by Meg McKinlay
Elijah always teased Hannah about her job. Spin, he called it. Finkle-spin. Making the council look good. Making the mayor look good.
Finkle’s face was on all Hannah’s papers, smiling out from the corner as if he was watching over the town and everything that went on here. He was that kind of guy – always smiling and joking and popping up anywhere, anytime, especially if there was the chance of a party or a ceremonial sausage or two. When we did Jump Rope for Heart at school, he came along and turned the rope for us. When we had Sports Day, he ran in the parents’ race, even though his kids had grown up and moved away years ago. It was funny to see him hurl himself down the track, puffing and blowing, tie flapping loosely around his neck like a flag gone mad in the wind.
I stared down at my grainy photo.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it before. In fact, I had a copy of that exact photo stuffed into a box under my bed. The box Mum thought was tucked away, out of sight, out of mind, in the shed.
“Moira and Andrew Romano” the caption read, “welcome Baby Romano. First New Lower Grange Baby! Sister to Hannah and Elijah.”
Baby Romano. I rolled my eyes. That was my name back then. Mum and Dad said it was because I was so early, that they hadn’t had time to settle on anything, that they were giving it long and careful thought trying to find the exact right one.
But I knew the truth. I had seen Hannah’s photo album – bright pink and tied in ribbon, full of elaborately displayed cards and photos and the letter Mum wrote to My dear Hannah on fancy notepaper months before she was even born, her curly name just sitting there, waiting for her to arrive.
I’d seen Elijah’s as well – shiny and blue and bursting with school photos and colourful slips of paper where Mum jotted down notes about his favourite stewed vegetables and his sleep times and random cute things he said when he was two.
And a birth notice carefully pressed onto the opening page. “Brother to Hannah,” it read. “A perfect pair – the Romano family is now complete!”
My own so-called album was stuffed underneath them. It was one of those plastic display folders Mum used at work, with a handful of school photos and a couple of old crayon drawings crammed in the front.
They were going to do me a proper album one day, she said. When they had time. When they could get their heads around the whole thing, the whole thing that was me.
Because it wasn’t just that I was early. I was unexpected too. I was accidental.
By the time I came along, Mum and Dad were done with kids. Hannah was twelve and Elijah was ten. Mum had gone back to teaching history at the high school and Dad was expanding his pottery hobby into a business.
When I was born, they smiled tired smiles in the newspaper and named me Rachael, no, Isobel, no, Sarah, no, Cassandra and maybe Cassie for short, yes, okay, well I guess that’s that then.
Later, they said things like lovely surprise and happy accident and oh, we just kept on trying until we finally got it right.
But I knew.
That I was extra. I was tacked on the end.
That our real family happened before, that it was over now, underwater.
Mum leaned over my shoulder. “What a photo. I look exhausted!” She pressed one hand to her temple and rubbed an imaginary spot. “No wonder, I suppose. All those weeks in the hospital. That horrible incubator. Thank goodness that’s all behind us!”
I nodded. Yeah. All I had to deal with now was the endless struggle to breathe. The endless swimming. The endless bandaids.
“Hey!” Dad pushed his way through the door. “We going to eat or what? I’m starving.”
Mum waved the ladle at him, sending tiny specks of soup flying through the air. “Minestrone.”
“Great.” Dad rubbed his hands together.
Mum smiled. “How’s it all going?”
“Good.” Dad threw a look at me. It was a look I knew, one that said, “Don’t tell her about the head.”
I wouldn’t have anyway. People need secrets, I reckon. People need things that are only for them.
In a quiet corner of my mind, the lake spread out, silent and still.
three
After dinner, in my room, I pulled the box out from under the bed, shuffling it slowly across the carpet. I eased the lid off and stared down at the pile.
It had been a while since I’d looked at all this – the newspaper clippings, the photographs, the crooked hand-drawn maps.
Even my old Atlantis drawings were down the bottom somewhere, buried under all the layers.
I guess that was fitting, if you thought about it a certain way.
I reached down into the pile. This had all been organised once. It had been sorted by date and place and category.
There had been a point to it all back then.
It had kept me busy. It had kept me sitting happily in a corner of Mum’s history classes for a whole week one year when our school holidays didn’t overlap with theirs.
She was teaching her Year Sevens about the flooding of Old Lower Grange – about the discussion and debate, the town meetings and the protests. She said history was important, that you couldn’t understand the present without thinking about the past. She stood at the front of the room and wrote on the whiteboard How can you know where you are if you don’t know where you’ve been?
I was seven then. I sat in the corner and listened. I watched while Mum’s students nodded and frowned and did what she told them. They had mock debates, making arguments for and against. They compared maps of the old town and the new one, writing essays about what was the same and what was different, what had been gained, what had been lost.
I walked around the classroom. I looked over their shoulders and remembered my drawings of Atlantis, of our drowned family, faces obscured behind a thick wall of blue.
This was my town, I thought. This was the place where my family grew. The place I came eight weeks early to see and missed by less than a day.
I collected photocopied clippings the big kids had finished with. I cut up leftover photos and made scenes to fit them into. I drew maps and diagrams. I wrote a story about the day of the flooding, based on eyewitness accounts.
At first, Mum smiled. She called me her little historian. She held my work up in front of her classes and said they could all take a leaf out of my book. She said if I was one of her students, she’d be giving me an A.
Weeks later, when I was still working on my maps, redrawing them over and over to add new details, when I had broken a month’s worth of Dad’s plates hunting through the old newspapers he wrapped them in, when I couldn’t sleep at night for dreaming about our house being engulfed by layers of silt and mud, Mum said it was time to stop.
She said what I had done was great, but now it was getting unhealthy, that I needed to think about other things, live in the present.
Enough, she said, was enough.
Together, we packed it away into a box – out of sight, out of mind. I stopped drawing maps and poring over photos. But I kept dreaming – about the town, about Atlantis. I couldn’t stop myself doing that, even if I had wanted to.
And when I walked through the town, I felt the old one behind it. I could stand in the main street and see Tuckers Supermarket the way it used to be – the wild orange and yellow rather than the new, tasteful blue. I could pause at the entrance to the pool and see the old timber mill, smell the earthy warmth of freshly cut wood, hear the whine of the saws that had stopped working before I was born. On the edge of town, I had to stop myself looking up to find the old fire lookout, the tree with its circular staircase of pegs disappearing into clusters of leaves.
When I closed my eyes, Old Lower Grange was there, like that echo of light that sits inside your eyelids, etching shapes into quiet, secret spaces.
And every now and then I pulled the box out from under my bed. Every now and then I snipped something from the paper and added it to the pile, just because it seemed important not to let things go.
I didn’t
tell Mum. I wasn’t sure it would be considered healthy. But whatever it was, I wanted to keep it.
I reached into the box and rifled through some old newspaper articles. They were mostly photocopies Mum had made for her class, the paper shiny and smooth in a way that seemed at odds with the stories they told. But there were a few that weren’t copies. They were older, brown and brittle with age and bearing traces of the clay they’d once been packed around and between.
When I came to one of these, I stopped. It was an article about the lake, almost as old as I was. There was a photograph of the wide, calm surface. Trees and bushy scrub hugging the water’s edge, the dam wall in the distance. A family picnicking on the bank up at the Point. A couple of kids mucking around in a canoe.
And off to the right, a shadow. Something that could have been a glitch on the film or the blurred border of the photo.
It wasn’t either of those things. I knew that because I’d been there with Dad in a canoe once, all the way out in the middle, where the sounds of people yelling and calling on the shore faded so far into the background they sounded like the edges of a dream.
I remember Dad stopping the canoe. He brought it around in a flurry of backpaddling into an urgent, swooping arc, as if there was an invisible line there in the water, as if crossing it would mean something to someone.
It was just a metal pole. Just a sign, bobbing lazily out there on a floating buoy.
No Swimming Beyond This Point, it said.
“We’re not swimming,” I pointed out, but Dad shook his head.
“It doesn’t just mean swimming,” he said. “It means no recreation area. Off limits.”
“But why?”
He shook his head again. There was no point asking.It was just one of those rules.
He backpaddled. We headed for shore. And we didn’t go out that far again.
It was silly anyway, according to Dad. It was reckless. What if something had happened when we were out there, such a long way from anywhere and anyone?
I ran a finger along the shadow on the photo.
I probably wouldn’t see the pole tomorrow, not from where I planned to be. I wasn’t going to take the road all the way around to the Point where everyone else swam. Even though that would be quieter than the pool, there could still be other people there – yelling and splashing and churning up the surface with jet skis. And it was too far on a bike. To get there, you needed a car, a plan, a family outing.
Tomorrow, I’d be taking a short cut. It had been years since I’d been that way and I’d never done it alone. The track had been tricky enough to spot back then. Now it would probably be completely invisible.
But I wasn’t worried about that.
I was sure I could remember.
four
On the way the signs were so weathered I could hardly read them. Rust had eaten tiny holes in the metal so it looked like someone had shot them over and over with a pellet gun.
That didn’t matter. I knew what they said.
No Entry. Trespassers Prosecuted.
That one was on the barrier just off the main road, the barrier I could easily lift my bike up and over onto the overgrown track that led up the hill.
Authorised Persons Only. Access Prohibited.
That one was right up the top, hanging loosely from the padlocked gate of the wire mesh fence.
The gate sat at the end of an old 4WD track, a dirt road that wound its way round and round the hill, occasionally crossing the steep track I had taken. I supposed authorised persons needed to come up here sometimes, although I wasn’t sure what for. Maybe just to check if there were any trespassers who needed prosecuting. The 4WD track was completely overgrown too. Elijah and I had never seen anyone up here and it didn’t look like that had changed.
I pushed my bike through the undergrowth, hunting for the break in the fence, the panel of loose wire you could peel back and slip quietly inside. Elijah and I found it together years ago, by accident. We were walking around the lake from the swimming area, talking and skipping stones and letting our feet carry us along the shoreline. At some point we looked back at the tiny figures swimming and jumping and picnicking on the grass, and realised that without meaning to, we had come almost halfway round. Halfway from the Point, halfway to … where? And we realised, then, that there was a somewhere else, that you could just keep going through the trees and the scrub and past the invisible line of the No Swimming pole and find yourself somewhere that might even be worth going to.
That’s how we found this place, on the other side of where we were supposed to be, a secret shore all our own.
I was worried about being here at first, worried that we would get into trouble. I pointed out that we had crossed the invisible line.
But Elijah just shrugged and said, “So what?” Even when we found the fence through the trees, the concealed track leading down the hill, the signs that yelled at you to stay away.
“People shouldn’t worry about fences and signs,” he said. If you let a see-through fence stop you, you mustn’t have cared much in the first place.
After that day, whenever he jumped on his bike, his towel stuffed away in his backpack, and asked if I wanted to come “for a ride” with him, I always said yes.
It was nicer around this side. It was still and quiet. You didn’t have to watch out for jet skis or speedboats. There was no one to tell you to wait thirty minutes before going in the water because you had eaten a single slice of apple.
But there was something else too.
There was Old Lower Grange.
The swimming area was over the outskirts of the old town, over paddocks and bush and the occasional shed. But here you were closer to the town itself, to the buildings and the roads and the houses where people had lived, where they had got married and pushed children on swings and tormented each other with gobs of flying mashed potato.
It was all out there somewhere. I watched the way the ground sloped down to the water’s edge and beyond, and thought about it all there, underwater.
We swam along the shoreline, Elijah setting the pace, his long, measured strokes between me and the deep.
We floated on our backs, looking up at the cloudless sky, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were things down below, things I shouldn’t turn my back on.
Sometimes we stood in the shallows, skipping stones out across the water, seeing how many skips we could get until they sank out of sight. Then we’d guess where they’d landed – the town square, the school, our very own drowned tree house?
Sometimes we found things that might have washed up from the old town – a plank of wood from a fence, an old biscuit tin, the wheel from a bike – but there was no way to be sure. For all we knew they could have just been bits of junk people dumped there later.
Once I saw a road. The weathered edge of a sheet of dark stones, tightly packed, leading down and away.
The maps I had drawn in Mum’s class clicked into place inside my head. We were west, and on high ground, so it could be the Old Lenton Road, where it ran up and away into the hills. That would make the school over there and the supermarket over there and our place would be …
I turned and scanned the water, the old streets laying themselves out like a jigsaw before my eyes, every piece perfectly formed to fit only and exactly in one rightful place.
It made me feel strange, shivery. I couldn’t help imagining myself following it, putting one foot in front of the other, all the way down into the dark underwater town.
But Elijah shook his head. “That’s not a road,” he said. “See?”
He scrambled down the bank and kicked at the stones. They came away easily under his shoe and I saw that they weren’t black, not tightly packed, but loose and irregular, a patchwork of colours. Just a random assortment of stones masquerading as a way to somewhere.
“But there could be roads,” I said.
Elijah shrugged. “I guess.”
“We could find one,” I said. Now
that the idea was in my head it was difficult to shake. “We could follow it.”
Elijah laughed. “It’s not Atlantis, you know.”
I knew he wasn’t laughing at me, though. He had one of my old drawings stuck to the inside of his wardrobe where he thought I couldn’t see it.
“Anyway,” he said. “It wouldn’t work. You’d just keep bobbing to the surface.”
He was right. But I didn’t want him to be. I wanted to believe that somehow my feet would stay suctioned to the ground, that if I found a road, it would lead me down.
Maybe, I thought, I could make myself heavy. I could put stones in my pockets and bundle them up in my T-shirt.
“You want to weigh yourself down with stones and walk into a lake in the middle of the bush?” This time Elijah was laughing at me. “Idiot. This is why Mum doesn’t let you swim on your own.”
That night, I dreamed about Old Lower Grange. I saw the streetlights hung with lake weed, dark fists of mud punched into the holes in the road. Crabs and yabbies made their homes in the hollowed-out buildings and fish cruised the streets, pausing at intersections to wave each other through politely with their fins. I couldn’t help wondering what kind of life was going on down there, without us.
I never walked into town, though.
We never found a road. I kept half an eye out for sheets of stones but never saw anything. Then the rain came and the water level crept up, and even the pile of stones I kept going back to have a closer look at disappeared under the surface.
I stopped going up to the lake.
Elijah moved to the city for uni and Hannah started working at the council. And she wasn’t the kind of person who would walk past signs and slip through a hole in the fence. She was more likely to redo the lettering, tighten the wire.
Soon after, Mum started letting me go to the pool on my own. As long as I was sensible, she said. I was old enough now and the pool was safe. It was much better than a lake. It had lifeguards and clear water. There were no shifting depths or hidden dangers, unless you counted people randomly jumping on you or slamming you with tennis balls. And it was clean as well, unless you counted the bandaids.