Tiny Little Carrots
It was the October long weekend, and the emergency department waiting room was full.
A mother was hugging her pale son and rocking gently, his legs wrapped around her, a sick bag at the ready.
A teenager rushed through the automatic doors, covered in raw, red marks, as though he’d run through a barbed wire fence. Shirtless and sweating, he sat muttering under his breath and jiggling his legs, eyes darting. He stood up suddenly, screeched, and fled, a weary nurse in his wake.
A few blokes arrived throughout the afternoon and went to the triage desk, complaining of chest pains. They were immediately whisked away in wheelchairs, one after the other, their bellies resting on their thighs.
We were waiting to see a doctor because my youngest daughter pushed a tiny plastic carrot, about the size of a grain of rice, up her left nostril. When I tried to retrieve it, she sneezed, sending it deep into the darkness of her head. After a few hours in the waiting room, a doctor used a small catheter to pull it out, covered in blood. The doctor seemed to be relieved to be dealing with this, just a tiny little carrot, the nose for a toy snowman.
The hospital visit was exactly a year after we’d packed up our flat in Sydney. We were lucky our dandelion-haired daughter had avoided the emergency department for that long. We had moved to my regional hometown to let our two daughters run free. But also because we needed to escape a city that was closing in on us.
By the time we moved to the country in October 2017, our eldest daughter was four and had lived in as many rented flats. Our youngest daughter, not yet two, had lived in two apartments. Our inability to stay in one place for longer than a year was a combination of misfortune and a frenzied real estate market — the city had become one of the most expensive in the world.
All the while, we were trying to buy a house within commuting distance. Most weekends we’d drive to the Blue Mountains or the Central Coast to look at houses in our modest price range. There was a cottage on the highway in Blaxland, with an arched front door painted pastel green. Inside, the kitchen consisted of a sink and a hotplate, and passing trucks made the walls shudder. The owner eyed us from a couch in the dark lounge room, a cigarette burning between his fingers. In the overgrown backyard, the real estate agent told us the man refused to take his chain-smoking outside, so his wife painted the walls black to cover years of nicotine stains.
And so it went on.
We looked at a house in Faulconbridge, with a giant steel pole in the backyard. “What’s that?” my husband asked the agent. “Oh mate, that’s the stink pipe”. There was a house on a busy road in Gosford with child-size porcelain dolls lining the walls, and the fertile stench of a teenage boy. At a house in Springwood there was evidence of the owner’s incontinence, and her family’s neglect, everywhere. A place in Emu Plains with nationalist graffiti on a bedroom door. A hot, weatherboard house at Umina Beach with a tenant ensconced in the granny flat. Many of those houses sold for much more than we could borrow.
In western Sydney, a 30-year mortgage would have secured us a house backing onto a busy train line, forcing out a family of refugees from Afghanistan. “Where will they go?” I asked the agent. “Dunno,” he said. One Saturday, we decided to give it one last go and look at a house in a cul de sac in Springwood with a native garden out the front. A few hours later, we drove back to Sydney in tense silence, having found crumbling foundations and a slumping, rotting balcony.
For respite, we visited my parents in Orange. Their garden was rambling and speckled with colour. We drank sparkling wine in a vineyard, the autumn sun warming our cheeks. At night, we could see the stars. This was the place.
On the first morning in our new house, 20 minutes away from my parents’ farm, my daughters asked to have their breakfast outside, still dressed in their fuzzy pyjamas. The previous owners left a garden bed bursting with snow peas, spinach, tomatoes and cabbage. We planted roses, bright red sage, and a crepe myrtle out the front. Out the back, we planted a pear tree to provide shade in the years to come. From our kitchen table, we had a view of a cluster of wise old eucalyptus trees. Our limby eldest daughter started dance classes and spent the first six weeks curled up in a ball under the barre. As the months passed, we watched her unfurl. Our toddler started speaking in sentences. Her first was: “Go ‘way flies!”
For a decade, my mum and I kept in touch through weekly phone calls and intermittent visits. Back home, I started running into her at the supermarket deli. A kind of undertow had pulled me back to her after having children. I longed for the care only she knew how to give: a too-tight hug, a generous pour of wine, a posy of Johnny Jump Ups from her garden in a vase next to the bed. I needed to be closer to her brand of wisdom, like when she comforted me as I struggled to adjust to life with a baby at the age of 27: “There should be RSLs for women with newborns — you know, Really Shit Life experiences”. Neither of us could hide our glee at being together whenever we liked. My sister also came back home, and moved into a semi-detached house five minutes away. Her place had the peach accents of houses built during our childhood.
A long drought intensified at the end of that first year. The water at the lake fell, exposing smelly weeds, and deterring swimmers. Turtles, snakes and echidnas started appearing on our street looking for water. Further west, rivers stopped flowing and fish washed up dead in their thousands, millions maybe.
The dry and unrelenting heat sat heavily on my shoulders. I started looking at the cloned brick houses — just like ours — all along the street, imagining the ancient trees felled to create our neighbourhood. Bins along the road overflowed with plastic bags and clapped-out pedestal fans. Seasonal workers packed up, leaving skips in their front yards filled with mattresses, blankets, appliances and new furniture. A few people put sprinklers on their drab turf at night to elude tight water restrictions.
I gritted my teeth when I read news stories from the city about long, glorious days at Bondi Beach. At the same time, newspapers ran photographs of cracked earth, and starving cattle, and cute kids in the red dust. There was a brief burst of enthusiasm for fundraising to buy hay for farmers, and donation drives for tinned food and clothes. My dad, a stock agent, grew more silent than usual after long days at the saleyards or out in paddocks. He rested his head on the green couch in my parents’ living room, dust in the crevices of his face, and I imagined the hopeless images that might be playing on the inside of his eyelids.
The town water storage fell, dropping below 50 per cent in February 2019. As the year wore on, we got used to having short showers with buckets at our feet, and saving the girls’ bathwater to tip on the thirsty garden. We lay in bed, roused by noises like an idling car, or our tin roof popping after a hot day: was that a drop of rain? As the supply dwindled, the water tasted strange, like the bottom of a muddy dam, and reeked of chlorine.
When my parents took a long-awaited holiday, they asked my sister and me to check on their cattle every day to make sure the little steers hadn’t run out of drinking water and weren’t stuck in the clay. I ran into a former colleague from the city in front of a vacant shop on the main street. We chatted as the hot wind, laced with dust, whipped our hair around and stung our eyes. Her weary family had been travelling further west. I directed them to the gelato shop around the corner and envied their escape back over the Blue Mountains.
At the end of 2019, when the town water storage fell towards 20 per cent, the red dust from the west started gathering over our house and meeting bushfire smoke from the east. The only thing sparing us from fire was the barren ground — there was wild wind, lightning strikes and heat, but almost nothing to burn. On New Year’s Eve, my family was in bed, sick and feverish. It seemed fitting. I wept watching footage of children, men and women, babies and animals gathered on the shore at Mallacoota under raging, hellish skies.
When everything in your field of vision is dead or dying, and the world beyond is burning, grief becomes omnipresent. “All the wildlife, the crying koalas, the protected forests, the frightened children. Is this the girls’ future?” I wrote in my diary on the first day of 2020.
Over the holidays we visited my husband’s mum on the Central Coast, driving between two megafires that roared for months. Depending on the direction of the wind each day, the bushfire smoke would either loom over the beach or disappear. On the days when the clouds turned the water inky black, the beach and surrounding streets were deserted. It felt like we were paying for our sins. On the clear days, rowdy groups returned to swim and frolic. I watched two families share a bottle of champagne on the shore, sinking it into the cool sand, in a convenient case of amnesia.
I feared for what late January and February — usually the harshest weeks of summer — would bring. I visited Young, known for its cherry orchards and grazing land. The heat was so dense, I felt it in my lungs. Rain fell heavily in the afternoon, tapping loudly on the cafe windows to announce its arrival. People stopped sipping and chatting and turned to face the wide glass expanse to confirm the source of the sound. On the two-hour drive home I was caught in a wild storm. The sky roared and released heavy rain and bolts of lightning. The eucalyptus trees bubbled and spewed out white foam, their sap reacting to the water. It was their exhalation after long stretches of dry. I pulled over when a curtain of rain blurred the windscreen and I waited for it to pass. A ute filled with young tradies in high-vis stopped next to me, and the passenger mouthed “Are you OK?” I gave the thumbs up. He returned it.
The rain kept coming in fits and starts. On my youngest daughter’s 4th birthday, kids and parents sheltered in our lounge room. Dressed in jeans and jumpers and boots, we drank hot coffee, as little girls danced around in floofy costumes. My parents watched one of their dams fill up before their eyes during a huge downpour. We started seeing hints of green, and my rose bushes developed hopeful buds five months too late.
When school holidays were over, another parent and I laughed about reports of people bulk buying toilet paper to prepare for the Coronavirus. I reminisced about being a young journalist in the middle of the swine flu pandemic in 2009, attending daily press conferences with health authorities at city hospitals. I ended up contracting the swine flu and spent a week staring at the wall, delirious. “Look at me now,” I joked, as our kids played nearby. It was months before we saw those friends again, as the state went into lockdown.
The girls stopped going to school in late March. They ran to the driveway on the first day at home to ride their scooters, and greeted their friends next door. My neighbour and I had to wrench them apart in a mess of confusion. In the ensuing months, the eldest, in Year 1, drooped and flopped when I tried to help her with schoolwork. She didn’t want to write out her spelling words, or put cartoon goldfish into equal groups, or learn about marsupials. One morning, while I was on a call with hundreds of other university staff to hear if we still had jobs, I gruffly explained to her how to put words into alphabetical order. “So if that starts with A, and that starts with B, which one comes first? You know this!” A posh voice came through my headphones: “Whoever that was, we can hear you.” I immediately hung up.
The eldest, named after a character in a Shakespearean tragedy, started mirroring the misery all around us. “I wish I was the little sister because I am going to die before she does,” she said, when the four-year-old smashed a melamine plate over her head during a squabble. One day we escaped to the wide expanse of the dog park. Sitting on the ground, plucking out blades of grass, she looked up and said: “Mum, what happens if there is no future?” My sister and I gaped at her. I couldn’t come up with an answer, or even reassurance, and I feebly laughed it off. The youngest started having night terrors and we often found her shivering, teeth chattering, half-asleep in the hallway, unable to express what she’d seen in her dreams. Her favourite game was lining up her stuffed toys and doling out invisible bandages and pills, sometimes heating up pretend cups of milk in her play kitchen to give to her collection of bears and unicorns. Her final words most nights were, “I miss my friends”.
When the girls returned to school and daycare on May 12, my husband and I went hiking at Mount Canobolas, an extinct volcano on the edge of town. Quivering shoots poked out of trees, which had been scorched in an almost forgotten bushfire two years before. A waterfall created a little rainbow in the bushland, and I sat on a big flat rock and let the water run over my palms, cool and clear. We shared a can of beer at the end of the hike, silent so we could catch our breath. A pair of rosellas danced around on a branch above us.
Now, it seems to rain here most weeks. Neon signs on the main street tell us our water storage is nearing 70 per cent. Our trees hunch under the weight of their leaves and blossoms, and our dog likes to swim in a flowing creek at the park. People are travelling here from bigger cities, admiring the lush hills, the big backyards, the beautiful gardens. Restaurants are booked out weeks ahead. Property prices are booming. Outside the post office one afternoon, I saw two tourists stop to admire pressed metal patterns under the awning of an old shop. They strolled on, into the spring sun.
It is a dream.
Recently my youngest daughter was rifling through my bedside table, pushing aside books, allergy tablets, and the girls’ crayon drawings. She found the tiny little carrot and held it up.
“Why do you still have this, Mum?” she asked.
“So I can remember.”
