‘Do we know anyone with a powerboat?’ Mark asks, standing barefoot near the back door, a glass of ice water in his hand. ‘I might need to get to work.’

‘You’d leave us in a flooding house to go to work?’

He gestures for me to follow him. We walk through the living room, around the sprawling cushions-and-blanket cubbyhouse Sarah and the twins are building.

‘Down there, past the Martins’ place,’ he says, once we’re on the veranda. I smell his sweaty armpit as he lifts his hand to point. ‘See that white pole? That marks the highest level the water reached during the 1893 flood. The worst flood Brisbane’s had. So even if it’s as bad as that, it’ll only get partway up our stairs. We’ll be fine.’

I scan our street. ‘Our downstairs floor is higher than all the other houses.’

‘Yes, it is.’ He glares at the pole as though it’s somehow responsible for this.

Despite my certainty that Mark is exaggerating, the rain doesn’t stop. It grows heavier. When he tells me Lou’s house is going under, I feel rattled for the first time.

‘They’re alone,’ I say. Andrew is forever travelling to Bougainville, coming home to present Lou with more unwanted net bags, tins of cocoa, tales from the mine, another ugly wooden mask for their walls. He’s gone for weeks at a time.

‘Tell her I’m on my way,’ Mark says.

I rush to the phone.

I’m a strong swimmer, stronger than Mark, and know I could help bring Lou and her kids here. First place in freestyle at school carnivals, always a ribbon in backstroke and butterfly. The current is calling to me as a challenge and I’m itching to pit myself against it, to steel my muscles and swim hard. But Mark says if we both leave the house the kids will try to follow or hurl themselves into what Sarah is calling our backyard sea. I know he’s right. So I stand in our front doorway and watch Mark walk down our steep driveway, shirtless, head bowed against the rain, bare toes gripping the concrete, his beige shorts speckled by water then darkening to brown. He raises one arm as a wave, without looking back.

I feel a surge of love, and fierce pride. Why don’t I feel like this when he goes to work? Some people think journalists are heroic. I’ve never thought that. But now, seeing my brawny husband calmly set forth to rescue our neighbours, I imagine myself running outside and throwing my arms around him, as if he were boarding a plane for a war zone. Instead, I watch. I worry that Lou won’t think to bring useful things with her. I should have sent Mark with a list. A list in a plastic bag. Woof frets by my side, unnerved at being left behind but too scared to venture into the swill. We jog upstairs to continue watching from the veranda.

Mark is knee-deep within minutes, staying close to the edge of the water, pushing through even that with effort. He wipes wet hair from his forehead. Mark has a thick, curly mane, forever bleached by the sun. I spent countless hours in my teens lying in the backyard with lemon juice coating my own hair, trying for a blonde like that. My skin tanned, leaving satisfying triangles of white where my bikini covered it, but my hair stayed black. Even now, the brightest summer sun can’t shift the darkness.