Looking for connection

Extract from Stars over The Southern Ocean

IT was called Noamunga, the Fishing Place, and it lay in the roaring forties, latitude 42 degrees south, at the edge of the Southern Ocean.

With its two hundred acres of scrub and rough pasture, the house stood on a barren stretch of the Tasmanian coast, the nearest settlement an hour’s walk away on the far side of the Wombat Ridge, a wall of rock and gale-pruned scrub one hundred and eighty metres high that separated the coastal strip from the hinterland. Noamunga had no neighbours; there’d been one once, but now that building was deserted, a roosting place for ravens, the grave untended.

The house faced due west; the nearest land on that latitude was the east coast of Patagonia, twelve thousand kilometres away. To withstand the violent storms, the house was anchored by massive steel hawsers to the rock on which it stood. When the gales were at their strongest, the hawsers vibrated like the strings of an enormous guitar, bringing the music of the ocean’s depths to the listener. When the king tides were running, the breakers – over six metres high in the frequent westerly gales – sent spray arching high over the house. As old man Marrek had told Marina years before, life at Noamunga was like having your feet in the ocean twenty-four hours a day.

It was a stern existence amid the wild thunder of the waves, but to Marina Trevelyan it was the closest to heaven she expected to get in this life. 1938

On a fine spring evening, two months after her seventeenth birthday, Marina Fairbrother met Jory Trevelyan at a dance organised in the village hall by the CWA.

“Not seen you here before,” she said.

Which was strange, since Mole Creek was still small enough for most people to know everyone else, even those who came in from the bush.

“Never been here before,” he said.

He had to shout a little, over the racket the band was making. He was a tall man, a year or two older than she was, with a smell of other places about him, and black hair over a hatchet-shaped face. His blue eyes watched distances unimaginable to a forest dweller. “What you doing, then?” “Hoping to buy a drink. Seeing there’s nothing doing at the hotel.”

“You won’t get nuthin’ here, either,” Marina said. “The committee’s all Methodists.”

“Don’t matter,” he said. “Thought it would be nice, that’s all.”

“Know where you can get one,” she said. “If you’re desperate, like.’”

Though why she should offer to help this stranger she could not have said. Perhaps because he was tall, with black hair and far-seeing blue eyes, or maybe because he’d spoken to her rather than to any of the other girls sitting like dolls around the edges of the dance floor. Sitting and waiting for some bloke to invite them to dance. She was used to waiting, sometimes unavailingly, yet tonight, for no apparent reason, this black-haired man had chosen her.

Although he didn’t seem to know what to do with her now he had her.

“D’you dance?” she asked. “Bit of a clodhopper,” he said. ‘Still, we’ll give it a whirl. If you like.”

She thought it was a funny way to invite a girl to dance with him but she stood anyway, holding out her arms, which might have been tiger snakes, the cautious way he took them.

Still, they managed, sort of. She felt the eyes of other girls watching them, some envious; others, their beaus tightly leashed, more willing to snigger as Marina and the tall man stumbled their way around the dance floor. Marina Fairbrother was willing to trample them all – envious or not, sniggering or not – beneath her uncertainly dancing feet because she felt her skin responding to her partner’s skin, his heat mingling with hers, his blue eyes and her brown ones exchanging silent messages as they danced under the yellow lights, washed by the sea of music that lifted them step by step and brought them, gently and harmoniously, to the shore.

He fetched a lemon drink for her, a coffee for himself. They did not dance again but sat and watched the dancers or each other, while a storm rattled the roof of the hall, competing with the noise of the band and the crescendo of laughter from those determined to be jolly, whatever the cost.

“What do people call you?” she asked.

“Jory,” he said. “Jory Trevelyan.”

“Jory?” she repeated, as though tasting it. “That’s a strange name. I’ve never known anyone called that before.”

“It’s a Cornish name.” As though that could explain its strangeness. “It means farmer.”

“Is that what you do? Farm?”

“No.”

Which was more confusing than ever.

***

She went to bed, resolved to think no more of Jory Trevelyan or the land where he lived. He’d said the winds there were so wild that trees could not survive, their roots unable to find proper anchorage in the stony soil, and she wondered why anyone should want to live in such a place, with its relentless gales and rain, its tumultuous seas roaring like hungry lions at the gates of the salt-blighted land.

She was firm about it so it was vexing that the moment she closed her eyes he broke into her thoughts once again.

Unlike her sister Iris, she’d never been much for men. What with her father and her brothers, she’d seen enough to know there was nothing special about them. They were men, with the advantages of being men; she was a woman and knew she would always have to fight for her place in the world. But she was content to be a woman and had never thought of marriage, or of moving away from the place she’d lived all her life.

Yet now she was unsettled. Jory’s description of the inhospitable land of the west coast had stirred her. His talk of the bleak country of stone and salt, of violent seas and violent men, had carried in it an unexpected message, that in its violence freedom might be found. It was a notion that both excited and perplexed her, and she thought that she would never be at peace until she had seen it for herself.

It made for a restless night, long periods of wakefulness succeeded by tumbled dreams, the contents of which she could not remember when she eventually rose to face the morning light, with Iris naked and snoring on her tumbled bed on the other side of their cramped room.

Cramped, everything cramped; life, living and future, amid the close-set trees.

No, she thought, looking at her sister, Iris’s way would never be her way, but her unconscious body reinforced Marina’s conviction that she must do something to change the direction of her life. Do something soon.

She went out into the morning. The air was still, the treetops unmoving. A kookaburra perched on the branch of a nearby tree, busily announcing the dawn. Nothing different, nothing new.

She dragged a load of washing to the base of the nearby cascade, where the water fell in a shining arc from high up on the hill. She’d left it to soak overnight before leaving for the dance. Now she pummelled the washing relentlessly, letting the clean cold water of the fall run over it before squeezing it between hands that work had made hard and strong.

She was hanging it on the wire when something made her look up and she saw the figure of the tall, dark-haired man walking up the track towards the house.