Sea Iris

There's light. Like headlights. Headlights on a truck, coming at me, coming for me. I wake in a burst. Gasp. Air rushes in. Hot air. I'm in the tropics. My eyes dart around the cabin. I'm in my bunk. On the Sea Rose. I'm okay.

But what is that light? I squint at the blinding white that's pushing through the porthole above my bunk. A floodlight, maybe. Pointed right at us.

I shuffle through the cabin, unlock the hatch door and climb up into the cockpit. I turn to face the light and my breath catches in my throat. It's not a light at all, just a reflection of one.

Never have I seen the moon so bright. I hold out my hand. I can see the lines across my palms, can make out the shape of my fingerprint. I look down at the deck, washed white. My moon shadow is stark, bold. Defiant.

And then I look up, my eyes slowly adjusting. Stars come into focus, spreading out across the sky like silver dust blown into shapes.

I go downstairs and grab my blanket and pillow from my bunk, bringing them up on deck. I lie down and gaze out, only there's no horizon to hold on to. There are only stars. Everywhere. Floating in space. Floating on the sea. Stars raining down, thousands of them. Like falling water. I catch them on my skin.

And it's silent. So silent.

I cough. I hear it. Ears still working.

But this silence … Lying here, grazing on stars. This silence is total.

Like I'm in the eye of the storm. The iris of the sea.

***

As the sky whitens, the islands wake with birdsong.

Melodies flow through the pines, cascade over cliffs, landing on the water where they swirl in wide blue circles. These islands are ancient, Maggie had told me last night between poems. They were once part of a mountain range. Bodies made of hoop pines and mammoth boulders. Not the tropical palms I'd dreamt of.

'If you hold your hand up and block out the view of the water,' Mac said, 'you'd almost believe you were standing on a bush track in a mountain forest, hundreds of miles from the sea.' I sit up in the cockpit, cover the bay with my hand, and feel the years peel away. Slowly, slowly, and then all at once I am barefoot on brown earth, running through the pines, between shadows and marbled bark. Wooded children stretch their wings, singing songs that catch on the wind, funnelling through valleys.

A breeze touches my cheek, as if the island is reaching out to me through its ringed wood, layer by layer, century by century. I lower my hand and see a turtle come up for breath, its head like wet stone. I rush to the back of the cockpit to watch it dive beneath the surface. The water is so clear; I follow it, deeper and deeper, as it glides between bulbs of coral. 'You're up early,' a voice says behind me. I turn around and Mac passes me a cup of tea. He eyes the blanket and pillow in the cockpit. 'Sleep up here, did ya?'

I take a sip of tea, nodding.

'Pretty special, isn't it?'

I nod because there's no sound in me to describe the thrill of no sound.

***

Later, Maggie lowers herself down the ladder into the sea. Mac dives in behind her. I jump in, tucked into a ball. When I come up, Mac is coughing on sea water. 'Cheeky,' he says, splashing me. I laugh and dive down again. Holding my nose to stop my breath escaping, I hang underwater and listen to the reef crackling. The sounds of the beaks crunching and bubbles popping appear behind my eyelids in bursts of yellow and pink.

I surface, breathe in deep. The morning air tastes of salt and dark wood.

Maggie climbs back up the ladder. Mac asks if I want to swim to shore.

'Sure!' I call out, and start kicking towards the beach. As I swim, I open my eyes underwater. The corals beneath blur together like splotches of paint on a palette.

Each time I come up for breath, the hoop pines become more pronounced, their outlines sharper, their immensity more overwhelming, until I am standing in the shallows, gazing up at the towering trees. Wooded bodies stand one after another, like the mountainside is an amphitheatre for a green choir singing all kinds of unheard songs.

I walk out of the water onto centuries of crushed seashells. Pieces of bone coral mark the high-tide line. My footprints dance between the scuttle marks of crabs, all the way up to the first pine at the foot of the forest. I reach out to touch the bark, and imagine for a moment that I can feel the vibrations of its song.

She is great,

We measure her by the pine-trees.

***

Back on board, Mac points to the top of the mast and says, 'The main halyard and spinnaker halyard are tangled. How are you with heights?'

'Ugh,' I say. 'Okay?'

'Good,' he says, winking. 'Let's get you harnessed up.'

'Hang on … What?'

But he doesn't hear me. He's already down the hatch, returning a minute later with a harness. I'm wearing a bikini top and board shorts. Mac tells me to put a t-shirt on so the harness doesn't chafe my stomach.

I grab a t -shirt, come up on deck and, before I can think twice, I'm in the harness being hoisted up the mast.

'How tall is the mast?' I shout.

'Doesn't matter!' Mac calls back.

Maggie is in the cockpit. 'You're almost there!'

'You don't know that!' I scream, and she chuckles.

When I get to the top of the mast, my palms are clammy. Mac calls out something about looping a red rope under a blue rope. I try to detangle the red from the blue, but my hands are shaking and I can't get a decent grip.

'You got it?' he shouts.

'Give me a minute!'

'Take your time.'

I look down at Mac and Maggie, their bodies shrunk to toy figurines from this height. I take a deep breath, exhale, and let go of the ropes, sitting back in my harness. I let go of the mast and let myself hang there, smiling the way you might if you were looking down at your family portrait—the one that had to be retaken because everyone was laughing.

My nerves begin to calm. And soon, I'm untangling the ropes, feeling a thrill in solving this problem for Mac and Maggie. Like I'm part of this boat. This body. This family.

***

The sun is setting when Maggie suggests one more swim before dinner.

'Well, I'm already in my swimmers,' I say.

I dive off the bow into water as warm as a bath. I remember the story Pa used to tell about the sun living in the sea. There is a pinch felt deep inside me, a pain in my heart, as I recall how much I'd loved that story, how different he'd been when Nan was still alive. I like to think they're together now, flowing through the earth in a river, deep underground. I smile, and swim around to the stern where Maggie is descending the ladder. She dives under, surfacing a moment later with her mouth gaping.

'Oli, Oli! Whale song!' she shouts, before diving under again. I exhale, close my eyes and sink down beneath the surface. I drift there, a moment, and then I hear it.

I hear whale song in swirls of violet and Prussian blue.

And in the same way that realising the blue of the sky is only an illusion marks both the death of innocence and the birth of imagination, listening to whale song is both an ending and a beginning. It's the lifting of a veil.

And there's the feeling of history happening all at once. Like I've been here before, my body dreamt in swirls of violet and Prussian blue. Like I'm coming home, finally.