Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks

Author:Ingrid Horrocks [Horrocks, Ingrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, nature, General
ISBN: 9780702265358
Google: vigsEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
Published: 2021-07-02T00:16:56.289523+00:00

Pods

Cottesloe Beach Dissolves

My older brother, Matt, and I stood shining wet from a swim in the Indian Ocean. We were watching Lena and Natasha and his daughter, Katya, just a year younger than my girls, play in the waves. His son, Max, a high-octane six, was digging in the sand further up the beach beside Sonya.

‘Davai, Maxy, davai,’ I heard my sister-in-law murmuring to my nephew.

Come on, Maxy.

I’d missed hearing that. It had been nearly two years since they moved away.

Sonya and Max had picked Lena and Natasha and me up from the airport when we arrived, handing us ice-blocks as we got into the furnace of their car. Tim hadn’t joined us on this trip, staying behind to work. It was October and cold in Wellington, but Perth was that kind of luxurious hot that makes your muscles unstitch, while still far from the scorching heat of the summer months we’d heard about.

My one request for the visit had been for a spectacular Western Australian beach. The teaching semester had almost finished and marking hadn’t yet come in. My year of attending rudimentary reo Māori classes in the evenings was also almost over. I needed a holiday. Cottesloe delivered. Its sand and blue sea seemed to stretch forever, going on for hundreds of miles right up the coast.

The ease of the three girl cousins slipping through the water reminded me of my brother and me on the beach as kids. The water itself shimmered with memory. It was hard to remember this was a whole other ocean. Matt was nine when Tom was born, and I was six, so for a long time it was just the two of us. We learnt to swim in the sea in Auckland. For a moment, this standing together in the water felt like the latest snapshot, a still: brother and sister, back to camera, knee-deep in the sea (could be any sea), while a little way off their children play. If it were film, there’d be little dialogue – just one of those shots where people look happy and which is used to show the passage of time and to establish a new location.

The feeling I’m trying to find the words and stories for felt more liquid than that, though. It was like swimming underwater amid surf and stirred up sand, when you know what you’re looking at but can’t get orientated, shapes disappearing in the moment they’re glimpsed, entangled shells and seaweed tumbling by. Seeing my brother and his family and this place they now live – and what relation all this bears to me – I ended up thinking about Uber rides and migrations, Rio Tinto and vegetarianism, and pods of embryos and whales.

I’d gone for a run alone along the bank of the Swan River on my first morning. Already there was the smell of mown grass, and the sight of outlandish Australian birds: a large sheeny raven, its harsh cawing somehow deliberate and human-seeming, and a pelican gulping something into its gullet.

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