Riptides

by Kirsten Alexander

  ‘Okay, enough,’ he says, as I put the phone down. ‘I need a hand. Anything we want to save has to come upstairs right now.’

  ‘You need string for that?’ Forever the boy scout.

  ‘C’mon, we don’t have much time.’

  ‘One more call.’

  After Lou and I agree we’ll meet as soon as the rain lets up, I work with Mark to move our belongings from one floor to another. We haul boxes of old books and uni assignments, Mark’s home-brewing supplies, and clothes in mothballs that Sarah has outgrown and the twins don’t yet need. Mark lugs the lawnmower up the muddy side path to the shelter of the back porch.

  We listen to the news and watch large puddles joining up on the lawn. Our garden starts to resemble the Japanese rice paddies you see in documentaries, but in colour.

  ‘Do we know anyone with a powerboat?’ Mark asks, standing barefoot near the back door, a glass of ice water in his hand. ‘I might need to get to work.’

  ‘You’d leave us in a flooding house to go to work?’

  He gestures for me to follow him. We walk through the living room, around the sprawling cushions-and-blanket cubbyhouse Sarah and the twins are building.

  ‘Down there, past the Martins’ place,’ he says, once we’re on the veranda. I smell his sweaty armpit as he lifts his hand to point. ‘See that white pole? That marks the highest level the water reached during the 1893 flood. The worst flood Brisbane’s had. So even if it’s as bad as that, it’ll only get partway up our stairs. We’ll be fine.’

  I scan our street. ‘Our downstairs floor is higher than all the other houses.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ He glares at the pole as though it’s somehow responsible for this.

  Despite my certainty that Mark is exaggerating, the rain doesn’t stop. It grows heavier. When he tells me Lou’s house is going under, I feel rattled for the first time.

  ‘They’re alone,’ I say. Andrew is forever travelling to Bougainville, coming home to present Lou with more unwanted net bags, tins of cocoa, tales from the mine, another ugly wooden mask for their walls. He’s gone for weeks at a time.

  ‘Tell her I’m on my way,’ Mark says.

  I rush to the phone.

  I’m a strong swimmer, stronger than Mark, and know I could help bring Lou and her kids here. First place in freestyle at school carnivals, always a ribbon in backstroke and butterfly. The current is calling to me as a challenge and I’m itching to pit myself against it, to steel my muscles and swim hard. But Mark says if we both leave the house the kids will try to follow or hurl themselves into what Sarah is calling our backyard sea. I know he’s right. So I stand in our front doorway and watch Mark walk down our steep driveway, shirtless, head bowed against the rain, bare toes gripping the concrete, his beige shorts speckled by water then darkening to brown. He raises one arm as a wave, without looking back.

  I feel a surge of love, and fierce pride. Why don’t I feel like this when he goes to work? Some people think journalists are heroic. I’ve never thought that. But now, seeing my brawny husband calmly set forth to rescue our neighbours, I imagine myself running outside and throwing my arms around him, as if he were boarding a plane for a war zone. Instead, I watch. I worry that Lou won’t think to bring useful things with her. I should have sent Mark with a list. A list in a plastic bag. Woof frets by my side, unnerved at being left behind but too scared to venture into the swill. We jog upstairs to continue watching from the veranda.

  Mark is knee-deep within minutes, staying close to the edge of the water, pushing through even that with effort. He wipes wet hair from his forehead. Mark has a thick, curly mane, forever bleached by the sun. I spent countless hours in my teens lying in the backyard with lemon juice coating my own hair, trying for a blonde like that. My skin tanned, leaving satisfying triangles of white where my bikini covered it, but my hair stayed black. Even now, the brightest summer sun can’t shift the darkness.

  I stand with my hands on my hips and look over at Lou’s house, where she’s gathered her three kids by the front door, painted a glossy mission brown a month ago. The rain falls at an angle so from the knees up I’m sheltered by the roof, while my feet are shiny wet. In the living room behind me, under the slung blanket, Sarah presses the dome-shaped plastic popper on a board game, calling out the number that shows on the dice after each clack. The twins giggle.

  Mark continues to stride forward, pushed and yanked, goaded by a current that strengthens before my eyes. The right choice, I think, to keep his feet on the ground as long as possible. On his side of the road, the water is surging towards Lou’s house, but there’s a strange current forming on the other side, heading in the opposite direction. A rip, in floodwater. I didn’t think that was possible. I hope they see it.

  Lou is wearing a sleeveless orange jersey dress I borrowed once, when it was new. She’s top-heavy, full of milk, and the dress strains across her chest. She rests Jemima above her hip, as the baby, in only a cloth nappy, squirms to be free. Joe holds his treasured Paddington Bear in one hand, and a scrunch of Lou’s hem in the other. Daniel, eleven months older than Joe, stands beside a cardboard box doubtless crammed with photographs and the kids’ baby books. I wave at Lou and she waves back.

  Mark swims the last thirty feet on a diagonal to navigate the current, keeping his head above the fast-flowing water, avoiding floating branches and furniture sucked out of smashed windows. He pulls himself up onto what still shows of Lou’s railway sleeper path, tan bark and leaves sticking to his back. She steps forward, and wraps her free arm around him. Mark places one hand on Jemima’s back as he talks to Lou.

  After a minute, he disappears into the garage and comes out with Andrew’s surfboard, which he slides into the water, urging Daniel and Joe to straddle the board while he stops it with his foot from taking flight. He points at the box and says something. Lou runs inside the house and returns with a black garbage bag, into which she places the cardboard box. That makes me smile because it’s what I would do, and because I know Mark not only wants to rescue Lou, he wants to do it well.

  Lou lifts the plastic-wrapped box onto Mark’s shoulder, where he balances it with one arm. Then she stands beside the board with Jemima held so high on her chest that the baby’s top half flops onto her mother’s shoulderblades as though she’s about to go headfirst down a slide. Mark stands on the other side of the board, his free arm across it, and they walk forward into the wild floodwater, the hammering rain. When the muddy flow rises above Lou’s chest, she puts Jemima on the surfboard, nestling her in front of Joe. Mark has seen the rip, which would pull them towards the football fields, and steers the board the way one would a ship, adjusting and readjusting to stay on course.

  I stay fixed to my wet spot, until they are where our front garden used to be, which is close enough for me to see the fear on Daniel’s face, the determination on Mark’s, to hear Lou shout, ‘Almost there.’ I run inside, grab a stack of towels and barrel down the stairs. Sarah and the twins run down with me, despite me telling them to stay where they are.

  I open the door to a gush of wind and rain, shouts of relief. As Lou’s children tumble inside, sliding on the glazed tiles, pushing Woof away as he jumps about and licks their faces, Mark places the surfboard against the wall and drops the box onto the closest stair. I hold his face in my hands and give him a kiss, Lou a hug, and then strip the children, creating a mound of sodden clothing in the entryway. Once the children are wrapped in towels and have scuttled upstairs together, and Lou has gone to our bedroom to change – ‘Anything you want,’ I say – I search for Mark. He’s standing at the kitchen sink, guzzling water.

  ‘Go have the first shower. The kids can wait.’ I pick twigs off his back.

  ‘Not done yet. Everything they own is in that house.’

  This time I go, too, despite Mark and Lou’s objections, which are half-hearted at best. They both know I can outlast anyone in the water.

  ‘But if it gets too dangerous, turn around. They’re just thi
ngs,’ Lou says. She holds me and whispers, ‘Thank you, friend.’

  The flood is a living beast now, large and throbbing, a serpent. It could dumbly drown us in an instant, and while logic says that Mark and I should stay inside with our children and tell Lou that whatever she loses can be replaced, I feel a shiver of pleasure as I put my feet in the strong flow. With Mark behind me, I wade in slowly, assessing the currents, then feel the tug of the water and think, go on, try me. Like Mark, I don’t look back.

  Together, we make two trips to retrieve bags of clothing and records, a box of paperwork and a typewriter, treasures from the kitchen and bedroom, a sack of masks.

  ‘Why does he collect these?’ I ask Mark. ‘Uglier than Blue Poles.’

  ‘And worth less.’

  The second time we head back, the water is higher and the journey more arduous. I am panting when we return to our house, excited, unconscionably pleased with myself.

  ‘That’s it,’ Mark says as he drops a heavy plastic bag onto the kitchen floor. ‘No more.’ I have one more trip left in me but I can see he doesn’t, so I agree.

  While we’ve ferried her belongings to our house, Lou has allowed the kids to run riot. The living room is a chaotic mess, but for once I don’t care. All six kids seem happy – a miracle in its own right – and I can see from the empty bags of chips and browning apple cores that they’ve eaten. Woof lies on the carpet, gnawing a wet branch into splinters. Lou isn’t in the room. She’s in the kitchen, on the phone, wearing one of my kaftans.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she says to us once she’s done speaking with her mother. ‘You’re my heroes.’

  Once Mark and I are in dry clothes, the children in pyjamas, we three sit on the couch, drink cold beer and eat potato salad and ham. There’s enough barbecue food for a week. We watch lightning crackle across the leaden sky, hear thunder rumble and boom. We flick through magazines, scan Friday’s newspaper for anything interesting we might have missed. The rain has softened, but none of us trusts it to stay that way. Mark urges Lou to stop checking what is left of her house. ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ he reasons. I top up Lou’s glass, grimace in sympathy, then flop back and rest my head on Mark’s shoulder. Jemima and the twins are in the playpen in front of us; Sarah, Daniel and Joe muddle through a sloppy, argumentative game of Go Fish.

  Despite the drama, I could fall asleep here on the couch. Last night was punctured by the yipping of our neighbour’s terrier, Jock, and by remembrance of tasks undone, my restless body, children. The twins had alternated their cries for attention as if on a secret schedule. In one of the quiet hours, Sarah climbed into bed beside me – apple-shampoo-scented hair, small toenails scratching my leg – and whispered fearful questions that kept coming as we plodded back to her room: How do people find each other in Heaven? Do ghosts get hungry? And her questions – which I couldn’t answer in a way that satisfied either of us – rolled in my head as I drifted in and out of sleep until the storm woke me at five, followed by the gushing overflow of water from the leaf-clogged gutter onto our window ledge.

  I don’t sleep, though, because the phone rings nonstop: Gavin Martin from number sixteen says they’ve made it to his sister’s house; Caroline from twenty-two asks if we’ve seen her cat; Dad tells us to switch off appliances so they don’t short. There are many variations on the question ‘Mark around?’, asked with the assumption he’ll know something they don’t.

  It’s true that Mark has been in touch with his news mates, and keeps the TV and radio blaring so he doesn’t miss any details of the escalating horrors: whole suburbs are without electricity; clean drinking water is running out; elderly people are trapped in their homes, alone; a child drowned when the torrent pulled her from her father’s arms. Occasionally we hear upbeat news. On TV we watch two burly men in a dinghy rescue a fretful terrier from a rooftop, and another, who looks like Santa in a blue singlet, hand out cans of beer from his boat with shouts of ‘we’ll be right’.

  ‘You battening down the hatches?’ Charlie’s voice echoes and lags across the long-distance line. ‘I met a guy who’s sailing from Perth to the Philippines. Says there’s a cyclone headed your way, a real roof-lifter.’

  ‘We’re past that. The cyclone’s been and gone. The whole city is flooded. They’re using schools and churches as evacuation centres. You should see it, Charlie. There are cars floating down our street.’ Through our kitchen window I watch water rushing from our backyard towards the side of the house, as if chased. Mark had predicted that the slope of our block would create this river to the road, sparing us from a sodden upstairs.

  ‘Whoa. It was a couple of days ago I talked to him so, yeah, old news it seems. I’ve been meaning to call but the restaurant’s crazy busy. People coming through before they head to Goa for Shigmo.’

  ‘What? Never mind. The news says the river’s broken its banks, and we’re –’

  ‘Broken its banks?’ I can see him grinning, bare feet on a table, around his neck a thin strip of leather anchored by a shark’s tooth. ‘My sister the weather girl.’

  ‘It isn’t funny.’

  ‘Poetic turn of phrase.’ He pauses; smoking, I’d guess.

  ‘You should call Dad, too, Charlie. He’s alone.’

  ‘Isn’t he with you guys for your Australia Day shindig?’

  ‘He can’t get here. It’s flooding. Are you listening?’

  ‘Sure I’m listening.’

  ‘Anyway, he wouldn’t want to come here. He’s busy with his . . . I don’t know, chickens or something.’ Mark walks into the room to fetch another longneck from the fridge. I click my fingers to get his attention, then point outside. ‘But he’s better off at his farm. It’s at the top of a hill.’

  Mark assesses the backyard water situation. He nods at the phone.

  ‘Charlie,’ I say.

  ‘So, I don’t have the readies to call Dad as well. But tell him hi. And hey, leave a message for me at the post office if there are developments, weather-wise.’

  ‘Wait, don’t go yet. I haven’t heard from you in weeks. Are you all right? Is everything –?’

  ‘I’m good, restaurant’s good, everything’s good.’

  ‘When are you coming back, Charlie? Say you’ll be here before Christmas, please.’

  He sighs.

  ‘You promised not to miss another one.’

  ‘I’ll be there. Early December, most likely, but for a month max. I don’t see why it’s so important for me to be part of the carnival though.’

  ‘You’re family. Anyway, Dad’s upset you’ve been away so long.’

  ‘We both know upset is not a word Dad would ever use.’

  ‘The kids barely remember you.’

  ‘Low blow, Abby.’

  ‘So you’ll definitely be here.’ At the top of the back door, rainwater has gathered into thick threads that are leaking down onto the towel.

  ‘Almost totally definite.’

  ‘Charlie, you’re killing me.’

  He laughs. ‘I’ll be there. Enough with the guilt trip. Stay dry.’

  I return to the living room and tell Mark about the leak. While he goes to check it, I recite my conversation with Charlie for Lou. I miss him.

  She shares a story about her younger brother – a playboy pilot who shuttles holidaymakers between Cairns and islands in the Great Barrier Reef. ‘Hate to think what goes on in that cockpit. He’d do anything for a screw. Probably lets the wives fly the plane.’ She picks up her glass and puts her free hand on my thigh. ‘Take a squiz down the road and tell me if my house is fully under. Wait, don’t. You have more beer, don’t you?’

  I smile. ‘Plenty.’

  ‘Okay, let’s have another one.’ She pauses. ‘But then I need to know.’

  Mark is on the phone, the twins are napping, Sarah is watching Mr Squiggle. Lou and I sit together, spent. I try to think of tasks, but there’s truly nothing to do. That’s the thing about floods. You move your belongings, help your friends if you
can, and then you wait. And wait. Wait to see what will survive, what’s changed, what’s destroyed.

  Our power’s gone out, so I can’t run the washing machine, but the linen cupboard would benefit from attention. Perhaps I can work on folding the troublesome fitted sheets that look like cotton boulders no matter how I tackle them. That would be something.

  I turn to ask Lou what she thinks and see she’s crying without sound. Tear trails mark her face, and her chin has scrunched up into a hill of dimples and pores.

  ‘Oh, Lou.’ I reach for her hand and hold it in mine. Our skin, tacky from the heat, melds. ‘It’ll be okay. We’ll fix your house. And you can stay here as long as you need to.’

  She wails. Mark comes into the living room, sits on the other side of Lou and puts his arm around her – warm and hairy from the elbow down, powder-dry white cotton above – on top of mine. I smell his musky deodorant, notice that he’s shaved. He’s antsy. I can see from his face he’s as frustrated as I am by being trapped here.

  ‘Did you find someone with a boat?’ I ask.

  ‘Not yet.’ He pats Lou’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. The rain will stop before the end of the week.’

  Lou’s wail rises.

  ‘The end of the week?’ I glare at him. He mouths, ‘What?’

  Lou will not be soothed. She sobs loudly, lists things that will have been destroyed by the water – the dining table given to her by her grandmother, the kids’ beds. ‘The car!’ She shrieks at the realisation. I murmur vague reassurances.

  ‘How about you lie down for a while?’ Mark says. ‘Get some rest.’

  She takes a jerky breath. ‘Okay, yeah.’

  He stands, helps Lou up, and walks her down the hallway.

  Mark is working on a story about the Whiskey Au Go Go. He was convinced, when the nightclub was firebombed in March last year, killing fifteen people, that the case against the two men arrested was shaky and, after seeing the way they reacted at their trial in October, he’s sure they’re innocent. Mark has hushed, urgent phone conversations with his producer, and disappears for hours to interview sources. When he tells me about his story he jigs his knee. Last week he told me he’s convinced that the police fabricated evidence against Finch and Stuart.