My dad’s on YouTube too, but I find watching him makes him deader than ever. I ask Aoife, “What was his name, your dad?”
“Ed Brubeck. I’ve got his name, too. Aoife Brubeck.”
“Not the Ed Brubeck? Wrote for Spyglass magazine?”
“That’s him,” says Holly Sykes. “Did you know Ed’s writing?”
“We met! When was it? Washington, about 2002? My former wife’s brother-in-law was on the panel for the Sheehan-Dower Prize. They awarded it to Ed that year, and I’d done a reading in town that day, so we shared a table at dinner that evening.”
Aoife asks, “What did you and Dad talk about?”
“Oh, a hundred things. His job. 9/11. Fear. Politics. The pram in the writer’s hallway. He had a four-year-old back in London, I recall.” Aoife smiles with her whole wide face. “I was working on a journalist character, so Ed let me quiz him. Then we emailed from time to time, after that. When I heard the news, about Syria …” I exhale. “My very belated condolences, to both of you. For whatever they’re worth. He was a bloody good journalist.”
“Thank you,” says one; and “Thanks,” the other.
We gaze out across eleven miles of ferry-plowed sea.
Perth’s dark skyscrapers stand against the light sky.
Twenty paces away, a medium-sized mammal I cannot identify lollops out of the scrub and down the slope. Chubby as a wallaby, reddish-brown, kangaroo forepaws, and a foxy wombat face. A tongue like a finger slurps the apricot stones. “Good God. What is that?”
“That charming devil is a quokka,” says Aoife.
“What’s a quokka? Besides a hell of a Scrabble score.”
“An endangered marsupial. The first Dutch who landed here thought they were giant rats, so they called the place Rat’s Nest Island: Rottnest, in Dutch. Most mainland quokkas got killed by dogs and rats, but they’ve managed to survive here.”
“If the archaeology falls through, there’s always natural history.”
Aoife smiles. “I Wikipediaed them five minutes ago.”
I ask, “Reckon they like apricots? There’s a squishy one left.”
Holly looks dubious. “What about ‘Do Not Feed the Animals’?”
“It’s not like we’re chucking them Cherry Ripe bars, Mum.”
“And surely,” I add, “if they’re endangered, they’ll need all the Vitamin C they can get.” I lob the apricot to within a few feet of the animal. It waddles over, sniffs, chomps, and looks up at us.
“ ‘Please, sir,’ ” Aoife does a trembly Oliver Twist voice, “ ‘can I have some more?’ How cute is that? I’ve got to take a photo.”
“Not too close, love,” says her mother. “It’s a wild animal.”
“Gotcha.” Aoife walks down the slope, holding out her phone.
“What a well-raised kid,” I tell her mother, in a low voice.
She looks at me, and I see the signs of a full, fraught life around her eyes. If only she hadn’t written a book full of angel bollocks for gullible women disappointed with their lives, we could be friends. It’s a fair guess that Holly Sykes knows about my daughters and my divorce: the ex — Wild Child of British Letters may not be famous enough to sell books, but Zoë’s huge “I Will Survive” splash for the Sunday Telegraph gave the world a very one-sided version of our troubles. We watch Aoife feed the quokka, while all around us Rottnest’s bleached slopes buzz and whistle with insects, tinnitus-like. A lizard crosses the dust and …
The feeling of being watched comes back, stronger than ever. We aren’t the only ones here. There are lots. Near. I could swear.
Acacia tree to wiry shrub to shed-sized rock … Nobody.
“Do you feel them too?” Holly Sykes is watching me. “It’s an echo chamber, this place …”
If I say yes to this, I say yes to her whole flaky, nonempirical world. By saying yes to this, how do I refuse crystal healing, pastlife therapy, Atlantis, Reiki, and homeopathy? The problem is, she’s right. I do feel them. This place is … What’s another word for “haunted,” Mr. Novelist? My throat’s dry. My water bottle’s empty.
Down on the rocks blue breakers flume on rocks. I hear the boom, faint and soft, a second later. Further out, surfers at play.
“They were brought here in chains,” says Holly Sykes.
“Who were?”
“The Noongar. Wadjemup, they called this island. Means the Place Across the Water.” She sniffs. “For the Noongar, the land couldn’t be owned. No more than the seasons could be owned, or a year. What the land gave, you shared.”
Holly Sykes’s voice is flattening out and faltering, as if she’s not speaking but translating a knotty text. Or picking one voice out from a roaring crowd. “The djanga came. We thought they were dead ones, come back. They forgot how to speak when they were dead, so now they spoke like birds. Only a few came, at first. Their canoes were big as hills, but hollow, like big floating rooms made of many many rooms. Then more ships, more and more, every ship it puked up more, more, more of them. They planted fences, waved maps, brought sheep, mined for metals. They shot our animals, but if we killed their animals, they hunted us like vermin, and took the women away …”
This performance ought to be ridiculous. But in the flesh, three feet away, a vein pulsing in her temple, I don’t know what to make of it. “Is this a story you’re working on, Holly?”
“Too late, we understood, the djanga wasn’t dead Noongar jumped up, they was Whitefellas.” Holly’s voice is blurring now. Some words go missing. “Whitefella made Wadjemup a prison for Noongar. F’burning bush, like we always done, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. F’fighting at Whitefella, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. Chains. Cells. Coldbox. Hotbox. Years. Whips. Work. Worst thing is this: Our souls can’t cross the sea. So when the prison boat takes us from Fremantle, our soul’s torn from out body. Sick joke. So when come to Wadjemup, we Noongar we die like flies.”
One in four words I’m guessing at now. Holly Sykes’s pupils have shrunk to dots as tiny as full stops. This can’t be right. “Holly?” What’s the first-aid response for this? She must be blind. Holly starts speaking again but not a lot’s in English: I catch “priest,” “gun,” “gallows,” and “swim.” I have zero knowledge of Aboriginal languages, but what’s battling its way out of Holly Sykes’s mouth now sure as hell isn’t French, German, Spanish, or Latin. Then Holly Sykes’s head jerks back and smacks the lighthouse and the word “epilepsy” flashes through my mind. I grip her head so that when she repeats the head-smash it only bashes my hand. I swivel upright and clasp her head firmly against my chest and yell, “Aoife!”
The girl reappears from behind a tree, the quokkas beat a retreat, and I call out, “Your mother’s having an attack!”
A few pounding seconds later, Aoife Brubeck’s here, holding her mother’s face. She speaks sharply: “Mum! Stop it! Come back! Mum!”
A cracked buzzing hum starts deep in Holly’s throat.
Aoife asks, “How long have her eyes been like that?”
“Sixty seconds? Less, maybe. Is she epileptic?”
“The worst’s over. It’s not epilepsy, no. She’s stopped talking, so she’s not hearing now, and — oh, shit—what’s this blood?”
There’s sticky red on my hand. “She hit the wall.”
Aoife winces and inspects her mother’s head. “She’ll have a hell of a lump. But, look, her eyes are coming back.” Sure enough, her pupils are swelling from dots to proper disks.