It’s January 1992.

My sister Sarah and I are lounging in the backroom, bored, hot, irritable, watching teevee. A pedestal fan drones in the corner, fighting valiantly against the oppressive Queensland heat when we hear a splash from next door.

We jump up and look out the window. Two brown bodies are thrashing about in the pool, throwing themselves over a Pool Pony, just visible beyond the palm tree between us.

We open the sliding door and run gingerly down the concrete stairs, still hot in the afternoon shade, and skip over thick green grass to the fence. I push a loose fence paling to one side and look through.

It’s just Jay and Shelley. No cousins, or friends, or older brothers.

“Hey Shelley!” I yell through the gap in the fence. “Can we come in?”

She squints up at us from the pool, freckled arms crossed over wet concrete bricks.

“Yeah sure. Come in.”

Sarah and I turn and simultaneously bellow at our house.

“Mum? Mum!”

She appears at the top of the stairs after a minute.

“What?” she asks.

“Can we go swimming?”

The pool behind is sparkling blue. Jay has turned on the water feature. Water gurgles over stone and concrete; he’s sitting under the stream letting it rush through his blond hair, eyes closed.

Behind us, mum leans out over the balcony.

“Is Robyn there?”

We hear the rattle of a clothes basket. Robyn pokes her head out from beneath the veranda.

“I’m here, Liz, I’ll keep an eye on them,” she yells back to mum.

“Alright, come and put some sunscreen on.”

We bound back up the hot steps and run for our rooms, quickly changing into togs, strewing our dirty clothes all over the floor. We head back to the kitchen where mum is waiting with a tube of sunscreen. She rubs the white cream into our skin as we wait impatiently.

“Hurry up, mum!” I whine.

After an age, we are released.

“Stay in the shade!” she yells as we grab our towels, scoot back down the stairs and run to the fence. Sarah is ahead of me – she’s pushed the rough-hewn paling to one side and steps through the gap. The pavers burn my feet but it’s okay – one, two, three. I launch myself into the pool, dive bombing into bliss. Bits of cut grass float to the surface.

…

We play. I can’t remember what. It could have been Marco Polo, or mermaids, or Baywatch. Maybe it was who can hold their breath the longest (Jay), or who can do the most intricate handstand (Sarah), or who can do the most tumble turns (sometimes Shelley, sometimes me). It might have been Red Rover, or Piggy in the Middle.

Jay and Shelley wrestle, pulling each other under the water, dunking and pulling hair, before someone screams and play turns into a full-blown fight.

The afternoon stretches out, long and golden, and shadows move steadily across the pool. Eventually mum calls for dinner, and we leave the way we came through the hole in the fence, pruney-fingered and spent.

“Bye,” we call.

“Bye,” Shelley and Jay call back.

…

This is all before.

Before Shelley and Jay’s dad, Mark, got sick. Before their downstairs pool room turned into a nursing suite. Before Mark lost his ability to speak, and then the use of his hands, and his legs. Before the tracheotomy. Before the robot voice. Before late takeaway dinners after visiting Mark at the hospital after school, where we raced wheelchairs down the corridor of the palliative care unit. Before he died, aged 40, leaving three kids and a wife reeling in grief.

This was before we learned that the disease lived in Jay and Shelley, too.

All we knew then, was that we were tired, that we were hungry, and that we couldn’t wait to go swimming next door again. 

We were just kids, playing under the summer sky.

…

Over the years, we stay a part of each other’s lives. We call each other family – Robyn is our second mum, Shelley is our sister. Jay introduces me to his son, and I introduce him to mine. Life takes us in different directions but we always find our way back to each other.

All too soon, we are our parent’s age. We have jobs, and families, and exes, and mortgages. We have tattoos, and missing teeth, and bad backs, and scars where we had the skin cancer removed.

But we are still kids. We see each other through all the grown-up nonsense. A grin, a laugh, a memory shared and we’re back in that pool.

I remember Shelley and Sarah giving a speech at my twenty-first birthday. I remember Jay leaning over a kitchen counter to give me a big peck on the lips at someone’s thirtieth. I remember the last time we were all together.

…

It was just last November. Sarah urged me to come, warning Jay had gone downhill quickly, that I should come speak to him while I could.

He was propped up on a chair on the patio of his home, a tube in his nose to help him breathe, thinner than he’d ever been. But he grinned at me, told me he was still here, still fighting.

We stayed and talked, the four of us happy to be together. Jay was soon tired, and we left, promising we’d be back soon with our kids, so they could play together in pool out the back of his house.

It’s January 2024.

I’m walking over sand towards the ocean pool at Pearl Beach. Seven ocean swimming friends are already in the pool, waiting for the sun to go down.

I’ve been crying; I can feel the sadness just under my skin. Everything is close to the surface, sharp and present and yet also completely unreal, as in a dream. A soft breeze moves my hair around and I am grateful for the warm embracing evening.

My sister me called at two yesterday afternoon, teary and upset. We were driving home from the beach when I took the call. I’d been feeling irritated and angry all day, wanting to crawl out of my skin. Sarah told me that Jay had passed at one o’clock.

The news took some time to sink in. We were expecting it. It wasn’t a shock.

And yet it was.

At age 40, he didn’t want to leave – he wanted to live. And I thought, somewhere, deep inside, that he would get better, that he would build up his strength again, and go into his backyard to play with his son. I thought, somehow, that was possible.

But it’s not. He’s gone. And that feels too heavy to bear.

…

I approach the pool and hear a chorus of: “Yoo-hoo!”

I shed my clothes and step into the bath. We form a circle, treading water, talking about books we’ve read, movies we’ve watched.

Someone shrieks when a foot brushes them and the owner of the foot says: “Don’t worry, I was just giving you a foot high-five.”

Soon we’re stretching our legs out to high-five each other with our feet, one by one, around the circle.

The sun inches lower and lower and night sets in. The pool is dark, but the chatter doesn’t stop. We wait impatiently for a couple to leave the platform; they’ve been studying the same arc of sandstone for at least five minutes, and we’re getting cold.

When they leave, we shed our swimmers and plop them onto the stone of the pool’s edge. We’re all nut brown with bright white bums, shimmering just under the water’s surface. We dip and play and twirl.

And for tonight, we are just kids, playing under the summer sky.