by Nick Earls
The tide, I think, has reached its height and turned. I pour the last of the wine into our glasses and we drink it.
I’m getting cold, you say, and we go inside.
We lock the doors and turn out the lights and you say you can attend to dental hygiene later. I open the windows in the bedroom and a breeze winds round from the sea and comes through the screens.
You lift my shirt up and over my shoulders and head and I feel the air on my back. You kiss my chest, take my face and kiss my mouth. I undo the buttons at the back of your dress and it slides down over your shoulders and drops to the floor. You stand there for a moment without moving, with the streetlight across your body, your white bra, your brown skin. We lie on the bed. Tonight you don’t have the sheet on you, you’re not wearing the T-shirt. I kiss your thighs, the tops of your breasts, I put my hands all over you and you hold me and close your eyes and your breathing deepens. You turn to face me, turn me onto my back and kneel over me, your hair catching all the light. You pause, as though you’re not sure what happens next and then you lower your face down to mine, you balance on your elbows, tuck your hair behind your ears and you kiss me on the mouth.
And for hours it’s like this and you say to me, Sometimes I want to do more, but we don’t.
We fall asleep next to each other, holding each other, our heads on the same pillow, one white sheet over us, lit up by the streetlight outside.
forty-seven
In the morning when the sky is a vivid blue in the window and the rosellas are shrieking in the trees I’m lying on my back, my head off the pillow, looking up at the seventies raffia shade over the light on the ceiling. And you’ve pulled the sheet around yourself, turned away from me and drawn the sheet with you so I’m lying covered by almost nothing. I move in against your sleepy-warm body and put my arm around you. You take my hand and bunch it in with the sheet against your breasts, but you don’t seem to wake.
I sleep for a little longer with my face against your shoulder. My hand feels your heart beating slowly when I wake again. This time you wake too and you open one eye and see me and say, Oh. You move so that you’re on your back and looking at me with both eyes.
When I get up I make tea and bring it back to you and you’re propped among pillows. And your dress is still on the floor where it fell, and my shirt, and you take the tea with both hands and sip it slowly.
Later we swim, and we both know it’s the last time for now. You take me out along Sugarbag Road and we have lunch with your family on a big outside table under a tree. Cliff paces up and down and looks at the ground and tells me to come back soon. Tells me not to waste my voice and all my other talents, but he never makes it clear what they are. He gives me a tape of the final mix of ‘Caravan of Love’ and a couple of other things, and he says he’ll teach me how to play guitar one day, if I want. Cause I hear you’re making more bread than a bloody bakery now, he says and smiles.
Skye hugs me and we both go very red and pretend it didn’t happen, and then she’s rude to me again.
You drive me to the bus and we don’t say much.
You park the car and the bus is already there.
I have a couple of things, you say, and you reach for a box in the back. The first is from my dad. It’s called The Potter.
And it’s a tiny clay figure of a very feral looking man wearing only a singlet, reaching out to a small wheel with big mad hands.
It looks like it’s got three legs, I say.
You look at it closely.
That’s my dad, you say. Underneath it all a very ambitious man. The other one’s from me.
It’s a grass head the size of a golf ball, and it’s got my ears and it’s laughing, and its body is a small jar done up like an academic gown, with Little Alex written around the base.
It’s a one-off, you tell me, as though you need to. A Big Merv just didn’t seem right. It’s just an undergraduate at the moment, but if you water it enough the grass grows till it becomes a mad professor.
Just for a moment, holding these things in my hands, I think I might cry. It’s a very strange and unexpected feeling.
I open my bag and wrap them carefully in T-shirts and put them near the honey you gave me when we first met.
I wrote some poems, I say, and I hand them to you.
Oh. I didn’t know you wrote poetry.
That’s all right.
You look at the first one and start to frown and blink and tell me you’ll read them later, at home.
And could you take my library books back? I never got around to it. I think I only read one of them anyway.
You take the books from me and laugh. It seems like such a domestic task.
Next you’re going to tell me they’re overdue and I have to pay a fine.
I hadn’t thought of that. I can pay you back from my condom budget. Soon.
I feel mildly nauseated when I get on the bus, quite unhappy when it drives away, past the car park you’ve already left, an empty space someone else is already backing into.
The bus is not even half-full and I have a double seat to myself. I put on my Walkman. We head out past the drive-in where the markets will be tomorrow for the second-last time, out past the airfield and the new developments and the race track, heading for the highway. At the other end my mother will meet me, other things will begin.
I play the tape, and I hear myself singing ‘Caravan of Love’. I sound more confident than I felt. Then your voice comes on, explaining what you’re doing, that the next two songs are just you accompanying yourself on guitar. And you sing ‘Not Given Lightly’ and ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’.
And I play these songs over and over on the long straight road south through the pine forests and past the mountains and into Bald Hills and the north of the city.
I’m thinking about uni, what it all means. Sandstone buildings, drinking, exams twice a year. But I can’t fit myself into this yet. But I don’t fit into those twelve years of school either.
Just these last three unlikely January weeks.
acknowledgements
There are a number of people I would like to thank, either for their direct assistance or for allowing me, on occasions, to borrow things from our pasts:
Noel Box, without whom Len Boit would have been a fictional character.
My mother, who may have said several quotable mother things.
My cousin Mark, whose cross-dressing days appear to be long behind him.
Paul, who has a unique ability with the pumpkin.
Sally Bick, then working at TEPA, for useful advice concerning tertiary entrance (at this point it is only reasonable to state that any departures from or errors in connection with the actual contemporary procedures for tertiary entrance in Queensland are the responsibility of the author, who is at times prone to handling advice clumsily and without due regard).
Robyn and Leonie, for getting this started, and keeping it going.
‘To read and review books for young adults is to meet my own adolescent self at odd and disconcerting moments, and usually to cringe in embarrassment. But occasionally, the memory evoked is clear and sweet. Nick Earls’s After January has reminded me what it is like to fall intensely, and requitedly, in love for the first time.’
The Australian
‘Very little escapes Earls’s gentle, sardonic but tolerant view of human nature. This is a genuinely witty book and Alex is an engaging character, funny, awkward and playful.’
Australian Book Review
‘A stunning novel . . . This is one of those books that reaches all ages – a beautifully written, poignant tale of adolescent angst . . . a little gem of a read.’
The Sunday Mail
‘A fine, subtly tuned story of a young man’s three weeks on the brink of change in a sharply drawn world.’
‘. . . the beginning of a new kind of Australian teenage novel.’
Viewpoint
‘After Summer is absorbing, elegiac and thoroughly memorable.’
The Times Educational Supplement
‘I found it impossible to put down . . . This really is writing at its best . . . It’s a wonderful book for anyone who feels that their life is on the brink of change . . . Fantastic!’
Guardian
‘thoughtful; very funny; bittersweet with depth’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Earls encapsulates the passion, angst, awkwardness and excitement of first romance . . . through a cast of sharply defined characters, the author wittily conveys universal truths about life and love.’
Publishers Weekly
First published 1996 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000 (twice), 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006
This edition published 2009
www.uqp.com.au
© Nick Earls 1996
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset in 11/15.5 pt Sabon by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Sponsored by Arts Queensland.
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
National Library of Australia
Earls, Nick, 1963-
After January / Nick Earls.
New ed.
ISBN (pbk) 978 0 7022 3765 2
ISBN (pdf) 978 0 7022 3786 7
ISBN (epub) 978 0 7022 5070 5
ISBN (kindle) 978 0 7022 5071-2
For secondary school age.
A823.3