The Overtopping

(This story shares its title with a performance celebrating the resilience and heart of the people of Lismore in the 2017 floods, created and developed by Sunita and Zeb of RealArtWorks, Lismore)

We stand on the balcony, Heidi and I, hair whipping across our faces. The rain has fallen in sheets for days, backdropped by a gunmetal sky. Heidi’s eyes are wide. She shivers, wraps her arms across her chest. I want to draw her to me, but my arms won’t move. 

“Will we be okay, Mum?”

I nod. My mouth is pressed into a flat line. 

We’ve spent the last two hours bringing everything up from under the house: the lawnmower, Heidi’s bike, the box of donated toys she outgrew a few years ago. We’ve learned, you see, from last time. 

“Let’s go inside,” I suggest. I hope she doesn’t notice the catch in my throat. 

She nods slowly, but doesn't move. She’s staring instead at the churning brown river: a muddy soup racing an escape to the sea. 

“Come on.”

I take her elbow and lead her indoors.

#

Heidi remembers. 

She was only six the last time, but she still talks about the things she lost. 

Tony was still here then. It was his idea to evacuate “just to be on the safe side.” But we watched the water rise from the sports centre on the hill where we sheltered and we knew that everything was gone. 

“We should have stayed,” he said. “Protected our things.” 

Ooh, there’s the hindsight, Tony. It was one of the things that irritated me most: he’d make decisions, regret them, then talk about what he should have done. Like Kelly. “I should have told you before I did anything.” Well hoo-fucking-ray Tony. Aren’t you the big man, owning your mistakes?

Tony and I had returned two days later to a brownwashed wreck. The stench of dredged sewerage and decay nearly knocked us sideways. Most of the windows were smashed, the yard was a swamp and one of our kitchen stools teetered in a tree across the road. 

Harry, our octogenarian neighbour had been there for hours when we arrived, clad in his Wilson nylon waders hosing down his steps. I admired his energy. I barely had the strength to step over the threshold and start sorting through the shattered remnants of our lives. 

It was at least clean when we took Heidi back. She insisted on coming, and Tony’s mother said it was for the best, rather than her having to imagine it. She was clutching a plush yellow Pokemon toy that some kindly soul had donated, the clean animal too bright and unsullied for the stage of our broken home. 

She stood between the buckling, exposed supports that were once walls. 

“Where’s my bedroom?” she whispered. 

A scrap of Winnie the Pooh wallpaper still clung to a chunk of plasterboard that had found itself living on the floor. 

“We could have saved her things,” growled Tony, as though it was my decision to leave them all behind. 

#

“Tony?”

“You two are okay?”

“We’re okay.”

“Can I speak to Heidi?”

I hand the phone over. Who knows how much longer we’ll have a signal or electricity for.

Heidi cradles the mobile with both hands. Her voice is hushed. I fish out the candles and matches from the cupboard and look through the recycling bin for bottles to wedge the candles into. I push a greasy white pillar candle into an empty Tempranillo bottle and, for a second, I’m in that trashy little Italian place Tony and I used to love. It had red and white checked tablecloths, and Tony used to pick the wax drippings from the bottle. I shake the image away and concentrate on spacing out the bottles to maximise the light when night falls. 

“I’m not scared,” Heidi says, but a tiny tremor betrays her. “I know, I know. One in a hundred year occurrence.”

This is the exact same conversation I had with her about two hours ago. We were usually on the same page, Tony and I. Even now. 

Heidi is holding the phone to me. “Dad wants to speak to you.”

I smile, as though talking to my ex husband is a treat, and take the phone from her. 

“Rebecca,” he says. He only ever called me Bec when we were married. ‘Rebecca’ started after he’d stopped trying to win me back. “Are you really okay?”

“Oh yes.”

“The house’ll be fine, even if the levee breaks, but you might get cut off for a few days.”

“That’s not going to happen.” I had to believe that. “We’ve got heaps of food in. Too much!” My voice sounds unnaturally bright. “Anyway, I want to charge this phone up, so I’ll get going.”

“I can come and get you both. You can stay here.”

I take a deep breath. “No thank you.”

I can’t - won’t - be in that house where he lived with her, even if she’s long gone. 

“Fine.” He sighs. “Holler if you change your mind.”

I hang up. 

#

The restoration and raising of the house took close to two years. 

“It’s not going to get that high again, darl. Not in your lifetime. But we’re putting it at twelve metres, just for peace of mind for you.”

It was hard, living between Tony’s mum’s cramped flat and later, one room at a time while we were fixing it up. No wonder he sought space from us. 

We didn’t have insurance. The insulting grant from the government evaporated. We pulled in loan on top of loan to make our house livable and safe, while working our arses off. We even had a Go Fund Me to replace the windows. I hated myself for using a photo of Heidi forlornly standing in the mud, the ruin of our house behind her, but, we did what we had to. 

Tony never really got the benefit of the renovations. He was living with Kelly three months after we moved back in. 

#

“Here you go.”

I hand Heidi a can of tinned spaghetti and a fork. She smiles briefly, then it vanishes. 

“It’s like camping,” she says. 

We’re bathed in a soft, corn-syrupy glow from the candles and the sky beyond our windows is a sullen navy blue. I try to tune out the relentless smacking of rain on our tin roof, but it hammers on. 

I dig my fork into my cold spaghetti tin and scroll through my news feed. 

Residents of South Lismore Urged to Evacuate, reads one article. I click on it, but the damn thing is behind a paywall. There’s a bit of moaning about it in the comments, then some lovely citizen has posted the text. 

Experts say it’s highly unlikely that the river will breach the levee for a second time in five years. 

I breathe a sigh of relief before reading on. 

2017’s catastrophic floods saw water levels rising to 11.59 metres and homes in the CBD and South Lismore destroyed when the Wilson River overtopped the flood defences. The ‘one in 100 year’ figure however should not mislead residents into complacency, and occupants of flood-prone areas should head for high ground, just to be on the safe side. 

I look at Heidi, sucking a strand of spaghetti through her teeth. She catches me watching as the orange sauce spatters across her lips and chin. 

“You don’t want to go to dad’s?”

She shakes her head. “Not without you.”

“Heidi, I…”

“Yes! I know. It’s…” she dips her fingers into the can, raising them to her lips and sucking the tomato sauce off them. “It’s fine.” She nods at my phone. “What does the news say?”

“Oh, you know. Unlikely to breach the levee but we should all evacuate et cetera.”

Her forehead rumples. “But our house is at twelve metres and the levee is eleven metres, so we’ll be okay, right?”

“Right. As long as the levee holds, we should be fine. And if it doesn’t, then we should still be fine.”

She nods, satisfied. 

#

We were praised for our resilience after the 2017 floods. Giant red hearts were festooned about the wreckage of our town. Our flood stories were celebrated in art works, music and dance, our weary faces and the carcasses of our homes splashed across national news outlets. 

Oh, you poor thing! outsiders would say, heads tilted in sympathy. You're so resilient. 

I felt like a fraud. My tired body mopping the river guts from our balcony may have looked like a woman rebuilding her life, but I was a gaping void inside. 

How, I would think every morning, can I possibly get out of bed and put our family back together? How can I be a good mother, good wife, when something of myself washed to sea in that murky river? 

“Snap out of it,” hissed Tony one morning as I looked at Heidi like she was a stranger. 

The diagnosis of depression didn’t come as a shock to me, but the tagged-on PTSD label did. 

#

We stand on the balcony, Heidi and I, hair whipping across our tear-streaked faces. The alarms have been sounding, but it’s too late now. We don’t have time to get out. The water licks the top of the levee wall, and all we can do is watch. Wait.