sitting up rigidly. Dirk’s mouth opened, but he didn’t say a word. He simply held out the phone to Saul, who took it and listened to the distant English voice of a police officer talking about fishing, a wave, an accident. Saul asked where it’d happened, who’d been there, whether a body had been found.

Afterwards he realized that he’d asked more questions in those few minutes than he’d asked about his brother’s life in years.

‘Saul?’ Eva is saying.

He is standing stock-still, the bread knife in his hand.