Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe Read Free Book Online

of wood, solid as a nut and sealed up tight.
    She saw a quarter-sized hotel once; public art at the side of a freeway somewhere south of here. She had wanted to pull over, to crawl in there on her hands and knees and lay her head on one of the scaled-down beds. To sleep for a long time, dreamless and alone, in a place where no one would find her.
    If she could get back there. Take the keys from his jacket while he sleeps, and head south. Inside the quarter-sized hotel it would be empty, just bracing and wires for the neon lights, but it wouldn’t matter. She could drive all night and be there by late morning. She would begin to remember. It would be as simple as that.

Heart of gold
    Lana drove all four of us out to the desert just so she could toss her shoes up into a tree. It took her three goes – hah. hah. hah! – and by the third try she was crying hard.
    Why’d you do that, said Mira. Those shoes are too good for that tree.
    We looked up into the branches slung with old running shoes and scuffed-up boots, and down where some of them lay in the dust beneath the tree, their laces frayed where they’d snapped. Mira was right; Lana’s shoes didn’t belong there. But she just ran her skinny wrist under her nose and said, Let’s go back now, okay? She walked shoeless back to the car and got in on the driver’s side. On the trip back we kept schtum, avoiding her sooty eyes in the rearview mirror. We watched her bare feet working the accelerator and clutch. When we stopped for fuel we watched her stand barefoot on the grease-stained concrete while she filled the tank, then we watched her dance barefoot down the service station aisles. Heart of Gold was playing over the loudspeakers as she swung slow and sad past the confectionary, past the ice-cream freezer. We watched the soles of her feet get blacker and blacker, picking up grime from the tiled floor. We tried our best to make sense of it.

Raising the wreck
    They’re raising the wreck. After so many years of it brooding innocuously beneath the surface, some idiot’s jet ski collided with it at low tide last September. Thao would be devastated. All morning people have been gathering on the beach to watch. Some have come prepared with picnics, cameras, binoculars, beer. Others are empty-handed passersby, joggers and intended swimmers who were turned back from the water. A few small-time journos are mooching through the crowd, interviewing locals about their memories of scrabbling onto the stern when it was still jutting out above the water. Of slipping and lacerating their arm or their foot on the mussel shells. Rolling back a sleeve, Here, here’s the scar.
    David sits beside me on the sand, lounging back against the dinged-up esky that is holding cold chicken sandwiches and a few bottles of pale ale. His white linen shirt is unbuttoned and flapping loose, but who’s looking. He leafs through the first few scenes of the play, deciphering my furious little squiggles.
    Would you say, he asks, that this … infatuation? Okay, this interest that he had, would you say it came from him feeling like something of an outsider?
    Divers are surfacing beside the salvage vessel, then disappearing again, trailing cables down to the seabed to snake around the ruined hull.
    I’m sure he’d be thrilled for us to think so. Do you think those beers are cold yet?
    When they brought him in from casting. Holy cats. They’d brought in a lot of guys who looked like Thao, but they didn’t speak or move like Thao. This kid even smelled like Thao. When I shook his hand there was a whiff of smoke and dry grass. You smell like an arsonist, I told Thao once. And he’d given me that grin, parenthesised by the lines around his mouth. Like a hammock strung between two young birches who were leaning under its weight. The same as this kid was giving me, still holding onto my hand.
    I’ve read your book, he said. Three times now.