At the Shallow End

Summer has me remembering.

Morning was for swimming.

Up before the heat set in, before the sun sharpened his teeth. Nobody paid attention to the UV. Pull on your bathers while the morning light peeked under the blinds, dawn nosing around, wondering what kept us. We raced up the hallway to the back door. Toss your boots, check for spiders.

The nearest ocean was hours away, so there was no sand – only mud and dry grass on my heels and thighs from where I sat, knees to chin, in that country backyard. Bricked around the edges in the dry Australian heat, the pool was could not have been more than six feet deep at its far end. Or maybe it was. Memory lies about childhood proportions.

What I do remember is the lavender by the gate. The bees that swum lazily through its brush. I remember my mother, nursing a baby every other summer for a decade, perched on a plastic chair at the shallow end. Blue sky above. Clouds like thickened cream and a water tank we guzzled from – noisy pipes and just-right twists of the tap. Lorikeets bending wiry gumtree branches. My grandmother’s voice: “There’s nothing as good for you as rainwater."

My brother’s voice: “You’re always in the way, Cait, move!” Elbows to the gut. Laughter. Video cameras shoved in faces. “Tonight we’re playing concerts!” Yellow jumpers miles too big – his old one slipping off my shoulders.

I was thrown into the water by the strong, capable hands of my grandfather.

My first time swimming, scramble to the steps and then back in again with no floaties. Those same hands hoisted me into his ute – scooped under the shoulders. A newborn lamb in my arms wrapped in a flannel. “Hold her tight for me, Louise.” There was always an axe behind the front seat. I don’t remember seatbelts, but I can see my red gumboots swinging – my too-short legs dangling above the rubber matted floor. I wore a lot of red then. The ute had a middle seat, between the driver and the passenger. Pop and me. And a gearstick like a truck’s that he wrestled navigating unsealed roads.

The house was a monument. Clinker bricks engraved into my bones, a yard made for playing. The garden of flowers: geraniums, pigface, violets, bluebells. Roses of all colours. Lemon and magenta and the deepest red. Granny’s greatest talent is gardening – though you could just as well say baking, or mothering, or entertaining a Church hall full of the nicest people you’ve ever met.

It doesn’t look the same anymore.

They pulled out the picture windows. They painted the bricks and sealed the front steps – my altar. The porch where the swing stayed, the babbling water fountain and the hanging plants and the heavy wire door that refused to close properly.

I spent afternoons watching VHS tapes on a TV that was rolled into the room on a cart with castor wheels. I’d drag it gently onto the Good Carpet, the new carpet – the “take off your shoes before you go on the Good Carpet” carpet. I’d wind back Quality Street to watch Katharine Hepburn and mimic her transatlantic twang: “I’m only thirty… why does thirty seem so much more than twenty-nine?” Through the window, I can see my sisters weaving around conifers and swinging in the front tree. Jumping through the sprinkler. Best friends from the beginning.

At night you hear the baby.

Not crying – just cooing. So little then, hands balled into fists, soft like homemade Playdoh. Feet stretching out his blue cotton romper. A big baby, stealing all the energy in the room in the sweetest way.

“And you walk and you walk and you walk and you stop!” It’s a game to make us be quiet, wind us down for sleep. It’s affects were always quite the opposite. Forever arguing, we crashed into each other. “Mum, Tom’s cheating again.” “I saw Liese move! She moved! I sawwww her.”

“It’s bedtime.” The sun setting over the eucalypt hills, smoky blue in the distance. Long shadows pulled along the bitumen, rustling trees in the dry breeze. The off chance of blue and red flashing from the side street; the ambulance station. “Say a prayer for whoever they’re going to.” At the end of the street lived a big kangaroo. Years on years he lay in the empty lot under a giant peppercorn tree.

Feet tucked under me, the thick brown curtains pulled open to watch the front yard in settled dusk. The darker it was, the quieter I became – hiding in plain sight. Quiet means I could stay up late, past my bedtime. The warm purple light of the tv, reflection flickering across the picture window. The occasional regional ad that doesn’t play back in Melbourne.

Cue the audience laughter.

Cue the clapping and smiling, people pouring into each other. 90s grainy footage. Live studio audience nostalgia. I giggle.“What are you still doing up?” I’m caught. I slide off the couch to the floor, become a puddle. Wicked Witch of the West melted into the floor. Crawl across the Good Carpet to the amber glass door.

Pad down the hallway, across the foyer my uncle tiled himself. Past each room – the first room, then Pop’s room, Mum’s room, Gran’s room. Mattresses lined up, prison bunkers I long for. Flop into bed, staring at the arched doorway, the double wardrobes, amber glass knobs. I can still hear the frogs if I’m quiet enough.

I can still hear the wooden doors closing. The sound of heavy whispers in the kitchen. The boiling kettle. The lawnmower and whipper snipper. The shouting and screaming and fighting and laughter. The clinking of mugs and the straw broom on the porch. The ute starting. The magpies in the morning. The knocks at the front door. The knocks at the back door. The tv late at night.

I can see the spiders, the kangaroos, the lorikeets, the furious jack russell down the road. Acorns we stole off the oak tree by the primary school. Horses in the paddock. The presbytery. The statue of Our Lady Pop helped raise..

I can smell the earth. Cemetery grass. Red gum in the fireplace. Distant burn-offs. The gas heater in the morning. The first, strongest cup of tea.

I swear – if I reach far enough –

I could touch it.