Surface Tension (2 page)

When I got home, Dad had a finger in someone’s eye and another in their ear.

I dropped my bag on the floor of the studio. “So, who is it this time?”

“Guess.”

I stared at the clay shape in front of him and shook my head. I never got it right. Then Dad got all offended, said it was a shame I couldn’t share his artistic vision, and started jabbing disturbingly at the face with his sharp little tools.

The problem was, there didn’t seem to be anyone who shared Dad’s artistic vision, including the tourists he stopped in the main street because they had such interesting heads.

When Dad presented them with their clay head, which always managed to look both like them but not – as if they were slightly out of focus or something – they nodded thoughtfully. They took a step back, sometimes two, and said things like
Oh, how interesting!
and
Well, you’ve certainly put a lot of work into it!
and
What’s that lumpy bit on the side there?
Then they checked their watches and muttered something about
Not much space in the car
and
Wouldn’t last two minutes round the kids
and
No, no, you keep it
and
Oh, please, I insist
.

Usually, the heads ended up in our backyard, their weird angles and smashed features staring out from bushes and long grass and the forks of gum trees, like some kind of creepy zombie museum.

I studied the misshapen lump of clay. Was it even a head yet? Maybe that bit in the middle was a nose? On the other hand, it could just be a blob Dad had left there by accident.

I grinned and shook my head.

Dad sat back on his stool and sighed. “I probably shouldn’t be doing this now anyway.” He motioned at the mess of half-finished work piled around us, all the pots and plates and other touristy knick-knacks he was supposed to be getting ready for the holiday season.

He had to finish the firing and the glazing. Then he had to get it all into town, packing it carefully so it wouldn’t shatter on the way, or develop hairline cracks that would give the tourists who wandered into Country Crafts Gift Shop a reason to bargain the price down.

Dad clapped his clay-caked hands together and stood up slowly from his stool, wincing as his knees clicked in protest. “Nearly dinner time, I reckon. I’d better wash up.”

“Yeah.” I bent down to unzip my bag. My damp towel was balled up in there. I needed to hang it up before Mum came along to issue her gentle reminder.

Dad glanced at me. “How was your swim?”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “Seven.”

“
Seven
?” He let out a low whistle. “Yuck.”

“Tell me about it.” I followed him out the door and down the hall.

In the kitchen, Mum was stirring a thick soup on the stove. “Did you do your six?”

I slid into my chair. “Yep.”

“Okay?”

“Yep.”

She turned. “Hang your towel?”

“Yep.”

“Good.” She smiled.

“Hey, Cass. Check this out.” Hannah was at the table, her work satchel hanging over the back of the chair.

Her laptop sat open in front of her, precariously balanced on a pile of papers.

She reached underneath it and pulled the top sheet from the pile. It was a newspaper article – faded and brittle-looking, as if it might flake into tiny pieces at any moment.

I glanced down at the date. It was old. Twelve years old, in fact.

There was a headline – WELCOME TO NEW LOWER GRANGE! – and a grainy black-and-white photo: two people holding a bundle of something.

Two familiar people. Mum with a tired smile, Dad with a deer-in-the-headlights expression.

A bundle of me.

Hannah grinned. “I was just telling Mum.” She made air quotes with her fingers. “
First baby born in New Lower Grange
. You’re going to be in it, Cass.”

I stared at her. “Me?”

I didn’t need to look at Hannah’s laptop to know what she was working on. It was the centenary book. Everyone in town knew about it. In the first place, it was that kind of town – so small everyone couldn’t help but know everyone else’s business. In the second place, this was the biggest news to hit New Lower Grange in as long as I could remember. The centenary of the town. Both towns, really.

Twelve years here, our teacher Mrs Barber said, and eighty-eight …
you know
. She waved a hand towards the window in the general direction of the lake.

They had realised kind of at the last minute – that twelve plus eighty-eight equals a hundred. That it equals a centenary and another opportunity for a bunch of ceremonial sausages and a really lame brass band. That they had only a few short months to get ready.

A few weeks ago, Mrs Barber rushed into class with a panicked expression. She cleared her desk and wiped down the board. She told us to forget about Antarctica and penguins and global warming and the soap-making business we had been looking forward to all year, because Lower Grange was celebrating one hundred years of history and we all had to do our part. We had to do handprints and mosaics. And 800-word essays entitled “My Lower Grange” with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end, which would be sealed into a time capsule and dug deep into the ground for future generations to laugh at.

“See?” Hannah interrupted my thoughts. “It’s going to be a kind of before and after. The growth of our town and all that. You’ll be here.” She scrolled with the mouse and pointed to a double-page spread that appeared on the screen.

Cassie
, she had written, in short, hurried text.
First baby etc.

The middle. That’s where I’d be, drawing the line between before and after.

“There’s a lot of work to do.” Hannah sighed. “But Howard says it’s coming along nicely.”

I nodded. Howard was Howard Finkle, the mayor of Lower Grange for the last seventeen years and counting, the man who’d flipped the lever to drown the old place. Hannah worked for him down at the council, putting together brochures telling tourists about the
vibrant arts culture
and the
laid-back country lifestyle
, and writing press releases about all the fantastic things the council was doing for our community.

Elijah always teased Hannah about her job. Spin, he called it. Finkle-spin. Making the council look good. Making the mayor look good.

Finkle’s face was on all Hannah’s papers, smiling out from the corner as if he was watching over the town and everything that went on here. He was that kind of guy – always smiling and joking and popping up anywhere, anytime, especially if there was the chance of a party or a ceremonial sausage or two. When we did Jump Rope for Heart at school, he came along and turned the rope for us. When we had Sports Day, he ran in the parents’ race, even though his kids had grown up and moved away years ago. It was funny to see him hurl himself down the track, puffing and blowing, tie flapping loosely around his neck like a flag gone mad in the wind.

I stared down at my grainy photo.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it before. In fact, I had a copy of that exact photo stuffed into a box under my bed. The box Mum thought was tucked away,
out of sight, out of mind
, in the shed.

“Moira and Andrew Romano” the caption read, “welcome Baby Romano. First New Lower Grange Baby! Sister to Hannah and Elijah.”

Baby Romano
. I rolled my eyes. That was my name back then. Mum and Dad said it was because I was so early, that they hadn’t had time to settle on anything, that they were giving it long and careful thought trying to find the exact right one.

But I knew the truth. I had seen Hannah’s photo album – bright pink and tied in ribbon, full of elaborately displayed cards and photos and the letter Mum wrote to
My dear Hannah
on fancy notepaper months before she was even born, her curly name just sitting there, waiting for her to arrive.

I’d seen Elijah’s as well – shiny and blue and bursting with school photos and colourful slips of paper where Mum jotted down notes about his favourite stewed vegetables and his sleep times and random cute things he said when he was two.

And a birth notice carefully pressed onto the opening page. “Brother to Hannah,” it read. “A perfect pair – the Romano family is now complete!”

My own so-called album was stuffed underneath them. It was one of those plastic display folders Mum used at work, with a handful of school photos and a couple of old crayon drawings crammed in the front.

They were going to do me a proper album one day, she said. When they had time. When they could get their heads around the whole thing, the whole thing that was me.

Because it wasn’t just that I was early. I was unexpected too. I was accidental.

By the time I came along, Mum and Dad were done with kids. Hannah was twelve and Elijah was ten. Mum had gone back to teaching history at the high school and Dad was expanding his pottery hobby into a business.

When I was born, they smiled tired smiles in the newspaper and named me
Rachael, no, Isobel, no, Sarah, no, Cassandra and maybe Cassie for short, yes, okay, well I guess that’s that then
.

Later, they said things like
lovely surprise
and
happy accident
and
oh, we just kept on trying until we finally got it right
.

But I knew.

That I was extra. I was tacked on the end.

That our real family happened before, that it was over now, underwater.

Mum leaned over my shoulder. “What a photo. I look exhausted!” She pressed one hand to her temple and rubbed an imaginary spot. “No wonder, I suppose. All those weeks in the hospital. That horrible incubator. Thank goodness that’s all behind us!”

I nodded. Yeah. All I had to deal with now was the endless struggle to breathe. The endless swimming. The endless bandaids.

“Hey!” Dad pushed his way through the door. “We going to eat or what? I’m starving.”

Mum waved the ladle at him, sending tiny specks of soup flying through the air. “Minestrone.”

“Great.” Dad rubbed his hands together.

Mum smiled. “How’s it all going?”

“Good.” Dad threw a look at me. It was a look I knew, one that said, “Don’t tell her about the head.”

I wouldn’t have anyway. People need secrets, I reckon. People need things that are only for them.

In a quiet corner of my mind, the lake spread out, silent and still.

After dinner, in my room, I pulled the box out from under the bed, shuffling it slowly across the carpet. I eased the lid off and stared down at the pile.

It had been a while since I’d looked at all this – the newspaper clippings, the photographs, the crooked hand-drawn maps.

Even my old Atlantis drawings were down the bottom somewhere, buried under all the layers.

I guess that was fitting, if you thought about it a certain way.

I reached down into the pile. This had all been organised once. It had been sorted by date and place and category.

There had been a point to it all back then.

It had kept me busy. It had kept me sitting happily in a corner of Mum’s history classes for a whole week one year when our school holidays didn’t overlap with theirs.

She was teaching her Year Sevens about the flooding of Old Lower Grange – about the discussion and debate, the town meetings and the protests. She said history was important, that you couldn’t understand the present without thinking about the past. She stood at the front of the room and wrote on the whiteboard
How can you know where you are if you don’t know where you’ve been?

I was seven then. I sat in the corner and listened. I watched while Mum’s students nodded and frowned and did what she told them. They had mock debates, making arguments
for
and
against
. They compared maps of the old town and the new one, writing essays about what was the same and what was different, what had been gained, what had been lost.

I walked around the classroom. I looked over their shoulders and remembered my drawings of Atlantis, of our drowned family, faces obscured behind a thick wall of blue.

This was my town, I thought. This was the place where my family grew. The place I came eight weeks early to see and missed by less than a day.

I collected photocopied clippings the big kids had finished with. I cut up leftover photos and made scenes to fit them into. I drew maps and diagrams. I wrote a story about the day of the flooding, based on eyewitness accounts.

At first, Mum smiled. She called me
her little historian
. She held my work up in front of her classes and said they could all take a leaf out of my book. She said if I was one of her students, she’d be giving me an A.

Weeks later, when I was still working on my maps, redrawing them over and over to add new details, when I had broken a month’s worth of Dad’s plates hunting through the old newspapers he wrapped them in, when I couldn’t sleep at night for dreaming about our house being engulfed by layers of silt and mud, Mum said it was time to stop.

She said what I had done was great, but now it was getting unhealthy, that I needed to think about other things, live in the present.

Enough, she said, was enough.

Together, we packed it away into a box –
out of sight, out of mind
. I stopped drawing maps and poring over photos. But I kept dreaming – about the town, about Atlantis. I couldn’t stop myself doing that, even if I had wanted to.

And when I walked through the town, I felt the old one behind it. I could stand in the main street and see Tuckers Supermarket the way it used to be – the wild orange and yellow rather than the new, tasteful blue. I could pause at the entrance to the pool and see the old timber mill, smell the earthy warmth of freshly cut wood, hear the whine of the saws that had stopped working before I was born. On the edge of town, I had to stop myself looking up to find the old fire lookout, the tree with its circular staircase of pegs disappearing into clusters of leaves.

When I closed my eyes, Old Lower Grange was there, like that echo of light that sits inside your eyelids, etching shapes into quiet, secret spaces.