by Peter Wells
We would hang around this toilet and the bus-shelter until boredom just about became a frenzy. Then we would laugh, scream, sing whole operas in complete gibberish, poking out our tongues, distending our eyes, until, overcome with vertigo, we would drop back into silence. At times like these we would turn to the walls again.
For the fact was the entire wall of the two bays was an illegible scrawl of writing.
Crowds in summer would take refuge in the bays, having come up off the beach only to find the bus had sailed off without them. At this point an almost sublime exhaustion would overcome them, an exhaustion perhaps like that of mythical gods who had spent a day creating the world.
On overcast or wet days, there would always be people in the bus-shelter, mournfully looking out at the rain like pilgrims who had arrived at a church only to find the religious event had been cancelled or was already over, and they had, forever, missed the miracle. We locals would look at them with eyes so superior we affected not even to see them. Or we would walk by, our faces averted as if from shame at their lack of knowledge to arrive at the beach on a wet day.
It was established you had not really visited the beach unless, one, you had cleansed your soul in the tide, two, you had rewarded the flesh by feeding into it as many sugary substances as you could intake, as if to signify this visit almost had the nature of a religious holiday or high-day, and, three, you took revenge on the eternal unseeingness, the always renewing energy of the sea by scrawling some message on whatever surface was available, lodging the fact that you had, in fact, been there: that you were not, as the sea always whispered, immaterial.
The walls became like an informal visiting book, a wailing wall, a via dolorosa as well as an eternal love letter, a plea of physically acute angst. Every inch of it had been covered, bedizened, bedecked and scribbled upon. But such was the universal urge of everyone who came to the beach to mark their presence there that words spilled out everywhere you were likely to go — from the terminal to the corrugated tin changing sheds down by the sundecks, onto the small metal surrounds by the bins — words were even scraped by the end of a stick into the sand almost in an effervescence of desperation, knowing they would be obliterated soon by the tide; yet such was the force of these words, of people carrying words and needing to express them, that the cliffs where the land met the sea, at the very end of Hungry Creek, were themselves carved all over with words, arduously, with a penknife, over a whole afternoon, or a series of afternoons, a single letter, or an elliptical message in the form of a word only the inscriber could understand.
GEOFF, DIRK, MADDY and I would trail off down to the cliffs as part of our ritual, having again inspected the words on the bus-shelter for any new entrants. Here we would go to the next station of our inventory: the lone and spectral cathedral of the pine trees. This was a part of the park which looked out to the reef, and, possessing such high cliffs with no access to the beach, it was seldom visited.
This area was sacred, given over, almost by common consent, to courting couples. In summer, it was our joy to creep up behind these couples, from tree to tree. We would watch these sexual wrestling matches for long intense minutes. We had no idea what was occurring under the blanket but occasionally one of us would break the seance by snickering out loud with sheer pity at the misery these couples inflicted on themselves.
Sometimes Dirk would throw a carefully aimed pine cone. The third or fourth pine cone always brought the situation to a crisis. Our safety was based on the fact that when the young man leapt up, there had to be such a concentrated series of adjustments, buttonings, pullings down and up — the young woman inevitably sitting up, dazed and pulling her top down, this was before a bleak and mute anger would colour her cheeks — that while this mini-tragedy of thwarted lust was happening, we would screel away across the green, just about making ourselves ill with the amount of ridicule bubbling up from our insides and cascading out in wild percolations of laughter.
Men and women, the drama of maleness and femaleness, never seemed so absurd, so pitiful.
On quieter days, we would pass by the empty banks, renewing, within the perpetually running cinema inside our eyelids, the many comic scenes of passion we had seen there, as well as purely educational and even erotic glimpses of thick engorged dalks straining to escape tight fabric, or the loose bowl of a breast with its central nipple, staring at us like a surprised eye.
On these still and empty days, when only a wind sped over the park, we might pause, for genuflection, before the hollows under the pine trees, then move on down to the beach itself.
The beach always had a special quality in its off-season period. It was then it was returned, unconditionally, to the local residents. Its cool emptiness was like a mirror image of a world unoccupied by humans. The empty wire rubbish containers rattled. The changing sheds were ghostly and abandoned shrines, as if the pilgrims and travellers had passed on to more clement lands.
OUR VISIT ROUND the shrines was made complete by our final point of call. The beach was so popular at the height of summer that it needed two changing sheds (or four depending on how you saw the sexes). The better known was the tin shed right by the bus terminal so those crowds, deposited by the tram and later the trolley, needed only climb down the steep hundred and five steps to a vast waiting corrugated-tin shed, a kind of immigration system not unlike Staten Island where immigrants from distant and rejected countries could enter and then, on exiting, emerge out into the desired new world, one they could only enter at the price of being returned to a shy demi-nakedness.
But further along the beach (and perhaps saved for those who had cars) was a superior changing shed, made out of roughcast concrete and the same heavy overhanging eaves as the terminus. This changing shed had a different ambience entirely, it was discretely placed off the beach and lay back, like an exhausted person, into pohutukawa trees, as if this person wanted only the solace and privacy of lying there, blissfully alone, gazing up through the trees to the moving panoply of clouds.
This changing shed was always our last point of call, our final search for the absolution of incident or event. Usually, however, this final stop in our search coincided with the fact that the changing shed was a hundred yards from Geoff and Dirk’s house, and our own, which in turn intimated our time together was nearly over. Nothing had happened. Again. Again and again. We had only our own bodies to inspect, willing that at these moments one of us might be able to invent, out of the surprises of our own flesh, some incident. We might, at this point, undress and look, with searching eyes and hands, all over our respective bodies, or we might, because we were drugged on boredom by this time, merely look at each other with unseeing eyes, and with barely an exchanged word, as if in common consent that the miracle this day was not going to happen, amble off back home to our respective homes, carefully continuing to say nothing to our parents which might illuminate them with knowledge of how we spent our time, how we explored that endless quagmire and invisible quality which surrounded us on every side and ambushed us day after day with such ruthless efficiency: time.
An Event of No Consequence
AND SO IT happened. Or didn’t happen. Nothing happened, as I tried to tell Geoff. But he would not listen. He was rendered incapable of listening. What had happened? What had made him no longer listen to my voice? He broke our secret. This is what happened. Or rather, this is what did not happen.
IT WAS AT the very end of summer, that time before school starts. We knew we were going to different intermediate schools, so we had a dim forewarning that our world was ending. But in one way, we hardly minded. We had been stripped, scoured down to the very bottom of boredom to such a degree that first of all Dirk had disappeared, ‘I gotta go and play footie,’ he muttered mutinously, having screwed up his courage. Geoff stirred beside him, turning the empty cup of his face from his brother to my brother and then to me. An almost lewd look passed over his features and he said in a dull voice, a thick voice, he wanted to go over to our hu
t, but once we were there, Maddy kept looking away, as if he had discovered something, something else somewhere and he only stayed a little while, and I said with a sigh to Geoff why didn’t he put his clothes back on, I preferred to go for a walk down the beach, and so we did and this was, this was what didn’t happen.
A man came out of the changing sheds, the roughcast concrete changing sheds, yet so casually and naturally it took us a while, Geoff and me, to realise he was naked.
He began walking back and forth in front of us, slowly, brazenly. The tide was out, it was a chill day in early autumn — there was no reason — no reason at all for anyone to be on the beach. Yet here he was, this man, breaking the commandment that no one shall walk naked on this earth.
What had driven him there, to that appointment, but exactly the same interest in intercepting the knowledge of those secret words, those codes as us? We had arrived at the same point, the same church, the same vessel, that dimly dark salt-smelling room which the air of the beach infiltrated and made cool, even cold as if to hush the fevers of the flesh. He was a tall thin man, not well made, walking slowly back and forth, completely naked.
It was seeing someone so completely in the round, in a proper perspective, a head attached to the body, a penis attached to the flesh, feet attached to the soil of the world (even if mediated through a path) which astonished us.
Gravely even gracefully, he conducted the passage of his penis as it bobbed along as he walked. I had the faintest impression of a small smile on his lips as he turned to look at us.
Geoff and I were hunched together, the two of us on the bank which led away from the beach. The bank was soft with fallen pine needles, all auburn and shiny, gripped between our toes as we squatted down to watch.
He walked back and forth three times.
Geoff and I were plunged into a silence so immense it was as if we were sinking under the water, but joyfully, inertly, with the pleasure of weighted bodies; we were seeking above all to reach the bottom, which we would know by some sonic boom, we would bury our squirming toes in the soft mud which we knew lay at the bottom of the tide, as if it were the underlining of the beautiful quicksilver on its top. We were blissfully sinking and losing contact with the surface of the world which yet surrounded us on every side, we were swooning and turning with the knowledge we were being handed by this stranger when, wrapped round each other as it felt, as if Geoff and I were intercoupled and clinging as we joyfully sank down to touch the bedrock of knowledge, yet just at the point when our toes might have touched the ocean floor, when a key might have turned in the lock, I felt Geoff beside me stir, and a low moan wired out of his mouth.
I smelt fear, the brimstone of panic coming out of every pore in his flesh. It was metallic that smell, ugly.
I looked into his face; we were suddenly back on the outside of the world, on a bank at about an hour before sunset, the sun was pouring a particularly sharp cordial over everything, so all flaws, all indentations and pits and pores became raised up, catching and carrying their own flags of shadows, and I could see, just as I could smell, Geoff was rigid with panic. I felt his muscles ride up and tauten. I felt him rise up on his haunches, his head already turning, like the mouth of a trumpet, towards his house.
I placed a hand on his legs to stop him, to slow him down. But already, like a startled hare, he was scrabbling his way up the bank, pulling himself along as he made strange gibbering noises: the noises of a startled idiot. I turned quickly to look towards the man (to apologise by glance for this break in the solemn and distant ritual which we were partaking in) but the man had gone; he had gone as absolutely as though he had never existed.
The beach lay empty.
The sun sparkled on a field of mud.
A gull stood on the edge of a rubbish tin, looking at me aggressively, as if I wished to steal the last morsel of summer food from it.
But I was scrabbling up the bank, too. I caught hold of Geoff’s legs on the bank and tried to pull him back. He kicked out at me, once twice, so hard I lost my speech. Instead I threw myself on him bodily, winding him. It was only as I lay on top of him, weaving my legs through his and forcing his arms back over his head so he raised his neck up once twice and tossed his head from side to side, that a slow and furtive consciousness came back into his face, that he was seeing me, that he saw me, that he knew me. He looked at me for a long moment, as if seeking to find out what intelligence I could flood into him, what meaning I could make of what we had just seen. I was so rhapsodic, I simply squeezed my hands around his wrists once twice three times, trying to force silently into his body all my excitement, my sense of sinking down and almost touching the bottom, of my feet rebounding from the floor of the world and sending me, like a rocket fisssssing towards the surface; his head fell, exhausted, to the side and I saw him looking at my hands tight round the boniness of his wrist.
My hands unclasped. He lay there exhausted and silent and the big bruise of his eyes moved up to my face.
‘Wha … what?’ he murmured to me. I heard in that second the extreme dryness of his throat. The very huskiness of his question made me feel, momentarily, nearly mad with a lunacy of power. I looked down into his pallid face. He was no longer beautiful. He was no longer brown and tanned and formed into a soft rawness.
‘Wha …?’ he kept saying to me.
I looked away from him.
From where we were lying, on the very cusp of the bank, I could see the neat line of houses all looking back at me, separated by the grass and road and powerlines. In fact, I could see Mrs Beveridge walking her bike along, for all the world like a clockwork toy, like a woman in the weather clock regularly making her appearance as part of an overall scheme. Soon I knew a bus would come streaming down the road, bringing the same workers, who would say the same words in parting as they got out and departed; what was the connection between this world and what we had just seen?
Where lay the connection?
We lay completely still. I began to hear, then feel that Geoff’s breathing had taken on a more regular rhythm.
When I looked over at him, he was starting to sit up. He looked like someone who had just been hit by something.
‘We must not,’ I said to him intently, ‘say anything. Do you understand?’
He looked at me without understanding. Without intelligence. I felt weariness overcome me. I wanted really to be on my own, to think through what had happened: to restore to its miraculous and untouched image, like a religious icon on a stand, the completely naked man; I wanted to look again at this image which remained as a litmus on my brain. But I could tell, looking at Geoff, this would not be immediately possible.
‘But wha …?’ His slack mouth opened wide. As it did so I saw a slim string of saliva joining his teeth to his tongue. Inside his soft warm cavern I saw his tongue lying there, struggling to form the word — a word — whatever word it was he needed to say …
‘Wha … wha …’ he kept on repeating, like an engine stalled.
He fell into a long silence. It was as if he had fallen back into a swimming pool, having released his hands from the metal bars of a ladder. I watched his entrance into the water. I watched his floundering.
‘Look,’ I said to him as I threw him a lifebuoy, ‘Look,’ I said to him, ‘it was nothing, nothing happened, nothing actually took place. If we tell, if we tell …’ and I myself fell into the same ring, the same aura of clotted silence.
I raised my eyes again to look along the road. The houses all seemed so prosaically still, even pretty. Late afternoon light was engraving the glass windows a pure lavender, with a shrill even tender pink running along the gutterings. The powerlines wavered in a slight breeze and I heard, overheard, the siren of birds’ wings as they began to move in a flock towards the largest pine tree in the district, their nest for the night. I knew if we did not return to our respective homes soon there would be questions. It was important we inserted ourselves back into the moving vehicle of ritual which surrounded
us on every side as seamlessly, as wordlessly, as possible.
Geoff was now sitting upright. He was even yawning. A divine stupidity slid down over his face as effectively as a motorised door sliding down, covering over all light. I calculated exactly what this omission would cover.
‘Geoff,’ I said to him, ‘We gotta swear. You know. Like Maddy made us. Eternal brothers. We gotta make a promise.’
I knew how important it was to keep our childhood world separate and uncontaminated from the adult world, just as I knew, as firmly, that there could be no understanding, no commerce between the two worlds, only the unknown dynamics of catastrophe.
He turned and looked at me and I knew I was seeing, inside his eyes, that complete emptiness which marked his native receptive state.
‘Wha?’ he struggled again to make sense.
‘We got to swear,’ I said to him. ‘Eternal silence. Not tell parents. Only trouble. Too much trouble. Understand? Comprenez?’
I used a word we all knew from the movies.
He nodded slowly but I knew, I sensed he was not convinced. Inside the emptiness of his eyes I saw the wire of doubt, just as I saw reflected in them the nobbled exterior of the vast old pine tree, the veteran of all pines.
His nod so slow I did not know.
‘Agreed?’
He nodded again, slowly.
I did not know.
He got up slowly.
‘Brothers forever.’
‘OK, Jamie.’
‘OK, Geoff.’
‘See you.’
‘See you,’ I said, letting my words fade in the evening air.
WE ARE SITTING in the back of Geoff’s father’s car. We are being driven up to the police station. It is night. My father and Geoff’s father sit in the car with us. There is a terrible silence sealing over everything. I turn to look at Geoff. But as my eyes catch his, he almost shrinks from me, as if I will hit him. I try to catch his eye again, to speak, to warn, to tell him to stay silent.