Willow Pattern

by Angela Slatter, Steven Amsterdam, P. M. Newton, Krissy Kneen, Geoff Lemon, Simon Groth, Christopher Currie, Nick Earls, Rjurik Davidson

  Downstairs, it rose. Each shelf a minor victory, the tabletop a major one. A swimming pool’s worth of water now sat heavily inside the house. The television slipping under. Packets of spices and kitchenware lifted from benches, bobbed on the surface. The water climbed the stairs, a long slow advance past the pictures on the wall, one by one, until the rising tide met and mixed with the upper floor.

  Water flowed down the hallway, into the bedrooms, and climbed there too. Mounting the bedspreads, taking each drawer. Hair dryers, electric clocks, telephones, all becoming useless. It rose in the bathroom evenly with the rest, climbing the side of the tub in pursuit of the level inside. Water will always seek its level, and that’s what my brother knew. As he waited he read Heather stories. I know this too. By now the afternoon had become late, slouching into evening. The light was dying from the air, turning grey. There was a sudden cooling as the edge of the tub was reached, the warm water mixing with the rest. The house fat with volume. But he closed off his cold tap, and opened the hot all the way, and they stayed quite comfortable sitting in its stream, as the levels rose around the bathroom walls.

  He read until, by the end of a story, the room became too dim. Then he reached out and floated the book across the flood, and sat back in silence. I know this because I know my brother. Down the hall, her clothes were swelling with water, sanitary napkins bloating one by one and popping out of their disintegrating cardboard box. Things floated that would float: expired condoms, tubes of lipstick. Things sank that would sink: glassware, ashtrays, loose change. The water climbed their chests now, took his clavicle, her throat. It covered her mouth as it reached his chin. When her nostrils dipped below the surface she didn’t murmur, or struggle. The water played with her hair as gently as he ever had. As his own lips submerged, then his cheeks, and his nose, he stayed as quiet. Whether it was the flood, or the sandbars, something had already taken her. To find her, he would have to go there too.

  By the time I arrived, people were gathering in the street. The water must have reached the ceiling. It came through the roof tiles and over the gutters. My brother’s house was on high ground: there’d been no real flooding here. But the locals heard the creaks and groans, saw the trickles winding through my brother’s lawn and tracing the edge of his driveway. They watched, and they wondered, no-one ever thinking to shut off the water at the mains. I watched too, knowing that what was done was done. And after an hour, or a day, or another lifetime, when the front door finally exploded outward with a cannon-bang, a flood descended on Tarragindi from the top of the hill, not fugitively upward from the bottom. Water spewed out in a rage, a flood coming out from inside, not in from out.

  While it seems crazy, I know that was the moment it turned. With that flood inverted, the other floods turned back, and the waters dropped. Not forever—I knew as well as the madman at the river that the sands and the waters would return. But that was the moment it lulled, and breathed easy for a time. And we could too.

  Gifted - Simon Groth

  His phone bleeped again. Marcus sat back on the stairs and stared at the screen as the children played around him. A couple of kids had climbed right to the top of the stairs where a window overlooked the library’s public area. He heard them laughing and performing blowfishes on the glass. To his left a row of studious-looking kids tapped at computers with huge oversize coloured keyboards and gigantic track balls. They attempted to play a wordy variation of Tetris, stacking letters to form words and watching them pop and disappear as soon as they had formed. Most of the kids were preliterate anyway so they just raced each other to stack random letters to see who could lose first (and therefore win, presumably).

  He looked at the message. It was Eleanor, again.

  ‘Are they there yet?’

  He typed his reply. ‘Nope.’

  At the other end of the room, a slide show ran through a long loop of children’s artwork: some of it scribbles, some of it representative, some of it genuinely beautiful. A group of boys constructed increasingly elaborate forts from foam blocks, admired their handiwork for a moment, before suddenly and at some undetectable signal charging into it, pro-wrestling style.

  Charlie was oblivious to it all. She kneeled at the small solitary bookshelf and stared at it; that unsettling stare when she lapsed into one of her reveries. She waved one hand across the spines of the books and held the other below as though catching the dust that fell. She lifted her hand and inspected the dust for a moment, before stuffing it into her pocket. Marcus smiled.

  She liked putting imaginary things in her pocket. She insisted any new skirts, jeans or jackets have plenty of pocket space. Marcus rarely found any actual things in there, but Charlie insisted it was necessary. Marcus thought of the behaviour as charming, though not everyone agreed.

  ***

  ‘Where is she? Where is that little special girl of mine?’

  Charlie broke out of her daydream and leaped up, scanning the room. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Chaaaahrrrrlaaaaaahhhie!’

  He’d never known Tanya to be quiet exactly, but something about this new boyfriend of hers amped up her voice to a shrill wail, even in regular conversation. From the tone of Tanya’s voice, Marcus already suspected she had Whippo with her.

  ‘I don’t know why we had to meet here. Lie-baries give me the creeps.’

  ‘This isn’t even like a proper library. There’s like kids and screaming and noise and shit. Where are all the books?’

  ‘It’s the kids section, Whippo. This is what they do now because the kids don’t read books and stuff.’

  Whippo contemplated this as Charlie rushed to them, wrapping her arms around her mother’s legs.

  Tanya lifted the girl into her arms and the pair shared a chest-crushing hug with claims and counter claims of who has missed the other more.

  ‘Hey Dorkus,’ said Whippo.

  Marcus responded with a curt nod. ‘Where have you been?’ he said to Tanya.

  ‘We had to park at the arse end of nowhere. Why the fuck did you want to meet here anyway? It’s chaos after the sand thing and now all this bloody rain.’

  ‘I wanted to bring Charlie somewhere she would like.’

  ‘Somewhere we can’t afford to park.’

  ‘You could have taken public transport.’

  ‘Whippo doesn’t like public transport.’ Whippo nodded to confirm this. ‘He doesn’t like putting his arse where someone else’s has been.’

  ‘That must get exhausting.’

  ‘It was stupid coming here. Haven’t you been watching the news? It’s like the end of the bloody world here.’

  He heard about the sand and there had been talk of flooding if this rain didn’t ease up, but Marcus hadn’t really thought much about the practicalities of what that might mean for today. He had been thinking more about this conversation and how he could broach the topic. He needed somewhere wordy to keep Charlie distracted and noisy enough to allow the adults to thrash it out. There was no room to account for breaking river banks. They would just have to deal with that if it became a problem.

  Tanya lowered Charlie back to the floor. ‘Okay darling, go and play with the other kiddies for a second, then we’ll go.’

  Charlie responded with a quizzical look. Marcus decided it was either in response to her mother’s babyish talk or the assumption that she would deign to play with other children. She returned the to the bookshelf and removed a picture book. She brushed at the pages, as though clearing something away from them.

  ‘Did you get my message?’ Marcus said to Tanya.

  ‘What message?’

  ‘About Charlie.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I wanted to pick her up early next week.’

  Tanya stiffened. ‘We agreed. One week each. When you want more time with her, you tell me three weeks in advance.’

  ‘I sent you an email four weeks ago about this.’

  ‘Didn’t get it.’

  ‘I put a read receipt on it.
I know you read it.’

  ‘Must have been someone else. I’ve changed my email address. The old one got hacked.’ She emphasised the last word, as though showing off something new she had learned.

  ‘Hacked? Don’t shit me, Tanya. It’s just a day early. It was the only time I could get in to see the psychologist.’

  ‘She doesn’t need a psychologist. She’s not crazy!’

  ‘She’s a bit weird,’ said Whippo.

  ‘Whose side are you on?’ cried Tanya.

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘Go and get us a coffee or something, Whippo. I’ll come out with Charlie in a second.’

  ‘We need to do something about this, Tanya. Charlie is gifted.’

  Tanya scoffed. ‘Gifted.’

  ‘I’m serious. She’s on level 30 readers and she’s still in prep for shit’s sake. The teachers are saying they’re never seen anything like it.’

  ‘So she’s smart. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing. But she needs to be assessed.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘So she can be challenged. They think she plays with imaginary things because she’s bored.’

  ***

  They were arguing again. They were such nice people, all of them. Even Whippo was great sometimes, letting her eat cereal in front of the TV or letting her wander through their neighbourhood looking for interesting words. They were nice people, as long as they weren’t together.

  They were arguing over her. It was always over her. They talked about ‘gifted’. Charlie wasn’t quite sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. It was a thing.

  Charlie checked her pockets again. A few names, some ‘doing words’ as her teacher calls them, little fragmented words like ‘if’ and ‘it’. She collected as many as she could from the bookshelf, but places like this were not great. Inside a library and especially in a children’s section there wasn’t much to see. Kids hung onto their words, they were careful with them, kept them close to their chests. Most kids didn’t have all that many words either. The kids in her class carried a few around. Some jealously guarded them. Others weren’t quite sure what to do with them.

  With adults, it’s completely different. Adults throw words around, waste them, step on them, treat them like a toy, and discard them at an alarming rate. They shoehorn words into each other with little regard. They smear them over surfaces, slice them, smash them. Adults don’t seem to like words at all.

  Charlie used to get upset at this, until she realised something very important. The adults couldn’t see what they were doing. Only Charlie could see the words.

  Her parents threw some new words at each other, firing sharpened phrases at each other’s armour. As they raised their voices, the words fell around their feet. Charlie was reminded of a war movie Whippo once let her watch. A man fired a machine gun and let the empty shells pile up around his feet.

  The piles didn’t last long. Some of the younger kids circled around her parents, absently gathering every word as fast as they were made. All kids do this. That’s why this place has nothing to collect. Kids seem to know how valuable they are. They scoop up stray words without seeing them, without even realising what they’re doing. They pick up everything. Even the words they’re not supposed to know. Especially the words they’re not supposed to know.

  Just beyond the kids section, Charlie spied the lounge chairs and tables crammed with people at laptops. Almost all of them with headphones. They all looked so serious, so intent on their screens and oblivious to anything else. There weren’t a lot of words here to collect either. People in libraries were as good as kids at tidying up the strays, she’d discovered.

  ***

  ‘This is not about you,’ Marcus hissed.

  His face was bright red, though more from embarrassment than anger. It seemed his plan to have this discussion in a noisy place wasn’t as well thought out as he’d hoped. The room was noisy, but not even a couple of dozen playing children could match Tanya’s screeching.

  ‘It’s not about you either! This is about Charlie getting a normal life!’

  Around them, the other parents were herding their own youngsters away. The women drew their handbags close to their chests, as though protecting themselves. The men leaned down and muttered to their charges. Everyone was preparing to leave. Marcus could see they were causing a scene and everyone around them were too embarrassed to intervene.

  ‘A normal life? What’s so normal about what you’re offering her, Tanya? That fucking douchebag of a boyfriend of yours is not exactly a model of straight up parenting. You let her stay up all night, eat shitty food, watch inappropriate movies. If she wasn’t so mature, you’d have broken her already. As it is she comes back addled.’

  The mutters around them grew louder. People were really starting to move out now. Come on, we’re going. Bags and protesting children were dragged up the few stairs towards the exit.

  ‘What about that little piece you’ve shacked up with then? What kind of model is she? All those precious books and vases and trinkets she keeps on the shelf. How is Charlie supposed to be a kid when she can’t touch anything in your house?’

  Almost everyone else was gone now, leaving Tanya and Marcus to go through the motions without an audience. They continued the regular dance, back and forth, raking over the coals of their brief but productive relationship. Every slight, every nasty aside, every cold response was catalogued and reviewed. They could almost recite it by now.

  It wasn’t until the last of the others had left the children’s corner, they noticed the thump from the window outside.

  Whippo curled his fist and beat desperately at the glass. He was saying something about the radio, but his voice was muffled.

  ‘Whfffr, whffr, whffr radio! Iron Brightman!’

  Tanya and Marcus broke their dance to stare at him.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ said Marcus.

  ‘Brian Brightman?’ said Tanya. ‘What about him?’ she yelled through the glass.

  ‘On the fucking radio! Just now! Talking to Brian Brightman on the fucking air! Yeah!’

  ‘What was he on the radio for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She raised her voice again. ‘What for?’

  ‘Fucking flood, baby! They wanted someone to sound panicky so I fucking gave it! Woo!’

  ‘Flood?’ Marcus looked around. The commotion wasn’t confined to their corner of the library. People everywhere were streaming out of the place. There was a large congregation at the windows overlooking the river. Even the headphone-and-laptop drones were unplugged, taking photos with their phones.

  ‘Nice work, Marcus. Bringing your daughter into the most dangerous place in the city. Real smart.’

  ‘Shut up, Tanya. Charlie! Let’s get going!’

  They look down to the bookshelf where Charlie had been.

  ‘Charlie?’

  Tanya spun around. Marcus peered through the sea of legs at the windows, looking for a sign of Charlie’s dress.

  ‘She can’t have gone far. She was just here.’

  ‘CHARLIE!’

  Marcus ran towards the windows, happy to leave Tanya to rely on the potency of her irritating voice. He was confident Charlie would have followed the crowd to the windows. No big deal.

  ***

  The library people looked worried. Nothing especially surprising about that. Charlie hadn’t seen library people much, but whenever she did, they looked worried. It seemed sad to Charlie that they would worry so much about words they can’t see. Today was strange though. The sky was dark, really dark and everyone had that librarian worry. There were so many people. It reminded Charlie of going to the show when her Dad wrote his phone number on her arm in black texta in case she ‘got away’. Numbers were really important to him. Sometimes Charlie wished she could see numbers the way she saw words.

  There were a lot of people standing around, looking down at the river. There was a lot of talking, a lot of words were crushed underfoot, but that wasn’
t unusual. The people who weren’t looking down at the river, were looking at their phones, swearing and shaking the things, allowing words to spill out from them.

  ‘Network’s down.’

  That was a phrase being passed from the back to the front, from the phoners to the starers.

  ‘It’s breaking the bank.’

  That was a phrase being passed from the front to the back, from the starers to the phoners.

  A string of words, all clumped together in a messy half-sentence dangled from one of the phones. She couldn’t make any of the individual words out, but usually clumps like this one contained some interesting and hard-to-find words. Charlie sidled up to the distracted adult – a huge hairy man with long arms and a round belly – trying not to draw attention to herself. The phone was attached to his belt, tantalisingly close. In straining to look over the shoulders of those in front of him, the man jiggled his belly and danced his feet back and forth. The words swayed with him.

  Charlie stood still by his side, watching the words from the corner of her eye. With one quick move, she snatched the clump and stuffed it into her pocket. The man stopped jiggling and looked down at her.

  ‘You right, kid?’

  She smiled. They always liked it when she smiled. ‘Yes thank you,’ she said.

  The man turned his attention back to the window. Something very important was happening here and Charlie had no way of reaching the front. She headed instead for the front entrance to the library. Her Dad once showed her how you could get to the other floors. Maybe if she got up high, she could see what the others were looking at.

  If she was really lucky she might find a few words for her collection along the way.

  ***

  Searching . . .

  Searching? Searching? Are they serious? Bloody technology. The one time you need—absolutely need—a phone to work, the bars conveniently vanish and in their place one word and a string of dots to suggest that civilisation is not far away. Not far away at all! What the hell is going on?