Willow Pattern by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-9872514-2-8
Publisher: if:book Australia
Published: 2012-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

***

It was some hours before the river had come down enough to attempt the trip home. When I got there I found Bernie, wide-eyed and worried. I told him the news, trying to sound reassuring. We knew where she was. She could be trapped out there for a while yet.

In bed that night, the rain fell like Noah was right. Not with force, but as if it had forever, the drumming came down on the tin sheets above, a thousand percussion enthusiasts practising their snare rolls while camped on the roof and waiting for me to come out. Occasionally it slowed to a patter, but it was like that game where you try to drive across town without stopping, so you creep up to red lights at four kilometres an hour till you’re almost kissing the bumper ahead of you, anything to avoid that little backward jolt that signifies a complete halt. Just before you hit, the lights turn green and the engine’s thrum takes charge again. So, the rain fell.

It would never stop. It wouldn’t destroy the world with violence, but it would fall pathetic and persistent until the paint stripped off, until the walls were worn to grey. It would fall until bricks and cinder blocks swelled, softened to sponge-cake and surrendered to the stream. Roads and footpaths would become colanders, straining water through their gaps and weak points as fleck by fragment was prised free. Trees would rupture outward, fibres unable to contain the saturation. Fish would drown from too much possibility. Our skins would not be able to hold to us. They would be sluiced away until we were covered only in slime, two inches thick, soft enough to be poked through with a determined finger. We would become amorphous, shapes in melted candlewax, each leaving our own oil slick on the waters as they passed through the sad remains of basements, shopfronts, tennis courts, piece by piece carrying this city away and out to sea.

The next day we went looking. At first we both phrased it as going to pick Heather up, but as we reached the area the librarian had mentioned, it became clear this was a two-man rescue mission in a tin dinghy. The place was a bomb site. The wetlands nearby had burst like an overdone sausage, disgorging their messy insides. No-one we hailed knew anything about an emergency medical team. We drove up and down byways and waterways, new culverts and dead ends. On its side in a park was a luxury boat, washed up and abandoned by falling water.

The afternoon found us as far south as the airport, watching three kayaks sheeting across the submerged runways, slaloming through the stork-like legs of the single 737 left stranded on the tarmac. Everywhere in the water were snakes, surprising us with how strongly they swam. When we were children, on a bush holiday, Bernie and I refused to swim in the river for fear of snakes. Our mother told us snakes couldn’t bite you in the water, because if they opened their mouths they would fill up and drown.

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