Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe

was matchbooks. Matchbooks. At some market, I don’t remember where, he finds this matchbook from the ’60s, from some pub in Melbourne he used to drink at. And he says, look at this, girls, it’s still got matches in it. And we say, great. Mission accomplished. And the guy says, eighty bucks. Dad’s still holding onto it, thinking about paying eighty bucks for six matches, and Michelle just looks at him. She didn’t say anything, just gave him this look like, Dad, are you mental? And he puts them down and that’s the end of the matchbooks. He just kind of got on with it after that.
    I remember when Johanna was thrown from that horse. When Dad carried her in from the paddock I watched him climbing the front steps with Jo in his arms and I thought. God, I thought. She was really busted up, you know. And by then I’d started thinking that Dad was a bit useless, always forgetting things, sometimes really important things. But right then he just looked like some kind of hero.
    Oh, that was going to be mine. Okay, I remember after the horse. After Molly threw me off I was afraid to get back on. I was afraid of all horses but horses were the only thing I was good at. So I was bored and sad and then Dad said,Why don’t you try drawing them instead? Before that I knew words like withers and chestnut and fetlock, but I didn’t know throatlatch or gaskin or stifle. I hadn’t looked closely enough. I know now that’s what he was getting me to do, to look closer. Cause you’re not so afraid of things when you can see them properly.
    Johanna steps forward, creek water spilling into her sandals. She bends low so that her face is close to the water, and says something beyond the reach of human hearing. Then she dips her cupped hand into the stream like she’s letting go of a delicate creature.
    When they pass the jar to me, I remember nothing. I remember everything at once, all the edges of our years together overlapping, and no way to lift a corner of any single instance. Robin’s ashes have the weight of sand and I cannot remember his face, but places I’ve not seen in thirty years rise up like the heat shimmering off the rooftops of cars parked along a coastal road, all the shops closed as though it’s Christmas Day – perhaps it is. But there are card games that we played on the day the bridge collapsed, the phone call to say that Whitlam was out or that Poor Fellow had won, though we were, at the same time, very drunk, very young, carousing in the corner at that Blackman exhibition, and Robin running into the roiling green ocean and running into the roiling green ocean and running uneasy and beautiful and not turning around. Like something folded small. I carried it around with me. Well, yes, I could take it out and look at it again and again.
    I remember how he laughed when he met me. I asked what was funny and he said he’d tell me one day. He never did.
    *
    Ruth slumps into the passenger seat, graceless with exhaustion. She waves a bird-boned hand at me. ‘Go on and drive then, Es. But it’ll be your fine if they stop us.’
    Further down the Hume I speed up to overtake a white station wagon, and we are flying then, down the right-hand lane. This is perhaps how it happens: something crashing through the line of trees, a roo or a loose horse, my sister asleep at my shoulder. There are worse ways.
    Outside the windows the world has grown bleary. A confusion of native and European trees borders the highway, and beyond that the paddocks are a thin wash of grey-green. Poor man’s colours, I decide. Beautiful all the same, like the grey that Gamblin makes from all the leftover pigment and gives away each April. Scraped-up flakes of all the other colours mixed together, so that it’s different every year; some years more blue, some years more green, though you can’t tell without comparing them side by side – this year and last year and the