One More Good Day

“If I pretend hard enough, maybe the world will too.”

Later, while I was testing my courage on the rope ladder that dangled beside the swing set—its swaying rungs daring me to climb just one more, just a little higher—I felt the familiar flutter of nerves in my chest that had nothing to do with heights. Each handhold and footstep became a small act of bravery, a delicate negotiation between ambition and caution, the thrill of rising into the air balanced against the quiet fear of falling. I was higher than I’d ever been before on this kind of equipment, high enough that the ground below had softened into blurrier shades of green and bark brown, high enough that I could see over the heads of most of the playground crowd.

And that was when I saw them.

Mum and Mack, beneath the shade of our tree. Our checked blanket spread neatly beneath them like a domestic anchor in the middle of this public oasis. From my perch near the top of the ladder, I had a clear line of sight straight across the grass to where they sat, close enough for me to sense the weight of their conversation but too far to catch the precise words. What I couldn’t hear, I felt.

Mum had taken off her sunglasses. That alone made something cold shift in my belly. I hadn’t seen her bare-eyed all day. Her glasses had been like armour—reflective, obscuring, offering her a shield between herself and the world. Without them, her face looked exposed, the way skin does when you've peeled off a plaster and revealed what was healing underneath.

She was speaking quickly, hands slicing the air in sharp, agitated motions. I knew those hands. I knew how they tucked hair behind ears and buttered toast and buttoned pyjama tops. But now they were fierce, gesturing with urgency, fingers flicking, arms rising and falling like punctuation marks in a silent argument.

Mack stood rigid beside her, arms crossed tightly against his chest, not sitting but standing, rooted like a post driven deep into the earth. He wasn’t speaking. Or if he was, it wasn’t with the kind of animation Mum had. His stillness was the kind that screamed. I’d seen it before—in queues at petrol stations, at rest stops, in places where adults had said things they didn’t think children could understand. It was the stillness of someone fighting not to shout, not to cry, not to move in case movement broke something inside them.

I pressed my hands against the rope beside me, feeling its scratchy warmth beneath my palms. The ladder swayed slightly with the breeze—or maybe with my own unsteadiness—and I realised I’d stopped climbing.

Something about the way Mum leaned toward him made my throat tighten. She wasn’t trying to win an argument. She was trying to make him see something. Or agree to something. Or forgive something. And Mack—he looked like someone who already knew. Who had already decided. Who couldn’t give her what she wanted without giving away a part of himself he couldn’t afford to lose.

I swallowed hard and focused on the knot of rope just above my head. Pretended, for a moment, that it was still a perfect day. That the breeze was just a breeze, not the breath of some change looming on the horizon. That we were just a family in a park, not a question in search of an answer.

But even as I pulled myself up one more rung, my eyes stayed on them.

Because I knew—before anyone said it out loud, before anything actually happened—that whatever was being discussed beneath that tree had already started to change the shape of our day. Maybe even the shape of everything that came after.

The air suddenly felt heavier, thicker, as though the Brisbane breeze had turned syrupy and sluggish. I blinked down at them, willing them to look different—less tense, less far apart—but the distance between them was no longer just metres of grass and tree shadow. It was something deeper, something built from choices and secrets and the things children aren’t supposed to know.

Then came the silence—the long, humming kind that swells with all the words that won’t fit into sentences. Mack looked like he wanted to say more but couldn’t, his mouth held in a firm, stubborn line. Mum sat completely still for a moment, her hands in her lap, her gaze fixed somewhere too far away to be part of the park.

And then she moved. Barely. Just a small, weary shift, and her hand went up to her face, brushing her sleeve against her cheek. I couldn’t see the tears, but I felt them. The gesture was too familiar, too much like the ones I’d seen through cracks in car mirrors or reflected in windows at rest stops. The ones she thought I didn’t notice.

She turned then—not toward Mack, but away. She angled herself so that her body faced the open park, her back drawn into a curve that made her seem smaller than before. Like she was pulling in on herself. Retreating.

I pressed my forehead against the rough rope of the ladder and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to re-anchor myself in the present. There was still laughter all around me. Still the thud of feet on bark, the creak of the flying fox, the shrill whistle of some child’s toy flute.

But in the middle of that paradise, a fault line had opened up—and even from my perch in the sky, I could feel it running straight through the centre of our little family.

Mack noticed me watching—maybe he’d known all along, maybe he always knew. Maybe that was part of who he had become in the time between Broken Hill and here: someone who was always watching the watchers, cataloguing the variables, mapping the shifting moods of the people he loved. He looked straight at me across the jungle of beams and ropes, and raised one hand in a small, almost sheepish wave.

It was meant to be casual, light. Reassuring.

But his face told a different story. His mouth tried to smile but stalled halfway, the corners twitching in uncertainty before giving up altogether. The result was something caught between grimace and grin—a contorted expression that couldn’t decide what it was supposed to be. It wasn’t comforting. It wasn’t confident. It was the expression of someone who wanted to be brave for someone else, but wasn’t sure he had the strength to hold it all together.

I didn’t wave back. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t know how to meet that look with anything simple or sufficient. There were no small gestures capable of untangling the knots that now lived between us, between him and Mum, between the past we’d left behind and the future we kept pretending was still on the way.

After a moment, he started moving again. He kept within a certain distance of me. I realised, with sudden clarity, that he was repositioning himself not as a scout, but as a shield.

He was protecting me.

He was ten years old and already knew too well what it meant to stand guard. Not just physically—though that was part of it—but emotionally, mentally. He was buffering me from the weight of things I wasn’t supposed to carry. Making sure that, whatever Mum and the world decided to do next, I’d have a little longer to believe in playgrounds and chalk drawings and giant rope ladders that led to thrilling slides.

The twist inside my chest was sharp and hot and strange. Not sadness exactly. Not fear. Something more like mourning—a quiet grief for the boy my brother should’ve been allowed to be.

I clambered down the rope ladder slowly, feeling the bite of each knot beneath my fingers, my foot catching once on a rung that had seemed effortless only minutes ago. The breeze shifted through my hair, bringing with it the scent of eucalyptus and sunscreen and a faint trace of grilled onions from a nearby barbecue, and I wanted so badly for that to be all I noticed. Just those simple playground smells. Just that ordinary mix of park-day perfume.

But it was too late now. The conversation I wasn’t meant to hear had cracked something. And though I couldn’t see what was broken, I could feel the pieces moving underneath everything else.

Still—still—I was six years old.

And six-year-olds, if nothing else, are good at pretending.

So I ran. Not because I felt carefree, but because I wanted to. I ran toward the slide structure again with a kind of desperate cheer, arms pumping, heart pounding, as if speed could outrun uncertainty. I climbed, slid, laughed too loudly. I hurled myself into the joy Mum had said I needed, because if it was going to be one more good day, then I would make it count. I would make it loud and glittery and full of motion, and hope that might be enough to hold the dark at bay for just a little longer.