“I lived alone, writing, after family rifts, loving where I lived, its solitude, but too long spent alone does more harm than good. Selling, moving, ripped me open. Later, after Covid restrictions, I grasped the chance to travel once more to the rugged island I had loved long ago when I was part of a family circle.”

Breath stifled, a beast squatting on his lungs, he protests to his tormentor until gasping out the words that wake him.  Shuffling across his bare floor, he thinks life, with all its sleeps, has slithered by filled with dreams, normal conscious memory let loose.  The only thing that could stop him now is the hue and cry of family meanness, his life’s bane.  Still dark outside.  The removalist is due in four hours.

His destination is a barely legal cramped room attached to a mildewed caravan, a deck with gaps, distant glimpses of the sea, roiling, calm, tidal-tug and foam-flick, and thickets of she-oak and tea-tree swaybacked by the Roaring Forties.  A rugged steep track leads to a beach’s great arc, and further, to volcanic rocks below cloud-shadowed mountains.  Always, the mountains.  His cat a neighbour will adopt prowls hollow rooms.

His books, drafts, now confined to corrugated cardboard, he fantasises being the last man left alive on the island, foraging for firewood, his body eventually circled by sea-eagles and wedge-tails.  He wants another life from the start, different, without lies, greed, and envy’s persecution, wants to rekindle his fire though it seems too late, loss a sickness, his grate cold.  He sniffs the stale odour of drawers emptied after long closure, again checks the time.

Wallabies shall find ways to crop his planted greens: he must take care with water catchment.  On his broad bluff stars blaze in glory, appear closer than on the mainland.  His new landfall rises and dips many miles to a town with a pub more than a century old, where gulls street-strut, where islanders weave windswept simple lives, their daily visual outlook the durability of those mountains.  He knows these are to be his last efforts.

Re-reading John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone, a work of detailed bleak beauty he loves, soon to be almost cut off, outcast as castaway, far from traffic lights, convenience shops, ghosted from any sign his blood once pulsed here, he hopes to subdue that old anger tattooed on his heart, find a kind of peace after a hectic life gone awry.  Tired, wanly hopeful, he shall read by lamplight, listen to scouring wind.  He might skip checking messages for last-minute letdowns.

About Ian

He/him

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds, The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.