A Fish

Fish

Memories are strange things. Slippery, like fish escaping a net and
they deceive us if they can. Make us long for things that never were -
or never were the way we remember them. It was a childhood memory of my
father's that led us to the waterhole that day. He remembered it from
his boyhood as a wonderful place to swim. At first he couldn't find it
so we drove around in circles for what seemed like hours. It was summer
and the car was like a hot box. The fact that there were five little
girls squashed on the back seat and two quarrelling adults on the front
seat didn't make things any cooler.
"You always do this," my mother was saying. "Admit that you're lost.
You don't know where you are, do you? You just keep turning
corners."
"Now then, Mum," was my father's mild reply to my mother's
accusations. No matter how much she yelled, this was all he said and
that only made her yell more. She always took his forebearance as a
personal insult. She cared and if he cared he would yell too. Or so her
thinking seemed to go.

We had our swimsuits on under our clothes so we were hot and itchy and
we longed for the waterhole as sailors lost at sea must long for
land.
At last we found it.
"Petrie," my father announced. "This is the place." He scratched his
head. "I would've sworn it was further down the road." He looked
around.
"Don't remember that mountain," he mused. "That house wasn't there
either," he pointed to the left. We weren't looking. As soon as the car
stopped we threw both back doors open and rushed out into the fresh air
and the cool of the forest. Because forest it was. Not the dry, ragged
trees that would have been called "bush" or "the bush". There were huge
pine trees, or so the fish of memory tell me as I haul them in, and
there was a dense, cool darkness to the place that made me think of
Hansel and Gretel and the witch.

"Come on kids," my father called. "Get on the path."
So we followed him in single file along timber walkways over the tops
of ravines. My mother followed too, heaving sighs and telling us that
this exertion was too much for her and that the ravines gave her
vertigo.
"Now then, Mum," my father mumbled.
It wasn't until many years later, until I was a woman myself in fact,
that I understood why this mild reply made my mother yell, '"shut up"
at my father, so loudly that her voice echoed back out of the ravines
and the forest and seemed to come at us from all directions. I hardly
noticed all this because patterns of light lay like lace at my feet. I
felt as if I was flying.

Then we came out into a clearing. No waterhole in sight.
"Where is it?" my mother demanded, sensing a victory. "Where is
it?"
"Just keep walking," my father told her, evenly.
Then we were there. We looked down from an immense height to a muddy
waterhole. It was like looking down to the centre of the Earth. I
thought about jumping in and it made my feet tingle with fear and
excitement. I imagine letting myself fall down, down to that water.
Sink or swim.
My mother's eyes glinted with triumph. "Are you mad?" she
snapped.
"How can they swim in that?"
My father couldn't understand it. This wasn't what he remembered. My
sisters all started insisting that they could swim in that. I was
silent. I was a natural mystic. I worshipped everything. Now I
worshipped this hole in the ground. The thought of actually swimming in
it seemed sacrilegious but now I could see that down there at the
bottom of the hole there were some children swimming around. It
reminded me of the story of the frogs who fell in the bucket of cream
and swam round and round in circles until it turned into butter. My
father looked down at the swimming children.
"Those kids must be able to swim like fish," he said in
admiration.
My mother gave him a disgusted look, "What are we going to do now?
They want to have a swim," she complained. "This can't be the one you
meant," she told him. "You're not going to tell me that you ever swam
in there."
"There used to be a rope down the side..." my father said and I
realized he wasn't sure himself any more.
"Well we'll have to go somewhere else. What a wasted trip!" my mother
sighed as she turned away; we followed her in single file. My father
followed a distance behind us and when I looked back he had a sorrowful
expression on his face. Paradise lost. The vanished kingdom. The
waterhole he would never find again lived on in his mind - but only
there.

Not far from where we'd parked we found a little stream, running over
rocks and flowing into a small river.
"This is more like it," my mother smiled now and put the picnic rug on
the ground. Tea in a thermos, sandwiches, patty cakes and some bruised
bananas were spread out on the rug and a bottle of lemonade which
proved to be both warm and flat was poured. "Yes, this is lovely," my
mother said. She was quite cheerful now. My father threw himself down
on the rug and stared up into the sky. I knew he was thinking about the
waterhole that he remembered from when he was a boy. His face made me
so sad I couldn't really enjoy splashing in the clean, cool water that
ran over the rocks.
"It's safe here," Mum purred lying back with her head on Dad's arm.
Don't go near that river though. We don't know how deep it is."

We splashed and played happily and it was some time before we realized
that one of us was missing. My sister Tania (the only redhead in the
family) was nowhere to be seen. We raised the alarm and my father
reared up like a startled horse and galloped off down the stream, shoes
and all. My mother kept saying, "Oh God, oh God, oh." She splashed off
after my father and we all followed her.

No one could find Tania and we all called her name. Then I looked down
from the bank where the long grass grew all the way out into the river
and I could see my sister's face looking up at me from under the water
while her long, red hair floated around her head. Her eyes were wide
open and I screamed and felt as if my soul was flying out of my body.
Blackness enveloped me. When I came to, my father was holding my
sister's head while she vomited water.
"The grass," she coughed and tried to cry but had no breath to do it.
"I thought it was the ground but the grass was growing in the water."
She cried and vomited for some time while my ashen-faced parents asked
her questions she was in no state to answer and one of my sisters
poured warm lemonade down my throat because my mother said I was in a
state of shock and needed sugar.

And now it is so many years later and tomorrow is my father's funeral.
We're middle-aged women now and my vigorous mother is slightly less
vigorous, though passion will only die in her when she herself is dead.
She wanders from room to room as if she's looking for my father.
"I can't believe he's gone and left me," she says, accusingly. The
heart that beat only for her, beats no more.

We are sitting in my mother's kitchen, drinking coffee and tea and
eating home made muffins. One of us is missing. Tania. Kay is a
physiotherapist, Lynette is a florist who runs her own shop. Brenda is
a nurse. I used to be a teacher but now I only teach in a community
centre two days a week. We are all married with teenage children. All
except Tania. "My vale of tears," that's what our mother calls her.
Tania has never really had a job and she always seems to be with men
who beat her and desert her. She's also a junkie. For years my mother
and father waited for the phone call telling them that Tania had died
of an overdose. It never came. It still hasn't and now it's my father
who's dead.
"If she turns up off her face I'll kill her," Brenda vows,steaming mug
of coffee held up near her own face.
Outside the cold makes the windows of the warm kitchen steam up. The
darkness is gathering and still no Tania. My mother gets that familiar,
stricken look on her face. She keeps glancing at the phone. We all know
what she's thinking.

Around six when we've put a video on and opened a bottle of wine I
notice that it's started to rain. Then I glance up and see Tania's face
at the window. The cold, wet wind makes her red hair fly out around her
head. Her wide-open eyes stare at me through the glass and I go cold.
The years fall away and a scream rises in my throat. I swallow it down
with the wine. Tania has been drowning all her life; I realize this for
the first time. At the window she smiles her child'' smile, mouths:
"Open the door."
My mother looks over, see Tania and shakes her head. "Like a fish out
of water," she says to no one in particular.
There's a silence while we all think our own thoughts, then my mother
sighs and pulls herself up out of Dad's old armchair.
"Always turns up. Like a bad penny," my mother laughs.
I laugh too but the laughter catches in my throat.

Tania slinks in from the dark like a cat. Pushing her wild, red hair
back with a skinny hand, she shivers. "I always thought I'd die before
Dad," she says in a trembly voice, taking the glass of wine from my
mother's hand. It's what we've all been thinking. A shocked silence
descends. Tania laughs uncertainly and looks around the room from face
to face.
She has an addict's rough, raw laugh.
"Come and sit near the fire," my mother says, taking Tania's hands and
rubbing them. "Your hands are so cold. You look half-drowned."
"Well I never did learn to swim, did I?" Tania laughs and sips the
wine.
"No, you didn't," my mother says softly.
And we sit and drink our wine while the rain flies in gusts against the
roof and water runs down the windows.

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