The doors of the hospital slid shut and Ro dodged the backwash from a taxi, jumping a creek that was normally a footpath. The car park was a lake. No hope of dry feet. She splashed along the rows to her car, scrambled inside and sat mopping herself with an old beach towel from the back seat. The world beyond the windscreen was liquid, unexpected in Adelaide. Or perhaps not, she thought. Not anymore.
‘We should check this out,’ the GP had said. Ro thought her fussy, but went along with it. She had a hazy idea that when you’re older you should pay more attention to the doctor. Tests. That’s all they were. She was never sick. She was sturdy and energetic, descended from Welsh pit pony and dour Scot. Now, watching the rain sheeting down, she pushed the whole thing away. She would get the results next week. No point thinking about it before then.
Her phone blinked. A group text from Julia, appealing to friends to help at Maddie’s low-lying house. Ro was startled by a streak of unearthly light, a deafening drumroll, and added a stutter of xs to her reply. She pressed send and waited, remembering a childhood belief: one mile for every second between light and sound. When the next flash came she counted five before the thunder. The one after that was ten. The storm was moving away. She started the car. Maddie and Julia were two of her oldest friends, part of her sisterhood. She was summoned and she would go, though rain, wind and lightning barred the way.
The main road was closed. She circled through Semaphore to Birkenhead, left the car in a backstreet and walked two blocks to Maddie’s place. The school oval was under water and the roadway, beyond a curve of sandbags, was a swirl of murky whitecaps. No horizon was visible and an early dusk pressed down. Floodwater, rain and clouds merged into one dark mass.
Further up the street three trucks were parked. Round them a cluster of people shovelled sand into bags, hoods pulled forward over faces, backs hunched against the weather. Ro stood for a moment in the shelter of a bus stop scanning the toiling figures. She spotted Julia in her fluoro bike jacket, standing in the back of a truck digging sand. Ro smiled. It might be years since they’d been lovers, but her pleasure in watching Julia never lessened. All around was chaos and wetness but Julia’s movements were as fluid and economical as if it was a calm afternoon in the garden. It would take more than a flood to rattle Julia.
Ro made her way over. ‘Got your text,’ she yelled above the wind. ‘I thought it was only Maddie’s house. What’s going on?’
Julia jumped down from the truck and stretched her shoulders.
‘It’s the equinox. Plus spring tides.’
‘What, you mean this is the river?’
‘Yes, Port River. Coming across Semaphore Road.’
‘Shit. All these houses.’
‘It’ll be higher yet. Peak in a couple of hours.’
‘Where’s Maddie?’
‘Making soup. Alby’s here.’
‘Alby? Here?’
Julia took her by the arm and led her down the road. Sure enough there was Alby, who lived in Melbourne but was somehow transported to a flooded street in Adelaide—who was not strutting a cabaret stage, but was here in the rain, compact energy devoted to flood control. Dropping her shovel, Alby bustled over, bright eyes alight. She threw her arms around Ro, transferring a cascade of water from her hood to the front of Ro’s jacket.
‘I thought you weren’t coming till next week,’ Ro shouted, mopping her face.
‘Didn’t you get my text? Show was cancelled. Come and help me. I’m getting too creaky for this sort of thing.’
She introduced Ro to a large man with tatts, who gave her a shovel.
The next few hours blurred. Water ran inside Ro’s clothes. Mud weighed down her shoes. She and Alby filled an endless succession of bags and left them to be tied up by a woman with a reel of string and a sacking needle. The brawniest helpers trundled the filled bags away in wheelbarrows.
By nightfall the wind was icy, each drop of rain threatening hail. Every muscle in Ro’s body was shrieking. The tattooed man tapped her on the shoulder.
‘Can’t do any more, girls. We’re out of sand. Get yourself a cuppa.’
Girls, thought Ro wearily. Over sixty and still girls. But she saw that he intended appreciation, probably gratitude. Maybe one of these houses was his. She managed a smile.
Julia was already in Maddie’s kitchen handing out mugs of soup and dry clothes. Neighbours propped wearily against walls and benches. But the mood was jubilant.
‘It’s levelled out,’ said a woman, quoting the voice in her earbud. ‘They think it’s peaked.’
‘And the sandbags held,’ a man called from the doorway. ‘It hasn’t come over.’
Once the neighbours had left, Ro, Julia and Alby washed dishes and the kitchen floor while Maddie sorted towels and left-over clothing. Ro looked around. Four good women. Their hair might be grey and their flesh sagging, but they could work. In an age of high-tech sophistication it was satisfying that they could roll up their sleeves and do something as basic and old fashioned as filling sandbags to hold back a flood.
Maddie’s taste was colourful. In her generous-sized clothes the others were defective clones, three performers trying out for a look-alike competition. Julia was too long and narrow, Alby and Ro too short and nuggety.
Maddie’s kitchen, like Maddie, was cosy and well-upholstered. The chairs were padded with mismatched flowery cushions, and an old clock ticked loudly on the dresser. Every cup and plate was personally chosen by Maddie from the op-shops of Adelaide. In pride of place was a dinner set in yellow china with green scalloped edges. It was almost complete, provided two people went without soup and three without dessert.
Ro wriggled back into the cushions. Once again she resisted the thought of doctors and tests. No need to tell the others. Perhaps in reaction to the hospital, or the weather, she was filled with goodwill and boundless optimism. What couldn’t they do, these women?
‘Okay,’ she said, propping her feet on the chair opposite. ‘Here’s the question. Could we have stopped this?’
‘Stopped what?’ asked Alby.
Ro waved at the window. ‘This weather.’
Alby snorted and threw a wet tea towel at her. Alby reserved flights of fancy for the theatre, and preferred the rest of her life straightforward.
‘Not the flood,’ said Ro, dodging. ‘The whole thing.’
Julia scooped up the tea towel and threw it in the sink. ‘Watch it. I mopped that floor.’
‘What could we have stopped?’ Alby growled. ‘What whole thing?’
‘Climate change. Could we have stopped climate change?’
‘Along with all the other things that need stopping.’ Maddie dropped a bouquet of socks on the table. ‘Racism. Detention centres. War.’
‘But maybe it’s all the same,’ said Ro. ‘What if there was no war? Wouldn’t that change everything else as well?’
Julia grinned. ‘So we wouldn’t be sitting here among the sandbags?’
‘Fortress Australia,’ said Ro. ‘Umbrellas provided for the lucky few.’
‘This is weather,’ said Alby. ‘Not war.’
‘But taking the broader view,’ Ro persisted. ‘No more violence. No aggression.’
‘Ro thought feminism would stop violence against women,’ said Julia, yawning. ‘And that would stop war. And stop people trashing the Earth. She tried.’
‘Not alone,’ said Ro modestly. ‘I had help.’
‘I was there,’ said Maddie.
‘You mean like the Shelter?’ said Alby. ‘I thought you got the sack, Ro.’
‘It was a collective,’ Ro said with dignity. ‘We didn’t sack people.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘I left,’ said Ro.
Maddie considered three odd socks of different stripes. ‘All that work,’ she said. ‘Protesting, lobbying. Setting up refuges.’
‘So much dyke time,’ said Alby. ‘What for?’
‘Sometimes I wonder,’ said Maddie. ‘Things look worse now, not better.’
‘Well, feminism is back,’ said Julia. ‘Young women are calling themselves feminists again.’
‘Bless ’em,’ said Ro. ‘Best thing that’s happened for years.’
‘But war’s another matter,’ said Maddie. ‘There’s always a war somewhere.’
‘When it comes to war,’ Julia said, ‘we overlooked capitalism.’
‘Anyhow,’ said Maddie, ‘we tried to stop violence. But we didn’t succeed.’
‘No,’ said Ro sadly. ‘We didn’t succeed.’
Julia stood up briskly. ‘It’s not over yet. Maybe tomorrow.’
Alby always stayed with Ro when she was in Adelaide. The two of them drove home along the coast. The thunderstorm was over but the wind was wild and the road deserted. Ro drove with one eye on the trees, though she knew it was pointless. If a branch blew down they couldn’t dodge.
The inside of the car was a bubble of quietness, dry and warm. After a stretch Alby leaned closer to Ro.
‘Do you reckon it’s really that bad? The climate stuff?’
Ro considered. ‘Well, I get scared,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Yeah. I guess so. When I think about it. Mostly I try not to.’
‘It’s the refugee thing that scares me most,’ Ro said. ‘Millions of people looking for a safer place.’
‘I don’t want them coming here. If I’m honest.’
‘Because they’re different? Or because we might not have enough for ourselves?’
Alby shivered. ‘It’s more how people here will react. Fighting. Hatred.’
‘Scapegoating. Someone has to pay the price. Perfect conditions for the rise of the extreme right, a Trump, a new Hitler.’
‘You think it’s all connected,’ Alby said. ‘Refugees, violence, whatever.’
‘I do.’
‘You know when you worked at the Shelter,’ said Alby. ‘I didn’t get it. I couldn’t understand why you’d want to do that.’
‘You knew what it was like. You came from a broken home. So-called.’
‘You don’t hear that anymore, broken home. My home was smashed up by Dad. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t interested. I escaped.’
‘Didn’t want to be reminded?’
‘Probably.’
‘So how was it?’ Alby asked after a pause.
‘What?’
‘The Shelter.’
‘I must have talked about it back then.’
Alby considered. ‘Yeah. But I never thought you took it all that seriously.’
‘I told you the funny bits.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Story of my life.’
‘So what sticks in your mind now?’
Ro drove in silence, remembering.
‘Kids mainly,’ she said. ‘All those kids.’
The angry ones. The children who wouldn’t look at anyone. Babies with blank eyes. The Aboriginal kid who called them all officer.
‘There was a young woman who’d been raped by her father,’ she added. ‘And all his friends.’
‘Shit.’
‘He was a professor,’ Ro added. ‘Just in case you think it only happens on our side of the tracks.’
‘Surprise.’
‘And then the women who kept going back. Bruises, broken teeth and all. He’s sorry now. He’s promised to stop drinking. It won’t happen again.’
‘I remember that with Mum. She blamed herself. If she’d … I dunno, been a better wife or something.’
‘Yeah. Frustrating. They didn’t think they deserved any better. I probably wasn’t all that patient.’ Ro glanced at Alby. ‘That’s enough, I’ll shut up.’
‘I did ask.’
Ro turned the heater up.
‘Can we check out Glenelg?’ said Alby.
‘Yeah. Let’s,’ said Ro. ‘I’m not ready to sleep anyhow.’
They left the car in a backstreet and walked down Broadway to the waterfront, jackets pulled tight and Maddie’s flowery beanies over their ears. They weren’t alone. A crowd had gathered on the high part of the footpath to watch the sea. Opposite them waves crashed over the roof of the kiosk and surged into the sunken roadway. It was impossible to hear anything above the noise of the water. People stood in silence, puny in the face of the ocean, faces lit eerily by the flashing blue light of a police car.
The expensive flats along the foreshore were in darkness. Here and there on balconies Ro saw people. Wishing they could sell probably, beachside real estate no longer so desirable. She felt the fine salt spray settling on her face and licked her lips. She had a sudden flash of the hospital, antiseptic, and a wrench of fear in her gut, fear of her own tiny irrelevance. The livid clouds parted to show a full moon.
‘Not me,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Surely not me.’
They drove away from the coast, but the water had encroached here too. Ro’s street was blocked at the far end. The creek had emptied itself into a row of houses. Once again a huddle of people stood in silence, watching the flood.
Ro’s place was untouched, though the power was out. It was a relief to drop their wet things in the hall and bolt the front door. Ro was heating drinks on the camping stove when her phone buzzed twice. A text message.
‘Julia,’ Ro said. ‘Oh hell.’
‘What is it?’ asked Alby.
‘The storm. It’s taken a chunk out of the bottom of Yorke Peninsula. Their shack … it’s gone.’
Ro lay in bed with her eyes open, staring out the window at the unaccustomed darkness. No street lights.
She thought about Julia and Anne. Not a big deal, she told herself. It was a holiday house. They had a permanent roof over their heads, they were dry and housed. But it was a loss, and frightening. What the elements could do, what might lie ahead.
At times like this Ro was overwhelmingly grateful for Julia and her kind. Environmental scientists, engineers, architects. The planners. The just-do-it people. Julia didn’t weep and wail. Her determination was unflagging. What human greed had damaged, human ingenuity must mend.