Chasing Light

YA novel

Love changes everything…

Luce is too used to people leaving her life. Jake is great at escaping. Gabe just wants to find his way home.

When nineteen year-old Luce receives an unexpected invitation from her late father’s partner, to visit the sea house at Arlington Bay, she has no idea what awaits her, or how her life is about to be turned upside down.

After a year-long road trip, Jake decides to join his sister at the sea house, unprepared for facing head on all the reasons he’s been running away since his father’s death.

For Gabe Summers, the remote beach at Arlington Bay is his favourite surf break, the place his family calls their second home, and where he met the only girl he’s ever loved. After living in London, Gabe’s world spins off its axis when he discovers that the girl who still haunts him has returned to Arlington Bay.

As past and present converge, old hurts, fears and memories rake up, and the ties of blood, love and loss that connect Luce, Jake and Gabe, will either keep them apart, or open the way to forge new lives, by facing unexpected truths about what really matters.

Published by mavericks e-press.

Ebook available at: iBooks/ Kobo Books / Amazon

(Preview: chapters one-three below)

ONE

He told me once that the sea was his home.

When Gabe was a little boy, his father would take him out in the dinghy, and they’d cut the motor to drift before anchoring at a spot where they felt inclined to fish. His first rod was a piece of plywood he could fist his hand around, a strand of fishing wire tied and tacked on, a small hook with bait. No reels or fancy rods. It was how his father learnt and it was how he wanted Gabe to learn to feel for the fish. And they would sit, peaceably, a couple of hours each morning, weather and catch depending, speaking little but awash with feeling. Sensing the sun as it began to heat the day, the light easing across the surface of the water, giving shape to what had been dark. The scent of brine. The salt of the sea resting on his tongue, stinging his skin. Salt, tangy with ocean life, and the spray and splash of the water as it rocked and occasionally heaved the boat. Gabe said he was breathing the ocean not long after his mother gave birth.

It was here that we met. His ocean home. As I bobbed and drifted and played in his watery house, a body of warmth that lured and freed me to suppleness and weightlessness, he spied me from the shore, suited up and board ready to paddle out to the deep where he would wait, sit with anticipation and wonder, perched ready to fly. While he skimmed the top, I surfaced from below, and with the splaying warmth of the sun against my skin our eyes met, brief and sure, a target hit. His hair was water slick, gleaming russet blonde, but it was his face that imprinted fast on my mind’s eye; the hollow shadows beneath cheekbones wide and high, his eyes narrowed against the light. An angular symmetry cast in peeling bronzed skin. It was a snap fast glimpse before he turned and paddled farther out, gliding and dipping like a dolphin towards the horizon.

I waded back to shore to sit in the dunes, shivering and wrapped in a towel, the water from my hair streaming, my eyes fixed on the surfers and blood slipping, pulsing as if the ocean had seeped through my skin into my veins. Gabe liked to tell me how seawater was similar to blood, how they both feed life, and one of the first things he spoke of was a story about his grandfather, Finn; one of the strangest tales I’d ever heard of how the sea can literally give life.

His actual name was Finnegan Summers, but Gabe said his family swore he was part dolphin or fish, his body slicing through the water like he had fins. When Gabe’s dad Jem was a boy, he used to wait for his father on the beach while Finn went for his early morning swim. His eyes strained to see Finn as he became lost in the water dark, a playful seal out in the swell. Jem said he moved so purposefully, it looked like he was never going to turn back towards the shore. Finn was a fisherman, and when he wasn’t out in the boat or swimming, he walked the beach, wave watching. He could never be far from the ocean, as if this were his true home.

And Gabe spoke of the time Finn nearly lost his life to the sea.

It happened on a day like any other. Finn was swimming out in the deep when he felt an onslaught of pain; small ripples in his chest like incoming waves. The ache ripped through Finn’s heart and he was sinking, a rock weighted by the water above. His heart was jarring, its rhythm spluttering, his blood no longer feeding his brain. Unconscious, he became flotsam at the mercy of the ocean drift that raked and towed all things caught in its net. Lying on the seabed, the push and pull of the tides jogged his body, his blood still flowing, and with the ceaseless motion of the sea his heart recovered, sparking consciousness.

Gabe shook his head after he told me and said, “It’s a bloody miracle.” And he was smiling at the sheer wonder of it.

If only life could be pulled back from the brink. To restart a still heart. To breathe life back into lungs deflated. To call out to those you love so that they hear your voice, turn back and grab at life and all that connects them to this earth.

I found myself, three years later, standing on the lip of the ocean where I first met Gabe when we were both sixteen. I opened my mouth, inhaling the spray of salt in the air, breathing deep and feeling the vibration of a word, a name.

I closed my eyes. Etched in light and heat, a ghostly shimmer of my father was imprinted behind the lids, and I was watching him, his back facing me as he walked into the sea. But it wasn’t my father’s name that thrummed in my chest, straining to burst from my mouth, to be caught and carried in the wind.

It was Gabe’s.

TWO

Jake saw it in the periphery of his vision.

Writing smeared with a finger on dirty metal. Yes, he thought in recognition. There was a crackle up his spine that made the hairs at the nape of his neck prick up. He paused taking it in, feeling the words; in a certain light you might not even notice them. He took out his phone, transcribing the writing into a text, found Luce’s number and pressed send.

There’s a starman waiting for you in the sky…[Oxford St, 6.35pm, side of a truck]

His phone beeped. She was quick.

Wen r u coming? Big waves—u’ll luv it! Xo

Luce was at the house he’d spent the past six years avoiding, in the coastal retreat of Arlington Bay in south-east Victoria that their father, Julian, had decided to make his home after he separated from their mum.

Jake had to smile. Tongue in cheek. Luce knew he liked his water lukewarm, shallow, and preferably in a bath. When it came to beaches Jake managed to take off his socks and high-top black Converses and roll up his jeans, but the t-shirt stayed on. All the while he’d be squinting behind sunglasses at the glare off the water, feeling overexposed, moving like a skittish crab across the sand. How he’d lasted at Mission Beach for a month was beyond him. Although, being heartsick and feverish probably had something to do with making him stay put.

B there fri. How is she?

Ok. Amy’s cool with u coming. Filly xcited 2 see u

Jake prickled at the very thought of having to see Julian’s partner. He’d kept his visits brief as a kind of protest, and his father was well aware why. Even when Julian and Amy had Philomena—Filly for short and whom Jake fondly dubbed the fairy—it couldn’t thaw the chill between Julian and Jake. Amy had always been a bit on the icy side as far as he was concerned.

Jake? U ok?

Luce had an antenna when it came to him. A year of not seeing each other still couldn’t tune it out.

Yeah. Lemme know if all 2 much. Wot about Lizzie?

He could never explain why, of his two sisters, it was Luce, not Lizzie, who had crept under his very skin when she was born. He was four when she came along; maybe because he was still such a baby himself, only two when Lizzie turned up, the connection was never the same. Usually he and Luce avoided the subject of Lizzie because it touched on stuff about Julian. Questions they didn’t want to ask about whether she was actually the closest to their father of all his kids. The fact Lizzie had done a sea change at the ripe old age of fifteen, upping and leaving to live with Julian down the coast, totally scrapped the dynamics among the three of them. Sometimes Jake thought Lizzie was the sanest and bravest of all of them, but mostly he thought she had a way of seeing the world that was brilliant bordering on loco.

Havn’t seen her yet. Mayb 2morrow

Just call Lu—anytime

I know

And that was it. They didn’t say goodbye. A weird superstition, or just plain tired of being reminded of people exiting their lives. There was guilt with that thought, too. He’d abandoned Luce, hadn’t he?

Because he left after the worst sort of leaving.

Julian dying.

His leaving was the kind that swallows you in a darkness that’s loss verging on a numbing depression. And it scared the shit out of Jake. Since he was a boy he’d seen how Julian had sunk into those black holes of despair. He’d seen too often what that kind of darkness could do.

Jake pocketed the phone and kept walking. There was a stencil mark-up on the side wall of a bookshop. He couldn’t resist.

Fight For Robot Rights Before They Do [Oxford St, neat stencil work, 6.50pm, side wall of shop]

Luce sent back a wriggling, giggling cross between a jellybean and a Pac-man. She could be such a dag. He couldn’t help smiling. Their sense of humour was embarrassingly alike.

He stood up close to the writing, hands balled into the pockets of his jeans, the tips of his black Converses nearly touching the wall.

Sometimes he missed it. God, did he really miss it.

Making marks on the street.

It was never the sneaking out at weird hours that did it for him. He’d been doing that for years because he couldn’t sleep, and walking had been the only way to quieten his mind. Julian liked to say how writers and artists made good walkers, and he’d quote the artist Paul Klee, who’d once said, that drawing was simply taking a line for a walk.

It wasn’t the blood rush—that sweet adrenalin kick that spikes the heart rate and sizzles along nerves. It wasn’t always the process, although that was a huge part of it—spotting the right place, sketching out the work, then hitting the street to make the marks. Or the sensation of riding the edge, knowing the cops could spring, making it urgent and vital to get the work done fast.

No. Mostly it was a bat squeak of time when Jake stepped back and saw the work, saw it in its entirety, and he’d get a gut-fizzing feeling because he’d done it—he’d actually pulled it off. It was the best of highs.

And then he’d get the hell out of there.

It was never a group thing for him and he never partnered up. Jake could remember looking as he walked those long night hours, literally seeing the writing on the wall. He just knew he had to try it.

When they were kids, Julian sparked Luce’s and Jake’s imaginations by showing them ways to see; how to make marks that were an extension of who they were, the very fact of their being on this earth, like breathing. He’d scrape a stick dripping with water on concrete, smudge the tip of his finger across breath-steamed glass, or he’d take a pencil and draw a line on a scrap of paper. He spoke of the artist Richard Long, who walked a line in a grassy field. He’d point out illicit tags on walls or trains, never thinking Jake might take that as a green light. Power lines gridding space, smoke trails left by planes in the sky, or silver trails left by snails on the pavement. Lines that traced a name. The line between two points. A way to get from here to there.

It was all a way to inscribe your very presence by simply making a mark.

If you knew how to look, you could read the streets like a story unfolding. A random, serial piece with many voices. Jake could remember streets by who made the marks. He might have been a loner, but he could make out the signature works of others.

Kink did paste-ups and stencils, and the word going round was he made them in the garage of a mate in Coburg. Meticulous line work and sharp cutting words executed in a palette of primary colours.

Mynx had a punk-pop aesthetic. Slinky girls with puffed up lips like a bad Botox job, and eyes that could seduce and stick daggers in with a glance. All curvy boobs and bum but with a hint of Betty Boop innocence in neon, bubble-gum colours. It was sassy work bordering on manga.

Maka was into spray, ammo style. He’d go for it in broad daylight, mostly at major intersections, and in the full glare of drivers and people walking by he’d create a masterpiece. A favourite of Jake’s was an acid green rhino, life size, with a small metropolis of skyscrapers on its back.

There were too many to name. The work captured the moment and went beyond it, only to be scrapped from public view within days or weeks after it was made. If it wasn’t the council wiping the work out, there were commercial bills pasted over the top, advertising gigs. That was why the green rhino disappeared after a week.

Luce had been documenting Jake’s stuff for years. She always knew when he’d snuck out and she’d ask where she should look, wanting to know where he’d made the work. She’d follow the marks he made as if he’d left a trail, taking Polaroids or digital images that became the only evidence of what he did.

Until he got caught.

Getting caught by the cops didn’t throw him. Being read the riot act by Julian and his mum, Miri, didn’t stop him. What totally cut Jake dead was the public humiliation of community service. He had to make a mural down near the Esplanade, not far from where they lived. And it needed to be themed. The fucking beach. A watered down piece of crap. Like making art to match people’s interiors.

He was sixteen and it all seemed to be coming to a miserable end. Because he’d loved it. When he made street art it felt relevant. Right. He felt relevant. He was putting something out there that was as much about him as this space and time he lived in, weaving his very presence into the fabric of this world.

Somehow, the powers that be thought they were reforming him by saying, “See, we get what you do, we can go with it, make it legal.” But they so didn’t get it because these “safe” spaces they wanted him to decorate just killed the work.

In the end he dumbed it down, never signed the mural and they weren’t the wiser. But the street won out. The wall got pasted completely with multiples of an A3 size work of a grenade with the pin pulled out. Pure poetry.

Jake missed making art for the street. But these days, there was so much more that he was missing. He was missing Luce. Missing Julian. He had moments of missing Miri. He was even missing a girl he’d never hooked up with but whose face he could draw from memory, and found himself doing just that without even thinking, on napkins, scrap paper, in his sketch book. Jake was made up of missing and it was tearing at him to the point of not feeling whole.

And he was sick of it.

After a year-long trek to the top end of the country and back, he was finally heading home to Melbourne, but not before going to that house by the sea first. A straight drive through the city; no stopping to see family, no quick drop in at the share house in Carlton he’d been shacked up in since he started art school.

Well, that was the plan.

A straight drive through and he had no idea what the hell he was going to find when he got there.

THREE

When Gabe was a kid, he swore he could hear a Siren call from the small cramped caravan where he slept.

That’s how he thought of it, not having any other way to describe it.

At night, while his family bunked down in the shack of a house on a block of land that sloped towards the sea, the very earth succumbing to the ocean’s pull, Gabe would lie awake in the pitch dark, and listen. It would come on the air, a singing hum that reverberated as a ripple of sound that seeped into his mind, then swept through his veins like fingers gently scraping along his skin.

The Siren called in the darkest winter months. Ever since he was nine-years old he’d been able to hear it during the family holidays spent at the shack at Arlington Bay.

Once, he asked his dad if he could hear the call. Jem Summers pinned his son with a hard stare. “Just the wail of the storms, Gabe. Nothing more. They whip fierce along the coast this time of year.” Then he was silent, not sure whether it was better to keep what was bubbling in his mind from surfacing.

“Maybe once,” Jem admitted. “Once I heard something that came close.” And he wouldn’t look at Gabe when he described the resounding wail that ascended to a scream. Never, he said, had he heard a sound that held such violence. Gabe’s brother Rhys said Gabe needed to get his head read, but he didn’t deny it, uneasy as he squinted to look out to sea. Rhys never admitted to anything he couldn’t label with his five senses.

For Gabe, the call was more like a lulling sigh, the spray of sound from the waves hissing across sand. He liked to think it was the sea singing, crying for an echo to its vastness through space.

Sitting on the veranda of the shack, he’d close his eyes any time of the day to simply listen to the sea and how it sang to him. And it was here that he heard it one summer afternoon. His name. Not the sea but a voice calling for him.

It was as clear as the sound of the wind that carried it. His eyes sprung open. Without thinking, he bolted from the hammock along the deck, running barefoot across the spiked couch grass of the scrappy lawn before hitting the track that wound its way to the beach. He could have shut his eyes and sprinted safely, knowing the dips and juts of the path. Over a year and a half since he’d been here and Rhys had kept the track clear. Gabe hadn’t known what to expect when he came back. Probably thinking that nature would have reclaimed what little evidence there was of them living here: the small weatherboard they called the shack and the caravan on blocks; the barn that housed their dad’s trailer, the two-stroke tinny and all his tools, a couple of kayaks hoisted with ropes hanging from the rafters, Rhys and his surfboards. Anything that couldn’t fit in the house or, more to the point, that their mum didn’t want in the house. He stood, dazed, taking in how it had been preserved, as if this small bit of the world had a bubble of frozen time laid over it.

Gabe scrambled to a halt when he hit the sand. He squinted to look across the arc of the beach, finding the familiar house built into the hillside, with the second storey peeking over the trees. Nearly every day that he stayed at the shack since he’d got back his eyes had scanned it, drawn to it, while feeling a sickening sense of hopelessness, of loss—a spiralling feeling of his heart plummeting to the soles of his feet. He could feel the pull of the house, and he wanted to run towards it, but he was terrified of what he would find. Or not.

There was no one on the beach. Gabe’s heart was hammering in his chest, bursting to rise up in his throat with each sawing breath. It was caused by more than the flight down the track; it was a crazy surge of adrenaline that fizzed in his blood, sparking every nerve with anticipation.

Because he could have sworn it was Luce who’d called his name.