Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe Read Free Book Online Page A

Feels almost like I know you.
    If you could spend some time with him, Georgia had asked before introducing me to David. Tell him how things were for the two of you. Be honest with him.
    And without knowing what a unique form of torture it would be, I said yes.
    Good, Georgia said. So much gets lost in translation, don’t you think? Just reading the book, I mean.
    What about the person playing me, do I sit down with them too?
    We haven’t found a ‘you’ yet, Alex. But yes, that would be very helpful.
    Georgia never passes on an opportunity to remind me how lucky I am to be involved in the production, that writers are typically considered nuisances at this stage of development and are only to be consulted as to the filling of plot holes and the ironing out of other minor dilemmas. Chandler’s Law, Chekhov’s Gun and what have you. I never pass on an opportunity to remind Georgia that she is twenty-fucking-six, and greener than her Green Room Award. Still has that Melbourne smugness wavering about her like heat haze. In any case, there are no men bursting into rooms with loaded revolvers and double entendres in my book. No Lauren Bacall trying to hold up her unsteady head. Just Thao and my life with him, at least a version of it. Of our life together, until the night he swam out, drunk, to the wreck.
    It wasn’t so long ago that the wreckage could be seen at low tide, just the tip of it sticking out of the water, a long way from shore. But it had collapsed in on itself in the early thousands, collapsed or shifted position, rolling over like a dog wanting to have its belly scratched, and it was no longer visible from the beach. The idea of swimming out to it always terrified me. I justified this terror with common sense; riptides, inevitable fatigue. I was – I am – no great swimmer. But it was never the fear of drowning that stopped me, rather the thought of the wreck itself, the rusting barnacled hull, all the unknowable things it was harbouring. Dark thoughts of a shape that I couldn’t fit words to.
    But I would watch Thao, from the safety of our sandy chequered rug, and I would watch the other beachgoers and the tourists watching him, the children who paddled behind him like dolphins in the wake of a ship before they grew tired or fearful or their parents called them back in. Thao had been swimming out to it since he was a child, and could always find it, no matter the conditions. In the water he was a beautiful machine, hardly turning his head from the water to breathe.
    He’d come back when he was ready, to stand over the rug, chest heaving, his hammock-shaped smile. I always wanted to pull him down onto me, taste the salt on him. But he was so discreet in public. He’d fall onto the rug, bat my hands away.
    Tell me something, Thao.
    Six deaths a year are caused by rabbits.
    That’s fascinating. Please, go on.
    Thao’s parents, who did not speak to me when Thao was alive, continued to not speak to me after his death. I don’t know if they have ever read the book, whether they avoided bookstore window displays for the few weeks that it occupied space there. They had wanted many things for Thao, and I was not one of them.
    A man, his mother had said. A man is one thing. But an old man? Your father and I do not deserve this.
    I see his father’s picture in the paper sometimes. I look for the signs of loss in his face. A volcanologist, he is consulted mostly during times of disaster. Yet he has not aged as I have aged, these past eight years.
    After I found out Thao was dead I packed all of his things into a box, thinking somebody was going to come and collect them, and when no one did I unpacked them again. I returned his shirts to the wardrobe, his jeans and socks and underwear to the drawers I had hesitantly cleared for him two years earlier.
    When David wants to know something, he doesn’t hesitate. He has read the book, and it’s all in there, I