The Bodysurfers

by Robert Drewe

  Moira’s letter caught up with him in Wyndham. Her face today is a blur but Grace’s is clear. Occasionally in dreams they run together. Scott-Bowdler said marrying an Australian was a curious thing. Maybe so, maybe less curious than sitting on a verandah staring at the Indian Ocean.

  The explorer’s life is an independent one. He never got around to replying. In the desert he attempted three letters but threw them away. Another English woman, what was the point? At the time he was recovering from another snake bite, a gwarder, and not himself. The venom confuses you.

  The next night the blacks returned. But I scared them away for good. To be frank, Miss Teasdale, they ran away because in all the ruddy panic I got tangled up in my mosquito net. I stood up like a white ghost and they fled into the spinifex.

  I thought you’d enjoy that story.

  In the early morning when he is lying there, the only patient awake, the sea shallows are dotted with variously coloured balls or buoys. Against his will he looked, turned away and they were gone. A nurse had no answer to his question. Not for some time did it dawn on him they were women’s bathing caps.

  Women were bobbing in the waves in the early morning, chatting to each other.

  The penny dropped when he saw them walking up the hill from the beach into the pines, most of them elderly and wearing bathing gowns over their swimming costumes. A couple of them still had their bathing caps on.

  As soon as his curiosity was satisfied he again lost all interest in the sea.

  Unless he is drugged he does not sleep. He lives on air, he hardly moves. He has been made aware of the salivation problem and keeps a handkerchief handy for the dribble.

  Strange tastes come into his mouth. Once it was damper, burnt and crunchy. Once it was grilled barramundi. Another time sour-grass. In dreams caused by sleeping pills he sometimes smells camels’ breath and feels his nostrils clogged with dust.

  A Fleet Street interviewer asked him in 1933 what the desert meant to him. The question stopped him in his tracks. ‘Finding your own love,’ he remembers replying. Moira touched his sleeve. It still embarrasses him to recall saying it.

  He runs his book titles through his mind. There were six books but today he can remember only four, all out of print. They were all most discursive on exploration.

  The National Library has all his expeditions’ logbooks and the thousands of photographs taken over the years. Sand fell from the spines of his logbooks when he plonked them on the Chief Librarian’s desk.

  His life and expeditions are now in the hands of the general public.

  In his papers for the library he found a social page from a 1924 edition of the London Daily Telegraph recording the marriage.

  He came up the steps. There were pine cones on the verandah, blown there by the sea breeze. The opal was on the dresser and the shipping list.

  He was lucky to be out of it.

  He was known for his many lucky escapes. He always knew the right people. He was good in a crisis, the men put their trust in him. He showed the Fleet Street boys how to make fire in Hampstead with sticks. Never tease a camel, he advised the British.

  When we got to the town we circled it on our camels. We didn’t want to come in.

  A young woman approaches his bed. Her skin is sun-tanned, she has a bossy, confident manner.

  ‘Have we done a wee this morning?’ she demands.

  He stares past her. His face is white as paper.

  ‘Yes,’ says the last explorer.

  When she is gone he lies back on his pillows with the heavy pulse of the sea and the whine of the sea-breeze in his ears.

  A little later he manages to slowly remove the bedclothes. He inches himself out of bed. Supporting himself on the head rail, he carefully stands. He holds on to the head rail of the bed and pushes. The bed moves silently on its coasters.

  He manages to turn the bed completely around. With difficulty he climbs back into bed. His pulse is racing. Gradually he relaxes and lies back on his pillows, staring into the far distance. He cannot see out the window. The sea is behind his back, its noise is gone.

  Facing the desert, he feels up to laughing.

  Stingray

  Something miraculous happens, thinks David, when you dive into the surf at Bondi after a bad summer’s day. Today had been humid and grim, full of sticky tension since this morning when he’d spilled black coffee down the crotch of his new Italian cotton suit. He’d had professional and private troubles, general malaise and misery pounding behind his eyes as he drove home to his flat. He was still bruised from his marriage dissolution, abraded from the ending of a love affair and all the way up William Street the car radio news had elaborated on a pop star’s heroin and tequila overdose. Then in New South Head Road it warned that child prostitution was rife and economic depression imminent. Markets tumbled and kids sold themselves. Only the coffee stain on his trousers and his awareness of his own body smell prevented him from stopping at the Lord Dudley and sinking many drinks. Instead, a mild brainwave struck him — he’d have a swim.

  The electric cleansing of the surf is astonishing, the cold effervescing over the head and trunk and limbs. And the internal results are a greater wonder. At once the spirits lift. There is a grateful pleasure in the last hour of softer December daylight. The brain sharpens. The body is charged with agility and grubby lethargy swept away.

  David swims vigorously beyond the breakers until he is the farthest swimmer out. He feels he could swim forever. He swims onto a big wave, surfs it to the beach. In the crystal evening ocean he even gambols. He is anticipating another arched wave, striking out before it through a small patch of floating weed, when there is an explosion of pain in his right hand.

  David stands in chest-deep water shaking his hand in surprise. He’s half-aware of a creature camouflaged in the weed scraps and wavelets, on the defensive and aimed at his chest. As he flails away from it into clear water it vanishes. Immediately it seems as if it had never existed and that his demonstration of stunned agony is an affectation, like the exaggerated protestations of a child. But the hand he holds out of the sea is bleeding freely from the little finger and swelling even as he stumbles ashore.

  Pain speeds quickly to deeper levels, and then expands. Bleeding from a small jagged hole between the joints, the finger balloons to the size of a thumb, then to a taut, blotchy sausage. Even so, the pain is out of proportion to the minor nature of the wound. This sensation belongs to a bloody, heaving stump. Dripping water and blood, David trudges up the beach, up the steps of the bathing pavilion, to the first-aid room, where the beach inspector washes and nonchalantly probes the wound with a lancet. ‘Lots of stingrays out there at the moment,’ he volunteers.

  The point of the knife seems to touch a nerve. It’s all he can do not to cry out. ‘Is that what it was?’ he asks. His voice sounds like someone speaking on the telephone, mechanical and breathless. The beach inspector shrugs. ‘I can’t find any spine in it.’ He gives a final jab of the lancet to make sure.

  ‘Shouldn’t you warn the swimmers?’ David suggests, making a conscious effort to sound normal. He wants to see signs erected, warning whistles blown. He’s beginning to shiver and notices that he has covered the floor of the beach inspector’s room with sand and water and a dozen or so drops of blood. He feels ruffled and awry; glancing down he sees one of his balls has come out of his bathers in the panic; he adjusts himself with his good hand.

  The beach inspector is dabbing mercurichrome on his wounded finger. On his hand a blue tattooed shark swims sinuously among the wrist hairs and veins. He shrugs again. ‘Stingrays’re pretty shy unless you tread on them.’

  ‘Not so shy!’

  The beach inspector screws the top back on his mercurichrome bottle. ‘I’d get up to the hospital if I were you,’ he suggests laconically. ‘You never know.’

  By instinct David drives home, left-handed, his pulsating right hand hooked over the wheel. Impossibly, the pain worsens. In Bondi Road he is struck by
the word POISON. He is poisoned. This country is world champion in the venomous creatures’ department. The box jellyfish. Funnel-web spiders. Stonefish. The tiny blue-ringed octopus, carrying enough venom to paralyse ten grown men. The land and sea abound with evil stingers. It suddenly occurs to him he might be about to die. The randomness and lack of moment are right. Venom is coursing through his body. Stopped at the Bondi Road and Oxford Street lights, he waits in the car for progressive paralysis. Is it the breathing or the heart that stops? In the evening traffic he is scared but oddly calm, to the extent of noting the strong smell of frangipani in Edgecliff Road. He knows that trivia fills the mind at the end: his mother’s last words to him were, ‘Your baked beans are on the stove.’ Baked beans and frangipani scent, not exactly grave and pivotal last thoughts.

  It would be ironic for such a beach lover to die from the sea. David has known people killed by the sea, three or four, drowned mostly in yachting accidents over the years. He certainly has a respectful attitude to the sea — as a young lifesaver he even saved a handful of drowning swimmers himself. Thinking back, he has never heard of anyone dying from a stingray sting, unless the shock touched off a cardiac arrest. This knowledge gives small comfort as a new spasm of pain shoots up his arm.

  He gets the car home, parks loosely against the kerb and carries his hand inside. He circles the small living room holding his hand. Left-handed, he pours himself a brandy and drinks a mouthful, then, wondering whether it is wise to mix poison and alcohol, pours the brandy down the sink. The hand throbs now with a power all its own and the agitation it causes prevents him even from sitting down. The hand dominates the room; it seems to fill the whole flat. He wishes to relinquish responsibility for it as he has done for much of his past life.

  Living alone suddenly acquires a new meaning. Expiring privately on the beige living-room carpet from a stingray sting would be too conducive to mordant dinner-party wit. He considers phoning Angela, his former wife. He imagines himself announcing, ‘Sorry to bother you. A stingray stung me,’ and her turning to her new friend Gordon, a hand over the mouthpiece, their gins and tonics arrested, saying, ‘Now he’s been stung by a stingray!’ (He never could leave well enough alone.)

  She would hurry over, of course. She was cool in a crisis. Gordon would hold the fort. Gordon was adept at holding the fort, perhaps because it wasn’t Gordon’s fort. This did not stop Gordon from making proprietorial gestures, sitting him down in his old chair and pouring him convivial drinks in his old glasses, when he dropped the children off.

  ‘He’s wonderful with the kids,’ she’d said, driving a barb into David’s heart.

  He doesn’t phone.

  He is becoming distracted and decides to telephone Victoria, of whom he is fond. She has mentioned recently at lunch that her present relationship is in its terminal stage and he feels that a stingray mercy dash may not be beyond her.

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ she says. ‘Don’t move. Sit down or something.’ In ten minutes she is running up his stairs, panicking at the door with tousled hair and no make-up, and ushering him into her Volkswagen.

  The casualty ward at St Vincent’s is crowded with victims of the city summer night. Lacerated drunks rant along the corridors. Young addicts are rushed in, comatose, attached to oxygen. Under questioning, pale concussees try to guess what day it is and count backwards from one hundred.

  ‘Please don’t wait around for me,’ David tells Victoria, painfully filling in forms about next of kin. He can barely print. He can’t remember his brother Max’s address.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ she insists.

  As he and his hand are led into the hospital’s inner recesses he glances back at Victoria, rumpled and out of kilter, perched on the edge of a waiting-room chair. Their parting seems suddenly quietly dramatic, moving, curiously cinematic. From beneath her ruffled spaniel’s hairstyle she smiles anxiously, reflecting this telepathic mood. Rubberised black curtains close behind him.

  Among the sea of street and household injuries David’s finger is a medical curiosity. A young Malaysian doctor with acned cheeks informs him, ‘We’ll play it by the book.’ Self-consciously squatting on a narrow bed in an open cubicle, his shoulder blades and buttocks exposed traditionally in a green hospital gown, David is not necessarily relieved.

  It was never him in hospitals. It was usually women — having babies, miscarriages, assorted gynaecological conditions which owed something to his participation. They always wanted him present. Alone with his unique sting he understands. He lies back holding his own hand.

  They innoculate him against tetanus, take his blood pressure, pulse and temperature readings and a urine sample. They wash and dress the finger and apply a bandage tourniquet to his forearm. ‘We want to keep an eye on you,’ says the Malaysian doctor. Around his cubicle the raving of grazed drunks continues. He hears a nurse’s voice say, ‘It’s no use, we’ll have to put the straps on.’ A man howls often and mournfully for ‘Nora’. In answer to a nurse’s shouted question a concussed woman suggests it is the month of August.

  ‘Close,’ says the nurse.

  ‘March?’ says the woman.

  David calls for a nurse and asks whether Victoria is still in the waiting room. ‘Please tell her to go home.’ A moment later she peers through his curtains, enters, sits on the edge of the bed and holds his good hand.

  ‘You look vulnerable,’ she tells him, touching his bare back.

  ‘So do you, actually.’

  ‘I came out in a hurry.’

  Amid some commotion four medical staff now wheel an unconscious young woman into the cubicle in front. The staff try to bring her round but the girl, dark-haired and with even, small features, seems to be fighting consciousness. All at once she threshes and moans and tosses her naked body against its restraining straps. ‘Hilary! Hilary!’ the nurses shout. ‘Come on, Hilary. Be a good girl!’

  ‘What are you still doing here?’ David asks Victoria. ‘It’s getting late.’

  ‘I want to wait.’

  ‘I’m all right. I’m under observation.’

  ‘Do shut up.’

  Hilary is given the stomach-pump. The staff attach her to oxygen and various intravenous drips, all the time yelling and laughing in strained cameraderie. Hilary is one of them, their age. Immediately David sees Helena in five, ten years time, her straight hair, her suddenly longer, womanly limbs, her emotional problems. His pulse beneath the tourniquet throbs almost audibly. ‘Hilary! Hilary! Do you know where you are?’ the nurses sing. His fault.

  He and Victoria are silent in sight of this drama. Though the pain doesn’t let up he thinks he is getting used to it and feels slightly ridiculous being here.

  ‘Nora, I want Nora,’ howls the man.

  David wants nothing more at this instant than for Hilary to recover.

  A violent commotion comes from the girl’s cubicle. Suddenly it is jammed with doctors, nurses and orderlies. The Malaysian doctor is wrestling her, so are two sisters and a nurse. Everyone is loudly swearing and grunting, her bed is shaking, metal clangs and instruments fall to the floor.

  ‘God!’ cries David.

  They are forcing something down Hilary’s throat and mixed up in her gagging and moaning is a cry of outrage and ferocity.

  Victoria’s hand is squeezing his good one with great pressure. The howling man is muffled by the tumult from the cubicle opposite, now jammed with what seems like the complete hospital staff. Hilary begins to gag again, vomits, and all the staff exclaim and curse angrily. Then they start to laugh. They are all covered in black liquid, the emetic they had forced into her stomach. Hilary has vomited up her pills.

  At 2.00 a.m. they release him. Victoria drives him home and keeps him under observation for the rest of the night.

  Though the pain lessens next day, six months later the tip of his finger is still numb, the nerve-endings damaged. Victoria, early in their living together, produces one evening a copy of Venomous Creatures of Australia, reading which it
becomes clear to David that his attacker was most likely a butterfly cod, a small brown fish which looks like a weed.

  ‘They’re actually very poisonous,’ she says generously. ‘People are thought to have died.’

  ‘Let’s keep it a stingray,’ he says.