A Drop in the Ocean. Jenni Ogden
Both men had nice faces, open and friendly. Tom’s was sort of lopsided, but perhaps that added to his attractiveness. How old would he be? Jeff had let slip that he was thirty-five—the right age to settle down, as he put it—so perhaps Tom was about the same age. I’d meant to ask Jack why he called him the turtle whisperer, but hadn’t in the end. I suppose it’s another Australian joke because of this turtle rodeo thing he does—the exact opposite of a turtle whisperer, if you ask me.
I finally got around to emptying my case into the small wardrobe and tallboy. I thought about putting my shorts on, but decided on my light safari pants and a T-shirt instead. The shorts would have to wait until I’d shaved my legs; the poor things hadn’t seen a razor since my student days. I went brown quite easily as a kid, so fingers crossed I still would, and the Australian sun wouldn’t burn me to a cinder.
After burying my black trousers and blue shirt at the back of the wardrobe and swapping my boots for sandals, I felt much better. I unpacked the food boxes and squashed the packs of rapidly defrosting meat into the freezer box, and the other refrigerator stuff into the fridge part. I managed to find space in the few cupboards and on the open shelves above the sink for the rest of my food, and hoped it wouldn’t soon be infested by god knows what creepy crawlies. I made a mental note to beg, borrow, or steal some plastic containers from somewhere. I had a few scary moments lighting the gas hob, but finally managed to boil some of the bird-shit water and make a cup of tea. It had a very peculiar taste but I was cautious about using my precious bottled water except for drinking it cold.
I took my cup of musty tea and a plate of biscuits and cheese out on to my deck—I was already thinking of it as mine—and sat in one of the plastic chairs. It was still and hot and all around me were scuffles and birds calling, and through a gap in the trees was the white sand and then the blue sea, now with bits of coral sticking up in it as the tide went out. I sat there not believing it was me, and that I was there for a year with nothing to do but write my memoir—not that anyone else would give a damn if I did or didn’t, and right then nor did I What on earth would I do for a year? Surely the campsite I was yet to see wouldn’t take much of my time? Luckily my Kindle was stuffed with at least sixty books and my iPod loaded with my favorite music. And I’d better at least make some attempt at the memoir just to keep my brain ticking over.
After a while I got up, reluctantly, and followed a sandy path around the side of the cabin and through some trees for about two hundred meters. Jack had told me the campsite was back there. And there it was, quite a large sandy, grassy area with trees all around but with a gap showing the beach and sea. A wooden building near the edge turned out to house a toilet that looked fairly unsavory when I looked down it, but didn’t seem to smell. Thankfully I didn’t have to deal with it. A man called Basil, whom I was yet to meet, apparently did the honors. On the outside wall of the toilet was a shower like mine. A little way from that was a large open shelter with a concrete floor and a wooden picnic table in the middle. A gas barbecue and a couple of gas bottles took up one side. A guttering around the roof of the shelter led into a pipe connected to a water tank on stilts, and at the base of that was a concrete tub with one tap. A notice stuck to the tank said that the water was undrinkable without boiling and to use sparingly.
All in all a very pleasant spot, but obviously not on the main backpacker trail, as there was not a single tent to be seen. Keeping an eye on this should be an easy job. I wandered out onto the beach, where even more coral was now exposed, and looked both ways. I thought I must be in the middle of the long part of the oval island. Looking to my right, back towards my cabin, I could see the wharf where we had landed, with Jack’s boat and a few others bobbing alongside it. Jack had explained that there was an artificial deep water channel there that the original occupants of the island—that is, the European occupants—had made with the help of a few sticks of dynamite. In the other direction the beach stretched for a few hundred meters before disappearing around the corner.
The light had become softer and the blue of the sky had taken on a sort of transparent luminescence. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see that it was five o’clock. I’d already been here four hours. Basil could wait ’til the morning. Basil Brush. I grinned as an image of the unknown Basil, complete with bushy red hair and tail, flashed in my head. Perhaps all Australians have these sweet, old-fashioned, simple names. Bill and Ben the flowerpot men, Jack and the beanstalk, Tom, Tom the piper’s son … Christ, I’ll never remember who is who. I wonder when I’m going to meet Waltzing Matilda? That’s if there are any females here. Not that I’m likely to have anything in common with them.
THREE
Basil showed up around nine o’clock. I’d been up for hours after a hot and sleepless night tossing and turning on the hard mattress, trying to block out the phenomenal noise of thousands of shearwaters as they made their ghostly howls at each other. Jeff had warned me about this, but it had to be experienced to be believed. At times, as I dozed, it almost sounded like an orchestra, but then a small gaggle of the birds sitting right on my deck would start up—whoooo up the scale and then hoooo down the other side, followed by their mates’ slightly higher whoooo-hoooo, and so on around the entire gaggle, firmly banishing the orchestral illusion. At one point I stumbled out on to the moonlit deck to chase them away, but apart from doing a short sideways shuffle, they ignored me, and continued to whoooo-hoooo. Fortunately for them they were decidedly lovable, and quite impossible to kick—large and soft and dark gray, with a bumbling gait when on land and when landing. Every few minutes there would be a loud swish as another bird hurtled out of the sky, skidding along the ground when it hit dirt. Then it would waddle slowly off to its nest—a hole in the sand, under a tree root, under the cabin, or sometimes right in the middle of the sandy path.
When, at six o’clock, I finally gave up on sleep and made myself a cup of tea, the noise stopped—of course—and, going outside, I saw the last bird waddling rapidly along the track before taking off like a drunken jet plane and spreading its great wings, soaring up over the low trees and out to sea. There, it was in its element—one of the greatest fliers in all the bird kingdom. The sacrifices a parent will make for its babies—not that I would know, but it awes me anyway.
Basil seemed like a nice chap, in his sixties I would guess, and a true-blue Aussie like everyone I’d met so far. Bald as a baseball. He didn’t say a lot, and what he did say I had a bit of trouble understanding as he didn’t open his mouth very wide, but his eyes had a blue twinkle and his grin was friendly. He indicated that he’d empty my rubbish bin as well as the ones in the campground, and he would clean the toilets once a week. He gave me a large book and a small metal box with a lock; the book to record campers’ names and payments—$5 per adult per night and $2 for kids; and the box to keep the loot in. He turned the small key and opened the box to display a pile of notes and coins—change, he said, in case a camper didn’t have the right amount. Most of them would be university students who would come on their summer holidays from mid-November to the end of February, and would stay for two weeks, between Jack’s boat trips.
“What do I do with the money?” I asked.
“When it gets too much to fit in the box, stick it in a plastic bag and give it to Jack. He’ll deposit it in Jeff’s bank account back on the mainland. He’ll take cash checks as well, if you’ve been paid that way, and he can cash your own checks too, if you need any money.”
“He’s the island banker as well as the transporter, by the sound of it,” I said.
“I suppose so. Someone’s got to do it. Give him your grocery list and a blank check as well when you want more supplies. You have to be organized, though, because you won’t get them until he comes back two weeks later.” He looked at me doubtfully, as if he thought I wouldn’t cope with this.
“Thanks. Jeff explained about the grocery thing. I’ll soon get the hang of it, I think.” I grinned to show him I wasn’t being sarcastic. “What about phoning out? Is that possible?”
“Yeah. I have an old computer and satellite broadband—it’s pretty slow—and so does Tom Scarlett.”
“Tom the turtle whisperer?”
Basil