Words in Deep Blue(12)

‘I just want you to be you again.’ Rose taps her nails on the door and calls my name. ‘Do you remember that day,’ she says, and I know what day she means without her naming a date or a place or a time. She starts to describe it, and I want her to stop, but I don’t want to make a big deal about it. Nothing much and everything happened.

Rose had come to visit in the summer before I started Year 12. She’d arrived home from Chile, turning up in the early morning the way she usually did, appearing in the kitchen with coffee and croissants and the papers. It was summer. Hot by first light. We ate on the balcony, and Rose told us she’d visited Cape Horn, the headland at the southern end of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Chile. Beyond that are the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, separated by the Drake Passage. ‘The connecting point between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans,’ Cal said, reading from the screen of his phone, pushing up his glasses with his knuckles, scrolling through more information. While he read from the screen, Rose put her feet up on the balcony and said, ‘First trip. Wherever you go, separately or together, wherever it is, I’ll fund it.’

Rose didn’t make promises she didn’t intend to keep. Cal and I started planning. We’d go together, that much was certain. I’d wait till he finished Year 12. The hard part was deciding where.

‘The offer still stands,’ Rose says tonight. ‘Pick a place.’

I pick the past.

The bathroom is too small. Rose keeps tapping. The strange girl stares from the mirror. I think about how good it would feel to get in the car and drive again, to concentrate and not think.

I unlock the bathroom door and come out.

‘Can we at least talk about it?’ she asks, and I tell her sure, we can talk.

‘But tomorrow. Tonight I think I’ll go to see Lola’s band.’

I take the flyer, and Rose gives me a spare key to the warehouse. She looks worried, so I kiss her on the cheek. ‘Relax. You got through to me. I’m living again.’

‘I’m not an idiot. You’ll drive around all night to avoid talking.’

I think she’s about to yell some more, but instead she thinks for a minute and then relaxes against the counter. ‘Okay.’ She picks up an apple. ‘Go out. Good idea.’

‘Thank you,’ I say, and I’m on the way to the front door when she calls to me.

‘But take a picture of Lola on stage. Text it to me,’ she says and bites the apple. ‘Show me proof of this life.’




Too smart for her own good is how Gran describes Rose: too adventurous, too honest, too unconventional, too loud. These are the qualities I love about Rose. Until now, when they’re working against me. I’ll have to go to the club, but first I drive around to old places, putting off the inevitable for a while longer.

Everything seems the same: the streets, the shops, the houses. I pass Gracetown High, where Mum taught Science and I went to school. Cal went to a private school across town that had a good music program because he played the piano.

I park outside our old place on Matthews Street, a three-bedroom Californian bungalow, painted cream. Whoever lives there now has kept our chairs out the front and the plants, but there are different bikes leaning on the side, and different cars in the driveway.

The back of the house was glass when we lived there. I remember Cal and me sitting in the lounge room one night when a summer storm started. Cal and I both loved storms. We loved the accumulation of charge in the air, electricity building in the clouds above and on the earth’s surface, moving towards each other.

Cal was interested in science, and he was good at it, but he didn’t love it, not the way that I did. He liked science because of all the possibilities, but he believed in other things like time travel and the supernatural. I remember once we had this argument about whether ghosts existed. Cal thought they did. I thought they didn’t. Mum explained to us why, according to the second law of thermodynamics, they couldn’t exist. ‘Humans are a highly ordered system and once we’re disordered beyond repair, we don’t reorder.’

Cal chose to believe in them anyway. I sided with science.

But after the funeral, after everyone had left the church, I stayed, waiting for Cal’s ghost. I still didn’t believe in them but I had this crazy idea that because he did, they might be possible. ‘See, Rach. I’m here,’ I imagined him saying, as he held up his arm to show the sunlight shining through. Ghosts are nothing but dust and imagination, though, and eventually the funeral director told me I had to leave. There was another funeral starting soon.

I think about Rose’s ultimatum. Stay here or go home. Cal’s everywhere, but at least in the city I won’t think about those waves that took him.

The dreams of the silver fish make me sad, but they’re not the worst ones I have. The worst are where I’m tangled in the water, screaming his name, hauling him onto sand, desperate to give him my breath.

I check the address of Laundry, and start the car.





Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Letters left between pages 44 and 45

8 December – 16 December 2012



Okay, Pytheas, I’ll write back, but only because I feel sorry for you. What kind of guy likes freaks?

I’ll tell you about me, but first I have some questions. Who is Pytheas? Have we spoken before? Why do I never see you putting letters into the book? I’ve been watching very closely.