Do You Believe the Universe Can Talk to You

by Liam Carroll (Australia)

I didn't expect to find Australia

I was never big on the paranormal, more as a defence mechanism than a true disbelief. My fear of ghosts on a shady immortal warpath has always overwhelmed any notion of guardian angels watching over me. But one night, in the Australian northwest outpost of Karratha, I became a believer in a grander force, a spirit world. Working as a locum physiotherapist in the remote mining town, most famous as a backdrop for "Red Dog" and his misadventures, I was stationed for a couple of months, saving my pennies, treating local residents and FIFO workers. It was Sunday night. I’d just been for my sabbath constitutional; a run up Mt Karratha, not that it’s called that by anyone else, the dusty hill across the road from where I was staying. It’s no easy climb, made much more agreeable with an ice cold can of beer in one pocket, a mobile phone in the other. Get the timing just right, and once perched up top, in the sunset glare bidding farewell to another week, I’d crack the tin and give Dad a call, right when it was almost bedtime across the other side of this vast, brown continent I’m lucky enough to call home. I couldn’t know it at the time, but that was the last time I heard his voice, the last sunset we shared. Later that night, I was in charge of looking after the dog at the place I was staying. An adorable Rottweiler, incredibly stupid, but adorable all the same. While preparing dinner, he ran out the closed door somehow, off into the night, certain to be run over on the dimly lit main road where Landcruisers and Hilux’s with high-viz stripes running down their sides were sure to make mincemeat of the poor lad. Racing around in the dark, in the dust, desperate to find him, a vice-like grip seized me around the chest. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe, paralysed by an unshakeable feeling that I was losing something so precious I would never be the same. Seconds that seemed like lifetimes passed. I could breathe again. I could move again. The pooch turned up. We wandered home, both starving. I shut every door in the place, made sure the Rottweiler wouldn’t be skipping town again on my watch and yet still, the vice-like grip around my chest, while nowhere near as strong, it lingered, weighed on me. The universe had shifted, mine at least. Almost on cue, a phone call. My sister. 3,600km away. Sobbing. Dad was gone. He’d died a quarter of an hour earlier, anything but peacefully. My best mate was never coming back. I could hear the ambulance in the background, wheeling his corpse away on the polar opposite side of Australia. There was a huge amount of blood. His cancerous lungs had literally exploded in his chest. That vice-like grip that had overwhelmed me…I can have no idea what a vice-like chest grip even comes close to. There’s no question some grander force beyond human understanding was with me in Karratha that night. Maybe it was the universe, grabbing me as hard as it could, making sure that moment was one I would never forget. Maybe it was some genetic, cosmic connection between father and son, transmitting the immense pain from one to another in spite of any distance or physical connection. And maybe, just maybe, it was Dad giving me a goodbye hug, fresh from the other side. I can still feel it today, almost a decade later. Now that’s one ripper of a farewell cuddle. And I’d honestly expect nothing less from the great man.