Five years old and hiding under upturned desks and boxes. The teachers leave us to play while they clean storerooms and write out our report cards with ballpoint pens.
My school friends are giggling as they crawl between desks and tug each other’s feet.
I tug at a loose thread on the corner of a tattered carpet square. It effortlessly unravels all the way along the edge, revealing frayed white nylon tassels.
It starts as a few drops and then the school roof comes alive with the first downpour of the season.
The smell of summer rain and sugar cane fill the air.
A week later and it’s the Christmas holidays.
It’s still raining. I’m playing solitaire right in front of the fan. My legs are sweaty and itchy from the carpet and my knees are sore from sitting with my feet turned back.
The cricket is on, but all I can hear is the rain thundering on the roof. Not Dad. Not the TV.
Now there’s a lull in the rain and suddenly the TV is blaring and Dad is yahooing. Someone took another wicket.
Who’s winning Dad?
He’s annoyed at the question, because it’s cricket and no-one’s ever winning.
It’s not your score that matters, it’s whether or not it rains.
Every year the same thing: rain, wet jeans with the legs rolled up, more rain.
I hear scraping as Mum drags the pot plants from the verandah into the front yard.
They enjoy the rain, she says.
She leaves the plants out and then forgets about them. Days later they have fallen over in the wind. Dad mutters. He scrapes potting mix and uprooted plants back into the pots.
Every year, upturned plants. My sisters and I get Mum a cactus. Three inches tall.
It won’t enjoy the rain, we tell her.
It sits proudly underneath the toilet window on a ledge above the cistern. It becomes a permanent fixture. Dad is happy.
Years pass. We grow up and begin to leave home.
Then one day a gust of wind blows the cactus off the ledge and into the toilet bowl.
It drowns. Dad laughs.
We repeat the story to each other over the phone.
Years later and Mum asks me to move the pot plants out into the rain. Her arthritis is playing up again. It’s been a year since Dad passed.
I’m a teacher myself now, but where I live there is no rain in the summertime. Mum is still at home in Mackay and my sisters are still elsewhere. But life has not unraveled.
We still have the cactus story.
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