Ocean mystery (fragment fiction)

A mystery was not what Lucy expected to find at the bottom of the ocean. It started on holidays: a dizzying dance of cocktails by the swimming pool overpriced resort food drunken nights at local bars salty sex in anonymous hotel rooms avenues of palm trees camel rides on acres of white sand rainforest walks and the world famous Great Barrier Reef.

This particular day started with clouds and two fat travel-sickness tablets, and whorled around her head as time stopped then spun and rain stung her cheeks while she leaned over the crashing boat and vomited the two useless tablets to the fish until suddenly, time became normal and they had reached the reef and the sun was out.

Busy throwing up, Lucy had missed the dive briefing and had to make do with some basic tips: breathe, kick your legs and look at fish. Clear your middle ear every few feet down. And never, not for a second, hold your breath. Lucy staggered, still sick-weak, the crushing weight of the cylinders on her shoulders threatening to pull her backwards, fumbling with the unfamiliar mask, cumbersome regulator and ridiculous fins, and changed her mind. This was not such a good idea, she would go back inside. Then the assistant let go of Lucy’s hand, gave her a push, and the ocean closed in.

Quiet.

Soft.

Still.

Slow.

Nothing but Lucy’s own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean.

She could hear the regular thump of the ocean’s heart and felt it in her skin as though she was floating through the very ventricles of the sea. It was extraordinary that here, immersed in one of the natural wonders of the world, Lucy closed her eyes and felt she loved it without needing to see it and later when she surfaced, grieved the loss of that heartbeat like the tearing trauma of a second birth.

Lucy moon-walked through the thick water while the others swam, appearing on the tourist video later as a slim, sloping, laughable figure in black, always last in the group, ludicrous pink fins flailing, arms groping forward like a blind man but eyes wide open now, like dinner plates behind the mask, and red hair pouring upwards, the only part of Lucy at home in the sea.

Nobody knew that here inside the ocean, mixed in with her terror, her constant struggle to remember not to hold her breath and a consistent dread that her lungs would burst or collapse or both, Lucy felt truly happy.

She felt it because all she could hear was her own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean. It was the most perfect music Lucy had ever known.

The catamaran carried them to a second part of the outer reef, and suddenly it was sea-sickness again. Half an hour of the nauseating rise and crash of the waves, petrol fumes, the stifling, constricting stomach and the familiar lean over the sides. Then the heavy cylinders, the clumsy fin-walk, the fear perspiring into her wetsuit, panic and regret, splash.

And the beautiful silence. Lucy’s own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean.

On the second dive, Lucy made a conscious effort to look around. She wanted to see and remember the rainbow schools of fish, the ancient turtle, the bashful shark. Lucy put her hand inside a giant clam and stroked its rich velvet before it slowly closed. She floated softly still while a groper twice her width nudged around her hands for treats. The group of divers entered a sandy-floored coral room by a window, one by one, and a hundred thousand tiny blue fish covered them like brilliant pieces of sky. When Lucy moved her hand through the swarm, it parted then merged again in effortless mathematical precision.

Then the heartbeat stopped.

One moment Lucy was playing patterns with the sky-fish and in the next, the ocean held its breath. Lucy was so distressed she almost held hers, but remembered the warnings just in time. She waited, frantic. The others had swum on out of the coral room and around a corner, and Lucy was alone in the unbeating ocean. She spun in the water, searching behind herself and in front for the source of the silent ocean, but it was not until she looked up and saw the legs and goggles of the snorkellers close above her that she realised with relief that the heartbeat had not stopped, she had simply floated too close to the surface and lost its rhythm.

Urgently, Lucy swam deeper, easing air from her tanks to help her sink and forgetting to unblock her ears until she felt the pain. She stopped then, and clumsily swallowed through her regulator. She was still alone, but the heartbeat was back in her skin, her own breathing was a soothing sound, and Lucy was happy again. She followed after the rest of the group.

Lucy swam on quickly now, past another giant clam, a turtle resting under a rock, sweet, apricot anemones, nervous clown fish, a small child, forests of coral…

The child was maybe three or four years old, and it was building a sandcastle. It sat naked on the ocean floor, piling sticky wet sand on sticky wet sand and pressing rocks and shells and pieces of coral into the sides, while remnants of the blue-sky swarm shot in and out of the clumsy sand walls and stroked the child’s tight brown curls. When Lucy swam past, the child waved, and she waved back. She tried to smile but her cheekbones pushed her mask up and it flooded with water so she had to stop smiling or not see.

Then the group leader returned from around the next corner and beckoned to her and she nodded then pointed to the child but there was nobody there, just the remnants of the sloppy sandcastle, so she swam on.

Quite a mystery.

Favourite things - just lovely

Can you believe this is the last weekend before Christmas? I don't know where the year went, I really don't. Remember when time used to stretch out forever? When the summer holidays were so long you could barely remember the beginning when you got to the end? Today, I sneeze and I miss a month. I'm looking forward to this weekend, my parents are coming to visit. But before I dash off, I want to leave you with five favourite things to take you into the Christmas weekend-eve. No theme today, just five lovely finds. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, too. See you on Monday!

1. Cowboy rollerskates How badly do I want a pair of these? Let me count the ways. Found here via Honestly WTF. (Also loving the piggy-back ride in the background)

2. Surprise gifts in the mail If I was rich, I would TOTALLY be signing myself and my friends up to receive amazing little surprise gifts in the mail, from Not Another Bill. Found via Rosalilium

3. The iRetrophone... ...which cleverly combines my love of all things old-fashioned and cunningly made, with my bona fide iPhone addiction. Found here

4. Summer light photography I adore the gorgeous, hazy summer light captured in this beautiful fashion shoot by Spell and the Gypsy. Found via The Flowerchild Dwelling

5. Handmade garlands I had planned to make Christmas versions of some of these, but I ran out of time (and energy). Still, I've bookmarked this page so that I can come back to it. Perhaps Em's next birthday party will be swathed in colour.

Entire worlds emerge from the shadows

Shadow puppets are fascinating, don't you think? We know that what we are looking at - that dog, that crocodile, that rabbit - are not real. And yet, we watch them hop and bite and run, and they appear like truth.

Entire worlds emerge from the shadows in this video. Watching it, I found I was holding my breath. I didn't even mind that it turned out to be an ad. I was just thankful that the company invested in such mysterious creativity.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L14dAurRVic]

Have you come across Plato's allegory of the cave? In The Republic, he posits that if people lived their entire lives inside a cave, and if the goings-on of life outside were reflected on the cave wall much as shadow puppets, then the people inside the cave would think the shadow puppets were reality. Not having seen anything else, they would attach all their meaning to the shadows. They would be wrong, of course, but you and I only know that because we live outside the cave and have seen the truth.

But what if, Plato challenged, and this is something I explored in my book Airmail, too... what if the outside world that we perceive to be reality is in itself but a reflection, or a shadow, of an even brighter reality that we don't yet know exists? What if our whole perceived reality is just a much bigger cave, and we have been prisoners of our own lack of curiosity?

I guess the point is that there is so much more to this world than that which we can see, touch or even perceive. Like Plato's cave-dwellers, imagine what we might see if we stop watching shadows, and venture outside.

Yuletide weekend

It was one of those lovely, lazy weekends. On Friday, we had friends over for Christmas dinner. I used candles and gold-painted pine-cones to create a table centrepiece, alongside fresh pine needles I picked from a tree that afternoon. To cover the table, I pulled out a vivid, striped red cloth that, the last time it left the cupboard, Mr B wore while dancing with the Masai in Kenya.

The menu was challenging, rather. Among the six of us, we had a pescatarian, a vegetarian, someone with an egg phobia, and a pregnant woman. That pretty much cancelled out meat, and any eggy and most cheesy meat substitutes. Not great for the remaining omnivores in the group. And I don't know about you, but I'm not a fan of nut loaf.

In the end, I opted for individual savoury strudels with wild mushrooms and artichokes, and added prosciutto to the meat-eaters' strudels. Then we had some shaved roast turkey and ham on the side for the carnivores; cranberry sauce; herbed baked potatoes, carrots and pumpkin; corn on the cob; and green beans and roasted garlic tomatoes topped with toasted almonds. It was a kind of Christmas-meets-Thanksgiving, almost-vegan dinner.

Dessert was cognac-and-plum Christmas pudding (of course) with custard and fresh cream, a big bowl of mixed berries, my old classic peaches-and-cream pie on an almond base, and the lemon snowdrop cookies I made last week.

We finished our Christmas shopping on Saturday, I am proud to say, then I set up my desk in the lounge room to watch Harry Potter DVDs and Antiques Roadshow on TV while I made Christmas cards.

To make the cards, I cut out photocopies of the little partridge-in-a-pear-tree painting I finished last week, and pasted them onto slightly larger cardboard cut-outs. Inside each card, I stuck a slip of paper with a lovely little Chinese proverb: "Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come." Finally, I left a few fresh pine needles in the spine, in the hope that when the cards arrive in my friends' mailboxes, they will smell like Christmas.

I came very close to achieving my month-long goal of going cherry picking on Sunday, with a local orchard's promise of a sausage sizzle and homemade cherry ice cream almost winning Mr B over, but not quite. I'm still working on that. Instead, we we took the dog for a two-and-a-half hour walk around Adelaide, headed up to the pub for lunch, and had such a lazy afternoon at home that I honestly can't remember what else we did.

Fairy tale

"This is the most popular story in western civilisation. We love to hear this story. Every time it's retold, somebody makes a million dollars. You're welcome to do it." Kurt Vonnegut [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBIogLNFkV8]

Deck the halls...

...is what I've been doing all weekend. I love Christmas: the smell of pine needles and jasmine, plum pudding, gift shopping, family holidays at home. So, this being the first weekend of December, I made a good start:

Trimming the tree. Still a little way to go before I'm satisfied. Painting a partridge in a pear tree as a gift card for friends. Gathering pinecones on a walk with Oliver and Mr B; painting them gold. Making solid progress in wrapping all the Christmas presents. Baking chewy lemon snowdrop cookies for a sweet Christmas treat.

I've also been re-reading the Harry Potter books, because somehow they feel like Christmas to me. Next, I think I'll make paper snowflakes and decorate the house. How do you get into the holiday spirit?

Where the wild things are

Earlier this week I blogged about the strange and lovely search terms that people use to find their way to my little corner of the Internet. One of the search terms was "power of music and imagination." It truly warmed my heart that someone found me through such a phrase. I'm guessing that what came up was a post I wrote about Peter and the Wolf some time ago. But today, I'm going to give that person another option.

Watch the story unfold in this beautifully produced music video by Aussie (Melbourne) group The Paper Kites. Where do you think these wild children are going? And what are they up to? I won't ruin the surprise for you, you'll have to watch it to the end (that won't be difficult).

I just love the dream-like landscape of this video, woven in with acoustic strings and gentle harmonies. Something about it all fires the imagination. I am going to buy their their EP, Woodlands, and try playing it while I write.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0IDiVQxZYg]

It's always a little bit embarrassing when it takes someone from the other side of the world to alert me to talent in my own back yard. But, not for the first time, that's exactly what happened here.

Rachel Jones of Black Eiffel consistently uncovers wonderful things and, if you haven't visited Black Eiffel yet, I highly recommend you do. Pronto. It was Rachel who introduced me to The Paper Kites, via her blog. I'd heard of them, but never actually listened to them. Thank you, Rachel, I really must pay more attention. And in the meantime, I'm glad I have your blog!

(ps. All photos are from The Paper Kites on Facebook)

Sweet mama bird

A gardener came today to cut back the vines beside our house (yes, we have the best landlords in the world). While working, he inadvertently exposed this sweet little mama. She refused to budge from her post, even with all the noise, and blades whirring millimetres from her nest. Luckily, little mama bird and her nest survived. Later in the afternoon I snuck back out to visit what she was so carefully guarding.

Search terms

I love to look at the search terms that lead people to my website. Many of them are straightforward, but some are strange, others are whimsical, and every now and then they are downright bizarre. I like to think about these people. Why were they searching for this term? Why did my little blog appear in their results? And what was it that inspired them to actually click through to my blog?

These are my favourite search terms from this month.

* Power of music and imagination * I am just writing you this letter * Cupcakes with messages * Paris flea Christmas * Storytelling and imagination * Crooked tree swing * Magic realism in life * I capture the castle excerpt * Flower blossom party

How do people find you? What are your favourite search terms?

Adelaide weekend

Day 1: guests for the weekend - dear friends long missed; hugs and more hugs; exploring the Central Markets; eggs for leisurely breakfast at an old cafe; loading up with fresh cheeses, tomatoes on the vine, hummus, beetroot dip, radishes, still-warm baguettes and a tray of glowing nectarines; talking, talking, talking together; making lemonade with lemons from our tree; picnic on the lounge room floor; stroll to Jam Factory to look at local art; throwing sticks for the dog in the park until he hides in the shade under protest; good food and dry riesling over a long and lovely meal. Day 2: reading the paper in the sun by the swimming pool; painting my toenails blue; fresh orange juice; breakfast of French crepes around the table; a hit-the-spot coffee from a cafe in Glenelg; strolling down the jetty to watch the divers and fishermen; walking along the beach, feet in warm sea water; small children chasing fish in the shallows like they chase pigeons in the park; a beer at the pub; fish n chips from newspaper cones outside in the sun; a spot of beachside window shopping; home for more fresh lemonade; watching Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra sing in Anchors Aweigh and placing bets on whether or not "He's going to dance in the fountain in this song"; a sad farewell.