An Astronaut's Life (20 page)

‘Oh.' His helpful science only seems to disappoint her.

By the time they reach the bottom of the escalator, he's spotted Alexis and Meghan.
They're standing in the women's underwear department, Meghan with a bag in her hand
and Alexis with her eyebrows raised in a way that suggests disapproval. Of the telescope?
But then he understands—they are calf-deep in water. It's lapping at the ankles of
mannequins dressed only in bras and underpants.

‘Dad?' Catherine says. She tries to back up on the escalator but there are people
behind.

‘Hey,' someone says. ‘It's just water, kid.'

Eddie wraps an arm around her waist.

‘It's okay. The fish are all safe in the sea.'

He lifts her to his chest and balances Catherine and the telescope as he strides
past the make-up counter. Catherine closes her eyes and buries her face in her father's
neck—it's already too much like the dream she has where the kitchen tiles are covered
in dying fish, flapping their tails and gasping for air.

The water is coming.

Late that night, Eddie leaves Alexis asleep in bed and heads downstairs to the girls'
rooms. Catherine is awake. She always is. Eddie thinks there must be something wrong
with a kid who can stay awake reading an encyclopaedia all night—an encyclopaedia
of all the fish in the Indian Ocean, which she holds to her chest like a dirty magazine
when he pokes his head in the door.

‘Get some sleep,' he says.

‘Just this page?'

‘It's late enough. You've got school.'

She switches off her lamp, but he hears her flick it back on before he's halfway
along the hall. Eddie isn't tired either. He opens the living room curtains and looks
out at the rain pooling in his drive. The first and only driveway he's ever made;
it was perfectly level at
the time, he's sure of it. But that was six years ago,
and anyone can see the ground has shifted since then.

It's rained eleven days in a row.

Eddie doesn't have time to set up the telescope so it sits in its box for almost
a week until Alexis reminds him that it cost, as it turns out, a hell of a lot more
than a child's bikini.

‘All right, I get it,' he says. But the weather's still bad and he's booked up with
work for weeks ahead thanks to the shoddy wiring in some of these older houses.

‘I'll do it tonight, I promise.'

Meghan's bikini proves to be a better investment. She wears it all day and then to
the dinner table that night with her best friend Kathleen in tow. Kathleen has a
matching bikini, and both girls have flowers in their hair.

‘No one told me we were having a luau,' says Alexis.

‘Well, it is summer,' says Meghan. ‘And at least we don't have to worry about getting
rained on.' As if the rest of them are stupid for wearing clothes.

Alexis reaches over to brush at the flaking skin on Meghan's arm.

‘How can anyone get sunburnt in this rain?'

‘Don't,' says Meghan. She pulls away.

‘So, who's going to help me get the telescope going?' Eddie says.

‘Sun tans cause cancer anyway,' says Catherine.

‘If it clears up we might see some planets.'

‘Can we go eat in my room?' Meghan says.

The telescope is more complicated than he thought, and by the time Eddie has it ready
night has fallen and his shoulders are wet with a spray of rain. Inside, Maddy is
already asleep.

‘She tried to wait,' Catherine says.

So the two of them head out to the verandah and Catherine stands on tiptoe to look
into the telescope tube. It's too high for her, so Eddie readjusts the legs, which
knocks out his focus.

‘When I was your age or a bit older, I used to dream of a telescope like this,' he
says. ‘I thought I'd be able to see space aliens or something. I used to love all
those old space movies.'

‘Like
E.T
.?'

‘All of them. Even the black-and-white ones. I used to lie awake imagining what an
astronaut's life would be like.'

Catherine squats on the back doorstep as her father refocuses the telescope. She's
struck by the idea of him wanting something different to the life he has today.

‘So what did you do?' she says.

‘I used to stay up at night staring out my window, counting shooting stars, waiting
for something to happen. Then I finally saw something.'

‘Aliens?'

‘Probably not,' he says. ‘Probably I just wanted to see aliens so bad I imagined
them.'

‘What did you see?'

‘It was yellow. I still remember this yellow glow, a circle way too big to be a star,
and it seemed to hover, right there, in the sky.' He points up over the horizon,
and the rain catches on his fingers. ‘It sat there while I watched it. I felt like
it saw me too. Next day I went to school and told my friends, but no one believed
me. They made fun, so I stopped talking about it.'

‘Didn't anyone believe you?'

‘Only your grandpa. I remember him coming up the hall in his work boots, and he said,
“I hear you've been seeing spaceships. Now show me right where you saw it.” He stayed
up late with me, but it never came.'

‘Why didn't it come back?'

‘I don't know. Most likely I dreamt it in the first place. But it was a good night
with your grandpa. It was good enough that he believed me, it made me more determined.'

He thinks Catherine will understand what he's trying to say; that he knows about
childhood obsessions and will believe in hers if she needs him to. But Catherine
thinks the story is sad.

‘Do you wish you were an astronaut now?'

‘Not really. I like how things are.'

It's a good father-daughter moment for them, even if the meaning they've found is
individual and not shared. When they finally spot Venus through the telescope they
share a similar sense of looking at something larger than their lives. It's a whole
different planet, and when it fills the viewfinder Catherine stops thinking about
the rain and feels what it might be like to inhabit a different life. The life of
a small boy dreaming of astronauts—but ending up here, beside her.

It's around then that Alexis walks into Meghan's room without knocking and finds
Meghan and Kathleen, still in bikinis, kissing on the lips in front of the new laptop's
inbuilt camera. It's for some sort of chat room, full of boys, possibly men, and
Alexis walks straight out. She waits at the door for the girls to emerge, then drives
Kathleen home in silence.

When they get back, she parks the car on the street again; the ditch that has formed
in the driveway is now so deep with water she isn't certain they'll make it over.
Meghan sprints across the wet lawn in her bikini, which is at last practical attire,
and Alexis follows behind in the rain.

Inside, Alexis uses the laptop to discover that teenage girls do this and other things—worse
things—all the time. The laptop is for school, she finds herself repeating, as if
the misuse of the computer is the problem. What is happening to girls? What is happening
to children? She heads to Meghan's room.

‘Have you done this before?'

No reply.

‘Answer me, Meghan. Who was watching you on the camera? Who was telling you to do
that?'

‘It was just some kids.'

‘But how do you know that? What if it's old men? Do you want them looking at you
in your little bathers? Bikinis are for swimming, Meghan.' As if it's her misuse
of the bikini that is also the problem.

Meghan starts to cry.

‘They what?' Eddie says after they climb into bed and Alexis explains what she's
seen. She tells him Meghan could already be one of those girls on the internet, flashing
breasts and dancing for cameras, who knew?

‘Jesus Christ,' he says.

‘They're twelve. Do you know it's illegal?'

‘I don't think two kids messing around is illegal. It's normal. I was younger than
her when the girls next door used to ask to see my penis. That was harmless.'

‘But these kids don't live in the same world we did. People can record it, make videos.
Can't you see the consequences?'

‘We'll keep the laptop in the kitchen from now on. I'll go talk to her.'

Eddie starts to get up.

‘Not now, it's late. Make her stew on it—she needs a proper punishment, to see we're
serious this time.'

‘I'll just see if she's okay.'

‘You're too soft on her. It's time she learnt a lesson.'

He climbs out of bed and heads down the hall, but when he stands outside Meghan's
room, he wonders if
Alexis isn't right; maybe it is discipline she needs and not
understanding. He listens at the door, and even though it's late, he knocks softly
then enters. Meghan looks at him with disgust.

‘Oh great, she told you.' She rolls over to face the wall.

Catherine dreams of a hammerhead shark washed up dead on their driveway. Its dull
grey head is tipped to one side, and as she leans in to inspect it, the shark winks.

She scurries out of bed, clicks the door gently open and stands in the hallway, listening
to her breath and calculating the trip up to her parents' room.

‘Dad?' She doesn't say it loud enough to wake anyone.

‘What's wrong, honey?'

His voice comes from the living room.

Catherine finds him in the recliner and crawls into his lap. They open the curtains
to check there's nothing outside, no hammerhead shark in the driveway. No fish gasping
for air. There's nothing like that. Just dark rain overflowing gutters and puddles
growing across their lawn.

The following day, Maddy returns from school with a note—the students have taken
their health assessment
and the nurse has some concerns about her development. She's
recommended a specialist to ensure Maddy's organs and hormones are in order. They
probably are, the GP tells them, but they need blood tests, X-rays and maybe a test
for her pituitary gland before they can get a referral.

Eddie and Alexis hold hands in the waiting room. Maddy measures herself on the chart.
She is ninety-two centimetres, only three more than she was a year ago. She bursts
into tears and Alexis holds her. It's frustration more than anything. She's too small,
it's obvious. Everyone knows it.

Alexis pats her hair. ‘We all grow at our own pace. You'll catch up; I bet you'll
be taller than me. You wait and see,' she says.

At home they sit down with Meghan and set new rules for the use of both laptops and
bikinis. It's dark by the time Eddie heads to Catherine's room. She's asleep.

He sits in the chair by her bed and listens to her soft, round breaths. There's a
pile of library books on the floor,
Our Changing Planet
and
Under the Weather
. He's
been meaning to talk to her teacher, he's been meaning to spend more time with her,
but the attention he intends to give Catherine is so often sidelined by the
more
urgent problems of his youngest daughter, who can not grow up, and his eldest, who
can't stop.

Catherine had come to him before a drop of rain had fallen. He'd been watering the
lawn, it was early in summer, they were barefoot.

He flicked the hose so water sprayed her legs.

‘Dad!'

‘What's up? You want to do the lawn?'

‘No.'

‘What then?'

He dropped the hose into the garden and squatted to face her.

‘Something wrong?' he said.

‘No. It's just I keep having this dream. About the ice.'

‘What ice?'

‘The ice. Like on the North Pole. The ice that is melting.'

‘In your dream?'

‘No, it's melting in real life. But I can hear it in my dream. Cracking.'

‘It's just a dream,' he said. ‘The ice is fine.'

‘They told us in school.'

‘It's normal for ice to melt. That's nothing to worry about.'

‘I'm worried Dad.'

‘You're safe as long as you're with me. Got that?'

By morning the driveway is completely submerged, and when Eddie opens the front door
water washes up to his feet.

Alexis stands behind him with her hands on his waist.

‘Still raining,' she says.

‘Right. Hadn't noticed.'

It's impossible to drive anywhere so they take the day off. They cook fish fingers,
play snakes and ladders and tire quickly of the novelty of confinement.

That afternoon Eddie is out on the verandah with a glass of whisky while Alexis reads
a mystery book on the sofa. Catherine curls in the crook of her mother's arm, Meghan's
off with the teenagers next door and Maddy's upstairs, casting her homemade fishing
rod from the window and waiting, with uncharacteristic patience, for something to
bite.

Eddie raises his feet on to an upturned pot plant and watches the water climb along
their street. It's slowly closing in, cutting them off from the world and all the
libraries and doctors and laptops and bikinis in it. It doesn't feel all bad.

The
following morning the carpet is wet. It squelches when the girls walk over it, dragging
mud into the house. There's no point telling them not to.

‘Let's pack a bag,' Eddie says.

‘We're going somewhere?' says Maddy.

‘Upstairs,' he says. ‘Everything's going upstairs.'

It takes all day. Alexis takes all the photos and bedding and Eddie carries what
he can of their furniture—mattresses, sofa, TV. They stand and look from the upstairs
window. The rain has engulfed all the streets and lawns they can see. It is rising
to cover the windowsills.