by Tabitha Bird
Seb is still crouching inside the cardboard box, rocking like he is at sea. At the top of his voice he starts singing his own version of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’. The song adds to the roar in my head.
‘Oceans!’ Eli says and runs inside. I should follow and see what he’s up to, but I need a moment.
The chill of the air conjures ghosts that hang from our breath. Soon, I will have to take the boys back inside. Back to what? Back to jam drop smells and sand? To an ocean that wants planting?
I clutch my tea too tightly, reminding myself of the life I’ve made, a thing well sterilised, sorted and regularly culled. A house far, far away from where I grew up.
I want to be a good mother, and ignoring my past is the best way to go about that. I try not to think about the fact that this is also why I don’t make up stories for my boys or read to them. When they came along I decided that packing away my imagination was the safest thing to do. No reminder of my childhood, no deluded thinking about ocean-magic changing houses or a garden that became a time slip to meeting an older Willa. Such nonsense. Though after Lottie’s call I can’t deny what a crap job I’m doing pretending our childhood doesn’t affect me. Now this box has arrived and there’s a sense of things fragmenting. There’s an ocean in my house that won’t be squashed.
With shaky hands, I rattle the teacup back onto its saucer.
At the top of his off-key voice, Seb belts out, ‘Row, row boat a steeeeem.’
A lovely Saturday morning serenade for our neighbours. I shush him and the dog next door that’s barking along with him.
I glance sideways at the box: a soggy box, that’s all.
Eli reappears from inside the house, wearing his snorkel and flippers again. The jar of water from my bedside chair in one hand. All I notice is that jar until he steps forwards, across the patio and onto the top step of our front staircase. He wobbles.
‘Stop. Eli, wait!’
He jumps at my voice, tripping on his flippers. Beginning to fall. Things happen so fast they happen on top of each other. Grabbing him by the corner of his robe, I yank him back from the edge.
The jar slips from his hands and smashes. I stand rigid, clutching him.
‘The ocean!’ Eli shoves me away then rips off his flippers and snorkel. The water drips down the stairs and onto the ground.
All I can see is that little girl. I was standing by the tree when my father surprised me, and the jar slipped from my hand. That part really did happen.
‘I’m sorry about the ocean, Eli. I’m so sorry.’ And I am. I remember wanting that ocean so badly when I was only a little older than him. But mostly, I’m relieved. The ocean is lost now. Whatever was trying to seep in with it has been lost, too.
With glass everywhere and a toddler under my arm, I try to clean up.
Then I see her. The moment is starched, as if someone ironed out a space from the wrinkles of urban life. Her cowboy pants with the fringes, those red gumboots. No, it can’t be her.
She drags a stick through the dirt: a single line in the earth. A line you follow. Maybe a line you don’t cross.
My hands are shaking again. It was a story, a stupid story – get a hold of yourself! Memories pull at me like seagulls squabbling for a chip. As a child I told Grammy I met a ninety-three-year-old woman who said she was me, but I don’t remember meeting someone who was thirty-three years old.
I think back to the first time Super Gumboots Willa went through her ocean-garden. New memories emerge: I see a brick house and there is a little boy who nearly fell. Oh, gosh. This is the same moment, only from my grown-up perspective. I look at the water dripping down the stairs and the sand forming wherever it touches. Eli has dropped the glass jar and planted the ocean.
I stare back at the box. I wasn’t going to collect it when Sam told me about it. So why was it delivered this morning?
I want to shake myself. Wake up, woman!
Seb escapes out of my loosening grip and runs inside.
‘Hey, you!’ I lean over the patio railing.
The little girl stops and looks up, and now I cannot deny it. Her face reflects me when I was her age. It really is Super Gumboots Willa.
Suddenly, I am caught with a hammering inside me. All that matters in the world is this girl. I’m so caught in the moment I don’t realise we’re still staring at each other until she opens her mouth as if to say something. Instead, she turns and runs so fast she almost tumbles at the bottom of the hill.
Chapter Ten
1965
Willa Waters, aged 8
I can’t wait to wake Lottie up and show her our new house. Same as the old Queenslander by the beach. I can’t wait to tell her all about how the ocean arrived and how I planted it in my backyard. I’m a bit worried about what Mummy and Daddy will say about the house and everything, but I won’t tell them about the water from the jar and how I wished for the old Queenslander and the ocean to help me. I won’t tell them how we live right by the sea now because we have a little ocean growing in our backyard. Lottie’s gonna love it! But as I run past the little rocks that ring my ocean-garden, I skid to a stop. Frog bumps into me.
The air goes kind of foggy and when I can see again I’m in a backyard, but it’s not mine. I’m standing on the other side of the rocky edge of my garden, and I see the yard has changed. Daddy’s mown-down grass is gone and instead there are weeds and dirt. I’m in a backyard with a brick-box-type house looking at me. Our house didn’t change again, did it?
I walk around the side and out to the front yard, but nothing looks familiar. This is a house that glares. An unkind thing with windows like mirrors that you can’t see through. Grammy says these houses have mean souls.
I run down the hill to the end of the street, staring at a funny-looking car that drives by. Kinda like the ones on The Jetsons, but not flying. This one has round edges, lots of lights, a bit like spaceships on wheels. The people are dressed weird, too. Two mums jog by wearing very tight pants with bright pink fuzzy knits on the bottom of their legs.
I’m staring so much I almost bang into the street sign at the end of the road. I read the name. Graves Place. That’s a horrible name, and it’s not the name of my street. Who’d want to live here?
I pick Frog up and give her a good talking-to. ‘Now, it’s all okay. The ocean is here and we’ve just run out of our garden and into someplace different. All I need to do is get back home.’
I try to say all that in a big voice, but it comes out sniffly. I hold Frog tight. Then a breeze blows, a friendly thing that smells salty, and I notice seagulls calling to me overhead.
At the beach with Grammy on the Very-Best-Day-Ever the seagulls were saying, ‘Looka, looka, looka,’ like in Lottie’s picture book. They really do sound like that and it makes me giggle a bit. Frog and I are much braver with giggles in our bellies, so I put her down and walk back up the hill.
Up and down the street there are lots of brick houses that look the same, all jammed together. A dad comes out of his house to get the paper and slams the door when he goes back inside. That makes me jump.
A kid is singing loud, the words all jumbled up, and a dog barks. Frog Dog barks, too, even though she thinks she’s roaring.
I stand back in front of the brick house with the backyard I just came out of, looking at it carefully. I notice it’s a little boy up on the balcony who is singing. He’s younger than Lottie. I wave at him, but he doesn’t see me.
By the front gate, I spot a piece of driftwood on the footpath and I pick it up. ‘Are you from my ocean? You’re in this funny street, too?’
I drag it behind me, thinking of how to get back home.
Sitting on the balcony is a lady all huddled over her cup. She looks so worried. I drag my stick along the fence, making a dull ding, ding. I wonder if the lady knows which way the shops are, but she looks too worried for me to ask her. Maybe I could find my way home if I got to Main Street in Boonah, where the shops are. I could use a phone box. Mummy’s name is E
bony Waters. I heard Grammy say once that the only good thing about my daddy is that my mummy didn’t take his last name. Daddy’s name is Hawthorn Mass. My phone number is 32 … 3 … Oh.
‘Frog, come here! Stop barking at everything.’
Another boy walks out of the house and onto the front balcony wearing snorkels and flippers. He kinda looks like something in the comics.
His mum yells out from behind him as he stumbles at the top of the stairs.
‘Watch out!’ I shout to the boy.
But his mum grabs him. He’s okay. Oh, thank willy-wollies, he’s okay. I don’t know what willy-wollies are, that’s Grammy’s saying. I drag my driftwood stick through the dirt.
‘Hey, you!’ The mum leans over the balcony railing. She’s looking right at me.
I stop. Frog Dog wags her tail all mad bananas like she knows this woman. Should I say sorry for being here? Sorry your little boy nearly fell. Sorry, I’m lost and … I hate people falling.
Instead, I race down the hill so fast my gumboots nearly fall off and run away from the rest of me.
Chapter Eleven
1990
Willa Waters, aged 33
The child I saw by my fence stays in my mind all morning. Her stick dragging in the dirt, her cowboy pants and red gumboots, head to the side, a question forming. Perhaps a thousand questions.
I collect every piece of smashed jam jar that I can find, mop every bit of water from my front stairs, but I can’t be sure water hasn’t dripped onto the ground below.
After I drop Eli off at a friend’s house for a play, I call Sam. He’s not answering. When our phone eventually does ring, I dive on it. ‘Sam?’
‘Guess again.’ The voice is flat. Steamrolled.
‘Lottie!’ If I could squeeze myself down the line to where she is, I would.
‘Look, I’m ringing from a phone box. I just wanted to say that I’m fine. I’m not your problem anyway, okay? You’ve made that really clear.’
‘Give me your address and I’ll come and get you.’ But she hangs up. I knot the cord around my fingers listening to the dial tone for a long time before I replace the receiver on the wall.
Standing in the middle of my kitchen listening to Sebastian as he rolls his cars down the hallway, I think I might be sick. I try to focus on where the water has dried, the shells. My white tiles are in revolt. I collect every shell I can find and dump them in the bin. A good mop and I will be rid of the ocean all through my house. I grab the same bucket I used to mop the front stairs. Warm water and Pine O Cleen. Sebastian assumes it’s a game.
‘Cannonball, Mumma.’ His cars plop into my bucket.
Of all the words he can say, cannonball. Sebastian’s preferred method of entry into all situations.
I fish out the cars and begin mopping the tiles, and that’s when it happens. How, I cannot say, but there they are. Wooden floorboards.
I drop the mop. Water puddles.
‘We don’t have wooden floorboards.’
I say it again. ‘We don’t have wooden floorboards. We have white tiles. Shamelessly white.’
Seb claps his hands and points at the floors like I’ve performed the best trick ever. ‘Mumma!’
I pick him up, but he squirms out of my hold and runs from the room. I stand there rubbing my feet back and forth on the floors, staring. The wood is marked, bumps and bruises in the very grain of it. A scuff here. A drag mark there.
As I stand there, I remember the last time I saw things transform.
I was eight the night the jam jar arrived. My dad stood under the stars with me and then something bad happened. I raced inside. I’m not sure what I ran inside from, only that I raced in and crashed into Lottie. My parents were fighting outside. There was a roar of the ocean? The floor was wet beneath my feet and then sandy. The next morning the whole house …
No, that didn’t really happen, did it? If it did, then … Oh, my goodness – Eli spilt water from the jam jar all through my house!
I stare at the bucket of water. It is the same water I used to mop the front stairs. I’ve mopped jam jar water all through my house. Wait. What am I even thinking?
Sam still isn’t answering the phone. I gawk at the floor until I can’t feel my legs under me, until I’m floating above. A nowhere-woman looking from the ceiling or bleeding right into the floors, becoming a scratch or a scuff mark.
I fight the pounding in my head and ignore the tingling in my fingers. Outside, underneath the front stairs, I hack at the grass and dig out all the dirt that might have been wet by the water from the jam jar, determined to stop whatever is going on here. Seb throws grass everywhere, chuckling.
Back inside I kick at the boards and get down on my hands and knees to inspect them.
‘Hide and seek, Mumma?’ Seb asks.
‘I’m not playing a game, honey. I’m …’ But I don’t know how to explain what I’m doing.
I vacuum every bit of sand I can feel and mop the floors again with fresh water. Seb wants sandwiches cut into triangles and Humphrey Bear dancing on TV. Through all of it, I hand-scrub, rinse, vacuum. The floorboards remain.
After lunch Sam still isn’t home and I’m a shadow of my former organised, Ajax-wielding self. Every sound makes me jump, and the wooden floors seem to rise up at me as if they had teeth.
Remember the sound of your father’s feet on these boards? The sound of your mother’s feet, quick-quick?
My shirt is covered in grime, my knees are grass-stained and when I look at myself in the bathroom mirror I don’t recognise the wild eyes or the dirt-caked face. I do the only thing left that makes sense and shower Seb and myself.
When Sam finally answers at work he says he doesn’t remember the white tiles and now’s not a good time. No, he doesn’t know where the sand would have come from and he can’t come home to see our floors. He’s in another meeting and he’ll be home as soon as he can. Could I please stop ringing? What’s wrong with me? I am wondering the same thing. Then I remember that my mother and father never remembered the floors changing in our house, either. Only Lottie and I remembered that.
Sam’s voice softens down the phone line. ‘Willa, this is about Lottie, isn’t it? Sorry, I’m not even thinking. I’ll be home as soon as I can this evening, okay?’
I pick at my forearm until it bleeds.
The first time Lottie was admitted to hospital because of her mental health I would sit on the edge of her bed running the sole of my shoes over polished floors and talking in upbeat words, cupping them in my hands like they were some sort of gift. How she was there to heal, how things would get better. There wasn’t a single one of my hollow words that I believed.
I debate putting Seb in the car and – and what? Even if I knew where my father was … All I know is I should have been the one to find her in the park. Should have held her hand and roamed the streets with her. Brought her here or gone there. Made one more 3 am call. Should have taken the needle out of her arm. I should have been her light.
In the early afternoon I collect Eli from his friend’s house. He notices our wooden floors immediately. ‘Now the floors won’t be bitey cold on my feet.’
‘So the floors have changed?’ I hold his shoulders tightly.
He pulls away. ‘Yeah, Mummy. But I like what you did with them. Everybody in the city should have floors like this.’
I prop both boys in front of a Play School video on the VCR so I can slip away and gather myself. Only a moment, and then I’ll make them fruit toast for afternoon tea.
I go through everything as I walk slowly to the bathroom. The ocean arrived in a box this morning. It brought smells of my childhood. Then the ocean transformed my white tiles into wooden floorboards that look eerily similar to those of my childhood home. Is that right? Surely that cannot be what is happening here.
I’m shaking as I push open the bathroom door.
The tiles in here are now green. I collapse by the toilet.
My childhood bathroom had green tiles,
too. I told Lottie stories about the Owl and the Pussy Cat, and how the tiles were the sea and we could sail away. This is why I don’t read to my children. I can’t do it. They don’t understand the memories that storytelling brings back, or how dangerous imagination can be. Oh, the places it took me.
I slump over. Think, please think!
My self screams back, ‘I cannot go back to the past!’ But Lottie is with the man who hurt our family simply because I cut her out of my life. Surely ignoring her was the only way to protect my boys from my past?
The longer I stay slumped on the tiles, the less I understand. I try to calm myself. Why would the ocean change my kitchen tiles into the wooden floors of my childhood? To dredge up memories? What would that achieve?
I remember that night in 1965 again, when I thought everything was my fault. That silly little girl I was begged an ocean to help her fix things. It never worked.
And then it hits me. I made the same plea last night after Lottie called:
Please, please let me fix this! Just help everything be okay.
That cannot be why the ocean is here again. Can it?
The razor slips easily between my fingers and I’m ashamed of how simply I hold it to my arm. Even as it touches my skin, I am numb. The cold from the tiles seeps into my legs. I welcome it.
The hurt: I welcome it, too. It says, ‘You’re here. You’re alive. And you can control your level of pain, if only in this moment.’
Eli’s snorkel mask is on the floor in the corner. There’s a word written in marker inside the band. Filipendulous (adjective): Hanging by a thread.
‘Grammy!’ Somehow I think she’d understand the lines I’ve made on my wrist, but I still cower in the corner.
I am a woman not safe in her own company. A woman who does not deserve her grandmother’s words.
Chapter Twelve
2050
Willa Waters, aged 93
You don’t need alarm clocks in Australia, only trees with birds. Unless you have a Katie, who woke me this morning at rooster hour, when it was still too early to properly be called a morning, with only a smudge of sun above the tops of roofs. From my armchair, I hear magpies in the trees start to flood the sky with squabble.