The Long Daylight – by Jo Gardiner
ISLAND | ISSUE 165
2015. December. Diamond Beach.
That Christmas, I travelled north from the Blue Labyrinth up through the dairy country east of the Barrington Tops and turned into Failford Road where great smooth-barked apple gums gathered amber light into their limbs.
As I crested the last rise before the small town of Diamond Beach, a snatch of violet sea appeared. That night, I remembered its colour as I rode the steady thump of surf into sleep.
On that first morning, before I met my three brothers and sister, magpies gathered on the open grassland before the dunes in front of the cabin and poured light from their throats. The whipbird whistled up the sun.
Fully fledged, first light
appears – swoops out from night and
conjures up a world.
A discarded eggshell cupped the night’s rain. On the wing, glossy black cockatoos recited their latest protest song; a green whip snake nudged a red berry across the road.
A white-bellied sea eagle floated past the deck where I ate breakfast. He sat poised at the top of a dead tree staring out to sea and dreaming perhaps of fields of fish and the riffs that would bear him aloft along the shore that day.
I liked having nothing to do but sit there with a cup of smoky tea, facing the ocean, tucked inside sand dunes, and watching. The beating heart of the bird world was always close there by the sea. Because of the transient and giddy fluency of their song, all other words were rendered spare.
2016. December. Tamworth.
It’s a year later when I drive from the Blue Labyrinth through the gardens of stone, across Pandora’s Pass onto the Liverpool Plains where Angus drift their black velvet on pale grass. Under a dreamy sky, corn-silk rustles, and cotton spreads all over Windy Station.
With its attendant
wolves, winter comes over the
river to reach us.
We’ve all come to be with you for Christmas, the illness which emerged in spring having bloomed in your brain now. Above the lavender New England hills, Venus watches chairs gather around the long table in your garden on the broad-leaved lawn near the pool. Your velvety roses are close, the heavy feast of midsummer’s laid out beneath the plush robinia mop tops.
I feed you figs and Bailey’s ice-cream; a glass jumps from your grasp and shatters rosy wine. The rain comes just then, and we all rush to gather you in.
2015. December. Diamond Beach.
The next morning, I walked with my three brothers and sister north toward the headland on the vast Saltwater Beach that edged the Khappinghat reserve with its pink bloodwood, mangroves, sedge, salt flats, its wetlands along the orange-stained creeks where white lace flower and silver bush grew.
We each wore halos of sea spray under a grey sky. A seagull on the shining sand held a fish in its beak. The whole morning was silver.
Ahead lay a strip of rare littoral rainforest on the clay of the headland, harshly wind-pruned on the seaward side. Further along the estuary beyond the beach, wallum banksia, sand heath and wet heath grew, and forests of magenta lilly pilly, red olive berry and brush muttonwood stood knee-deep in sand.
We had companions – a pod of dolphins who encountered surfers in wetsuits bobbing on the waves. It was hard to tell the dolphins from the humans when both emerged sleek and glossy from the water. Large white shorebirds drifted high above the ocean and surfed waves of morning light.
We found milky-skinned driftwood and a washed-up bottle encrusted with miniature seashells. You’d want to find a message in such a bottle. The shells inside told their journey through oceans and time, clutching the glass to better ride the currents and roll down to blue and green realms.
Tiny glass bells ring
in my ear. Why do we love
what is unspoken?
A creature – half fish, half bird – had washed up overnight. I gazed into her beautiful face, her open dead eyes on the sides of her head; her small, round fish mouth. Her body was bird-shaped with ridges that looked like wet feathers. I knew unlooked-for loves were always sweetest. How far had she flown through these seas, saltwater streaming through all her lives, to meet me here on this shore?
Olive-coloured searushes and samphire lay flattened by the breeze. A lone woman wandered further along the shore gathering seaweed, pausing here and there to arrange it in her basket.
As we approached, the white-bellied sea eagle rose up from a sandy mound, its wings wide and curled at the ends. It flew towards us curiously then wheeled away down the beach and landed there until we approached again. It did this four times. It seemed to be waiting for us to catch up when, like the waves, it would retreat.
Hollow-boned gulls fletched
with light set their wings for the
wild, white-feathered sea.
I waded out into the water and felt it swirl between my toes. A large group of very young terns looked out to sea while three adults stood watch. All their little bodies faced in the same direction until – disturbed by our approach – they rose in unison, turned as one above the waves, and flew further along the beach. Just then, my heart was occupied by terns and gulls; my body, by a sea stirred blue.
At the northern tip of the beach, the character and spirit of the land and water shifted into something different and wilder from the rest of that shore: we knew the first peoples walked here to Saltwater from Purfleet. They set fish traps, scarred trees, and left middens and a burial site.
We swam in rough surf in the rocky lee of the headland, our bodies prickling and alert for sharks. I imagined that in a violent frequency I picked up in the current, I heard – far out at sea – the sound of an orca picking out the tongue of a whale trapped deep in a seaweed forest, just as foxes feasted on the kidneys of lambs when we were young, and left their mauled woolly bodies floating on rain-sodden grass for us to find.
On the way back, the sea changed from grey to deep indigo as we walked south toward Red Head where mock-olive, black apple, flintwood, forest maple and brushbox grew beside the water gum in the mudstone and tuff, and where the paddocks further inland shone green from last night’s rain.
Two hours of walking on the smooth, hard creamy beach, then came swales of warm, soft, crinkled sand.
2016. December. Tamworth.
We all drive the forty kilometres out of town into the New England hills to the land and pasture of our childhood home at Bendemeer. The tussocky paddocks take up the wind like a sail let out loose. The she-oaks stretch their limbs over the river that slides below the trees and hide those unknown, open-mouthed things we know swim its brown currents. As we picnic in the shade, we remember that big red-bellied black that cruised across the water towards me as we swam just here when I was sixteen.
Late afternoon, you turn away from the river, cake crumbs on your lips, and with your son’s help, drag yourself from the chair into the car which heads off along the dusty track across the dry paddocks and into the fold of hills. In another car, we follow fast behind you, trying to keep up, but – radiant in the last of the long daylight – you vanish in yellow dust.
Too soon, toward the
day’s last catch of light comes a
cortege of shadows.
2017. February. Tamworth.
For hours I sit at the end of your bed by the huge window looking onto your garden, and massage lavender cream into the foot that’s not numb. It’s high-arched and shaped just like mine. The heat sits outside. You put your hand over your unbandaged eye and eat honey on toast. I’ve buried the Dex and chemo in a banana – the way we used to worm the sheep dogs.
You walk as if unsteady aboard a boat negotiating heavy seas. This is your world now. Your face is a mess. I cut your hair and trim your fingernails. The last time I did this was for my dog, I say. Woof, you reply.
I sweep the concrete path and hang blue sheets on the line. Always the birds are present. Only they and the frangipani scent are infallible. I hear someone weeping behind a closed door. I gather fallen feathers from your garden, and slip them into my bag.
I search for the words.
In my silence, the eastern
yellow robin sings.
There’s rain on the wind’s breath the day I leave you to fly home for a week, but none comes. Goodbye, come back, you say, your one blue eye watching me go. Galahs fly across the airfield. A yellow cat slides from a drain. Grasshoppers spring from hot cement. Sun reflects silver on the side of a truck moving fast through dry paddocks.
I remember a crowded car when I was ten and you were three – headlights sweeping avenues of red gums on the road home from the south-east. Inside that tunnel of light, your small sleeping body lay heavy on my lap; I smelled the musky wool of your hand-knitted jumper, the sweet scent of your white hair as we moved further into shadow country. Now, I try to hold the cup of my grief still – not let it spill. Our betrayal of you – we four outliving our youngest brother.
When I reach home in Woodford late that night, I open my bag in the garden and let the feathers fly free.
I lie in my bed beside my love and know this starlight’s falling on your white bed by the window. I know you are in good hands for your mates have come and your sons, but I know you listen to the darkness, the soft core of your thoughts haunted by a language you’re now moving beyond. I can’t feel my face. I walk into walls. I weep from one blue eye.
You lie like an injured man stretchered across heavy, war-torn terrain. You can’t see the faces of those who carry you, but feel the rough movements of their bodies as they scramble – fearless and clear-sighted – across rocks and gullies. You try to raise yourself up to relieve them of their burden, but fall back, your limbs paralysed. You’ll have to apologise for your laziness. It’s an old trick of yours.
As the journey takes you on into darkness, the air grows hushed. You close your eyes and give yourself up into the care of strangers whose hearts you hear beating as they bear you along.
You want to know the wherefores and whys from doctors, but it’s the night’s ugly mouth that whispers it knows where you’ll travel, and how.
Birds screech inside a
head – the incoherent pleas
of black cockatoos.
When I return the following week, and step into your untended garden, I imagine rank flowers, wise rats, fake-innocent foxes crowding at the chicken coop. Instead, some bird wildly sings, and air touches me in soft waves. The mop tops – impartial to these events – stand idle where our mother once stood watering red pelargoniums in her own heat-soaked days, and eastern yellow robins – like small hearts – come beating through their leaves.
2015. December. Diamond Beach.
Later, the five of us sat outside the café in freezing air. Almost a frost. A peacock called from somewhere across water. Sedge water frogs crackled in the waterlily pond. We brothers and sisters hadn’t been together all year, scattered as we were across the country, and we laughed together in that wild way you do when you can’t explain it to anyone else, and can’t stop. We ate fish and chips and drank coconut daiquiris.
On cold moonlit nights
the black swan’s grieving call flies
to fresh feeding grounds.
Those of us from the far north were freezing and sneezing, not having brought coats or jumpers, expecting summer at the beach at Christmas time.
That next day, I rose as soon as I woke. A slip of cloud hung over the islands at the end of the headland. One lone surfer hung in the thrall of a green wave. I swam in gentle water. The sea was humming and vibrating; each wave unfolding from the body of the ocean was an offering from the depths.
I surfed Blackhead Beach with the others later in the day. We each caught the same wave and exchanged looks across the top of the foam in recognition that our lives belonged to each other.
The wave left us there in that moment and we jumped up and chased out to sea to do it all again.
When the sea turned rough, I was deluged by a wave I didn’t see coming because I was recovering from the last one. My fingernails scraped the ocean floor; my ears exploded like they had the night before when hoons threw crackers down outside the window and, scared, I killed the lights and hit the floor.
In a sudden squall
gulls lose their direction, ripped
by violent wind spill.
Now, my body was pulled down through streaming green water and flung over and over in cartwheels not seen since I flew across a Christmas lawn as a child showing off in my new good dress, plaits and legs flying out unhinged.
Now, with kelp glittering about my ankles and sea urchins in my hair, I flipped over and over and twirled like a Catherine Wheel spinning off into the future. Exhausted, I rose – and the others laughed and screamed a warning as another wave smacked me straight down.
This summer crescent
moon – a silver fish turning
in a calm, black sea.
The evening light appeared, and the waves became translucent in a loose weave along the shore where pipis had scrawled their final message. A fine white salt spray hung over everything. Seagulls skimmed the glaze over creamy sand where small polished flat stones lay here and there: perfectly round; perfectly black.
By dusk, the light over the sea was a rose-pink sheen that gradually turned blue then grey. Huge clouds blazed brilliantly white at the top, their bellies flushed with deep, dusky rose. Below them, a long band of silky cloud folded in and rolled in waves to the shore.
Night fell velvety black, and the sea was effulgent. Breakers swept in out of the darkness. They were fluffy, luminous with phosphorescence, and relinquished their power in a great hollow, booming incantation that filled the air in the never-ending rhythm of the didgeridoo. Our youngest brother, hair curly from seawater, put a hand on my shoulder as he stumbled then melted into darkness as we wandered back along the beach beneath a nest of stars.
We stood at the top of the sand dune, blindfolded by night. My hair lifted in the breeze while the sea dreamed of gulls sailing feathers and songs on wings of light.
The strange cry of the
plover mourns the moon as it
drowns in the dark sea.
Shadows slipped across the sky. Lightning struck and, in its sudden light – the colour of a ripe plum – something winged and feathered flew past, and I imagined I saw the blank, moon-white gaze of the rare grass owl.
2017. May. Tamworth.
You lie in a late flush of autumn heat, a finger to your lips to quieten the riot inside your head. Under the mop tops – now a forest of gold leaf – you take my hand and turn it over inside yours. We can hear your girl singing softly to the mirror. She’s still full of sleep and uncombed hair.
In this house of sisters, we feed you buttered toast with honey, and remember our mother’s sticky fig jam and cream on soft white bread and when, at Tullaree, that deer stepped lightly through trees as we all picked mushrooms between gleaming drops of rain.
A magpie’s long song
is flung in cartwheels across
a ravaged morning.
Night does fall, but something small-hooved and sturdy stands between me and sleep as I lie listening along the darkness. A fan whirrs, slowly turning air. I creep along the passage and sit on the end of your bed. With the dark, I watch you leave the world eyelash by eyelash. I fear your life – before it can be lured from sleep and carried into day – will slip from the hook and vanish.
2018. May. Tamworth.
On your birthday, a year after your death, we gather at the foot of the New England hills and bury your ashes with our parents in the cemetery out near the airfield. It’s autumn again, and by the time we all get into our cars and drive east, it’s very late afternoon and I’m shivering.
Across fields of yellow grass, the sun casts itself low and long. From the car window, I watch currents of last golden light move through the paddocks in a strong tide, and I remember our last day together at the beach that Christmas before you became ill, and how the sea soaked through to my bones as I rolled in the surf. I felt the waves draw away the detritus of the year. Soon I would say goodbye to you and the others, and start the long drive home to the mountains.
I remember that as I stood up and turned back to the cabin for a last hot shower, the brimming sea drew itself together and swept away from the broad beach in one swift powerful movement.
I saw the sea eagle watching me from the bough of his dead gum at the top of the dunes. He turned his head away and launched out into the warm air above the beach.
Wind ruckled his feathers as he flew on into the strange blue elision between sea and shore and disappeared as if into the skin of the ocean. ▼
Image: David Martin
This essay appeared in Island 165 in 2022. Order a print issue here.
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This essay was shortlisted in the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.