A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  It was easy to tell herself that.

  Inside, in bed, Lucy went straight back to sleep, dreaming only of sun and of newness.

  Then, in the morning, a grey-day pall—she woke as tired as if she hadn’t slept at all. The rain started. Stopped. Started. Stopped. An erratic punctuation throughout the month’s first days, until the balance tipped from dry to wet entirely and beyond to saturation. There was more rain than sunshine, then no sunshine at all. The sinkholes in the park filled with water and stayed full, their surfaces thick with mosquito larvae and their edges busy with frogs. There were no breaks in which Tom could go out to play, and the house shrank with his containment. Suddenly, it was always raining, and when it began to feel as if the rain couldn’t possibly get any heavier, any thicker, it did. It was like someone playing with the volume of a stereo, nudging it up, and then nudging it higher.

  Lucy stood on the deck under a Christopher Robin umbrella, holding Tom high. The park had a deep layer of water across its car park now and a curtain of water obscured its grass.

  ‘What do you think, Tom? Will Dad have to sail to work in an umbrella, like Winnie-the-Pooh?’

  Tom chuckled and squirmed and Lucy squeezed him before she set him down.

  ‘Should we worry?’ she asked Ben as he arrived under the canopy of his own umbrella. She nodded at the heavy sheet of rain.

  ‘You can’t worry about everything, Lu. All the warnings are for flash floods, and that’s nothing to do with us here.’

  ‘Then what is?’

  He shrugged again. ‘A river flood, I guess.’

  ‘Like seventy-four?’

  ‘Like seventy-four.’

  ‘And will that happen again this time?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re releasing water upstream, so I don’t think so. I’ll make some calls when I get to work—’ flicking his watch around on his wrist ‘—where I should be heading now.’ He kissed the top of her head, their umbrellas butting and showering spray. ‘You don’t want something else to worry about, do you?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  He smiled then, and rubbed his hand across her back. ‘Come on, Lu. It’s fine. It’s all fine.’ Kissing her head again. ‘I might be late tonight—there’s a bloke out from England that they want me to write about. He’s doing a talk at the uni; I’ll call you on the way.’

  ‘Home by eight?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Say bye to Dad, Tom—he won’t be home till you’re asleep tonight.’

  Tom nodded.

  ‘Then I’ll see you both tonight,’ said Ben, fastening his bag.

  He was halfway down the stairs when Lucy called, leaning down towards him, ‘Can you let me know earlier next time, if you’re going to be late? It’s fine, I mean, of course it’s fine. But I wouldn’t mind a bit more warning of a bad day, when one’s coming.’

  ‘A bad day?’

  ‘I just feel sort of storm-stayed.’ She waved her hand at the grey wall of water dumping on their yard. ‘And it’s nice when you come home, you know, at the end of a long day with Tom.’ ‘I won’t be that late,’ he called back. ‘OK? Can we talk about all this tonight?’

  She nodded as a smash came from the kitchen, and she wheeled around and went back through the door, calling for Tom—who stood, smiling brightly among bright shards of his mother’s mug that were scattered on the floor around his feet.

  ‘Crash, Mummy, crash!’ he said happily, and Lucy, bending to pick the pieces out of the puddle of cold liquid, heard Ben call out from below, ‘You right, Lu? I’ve got to get the train. I’ll ring you on the way.’

  ‘Big noise, Mummy,’ said Tom above her. ‘Bi-i-ig noise.’ While she sat, very still, on the floor.

  Happy new year, she thought. At least it wasn’t Elsie’s cup. She rang her mum. She rang her sisters. She rang her dad. No one picked up.

  Maybe I’m no longer real.

  And the rain surged hard again.

  •

  It was days before the flood came, creeping across the lowest reach of their backyard and stopping there, while all around them other buildings became islands, marooned by waterlines that breached their battened skirts, their floorboards, their windowsills. Some were fully immersed, their roofs invisible under thick brown fetid water. And it was quiet, so quiet, with no cars, no power, no ordinary, everyday life. As if the world had gone away.

  In the quietness of their torchlit house, Lucy felt gratefully, inexplicably spared. Elsie’s house had gone under in the last big flood, in 1974: they’d heard the story when they bought the house, taking the neighbours’ tales of rising water as of historical interest only and nothing to do with them.

  ‘We need to tell her,’ Lucy said as this new flood peaked. ‘We need to let Elsie know her house is fine.’

  ‘Our house,’ said Ben. ‘I’m sure someone she knows has come by to check—or would you have her coming across the park in a boat?’ He tousled his hand in her hair, trying for a joke. But Lucy didn’t smile.

  And if it was shocking that the flood came, it was also shocking how quickly it went, under a sky of hot and sudden sunshine. It left a thick, rich smell, organic and alive. It left households to decide what might be salvaged from everything that had been immersed—from the garage stuff of Christmas decorations and drill bits and screwdrivers to the entire contents of a family home. And it mobilised an army of people, ready to stand and scrub and hose and sort.

  Lucy volunteered too, almost embarrassed by her own dry good fortune. She went, in gumboots, shorts and an old singlet, on the first day that Ben was home. Tom offered her his little plastic beach bucket as she left.

  ‘She might need something a bit bigger, mate,’ said Ben as he unhooked his son’s fingers from the handle and made them wave goodbye. ‘Ta-ta, Mum,’ he said for him.

  ‘Ta-ta, Mum,’ said Tom.

  She only had to turn two corners to find a house that needed help.

  The smell was ghastly, and the mud was everywhere—the husband muttering about lawsuits and hydrology reports. ‘It came twenty-four hours earlier than we expected,’ he said to Lucy as she came through the gate. ‘We should have been more prepared.’

  His wife looked at everything she was shown and asked that it be put in the middle of the yard, in the zone that she’d designated for items she’d think about later.

  ‘Can I get you some tea?’ Lucy asked her after an hour or so. ‘Do you have a way to boil this kettle?’ Her own mother’s approach to shock: hot, sweet tea, given often—‘and tell them a doctor said they should’.

  But as the woman shook her head, Lucy realised that the sounds of ripping and moving she could hear were those of the innards of the house being stripped and cleared above and thrown onto a pile of rubbish at the front.

  ‘He said it would come on Wednesday,’ she said. ‘He thought we had another day. I didn’t even have time to clear the kids’ rooms.’ She stared at the muddy plastic container of photo albums she held in her hands—someone had wiped a cursory streak across the grime on one side, through which Lucy could see the same woman in the tight white shine of a wedding gown.

  ‘Throw them away,’ the woman said. ‘I don’t want to remember. In fact, throw it all away. Why would I try to save stuff?’

  She waved her hand at the growing pile on the muddy grass—the yard, its trimmed lawn, its landscaped pool, its topiaried figs: all of the colours that these things should hold had been reset to shades of brown, like a sepia photograph from some battlefield in World War I. A group of surly-looking teenagers stood by the fence, painstakingly rinsing a boxful of little plastic building blocks. Two women in bright gym clothes carried boxes of glasses down from the kitchen to their car, to take away and wash in their own blemish-free kitchens.

  ‘I kept a clean home,’ the woman of the house was saying. ‘I kept it spotless. We were in the local paper once for a story on design. And now look—how could this happen?’ She stared at Lucy. ‘I don’t even know who you are.�
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  An old Valiant turned into the street, honking its horn. On the rear driver-side window was a sign—Free beer, one per worker—and Lucy ran towards the car. Maybe beer instead of tea; she counted the people around her.

  ‘My back’s buggered and I’m not good for much,’ said the elderly man at the wheel, ‘but I thought youse could all do with a cold one.’ It was XXXX and she knew that this particular can of it would taste better than any she’d ever drunk before.

  ‘There are eight of us here,’ Lucy said to his granddaughter, who was dispensing the beers from the boot. ‘And thanks.’

  The girl smiled. ‘Have the army been round yet? I’ve been waiting to see some soldiers.’

  Lucy shook her head, and the girl shut the boot with a slam, rapping it twice: drive on.

  Walking up the stairs to find the woman, Lucy could hear the two owners shouting at each other—about a rug, in the first place, and then the whole awful shambles of it next. She opened one of the beers, wincing at the force of their words. They were into grievances that were decades old, still so ripe for the picking, and the noise boomed, amplified by their emptying world.

  ‘Do you think they’ll be all right?’ she whispered, describing the scene to Ben at the other end of the day as Tom wound through her legs to welcome her home.

  Ben shrugged. ‘It’ll take a while to get through all that mess,’ he said.

  ‘Not their stuff; I mean them. She was so angry about it all.’

  ‘She could have moved things herself if she thought he was wrong.’

  ‘And he could have paid more attention.’ Lucy bent down to pull her gumboots off, tickling Tom as he passed. ‘What would we have done? What would we have taken? We thought we were fine—we were lucky. How would we have known when it was time to go?’

  Ben shrugged again, scooping Tom onto his shoulders to carry him up towards his dinner. ‘It didn’t come, Lu. We were safe. In seventy-four, Mum and I were on the northside, up a hill. I hardly knew it was happening.’

  She stood awhile gazing at the grass of their back lawn. It looked like a colour wheel, changing from thickly green at the top of the rise near the house to the encroaching brown of mud at its boundary.

  Then, setting her shoulders, she pulled up the garage door and scanned the stacks of boxes and containers that would have been lost if the house had been a little lower, a little closer to the river’s reach. It was so gloomy down here in the unlit dusk that these stashed possessions looked like they were already fading out of being.

  It was easy to picture herself in the angry woman’s place—everything coated and gummed up by this foul-smelling mud, and the horrible process of having to decide what to throw out, what to wash, what to salvage.

  As she reached for a box of her own and imagined it mucky, destroyed, Lucy blew out a breath, remembering—again—the ruin of Elsie’s photos.

  I should have tried to clean them. Now that she knew how much of the mud could be washed away, she thought she might have been able to clean off a little jam.

  Out of habit, she flicked the light switch, then remembered the power was off and reached for a lantern. Standing in the middle of the puddle of light and the wide stash of storage, she took stock of what she hadn’t even realised was at stake. There were bulky things about which she had no opinion—bikes and the lawnmower, and stray pieces of furniture for which there was no room upstairs. There were the desultory artefacts of their arrival—tins of paint, boxes of tools, offcuts of wood. There were boxes of documents—the receipts and justifications of old tax returns, programs for concerts and gigs spanning more than two decades, the glossy squares from the years when people still printed photographs. And then there were the boxes of letters and postcards.

  She lifted the lid from one of these and saw a postcard of the Sydney Harbour Bridge half-built, one arm of its arch reaching up into space and a man perched, precarious, in the box of its end. She’d seen it in an exhibition with her mum, who’d sent the card a week or so later, saying how lovely the morning had been. It was a long time since they’d done something together like that, and that seemed suddenly sad.

  A generic beach shot, complete with scalloped edge, slipped from the pile and Lucy sat back on her haunches. It was a postcard from her old friend Astrid.

  Lucy, you won’t believe this! I’m working in a café by the beach. This woman walks in—I swear it’s you, but you in twenty years. Red hair—still crazy curly red—and bright red glasses; your eyes are going, love. She’s wearing a pink shirt you’d like—nice Chinese collar. I had to make the owner take her order—didn’t know what I’d say. And what if she’d ordered soy? Don’t you take up soy in twenty years. You looked great, though. You looked happy. I like your glasses. You looked well.

  And then a scrawl and lots of kisses. As if Astrid had seen her future. She checked the postmark: Sydney, 4 February 1991.

  Almost twenty years ago.

  And in a café by a beach: somewhere in the world, she hoped that’s where one of her vardøger was.

  She slid the postcard back among the rest and sighed. She hadn’t been in touch with Astrid for years, although a Christmas card from Astrid’s mother, Linnea, always found her, no matter where she was.

  Crouched beside the box, Lucy read through messages at random—so many moments, her own and other people’s—until Ben came down to tell her Tom was ready for bed.

  She heaped handfuls of letters and postcards into her lap and sat there, cradling them. There was something mesmerising about these rectangles of life: something mesmerising about how easily they might have been lost; something mesmerising about their recovery.

  ‘How could I have let all this go?’

  Ben pulled her to her feet and into a hug. ‘You didn’t. We lugged them with us everywhere we went. Here they are. Safe and dry.’ He clicked the lid onto one of the containers. ‘Come upstairs, Lu; you’ve had a long day. Probably not the greatest time to open Pandora’s box. Come on, put it away. Tom’s waiting for you. Come up and I’ll get you a drink.’

  Leaning against the stack of boxes, Lucy looked out at the clear night sky. ‘It looks as if it had never rained at all,’ she said. ‘What are they going to do now, all those people?’

  ‘Find out if they have insurance. Go and stay with friends. Wait for builders.’ Ben shrugged. ‘I’ll tell Tom you’re coming,’ he said as he turned towards the door.

  An aeroplane tracked north across the sky, heading for the airport with its lights flashing. ‘One house I went to already had loads of people helping,’ Lucy said. Through the open garage door she watched the plane’s descent. ‘The guy had all the notes from his PhD spread out across the lawn like a carpet. I saw him again when I was walking home. He was bundling them up and stuffing them in the bin.’

  Ben was waiting, his hand out. ‘If it were me, I’d chuck the lot,’ he said. ‘Some things you just can’t save—like that woman said about her wedding photos.’

  Which wasn’t quite how Lucy had heard it.

  She pulled a sheet of paper from the closest box, glanced at the messy writing and smiled. Ferdi Klim—the bloke she’d left before she met Ben. She scanned the first few lines. Hang on: who’d left whom? She shook her head: it didn’t matter. He always liked to have the last word.

  She laid the sheet on the floor and began to fold it—in half, and then two wings, and then some shaping: a crude paper plane. ‘Ferdi Klim,’ she said aloud, aiming the plane through the wide open door and sending it soaring. It caught an impossible draught and sailed on towards the street.

  Off you go, then; off you go. Still, he did have the best name—they’d joked that they should be a double act, Kiss and Klim. It had been a bit too much circus.

  Then: one giant leap, thought Lucy, and she’d leapt free. On her own in the world; out late in pubs with ice cubes to keep herself cool.

  She smiled, restacking the boxes then pulling the tilt-door and taking the stairs two at a time. She could trace a dire
ct line from that leap to here—and to Tom in his cot, ready to be cuddled and sung to.

  Only he’d already gone to sleep.

  She leaned forward, resting her hand on his tummy. Here we are. Safe and dry. Just us three. The words came automatically—but safe and dry? Perhaps that was just an accident of luck.

  Waiting for catastrophes was exhausting. She dipped her head and kissed her sleeping boy.

  In the bathroom, she washed her face in the tepid temperature of no hot water system. She’d send a card to Elsie’s daughter. She’d confess about the photos; she’d let Elsie know that her house was OK.

  The real Elsie, she thought, stretching her tired arms above her head and flexing her shoulders. Not the one she liked to think came by.

  ‘All those places, all those yards,’ she said to Ben as they ate their candlelit dinner. ‘I kept imagining they were ours, strangers walking in and helping us.’

  Reaching across the table, Ben cupped his hands around Lucy’s, as if to spring their pressure. ‘I worked it out—those holes drilled into the floorboards? Water in; water out. They must have drained the house in seventy-four.’

  That would be Elsie, thought Lucy. Always prepared.

  ‘I heard more about Elsie today.’ She wiped her last piece of bread around her dish. ‘One of the other volunteers lived round here for years—she said Elsie’s husband died before the last flood. She’d lived alone here all that time—decades—her kids all grown up too. I imagined family here, all the time, but it was really Elsie on her own.’

  ‘My investigative reporter.’ Ben laughed. ‘Does it make you feel better to know?’

  ‘Better?’ Lucy frowned. ‘I don’t know. I never thought of her being alone.’

  Later, under a lukewarm shower with the plug in and water pooling around her feet, Lucy scrubbed at her fingernails, pretending the shower’s water was sweet, fresh rain. She felt the puddle rising up and over her feet, around her ankles, her shins, and up towards her knees. I would have stood here and watched it come. I would have stood in my house and felt it rise. She ran the scrubbing brush back and forward across her fingernails. Tom’s things, we’d have kept those safe. And documents, important things. Everything else, it’s just stuff. Imagining the bath overflowing, the bathroom filling like a giant aquarium—toothbrushes and make-up tubes floating across the surface; toilet rolls and cotton wool thickening and sinking.