Start reading Downstream by Annika Johansson

Chapter One

I dry-retch again and pull my T-shirt up over my nose. Damp rot and faeces are a putrid combination. It’s hard to breathe and my eyes sting from the soupy air and what lies behind the police tape. It’s like a crime scene – an exhibit. Look, but don’t touch. Do not trespass any further.

I can’t enter my own home.

The life Sal and I had two weeks ago is now a peeling, stewing carcass. We’d had nowhere to run, forced to wait it out as the flood waters surged higher and higher, cheered on by buckets of rain thrown from the darkness. Like a lethal serpent swallowing and suffocating everything in its path, the river oozed on through our street, and the neighbouring streets, and half the streets of Lismore.

February 28, 2022, an early Monday morning. Our evacuation orders had been to get out by 5 a.m. That was supposed to give us enough time.

The river breached its banks before 3 a.m. and then it was party time.

Yeah, nobody was prepared.

A couple more sticky steps. I have an overwhelming desire to scream – scream it all away, rewind time. Or fast-forward; I’m not sure what’s better. Whatever it takes to get my home and my street and my town back.

This mud bath isn’t Lismore.

I want to jump over the tape and start hosing, start shovelling, start wiping, start the horrid clean-up. But I can’t do a thing. The soggy, muddy cardboard replica of a home stares back at me heavily. Four decades of memories gutted from its insides and I don’t even know what’s left; what’s fighting for air beneath the mud and what’s been washed away downstream, down into the riverways. Where will all the overflow end up?

Every millimetre looks like it will need repair. Lucky me. Sal didn’t marry me for my hands, that’s for sure; I’m a DIY scholar still stuck in the undergrad course. Though I’ve always given it a crack, even before Bunnings landed with its huge, green invitation to give it a good old go. ‘Easy job,’ the staff nod while loading your arms up with foreign objects. ‘Can’t go wrong.’ And if it does – and it invariably does – there’s always some other miracle product so you can patch up the mess and start again. There’s a term for that. Cross-selling. Now that I’ve given up teaching, I work at the darn place.

I’m a sucker for education.

All the stress and research of every one of my did-it-myself jobs has been washed down the gurgler. Hours of frustration learning how to retile the bathroom. Hammering and staining the new deck after coming home from the classroom. Sanding the old front door and painting it Summer Sea Blue, just like Sal asked.

Now a revolting, pungent, River Sludge Brown.

I steal a look down Macadamia Street. Just one, though my heart is pleading for none. Neighbours with their slouched shoulders, shaking heads, staring in silence at what remains of their homes. It’s like visiting hours in an open-air hospital wing. Not knowing what to say, not wanting to compound the situation. Stolen whispers. Though the upturned furniture makes it look more like Halloween; a muddy freak show.

A few more sticky steps. We’re back in our street, finally, after thirteen days of being blocked off. Yes, our street is on flat ground, but so is half of Lismore. It’s a town, for God’s sake. But they don’t call us ‘the wok’ for nothing. Many houses are on stilts, like ours, raised to combat these liquid visits. We escaped the last floods with just water on our first floor; most of the furniture survived when shifted to the second. This one wasn’t meant to peak so high, but it somehow topped the record by another three metres to fourteen and a half metres. Two hundred and fifty billion litres of water passed through, backed up for hundreds of kilometres. How they measured this is beyond me. All I know is the creeks and rivers got together for a bit of a reunion in Lismore, lucky hosts. On our way into town this morning, we spotted the now-infamous three-seater lounge chair lodged hard in a fork ten metres up a gum tree. The water may have been slow, but the pressure of all that mass pushed and pushed and made its presence known.

I eye my fallen picket fence palings; once white, now a shade of that same River Sludge Brown. The scene from the road to the grass to my home is all in sepia, I think they call it, or is it monotone? I can’t remember the art theories I used to teach twelve-year-olds. I spot our silver letterbox, the first official DIY job I’d proudly constructed from leftover tin I’d found under the house, the weekend we’d moved in forty years ago. Six-month-old Jean bouncing in the baby chair next to me, lda skipping rings around her. The letterbox is now lying sideways and right at home in our new sepia landscape – the numbers one and four face-planted in the mud. The intense smell of faeces digs deep into my nostril lining. The sewage has seeped into the waterways. Probably faeces right now under the sneakers I’ve borrowed from my brother-in-law. He’ll have a heart attack when he smells it later, the poor thing.

The now-familiar whoosh of propellers passes over; that’s the fifth army chopper for the day, like we’re in a mini war zone. Fat lot of good now; we needed them two weeks ago, when we were clinging on for our lives, holed up in our roof cavity, just like our neighbours and their neighbours. Once the rain had finally died down from two-inch-wide nails to what you’d call ‘lovely tropical rain’ any other day, the floor had opened up to the cries of help echoing in the darkness across the streets, and Sal and I tried to guess how fast the water was rising downstairs, thoughts of ‘should have left yesterday’ whipping their cruel tails around my sensibilities. First the water had made itself at home in the kitchen, then the lower stairs, the upper stairs, the bedroom carpet. It crept past our ankles and thighs, the bed frames. With no ferry outside waiting for us, the only way was up. My neighbour, Karl, and I had stood on our upper verandahs and made a pact: neither family would leave without the other. Then we’d headed through the manholes into our dark roofs and waited. Sure, we had our phones, held up high out of the water till it was more important we could keep ourselves upright, but our SES calls were going unanswered. Can’t successfully man the phones when the entire town is calling.

Now and then we could hear the whir of motorboats and we’d start yelling louder, hoping one would pass with room for us all. The soft whimpers from the kids next door filtered through the eaves during a break in the rain, Karl and Neave promising them help would come soon.

We’d waited, and waited, Sal and I refusing to entertain the worst.

When the dinghy came at 4 a.m., not the SES team but a local, Craig, with his own dinghy on his fourteenth trip through the streets, we waded out in waist-deep water on to our top verandah and climbed on board together, tears of relief mixing into the dirty river water. Everywhere was chillingly dark, the water having tripped the streetlights. I still remember that burn around my lids, from the salt, the sweat, the adrenaline. I only had Sal to worry about; Karl and Neave had three kids. Luckily, they were young enough to sit on laps and not sink a four-man dinghy that was already carrying five adults.

Thirteen days on and I’m back and we still can’t do a damn thing. I can barely see our furniture through the broken panes of glass, but it’s probably stained beyond repair. All the arguments and headaches that came with agreeing on colours and textures of walls and curtains and bedspreads, buried in the rot. Shoes, books, family albums, appliances: wet and ruined. Perhaps some clothes can be salvaged at the laundromat with ten kilos of Sard. That’s what the choppers should be soaking the town with. Not politicians and news crews, but bleach and disinfectant.

I scratch my thigh and find a swarm of mozzies circling my legs, flying half-speed, displaced and disoriented themselves. Swept through town from the higher mountains and rivers, the currents no doubt creating a rollercoaster of air above. Hey, follow us, check out this new town lake! A town whose main tourist attractions now aren’t lush tropical gardens and antique shops and fruit trees, but thick brown mud. Mud and keep-out signs.

Sal appears by my side. ‘Least you can now update the ugly green kitchen.’ Her lips squeeze tight. She’d fought tooth and nail for those ugly cupboard doors. I’d even started to look at them fondly, two decades on. Kitsch, I think the kids called them. Sal thought they oozed Italian glamour. I reach out and squeeze her hand. Sal with her chin held high, always high. But her misty eyes betray her.

Where the roof angle hits the western side, I now see it’s not all a soggy cornflake box. Flakes are starting, crisping layers baking under the sparkling sun and eerie blue sky. Only the movement of choppers breaks the picture-postcard canopy. At first, they had felt a little like hope; supplies, extra arms to lend a hand. Now it’s all become a bit of a circus. Our home doesn’t sit in the main quadrant, thank goodness – dealing with this mess and heartbreak is hard enough. Being interviewed with ridiculous mainstream news questions like ‘how are you feeling?’ and ‘what are you going to do now?’ would make me snap, and then that’d be all over the news – I’d be ‘that guy’ for sure. I don’t want to be any guy except the one who used to live here. The one who used to have a home. Though I don’t want to be that guy, either. My vision blurs. The rot is taking over my brain. I want to run as fast as my borrowed lace-ups can take me. This double-storey thing in front of me with mud and sediment and twigs and God knows what else lying within isn’t my home. My nose prickles hard. Don’t cry in front of the neighbours.