by Nick Earls
I should stop thinking of it as though it’s weeks of sensory deprivation leading up to an execution. I should stop thinking of it and get a life.
The waves change with changes in the weather far out to sea, storms and cyclones and winds, and the first of January blew in a forest of red weed and a fleet of blue box jellyfish, and the second blew them away again. Whatever it’s like I go to the beach early because I’m in the habit of it. It’s the best time. On all but the worst days I swim, and my body is still warm and creased with sleep and the first cold wave always comes as a shock.
I’m facing the house when I look back at the shore, the fibro beach house lit up white by the sun, the white plastic chairs on the long veranda, the unbleached calico curtains through the locked sliding glass doors, my mother asleep inside. My mother who was very clear with her This is my holiday too you know and I don’t expect to be woken before nine. Said as a joke, but worth remembering anyway. And I expect to have my breakfast brought to me in bed when I call for it. She said that too. Yeah, so do I, I remember telling her; I wonder who’ll bring it to us. So she makes her own breakfast, and takes it back there on a tray every day, and I can hear her swearing as she manoeuvres around among the crumbs afterwards, trying to read a novel.
This is a house I have known all my life, and each summer spent in it is a variation on the same routine. My mother with her same holiday expectations of doing nothing for weeks, but gardening by the third day and cleaning out leaves from the gutters because it’s not as though anyone else will ever do it. It’s not as though anyone else would even notice. Meaning my father.
Each year I come up here and the sliding door opens and the house smells of seagrass matting just the way I know it will, that trapped musty smell that it accumulates in just a few warm days. And there’s the same Caloundra furniture, the seventies Brisbane lounge suite where anyone who sits down is taken prisoner by the sagging upholstery, the underfilled bean bags covered in bedroom curtains from so long ago I can’t remember them as curtains, the pine dining table with its bench seats and the teeth marks of infants, including perhaps my own. And on the wall the same macrame owl with mismatched shells for eyes. There is nothing like this place.
I swim in the sea right in front of the house. I catch waves that take me in a straight line right back towards the bright white fibro. This is the part of every holiday least like life in a flat in the city. Waves at the door. Even if there are better waves to the north at Dicky Beach or south at Kings, I usually swim here. These waves are mine.
This morning the waves aren’t great but they’re okay, coming in in unspectacular threes and fours with long spaces between. I float and I look out to sea in case there’s anything better out there, but there isn’t, so then I set off on whatever’s passing.
I’m built for this, made into a shape with this in mind, my light streamlined body – describing it in terms of its aerodynamics is the kindest way to deal with fifty-five kilos stretched across a 178-centimetre frame – my arms looped under me like the runners on a sled. And I stay on the wave all the way in. All the way till there is no wave and it fades to nothing and drops out from under me. Some days when the surf is right it takes me all the way till I hit sand with the tip of my shoulder or the bony points of my pelvis and I flip or roll and the wave slips back and I’m on the beach. On the beach with sand down my togs and in my hair and in my mouth, and no one else catches waves this way. But then maybe no one else is built with a chest like a bird cage, a body shape not often found desirable, that feels quite undesirable when I’m beached and I’m all ribs and limbs and none of my angles are turned in any way gracefully. I have assumed that I am more likely to be desired for my wit and intellect, and possibly only in winter when I can hide the rest in jumpers. But it’s a body that catches waves in a way the more conventionally shaped can only envy. A body you’ll grow into, my mother sometimes says as a joke. A body I’ll never grow used to.
But there’s more to you than that, my mother says. What about that girl Juliet, the one who was in the play with you? What about her? We did the play, we kissed in the school play and it all lingers in my mind like a relationship. The problem was it was probably only ever in my mind. I can see her even now, that look, the last look she ever gave me, telling me about a school dance as though we were arranging to meet there. I went but I didn’t see her. I haven’t seen her since. All I have left is the fifteen episodes of our ‘relationship’, thirteen rehearsals and two performances, and the story I wrote two days later when she was all I could think about. The story I showed my mother in a moment of weakness, not realising of course how much she would like it. It’s beautiful, she said. It’s beautiful. And she kept saying it as though it was some miracle. It’s beautiful, and nobody dies. You wrote this story and nobody dies. There’s no blood at all. No weapons, no heavy machinery, no mutilation. It’s so unlike you.
She started making copies and I took this for the grim sign that it was. At least one copy changed hands at a parent-teacher night and my English teacher took me aside the next day and told me it should be in the school magazine. I told him that as I was one of the editors I thought this would be inappropriate and he told me, There’s a time and a place for modesty, and he seemed to have made up his mind that this was neither. I told him that the girl in the story was based on the daughter of my maths teacher, Mr Koh, and that the story was based on the school play and I was really rather annoyed with my mother for circulating it. He said that it was a beautiful story and that my mother was right to be proud and that he was sure people would accept it as a work of fiction if that’s what we told them it was. I said that in many respects, or at least in some, it was actually fiction, but I was concerned about how Mr Koh would feel. He looked at me earnestly with his rumpled middle-aged face and his fading grey eyes and he said again that it was a beautiful story, and he was sure Mr Koh would see it that way too. I knew I was losing. After this he brought me his poetry, and took notes when I gave my opinion. I knew I should never have written that story.
And it went in the school magazine and won the literary competition and it gave me a fleeting clandestine kind of fame, but fame only among the sort of people who had already seen the play and who would think a story in which almost nothing happens can still have credibility. For the socially important, the several acts of this tiny drama passed completely unnoticed.
Maybe Juliet saw it but whether she did or she didn’t I haven’t seen her since. Not at any dance, not at schoolies’ week, not at all.
I catch a wave. And it’s as though I’m passing through this summer in a bubble. Vaguely detached and drifting. I’m not even thinking about the wave. I’m observing but not participating, squandering these counting-down days, willing January to come to an end, willing it not to.
There are people out now, jogging, walking dogs without leashes despite the signs, a girl in the surf nearby. I notice her as I turn and she’s on a wave, lifting herself to a standing position on her board. And the sun is partly behind her, reflecting off the water so I don’t see her well. Tanned legs balanced perfectly and comfortably, sun-bleached hair in a wet ponytail, the bare elegant muscles of her shoulders and back. This is the last thing I need, to be floating around staring into the sun at some girl I can’t even see properly. I should go home and write a story about it and please my mother.
One more wave and I’ll go in. There’s always the temptation to wait for a really good wave to finish with but I know it won’t come today. So I take the next one and I head for the showers. This is all part of the routine, right down to the seventy cents I’ve wrapped in my towel to buy the Courier-Mail.
On these mornings my brain doesn’t work till it’s woken by the surf, so I need the routine. This, my mother says, is a habit of my father’s, and hence not highly regarded. My mother claims to despise routines, though she will inevitably enact one within the next few hours when she makes her br
eakfast. It’s not a routine, she’ll say if I question her. It’s just something I enjoy doing, so why shouldn’t I do it every day?
At the newsagent in Seaview Terrace I buy the paper, like every other morning, and I walk home with my towel around my shoulders and let myself in with the key I have left in one of the sandshoes lying near the door. The house is dark inside and still cool, my mother almost certainly still asleep.
two
I read the paper. I consume the silent breakfast I am now used to. Not the high speed breakfast of home, my mother rushing to be ready for work and me for school. The holiday breakfast when no one else is awake and there’s just the sound of the sea out the back and the scraping of the knife on the toast and the boiling of the jug.
I take my tea and toast to the table and read the paper but this is summer and no one around here is making news. The real stories are in other countries.
So what do I do now? I’ve finished the paper and there’s no one around. I’ve finished the books on the bookshelves. This is clearly a test of my abilities as a holiday-maker, my ability to relax. I hear my mother turn over in bed, but in the way sleeping people do, not like someone waking up.
I could go for another swim but the surf is no good. I could go next door but I don’t hear anyone up yet, and I can usually hear Len clattering a few things around in the kitchen if he’s making breakfast.
I decide to sleep. I try to tell myself this is fine, that this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do on a holiday and it doesn’t indicate that I’ve run out of even vaguely productive activities. I try to convince myself that this is a choice, that I actually want to go back to sleep.
I lie on a bean bag, on cartoon palm trees with their cartoon monkeys in fezes and waistcoats and slippers turned up at the toes. Maybe this is a movie I liked, so my mother bought the curtains for my room. I don’t recall. I can remember being so bored in Fantasia that I cried, but I don’t remember the monkey cartoon. Maybe it was only ever just a curtain. I don’t know.
three
The curtains in my dream are brown, violent geometric brown and burnt orange. A cyclone is beginning. My parents stand on the brown-tiled balcony, looking down Pumicestone Passage, over Bribie Island and out to sea. My mother, who is in the late stages of pregnancy, has both her hands on the white railing. My father has one hand on her right shoulder, tenderly. (This is after all a dream, and it has its own rules.)
My mother’s hand holds an envelope, my tertiary entrance offer. She seems unaware of it, even though it’s my whole future. The wind gusts. The free end of the envelope flaps against the railings, as though it doesn’t matter at all, as though it’s up to the wind now, and the wind doesn’t care.
I’m at a window. At the huge window along the side of Mayne Hall at uni with my mouth sucked against the glass in a pool of steam, my uvula waggling at the back of my throat as the air moves out in a scream that goes nowhere. There are thousands of people in the hall for orientation, thousands of people and, far up the back, one empty seat. I read the Vice Chancellor’s lips as they say, Well if everyone’s here we’ll begin, and everyone shrugs their shoulders and he does begin and I’m not there.
I’m in a bubble. In a bubble, turning over and over in blind warm fluid and my mother holds the envelope in one hand and doesn’t even know. I’m in an advanced stage of intra-uterine life and already the future is beyond my grasp, beyond my tiny waxy see-through fingers, squeezing and relaxing pointlessly in the fluid.
And there are monkeys around me. Monkeys in fezes and waistcoats and slippers turned up at the toes and they’re dancing. Dancing for hours and hours to the same insistent rhythm section with an occasional sax solo from a crocodile in dark glasses. Hours and hours of the same repetitive monotonous pointless steps and the same inane smiles with the background switching from homogenous pink to homogenous blue and back again every couple of bars.
Fantasia.
I think I’m going to cry.
four
Lying there with your mouth open catching flies, my mother says when I wake.
She is making breakfast. No one has brought it to her in bed.
Like your cousin, she says. Do you remember Mark when he was young? When he was three maybe and that whole summer he’d want to stay up late and be part of everything and every night he’d sit in a bean bag and pass out.
He is now fourteen but he will always be trapped by his aunt’s memories of the summer he wanted to wear a woman’s black silk blouse all the time. The summer when he could only go to the toilet with the door open while he sat there swinging his legs and singing. It was a small house and its toilet was a strangely proportioned room that seemed to deliver its every sound to every other part of the house, but only when the door was open. We were a close family that summer, and we had no choice but to know intimately every sound Mark made in there.
This is what my mother is telling me. This is the joke. Not merely that my mouth happened to be open because I fell asleep half sitting up on a bean bag, but that this implies I am a juvenile cross-dresser who attends to very personal needs in public.
I’ve finished my book, she says, as though this means her plan of going back to bed with her breakfast is ruined. Is there anything in the paper?
Not really.
When will your thing be coming out? The offer.
A couple of weeks or so. A few weeks.
Today neither of us wants this conversation. She picks up the front section of the paper and manages not to tell me it doesn’t matter really. She begins to eat her toast and I know she wants to tell me that tertiary offers are no reflection of a person’s worth, that there is much more to a person than a numerical score and a coded offer, but even she knows that every time she tries to convince us both of this she sounds like a self-help book that is in reality a no-help book. Next, in the conversation we are not having today, I would be told of the many joys ahead, whatever the outcome. I would be told again about her days at uni, the great times she had, the balls, the late nights, horrendous medical student practical jokes, the man who accidentally threw a liver out of the window of the anatomy lab because someone ducked, the clinical tutorial when people loaded her pockets with condoms and she pulled out her stethoscope and they flew everywhere. Right in front of the Professor of Medicine. And so on.
This is supposed to help me, to promise me bright moments, but what if I don’t have them? What if it doesn’t work out this way? What if I end up making the wrong friends early on and behave like a complete dork and study hard and end up with an honours degree by accident and the people who have the fun don’t speak to me, don’t even know I exist? It seems distinctly possible that the cool people will find each other early and I’ll be left with the losers. That I will spend my glorious undergraduate days not in the company of heroes, but with people who never miss a tute, never miss a lecture, never go out at night, bring packed lunches instead of hanging out wherever it is you’re supposed to hang out, trip over condom vending machines and cause themselves trivial injuries instead of knocking off a handful for a legendary prank or two, and don’t even have the social skills to judge when to blow their noses. Revenge of the Nerds part five and I’m the Nerd King. Not the biggest nerd, but the best a nerd can ever aspire to. An unfortunate organism that only a rude quirk of fate prevented from having a human life. Another one of those times when a really important line was drawn, and I was damn close.
Today, we don’t have this conversation. Today we side-step the conversation, and I jump right to the failing part. I am growing used to this now. I expect that when I turn up at uni, whatever course I end up doing, this will have become so much a part of me that I shall seek out the nerds early, and live as one of them.
Perhaps I should tell my mother now, and attempt to lessen the inevitable later pain.
five
I hear feet on the steps outside
. The unhurried heavy feet of Len Boit.
G’day young Alex, he says when his head appears over the edge of the veranda. Fancy a frame or two?
His right hand vigorously works an imaginary cue while his face realigns its wrinkles to make his one open eye seem very large as it takes aim at a distant pocket. This, for a moment, might look like a clever caricature of a pool player, but it is in fact the very way Len plays every shot. Same enthusiastic cue work, same intimidating cycloptic aim.
Son, I could make those balls talk once, he told me a year or two ago.
Perhaps he could, though most of us would settle for hitting them into the pockets.
It’s all bloody trigonometry and a good eye, he said. That’s all it is.
And the eye was more than apparent, and when it came to the trigonometry I knew the maths but for me it always seemed easier on the page.
The balls are already racked when we get to Len’s place. We chalk our regular cues with the solemnity of duellists. As the guest it is the custom that I break first.
With characteristic caution, Len says after my shot as he sizes up his options, young Alex breaks and gives nothing away.
So he mirrors the shot, sending the cue ball down and back and glancing one ball on the way. I make the first mistake. A slight misjudgment and the cue ball ricochets into the pack. Len pots the ten and the twelve, and I don’t usually win from here. Today is no exception. He takes the second frame too, but it’s closer, and he tells me he should be heading off to the Home.