Page 45 of Reckless

It came out now, jolting in its intensity, horrible in its familiarity. Worse, somehow, for this feeling that I deserved it even if I hadn’t earned it.

I don’t know that I could have borne it alone.

Robbie didn’t stay that night, and that was fine. Whatever we were building, it was new, and both of us were still finding our feet. I wasn't sure if Robbie was even out, or what it would mean for him to stay overnight. Because it would be noticed, I had no doubt of that, in a place as small as Dauntless Island. Even Button John noticed when he strolled into my kitchen like he owned the place.

“Oh, I see Robbie’s been,” Button John said, nodding at the empty burlap sack on my table. “You must be eating a lot of eggs, Doc.”

I waited a moment for him to leer, figuring there was an insinuation behind it, but he didn’t. He just dragged his fingers through the birds’ nest of his hair and opened the fridge.

“I don't think you'll find the cleaning supplies in there,” I said, though with Button John that wasn’t a certainty.

“Ha!” he said. He straightened up, empty-handed. “Do you have any soft drinks?”

“No.”

“Oh, well.” He shrugged.

“You’re late this evening,” I pointed out, moving past him to put the kettle on.

“Yeah, I had to help Nipper Will,” he said. “That’s my cousin. Archie Hooper is usually on his crew, so...”

“His crew?”

“He has a fishing boat,” Button John said. “The Adeline. But nobody wants Archie to go out right now, so they’re down a man."

“You went out on the boat today?”

Button John made a face. “Nah. Nipper Will reckons I’m a hazard. He’s an arsehole.”

He sounded like an astute judge of character to me, but I gave a sympathetic hum anyway.

Button John wrinkled his nose. “He won’t even take Natty out, and Natty needs work and he’s his brother.” He shrugged again. “He just needed me to help clean up and shit when they got back this afternoon. Then I had to go home and shower before I came over here because I stank, so that’s why I’m late.”

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

He flashed his customary grin, and it froze and then faltered. “I dunno. I feel bad for Archie, and the kids, and I can’t stop thinking about how Anna was only a few years older than me. It’s messed up. Shouldn’t be thinking about me, should I?”

“When someone dies, it forces us to take a look at our own lives, whether we want to or not,” I said. Didn’t I know that better than anyone? “It’s not selfish to think about yourself at a time like this. It’s human nature.”

He grimaced. “Human nature’s a bit shithouse then, I reckon.”

“I like to think most of us do the best with what we’ve got,” I said, my thoughts swirling to Neal, to Anna, and even to Robbie, and wondering where I fit into my charitable assessment of humanity. Or even if I believed it at all, and it wasn’t just a platitude, the sort of thing one said to someone who needed to hear it, because lies were sometimes kinder than the truth. I couldn’t tell.

Button John furrowed his brow, then let out a long breath. “Yeah, I s’pose we do.” He showed me a smile. “Thanks, doc.”

He bustled off towards the clinic rooms, and a moment later I heard the clatter of either the broom or the mop—possibly both—hitting the floor and bouncing. I made myself a cup of tea, and sat at the kitchen table, unwilling to go upstairs when Button John might need rescuing at any moment. He did a passable job as a cleaner, although I was sure that literally anyone could have done the work twice as quickly with less than half the trouble, but I liked having him around the place. Not in the same way that I liked having Robbie here—quiet, watchful, thoughtful Robbie—but because a little chaos, especially on a night like this one where silent reflection could tip so easily into despondency, was good for the soul.

Once Button John left, I sat in the living room with the windows open and listened to the sound of the waves lapping against the harbour wall. It was a dark night. If there was any moon at all it was hidden behind a heavy curtain of clouds. I thought of Anna, and wondered if she was still lying in her bed. I thought of how old-fashioned Dauntless seemed at times, and nowhere was it more apparent than in its death rituals. There were no morgues with refrigerated drawers on Dauntless Island. Hell, there were no undertakers. There were only families, and familiarity, and the sort of self-continuity that had been lost long ago to most of the rest of us, where you might be born and live and die all under the same roof. That seemed like the sort of thing that would feel like either an embrace or a stranglehold.

Or maybe both, at different times.

Robbie loved Dauntless, without question. And yet every now and then he was compelled to go to Newcastle where he put himself in harm’s way seeking what he thought he couldn’t get here. Seeking something he couldn’t even articulate, not to me and, I was certain, not even to himself. How much of that was because Dauntless Island had put him in a box he didn’t quite fit? Farmer, brother, Islander—those were the roles he’d been born into on Dauntless, but who else was he trying to be?

When I finally closed the windows and went upstairs to bed, I didn’t sleep well.

In the morning, the wind had swept most of the clouds away, and the day was bright. I showered, shaved, and dressed, then ate a couple of poached eggs on toast for breakfast. The yolks were bright gold, the sort you never saw in eggs from supermarkets. I wondered if I could make my own bread here. I assumed most people did. During the pandemic, Neal had gotten into making bread for about half a minute, before he realised that, as doctors, our quarantine experience had meant basically living at the hospital instead of holing up at home, and we’d both been too knackered to develop new hobbies. But thanks to his impulse internet shopping spree, I was fairly sure I had everything I needed to become one of those people who made sourdough. And why not lean into it? My free-range eggs deserved homemade bread that was made from scratch. Maybe I’d even start a vegetable garden and grow my own tomatoes, like Tall Tom.

A fantasy, probably. Here I was entertaining ideas of self-sufficiency and a cottage lifestyle when I wasn’t factoring in the most important thing about what my life would look like if I stayed on Dauntless long term: Robbie. He’d told me he wasn’t a replacement for Neal, and I’d told him I wasn’t looking for one, but had he heard that? Really heard it? I wasn’t sure he had, because I wasn’t sure there was any way to actually say to someone, “Yes, I was married, but I didn’t actually love my husband by the end, so there’s nobody you have to live up to in this scenario.” Because people weren’t supposed to think things like that, let alone say them, even if they were true. It wasn’t just Dauntless that put people into boxes.