Swallow the Air

In a flashback, May describes her childhood habit of “cloud busting” with Billy, biking down to the beach in order to explore the dunes and look at the sky. They collect many different kinds of shells, dance in the waves, and dive in the water. They’re too young to be afraid of the ocean, and they both feel perfectly at ease.

When May and Billy get home, they decorate the house with shells and Mum fries any fish they’ve caught. While she cooks, Mum tells them the story of her saucepans, even though they’ve heard it a million times already. She says it starts in “Gouldburn, 1967 […] a Gouldburn that doesn’t exist anymore.”

In 1967, Mum lives with her own mother, Alice, in a dismal housing project. The rest of her siblings had been put into missions by then, but she stayed with Alice because her skin is very dark. Alice works for a nice family and Mum plays in their yard all day. When they return home, Alice smokes her cigarettes outside. Sometimes she chats with women from the project, but many of them have also lost children recently and they are “trying to forget,” not to be sociable.

One day, a white salesman arrives in a suit, trying to sell saucepans. Alice puts out her cigarette and asks to look at them. The man opens the box and shows off beautiful stainless steel cookware, expounding on its many merits. The women all laugh, because they know they can’t afford even one of the pots. However, Alice makes a deal with the salesman, Samuel, that she’ll buy the pots and pay him in installments every month.

Alice starts taking on extra hours at work in order to save up more money. When he visits every month to collect payments, Samuel brings sweets and chats with the women until after dark. After three years and seven months, Alice has finally made her last payment and gets to collect the cookware. When Samuel brings the set over, he’s filled each pot with dry goods, meat, vegetables, and new knives. He even bakes them a cake. Alice bursts into tears at this gesture.

When Mum finishes the story, she always cries too. She’s inherited the pots and pans from Alice, and May knows that she would sell everything they owned before she gave them up. May believes that to her grandmother and Mum, “Samuel was much like a cloud buster,” a spot of friendship in her dark life. For them, being around him was like experiencing “a cleansing rain.”