WIP - Chapter 1 - by Charlotte French

The tide was right. Shadows, the giant flat rock, lay exposed a foot above the water’s surface, allowing the ocean to sweep across and cascade over the edges creating the waterfall effect Josie was after. The sky was wrong. Dawn would offer no clouds to catch the light when the sun rose. Yet, here she was in her wetsuit with a torch strapped around her head swaying in her uncle’s dingy in the crevice three meters behind Shadows.  

She didn’t want to be here. But she’d promised. She’d said yes, months ago only to put it off and put it off. Now she had a week? Her mum wanted Shadows on the wall for her opening night. If Josie settled for a cloudless sky and less colour, she and Alfred could be on the road in less than two hours leaving Uncle Eddie’s place behind. Menora Point behind. The past. But how could she settle for that when her mum deserved the rock captured at its best. Josie could envision it—silky water, soft and dreamy, clouds across the sky coloured by the sun, glowing. She wouldn’t catch that today so they had to stay. She’d experiment with shutter speed and aperture, adjust the exposure compensation, find the right angle, be useful. And after she wouldn’t put it off any longer—Uncle Eddie’s house. Her house. Josie whacked her chest with her palm. Not going emotional now. 

‘No chewing anything,’ she said to Alfred, who stood on the stern seat by the pulled-up motor with his nose to the breeze. The churning ocean was kind here, and the fenders on either side gave the boat a gentle bounce between the cliffs with the coming and going of the water. The dog’s balance was impeccable. Josie angled her forehead to shine the light around the sole of the boat for anything that Alfred might want to try to eat while she was gone. She picked up Eddie’s old fish club, lifted her bottom of the the seat and slid the lid open enough to throw it in. ‘And don’t open the lid. Alfred.’ The dog turned to her waving his tale, ears on alert, eyes two yellow dots in the spotlight. ‘Wood splinters,’ she said. ‘And bad for your teeth. Just so you know.’ 

Then she opened her haversack and took out the gorilla grip, the compact camera bag, and her mobile phone to check the time. To her suprise there were two voicemails from the previous night. How had she missed them? From Sadie!? The skin at the back of Josie’s neck tingled. It had been seven months since Josie hung up on her—the week after the Wooli incident. Now within hours of arriving at her uncle’s … Uncanny.

What happened in Wooli wasn’t Sadie’s fault. Her annual January 9th calls were for Josie’s benefit—to reaffirm Josie as a human being, to make sure she knew her life was still worth living, and to make sure she was in a safe place in case she was planning to drink herself into a stupor. Josie had been camping at Wooli for the week, surfed her brains out that day with a rowdy gang of Europeans and forgotten the date. The shame. The shame of it. Of forgetting. After Sadie’s call she had drunk herself into a stupor. 

It was the psychiatrist she had to face when waking up in a hospital bed—after her pill-and-piss-up-pity-party, after the Europeans decided she ought to have her stomach pumped—who’d suggested Josie might  need to create space between herself and Sadie. Josie had not told him what she did when she was fifteen but she had mentioned Sadie. A first. She’d created a different story with them as spectators of a tragedy and felt sick the entire time in his office. Dr Breck had asked her how much she wanted to leave the trauma behind. He understood Josie’s issues weren’t Sadie’s fault. She was only the reminder of the past, but to heal, Josie might need to cut ties with even the friend who’d been there. Josie had done it as soon as she came out of the session.

‘Do you mean I make you drink?’ Sadie had said with a hurt in her tone.

Josie had distanced herself once before, after a phone call where Sadie had mentioned she’d started dating an up-and-coming superstar in the judicial system. Though it held a 99% improbability that Josie would ever be introduced to the lawyer, and the certainty the relationship would end within months if not weeks, Josie had not called after that for ages. But the following year on January 9th, Sadie had called. She was dating a perfectly safe body builder and so they were on again.

This time was different.

‘I only ring you because I worry about you,’ Sadie had said. ‘I worry about Claire. Claire still matters.’

Josie had hung up on her. It was immature. Cruel. Unfair. Sadie had called in the weeks that followed, but when Josie didn’t pick up she’d finally stopped. So why now?

Delete the voicemails. The voice in her head sounded like Dr Breck’s.

Delete them darling, she heard her mother say, her mother who’d written Sadie off after their dinner date years ago now, her mother who—despite her psychology degree—didn’t understand that Sadie flirting with men was all about her insecurities. 

Should she delete? Selfpreservation, the psychiatrist had called it. The last seven months had been okay. Maybe not the last seven, the last four. Staying off the booze had made it easier. And Alfred. ‘Uncanny,’ said Josie to no one, to Alfred, to the Cimmerian morning. ‘I return to Menora Point and she rings.’ Another cold shiver up her neck. An image of that night so long ago. Josie pushed against the memory—the panic, the spinning world, the dark outline of Rick running up the beach.

Along the horizon streaked a paler indigo. She had a job to do. Sadie’s messages would have to wait. Forever perhaps. Josie didn’t press delete, but she dropped the mobile back in the bag, put the Nikon around her neck, and grabbed the gorilla grip.

At the bow, Josie pulled in the rope she’d secured to the inch-thick iron ring Uncle Eddie had drilled into the rock face. She was interrupted again. This time with a snapshot. They came out of nowhere. She’d often wondered if it was a ‘thing’ for photographers. The snapshots didn’t necessarily have anything to do with anything. They were a moment in time, an instant still life of something she saw. This time, in the frame was the iron ring. The noise of the ocean disappeared and the creaking boat. Perfect silence. The image came to her in sepia. A close-up. So close she could see the corrosion, the bumps of rust on the ring’s surface from years of nature’s wear, years of hungry salt. Stuck. Immovable. Wearing down. She was that ring, deeply buried in the truth that would never let her go. Sadie mattered not. The psychiatrist was wrong for the simple reason, he’d been told a lie. 

Focus.

Josie blinked and swallowed, lifting a leg over the side of the boat searching for somewhere to put her foot. She visualised getting in the cold black water, imagined herself climbing the few metres across to the channel behind Shadows, her fingers gripping sharp and slimy stone, her feet sliding across protruding rocks searching for the ledges that could secure her. She anticipated shifting the balance, getting the other foot out.

Why would Sadie ring? 

Josie didn’t lift the other leg out of the dinghy. She stood with one foot in the boat and one on a slippery stone, holding the rope tight, balancing with the movement, thinking about the voicemail. Curious, she was curious. It would take thirty seconds to listen. Why had Sadie rung her last night. Her foot pushed away from the rock. She let go of the rope and stumbled back to the seat.

Alfred was immediately alert, sitting up, ready to go back to shore.

‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ she said finding the phone again. She pressed play.

Sadie’s voice broke the murmuring ocean and the lapping water with a metallic, ‘For fuck’s sake, Josie. Why don’t you ever pick up.’

That voice! Not the calm and collected Sadie. She only had one memory of a flustered Sadie and an agitated voice. The bonfire night when Josie didn’t know her, only knew of her. The memory was vivid. Sadie sitting next to her in the sand talking to a girl on her other side, using that exact voice. Josie cross legged and hunched over, drunk from her concoction of alcohol stolen from Uncle Eddie’s pantry, staring at a pill dropped in her palm. Then she was in the water and Celeste gone. No splashing. Waiting. The world spinning. Fear. Acrid fear. Confusion. Pitchblack. Rick’s voice.  

Josie dropped the phone on the seat as if it were hot coal. She could taste the salt in her mouth, feel the shivering that had had nothing to do with her soaked clothes and everything to do with seeing Rick run up the beach with Celeste’s lifeless body. 

Josie leaned over the railing to vomit up the earlier sandwich. Once the retching was done with, she stretched a hand into the black liquid, washed her mouth and splashed water on her face. Alfred was up on the seat now—his nose, ice on her cheek. Josie buried her face into his warm neck, his smooth hair. The wetsuit didn’t protect any longer. The cold came from within her bones. Josie hugged the dog’s sturdy body breathing in his scent of warm earth, thinking of the funny things he did, waiting for the calm, for the panic to withdraw back to its source, the guilt that lay encapsuled deep inside not unlike the tumour that had attached itself to her mum’s body, which her mum kept at bay year after year. Just as Josie did. 

When Josie finally opened her eyes, the sun was out of the water and the sky was changing to washed out yellow and pink and blue. The low tide had peaked. In a few hours Shadows would be back beneath the water’s surface. Alfred stood and shook his body to put all his messed-up hair back in place before giving her a look of, can we go now?

Shivering, Josie lifted the camera strap over her head and placed it back in its bag. She picked up the phone. Opened the weather app for the umptenth time. The image for tomorrow was the same as it had been yesterday for this morning—a cloud half over the sun. Josie sighed. Tomorrow morning’s sky would most likely not offer any clouds. Tuesday held some promise. She would have to stay minimun two more nights and the rest of the week was a possibility. Josie closed the weather and looked at the second voicemail. Something was going on in Sadie’s life. That voice was not her usual calm. Deleting meant she was a heartless bitch. Sadie had always been there for her. Josie pressed play.  

‘Why don’t you pick up your phone? Pick up Josie. I need to talk to you. This is serious. Long story. I met this guy just then. For fuck’s sake, pick up … I’m waiting … Pick up. Oh shit, my bag. I—A short scream interrupted. Was that screeching tyres? A sound from Sadie as if someone hurt her, punched her. A thump and then nothing.

Josie played it again. Then again. And again.

It was definitely screeching tyres. She closed her eyes against the sun seeing Sadie being hit by a car as she walked across a city street, her body thrown into the air.

Joise pressed the call back.

Not in service. 

© 2024 Charlotte French. All rights reserved.
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