Two Strange Girls: Project Tempest

By C J Halbard

A turbulent friendship falls apart amid secrets, betrayal, and horror. Can we ever regain what's lost? 

 

Tempest Bay, 1910. A south seas smuggling town where misfits of all kinds live with vivid intensity. Marjorie Morton and Constance Pream are smart and strange and gloriously difficult. Both know they'll be lifelong friends. But when a storm brings a distress call from the ocean deep, terrors emerge to threaten everything they love. 

 

The acclaimed Project Tempest series imagines a world on the cusp of emotional climate change: a profound shift in how our inner lives connect to the places around us. The warring forces of this world are kindness and cruelty, creativity and death, history and memory and possibility and the deep primordial horror that echoes from the ocean to the stars.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: C J Halbard
• Release date: Oct 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780473601720

Book preview

I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.

—Simone de Beauvoir

Marjorie Morton

Talking into this thing makes me all funny. Is it working? I’ve pushed the white button marked record. The reels are spinning. And a little red needle seems to be listening to me. The grille looks like the front of an old car. Hope I’ve got it right and this isn’t just going out into nothingness.

Well even if it is, I’ll have said my piece. And the sun will rise tomorrow like it always does.

My name is Marjorie Morton. I’m sixty seven years old and I’ve drunk three gins already tonight. The storm scares me, and I drink too much when I’m scared.

Of course that’s not what I said earlier today at the Gramophonium. I’d never give Nancy Sharman the satisfaction. No, I went down past the dress shop and the grocer and the Idle Hour bookshop and turned left into the music store and I told Nancy very clear, Nancy I’m loaning your stereophonic tape recorder, so hurry up about it.

The important thing with a t’awd bitch like Nancy is to give her no option. Just roll in there like the tide.

Nancy was in her plump chair with a Mills & Boon up in front of her specs. She lowered the book and glared but knew better than to cut back.

Well Marjorie Morton what can I do for you today? she said.

You heard it, I said. I know you’ve got the machine out back. And I’ll strike you a good bargain for one night’s use.

See I knew about Nancy Harman and this stereophonic tape recorder. She’d ordered it from the distributor’s catalogue two years ago, gotten all excited in her silly way even though it’s far too expensive. She waited twelve weeks for it to arrive from Sydney, for the day John Innsbruck the Post lugged a package in and demanded sixpence for being so kind as to bring it all the way over from the post office. Which is four doors down.

Nancy had dreams for that tape recorder, the first in town. All the wondrous sounds of nature and man that she’d capture. Even took out an ad in the paper. But of course it ended up sitting in the back office of the Gramophonium under dust and papers and boxes and coffee cups. A month after it came no one in town even mentioned it. Just a faded little notion like so many other things.

Until I walked in the door this morning and told her I’d be borrowing it.

Well, Nancy said, that’s a genuine Wollensack one fifty five, that recorder is. Very precious to me and I’m using it constantly. But maybe I can sacrifice a bit of my own joy to help you, Marjorie.

Maybe you can, Nancy, I said. Maybe you can.

I don’t mind, of course, she said. As long it’s not too much of a bother to me.

What a generous soul you are, Nancy, I said. It’ll be no bother at all.

Ha!

•   •   •

So here I am. Marjorie Morton, sixty seven years old and three gins in. Coming to you from Tempest Bay, New Zealand, south coast near Wellington town, the far reaches of the earth. My sitting room has lace curtains and a single oil painting on the wall, which is of a ship foundering in rough seas. The Starry Voyager, an old bit of local history. There’s a tea cosy and one armchair and an umbrella stand by the door. I’ve propped this machine up on my table, next to the gin bottle.

Majorie Morton, finally ready to begin.

I smelled it, you see. The storm that’s coming. I always do. Tempest Bay storms aren’t like anywhere else. They bring up memories. Feelings. Buried things.

I don’t think of myself as a complicated person, quite simple really, but others might differ. And I realise I’ve lived a lot of my life going from one day to the next, right across the twentieth century so far. It always seemed like there was another sunset and another dawn, and to get from one t’other was the priority. But of course it’s more than that and always has been.

A parade of faces, now. One face in particular. They only ever march past me when the storm’s coming. Only ever open their eyes when I’m drunk.

You don’t know the past. That’s the horror and joy of it. This thing you live with every day, that presses down on you like slow machinery, you don’t even know it.

In Tempest Bay we know something about horror. And joy. And sacrifice. And most of all, the secret things we do here and don’t ever talk about. Until now.

It’s time for the truth of Marjorie Morton and Tempest Bay and what happened in the year 1910. Bottoms up. I hope this bloody thing’s working.

1910

It was the morning before the spring storm, and I was up a wooden ladder mucking with the gutters, when Constance Pream came to get us both in trouble.

This was the pattern of our lives and I don’t know if it ever changed. As long as I knew Constance she’d show up over and over again at the most awkward moments. Stick her nose where it wasn’t welcome then haul us off on some mad adventure that inevitably led to disaster.

Constance Pream was a right pain in my arse. How I miss her, now.

I was very serious back then. In 1910 I was nine years old. Born the day Queen Victoria died, which was January twenty second, which meant every year I got one present combined for Christmas and birthday, which is enough to make anyone take a dim view. Constance was born in June, of course.

I lived with my Da at our cottage on the midside of Tempest Bay, up among the trees. It was all different back then compared to now. No road tunnel or street grid or suchlike, all that came later. Tempest Bay was still a rough little village focused on the dock and Cat’s Alley at the shoreline. Houses and cottages and lean-tos scattered about in this lovely pattern. Cut off from the outside world by the hills, which was how everybody liked it.

Da had made our cottage by staking a claim and dismantling a run-aground schooner over by the cliffside rocks. Hauled its guts across with ropes around his waist, planking and fixtures and suchlike. I’ve only small memories of him building it. Sunlight and wood smell and the sound of his tools, me all eager to carry up some water or hold a nail. But I remember before, when there was just a patch of ground in a clearing, and after, when it was our home.

The day it was done he lifted me up on his shoulders, which I loved. Faced the cottage together.

Marge, he said. They will never take this away from us.

Then he swooped me round and I giggled so hard I was nearly sick, and he landed me right in front of the doorway and had me be the first person to step over it. Inside were the three rooms he’d so lovingly built, with beds and a table and shelves and space out the back for washing, and from that day the cottage was ours.

The one thing Da had struggled with were the gutters. When I’d woken that morning I’m talking about, the cottage was empty but there was a drip-drip-drip coming from above. I found the beginnings of a puddle in the corner, hadn’t spread very far but it would. So I pulled on my smock