by Tabitha Bird
I asked the ocean to help me fix everything. To help it all be okay.
Oh! What if …? No, it can’t be. I have to get outside and see what our house looks like from out there.
Down the hallway we go, jam jar in one of my hands, Frog under the other arm. She won’t want to miss this adventure. I stay close to the walls so that if someone stood at the top of the hall, their big shadow coming down, maybe they wouldn’t see me.
With each step, I hold my breath. It’s silly. The air going in and out of me won’t wake Daddy, but it might be safer to only take little sips of air.
In the kitchen, I look around. Lemon benchtops with blue flower paper all over the walls, like a sun in a happy sky. I stuff my pockets with cheese slices and crackers from the cupboard because they’re our favourite. And probably the reason Frog is so plump.
My gumboots are still at the back door: red and brave or yellow and fabulous. I choose red ones today. Placing Frog and the jam jar on the ground, I put the boots on. Our new house has a deck out the back now, too.
The air outside makes me stop. The sting of cold around us. I should have put a jumper on Frog and brought a blanket. Blankets are good because if anyone is rough you have all this soft stuff around you, like bubble wrap, and you won’t get hurt. I never have a blanket when I need one.
With the jam jar still in my hand, I race around to the front of the house.
‘Froggie, look – it even has a white picket fence and those butterfly stairs and the yellow front door!’ It is exactly the same as the old Queenslander. I keep the jam jar close to me and rub Froggie’s belly. ‘Ocean, you are going to help!’
I look across at the neighbours’ homes and they are still the same. We walk to the end of the street just to check. The street is still Seagrove Way. We are still on the same street in Boonah. It’s only our house that’s new. The happy inside me fills me from my toes all the way to the tops of my ears. A home by the beach! Only, I guess it’s not really by the beach.
‘Wait a minute, Froggie.’ She looks up at me. ‘There’s an ocean in my garden!’
I walk into the backyard like Daddy. Stomp. Stomp. Frog runs behind me, her legs so little even though Chihuahuas think they are huge.
Right before I get close to the small rocks around the edge of the garden under the mango tree, I stop. Close my eyes. Please be there, blue glow. I’ll be good for a thousand years. Please.
My eyes snap open. It’s an ordinary mango tree with the ratty plants around it. No glowing anywhere.
Where is it? What did I do wrong today? I think about the ocean-garden last night. About dropping the jam jar and the water dribbling down the tree trunk … Oh! What if you have to water the garden from the jam jar? I race back inside to the kitchen tap, Frog following. Carefully, I fill the jar.
Back outside, Froggie watches as I pour water all around the mango tree.
I step back. I wonder if it matters that the water isn’t the same as what was in the jam jar last night? Fingers crossed.
It’s the smell I notice first, and then I can taste it on my lips. Salt. Grammy’s beach day and the sun drying the sea on our skin.
‘Smell that, Frog?’ She snuffles around with her nose and that’s when I see the sand. Phew, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t the same water. But I’m going to have to keep this jam jar safe.
The sand between my fingers is soft like icing sugar. Frog Dog digs, sand flicking up all over her fur. Shells and clumps of seaweed are scattered right to the edge of the garden. Crabs scurry about the place digging holes and making tiny sand balls that remind me of when the tide went out at the beach with Grammy and we saw soldier crabs make patterns from their digging. None of them crawl over the little rocks around the edge. They are happy to stay inside the ocean-garden.
My own beach and a new house: Lottie is going to love this. Thank you, thank you, Ocean! I bury my jam jar beside the mango tree to keep it safe and run inside to wake my sister up.
Chapter Nine
1990
Willa Waters, aged 33
It’s a smell that wakes me early the morning after Lottie’s call, elbowing its way into my fitful sleep. It reminds me of the sugary aroma of jam drops baking in Grammy’s oven.
My sleep was too thin; the sorrow of last night has left me washed up and wrung out on the shores of morning. Lottie’s name pulses in my head.
Sebastian squeals. I can hear him banging around the kitchen, telling Eli to ‘Gib me bikkies or I bonk your head.’ He’s working up his own personal thunderstorm about it.
I peer at the clock. 6.22 am. Too-early o’clock. Too-silly o’clock. Sam has already left for work even though it’s a Saturday. He’s trying to make a go of his own architecture business, and if a client wants to meet on the weekend he has to oblige. Hopefully he’ll return before lunch. There’s a note from him saying he called my mother. His exact words are, Raised the dragon from her sleep, and she hasn’t heard from Lottie. Sorry, Dragon will call later. Sam has underlined the word sorry and added to the end, Tried to tell your mother not to call. Beside me in the bed is the empty space of him, leaving me nothing to anchor my day to.
The smell of jam drops is stronger now, as if the air awoke this morning and decided to dress itself in long-ago.
As Eli climbs on my bed, there’s a hint of salt breeze, the scent of sea water sprayed off the froth of waves. I wrinkle my nose.
‘The mailman came and left a big box on our doorstep, Mummy. Wake up. Look!’ He points at the jar on my bedside chair with its strawberry jam label peeling off, liquid dribbling down the glass, a watery stain forming on the linen.
‘What? It’s early Saturday morning. You didn’t open the –’
‘I didn’t open the door till he’d gone. Promise!’
I stare at the jar. It can’t be what I think it is. There is sand around the jar now, and a single cone-shaped shell. And then another smell. Oil paints. An urge to knock the jar to the floor surges through me, but I’d frighten Eli. There are rules for keeping things in order. Blot clean with vinegar solution. Don’t rub, or you may damage the fabric. Fold yourself and put your heart away.
Eli pulls the covers off me and scoots up closer on the bed. There he is: in snorkels, with his pyjama pants tucked into flippers.
He laughs. ‘Grammy sent these in the mail. There’s a word written under my flipper.’ He sticks his flippered foot in my face.
I purse my lips. I bet I look like my mother when I do that. Grammy’s word of the day is written in black marker. Deracinate (verb): To uproot someone from their natural environment. I think Grammy and I need to talk.
Inside me, the strangest thing happens. A giddy childhood thing that doesn’t belong, and when I speak my voice becomes bubbly. ‘Why are you wearing the flippers now, though?’
‘’Cause look what was stuck on the box.’ He pushes a postcard in my face. Something about planting. Something else. I push it away.
Another cone shell appears beside the first one and as the water drips onto the floor I notice that sand now covers the entire seat of my chair.
I sit up.
‘Eli, did you dribble water from this jar on my chair?’
‘Uh-huh, but I cleaned up the water we splashed on the kitchen floors.’
‘What? Take that jar outside!’ I shouldn’t snap at him. He doesn’t understand what that jar means to me. ‘Sorry, I … I’m sorry. The jar. It’s …’ I fumble my apology.
‘But, Mummy?’ Eli pouts.
‘Please, honey. Take the jar out and get those flippers off. You’ll trip over.’ A thudding begins in my head and I grip the bedsheets. This isn’t happening. I’ve talked about this over and over in counselling. The jar, the ocean with its beach, it’s all a story I made up.
The smell around me changes again. Boats on the dam and fish and chips. Not just any dam: the one near my childhood home. The chips are fat and drip with gravy from Sunday evenings, when my mother couldn’t be bothered cooking and we got
takeaway from MacBean’s Diner. We were an ordinary family, if only for a moment. Finally, there’s a smell of overripe mangos that reminds me of climbing.
Eli takes the flippers off, snorkel mask now hanging about his neck. He sits on the end of my bed, sniffing. ‘Smells like farms. Do you know carrots are root vegetables? Who discovered we could eat roots? Onions are root vegetables, too, but they taste disgusting and make your eyes cry. Why do we eat onions?’
Eli’s right about the smells. No matter which way I turn my head, the starch and bleach of my house fades further into the background. The scent of ripened earth reminds me of carrots carefully stitched into fertile soil. Every winter the carrot farms in Boonah opened, inviting the public to pick the leftover produce.
Grammy bent over, her huge floppy hat shading all of her.
‘They still taste like carrots. Who cares how they look?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t it be boring if we all looked the same? Fancy calling them ugly vegetables.’
Lottie won the game to find the most peculiar-looking carrot. Hers had a fat top and two skinny legs so we called it Wrinkly Carrot Man.
‘Can we visit a farm one day? Please say yes. Seb can stick carrots up his nose.’
Eli takes pens from my bedside table and pushes them up each nostril, pretending to be Seb. The school wants to put Eli a year ahead; if they could only see him now. Eli’s right, though: Sebastian would stick carrots up his nose. Eli’s demonstration makes me loosen my bedsheet grip.
‘Well, maybe we could visit a farm with Grammy one day.’
‘Goodie!’ Eli runs out my door and down the hall. Something falls from the shelf in the kitchen and I hear Sebastian, my mini drum kit, all bang and clang from the moment he’s awake – from the moment he was born, really.
‘Noooo – mine! It Seb’s.’
Uproar and trampling. Feet pound back to my bedroom.
Eli’s hands reach under the blanket and grip mine, trying to heave me out. ‘Mummy, he’s all wet and he’s trying to eat shells!’
‘What shells?’
‘I don’t know. He found them next to the puddles of water.’ The thudding in my head becomes an ache behind my eyes. Lying back on the bed, I pull the covers high. Cocoon me, please.
He waves the postcard at me again. ‘We have to talk about this. Can you grow oceans? Do you know that seventy per cent of the earth is covered in water? I read that. What is a spe … a species? Scientists haven’t discovered them all yet. Can we send Seb to be discovered?’
I try to ignore him as small feet plod into my room. Sebastian sobs incoherent things with his thumb in his mouth, whale-print patchwork blanket in his other hand. Pulling my own blankets back completely, I rise with my boy on my hip. His pyjama pants are saturated, so I take them off him. His blanket is wet, too, but I haven’t the energy for the fight it would take to get it off him. Oddly, he hasn’t wet his nappy. He runs off before I can get fresh pants on him.
I walk barefoot into the kitchen, and the cold stings my feet. A sensation that is strangely grounding. I look down at the white tiles, which are brazenly clinical. My mother would say, ‘Clean enough to eat off,’ and she’d be proud.
The tiles aren’t only cold, though; they are wet in places, and sandy. Puddles of water and a shell here and there. Seb clomps through the puddles collecting the shells. I pull them out of his hands and use wads of paper towels to wipe him down. He has sand on his feet and all over his legs.
Eli follows on my heels.
Water is all over the dining-room floor, too, so I grab a bath towel and sop it up. The living-room floor is also wet. Parts of my rug, too, and there are splotches on the couch. Everywhere the water has dried there are little piles of sand and more shells. ‘What the heck, Eli?’
He looks about. ‘Tried to clean it. There was lots of water. It just kept coming out of the jar and more and more and –’ He spreads his arms wide.
‘What about the sand and the shells?’
He shrugs.
‘Okay, okay. Stay out of the living room.’ I need a strong cup of tea before I mop.
Eli follows me back into the kitchen. ‘Are we gardening today? Can you really plant oceans?’
‘No!’
His face drops.
‘Sorry. Honey …’ I don’t know what to say, so I ruffle his hair. How can I explain to him that I simply can’t plant anything that might take me back to a time I’ve fought so hard to forget?
I wrangle Sebastian into his highchair and Eli slumps into his own chair at the table. ‘But why not? Why can’t you plant oceans? If you could, would they make for superior infreestructure?’ He pauses, and because he’s uniquely my six-year-old, he says, ‘I read a book about building. What’s infreestructure?’
‘Eli, please!’ I grab the postcard he’s been holding all this time, ignoring the way my fingers tingle. ‘You plant an ocean and terrible things happen.’ With force, I throw the postcard in the bin.
I place a bowl of cereal in front of him as he mutters about it not being nice to throw people’s things in the garbage. He fishes the postcard out and I don’t stop him. I don’t want to touch that thing again.
‘Where on earth are you reading about infrastructure and oceans?’ If he’s borrowing books about oceans, then perhaps libraries are evil places after all. Books like that will stretch his mind, and then what will ever hold the boy in place? I tell Eli not to ask any more questions before 7 am and send him back to the table, then muster up something responsible to feed Sebastian. Something he might not paste through his hair. I decide on toast.
When I return to the table, Eli is shovelling spoonfuls of Weet-Bix into his mouth. One shoe is off and his underpants are on his head.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Eating breakfast.’ He blinks.
Right.
I try to get my bearings. The fridge door is opened. Milk drips down my stainless-steel benchtops. There’s more sand where the water has dried. The air still smells of salt and jam drops.
My mind stops mid-turn.
‘Did we bake jam drop biscuits?’ I ask Eli.
He stares at me. ‘No. But I want to. Can we –’
‘No. No baking in my house!’
I try to ignore the way Eli’s face falls. I cut Sebastian’s toast into triangles to avoid a repeat of the fit he had yesterday, when I cut his toast into squares.
‘Wanna eat bikkies!’ Sebastian bangs his fists. It doesn’t take him long to grab his brother’s bowl and shower the table with milk. I pull him out of the highchair and put him on the floor so I can clean the mess. Seb paints butter from the toast all through his hair and over his blanket. I’m going to have to bathe them both.
Eli wrinkles his face. ‘Aww, stop being gross – Seb is grossing me out!’ Eli takes a spoonful of spilt cereal and aims it at his brother. The cereal hits Seb and he cries.
I try to calm myself. Today will be twenty-four hours long. Twenty. Four. Hours.
Seb bangs his hands on the floor. ‘Mumma, all done!’
Yes, me too. Smells of jam drops that don’t belong in this house. There’s a tug on my mind. Something I’ve long pushed down about wet carpets and two little girls, but I can’t place the memory. I need to get outside. Breathe and think.
‘What are we doing?’ Eli folds his arms. My mother says he looks like me when he does that. She can suck a lemon.
‘Come on. We’re eating on the front patio. Something different.’ The walls of my house seem to tighten around me as I grab robes for the boys and blankets for our knees. I put Seb in his robe and hand Eli his. Gathering a fresh bowl of Weet-Bix for Eli and another piece of toast for Sebastian, I head out the front door onto the patio, where I almost trip over the now empty cardboard box.
The address label reads: 21 Graves Place, Brisbane North, 1990. That is my address, but 1990 is not Brisbane North’s postcode. Wait – those numbers are referring to the year. This year.
I race back inside, dumping the boys’ bre
akfast on the kitchen table on the way through. I search my bedside drawer. The post office collection slip still sits on top of the pile of letters Sam wrote when we were teenagers. I rummage to the bottom. There it is. The postcard. One ocean: plant in the backyard.
Exactly the same as the one Eli was waving in my face, only mine has little fingermarks all over it and torn edges from years of handling. I told Dr Williams that I wrote this postcard. I must have, right? A little girl playing a game about a strange box arriving? In my game the jar of water grew an ocean and then … What did the ocean do then? I dismiss the question.
Eli follows me into the bedroom. Again, there is a tug on my mind, and this time the memory is harder to push away.
It was the night I’d pretended a jam jar arrived. That’s all it was: pretence, surely. Daddy stood under the stars with me. Something happened and I ran inside. There was a fight between my parents. The house lights were out. I remember water from the jar sloshing all through the house.
I shove everything back into my bedside drawer. ‘Eli, you said you spilt water all through our house from the jam jar, right?’
He grins sheepishly, and I march out of the room with him behind me.
The box is still at the front door with sand all around it. Sebastian climbs inside.
‘Pirates!’ he says, holding up a shell.
Eli gathers his cereal from the table where I left it and joins us on the patio, stepping past his brother. ‘We never eat outside. It’s not the proper thing,’ he says.
‘That’s why it’s different.’ I pretend this is some little game we are playing.
‘I don’t like different. It’s not right.’
‘Do you suppose the Different Police will get you?’ I try to joke.
He stares at me a moment, and I want to tell him how sorry I am for being snappy and how I wish the stars were out and the moon was full and friendly. But there’s a sudden prick of tears that I hold back, and instead I touch a finger to the tip of his nose.
Eli slumps into a patio chair and picks up his spoon.