Black Christmas

I was fourteen the first time it felt like the world was ending. I kicked my bedsheet away from me, trying to move around air that was heavy with heat. I heard Dad coughing. I walked out of my bedroom in my nightie, and through the dark house.

The late news bulletin was on in the loungeroom; the sound of trumpets reverberated from the walls.

‘Can’t sleep,’ I announced as I opened the door.

‘Darling.’ My mother, Rebekah, looked up from the couch where she sat in a blue negligee. ‘You’re all flushed!’ Hair piled on top of her head, like pavlova. Dad was next to her in boxer shorts. Ice cracked in their whiskys.

‘Half the state is on fire,’ Dad said, nodding at the television.

The newsreader in blue-framed glasses declared New South Wales was in a state of emergency; a multitude of bushfires covered it. Footage showed flames taller than trees, emergency services workers back-burning, whole landscapes of charcoal. Families stood beside bent corrugated iron and small piles of bricks. Empty dog houses. Smoke rose from Cammeraygal ground, from Dharug ground, from Dharawal ground. Images from here in Sydney showed thick smog over the harbour. Pictures of the bridge against a red sky and much of the cityscape disappeared behind floating ash. On the television people wandered around Bennelong Point looking up for direction, trying to get their bearings. The top of Centrepoint Tower was obscured. The sun was high and set behind layers of pollution, the light rusted and dim.

I thought about the people who started fires: how they struck a match, lit kindling and burnt the first bush on a day so hot and dry that flames stampeded across the earth. I wondered what it felt like to watch fire destroy cattle, make horses rear up in terror. I imagined them standing as we were, seeing old people leaving nursing homes on gurneys, wide-eyed, their faces covered in oxygen masks. Watching farmers as they cried, their belongings turned into vapour. I imagined the firebugs and wondered which part of it made them happy.

‘How hot is it?’ My older brother Elijah appeared at the doorway, wearing only faded board shorts. His voice a self-answering question, his body all shinbones and forearms.

‘Weird,’ he said, joining us in front of the television, ‘like a horror movie.’

The sails of the Opera House were not ivory but carved out of red jasper. It didn’t look like the city printed on postcards. It was still ours, but it didn’t seem like home.

‘It’s a bit cooler out here,’ Dad offered from the back veranda, where he had wandered. ‘Why don’t you kids sleep on the balcony?’

My mother stood from the couch and joined Dad on the veranda; she swilled the last of her drink before kissing him on the lips. ‘I’m going to get another; do you want one, Seamus?’

Dad shook his head.

My brother and I pulled our camping mattresses onto the veranda. We lay on our backs and hoped a sea breeze would find us. Over the wooden railing I saw the dim glow of Middle Harbour and heard the slow rush of burning underneath. Dad sat down behind us and leant against the wall.

My father’s voice was low and deep, the sound of waves breaking from the floor of the ocean. He was talking about when my mother was pregnant with Elijah, more than three years before I existed, how she used to bring her cello to this spot in the evenings.

When we were younger Dad told us tales of when he was a boy, Northern Irish myths, and the years before we were born. I had to listen carefully because the storylines changed; characters merged with one another. There were sudden unexpected endings followed by new beginnings. Inside the sound of my father’s voice was a place that for as long as I could remember always made me feel safe.

I opened my eyes a slit and saw old rafters above me, the awning of the balcony, the floating ribs of our home. Dad’s words drifted up there, getting caught in the wood: they collected and hung in the cobwebs. My father’s voice was made in Northern Ireland, but decades after his emigration the centre of it had been ground down, worn like sea glass into the frosted-light sound of an Australian drawl. The curled edges of his voice, though, remained Northern Irish. His accent gave his words a melody and the illusion of rhyme. I heard him smile as he recalled my mother’s normally lean legs swollen in the last trimester, malleable as if made from plasticine.

‘Rebekah was as big as a house, but it sure didn’t stop her from playing.’

‘Ah, Seamus, you are so cruel to me!’ My mother rejoined us on the deck. She sat next to my father and slapped him playfully on the stomach before she rested her head on his shoulder. It was one of my favourite places, the stillness as I listened for the spaces between his words. I saw the shape of my mother’s buttocks as they half-slipped off her wooden stool to accommodate her growing abdomen. Between her thighs, the body of her cello, wood more than a hundred years dark, fell backwards. The cello’s wooden neck to the left of her own, lovers that rested on each other.

Years later, when things began to unravel, I followed strings of thought like yarn back to this: my brother and me lying head to head, his dark curls touching my own long strands of sun-bleached auburn hair. Our parents adjacent to us, soothing us with memory. It was there the string finished, the frayed end stuck to a cardboard roll. That was it. The end and the beginning, that told me the truth.

Elijah’s life began inside our mother’s, as he floated in transilluminated fluid. There would have been a short distance between my brother’s head and the curved back of the instrument. I imagined the layers between, dissected them like a surgeon through tissue, an archaeologist through earth, a worker who stripped back wallpaper. The fluid, placenta, muscle, fascia, fat, skin, the dress my mother was wearing. My brother, so much smaller than he was now, curled up. Growing, furling. Attached to my mother by a lifeline of cord. A primordial astronaut. The deep notes of the cello, the music as it passed through the layers, through waters, making vibrations, as it passed through something thinner than blood.

I heard this story so many times that pieces of its versions became something of my own. Part of my story and that of my family. Later, I would think about the way Elijah was brought into being, surrounded by warmth, and love, and music, and wonder if that was where the problems began – whether somehow, in that process, there were promises made about the nature of the world that it couldn’t keep.

~

The starter’s whistle trilled, rose and then fell.

‘Take your marks …’

Crack!

Underwater. The cold in my ears. My goggles pressed on tight. The blue-green of seawater and clear baubles of air floated past. I could hear beneath the water not silence but sounds of a secret world: Saturday-morning swimming club at Northbridge baths. Underneath was unhurried – a space where everything moved slower. The sand below was a distant moonscape. It was the hundred-metre freestyle. The blocks approached, I swam, arm over arm. I raised my head near the far end as there was no black line to guide me. I neared the white blocks, pointed down into a tumble, turned and pushed off, kicking. A school of long silver fish swam below me; they too changed direction and flickered away. The swimmer in the next lane moved past me – their arms stroked, legs kicked, they left me in their steamboat wake.

New Year’s was over. The rest of the summer holidays stretched across January, so long and hot we couldn’t see the end of them. We’d been coming down here every summer I could remember. The watery cove of Sailors Bay was just next to the marina. There was a full-length harbour pool stretched out within an arcing boardwalk, the lanes made of sea-worn rope strung with faded pink polystyrene.

When I was smaller I’d jumped off the edge in a one-piece with frills around the bottom and a foam safety bubble strapped to my back, goggles on my cheeks as I dog-paddled in a fifteen-metre race, Elijah out in front of me, cheering me on. Thinking I was drowning I grasped towards him, more a scramble than a swim, trying to latch onto his shoulders, his hands, his brown hair, but he would kick back beyond me. Always just out of reach, he would slip out of my grasp, elusive.

It took some time before I really loved the water. My mother used to say I was too thin to float, all skin and bone wanting to sink to the bottom. I had to learn to lie on my back, to lean into the ocean and trust it. Surrendering.

The morning sun moved out from behind clouds and lit up the water down to the bottom, to earthen shades of sand and shells where small schools of fish hovered. The Black Christmas fires closest to us had been beaten down, but others were still burning. I occasionally saw flecks of ash just under the surface or left among the leaves and weed on the sand in a tideline.

I climbed up the steel ladder and walked back to where Cate was sitting.

‘Nice swim.’ She and I had been friends for so long I couldn’t recall a time before we knew each other. Cate sat with her younger brother, and behind them in the bay white hulls of boats rocked softly side to side, the masts bare, sails folded away.

‘Thanks,’ I said, distracted by the sight of Cate in her bikini. Some time between last year and now she’d changed. Grown taller and with wider hips and a bust. She’d started to look like the older girls at school who wagged class to hang out with guys in St Leonards Park. I was self-conscious and grabbed my towel to dry off. As I patted my body down I felt the lean hardness of my legs and arms, abdomen and chest. Next to Cate I felt small and boyish. ‘A late bloomer’, my mother called me as I rolled my eyes; waiting.

I laid my towel down beside Cate’s on the decking and lowered myself onto it front first, hiding all those things I didn’t have, and felt the sun evaporate water from my back, leaving saltwater outlines on my skin. I looked up from where I was to the lanes below, waiting for Elijah to swim.

Elijah limbered up on the starting blocks, the long white structure that floated on the harbour. He swung his arms from the sockets of his shoulders: his right arm forwards and left arm backwards, around and around, before turning slightly to the right and switching the directions. My brother was all different shades of brown, tall and leanly muscular with olive skin that kept a tan through winter and darkened as the summer went on. His hair was the exact same chestnut as our mother’s but cut into a shaggy head of curls, and he had a spray of moles that sat as beauty spots over his skin. You would expect him to have brown eyes – to match his skin and hair – but his were the clearest and most cutting green.

‘Take your marks …’

Crack!

Hundred-metre ’Fly. I saw him underneath, his arms still and streamlined in front. His hips drove a strong kick. He stayed under longer than the other racers, the shape of his torso, a flash of his back under light that skipped on the surface of the water. He emerged in front; his arms broke the water symmetrically as his head raised and he took his first breath. Butterfly was his best stroke. He sewed through the water, lurching up, propelling forwards, soaring downwards. By the return lap he’d pulled away a good twenty metres in front of the next person, and most of the club had stopped talking to watch him finish.

Sometimes people didn’t believe we were related. My skin was so pale it glowed. The sun treated us differently – it coloured Elijah in, shading him gently, while my skin either quickly turned pink or freckled in patches of redbrick over my shoulders and back, my nose and feet. After a burn the tops of my shoulders were left blistered and broken, blanching and shedding off like snakeskin, old paint, boiled stone fruit.

When Dad was our age he couldn’t swim. Where he lived in Northern Ireland there were no beaches or harbour pools, and when he came to Australia as a young man he had to learn. He was still afraid of the ocean. I’d seen classes at the pool, grown men and women in the shallow end, their limbs uncoordinated, flailing to the sky. It must be harder to learn how as an adult: their eyes had the same expression as someone who was drowning and they held the kickboards like lifebuoys.

I didn’t have memories of my very first time in the ocean, of feeling sand between my toes or tasting saltwater. I didn’t recall learning how to walk or speak either. It must have all happened around the same time, in stumbling, reaching and wordless years.

‘We threw you in when you were six months old to see if you would sink or swim,’ Dad once teased, holding me in a bear hug from behind, when I asked about it.

‘Weren’t you worried I would drown?’

Dad chuckled and shook his head. ‘Ahhh well …’ he said as he let me go and winked, ‘you can’t grow up dry in Sydney.’

Something hard stuck into my arm. Cate was pushing a dollar coin at me.

‘Want to go to the shop?’ she asked.

I pulled on my denim shorts and singlet, but Cate walked in just her bikini. We headed around to the milk bar made of concrete.

Barefoot, I tried to walk in the shadows, taking refuge in the shape of the fence.

‘Hurry up,’ Cate said, exasperated. She’d been using this tone a lot more. Last summer she’d made me carve our initials into a scribbly bark down the back of her yard to seal our friendship in a pact, forever. But now her annoyance with me had grown alongside those other new parts of her.

Cate bought skittles and I got a sherbet lollypop. The candy was a tablet of powder made of layers, like sandstone. I sucked on the cool sweetness of it, and then chipped at it with my teeth, breaking off pieces that fizzled in my mouth.

When we headed back up the walkway we could see Elijah and some of the other boys jumping off the far side of the railing into open harbour.

‘Hey …’ Cate said. ‘I think I have a crush on your brother – can you ask him if he likes me?’

‘Okay,’ I said, even though I didn’t think the request was fair.

‘What are you doing later?’ Cate asked when we lay back on our towels.

‘Don’t know.’

‘You can come over if you want.’

The prickling heat on our backs was suddenly interrupted by cold droplets. Elijah and his friends were shaking their wet hair over us, side to side, like dogs. They laughed as we squealed and sat up.

‘Hey, Grub,’ Elijah said, smiling.

When my brother laughed the skin around his mouth creased, his back teeth showed and the mole that sat on his right cheek directly under his eye moved up a fraction. That mark was one of my favourite things about him. Completely round and smooth, a drop of chocolate on his skin.

That was how it was with my brother: there was perfection, even in his imperfections. They were all grace notes.

~

‘We must leave! They are coming!’

Nonno sat on a plastic chair at his nursing home in Bondi. He wore beige pants, a neatly tucked-in plaid shirt and his coat was folded over his elbow. He still had the sun-kissed skin of a beachgoer. Everything he owned was packed into two leather suitcases. The cases had heavy brass locks that were strained from holding in his belongings. Next to the suitcases were photos of his family, of us, in their frames half-wrapped in newspaper and piled on top of each other. He’d unplugged the standing lamp, the one from the house he’d shared with Nonna, and laid that down next to the cases as well.

‘I’ve packed!’ Nonno announced as the four of us gathered around him. He looked at us intently through square tortoiseshell glasses.

‘Hi, Papa,’ my mother said, and kissed him on each cheek.

‘We need to leave! They are coming!’

Every time we visited it was like this. He said the same things over and over. He packed up his room every day and tried to find the exit. He thought he was being watched. Nonno didn’t recognise me or my brother anymore. He was losing his memories in a retrograde way, my mother had explained, so the most recently made ones were the first to go. As if they had been newly thrown in clay and not fired, they collapsed on themselves; his mind a movie that deleted itself while in rewind.

My mother and her parents came to Sydney from Alexandria, in Egypt, when she was ten years old. They were from a long line of Sephardi Jews, a people who were always moving. Elijah inherited all his beautiful features from that side of the family. Brown-black hair, green eyes and olive skin, all brought from far away.

Nonno was born in Alexandria. His father came from Syria, and before that we don’t know. Sometimes our family chose to move, and other times they were forced out. It wasn’t always overt conflict that moved them on; often it was something just a little bit less.

Once I asked my mother which war it was that made my grandparents move to Australia.

‘Does it matter?’ she said, sounding tired. ‘Every war is the same.’ And another time: ‘War is not a part of life, but the absence of it.’

On my maternal side every generation was the first. My mother once told me that she thought our family began in Spain but she’s not entirely sure, that it was hard to draw her family tree because the histories were handed down mostly through stories. When I thought about that I realised the past I was taught from books was only part of the truth – only the version from those who survived, those with power. I often thought about all those generations that packed and unpacked from the Iberian Peninsula to Sydney; they took only their pants, socks, books and the shirts on their backs. There were people who probably walked away with not much, but still succeeded in passing on their beautiful skin to my brother.

‘I miss home,’ Nonno said.

‘You are home,’ my mother said.

‘I miss Alexandria.’

When my mother was growing up, Nonno told all his children they had to choose a vocation that was transportable. They could become teachers, tailors, musicians or engineers, but whatever skill they developed it had to be something they could carry with them, inside their minds and muscles. He’d seen too many relatives walk away from properties, from plantations, from stables: from assets tied into the ground.

When my mother played the cello with Elijah she became more alive. The two of them sat on stools with their backs to the door, legs bowed, her knee bumped his, the hourglass bodies of their instruments side by side. The sound of their cellos was so known to me that it felt like two other people lived in our house – their voices, their conversations familiar. Sometimes when my mother played, rocking the fingers of her left hand with a vibrato that made the notes expand, tears sprang from the back of my eyes even if I wasn’t at all sad; as if momentarily I could see all of our lives there, somewhere between growl and bloom. Elijah’s cello was made of new wood covered in a glossy varnish; compared to our mother’s antique cello, it shone. When he started playing, the cello was half the size of a normal one; but as Elijah grew my mother bought larger instruments, so in photos it seemed that they grew together, the cello and him.

~

The first time I met Zed he was carrying a surfboard through the parking lot near Narrabeen Beach. Elijah and I had got up before dawn so we could watch the daybreak from our surfboards, over the ocean. We were heading home, in the opposite direction to Zed, when we crossed paths.

Zed was heavier-set than Elijah, with thick sandy hair and small eyes so brown I could barely make out his irises. I found out later that his real name was Zachariah, but no one ever called him that. He’d transferred to my brother’s school after moving to live with his aunt. Before that he’d been with his mother in Maroubra and had grown up on the breaks around there, so he was a pretty good surfer compared to us. No one seemed to know what had happened to Zed’s father. Zed always just said he didn’t have a dad and left it at that.

‘Hey, mate,’ Elijah said when we saw him in the carpark.

‘Mate, how’s it going?’ Zed’s surfboard was in a soft grey and green striped cover. When he stopped to talk to Elijah he let the tail end of the board touch the ground. His face was broad and angular, his features coarse and his mouth slightly asymmetrical.

‘This is my sister,’ Elijah said, nodding his head in my direction.

‘How’s it goin’?’

I’d never met a kid who didn’t live with at least one of their parents: it was the first thing that really fascinated me about Zed. When he smiled the left side of his lips seemed to move further up his face than the right.

I decided Zed was unattractive in a way that didn’t explain why I was still looking at him.

Elijah and Zed stood talking about the ocean, what they wanted to do for schoolies week, and some barbeque they were both going to the weekend. There was more light in the sky now, and a strong offshore breeze that made the edges of everything seem exciting.

I watched the two of them with their shirts off, unbrushed hair pointing skywards. Their small waists, broad shoulders and fatless bodies. Zed’s torso was so lean I could see all the muscles outlined neatly under his skin. There were muscles I wasn’t even sure I had. When the wind dropped, I smelt sunscreen, sweat and saltwater.

They eventually stopped talking, and Zed turned towards the beach and pulled the cord tied to his wetsuit zipper up his back with one hand. Elijah started to put our boards on the roof of Dad’s car.

‘See yas,’ Zed said as he started to run towards the beach, and I thought he was talking to Elijah, but he was looking straight at me.

There was space in our loungeroom where, if we were another family, we would’ve put a Christmas tree. I could see where it would stand, where the pine needles would drop as they turned brown in the heat, over presents placed underneath. When they married, my parents made a pact to jettison their inherited religions and to raise us without faith. Their families hadn’t wanted them to marry, Dad not being Jewish, my mother not Protestant. Both sides had arrived in Australia after fleeing religious conflict, yet neither side could quite overlook the mismatch. My father grew up during The Troubles in a place where bombs blew up cars and houses. When a four-year-old girl died in crossfire as she played in her front garden, Dad’s parents decided they would try to move. My father was softly spoken and had a calm rationality that pervaded everything he did. I had never seen him lose his temper. From my paternal bloodline I inherited bony legs, snowy skin and copper-toned hair. Theirs was a complexion not well-suited to the harshness of Australian summers, but beneath the surface it carried with it a stubborn determination to make a go of it.

On my mother’s side, Nonno was forced out of his own factory. They left their house with all the furniture still in it. The beds made, glassware in the sideboard, books on the shelves.

‘It wasn’t simple,’ Nonna said as she sat behind me and braided my hair. ‘People like us had better jobs, more incomes, easier lives. But it was Egypt, it was an Arab country. People like us had more power and then—’ Nonna let go of my hair and when I looked back at her both her hands swung up and made a circular motion ‘—then it was flipped. We became the oppressed. It was their country, but our families had been there for many many years. Alexandria was our home. We loved it too.’

Nonna had the type of arms that enveloped people regardless of their age. Her skin was soft and velvety and her body smelt of sweet amber perfume. She had the same complexion as my mother but was petite, with a quieter voice, and in every memory I have of her she was being kind to me.

Nonna’s hands were small and moved fast, even though her knuckles were enlarged with arthritis and at night they hurt. We used to make marble cake, one bowl with chocolate batter and one with vanilla. Her hands never stopped moving, cracking eggs, whisking, folding creamy batter.

‘First we put in the chocolate.’ She held the bowl over the rectangular loaf tin and handed me the spoon so I could guide the mixture.

‘Now, carefully, vanilla.’ Nonna gently layered the paler batter on top.

‘Now we make the patterns.’ She handed me a fork and showed me how to dip it through the layers, bringing the darker batter up through the top.

After it was baked Nonna lifted the tin out of the oven wearing red embroidered mitts and turned the cake onto a wire rack.

She made us milky tea in china cups and stirred in the sugar before she cut thick slices of sponge and placed them on our saucers.

The cake was brown on the bottom and white on the very top, and in between was an intricate pattern where the two colours met and swirled together.

I remember being in her kitchen, me up next to the sink on the worn green linoleum, Nonna in her apron with her back leant into the bench, smiling at me with her bright eyes. We sat and stood there sipping our tea, chewing our cake, listening to the lorikeets. The comfort of the tea, the sweetness of the warm cake, my affection for my nonna, all marbled together.

When Nonna minded me, she sat behind me and brushed my hair back from my forehead. She could untangle knots without it hurting and when she finished she would plait it so it hung neatly down my back.

‘My sister had hair just like you,’ she said as she turned it over in her hands.

I’d seen pictures of Nonna’s sister. There was one on her sideboard, a black and white photo of them sitting together on a wall. Young women with handkerchiefs in their hair.

‘Do you miss her?’

‘Yes,’ Nonna said, ‘but one day you will learn that not all grief is sad.’

Nonna was always busy baking, knitting, painting, crocheting. ‘I have only my hands, and now they are old,’ she said to me once, holding them out for me to inspect, but I could never see them as old: I could only see them as hers.

She let me pick coloured wool, like fairy floss, from her sewing cupboard, and gave me my own steel needle. Together we crocheted squares, each with a multicoloured face. When we had enough pieces she sewed them together into a blanket. The pattern was tight enough to hold the heat but loose enough that I could stick my fingers through the gaps as I drifted into sleep on her fold-out bed.

~

One Saturday morning that January, I was still waking up while watching Rage on television. Elijah came in wearing the black rashvest and silver boardshorts he’d gotten for his birthday. There were surfboards in the hallway.

‘You going to the beach?’ I asked.

‘Yup. Zed’s driving us there; he’s got his aunt’s car.’

Zed came and stood in the doorway. He was wearing Elijah’s old maroon rashvest with his boardshorts.

‘How come you’re wearing that?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t that Elijah’s?’

Zed pulled down the sleeves of the rashvest from the wrists, adjusting it. ‘Yeah, he gave it to me. Can’t believe he got another one – this one’s still good.’

‘Hey, can I come with you guys?’

My brother was retrieving his thongs from under the table. Elijah looked to Zed and Zed looked at me on the couch. When he did this, it made me feel like I was a small animal instead of a person.

He put his blue sunglasses on his head. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘surf’s too big. You’ll drown.’

As they left Elijah looked at me and I thought I saw an apology flicker across his face, but it happened so quickly I couldn’t be sure.

Zed started spending nearly every day with Elijah and I thought I wouldn’t get much time with my brother for the rest of the holidays. The following week though Elijah suggested Cate and I go with him to Manly. The three of us caught a bus that crawled along Military Road and over the Spit Bridge. Zed met us at the wharf.

‘This is Cate,’ Elijah said when we got there.

‘Hey,’ Zed said.

‘Hey.’

We walked the hill towards Little Manly, the boys in front of Cate and me. When we walked past a parking meter, Zed reached his fingers into the metal tray at the bottom, skimming for change.

Cate wore her yellow string bikini and denim shorts. It was as if no clothes could contain her new body. Material disappeared into the curves of her chest, her waist, in between her thighs, the softness of her flesh bulging around it. My outfit was the opposite: a baggy T-shirt and longer shorts.

‘Did you ask your brother?’ Cate asked.

‘About what?’

‘If he likes me?’

‘Um, yeah … I think he said he did,’ I lied.

By the time we climbed the hill we were red-faced and sweaty.

‘It’s down here.’ Zed pointed at a beaten-down path.

There was a sandstone ledge jutting out over the water and a six-metre fall to the harbour below.

Cate perched on a nearby boulder.

‘You jumping?’ Zed asked Elijah.

‘You first,’ Elijah said.

Elijah and Zed pulled their shirts up over their backs and used their drawstrings to tighten their board shorts. I could see Cate’s gaze resting on the shape of my brother’s abdomen.

‘Have you done it before?’ Elijah asked.

‘Once,’ said Zed. ‘It feels further than it looks.’

Elijah moved towards the edge of the rock, sized it up and then retreated and rubbed the tops of his arms.

Suddenly Zed took a running leap and launched off the rock feet first, his arms bent out to the side. There was a silence between when he jumped and the distant splash below. Cate and I got up to see the rising plume of bubbles where he went in.

When Zed emerged from under the water he threw his head back and whooped.

‘C’mon, Elijah, you wuss!’

Elijah looked over at me, and for a moment I thought he might not do it.

‘Here goes …’ he said to me and Cate, his eyebrows raised slightly. He jumped from the ledge holding his nose and with his legs tucked up in a cannonball. The wind rustled the leaves, a pause, then he hit. We waited for him to come back.

‘You okay?’ Cate called out.

‘Yeah!’

Cate took off her shorts and turned to me. ‘You going to do it?’

‘No way.’ The jump was too high and looked unsafe, but what scared me more was Zed seeing me in my bathing suit next to Cate.

The boys ran back up the track and saw Cate halfway to the ledge.

‘You girls giving it a go?’ Zed asked.

‘I’m not,’ I said, and sat down on my towel.

‘Yeah, don’t feel you have to,’ Elijah said, looking at me reassuringly.

‘How deep is it?’ Cate asked.

‘It’s like flying,’ Zed said, his gaze glued to her.

‘I don’t know …’ Cate looked down into the inky water. What was it about Zed that moved people around him towards high edges? I wasn’t sure, but I knew I didn’t want to go over.

In the distance ferries with green bottoms and burnt yellow cabins passed by, headed in the direction of the quarantine station, and back towards the wharf from Watsons Bay.

Cate didn’t see Zed sneak up behind her. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her off the rock. As she went over she let out a scream.

Elijah and I moved to the edge and saw them falling down together, then their bodies broke apart. They both flailed in mid-air, clawed their arms and kicked their legs, cats falling, as they tried to stay upright. They hit the water in turn and managed not to land on each other. I didn’t take my eyes off the entry point until I saw the top of Cate’s head come back up.

~

‘Look here.’ Dad, Elijah and I were in the national park near the Blue Mountains for the day, while my mother stayed at home, painting notes onto the silent canvas of the house. The bush was dense and layered with sound: the ring of cicadas, under the shuffle of leaves, under the call of whipbirds. The sounds replaced the city noise in my mind.

Dad called us over to look behind some long grass. On the ground were two structures that rose towards each other like waves made of twigs and sticks. All around lay blue plastic milk lids, drinking straws, clothes pegs, chocolate wrappers, a train ticket.

‘Bower bird,’ said Elijah.

‘Where?’ I asked, unable to see a creature.

‘It’s just the bower,’ he said, ‘the bird’s not here.’

It was an elaborate display of blue objects that decorated the bower in the hope of attracting a female mate.

‘Everything he has is rubbish,’ I said.

‘Ahh well,’ Dad chuckled, ‘to him, it’s beautiful.’

We walked on; heat rose from the ground and made us stop for frequent water breaks. My scalp itched under my hat and my back was covered in sweat.

We finally made it to where the handprints were. Red Hands Cave was damp and we heard the echo of our voices over running water.

On the rock face were the ghostly outlines of hands surrounded by sprays of red and orange. Dad said they’d been there for thousands of years, here on Dharug land. I imagined someone putting their hand on this rock before the tall ships came, before settlers, before migrants and refugees, before everyone else who came by chance or design.

‘Race you back,’ Elijah said on the way out.

Before I could answer – he was off, his sneakers hitting the earthen track. I burst forwards and chased after him. His laughter dropped like a pebble guide. We charged along the pathway and the bush around us closed in, creating a tunnel. Dad was left far behind; it was as if Elijah and I were the only ones in the forest. The crunch and snap underfoot, the insect hum. Occasionally I caught sight of him as he paused momentarily at a fork in the trail, in light filtered by angophora. Then he was gone again.

Elijah, always taller, faster and with the grace of a show horse. He’d push his chest out and bend time, slipping through seconds, undoing the path like a puzzle, seeing shortcuts I never could.

~

The hot shower felt good after the long drive home. Dirt from my skin was carried by water down the drain. Dad cooked dinner for us as my mother was going away with her orchestra. The firelighters smelt like spirits when Dad put them on the Weber and lined up sausages for him and Elijah and a lentil burger for me; there were also potatoes, wrapped in foil. I found my mother in my parents’ room; she was pulling a white knit cardigan out of the closet and her small black suitcase lay on the bed. Inside I saw three pairs of high heels and at least two evening gowns.

‘I thought you were going to a music camp?’ I asked.

‘I am, darling, but there’s a big concert on the final night.’ She said this as she pushed past me, holding the long cardigan up between us like a soft translucent screen. She folded the knitwear and placed it on top of the contents of her case; she zipped the lid closed quickly.

‘You should have your dinner,’ she said without looking at me as she lifted the case by the handle and wheeled it down the hallway to the front door. She left me to watch the back of her leave the unlit room.

~

Zed was at our house so much that January it was as if he had moved in. I spent a lot of time looking at his face, and the more I did the more it unfolded, like found messages in paper, becoming increasingly attractive. I couldn’t tell if he was changing or my eyes, if I was learning how to see him properly. He stayed over most nights, sleeping on a camping mattress next to my brother’s bed. They were in Elijah’s room on the computer a lot. Often I noticed a smell like wet clothes, or compost coming from in there.

The night after my mother left for music camp I knocked on Elijah’s door and Zed answered it, wearing faded blue boardshorts without a shirt.

‘Tea’s ready,’ I said.

Zed’s face was very close to my own, his eyes moistened and bloodshot, his lips curled back in half of a smile.

‘Hey, Grub.’

I wished he wouldn’t call me that. I would have preferred if he used my real name but it felt strange to correct him.

‘We’re about to watch someone die … want to see?’ he asked.

‘Zed!’ Elijah was behind him.

‘Like a zombie film?’ I asked.

Zed laughed and shook his head. ‘Nah, this is the real thing. You ever heard of snuff?’

Later, when I thought back to this time, every replayed conversation with Zed made me feel the same way: the uneasiness of his gaze locked on mine, as it was later in the rear-view mirror; a feeling of nausea and vertigo as the three of us were trapped in a cabin, spiralling with inertia.

‘Zed, shut the fuck up.’ My brother picked up the closest thing to him, which was an empty milo tin, and threw it at Zed’s back.

A strangeness precipitated in the room; it thickened the air. As he sat in front of the computer monitor my brother was dwarfed by Zed, and he appeared very far away.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘dinner.’

I backed away from the door, feeling simultaneously defeated and relieved.

After that, the door to Elijah’s room stayed mostly closed. I heard his voice late at night as he talked to people on the phone and the sound of keyboard tapping. He slept a lot. He slept longer and more deeply than anyone I had ever known, and yet when he woke up he still looked tired.

~

Most mornings I was woken by the sound of cello, the notes creeping into my dreams. Elijah usually played in his bedroom, but when it was hot he lugged the instrument out onto the back veranda and played shirtless in pajama pants. He conjured a deep melody that spread and moved over itself like molasses.

Then there was a second sound. My mother and Elijah were playing a concerto for two cellos. I watched them from behind: my mother’s taller body, long tendrils of chestnut hair piled on her head, the sway of her, and Elijah similarly lean but not as tall. Their song was a dance, a call and answer. A conversation. The other voices of my mother and brother.

When my mother was pregnant with me, her placenta started to grow over her cervix and threatened to block my way out. She was put on bed rest for the last three months and spent day and night horizontal; she couldn’t play the cello. When I arrived, I had two regular ears but I wasn’t born with the one needed to be a good musician. Elijah, on the other hand, understood whole pieces of music. He was able to play not only the written notes, but the stories between them, and all the quavers that couldn’t be seen. More recently Elijah hadn’t even needed to read the sheet music: he imprinted it on his mind. I knew this because sometimes when I watched him play I saw his eyes look beyond the score, coming to rest on a painting that hung on the far wall, or even further to the bay window that looked out over the harbour. There was a moment when Elijah almost ceased to exist as a regular person, becoming instead a conduit to another realm, and it seemed unfair that I would never know how that felt.

My mother taught me for a while: the noises I made were high-pitched and scratchy, the bow didn’t grip properly. The horsehair made a whistling sound as it came off the strings, and the resin floated away in white powder.

‘Bring your right arm around more!’ my mother would shout while I was trying to bow.

‘To play properly you need to embrace it – open your heart to it!’ she exclaimed.

After a time, the lessons stopped. I couldn’t remember who gave up on the other first, me or her.

My mother and Elijah approached the end of a fast section; their bows raced, speeding to finish on time with each other. When the song ended in a flourish my mother threw her head back and laughed. The sound flew up and out of her, a small messenger bird, the shape of white wings beating against the wall. It circled the rooms of the house, gliding so close to me a wingtip brushed over my face, reminding me of secrets I could not share.

~

Elijah and I walked down to Northbridge baths. The way was steep and mostly covered by scrub. We moved without talking and listened to our thongs as they hit our heels. At the front of the baths were giant red gum sentinels. The air smelt of eucalyptus oil.

Low tide. The water was eerily shallow, so we looked down from the boardwalk as if into a drained bath. The pylons stood like women who had dropped their nightdresses, exposing blue and white rock oysters clinging to their legs.

We’d brought snorkels and masks, when I put mine on the clear plastic lens was foggy. Elijah and I floated face down in the water, our feet elongated behind us in large grey flippers. We saw schools of whitebait and rubbery seaweed that swayed back and forth, waltzing in water. A jellyfish floated by.

Elijah motioned to me under the surface, and then dived down; his snorkel filled with water and released large bubbles. I followed him and looked where he was pointing. A translucent squid, pumping its body – skewed at an angle, it arrowed away from us. At the surface Elijah ejected a jet of water from his snorkel.

‘Squid!’ I laughed.

‘How good is this?’ he said, and I revelled in a momentary gladness that Cate and Zed were not there. It reminded me of past summers, before there were best friends who weren’t in our family, when those long lazy days forced us to choose each other.

‘We should learn how to scuba dive,’ Elijah said, ‘then we could stay underwater for much longer.’

‘We could go up to the Barrier Reef when we’re older.’

I had seen photographs. Tropical fish, turtles and reef sharks; all the colours of the rainbow spread out over rock shelves, a tapestry of coral.

‘Definitely – I want to see one of those giant molluscs, what’s it called? A chambered nautilus.’ In that moment Elijah belonged only to me.

There was a space next to where the lane ropes were, a void between the starting blocks and the boardwalk, that was good for jumping.

‘Dare you to go off?’ Elijah goaded as I peered over the edge. It wasn’t nearly as high as the jumprock at Manly, and without Zed and Cate the atmosphere was fun and not challenging.

‘It’s too far down … I might—’

Before I could finish Elijah had leapt upwards and turned his body down in a boyish swan dive. On entry his shins whacked the water and he disappeared into a plume. His head emerged; he turned back to look up at me and flicked his dark hair to the side.

‘C’mon, Grub!’

It was towards the end of summer holidays. My speedos that were jade in December were now faded to a greyish green from overuse. When I’d stood up I heard the nylon over my bottom as it pulled away from the decking. I ran my hand over it and felt the fuzziness of the damaged material where I had sat: instead of a smooth elastic there was the irregular softness of broken threads.

I pushed the end of my big toe into the walkway. I didn’t want to jump, but I didn’t want to not jump either. I closed my eyes and stepped off the ledge, pencil-dropping into water that walled up around me. I was relieved when I realised I hadn’t hit the bottom. After the first time, it wasn’t as scary. We took it in turns to leap from the side and watch each other.

Elijah did a running launch to see how far away he could land and then the next time tried to do a somersault in the air and come out of it. He attempted an unsteady handstand then fell out from it into the water.

I spun off the edge like a top, covered my eyes with my hands and leapt forwards into darkness, laughing into saltwater.

Elijah stood with his back to the water, balancing on the balls of his feet like a diver.

‘Watch this,’ he said.

He wound his arms in a rhythmic circle and when his hands returned he used their momentum and flung himself upwards, bringing his legs overhead in a backflip.

Elijah hung momentarily, mid-air. The shape of his tanned back glued against the aqua sky, his wet hair hung away from his face. He was bright-eyed and wild.

I wondered how it was that he was never afraid of anything.

~

That January, like every other year, we packed up the car and headed north to spend the last two weeks of the holidays at Hawks Nest, in a weatherboard house Dad and his brother were left when their father died. Elijah and I sat in the back seat of our station wagon. Elijah listened to his discman and stared out the window. I preferred to hear Dad describe to my mother the different birds he’d found and tagged. He spoke while he drove, momentarily letting go of the steering wheel to draw shapes with his hands, cupping for a body or motioning the splay of a tail. My mother watched Dad and made a humming sound but then she started to look out the window. I didn’t think she paid him enough attention sometimes. If you let Dad’s stories wash over you they always made sense in the end and showed you something. She needed to listen to him the way she did to music.

Dad had taken me twitching a few times. He had a great ability to become silent and camouflage into the bush; he trod on the leaf litter in a way that was barely detectable and as a result the scrub and its inhabitants revealed themselves to him.

We stopped at the old Leyland Brothers World for petrol. It was an oversized plaster rock painted deep orange, a peculiar attempt to replicate Uluru. Inside were shops where you could buy souvenirs, pies, sausage rolls, and outside were the bowsers. My mother called it trash.

Hawks Nest was a dot of a town further up on the Central Coast. I wondered how many similar sleepy towns there were with white-sand beaches and crystal water. As the car drove on I imagined the coastline of Australia, how it looked from above: the surrounding navy deepwater that turned a shallower turquoise near the edges. The white outline where the waves broke.

I nudged Elijah and prompted him to take his earphones out. ‘How many beaches are there in Australia?’ I asked.

Elijah looked out at the dusky sky through the back-seat window, thinking, and then turned back to me. ‘Infinity.’

The house was an elderly relative that every year appeared more shrunken and with another piece missing. Dad pushed open the door and we were greeted by the smell of dust and old carpet. Inside there were gaps between the window frames and the walls, and separating the door and frame, so when the wind blew it was felt right through the house.

In Hawks Nest the rest of the world was far away. In the morning I chewed my vegemite toast and squashed it against the roof of my mouth. All I thought about was the direction of the wind – when the surf would be offshore. It took half the day to have breakfast, and the other half to go to the beach. Decisions were made over hours, time passed slowly, everything was sweet and moved like syrup.

At Jimmys Beach the sky was azure and flawless, the sand shell-white and scorching. Elijah was at the top of the beach stairs with his surfboard tucked under his arm, against his ribcage.

‘There’s a rip there,’ he said, pointing to the right of where we stood.

Elijah had white zinc on his nose and cheeks in the shape of a bird’s foot. The water in front of us shifted in the morning sun, the light blinking brightly on the moving faces of the water.

‘Further along looks okay,’ he said.

I had my hair tied back and zinc painted all over my face. Unlike Elijah, it wasn’t just my nose that was vulnerable. I held the mini mal board that used to be my brother’s. It was faded mint green with a few big dents in it and a gash that had been patched over with fibreglass, but Elijah said it still worked fine. I was a beginner at surfing, but Elijah always found the right spot to wait and picked out the best waves for me. If I was struggling to get on, he paddled up behind me and gave me a shove.

‘C’mon!’ Elijah ran towards the shore break, took a few strokes and pushed the board down under the approaching waves until he was out the back. It took me a lot longer to get there as I hadn’t learnt to duck-dive. I gulped at the air, put my head down and paddled my arms, a baby turtle moving over sand. The set rolled in. I managed to kayak roll the first wave but after I righted myself on my board the second wave cleaned me off, knocked me backwards and I tumbled around inside of it. I felt the elastic tug of my leg-rope pull away from me and heard that curious crackling that happened beneath: underwater static. In the calm between sets I managed to make it out the back to Elijah, who grinned at the sight of me. Before I’d even caught a single wave, I was exhausted.

The two of us sat astride our boards. Elijah slapped water towards me.

‘Grub, look out the back. The sets coming in.’

I could see lines of water approaching and felt my heart as it beat against my chest wall, my throat constricted.

‘This one’s yours,’ he said.

I turned the board around and started to paddle. The wave picked me up as if by the seat of my pants. I slid down the face of it, a tobogganist down the side of a blue mountain. I scrambled to my feet and crouched down. Slowly I straightened, my arms out to the sides. It felt like I was flying as the ocean propelled me forwards; the whitewash broke around me and all I could hear was wind.

The wave hit deeper water and petered out underneath me. I realised I was laughing uncontrollably to myself. I couldn’t wait to catch another one. My shoulders and arms burnt as I paddled back out. Elijah was bobbing past the break, humming to himself. I missed seeing his wave but I knew it must have been good; he was so efficient in the water he’d made it back out again before me. I couldn’t hide my smile, and as he spotted me I could feel it cracking open on my face.

‘Yieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew!’ Elijah yelped.

We sat out the back and waited for the next set. I looked past Elijah, over his left shoulder, sensing there was something more there.

A large fin projected from the water, attached to the rounded body of a sea beast I could just make out under the surface of the water: gunmetal grey. It was less than two metres from Elijah and pointed straight at him.

It was a moment that didn’t feel quite real.

Filled with the terror of losing my brother in that instant, I wanted to do whatever would be right. Instead I could barely move at all; I was paralysed.

Years later, after Elijah was gone, I would return to this moment and view it as some kind of test that I might not have passed.

‘Shark.’ The word formed at the back of my mouth and came out in a barely audible croak.

We clambered in the silent frenzy of two people who thought they might not make it. The next set of waves arrived and we both launched ourselves onto the leader; the wave picked us up and hurtled us towards shore. We hung to the noses of our boards and willed them to go faster. When we made it to the beach we sprinted out of the water, our bodies spent. We climbed to the rise of sand and keeled over. Elijah retched and spat seawater into the ground. We sat there for a while before we remembered to pull off the velcro cuffs from our ankles.

Elijah looked out to the spot where we were, and then northwards down the beach.

The shark siren hadn’t sounded.

‘We should tell someone,’ I said.

After we caught our breath we walked towards the surf club. Three lifeguards were manning the station, each wearing loud marmalade shorts and yellow long-sleeved shirts, their skin dark as stage make-up. The youngest lifeguard sat on a plastic chair, thin matchstick legs propped up on the balcony ledge as he looked through binoculars. He had woolly hair that was bleached from the sun and poked out from under his club hat.

‘Um, excuse me,’ I said, ‘we just saw a shark.’

The lifeguard with the binoculars looked at us and smiled broadly. ‘Oh yeah, whereabouts?’

‘We were just surfing over there.’ Elijah showed him.

The lifeguard smiled again and nodded. I couldn’t understand why he seemed so calm. My ears were still filled with the regular thumping of my pulse.

‘That,’ said the lifeguard, ‘is not a shark. It’s a sunfish.’

Elijah and I looked at each other, confused.

‘A what?’ I asked.

‘A giant sunfish – take a look.’

He handed me the binoculars and turned me by the shoulders to look in the right direction.

‘Huge fish,’ he said. ‘Completely harmless, aye.’

I darted the binoculars around looking for the spot where we were until I thought I could see something sticking out of the water.

‘See how it’s not moving, it’s just floating there in the shallows?’ the lifeguard said.

I brought the binoculars down and looked at him, sceptical.

‘Sharks have to keep swimming,’ he said, moving his right hand forwards from his chest, drawing out an S. ‘Otherwise they cark it.’

I turned my eyes back to the ocean. ‘What’s it doing then – is it sick?’ I asked.

‘Sick?’ he said. ‘Nah, it’s sunbathing.’

At dinner that night my mother asked why I was so quiet as I pushed pasta around my plate. Elijah and I had decided not to tell our parents about the sunfish. We kept it to ourselves: a giant monstrous secret, steel-grey and finned, that wallowed between our consciousness. Later as we lay in our bunks Elijah told me of my look of horror, the way my eyes bulged and all the blood drained from my face, leaving my lips an unnerving blue.

Even though we had heard what the lifeguard said, it still felt shark to us.

~

Dad set up his telescope on the concrete balcony at the front of the house on a night when there were no clouds.

In the eyepiece gleamed the luminous circle of the moon.

‘What are the dark patches?’ I asked.

‘They’re the lunar maria – basaltic plains – but originally astronomers thought they were full of water, so they’re named as seas.’

‘What’s the bright spot?’ Elijah asked.

‘That’s Copernicus, a crater.’

Dad took over the eyepiece and adjusted the settings. I watched him side-on, peering through the telescope in his faded navy polo shirt, his greying ginger beard backlit by the glow in the house.

‘Look here, around the edges.’ Dad showed us the uneven perimeter of the moon, not smooth but indented with what looked like volcanoes: pockmarked. These were the imprints of all the meteorites that had crashed into the moon, changing it as their masses joined. Impact craters.

~

‘Kids! ’ the word hissed in the air of our final night. ‘There is something that you have to see!’

Dad. He had that urgency in his voice, the sound he got when he’d discovered something.

I emerged from deep layers of sleep.

Elijah, who had been dozing shirtless, pulled on a navy singlet.

I put my tracksuit pants on under my nightie and hunted around in the dark for thongs.

Dad had his flashlight on his forehead, the one he used for prawning. He led us through the loungeroom, where my mother was waiting, her long brown hair hanging in loose turns. She was in her blue and white silk kimono, the one with the cranes on it. Dad led us out onto the street, across The Anchorage and over the sandbar separating our street from the bay. A gentle breeze rustled through gums. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, at first everything seemed as it should be. The inkiness of the bay, sand grey in the night, air still warm and moist as it sat on our skin – and overhead a thousand pinpricks of stars. Down at the shoreline Dad rolled up his pants and walked through the water, churning it. Mystically, the liquid around his ankles began to glow an iridescent green.

‘It’s phosphorescence!’ he announced triumphantly.

Then we were all in the water – we waded through it, slapped it with our hands and kicked, turning blue-black to uranium green. It was in the sand too: if we dug with our feet the grains momentarily shone when they moved. We watched night fisherman in their tinny, the outboard motor behind them sending water up in a glimmering emerald light. Dad placed his arm over my mother’s shoulders and they walked down the bay for a stroll, leaving Elijah and me by the water.

‘Watch this.’ Elijah picked up a stone and flicked it from his hand; it skipped across the bay's surface, and with each jump the luminescent green sparkle of tiny water sprites was released.

Later when I looked back on those early morning hours the four of us spent on the bay, it felt unanchored to reality. Despite coming here nearly every year of my life, that night the place felt foreign and mysterious. As if, once we scratched its surface, secrets of a different colour could be seen.

In the time that followed, bits of ourselves kept breaking off, crumbling like limestone into ocean, apostles falling: every year we became a little less of whoever we were in those moments.