Svetlana Sterlin writes prose, poetry, and screenplays in Meanjin. She has been recognised in the 2023 Richell Prize and the State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award. Much of her work deals with coming of age amid uncertainty, which is why the theme of young people cultivating their futures spoke to her. Her writing appears in Island, Westerly, Meanjin, Cordite, the Australian Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. A swimming coach and former swimmer, she ties most things back to swimming, including her online publication, swim meet lit mag.
On Grieve Road
We’re going somewhere. A dip in the road foretells of the valleys ahead.
Our destination is the same as every other day: the swimming pool from which we’re about to be evicted. Its sides are lapped by water a few shades too blue for my father’s paling eyes. He’ll inspire us to swim smarter, not harder. Our warm muscles will ache as we laugh and splash and tease.
Damp air swirls through the window; it tastes of sunlight and warmth and twirls through my hair.
We’re descending the last hill on Grieve Road. Time has leached colour from the brick walls and picket fences flitting by.
The sun bakes the cement and brick and metal, and us, too.
A flash of blue and red; the glare of sunlight catching on police tape. The putrid parody of yellow is enough to warn potential trespassers away. I make a mental note to use this line in the memoir I’m writing for class.
I twist around to peer through the rear window. ‘What was that?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Dad.
*
In the last seven months, various uniformed figures have parked vans in the otherwise empty driveway and ducked under the yellow tape.
Half of the tape disappeared from the fence a few weeks ago. One flimsy strip remains, tied to a tree beside the house, closing off the backyard.
The windows reveal only hollow rooms; the driveway remains empty.
Dad’s tenure ends; my swimming career, too. We stop driving along Grieve Road, but I can’t let go of what happened there. Like my father, I should forget about it, let it sink into the past along with the last decade: my swimming career, Dad’s first steady job, my transition from childhood to adulthood.
At the end of semester, I submit my memoir. I graduate from university. I’m not sure what to do with my writing degree.
Dad suggests that I write an exposé on the circumstances of his redundancy and send it to a newspaper. I could, but I don’t.
I make excuses: ‘What if we get sued for defamation or something?’ But that’s not what’s stopping me from writing it.
Likewise, when I ask Dad what he thinks happened on Grieve Road, he encourages me to research, to write about it. ‘It’s what your best at, isn’t it?’
I scour the Internet, but when the pixelated images I find don’t divulge any information, when the news outlets don’t report on it, I open my laptop and fill the hollow rooms and the empty driveway with a story that paves the way to my future. Like water spilling over the pool’s edges, my words fill the empty spaces with memories of my friends, of what it was like to strive towards something as a team, to be part of a community, to leap from one goal to the next, always reaching for something higher up ahead.
Among the lessons my father taught us is that, for better or worse, the future is a reflection of the past.
