The water was everything.
It was desperate gasps, it was glittering mortality. Yet absence from it was anguish. I use the sea to document my life. Somehow, the moments when my chin slipped above its molten surface were the happiest I ever documented.
The drought bit into Jindabyne this summer and left its teeth-marks. The bush is brittle and frail. The hills are parched and peeling.
Now I stare at the sky and pray I see the ocean one last time.
Dive into me.
***
Slips of light-tainted blue on textured canvas. Prismatic colours shift along a spectrum; light fiddles with hues.
This recollection exists clumsily. It fumbles like silk between the pads of fingers, sliding from a countertop into crumples in the recesses of my mind. Images warp and twist in ribbons of light.
There, in one fold of Impressionist silk, the current pulled greedily at my flailing limbs as I swam. It tugged purposefully, as if peeling a shred of meat from the bone. Salt water seeped
in my open mouth when coming up for air. The air was slick with the greasy residue of a humidity-choked afternoon.
In another valley of the silken memory, the voices on the beach were tinny, as though my parents’ feeble attempts were echoing through a long tunnel of crushed aluminium, and though I couldn’t have been twenty-five metres from the shore, it felt like kilometres.
I felt my toes brush sand after a few frantic strokes. My chin tipped up as I stood. I imagine it now: less sunflower-eager, more noose-bound. Forced by the buoyancy of the warm sea to soak in the vindictive, sickly sun.
When I fumble over this heavy memory now, it settles unpleasantly, like a handful of waterlogged sand in the pit of my empty stomach.
I wonder why my father never swam in for me. A surf-cutter by trade, the salt in his hair and his veins, he stood there on the beach and yelled down the tunnel in vain. The sun could have brought me death. Lazy flies over a ten-year-old, her face tilted no longer to the heavens but to the ever-shifting sandbank.
***
Seascape two. A hardened sculpture in the halls of my mind, capturing an ugly moment after two worlds messily diverged.
Dawn rose over the wind-worn coastline in rotten grin of tangerine and plum. A cup of black tea was cradled in my left palm. A serrated chip in the terracotta grazed the crook of my thumb as I stirred a finger in the lukewarm liquid.
This Melbourne coastline was wildly different to those idyllic beaches of my childhood. I sat there on the patio in nothing but my white polyester nightgown, shuddering with the cold that targeted my teeth and the goosebumps on my calves.
Not a soul but mine in sight.
I would like to think that I spent my energy soaking in the moment. But I sat there in the cold and my vision smudged the scene as I gazed upon the ocean. I wondered why my tea went cold so quickly, and how it’s even possible that the rust-splotched kettle took ten whole minutes to produce boiling water. These trivialities became a background noise to my quiet subsistence.
Tea in hand, I took the path down the scrubby bushland towards the beach. I imagine a sculptor rubbing slurry into an uneven landscape, attempting to smooth it into something more picturesque, but lumps remain where sand dunes pile in the wind. Bindis embedded themselves in my bare feet.
I let myself be pulled by gravity towards the shore down that last dune before the beach. Dark sand clung to my dew-dampened toes.
The glaze of the sea that curves around the Earthen urn was once blue here. Kiln time made it boil (just like the water in that torturously slow, rusted teapot), melting the veneer into waves of white that puncture smooth blue.
Rips bit into metallic water. Red skies tinged the foam a soft, bloodstained salmon. “Magic,” my father would have called it. And I would have mocked him for his predictability. He always described the sea that way. “Magic. Beautiful.” It was magic. The heat of the kiln is magic when it makes waves, and it is alchemy when I change my dad’s little words into precious metal in their absence.
I smooth out the edges of the clay as I recall.
My throat closed. I looked down at my hands, tinged a pale yellow with the early morning cold, spotted red with bushland hives (and sickly guilt.)
Primary colours.
He forgot himself, but I swore to never forget him.
I dipped my ankles into the furiously boiling sea, teacup stranded in the sand. ***
I left the sea by itself for a while. The three years between Melbourne and Sydney, empty of sand and waves, I record now as purgatory.
But look: an interlude. Currumbin.
Afternoon reclined on me like a sheet of soft linen.
We were two adults (twenty-four and sixty), lying side by side on the black polypropylene of my little cousin’s trampoline in a shallow pool of archived memory. When I was little, I jumped a little too eagerly one time and dislocated my elbow. I don’t remember the hospital trip, but I have a smoothed fragment of sea-glass memory, warped and strange. In the jade green glass, I clutch a tiny plastic Tinkerbell and stroke her straw-blonde synthetic hair: my reward for being so brave.
We talked of the gallery back home, and our favourite pieces from the Grand Courts. Mine was the Monet, hers a John Russel: “Rough sea, Morestil”.
“I’ve never seen that room change,” I mused.
We watched the clouds drift overhead for a while, before my mother responded, “There are things that stay, and things that leave. But all the artworks leave traces. They’re documented. Nothing is invisible after it’s gone.”
I told her how badly I wanted to see a Colour Field painting in person. Their vibrancy beckoned me in a natural way. I wanted hues so bright they peal like bells, ringing in my vision long after I left the gallery, leaving their traces in my memories so I would have untainted something to treasure when I’m alone.
She told me that life is the gallery, not just one room.
“Existence is art,” my mother said.
After dementia took Dad, an exhibition closed. A different one filled that room. New artists, new ideas.
That’s what distinguishes a gallery from a ghost town.
“I forgot how these things stain you. See?” Mum lifted her elbow. It was smudged black from the trampoline. The crook of her sun-wrinkled arm framed my view of the murky yellow sky. I brushed off the taint with my thumb. We laughed, then coughed out the smoke.
***
And now, a swollen moment from my return to Asphodel.
I was on the shower floor, nursing a razor nick on my calf. A trickle of red traced a futile pilgrimage to my ankle. The water diluted it before it found its destination. I felt I had lost my destination. It had been years since I was home, and I ached for the beach where I almost drowned at ten.
(The previous time I saw my mother, I asked her about that first seascape. She had no memory of the incident. “You would never have drowned while your father was watching,” she assured me.)
I stared up at the showerhead like a vortex pulling me back to the water. In the basement of my mind, in the discontinued ‘Limbo’ exhibition, the plaques detail:
Tsunamis teetering over the bowed scalps of cities.
Mutual brinkmanship, the foreign policy practice of pushing
states to the threshold of destruction, all to leverage negotiation.
Seaweed dragging itself to shore in the feverish heat of a storm, tortured. Fears for islands swallowed in one greedy oceanic gulp (or multiple).
A message in a bottle, lost to the fury of the high seas.
Evacuations. Riots.
Oblivion.
I watched the morning news for once last week and I felt like my parents, calling through the imaginary tunnel out to sea. So close but limply distant.
I’d been thinking a lot about solipsism. It sickened me.
If everything’s in my head, I thought, I must have the ugliest mind out there. Who in good conscience could concoct this life so full of viciousness? A life in which my own suffering is so feeble in the grand scheme of things.
I nestled my chin in the crook of my knees and watched as the flow of blood from my leg slowly ceased. The stinging lingered.
I was suddenly struck with the occasional horror I often feel in complete recognition of myself – one of those moments when I came to full awareness of my skeleton, organs, flesh. I hated that thought. I wanted to be whole when I felt the hooked island of my kneecap, the foothills of my spine, the valley of my collarbone. I wanted to be one moving part, not all those
fragile ones. I wanted my life to be composed of one story, not moments that washed in and out, at the mercy of the tide.
***
My mother taught me the rule of three as a child. She was an artist and had an affinity for designing things to look ‘just right’.
So, seascape three.
My town faces imminent onslaught after yesterday’s brutal wind gusts that swept the blaze to Rocky Plain, Berridale, Burrungubugge… we are surrounded. All evacuation routes clogged, air support absent. We have mere hours left.
I am stranded, detached from the umbilical cord that tethered my life to the ocean. That grief tugs on my chest with clawing immediacy.
I glance out at the lake as I lie here, childlike, sprawled in the grass. The Lion and Cub Islands are perched upon glittering waters; bordered by the undulating mountainscape, the skeletal survivors of gums burnt last summer. I know how little will remain this time.
Will the winds change? Will the firies arrive? Will torrents of water stream from cloud skating planes, the fire quelled by twirling jetés on the nebulous smoke-sea? Is hope good for anything at all?
I close my eyes. The smooth, liquescent-dappled dark is soothing: a fleeting reprieve from the abrasive smoke.
This is not the calm before the firestorm: this is the eye. But if ignore the clouding asphyxiation and press the acrid smell from my nose and exhale, I can feel the ghost gums. I can admire the serene warbling of the magpies. I can forget.
In observing the slow march of Time’s hands, tiptoeing a line through horizon to roots, I am wrapped inextricably in the moment.
A distant rumbling sounds from the sonorous belly of the horizon. Slate stains fold and crumple it into swells of distilled clouds. Silence spills in the thunder’s wake… Naphtha-spark lightning carves the horizon. Sliced in forked halves. I know it will soon beckon the soft onslaught of summer rain. It will stipple the fields into gentle dew beneath warm hooves, and that damp musk will follow. It will rise in misty undertow, petrichor threading its mellow fingers from the soil to meet the deluge. The ocean will deliver itself to Jindabyne.
Dive into me.
Or perhaps the rumbling is just the wind-gushes, dragging the inferno in from the north. The sky is empty of planes. It is clogged with smoke, devoid of the twirling arabesques of water that could save us.
In this final recollection, I could cite the artworks of my existence. Scrawl these pencil inscriptions beneath wildly different pieces. But I realise that perhaps it’s enough just to admire.
Evacuation is futile. I just watch the Lion and Cub and the water nuzzling the pier. So affectionate. A plié of ephemeral intimacy.
I will be here, basking in the last of the languor, until the downpour begins, and the waves meet the shore.