Tom sits in front of the TV news, nodding off, alone in a darkened room.

TV Announcer: Despite five days of incessant bombing, Colonel Gadaffi's forces continue to wreak havoc on the civilian population in the East of Libya.

One last nod of the head and finally, Tom is asleep.

----------------

Old Mate's phone rings out twice before he wakes. It starts ringing again. He fumbles for the phone, knocking over the alarm clock that shows three am. He checks to see who is calling.

“This better be good,” said Old Mate.

“It's a doozey mate,” I said.

“ What's up?”

“ I have to see her.”

I heard Old Mate fossick around trying to wake up and pay attention. He made a long sigh.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“I'll support you but not until I have done my...”

“ Due diligence?”

“Lets call it that, shall we?”

“Okay, lets go.”

“First off, what do you mean you want to see her ?”

“I just want to look at her and have her say one word.”

“What word?”

“It doesn't matter. It's not the point. Anything. I just can't have her leave like that. Just gone. One minute she's there and the next minute she's gone. I need one more word.”

“Can I go there?” asked Old Mate.

“You know you can.”

“We talked about this. You talked about this. You both agreed. Your relationship had been on the down for months. You both agreed to split and now… now what? You going to go and ask for her back?”

“I'm not going to ask for that. I just need to see her one more time.”

“Sure. I am on board. That's what you want to do. I'll buy into it.”

“Thanks mate.”

“So where is she?”

“Umm…”

“Check her Facebook page. She's always blogging on that.”

“I'm onto it now. Standby. Here it is. Huh. Surprise. She's gone to Brisbane to see her brother.”

“So you're off to Brisbane?”

“Guess so.”

“You got any money?”

“A few grand.”

“What about your work?”

“I'm freelancing. I'll ring the clients and put it all on hold for a while, send off a few invoices.”

“I'm here for you, okay? Text me. Keep me in the loop. I'll look out for you.”

“Thanks Bro.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Good luck,” said Old Mate.

At Brisbane airport, it was pissing down. Nearly didn't get out of the airport because of the water.

I called Cathy from the airport but her phone rang out. I would have called her brother but I didn't know his number. But I did know where he lived. I took a cab from the airport.

“I don't think you want to be going there,” the cabbie said when I told him the address.

“Why not?” I asked.

“This rain coming in, those suburbs are flood prone.”

“Flooding is the worst of my problems,” I said.

Cathy's brother, Dan, was home. He was pleased to see me. We had some beers and some food. Dan said I could hang around as long as I liked, but I managed to convince him that all I wanted to do was to see Cathy one more time.

Dan commiserated with me and said that he didn't think that Cathy and I had a future any more. He said that she had flown to Townsville which was a total bummer as I had just flown from Townsville. Crazy. Anyway, at least I knew where to go next.

The rain came down like crazy all night. Total madness. At about two, I was woken by sirens wailing above the din of the torrential downpour. Dan appeared in the door of my room and he only got to say one word before the world changed.

He said, “Flood.”

Next thing the room started filling with water. Cold water rising from the floor, filling the room. I panicked but managed to grab my wallet, bag and clothes. Next thing, a wall of water busted into the house and the room filled quickly to the ceiling. I was drowning, gagging against the rising water.

Then I woke up.

Next to my bed was my little boy, Toby, his big blue eyes twinkling like someone who had been having adventures for hours. He raised his hand to show me my present. Long and squirming.

“I got worm,” he said.

It was the biggest bloody worm I had ever seen.

An hour later I had Toby dressed and driven to school, the worm safely back in the garden bed.

I got home about nine, exhausted, as always. I made some tea. Set the alarm, then crashed out on the couch for a few hours.

Dan and I were pinned up against the ceiling treading water, when the flood reached its peak. We found a hatch in the ceiling that allowed us to clamber into the attic where we sat for the rest of the night waiting for the sun to rise and the water to fall.

I stayed with Dan a week helping him to mop up his mangled house. The entire area was devastated by the worst floods in living memory. One soggy, muddy suburb after another.

In all this time I had had no word of Cathy except that Dan had received a text asking if he was okay and reaffirming that she was still in Townsville.

I felt a wave of relief when I took my seat on the Virgin Blue flight and clicked my seat belt closed.

I must have sighed audibly because the guy sitting next to me said: “You going back to prep for the cyclone?”

I didn't know what he was talking about. “Cyclone? What cyclone?”

“Yasi. Category five. Coming over the coast sometime in the next thirty six hours.”

“You shitting me,” I said, incredulously, “Cat 5? Where's the eye going?”

“Somewhere between Cairns and Townsville. Storm surge is going to whack Townsville.”

I stared at my hands, dumbstruck, totally exhausted physically and now emotionally.

An alarm started bleeping.

It freaked me out. What was it? Don't tell me the plane was on fire.

It was my alarm clock next to the couch where I was crashed out.

I stumbled off the couch trying to get my bearings.

I found my self staring at some paper work I had laid out on the kitchen bench the night before. I struggled to comprehend what the information meant. Then it hit me.

“Bugger,” I said.

The document was an air travel itinerary.

My wife was coming home for a few days and was due at the airport fifteen minutes ago.

Corrine looked sexy and professional as always. Immaculate. She was a C.E.O. of a big firm in Sydney and she flew in for a few days every week or so. I was stay at home dad. Role reversal. Corrine made the money, I looked after our offspring. I liked the arrangement, but could never parent with the ease that the women at pre-school showed. For me, parenting was a never ending trial of repetitive chores. And sleeplessness.

Corrine and I went for lunch at the C-Bar, a restaurant that overlooked Cleveland Bay and Magnetic Island. Very different to Sydney CBD where Corrine spent most of her waking hours.

“How's Toby?” she asked.

“He's awesome. Up real early. Every morning. He bought me a worm today. Monster. How's Sydney?”

“That's so sweet. Sydney is madness. They want me to go to London for six weeks.”

“Do you have an option?”

“Not really.”

I must have looked deflated because Corrine said: “The bonus is pretty awesome. It would make a big dent in the mortgage.”

“That's important,” I said, not really knowing whether it was or not.

Later, before it was time to pick up Toby from pre-school, Corrine and I were in bed, making love.

After, I fell asleep.

I touched down in Townsville and took a taxi straight to Tonielle's house. Tonielle was Cathy's best mate, our confidante before Cathy and I split. Now she was Cathy's confidante and I had to plead for information.

Tonielle told me that Cathy had just sold her car and bought a plane ticket.

“Where to,” I asked, desperately.

“She's visiting relatives in New Zealand then going to Japan,” she said.

“Oh, no.”

“So what are you going to do?” Tonielle asked.

“I just need to see her again.”

“I don't think that is such a good idea,” Tonielle told me, but I wasn't listening.

I took a cab from Tonielle's place to the City and booked a ticket to Christchurch, New Zealand, the city that Cathy was visiting.

The Travel Agent advised me that the next flight would not be until after the cyclone had passed and I remembered the conversation on the plane.

“When is the cyclone due?” I asked.

“Tonight. Better lock down.”

I found my way home, noticing the preparations underway in the city ahead of the cyclone: windows taped up, people cleaning debris from their yards, long queues at service stations.

I bunkered down for the storm. The winds picked up through the evening. As night fell, I started to feel nervous, questioning whether I should have spent more time preparing and less time drinking beer.

The winds picked up and up and from my unit I watched trees falling over, pieces of fencing and roofing material sheering away and flying through the air. My unit shook and whined, it was terrifying and deafening, like a jet engine running full blast above the roof.

The height of the storm struck around two in the morning, a hideous howl. I had drifted off to sleep and woke with a tight knot in my stomach. The entire building shook and trembled and I thought I could hear the noise of collapsing buildings and screams. Next thing, in the height of my fear, the roof pulled away with a terrific screeching noise, flooding the unit with harsh winds and cold rain. I spent the rest of the night cowering under the bed with a cyclone lashing my bedroom, not knowing whether I was going to live or die.

It took me two weeks to mop out my house and put things in order. Every second, I was thinking about Cathy.

At the end of this period I got a flu and was bedridden for three days while above me workers replaced the roof, paid for by the insurance company.

I must have woken choking or something because Corrine put on the light and asked: “Are you okay, darling?”

It was two am again, the witching hour.

I smiled at her, placed my hand on her cheek and fell back into sleep.

I was back in Brisbane airport, this time the International Terminal in a queue for a Pacific Blue flight to Christchurch. Cathy had relatives there.

First time in New Zealand for me. I took the Shuttle Bus service to the City Centre. I bought a meal at a pub and sat on the wooden benches outside the building, resting my back against the brick wall, enjoying the sun on my face.

I became aware of a shaking sensation and immediately picked up on the look of panic in the eyes of people moving around me. The way they moved with short jerky movements, unsure of themselves. I was too busy watching the people to realize that an earthquake was striking.

Suddenly a terrific noise, like a loud CRACK! and the bench seats I was seated on started to give way. I caught a movement in the corner of my eye and I leapt to my feet, landing a few meters away from the building. A split second later, a ton of bricks, literally a ton, fell from the balustrade three floors above me and pulverized the wooden benches into matchwood and smashed bricks.

Adrenaline surged through my body. I staggered backwards in shock, my eyes flicking in the direction of very new noise. To my left, huge windows on the side of a commercial building burst out, throwing shards of glass into the air, cascading on the pavement. To my right, a building collapsed. Crunch! Just like that. Fires spontaneously erupted around me and everywhere was dust and smoke curling into the air. And frightened, confused people.

I staggered towards open ground, a park by the river, but as I approached, the ground opened up into a series of parallel splits, as though the earth were being ripped apart. From within the splits oozed a dark grey liquid. It rose from the ground, spilled over the edges of the grass and crept its way across the park like grey lava.

I looked down the street to see rivers of this grey mud - liquefaction, I would later learn its name. It gurgled up from the storm water drains and at the base of lamp posts. In some areas where there was a low point in the road, it rose to a depth of two meters, swallowing cars in its foul embrace.

I saw a young woman standing, terrified, staring at the grey goo oozing from the road at the feet.

My heart raced. Cathy!

I raced back to the smashed benches and dragged my mangled and dusty bag from under the rubble. And I ran in the direction of the coast, where she was staying.

I woke, choking, gasping for breath.

Corrine placed her hand on my chest and comforted me: “Are you okay, sweetie, are you okay?”

I caught my breath looking around the room anxiously, almost as though I expected to see floodwaters or liquefaction rising or masonry falling from above. Slowly, I calmed and my heart rate settled.

I looked at the clock. It was 4 am.

“I'm okay now.”

“Was it another disaster dream?”

“Yeah. No. It's okay. Liquefaction. I'm alright. Really”

I turned over, pulled the pillow tight against my head and drifted off into sleep again.

The house where Cathy was staying was half destroyed. Cathy's Uncle approached me with a graven face as I stood in his driveway which was now under half a meter of liquefaction. The entire suburb was awash with the smelly goo which was starting to harden as the liquid portion sank back into the ground leaving the grey silt behind.

“Are you okay?” I asked Cathy's Uncle. He was Okay. Himself and his wife were in the yard when the house came down.

“And Cathy?” I asked, preparing myself for tragic news.

“Japan,” said her Uncle. “She left for Japan two days ago.”

“What for?” I asked.

“She's taking a job. Teaching English.”

I looked around the devastated suburb, at the billons of tons of grey goo that saturated gardens and made the roads impassable. I saw stunned people standing with the mouths open surveying the wreckage of buildings, fallen power lines.

One part of me wanted to stay to help, but the larger part wanted to be at the airport on a flight to Japan.

“Do you have an address for her. For Cathy? In Japan?” I asked of her Uncle but he wasn't listening, just slowly shaking his head in disbelief.

That evening Corrine, Toby and I went to the cinema to watch Up, an animated film about an old man whose house floated away on balloons, or something. Neither Corrine's nor my preferred movie, but Toby was adamant.

Half way through the movie, I nodded off.

As the plane touched down in Narita airport I had an overwhelming sense of dis-ease. What the hell was I doing? My stomach ached and my whole body throbbed with exhaustion.

From Narita, I took a train and then a coach to Daichii Province , heading to a town called Narrimbarr where Tonielle had told me Cathy was staying. I emailed Tonielle telling her I was in Japan and this must have impressed her of my commitment so she opened up some more and told me in a reply email that she was staying in The Nagashi Hotel.

I got to Narrimbar about 1pm and almost as soon as I stepped off the train the ground started to tremble. It was like déjà vu , another disaster befalling me. I looked around and saw panicked people rushing out of buildings, masonry falling from facades onto the street. It occurred to me that no matter what race, people behave in a similar manner in chaotic situations.

Next thing there was a terrific ‘CRACK!!' noise, like the earth had snapped, and the little earthquake suddenly turned into a massive one. The ground wobbled back and forth, buildings crumbled, people screamed and fires spontaneously erupted all around me.

I found myself crouched on the ground, gripping my bag.

As I was out in the open, in the coach parking yard, I was in no immediate danger but all around me, people were suffering. A woman staggered toward me. She was middle aged, clutching her handbag, with blood streaming from her brow, matting her hair.

I was back in a city in chaos, first Brisbane, then Christchurch, then Townsville and now somewhere on the other side of the planet. Were these disasters following me?

One of the buildings unaffected by the earthquake was a solid multistory car park. I saw people on the top deck looking around and decided to join them. From the top of the car park, the damage to the city was evident, one in ten buildings had either collapsed or was in flames. There was smoke and dust everywhere. Sirens and flashing lights. I found a Japanese man who spoke English and asked him where Cathy's hotel was. He pointed into the smoky distance inland.

Corrine woke me when the titles were coming up at the end of the movie. Both Toby and I had slept through the film. Corrine was prepared for this and had bough with her the carry device that allowed me to strap my unconscious son to my chest.

We had a glass of wine at a bar next door to the cinema before going home. The bar staff were highly amused at my sleeping child hanging off me.

Corrine was heading back to Sydney in the morning so by the time we had put Toby to bed and sorted Corrine's packing it was midnight and I was too exhausted to pleasure her, even though I knew she wanted it.

While I contemplated whether or not Cathy's hotel was in flames or crumbled to the ground, I heard a low rumbling sound coming from the other direction. Next I heard gasps of fear from my Japanese companions. People were rushing to the other side of the car park roof. I joined them and looked toward the sea where a slow, fat wave raising higher and higher, bashing against the seawall a few hundred meters away. My English speaking companion was next to me. I looked at him to see his eyes showing terror.

“What the hell is that?” I asked, incredulous.

“Tsunami,” he said.

The ocean had gone wild. It rose higher and higher, the front edge of the wave overran the sea wall and munched and rolled through the streets taking with it a tangled mess of motor cars and broken buildings. I saw people run in panic from buildings only to be swept up and devoured by this roaring mass of water.

Riding the wave, was a fishing boat, proud and white with a high bow and stiff white rigging. The boat rode on top of the wave while motor cars and houses were rolled up inside it.

As the wave rose and overcame more and more buildings, I became afraid that the car park might have been damaged by the earth quake and would collapse into the foaming tsunami wave.

Despite having survived a flood, a cyclone and two earthquakes, fear clung to me like a cold, wet sleeping bag. The fishing boat moved closer as the wave ploughed into the lower floor of the car park.

I was struck with a feeling that the people with whom I was standing were soon to be dead. I wanted to be away from them.

As the rigging of the fishing boat clanged against the side of the car park I leapt out, and grabbed it.

A second later, I was meters away from the car park, riding the front of the tsunami wave as it pushed mercilessly and relentlessly inland - toward the Nagashi Hotel.

Below me I watch families squashed under the foul brown water as it tumbled human lives, buildings and vehicles.

At the airport coffee lounge, Corrine and I had a light breakfast.

I must have looked exhausted because she asked: “Are you still up at all hours watching the world news.”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Are you getting enough sleep?”

“I catch up during the day.”

“You really should do something about that. It's become an obsession.”

“I was reading a story in the Guardian the other day about a guy who spent a week in a Gadaffi prison.” I stared at my hands. Corrine didn't want to know that story.

She placed her hand on my hand.

“What about sleeping tablets.”

“No.”

“Well then…”

She was going to say anti-depressants, but I cut her off.

“I am okay. I am. Really. I just have to know. I just have to see what is happening in the world.”

“You watch the same bulletins over and over again.”

That was true.

“I came into the lounge room the other day,” she said, “three am, you had CNN on the TV, the world news section of the paper on you lap and the same story on your iPad.”

“They are not all the same stories,” I protested.

“I am not trying to tell you off, Tom. I care for you.”

“I know.”

Then she said something that struck me as profound.

“Important things that go on don't just happen overseas. In disaster zones.”

I didn't understand what that meant, nor did I have time to find out because Corrine's boarding call came through. She kissed me lightly on the cheek, then walked towards security.

In the airport carpark, I put the driver's seat back and took a kip.

The tsunami wave had travelled kilometers inland before it started to run out of steam. We were on the outskirts of town now, munching though an agricultural district. My ship still held me safely aloft as I looked down upon the merciless destruction of the wave's leading edge.

A building was in front of me, a big solid one. As the tsunami wound down, the keel of my ship started to touch the ground and just as her bow pushed into the ground floor of the building, it came to a stop. Immediately in front of me was a balcony on the third floor. I stepped out of the rigging onto the balcony.

The sliding doors were open, the white curtains blowing in with the breeze. I took one step into the room. It was a hotel room. Something familiar was there, an aroma, a pattern, a noise maybe.

It was Cathy.

She stepped out of the bathroom holding her bag. She looked at me, made a very slight smile, then walked out the door.

I was dumbstruck. I followed her out the door, down the stairs into the lobby. I had one fleeting glimpse of her as she left the building but when I got to that same spot she was gone. Lost somewhere in the devastated landscape of mashed up wood and muddy cars.

A loud rapping noise woke me with a start. It was a parking inspector.

“You alright, mate?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Just sleeping.”

The inspector walked away and I wiped my eyes. I checked the time on the clock on the dash board.

My heart raced as I saw the clock. I was late picking up Toby.

When I got to the pre-school, Toby was at the front gate, in tears. Meryl, one of the Mums had stayed back waiting for me with her little daughter.

I thanked her profusely and apologized profusely to Toby. She told me that Toby had picked up a flu and I realized that his red face was not just from crying but from the illness.

I got Toby home, via the doctors and the chemist and for the rest of the day and evening cared for him as he wheezed and spluttered and cried. By nine pm when he finally fell asleep, I felt like I'd not slept in a month.

I turned on the SBS evening news and watched the valiant, ill prepared young men of Libya get chopped up by Gadaffi battle tanks. I saw hundreds of people camped at Tokyo airport trying to escape the nuclear fall out. I saw women shot dead in the streets of Ivory Coast. Planes crashing. Ships sinking. Cities on fire. Bodies littering streets. Explosions. People running, crawling with open wounds. I flicked to CNN, then BBC, CNBC. My ipad was running hot. A helicopter fell to the ground in flames. A Russian Sukhoi jet hit the desert and burst into orange fire. A ship sank. Mobs rioted. Teargas.

Live ammunition. Bodies washed up on a beach.

Tears and sobbing from the next room.

I climbed up onto the debris washed up by the tsunami, clambered as high as I could go and looked for Cathy. From the hotel a few kilometers inland towards the coast was a sea of mashed wood and vehicles and debris. It smelt salty. Pieces of clothing, books, a small, ripped teddy bear were at my feet. And somewhere, amid it all was Cathy. She had still to say one final word to me.

I heard tears and sobbing right next to me.

I found a way to get higher in the rubble which extended my view further along the coast. Hundreds of acres of rubble and destruction all around me. Devastation. Death. And then someone calling. A voice. “Help me,” it said. “Help me.” I staggered down the rubble pile, heading in the direction of the voice. It was Cathy.

“Daddy. Help me. I can't breathe.”

It was Toby, standing next to me, tears streaming down his face, half choking as he struggled to say these words.

The poor boy was in a terrible state. I felt heat radiating off him and could smell the saltiness of his tears. I was struck by an emotion that was overwhelming for me - something deeply personal about my little boy's suffering.

Corrine's words from the airport came back to me: “Important things that go on in the world don't just happen overseas. In disaster zones.”

It suddenly made sense.

I am one who so casually scans the news and acclimatizes myself to two dimensional TV suffering from thousands of miles away. Lazily observing the personal trauma without empathy, just interest. The only suffering I shared with those miserable victims from overseas was tiredness, because I stayed up late watching them every night.

I understood Corrine's message.

The real suffering, the suffering that mattered most to me was not in Japan or Brisbane, but in my house. Standing in front of me.

My little boy with a flu.

That's where I needed to be focusing my attention, not chasing shadows in someone else's disaster zone.