Ryland’s Island

Luisa Mitchell

On an empty treeless street, beneath a swelling velvet sky pin-pricked with stars and an absent moon, sits Mick’s rather ordinary home. Concrete driveway, planted between a line of identical houses and the occasional rebel – a house on stilts with a wide verandah, overwhelmed by bamboo plants growing out the front – a white, corrugated iron to reflect the sun’s rays in the day, and a commanding metal fence defending the still and shadowy backyard. It was so dark in fact, it would have appeared nothing but an abyss lay beyond that fence, and the dark masses and shapes beyond didn’t materialise into anything I could recognise, even when I squinted so closely that my eyelashes touched. The only reason I knew that an abyss in Mick’s backyard was impossible was because I had been in this very spot many times, sat here, outside on the curb opposite the house with Renee and other friends, waiting for Hugo to come outside, cigarettes in hand, and skateboard over his shoulder. Only because of that, having stared through those black bars for several days over this past year, did I know that there was a small hand-built garden shed out the back, patches of wood and iron knocked together with impatient muttering, full of spider webs, cockroach shit, and random pieces of junk that I suspected Hugo had stolen from other people’s backyards over the years.

At this very moment, and as usual, the door to Mick’s house and the two blind-covered windows are closed shut, no doubt the air-con on full blast inside. But despite its closed-off face, there are some signs of life. Flickering blue light streams out through the cracks around the edges of each window, hinting at moving figures, and voices from a TV set. And disturbingly rough snoring noises drifting towards us makes me think that Lotto, Mick’s four-legged Bull Arab friend, is sleeping somewhere outside, just beyond the fence.

But apart from this small twinkling of light and movement, and the sounds of Lotto’s disturbed sleep, the house, and the entire street for that matter, is quiet.

It occurs to me that this is pretty strange. It’s about 11pm, the kind of hour that is usually filled with shouting or bottles smashing. I shift uneasily, torn between the desire to look around for the swaggering movement of someone returning from a party down the road, and keeping my eyes strained on Mick’s house to see if anything is happening inside.

It’s taking too long. What’s happening in there? I feel the urge to do something, anything. I kick aside a half-broken glass beer bottle beside my ankle, hoping it will fly off dramatically into the sky and down the street, preferably with a comforting splintering noise as it hits the curb - but instead, the bottle, still holding a mouthful of first-rate Emu Export, catches on a particularly large piece of gravel only a metre away from me and simply spins in on itself, turning to a slow and disappointing standstill.

‘Oi!’

Renee looks up at me with annoyance, her mouth twisted in an ugly hiss. She tells me off for being a ‘dickhead’ and to be quiet. I flip her the finger, feeling more restless. I think to myself that my mate seems more on edge tonight as well. More of a bitch than usual, I say to myself.

Renee and I are best friends, ever since the eighth grade when we both skipped class to wrestle on the oval and cut our ‘Catholic school appropriate’ dresses a little shorter with stolen scissors from textiles class. Renee also happens to be a difficult person. Often, she laments aloud to no one in particular, why she always gets into fights, why people pick on her – to which I respond seriously that she is an incredibly rude little ‘ning nong’ and can’t keep her opinions to herself. With no small amount of guilt, sometimes I wonder if I even like her anymore, or if we just stick together because we don’t have any other options – this town is too small to get picky.

Renee and I bicker half-heartedly for a few seconds over the bottle, ‘when Hugo specifically said to shut up’, she half-screeches. We turn our shifting eyes back to Mick’s house, to that same curtain behind which blue light flickers, as we have been for the past fifteen minutes. It entrances me, promising something, but I can’t quite catch it. Ears pricked and attentive, for a second I think I hear someone’s voice inside.

My stomach turns. I understand why Renee keeps picking at the scab on her knee and casting furtive looks around her as she is doing right now. Hugo is inside that house and he is doing something he shouldn’t be. He said he was going to grab something, which means he is stealing his dad’s alcohol, and maybe his weed too. Secretly I hope it’s just the weed, because I know Renee turns into a mess when she drinks – first she dances, then she fights someone, then she cries, and finally, she falls asleep and I am forced to clean her up and take her home.

I look over at her where she sits on the curb. Her hazel eyes are boring into her phone, the glow of its screen lighting up her face, reading something with concern. A string of messages pop up on the screen, the strange shadows cast by the phone making her skin look sick.

A crash is heard from somewhere inside the house and raised voices immediately follow it - swearing, cursing, and more bangs and clutters of things falling discordantly over the ground.

I grab Renee’s arm instinctively, afraid, but she is already up on her feet and moving toward the house.

A second of silence and then a hoarse but deep voice screams out - ‘You fuckin’ FUCK!’

The running of feet and then Hugo appears like a streak of lightning in a cloud-filled sky, hauling himself over the side fence and streaming past us without a second glance. His long legs and arms, too long for his still-growing body, fling around madly, and I see quickly that in one hand he holds a bottle of some sort, and in the other a short shovel.

No words necessary, I leap up and burst into a run after Renee and Hugo, who are already sprinting down the street and swearing with exhilaration to the moonless sky.

Running, running, running.

We don’t stop for a second, we know Mick would beat all three of us up if he caught us. We run across several blocks and through suburbs and houses as they grow richer and larger, as we near the coastline, and the pungent smell of seaweed hits us. We run with the wind on our face, Hugo with his oversized shirt billowing past him, Renee’s harsh breathing beside me, and the pounding of our feet on the hardened bitumen. I know we all feel mad and young.

Hugo, the tallest and oldest of us, black curly hair bouncing up and down against his skinny neck, whooping loudly and waving his shovel around like a caveman; Renee, short and muscular legs from years of footy and dark from days spent at the beach, face pinched and eyes unusually frightened; and me, a waif-like ghost, thin and pale, angry freckles splattered across a face I try to avoid looking at too much in the mirror.

Yes, wild and young and free. And out of place. Dirty spots on an otherwise clean plate.

I run, passing by these huge two-story houses with their tidy pools and gleaming cars. I fucking hate these people. I hate these ‘locals’ who own their businesses and their fishing boats but have lived here for only five years and wouldn’t last five minutes in this town if they stepped outside of their cool air-conditioned houses. I hate the way they look down on us kids, their eyes glaring at us from across the street and then turning away, deciding to pretend we don’t exist, because acknowledging we do would ruin the image of their perfect little hideaway resort town, their slice of paradise.

My mind bleeds red and I feel like I could hit someone, hurt someone. ‘Fuucckkkkk!’ I scream out.

Hugo laughs manically at my exaltation, his black pupils wide and electric, and we catch eyes for a second. He seems to understand – years spent playing together as kids and then, more recently, summers spent in parks and beaches getting up to no good, has allowed us to communicate without words. We know what the other thinks. Our white teeth break into crescent moon grins that glow bright in the dark.

‘Yeah, fuck yas!’ Hugo adds his voice, darker and deeper than my own, to our night-time chorus. Then, without warning, he stops running and pushes the tequila bottle into my hand. He scans the ground for something, then finds what he’s looking for, picking up a large rock on the side path and with one smooth movement, throws it into the yard of a sleeping stranger’s house, through swaying branches and into the wretched heart of some unlucky idiot’s home.

We hear the tinkle of glass as the rock lands against something brittle. A shiver of fear runs up and down my back and legs, but I laugh out of surprise and pleasure, and I grab Hugo’s shoulder, reminding him we need to keep going, pulling him toward me, savouring our skin connecting.

Laughing, out of breath, we finally stop running at the hip of the Waiting Woman. I throw down the tequila bottle on the grass lawn and lean against her bronze waist, using the statue as a resting stop and enjoying the cool metal against my arms. The Waiting Woman, a sole statue in a long strip of green park that slopes down to the deep blue mangrove below, sits perched atop a curling wave, frozen in time. The Woman’s hand is outstretched to the ocean bay, eyes perennially sad and fixed on the horizon.

The smell of mud and salt on the gentle breeze is a sweet relief, and we don’t speak for a moment. Then—

‘What. The. Fuck,’ Renee gasps, doubled over, face gleaming with sweat, hand still clutching her phone. ‘How dumb can you two get? Why did you do that?’

Hugo falls to the sweet dewy grass below us and lies on his back, laughing at the stars. I join him for a second, embrace the moment.

Sometimes I feel like I’d go wherever Hugo goes. I’d known him since we were little, to the point that we felt like cousins, but we weren’t really. For as long as I’d known him, he had this swagger in his step and a promising dimple in his cheek, and I always felt the urge to agree with him, back him up – just to be with him.

If he jumped, I jumped. If he shoplifted from the Chinese general store, I shoplifted from there too. And in return, he always understood. He never judged. Sometimes I felt like I was crazy, I would do stupid shit, like throw a chair in class, or wonder aloud, voice trembling, that I didn’t know why I did things sometimes, and Hugo would just nod, and agree, or yell at whoever I was yelling at. Sometimes he would say nothing at all, and just stay there with me, which I liked most of all.

But now, with him laughing hysterically on the grass, and Renee scowling at us both, suddenly the minutes before no longer seem very funny. My mind is already racing. I had been so angry a second ago, I hadn’t even been able to control it. I let it wash over me and take my breath away. Now my mind races back to that house and the window breaking, and think of the stranger inside who would have woken up with a fright from the noise.

My eyes flash over to the shovel still clasped tightly in Hugo’s right hand. What had he done with it? He hadn’t mentioned needing a shovel when he went in. Had he hurt his dad – had he finally had enough of all the bullshit?

Now Renee is complaining about Hugo being a psycho, too hot-headed, drawing too much attention to us, but I barely hear her and Hugo’s back-and-forth. I feel the same fear that overcame me when Hugo had picked up the rock. The tips of my ears tingle red-hot and tears creep into my eyes. I blink quickly and they disappear, drying before they even have a chance to fall. Still, I turn my back on the two of them and look over the bay, urging some respite from the soothing breeze.

The Waiting Woman is a sole figure against a backdrop of blues and blacks. The grass disappears into sand, and the sand touches where water would usually be – but tonight the tide is so far out I can’t even see it. Instead, the mangrove lies unmoving, a single mass made of tiny leaves and skinny branches, crabs creeping silently beneath deep roots and still-wet mud.

The Waiting Woman doesn’t care about the mangrove or even the distant sea. Her eyes are locked on an impossible dot that should appear where the sky meets the water – on a ship carrying her husband. She waits for him to come back breathing and alive – no easy task after diving deep for precious pearls to make his master rich, no easy task surviving the dreaded rising of bubbles in tortured lungs that kill so many. The Waiting Woman is still, lost in anxiety over her husband. She doesn’t seem to notice anything else around her.

She doesn’t even have fucking legs, I think angrily, looking down at where her nasal transforms into a curling wave.  She couldn’t walk anywhere if she wanted to.

The heat still lingers in my ears and chest, and I take a deep breath. Why am I so angry ALL the time? I think to myself. I fucking hate it. I hate this town, these people, and I hate how angry I am. Always so angry. I hate going to school and people looking at me thinking I’m dumb; I hate going home, where the walls are too close and the spaces too small, everywhere crowded with family and cousins and uncles who visit on weekends, so loud sometimes I think I can’t breathe.

I take a deep breath then, at least enjoying being outside here with Renee and Hugo, and under the expanse of the night sky. I look out over the curled back, depleted bay, at the distant horizon where the sea must be waiting, swirling and twisting, before feeling the pull to come back in.

What strange lands might lie out there, beyond where the tides shift constantly? What languages do they speak? I wouldn’t understand a word in those foreign places, surely. How wonderful, to be mute and understood only by the frank honesty of your smile and your actions.

I didn’t want my life to be anything like that of the Waiting Woman, waiting for her husband to return; nothing like Renee’s, who only saw herself having kids and living in this shithole forever; and perhaps, not even like Hugo’s, whose mad laughter bounded around the park and causes a dog to start barking in the distance. Hugo is truly himself, yes, he isn’t a fuckin’ fake like so many others, and I love that about him – but where was he going? Would he keep stealing other people’s junk and messing around in his Dad’s shed forever?

If the impossible could be possible, I’d leave this town in a heartbeat.

 ‘Milly, are you listening?’ Renee howls behind me, and I jump back into reality. Suddenly I feel a long arm around my shoulder and realise Hugo has stepped up beside me.

‘Are you in, or what?’ He says plainly, looking down at me, suddenly quite close. His wide mouth promises a smile, his dark eyes seeming to drill straight into my thoughts…but perhaps missing the angry black cloud I had disappeared into just moments ago.

‘There’s no fucking way we’re doing this, Hugo,’ Renee is saying. She’s still checking her phone every five seconds, and I see new messages popping up on the screen. I realise suddenly that something is going on with her, but I’m too distracted by Hugo’s warm body beside me to ask what.

‘What’s the plan? Sorry, I wasn’t listening,’ I mumble.

‘Well, see this shovel? There’s a reason I brought it with me.’ Renee scoffs but Hugo ignores her and goes on smoothly. ‘We’re going to dig for treasure tonight.’

Bing. Bing. Renee’s phone is going off, but she is now ignoring the messages and instead can’t seem to stop looking over her shoulder every five seconds.

I ask Hugo, ‘What damn treasure?,’ and he takes a deep breath as if he is just so glad I asked, before launching into a ten-minute speech about the ‘horrible, bloody, and historically-accurate story’ of Ryland, the marooned pearler.

‘See just over there,’ Hugo says, taking the shovel and pointing it at eye-level over the bay and beyond the mangroves, slightly to the left of where I had been looking moments earlier. ‘That dark shape, almost hidden. That’s Ryland’s Island. They named it that ‘cause there was a pearler, a blackfulla called Ryland, who found so many pearls – big ones too, the size of your head – and he thought he could keep ‘em for himself and sell them somehow, and become rich and run away. So, he took them to that little island and buried them all there, just to be safe, ‘cause back in town he didn’t have anywhere to hide stuff – he knew they’d find it anyway. But the boss guy, a kartiya, he knew Ryland was stealing from him and decided to punish him. So, the boss man took him to that same rock and strung him up against the pole, and left him there to die…just when the tide was coming back in too, so he knew he would drown. Then in the morning, when the men sailed out again, there was nothing left there on the island but the rope they tied ‘im up with.’

‘That’s fucked,’ I murmur, staring at the small crop of land Hugo was pointing to. In the shadows, I imagine I make out a tall metal pole standing rigid in its centre. ‘Maybe he escaped?’

‘Yeah, or maybe he got eaten by a croc and died,’ Hugo laughs, turning back and dropping his arm back down to his side. ‘Anyway, those pearls were never found. The boss got tipped off they were hidden somewhere else, so he never looked in the right spot. I know the truth,’ he said importantly, ‘because my family passed down the real history. The pearls are still there, buried on Ryland’s Island. So…tonight, we are going to go find them.’ He looked at the shovel, making his point clear.

I protest loudly. No. Fucking. Way. If there is one thing I know, going into the mangroves at night is just calling to be stolen away by the Red Dress Woman – the spirit who wanders there searching for her drowned babies, and who kidnaps any other kids she might find there instead. Wet, cold hair clinging to grey cheeks caked with mud, the dress faded and colourless from the sun, eyes red from crying – she is vivid in my mind, and I feel a shiver run through my body.

Before Hugo has a chance to persuade me, however, we hear tyres screech and bright lights turn a corner, blinding us.

‘Fuck, let’s go!’ yells Renee, eyes wide in the headlights.

Too late – a second car pulls out from the opposite direction and launches across the road toward us, over the curb and onto the grass, pulling up with a growl. The first car follows suit and we are cornered, backed up against the Waiting Woman.

On our left is a shitty, second-hand peeling Holden, but the car closest to us is a big four-wheel drive Hilux; white, shiny, and looking like a debutante lost at a footy game. They both rev loudly, engines humming clear as ever, and out of their windows, various girls stare out.

I recognise first the square jaw, caramel skin and green eyes of Shannon, one of the girls from school. Renee and I usually avoid her, mostly because she looks like a Pitbull that shouldn’t be let off a tight leash. I also recognise other girls from some of our classes, but a couple are unfamiliar, their eyes serious and mean in the back seat.

Shannon, chewing on gum and in the driver’s seat of the Hilux, smiles unnervingly.

‘Milly, Hugo and Renee-fucking-Tinley – what a sad little threesome.’

I can almost hear Renee’s heart beating out of her chest beside me. I suddenly realise what the text messages she has been receiving all night were for – it was for this, some showdown that had been planned for who knows how long, something she had coming from Shannon and her friends.

‘What do you mob want?’ Hugo says defensively, holding his shovel over his shoulders like he’s carrying a kangaroo freshly caught, but this doesn’t bother Shannon at all. She’s smaller in height than Hugo, but she’s twice as wide and got far bigger balls. In fact, she ignores Hugo completely, and her eyes don’t move for even one second from Renee’s face. Renee doesn’t blink – she holds the gaze between them, silent.

‘What are you staring at, you dumb bitch?’ Shannon says suddenly, spitting out her gum.

One of her mates, who I recognise as lanky-legs Kirsten from sports class, pipes up from the back seat of the Hilux – ‘We know you bin’ talking shit, Renee.’

Renee spits something that sounds both angry and attempting peace, and Hugo quips back an angry retort, but I can’t hear them. I feel my chest heaving, notice the uncomfortable silence from the people who aren’t talking – the girls who are watching with bristling electricity from the shitty, peeling Holden, and the twisted, giggling mouth of the girl next to Shannon, holding up her phone and filming us – and above all else, I can’t stop staring at that shining white Hilux. My ears are ringing and all I can think is – there’s no fucking way that’s Shannon’s car.

 ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I whisper, trying to hide my breaking voice.

Shannon and her mates are getting out of the cars, and Shannon is yelling loudly now, waving her hand in Renee’s face. Renee’s hands in turn are already clenched into fists.

‘It’s not worth it,’ Hugo is saying, grabbing Renee’s arm. ‘C’mon, let’s go.’ He is saying this to her but he’s staring at me as he says it, and I wonder if I look insane to him – my heart feels like it’s about to burst out of my chest and my eyes are burning and the only thing I can focus is on that damn fancy car and poor Renee’s trembling fists.

I hear Hugo ask me something, but at this point even his words and the shrieks of Shannon, who is currently tying up her hair in a messy bun, are drowned out by a deep humming in my ears.

Fuck, it’s happening.

From the corner of my eye, I see Shannon take one wide WHACK into Renee’s face, causing her to stumble back into Hugo’s arms, but something shines under the light of the streetlamp behind Shannon and this catches my attention instead – the glint of a knife in the dark, pulled out of one of the girl’s pockets.

Hugo’s seen it too, everything’s happening too fast, and he looks between the girl and her shiny blade and me, and I wonder what he’ll do – or what I’ll do.

I see red and I feel my own feet move, perhaps about to move forward, to do what and go where I’m not sure, but in the brief second of Shannon pausing to laugh aloud to cheers from her taunting friends and the flash of a phone light, Hugo pulls Renee back by the neck, practically in a chokehold, and grabs me by the elbow, shovel banging painfully against my thigh as he does, and takes us in a run down the hill and toward the sand.

‘Where are youse going?!’ We hear screams and peals of laughter. ‘Cowards!’

‘Fuckin’ get ‘em!’

We thought we were running before – we are fucking running now. This time into the dark and away from the yellow streetlamps above. Now we are running over sand, running over large white midden shells, running over the quiet traces of an ancient history. We keep running, the stamping of feet behind us and harsh taunts thrown at our backs, and before we know it we are in the mangrove and our feet slip into cool mud.

Renee shrieks, ‘Let me at ‘em, let me at ‘em!’ and struggles against Hugo’s star-lit frame. I have to grab her too to stop her from running back.

‘They had a knife, Renee!’ I scream and grab her by the shoulders, forcefully, so strong she feels soft in my hands, which are already muddy.

The three of us are standing close, shivering, suddenly cold from the ocean breeze and still sticky from an encroaching heat. We are so far into the mangrove, in almost complete darkness were it not from the light of the stars above, that I realise I had lost myself in the rush of our flight from Shannon and the others, and my brain struggles to comprehend that we are already deep in silence and brackish mud.

‘Where are we?’ I ask quietly, and we all look around as one, barely trying to hide our fear from each other.

The leaves of the shrubs around us are entwined and scratching around each other as if attempting to lurch past each other for the fresh air above. From out of the wet grey mud, tiny, stiff roots poke upwards, and I can’t help but think they look like pale, small dead fingers reaching out from under the ground, and my mind rushes to the Red Dress Woman. Maybe this is all that is left of the children she preys upon.

‘Let’s go, Hugo,’ Renee says weakly.

Hugo seems to be lost for words, but after taking a long look around and wiping the sweat and mud from his brow, he instead picks up his shovel again and points it forward.

‘The Island. It’s right there.’

‘Fuck off. No it’s not. I’m going back.’

Renee looks at me expectantly – are you going to listen to this guy?

I look past Hugo, who is already walking away from us, carefully picking his way through the branches and over roots, shovel clutched quite closely to his side.

A mosquito whines in desperate search of blood, and I whack the air near my ear. Then, looking up and above Hugo’s curly crown, I see it. A tall straight line, something grey looming tall against the deep black of the night sky.

‘He’s right, we’re almost there.’

I reach out to hold Renee’s wet hand, and after a small hesitation, I am surprised to feel her take it, her fingers curled in mine. Our feet slip in and out of the clay, walking behind Hugo in silence toward the iron cross ahead of us.

The mangrove branches thin out, and we feel the mud become flat stone before we see it. The roots disappear and the last of the trees’ leaves scrape farewell to our arms. We enter a clearing in the saltwater forest. The smell of saline water is so pungent here it seems to sit in our lungs. The breeze whips my hair around my face and for the first time, I shiver.

The Island, Ryland’s Island, is right there. The black rocks are curved and cracked, and for the most part worn smooth by the sea, but some closest to us around the rim of the mound are covered in barnacles that gleam white and sharp. Seawater from the recent tide still lingers in its recesses, tiny pools looking as deep and as black as Hugo’s eyes, which turn back to look at us now.

He beckons us to follow him with his hand, and we all move forward and upwards, gently and carefully choosing where to place our feet on the rocky hill.

Moving past the pointed barnacles, the rocks become larger and smoother, until it plateaus to an even surface covered in soft, granular sand. And there, in the very centre, is a tall and rusting iron pole, standing almost five metres high.

I take a deep breath, unable to stop myself from imagining the frail body of Ryland there, his arms and legs wrapped tight behind to that very pole, hanging there all day and all night, before…

Hugo is already banging the shovel repeatedly into the soft sand nearby, and finding a particularly deep spot, begins to dig furiously with alarming speed.

Looking past Hugo and the pole, the expanse of the full bay becomes terrifyingly apparent to me. Instead of mangrove, a succession of grey brushstroke lines that make up the mudflats. They roll out for as far as the eye can see, at least until the horizon, where the line becomes blurred and full – the distant threat of an ocean tide that should surely be turning back soon.

Renee doesn’t seem phased at all by the history of the pole, left red and cracked by the ocean, and sits down in front of it to lean against it, extremely displeased at being here. I look down at her, feeling an odd tenderness toward her; she looks so tired and small.

‘We’ll go back soon,’ I say, listening to the dull thud of Hugo’s shovel hitting rock to my left somewhere.

‘Mm,’ Renee allows, closing her eyes and appearing to want to ignore both Hugo and I.

Hugo continues to jab the shovel here, there, and back here again, moving around the whole surface of sand in aggressive concentration, looking for something. I’m not sure how he will know where the treasure is and wonder if this has occurred to him also.

Not wanting to be near the pole, I sit down on a smooth rock facing back the way we came, to the bright lights of town. The street lamps look small, and the headlights of a lonely car in otherwise deserted streets curls around a bend before disappearing from view. The sight of it looks welcoming compared to the damp coldness of the stone beneath me, and the harsh sounds of Hugo’s shovel continuously meeting rock beneath shallow sand.

His shallow breathing tells me he isn’t having much luck.

‘Hugo,’ I ask slowly. ‘Who told you about the story of Ryland?’

A loud thud of the shovel hitting sand breaks the night air and catches me in surprise. I turn around to see if Renee will say anything, but she is apparently nodding asleep, head collapsed on her shoulder and mouth open slightly.

 ‘My bloody Dad told me it...’ Hugo pauses and rubs his jaw. ‘When he was piss-off drunk.’ He abandons the forlorn shovel where he has dropped it and instead walks over to join me where I sit. We stare out at the mangrove and at the firefly town beyond, warm and distant.

‘I’m sorry,’ Hugo says. ‘This whole night is my fault.’ He doesn’t wait long enough to let me say anything, steaming ahead. ‘I didn’t even plan any of this. I grabbed the shovel from Dad’s place cause…he was being a fuckin’ dickhead, so I had to get out of there. Well, you know. And then he was coming for us, and I knew he’d be waiting for me if I came home straight away. So, I thought we could do something together, to just keep hanging out. Then the treasure story came to me, you know... Anyway, there’s no treasure here. There isn’t anywhere the poor bastard could have buried it…’ He scoffs, and then turns away from me, hiding his disappointment. ‘Ryland probably never even existed in the first place.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘I don’t care about the treasure.’

I stare at him then, wait for him to turn back to me in response. I run through his features in my mind; at his wide downturned mouth, sloping nose, high cheekbones, deep eyes and curling hair. He’s the most familiar person I know. I could paint every crevice of him from memory.

‘I’m going to leave this town,’ I say to him. ‘I’m going and I’m never coming back.’

Hugo looks at me too now, and stares into my eyes, in that way he does when he seems to be reading me, like returning to an old book that offers something new each time he returns to it.

For a second, I think we are frozen there, staring at each other, but then Hugo leans forward and kisses me. It is small, gentle, soft. His lips are cold and salty. It lasts only a few seconds and then he leans away, and it’s over. He smiles, looking quietly satisfied. 

‘Good,’ he says simply.

‘Good?’ I ask, mind caught between his words and the lingering sense of his lips on mine. ‘What about you? Will you leave too?’

Hugo lets out a bark of laughter and Renee stirs softly behind us, waking.

‘Are you kidding me? I’m never leaving. This is my home…this is my goddamn island. Ryland’s Island!’ He picks up a handful of sand in each hand and raises it to the sky, as if making an offering to the gods, laughing carelessly as he does.

I realise, then, perhaps for the first time, that Hugo and I are different. I had always viewed us to be like two parts of the same unit, two pieces in the same chaotic puzzle of our life, the same one that encompassed and trapped us both. I had always thought he would want to escape his Dad, and leave this shithole town, and we would, by coincidence, meet in a new city somewhere, and continue as we always had done, as best friends or more.

But, now, looking at him laughing and throwing the sand away, quite content being here on his rocky throne, I realise he loves this place. Where I felt trapped, he felt free, out here, under the sky, by the ocean. Or perhaps the real freedom came from within his beautifully mad mind, which roamed wild; and my prison was inside the parts of my brain that felt distant from even myself. I wondered then, if I moved away, if I would finally be able to hear my own thoughts clearly…or if I would be crazy like this, forever and ever.

In his strange intuitive way, Hugo grabs my hand at that moment and interlinks his with mine, his touch immediately calming my spinning thoughts. ‘But I always knew you would leave,’ he says softly. ‘You’re not like me. You’re actually going to do stuff.’

I squeeze his hand back, his firm touch swinging me back into my body and out of my mind.

‘Hey, look.’ Renee’s voice suddenly bites into our conversation and our hands break apart as if hit by lightning. ‘What is that?’

We look.

Across the mangroves and on the grassy slope of the park we had run from, is a ball of fire. It burns so loud and brightly that I worry for a second a bushfire has started, and the whole park will be covered in flames, but seconds pass and the fire remains quite fixed, although still ferocious.

‘It’s the car,’ Renee whispers, stepping up beside me. ‘It’s the car Shannon stole.’

She’s right. The Hilux, what had been earlier in the night drilled into my mind, so precious and white and shiny, was on fire. Out of its skeleton frame, black smoke blew into the wind and red flames licked the air around it, eating both iron and leather with ease.

‘C’mon,’ Hugo says quietly. ‘We need to go back.’

There are no questions from Renee about the forgotten treasure. We simply pick ourselves up and begin the slow, sticky walk back through the mangrove, sensing the turning tide closing in behind us, and surely the sound of sirens that will be coming to investigate the smoke very soon.

As we walk, none of us say a word. I hold Renee’s hand again, and use the bobbing curls of Hugo’s head in front of me to guide my path. We are caught in our own thoughts, and watch in silence as the sky begins to lighten with the coming day.

It comforts me a little, at least, to know that soon the great sea behind us will come full circle, and will cover up Ryland’s Island at dawn. And that sad little shovel we left behind, lying battered and cracking with age on the rocky rise, will be picked up by the churning current. The ocean will send it on its way, perhaps to float for many more days under changing moons and ceaseless suns, before arriving on a distant shore – the adventures of Ryland’s Island already long forgotten.