Except for the flies, it was silent; there was no breeze. The sun bit my scalp. I was six years old and the billabong was full. We didn’t know why, it hadn’t rained for years.
I leant on a stick like an old man and waited for my mother to catch up. My arms were tanned up to my elbows, the rest of me was pale as she was.
Every day I’d asked her if she’d teach me to swim but she didn’t like to leave the garden. Then she started sewing something. She made me a pair of baggy trunks that hung from the narrow of my hips.
The towel was pulled around my shoulders, I nuzzled in close to her as we walked. Her white-skirted bathers brushed against my arm. She carried a towel of her own and a special rubber cap. She’d been swimming before, but that was in Europe.
She moved her sun umbrella to an angle that shaded me and looked down at my feet. They were dusty and bare as always, the colour of the sand.
“I wish you would wear shoes,” she said. I didn’t like them, they blistered the tops of my toes. She had on lace-up boots with heels. I trod carefully to avoid the bindi burrs and tiny sharp remnants of shells in the sand. The sand that now bore poisonous snakes; I’d seen them hanging dead on fences.
My mother was swollen with a baby. It pulled the material at her waist, made her bathers look uncomfortable. She brought it with her from Vienna. She said they don’t have snakes there.
We put our towels and the umbrella down at the base of the coolibah tree. There was a streak of shade, the width of the trunk, that stretched out over the water.
“It’s like a beach of our own,” she said, “three hundred miles from the sea.”
Fresh water had seeped up from an eye in the earth below the reeds and spilt out over the sand like a tongue of honey. I knelt on all fours at the edge, I was a wallaby drinking. It was cool on my lips, not brackish or salty, but pure as water running in a river. But it didn’t move, it was still like glass. A stone I threw went plonk in the middle where the bottom was dark. The red, scented lilies wobbled on their pads and the ripples they made lapped the edge where I waited.
“You can go in,” she told me. “He said it’s safe.”
My father said he’d thrown in a cattle dog to make sure there weren’t any crocodiles, but you didn’t get crocodiles that far south. He said things like that to make her scared. That’s why she hardly left the house.
The water came up to my chest, it felt warm like hands around me. Clear-winged insects stood weightless on the surface, my face just inches from them. The light reflected like rainbows on the film of their wings. I stroked the air with my hand and they flew lazily away, making sounds like purring cats.
My mother sat down in the shallow behind me, cooling herself. “I’ll teach you to swim,” she said.
She was sweeping her arms under the surface to show me how to move my legs without splashing. “Like frogs do,” she said. She held my hands firmly as I kicked and it made my head sway back and forth. The sun shone on the ripples.
I looked up at her as she blew at a strand of her hair. It fell from her cap, her fingers not free to tuck it. Still holding my hands, she walked me in deeper where there was mud underfoot. The water came over the swell of her belly, the skirt of her bathers was floating.
“Put your head under this time and open your eyes in the water,” she told me.
I took a breath and blew out my cheeks, floated face down. The sound of water filled my ears. I could see to the bottom, the stirrings in the mud about her feet. Swimming is easy, I thought. The reeds wandered around her legs, her skirt billowed, and then there was blood; it ran from her thinly, scribbled in the water like ink. Her body jerked sideways. She bent at the knees and let go of my hands. I shut my eyes and floundered, took in a mouthful of water, swung my arms until there was sand under my knees and it was shallow. I didn’t know what was happening.
She squatted in the water and struggled from her bathers. Blood came up in her hands.
“What is it?” I asked her. She didn’t speak. She pulled off her plastic swim cap and put what had happened inside it. Her hair unfolded and fell down over her face; she wiped it back with her hands still full, a smear of red against her brow. I gave her the towel but she motioned me away.
She crouched at the edge of the water and scooped a hole, covered the cap and what was in it with sand. She looked anxiously at the ground. I knew it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t kept asking to swim, if she’d stayed in the house. She got up and moved past me like a blind woman, her hands all over her face. She hadn’t wanted to come. I picked up the towel and umbrella, her bathers, and her boots. The cattle dogs came down the track and barked at her.
She stopped and turned, as if she’d forgotten I was with her. She looked older than before. She didn’t put her boots back on.
“We shouldn’t have come to the water,” I said. She took her bathers from me and hugged them to her stomach. She didn’t say it wasn’t my fault.