Summary
Miles screams Harry’s name. He sees Harry’s arm and climbs onto the rails to jump into the water, but Dad holds him back. Dad tells Miles that he remembers, doesn’t he: they were dead when Dad found the car. Miles’s insides go still. Dad says, “She was leaving me.” Dad says, “I had to take him away, Miles. I had to leave you there. He was already dead and everyone would have found out. Everyone would have known.” Miles feels Dad’s grip loosen and then bombs down into the water. In the cold, he grabs Harry and carries him to the surface. With much effort, Miles swims against the six-foot swells with Harry coughing and spluttering on his back. He instructs Harry to take breaths as they duck into waves. Miles worries about hypothermia setting in as he realizes there is no land in sight. He is wearing a wool sweater but Harry is wearing cotton. Miles imagines a warm flame at his core that turns into a ball of fire that he shares with Harry through his skin.
The narrative shifts to a scene from the past. Mum is tucking Miles up in a blanket on the couch while a fire pops and hisses. Miles had gotten too close to the edge of the river and fallen in. Mum says Miles is lucky his brother was there. Miles looks up at Joe, who had fished him out of the water and carried him home. Mum asks where her baby Harry is. Harry stands before the fire and tells Miles that he isn’t afraid of the water anymore. They touch foreheads. Miles comes back through a fog. He feels wind and cold water against his skin. He spins around and calls Harry’s name, but Harry is gone. The perspective shifts to Harry running as though his feet are barely touching the ground. He runs with Jake to the top of a hill where George is waving. There are trees and bodies of water as far as the eye can see. He can see the entire world. Harry thinks, “I am free—flying like a bird. I am free.”
Miles is in the orange light that comes before darkness—the sun burning brightly before it falls below the horizon. He feels he is part of the deep water now. He sinks in with his muscles relaxed, dropping away from light and air. Then water spews from his mouth and he gasps and coughs. He is being carried. He is incredibly thirsty. He feels water touch his mouth. His body shakes and he feels pins and needles. Joe looks down at him. Joe’s eyes are swollen from crying. Joe touches Miles’s arm and says he is sorry: they found Harry on one of the reefs near Acton. Joe says he looked peaceful; nothing had touched him. Miles screams and seems to see himself lying in a hospital bed before he feels heavy, tired, and warm.
The narrative returns to Miles’s memory of being in the car when it crashed. It is snug with bags packed all around him and Harry in the back. The car pulls over and stops. Mum smiles in the dark as a man gets in. The man turns in his seat and strokes Harry’s cheek. The man is Uncle Nick. Mum talks about the tall ships in Hobart as Miles drifts off. He wakes when he feels the seatbelt pull tight and all the bags falling and he hears Harry crying. Miles then opens his eyes in his hospital bed. Joe asks if he needs anything, or if he is hungry. Miles says he came back. Joe says the wind was too strong for him to sail through the strait. Miles says Uncle Nick was in the car when it crashed. Joe opens his mouth but says nothing. Miles says he remembers the crash now: Dad took Nick away and left Miles and Harry in the car. He waited in the cold, calling Mum’s name, but she never answered. He was too frightened to reach out and touch her.
After sleeping on Joe’s boat, which Miles admires for all the handmade wooden details, Miles and Joe drive to Miles’s house. Outside Miles asks what Joe thinks happened to Dad; Joe says he doesn’t know but he hopes Dad is dead. Inside Miles lifts the photo of his mother and remembers how Uncle Nick had his hands on her in the car and how she’d laughed before playfully pushing him away. Miles thinks about how much Joe looks like Mum. In the bedroom, Harry’s show bags from the fair and clothes are all still there. Miles tells Joe he doesn’t want to go to Harry’s funeral: he wants to stay at the house and wait for Harry to come back, just like how he and Harry used to wait for Mum to come back.
Miles stands on the deck of Joe’s boat and looks over the bay. It is calm now, but the storm had turned over car-sized boulders, exposing the shellfish and plant habitats above the waterline. Entire trees lay battered and smashed on the rocks. Miles takes his board and runs down the warm sand. He rides a rip curl out to his surfing friend Justin Roberts, who lends him his new board. Miles catches waves, remembering how good it used to be to ride with Justin when Miles’s mum was waiting to pick them up in a warm car. After surfing, Justin says he’s sorry about Miles’s brother. Miles wants to say goodbye and thank Justin for everything, but he just watches Justin walk off home. Miles feels his mother and Harry waiting in the car. Then Joe honks a horn and Miles turns around.
In the final scene, George and Jake meet Joe and Miles on the shore of Cloudy Bay beach. Without needing to speak, they dig a small hole. Miles buries the treasure-hunt items Harry collected: a seahorse, cuttlefish bones, shark eggs, and driftwood. Miles thinks back to the first scene in the novel, when he sent Harry to find a shark egg. Instead of surfing, Miles found one himself and planted it for Harry to discover. Miles returns to the present when Joe touches his arm. Miles puts the items in the hole and fills it in, marking the spot with shells. They walk away.
As Miles shakes George’s hand, George pulls him in for a hug and tells him not to look back. George puts the white shark's tooth in Miles’s hand. Miles sees in his mind how Uncle Nick stroked Harry’s cheek in the car then gave Miles the shark's tooth, saying it was for luck. Miles realizes George must have been the one who found Harry’s body. George confirms he did. George and Joe wave goodbye and then walk up the beach as Joe and Miles take the dinghy back to Joe’s sailboat. Miles thinks that Cloudy Bay is the only place he will miss. The novel ends with the narrator commenting that out past the shallows rolls an invisible path for Joe and Miles to follow. A path to somewhere warm, somewhere new.
Analysis
When Miles tries again to jump into the water, Dad holds him in the boat. Dad begins talking in cryptic language about the night Mum and Nick died, causing Miles’s insides to go still. Dad admits that Mum was leaving him, and says he had to take “him” away and leave Harry and Miles in the car. He claims “he” was already dead, and that everyone would have found out about Mum leaving Dad for another man.
As Miles feels disgust at the feigned sorrow his father exhibits in his face, Parrett subtly depicts the moment in which Miles finally gives up on protecting his father, who his instincts tell him is lying and therefore cannot be trusted in his account of what happened the night Mum died. Just as Dad loosens his grip, Miles abandons his pathetic and dangerous father and dives in the water to rescue Harry.
Even though Miles miraculously pulls Harry’s body to the surface, the need to swim far with Harry on his back while hypothermia sets in causes Miles to lose consciousness. The narration shifts to Harry’s perspective as he drifts across the land and then begins flying, free as a bird. In this dream-like sequence, the reader sees Harry’s spirit leave his body and find peace in the afterlife.
Miles wakes up in the hospital with Joe at his side. He learns from Joe that Harry died. Unable to process the information rationally, Miles panics and believes Harry is still in the water. He dissociates from his body, seeing himself screaming in a hospital bed until he falls asleep. The narrative then resolves the mysteries surrounding the night Mum as Miles recalls how there had been a man in the car with them, just as Harry had suggested to Joe. Miles recalls that the man was Nick, who gave Miles the shark tooth necklace. With the details that Mum was leaving Dad for “him,” and the flirtatious way Nick and Mum behave in Miles’s memory, it becomes clear that Uncle Nick and Mum had been eloping to start a new life together in Hobart the night they died—seeking refuge from Dad.
Instead of making everything explicit, Parrett leaves the reader to fill in certain unknown details surrounding the crash. Based on Dad’s violent patterns and the lies he tells Miles about the night of the crash, the most likely explanation is that Dad ran Mum’s car off the road and into the tree; he then murdered Nick and disposed of his body in the bay. Dad left Harry and Miles in the backseat of the car while their mother lay lifeless over the steering wheel. With this recollection, Miles overcomes his dissociative amnesia and is able to put to rest what happened to his mother.
The novel ends by returning to the theme of grief. While Joe and Miles had reacted to their mother’s, uncle’s, and grandfather’s deaths with repression, they go to Cloudy Bay beach and perform a mourning ritual to help process Harry’s drowning. In an instance of situational irony, George returns the shark tooth necklace to Miles, revealing that he was the person who found Harry’s body. Parrett closes the novel by echoing and reconfiguring lines from the preface in a resolved and optimistic tone. As Miles prepares to leave Bruny with Joe, the currents past the shallows will bring Miles not to the abalone treasure under the cold water but to somewhere new and warm, above the surface.
