I was young and enamoured with notions of not being tied down, so I kept moving. But she had my number, and when she called me in Sydney a few months later, to say she was in town, I panicked and invited her to stay. I arranged to meet her in a bar, but I took Bernie and some other friends as insurance. During the night I tried to be as distant as I could, and drank heavily, and insisted that Bernie talk to her, having introduced her simply as someone I met while travelling. I made a point of chasing a dark-haired girl who walked in and sat upstairs. By the end of the night, Heather said Bernie had offered her a place to sleep, and I said that was cool, and they went off together. I didn’t expect them to still be together twenty years later.
The strange part was that Bernie never knew. I mean, he took her home, so I didn’t mention it. Then she showed up with him somewhere else, and I didn’t mention it. She was going to disappear any minute, she was supposed to be travelling to Melbourne and crossing the Nullarbor. But when she was still around a month later, and I still hadn’t mentioned it, and clearly neither had she, how was either of us going to suddenly mention it? When was a good time? Before they went travelling together? The one-year anniversary? When I was handing over a ring at his wedding? All these years on, that slight grain of awkwardness was still there, something neither of us ever acknowledged. In the end it didn’t matter, and if I told Bernie now it would seem an insult, an attempt to detract from whatever happiness he had made for himself. It didn’t matter, yet it was always there, that kick of lust in memory, the self-recrimination for allowing it.
***
The day the phones went down, things got different. Bizarre as it seems, we had been settling into a kind of ease, where the abnormal happened with comforting certainty. Swarms of spiders floated in on the tides and climbed the highest trees, wrapping their tops in fairy floss. Mud twisters spouted up for an hour in Forest Lake. Ants swarmed into houses, spilled into the boat when it bumped against a tree. Eighty-six cats were rescued from the roof of a house in Fig Tree Pocket. I know because, as the fearless reporter, I was there to count every one. From a storm cloud over Mount Coot-tha, thousands of North Queensland barramundi rained down like silver Stukas. A hardy chap trying to have a barbeque said that half a dozen of them landed on his grill, just like that. He put the sausages back in the esky. There was something cheery about the mayhem. But the day the phones went down was something else.
We knew it when the sky started changing, the thick grey pelt darkening with each quarter hour. By midday the sky was almost black. From my position, north of what was now euphemistically called the river, it looked like the sky over the city centre was splitting open. The clouds certainly were, with a violence that took away the ability to do anything but watch. The streets became torrents, hypnotising my gaze like a campfire. The rain over the city looked solid. Later I learned it was; sand was falling in columns with the rain from the sky. Eventually the deluge eased, leaving only the sound of the sluicing streets.
I’m not sure how much time had passed when my phone rang. I only just heard it. It was Bernie.
‘Thank fuck you’re answering,’ he said. ‘I can’t get onto Heather.’
‘She’s probably under the pump at work right now.’ The shit pun was an accident that made me wince.
‘No, didn’t you hear? A boat smashed into the dock where the relief centre is. The whole place is fucked up.’
‘Shit. And her phone’s dead? Is it the network?’
‘Probably. She’s on fucking Vodaphone, of course. Piece of shit. Look, are you anywhere nearby? I’m stuck out in Carole Park, I don’t know how soon I can get there.’
‘Ok. Sit tight. I’ll meet you at home later.’
It was chaos getting down there. Some of the mobile towers were indeed down, and the panic of people who’d lost contact with their loved ones was driving them into the streets. Those streets were screaming with water. Even less than knee high I saw it take people off their feet. I chose the smallest, quietest paths, stuck to the edges, and even so nearly burned out the little motor running against the current. When I knew I was within land range, I dragged the boat to higher ground, concealed it, and stole a bike to make the last push to Southbank.
The place was a trash-heap. The boardwalk had gone well under, and debris was everywhere. (Just like the explosion in the cheese factory, said a cheery voice in my head.) I walked across the sodden concrete pavers by the gallery, looking for any sign of life. Surely amongst so many august institutions there had to be someone with some official knowledge. Outside the door of the State Libarary was a huge and colourful mandala, the sands smeared into one another by the relentless water. Inside, the building was dark and cavernous. The glass panes of the atrium had shattered inward, and piles of sand lay heaped beneath. Looking up, there seemed to be a haze spreading out above me. For a few moments I wondered at the unlikeliness of anything catching fire in such conditions, then I realised what it was. Spiderwebs, strung from wall to wall to ceiling. The refugees had taken this as their own.
If anything, what I saw next was even less expected. Emerging from the gloom came a light, then a figure, and for a moment I thought I’d gone delusional from adrenaline and too little sleep. Then the figure resolved into form: a young woman, wearing some sort of goggles, and a chain mail vest.
‘The more I think about it, the more it makes sense,’ I said at last, glancing between her outfit and the spiders—much larger than they had any right to be—crawling up the walls.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s an OH&S requirement.’
I smiled, thinking that any joke made in these circumstances deserved a more enthusiastic response.
‘Are you in charge around here?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’m the head librarian. Sammi Bernhoff.’
‘They told you, “One day all this could be yours”? Uh, my name’s Martin Polney. I’m looking for my sister in law.’
‘I think there are a lot of people looking for someone.’
‘She’s a doctor, she was running the emergency relief station down here.’
‘You mean Heather? Of course, I didn’t put the last names together. Well, the station got badly damaged, but she wasn’t there. They had troubles elsewhere this morning, before the storm hit. The creek near Boondall was crazy. She took a few staff out there before things went batshit here. Oh, excuse me.’
‘It’s ok. I don’t think you need to worry about professional propriety at this stage. I’d better get going. What about you-do you have a way out of here?’
‘I think there might be a few more stragglers,’ she said. ‘I’ll round them up first.’
I thanked her and walked out of the library, dialling Bernie. No signal. The rest of the phone towers must have gone down. I looked at the telephone, now a useless brick of circuitry, then stared at the river, ugly as your new Texan cellmate. The dawning moment you realise life’s about to get a whole lot harder.
I put the phone away, and pulled out a notepad to scrawl a few lines. ‘Nice work, journalist!’ came a loud voice down the footpath.
‘Thanks, pedestrian,’ I said. It was all I could think of, given the man’s only defining characteristic was that he was walking towards me.
‘I know you,’ he said. There was a Teutonic tilt to his vowels. ‘You are that journalist. You write all those words and try to fool us of what is happening. What is your newspaper?’
I told him.
‘That,’ he said, with the pride of one mastering the vernacular, ‘is a bloody rag.’
‘Some days I might agree. So you know who I am, who are you?’
‘My name is Pos Djüring,’ he said, and spelt it for me, emphasising the umlaut.
‘And what are you doing here?’
‘I am watching. Noticing. Like you, but I owe nothing to no-one.’
‘And your opinion?’
‘This is the beginning. All this will not be better.’
Up close, he clearly had the look of one of th
e ragged city prophets, the dirt and slight odour robust enough to resist even rain like this. His words sounded like theirs as well. I made my excuses and started to head away. His voice came after me over the wet pavers.
“You remember! It gets worse from the beginning.’
***
It was some hours before the river had come down enough to attempt the trip home. When I got there I found Bernie, wide-eyed and worried. I told him the news, trying to sound reassuring. We knew where she was. She could be trapped out there for a while yet.
In bed that night, the rain fell like Noah was right. Not with force, but as if it had forever, the drumming came down on the tin sheets above, a thousand percussion enthusiasts practising their snare rolls while camped on the roof and waiting for me to come out. Occasionally it slowed to a patter, but it was like that game where you try to drive across town without stopping, so you creep up to red lights at four kilometres an hour till you’re almost kissing the bumper ahead of you, anything to avoid that little backward jolt that signifies a complete halt. Just before you hit, the lights turn green and the engine’s thrum takes charge again. So, the rain fell.
It would never stop. It wouldn’t destroy the world with violence, but it would fall pathetic and persistent until the paint stripped off, until the walls were worn to grey. It would fall until bricks and cinder blocks swelled, softened to sponge-cake and surrendered to the stream. Roads and footpaths would become colanders, straining water through their gaps and weak points as fleck by fragment was prised free. Trees would rupture outward, fibres unable to contain the saturation. Fish would drown from too much possibility. Our skins would not be able to hold to us. They would be sluiced away until we were covered only in slime, two inches thick, soft enough to be poked through with a determined finger. We would become amorphous, shapes in melted candlewax, each leaving our own oil slick on the waters as they passed through the sad remains of basements, shopfronts, tennis courts, piece by piece carrying this city away and out to sea.
The next day we went looking. At first we both phrased it as going to pick Heather up, but as we reached the area the librarian had mentioned, it became clear this was a two-man rescue mission in a tin dinghy. The place was a bomb site. The wetlands nearby had burst like an overdone sausage, disgorging their messy insides. No-one we hailed knew anything about an emergency medical team. We drove up and down byways and waterways, new culverts and dead ends. On its side in a park was a luxury boat, washed up and abandoned by falling water.
The afternoon found us as far south as the airport, watching three kayaks sheeting across the submerged runways, slaloming through the stork-like legs of the single 737 left stranded on the tarmac. Everywhere in the water were snakes, surprising us with how strongly they swam. When we were children, on a bush holiday, Bernie and I refused to swim in the river for fear of snakes. Our mother told us snakes couldn’t bite you in the water, because if they opened their mouths they would fill up and drown. So we swam, at ease. I didn’t think to question this until far later than I should have, in my first year of university, when someone told a drunken story about river snakes and I opened my mouth, only to bite down on the first word of the sentence. Somehow that belief had sat there all those years, seemingly solid, only needing to be held up to the light for the holes to show.
We searched until well after dark, when I had to insist it was no good, that we needed to rest, and resume in daylight. Finally Bernie agreed. The memory of her twitched, and I felt worse. Although it happened and you can’t change the past, it was wrong and shameful to even remember fucking your brother’s wife, when her skin was taut and young, her eyes unlined.
The next day we combed the wetlands again, monotonously and mostly in silence. It was afternoon when I saw it, a tow-headed glimmer in the stream. The closing scenes of Submarine flashed up, where the Welsh kid runs after the girl on the beach, and of course it isn’t her, but of course it is. Bernie was in the water before I’d finished this thought, and it took another second before I gathered my thoughts enough to realise I couldn’t go after him, for the sake of the gesture. Someone had to stay with the boat. Of course it wasn’t Heather, and of course it was. She was tangled in a dense mat of branches, and Bernie prised her out before swimming her to what passed for the shore.
All I could think was that I didn’t want to be there while my brother held his dead wife in his arms, and then a second-tier thought that said I should feel bad for thinking this, and a tinier third level that still felt bad because I’d fucked her once, before they met, long ago. The fourth level, the one aghast at how self-obsessed level three was, was too distant even to register.
But she wasn’t dead. She was silent. There was sand in her hair, and in her pockets, sand lined the insoles of her shoes. She was breathing, shallowly, and her freezing skin moved, and after Bernie nestled with her in blankets in the bow (the only useful thing I could remember from a bush survival course in Year Nine, on how best to avert hypothermia) I looked ahead from the tiller to see her eyes open. She didn’t speak though, or seem to even see Bernie, but just stared blankly at a spot around cumulonimbus level, her head shaking slightly as we juddered through the byways and new creeks of Brisbane.
She didn’t speak. For three days, she would sit on the couch wrapped in blankets, even walk when Bernie coaxed her to her feet, and eat peaceably enough if he held soft food to her on a spoon. But her face would not respond, nor her voice. She was there and not there, the light before morning.
Three nights later, through the dark, we could see flames over at Nudgee, an oily gleam against the night sky hinting at how it would look on the water beneath. Later the story came through in fragments from other journos: an arranged marriage, a girl who was already in love. The father pressing ahead with the deal despite the inclement situation; or perhaps because of it. The proposed suitor had a sizeable boat, and in this new world, the mariner was king. He arrived at the family home, now an easy walk from the waterline, to be presented to the bride and entertained by the family.
On the second night, though, the bride’s lover arrived under cover of darkness. When photos of him trickled through, he looked unlikely—an accountancy student, seemingly soft and gentle, straight hair falling forward over a quiet face. But he’d had the courage to creep through a night not made for stealth, rich with splashing water and creaking timbers, to claim her. They’d rifled the suitor’s possessions, claiming the wads of money and the clutch of family silver he’d brought for dowry. Then they’d taken to the boat and cast off, drifting away into darkness before firing the engine well downstream, and ploughing on down the distended maw of what had once been the Brisbane River.
Whether they thought this a clever plan or a last piece of desperate resistance, it’s hard to say. They were twenty: young enough to be that naïve, but old enough to have despaired, to have grown tired of hoping for something to get better. Whatever they expected, they had made their move, and done their best. But a boat like theirs was a scarce commodity; it would never escape attention. They’d moved on several times, following the floodwaters into new patches of city, hiding out where they could. They should have abandoned the boat, but it was probably the only place they’d ever felt safe. They weren’t. The suitor had connections, and after two weeks they were tracked down. The raptor was not easily pacified. His attempts to take them by force were met with resistance, and the end result was this: the reflection of flames against Brisbane’s black sky, a boat burned to the waterline, two lovers gone the way of the fables.
I’m not sure if that’s what tipped Bernie. But I suppose it was. When I left the next morning, he was sitting on the couch, still speaking to Heather with a determined cheerfulness, looking into her blank eyes. There was no response. I said goodbye and he sprang up to walk outside with me, and hugged me tersely. I’d never seen him look so sad.
‘You know . . .’ I said impulsively, and stopped.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Oh. Nothi
ng.’ He didn’t insist on an answer. We never played that game.
‘I’m going to run a bath,’ he said, and I left.
I don’t know what happened that day, but I do, because he was my brother, and I know what I would have done. I’d told him what Pos Djüring said: that the waters would not stop. I know he ran a bath. But first he visited the half-submerged hardware shop on Fairfield Road, carried away what he needed from those shelves above the water line. Planks, tar, sacks of barbeque coal. He caulked the gaps under the doors with hot pitch, boarded the windows and sealed them too. Plugged every hole, blocked the showers and the sinks. Then he opened all the taps on the ground floor, opened all but two upstairs, carried his unprotesting wife for the last time, and having undressed them both, settled into the bath.
Lying behind her, one arm across her chest, he turned on those two taps, finding just the right balance of warm water. It rose over them, taking first his toes, then her knees, the curve of her hip bone, the head of his cock pulsing dully against her spine, the ticklish expanse of his belly, the back of her right arm. Over their chests, the small hairs, the nipples, before reaching the lip of the bath and tipping onto the floor.
There it mixed with water flowing from the bathroom sink and the shower, covering the tiles, washing out through the door, along the hall, finally cascading down the timber staircase. Below, the floor was already sodden with water from kitchen, laundry, the second bathroom. Lapping the doors and turning back, it soaked the carpets until they could take no more, then climbed the furniture, the creep of moisture reaching ahead of the water level. The couches drank thirstily, but not enough: the water took them, mounted the half step to the kitchen, began inspecting the contents of the cupboards. The appliances were unplugged, the mains switch off. My brother, a practical man, had thought of this. His hot water service in the ceiling ran on gas, so the water in the bath stayed warm.
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