A blue sea, splashed with sunlight. An empty beach. White sand, stretching north and south, disappears into the afternoon haze.

The Pacific Ocean. If you swam due east you would reach New Zealand. If you missed New Zealand your next stop would be South America.

Seagulls on the wet sand wait and hope as the breakers lift and curl and throw themselves on to the beach.

Crabs scuttle and hide. A cuttlefish’s dry, brittle flesh is gouged and torn by beaks as sharp as fishermen’s knives.

He wonders why the beach is empty. He has walked ten miles through the bush to get there, but still is surprised to find himself alone.

This is a pilgrimage.

Why here?

He sits leaning against a paper bark tree. Its bark, breaking away in broad, thick strips, is soft against his back. He looks up into the branches of the tree. Its dark leaves are lit by the sun. Light and shade flicker across his face.

Here he is alone. It is what he has been looking for, but now that he has found it, it is a surprise. He knows it will not last.

The sea is empty, all the way to the horizon.

It is not safe to swim. He can see the current: hard, fast-moving, dangerous. He is a big man, and strong, and loves the sea, but the surf is menacing, driven by far-away storms. By day you see and hear nothing. At night you see the lightning flickering silently over the horizon. Still you do not hear the thunder or feel the wind.

Once before he had sat beneath this tree and watched the sea turn pale then dark and hard as the sun at his back set behind storm clouds. A summer evening; hot, still and humid. He had sat there, waiting for the storm, sensing it beyond the mountains to the west. It was too late to look for shelter, too late to fear the lightning.

Where had he thought he would spend the night? He had not thought. Then or now.

He had waited for the storm to break. The rain came first, a wall of water beating at the ground, churning up the dry creek-beds, ripping through the branches of the trees. The sea disappeared as if it had ceased to exist. Somewhere nearby, a tree exploded in a blaze of fire as lightning descended on him and thunder cracked in his ear, flinging him sideways.

After the storm, he had walked on the beach. The sand was warm. He stood by the water’s edge, watching the storm move out to sea. Behind it the sky was clear. The moon rose out of the storm clouds, dazzling on the white sand. Far out to sea, lightning lit up the clouds from within or leapt forth and plunged down into the sea. He could no longer hear the thunder. Only the lightning remained, and clouds as huge as twenty mountain ranges piled one upon another, and the brilliance of a night that would never grow dark.

The smouldering stump of the shattered tree had dried and warmed him. He had slept briefly, waking as the dawn spread across the sea, the sun climbing into a cloudless sky.

This time there is no storm, only the imprint of the storm there in front of him, in the rip that would sweep him out beyond the horizon, towards New Zealand or South America.

He is here to say farewell.

It is time to move on.

Here he is at peace, as he rarely is. Here he can understand what it is he needs, why he cannot be still, why he must always move on.

Here, drifting, dreaming, dozing against the paper bark tree, by the empty beach, by the blue, empty sea.



The summer had turned into autumn by the time Vic arrived in Cairns.

It was no trouble getting a job; the place was booming and the tourist boats were crying out for deck hands. It was harder to find somewhere to live, with everything being turned into hotels and apartments. In the end he rented an old, ramshackle house at the back of the show grounds, out on the edge of town. It was nothing special but it was quiet and strangely peaceful. When he stood on the back verandah, he looked out through a screen of bougainvillaea and across fields of bright green sugar cane. The red volcanic earth spread through the fields as far as he could see, turning to dust that hung in the air over the harvesters or formed long, billowing trails behind the tractors and narrow gauge trains that hauled the cane to the mill. Beyond the cane fields, the forest-covered mountains had their tops in the clouds.

On his days off, he sometimes walked into town and sat on the Esplanade, looking out over the mud flats or the shallow water as the tide came in, letting his mind drift, letting go of so much that he had held on to, and with it the restlessness that had made him move on again. At other times, he went into the garden and sat under the tall mango tree that sheltered the house. He stared up at the mountains, getting to know them as they opened up vividly at the touch of the sun then suddenly darkened again as the south-easterly wind enveloped the peaks in dense, heavy clouds and the smell of distant rain drifted down over the sunny coastal plain.

As he had expected, he got occasional letters from Lottie. What she wrote was straightforward enough, but behind the words he sensed the sorrow and the gap he had left in her life. He wrote back letters that were meant to be impersonal but which he saw had their own hints of loss and longing. Though not for Lottie, he was sure. More for something he had never had than for something he had lost.


The vivid evening light faded as Leonora looked out over the city from her hotel room. In the distance the cane fields were burning. Beyond them, the mountains were silhouetted against the darkening sky, blue turning rapidly to black. She stretched her arms and legs, feeling the ache in her muscles from a day spent swimming in rock pools and crater lakes and under pounding waterfalls. Soon she would go white-water rafting, despite what they said about broken noses and dislocated shoulders.

Her mother, preferring to travel in comfort, did her sight-seeing separately, especially since she had met Tony Tomaselli, the builder. The developer, her mother liked to say; the architect.

Soon Tony would arrive in his Mercedes and take her mother out to dinner. Leonora on her own would walk down to the Esplanade and choose somewhere for herself: fish, flesh or fowl; French, Japanese or Thai; somewhere bright and warm where she could enjoy the throng of sunburnt men and women fresh from diving on the reef, or bungy-jumping or canoeing down the rivers, self-conscious in their Passions of Paradise or A J Hackett tee shirts.

She had grown used to Cairns and what it had to offer: its luxury hotels with their tropical gardens; its cheap backpacker hostels and dive shops; its restaurants as good as any in places twice as expensive; its pubs and bars and night clubs, noisy and smoky and smelling of stale beer as she passed by on the pavement. She had made a habit of getting up early to sit and watch the sun rise crisp and cool over the still sea. She was entranced by the early morning tranquillity of the waterfront, before the tourist boats shook themselves into life and set off towards the reef and the islands. At that time there was hardly anyone else around, just the occasional fisherman gathering prawns in a net in the shallows, or a sweating Japanese jogger, or the Council workmen, clearing away the empty bottles and other reminders of the previous night’s pleasures.

Away from the sea and beyond the shopping centre, the back streets surprised her. On the dark verandahs of scattered wooden houses, men sat sprawled in vests and shorts with the racing turned up loud on the radio. Children in bare feet kicked balls or played cricket in back gardens that disappeared into tall grass and tangled thickets of scrub and vines and trees with unknown names. Once a leering old man had caught hold of her arm. She had pushed him away with such force that he had fallen hard against a broken fence. She had kept on, ignoring his cries for help, walking towards the mountains where the houses climbed the foothills in dispiriting, treeless rows.

In the early evening, she liked to stroll along the waterfront that was now so busy, full of people like herself, drifting, thinking, watching. Groups of divers spread their gear on the grass, cleaning and sorting and arranging. Others loudly swapped stories, drank, laughed, played music, sang and danced. An aboriginal man made long, low, mournfully-beautiful sounds through a didgeridoo while the birds roosted noisily in the trees above him. Japanese and Korean tourists gathered round and asked him questions. He did not answer them, even when they tossed their dollar coins on to the blanket by his feet. Night after night Leonora stood in the shadows and watched the aboriginal man, looking but hardly seeing, content to let the sound of the strange music drift over her, drawing her into a world that was filled with terror and beauty, inextricably intertwined.

Then the aboriginal man went away, up to the Daintree where his family lived, and in his place was a huge, broad-shouldered man, no longer young, who sat hunched over his guitar like a relic of the sixties and sang to himself and sometimes looked up and out over the sea, smiling as he sang.


Vic Townsend saw the woman standing in the shadows, watching him, listening to the words he could hardly hear himself.

He tried to ignore her but found he could not. There was something unusual about her, something distinctive. When she came out from under the trees and passed by, looking not at him but over his shoulder, it was her eyes he noticed: deep and dark and sparkling, but threatening at the same time. He shivered, wishing he had not seen, but turned and watched as she walked across the street and disappeared into the night market.

When Vic got to work next day, he found the boat had engine trouble. He could take the morning off while it was fixed, they said.

He walked up the Esplanade to the café’s spreading out over the footpath. He ordered breakfast and took his mug of tea across to the only empty seat. As he went to sit down, he saw her there, the dark-haired woman from the night before.

‘The shy musician!’ she said, raising her cup to him and laughing at his confusion.

He hesitated but sat down anyway. She was English, despite her Mediterranean features and dark hair. In the bright morning light, her dark eyes no longer disturbed him. He smiled, feeling himself relax.

‘I play for myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect people to listen.’

‘And you resent it if they do?’

He laughed. ‘No, I don’t mind.’

Leonora waited for him to go on, but he picked up his tea and drank it. He seemed to be thinking of something else, as if she was no longer there.

A Chinese woman brought his breakfast of bacon and eggs and hoped, in a light, chirping voice, that they would have a nice day. Vic smiled his thanks and turned back to look at the woman sitting opposite him. She was eating a bowl of fruit salad. ‘Good?’ he said, looking at the chunks of fresh papaw and pineapple and the slices of banana.

‘Yes, it’s good.’ For a moment she was disappointed, thinking this man’s huge frame enclosed no more of interest than she would find by picking up one of the young tour guides or the blond attendant at the hotel pool or the Vietnamese waiter who had smiled at her the evening before. She must be getting old, she thought, if she expected men to be interesting as well. As well as what? she wondered, and smiled to herself. Then she turned back to this giant of a man and saw a strange, restless look in his face. Perhaps it was worth persisting after all.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked him.

‘Vic,’ he said. ‘Vie Townsend.’

‘I’m Leonora. Leonora Stanislavski.’

‘What are you doing here?’ Vic asked her. She was beautiful, he thought, and was surprised at himself.

‘I’m here with my mother. She lives in Sydney and likes to travel, so we meet up in strange places.’ She thought of their time in Como at the end of the northern summer, and of Mario, the doctor she had met, too young and too beautiful to last, with whom she had climbed the mountains by day and rowed on the lake at night, swimming in water so cold she felt her heart contracting with every stroke she took. She looked out at the sea and back at the tall man, Vic, and was happy to be there. ‘We’re here for another three months, and then it will be somewhere else. Maybe South America.’

‘Three months!’ Vic said incredulously.

Leonora shrugged as if to excuse herself, though she did not feel defensive. He would do the same if he had the money. He was not the type to work just for die pleasure of it. For her it was three months to rest, to reconsider, to see what might become of her. And to think, from time to time, of the life she had left behind in London.

They finished their breakfast and went over the road to sit and look out at the sea that glittered under the low sun. Leonora put on her sunglasses and a hat. The trail of boats out to the reef was already under way, making waves that spread slowly across the bay and washed up against the sea wall in front of them.

Vic hoped they would not get the boat fixed in time. He could happily spend the day sitting peacefully with this woman, looking out over the bay. And it would be rougher than he liked, going out in the afternoon when the wind had picked up. They would shorten the journey, maybe just going to Fitzroy for a bit of snorkelling. He preferred the outer reef where they did the scuba diving, down through the deep coral to huge caverns and hidden grottoes and the occasional lurking shark.

‘Have you been out to the reef?’ Leonora asked him.

He laughed. ‘I work on a boat. What about you?’

‘I went with my mother on the fast catamaran,’ Leonora said. ‘Then on my own on one of the slower boats. We went right out where you could see the surf breaking on the outside of the reef. The water was so deep. And cold after a while.’ She smiled at the memory of it and at another much stranger memory: Mario and his moonlit face as she emerged naked from the water in Lake Como, his hands rubbing the warmth back into her limp, frozen body, the moon drifting silently in and out of clouds that merged with the mountains around her and above her, so close she could raise her hand and touch them, and yet so far away, so far away...

‘Did you like it?’ asked Vic.

‘I loved it,’ Leonora said, and did not know whether she meant the slow, languorous drifting down through the schools offish and the coral, or the dark, cold, miraculous moment when she had glimpsed eternity - or was it only mortality? - as the water of the lake closed over her and drained the life out of her. Before she was saved, she thought, and did not know whether to appreciate or regret it.

Vic looked at her face, which was beautiful: strong and clear and alive, despite a strange twist to her mouth, but also somehow unsettled. It was her deep, angry-looking eyes, he thought, and the darkness of her hair that shaded her, even in the bright sunlight. And then she laughed, and it was impossible to believe her face could ever contain or express anger, despite the eyes. If he felt uneasy, it was because of his own uncertainty, his own fear, his unwillingness to see what another human being might contain: joy, love, happiness even; things he had never really understood and which had -forever, it seemed - hung over him, threatening whatever peace he managed to attain. He could never tell her that, however; thinking it was disturbing enough.

‘I’d better go to work,’ Vic said, his uneasiness making him restless. ‘I’ve got to help them fix the engine.’ He needed to get away, as if she had already become too much for him, this strange English woman who was almost too beautiful to bear.

‘Shall we meet for dinner?’ asked Leonora. ‘At the Asia House? Around eight o’clock?’

‘Yes,’ he said, surprising himself, ‘eight o’clock will be fine.’ He stood up, towering over her as she got up and reached out to shake his hand. She laughed, in away that made him feel comfortable, and he smiled at her and turned away and strode off down the road towards the wharves.

Leonora walked back to her hotel. She picked up a couple of letters from London that she read over a coffee in the sunny, palm-filled atrium. She composed brief replies and took them to the desk to be faxed so she could forget about them. Her mother was not back from her night with Tony Tomaselli but had left a message: Tony was taking her to the Whitsundays for a week or maybe two. It was a kind of celebration, she said.

Leonora took the lift to her room and changed into her bikini. She picked up her book and suntan cream and went down to sit by the pool. The blond attendant nodded but did not speak. From time to time he strolled up and down by the pool, flexing his muscles. He was no longer interested in her, not since the arrival of a group of young French women who happily displayed themselves in as little as they could get away with. Leonora smiled to herself and settled down to her book, only emerging from time to time to do a few lengths of the pool or to sit and dream in the warmth of the Jacuzzi.

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