by Tom Lee
The water was glorious. I bathed and restored myself in my favoured channel that cut through the rock platform between Tamarama and Mackenzies. I did some half-hearted aqua jogging and improvised aerobics in the waist-deep water. The swell was just big enough to send small waterfalls spilling over the rock ledge which formed the outer part of the channel.
I was reflecting on how different my chest hair looked when it was wet when a large dog, maybe a ridgeback, splashed into the water, pawing me with aggressive demands for some difficult to determine affection. I could hear its owner calling Toby! Toby! I managed to parry the animal’s blows, and moved to its side where I could grab and pat it without being scratched. I’m sorry, said a red-haired woman, who, like many people that fascinated me on first impression, seemed a fusion of both adult and child. It’s okay, I said, I love dogs, and dunked the animal into the water before pushing it away as I swam out into the wider part of the channel. The animal clambered out next to its owner and shook itself off before bounding away to sniff the rear of a French bulldog back towards the beach. Do you come here often? I yelled over the sound of sea – but she couldn’t hear me and continued to look out over the ocean. Do you come here often? I yelled again. She looked at me, and said, What? Do you come here often? Yes, she said, it’s a great place for Toby. Yes, I replied, it’s one of the best dog-watching spots in Sydney. I sometimes come here with a picnic in the evening or at lunch and watch the dogs. It’s better than television. She smiled and nodded before turning to ensure Toby wasn’t getting into any trouble with the other dogs that were beginning to populate the rocks.
I put my head under the water and swam down close to the seagrass so it brushed against my face, imagining I was massaging images of Toby’s owner into the perpetually growing stained-glass window in my mind. This is my private exercise, I thought, feeling the translucent leaves against my face, letting the odd bubble escape, thinking I could do this better than anyone. I looked up at the bright sky through the gelatinous opacity of the water. I was pleased to find the dog’s owner still there when I resurfaced. I ejected myself from the water and walked over. My name is Tom, I said, still dripping from the water. Rachael. Toby is a lovely dog. Yes, he can be a bit of an oaf, but he’s a good dog. I noticed I was scratching my head as I often did when nervous. I wish I had a dog, I said, but at the moment I live in my car. I think I’m going to move into a place soon. Good idea. Toby! Stay out of it. Come here. At this point Rachael removed a small soft pink plastic ball that had been hidden in her swimmers. It had a little face on it. Then she removed another, more or less exactly the same, except blue, with a few different appendages. She threw them both into the water. Due to some unaccountable compulsion I found myself sprinting towards the toys with Toby. I leapt as high as I could into the air and out over the water, perhaps hoping for a second that God would punch me at the apex of my flight, and then, splash! I pushed the dog to the side and retrieved the first toy and then the second, squeezing them in my hands to test the material. One made a dull squeaking noise. Toby was pawing me again, so I ducked under the water and swam back towards Rachael, leaping out of the water and handing her the toys. Toby joined us and we stood for a while with little to say. I noticed my palm was bleeding and with the blood emerged a vague memory of my dream. I held it out to show Rachael, who was occupied patting Toby. I thought it was probably a good time to leave, and I said goodbye, hope I see you down here again. Me too, said Rachael, trying to pry one of the toys from Toby’s mouth.
Walking back up to the Odyssey I started to imagine inviting Rachael over to dinner at my new house. I would make fresh pasta with high-protein flour and a light sauce of chilli, tomato, basil and garlic, and maybe even have some ice cream for dessert. I looked at the Odyssey parked in a well-chosen spot under a tree. We’ve come a long way, my friend, I said, but it’s time to move on, I need to have Rachael over for pasta. Rachael and I would sit in the garden after dinner and maybe we would edge close enough so our bare arms would brush up against each other. She might tell me that she needed to go home, but it wouldn’t mean she didn’t like me, just that she needed to go. I would walk her to the door and before parting I would ask if she minded if we kissed, and she would say no, that she didn’t mind, and we would kiss beneath the door frame. We would say goodbye, Rachael suggesting we meet again soon, giving the impression that she really did have a good time. I would return to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, examining the contents of the evening to extract some kind of perfect certainty that I had said and done all the right things, and that she had been impressed and hadn’t got the sense I’d been trying too hard.
Coach Fitz’s Garden, Annandale
Only a few days after our discussion in the pub I was surprised to receive a text message from Coach inviting me to her house in Annandale for a beer and some recreation in the backyard the next evening. Despite my hesitations due to the awkwardness of our last meeting and my ambivalent understanding of her intentions towards me, I overcame my apprehensions and resolved to go.
I parked my car on Albion Street and knocked on the door of an old weatherboard cottage. I received no response and repeated the gesture several times without any luck. The wooden gate leading up a tight alley to the backyard flapped open, having fallen stray of the broken brick that would hold it in place.
I cautiously made my way up the side of the house calling progressively louder hellos as I walked. The alleyway opened out into a paved area, behind which stretched a small lawn and a vegetable patch surrounded by medium-sized eucalyptus trees.
Coach was sitting at a large square wooden outdoor table with a collection of empty beer bottles and a metal bucket containing fresh, frosty beers embedded in ice. Behind her was a pigskin dartboard in a novelty medieval-style wooden cabinet, its doors ajar.
Six darts and an old baseball were arranged on the table in a manner that while appearing haphazard nonetheless seemed purposeful, and even before exchanging pleasantries I felt a compulsion to pick up a dart and connect it with some desired target in the vicinity.
When Coach stood to offer her hand I could tell that the beers had gone to work on her usually impeccable balance, a fact confirmed in her warm greeting, which was laced with a playful aggression that while often present in her voice had on this occasion risen to the surface in a more explicit, even malignant fashion.
My mind had already begun working away busily on its selection of escape routes. Darts? she said, which, considering the arrangement of elements on the table seemed like an inarguable proposition. We played a bastardised form of darts that Coach called ‘golf’, and unlike me she got steadily better as the grog kicked in further, each throw acting like an imperative to regain her composure.
After three rounds we had emptied the metal bucket of its beers, and Coach suggested we might try another game, this one involving various objects around the garden and the old baseball, that she had improvised on a previous evening. The gist of the game was to hit objects on the full with the ball, for which you were rewarded with maximum points. Lets call it ballie-ballie-thing-thing, said Coach, scanning the yard for appropriate targets. She nominated a besser brick, a lemon-scented gum, and the ‘swanny man’, a gnome-like statue of a football player in red and white standing guard over the vegetable patch.
Coach went first, and she hurled the ball with such force at the besser brick that when it hit the target it ricocheted over the wood-paling fence and into the neighbour’s backyard. She looked at me, seeming at once exasperated and entirely satisfied by the result, before scaling the fence and almost immediately popping back again, ball in hand, as though this was a routine she’d had some chance to perfect.
The game continued in this fashion, with balls flying everywhere and gestures of the victorious and the defeated becoming more elaborate and desperate as the refreshments wove their way through our bloodstreams. When we reached the swanny man in the silverbeet, the scores were locked. We had three throws each at the target and b
oth missed our first two. On her third throw Coach’s nonchalance obscured what I suspected must have been a fair amount of effort, because the outcome was a shattered swanny man, its hollow form amounting to very little once smashed into a pile in what was fast becoming a ruined vegetable patch.
Predictable peals of laughter were followed by the realisation that the game must now be forfeited and that we ought to retire to the table and perhaps to more darts, Coach with a sense of increasingly tunnelled certainty, myself willing but not without some concern as to where all this might be heading.
I did wonder whether Coach was merely using these games as an excuse to drink more, and that I was simply an accomplice and spectator called up to make the routine appear less grim. My mind turned over the possibility that at some stage during the evening I might force some kind of confrontation regarding the contradictions becoming ever more explicit between Coach’s thoughts on maladaptive practices for ritualised transcendence and her current display of infantile jubilation.
Two different possibilities were held in balance in my mind: one, that Coach, like lots of people, was unable to gain an adequate grasp on her own shortcomings, which she was aware of in a sense but which didn’t agitate her as they did when she observed them in others. Or, two, that Coach was totally aware of her own tendencies and through the application of a convenient pragmatism she had excused or trained their necessary eruption into relatively innocuous solitary displays, balanced by a varied schedule for exercise and inspiration.
Once we sat down I could tell a lengthy pep talk was on the cards. Tell me of your failings, said Coach, tapping the table as though her finger were identifying the question on its surface. What are your most profound failings? Why is it again that you have come to me? What is the source of your wish to improve? What keeps you up at night? She spoke as if she’d entirely forgotten everything we’d discussed up until this point.
For a while I scanned through possible responses without any success, turning to this or that story I’d already mined for its sense of pathos. Coach stood and positioned herself somewhere behind me, continuing to offer variations on what was more or less the same question. After the anxiety produced by her initial directness departed, I found myself beginning to discuss the period of dissolution in Sydney which was the initial provocation for my overseas trip. I decided I might acquire a sense of purpose elsewhere, I said to Coach. The west coast of Spain, to be specific, free from the stresses that led me into the same patterns of delight and sadness in my home city.
A common dream, came Coach’s voice, a common dream.
I played things poorly on my trip, I continued, and managed to embed myself in a situation very similar to the environment I’d sought to leave behind in Sydney, as though I carried the capacity for my own failures with me, and inflated them to live within as soon as I had the chance. I met with old friends who, though it was unknown to me at the time, were the source of the joy and sadness that have given my life in Sydney its particular emotional tone.
One friend in particular, her name was Alex, became the source of an intense romantic investment. Buoyed by the idea that a new me might flourish in this foreign environment, I applied myself to the task of persuading her affections with diligence, and presented a character free from its previous inhibitions. No more would I hide my thoughts in favour of pleasing others. I outlined my position on issues regularly and took those in our small group to task when I believed they deviated from principles I held to be worthy. I wore striking mesh shirts I’d dug out of op shops and applied makeup to my face and nails. I perfected dance routines of a peculiar rhythm and performed these at every opportunity, often provoking others to circle and watch my antics. I learnt the lines of songs and poems by heart, and adorned my wrists with trinket bracelets of blue stone and silver figurines. I shaved my head and attempted to sustain a front of emotional generosity in contrast to the twisted being I imagined I’d been before.
This charade soon ended, I said, when I found myself in a position of having something to lose, when my efforts to attract the attentions of Alex proved fruitful, much to my surprise. It was your Arab Spring, said Coach Fitz. I set my tent up on the rooftop balcony of the apartment which Alex was renting with a friend, I continued, and started to hang around as though her presence was the oxygen I needed to sustain myself. I became risk averse, sensitive to the idea that a false move might offend. I began to expend energy on interpreting inconsequential gestures as affirmations or negations of a potential future together. I made what must have seemed to her a shocking shift from a virtuoso and vagabond, free from needs, polite and yet immune to bad affects generated by the scrutiny of others, to this peculiar being who wished to inhabit a stable, conservative domestic arrangement.
We parted ways for a while, promising to meet up again in London, where, after joining her parents and siblings who were renting a house there on an extended holiday from Australia, she planned to move indefinitely. Ah, said Coach Fitz knowingly, the second of your great mistakes. This, I concurred, was the second of my great mistakes. I attempted to live in London for what, in comparison to the impression it left on me, was only a very short while, maybe six weeks, I now find it hard to say. I tried to make a go of the relationship that, with the help of the city, seemed to reduce my self-esteem to such a degree that I was forced to build what some might consider too close a relationship with my internal voice, as though it were the only source of structure and comfort in an increasingly unfriendly environment. You didn’t yet have a resilient repertoire of solitude techniques! said Coach. I couldn’t get a grip in the city, I continued. I spent my time aimlessly wandering the streets, not really animated by the things I saw, preferring to sustain myself with cryptic sentences in a black leather journal which also functioned as a wallet and an archive for ticket stubs and other ephemera. I retraced the same routes to parks that I’d chosen for no particular reason and would sit there in the late summer weather at a loose end, a man stripped of his program. I bought an electric shaver to trim my beard. I bought a special kind of shampoo for my itchy scalp. I tracked down a few friends that were in the throes of their own problems. Utterly skint, my daytime diet consisted of a strong coffee in the morning, then bananas, capsicums and nuts throughout the day, sometimes keeping my hunger at bay with another coffee in the afternoon. Due to my lack of money and ineptitude at finding work, I was forced to sleep opportunistically at the houses of my partner’s friends. When her parents left the city, I would stay with her in the house they had rented for the summer and wash my rucksack of clothes in the biscuity, lemon-fragranced powder that I came to associate with the city, spending the day shooing insects from the house and conceiving dinners of chicken and late-summer vegetables that would make my presence a more appealing proposition. When her parents returned, I would pack my backpack, joggers slung on the outside, books still riddled with sand from the beaches of Spain stuffed down the bottom, and escape before they arrived. Then I’d scrounge out a night of accommodation somewhere else, perhaps paying for a shared room in a hostel, sleeping on the bedroom floor of a friend, or even on a couple of occasions sleeping under the bushes of a nearby private common, putting myself to sleep with a series of nausea-inducing cigarettes.
Alex seemed to evolve in the opposite direction. She developed the active lifestyle and outgoing attitude that had been one of the reasons I was so drawn to her originally. She began a militaristic routine of morning runs before work and gym sessions in the evening, and became fearsomely committed to establishing networks of friends in the city. The levels of pride she had in her own family seemed to increase, and I could say nothing of consequence in any conversation that made my own legacy seem important. All our dialogues were oriented around either her birdwatching dad, hard-working mum, eccentric younger brother or a cast of ambitious, stylish, witty, cosmopolitan friends. I merely had my diary, to which I turned in her absence during the days. It might seem like an odd thing to notice, I said to Coach Fitz
, but her eyeballs became strikingly clear and whenever we talked I inspected them distractedly, marvelling at their brightness and transparency, in comparison with the dull glaze of my own, which I spent increasingly long periods inspecting in bathroom mirrors.
Without work I had no injection of routine to give form to my days. I didn’t run or use outdoor gyms, nor did I find myself able to show any interest in the built environment. I lacked mediators to open up the city for me. You experienced the city in a suboptimal fashion, said Coach Fitz. I existed in the bubble of an improbable love, I carried on, which I sought to maintain in good part due to its improbability and the legend I had concocted for myself that showed its unlikely evolution.
Without my noticing, Coach had replaced my previously empty beer with another, as icy cold as those we first enjoyed from the bucket.
It was as though I’d rescued something rare, an improbability, I continued, and that was a reason in itself to nurture it. I had set myself the challenge to obtain a dream and worked away hard, ruining any sense of perspective, any grasp on what a self-respecting individual might do in such a situation.
I recall sitting in the empty house of one of Alex’s friends. I was confronting the dawning realisation, still not quite able to admit it to myself, that I’d lost sight of myself. I had overstayed my welcome. I was the residue of a holiday in Spain who through determination and finite resources of charisma had managed to keep a possibility alive longer than seemed likely. Now, in this new life, in this new city, without the means or the initiative to reinvent myself, I was starting to become an irritant.
I sat at the table in the living room scrawling absurd, self-referential sentences in my journal. A purple balloon that had been slung up some weeks before for a party popped loudly in the silence and shook me to my bones, my scalp beginning to itch on cue. At which point I realised I needed to leave that city. I had become very vulnerable, lacking the network of friends and familiar sights that would reliably remind me that I lived within them as well as within myself, and lacking motivation to stimulate my body and mind through exercise and exploration of my environment.