After the Blues

by Kathy Lette

  ‘She won’t hack it,’ I heard Bruce reassure his mates as they paddled out behind me. ‘Chicks can’t surf. It’s their tits. Puts ’em off balance.’

  The three mates, known locally as the Bob Hawke Surf Team (they work as brickie’s labourers in the winter and live on the dole all summer), grunted in agreement. Girl surfers were only tolerated because of their perv value – the guys paddled out behind them and watched their pert little bottoms rising up for duck dives.

  As the wave approached, I flicked the speedo elastic over my chickers, built up speed, then hoisted myself up on my arms and sunk my shin into the tail as the whole board submerged. The sea went into a spin rinse.

  Craning over my shoulder, I saw the boys bob up after the wall of water had washed over their heads. I’d beaten them out the back. They’d be spewing.

  They made their way into the take-off zone. Sitting astride their thrusters, surveying the swells, Bruce, Bodge and Squid gave me the full-on hairy eyeball.

  ‘Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum.’ Knifing the air with a flattened palm, Bodge warbled the theme song of Jaws.

  ‘Well, well, well, check out who it is!’ Bruce planted his hands on his hips. ‘We heard you’d turned into a full on Av cat, Deb.’ There had always been aggro between Cronullites and the seaweed-munchers from Avalon. ‘You can’t surf Vooey, little girl,’ Bruce scoffed. ‘You’ll get killed!’

  Sitting on the inside, I could see a set peaking. Knowing my backhand was hot, I was relishing pulling into one. I lay down and started stroking towards the wave. Bruce started paddling for the same one. ‘This is a man’s wave!’ he yelled. But I was certain he wouldn’t drop in on me. Not on the first wave of the day. That was a severe breach of surfing etiquette.

  I felt the swell pick me up. Hoisting myself up as it peaked, I was jacked heavily and took a vertical drop. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bruce taking off. The bastard. I dropped low, put my weight on my back foot and swept into a heavy backhand bottom turn. The Neanderthal nerd had delayed his first turn so that I’d be crushed by the lip. Chundered. Dunked. The Human Tea Bag. Spluttering to the surface, I squirmed back onto my board and paddled out of the impact zone, cursing this shark fucker.

  Back in the line-up the boys smirked and sniggered. They yahooed Bruce as he paddled back out to join them. I sat outside, waiting for the next set, feeling piss-weak.

  As surfie chicks, we had folded their towels, bought their Chiko Rolls, minded their milkshakes, turtle-backed (‘Once you’re on your back,’ the boys told us, ‘you’re fucked.’) and got branded. We used to cut our boyfriends’ names out in paper and sticky-tape them onto our tummies to get a tan tattoo. Most of my surfie girlfriends would have a huge dossier branded onto their bellies by the end of every summer. Frieda had the most, but that was before she went full on Footyhead. If I ever get cancer the malignant growth will be in the shape of my first boyfriend’s name. Imagine it, a melanoma called Bruce. But, that’s why I’d come back here, wasn’t it? To get a Bruce-ectomy.

  A heavy lull set in. Frustrated, I paddled for some waves which didn’t break. To beat the tedium, the boys tried to stand up on their boards and balance in the still water. Arms semaphoring, they chucked three-sixties. Bruce pulled his board down into the water, took aim and let it fly at me like a harpoon. I wasn’t worried. Board-flicking was a big Lull Practice. His leg-rope stopped it just short of my head.

  Two other guys were paddling out. I recognised Soula’s married, teacher boyfriend. Wayne was from Maroubra, but the Greenhills gang knew him from surfing comps, before he became a chalkie. The bloke with him was a windsurfer from Avalon, a total trendoid with a fashionable haircut – curly on top and shaved round the sides.

  ‘Whatcha doin’ hangin’ round with an Av cat pineapple-head, Wazza?’ Bruce droned in disgust.

  ‘What happened to the surf?’ whinged Wayne. ‘Triple J reckoned it was glassy, four-to-five-foot perfection. This is … ah … Damien.’

  ‘Aren’t you a wind wanker, mate?’ Bruce interrogated, hostile as buggery.

  ‘Hey Deb!’ Wayne grinned and started to paddle towards me. ‘Ripper. How goes it? Gettin’ many? Haven’t seen you round Cronulla before.’

  ‘It’s chocker enough without chicks,’ Bruce growled. ‘Dunno what the world’s coming to. Chicks surfin’ up and down the coast. Spokespersons and chairpersons an’ all that shit.’

  ‘Yeah,’ chorused Squid. ‘And what the fuck are they gonna call mail men?’ he yelled over at me. ‘Person persons?’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon.’ Wayne turned tail quickly and paddled back to them. Surfers’ emotions are kind of ingrown. On their lonesome they’re not total rejects. It’s only in packs that they turn into walking, talking, real-life Neanderthals.

  The surf had gone flat as a tack. We all sat astride our boards waiting and watching for the set. Nervous, I played noughts and crosses with my nail in the board wax while the boys talked.

  ‘I dunno,’ Damien said, checking me out. ‘I reckon feminism’s let us blokes sort of tap into our own sensitivity.’ He fished down his board shorts to rearrange his balls. ‘Feminism’s made me heaps more sensitive and vulnerable.’

  The Bob Hawke Surf Team swapped looks of loathing. ‘S’pose your shit’s stopped stinkin’, too.’ Squid took aim with a missile of mucous. It slithered down the nose of Damien’s board.

  ‘In fact,’ Damien continued unperturbed, directing his comments at me, ‘I now consider myself a male feminist.’

  ‘What does that make you, a closet lesbian?… Shit!’ Squid heaved his board sideways to avoid a nasty-looking clump of toilet paper and turd. ‘Blind mullets,’ he warned, and the boys lifted up their legs.

  ‘It’s a spin-out, I know. I mean, the prospect of compulsory orgasm freaks me right out too, guys.’

  Bodge looked at him blankly. ‘Speak Australian, wouldja?’

  ‘Women,’ Damien elaborated, ‘are demanding more in bed these days.’

  Bruce shrugged. ‘Are they?’

  Squid peeled off some board wax and moulded it into a pellet. I swung my legs up onto the board to avoid a floating condom. It drifted over against Bruce’s leg. I saw him scoop it up on the sly and fill it up with sea water.

  ‘I’m not bullshittin’ you. Women are changing heaps. They expect heaps more. These days, if ya wanna swing in on a girl you’ve gotta crap on about recipes and PMT and shit like that.’

  ‘Fuckin’ Jesus,’ Bruce moaned. ‘Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned romantic days when you could just ask a chick for a fuck?’

  ‘Yeah’, the boys agreed. ‘Bloody oath.’

  Damien paddled over towards me. ‘You cop a lot of flak being a sensitive male,’ he lamented.

  I looked away. Living in the city for the last few years I’d met heaps of Damiens. It didn’t take long to suss that men only called themselves ‘feminists’ in the hope of getting laid by a brainier woman, as brainier women earned more money and could pay for dinner.

  ‘You reckon it’s easy being an animal?’ Bruce jammed his board between Damien and me.

  ‘Yeah!’ Squid was struggling to articulate their intellectual dilemma. ‘If you don’t ask a chick to bed she calls you a chocolate-donut hunter.’

  ‘And if you do,’ Wayne commiserated, ‘you’re a perverted, psychopathic rapist.’

  ‘I don’t want you to take this as an insult, fella, seeing as how I’ve only just met you.’ Bruce dunked the nose of Damien’s board. ‘But you’re a limp turd.’

  Damien snarled. ‘Yeah, well, I’d advise you to grow an extra brain cell, mate.’ He swiped Bruce’s hand away. ‘The one you’ve got must get so lonely up there.’

  I lay still, all eyes and ears. Bruce flexed every muscle in his six bronzed feet of flesh.

  ‘Just a little joke …’ Damien grovelled.

  But Bruce peaked. He flicked the condom at Damien. It missed and landed with a thud on Squid’s board. Squid torpedoed it back. And it was on. Missiles of seaweed,
wax pellets and condom bombs exploded all around. Bruce dived off his board, capsizing Damien.

  ‘Mate, hang on. I just had me teeth capped …’ Damien squealed, seconds before he was submerged.

  The boys didn’t see the set swelling in behind them. I was sitting outside, so I lay down quietly and started to paddle with the back foot, angling further and further inside. By the time the boys saw the set and started racing in for it, I was in the prime take-off pozzie. The biggest set of the morning jacked up. It was eight feet.

  ‘Maggot!’ Bruce, realising he’d missed the biggest wave of the day, shrieked across the water at me. ‘Surf chicken.’ He flapped his arms. ‘Buck-buck-buck …’

  Halfway up the face I swung round. It was a late take-off. I’d only had to paddle once and I was up on my feet. The face of the wave sucked out vertically. It felt like freefalling. I knew I had to keep the rail in or I’d nose dive. I rode to the bottom, vertical, sensed the wave’s power and leaned into a heavy backhand bottom turn with full thrust off the back foot.

  Glancing down the line out towards the flat I saw the guys hanging over the edge. None of them was in the right position to take off. They’d missed it. I turned under the pitching lip, changed rails, set a line, leaned forward in perfect trim and I was flying. The whole lip cascaded over my head. I was in a huge cavern, feeling the majesty of the tube. The noise was enormous, deafening, blue. Four or five seconds in a screaming tube feels like forever. I could see the sky, like another world, through the watery membrane. Racing under the edge, I freaked, thinking the liquid cylinder was going to close out. Then instead of pulling out the back of the wave, I decided to race the second section. I backdoored the barrel and raced under the lip as it passed over.

  Sensing that the wave was going to collapse behind me, I braced myself, accelerated, and went flying out the other side of the section. The tube just spat me out. I went into a full face to the water roundhouse cutback, bounced off the foam, did a couple of turns and then pulled off into the channel.

  A long line of late risers were watching from the rocks. They whooped and hollered as I emerged from the hozzo. Convinced I’d been chundered, the Bob Hawke Surf Team now gawked at me in amazement as I paddled out the back to join them. They were blown away.

  ‘She pulled into that hozzo tube.’

  ‘Shit! She went off.’

  ‘That’s hot.’

  ‘Classic.’

  ‘She killed it.’

  ‘Bullshit. You reckoned she couldn’t surf.’

  Bruce talked such shit he could qualify for a lifesaver’s job at the local sewage plant, but for once the macho meathead had nothing to say.

  For the next few waves, all the boys were on their best behaviour. No hassling. No dropping in. They surfed nervously, freaked in case they fell off in front of me.

  The wind turned onshore. It blew it out severely. The water was chopped up. We all went in together, the boys keeping a respectful distance behind me, Ocky, Wogo, Midi, Pots, Gobbo, Kong, Rabbit, Gordo, Gibbo, Grub, Zit, Teary, Horse, Rhino, Picko, Whacker. They all pulled out of my way.

  I had recco.

  Back on the beach, as I tugged on my trackies, a P-plated Celica shuddering with the bass of a Bruce Springsteen song cruised down the sandy track. It was chock-a-block with lipsticked chicks. Long blonde hair trailing, dolled up to the dinners, they looked like those hair-free, care-free, bright white smiling, golden tanned girls on a tampon ad. Having checked out the surf report, they knew it was working at Voodoo and that the hot surfers would have been here since dawn. Leaning on my board, I chucked a cheesy at them. I wanted to tell them to go for it. To fire up! To amp to the max … That the whole wide world was just stretched out in front of us. Things had changed for women! All we had to do was get out there and get into it!

  The bikini-clad driver wound down the window. ‘What a wanker,’ she spat at me.

  ‘Think yer can surf, ya bushie?’ A peroxided head protruded through the sun roof.

  ‘What are ya tryin’ to do, swamp hog?’ Daddy’s Celica circled me like a four-wheeled shark coming in for the kill. ‘Lick out the boys, ya brownnoser.’

  The car screeched to a stop and the prettiest girl got out.

  ‘There are three types of turd.’ She bent down and selected a rock. ‘Musturd, Custurd… and you, you shit.’ She hurled the rock at my head. ‘So piss off!’

  I lifted my board just in time. The rock bounced off the thruster and broke.

  ‘What are ya tryin’ to do? Steal our guys? You’re ruinin’ it for the rest of us.’

  The other girls piled out of the car, stripped off to bikini pants, then lacquered their bare breasts in sun factor four, adjusted any stray pubic hairs, lit cigarettes, compared tans, fought over the one copy of Tracks, rolled a joint … and then lay back and waited for the boys.

  From the water’s edge, Bruce let out a triumphant roar. ‘Hey Deb. J’know why chicks exist? You’re just something for us to lie down on while we’re having a root.’

  Crestfallen, I lugged my board back towards my car, desperate to get away. The sun sliced into my eyes, making it hard to see.

  ‘Deb?’

  I stopped dead still at the sound of his voice, velvety and rough all at once. I shielded my eyes and squinted up into his familiar face.

  ‘Spectacular ride,’ he said. ‘Yer must have had a hell of a good teacher.’

  A cheeky grin split his face. The same twinkly eyes. The same mocha-chocolate tan. The same insouciant stance.

  ‘Garry! Crikey! I heard you were surfing overseas. Pro circuit. I heard you were still doing drugs too. I heard a lot of things about you, actually.’

  ‘No more drugs … Turns out the only thing I’ve ever really been addicted to is you, Deb.’

  ‘Yeah?’ It was my turn to grin at him now. ‘Took you long enough to find out, you big dag.’ I propped my board up against my car and gave him a good, slow once-over. My old boyfriend looked fitter and firmer than ever. It was as though he’d been taking Handsome Lessons, the bastard.

  ‘Unlike you, I’m a slow learner. But …’ He leaned his body into mine, pushing me back against my car. ‘I certainly wanna make up for lost time.’

  And then Garry kissed me, long and slow and salty. The kiss certainly left something to be desired – the rest of him.

  He moaned my name, his breath hot on my neck. ‘Christ, I wanna make love to you so badly.’

  ‘Badly? I was kinda hoping that it might be really, really good.’

  He laughed, pinning my wrists to my sides. ‘Oh, it will be. I owe you that. Let’s go … before I start peeling you out of that bikini with my teeth. I’m staying at Pete’s …’

  ‘Wait … I can’t come with you right now. I’ve got a girls’ night out. In town. Tonight.’

  ‘So? Let ’em wait.’

  I shoved him away with all my might. ‘One thing I’ve learned since you broke my heart is to never, ever put a bloke before your girlfriends.’

  ‘Ah … yeah.’ He squirmed. ‘About that night … The Sarah thing. I’m so fuckin’ sorry. It wasn’t supposed to happen. We were off our faces. We were …’

  I let him suffer. For a bloke, being dragged into the emotional terrain is akin to finding himself in Apache territory. In fact, I reckon most surfies would rather be staked out by their testicles over an ant’s nest than have to talk about their innermost feelings. But just because men don’t express their feelings doesn’t mean they don’t have them. Regret and shame were etched onto his face.

  ‘Shhh …’ I finally put a finger to his lips. ‘You can make it up to me later … But I gotta run.’

  ‘Well, don’t go far … Not now that I’ve bloody well found you.’

  ‘We’ll see, surfie boy …’

  ‘Will yer come for a surf with me? Say, tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course I’ll come for a surf with you … How else can I hit you over the head with my board, push you under and make it look like a drowning accident
?’

  He patted my arse in a promising way then wet his finger and raised it up in the air.

  ‘Great. Wind’s changed. Surf’ll be pumping again now. I’m gonna ride those waves like I’m making love to you.’

  ‘Bruce is out there.’

  ‘Oh God, that fuckwit. He never did get over you dumping him for me.’

  ‘Yeah, well, since then he’s only had one long-term lover – his right hand.’

  ‘Well, I think I’d just better go drop in on the prick to totally humiliate that brainless dipshit in front of all his mates.’

  ‘That would be soooo good.’ I grinned.

  And there and then I finally had it – what I’d waited for since my early teens – a Bruce-ectomy.

  Girls’ night out

  A girl’s late teens and early twenties are an endless round of engagement parties, shower teas, baby showers and twenty-first birthday bashes.

  A shower tea

  It suddenly seems as though all your friends are getting married. Every Saturday you bake an obligatory cake (if not the traditional cream sponge, then Battenberg or black forest gateau), gift-wrap a Tupperware beetroot strainer and mooch off to a suburban lounge room for a shower tea. This week it’s Kylie’s. Mums, distant cousins, neighbours and schoolmates circumnavigate the cakes, cackling and clucking. ‘You’ll be next, Deb.’ You squirm under their scrutiny. ‘Isn’t it time you settled down and had some kiddies, Deborah?’

  As the bride-to-be is buried alive beneath a mountain of tea towels, placemats, spice jars, oven mitts, dish racks, teapots and tablecloths, guests strain anxiously to see who has given the most expensive prezzie. Girlfriends eye your beetroot strainer with disdain. It is clear you like Kylie $5.68 less than everyone else does. Some of the presents look pretty familiar – that elephant tusk bookend and miniature ceramic dolphin have done the twenty-first and shower tea rounds at least twice.

  As you pass the parcel, musical chair and play the more risqué version of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey (pin-the-penis-on-the-toy-boy), you decide you’d prefer walking on hot coals, bound feet, a bone through the nose or a million other rites of passage than suffer this clichéd, mawkish, suburban matrimonial ritual. It will never be time to settle down and have some kiddies. Never, ever, ever.