Maybe it’s because of the message on the short-wave. Or maybe it’s the anniversary of Papa’s death that has dredged this all up again, this feeling, these half-formed memories. Whatever it is, I wake in the morning from the dream, the one I have been having for years now. It’s hard to explain, but it’s more than some random feeling, or a vague sense of displacement. There are big holes in my life. I know that now. I can feel them, as real as the heart beating inside me.
I swim out toProvidence, tied up on her mooring in our cove, and look through her log books, ranks of blue-bound hardcover volumes, the spines faded by decades of sun, the oldest frayed and worn, the ones yet to be used hard and crisp still, despite the years.
They go all the way back to her original owner, Daniel Menzels – to before the Repudiation, to before Papa stole her, or whatever he called what he did. But that’s another story. Papa’s entries begin in July 2039, the day he and Mum and Derek Argent escaped from a religious cult leader and his followers on the Gulf Coast of the United States. The days from then are numbered sequentially from one until day 124, when the log book is full, the entries detailed and precise in Papa’s neat, legible hand. And then nothing again until a new log book starts six years later, as if nothing has changed. Papa’s chronology is missing exactly 2,190 days. Everything from the moment they left Belize until they arrived here. Our whole transit across the Pacific, along the south coast of Australia. And then the log restarts: our trips as a family along this coast, those Lewis and I took alone, the solo trips I did as Papa got older, all recorded in book after book. But all of that time – those first five years aboardProvidence, my birth, Lewis’s – all of it gone.
Later that afternoon, after a full day’s work with Lewis, cutting and hauling windfall from the forest behind the ridge, I walk down the hill and find Mum in her garden. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I don’t even greet her. I just walk up to her and ask her. ‘What happened after you and Papa left Belize, Mum?’
She narrows her eyes, sets aside her hoe.
‘I know you were pregnant with me and that I was born on the boat. But other than that, you’ve told us almost nothing.’
I can still remember some of it, vague childhood memories of sitting at the bow, watching the dolphins ride the wave, the silver darts of flying fish springing from the water, the way the silver droplets dripped from their translucent wings. And then there are the dreams. And the nightmares.
She looks surprised, stands brushing
