The Bodysurfers

by Robert Drewe

  My mother smiled, a little embarrassed, holding her mouth in a constrained way, like the time she had her teeth capped. ‘I know, Davey. It took me a while to make adjustments.’ There seemed some strain to the left side of her face, a tautness in the skin that she was shy about. Otherwise she looked very well, and I said so.

  ‘Getting there,’ she smiled. ‘The dolphins keep me young.’

  ‘They would,’ I agreed. ‘What do you hear from Dad?’

  ‘Ask him yourself,’ she said. ‘Let’s go down to the boatel.’

  We drove off down the road, Amphitrite Avenue, I noticed, with me asking inane questions about her new Volvo — was she happy with the safety features, et cetera? — and presently she indicated another limestone statue of King Neptune, with trident, this one about thirty feet high, rising out of the dunes.

  ‘I like it,’ she declared firmly. ‘Rex thinks it’s vulgar, but I like it. The boatel’s near here, in Poseidon Place.’

  Was this a delicate situation? Separate living quarters? I kept my questions to myself, however, as we drew up to the Triton Boatel, a dun-coloured limestone structure built right on the edge of the ocean like a Moorish fort. Radiating out from it was a long limestone breakwater sheltering hundreds of pleasure craft, their stays and moorings rattling and tinkling in the wind — yachts, launches and power boats of all sizes and varieties, even a Chinese junk — though their owners, or any people at all, were not to be seen.

  We sauntered along a sort of fake gangplank into the boatel lobby, Mum tripping very brightly through the foyer, I thought. She had discarded her brunch coat and looked very tanned and fit in her green Lastex swimsuit, just like the old Jantzen girl trademark.

  Dad was behind the counter in his neat summer seersucker. He waved off my enthusiastic greeting, smiling apologetically. ‘It’s the off-season,’ he said. ‘We’re still settling in, David. The last chap ran the place down. An Iraqi or something.’

  ‘It’s very presentable,’ I told him. He looked a bit fidgety, though happy enough.

  ‘The boatel business has got to expand,’ he asserted stoutly. ‘I couldn’t wait to get here, I can tell you. Best decision I ever made, running my own show.’

  ‘It’s certainly an interesting proposition, Dad.’ For some reason he was a little skittish in my company.

  ‘All units right on the ocean, waterbeds in every room, colour TV, fully equipped kitchen, mid-week linen change where applicable. It’s got to go like a bomb.’

  We left Dad adjusting his Diners Club brochures in their little display stand. My mother was anxious to show me over the marine park. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ she said. ‘He’s really as keen as I am about the whole Aurora concept.’

  It was surprisingly not beyond my comprehension to learn that my mother was leading a new life as a vivacious dolphin communicator. She certainly looked the part as she proudly swept me in to the Aurora Marine Park, the sun catching the blonde streaks in her hair and highlighting her brown, slender limbs. She tossed a silver whistle briskly from hand to hand.

  ‘Activity. Activity-plus is the message humming through Aurora,’ she said.

  What was new to me was my parents’ sudden boundless punchy optimism. I felt slack and middle-aged by comparison; pale, short of wind.

  Mum knifed into the pool then, and surfaced balanced on the backs of two dolphins, smiling fit for television. Her charges were just as energetic, jumping and squeaking and snorting through those holes in their heads. She had names for them, unapt modern children’s names like Jasmine and Trent and Jason and Bree, and conducted some sort of affectionate dialogue using her whistle while they squirmed self-congratulatingly out of the water and bumped up a ramp towards us like sleek blow-up toys, their grey tongues waggling disgustingly at her.

  ‘Do you speak dolphin, David?’ she asked me out of the side of her mouth.

  ‘No, I never learned.’

  ‘I’m particularly fascinated in people exploring the intricacies of the dolphin language,’ she went on. ‘It’s taught in the school here, you know.’ She gestured vaguely. ‘Humans learn it too.’ And then she began speaking warmly to Bree, Trent and company in fractured schoolgirl French. They replied similarly, their beaks actually quite well formed for the nasalities and their accents rather better than my mother’s. Fishy vowels hung in the air.

  ‘Think you could hack it here?’ Mum asked me suddenly, an arm each around Jason and Trent. ‘Je t’aime,’ she murmured to Jason, unnecessarily I thought, raking her inch-long red nails down his tongue. He crooned appreciatively.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. Her jargon jolted, also her recently acquired fondness for animals. She didn’t even allow us to have a dog.

  ‘You could be an aquarist,’ she suggested, ‘helping Damian with the makos and hammerheads.’

  ‘What about Dad at the boatel?’

  ‘If you prefer.’ Allez! she exclaimed suddenly and blew a blast on her whistle. The dolphins bounced back into the pool. ‘You know something?’ my mother said to me conversationally, and the sunlight on the sheen of her swimsuit was so glaring it hurt my eyes, ‘It may be perpetual summer here but I’m against adultery.’

  ‘Who isn’t, Mum?’ I said.

  ‘So put that in your pipe and smoke it,’ she said.

  In the Sunday papers there was nothing about the picnic ground murders. David thought it looked as if the police had put the case in their too-hard basket. He spent most of the day reading alone while the others swam or played Scrabble or, in the children’s case, the video games at the store. Mid-afternoon he got them packed up and moving early, he said, to avoid the traffic back to the city. Driving fast to get home, and in deep thought, he crossed Mooney Mooney Creek without noticing.

  Eighty Per Cent Humidity

  On Paul Lang’s worst day since being extruded from the employment market he makes several bad discoveries. In ascending order of disruption and confusion rather than chronologically they are the flat battery in his old Toyota, the lump on his penis and the lesbian love poem in his girlfriend’s handbag.

  The last mentioned discovery, on top of the heat and the eighty per cent humidity and his grinding hangover, drives him in ever decreasing circles from room to room evading the sunlight and finally past Faye, still lounging in bed checking her stars in the Sunday Telegraph, and out of the flat into the street without a word.

  The morning sun sliding through the chinks in the bamboo blinds had given her body a sly tiger skin effect. Only the sides of his eyes could look at her and slip away. Too breathless to speak, he stuck the poem on the fridge door behind a magnetised plastic pineapple and left. More than left, vanished. Vaporised.

  This is where he retreats into his core, stamps down the stairs scattering cats and tries to start his car, take off, drive far from Bondi, and discovers the flat battery. Not a kick. Paul could get hysterical at this stage weren’t it for the pressure booming in his ears and a sensation of increasing concavity at the temples. Slamming the car door he moves heavily towards the security of Mario’s thick aromas.

  Humidity is enhancing the smells, sending their tendrils out to jolt the senses of passers-by. The usual wild-eyed locals are at large: junked-up rhythm guitarists and New Zealand maintenance dodgers not yet down from Saturday night, munching fast fried foods and planning survival routines. Cackling juvenile surfers sit on the kerb picking their toes. Against an ocean backdrop the first Japanese of the day photograph each other uncertainly. A blondish woman with a fixed religious smile verges up to Paul and presses a pamphlet on him. He accepts it absent-mindedly, meanders around everyone, smoking a cigarette with discomfort.

  Mario’s bins are festering out the front, last night’s prawn cocktail and snapper mornay remnants stewing in the heat. Holding his breath, Paul slides through the door into the café, down the back into the gloom with his darker fancies, and sits down at a table as new waves of surprise and fury arrive and revolve.

  When they met up at Byron Bay
in his surfing days she said she had never been in love — but she had been ‘in lust’. This announcement was boldly but self-consciously delivered in front of him and her then boyfriend, Andrew of the serene brown eyes. She had been an enthusiast of ‘pure, unadulterated fun’ in unusual quarters, she hinted over some local dope and Hunza pie, but later recanted. After she went off with him she said such past affairs were only to be expected of this era and other circumstances. To his questions both tentative and explicit she effortlessly gave the wrong answers. He took it she was in love with him because she said so, but what would she know? Her life story was full of modest lies and wide omissions. She had the slyness and eye wrinkles of an extra ten years. She censored scenes of bliss. Women are patient and men are not.

  There is an explosion as Mario’s orange juice squeezing machine starts up like a Boeing, grates and roars. It sounds as if it is chewing and mangling the oranges, skins and all.

  He should have seen it in her intensity and steady black eyes. The first time he saw her her body seemed to quiver under the skin. At the sight of her the afternoon turned to madness. He was in the Byron Bay newsagent’s buying torch batteries for camping. There was a hand on his arm and a blissed-out bearded type said, ‘Save your money, man. I’ve got a hint that’ll save you on lighting. Electricity, batteries, even candles.’

  ‘Oh, really.’ Then he saw this typical thirty-five-year-old sixties hangover was accompanied by a black-eyed woman with a level gaze. She was about thirty, slim and tanned and naked under her caftan. She drew his eyes while this perfect stranger rabbited on about energy economy. They were Andrew and Faye, local residents and alternative culture couple. It turned out that Andrew was beating back the Recession with tampons and margarine.

  ‘They give you a more romantic light and a nicer dispersal,’ Andrew announced loudly in the shop. ‘We use them all the time, Faye and I.’

  And she winked.

  ‘They burn for ever and you get some great effects. I cover them with a coloured shade. It disperses the light really beautifully. I’m into imaginative light dispersal.’

  On the footpath they offered him a joint and, shuffling in his thongs, he received her signals, every one, and couldn’t leave.

  ‘Any old oil,’ Andrew instructed. ‘Meadow Lea margarine, safflower oil is fine. Pour it in an ashtray, a soy sauce dish, what-have-you. Get a tampon, put one end in the oil, hang the other over the edge of the saucer. It sucks up the oil, you know. Take it easy, though. Too far in and you’ve drowned it, too moist and you’ve got a bit of smoke and flame. Light the string as a wick. Bingo!’

  Andrew demonstrated one of his tampon lamps over dinner. Flames leapt a foot, smoke filled the galvanised iron room. ‘You like a lower flame, use only a thin strand of the tampon,’ Andrew recommended. It was hard to imagine Andrew as a science student back at Geelong Grammar. It was hard to imagine Faye with him for long and she wasn’t three days later.

  Driving south in the Toyota, she said, ‘You know why I love you?’

  ‘I couldn’t guess,’ Paul said.

  ‘Because you can come five times on a milkshake and a muesli bar.’

  He must have appeared shocked. ‘That was a joke,’ she said.

  Mario’s could rise from its foundations with the din of the juice machine. The poem mentioned the works, nothing euphemistic, enough lyrical and romantic personal obscenities for him to mull over for the next thirty or forty years, plenty to give him the shivers now, literally set him shaking in his seat as Yvonne, the diminutive Maori waitress, materialises alongside smelling musky.

  Paul needs protein, Vitamin C, carbohydrates to recover and live. He checks the twenty dollar note in his pocket. That’s it until dole day. ‘Juice!’ he tries to shout over the clatter of the machine. ‘Toasted cheese sandwich! Cappuccino!’ Yvonne smiles anxiously, lowering her lip over a diagonally snapped tooth, a present from Albert, her Samoan boyfriend, on Christmas Eve, and bends low, putting an ear to Paul’s mouth.

  ‘Come again,’ she says. He breathes his order into her black hair, his nose nudging her earrings. Yvonne wears two together halfway up one ear and they look odd though satisfactory, he thinks, a nice exotic touch. The little musk-smelling ear looks sympathetic enough to nuzzle. Faye has no lobes, which presents earring problems, but not, he imagines, if she had her ears pierced like Yvonne’s.

  He’s becoming irrational. He notices he is unwrapping sugar cubes and building a little igloo on the table.

  The juice machine judders to a halt but Mario, a believer that silence indicates a lack of proper capitalist intentions, substitutes for its uproar a tape of ‘House of the Rising Sun’. Its volume and sentiments go badly against Paul’s grain. Outside the café tourist buses are pulling up, discharging loads of denimed Japanese honeymooners, but the exterior smell and interior ambience of Mario’s do not tempt them to enter. Lighting another cigarette with many a twitch, Paul suddenly remembers his lump, swept away by more dramatic events.

  An accurate prod is not possible here; neither, for that matter, was a full inspection carried out on discovery in the headachy dawn. His hungover head had driven him first to her handbag for her period-pain Myadols, thus to her hymn to lip, nipple and vulva. Belonging to one Joanne. Blank verse with a fascinated stress on the softness of textures. Touches, kisses, jokes and giggles. Again in anguish he forgets his lump. Joanne?

  He is in a trance. Surprised, he sees the blonde woman’s pamphlet on the table, a screed in the form of a comic strip for slow wits featuring a character called Sam the Super Surfer. At his present ebb Paul sucks a sugar cube and reads:

  Sam was given his first surfboard at the age of ten.

  From then on it was down to the beach and surf, surf, surf.

  Before long Sam was real good, by far the best surfer on the beach.

  He started entering local comps. And winning.

  Pretty soon he had become national champ. Before too long he was taking out big prizes on the international circuit.

  Hawaii, California. Life at the top for Sam was pretty cruisy.

  He became world champ and rode the crest of a huge wave of popularity.

  Sam had everything he always wanted. Money, cars and plenty of girls, girls, girls.

  He didn’t have to work any more for a living. Or even wax his surfboard. He paid someone else to do it.

  But Sam was enjoying himself so much that he neglected the most important thing — practice.

  One day the bubble burst. Along came Hotfoot Harry and took the world title.

  Sam was stunned. He was all washed up and his lifelong dream was over.

  As he turned to go someone put his hand on his shoulder. It was Ken the Contest Organiser.

  ‘You know, Sam,’ said Ken kindly. ‘We all have bad breaks sometimes. But there’s someone we can lean on when life gets us down. His name is Jesus.’

  ‘By receiving Christ’s life into us we are “born again” and become children of God.’

  ‘Jesus said, “Unless a man is born again he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.” You must be born again.’

  ‘John 3, verses 3 to 5,’ added Ken with a smile.

  Sam thought about what Ken had said. Then he replied, ‘I’d like to give my life to Jesus, but how do I do it?’

  ‘Easy,’ Ken replied. ‘Just kneel on the sand and pray after me right now.’

  So Sam gave his life to Jesus. And he discovered that while being a Super Surfer was great, it was not as great as knowing Jesus.

  No matter what sort of a surfer you are, you can ask Jesus into your life.

  Don’t wipe out when you can be stoked on Jesus.

  Paul has a clear image of Ken the Contest Organiser. Ken is a boy-scoutish thirty-five-year-old, square-jawed, tanned, with a clipboard and a natty Piz Buin eyeshade, and a matey slap on the buttocks. Ken encourages cold showers, communal and boisterous. Ken turns up at the after-contest dance without a girl once again and suggests a Big Mac and a lift home in his ca
r and, gosh, what a terrific view of the surf tonight, doesn’t it stoke you, might stop for just a minute, Jesus or no Jesus.

  Men are not close to God, even if there is one, thinks Paul. Women are nearer. From old Catholic ladies to your average nymphomaniac, he’s never met one who was honestly an unbeliever. He used to believe females were just generally nicer, remembering birthdays, keeping busy and scrupulously hiding farts. Women were better people. Until this recent revelation. And now he knows why they’re such Christians: the hypocrisy appeals to them.

  Yvonne approaches with his food and sets it down in a gentle fashion. Her T-shirt displays the diameter of her nipples. The business with the lip over the tooth makes her seem shyer than she used to be and he likes the change. She potters around the table, adjusting cutlery and tentatively creating a presence.

  ‘Where’s Faye?’

  He shrugs and makes a slicing motion with his hand, a horizontal karate chop of resignation and finality. The air motion blows Sam the Super Surfer to the floor. Yvonne bends and picks up the pamphlet and gives it a quizzical glance.

  ‘Heavy,’ she remarks. Then she announces, ‘Albert’s going Orange.’

  ‘Rajneesh?’

  ‘Right. Another bouncer at Abe’s put him onto it. The Rastafarian thing never sat easily — his hair wouldn’t work. He says he’s tired of everyday violence. He sees the world in a new serene light through Bhagwan.’

  ‘Is it the clothes or the serenity? I didn’t take Albert for mystical.’

  She fingers the tooth. ‘With the other thing, as far as he could ascertain Haile Selassie never made it to Samoa. This one’s a challenge, getting the colours right. But they’re not so stuck on orange these days. Pinks, reds, maroons, there’s quite a range. I saw a Rajneesh guy up the Cross the other night in a red Pierre Cardin suit, very stylish. I don’t mind all that. You seen the bumper stickers? “Jesus Saves, Moses Invests, Bhagwan Spends.” ’

  ‘Albert doesn’t need the encouragement.’