The Bodysurfers

by Robert Drewe

  David and Angela looked at each other. ‘Not at all,’ they said together.

  ‘A girl?’ David laughed.

  Boyle said, ‘Silly old Jimmy. He’s here with some Parliamentary delegation. He came up to me moaning plaintively, “I’ve got a list for New York and Washington but I don’t have a number for San Francisco.” He’d already struck out with the cocktail waitresses. Anyway, I got him someone.’

  The meal passed slowly for David. The suspense of waiting for the arrival of the conservative Cabinet Minister and his ‘date’ was almost delicious. This was a stronger dose of nationalism than he’d expected. Meanwhile Angela and Fiona seemed to be hitting it off surprisingly well, given Angela’s usual initial reserve. Boyle was also enjoying being host, becoming more expansive and assuming more authority by the minute. He had already taken it on himself — apparently when making the restaurant booking — to order Peking duck for everyone; now he was demanding a particular Napa Valley Chardonnay which the restaurant did not stock. ‘Send out for it then, my man,’ he dismissed the wine waiter. David squirmed at this sort of behaviour and also envied its perpetrator his clout and knowhow. A call-girl for a Cabinet Minister, an unavailable wine, it was all a cinch.

  Discussing the events of the evening afterwards, David and Angela differed only on the colour of the call-girl’s hair. He recalled her as a redhead; she insisted on brunette. They didn’t disagree that she had been pleasant, modestly pretty, tastefully dressed and, as a former Berkeley political science student, possibly too intelligent a companion for the smirking political rake. She, Kathy, had got there first. The details of the minister’s actual arrival were also agreed upon: they had both delighted in the nervous adjustment of the tie-knot in the doorway, the sudden little spring of feigned youth in the step, the look of confusion when confronted by three youngish, attractive women.

  What fascinated David was the way Boyle had let him suffer. He had introduced them all only by first names. So Dunlop had squeezed between Fiona and Angela and trotted out all his dated suave ploys. He read the love lines in their palms, twinkled right and left, volunteered star signs and showered the table with innuendo. His hands were a blur of motion from knee to knee. Boyle leaned back in his chair and watched this performance with great satisfaction, letting fifteen or twenty minutes pass before he announced with great solemnity, ‘Minister, may I present, at the far end of the table, Ms Molera, your companion for this evening.’ David felt like clapping.

  David and Angela also agreed that as neither of the Boyles had mentioned their staying with them at Malibu they would let the invitation, if one existed, lapse.

  David was carrying luggage down to their second-hand Thunderbird when Helena called him up to the telephone. Fiona Boyle was calling from L. A. ‘When can we expect you down here?’ she asked.

  He gathered his wits and rambled on once more about not inconveniencing them, and the loose nature of their schedule. ‘Actually, we’re leaving San Francisco in a minute.’

  Fiona interrupted him. ‘Look, we’ve got a big place on the beach and domestic help. It’s no problem. Peter is counting on it,’ she said. ‘You’d be doing us both a favour.’ She spoke lower into the phone. ‘It would do him a lot of good, he’s a bit down at the moment. He needs the distraction of a few friendly faces.’

  What could he say? He thanked her and said to expect them a week from today.

  ‘We look forward to seeing you,’ she said brightly.

  * * *

  The trip was not without its tensions. By the third day, at the edge of the Roman pool at the Hearst castle, Paul said loudly to his sister, ‘Why don’t you fall in and drown?’ His accent carried across the terrace to at least two tourists other than his father, who gave him curious glances. Picking up the frisson, the tour guide announced that they could now smoke if they had to, but repeated her warning against touching the statues. She wore, David noticed, the same masculine green uniform as had their guide at Alcatraz. It accentuated her broad hips and gave her a rolling, Smokey-the-Bear gait up the wide staircases and along the patios.

  ‘They’re porous, you’ll understand,’ the guide said. ‘No offence, folks, but each of us has this uric acid and ammonia in our skin and that Carrara marble just soaks it up like a sponge.’

  David glared at his son. He watched him saunter morosely over to a drinking fountain and remove his maroon felt cap before bending over the faucet. The boy fancied himself in the cap; it had been his first American purchase, at Macy’s, the day after their arrival. David had believed it an odd buy then, considering its irrelevance as a Californian fashion souvenir. This lack of novelty seemed not to have occurred to Paul. He’d barely had the cap off his head all year, and now, after wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he replaced it purposefully, pulling the peak low on his forehead. Today he had teamed the cap with a red ‘Sex Wax’ surfer’s T-shirt, his only concession to the spirit of the holiday. He stood at the balustrade and, his chin jutting self-consciously, peered out over the pool and the San Simeon hills to the ocean.

  A light Pacific haze lay across the sun and horizon. Ridiculously photogenic, two zebras, descendants of William Randolph’s original herd, trotted suddenly over a knoll into camera range and stopped to graze. In the rush to the balustrade Helena came up to her father, remarking matter-of-factly, ‘He hates me.’ Squeezing her hand he turned back to the guide with a question on the zebras. In the corner of his eye was the silly defiant cap.

  After the castle they had a picnic lunch on the beach at San Simeon. None of the other hundreds of castle tourists had considered this: chiefly Americans, they lined up for hot dogs and hamburgers and tacos at the concession stand in the parking area and stayed clear of the pebbly sand.

  ‘They don’t understand the beach culture,’ David joshed with his elder son.

  ‘Maybe they don’t want to look like jerks hanging around where there’s no surf,’ Paul said. Despite everything, he had been very receptive to the American accent and slang. Grabbing a sandwich, he wandered down to the shore, head down, cap over his eyes.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ Helena called.

  ‘With you?’ echoed the baby, Tim.

  ‘No!’ Paul called back. The relentless word hung in the air. Helena’s eyes sprang with tears.

  ‘He really is too much,’ Angela said. ‘You’d better have a word with him, David.’

  He said nothing. He had been avoiding scenes since they set off; he hated the way travelling scenes changed in shape and engulfed everything, like amoebas.

  Angela’s face was cool and affronted. With a sharp knife she dextrously peeled an apple and handed it to Helena. ‘Go and collect some stones, darling,’ she said. The unbroken peel momentarily retained the apple’s sphericity. Angela was good at that trick. David thought briefly that she made the peel more important than the apple.

  ‘Why should she want to collect stones?’ he asked. He believed he was smiling mildly. ‘Shells, yes.’

  ‘The stones are pretty here. I read it in the Sunset Guide.’

  ‘I don’t want to collect stones,’ Helena cried. ‘I can’t eat this apple!’ She dropped it in a trash can.

  ‘Don’t waste that good apple!’ shouted her father. ‘What a bloody waste!’

  ‘You can all do as you like,’ Angela said. ‘Be as tiresome as you like.’ She lay back on the rough sand and closed her eyes wearily. Timmy began to cry until his father picked him up. Low grey waves snapped against the pier.

  Strangely, of all their stopovers before Los Angeles David could remember clearly only San Simeon and Santa Barbara when later recalling the trip’s effect on their lives.

  In Santa Barbara he was walking back from the motel sauna to their room. It was drizzling rain and Helena ran up to him flushed and with damp hair, exclaiming, ‘Paul’s going to play with me today! We’re going to swim in the pool!’ He could not tell her the weather was too bleak. He felt immeasurably sad, as sad as he had ever been.

  Relo
ading luggage in the Thunderbird thirty minutes later he watched Paul and Helena playing out of the corner of his eye. His daughter, round and chubby in her swimsuit, bobbed in the shallow end of the pool, shrieking with happiness and gratitude. The boy was not actually playing, in the sense of sharing fun, he was just in the pool at the same time. Pale and stringy, he dived and swam with aggression and panache, as if making up for a lost indoor year. His angularity, his new American mumble, the long, flat feet slapping on the wet paving around the pool, were a stranger’s. Light rain fell on the children’s wet bodies. A smell of chlorine hung in the air. Around the terrace Mexican women pushed trolleys of bed linen, towels and detergent. Stacking their bags in the trunk, David noticed his hands were shaking.

  Angela appeared by the car and said, ‘Call the kids, will you?’ He thought her make-up looked laboured this morning, a big effort for the final stretch and their arrival at the Boyles’, he supposed. He preferred the casual American look, the Northern Californian look. Wind-in-the-long-hair, little cosmetics. In the dim past she used to have this look herself. In her sleep her beauty, her serene, happy profile, had taken his breath away. When he called them, Helena whined and pleaded for more time but Paul climbed instantly from the pool without a word. His snappy obedience verged on insolence.

  As they got into the car David said to his wife, ‘You’ve got lipstick on your teeth.’

  Even on the quieter coastal highway approaching Los Angeles they picked up energy from the traffic’s increased momentum. At the sight of road signs from a hundred movies and cop shows everyone perked up and began chattering.

  ‘You all asked for beaches, here’re beaches,’ announced David. ‘This is where beaches were invented!’ Paul began reciting them from the map: ‘Leo Carillo State Beach, Zuma Beach, Malibu Lagoon, Las Tunas, Topanga, Will Rogers State Beach, Santa Monica, Venice, Manhattan, Hermosa, Redondo, Long Beach, Sunset, Bolsa Chica, Huntington, Newport, Corona Del Mar, Laguna … There’re only two spots that interest me — Malibu and Huntington,’ he said, but his eyes were shining.

  Angela had her make-up purse out and was freshening the colour in her cheeks. She combed her hair, then suddenly squeezed his knee, an old warm gesture so currently unfamiliar that he almost jumped. ‘Well, we made it,’ she said. ‘The old intrepid team.’

  He squeezed hers back. Over her shoulder sea and sky fused in a dazzling milky light. On his side the highway bit into the muddy hills and periodically the car was diverted around landslides by barriers or road gangs. Angela read out the Boyles’ address to him: 21 001 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. Dropping speed, he cruised past public beaches until the first beach houses appeared, perched together precariously on the cliffs and blocking the sea views.

  David didn’t know what he was expecting, a minor Hearst mansion perhaps, but he was unprepared for the weathered pine and stone structure clinging like a limpet to the hillside, its entrance flush to the highway and its sides closely abutting its neighbours. He stopped the car and announced himself in an intercom beside the high pine gate. After a delay during which he could hear someone breathing, he repeated his name. The gate swung open and he drove inside.

  Once behind the gate they saw that outside appearances had been deceptive. The building on the street was just an annexe — perhaps servants’ quarters — to a larger, contemporary pine and shingle house which squatted on latticed struts behind it facing the Pacific. Even though this building was at the most fifty yards from the highwater mark on its own beach, a swimming pool and a big redwood spa tub had also been set into the hillside, and bobbing in the pool, as the Lang family approached, was a naked man.

  As they came tentatively nearer two things happened. The man giggled and climbed out of the pool, and a tiny dark woman came out of the house holding a growling German Shepherd by the collar. At the dog’s appearance Tim began crying; Helena ran behind her father.

  ‘What is this!’ Angela cried.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Boyle, please!’ requested David. ‘Mr Peter Boyle!’

  The nude man, perhaps Mexican, switched on the hot tub, fumbled on the ground beside it for a joint, lit up and slowly settled himself in the oscillating foam. The woman with the dog also appeared to be Mexican. She wore a lemon housecoat and her sneakered feet and her grip on the collar looked insecure. Clasping one of the house struts to support herself, she cried, ‘Vamos!’ and waved them away. The man shouted something at her, then smiled happily at Angela. ‘Babee,’ he said, ‘Honee,’ and holding out his invitatory cigarette he groggily beckoned her to join him. His other hand was busy under the water.

  ‘All go in the Mercedes!’ the woman shouted. ‘Nothing!’ And needing her hands to gesticulate speedy departure, absence and nothingness, let go of the collar.

  Angela screamed, the dog moved towards them very jerkily, literally in slow motion, for several steps, and then fell, frothing, on its side and died.

  David found himself beside the dog and the woman. Some time in the recent past the dog had been shot in the head; the blood had crusted in its fur. The way the woman was weeping and holding its head in her lap put him in mind of the widow of a shot gunslinger. She had whisky on her breath and the smell of it brought him out of his detachment, the weird sensation that he was taking part in American television. ‘They’ve gone, eh?’ he asked unnecessarily. She nodded.

  In the car no one spoke. David sat motionless behind the wheel for five minutes, then turned the car around and drove back to the Malibu public beach. ‘This is Malibu,’ he said. ‘Go to it.’

  Angela said she thought she could see a supermarket on the hill. ‘I need a few things,’ she said, and left, taking Tim with her.

  ‘Are you surfing?’ David asked Paul. The surf was middling and the sunlight behind the waves revealed a thin skein of kelp stretching intermittently along the shore. Two surfers were out on their boards; no one was swimming. In the distance a hang-glider drifted over the cliffs like a scrap of burnt paper. The boy shrugged. ‘I’ll have a look in the surf shop,’ he said, and disappeared after his mother.

  It was neither warm nor cool, sunny nor cloudy. The beach was unremarkable. In the bright milky light the pier stood out in sharp relief. David didn’t swim. He and Helena walked out on the pier. Her hand kept tightening its grip; she wouldn’t let him go. Big grey eastern Pacific gulls wheeled silently over men cleaning fish.

  Malibu sparked off several memories for the family over the years — the vanishing Boyles of course, and Angela’s recognising Rod Steiger at the ice-cream freezer in the supermarket. For David a vivid memory was the unshakable grip of Helena’s hand and, for that reason, the photograph snapped for them by an obliging fisherman of father and daughter hand-in-hand, with strained holiday smiles, on the Malibu pier, was the only American souvenir he took with him when he and Angela finally separated.

  After Noumea

  Recovering from his breakdown late that winter, Brian rented a weatherboard off-season holiday cottage at Palm Beach with two separate ocean views to guarantee serenity. A trailing edge of Cyclone Anna lashed his car as he drove up the peninsula, and on arrival he immediately lit a fire to keep the storm at bay and arranged himself in front of it. Below the cottage a high surf crashed on the beach. Eucalypt branches scraped along the roof guttering. Still tense from the drive he drank two brandies, cursorily read a magazine and went to bed.

  Currawongs and kookaburras woke him early. The day was grey but fine, with a clear light. Right away he determined to make a schedule to live and work by. This took him the morning. Sharp at noon, as set out in his new schedule, he left for a walk down the gravel track through high trees to the beach.

  Just around the first bend in the track he was ambushed by a blue heeler. Crouching low without barking, the dog ran around him to attack his legs from behind. Brian kicked out and it bit him on the calf though his jeans kept it from breaking the skin. He arrived at the beach still angry at the dog. Walking and jogging in alternate spurts, he became quickly p
uffed, his feet sinking into the soft sand. The storm had brought in dead fish and sea birds, plastic bottles, amorphous lumps of jelly from some marine invertebrate. Fine russet sand grains stuck to his feet and legs. Waves broke close inshore and a haze of moisture hung over the headland.

  Returning to the cottage, breathing hard as he climbed the hill, he was again attacked by the dog. Furious, he yelled and ran wildly at it. The dog stood stunned at his reaction and then fled. From a safe distance it barked and showed its front teeth at him. Climbing the rock steps to the cottage he was surprised at how tense and angry it had made him.

  At a table in the sunroom he attempted some cartoons immediately after lunch; snappy drawings with witty captions, nothing political. He tried out a few ideas, but none of them was satisfactory. As he discarded one cartoon after another, the kookaburras, sensing his presence in there, dived at the sunroom window and tapped their beaks on the glass until he threw them some crusts. They looked questioningly at him, as if he had thrown their schedule into disarray.

  His concentration broken, Brian went out to forage for firewood on the hillside below the cottage. Most of the wood was still wet or too green to burn properly. Apathetically, he was snapping branches against his knee when a neighbour, out exercising her terrier, made an excuse for conversation.

  ‘Collecting firewood, are you? That chimney doesn’t draw, you know.’

  Brian picked her at once as a nosy bourgeois person. She warned him of the grass ticks. ‘A dab of ammonia’ll get them off.’

  Hovering around him she brought up the death the week before of his landlord’s wife. Apparently the old woman’s heart had given out while she was cleaning the kitchen for him, the new tenant.

  ‘She was scrubbing out the oven when she went,’ the neighbour said, peering at him intently. He felt she held him responsible. ‘Yes, she’s deady-bones,’ she went on. He thought this was a little flippant. The neighbour had flushed middle-aged cheeks, with a drinker’s broken veins. As he moved off she made him an offering of a piece of sodden gum branch.