Before I get too caught up in remembering the past lives I’ve had, I change out of my clothes and swap my handbag for my backpack. I pull a hoodie over my shirt, checking in the mirror that my face is pretty much undiscoverable when the hood is raised. Then I swing out of my room, ignoring the strengthening curry smell from the kitchen where Mum is.
Mum is more like me than Riley. She’s usually always meeting up with friends and talks way too much in polite conversations. Whenever she’s asked ‘how you going?’ as a hello, she never just says fine. Mum will go on and on about her day and everything that’s happening in her life. Me and her are both chatterboxes. She’s not like that so much at the moment though. These days she just says fine cos she doesn’t wanna make anyone uncomfortable with all her grief.
Mum has her back to me, luckily, and I make it out the front door without a comment.
‘Aye!’ Aka Lai’s voice cuts through my heart and shocks my system.
I get my breathing under control before turning to face her.
She sits on the veranda, beginning a card game on the fold-out table I got her from Bunnings. She places plastic tablecloths over it and, when it rains, she puts towels on top, so the plastic tablecloths won’t get wet. I don’t understand half the things she does.
I wander up close to her and lean against the front door frame.
‘Wanem wrong, Kala?’ she says, while keeping her eyes glued to her game. Solitaire maybe?
I breathe out slowly, a thumping going off wildly inside me. Riley moves closer and her hand brushes up against mine. My skin gets a tingling feeling, like colourful fireworks buzzing through my veins. But it doesn’t feel like a real hand touching mine.
It’s just Riley, doing her best to persuade me to stay here.
I smile at my grandmother and convince myself I am being genuine.
Aka Lai’s mouth twitches and my stomach muscles tighten in response. It’s like there’s this energy between us. I can almost see the red vines of our auras tying together. Connecting my mind with my aka’s. It pulses with knowledge. Warmth vibrates from it. She knows me. She knows something about what we’ve hardly discussed.
She swallows and the lines in her face deepen. Beautiful.
Aka Lai came from TI when my mum was a kid. She and my athe held two suitcases each and lived in a house full of his relatives. She got a job as a receptionist at a doctor’s office and still works there now. I reckon she wants to return home but couldn’t bear to be far away from us.
This place is the next best thing anyways, since there’s plenty island people here.
‘I mina love you,’ she says slow one, glancing up at me.
My throat immediately gets choked up. Some part of me is real touched by this small admission, which of course I knew. I know it as well as I know I breathe air to live.
‘I love you too.’
She nods and returns her eyes to the cards in front of her.
I sigh and reach back towards the front door to turn the porch light on. ‘You shouldn’t be playing cards in the dark, Aka.’
The harsh yellow illuminates her small body suddenly, like she’s an angel. Her white hair, a halo. I don’t feel unsteady or uncertain anymore. The sight of her makes me sure.
‘Ah, mata quick game here,’ she answers.
‘Yeah, sure.’ Although I feel unwavering in my nightly task, I am hesitant to leave the comfort of her presence. She senses it and looks up at me.
‘Wanem?’ she asks, eyes narrowing again.
‘Just … everything.’ My inability to express what I really mean is hereditary.
She nods though, because words aren’t always necessary to express feelings.
‘Wa, I sabe,’ she says.
I sniff the stinging in my nose away and shake my head a few times to clear my eyes. I lean over and kiss her cheek, soft and sweet smelling. As I pull away, her hand grabs my wrist and she keeps me close. She lifts herself further upright in her chair and touches our foreheads together. I squeeze my eyes shut and accept the love.
After a moment she releases me, and the air gets caught in the back of my throat.
I can feel Riley vibrating to my side. She wants this too. She wants to reach out and have our aka hold her, kiss her, and make everything okay.
I stand straight and spot my mum looking at us through the window. Her brows are creased and her mouth open as if she is about to call out for me to come back inside. She splays her hands out with a shrug of her shoulders. Where are you going?
I’m surprised she hasn’t soldered a tracking bracelet to my wrist at this point. I kinda want to do the same to her and Aka.
Friends, I mouth back at her.
Her frown deepens but she doesn’t beckon me inside, nor does she come to me and drag me back to my room. Part of me longs to be taken care of like I’m a child again. For that simplicity. Before Mum can call me inside and treat me like that, I lift my hand in a wave.
‘You right, ah?’ Aka whispers, as I lift my backpack up higher on my shoulders.
I shake my head and then nod, contradicting myself. ‘Wa,’ I say. ‘Yawo.’
Mum presses her hand to the glass. Aka jerks her head in goodbye and, as I am bounding down the steps and lifting up my bike, I feel them both watching my back. Riley follows, gliding down from our veranda like sand falling from hands. We go off into the night, the two of us, like we used to when it didn’t require a real effort just to see her, me on my bike and her dragged along by my mind.
The car park is dimly lit. Still. Council haven’t learnt a thing from my letters. It’s empty, but for a lone white sedan that has police tape telling us the cops know about it. The car is creepy, but I reckon I might be freaked out more if I turned up one night and it wasn’t there. It’s part of the setting now.
Riley shivers needlessly beside me. She’s not cold. Just wants my attention.
My tongue touches my lips and I taste salt. Gentle rolling waves breach through the nothingness towards me. They aren’t real waves, not like down south. Just baby ones that want to be heard and yet you must strain to hear them. I can also make out the whistle of sand dancing down on the beach. No gulls, no other people. No sound of life other than that of the land.
Mum and I reckon we live near the beaches cos we are saltwater people, and since we don’t live on the islands, we need to be connected to the water in any way we can. When I was little, we used to live right on the beach and the lapping of the ocean would lull me to sleep. Maybe that’s why I work in a swimwear store!
I’ve been coming to the beachside car park here on the northside for too many nights to count now. It’s a relatively small beach that stretches just under a kay. It’s not very busy, with only one corner store and one fish and chip shop. There aren’t any houses along it either, aren’t many people to bear witness to you. Homes are set back a block cos there was supposed to be big flash apartments built, but not even the digging got underway before the company planning it went bankrupt.
I go to my spot, the wooden steps that lead you up onto the sandy dune before you tumble down to the water. The stinger-, crocodile-, and shark-infested water.
The steps are tucked in between plants and long grass. And there are wood splinters in certain places so I gotta be careful where I place my din. When I sit on them, I know no-one else can see me, even if they drive past or park their car directly in front of me. I know because Riley couldn’t see him.
Whenever she or I used to walk the beachside way home, we’d always hold our keys in between our knuckles. Mum joked that we should carry pepper spray, and we laughed about not knowing where to even buy it. I can make it myself now – I googled it: chopped chilli, garlic, oil and a dash of vinegar. Images of mine and Riley’s practice jabs and right hooks flash with a bitter taste in my mouth now. Giggling play fights are distant memories.
I s
ettle onto the steps and open my backpack. Reaching in, I pull out the metal; it’s cold against my palm, but the rest of me feels flushed. Speckled heat across my cheeks.
I roll it in my hands – it’s the length of my forearm and hand together. Rust has covered the two ends and it crumbles a little under my touch.
Time passes in a different way here. It’s like it continues on around me, while I wait, paused. Really, I’m not even sure I know what will happen on these nights I come. I don’t even know if I’d be able to stand up against the scary something that I know could happen.
Riley stations herself behind me. She stands, or hovers, and watches over my head like a lighthouse – waiting to protect me. Not that she could.
She is quiet, but I can feel her impatience and frustration with me. If I had enough imagination to make her talk, she’d tell me to go on and piss off outta here. I would listen if she could tell me that. Honest.
Now that I’m sitting still, I can hear even more undercurrents of life on the beach. A rustle here, a crunch of sand under feet there? It all sends my ears perking up, and I feel like a dog listening out for the words walk or park. Except it’s not excitement in my tummy. It is fear and an unending wave of fury.
I jump when a streetlight near the car park, usually broken, flickers on. A shadow appears under the light. My grip tightens around the tool in my hands and I grit my teeth.
The shadow moves towards me.
Big shoulders.
Thick body.
My heart stutters and my fingers and toes turn cold.
It freezes, just at the edge of the lamp’s light.
We stare at each other, me and this creature.
And then I blink, and it is gone.
I let out a breath and realise my heart is beating too fast. Did Riley’s heart beat this fast? I look up at her, but her jaw is locked, and she won’t glance down at me. She’s very mad.
It must be close to seven or eight pm by the time I lose my nerve, like usual. The dark gets a new meaning once a certain number of minutes click by. Maybe cos curfew used to be eight-thirty for me and Riley when we were kids in school, and now I can’t bring myself to break the habit for long. But I think knowing nobody could be possibly driving this way now is what makes me frightened even more.
My limbs feel like they drag with disappointment as I move across the sandy grass and then onto the rough gravel. Shadows of my body stretch over my path as I walk back across the car park, putting the metal something back into my bag and shouldering the pack. Shouldering the yuckiness that holds my heart.
I find my bike and get on, making sure my Riley isn’t too far away.
The hospital is like a beacon compared to the darkness at the beach. I had to stash my bike behind a bush and a frangipani tree and then luckily wait only five minutes for the bus. I would have called an Uber, but these days I’m a little low on funds. Besides travelling across the city, with no-one but me, the driver and my sister, was comforting, and I almost fell asleep. But when we stopped outside the hospital, the driver barked at me to get the fuck off.
It is right across the road from the Esplanade. I suppose that makes for some interesting scenery, and maybe being by the water and looking out at the sea is helpful emotionally to the patients. I like to believe it is.
I walk right in the front doors, and my sister follows me. She keeps glancing over her shoulders, very nervous. I would guess she doesn’t like to come to the hospital – it’s kinda creepy.
Visiting hours will be over in fifteen minutes so I speedwalk and sweat gathers under my pits. I’m nervous too.
The lobby is noticeably empty. I do see one woman alone at the lobby café. She is slouched in on herself, holding her head in her hands. Her aura is crying out of her body, greys and silvers dripping like diamonds onto the polished floors. Two older folk clutch each other by the stairs and their intensity scares me so much I take the lift.
Nurses pass me and, even though I don’t know them, even though I am a stranger here, they give me welcoming nods and smiles. They’re a godsend, Mum reckons.
The room is in the corner and, just like I’ve been told, she has it all to herself.
Riley’s bed is in the middle, facing the TV Mum says is never put on. Riley always hated regular TV; she only liked Netflix or Stan. American shows she could binge in one weekend. She would always say Home and Away and Neighbours, our mum’s and Aka’s favourite shows, were vapid. I don’t know why she’d use that word, probably cos she thought we wouldn’t know what it meant. Mum and Aka Lai would just scoff. I’d roll my eyes and point out when the actors were wearing the brand of swimwear I sold.
Her eyes are closed, and her hair is braided on one side. Mum does it, with the help of the nurses every so often. They brush it out and run oil through the strands to make it strong for when she comes back to us properly.
I stand close to the bed and put my hands on the blanket covering her.
She has become a reduced version of what she once was. It hurts to look at her now, but I owe her that much. She is surely hurting more than me.
I look at my mind’s-eye Riley who has followed me around all evening and is standing next to me now. She’s fuller, brighter than the real Riley. The brown of her hair is deeper, her cheeks rounder, and her eyes glint.
She’s watching me, and I expect her to disappear, cos surely seeing this real Riley in person is confusing and worrying to her. Technically, she should dissipate back into the atmosphere again, back into the real Riley. Or fizzle back into my mind, I suppose.
The Riley beside me doesn’t fade away though. She blurs and for a moment I think she might speak. She’s never spoken before.
Her hair lifts and stretches up, like when you rub a balloon on your arm and the static electricity sends the strands on your arm upright. There’s a light flickering in her eyes. She’s alive with emotion.
I stare at her and she stares back.
But I can’t take it anymore, because this means something, and it might be something I’m not ready for. I squeeze everything shut. Block out the noise. Block out the sights. My hands tighten on the blanket that is covering my very real sister. The cotton feels rough and heavy, jolting and comforting. It’s all too confusing to allow my senses to acknowledge.
My knees buckle and the sensation of falling extends to my heart and my mind. I sink down further and press my face into Riley’s belly. My arms go around her, and I won’t think about what’s happening around us, to us. To her.
I’ll never, ever leave her.
Split
Cassie Lynch
Cassie Lynch is a writer and researcher living in Boorloo/Perth. She is a descendant of the Noongar people and belongs to the beaches on the south coast of Western Australia. She has a PhD in Creative Writing that explores Aboriginal memory of ice ages and sea-level rise. She is a student of the Noongar language and is the co-founder of the Woylie Project. Her writing has been featured in Perth Festival, Fremantle Arts Centre, City of Perth, Westerly, Artsource, and Brio Books.
A black swan glides across the surface of the river and lands with a soft splash near a batch of reeds. It floats through the base of a semi-solid statue of a European man, his gaze fixed on the horizon. The swan cranes its neck and grooms under its wing.
Did you come here looking for Water?
I’m standing in Perth, a city located on the banks of a river on the south-west coast of the Australian continent. I’m in the central business district, on a long, wide road with deep kerbs, surrounded by a rectangular gorge of skyscrapers. I am walking north and in between the glass and concrete buildings I see glimpses of the Swan River, a blue snaking body of water.
It is the afternoon. Office workers hurry past carrying document wallets and laptop bags. Couriers push trolleys stacked with boxes. Road crews peer into excavated cable tunnels. Charity volunteers shake tins
. Thousands of pairs of feet create a dull patter against the rumble of buses and cars and construction. The glass canyon collects the sounds of rubber hitting hard surfaces and bounces them around.
A tiger snake emerges from a storm drain and swims across the surface of the water. A scooter drives right through its body as the striped serpent makes its way towards a clump of bulrushes. The snake’s waving swim is undisturbed. It disappears into the fringe of green.
Beyond the buildings the river is mild-mannered. The Swan River, so named three hundred years ago by a Dutch explorer, is a creation of the new people, the settlers from over the seas. They infilled the swamps that were here, turning riverland into parkland. They gave the river new banks, new borders. They dammed the tributaries coming down from the eastern hills, changing the flow. The Swan River is a bound river. But there is an older river within. The Bilya. This river is the sweet water body of the creator serpent – the Wagyl, as it is known in the first language of this place.
The main banking institutions are here on this street, and the mining companies. There is prestige attached to possessing the best view of the Swan River. Settlers manufactured dry land to stake their buildings into. It is only a temporary possession though. A recent occupation.
I walk towards the tallest building on the street and enter its broad plaza filled with dining tables and benches. An osprey dives from above and plucks a wriggling salmon from between two suited men eating their lunch at the tables. A cormorant shrieks from its perch in a swamp banksia growing through the centre of the feature water fountain. The tips of melaleuca flowers dip in and out of latte froth, moving on the breeze. Across the expensive pavers are glass doors that lead into the building. I can see that there are bulrushes in the foyer.
A thread catches my eye and I instinctively brush it away from my face. I can barely feel it on my fingertips. A spiderweb.
Flock Page 12