Lucy Clarke - A Single Breath

Callie was due to start a six-month contract there in February but kept on saying that she would cancel it if Eva wanted her to stay in London.

‘I could even meet you in Tasmania,’ Callie says, ‘and then we could fly on to Melbourne together. The company’s paying for my flat. It’s a two-bed place, so you would have your own room.’

‘What about David?’

‘He doesn’t do long haul. Tells me it plays havoc with his sleep patterns. That’s what happens when you screw a 45-year-old.’

Eva tries for a smile, but feels the sadness that lingers around her mouth and in the dark hollows beneath her eyes.

‘Seriously, Eva, why not take a sabbatical? Give yourself some time.’

She nods. ‘I’ve been thinking about it.’

‘Have you spoken to your mum about this?’

Eva shakes her head. ‘She won’t like it.’ Her mother’s life had been punctured by sadness; she’d lost her second daughter at birth and then, twelve years later, lost her husband to a stroke. All her love – and all her fears – were poured into Eva.

‘You’ve got to do what feels right for you, not what your mum wants.’ Callie pauses. ‘What would Jackson have said?’

Without hesitating Eva says, ‘Go. He’d have told me to go.’

We talked about taking a trip out to Tasmania. You wanted to meet my family, go for drinks with my friends you’d heard stories about, see the shack on Wattleboon where I’d spent my summers.

People often think of Tassie as Australia’s poorer brother because the climate is cooler and the cities are smaller and less sophisticated. Its brutal history as Van Diemen’s Land is never forgotten. Yet I’ve always loved it for exactly those reasons – it’s wild and rugged, with a shadowy past, and enough raw wilderness to lose yourself in.

I’d love to have hiked with you in the eerie beauty of Cradle Mountain, where moss drips from the trees, or shown you the wombats that amble on the tracks around Wineglass Bay. We could have been tourists together and taken a boat out along the east coast to see the whales cruising by, or eaten soggy fries and gravy from Buggy’s Takeout in Hobart.

You used to ask me so many questions about Tasmania, as if by trying to understand the place you could piece me together. But there was a lot I didn’t tell you about my life there – whole chunks of time that I left out, people’s names I never mentioned, things I wanted to forget.

I’d’ve liked to have shown you every edge of Tasmania because I know you’d have fallen in love with that little island in the sea. But the truth is, Eva, I never planned to take you there. How could I?

There is a bus ride to Gatwick, a long wait in the overcrowded fug of the departures lounge, a plane seat with a dusty headrest, a bleary-eyed refuelling stop in Dubai, a further twelve hours in the same cramped seat, a frantic run to the domestic terminal in Melbourne, and then a smaller plane heading finally for Tasmania.

As they descend through broken white clouds, Eva peers through the scratched window of the plane. The Southern Ocean meets the winding Tasmanian coastline that unfurls in a mass of inlets, bays and wind-ridged channels. She sees farmland, forest, tree-lined hills, and only a scattering of houses. What strikes her is the space. Almost a quarter of Tasmania is classified as a national park, an isolated island wilderness, dropped off the coast of mainland Australia.

She feels the symmetry of her journey, which is unfolding in reverse of the flight Jackson made to the UK two years earlier. That’s how they’d met: on the plane, with Eva boarding in Dubai after spending a week there with Callie, who was working on a shoot.

She had a pounding hangover made worse by the depressing thought of returning to Dorset, where she was still living at her mother’s while she tried to save for a place of her own. She barely registered the man in the seat next to hers as she sank down and took out her book. It was only when he introduced himself that she’d turned and looked at him properly. He had pale blue eyes that were clear and cool against his tanned face, and he smiled as he shook her hand, showing a row of strong white teeth.

‘I should warn you,’ he’d said, the drawn-out vowels of his accent warm in her ear. ‘I’ve a low boredom threshold – and I got on this plane in Australia. If you want to request a seat change, now’s your chance.’

She’d felt herself smile then, and when she glanced down, she saw he was still shaking her hand.

Like any traveller, he didn’t want to talk about where he was from, but where he was going. He asked question after question about England and so she’d told him about the hectic pace of the capital and how it sprawls out for miles and miles. She told him that Big Ben isn’t actually the name of the clock tower, but the bell within it, and that parts of the Tower of London are over 900 years old. She told him what she loved about England: the culture, the history, the mixture of cities and agriculture. And what she hated: the pigeons, the weather, the political correctness gone mad.

In return he told her that he was a marine biologist and she was captivated by his stories about working off a dive boat on the Great Barrier Reef, where he led tourists in coral restoration projects, or the three months he spent teaching teenagers to dive at an outdoor experience camp on the east coast of Tasmania.

After the drinks trolley had passed, he poured her a glass of red wine from a miniature bottle, then leant back in his seat and said, ‘So tell me, Eva, what is it you love about being a midwife?’

She liked the question and the way he listened closely as she answered. ‘Everyone assumes it’s the babies – that all midwives love newborns. But for me it’s working with the women. I get to share one of the most intimate and important experiences of their lives. It’s a privilege.’

Jackson had studied her for a long moment and then his gaze trailed to her mouth.

She had felt heat rise in her cheeks. ‘What about you? Why marine biology?’

He’d not answered right away, just sat there, thinking. Then he smiled as he told her, ‘It was a book that made me want to study it.’

Eva had tilted her head, intrigued.

‘Most Saturday afternoons me and my brother would go to a second-hand shop looking for good finds. Sometimes we’d pick up old reels or bike parts. This one Saturday, I bought an old khaki backpack for a dollar. When I got it home, I found there was a book stuffed inside. It was called The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist. It might sound stupid now, but at the time – I was 13 – it felt like that book was meant to find me, as if it had stowed itself away. I wrote my name in it and read it cover to cover. I swear I looked at the sea differently after that.’ He paused. ‘It seemed like a mystery waiting to be explored.’

It was then, that moment sitting beside him in the narrow space of their plane seats, that Eva felt something sway and tip inside of her.

When they got off the plane in London, they were still talking. They went through passport control in different lines, but met again after customs. Eva was staying the night in Callie’s empty flat, so they shared a taxi through London and he stared out of the rain-smeared window, not hiding his wonderment at the grandeur of the city. Before she got out, he asked for her phone number.

He called her the following morning and they spent the next three days in bed together, only leaving to buy croissants and fresh milk. When she finally returned home to Dorset, it was to pack up her things and move to the city with a man she barely knew.