Pat puts a big map up on the wall and stands back to take it all in. It’s a map of roads, towns, pubs and state lines we’d travel through and across before we got to the ocean, but it’s more than that. There is another line through some of those pubs drawn with pink highlighter, some circled in red. This is a treasure map. I raise a leg into the air and let the breeze from the ceiling fan cool my toes. Pat’s nodding his head slowly and crossing something off in his notebook. And just when I think he’s forgotten I’m there he says, ‘Those teeth aren’t gunna brush themselves.’
Fifty brushes upstairs, fifty brushes downstairs, and my teeth are as clean as a century. The tap’s leaking and no matter how hard you turn it a slow trickle of water runs down the side of the sink. What a waste of magic. Water has a strength you only see through time. Runs so smooth after hundreds of years its worn great big rocks down to tiny little stones. It doesn’t start like a car engine or switch off like a light bulb. Back home it would come through the bathroom taps: water travelling down on the back of a melody. Sometimes it sounded like a whale calling across the sea to its baby, sometimes like a harp with strings made out of early morning spiderwebs covered in sparkly dew. If I hold out my hand, sometimes the song drops will come sit in my palm or balance on a fingertip just like a butterfly.
Water used to protect me from Dad too. If I couldn’t get to the hole in the trunk of Barry in time or find the metal fish, I’d imagine myself diving down into the sea where I couldn’t hear them fight. The water can be dark and ruthless, don’t ever forget that. It can slam you about, steal the life from your lungs before you’ve got time to come up for air. Wrap you up in a wave and you’re gone for good. But in the bathroom it sings. If you play violin or maybe the tuba, you’ll be saying, ‘Well, are the notes G sharp or E flat?’ But I cannot tell you that because the notes I see are colours. The Mongolian monks know. They throat sing about their water which is magic too. For me the low notes are darker in colour. The highest note is clearer than light. But there are no black ones.
I fill two water glasses up, one just shy of the top. If you get the levels right and run a finger round the rim you can sing in harmony. I carry the glasses into the bedroom. Water sloshes up the side but folds back into itself so I don’t spill a drop. I place each glass in diagonally opposite corners of the room where the walls meet.
‘You don’t waste water round here,’ says Pat.
It’s a scientific fact that genders see things differently and men lack foresight. ‘The water is our insurance policy until morning. Night is the loudest time of day and there are many things we cannot know about because they hide in the dark and we ignore them at our peril.’
Pat frowns with confusion. Probably because men also have a limited vocabulary.
‘Peril is risk and harm combined and water is the antidote.’
‘Yeah, yeah, righto. Just go to bed.’
I try, I really do.
Pat turns out the light then sits on the balcony and smokes a cigarette ’cause he thinks that I can’t see him. He’s breaking a promise to Mum and that makes him feel even worse about it all so he needs another cigarette to calm down. ‘It just takes the edge off’ is what they say, those people who huddle in a circle out the front of city buildings like a secret tribe trying to make smoke signals. I watch Pat with his feet up on the railing like he’s been there for years. Now he’s a silhouette of an old man looking down on a sleeping town below, the town he’s grown up and old in. Thinking about where the time has gone, the drought of ’64 and the flood of ’78. The Christmas dance in Mick’s shearing shed where he met his wife Meg, buttoned up in the starchy white shirt his mum had ironed special. All the secrets he kept but wishes them long forgotten because he’s just too tired to keep holding them anymore.
That’s what the quiet time is for, the time between sleeping and dreaming when memories float through the air, twist and turn like vines crawling up to the sun and reach out to rest in someone else’s head. The dreams of strangers pass through all the time. They might bring a sadness that’s not your own but is bruising all the same. And your heart can’t grow when it’s hurting like that. I keep thinking of Mum, where the boat is, who I can be without her. And then I am taken in a dream of my own.
We’re right in the middle of a big intersection with cars zooming past and busy businesspeople banging into us. They are cold and unfriendly. Then a man says if I tell him the answer to a riddle I can keep her. But he never tells me what the riddle is. I hold onto Mum’s hand until the ground slides away. Then people on buses and in taxis call out to me, talking over one another just to confuse me. And I need all my concentration to hold onto Mum so I scream at them to tell me the riddle and a woman with no eyes turns to me and smiles: ‘How long is a piece of string?’
Then she takes Mum’s hand and before I can think what the answer might be she slips from my fingers, disappears into the crowd as they shuffle into buildings far away.
I wake up with a start, panting like a dehydrated dog. Even though I hadn’t cried in my dream I lick salty tears from the corners of my mouth. Pat is standing over me; says to go back to sleep but I don’t want to close my eyes in case I go into the same dream without knowing the answer. I lie on my stomach and ask Pat to draw on my back.
Mum would draw mythical animals like a Centaur, Griffin or a Sphinx. Sometimes even a Teumessian fox, which is so huge that no one can ever catch it. But Pat doesn’t know these animals. Mum says Australians have no sense of themselves let alone the history of the world and even though Pat said that was a bit harsh he still doesn’t know that man-eating birds with beaks of bronze and sharp metallic feathers are called Stymphalians.
Pat says we have a big day ahead of us tomorrow and that we both need to get some sleep. He wipes my face with one of his hankies and it smells a little bit like the eucalyptus lollies he keeps in his pocket so Mum doesn’t know he’s been smoking. He says I should just try to think of something nice, but I say that everything nice has a picture of Mum in it somewhere. I ask Pat why, apart from when Mum died, had I never seen him cry, not even once. Pat sits on my bed and for the longest time he says nothing. Then he says that once the floodgates are open it’s hard to close them again. The shadow of Pat’s hand reaches towards me. I think he’s going to draw like I want him to and I don’t even care if it was something unmythical like a stapler or a pineapple. But he got startled by his own silhouette. Got up and lay down on the other bed. He still had that old man’s sadness as well as his own.
I watched Pat that night, watched as his breathing got slower and slower and heavy with stories travelling through the night air. We would have to take turns looking out for one another. Even though Pat was older than me, he still needed someone to stay near when he was scared and thought that dam would burst. Suddenly I had the answer to that riddle—I knew how long a piece of string was. Twice as long as half of it.
12 Lending time
Some things you just can’t return to, least not straight away. And when you wake from a dream, it’s like missing the bus. Another will come around the corner but it might take you somewhere else. Even though I stepped back into sleep, I couldn’t find the building where those people had taken Mum. Couldn’t find that cold grey place at all. So in the morning I wrote down the riddle and the answer just in case that bus came back another night. Pat was shaving in the bathroom and I had to pee real bad so I lay back on the bed and stretched my legs up and over my head so it wouldn’t trickle out.