I dry-retch again and pull my T-shirt up over my nose. Damp rot and faeces are a putrid combination. It’s hard to breathe and my eyes sting from the soupy air and what lies behind the police tape. It’s like a crime scene – an exhibit. Look, but don’t touch. Do not trespass any further.

I can’t enter my own home.

The life Sal and I had two weeks ago is now a peeling, stewing carcass. We’d had nowhere to run, forced to wait it out as the flood waters surged higher and higher, cheered on by buckets of rain thrown from the darkness. Like a lethal serpent swallowing and suffocating everything in its path, the river oozed on through our street, and the neighbouring streets, and half the streets of Lismore.

February 28, 2022, an early Monday morning. Our evacuation orders had been to get out by 5 a.m. That was supposed to give us enough time.

The river breached its banks before 3 a.m. and then it was party time.

Yeah, nobody was prepared.

A couple more sticky steps. I have an overwhelming desire to scream – scream it all away, rewind time. Or fast-forward; I’m not sure what’s better. Whatever it takes to get my home and my street and my town back.

This mud bath isn’t Lismore.

I want to jump over the tape and start hosing, start shovelling, start wiping, start the horrid clean-up. But I can’t do a thing. The soggy, muddy cardboard replica of a home stares back at me heavily. Four decades of memories gutted from its insides and I don’t even know what’s left; what’s fighting for air beneath the mud and what’s been washed away downstream, down into the riverways. Where will all the overflow end up?

Every millimetre looks like it will need repair. Lucky me. Sal didn’t marry me for my hands, that’s for sure; I’m a DIY scholar still stuck in the undergrad course. Though I’ve always given it a crack, even before Bunnings landed with its huge, green invitation to give it a good old go. ‘Easy job,’ the staff nod while loading your arms up with foreign objects. ‘Can’t go wrong.’ And if it does – and it invariably does – there’s always some other miracle product so you can patch up the mess and start again. There’s a term for that. Cross-selling. Now that I’ve given up teaching, I work at the darn place.

I’m a sucker for education…

Continue reading the extract here…

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