Remembering The Storm 1

Author's note: 24/25th December 2024 is the 50th anniversary of the destruction of Darwin, Australia, by Severe Tropical Cyclone Tracy (for global readers, a tropical cyclone is the same as a hurricane or a typhoon, and the Australian tropical cyclone season is from November to April). This 'Winter Holidays' story is dedicated to the survivors of disasters everywhere, dealing with the ongoing trauma suffered by those who have been left behind.

Please note that the main events described here are historically accurate, but the characters are fictional. The actual list of the victims of Tracy can be found online.

The air was stifling in the December heat. There was little sound other than the rumble of cars on a distant road, the occasional barking of neighbourhood dogs, and the constant hum of birds and insects. It was a working day, and most people were somewhere else. If they were unlucky, they were working outside, but many of them were safely in air-conditioned offices, or had already left to go 'Down South' to visit families in the southern capitals for Christmas. Most people in Darwin had been born somewhere else. They came up to the deep tropics for work, stayed a little while or a long time, and then eventually left to get out of the heat and humidity.

A car came slowly, hesitantly down the street, the driver stopping to read the house numbers when he could see them on letter boxes. The car was a recent model sedan, a hire car company logo on the rear window.

He eventually pulled over and got out to stand next to a front fence in the shade of a large banyan fig tree, its thick, buttressed trunk supporting a massive spread of foliage. Figs fallen from the tree or discarded by fruit bats were rotting on the ground below. The atmosphere here was cloying, sticky with humidity and rich with the scent of the figs and the hum of the insects feeding on them, but it was cooler at least than in the sun.

He stood for a few minutes, looking through the vertical bars of the fence and the lush tropical garden towards the house. It was an elevated house, Top End style, with a small, enclosed area underneath and a swimming pool in the backyard. Upstairs, he could see louvered windows and a veranda with the toys of a small child casually scattered across it. There was no car in the driveway, and there was a chain on the gate. A medium-sized, brown dog of indeterminate breed trotted up to the fence on the other side. It was trying to catch his scent, tail wagging gently: willing to be friendly, but unsure. And watching carefully, just in case the visitor was not a friend.

The man stretched out his right hand as a peace offering through the bars of the fence. It was an old hand, leathered skin marked with many small scars and joints a little swollen, but it was steady.

The man allowed the dog to take its time sniffing him. Suddenly, the dog started barking excitedly and licking the man's hand, tail wagging furiously.

The man smiled, bemused but pleased.

"Fifty years, young pup," he said to the dog in a warm voice. "Fifty years since I was here, and I don't even know who lives here with you. But I guess scent can linger in a place. Well, it's charming to meet you too. It looks like you have a nice family to look after, judging by the garden and the toys."

He closed his eyes, and let his mind return to when he had last seen the house before the clean-up.

The garden was a nightmare of shattered branches, leaves stripped off every tree, sheets of iron roofing, glass and building timber lying everywhere amongst debris of every kind. The banyan still stood, rooted firmly into the earth, but there were no birds, bats or insects to savour the fruit: they had all blown away with the wind, or had perished. The stench of death and corruption was overpowering in the hot, fetid air: rotting food, broken sewerage lines, and worse.

The house itself, once full of love and laughter, was just a platform, stripped of walls, roof and furniture. A toilet and some shower and kitchen fittings were all that remained. The rest was in the garden, or the neighbour's garden, or in the next suburb. He had managed to retrieve a few sodden valuables, but nothing else could be saved. His life and the lives of the two that he loved above all had been destroyed, and the splintered wreckage would go to landfill along with his broken heart.

He opened his eyes, shuddering, and realised that his left hand was clenched around a bar of the fence. The dog was gazing at him in silence, concerned. It made a low, mournful sound, and gently reached out its tongue to lick his right hand again.

He gathered himself.

"I'm sorry, pup. It's a heavy load to lay on you. I don't even have photos to remember them by. We were going to go Down South to visit Elsie's family after Christmas, and we would have done all that then."

He looked at the house again, so peaceful in the afternoon, and searched for a happier memory.

They were finishing setting up the Christmas tree. Elsie, smiling, put a wrapped present for Ruby underneath it. Ruby herself was being taken for a walk in her pram by a friend. It had been a hard time, but today was a good day.

Elsie stood up and took his hand. "C'mon, we've got another half-hour before Ruby's back." Laughing, she pulled him to the bedroom, losing no time in whipping her sun dress and bra off, and peeling her knickers down to the floor. Her boobs were heavy from nursing, and her eyes red from sleepless nights, but she was pouring her energy into this rare time together. He quickly stripped and joined her on the bed. They coupled frantically, joyfully, skipping most of their normal foreplay so they could cut to the chase with enough time to spare. Before long she was bouncing up and down on him, head thrown back in pleasure, bottle-blonde hair hanging down her back as first she peaked, and then he swiftly followed without even changing position.

They bolted into the shower together and then dressed in fresh clothes, strolling out onto the veranda smiling from ear to ear, just as Ruby, her minder pushing, came in her pram back through the front gate.

He focused again. The dog was still here, happier now that he was more relaxed, and he slowly knelt to address it in grave, kind tones.

"Thank you for your help. You look after yourself and your family here, and make sure you show them all the love you can. I'm sure they deserve every bit."

The dog licked his face through the bars of the fence. He smiled and ruffled the back of its head and went back to his car, his eyes moist. He started the engine, took a minute to compose himself with the air-conditioning blasting, and then drove off, heading towards his next stop.

...

He was early for the memorial service, but that was okay. He settled himself in the corner of a pew near the back of the cathedral. It had changed little from what he had remembered. It wasn't the prettiest cathedral in the world, but it was nice enough, and one of the largest churches in northern Australia. It did the job.

People started to trickle in; not a huge crowd, but enough to respect the space and the occasion. Most were around his age, some walking with difficulty, assisted by younger relatives.

He noticed a thin woman with long grey hair. She had taken a seat in another pew, together with friends, but she was gazing at him intently. She looked familiar, but it took him a minute to place her. By then she had stood, whispered something to her friends, and walked over to sit next to him, eyes still fixed on his face, a tremulous, hopeful smile on her mouth.

"Tony? Tony, is that really you? It's Grace."

She reached out and took his hand, grasping it, waiting for his response.

Words came slowly. "Grace," he said quietly. He pressed her hand and then, feeling that more was in order, leaned into her to offer a gentle hug. They stayed like that for a minute, not speaking, breaking apart when the Priest started the service from the front.

"Don't you dare rush away after this," she whispered into his ear. He nodded, and then they settled side by side on the pew as the service continued.

It was a hard service to listen to, and more than once he regretted coming. Memories were flooding up with every prayer, every story told, and even just the presence of these people in the room, united in their various pathways of pain. Fifty years was not long enough to forget: forgetting would be impossible. But that was also why he was here, to try and find another way to deal with things after so long. So he stayed, sitting in this uncomfortable pew with this kind but unsettling woman by his side.

Kind... there was no doubt about that. She had always been kind, cheerful, and perceptive. She had been a good friend from the minute that he had met her to the time just a few years later when the world had been ripped apart.

Unsettling... because she wasn't

his

friend, not really. She had been Elsie's friend. The two had worked together as nurses at the hospital, and when he had courted and then swiftly married Elsie on the back of her pregnancy, Grace had been part of the package deal. It had been Grace who had been at Elsie's side during labour, while Tony had been caught dealing with a difficult police case out in the bush. It had been Grace who had come over countless times to help with baby Ruby during Elsie's post-natal depression, particularly when Tony had (once again) been working late hours.

And, to his shame, it had been Grace who had found Elsie and Ruby first after the cyclone, their bodies bloody, bruised, and lifeless. She had rushed over from her own house several streets away as soon as the winds had eased enough, heedless of the dangers of the chaos of wreckage in the dark. She had stayed there to greet him, crying, when he had finally made it home from work on Christmas morning, from navigating through the nightmare of trying to make sense of what had happened to their beautiful town on Christmas Eve.

The wind was relentless, the sound hideous. It had been building all evening, but as the centre of the cyclone approached, it rose into a scream, mixed with the terrible sounds of trees snapping and the impact of flying debris on houses. And then it all died away, just for a little while, as the eye passed over the centre of the city, and terrified residents tried to find better places to shelter from what was to come. In the police station they could do nothing except get radio situation reports from the Weather Bureau and their own staff. They had no way to mount rescue missions, and they couldn't do anything for their own families. Tony had tried to reach Elsie on the phone, but couldn't get through of course: the lines were all down.

After the eye passed, things were even worse. The wind came from the other direction, carrying all the debris back again, but there was more, much more of it, and the noise of the wind had risen from a scream to a cacophony of shrieking, punctuated by the bass impacts of more houses breaking apart and crashing into each other. It had gone on for hours, until dawn had slowly revealed the catastrophe left in Cyclone Tracy's wake, and he had started to pick his way through the wreckage. He had walked from the city to their home: the roads were impassable to cars.

Tracy

. He wasn't a fan of naming storms after people. He knew a few women named Tracy, but none of them were psychopathic mass killers. It was a macabre meteorological joke.

He hadn't seen Grace since that dreadful Christmas morning. The aftermath of the cyclone had been terrible, of course. Between dealing with the practicalities of the loss of his wife and daughter and the destruction of their home, the insane pressures of work as the community came to grips with what had happened, and then the extra stress of dealing with the federal government and defence forces when they came in to evacuate the survivors and start the clean-up, the daily grind of survival had been overwhelming, and he had shut down all his relationships. Six months later, he had washed up back home down in the West Australian capital of Perth, a broken shambles of a man, rebuilding his life and vowing to never go back to the Northern Territory. Never to reopen that mare's nest of grief and memory. He had kept that vow, until now.

He hadn't stayed in Perth long. His family and old friends were there, but they didn't know how to connect with him. What do you say to somebody who has lost his loved ones during the destruction of a city? Who wasn't even there at home with them at the time? Once the platitudes had been uttered, there was nothing left, and it was easier for him to avoid them than to listen to the awkward silences or engage in a facile discussion of football.

So he went up to the Pilbara and worked at the mines. Site management, mostly, using his police background to good advantage, particularly when things kicked off. Tony was reliable, good at procedure, calm in a crisis, kept to himself. He dealt with a lot of local communities and a lot of fly-in fly-out workers, and the issues created when the two collided. He gained a reputation, earned very good money, and soon had enough to buy a swish house in Perth, into which he put tenants.

He got bored with the mines eventually and headed overseas. Ten years in the Middle East, working with the oil industry in Kuwait and then Saudi Arabia when the first Gulf War started. Then to the United States, where he got interested in cleaning up the mess of oil spills and other environmental disasters. He had developed a good bedside manner when dealing with people undergoing a crisis, and his star kept rising.

By the early 2000s, he had more than enough for a comfortable retirement, and he started to slow down, picking and choosing his contracts, and travelling more as a tourist. Occasionally he dropped into Perth again, usually for a reason: once to bury his father, and then his sister, who had been taken young by breast cancer. But he didn't stay long, and he made sure to never put down new roots or form emotional bonds, because they could hurt you when they broke.

The pain from Cyclone Tracy had eased, but it stayed gnawing at him every night like a toothache. And so finally, after some soul searching, here he was, back in Darwin for the fiftieth anniversary, looking for some kind of closure.

"Tony?" Grace's voice broke him out of his reverie, and to his surprise he realised that the service had ended and people were getting up to leave. Some of them were talking quietly, and some were silent, lost in thoughts similar to his own. He was adept at putting his face back together quickly, and smiled at her. He could at least be a little honest with her.

"Sorry, Grace. A bit to process."

She squeezed his hand again. "I know. You're not the only one either. Give me your phone."

He looked at her, startled, but unlocked his phone and handed it to her. She punched her number in to his address book, and then called it from his phone so that she had his number too.

"You're not running off again, Tony," she said. "You and me, we've needed to talk these past fifty years, but you've been hard to catch."

He nodded. Her face was a little stony as she said this last bit. He was starting to realise that Grace was holding herself together as much as he had been.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I guess I've been a little selfish."

"Understandably," she replied. "But it's time we talked. Are you free for dinner?"

It had been a long day. He could demur, but she was right and there was no point fighting it.

"I'm free. What time and where can I pick you up?"

She named an address, a time, and the restaurant that she would be booking for them.

"It's Asian fusion. You've never tasted anything better in all of your travels, I guarantee."

...

He had a quick swim and shower at his hotel, and felt much refreshed as he drove to pick her up from a nearby suburb.

"It's a friend's house," she said, getting into the car. "I've lived in Adelaide since I retired, but she stayed here."

She had also showered. She was wearing a light cotton dress in a sky blue with local indigenous designs hand-printed onto the fabric: perfect casual evening wear for Darwin. He was also in a cotton shirt and shorts, and simple leather sandals. Back in the day, long socks and sandals had been the required look with shorts, but fortunately the socks had long been discarded.

"You stayed all those years after the cyclone?" he asked.

"Forty years," she said, "and then the last ten in Adelaide. I married a few years after the cyclone, and we raised our kids here, and then just stayed when they left for university down south. But when Ken got sick, it was better to be out of the heat, so we moved."

"Ken is your husband?"

"Was. He passed away three years ago. Cancer got him in the end. He was a good man. Before I met him, I used to wake a lot during the night, screaming or crying. I slept much better with him there. He was always gentle, always understanding."

"I'm sorry."

"Thank you. I'm okay now. We had a long and happy marriage, and I have my children and grandchildren to surround me."

Tony's heart twisted a little, but he kept his thoughts to himself. It wasn't Grace's fault that she had family to love her.

The restaurant was busy, and after their order arrived, Tony understood why. It was a delicious mixture of Thai, Indian, and southeast Asian flavours, served with a local twist and in a setting that looked out onto Darwin's main entertainment strip. They chatted about small things for a bit, getting to know each other's lives. Grace talked about her children and grandchildren and other things she was doing with her time. She was now something of an activist in the Adelaide community, mainly on human rights issues, and as he listened, Tony realised that her life had been easily as rich and interesting as his own jet-setting career, but with the added bonus of family.

"I'm afraid that, by comparison, I've been more like the guy in 'Khe Sanh'," he said, referencing an ever-popular Australian song about a Vietnam war veteran. "Tried to find a place to settle down, where my mixed-up life could mend."

"And were their 'legs often open, but their minds always closed, and hearts held in fast suburban chains'?" she asked wryly, quoting another line from the song.

He grimaced. "A bit of that, yes. Trying to hold potential partners to an impossible standard, when nobody has been through the same trauma and nobody can replace what was lost. And a bit of mindless sex as well, to be honest, but there's no joy in that. I've slept alone every night since the cyclone."

She nodded, accepting. "If you have come through with your health and mind intact after what happened, I think you're ahead of the game. I won't judge you."

They sat in companionable silence for a while, sipping their wine, and each wondering how to broach the next subject. It was Tony who broke first.

"I've never been able to escape the guilt," he said. "There's not a day that I don't remember arriving home to find you with their bodies. I can't ever forgive myself. And I'm so sorry you had to find them first."

She looked up, surprised. "Somebody had to find them first. Nobody said that it had to be you."

"I should have been with them all along," he replied.

"It was your job to be at work, just like I had to go to and work at the hospital the next day and every day for the months after that. Anyway, what do you think you would have done to protect them? Was your skin made of Kevlar? I would have found three bodies, not two."

He was taken aback at her refusal to accept guilt that he had taken for granted for fifty years. "Maybe I could have taken them to shelter somewhere."