‘This is where my love is.’
It was wet in there. Ella showed her this, first with the V of her fingers. Love, forever married to flood. She dipped her finger in to the tight crevasse, the skin of her hymen stretched taut, her finger dipping its beak into her body like a bird. Here. Flood. She raised her finger, slicked in juices. The woman’s eyes bulged wider, her mouth opened, and she shuddered. Air escaping. This is how it is. This is how it feels.
‘Wait,’ Ella called to her. She was not ready. ‘Wait for me!’
But the convulsing continued and the legs kicked out and the glass shuddered. Ella pressed herself against it. The stack of Courier-Mails slipped under her feet and she righted herself awkwardly, reaching to grip the back of the chair. The Librarian clutched at her shirt, pulled it, and the buttons tore free. She showed Ella her breasts, one of them still cupped in the black lace of her bra, the other nipple dislodged, a single eye peering out as wide and bright as her eyeballs which stared down at Ella as the rest of her body began to float upward. She bobbed at the ceiling, butting her head against the glass. A beautiful rhythm, the rhythm of water and flood and death.
Ella stepped off the chair. The newspapers slid to the floor. She lay amongst them. Someone murdered in Tarragindi, someone missing in Brookfield, Someone falling from grace in New Farm. She lay amongst the forgotten history of this place and the water was cool on her hot skin. She looked up to where her lover lay, one hand still clutching the edge of her shirt, one nipple peering down, her eyes wide with the mystery of this odd connection. She let her knees slide wide. Her Librarian’s legs were splayed. Ella mimicked her pose. She held one breast between her fingers, feeling the heat of the sensation drawing a line between her cunt and her breast.
Woman Drowns. Family Grieves.
The headline beside her. She felt grateful tears prick at her eyes. All things colliding. The past, the present, the future. This moment. This perfection of partings and connections. She reached to the paper and tore a few pages free of their binding. Woman Drowns. She rolled the pages into a tube. She placed it at the mouth of her cunt. She felt the pain of it, the new place filling with the news of the day. Woman Drowns. Family Grieves.
Her Librarian watched, unblinking. Ella felt the tearing, the breaking of her old life, the spill of blood. She pushed the wad of newspaper into herself with enough force to tear her flesh. Ella arched her back.
‘I love you,’ she said. ‘You know. I will love you forever.’
A Strange Way to Catch Barramundi - Geoff Lemon
We never expected the phones to go down. Even when swatches of inner suburban streets were succumbing to the water, great wet swathes drawn across the aerial photographs, I’m sure we thought of telephone signals as something that existed above that, vaulting from the top of tall towers to the next receiver, and from there into our pockets. For a long time that illusion persisted, tying us all together. But when without a whimper one morning it was gone, those invisible threads abruptly snapped, and we remembered what it was like to be humans in a world without certainty.
Not that it started there. But when things begin to get strange, we have a great tendency to imagine that each new level is as strange as it’s going to get. For all the talk about the depressive nature of the human condition, we are eternal fucking optimists, building cities on flood plains or chipping housing lots into newly hardened lava. While the phones were up, no-one thought things were impossible. But as the mobile carriers dropped one by one, and my brother couldn’t find his wife, and people lost their husbands and their friends and their kids, we watched things boost up to another level again. Of course it didn’t start with the phones, and it didn’t start with the floods. It started with the sands. The phones were just the point when everyone knew that shit was getting real.
When we first started hearing about the sands, the story was a curiosity. I got a call from our news bureau. For the past year and a half I had been circulating country towns, two nine-month contracts back to back. Apparently my articles demonstrated our paper’s ‘ongoing commitment to and engagement with rural and regional Queenslanders’, fetishised for city readers as somehow more real than anyone with an urban postcode could ever be. The entire scope of that deep relationship consisted of one guy, born in Adelaide, raised in Sydney, traipsing around anywhere north and west of Brisbane, and filing twice a week for a floating spot on the innermost of pages.
The second contract had run out three weeks ago. I had heard nothing about an extension, aside from a couple of stalling emails from my editor. Even we had taken to running stories about newspapers going down the shitter, so the eternal stinginess was hardly a surprise. Bar the handful of Twitter stars preening from Parliament, every journalist in the country was being made to feel that their continued existence was at the pleasure of some eccentric, clement royal.
But then Chris was on the line, a little too early in the morning, as the sun cracked through the plastic venetians of the pre-fab miner’s accommodation that I hadn’t had sufficient reason to vacate.
‘Martin. How are you, mate?’ he said, sounding unnaturally chipper. ‘Got a job for you if you’re keen.’
‘Funny,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d lost my number. Now you need something and you’ve suddenly found it again.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ he said tolerantly. ‘It’s been mayhem down here. You know how it gets.’
‘What do you need?’
‘I need you in Rathdowney.’
‘Where?’
‘Hundred k south of Ipswich. Down near the border.’
‘What’s the story?’
‘Some weird stuff going on. I don’t know how much is real and what’s alien abduction shit from yokels huffing too much sheep dip. Destroyed crops and who knows what else. We can’t really get much sense out of any of the reports, so I want someone on the ground.’
‘Well, I’d love to go, but I’m pretty sure I’m out of contract,’ I said, angling. I wasn’t sure I wanted a new contract, but if there was turning down to be done, I wanted to be the one doing it.
‘I’ve been talking about your contract, but it’s not through yet. I can do you a day rate until then.’
‘Then I’m freelancing. I want freelance rates. And I want expenses for the period since my last invoice.’
‘Come off it, Martin.’
‘I’ve been cooling my heels waiting on word from you, and accommodation out this way doesn’t come cheap.’
‘Ok. Freelance rates on this job, and I’ll take care of your last five days. That’s the best I can do.’
‘Deal. I’ll see about a rental car.’
***
Of course, there was barely a story left in Rathdowney by the time I got there. Trails of grit and empty chook pens. A hundred people in the town, and fewer still who’d been home at the time. A sandstorm had come through, they said. At first it had been hot wind and dirt, not out of the ordinary. But the sand had piled up until it was everywhere, knee high and rising, and the locals had left, wheels spinning in the grit until they got out of range.
It cleared in a few hours. The only thing of note was that all the animals left behind were gone. A lot of the houses stood dark and empty too, but that had been the case for years now. Had some people stayed when the storm hit? Well, perhaps, it was hardly an organised evacuation. When I pressed the question I was told there were some current residents, a couple of dozen, whose houses were still empty, but surely they had gone to stay with relatives. The last part was posed to me almost as a question, as though I could provide assurance. People showed me hallways they said had been filled with sand. Now there was only a crunching underfoot, though the wooden edges of doorframes and stairs were smoothed and rounded, sometimes shoulder high.
The story, of course, was written off: some hicks spooked by a storm. At the pub where I stayed that night in Beaudesert, the front bar’s most durable denizen flashed his tooth gap at me and said, ‘They’re practically New So
uth Wales,’ as though that explained it all. The report was nothing special: missing livestock, probably taken by opportunistic thieves or scared away by the wind. A trail of ruined crops. From higher ground, you could see the trail led in an unmistakeably narrow front toward the town, but I didn’t stress it. It doesn’t pay to give your colleagues the impression that superstitious country folk are turning you into one of them.
Nonetheless, high winds continued in gusts, and started to spread across the south-east of the state. Dust storms came up out of nowhere, growing into heavier sandstorms. Windblown dunes cut the highway between Veresdale and Jimboomba. When I went to inspect, the sand was gone, the tar polished down to shiny snakeskin. Then more reports of sand inundations began to come in, in nearby Boonah and Christmas Creek, then in anti-intuitively disparate towns like Moombra, Hampton, and Allora.
The first good photo came out of Glengallan, a shot from a nineteen year old who’d planned to wait out the storm, then lost his nerve. Just before he rode out, he snapped the ancient mansion, sand reaching two metres up the walls, front windows breaking under the weight to let the dunes swamp in. The famous homestead half submerged. He rode his dirtbike through the storm with a scarf wrapped round his face, and somehow made it to clear air, vomiting sand. In Kearney’s Creek, we had the first verified reports of people who had stayed behind, boarding up their houses against the wind. Those houses were found empty, doors broken, sand swirled around the skirting boards. Cars that had been overtaken on the way out of town were empty too, windows smashed in or doors ajar. Never a sign of anyone. Some turned up later, having simply fled in the other direction with no means of contact. The rest, anxious relatives were assured, would do the same any day now.
It was only then that we began to get the impression of dunes. From up on Mount Glorious, I spent six hours watching one heave its way down the valley, humping like a caterpillar on the time lapse tape taken by the videographer I’d picked up in Brisbane on my way through. The same day, an amateur shot rooftop footage of a dune crashing in slow motion through the Deception Bay Bowls Club, down Bayview Terrace, and into the sea. The tapes went bananas on prime-time news. Chris was on the phone the next morning. ‘We’ve got sand in Wacol,’ he said. ‘We need you based in Brisbane. That contract should be through in the morning.’
‘Keep me on freelance,’ I said. ‘Paid weekly. And expenses through that three weeks I had off.’
***
It was hot in Brisbane then. No shit, Sherlock, the masses might say, but a different kind of hot. Normally Brisbane is rotten hot, wet hot, the fermented kind of stinking hot that makes you feel like everything is about to explode in a bloom of fungus. Your skin rupturing outward in an alien profusion of spores. A whiffy mix of licentiousness and pheromones and rot. It’s an over-ripe mango, swelling against its skin, barely clinging to the branch, about to hit the ground and split open in a gush of fermentation and sweetness. My first time in Brisbane was for a work posting, playing stenographer to a senior reporter, when I was twenty-two. Mick Fuller was his name. As we left the airport the visceral slap of the heat fetched me somewhere between the nostrils. ‘Hot,’ I mumbled, dredged into inarticulateness by hours of air-con and fluorescent lighting.
‘Mate,’ said Mick, turning to me, ‘it’s like a whore’s cunt on the equator.’
No matter how many analogies I come up with, when I think of Brisbane, Mick Fuller’s voice plays first in my head.
But it wasn’t that heat as I drove in ten days after Rathdowney. For the past couple of weeks it had been dry hot, blazing hot, the kind of heat I remembered from childhood in Adelaide, when the desert winds would come baking down the plains, and stepping outside was like opening an oven door. When the state turned into a kiln, the city lay flat on its back, the heat breathing on us like an open mouth. Air warm as blood, dry as sandpaper. The scrape and catch of bushfire season whispering in the leaves, the creak of gum tree fibres desiccating till they splinter. The sense of portent. At night it pulsed at you, a dull red in the darkness.
I got a mate who worked at a city hotel to print me a receipt for a three-week booking, then went to stay with my brother in Tarragindi. Expense accounts have to work for you. It didn’t matter where I was staying anyway. The sands kept shifting. They were showing up in the suburbs consistently now, but erratically, appearing then withdrawing. The winds hadn’t let up in an age. There was no panic. The government was talking about levees and diversionary pathways, but the sands didn’t move fast enough to catch anyone more than half alert. They came, submerging whole streets and scouring through buildings, then blew away. They broke through shopping centres, down the middle of pedestrian malls, sometimes turning back the way they’d come, sometimes charging through to the river to sink. There was no pattern, nothing that defensive lines could have done.
But they were thorough. Never any bodies, no horrors to be cleaned up. Just the occasional name to add to the slow-growing list of the missing. Mostly old people, or loners, the odd stubborn recluse. Only one person had been rescued from the sand, or even seen taken. A helicopter doing low passes over Springfield (‘Outskirts?’ said Chris to my copy. ‘Mate, that’s a fucking Versailles ballgown!’) had seen a figure gesticulating for help, as the dunes snaked through labyrinthine housing development streets. Despite a near-suicidal drop by the pilot, and a rope-burning rappel from the emergency rescue officer, by the time they got to the target he wasn’t much more than a head and a frantically waving arm. The officer got a chain round the man’s chest, under one armpit, and signalled to the pilot to take them up. I introduced the world to a rescue-story dream, a humble electrician born in Mt Isa. Where the sand had been, a diagonal line was scored across his chest. Above it, he was dark with outback sun. Below, his skin was baby-white and hairless, almost translucent, a jumbo rice-paper roll.
At night, if I wasn’t driving to an incident, Bernie and I would sit up on the balcony of his house, high on the hill, and watch the lights unroll across the evening. Bernie and I are twins: not identical, and not close in terms of spending time together, but close instinctively. We’re comfortable in silence because we understand each other. Heather was doing nights on the emergency ward, so it was only ever us. It wasn’t that they needed doctors for injuries—everyone was either healthy or missing. But a higher than normal number of paranoiacs were showing up, worrying about sand inhalation or some other invention. So she would pacify them, and Bernie and I would sit in the dark, heat dragging condensation across the glass of our longnecks, watching the lights. We knew that out there, somewhere, the sands were swirling and forming and building and collapsing, dragging their way through some street or gully. Everyone knew it. But aside from the few emergency ward addicts, there was no panic. The enemy moved slowly, and everyone knew what needed to be done.
When the rains started, they were welcome. First, they took the edge off the heat, a layer of gauze across the sun. Second, while they didn’t start heavy, their insistence meant we thought they might help to wash the sands away. But just as cane toads went from being the potential saviour to a grimly insistent wave, the rain kept on coming, one day bleeding into another, days bleeding into weeks. The ground became sodden, sheeting water off its own back. The streams and rivers began to swell, and gradually the lowest towns and houses began to think about going under.
The high winds had stopped, but the dunes didn’t seem to have noticed. Now they shifted their lumpen shapes through the water instead. The one benefit of the water was that it apparently reduced the sand’s potency. Wet, people could almost walk on it, clump through it with gumboots. The toll of missing from the dunes stopped climbing, leaving a new toll from floods to rise as slowly as the tide markings. But the dunes were still players. Where they moved, the floodwaters were redirected. There was as little pattern as there had been before. Whole suburbs were flirted with, left dry, then taken again, the topography of the city ever shifting. Towns well above the water line would abruptly be submerged
. I hiked into parts of Chapel Hill that were inexplicably waist deep. We sloshed down the supermarket aisles with my photographer quoting lines from Deep Blue Sea. But still no-one panicked. The rise was slow and easy, and we felt the same, even as the spread increased and more streets fell.
Everywhere there were stories to be told. I was filing four times daily, and as many radio calls morning and night. By virtue of having been a fortnight early on the case, I was now some sort of authority on the sands, on dunes, on unpredictability. I bought a tin dinghy and an outboard motor, now vastly expensive, on the paper’s account. In most of the outer suburbs it was the only feasible way to get around. I wasn’t the only one. Every kayak that had lain untouched in a shed for the past ten years suddenly carried the most smug of pilots, slicing through the streets with the stern grimace of a nautical commander.
Heather arrived home one night, her fair hair damp and tousled. It was the first time I’d seen her in a week.
‘Not on ER tonight?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t been for days,’ she said shortly. ‘I’ve been heading up the emergency relief centre down on Southbank.’
I’m not sure how I was supposed to know. Bernie hadn’t been around much since the water rose either, working as a stand-in engineer on emergency levee projects. Ironically, our main defence against the floods came in the form of sandbags. But Heather and I have always been a little uneasy, due to some history from before she met Bernie. We were young, both backpacking up in Cairns. She was working at a hostel bar and I was hitching with a fried-headed dude who called himself Dogweed. She was fair, and pretty, and we spent a week of scenes so idyllic they should have given us diarrhoea: swimming in bath-warm blue water, drinking on beaches, and-the scene I remember most-fucking in the rainforest near a waterfall (I shit you not), her back against the wet rock, her body damp with spray.
Willow Pattern Page 7