BURRANGONG, SEPTEMBER 1978
The sky was a clear balloon blue when Arjun heard the wave surge down the street behind him. Arjun turned. The river had vanished in a rage of water, rolling, slashing, crashing, a mix of white-tipped froth of mud and logs and hamburger wrappers. Cars bounced like plastic toys in a bath.
Flash flood.
Run! thought Arjun. Where? The new mall where he’d been heading had been built on the river flats across the river from the main town. Its high ground was over the bridge, impossible to get to now.
He couldn’t outrun the water. He began anyway, pushing his legs, his lungs screaming. Behind him the mall erupted in shrieks as water gushed through its door.
A motorbike roared out of a side street in a flash of black and purple. It swerved towards Arjun. Tyres screeched as the rider braked to a brief standstill.
‘Climb on!’
Arjun clambered on the back before he realised what he was doing. The rider gunned the motor; Arjun clung to the black leather jacket in front of him. He glanced behind.
The wave’s swirling edge was almost upon them.
The motorbike swerved wildly, jumping up onto the footpath, then into the slightly higher ground of the new park, tearing through the marigolds. Bikies don’t care about flowers, thought Arjun, then realised the figure he held wasn’t the sturdy shape of a bloke, but a woman’s, skinny under the leather jacket. Her helmet hid her face.
The bike swerved around a picnic table. Uphill, Arjun thought, we’re heading uphill — but there was little ‘up’ to climb. All this side of the river flooded every time a downpour surged down the mountains upstream and into the river, which was why the town was built on the high side across the bridge . . . except for the new mall. The council had said the new levee bank along the river would block a flood.
The council had been wrong.
Arjun risked another look behind. The wave hadn’t even slowed as it swallowed the park’s small rise. The water followed them like some determined monster, the wave’s wide froth mouth grinning at them, about to gulp them down.
The bike’s engine roared as the rider hauled on the throttle.
‘It’s going to get us!’ Arjun screamed.
‘Not if I can help it!’ the rider shouted.
They flew. The wind roared. All at once the first surge of the wave crashed, spilling foam, leaves, bits of wood, plastic bottles around them as the water and its debris overtook the bike. The wheels swayed. The water rose to Arjun’s ankles as the water behind them surged into another wave-like crest.
‘You can’t keep going in this!’
The rider laughed. ‘This is a doddle! There isn’t even anyone shooting at us. Hold on!’
Shooting? He didn’t have time to think. He just held on.
The bike swerved as the water sucked and dragged it. A log bashed against the headlights, then was gone. For a second Arjun thought the flood had captured them, but the bike suddenly straightened, heading to the right now through shallower water. A sign flashed by on the side of the road. Johnson’s Lookout.
Of course! The lookout was only a knob of a hill, but it had a view across the whole riverbend and paddocks, the sunflower crops and canola, all the way to town. With luck — a lot of luck — the flood wouldn’t rise that high.
‘Look out, Johnson, here we come!’ yelled the rider.
The motorbike broke out of the water, the engine spluttering, surged briefly uphill, then skidded to a stop in the car park at the top of the lookout, next to the rubbish bin fastened onto its concrete plinth, the lookout’s only decoration. The rider stopped the engine then slid off. Her hands in her leather gloves trembled slightly as she undid her helmet.
She was old, far older than Arjun had realised, despite her jeans and farm boots. Her hair was short and grey, her skin the wrinkled brown that came from decades of sun, not smooth brown like his family’s. Nanni was proud she had no wrinkles. Nanni could sit on her grey hair.
The woman pulled off her leather glove and held out her hand. Only two fingers and a thumb, Arjun realised, as he shook them automatically. The rest of her hand was scar tissue.
‘I’m Jean McLain. Mrs,’ the woman added. Her accent sounded English.
He hauled out a memory from when he was small: an old woman on a motorbike who’d emigrated from England after World War II. ‘Didn’t you deliver the mail out past town? I think I met you once when I was staying with my grandparents.’
‘That would have been me, all right. How about you?’
‘I’m Arjun. Um, Arjun Chowdhury.’
‘The Chowdhury farm, past where the McCoys used to live? I know it.’
Arjun found he was shaking too. ‘I . . . I was just going to meet some mates to see a movie at the mall . . .’ Simon, and Christopher and Lucas . . . were they okay? Maybe they hadn’t even left home — he’d gone early to buy Mum a birthday present.
Would Mum and Dad think he was dead? If only there was a public phone box up here on the lookout, but there wasn’t even a seat or a barbecue, just the rubbish bin.
‘I was going to the mall to buy a pair of pyjamas. Picked the wrong day for it, didn’t we? Idiot councillors,’ Mrs McLain added. ‘This side of the river floods every time there’s a storm on the mountain slopes upriver. That’s why the soil’s so good for cropping down here — all that lovely silt has been washing down for hundreds of thousands of years. And those council engineers who thought that levee could stop it? Twits.’
Arjun gazed out at the water. The flood had changed, no longer leaping dragons surging after them, but a vast sly creature slowly lapping around the hill, inexorably rising, slow now the wave had spread out over so much flat land. He watched the water cover yet another tussock as it crept towards them. How could something so deadly be so silent? It stank, too: an accumulation of dead leaves, animal droppings and something that belonged to the flood alone.
He shaded his eyes to stare into the distance. The world all around them was water till it reached the higher banks on the far side of the river. The mall was just a stretch of roof and wall, glaring metal in the brown water.
‘What . . . what about the people inside the mall?’ Another thirty seconds and he’d have been in there too.
‘Hopefully everyone got up to the second floor and can get up onto the roof.’ Mrs McLain shaded her eyes too, with her three-fingered hand. ‘Should be safe up there, as long as the water doesn’t rise much more.’
‘What if they were outside?’
Mrs McLain shrugged.
‘You mean they drowned?’ Arjun said sharply.
‘I mean I don’t know. I was concentrating on making sure we didn’t.’
‘How long will it keep rising?’ Even as Arjun spoke the water crept over more tussocks. It was only metres away from them, brown froth at the edges, deceptively smooth now.
‘Depends if it’s still raining upstream. There’s a lot of mountains and gullies up there.’
Another metre and the water would reach the garbage bin, and them and the bike. And then . . .
‘What do we do if the water covers the hill?’
‘Get in the garbage bin,’ Mrs McLain said promptly.
She pulled a strap out of one of the big pockets of her leather jacket, and began to fasten the motorbike to the bin. ‘Even an ankle-deep flood can sweep you away if the current is strong enough. The bin’s set in concrete, so it shouldn’t move.’
‘What if the water covers the garbage bin?’
‘We swim. Can you swim?’
‘Yes. No. In a swimming pool. Not in a flood.’ Arjun gazed at the distant town. It must be four kilometres away, or more, with the full force of the river between them and safety. ‘Not that far.’
‘You’ll swim if you have to,’ said Mrs McLain, as if there was no doubt about it. ‘You’ll find a log and hold onto it and float.’
‘What about you?’
‘I swam the English Channel in the middle of the night.’
Yeah, right, of course you did, Arjun thought, glancing at the skinny old woman beside him. Though she had saved his life. For now.
He stared at the water nibbling its way to them, unable to look away. Maybe she wasn’t lying. ‘You were a long-distance swimmer?’
She looked at him, suddenly exasperated at his obvious disbelief. ‘No. A U-boat torpedoed the ship I was on back in World War I. I either swam or drowned.’
She saw he didn’t understand. ‘A U-boat is what we called submarines back then.’ Mrs McLain unzipped another leather pocket and pulled out a big block of dark chocolate. She unwrapped it, threw the paper in the bin, then handed half the block to Arjun. It was a bit soft from her body, but still kept its shape. ‘You’re in shock. Eat. I learned that back in the war. I learned to always keep chocolate in my pocket, too.’
‘You were really in World War I?’
She laughed. ‘That’s why it was called a world war, my lad. Almost everyone alive back then was in that war.’
She nibbled at her chocolate, her gaze drifting to look at something far away. ‘I was in it more deeply than most. I was only sixteen, a few years older than you, but they made me a signaller.’
‘A signaller? Like with flags, semaphore like the boy scouts use?’
‘No. Not semaphore.’
‘What kind of signals then?’
Mrs McLain narrowed her eyes, evaluating the flood edging its way up to them. ‘Morse code. I was a telegraph girl.’