The Same Sea

The Same Sea started as a single teardrop. It fell from her left eye. But she wasn’t sad.

They’d swum in the dam all morning, her and Tom, playing their favourite game. Dive underwater, groping for hands through the sun-lit green haze, face one another and try to say something. All you’d hear was a thick wet mumble of tumbling white bubbles but, somehow, meaning always swam tadpole-like into her ears and she understood exactly what he was saying.

After, she chased Tom’s flapping cape of towel back through the field and over the fence, yelling and panting out the taste of earthy tannins, and back inside where sandwiches of fresh, chewy bread thick with butter and cheese and ham sat on the table. Her mother stroked a pretty song from the old piano keys in the corner. Even her father seemed relaxed; a wink surprised her through clovey cigarette smoke. She hummed to her mother’s tune through a mouthful of salt and sourdough and she felt completely happy.

And that’s when it happened.

Her vision blurred, turning the room into a watercolour painting, and a fat teardrop squeezed itself from her eye. Before she could blink it away it tumbled down her freckled face onto the tabletop. It wasn’t clear like other tears. It was the warm yellow of melted butter and it shone with a honeyed gloss. For a moment it sat on the knotted wood, perfectly round and quivering.

Then it moved.

Neither her mother nor her father nor Tom noticed it roll past Tom’s plate and free-fall to the floorboards. They didn’t see it race through the skinny legs of their Kelpie, Jack, dodging flecks of mud kicked from rain-soaked boots. And they didn’t watch it slip under the crack in the front door of the farmhouse.

She did.

But she didn’t say a thing.

Because she was only six. And when you’re six you’re always discovering strange new things about the world, like the way lightening can zap a tree into a black skeleton and how red dust chases itself in frantic circles across the farm. This, she thought, was just another one of those strange things.

Besides, if she asked about it then Tom would quietly try to explain it to her and her father would smack the back of his head for wasting his breath answering her stupid questions and her mother would stop playing the piano and this golden moment would be over. So she kept quiet and took another mouthful of bread.

And she can still remember the taste of that sandwich now, sitting outside on days like this. Days when it’s not too hot and her old bones are settled comfortably in a camping chair on the grass bank of the Sea, under the shade of a faded rainbow-coloured sunshade. Days, like most, when there is a long line almost to the horizon and she watches people in caps and towels wait their turn to swim. Days where she sits and thinks about her life and feels it’s important, somehow, to remember how all this started. To remember every teardrop that fell in those years because they are what makes her different and what makes her the same.   

So. She can still remember the taste of that sandwich because it was the last one like that she’d have for a very long time.

They swam in the dam a lot less after that day too, even though sometimes it was too hot for even Jack to do anything but flop on the deck and pant. Not that the dam looked very inviting with its walls that grew steeper and higher and crumblier by the week. Tom was brave enough to jump in, strong enough to scramble up and out, but she didn’t dare cause trouble by getting herself stuck down there.

From then on, sandwiches were butter only. If her mother made them she would get half and Tom would get half but her father cut them into a third and two thirds and she was woken by thunder grumbles of hunger during the night. At first Tom ripped off some of his bigger pieces for her until one morning she saw his right cheek mimicking the purple of a stormy sky and she knew, somehow, it was her fault. She ran and hid in the barn and a tear of the same bruised purple as Tom’s cheek bloomed from her eye but she lost sight of it through the clear tears that followed. Her face was puffy for hours and her father shook his head and her arm: “It ain’t Tom’s job to protect ya from life.”  

After that, when she felt the strange tears prickle the corners of her eye, she taught herself to blink them back. Even though it felt like holding her breath underwater.  

But she couldn’t always. Not for long.

She was ten and with and her father and Tom and Mr Thompson and his son, Drew, in the far paddock that neighbored Mr Thompson’s, rubbing her numb backside after bouncing over the rough, rock-hard land in the Ute’s tray.  

The adults talked loudly about the fair price for land while Tom and Drew threw and kicked dried bits of cow dung so they exploded into brown powder in the air. She scuffed her feet in the dirt, not sure enough of her aim to join in.

“Nice hair cut!” It was Drew.

Her father had cut it when her mother was in town giving music lessons and it was so short it tickled the tops of her ears. She’d squirmed and fought but when the brown rust of the scissors passed close to her eye, she’d stopped moving.

“Your dad always told my dad he wished he’d has another boy instead of you. Now he’s got one!”

A sunburn red heat stung her face and eyes. She turned and barely had time to register the fiercely orange liquid bead hit the ground and dart away from her over the patchy grass and dust before her brother’s hand was on her shoulder. She looked up at him but he was staring at Drew and his chest was drawn up and out. “Well now it’s shorter than yours so I guess that makes you the girl then, doesn’t it?”

Drew opened his mouth but Tom took a fast step forward and Drew backed away towards his father.

Tom faced her. “Hey, it’s no shame being a girl.” He was holding both her shoulders now. “Mum’s a girl. Think of that. And you’re like her, Lily.”

“But you’re nothing like him,” she said and Tom sighed. 

“Everyone’s like everyone else in a way. Dad just didn’t get the kindness that we get made up to us by Mum. To help us know our own kindness, you know?”

She didn’t know but she nodded anyway. She thought Tom was probably particularly smart for his age but he didn’t get to go to school.

“Hey,” Tom said. “I love you.”  

Walking back to the Ute she remembers how those words formed a warm glow that she could shelter in and her heart swelled and one eye filled and this tear was silver, like a coin in a piggybank. It tumbled to the ground and she wanted to chase it, to see where the tears go, but her father’s face wore a dangerous scowl so she climbed back into the tray instead.  

It was then, she thinks, that she began to know this was bigger than her. Was it what Tom had said? Maybe. Whatever it was, she remembers deciding not to blink the tears back anymore.

The orange drops were most common for a while but they often formed when she was near her father and she didn’t dare chase them. She saw, though, that they always took off in the same direction: across the south paddock.

Then she was 12 and it was a Saturday. Despite the warm air under her rainbow sunshade now, her skin grows cold at the memory.  

Saturdays were her favourite days. She and her mother stayed home while Tom and her father sold cattle. They would play piano together and sing. Sometimes she’d let the silver and yellow drops fall when her mother wasn’t looking but although she burned with curiosity, she never wanted to leave that moment to follow them.

Then her mother started working on Saturdays, too, or going to help at the market, so she was home alone and would sit on the rug doing maths homework for Mrs. Peterson who lived in Sydney and whose voice came through a crackling radio once a week.

But this day she couldn’t concentrate for two reasons. A sharp crack had woken her in the early hours of that morning and when she’d poked her head outside her bedroom she’d seen her father stumbling over an upturned kitchen chair and into the bedroom. She’d crept out to straighten the chair because when he was in trouble with Mum she sung less. She’d had to wrinkle her nose at the sour smell in the air. Then she couldn’t sleep. So she was tired. Also, her mother and father and Tom were late.

Soon she finished all that week’s homework and went to the kitchen and made herself half a butter sandwich. Then she read ahead two weeks in her workbook and saw that outside the window, the sun was orange across the brown land and the distant gums were silhouettes like shadow puppets.

In her room, she sat and waited on her bed. Knees gripped to her chest. She sang her mother’s favourite song as the darkness filled in like deep water around her. Soon she was gasping for breath through swirling thoughts of dust and hunger and hurt and she felt the now familiar tickle in the corner of her eye.

She saw it, reflected in the bedroom mirror: a dewdrop imitating the green of a blade of grass in the faint moonlight. It filled and swelled and spilled down her pale puffy cheek and as soon as it hit the floor it was racing out the door away from her, where fear kept her rooted on the bed.

Morning. A knock on the front door. She knew the policeman, a good friend of her father’s from the pub.

“Don’t worry, I’m gonna make sure he ain’t gonna be in much trouble now. More the pot hole in the road than anything else that caused it I reckon.”

When the policeman left, the black drop fell. Coloured like the sheen of their cows’ hide back when they were healthy, it rolled thickly, slower than the others. She could have kept up but, suddenly, finding out where the teardrops disappeared to seemed like the least important thing in the world.

After that, well, after that it’s harder to remember everything. Orange and black and green tears fell, or silver when she played the piano, but they were always too fast to catch or went by her dad and Mr Thompson, crushing endless cans on the floorboards with their boots.

They ate potatoes, mostly, but once she found a whole buttered cheese and ham sandwich placed outside her bedroom door and spent the whole afternoon searching for Tom’s ghost.  

Then she was 14. The day of the blue drop. Yes. That memory’s clear.

She received a music scholarship at a school in the city. The letter was typed. Her stomach bubbled with excitement and burning pride and this tear was pink and sparkling. She raced into the lounge room to follow it but ran straight into her father.

She showed him the letter. He looked at the piano and his hands began to shake. Then he tore the letter in half.

Excitement turned to acid in her gut as she breathed in his sour smell and she felt her eye tingling again. Blue. She knew, this time, she would finally follow.

Out the door and to the left she raced, through an entire paddock, chasing the drop as it reflected the white clouds in the sky. She ran and ran. Then, as she realised where they were going, she slowed down. She stopped. Her father stopped behind her.

At the bottom of the dam sat an ankle deep puddle of liquid. Not soaking into the ground. Just sitting there. It wasn’t brown like the dam water used to be before it dried up, but iridescent like the lights that sometimes appeared in the sky at night. Shimmering. Alive. The blue drop rolled down the steep crumbling side and joined the puddle of every colour she’d ever cried.

The next day, Mr Thompson was there and the three of them stood by the dam. The men rubbed their weathered hands together and talked about luck and oil but she knew it wasn’t oil. She went to say as much but suddenly, beneath their feet, the dam wall began to crumble and Mr Thompson was on the seat of his jeans, sliding down the steep slope and landing face down in the gleaming pool.

He lay for a moment, almost fully immersed, and when he raised his head he looked straight up at her with an open mouth and unreadable eyes. Then he began to cry. His own teardrops, falling hard and fast like summer rain, were coloured like hers and they sank into the liquid around him. When he finally stopped, he pulled himself up the bank, dripping a rainbow, walked to her and wrapped his arms around her tightly. They stood there, him sniffing and mumbling words of comfort, her fearful and confused, before her father pulled them apart.

“What the hell is this about?” he said.

But Mr Thompson just walked away then, towards his truck, ignoring him.  

Her father left that afternoon and came back stumbling in the early morning so he wasn’t awake to see Mr Thompson and five other men and two women from town standing by the dam.

She watched from behind a dead tree as, one by one, they cautiously scrambled down the slope and slipped into the liquid. They cried their own coloured tears, they hugged, they dragged themselves back up the bank and walked away arm in arm.

The next day there were 20 more. The week after that, 50. Mostly strangers. And the shimmering pool in the dam began to rise.  

Her father called the police. People were trespassing, he said. Stealing his oil. The police came and they swam, too.

More people arrived. Hundreds. And their coloured tears fell and the liquid swelled and her father, devastated by his lost riches, locked himself in the dark dusty house and spoke to no one.  

A month passed before she swam herself. One still night, she scrambled down the then gentle slope of a bank and immersed herself in the warm liquid. And like words formed by bubbles swimming tadpole-like into her ear, she understood. She understood all the stories of the people she’d never met who had swum there. Stories of the drought. Of pain and love. Of family and loss. City life. Of people and places she never dreamed existed. She knew what had happened to them, and how it was different than what had happened to her, and how it was exactly the same, too.  

From then on, she swam in the dam every night.

Often, people who’d swum came back with food. Sandwiches thick with cheese and ham, which she would eat and leave for her father, too. Others came back with musical instruments and they would play and sing together. 

The dam filled and filled, quenching the thirsty land with lustrous colour, and soon the walls threatened to burst and flood her home. A crew was formed and they dug deep into the earth to widen the sea. The fences were downed and the remaining cows roamed free. They built a pier and a diving board.  

A sign was erected. The Same Sea, they called it.

People, pilgrims, came from all other the world. Thousands and thousands. They waited for days, respectful of the other swimmers, a line snaking across the land. Then they swam and wept and hugged one another and sat for long stretches of time in deep contemplation until the land felt holy with their presence.

And now, 60 years have gone by. And the Same Sea stretches to the horizon. She sits in the shade, taking gifts, singing, and watches the people as they wade into the sea. She sees their faces and their understanding and she remembers.

She remembers years ago when her father grew very sick and very thin and helpless and late one night she scooped him out of his bed and carried him to the sea. She remembers how she walked into the liquid with him in her arms and he did not protest but floated there.

Then his tears began to flow.

And his colours were the same, like she knew they would be, but it was still not enough. So she let him float and she plunged her head under the water.

There was her father, a young boy, in flickering flashes of colourful memory, caring for his younger sister who was sick and weak. His own father’s fist punishing him for helping her and his hurt and pain echoing back through the generations.

It ain’t his job to protect you from life.

And, like she’d both hoped and feared, she saw Tom in her father: his gentleness, his softness. The sandwich. She saw the car crash and felt her father’s fear and guilt and anger and pain, black and orange and shadowy greys, so dark it had almost drowned him. 

She resurfaced, dripping his rainbow, and they felt for each other’s hands. Then, at last, they both gave in and he drifted away.

One silver tear fell from her eye and into the sea.