The islands were a day’s boat ride west of the mainland. There was a point halfway across, the fishermen said, like an imaginary line drawn in water, where you left it all behind. Sparse weatherboard suburbia. The dusty rhythm of mainland life. The port, with its towering silos, its tugboats and ocean liners. Halfway across the deep trough you entered another universe. A few more hours of travelling and the welcome sliver of an island would come into view, then another. Landscapes built of bleached coral rubble, of saltbush and seabird droppings.
Onni Saari had sensed it on previous crossings, that vaguely magical feeling, as though freedom was waiting for you just over the horizon. But on this occasion he could not conjure it.
There was nothing good about this particular boat ride.
In the aftermath of the storm the sea was flat and still, its energy all but spent in the deluge. As the carrier boat neared the mooring at Little Rat Island, Onni took a deep breath and found the stone face he needed.
Sulo Koskinen, a seasoned fisherman, met him with a sombre and meaningful handshake. Sulo stood with his legs apart and was solid as rock.
‘He was last seen motoring out towards Disappearing Island to collect his craypots.’
It was now Onni’s turn to speak. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
‘When he didn’t come back,’ continued Sulo, Onni having remained silent, ‘there was nothing we could do. The swell was on the up, son. We’ve been out looking early this morning. No luck. We’ll head out again soon.’
Onni coughed, like a motor spluttering to life. ‘I’d like to go with you.’
The message had been sent by short-wave radio two days prior:
Nalle Saari lost at sea. Contact brother.
It was the Northampton constable who had delivered it. They were taking their lunch outside the miner’s humpy, seated on empty dynamite boxes. After the policeman left, Onni let Alva unfurl his tightly clasped hand and take it in her own, but ignored her suggestion to let the morning blasting be. The boat wouldn’t be going out until the sea settled, he told her, and it wouldn’t be right to leave the work for others. It was the covering of the earth that he longed for. Out there, in the wide open country, he felt exposed. So he had gone down into the hole and shovelled dirt furiously, his heart pounding from the labour, and from the not-knowing. Sweat marked the high planes of his cheekbones, and he was grateful for the solitude afforded by the dark narrow tunnel. Onni made the drill holes in which he would lay the dynamite, each one the length of a body. When it was time to blast the new section of the lead mine, he welcomed the rumble of dynamite in his bones. His body trembled with each explosion, and that helped a little.
His body trembled with each explosion, and that helped a little.
The next day Onni drove from Northampton to Geraldton. He could scarcely focus on the road ahead, nor on the countryside around him. He would have followed the red-dirt track leading out of the mine site into yellow wheat country. He would have passed by several river red gums, bent over the Chapman, before rattling his way into town and down to the port.
Nalle Saari lost at sea. Contact brother.
The words returned to him over and over, but he could not settle on them. They didn’t sound like any language he knew.
‘Good luck, mate,’ a man from the fishermen’s co-op said, shaking his hand with a firmer grip than usual. ‘Hope you find him.’
Onni had looked at him with his lake-water eyes, and the man could not hold his gaze. Onni did not want his pity. Besides, it wasn’t over yet, was it? He refused to count the hours. He didn’t want to know how long his brother had been out there. It was possible he had been swept a long way in a squall and even now was navigating his way back to the islands, laughing at his good fortune. It was possible.
The search party was made up of six men, including Onni. The others were all Nalle’s good mates. Onni knew them a little, from his few, brief visits to the islands, and from the stories Nalle would tell him when they came together during the off-season. Sulo, Esko, Tall Tommi, Risto and Latvian Igor. They’d come out to the islands almost ten years back, around 1950, on hearing that a kind of gold could be found in the waters here. Come with a map and compass and little else. In Sulo’s cray boat, they now circled the perimeter of Disappearing Island with Onni, keeping an eye out for the strewn debris of a boat and, far less likely, a man clinging to it. Gulls cawed, and the stale odour of dead fish, emanating from the vessel, entered his nostrils. Onni scanned the water, willing Nalle to turn up, for some miracle to come to pass.
Onni had looked at him with his lake-water eyes, and the man could not hold his gaze.
‘Why do you call it Disappearing, then?’ Onni asked, head down.
After a moment, Sulo’s gruff voice: ‘Comes and goes, this island, with the movement of the water.’
So it was not some gyre that swallowed lone fishermen.
The men were quiet, and Onni wondered if they, too, were thinking about water. How it could shift great swathes of sand. A melancholy feeling settled down in the boat, until the man with one eye passed wind, and someone laughed.
For Onni, time became elastic, the hours warping, bending, with no beginning and no end. He tried not to blink, lest he missed something. A mere shadow below the water. Some remnant of Nalle’s boat. His equipment. A craypot. Anything at all. Evidence that he had been here, that he existed. The water, glistening in the sunlight, reflected nothing but calmness. Onni couldn’t equate this blissful aquamarine with the sort of violence that might drown a man.
This is an extract from The Islands by Emily Brugman (Allen & Unwin), available now at your local independent bookseller.
