Chapter Text
From the window of the helicopter, dense scrubby vegetation on a rugged island comes into view. It’s almost dawn, but it’s the first time in two weeks that the rain has eased enough for flying, so they’d been hurried into the chopper before their post got delayed further.
Near the southern tip of the island, along the rocky steep coastline, is the lighthouse. The tiny white beacon that, along with the weather station, several other white-roofed buildings and the surrounding shrubland, will be home for the next six months.
As they head towards the helipad nearby, Jack finally looks over at his fellow lighthouse keeper and island caretaker. He looks the same as he did over Skype and Facebook, a lanky young guy with messy hair, tan skin, and a large nose. They hadn’t talked much beyond making sure they didn’t go over their respective weight limits for what they’d each be taking to the island, which are in plastic fish bins hanging from the bottom of the chopper.
Jack’s chest tightens as he wonders, yet again, what the hell they’re doing.
(What he’s doing.)
He takes deep breaths, reminding himself that the helicopter pilot is a professional, has ferried dozens of other caretakers back and forth before, including the ones from the most recent post just minutes before. He wants to talk with his fellow caretaker – Gavin – but the helicopter blades are too loud, and once he opens his mouth to speak Jack suddenly doesn’t know what to say anyway.
They land.
The pilot helps them unhook their bins and move them into the biggest of the white-roofed buildings – quarters one, the brick house they’ll be living in – but after that he leaves.
Now, they’re here. Alone on this magnificent, sprawling island.
They’re just in time for the first weather observation of the day for the Bureau of Meteorology, so that’s what they do first. It’s awkward and silent but for the wind whipping around them, huddled up in Parks-issued wet weather jackets and pants against the light drizzle as, led by their head torches and the lighthouse, they head up to the weather station.
Jack shuts the door behind them. He unwraps his notebook and pen from his jacket, sighing in relief when they’re dry. He clenches them tight to his chest like a shield, waiting for Gavin to do something so that he can fall into step behind him.
He doesn’t.
What happens is that he hovers, stock-still, in a corner by the door, staring at the entire room like it’s going to swallow him whole.
Jack’s heart races at the too-loud silence. “Um – ” he blurts out before he can stop himself.
Gavin looks over at him, straightening up in that expectant way people do when they’re expecting guidance or instruction.
A lump rises in Jack’s throat.
“What do you…what part do you want to do?” Jack finally stammers.
There, that wasn’t too bad (he hopes).
Gavin blinks at him, his face completely blank. He shrugs. “I dunno, whatever you feel like.”
That’s not helpful, and not just because that’s what Jack was going to say to him instead. He doesn’t want to risk stepping on toes here, and he won’t be the cause of an argument two minutes into their six month stay.
“Are you sure?” Jack asks finally, because Gavin hasn’t said anything in a minute, and someone needs to say something, lest they miss the ten minute window for their weather observation.
Gavin nods. “Yeah. I can do any part of it, if it helps.”
It does and it doesn’t. Does, because that means he’d completed the compulsory training back in Hobart, which they’d scheduled to do separately since Gavin couldn’t fly in until later. Doesn’t, because he hadn’t expressed a particular preference or system for the order in which he did things, which probably differed to Jack’s own.
But he’s put the ball in Jack’s court, so Jack swallows around the lump in his throat and says, “How about…maybe I could…determine visibility in miles?”
Gavin nods, something relieved coming over his face. “Sure. Guess I should log onto the laptop, right?” he says, tilting his chin towards the ancient laptop across the room. “Since we have to send the results off to the Bureau.”
“Yeah, sounds good,” Jack sighs in relief.
With that, the tension eases a bit as they go off to do their agreed duties.
Jack picks up the standard-issue binoculars on the desk and looks out the window into the ocean. He’s met with monstrous waves crashing thunderously against the thousand-foot cliff drop just outside the weather station. They rattle the thin walls of the station and suddenly he wonders whether they’ll be bowled over in the swell.
He forces himself to put that aside, to take deep breaths, but a pit of dread has formed in his stomach as he tries to determine visibility. In the pitch black of thick clouds, he can’t spot the jagged peak of the Southwest cape peninsula, one of the landmarks they’d be using as a benchmark for distances. There’s a diagram on the wall reminding him of other benchmarks, such as the collection of sheer rocks called, ‘The Needles’, but he can’t find any of those either.
He swallows down his worry to watch for sea swell height instead. There are two shorter rocks nearby, embedded with jagged edges like a height metre for the swell. Their exact heights are specified by the swell height chart on the walls of the station. Based on this, Jack records the swell height and direction; it’s a five metre – he’s not sure what that is in feet – south-westerly swell right now.
He spends another minute trying to determine visibility, but after writing down the type, height and direction of the clouds, nothing else has become clearer in the inky black skies, so he reluctantly pulls back. Maybe Gavin would be able to spot something?
He calls him over, stammers out that he’s not completely sure of the landmarks that are visible, but Gavin doesn’t seem to notice, taking his turn with the binoculars without comment.
Almost instantly, he says that he can just see the outline of the closest of the Needle rocks. Jack feels awful for not being able to spot them himself through the thick clouds, but Gavin’s already pulled back from the binoculars, moving over to the laptop and pointing out the wind speed and direction, which Jack hastens to write down manually. Gavin copies the observations in Jack’s notebook onto the computer and submits everything just after 06:00.
They hover, afterwards. Silence thick, now.
“Do you want to go to the lighthouse?” Jack rattles off, finally, unable to stand the silence any longer.
Gavin nods. “Sure.”
The stifling silence during the long walk down the grassed track to the lighthouse is matched only by the cold, sticky air and the slowly easing rain, which stops by the time they reach the lighthouse.
They trudge up the long spiralling metal stairs, past several landings and the tiny windows, and out onto the balcony. The view from which, Jack decides, is immediately worth the months of struggle preparing for this trip.
Rolling waves in the expansive ocean that seems to go on forever, a narrow circle of light in one spot from where the lighthouse beams into the ocean. The Needle rocks are coming in clearer now, the clouds having already started to shift in the distance. They’ve moved to obscure the first hints of light from the sun instead, which is barely peeking through where the sky and sea meet.
He leans his hands against the metal railing, inhaling deeply. Everything smells fresh and cold, salty and clean. The air is thicker here, like he can taste the clouds above. The metal balcony clatters as he walks around it, the light humming gently inside.
They’ll still have to turn on the light each night, using the old clockwork mechanisms, but it has an automatic daylight sensor that will switch it off upon sunrise. The light consists of the electric lamp itself and the Fresnel lens in front of it, the giant lens that concentrates the light into a relatively narrow beam. The lens is made up of a series of concentric rings that will need to be gently cleaned with a rag every day. They won’t need to touch the daylight sensors; those require more specialised hands and are monitored remotely by Parks.
Nonetheless, the lighthouse won’t be their main responsibility, despite the job description and it being the main attraction of the island. It was built in the late 1800s, along with the three houses and the weather station, but like all lighthouses these days it’s mostly automated. The lighthouse used to guide boats away from the rocky shores of the island, but now GPS and radios exist, and boat transportation has been replaced with helicopters. The island is still important for heritage and weather reading reasons, hence the requirement of keepers.
Other than cleaning the lenses and turning on the light, all they’ll have to do is open the main door of the lighthouse to air out the interior from the rain and repaint the exterior on sunny days.
Jack ponders whether it’s actually a good idea to air it out now – it might, no, it will rain again – but Gavin’s already opened the door, so Jack reluctantly lets it be.
Afterwards, they go back to the house. Once they’re inside and Jack has shut the door, it’s just the two of them, standing across from each other in the living room. Gavin’s scuffing his foot against the floorboards, boot squeaking as it catches on them.
What now?
Jack had expected Gavin to have started conversation by now; he looked like the confident, outgoing type. But he’s been silent other than for their duties. His hands are now stuffed in the pockets of his jacket, eyes fixed on the ground, and Jack realises, somewhat belatedly, that it’s up to him to reach out first, to figure out what to say.
How could he start a conversation? Hi, I’m Jack, had already been done, while disinfecting their boots right before they’d gotten into the chopper together. How are you? is his default, but he doesn’t want to exhaust that conversation starter before they’ve begun. Maybe task designations? But he doesn’t want to seem bossy.
This is why he escaped out here in the first place: because he is completely incapable of social interaction.
“What do you want to do first?” he asks, finally. That’s neutral enough, right?
A shrug. “Unpack?”
Jack stares at him incredulously. Three weeks of cramming their brains – albeit separately – with how to maintain generators and mowers, how to navigate the water and electrical systems, how to maintain the multitude of gardens, and the first thing is unpack?
“If you want to do something else, I’m open to suggestions,” Gavin says tentatively.
It’s like cold water being thrown over him.
“Sorry, no, it’s fine,” Jack sags. “It’s just that I wasn’t expecting that.”
“What were you expecting?” Gavin asks with an air of curiosity, eyebrows furrowed.
He doesn’t even sound offended.
“De-moulding and cleaning all the buildings, mowing the grass, clearing the drains, checking up on the power systems, then working on the gardens,” Jack lists off. He’s got a notebook listing all of their duties, and that’s only a few of them.
Gavin nods. “That sounds good, but I’m not sure if we can do all of that in one day. I figured that we could unpack today, since we’ll probably be so busy every other day that we won’t get around to it otherwise.”
It’s a good point.
Jack nods. “Okay. But we should de-mould and clean the house first, then unpack. After that, we can mow the grass – ” he says, even as his brain is yelling at him to mow first, it’ll probably rain again later. “Actually, can we mow the grass first, then de-mould and clean the house, then unpack?”
Gavin nods, undeterred by Jack’s take-back. “Sounds good. Probably a good idea to mow it now before it rains for the next however long.”
He says it casually, like the fact that it rains here two-hundred and fifty days a year isn’t that note-worthy. Given his English accent, it probably isn’t.
Jack’s about to go look for the lawnmowers when his tummy rumbles. His face heats.
Gavin, to his credit, appears completely unfazed. “Want to have breakfast? We have those yoghurt sachets, right?”
Jack hesitates. They’d known beforehand that the island had an EasiYo yoghurt maker, so they’d decided that during their stay, breakfast would be yoghurt with cinnamon toast crunch.
The grass, though…
“Are you hungry?” Jack asks him.
Gavin shrugs. “I don’t mind either way. It’s up to you.”
Jack internally sags with relief, then immediately feels guilty for it. Because what if Gavin had actually been hungry?
(What if he is, but is just playing nice with Jack?)
But he puts that aside, otherwise he won’t be able to say anything at all. “How about we mow first, then we have breakfast?”
The grass is expansive and grows fast enough that it needs to be mowed every two weeks. There’s grass around their house, the half a mile up to then around the heritage houses – quarters two and three – then around the vegetable garden, the workshop, the generator shed, and the track leading to the lighthouse. The grass continues around the secret garden, the weather station, the helipad, the communications towers, the tea tree and myrtle track, the pig face plant track, and the mile-long grassed road that goes from the southern to northern ends of the island.
Ten miles in total, if Jack remembers correctly. Nothing they can do but get to it.
The wet grass bites at their waists. It’s tall enough that they have to use brush cutters on it first, and Jack marvels at how Gavin’s able to handle them reasonably well despite how lanky-limbed he is. Afterwards, they get out the lawn mowers. In a bid to prevent potential collisions, Jack proposes that they start at opposite ends of wherever they’re mowing before meeting in the middle, which Gavin readily agrees to.
In the cold, heavy air, sweat sticks to Jack’s face in thick layers as he works. The sun slowly rises to match their workload, and he quickly gets lost in the smell of freshly cut grass, how it tickles his ankles, in the motions of running the mower over tall damp grass, lane by lane.
They’re just starting up around quarters two when Jack looks at his watch and curses. It’s 07:20, ten minutes before they need to tune into the scheduled broadcast, or sked, of the Tasmanian Maritime Radio at 07:30 for additional coastal forecasts and observations. He stops his mower, making his way over to Gavin and waving his arms at the same time until he finally notices.
Once Gavin turns off his mower, Jack leads them back to the house and into the living room, where they turn on the radio.
They’re just in time. Jack writes down the weather observations for their coastline to send to the bureau later and Gavin checks in with the operators. They’ll re-confirm their safe arrival on the island with Parks Tasmania later, but the operators at the radio station are a nice safety mechanism as well, a point of contact in case there’s an emergency.
After the radio sked, Jack suggests they go back to mowing. Gavin hesitates, then reminds him about breakfast.
Breakfast, right.
Fears of it raining again before they can finish mowing rush through Jack’s head, but in the end, hunger wins out. Jack grabs a cloth to wipe down the wet plastic bins, but Gavin’s already thrown open to the door to shake the water off of them outside. Which is fine, just unexpected, Jack tells himself even as unease rises in his chest at the excess water that’s probably being left behind.
He swoops in to wipe them down properly the moment Gavin’s grabbed their breakfast and turned away from him to head into the kitchen. Jack feels vaguely guilty for being sneaky about it, but he doesn’t think the excess water could possibly evaporate in the humid air.
Gavin’s found bowls and spoons for their cereal. They would have had EasiYo yoghurt with it, but they’d both forgotten that they had to leave it in the yoghurt maker for eight to twelve hours, then refrigerate it, so plain cereal it is.
Gavin doesn’t seem bothered by the mistake; if anything, he’s amused by it, like the mistake is part of the fun.
(Maybe it is, a small part of Jack’s brain says, but Jack quickly ignores it.)
During breakfast, they check in with Parks using the radio as confirmation of their safe arrival. Afterwards, Jack goes to put his bowl in the sink, then stops himself. He’s not sure what Gavin’s policy on this is, had been too scared to ask him over the internet, but now the problem has come back to the fore-front.
“Do you put dishes in the sink or on the counter?”
Gavin shrugs. “I don’t mind either way. Just gotta keep it clean, you know?”
“What do you usually do, though?” Jack asks.
“Um…” Gavin trails off, eyes wide. “I use the dishwasher.”
Oh. Jack really should have thought of that.
“That makes sense,” he says, finally. He looks around the 1800s style kitchen, “But there’s no dishwasher here, so…”
Gavin coughs, something awkward to it. “I usually put them on the counter,” he says in a rush. “But what about you?”
“I usually put dishes in the sink,” Jack says. “But we can put them on the counter, that’s fine.”
“O – okay,” Gavin says. He shifts glances all around the room, but he puts his bowl on the counter anyway.
Jack adds his bowl to the counter, and it’s admittedly odd to see the counter a bit cluttered, but he’ll get used to it.
It’s almost 09:00, so they head back to the weather station for their second and final weather reading. On the way, they stop by the Stevenson screen, a meteorological instrument shelter that looks like a mailbox, to take additional readings.
The Stevenson screen is a standardised environment within which to measure temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure. Accordingly, it shelters thermometers, a hygrometer and a barometer, respectively, from the frequent rain and wind here. They reset the minimum temperature gauges, then take the additional readings of dry bulb, wet bulb, minimum and maximum temperatures, as well as humidity and atmospheric pressure.
Then they go up to the weather station to take the same readings as before. They submit their weather reports for the day, and the rest of the day is theirs.
The weather is still holding up, so they decide to go back to mowing. They finish up the areas around quarters two and three, the vegetable garden, the workshop and the generator shed, but halfway through the track leading to the lighthouse, it starts pouring with rain.
They shouldn’t have broken for breakfast.
At least, that’s what Jack thinks, as he hurries to juggle his brush cutter and lawnmower into his hands and rushes to close the lighthouse door. Thankfully, not too much rain got in, so he heaves his gear up into his arms and sprints back to the workshop by the house.
They hadn’t even made it to the second garden.
But Gavin doesn’t seem to be bothered by all the mowing left to do. He arrives at the workshop at walking speed, languidly dragging his lawnmower behind him, as though it’s not getting soaked by the rain, as though they don’t have to keep their equipment in shape for the next six months.
Okay, this is fine, Jack thinks to himself, trying to go over the repair procedures for rained-on lawnmowers. We just need to get –
“Starter fluid, right?” Gavin says, plucking an aerosol can labelled premium-strength starter fluid from a shelf. “Where do we spray it, again?”
He says it lightly, like he’s not bothered at not having fully memorised everything from the training back in Hobart, like there’s no repair shop to pop down to if they can’t fix something.
“Into the carburettor,” Jack says automatically, having long memorised labelled diagrams of equipment. Then at Gavin’s blank look, “the mixer, the one that mixes air and fuel.”
He comes over and points it out to Gavin, who says, “Ah, that’s what that is,” before spraying the starter fluid into it. “We should check for rust too, right?” he says, even as he’s already pulling the mower apart.
“Yeah, we need to check for rust on the coil.”
After a quick look-over of the coil – no rust, Jack notes – Gavin nods and puts it back before starting to put the mower back together. He’s casual about it, like he’s contemplating what would happen if he put certain bits in different places, and for some reason Jack can’t take his eyes off of him as he does so, the curious way he tilts his head, alternating between picking up and turning over various bits and pieces.
At some point, Gavin grabs the starter fluid and holds it out to him, and Jack shakes himself in time to accept it from him. He sprays it into the carburettor of his own lawn mower before pulling it apart to check the coil. There’s a bit of rust there, and he grabs some sandpaper and a wire brush to scrub it off.
Afterwards, they take turns running their respective lawn mowers, and they both work fine. They let them run for a couple of minutes, then turn them off, take out the air filters, clean them, and leave them on one of the benches in the workshop to dry.
They head back to the main house, but it’s already one in the afternoon so they decide to have lunch. Even that takes a while; they have to shake off (and wipe down) the plastic bins with their food, then unpack them all – including dozens of boxes of tea, giant sacks of flour, jumbo bags of pasta and stacks of packaged meat. With Gavin’s permission, Jack cleans the kitchen – the wooden overhead cabinets and counters, the gas stove, then all the cutlery, dishes, pots and pans – then cooks them spaghetti with packet tomato sauce.
It’s three when they finally sit down.
“So, where are you from?” Gavin asks him.
“Austin, Texas,” Jack answers, digging into his spaghetti. He doesn’t know whether he wants Gavin to ask about it more or not. “What about you?”
“England. Oxfordshire, if it matters,” Gavin says, tomato sauce around his mouth. “It’s near London.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It is.”
Jack wants to ask him about what it’s like there, what he was doing before this, but he’s not sure if those kinds of questions are too personal, so he can’t get the words out.
(Also, he’ll inevitably be asked the same questions, and he’s not sure if he’s ready for that.)
“So, what’s wrong with you?” Gavin asks.
Jack freezes, halfway to a bite of his pasta. “Excuse me?”
Gavin has frozen too. It’s like his question slipped out without him noticing, given the deer-in-headlights look he’s giving him now. “Uh, sorry, I didn’t – ” Gavin swallows, before his face evens out and he folds his hands on the table in front of him. “We’re not exactly here for a walk in the park, are we? People only take these kinds of jobs to get away from something. Besides, what’s a Texan doing out here? Isn’t it really hot over there?”
Jack nods at the last bit. “Yeah, but I like colder areas. I’ve always run warm, and I used to go to Scotland for the holidays.”
“That’s good. It’ll be mighty cold here, that’s for sure. And Scotland, aye? At least you didn’t say Wales.”
“What’s wrong with Wales?”
Gavin gives him an, it should be obvious, look. “I’m English, Jack.” And when Jack doesn’t say anything, “Friendly rivalry, innit? Between us and Wales. You also have to pay five quid to get into Wales from England, the cheeky buggers.”
Jack snorts with laughter. “That’s very cheeky, and very clever. I’d do that in a heartbeat.”
Gavin scoffs a laugh. “Of course. Nobody would pass up the chance to sneak a few extra pounds from unsuspecting travellers.” But he’s smiling, so it’s clear no offense has been taken.
Gavin had put the kettle on a few minutes ago, saying he wanted to make tea, and it’s finished boiling now. As he goes into the kitchen, he asks again, “So…what’s wrong with you? And don’t say ‘I hate warm weather’, you’d have just taken another trip to Scotland or something.”
It’s true.
But Jack also can’t say why he came out here. He’d spent months preparing for being here, spent way too much money to do it, but he has no idea if he’ll even get what he came out here for in the first place.
Jack shrugs, before answering as neutrally as he can. “I’ve been looking for open space in the wild. Can you make me some tea?”
“Sure. You take it black, right?” Gavin asks, coming back to grab Jack’s thermos.
“Yeah. Black, no milk or sugar,” Jacks says. He’d become accustomed to it. Tea weighed less than coffee, milk and sugar would have taken up valuable weight, and he figured he’d need the caffeination, so his usual go-to of hot chocolate wouldn’t have worked.
“Got it. But again, Scotland. Plenty of open fields there. Or Wales, if you want to pay an extra five quid for it. I hear Brecon Beacons is a favourite.”
“Have you ever been to Wales?”
Gavin nods as he pours the tea into their thermoses. He’s made his black, too. “Once, as a child. The names of those towns are very unpronounceable. They put three L’s at the start, followed by twenty characters, none of which are vowels. It’s rather ridiculous, that.”
“I can imagine. ‘Rhythm’ is the longest word I know without vowels, and that’s – ” Jack counts it off with his fingers. “ – only six letters.”
Gavin hums, bringing their thermoses over. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.”
They sip their tea. The warmth of the thermos is a relief against Jack’s cold hands, even with his thick gloves.
“Why are you out here, anyway? What’s wrong?” Gavin asks.
So, he won’t let it go.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jack snaps.
Gavin tilts his head to the side, contemplative, as he clutches his thermos. “Why don’t you guess?”
Alright.
Gavin looks young, and fit, and in the prime of his life. Logically, there’s no reason for him to be out here at all; most caretakers are retirement age, but he looks like he could be in college. Still, there are plenty of reasons for someone to be driven to one of the most remote jobs in the world, so he has some guesses.
“You…just broke up with someone,” Jack guesses. “You’ve just graduated from college and you’re in a post-college crisis because you did a degree that has no practical use, or you did one that you hate but pays wells and you want to switch anyway.”
“I haven’t dated anyone in a while, and I didn’t go to college.”
“Okay then. So…you recently quit your job, or you hate it, for some reason. Or you’re stuck in a creative rut and you’re out here to try and get your mojo back to write that dream idea into a novel that’ll sweep everyone away.”
Gavin stiffens.
“Close?” Jack says.
“Let’s unpack,” Gavin says, getting up from his chair and heading towards the plastic bins stacked in the living room, taking his thermos with him.
“We need to de-mould first,” Jack reminds him, getting out of his chair. The words come easier now that they’ve both more or less dropped the ball.
“Oh yeah. Let’s de-mould, then.”
De-moulding will be a regular thing; mould is inevitable in every building due to the extremely high humidity – it’s a hundred percent today – and low temperatures. In the store-room of the main house, Jack grabs the long-handled mops, while Gavin grabs the clove oil, a bucket and some spray-bottles.
They’ve been given instructions by Parks and past caretakers for de-moulding: mix a quarter teaspoon of clove oil with a litre of water, put it into spray bottles, spray the mixture on every wall and roof panel, leave for twenty minutes, then mop it off.
They make up two bottles of clove mixture, then split up to spray different rooms. Jack starts with two of the four bedrooms, where paint flakes off the walls, before moving into the kitchen, where there’s a large wall crack stretching from the top of the window up to the ceiling. Fortunately, it’s a thin hairline crack, something that can be easily taped over and repainted.
He then moves into the bathroom, which is next to the bedrooms. It’s a surprisingly large space with yellowing tiles, a shower, a bath, a sink and plenty of over and under cabinet storage. There’s a crack in the wall tiles from just above the sink into the ceiling, but there’s no discolouration around it, meaning there’s no leakage. It’ll need to be grouted over before it gets to that point, though.
The laundry is a tiny space with only a washing machine, a single laundry basket, several outdoor clotheslines, and some pegs. No cracks in the walls at least, and the small room is quick to spray down before Jack heads out into the hallway.
He runs into Gavin, who says that he’s sprayed the other bedrooms, the living room, and the storeroom. Those are the rest of the rooms, and almost twenty minutes have passed, so they make their way back to the bedrooms and start wiping them down together.
They don’t talk much; rain cascades down the windows outside, the air still heavy even indoors. Through the spicy sweet scent of clove oil in his nostrils, Jack’s thinking of the mowing they haven’t done, the drainage pipes they’ll have to clear, the generators they’ll need to check, the roads and walking tracks they’ll have to maintain, the seeds they’ll need to plant in the garden and whether they’d grow in such harsh conditions –
He doesn’t realise he’s been mopping the same section of wall for a while until Gavin taps him on the shoulder. Jack jumps. He thanks him, then gets back to work.
It takes them several hours to de-mould the house. It’s a much bigger job than expected; they’d had to re-apply the clove mixture to most of the rooms, then wait another twenty minutes before cleaning them off.
The amount of doubling-back had left Jack uneasy, manifesting in him saying so, but Gavin says that it’s fine, they’ll just need to do one or two rooms at a time next time. He says it so lightly and casually that it makes the wasted mixture and time a little easier to live with.
After de-moulding, they decide to fore-go de-moulding the other houses to clean the rest of the house instead. They’d already cleaned the kitchen, but Jack offers to clean the bathrooms and laundry; they tend to be more tedious, after all. Gavin looks surprised, but accepts, going off to clean the bedrooms.
In the bathroom, Jack mops the floor, cleans the toilet, scrubs the shower and makes a note to himself to put new towels in here later. In the laundry, he wipes down the washing machine and laundry basket before mopping the floor. Once he’s done, he emerges to Gavin sitting in the dining room, duster on the table, saying that he’s dusted every other room.
They’re both satisfied with the other’s work, so they pack up their cleaning tools and head over to the lighthouse to turn on the light. The clockwork mechanism grunts as it’s turned, Gavin straining to turn the metal workings, but Jack helps adjust his technique and after that the light comes on easily. While they’re there, they check up on the generator shed, or the genny shed, as Gavin is calling it, next door.
The genny shed houses a diesel generator, a battery bank, some old diesel tanks, a compressor, pumping equipment and gas bottles. The diesel generator won’t be their main source of power though. The light in the lighthouse is powered by solar-charged batteries mounted on top of the tower; spare batteries are in the battery bank and diesel will be a back-up. Similarly, each of the houses are powered by solar panels on the roofs, with gas bottles for hot water and cooking, and diesel as a back-up.
Still, despite assurances from past caretakers that solar power is sufficient, neither Jack nor Gavin are entirely certain that it’ll be enough. Given how much it rains here, it’ll probably be close, and the nearest set of diesel fuel after the lot here is a helicopter ride away.
Still, Gavin says, they can’t do much about that. Mercy of mother nature, all that. But what they can do is check-up on the power systems, so that’s what they do.
Jack records the fuel stocks, generator hours, voltage and kilowatt usage; not bad for a first night, he notes. Meanwhile, Gavin goes off to check the condition of all the equipment. Everything’s already oiled, the fuel in the generator is already topped up, and the battery bank is full, no doubt all done by the previous caretakers just before they left. There’s readings for the amount of power left in each of the solar panels too; they’re alright, as good as they can be given the previous two weeks of continuous rain.
When they emerge from the genny shed, the rain’s gotten heavier, so they rush back to the main house for dinner. Jack asks Gavin whether he wants to cook, but Gavin shakes his head, backing away from the kitchen like it’ll bite him. Odd, but Jack won’t pry.
He cooks more pasta, since there’s no time to bake bread tonight, and some shaved ham. Gavin had asked whether they’d be having anything from the garden, but since they haven’t had a chance to tend to it yet, Jack hadn’t felt comfortable with it. Not until they’d grown some things themselves, at least, which would be from seeds Jack had bought from the local markets in Hobart a couple of weeks before.
Again, they don’t talk, other than to agree that they’ll unpack after washing up, but that’s fine. Jack figures they’ll have plenty of time to talk more later.
They are, after all, each other’s only company.
Packing had been months of pouring over a live spreadsheet they’d edited together over Cloud – consisting of all the food, toiletries, electronics, sleeping, medical and recreational supplies they’d need for their six month stay – and weighing everything on large kitchen scales, right down to the toothbrush. They’d reduced packaging as much as they could, filling a skip bin each with plastic and cardboard packaging. They’d packed, re-packed, re-packed again, then re-packed everything into the plastic fish bins for Parks.
It’s almost anti-climactic to unpack it all now.
Stacks of toothpaste, piles of wool blankets, dozens of adaptors, jumbo bottles of shampoo and shaving cream, thick parkas and pants and underwear, bars upon bars of soap and a well-stocked first-aid kit later, the four-bedroom house is feeling half-familiar with a mix of Jack and Gavin’s things. Jack wonders whether this is what it feels like to move in with a partner, before abruptly remembering that he and Gavin are strangers.
It feels too impersonal to think of Gavin as a stranger, even though they’d only met eighteen hours ago.
It’s pitch-black by the time they’re done, so there’s no real chance to work in the gardens. It’s only ten at night, but they’ll need to get up early tomorrow to do the weather readings all over again.
They fumble their way through who gets to use the bathroom first – Gavin lets Jack go first, who rushes through his nightly routine so Gavin’s not left waiting – and as Jack changes for bed, he can’t help but listen to the gentle patter of footsteps in the bathroom across from him.
They’re sleeping in separate bedrooms, but Jack can’t help but wonder whether Gavin’s doing okay. About what he’s like.
If only Jack was better at conversation.
A blustering wind has started now, and as Jack settles into the cheap, springy mattress, that’s what sings him to sleep.