INFINITE: Island of the Immortals

3. Finches

As the sun fell behind the island, lanterns strung between the palms lit-up and led Michael and Amanda back along the beach to the stone heads guarding the entrance of the main building. Inside, a high ceiling soared upon thick, wooden beams over a vast space that flickered with burning torches. Tropical gardens, fishponds and mezzanines divided the area into jungle-lined niches that bubbled with life and looked over the polished dance floor.

Michael and Jill followed the Finches through the tables of couples and families, chatter and laughter. Candlelit faces watched a man on a little stage surrounded by a sea of swaying dancers. He sang and played guitar, painting scenes of lazy beaches, surf and sun. The dining tables spilt outside under fairy lights and even brighter stars above. Uncle Michael's hot-pink Hawaiian shirt floated through the scene as he paused and chatted with guests. All the while his little red-haired daughter hovered mutely about his legs.

"Hungry?" He asked, finally dropping into a chair beside Michael.

He insisted they order almost everything on the menu. Sizzling hotplates arrived at the table. Platters of seafood, lobsters, and exotic alien-looking fruit. All washed down by drinks served in coconuts with little umbrellas.

It was all good fun – lots of laughs and stupid stories. The brothers, Wayne and Uncle Michael, seemed to perform mainly for Jill's entertainment. She constantly blushed, seemed to shrink and swell under all the attention, rising on waves of nervous giggles only to self-consciously fall quiet again. Michael couldn't remember seeing his mother like this. The Finches brought something out in Jill that hadn't been there for years.

Laughter.

There'd been laughter once, when his parents had been together, when Michael was little. But mostly he remembered the arguing or brooding silences and lying awake at night listening to them fight. He didn't see much of his Dad after the divorce, just a phone call or a parcel delivered on his birthday, finding him wherever they happened to be in the world. There were rushed visits when both of them were in transit – Paris or Zurich airport, Heathrow or JFK. Michael would get a T-shirt from his father. I (HEART) Paris. Jill hated them, "You're never going to wear it." Michael loved the shirts but never did wear them in public. The young Michael mainly remembered the look in his Dad's eye when it came time to say goodbye, like he was trying not to sneeze. His father was – is – a war correspondent, always ready to go into harm's way, and there always is – was – a war. Jill would say, "He's on a crusade to fix the world's problems but never his own."

Jill took Michael steadily around the world, from country to country, job to job. Michael told himself she was a sought-after lawyer, which she was, but he knew there was something else. He couldn't work out if she was really searching for something or simply running away. Jill was constantly busy, with too much to do. Michael decided she liked it like that, it helped her forget, and so he never said a thing. Never complained when they moved so often he couldn't make friends. Never made her feel guilty about any of it. She was a good person, a good mother, so he felt this was his way of being good to her – by letting her have this. Escape.

Jill and Michael started out in New York when he was young, then London. Paris, Berlin and Rome in the space of two years. Dubai. Switzerland. He knew the world from the inside of an international school with its confused accents and ever-changing faces. Every place they ended up was not home. If Jill was living with a man, Michael was the third wheel, the elephant in the room, a reminder Jill was once married to someone else. The last years they had spent back in America. L.A, Chicago and finally San Francisco, where Jill met someone at a speed-dating night.

Michael didn't believe he was a lumberjack until they went to live with him on the edge of the forest. Michael loved to walk amongst the ancient giants, trees as wide as a house and so tall they hurt your neck. Unfortunately, they were there to cut trees down, a point Michael tried to ignore. Jill, however, tried to ignore the fact that the lumberjack started communicating in moody grunts whenever Michael was around. His presence drove the man to random displays of masculinity – like fixing his truck and sharpening his axes – all with the reverence of some vain martyr, off to save the world and possibly not return. Michael wished.