Night Swimming Read online

  I nod.

  ‘What did you want to order?’

  I falter. ‘Oh. What do you recommend?’

  ‘I’m a vegetarian, much to my parents’ chagrin, and my favourite is the palak paneer. Cheese and spinach. Dad’s speciality is the beef madras.’

  She just casually used the word chagrin in normal conversation. I think I’m going to faint.

  I consider my finances, inside my Velcro Harry Potter wallet from the op shop. Our op shop has a very poor selection, so the wallet was actually a pretty good find, compared with the taffeta nightmares and worn-out jeans. I had not planned on ordering takeaway. Clancy’s parents give me a free meal on Tuesdays. Due to a combination of my low-paying apprenticeship and my book-buying habits, I am skint.

  ‘What do you recommend that costs four dollars seventy-five or less?’ I ask.

  She grins. ‘Garlic naan is three fifty.’

  I hand over the coins as she gestures for me to take a seat. ‘Won’t be long,’ she says, and vanishes to the kitchen. A few minutes later, she emerges with a tall, broad-shouldered, balding Indian man in tow. His arms are held out wide—in one hand is a small paper bag and in the other is a phone. He is smiling at me as if he is about to tell me I’ve won a car or a holiday to Fiji.

  He hands the phone to the girl and grips my hand very tightly. ‘Thank you,’ he says. He hands me the paper bag with my naan inside.

  ‘Thank you,’ I echo.

  ‘Do you mind if I have a photo with you?’ he asks.

  ‘Um, what for?’ I mumble.

  ‘You’re our very first customer.’ He is beaming.

  ‘This is our first restaurant,’ explains the girl. ‘It’s my parents’ big dream realised.’

  ‘A photo,’ I say. ‘No worries.’

  Her father is posing. ‘Should I do the peace sign or thumbs up?’ he asks.

  ‘Neither,’ says the girl. ‘Just smile.’

  I smile and try to hold my naan in the shot without it being too conspicuous. She takes the photo. I probably blink.

  ‘That’s a good one,’ she says. She smiles again. ‘Thank you, really.’

  As I leave, I hear her father say, ‘Should we have a wall of photos of me with customers?’

  ‘Mum is not going to agree to that,’ the girl says.

  ‘You can’t eat food from there in here!’ says Clancy. ‘Mum will kill you.’

  I am halfway through my naan and already reeking strongly of garlic. ‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’ I ask, mid-mouthful.

  ‘You betrayed our restaurant, is what happened!’ He shouts and waves his hands about theatrically, ushering me outside onto the footpath. Once the door has closed behind us, the bell ringing sharply, he drops back into normal conversational tone. ‘Sorry, I wanted Mum to see I disapproved of the naan. What’s her name?’

  I look down. ‘Didn’t get it.’

  ‘You are the worst undercover operative I have ever worked with. I am seriously unimpressed.’ He’s smiling as he says this. I tear off half of the half of my naan to give him, but he shakes his head.

  Stanley, who is tied to a post out the front, starts sniffing at Clancy’s shoes. Given the opportunity, Stanley would chew his feet off.

  All the animals I’m responsible for at home—the pets, not the ones that are our livelihood and are thus too important for me to look after—have a tendency to gluttony. Probably because I spoil them.

  Stanley is rather svelte considering his habit of over-indulgence, but I can’t pick him up anymore, like I did when we were both kids. His hair is white but he often frolics in mud and refuses baths, so it doesn’t look that way. He is a cute goat, but he is not your typical cute goat. If he could speak, I am sure he would tell me that he is so much more than his appearance. Stanley has a very knowing look about him. I am sure he has a valid reason for wanting to eat literally everything. It’s no doubt a statement against consumerism.

  ‘I better nick off,’ I tell Clancy. I look over his shoulder at his mother as she emerges from the restaurant, a plastic container in her hand.

  ‘Chicken and almond,’ she says, handing it to me. She lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper and nods to the restaurant opposite. ‘What’s it like over there?’ She says it like we’re in a war zone and I’ve just returned from the frontline.

  ‘It’s nice. Tables and chairs are posh. Food smells good, but there’s no one there.’

  Mrs Lee’s mouth is a hard line. She nods. She is taking the competition even more seriously than Clancy is.

  ‘Thanks for the food, Mrs Lee. Appreciate it.’

  She smiles and gives my arm a squeeze. ‘Say hi to your grandfather for me.’ She raises her eyebrows at Clancy and speaks to him in Cantonese.

  He mouths something like one minute to his mum. When she’s gone, he turns back to me and mouths his mantra, child slavery. He looks across the road to Saffron Gate. ‘We’ll redouble our efforts to befriend the restaurateur’s daughter tomorrow, shall we?’

  ‘The Restaurateur’s Daughter,’ I say. ‘That’s probably the name of a Mills and Boon at the op shop. She’s gorgeous, Clancy. You’ve got Buckley’s.’ My tone is jovial, but I mean it. As wonderful as Clancy is, she’s a higher life form than the rest of us. I know it. Clancy hugs me. I untangle Stanley’s lead and wait for him to accompany me down the street. Stanley is never in a hurry. He is a very Zen goat.

  ‘You’re going to give a beautiful speech at our wedding!’ Clancy shouts after me. Sometimes I can’t tell if he’s kidding or not.

  ‘I am very much looking forward to being your best woman!’ I shout back.

  This far inland, the nights are cold but the days are still warm; it feels like the sun’s biting into you by 10 a.m. We’ve been having amazing rains this autumn, raindrops thrumming on the roof steadily overnight, a very reassuring percussion, with that still, fresh, after-rain feeling to the mornings, the ground soaked beneath your feet. Pretty magic.

  A couple of thousand people live here, but the properties are spread out, so it’s still peaceful. Spacious. The streetlights stop two streets from Main Street. Tonight the stars are out, and bright. I like walking home in the dark so I can skip and twirl, do my interpretive dancing. Stanley gets into it, too. There are hackneyed quotes that say you should dance like no one’s watching, but dancing when there’s really no one watching is the best thing, because then it’s just for yourself. Me dancing through my town in the dark.

  How my family ended up here: my grandad, Cyril, got conscripted and had to fight in the Vietnam War. He didn’t have a wife or kids then. He worked on a farm down in Victoria, milking cows. If he’d been born a couple of years earlier, he would have been too old to fight. But he wasn’t, and he had to go, and he doesn’t really talk about it now. His medals are in a carved wooden chest in the front room, along with old photos and coins, saved baby teeth and curls of hair from my first haircut, my mum’s and my uncle’s—all relics of Grandad’s life, and ours. He never puts his medals out on display.

  Mum told me he was a bit broken by going to war. He came back adrift. In faded photos of him from the seventies, he and his huge moustache appear, working in farms all across the country, picking fruit and shearing sheep and even delivering a calf. Pictures he sent to his mum, so she’d know he was okay. Perhaps it’s because I know he was messed up by going overseas, but he seems a little dead behind the eyes in a lot of those photos.

  Then he found Alberton, which wasn’t much more than a pub on the old highway back then. I reckon it’s a magical force, this town, for people with our blood. He knew it was where he was meant to be. Someone was selling a whole lot of goats, and he thought, that’s it, I’ll make soap. He’s told me this story a thousand times but I’m still not sure why he settled on soap.

  My grandparents first met when Grandma was travelling through town. She was adrift, too. I now think the age gap between them was a bit gross: she was a fair bit younger. But in photos of her when she was my ag
e, she looks like someone who could not be intimidated.

  I don’t know about this part. They don’t talk about it. They might have fallen in love, or my grandmother might have thought he’ll do. There was a wedding at the registry office in Sydney and a honeymoon in Canberra, then my mum was born, then her brother. Then, when they were still toddlers, my grandmother left. But that’s not the important bit.

  If he’d never gone to Vietnam, he might have stayed working at that dairy farm his whole life and never moved here and built this house and raised these goats and met my grandmother. My mother wouldn’t have been born and then I wouldn’t have been born. If you think about it, it’s extraordinary, the odds that I’d be here right now. Every living person is a one in a billion chance. Even if my family isn’t perfect, I’m lucky to have them.

  These days, my grandad has a bad memory problem. We have the same five conversations over and over again. It’s very reassuring, in its own way. Most of the time you don’t get the chance to say exactly the right thing when you speak to someone: I’ve often lain awake at night panicking that I made an absolute idiot of myself. But with Grandad I get an opportunity to redo every conversation we have, multiple times a day. Isn’t there something lovely about that?

  Grandad is one of the most cheerful people I know. Mum doesn’t like the repetition; she thinks it’s like living in a time warp, going round and round. I can’t think of anything better. If you’re stuck in time, nothing ever has to change. For me, nothing changing is a perfectly acceptable state of affairs.

  My mum has more in common with her mum than she’d like to admit. They’re both smart and hardworking, and stubborn and impatient. My grandfather and I, we’re more easygoing. He’s never mentioned Grandma nicking off. Sometimes he asks me how my mother is, and he means my grandmother—for him, we’re interchangeable at times. They’ve been married forty-three years but lived apart for most of that. Maybe that’s the secret to a long marriage. Don’t see each other. She first left forty years ago, though she comes back for a visit occasionally—most recently when I was fifteen. She and Mum talk on the phone every so often, but I don’t think she speaks to Grandad, at least not since his health declined.

  I’m not that interested in marriage—I haven’t had good role models. My mother was never married to my dad, and she hasn’t had a partner since he left. Grandad and Grandma don’t function like ordinary married grandparents. Anyway, the idea of being married to a bloke makes me feel ill. Not even weddings appeal to me. Okay, maybe the food. Certainly not the big frothy dresses.

  When I get home, I stand outside for a minute and just look at it. In the cool, dark night, the house is enchanting, warm and welcoming. Home. This house probably doesn’t look wonderful to anyone else, but it’s the centre of my universe; sometimes it gives me an ache in my chest, which is an irrational response to a shelter made of cut-up trees. I’m a bit sentimental.

  Grandad built the house with the help of his best friend, Mr Pool, who ran the newsagent’s and certainly wasn’t a builder, and I’m not sure they obeyed any building codes, if there were building codes back then.

  The original house was not large or stable; just a kitchen and a bedroom, built when Grandad was here on his own. The floorboards don’t fit together perfectly, so you get a terrible draught in those rooms in the winter and in the evenings, and you can see between the slats to the darkness below.

  Everything else is extensions, built as needed over the years, with very little eye for design. Architecture is not a word to use around our house. The original bedroom is the lounge room now. After Grandad got married he built a couple of nicer bedrooms off the kitchen; in one of them he placed the new bedroom set given by his parents, and that’s still his bedroom. After Mum and Harry were born, Grandad built the upstairs. The most dangerous staircase of all time leads up to two bedrooms with big windows facing the paddock and the shed, and little windows at the front, just big enough to squeeze through. One of the bedrooms is mine now, and the other belongs to Nathan, my cousin, who lives with us. Grandad built the ‘nice sitting room’ next, tacked on behind the lounge room, and the sunroom tacked on behind that (we’ve got a daybed in there for guests, though I mostly use it for naps). When Mum was pregnant and my dad was living with us, a granny flat was added out the back, a little cabin. Mum sleeps in the house now, and occasional backpackers stay out the back. They milk the goats in exchange for food and board.

  I think you can tell that our house has expanded to keep pace with the family, growing with all the love it had to contain, like the Weasleys’ house in Harry Potter. The wiring is hazardous and, when we get a big wind, it feels like the whole house might lift off like when Dorothy and Toto head to Oz. But it’s also a place of magic and love and joy, cluttered with books and second-hand furniture and more soap than we could ever use.

  So, as I’m wandering up the front path, my heart is warm in my chest—of course it is, because it’s an internal organ, but I mean it metaphorically.

  Maude is inside the front door, lying on her back, offering her belly for a scratch, her tail madly sweeping the floorboards. The Downs’ dogs had a litter a few years back, and they gave us Maude. She’s a mix of breeds. In the old days they called them mongrels, but I think it’s nicer to say she’s a bitser. She is cheerful and fluffy and her coat is golden. She and Marianne, the cat, and Stanley are all on good terms, though not exactly friends. While I give Maude’s belly a rub, Stanley chews on the umbrella hanging from the coat stand. Grandad calls Maude his ‘clever kid’, Marianne ‘the black pussycat’, and Stanley ‘the bloody goat’, as in ‘get the bloody goat out of the house, it’s eating my slipper’—then he throws the other slipper at Stanley’s head, which doesn’t worry Stanley in the slightest. We go through a lot of slippers. I walk barefoot round the house now, because I can’t deal with losing them anymore.

  In the kitchen, Mum’s in her permanent spot at the head of the table. Nathan once joked to me that when she dies, we’ll have her stuffed and propped up at that table, her glasses on and a stack of paperwork in front of her. I laughed, even though the idea of Mum dying is unimaginable; death hardly seems like something she’d have time for. She’s always too busy.

  Tonight, there’s an envelope sitting in front of her, sliced across the top with a letter-opener. She’s staring at it. Nathan doesn’t seem to be home. Mum is nursing a cup of tea and wearing her usual plaid-and-jeans ensemble. She could easily pass for a lumberjack. I think she would be very good at competitive woodchopping. She has a lot of upper-body strength from goat-wrangling and such.

  ‘No goats in the house, Kirby,’ says Mum, and we launch into our familiar goats-in-the-house repartee.

  ‘Mum. It’s Stanley. He’s house-trained. He’s a pet, not a farm animal. Not like the rest of them.’

  ‘Some animals are more equal than others, you reckon?’ We both like George Orwell’s books—she’s the one who put me onto him, and she’s also responsible for most of the books in the house—but my favourite is 1984 and hers is Animal Farm. ‘Put the goat out.’

  She seems particularly devoid of patience this evening, so I don’t push it. I take off Stanley’s collar and nudge him out the back door. The other goats are fenced in so he can’t be cavorting with the ladies, but he can socialise with them through the fence, which is a bit of a tease, if you ask me. He stares at me angrily as I close the door in his face.

  The room is worryingly quiet. ‘Has something happened?’ I ask. ‘How’s Grandad?’

  ‘Watching TV,’ says Mum. ‘We have a letter.’

  ‘From?’ I ask, as I put the takeaway in the fridge.

  ‘You know how Grandad and I went up to Sydney, had those tests done.’

  I nod. ‘Mmm.’

  Mum doesn’t look at me when she says the next thing. Her voice is quiet. ‘He has dementia. Most likely of the Alzheimer’s type. They think he’s had a couple of mini-strokes. Damaged his brain.’

  Sometimes people think Mu
m is brusque or tactless. Usually I disagree. She’s straightforward. To the point. This is not like usual.

  None of this computes.

  ‘That’s not right,’ I say. ‘I’ve seen films about people with dementia. They’re properly disconnected from reality. Grandad’s just forgetful. That’s not a disease. That’s old age.’

  ‘The specialists would know, Kirby.’ Mum is firm. ‘They’ve prescribed a medication for him. Might help improve his brain function.’

  ‘Doctors stuff up, though, don’t they? They misdiagnose. Surgeons leave sponges and scissors in people’s abdominal cavities sometimes. They are human. Maybe they bungled the results.’

  I think this is a very valid argument, but I don’t think she is listening. My opinion doesn’t count.

  ‘It doesn’t have to change anything,’ says Mum. ‘We just need to be prepared. For the future. In case he needs to go into care. Know what our options are.’

  ‘What? Where? You can’t just ship someone off as soon as they get inconvenient.’

  ‘Calm down, Kirby.’

  I ignore her. ‘Why is it up to you? I look after him as much as you do. He built this house! You can’t just make him leave it because of some brain scan!’ I’m shouting at Mum, which I never do. I don’t clash with anybody. I guess I make an exception when the subject is Grandad.

  ‘Eventually you’re going to move out,’ says Mum. ‘I don’t expect you to stay here and care for Grandad. You have to lead your own life.’

  ‘I will never leave! This is my home!’ I mean this, even though I sound hysterical.

  Mum shakes her head. ‘I don’t think that’s in your best interests, Kirby. Be realistic. Life changes. Your grandfather is unwell and deteriorating. He will need care. You will be an adult soon, and I’m not going to let you spend your whole life in this dead-end town playing Bob the Builder with Mr Pool and wandering about with a goat.’

  ‘You want to get rid of us all now, do you?’ I would like to stop shouting at this point because my throat is sore, but I’ve committed and I have to continue.