The Bodysurfers

by Robert Drewe

  Her father returned from the pub with a bigger entourage than usual that afternoon. I heard him running across the car park, laughing and grunting as the bitumen burnt his feet, and then thudding down the wooden ramp to the beach. Some lifesavers and a couple of girls were with him. The men were strangers, with the names of famous far-off surf clubs on their T-shirts, visiting for the surf championships that weekend. They were all merry and boisterous. Parnell was in his element. The visitors were his types. They bantered and teased but they also observed a deference to him that he liked. Of course they were delighted to meet Geraldine, even sobered for a moment at first sight of her. I saw she was taken aback by them and by their status, especially by a fair-headed fellow who, in the way of these matters, assumed and was granted by his companions some sort of priority in flirting with her. I was introduced in a perfunctory way (‘This is young David Lang over here’), but by the time the fair-headed one had asked her to spray him I’d had enough and I sloped off.

  I skirted around the visitors for the next hour or so. They were much in evidence on the beach, ostentatiously bodysurfing, vigorously passing a football back and forth on the sand, Rugby-style, and generally creating a rowdy athletic presence. I was about to leave when I saw a small crowd of beachgoers gathering halfway along the beach. They were all looking at a black swan, surrounding it in a vaguely curious way as if to see what it would do next. The swan was bedraggled and looked far from home.

  It was definitely out of sorts, squatting disconsolately on the sand, hissing softly and occasionally raising and lowering a dishevelled wing. Two children threw sand at it tentatively and a yellow Labrador barked gingerly in its general direction.

  It wasn’t long before Parnell saw the crowd and came down through the sand to investigate. Geraldine and a couple of the lifesavers were with him. He immediately assumed control of the situation. You could almost hear his brain ticking over: this is a water-bird and there is the water; it must be returned to it at once.

  He scooped up the surprised swan, held it to his chest with one arm, walked into the ocean and began side-stroking out to sea. Every so often a flapping black wing or craning neck could be seen in the rise of a wave, but Parnell kept a firm grip and swam on. Out beyond the marker buoy he released the swan, pointed it towards Madagascar and, to the cheers of his beach fans, began swimming back to shore. He caught a wave and rode it in. Somersaulting out of it, he cleared his nose, adjusted his trunks and modestly acknowledged the applause of the beach urchins and his new friends. They were smiling a little too broadly, however. On the beach, flicking the unfamiliar sea water from its tail feathers, sat the swan.

  Parnell looked surprised, then determined. He stamped the water from a blocked ear, lurched up to the swan, grabbed it up and set off again towards the sea. On the way it hissed aggressively and pecked his ear. He was clasping it tightly to his side but one wing flapped free and beat furiously, tousling his hair. Sandy kids danced around him, shrieking, and the Labrador began leaping up and barking. To this noisy circus the visitors offered smart suggestions. Geraldine looked embarrassed for her father but she was also half-smiling at the cracks and hubbub.

  By now most people on the beach were watching the drama of the reluctant swan and pointing to Parnell slowly side-stroking out through the breakers. All the way the bird’s serpentine head could be seen striking at his face and neck. Three or four children ran up to his shelter, raided it for free surf shooters and paddled them out after him.

  In the deep Parnell again released the bird. This time he gave it a shove and watched it begin paddling away from land. He trod water for a while to make sure it kept swimming. Then he slowly began his long swim back to shore. He struck out for a big breaker, but it broke over him and he had to swim hard against its backwash. On the beach people were clapping and cheering ironically. The visitors led the applause. ‘The Swan King!’ one of them shouted. In the middle of the crowd, which was making way for it with squeals and laughter, the swan waddled, hissing and snapping viciously.

  Parnell plodded ashore with hair in his eyes and mucus trailing from a nostril. An ear was bleeding. He didn’t swear or say a word. He picked his way through the people, wiping his nose. He got back to the shelter before Geraldine, turned to her and the lifesavers and fixed his eyes on her. ‘Get back in here,’ he ordered.

  According to the police evidence in the newspapers Parnell arrived at the surf club very late that night, after the dance to celebrate the surf championships, with a jerrycan of petrol. The club lost two surfboats and most of its reels and equipment in the fire. Drunkenness was taken into account, and his past record of fine community service — as the judge put it. The arson conviction got him four years.

  All this was scandal enough for that time and place, but three or four years passed and we were living in Sydney, where Dad had been transferred by his company, before Annie told me the story behind the story. Until Parnell was in prison Geraldine was loath to reveal it, and she swore Annie to secrecy. She told Annie her father had been sleeping with her for three years — since she was thirteen. She thought it wasn’t so much the indignity of the swan affair which had set him off as her interest in the fair-headed lifesaver.

  This grim revelation started Annie off on a new line of conjecture. ‘It was lucky that Mummy didn’t marry Kevin instead,’ she said at first. Then she changed tack and got to wondering in a quirky, romantic frame of mind whether it mightn’t indeed have been better for both of them. ‘Maybe they would have made each other happy,’ she said. ‘She mightn’t have died and he wouldn’t have been unbalanced and frustrated.’ She looked suddenly distant and I knew she was imagining Geraldine’s three years. ‘And, anyway, I would’ve been there,’ she said.

  Shark Logic

  Journal entry for 10 January (11.00 p.m.): Six months, four days now since my ‘death’.

  Today is John’s tenth birthday, a day of reflection for me. I fought a strong urge to send him something, even just a card, but that’s impossible in the circumstances. My telephone call last month (after the splurge in the bar) still worries me. When I heard Peter’s voice my heart beat so fast I came to my senses and hung up without speaking.

  ‘Hullo, hullo,’ he said, ‘Hullo?’ a questioning rising inflection in his voice. His voice was cracking at the edges, on the verge of breaking. When I ‘died’ it was still a high-pitched child’s voice. Just as well Marion didn’t come to the phone, I may have spoken. I came very close to speaking to Peter. He sounded so near, not twelve hundred miles away, in a different State. The line was very clear. In one ear I heard Peter’s voice, in the other the surf breaking not a hundred metres from the phonebox. I wondered if he could hear the surf. I went back to my flat very depressed.

  I haven’t recorded before that my flat is in an apartment block, ‘The Pines’, one block back from the beach. If there were pines here once they must have succumbed to the fatal sea breeze which is killing off the Norfolk Island pines on the ocean front. (The environmentalists say the sea spray is laden with detergent and oil particles and that, combined with the salt, this mixture poisons the trees. They just dry up and die from the bottom up.) The block was built in the days when these studio flats were called bedsitters or one-bedroom flats, a generation before they became bachelor flats. I suppose the flat hasn’t changed in all that time — a bedroom-cum-living room and dining room is all it is. There’s a tiny kitchen and a bathroom with a glimpse of the sea from the lavatory. From my main room window I have a view of Palm Street and part of the beer garden attached to the Hotel Pacific next door.

  It’s not fancy living, but I make do. For example, I can eat for nothing at the pie shop. The shop carries a big range: the usual mincemeat, then potato, steak-and-kidney, pork, curry, chicken, veal, onion, on the savoury side, and fruit mince, raspberry, loganberry, apple, black currant, lemon meringue, custard and so forth, on the sweet side. When I say ‘pie shop’ I should say ‘specialty pie shop’ because it’s quite an op
eration. We sell hundreds a day. The day trippers on the ferries, the surfers and the pier fishermen are our best customers. My job is to unload the full pie trays from the bakery van each morning and stack them in the ovens, wash the trays, sweep and clean.

  I provide the backroom ‘muscle’. The backroom aspect of the job is important for me. The front-of-the-shop work is done by two girls, Tracey and Maria, and Mrs Moore, the manageress. We’re on civil terms but we’re not what you would call friendly. People on the coast are more cold and aloof than I expected. No one looks you in the eye. That suits my purposes perfectly. Tracey is a thin, freckled girl about sixteen or so; Maria is slightly older and Italian. Mrs Moore is tense, grey and fiftyish and apt to be a bad-tempered martinet on busy days. I do my job efficiently and energetically and don’t let her get me down. I remember that I was known as a strict disciplinarian myself.

  I should make it clear that from the day I ‘died’ I have not touched or even spoken warmly to any female.

  * * *

  My life here after six months is as simple as I can make it. I get up at eight, shower and eat some fruit. I do fifteen minutes transcendental meditation. Since I grew the beard I don’t waste time shaving. My flat is only two blocks from the shop so I’m at work reading the morning paper in the loading bay when the bakery truck pulls up at nine. Because we all work through the lunch hour — our busiest period — we finish at four, sometimes earlier. Mrs Moore stays till after five doing the book work. Sometimes of a humid afternoon I sympathise with her. I know the pinch of responsibility, the hundred-and-one niggling pressures of authority. She must envy us our early departures — Maria and Tracey whipping off their green uniforms and sailing gaily out the door to meet their strangely dressed boyfriends, me putting on my sunglasses and fisherman’s cap and wandering down the esplanade to the beach.

  It has become part of my routine to walk along the beach after work, from the southern to the northern end and back, a distance of about three miles. During my walk I think things over as calmly as I can, using my breath exhalation relaxation techniques.

  I’ve revised my plans; I can’t live here. I think I will buy an air ticket to New Zealand. There are no immigration problems with New Zealand. ‘Joe Forster’ would have no passport or visa worries. Here, I’m still uneasy with the name. I keep reminding myself I need to be more cunning in my planning. I have to be constantly watchful for familiar faces in the crowds of summer tourists. I have to stay out of bars. I don’t trust myself when I’ve had a few scotches; I could confide in some garrulous barfly. There is always the possibility of being spotted by someone from home. Even more likely is that I could become maudlin and lonely and initiate the contact myself.

  After my walk along the beach I return to the flat via the fish shop where I buy some snapper or jewfish for dinner. I eat my meals at my window overlooking Palm Street. There is plenty to see out there, on some nights there is more activity than on the television. The coast is not what I had expected. Not only is the pace faster, but there is a careless, violent hedonism here that astonished me at first.

  Last night two girls in bikinis were fighting in the street. They careered out of the Sun’n’Surf beer garden next door screeching drunk and began clawing at each other just under my window. Apparently they were both keen on the same youth, a big blond oaf who stood by with his laughing friends, egging them on until the police broke it up. On hot nights the streets don’t clear until well after midnight. Even small half-dressed children are still shrieking up and down the pavements while their parents get drunk in the beer garden.

  When I can’t face the beach night-life, the coarse aimless lives, I close my window, pull the blind, turn on my electric fan and meditate. Behind and inside my contemplation the electric bass from the rock group in the beer garden throbs like an amplified pulse.

  A life spent largely inland has made me awed and fascinated by the sea. The minutiae of a rock pool — the anemones, crabs and imperceptibly creeping limpets — can absorb me even in my worst depressions. I crouch like a child poking anemones with sticks, trickling sand into their cringing tendrils. The sea mystifies me. What caused thousands of sea-urchins, for example, to suddenly turn up the other morning clogging every tidal pool? When there had been no storm, when no other marine creature seemed affected by the mysterious disturbance which had agitated the sea-urchins. Even enterprising Omar, my landlord, whose Middle Eastern pragmatism has reasons for everything, had no answer to the sea-urchin mystery, though this didn’t stop him and his cronies from scooping up as many of the creatures as they could stuff into buckets and sugarbags.

  ‘What are you going to do with those?’ I asked Omar. The things are rumoured to be poisonous; even a graze from their spikes festers instantly. Omar was thigh-deep in a sea pool wearing pink dish-washing gloves. Picking up spiky balls with a steady, sweeping motion, he looked up at me patiently. ‘Eat!’ he said aggressively. ‘A bottle of beer and these, bloody good, Joe.’ His gloves reminded me of a housewife in a detergent commercial. Cracking a sea-urchin on a rock while its spines retracted in surprise, he threw back his head and drained the creature like an egg.

  Intrigued as I am by the ocean, I am not an enthusiastic surf swimmer. Living most of my life in the Tablelands, I prefer lake or river swimming. I’m a still-water man. Surf and tides turn malign too suddenly, waves dump you, sandbanks crumble in the current, undertows can catch you unawares. The local council maintains a swimming pool at the north end of the beach and I generally swim there. I have ventured into the ocean of course, usually on scorching days when the pool is jammed with children. It isn’t the waves or undertow that worry me when I do, however — it’s sharks.

  I imagine they’re everywhere. In every kelp patch, in the lip of every breaker, I sense a shark. Every shadow and submerged rock becomes one; the thin plume of spray in the edge of my vision is scant warning of its final lunge.

  Of course my anxiety is not supported by statistics. There has not been a fatal shark attack on a swimmer in this strip of ocean since 1936. We have the best figures of any stretch of coastline. I keep newspaper cuttings on the subject. I have one clipping, Meshing Cuts Shark Risk to Minimum, in which a marine biologist asserts that the risk of being killed by a shark is the same as dying from a bee sting.

  The reason for the low risk factor these days is meshing. Meshing contractors regularly set nets off the beach to catch sharks, thus reducing the numbers in the area and the risk of attack. The nets don’t close off sharks’ access to the beach; the idea is to prevent them from establishing a habitat. The shark is denied territory.

  It is hard to argue against the efficiency of this system when the annual fatality rate since its inception is zero. I actually see the meshing contractor out there in his boat as I’m walking after work, winding in his nets, motoring to a different site, re-setting them. But the nets are not set right across the beach. The beach is not closed off to sharks. I am a logical man and I have no trouble imagining a shark sensing me splashing about in the shallows and swimming in from the deep via a route where there is no net and, admittedly against large odds, biting me in halves.

  There is an aquarium here with sharks on display. As the day trippers round the Point on the ferry the first landmark they see is the fifteen-foot black tin shark on the roof of Sealand and the sign announcing ‘Savage Live Sharks’. Sealand doesn’t bother advertising its turtles and stingrays, knowing it’s the sharks that bring in the customers. I must admit to paying my admission to Sealand with the same morbid enthusiasm I felt thirty years ago entering the Police Department’s tent at the local Agricultural Show to ogle severed hands, death masks of notorious nineteenth-century criminals and infamous murder weapons.

  There were hints of seepage in the grey cement walls. The aquarium’s windows streamed with condensation. Through misty glass children strained to peer beyond the scarred tuna and mundane yellowtail passing by, seeking the scary stuff. Then a shark appeared, grey, sleek, straight o
ut of a TV documentary, a horror movie, and drifted past my face so slowly I saw its scars and the tiny parasites on its belly, even the opening and closing of its gills stirring the faint weed shreds on its skin.

  The children oohed and aahed and jerked back from the windows. The shark cruised on, and five or six other sharks of all sizes gradually materialised from the murk and drifted after it.

  You notice the teeth first, then the eyes. Sharks keep their mouths slightly open all the time, their lips drawn back from those irregular, sharply serrated teeth. The eyes, cold as a machine’s, are also kept open. They are not savage eyes exactly — there is no jungle glint — they are just cold. I don’t wish to be anthropomorphic, but I think they are the cruellest eyes in Nature.

  I am drawn back to the aquarium regularly. I view the sharks through the windows and then I climb to the roof of the aquarium, in the sunshine, and look down on its open surface where the turtles rise, snorting. Looking down into the tank all you see are the ripples and whorls of the turbulence below. The sharks’ fins never break the surface as they do in cartoons; there are no sinister black triangles cutting through the water. The water’s greenish transparency turns black up there. All the creatures are invisible. Then a stingray’s nonchalant wing tip breaks the surface, a turtle’s mossy flipper, and the tension is relieved for a second before the surface settles again. On the roof everything is concentrated for me, my decision, my direction of my fate, my chosen loneliness. Up there only a low railing separates me from the water. Always I have the same infantile portentous sensation as I look down into the tank. There is the thrill of knowing they are endlessly circling down there and that there is the potential for me to jump in.

  After six months there is nothing more in the newspapers, not that my disappearance made more than seven or eight paragraphs in the interstate editions. Those stories mentioned only that Mrs Cole-Adams had been the last person to see me, that I had dictated a short memo to her for the Bursar, remarked that I wanted to do a spot of trout fishing at Bourneville before dark, and left the school at 4.30. It was customary for me to go fishing once or twice a week, the papers correctly reported. The Rover was found parked by the spillway, one wader turned up three miles down-river near Tom’s Dog Bridge — that was all. I certainly threw the rod away as well, presumably some local reprobate is now fishing with it.