Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

It was a little girl. She was curled like a comma under the drive shaft, fast asleep.

Twenty minutes later, Hannah Gerlic lay dozing on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance parked just metres from where the minibus had sat. The cabin roared as if the Pacific were crashing on its roof, but Hannah’s parents didn’t seem to mind the deafening noise: each held one of Hannah’s hands. Hannah had woken long enough to yawn, ask to go home, and confess she couldn’t remember one thing that had happened after eating Vee’s enormous lunch.

Police in raincoats paced outside the ambulance, waiting to be released from the scene. Constable Brian Wenn was counting the minutes to the end of his shift — his girlfriend, Eva, had returned from a week-long conference today and was no doubt lying naked in his bed. Even more pressing, his bladder was full to bursting. Wenn checked his watch, cursed his soaking wet feet, and hurried through the tall grass towards the tree line, unzipping his fly as he went. As his waters mixed with the rain, he glanced idly to his left.

And so the second happenstance discovery of the night was made.

A man lay unconscious in the tall, dark grass, his head not two steps away from Wenn’s stream of warm urine.

The rain stormed down for three days, never stopping, a seemingly endless disgorgement on roofs and roads and car hoods and gardens.

Residents who just weeks ago had complained bitterly at the council’s water restrictions turned their ire to the ceaseless rain. Elation at the filling of the distant dams that fed the city turned to apprehension as inner-city storm-water drains failed to cope with the torrents. Streets closed. Mains burst. The wide, brown river rose. . and kept rising. Landscape suppliers sold out their stocks of yard bags and sand. Schools closed. Birds too wet to feed and too weary to cling fell dead out of trees.

Five people drowned.

Three were in a car trying to cross a floodway from their five-acre property on the city’s western outskirts, swept away in waters that ran far faster than the driver had guessed. The fourth was a Chinese-born shop owner in Fortitude Valley, whose import warehouse had flooded. He had been working with his wife trying to raise the cardboard boxes of teapots, calendars, woks and — incongruously — vibrators off the flooding warehouse floor when a sodden carton at the bottom of one precarious stack slumped and gave way, and a whole mountain of cardboard, ceramic, steel and soft-to-the-touch silicone came down, trapping the man until the waters covered his face. The fifth death was an elderly man whose inquisitive foxhound crept too close to racing creek waters and was swept away. The pensioner, desperate to save his only companion, stepped calmly in after the tiny creature, which witnesses said, screamed like a child until it went under. Its owner drowned without a sound.

While the river eventually broke its banks in many places, the first flood was over a lobe of land at Tallong, which the waters normally circumvented in a lazy loop. Now, the river was travelling at twenty knots and decided no longer to take the slow way round. The waters rose four, five, eight, ten metres, and then poured across the hundreds of hectares of thickly wooded land — land that had been slated for clearing and construction until the developer withdrew his plans and subsequently suicided. The fast brown waters smashed through trees, uprooted the smallest shrubs, picked up surface boulders, and strained against gums and figs and muttonwood and wild quince.

No one but the spiders perched high in rain-lashed branches were there to see a wave of brown water gush between the bristling trunks to drown a garden of fragrant herbs and smash against a tiny cottage. An hour later, the insistent, powerful tide sent a floating trunk like a battering ram into the cottage: the collision swept one wall clean away. With the structure breached, the waters soon took the other three walls, and the cottage washed away. A cellar beside the cottage filled first with water and then with mud, burying forever a steel box surrounded by wet ash, the mummified remains of an Aboriginal boy named Billy Fry who went missing from the Our Lady of the Rosary Orphanage in 1916, and the charred body of an impossibly old woman. One door to the cellar was carried off by the swirling waters and ended up punching a hole in the hull of a catamaran moored fifteen kilometres downstream. The other door, like the cellar itself, was drowned in black mud.

A sagging cage of wood and bone within a ring of trees floated away and broke up gradually, tossed among the living branches of yellow wood and spotted gum. Two small knives were lost forever.

One early morning revelation to the residents of the city was the reappearance of the ferry Wynard. A dizzy Lazarus, the ferry floated with her hull upturned to the thundery skies, like a turtle emerging from long hibernation. Her grey timbers threatened at every moment to sink forever, yet she bobbed downstream with the grace of a retired soprano convinced to make one final curtain call.

She passed the rain-washed glass towers of the city proper, and finally was caught by enterprising young men from the Kangaroo Point Abseiling Club, who appropriated one unpopular member’s old ropes, attached a makeshift grapple and snagged the Wynard from the shore. They sold her carcass on eBay for almost three thousand dollars.

As the flood waters ploughed through the woods, Nicholas Close slept in his hospital bed.

He was tended in shifts by three women: firstly by Laine Boye, then by his mother, then by his sister. Suzette would wait for the nurses to leave the ward and then trace strange symbols with fragrant water on Nicholas’s forehead and over his heart. Neither Katharine nor Laine protested, just nodded and watched.

The doctors informed all three women that there was nothing gravely wrong with Nicholas’s body: it had recovered surprisingly well, although the reattached tendons would never again close a full fist of his left hand. He had, however, lost a lot of blood and lasting risk was to his brain, which had been starved of good blood flow for a long while. Unfortunately, any damage to his brain would only be apparent if and when he woke again.

The three women watched and waited.

Two policemen visited twice.

The first time, they ignored Katharine as if she were invisible gas instead of a mother beside her unconscious son’s bed, and spoke only to Nicholas’s doctor. The second time, they marched straight up to her, and informed her matter-of-factly that the Department of Public Prosecutions would not be pursuing any charges against Nicholas Close for firearm offences, including the shooting of Hannah Gerlic.

Katharine followed the pair all the way to their unmarked car, quizzing them relentlessly, until the younger of the two finally admitted that the Gerlic child insisted that Nicholas did not shoot her, and had no recollection of how the lead pellet had got into her calf.

‘And where’s the gun?’ asked Katharine.

The policemen sent warning looks to one another and drove away.

Katharine guessed the answer. There was no gun. The floods had taken it.

Nicholas slept.

He opened one eye at 2.13 a.m., just as the last of the flooding rain fell on the city and the clouds pulled close their coats to scurry out to sea.

He was certain he was dead. He was certain that he was lying in Quill’s cottage, waiting to enact again and again the trudge to the cellar, the walk to the ring of trees, the incarceration in the cage of bone, and the cutting of his throat. So much blood. So wearying. But then he remembered. . it was not his throat that had been cut, and not Quill who did the cutting.