Coasting

by Ben Karwan

  ‘Seriously, dude, shut up.’

  Teddy sings another line from the song and Elliot hits him again. ‘Jesus, fine, I’ll stop. You should learn to appreciate the magic that is theatre.’

  ‘Don’t make me hit you again.’

  ‘Hey, I have a question,’ I say as soon as the thought occurs to me. ‘Do you actually know where Nessie is staying?’

  I’m met with silence.

  ‘Shit,’ Elliot says.

  I can’t help but laugh. We’re maybe half an hour away from the Sunshine Coast after twenty-something hours of travel and hundreds of dollars spent on fuel and we don’t even know how to find her. At least Nessie is living up to her name and avoiding being found.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ says Teddy. ‘Just go home?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘We’ll figure something out. Maybe you can just call her, Elliot.’

  ‘But the whole point was for this to be a surprise,’ says Elliot. He looks beyond disappointed, as though Christmas had been moved to the end of November and nobody told him until December had started.

  ‘At least you’ll still get to see her, right? And we’re in Queensland. It’s going to be fun!’ I want to cheer him up because – for me, anyway – the little detail of actually finding Nessie is less important than us enjoying ourselves.

  ‘The phone book,’ says Sophie. ‘Look up her family’s address in the phone book.’

  ‘Sophie, you’re a genius,’ says Elliot. Christmas is back on the right day. He pulls out his phone and searches the online phone book for her relatives. ‘I found it!’ he says after a couple of minutes. ‘T. L. Portland. That’s got to be it. Her uncle’s name is Terry.’ He reads out the address and Teddy plugs it into the GPS.

  ETA: fourteen minutes.

  But it takes longer than fourteen minutes because a) Elliot wants to buy flowers but b) the florist doesn’t open until nine, meaning that c) we have to wait for half an hour.

  We take a walk around one of the parks and the salty air slips into our lungs. The sun is already warm on my face and I’m itching to get to the beach. The beach is the only place that heat is tolerable.

  ‘It’s nine,’ says Elliot. ‘Flowers and Nessie. Let’s go!’

  The beach will have to wait.

  Elliot forks out a fortune on a bunch of bright flowers arranged in a bouquet. They’re beautiful and they smell amazing but I didn’t know how expensive flowers could be.

  Elliot takes the wheel for the final leg of the trip, a five-minute journey through the backstreets until we find the two-storeyed red-brick house that contains the elusive beast.

  Elliot walks to the front door, while the rest of us lurk about halfway along the path between the street and the door.

  A brunette girl who could only be Nessie answers the door. Her hair curls down just past her shoulders. Her eyes are huge and brown and her skin pale.

  ‘Surprise,’ says Elliot, holding out the flowers. But Nessie does not smile. She doesn’t look pleased to see him at all. Her already magnified eyes widen even further.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she says, her beautiful complexion stern. She folds her arms across her chest, looking incredibly uncomfortable. I take this as our cue to back away.

  We go back to Vincent and Teddy says, ‘Goddamn. She’s hot. Nice work, Elliot.’

  I know that I’m sometimes guilty of saying rubbish like this and I know exactly how Teddy meant it, but what’s happening right now to Elliot is making me far too angry to let the comment slide.

  ‘ “Nice work, Elliot”? Are you serious?’

  ‘Here we go,’ he mumbles.

  ‘You’re damn right “here we go”, ’ I say. ‘Obviously she didn’t have the reaction we expected, so making stupid comments maybe isn’t the best idea right now. Secondly, she’s not an object. She’s a person. She’s not some great conquest Elliot made. She’s not some goal. She’s not a prize. She’s not an achievement.’

  ‘I know, I know, I’m sorry.’

  But a) I’m on a roll and b) I doubt whether he’s actually sorry. ‘It’s these stupid comments that perpetuate sexism. You think it’s all in good fun but you’re implying women only exist for men to conquer and possess and you’re saying that the hotter the girl, the more successful the guy. It needs to stop.’

  ‘Come on, Jen, it was just one comment. It’s not like I’m ruining the planet,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah, it was one comment from you,’ I say, ‘but what about the one comment from everybody else? They all add up and before you know it, everybody – me included – has these subtle prejudices they don’t even recognise in themselves. If everyone thought of their comments as “just one comment”, nothing would ever change.’

  He doesn’t say anything. Then, finally, ‘Sorry.’ He means it this time.

  I exhale through pursed lips. Sophie massages my shoulders.

  Soon after, Elliot storms straight past us.

  ‘Elliot!’ I call, but he ignores me. Teddy starts to walk after him but I grab his arm and swing him back. ‘Stay. I’ll go.’

  I keep calling Elliot’s name as I jog to catch up to him but he doesn’t respond. Running in thongs is hard.

  ‘Hey!’ I grasp his hand, finally catching up three streets over.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he says, pulling his hand free.

  ‘Talk to me. What happened?’

  ‘This is all your fault,’ he says, rounding on me. ‘It was your stupid idea to come here. Why did you even suggest it? You ruined everything.’

  And he starts to cry.

  I hug him tight. He holds on just as tightly and sobs into my shoulder, which is no easy feat given our height difference.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  After a while he lets go, wipes his eyes on his arm and sits along the side of the footpath, with his feet in the gutter. I sit next to him and hold his hand.

  ‘She dumped me,’ he says, which I had already figured. ‘I asked her why and she basically said we weren’t compatible. She thought I was too smothering, even though I consciously tried not to be. I mean, before she left we were seeing each other maybe once a week. And texting only every few days or so. How is that smothering? She told me it was totally out of line for me to come here and that I don’t respect her privacy enough. She’s right … I shouldn’t have come.’ He wipes his eyes again, this time on the heel of his palm. ‘I just screw up everything. I was so excited to see her and I thought she’d be happy. I guess she’s just way out of my league.’

  ‘Please don’t say that,’ I say. ‘So things didn’t work out. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. Maybe she’s right. Maybe you just aren’t compatible.’

  ‘Yeah, we aren’t compatible because she’s endlessly amazing and I’m a stupid, useless lump of shit.’

  ‘No, you aren’t. Why would I be best friends with a stupid, useless lump of shit?’

  ‘Why did she dump me, then?’

  ‘Sometimes personalities just clash.’ I’m not exactly an expert in the field of dating, so I’m not sure how good my advice is but I can’t just let him sit there and cry. ‘Think of it like … food. A chicken parmigiana is amazing, yeah?’

  He nods.

  ‘And a hot fudge syrup is good too, right?’

  He nods again, more slowly.

  ‘Both of them are amazing and neither is inherently better or worse than the other, correct?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t want a mix of parma and hot fudge, would you?’

  He sighs and shakes his head. ‘It just hurts so much,’ he says.

  ‘I know it hurts,’ I say. ‘That’s how you know it mattered.’

  Chapter Twelve

  The gutter doesn’t feel like the most appropriate place for mourning a broken relationship, so with a little persuasion I manage to convince Elliot that we should move to the park.

  For the next two hours we sit under a tree together. There aren’t a whole lot of pe
ople around – a few couples walk hand in hand, the occasional dog walker strolls past and fitness freaks take a morning jog. A few children climb on the play equipment (a slide, a few plastic tunnels and a couple of swings) but they don’t stay long. I text Sophie to let her and Teddy know I’m with Elliot and that he just needs some time to process what’s happened. There’s not much for me to say to him; he sheds a few more tears and I’m here to comfort him.

  ‘We should go and find Teddy and Soph,’ he says eventually, blinking away the remaining tears.

  ‘You sure?’ I don’t want him to feel pressured to face the others or to feel as if he’s being a burden or anything. I just want him to be okay, no matter how long that takes.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘We did just leave them stranded.’

  I call Sophie to find out where they are. Her answer is ‘on the beach’, so after I remind her that the beach is a big place, we make plans to meet outside a particular coffee shop by one of the beach car parks on the main street.

  Elliot and I walk together in silence, his arm around my shoulder. It takes us only five minutes to reach the coffee shop, where Teddy and Sophie, both dressed in bathers, wait with an ice-cream in each hand.

  ‘You okay, champ?’ says a shirtless Teddy, handing Elliot one of the ice-creams. Sophie hands one to me – a scoop each of honeycomb and boysenberry in a wafer cone.

  Elliot nods. ‘I’m only going to say this once so listen up. She broke up with me. No, I’m not happy about it. No, I didn’t see it coming. No, I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Teddy thumps him on the back and Sophie gives him a quick hug.

  ‘Keen for the beach?’ I ask, my mouth full.

  ‘Yeah, but … Never mind, I don’t want to be a pain.’

  ‘What is it, you doorknob?’ asks Teddy.

  ‘I don’t really want to stay here, so close to her. I won’t be able to relax. I’ll be too paranoid about running into her. Do you reckon we could go somewhere else?’

  Of course we all say that’s fine.

  ‘So where are we going?’ Teddy says.

  The rest of us look at each other.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I say.

  ‘Me neither,’ Elliot says. ‘Just … not here.’

  ‘We should go back to the car,’ I say. ‘It’s really warm out here.’

  ‘It’s in that car park,’ Sophie says, pointing. ‘I moved it when you guys left before.’

  I hadn’t even thought about that. I’m glad Sophie did, though, otherwise we’d have had to go back to Nessie’s house.

  ‘What about Brisbane?’ says Teddy as we cross the asphalt.

  ‘Yeah, that’s fine by me,’ Elliot says.

  Sophie nods.

  ‘Brisbane it is,’ I say.

  I climb into the driver’s seat and turn the air conditioning on full blast. I reckon my thongs would have melted if I’d stood in the car park for too long.

  Elliot slides into shotgun and the others get in the back. I put Vincent in gear and back out of the parking space.

  I’m not really sure what Brisbane is like. I’m imagining it to be similar to Melbourne, with dense buildings and people everywhere. I run the image through my mind a few times as I weave Vincent through the streets towards the freeway. To be honest, I don’t really want to go to Brisbane. I really want to lie on the beach and do nothing. Everyone talks about Queensland beaches.

  ‘Dude,’ says Teddy. ‘Do you want to move your chair forward? I have zero leg room back here.’ He’s sitting behind Elliot.

  Elliot leans back in his seat and rests his bare feet on the dashboard, just above the glove box. ‘I’m pretty good, actually.’

  ‘Come on, don’t be a moron.’

  Elliot fiddles with the lever and pushes off the dashboard, sliding his chair back into Teddy’s legs.

  ‘I will actually murder you,’ says Teddy.

  ‘You know what we should do,’ I say as Elliot shifts his seat back to its usual spot. ‘We should go to the Gold Coast.’

  ‘I get it,’ says Teddy. ‘Between the two of you, you want to crush my legs and my dreams.’

  Sophie snorts. ‘I think you’ll find it’s all three of us who want to do that.’

  ‘Dreams?’ Elliot says. ‘Since when is going to Brisbane your dream?’

  ‘Ever since I was about nine,’ Teddy says, his voice dropping, ‘I’ve wanted nothing more than to go to Brisbane. My cousins went once and they kept showing me photos and talking about how it was the best place in the world. I begged and pleaded with my parents to take me. When they got divorced, I asked Mum to move to Brisbane, just so I could go with her.’

  We all go silent. I feel awful – why did I even open my mouth? And there’s no way we’re not going to Brisbane now.

  Sophie breaks the silence with her laughter. ‘You’re full of it.’

  ‘’Course I am,’ says Teddy. ‘I couldn’t give a toss where we go.’

  ‘I feel like I should have seen that coming,’ I mumble.

  Elliot puts a random Gold Coast address into the GPS as I enter the freeway.

  Twenty minutes into our drive, Sophie runs a Google search to find a hotel for us to stay in. It’s probably about time we do some actual organising; ad-libbing hasn’t really worked for us so far.

  We arrive on the Gold Coast midafternoon and stop at a few hotels. The first four we stop at are fully booked out and we begin to worry. Or perhaps panic is a better word. We hadn’t really considered how many people come to the Gold Coast, especially in January.

  The fifth hotel we go to is called The Toeval. We park in a two-hour spot out the front, giving my parallel-parking skills a real test. The Toeval is not particularly wide – perhaps only two or three rooms across – but it seems to stretch infinitely upward. With our hopes battered, bruised and torn, we enter through the front door, which is no larger than my bedroom door.

  A few people lounge around in the foyer, having drinks, chatting or watching a cricket match on plasma screens. Sculptures of people striking various modelling poses and paintings that would rival Aaron’s line the walls. Behind the reception desk, a glass wall offers a clear view of a fenced-off pool and the beach.

  ‘Hello and welcome to The Toeval. How can I help you?’ asks the receptionist. He has shaggy blond hair and a natural Queensland tan.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, leaning my arms on the reception desk, which is so high it comes up to my armpits. ‘We don’t have a booking or anything – we’re not really organised, so I don’t have high expectations – but I was wondering if there were any vacancies at all?’

  The receptionist, who is almost certainly a surfer, laughs, showing his pristine teeth. ‘Random holidays are the best. Let me see what I can do. How many of you are there?’

  ‘Just us,’ I say, gesturing Sophie on my left and the boys on my right. Except they aren’t on my right. ‘Um … and those two over there,’ I correct, as I spot Elliot and Teddy across the foyer, glued to the cricket.

  ‘So four,’ he confirms and makes a few clicks on his computer. Blue eyes skimming back and forth, he bites his lower lip and clicks a few more times. ‘I can give you one room with two single beds for tonight but that’s the only vacancy I have at the moment. I’m sorry.’

  I puff my cheeks as I exhale, and Sophie makes a low murmur of contemplation. ‘I guess we could cuddle up for the night …’ she suggests.

  ‘Look,’ says the receptionist, lowering his voice, ‘there’s a booking with two double bedrooms but the guests haven’t shown up yet. They were supposed to check-in by eleven. Technically I’m not even meant to mention it to you, but if you’re still here in an hour their booking expires and I can put you in.’

  ‘That would be amazing,’ I say.

  ‘Well, in that case, you can hang around the foyer for a while. Just don’t tell my manager you’re waiting for a cancellation.’

  Sophie and I watch the cricket with the boys on a leather couch while we wait. I still don’t really
get the appeal of the game but at least this version is over within a day.

  By the time the receptionist comes back over, I’m actually beginning to not hate watching the Australians hit the ball over the boundary rope. It’s kind of exciting to watch the ball fly through the air and not know if it’s going to land on the ground, in the hands of a fielder or in the crowd.

  ‘That other group didn’t show,’ says the receptionist. ‘You still want in?’

  Of course we do, so the four of us return to the desk. He charges us three hundred and thirty dollars per night for a three-night stay, which seems a tad less expensive than it should be in a hotel this close to the beach.

  Again, I put all the charges on my bank card.

  ‘Here’s your receipt and four room key cards,’ he says handing us a card each. ‘There is a fifty-dollar surcharge for lost key cards, so keep them safe. On behalf of all of us here at The Toeval, I sincerely hope you enjoy your stay.’ Cue the smile.

  All of us go out to move Vincent into the underground car park and to collect our bags, before heading up to the twelfth floor.

  I expect to slide my key card into a slot to open the door, but instead there’s this fancy-looking reader next to the doorframe. We just have to hold one of our cards against it to unlock the door.

  The apartment is small but luxurious. There are four rooms: two bedrooms, a bathroom and a room for everything else. A couch faces a flat-screen television, which is next to a stocked bookshelf. Near the kitchen (a stove, oven and refrigerator against the wall) is a four-person dining table. A glass sliding door leads to a deck that, from twelve floors up, has a spectacular view of the ocean. It finally feels like a holiday.

  ‘Who’s sleeping where?’ asks Elliot.

  ‘Boys in one room and girls in the other?’ suggests Sophie. ‘But I don’t really mind.’

  ‘What are we, gay?’ says Teddy indignantly. I open my mouth to snap at him but he cuts me off. ‘Relax, Jen, I’m kidding. But seriously, I’m not sharing a bed with Elliot.’ I consider giving him a lecture despite his ‘apology’ but decide against it.