We walk around Lake Lyric most days, and today we’ve stepped out early to avoid the summer’s heat. This morning, while we sat on our deck drinking coffee, the weather report crackled on your ancient radio: high temperatures forecast with a possibility of an afternoon thunderstorm. Since I moved in with you, our walk has become a daily ritual, meditative like trailing a labyrinth with still, deep water at its centre. Sometimes we talk about the life we share – our garden, the renovations, what we’re going to cook for tea – and sometimes I do most of the talking. You don’t seem to mind. If you do, you’ve never said.

The path we walk circles the lake and the air is still crisp when we start out on our usual trek. Ahead of us, a group of children, wet and fresh from their swim, are huddled together laughing and squealing. One small boy, hair plastered to his head, a bright blue towel around his waist, is poking something with a stick. “It’s dead,” he yells. Curious, we join the little group. A young turtle is on its back, flyblown and rotting. The acrid smell makes me take a step backwards. When they see us – adults, old people – the children stop laughing, move away and head back towards the water, orange life jackets bobbing behind them.

“We can’t leave it like that. Let’s cover it, at least,” you say, pouring handfuls of sand over the dead creature. Joining you, I scoop up bundles of twigs and brown brittle leaves and crunch them between my palms. I hold the mulch above the dead turtle and let it fall and I recall another dead turtle, Lolita, the pet turtle of my childhood.

Decades ago, now. I knew she’d gone missing, and my brother and sister had been looking for her. I didn’t tell them I had found her by the wooden fence, under a tall, dark pine tree in our yard. I had watched her for a while, on her back, her little legs flailing. All I had to do was help her to turn over, but I didn’t. When I returned the next morning, she was dead. To hide my shameful secret, I scraped up handfuls of dry earth and pine needles. Years later, shortly before he died, I asked my father if he remembered Lolita. He did. “I don’t know why I left her to die,” I remember saying to him. Perhaps he didn’t hear me; he didn’t reply. The inquisitiveness of a young child wanting to watch a creature suffering it could have been, but maybe there was something else I wanted to kill.

***

Feeling the sharp heat of the morning sun on our backs, we move away from the rough grave we made and fall in step again. The children are doggy paddling at the shallow edge of the lake. “Good to see them in their life jackets,” you say, and I think again of Lolita. Her shell: carapace, shelter, home. As we walk, I consider telling you about Lolita.

Now, I wonder if my mother ever discovered what I’d done. Doubtful. I visited her about a year ago. That afternoon, we drank tea from her blue willow-patterned cups in the warm sunshine and, for some reason, I began thinking about Mrs Bramfield, my high school basketball coach.

“Do you remember Mrs Bramfield?” I asked my mother, swallowing a mouthful of one of her rock cakes.

“Why on earth would you be thinking about her after all these years?”

“Well, I think she may have saved my life,” I replied, thinking aloud, not expecting my mother’s sharp response.

“Mrs Bramfield saved your life? What are you talking about?”

It was a winter’s afternoon, after school, and I was on the bench watching the girls’ basketball team train. I was bleeding heavily and I had stomach pains. I remember too, on that day and on other days, my legs were bare, and my feet flopped inside some old flat shoes that were way too big for me. As I was talking to my mother, I could see myself clearly, wearing an old donkey-brown coloured coat, and not much else underneath.

When basketball training finished, Mrs Bramfield came and sat next to me on the bench. She was wearing a coat too. Hers was bright red and smelled of baby powder. Maybe she’d asked me what the matter was? I began crying. And crying. I remember I told her I didn’t want to go home. She didn’t say anything but she hugged me for the longest time and I sank deep into the folds of her coat and the softness and warmth of her generous body. I didn’t tell my mother everything I recalled but I told her enough.

“A child can die from lack of love,” I said that afternoon in my mother’s garden. You can never know the impact of your words until they land. My mother said she never wanted to listen to such rubbish again and told me to leave her house. To get out.

***

At the lake, we continue on our usual path and the view across the water is clear except for two black swans in the middle, their two long necks forming a heart shape.

“Do you think people can survive without love?” I ask.

“How would I know?” you say, laughing. We walk in silence for a while.

I ask if you have ever seen Blade Runner.

You nod. “Wasn’t there a test where they ask the characters what they would do if they were walking in a desert and they found a turtle on its back, in the desert sun?  Who would leave an animal to die like that?” You shake your head.

No, I will never tell you what I did.

I wish now I could have a good cry about Lolita. I can’t remember if I even cried at the time, all those years ago. Lately, I have been worried I have lost the ability to cry. Completely, I mean. No longer able to shed tears at all. When was the last time I cried? Maybe at my father’s funeral? All I know is that my tears just won’t come anymore.

“You cry easily,” I say as you stop and wipe your brow.

“I guess I do. I cried when we saw The Notebook. Embarrassing. A bloke crying at the movies.” You laugh. I tell you it’s sweet.

My father would never tolerate crying. He demanded my brother, sister and I stand to attention when he spoke to us about some wrong-doing or oversight: straight back and shoulders, feet together, both arms at our sides. So odd to think of it now. Young kids standing in line like a military platoon. It didn’t pay be sad, or happy for that matter, in my father’s presence. Invisible was the best way to be when he was around.

“I sometimes wish you had met my father,” I tell you when you stop to do up your shoelace. You say possibly it would have been nice but you are not so sure it would have been.

***

We deviate from the sure path and turn down a rougher trail leading into the bush away from the lake. The gravel is slippery under our feet. You tell me to be careful and you take my hand. You stop for a moment and adjust your cap. A green and black butterfly floats to your shoulder, stays for a second or two before it flutters its wings and flies away.

“I always feel happy when I see a butterfly,” you say.

“Do you? Butterflies remind me of my butterfly card collection I had when I was a little girl,” I tell you, thinking back to the album I used to keep under my bed. “Whenever my father took me for a drive on my own, he’d stop for petrol and get me some more cards for the album.” All I can remember now about those long drives is the butterfly cards and the album I never filled.

A pair of rosellas, deep crimson and blue, swoop past and land ahead of us on a wattle tree in full blossom. Yellow. You trip slightly on a fallen branch and kick it off the path. “Don’t want anyone else to trip on that,” you say. We walk on. I bend and pull a leaf from the branch of a fallen gum tree. I rub it between my fingers. Eucalyptus, a fresh and uplifting smell, not like pine: earthy and dank.

“Memory is strange,” I mumble then speak my thoughts aloud. “I’ve read water has memory … perfect memory … it’s always trying to get back to where it began.”

You don’t answer. You grunt or maybe you don’t hear me. You might be busy with your own thoughts. I brush a fly away. “I don’t know why I am thinking about it now, but I feel I was so often alone when I was a kid,” I say, not expecting you to reply.

“That sounds a bit far-fetched, fanciful even,” you say, rubbing my back. Your hands are warm through the fabric of my shirt.

“You don’t believe me?” I shrug your hand away.

“Well, people have memory, not water.” You stop and walk back a few paces. I ask what the matter is and you tell me you just wanted to make sure you hadn’t stepped on an ant back there. You care so much about animals, you would even worry about hurting a jack jumper ant – a nasty little stinger. Sometimes you cut your toenails in the backyard so the ants can carry off your nail parings and have “a feed of protein”. I’ve noticed, too, when you mow the lawn, you take care not to run over any bees. We are silent for a while. Pebbles roll under our feet, blue-faced honeyeaters dart in front of us.

“Why do you think you were alone so much?” Your voice is quiet.

“I don’t know.”

We were always moving, and we knew no one and no one knew us. My mother always seemed to be so busy cooking for my father, ironing his shirts, tending the vegetable plot and caring for my younger brother and sister. I roamed around the neighbourhood looking for company.

I tell you about the old man in the park who used to talk to me. I thought he was my friend. “One day when I was sitting alone on the swing, he asked me if I knew where the post office was.” I stop for a moment. You still seem to be listening, so I continue. “I was so proud an adult had asked me for advice. But then he put his face close to mine and said, ‘If I push you high will you give me a little kiss?’ I ran and ran until I reached our front gate. I’ve never told anyone, until now.”

You say how lucky I had been because I could have been kidnapped or something. The idea of being kidnapped has never occurred to me. Maybe because I know far worse things can happen to a child.

You rub my back again. “You seem a bit preoccupied, today. Miles away,” you say. You motion to the park bench ahead and we sit for a while, just listening to the noisy miner birds call and sing.

***

The sun is high in the sky now and I stare out at the bushland, watching the stream which has filled after yesterday’s summer downpour. You walk over to the stream, bend down and scoop water. “Clear and cold,” you say.

I recall once when I was about seven playing alone in the bush, I stood too close to the edge of a fast-moving creek. I remember the sick feeling of the earth moving under me and how I slid down into the current and icy water, the force of it sweeping me along and miraculously dumping me on the sandy riverbank. Dazed, I stood up and shook my dripping hair and wrung out the hem of my sodden dress.

“Come on. Let’s go,” you say and pull me to my feet.

Now I breathe easy and walk beside you, in step. We emerge from the thick of wattle trees and leave the rugged path with its rocks and potholes behind to arrive back at where we began our walk. We tread a smoother surface. Easier. The breeze from the lake’s glass surface is cool but the sun is warm. Morning has crept into afternoon. The children with their life jackets have gone. We pass the burial mound we made earlier for the turtle. We pause and look down. The flies have gone.

“At least it is covered and at peace now,” you say and you take my hand.

Soft, my hand in yours, protected, in its shell.