Chapter 7 — Remembering Uno

Heading home from school one afternoon, Molly chose to walk next to the busy road, with cars, bikes, buses and trucks all whooshing past. On the footpath, pedestrians bustled and stepped, most of them looking at their phones.

She stopped at the crossing and let the crowd gather and go without her. They flowed around her and off the kerb, all of them leaning forward, none of them late. Molly stood where she was and felt, of all things, calm. The same calm she often felt at the coast. The same calm she felt while fishing with her Grandad.

Thinking about Grandad and catching fish, Molly could see the tide moving slowly in front of them and Grandad speaking in his gentle, steady way.

“You don’t fight the sea,” he was saying. “You line yourself up with it.”

Molly smiled. The thought arrived as simply as the tide.

And then, standing on the footpath with the traffic whooshing past, Molly saw Nin. Nin on her mountain, after the rain, looking out at the whole business at once. The sea breathing itself up into cloud. The cloud walking inland. The rain letting go, the mountain letting go of the rain, the river carrying it all back down to the sea, which was already breathing itself up into cloud again.

It wasn’t two things taking turns. It was one water, wearing different weather.

Molly realised she knew how the story ended. She’d known for ages.

Someone walked straight into her and neither of them seemed to notice.

A shudder ran through her entire body, and for a second her eyes stung. Nothing outside her had changed. Inside, everything had.

She walked the rest of the way home slowly, which took eleven minutes longer, and she noticed that too.

The next morning her mum came down the hall at full tilt.

“Molly, shoes. Molly, hurry up.”

Molly picked up her mum’s keys from the bench and held them out to her as she passed.

“Found these,” she said.

Her mum stopped, blinked at the keys, said “oh” and then “thanks, Molls,” and the whole house seemed to drop half a gear. Molly got her shoes on. Nothing else about the morning changed at all.

In the dark that night, Molly’s fingers played with the air over her face.

“It’s definitely all about me though,” she chuckled.

Molly started the next day humming a little tune.

“Mollymook with her little book / dancing around like a lost old chook.”