Tidelines, p.1
Tidelines, page 1
Sarah Sasson is an immunologist and writer living on Gadigal and Bidjigal land. She has spent time living overseas in Chicago, Singapore, Montreal, Hanoi and Oxford. In Australia, the UK and the USA, her poetry, short-fiction and creative non-fiction have been published in Meanjin, Medium, Oncology Republic, Grieve Anthology, Unsweetened, Intersection Stories and Orris Root, among other places. In 2021 Sarah edited Signs of Life: An anthology (MoshPit Publishing), a collection themed around first- and second-hand experiences of mental and physical illness, and of caregiving. Tidelines was shortlisted for the 2020 Varuna House Publisher Introduction Program and longlisted for the 2020 Queensland Writers’ Centre Publishable Program under the title Some Things Beautiful. Sarah is currently living in Sydney with her husband and young children, and works as a clinician and scientist. When she is not writing, Sarah enjoys swimming, bushwalking, travel and spending time with family and friends.
First published by Affirm Press in 2024
Boon Wurrung Country
28 Thistlethwaite Street
South Melbourne VIC 3205
affirmpress.com.au
Text copyright © Sarah Sasson 2024
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 9781922848420 (paperback)
Cover design by Alissa Dinallo © Affirm Press
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by J&M Typesetting
2012/Outside His House
I follow him home, where he parks his white van in a carport outside a single-storey bungalow. Cronulla Marine Supplies is on the vehicle’s side in blue lettering. He wears jeans and a grey T-shirt. As he walks towards the mailbox I see he has sleeves of tattoos on both arms now, shades of blue-green and black.
‘You took someone from me.’ I say the words aloud in the car on the opposite side of the street. It isn’t my car. The paint on the bonnet is peeling and inside it smells damp.
He looks up and for a moment I think he sees me. He has the same hair; perhaps those sandy curls are a shade darker now. I remember how they felt, the shape of them in my hand. There it is, that slight tilt in his face.
I sink lower in my seat.
Rebekah says I’m still learning how to carry it, my grief, but I don’t want to hold it anymore. I want to draw a line in the ledger – to take something from him that would equal my loss – which is why I am here. To learn what that could be. It had been easy to find him; these days you just type a name into a search engine. His company website opened with a map and everything.
I don’t know what happens to people like me, who lost someone integral in their formative years; it feels like the removal of a linchpin. Without my brother, I’m not a complete person; I’m loosened. I try to move forwards, but pieces come off. I wobble. I keep falling: over, down, apart.
Part I
2001/Wide Horizons
Black Christmas
I was fourteen the first time it felt like the world was ending. I kicked my bedsheet away from me, trying to move around air that was heavy with heat. I heard Dad coughing. I walked out of my bedroom in my nightie, and through the dark house.
The late news bulletin was on in the loungeroom; the sound of trumpets reverberated from the walls.
‘Can’t sleep,’ I announced as I opened the door.
‘Darling.’ My mother, Rebekah, looked up from the couch where she sat in a blue negligee. ‘You’re all flushed!’ Hair piled on top of her head, like pavlova. Dad was next to her in boxer shorts. Ice cracked in their whiskys.
‘Half the state is on fire,’ Dad said, nodding at the television.
The newsreader in blue-framed glasses declared New South Wales was in a state of emergency; a multitude of bushfires covered it. Footage showed flames taller than trees, emergency services workers back-burning, whole landscapes of charcoal. Families stood beside bent corrugated iron and small piles of bricks. Empty dog houses. Smoke rose from Cammeraygal ground, from Dharug ground, from Dharawal ground. Images from here in Sydney showed thick smog over the harbour. Pictures of the bridge against a red sky and much of the cityscape disappeared behind floating ash. On the television people wandered around Bennelong Point looking up for direction, trying to get their bearings. The top of Centrepoint Tower was obscured. The sun was high and set behind layers of pollution, the light rusted and dim.
I thought about the people who started fires: how they struck a match, lit kindling and burnt the first bush on a day so hot and dry that flames stampeded across the earth. I wondered what it felt like to watch fire destroy cattle, make horses rear up in terror. I imagined them standing as we were, seeing old people leaving nursing homes on gurneys, wide-eyed, their faces covered in oxygen masks. Watching farmers as they cried, their belongings turned into vapour. I imagined the firebugs and wondered which part of it made them happy.
‘How hot is it?’ My older brother Elijah appeared at the doorway, wearing only faded board shorts. His voice a self-answering question, his body all shinbones and forearms.
‘Weird,’ he said, joining us in front of the television, ‘like a horror movie.’
The sails of the Opera House were not ivory but carved out of red jasper. It didn’t look like the city printed on postcards. It was still ours, but it didn’t seem like home.
‘It’s a bit cooler out here,’ Dad offered from the back veranda, where he had wandered. ‘Why don’t you kids sleep on the balcony?’
My mother stood from the couch and joined Dad on the veranda; she swilled the last of her drink before kissing him on the lips. ‘I’m going to get another; do you want one, Seamus?’
Dad shook his head.
My brother and I pulled our camping mattresses onto the veranda. We lay on our backs and hoped a sea breeze would find us. Over the wooden railing I saw the dim glow of Middle Harbour and heard the slow rush of burning underneath. Dad sat down behind us and leant against the wall.
My father’s voice was low and deep, the sound of waves breaking from the floor of the ocean. He was talking about when my mother was pregnant with Elijah, more than three years before I existed, how she used to bring her cello to this spot in the evenings.
When we were younger Dad told us tales of when he was a boy, Northern Irish myths, and the years before we were born. I had to listen carefully because the storylines changed; characters merged with one another. There were sudden unexpected endings followed by new beginnings. Inside the sound of my father’s voice was a place that for as long as I could remember always made me feel safe.
I opened my eyes a slit and saw old rafters above me, the awning of the balcony, the floating ribs of our home. Dad’s words drifted up there, getting caught in the wood: they collected and hung in the cobwebs. My father’s voice was made in Northern Ireland, but decades after his emigration the centre of it had been ground down, worn like sea glass into the frosted-light sound of an Australian drawl. The curled edges of his voice, though, remained Northern Irish. His accent gave his words a melody and the illusion of rhyme. I heard him smile as he recalled my mother’s normally lean legs swollen in the last trimester, malleable as if made from plasticine.
‘Rebekah was as big as a house, but it sure didn’t stop her from playing.’
‘Ah, Seamus, you are so cruel to me!’ My mother rejoined us on the deck. She sat next to my father and slapped him playfully on the stomach before she rested her head on his shoulder. It was one of my favourite places, the stillness as I listened for the spaces between his words. I saw the shape of my mother’s buttocks as they half-slipped off her wooden stool to accommodate her growing abdomen. Between her thighs, the body of her cello, wood more than a hundred years dark, fell backwards. The cello’s wooden neck to the left of her own, lovers that rested on each other.
Years later, when things began to unravel, I followed strings of thought like yarn back to this: my brother and me lying head to head, his dark curls touching my own long strands of sun-bleached auburn hair. Our parents adjacent to us, soothing us with memory. It was there the string finished, the frayed end stuck to a cardboard roll. That was it. The end and the beginning, that told me the truth.
Elijah’s life began inside our mother’s, as he floated in transilluminated fluid. There would have been a short distance between my brother’s head and the curved back of the instrument. I imagined the layers between, dissected them like a surgeon through tissue, an archaeologist through earth, a worker who stripped back wallpaper. The fluid, placenta, muscle, fascia, fat, skin, the dress my mother was wearing. My brother, so much smaller than he was now, curled up. Growing, furling. Attached to my mother by a lifeline of cord. A primordial astronaut. The deep notes of the cello, the music as it passed through the layers, through waters, making vibrations, as it passed through something thinner than blood.
I heard this story so many times that pieces of its versions became something of my own. Part of my story and that of my family. Later, I would think about the way Elijah was brought into being, surrounded by warmth, and love, and music, and wonder if that was where the problems began – whether somehow, in that process, there were promises made about the nature of the world that it couldn’t keep.
~
The starter’s whistle trilled, rose and then fell.
‘Take your marks …’
Crack!
Underwater. The cold in my ears. My goggles pressed on tight. The blue-green of seawater and clear baubles of air floated past. I could hear beneath the water not silence but sounds of a secret world: Saturday-morning swimming club at Northbridge baths. Underneath was unhurried – a space where everything moved slower. The sand below was a distant moonscape. It was the hundred-metre freestyle. The blocks approached, I swam, arm over arm. I raised my head near the far end as there was no black line to guide me. I neared the white blocks, pointed down into a tumble, turned and pushed off, kicking. A school of long silver fish swam below me; they too changed direction and flickered away. The swimmer in the next lane moved past me – their arms stroked, legs kicked, they left me in their steamboat wake.
New Year’s was over. The rest of the summer holidays stretched across January, so long and hot we couldn’t see the end of them. We’d been coming down here every summer I could remember. The watery cove of Sailors Bay was just next to the marina. There was a full-length harbour pool stretched out within an arcing boardwalk, the lanes made of sea-worn rope strung with faded pink polystyrene.
When I was smaller I’d jumped off the edge in a one-piece with frills around the bottom and a foam safety bubble strapped to my back, goggles on my cheeks as I dog-paddled in a fifteen-metre race, Elijah out in front of me, cheering me on. Thinking I was drowning I grasped towards him, more a scramble than a swim, trying to latch onto his shoulders, his hands, his brown hair, but he would kick back beyond me. Always just out of reach, he would slip out of my grasp, elusive.
It took some time before I really loved the water. My mother used to say I was too thin to float, all skin and bone wanting to sink to the bottom. I had to learn to lie on my back, to lean into the ocean and trust it. Surrendering.
The morning sun moved out from behind clouds and lit up the water down to the bottom, to earthen shades of sand and shells where small schools of fish hovered. The Black Christmas fires closest to us had been beaten down, but others were still burning. I occasionally saw flecks of ash just under the surface or left among the leaves and weed on the sand in a tideline.
I climbed up the steel ladder and walked back to where Cate was sitting.
‘Nice swim.’ She and I had been friends for so long I couldn’t recall a time before we knew each other. Cate sat with her younger brother, and behind them in the bay white hulls of boats rocked softly side to side, the masts bare, sails folded away.
‘Thanks,’ I said, distracted by the sight of Cate in her bikini. Some time between last year and now she’d changed. Grown taller and with wider hips and a bust. She’d started to look like the older girls at school who wagged class to hang out with guys in St Leonards Park. I was self-conscious and grabbed my towel to dry off. As I patted my body down I felt the lean hardness of my legs and arms, abdomen and chest. Next to Cate I felt small and boyish. ‘A late bloomer’, my mother called me as I rolled my eyes; waiting.
I laid my towel down beside Cate’s on the decking and lowered myself onto it front first, hiding all those things I didn’t have, and felt the sun evaporate water from my back, leaving saltwater outlines on my skin. I looked up from where I was to the lanes below, waiting for Elijah to swim.
Elijah limbered up on the starting blocks, the long white structure that floated on the harbour. He swung his arms from the sockets of his shoulders: his right arm forwards and left arm backwards, around and around, before turning slightly to the right and switching the directions. My brother was all different shades of brown, tall and leanly muscular with olive skin that kept a tan through winter and darkened as the summer went on. His hair was the exact same chestnut as our mother’s but cut into a shaggy head of curls, and he had a spray of moles that sat as beauty spots over his skin. You would expect him to have brown eyes – to match his skin and hair – but his were the clearest and most cutting green.
‘Take your marks …’
Crack!
Hundred-metre ’Fly. I saw him underneath, his arms still and streamlined in front. His hips drove a strong kick. He stayed under longer than the other racers, the shape of his torso, a flash of his back under light that skipped on the surface of the water. He emerged in front; his arms broke the water symmetrically as his head raised and he took his first breath. Butterfly was his best stroke. He sewed through the water, lurching up, propelling forwards, soaring downwards. By the return lap he’d pulled away a good twenty metres in front of the next person, and most of the club had stopped talking to watch him finish.
Sometimes people didn’t believe we were related. My skin was so pale it glowed. The sun treated us differently – it coloured Elijah in, shading him gently, while my skin either quickly turned pink or freckled in patches of redbrick over my shoulders and back, my nose and feet. After a burn the tops of my shoulders were left blistered and broken, blanching and shedding off like snakeskin, old paint, boiled stone fruit.
When Dad was our age he couldn’t swim. Where he lived in Northern Ireland there were no beaches or harbour pools, and when he came to Australia as a young man he had to learn. He was still afraid of the ocean. I’d seen classes at the pool, grown men and women in the shallow end, their limbs uncoordinated, flailing to the sky. It must be harder to learn how as an adult: their eyes had the same expression as someone who was drowning and they held the kickboards like lifebuoys.
I didn’t have memories of my very first time in the ocean, of feeling sand between my toes or tasting saltwater. I didn’t recall learning how to walk or speak either. It must have all happened around the same time, in stumbling, reaching and wordless years.
‘We threw you in when you were six months old to see if you would sink or swim,’ Dad once teased, holding me in a bear hug from behind, when I asked about it.
‘Weren’t you worried I would drown?’
Dad chuckled and shook his head. ‘Ahhh well …’ he said as he let me go and winked, ‘you can’t grow up dry in Sydney.’
Something hard stuck into my arm. Cate was pushing a dollar coin at me.
‘Want to go to the shop?’ she asked.
I pulled on my denim shorts and singlet, but Cate walked in just her bikini. We headed around to the milk bar made of concrete.
Barefoot, I tried to walk in the shadows, taking refuge in the shape of the fence.
‘Hurry up,’ Cate said, exasperated. She’d been using this tone a lot more. Last summer she’d made me carve our initials into a scribbly bark down the back of her yard to seal our friendship in a pact, forever. But now her annoyance with me had grown alongside those other new parts of her.
Cate bought skittles and I got a sherbet lollypop. The candy was a tablet of powder made of layers, like sandstone. I sucked on the cool sweetness of it, and then chipped at it with my teeth, breaking off pieces that fizzled in my mouth.
When we headed back up the walkway we could see Elijah and some of the other boys jumping off the far side of the railing into open harbour.
‘Hey …’ Cate said. ‘I think I have a crush on your brother – can you ask him if he likes me?’
‘Okay,’ I said, even though I didn’t think the request was fair.
‘What are you doing later?’ Cate asked when we lay back on our towels.
‘Don’t know.’
‘You can come over if you want.’
The prickling heat on our backs was suddenly interrupted by cold droplets. Elijah and his friends were shaking their wet hair over us, side to side, like dogs. They laughed as we squealed and sat up.
‘Hey, Grub,’ Elijah said, smiling.
When my brother laughed the skin around his mouth creased, his back teeth showed and the mole that sat on his right cheek directly under his eye moved up a fraction. That mark was one of my favourite things about him. Completely round and smooth, a drop of chocolate on his skin.
That was how it was with my brother: there was perfection, even in his imperfections. They were all grace notes.
~
‘We must leave! They are coming!’
Nonno sat on a plastic chair at his nursing home in Bondi. He wore beige pants, a neatly tucked-in plaid shirt and his coat was folded over his elbow. He still had the sun-kissed skin of a beachgoer. Everything he owned was packed into two leather suitcases. The cases had heavy brass locks that were strained from holding in his belongings. Next to the suitcases were photos of his family, of us, in their frames half-wrapped in newspaper and piled on top of each other. He’d unplugged the standing lamp, the one from the house he’d shared with Nonna, and laid that down next to the cases as well.
