The Survivors(28)

‘Go up! Up! Get higher!’

Kieran had stumbled to his feet and, mustering every shred of the muscle he had worked so hard for all summer in the gym, started to climb. He hauled himself up to a craggy hole in the cliff face, buoyed at the end by the tip of a wave that a second earlier and a metre lower would have dragged him back under.

Kieran clung to that spot, sucking in ragged breaths and hearing his heart pound as he pulled himself further in. He could make out the edge of the cliff path a short way up and across but it may as well have been a million miles away. He couldn’t find the strength or courage to move. He was still lying there, with stinging eyes and aching lungs, when he saw a flash of colour out on the water. It took him a long, slow moment to realise what he was seeing.

It was his brother’s boat.

The Nautilus Black was barely visible as it forged its way through the crashing waves. Past the hidden wreck and past the point where The Survivors should be standing. On, towards the caves.

Finn is here. It was Kieran’s only clear thought. Finn had come for him. And, amid the pain and cold and the heavy ache in his lungs, in that single moment, Kieran had felt safe.





Chapter 11


Finn had taught Kieran all the important stuff. How to swim, how to kick a footy, how to drink. How to talk to other guys. How to talk to girls. People liked Finn. They liked Kieran because he reminded them of Finn, but Finn was the real deal.

Finn Elliott brought home sporting trophies for Evelyn Bay when he was younger, and brought in tourism dollars when he was older. Finn was the kind of guy who could walk into the Surf and Turf and never have to buy a drink, but he did, often, because Finn was also the kind of guy who stood his round.

Finn had pounded the streets as a pacesetter when Verity was training for a half-marathon, and he’d got out the ladder and helped Brian clear the leaves from the gutters every autumn, and he’d stood chest-deep in the freezing ocean and showed Kieran how to improve his open water freestyle technique.

For twenty-six years, Finn was there for the people in his life, and then he wasn’t there at all anymore.

Kieran couldn’t remember much of the last time he saw Finn, and he was grateful for that, mostly. If Kieran’s memories of leaving the cave were patchy, they shrank to almost nothing once he saw the boat. There was no medical or physical reason for this – that doctor in the Hobart hospital had been right – because his body had recovered well.

Kieran knew what had happened as he was clinging to the rocks with the waves pounding beneath him, but only because he’d asked and he’d been told. The Nautilus Black, a catamaran specifically chosen by Finn and Toby for its stability and manoeuvrability and all those things that really matter in rough seas, had been unlucky. In a literal perfect storm of events, it had crossed a breaking wave and rolled.

It still hadn’t sunk, despite the sea’s full fury. The catamaran’s natural buoyancy had kept it on the surface, drifting drunkenly in the rolling green waves with its underside hideously exposed.

Toby had not even drowned, technically. He’d been slammed against the hull, the impact shattering part of his skull. He had died facedown in the sea without taking in a breath of water. Gone at thirty, leaving behind his wife Sarah and their young son Liam, as well as his own brother Sean.

Finn had drowned, though. He had been tangled, life jacket and all, when the boat flipped, trapping him below the surface. Finn was submerged in the end for nearly an hour, of which only the first four minutes had counted.

Kieran should be able to remember all that if he wanted to, he’d been told a few times. The lack of clarity was a defence mechanism, not a physical problem. But he didn’t want to remember, so he didn’t. Kieran didn’t argue, but he didn’t really believe it either. Because some things he remembered very clearly.

His parents’ faces in the hospital corridor, for example. Kieran had seen them through the viewing window and tried not to listen to the urgent whispered conversation that ended with Verity entering Kieran’s treatment room alone. Kieran had watched the open door, but Brian had never appeared.

He remembered coming home, later. The shock at the sight of the torn-apart town, still reeling from the storm damage. The strange and unsettling question now hovering around Gabrielle Birch’s whereabouts. Brian retreating to his study for hours and then days. The sound of muffled crying in the house.

Kieran would have given a lot not to remember those things, and yet he did, all the time.

Ash had rung the front doorbell on Kieran’s second day home, and the pair had sat in silence, watching TV with blank eyes, neither able to think of a thing to say. Ash had come back again, though, and on the fourth visit he’d brought Sean with him.

‘It was an accident –’ Kieran had stood opposite Sean in the house that felt too big. Brian locked in his study, Verity sleeping a lot. Sean’s gaze had moved around the living room he’d been in a thousand times and landed on a framed photo of Finn. Finn, smiling and happy, and just as dead as Sean’s own brother, Toby.

Kieran was still struggling to find the words when Sean had stopped him.

‘I know, mate. It’s okay.’

The relief had been blinding.

‘It was an accident,’ Sean had repeated, in a quiet voice that sounded like an attempt to convince himself. He seemed to need to hear it almost as much as Kieran. ‘The storm was worse than any of us thought.’