Diving into Glass by Caro Llewellyn

Author:Caro Llewellyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760144517
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Twenty-three

Dad and Becky built a wooden deck at the front of their house at Henley Beach, so my father could look at the ocean, smell the salt, feel the wind whip up from the south and remind himself of his beloved days in the navy.

Sometimes, if he lifted his head to a certain angle, all he could see was ocean and the dome of the sky; he could fool himself that he was far out at sea.

My father’s mind could take him anywhere. Just like he’d read Moby-Dick and imagined himself out at sea, he could do the same simply looking out at the wide expanse of flat water that stretched as far as you could see left and right, straight to the edge of the world.

His great lesson was to teach me that we’re as free as we allow our minds to make us. Imagination can save your life if you need it to. It saved my father. I was not sure if mine would be able to save me when my life depended on it most.

My father loved watermelon, but never so much as when we were in the backyard during our summer holidays, engaged in watermelon seed–spitting competitions. The rules were to propel our seeds at the same time. I took pains to line up my shoulders even to his, to have him believe our game was a genuine duel. Then I’d raise my arm in the air like a starting gate and shout, ‘One, two, three, spit!’

I’d wait just a second or two before spitting mine, though, so I could aim my pips a little short of his. When he began to suspect what I was up to, I’d narrowly defeat him in a round or two to get him off the scent.

Out in the yard playing on my own, I could spit my pips three times as far as him. The little black seed would shoot all the way past the line of spindly beans staked up on bamboo sticks in his beloved vegetable patch. It wasn’t much of a garden. As strong as his willpower and efforts were, they were no match for the harsh sun or the salt and sand that blew in from the beach. But he would not be defeated. He brought in pea straw to trap what moisture there was in the ground and hung shade cloths to dull the sun’s rays.

He planted an olive tree, which thrived. But when I said he should just plant a grove of those and be done with it, he scoffed. He wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in that. What he liked was beating the odds. There was no challenge in an olive tree. A tomato, though – in that soil – well, that was another thing altogether.

‘Come and see my tomatoes. I just built the pergola last week to protect them,’ he’d say, pointing with his chin to the four large pine posts stuck in the ground with dark mesh stretched tight between them.

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