Extract from The Clinking
When it was too hot to sleep, they took their bikes – Orla tucked
into a seat behind her father – and rode down to the night markets
outside the esplanade’s empty warehouse hotels. Along the river, rows
of stalls sold clothes and food by the light of candles and kerosene
lamps. There were drum fires, yams and corn cobs blackening on
the coals, the arcing river behind them a shimmering mirage of heat
and smoke.
At the markets Orla stayed in her seat on the bike, listening,
watching with half-closed eyes. She drifted in and out of sleep as
one language entwined with another, a tangle of words dissolving
into laughter, into arguing, into the lyrics of the buskers who sang
there in the dark. Elena’s hips swayed involuntarily to the music. And
Orla watched her face, glistening with sweat, and how she smiled at
the stallholders, at the carnies, at the olive-skinned women with their
silver guitars. And she watched the way they all smiled back at her
mother, as her father pushed the bikes between stalls. And sometimes
she looked up at him, her father, and she watched his face too but
he didn’t smile, not in the way her mother did. She gazed at his eyes
as they shifted from the dragon fruit to the change in his hand, the
children dancing by the wall.
After, as they followed the rivulet path home, the voices and music
of the market folded into the sound of the wind in the trees, the
smells of food and smoke and the acrid taste of incense and oil fading.
Some nights, above the hiss of the traffic, they still heard the calling
of the currawongs circling over the foothills – a haunting, clinking
sound that seemed to echo in the chest. In the laneways the pulsing
shrill of crickets was so loud that when it stopped, Orla felt the city
holding its breath.
Image by Amy Barrows
In those first years of dark after the floods, bioluminescent blooms
of Noctiluca scintillans, a form of dinoflagellate from the north, had
appeared along the saltwater shores of the harbour. It collected in the nutrient-rich shallows off beaches and coves, in a flush of stagnant warmth. Its light was unlike anything Tom and Elena had seen before in the oceans. Its luminescence reacted to the movement in the water, drifting in shimmering circles around their ankles, around their knees.
‘It suffocates the fish,’ Tom explained. And on the tideline the
bodies of juvenile leatherjackets twitched in the dark.
‘But it’s beautiful.’ Elena waded knee-deep into the water and
Tom followed with Orla on his back. ‘Let her down? It’s incredible.’
Tom waded deeper and lowered Orla into the water. The warmth
was still always a surprise, and that feeling of seduction, of succumbing.
Further out, Elena dived and her silhouetted body flashed before
them through the waves.
‘It’s magic!’ Orla cried, now up to her waist in the water. She glided
her hands beneath the surface in spirals of milky light. In the distance, others were laughing, calling to each other across the swell. ‘It’s really magic!’ Orla giggled as she floated on her back, splashing him with her feet. And then Elena was behind him. ‘Just enjoy it, Tom.’ And she wrapped her dripping arms around his aching chest.
It became a ritual that summer. When the lights went out, people
gathered by the sea. They crowded on the edge of the river and inhaled that eerie, turquoise light.
‘It’s life,’ Elena had said. ‘It’s just a kind of intoxicating life.’ And
their island, once cool and verdant green, once illumined by different kinds of light – a pale light, ancient and storied, that had glimmered like the sky – shone blue and bright there in the warmth of the dark, the humidity pressing on their clothes, on their skin.