I said nothing, stared at him. His eyes were tracking for small sounds and smells but the booze had dulled him. The damned weeping had started up but I clenched my jaw against it and gave no sign. He could not sense the run of tears. My father felt with one hand for the table edge, with the other for me. I let his hand waver in the air: I would not give him the comfort of soothing me. In the tips of the outstretched fingers I saw his hope die: the hand slackened and returned to the table.

‘No. Not worthy of you, girl.’

He turned his body in the seat until he was curled like a wounded animal. He remained in that position as I watched him and grieved, and after a long time I saw that he was asleep.

RODONDOINTO THE FOG

RODONDO: INTO THE FOG

The next day we watched an island approaching on the horizon. There had been islands all along the voyage, and contortions of the coast that appeared as islands but weren’t.

But there was a singularity about the one that loomed in front of us: a brutal bulk, high and sharp. As we neared, the great mass of Wilson’s Promontory stretched southward out of the coast on our right, and the island drew threads of cloud from the low sky and teased them into mirages: the island was burning, the island was cut from coal or obsidian; the island was not there at all.

The world around us contained plenty else. The promontory was cloaked in great forests, and seabirds ventured out from it to soar high over our masts. Flatter islands came into view, porpoises rode the Moonbird’s wake and a million hidden fish erupted through the surface, flashing bright shards of flank and fin.

But it was the towering island that held the eye. During the morning it turned into a shark’s fin, a hat, the wall of a forbidden city. When it could no longer play at illusion, it began to reveal details of itself: vertical ribs down its flanks like the baleen of a whale, a dark forest on the sloping heights above the vertical cliffs. The arc of the sun found new fissures and shadows, the escarpments stood higher and pressed their claims on the sky. The master kept the helm all day, eyes on the cliffs. The Connollys, bent to their work, glanced up as if to ensure it hadn’t moved. Dr Gideon was on the deck with his journal once again to take advantage of the light. Each time he stopped writing to gaze at the island, the pencil rested in his mouth. Always, with him, this earnest need to appear learned.