A new year melted in, and the brown mud flooding started.

Once the rain began, it barely stopped. It rained morning, noon, and night. Great fat drops that fell straight down and warmed and softened everything they landed on like wax; gorging the bush until even the most sheltered trees were dark and dank, and the ground beneath a mush that spat like porridge underfoot.

Sometimes I woke and in the purple of night wondered what had woken me. I’d lie still and listen hard before realising it was the no-noise-at-all. The rain had stopped, its gush replaced by a timpani of drips, and I’d drift off back to sleep relieved that maybe the lettuce would recover and the tomatoes fruit after all, only to wake in the morning to the too-familiar hiss and a suspicion in myself that, like the arms that crept around me when I slept, I had been dreaming and it hadn’t stopped at all, not even for a second.

Winifred flooded as it always did, year after dripping, drowning year, only this time it was later and this time it was worse. This time Carney’s had to close for a week because of all the water. The carpet was ruined and the paper in the lounge bar puckered and peeled off the wall in strips.

The rain poured on and on. It flowed through the streets and the lake turned red and crept up around its edges. Homes were evacuated as roofs collapsed, gardens slid and sank, and the river mouths at Milligan and Guilder were thick with bark and branch and bits of garden furniture.

And still it rained.

Mr Breadsell stood buckets in the damper corners of the theatre, and ticket takings dwindled as people found more pressing things to do with their wet Tuesday mornings.

By February, they were calling it The Flood, the Biggest and the Best, the most there’d ever been. Comparing every figure with years past, and with what had fallen elsewhere, the Courier took an honest pride in printing that what we were getting was the very worst there was. Front-page after front-page after front-page story: WORST FLOODING IN THIRTY YEARS. WORST FLOODING IN FORTY YEARS! LAKE CARNEY AT AN ALL-TIME HIGH. PLANS FOR PREMIER TO VISIT. By the end of it, more rain had fallen than had caused the flood of 1936, the one with all the capitals.

Flooding had never really bothered us at Magpie Beach. The water from the higher land wore a path down through the bush in places, but we’d all been careful not to plant our homes in the way. I was the only one who felt the brown mud flooding that year, because it was The Flood and not just a flood; because more rain was falling on the headland than had ever done before.

For the first time, I had to barricade my home with bags of sand. They lay like corpses in a pile two, three, four deep, after a while, absorbing water from the sticky skirt of mush that gathered around the caravan until I had to pile logs up beneath my bedroom window and come and go through that.

‘It’ll pass,’ Eddie said, but it didn’t.

‘There can’t be much more, surely?’ Lily said, but still there seemed to be.

It was a Thursday morning when the big slide came. The bus was late, the rain coming down so hard on the highway that with wipers and headlights on full the driver still couldn’t see his way to make good time. No one cared. It had been that way for weeks. The bus was almost empty, and as I felt the cool of condensation on my cheek, I closed my eyes and remembered Lily’s story of the train that took her away from the wreckage of London as a little girl, north, to the hills and heather and fresh air.

Someone had to shout my eyes open when we got to the stop outside the library.

‘You’ve not missed much,’ Catherine said, as I hung my coat and backed the trolley out of its bay behind the counter. It was as scantily filled as the bus, but Catherine liked it empty, and I liked putting the books back, and the look of them in order on the shelves: Doyle next to Dove next to Dostoyevsky. (The Brothers Karamazov. No one ever read it.)

I never put a book back on a shelf without first fanning through its pages. People forgot their bookmarks, their ticket stubs and shopping lists, receipts and strips of paper. Through the years I’d found a couple of photos which I’d pinned up on the noticeboard with the Lost, For Sale and Babysitter flyers. I once found five dollars trapped inside a Stephen King, but my favourite was a picture postcard of a bronze lion. A Brisbane landmark, as it turned out, modelled on four in London I’d once dreamed of visiting. The lion in the postcard had his sculpted paws together and his head bowed just enough to hint at humble. He reminded me of Aslan. The postcard had been stamped and sent and I could have returned it to its owner, but I didn’t really get the chance or think they’d care that it was lost. It was very old, and there was only the scribble of an appointment as a message. A meeting long passed. March 2, 10 am, don’t forget! The curl of an initial in the corner: a P so exaggerated that it could have been an A. I used it as a bookmark myself for years, and it was tight and dry between the pages of A Prayer for Owen Meany, in the bag that swung on a peg beneath my coat, when Catherine led Rosemary around the corner.

‘Here she is!’ As if the other wouldn’t have seen me if one hadn’t pointed me out. Then, ‘Just leave that, darl.’ It’s a word they use in Queensland. It sounds like doll, is short for darling, and I knew then that something terrible had happened.

My caravan was gone. Swept away, Eddie said. Like a dog on a pier, or a woman in a bonnet and in love. There were fallen trees and the rubble of a hillside in its place, and under and on top of everything a thick brown frosting of mud.

The chicken coop had travelled but its roof was visible, and I lost my shoes in the clag, running to dig for Jo, Beth, and Amy. There were other things beyond it, slabs of wall and window cracked like peanut brittle, my front door torn from its hinges, the legs of a chair—its seat upside down and deeper, the water tank still upright, and Eddie, up to his waist in it all and wrestling with a rope he’d tied around my chest of drawers, which as it turned out was the heaviest of everything I’d ever owned.

‘Stop!’ Rosemary shouted above the weather. It was still raining. It didn’t stop to see the damage it had done. Broken glass and bare feet. ‘Meg, stop!’

Eddie turned, words lost in hiss and spatter but shouting too, shaking his head.

And I stopped, and Rosemary came to cradle me in her arms, and we sat together in the filth that had been my home.

It was the only thing saved: that chest of drawers that we heaved out on the end of a rope like a cow, Eddie, Rosemary, and me, steaming in the rain. We carried it up and onto their porch, which is where Mrs Robinson found us days later, and where Rosemary and Lily and I went through its drawers together. There wasn’t much in them: jerseys and socks, underwear and a thick winter blanket. Useful enough, but not what I’d have filled them with if I’d known I was to lose everything else I owned. There’d been books (so many books); letters and cards and ticket stubs in a box I’d pulled from under the bed on my loneliest nights. There’d been a teddy Sonny had cuddled in his crib and grown to give me, and a lock of his hair trapped in a pillowslip. All gone, out on the tide like a message in a bottle.

‘At least you’ve got some clothes,’ Lily said.

And, incredibly, some photos. The last ones taken—in the bottom drawer, kept dry between the pages of Grant’s Guide to Fishes, which had never made it to a shelf. A gift I’d bought before the sickness came, so that the birthday didn’t really. At least there had been some small recognition of a day, with cake and song, but by then a gift like Grant’s Guide would have been too cruel. By that last birthday, we both knew he’d never fish or dive again.

Inside it, in a still-crisp paper sleeve, twenty-four photographs and four strips of negatives.

We’d been at Magpie Beach three and a half years. The Christmas tree had been out of its box four times, and Sonny would be dead in eight months, though we didn’t know it then. There were no dizzy spells or headaches.

Five days we spent in a cabin on a beach, where we swam all morning, drank all afternoon, and whispered half the night. Twenty-four photographs: pinky purple skies, and plates of food, a bat hanging under a bathroom sink, a towel twisted into a swan—and Sonny.

Sonny dressed for dinner, in the shirt I’d bought him, only half a joke with its pineapples and parrots, soft on strong brown shoulders.

Sonny caught by surprise and freshly woken, between morning-bright sheets.

Sonny standing in shallow water, waves lapping at his ankles.

Sonny sitting on a towel, his face hidden in the shadow of a pine tree, but the tilt of his head and the slope of his back telling everything, saying, Enough now, Megs. Put it down.

‘What was he like?’ Rosemary asked. Sonny and I, shoulder to shoulder. Both of us squinting at a stranger. He would have handed her the camera; did she mind? It was always him: Can I go first? Is that seat taken? ‘You don’t know if you don’t ask,’ he used to say.

The same beach then, but without us. The blur of a monitor lizard, another shade of sunrise, and then Sonny and I together again for the last time. The picture taken by a waitress whose outline was reflected in my glasses. A half-carafe of red wine and a half-eaten fisherman’s basket on the table between us, we were halfway through our supper, and our lives were almost over, but who would know a thing like that outside Mr Breadsell’s enchanted darkness? If she’d known, would the waitress have framed the picture better? Held the camera in steadier hands? Would we have ordered the champagne?

No one lives for today. For some days, perhaps, but not every day, and rarely the days that matter.

Who knows how tenderly King Cole might have made love the night he was smashed and smeared across the Bruce Highway? And what about Jessie Else? Did she have a proper breakfast the day she skipped school? When she left the table, did her parents tell her that she’d never grow up big and strong with just a sparrow’s appetite? They might have, because they wouldn’t have suspected for a moment that she’d done all the growing she was ever going to do. That what mattered in that instant—in those few, precious moments they had left with her—was that she really felt the arms they wrapped around her and the kisses that they buried in her hair.

The holiday I held there in my hands should have been the first of many, pasted in an album on the far left of a shelf. But we were living our last—that wordless sequence in a movie, the winding-down of a farewell, though in the movie they would have ordered the champagne because they would have known.

If only life were like that. It’s what Lily said to Mr Breadsell, and he’d questioned it, when he should have known better.

The screen door rattled as Rosemary backed her way out through it. Her fingers were hot and damp from the mugs she set in front of us, and when she took a biscuit from the packet Lily handed her, her thumb melted its print into the chocolate.

‘What was he like?’ she asked again.

What was he like?

How many beans in the jar?

Describe blue.

He was kind and funny and warm to touch. The first thing that mattered every morning and the last at night; he was my sunrise and my sunset. He climbed first and waited with strong arms.

‘He was everything,’ I said. And that was more than I’d ever said to anyone about him. He was a secret that might not exist out loud, something that could fly away on a breeze or be swept away on a tide of mud and rain like an old caravan.

The last drawer was almost empty when Rosemary spoke again. The clothes lay in piles on the floor: lights and darks, waiting to be washed. There was plenty of water. The tanks had been overflowing for a month.

‘Do you miss him?’

Do I breathe?

‘Every day.’

Rosemary was quiet for a long moment before she asked, ‘What if he wasn’t dead? Do you think missing him would have felt the same?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Lily scoffed, but I thought I knew what Rosemary was asking.

If he’d chosen to leave, would that have hurt me more?

‘I don’t know,’ I told them honestly, but it was a question that burrowed in, because he would have left eventually. I had always known it. What we’d had would not have been enough for him forever, and when he’d gone then, would missing him have felt the same?

Rosemary was watching me, palms pink around her steaming mug. ‘Worse?’ she wondered.

Could anything have possibly been worse?

‘I think so,’ I said.

He was my best friend and my turkey carver. He held my hands and helped me up and stood in front and waited while I drew deep breaths. ‘Let me worry about that,’ he used to say. ‘Leave it to me.’ And I left so much that in the end all I had was what he’d shown me, and it was not enough, I was not ready. I don’t think I would have survived his leaving me. If he’d chosen to go, dropped his arms and stepped over my pieces, left me wondering what he might be doing, every day, and whether he was happier without me; wondering whether he might be missing something of me; wondering if he might come back. The not-knowing would have finished me.