The Styx. Patricia Holland

the other side of Lilian Bay. Both the town and the whole bay have the same name, weird, hey. It should be Lilian Bay Bay, I reckon. Strange calling a town Lilian Bay, but, hey.

      “Good morning, sea; good morning, sand,” I mind-say.

      “Good morning, Sophie,” they both say back. Very well-mannered in terms of small talk, the sea and the sand.

      Nothing is ever the same through my verandah rails and out over the cliff. The beach changes its mind at least four times each day. My eyes walk from my house to the sea, and the sand is never the same twice. One day it throws prickles and greying moondust, the next crunching salt and quicksand. Sometimes smooth, sometimes rippled, seabeds peel a kilometre out to sea.

      The nearest beach that I can see is Pandanus Beach. On its southern end, the beach forms a creek that feeds into an inlet where people paddle-board and putt-putt around in small boats, and pelicans stand in ankle-deep water watching people fish really badly. It’s called Lilian Bay Causeway Lake; well that’s what the sign says, even though it’s not really a lake. Everyone just calls it The Causeway. The creek’s got a proper name too. Officially it’s Basalt Creek, but no one calls it that. They just call it The Creek. It doesn’t have a sign, but.

      Pandanus Beach is a really tidal beach. It has a bore tide on a king tide. It’s scary way out there where the low water mark shrinks. When the tide turns, people try not to panic. They try not to rush to out-walk it back to the high tide mark, but they do. I do too, in my mind, for them.

      During the week, there’s virtually no one walking along The Causeway. At weekends, it’s a fisherman’s fishing place. Cars creep in at all times of the night spilling out to their own closely guarded secret spots. It’s all to do with the tide and generations of passed-down knowledge. I’ve never seen anyone actually catch anything, but there’s always plenty of blood on the ground when we go over that way, and the fisherers, they keep coming.

      My mother said the people over at Pandanus Beach are different. It’s where she grew up.

      “They are united by their difference,” she said. “No one chooses to live there if they have other options. The place claims its inhabitants. They move in as a last financial resort,” she said.

      “It’s too tidal for most people, not really a swimming beach, but you’ll never get cheaper beachfront land. That’s the main reason they come,” she told me.

      Apart from the few houses in The Causeway bowl, Pandanus Beach is all beachfront: one long, lonely, mixed strip of community history. They are mostly 1950s original beach shacks, a smattering of 1980s monuments to the socio-economic rise of the tradesperson, and now two or three testaments of the 2000s—the monuments to hard-won financial comfort. The people who come rarely leave, even when they can afford to leave. They can never explain what keeps them there.

      My mother told me that Pandanus Beach taught her to live in the present.

      “It’s taught us all to live with little and to expect lots from life,” she said.

      Every weekend that we drove over The Causeway—even still, even these days—kids are fishing, old men are fishing, there’s always an Islander woman in a long flowing, blue flowery dress fishing. There are those who just sit, those who just think.

      “They’re not waiting,” my mother said, “they’re just living.”

      From where I sit now, I can see countless islands, some floating into shore wearing petticoats, some misting into the horizon. The coastline sprouts the oddest foliage, tufts of surprised crazy-man hair along the ridges, stunted pandanus with funky branches frozen in sashaying dervishes. On the northern end of the causeway inflow, mangrove swamps seep into columns of hexagonal rock, lifting fifty metres up from the sea. Thousands of these shapes fold neatly into each other, perfect fit, perfect six-sided shards. There’s a geological theory to all of this, but most don’t need to know.

      My mother’s old house where she grew up is on the northern strip that separates The Causeway Lake from the sea. It looks empty now when we drive past, though sometimes the lawn has been mowed, but the house has never been painted. Perched on the strip like that, it seems a tenuous existence at the mercy of the elements, at risk of dissolving into the water table.

      She told me that the locals knew their stuff back then in the 1950s.

      “In Cyclone David we had one hundred and fifty-five kilometre gusts, but our skillion-roofed shack stood proudly in its path. Louvres screamed, but lived. Fibro walls strained, but stood firm. The old asbestos roof levitated, but soaked back to rest. Just down the coast a bit, massive brick monstrosities exploded. Nature’s retribution, we strip-dwellers smugly thought,” my mother said.

      That’s the sort of stuff she told me.

      Her old place is the closest settlement to Styx River Station where I live, but it takes the longest to get there. It’s so, so close across the basalt maze walls. But, by the only road in, it’s a three-hour drive through town, circling two vast corporation-owned cattle stations. As the crow flies, Styx River is a mere ten kilometres from my mother’s old house. As the crow flies, for me, it’s a universe apart.

      My mother loved that place growing up. She’d get so excited at times, she’d gush at me.

      “I love the retirees on bandy-legs who smile and aren’t in a hurry. I love The Causeway melting pot of inhabitants, living in jaunty-roofed shacks nestled around the caravan park. I love The Causeway pride and joy—the fish and chip shop. I love their display of framed certificates wallpapering the shop declaring ‘Best Fish and Chips on the Coast’.” I counted 12 frames.

      “I love the fifth Sunday of the month markets,” she said every time they were on.

      “I love the pink and blue paddle-boats,” she’d say every time we passed them.

      She loved lots of things, and she loved me. I know she did.

      I loved it when she was like this—she was so happy. I hate what I’ve lost. I hate what I’ve been cheated out of. I hate her for her weakness in allowing it all to happen. How could you let it happen? You forgot me. How could you forget me?

      I hate, I hate, I hate. I hate who I am. I hate me.

      Rememory 10

      It’s wild out there today. The sea is going sideways fast. It looks like a wall again, higher than the person standing on the sand. The tide rushes the water in, the wind rushes it sideways, and the sand’s sweeping sideways too. I feel in the midst of ethereality. Grains of sand float, fleet, sideways across the tidal flats, across the bay almost to me. A time-release video sped up. It’s beautiful. Also, freaky.

      My parents told me things I shouldn’t have heard. People often forget, not realise, not care maybe, that I can hear, understand. And I can hear what people say on the other end of the phone. My hearing is that good.

      My father was away in Thailand with his chief crony, Psycho Silas. My mother rang their Bangkok hotel suite, and Silas answered. While she was small-talking the “hello, how are things” to him, I saw her face freeze, her eyes shrink to dead. I could hear her heart, and then I couldn’t. I think it stopped too.

      “He’s in the other room doing naughty, naughty things to a little brown-skinned girl we picked up in a bar,” Silas told my mother. He was obviously high, drunk, excited, all three probably.

      My mother had been lonely I think, and only rang to see how things were going; for a chat.

      My father was on a “fact-finding” mission into the live cattle export trade, and a few weeks before, when he started planning it, he said to my mother, “Do you want to come too?”

      Her face lost energy, just slightly; her eyes shrank, hollowed, just slightly. She looked a bit taken aback, hurt that he hadn’t taken it for granted they would go together—like other couples.

      “I’m sure we’ll be able to find someone