Riptides

by Kirsten Alexander

  I turn back to Jim, who is regaling the three men now circled around us with a tale of his past prowess on the rugby field. Then I head to the kitchen.

  Dad is getting himself a fresh beer while a woman wearing a purple headband talks at him. I should have fought him harder. I should’ve stopped him from going to the commune, shouldn’t have helped out.

  Once the record ends, the dancers gather around the stereo, choosing what they want to hear next. Abby holds up one album cover after another to shouts of ‘naaah’ or whoops of approval. For a moment there’s no music, and the radio that no one bothered to turn off bays for attention. Mark is standing in front of it, turns it up, and people begin to fall silent and funnel into the kitchen, aware that something has changed, something important is being said.

  Mark leans on the benchtop, his brow furrowed in concentration. His mate Geoff stands beside him, hands on hips.

  Abby cuts through the crowd to get to the radio. ‘On Christmas Day? Turn it off. We’re playing records.’ She reaches for the radio, but Mark grabs her wrist. ‘Ow, that hurts.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He releases her, but his eyes don’t leave the radio.

  ‘What’s so important?’ She rubs her wrist.

  The radio newsreader is grave: ‘. . . city of Darwin destroyed by Tropical Cyclone Tracy. Reports of the devastation are only now making their way to the rest of the country. Eyewitnesses say the city has been levelled, with the remains of thousands of homes scattered across the town. Winds of 135 miles per hour were recorded by the gauge at Darwin Airport before it was blown away. Never has Australia seen a disaster of this magnitude.’

  Lou joins the back of the crowd. ‘What’s going on?’ Low murmurs of explanation ripple across the room.

  Jim is standing beside me. A lit cigarette dangles from his parted lips, ash dropping onto the floor. ‘Holy Christ.’

  ‘Prime Minister Whitlam has ordered a mass airlift of citizens from what remains of the city, and has sent Navy boats, armed services and police from southern states to assist with the disaster.’

  I hate to admit it, but my first thought is that a disaster of this scale is good for Abby and me, that it will draw focus away from us, make Mark forget about the commune and Beau, make Roberts think about bigger things than a country-road car crash. Maybe some of his sprawling family or workmates come from Darwin.

  ‘. . . number of fatalities is not yet known, and with people already evacuating the town by car, authorities are struggling to determine the full scope of this disaster . . . We’ll bring further information to air as it comes to hand.’

  When the news story finishes, the kitchen comes back to life with a rustle of talk like leaves caught in a wind. I don’t want to process this with a bunch of strangers so I go to my bedroom. As I walk past Sarah’s room I see Joanne sitting cross-legged and alone on the bed, stroking Sarah’s toy unicorn like it’s a beloved pet.

  Dad joins me in our room. ‘Skye’s there, in Darwin,’ he says.

  ‘Right, I forgot that. Her family too, yeah?’

  ‘Her brother. Parents are dead. I don’t know if she had cousins, or if her grandparents are alive. I should know that.’ He takes a jerky breath. ‘I hope they put her deep in the ground, Charlie. I hope she was safe.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Thursday 26 December 1974

  Abby

  Geoff’s wife, Margot, calls while I’m making lunch. I wipe tomato juice off my fingers with a paper towel, holding the phone between my shoulder and ear.

  ‘They’ll be on the news tonight,’ she says. ‘Geoff got an emergency line out of Darwin and called the station. They’re both okay and Mark says to tell you he’ll be in touch as soon as he can.’

  I phone Lou. ‘I’ll be on your couch at five-thirty,’ she says.

  Radio reports have drip-fed us information about the cyclone. It turns out the rest of Australia hadn’t known about the cyclone until Christmas afternoon because there’d been no way of getting word out. In the end, a ship not too far off the coast, taking its own beating in the storm, got news to Perth. It’d taken them four hours to make radio contact. The ship’s captain said that when the cyclone changed course and headed for Darwin he’d feared the worst: ‘It wasn’t like any wind I’d seen before. It was colossal.’ He’d told his men to keep calling until they made contact. And, he said, he prayed.

  Wind had battered Darwin for seven hours. It cut a line across the city, missing nothing, destroying everything. And, as is the way with these things, those awful hours were followed by a series of insults. With an earthquake, it’s aftershocks; with a tropical cyclone, it’s fear of typhoid and an infestation of mosquitoes and flies. All of this I learned from the ABC.

  Mark, Geoff, a cameraman and a sound guy flew up in a Hercules late yesterday, hours after the reports started coming through. Tonight, we’ll see the first images of Darwin on the news.

  At a quarter to six, Lou and I usher our kids into the living room. The cyclone will be the first story and I want everyone to be settled when the news comes on. I’ve made Dad a pot of tea, put it on the table near the armchair. Charlie has kicked off his stinky sandals, plopped down onto the floor, and is nursing a can of beer. The kids bump one another like dodgems before finally agreeing on a seating arrangement where no one is touching anyone and no heads are in the way. Lou and I take the couch, each holding a glass of moselle.

  ‘This year,’ she says. ‘What a debacle. Starts with a flood, ends with a cyclone.’ She doesn’t mention Skye but yes, this year . . .

  We hear Mark before we see him. ‘We arrived in Darwin last night and what we’ve seen since then defies belief.’ My heart lifts at the sound of his voice, so measured and authoritative.

  ‘What’s the population up there, do you think? Before this,’ Charlie asks.

  ‘I heard 47,000, and they’re expecting to evacuate almost all of them,’ Dad replies.

  ‘To where?’ Charlie asks.

  Dad rattles off the list of potential towns people could be taken to.

  ‘Look,’ I say and nod at the TV.

  We watch as the camera pans across the devastated streets of Darwin. Mark’s team has filmed from a helicopter, and what’s left of the town beneath them looks like a sprawling rubbish dump. Over the sound of chopper blades, we see collapsed, dishevelled skeletons of homes. They sit along the edge of streets strewn with wooden boards, metal sheeting, upturned cars, and telephone poles pointing every which way, wires draping despondently between them. We see footage of life on the ground, too. Men, some slim, some with pregnancy-sized bellies, wearing shorts and work boots, haul great hunks of whatever they can carry into garbage trucks. An elderly Aboriginal woman in a faded sundress watches.

  The footage cuts to Mark, handsome and composed as always, standing alone on ground covered with detritus. He’s wearing tan slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt, and has one hand on his hip. He points to a snaking line behind him.

  ‘There’s Daddy!’ Sarah points at the screen.

  ‘Daddy!’ Petey stands up.

  ‘These men and women, mums and dads and grandparents, teachers and bus drivers, are queuing for ice,’ Mark says. ‘It’s about thirty-nine degrees in Darwin today, and the water is running out.’

  Joanne begins to cry. I lift her onto my lap and smooth her hair off her forehead. Dad touches Petey on the back. ‘Sit.’

  ‘The people here have an unbreakable spirit, despite all they’ve been through,’ Mark says. He talks of the neighbourliness – encouraged by the presence of law-enforcement officials – of the food and medical supplies making their way to the schools, which are now shelters. It’s horribly familiar, words we heard following the flood. But this is worse, as much as disasters can be compared. It’s much worse.

  ‘All public services have been severed,’ Mark says. ‘There is no electricity, no sewage, no clean water flowing from the taps, and aside from emergency services and the media, there is no way of contacting the outsi
de world.’ He pauses for effect. ‘This is a tragedy of unprecedented scale.’

  I don’t think Mark should have let the cameraman shoot footage of the children’s toys and Christmas decorations that litter the ground, soiled and wet, but Mark has told me many times his job is not to show what’s palatable but what’s true.

  He interviews a woman called Nan who says she and her children have only the clothes they are wearing.

  ‘Barney got thrown against the shed wall.’

  ‘Barney is your dog,’ Mark says.

  ‘My dog, yeah. Went up like a piece of paper and off down the street. Down there.’ The camera follows her sightline to the end of a ravaged street.

  ‘And what did you do, Nan? How did you survive?’

  ‘We went under the caravan, didn’t we? Stayed there in the mud for hours till the wind stopped enough to crawl out. Kids were screaming and we were all a foot in the muck and I thought the caravan was going to come down on top of us. Not much of a Christmas for the kids.’

  ‘But you made it through,’ Mark says.

  The camera moves closer, ready for tears. Nan remains stoic. ‘Can’t find the dog, but.’

  Mark speaks with local mechanic Sam who describes his night, saying the rain had been heavy, and the wind immense.

  ‘Sheets of corrugated iron scraping across the road and smashing into cars. There was an almighty wind, like standing near a plane. Deafening. I watched my kids screaming at me, right in front of me. Couldn’t make out a word.’

  ‘Well, at least people are getting out,’ I say to Lou. The television shows a crawling line of cars leaving the city on a cleared road.

  ‘People are fleeing this shattered city by air, land and sea,’ Mark says, ‘leaving those whose job it is to clean and care. People who go by plane are being sent to Alice, Sydney and Adelaide. Those who drive are heading to Katherine and Tennant Creek. Some are heading by sea to parts of north Queensland or down to Brisbane. And no one knows when, or if, they will be coming home.’

  He ends his story with a shot of a sign outside the local cinema. It’s fashioned from a piece of old board, with the handwritten words, ‘Gone with the Wind, starring Cyclone Tracy’.

  ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think Mark wrote that himself,’ Dad says.

  They cut back to the studio, where the program’s host stares gravely into the camera. ‘That was Mark Campbell reporting from Darwin. And the prayers of the nation are with the people of that city tonight.’

  ‘Prayers?’ I stand up. ‘If there’s anybody up there who let this happen, why would you pray to him?’

  Lou whistles. ‘You’ll be in for it if the nuns hear that.’

  But I don’t think I believe what the nuns forced on us as teenagers. I’m not sure I believed it even then, since I’d wondered from a young age why any god worth worshipping would allow children to starve or loving mothers to die.

  ‘I just think it’s strange to hear people thank God for their survival,’ I say. ‘He could’ve stopped this happening in the first place. If it was the work of the Devil, why didn’t God blow the wind back out to sea? What kind of god lets wind destroy a city?’

  These are the sorts of comments that Dad would have leapt on in years gone by, since he remained resolutely Catholic even after Mum’s death. He’d have offered a ‘God works in mysterious ways’ or ‘There’s a larger plan at work than we understand.’ But he says nothing.

  ‘You think God lets people die because he doesn’t care about them?’ Charlie asks.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think that.’

  When Lou has gone home and the kids and Dad are in bed, I sit outside with Charlie. We slouch in the butterfly chairs and look up at the night sky. The air is hot and humid, and carries the anxious scratch of cicadas, ratatatatat, insistent agreement of frogs, uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh, and the acrid smell of our insect repellent.

  He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a joint and a box of matches. ‘It’s a shame for us you’re married to a reporter.’ He puts the joint in his mouth, lights it and takes a series of short, sharp drags. He tips up his head and blows out a stream of smoke, grey-white against the black sky. ‘Here.’ He passes the joint to me.

  ‘It’s never been a problem until now.’ I sink into my chair, almost relaxed for the first time in months. I take another long toke before I pass it back to him.

  ‘Cyclone won’t hold his interest for much longer. How are you going to keep him away from the commune?’

  I groan. ‘You tell me. I wish either you or Dad had told me about that place before it got to this point. You know Mark’s like a bloodhound once he gets a whiff of something. I would’ve told you not to go there.’

  ‘That’s exactly why Dad didn’t want you to know.’

  ‘Well, yes, that’s fantastic. My father not telling me so he could bring back a stolen child. My husband not telling me because –’ But that one is on me. Mark doesn’t tell me the details of his stories because I’ve made it clear I’m not interested or am annoyed or want to get him to do something useful around the house. And bloodhound is the wrong dog: when it comes to investigating a story Mark is a pitbull, a pitbull attacking a poodle. ‘Charlie, he’s been investigating illegal brothels, gambling places, drug trafficking, the criminals coming up from Sydney – everything that goes on in Fortitude Valley – for two years. He’s obsessed. If he’s found out there’s a police-run dope farm that’s funnelling drugs into the Valley, no one will be able to keep him away. Not me, not his boss.’

  ‘He’d drop it if he knew it’d keep you safe.’

  I hold my hand out for the joint. ‘I’m not telling him.’

  ‘I don’t see any other way.’

  I don’t either. But I have a few more days to think of one, and Charlie’s making me anxious. I change the topic. ‘Remember the summer Dad decided we had to learn about physics?’

  ‘Bread always lands butter side down?’

  Which makes me laugh. ‘That is not a law of physics.’

  ‘Pretty sure it is.’

  ‘You don’t remember him explaining the laws of motion?’

  ‘I really don’t.’ He smiles at me. ‘And if this is your best stoned riffing, I’m cutting you off.’

  ‘So funny. Dad was teaching a grade ten physics class, which meant our ignorance was suddenly outrageous. Nothing?’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s amazing how much you’ve blocked.’

  ‘My superpower,’ he says.

  ‘First law of motion: Everything stays in its state of rest or moving straight ahead, except when it’s compelled to change its state by another force. Third: For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Second one’s not relevant right now.’

  ‘I don’t see how any of them are relevant right now.’

  I sigh. ‘Charlie, you interfered with the motion of things, the way things were supposed to go, when you ran Skye off the road. She was moving somewhere, going to her child. She was thrown off course and now Beau’s stuck somewhere he shouldn’t be, and a woman and a baby are dead.’

  ‘You know what? The car accident is good for Doyle. If it wasn’t for that, Mark would storm into the commune with his crew and Doyle wouldn’t have any leverage to stop him. But now he can use you.’ He sits forward. ‘And we can use Mark’s work.’

  But I’m not done explaining the laws to him. ‘We changed Skye’s course, the course, some action of the universe. There has to be a reaction to that, equal in force. Do you know what I mean?’

  He pulls on the joint, considers the stars.

  ‘Charlie?’

  ‘Because it’s not like Doyle cares that some chick had a car crash. But now she’s tied to you, and you’re tied to Mark. So when you think about it, this all circles around you.’

  ‘No, listen. We – you, mostly – caused something to veer from its natural trajectory. And now we need to do something to put everything back on its right track.’ I stop, struck by an idea. ‘It’s like the cycl
one. Some force flicked it in a different direction and now a whole city has been destroyed. Because –’ But I don’t know who to blame for that, or exactly how it relates to our driving – though I’m sure there’s a connection.

  This seems to strike a chord with him. ‘Karma. There needs to be a right to balance a wrong.’

  ‘Karma? What?’ I can’t follow our conversation anymore. I don’t smoke often and I’ve never found myself in such a convoluted mental mess. But somewhere in my brain I’m clear on two things: I have to talk my husband out of doing his job, and Dad was right when he said the third law was the one you had to look out for. For every action there’s a reaction. Nothing and no one escapes that fact.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Saturday 28 December 1974

  Charlie

  I sit on a park bench in the treeless playground near Indooroopilly Shoppingtown while Abby pushes the twins on swings, first one then the other. She’s like a hydraulic machine. One arm in, one arm out. Yelling at them to hold on to the thick chains. Grim.

  There’s a long gulley in the ground where kids have dragged their feet to slow down. Petey draws a line through it with the front of his thongs, lifting the dust. I can call up the feeling of my own shoes stuttering against the ground, the vibrations going up through my ankles. But the dust – the dust brings other things to mind that I don’t want to think about.

  To my left, two boys are kicking a football across the dry grass. They’re both wearing short shorts and jerseys. One of them, with flame-red hair, leaves his arms hanging in the air after he kicks, and watches the curve of the ball against the sky until it thuds into his friend’s arms.

  I’m the sole man in the play area. Four or five bored women watch their children, sometimes chatting to one another. A kelpie zips around the climbing frame, which is shaped like the skeleton of a rocket, and has a steep slide coming down from the top. The dog barks anxiously, ears pricked forward, shifting his weight from one front paw to another like a tennis player not sure which way he might need to run after the serve. His small human must be inside the rocket.