Ember Island Read Free Page A

had been my task. I’d read them all. Everything. I’d grown to love Eleanor through this insight into her agile mind, her imaginative turns of phrase, her honesty and sometimes ribald humor.
    When I bought Starwater, before the renters moved in, I’d combed the house for more writings and found an old suitcase inthe attic. Mostly poems and short stories. And I’d believed then that I must have exhausted all chances of finding anything else she wrote. But tonight I wondered what else might be stashed around the house in nooks and crannies, behind modern renovations, under carpets and floorboards. Eleanor had lived here until her death at the age of seventy-nine. What else might she have written?
    Frankly, I was desperate to find it all.
    One room after another, I went through the house. Starwater was a rambling T-shaped building: the central column made up of lounge room, dining room, and kitchen; the west wing of three bedrooms and a bathroom; and the east wing of rooms that had been converted to the whale-watching office. The whole house was surrounded by wooden verandahs, open to catch the breezes on hot summer days. I assessed cornices and skirting boards, lifted a loose tile in the bathroom, peeked under lino in the kitchen, knocked the bedroom walls listening for hollows. Then finally admitted I didn’t know what I was doing and was unlikely to find anything, and wound up back in the office. I sat at the largest desk. A desk calendar sat open at July the thirty-first. Perhaps that had been the last day George and Kay had been in the office, before hastily packing their things and fleeing their debts. It had also been the date my next book was due. A missed deadline, now ten weeks in the past. I experienced that familiar feeling in my guts of tightening and hardening, and had to breathe through it. “It’s writer’s block,” Mum had said, and Marla and my sisters and Stacy and even Cameron, when he’d come by with a trolley to take the last few things in my apartment that were his. But there was no way such a simplistic name could be applied to the problems I was facing getting the words down.
    I went back to the west wing and chose a bedroom. I think it was the guest room. I didn’t want to go to bed in George and Kay’s room and lie there all night wondering how many conversations they’d had in there about their failing business and mounting debts. I had plenty of anxieties of my own to keep me awake.

THREE
     

The Deep Quiet
     
    I woke to a deep quiet. It took me a few moments to remember where I was. The only sounds were the distant ocean and the chirp of sparrows in the trees. I rolled over and looked at my phone. The SOS signal was gone and I could see I had one tiny bar of reception. Fearful that my agent, Marla, would call me, I switched it off.
    It wasn’t the lack of traffic noise and joggers’ footfalls that made the morning quiet: it was that there was no way to download e-mail or take a phone call or post cheerful responses on my Twitter stream. I was unreachable. Nobody could expect me to respond to anything.
    I hadn’t felt this relaxed in years.
    And that’s when I had the idea: I wouldn’t go home. I wouldn’t even leave the island. I’d get Stacy to brave my mother’s house on the mainland and bring my suitcase over here for me. I had my laptop in my satchel. I could write. The world would go away. It would be me and the story and I wouldsomehow get it done before the new deadline—just two months away—swung around.
    I was so excited, so certain, that I practically jumped out of bed and switched my phone back on. One bar of reception became two out on the verandah and I dialed Marla’s number. It was ringing before I realized it was six in the morning.
    “Hello?” she said, warily.
    “I’m so sorry, Marla. Did I wake you?”
    “Of course not. I was up at five for a jog.” Marla was a ridiculously fit woman of an unguessable age, who seemed to run on coffee and leafy