After January

by Nick Earls

  There’s some of that chicken left for lunch, she says as she goes, and some Coles salads.

  This would usually be a good time to play pool with Len, but he and Hazel are taking a bus-load of the oldies somewhere for the day. Len will make sure that wherever they are they’ll manage a few beers with lunch and he’ll have them all singing ‘Brown Slouch Hat’ on the way back to the Home. And when he drops them off he’ll say, I think you’ll find they’ll sleep well tonight, Matron, with a big wink, and the old diggers will stagger off the bus saying, Good on ya Sarge, because there were several times during the war when Len was a sergeant, though he never held the rank for long. Busted for the stupidest things, he will have told them long ago, just like he’s told me. I even lost a bloody stripe before El Alamein for eating a square of my chocolate ration early. So they like to call him Sarge, even though he was more often a corporal at best.

  Without Len there is no pool and no poetry, and the place is quiet because there is nothing going on but waiting. And it’s driving me fairly close to crazy. I know she’s out there.

  fourteen

  By mid-afternoon I am still sitting on the back veranda with my book. Still sitting, more than half way through it now, but thinking about going down to the beach again. I hear feet on the front steps. A voice calls Hello. It’s her, it really sounds like her.

  F.

  I stand up and drop the book and I say, Hello, back and I walk to the sliding door at the other end of the veranda.

  Hi, she says, seeing me from the top of the steps and through the living room. She is smiling.

  I reach for the screen door and, forgetting it needs to be handled gently, I de-rail it and it falls away from me and into the living room, hitting the nearby bean bag with a wheezy thump and sliding off onto the floor in front of me. I am left standing like a stereotypical silent-movie idiot, my hand still feeling for the long-gone door handle, the fallen door barring my way. She is at the front of my house and I am at the back of my house, wrecking the house that stands between us in order to get to her. She is of course laughing now. It would be a mistake for her to make any attempt to avoid laughing at an incident of such cruel comedy. But she makes no attempt whatsoever, and she laughs a lot.

  I pick up the door, fortunately without damaging anything else, and I lean it against the wall, trying to make it look as though I do this all the time.

  Is it damaged, she asks me, or does it just need a push start?

  It falls out a lot, I tell her. All the time. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to do that to that door. We should pay for someone to fix it properly.

  I open the front screen door with great caution.

  A lot of very sophisticated people have done that to that back door you know.

  I’m sure they have. And I’m sure some of them went the same shade of red. Do you want a swim?

  Yeah.

  I just thought I’d drop round cause I thought I’d go for a swim and the surf’s much better at Kings. I didn’t know if you had a car so I thought I’d drop round and see if you wanted to go there. In case you were thinking of going for a swim.

  Yeah. That’d be good. Let me just lock up what’s left of the house.

  I go round locking and shutting things and trying not to think about the door incident, trying to re-define it in a more positive way. There isn’t one, but she’s still here, waiting to take me to Kings Beach in her Moke.

  We drive up Maltman Street and she apologises for the radio being old and only AM. There’s country music coming through, filled with static, and she turns it off as though I might hold her responsible for the programming.

  What does F stand for? I ask.

  What does F stand for?

  Yeah. F.

  Lots of things I suppose. Why? Is this a car game, like I Spy or something?

  Your name. Doesn’t your name begin with F?

  And there is a horrible fear running through me, telling me that I invented the honey, the note, and that this is where I do my cause irreparable damage. Just here near the lighthouse, on the crest of the highest hill around, an enormous view with nothing beginning with F, nothing that would let me change my mind and make it I Spy.

  Oh, that’s right. The honey. Did I just put F? I hope you liked the honey.

  Yeah, the honey was really nice. Thanks. And F, the F on the note?

  Sorry, that’s just habit really. Leaving notes for my family when I go out. Of course, they know what comes after the F, so I don’t need to put the rest.

  She stops then, as though it is answered.

  I don’t have the rest, I tell her. I don’t have the bit after the F. Okay, let’s do this the obvious way, as though we’ve just met, and not over a clutch cable, or breakfast, or honey. My name is Alex.

  And mine, she says, mine starts with an F.

  That’s all I’m getting? F?

  It’s a start. It’s a good start. There are a lot of names that don’t start with F.

  And I have to guess now?

  If you want to. Nobody’s making you. F might be enough for you.

  Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should be grateful, I tell her. Here I was sitting around having just another holiday at the coast, catching a few waves, fixing cars for friends, and all of a sudden I’ve got F. You’re right. It would be greedy to ask for more. Fiona.

  Fiona. And she says Fiona as though she is thinking about it very seriously. No.

  Not Fiona.

  No. Not even close.

  Not even close? What’s close to Fiona?

  Nothing that matters to you, Alex.

  Don’t say that.

  What?

  My name. You tricked me. You shouldn’t have my name. You should just have an A. An A would be tough.

  F will be tough enough, Alex.

  Fran. Anything like Fran. Frances.

  She shakes her head.

  Can I buy another letter?

  I’ll give you another letter. And to show you how generous I am, I’ll not only give you a vowel, but I’ll make it the second letter. O.

  O. F, O. Fo.

  And this has me thinking, the rest of the way to Kings. She parks the car.

  Are you making this up? I ask her.

  She laughs. No.

  Is it, don’t take this the wrong way, but is it a weird name?

  A weird name. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I bet you think a lot of names are weird names.

  Fo. That’s all I’ve got. Fo.

  And the next day I see you I might give you another letter.

  Okay. Okay. Is it a long name?

  It’s quite a long name.

  And do I get a letter a day?

  Maybe.

  Okay. Okay Fo. I can be patient.

  Then let’s swim.

  And with that she takes her T-shirt off. and she has a body that makes me realise I should have worn board shorts. So already I like her, she behaves as though she might like me, she plays consistently with an irresistible elusiveness, and now the body. The body in a blue and white striped one piece and I’m about to drop my shorts to my multi-coloured Christmas-present dick togs. The dreaded DTs that highlight every male contour. I sense this would not be a good point in our relationship to be carrying obvious signs of arousal in my togs. So I try to contemplate only the intellectual dilemma of her name, and I run quickly into the water, just in case.

  So show me your stuff, she says, surfacing beside me after diving under a wave. This bodysurfing you’ve been doing all your life.

  The waves aren’t great, I tell her.

  I know. That’s why I didn’t bring my board. Come on, impress me.

  So we catch a few and of course she knows what she’s doing, but she doesn’t have a body lik
e mine so she doesn’t quite make the distance.

  You’re not bad for a city boy, she tells me.

  And when she takes me home she says she’ll stay for a drink and we sit on the veranda with mineral water and I wonder when my mother will turn up. I can’t cope with the idea of having to introduce someone to my mother by using only part of their name, and fumbling my way through an explanation that sounds more like ‘Wheel of Fortune’.

  Fo. What kind of name does that begin? We talk and there are no clues.

  There’s no one here, she says.

  No. My mother’s gone to Noosa for the day.

  There’s just you and your mother then?

  Yeah. Well, I have a father as well, but he isn’t here. He’s in Brisbane, with family number two. I usually spend a week or so up here with him each holiday, usually before Christmas, then a couple of weeks with my mother. Christmas Day is often the hand-over period, but that can be subject to negotiation.

  Who does the negotiating?

  Me. My Mother. We have custody of me.

  I make her laugh with this, which is good. I don’t want her thinking my family arrangements are a big deal.

  We call the shots. But my father’s pretty good about that sort of thing. He’s not great about a lot of things, but that one he’s fine with. He’ll go along with what I want when it comes to what I do for summer. What about you?

  What about me? Summer’s pretty busy for me. It’s a great time for making money out of tourists. Not that we’re ever out to make a lot but if we have a good summer the rest of the year’s much easier. We’re more established down here now though, now that we’ve been here a couple of years.

  So what do you do?

  Well, there’s the honey and other things like that. And things we make.

  You make money out of honey and things you make? That’s wild.

  It’s not a new idea.

  What do you make?

  A few things. My father’s the main maker of things. He’s a potter, I suppose, but he does a few things. My mother runs it all. My sisters and I go to school, or we have been going to school. I’ve finished now. We help out when we can.

  So what are you going to do now that you’ve finished school?

  Make things, I suppose. I haven’t got any definite plans. Not yet. I’m pretty comfortable with all this, living here, catching a few waves when I can. I’m in no hurry to move on.

  What about the future?

  The future? Like Arts/Law Queensland Uni? I just have a funny feeling that’s not my future. There are a lot of people who want all that stuff. I’m happy to leave it to them. And I think some of them are just doing it because people expect them to.

  Yeah. Or because they’re not so good at making things. I once made a cake tin at school and the first time my mother used it one of the ends came undone. I think she knew it was going to happen. I could just see by the way she looked at it when she was putting the mixture in. And pretty soon it was sitting on the bottom of the oven like a big overdone biscuit.

  This is, of course, only one of many such stories of ineptitude, but she has already lived through the clutch cable fiasco and the screen door, so I decide not to bore her with any more examples.

  She stays a while longer and we sit on the veranda with our legs hanging over the edge, leaning on the lower rail, drinking our mineral water. And she tells me about her family and their several hectares of bush at Little Mountain, her younger twin sisters whose names both start with S, and her parents C and G.

  I am beginning to wonder if she has somehow intruded upon my library fantasy, where alphabetically adjacent authors are instrumental in the babe encounter.

  The breeze comes in, soft off the sea, and it pushes the waves of her hair around and she tucks them out of the way with her fingers, casually braiding the strands as she talks. She has fine fingers and hair all the colours of sand, white, ochre, ash. This I can see now I’m closer, and more of those green eyes. And I imagine the city taking all these colours away, and F wilting like an exotic plant taken to a cold climate and kept indoors, her hair turning to a limp brown, the emerald light in her eyes fading to a dull green-grey, her honey skin turning pasty. Maybe she needs this light, the space, the sea breeze.

  She tells me she has work to do, things to make.

  I’ll see you soon, she says when she goes, and she gives me a smile that says she likes this game where she decides when soon is, and I don’t even know her name.

  fifteen

  My mother returns without bags.

  You’d be proud of me, she says. Apart from lunch and coffee I didn’t spend a cent.

  What went wrong? I ask her. Noosa can’t have run out of your size.

  Well if it has I wouldn’t know. That never became an issue. This was not a shopping day for Gina. Gina. And she throws her hands in the air, as though this is some joke at the expense of her very expressive friend. Man trouble, she says. Man trouble. They’re all bastards you know. You can’t trust them.

  I say nothing. Gina has had man trouble before. Once she had such bad man trouble she even had her dog de-sexed. I won’t have balls in my house, she told my mother, or so my mother’s story goes. This is perhaps not the time to remind her.

  My mother continues. So whatever you decide to be, for God’s sake don’t be a man.

  You parents, I tell her, sometimes you have such unreasonable expectations of your children. What do you want me to be when I grow up?

  Don’t grow, she implores me. Don’t even grow into clothes. Still waving those hands around in a way that turns everything she says into a ridiculous emphatic pronouncement. Stay young and beautiful and unspoiled.

  Do you know how hard it is to get spoiled these days? Do you know how hard I’ve tried to get spoiled, but I’ve been brought up responsible. Once again I am nothing more than the victim of rigid parenting. But in the end that’s all going to pay off and I imagine I’ll grow up to be just like my father.

  Don’t make me angry.

  Hey, I’m male. I’m likely to make you angry. It’s the ball thing, remember? I take no responsibility for my chromosomes.

  No responsibility. No responsibility. You learned that from a man, right? I didn’t teach you that.

  She makes a pot of tea and we drink it on the back veranda. She tells me about Gina and the man, the man Gina met through an agency who had written on his form looking for a committed relationship. He had written this down; he had not simply ticked a box. Gina had not felt good about going to an agency in the first place, and she had chosen to meet this man because she too was looking for a committed relationship.

  So they had lunch a couple of times, my mother tells me, because lunch is pretty safe and it gives you a chance to check someone out. But the third time they met he was all slime, and it became very clear that his view of the way these agencies work differed from Gina’s. So that was that.

  I imagine it wasn’t. I imagine my mother heard every grim detail, but I’m quite happy with this shortened version.

  So we talked. We sat there with this great ocean view, drinking coffee and talking about all of this, and there was no need to be in Noosa at all really. We didn’t shop; she didn’t want to shop. She’s really not very happy. She wasn’t happy before but she’s worse now. I wish she could just work out that she doesn’t need anything like that for her to be happy. But what can I do?

  I am not expected to answer this, just to make an mmmm noise and go along with it.

  So how was your afternoon?

  Fine.

  Of course, that’s all I say. Fine, pause. And any opportunity for saying more slips by in an instant, so by the time I’ve gone Fine, pause, I can’t say anything else or it might mean far too much.

  Fine. I went for a swim.

  What a chan
ge. Endless variety, these holidays provide for you, don’t they?

  I’m not complaining.

  Particularly, I’m not complaining about how yesterday’s sarcasm becomes today’s irony so effortlessly. If I had to complain about anything at the moment it would be my mother’s expectation that I go back to Brisbane with her at the end of the week. This bothers me all the rest of the afternoon.

  We go to the Boits’ around six-thirty. Len and Hazel have invited us over for a barbecue and I can already hear activity in the kitchen before we reach the door.

  Come on in. Come on in, Len says, seeing us through the screen. I’m just tossing the salad.

  He wipes his hands on the apron he is wearing to protect a lively Hawaiian shirt. He goes to the fridge to pour my mother a glass of cask wine and fetch me a beer.

  How was Noosa, Tessa? he says, still facing the fridge and obscuring almost all of it with his large frame. He holds the glass in his left hand and turns the spigot with his right and the wine dribbles noisily, as though he is nonchalantly weeing into his vegie crisper. I try very hard to put this image from my mind, but it isn’t helped when he gives the near-empty cask a bit of a shake to get the last of it out.

  Fine, my mother with her safer side-on view tells him. Like it always is, busy and very fond of itself. Didn’t find anything I had to buy though.

  And your day, young Alex? How was it? He gives me a big wink as he turns. My mother notices.

  Good. Good. It was good. I had a swim or two.

  Of course I say this slowly and carefully, to give nothing away, but that only makes the wink more suspicious. My mother is looking at me now. She says nothing.

  Surf’s not great, I go on to say. It’s okay, but it’s not great. How was your bus trip?

  They seemed to like it. One or two of the fellas might have had a beer too many at the Ettamogah Pub on the way back, but it didn’t stop them singing.

  The doorbell rings.

  That’ll be Clive and Alma. Could you get that, Haze. I’m knee deep in salad.