The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  He said, ‘It’s not sex, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  Our plates of snapper arrived then, the fish engulfed by circles of beetroot and orange slices and onion and pineapple rings. Collage as much as meal. As I scraped the bright geometric toppings off my fish I almost asked whether all this round food was conveying wisdom to him.

  I was running out of questions, and Anthony, his cheeks already flushed from the alcohol and conversation, was still frowning. I swallowed another mouthful of wine. I was forced to raise my voice over the dour northern English voices and seagull squawks.

  So, this new life journey, one of tossed-in job and dumped family – apparently a celibate journey, to boot – was being determined by serviette rings and wine labels.

  ‘Ant, I think you need to see someone,’ I said.

  *

  Charged with carbohydrates, the melee of kids fled the debris of the party table. For several minutes Jason and I tried to exhaust them by organising a game of Red Rover under the peppermint trees, but the idea didn’t take hold.

  Weary of manners and adult directions, first one boy then another broke away from the game and began running up the hill and rolling down again. Soon all of them were rolling and shrieking and somersaulting down the slope. Late-afternoon shadows were stretching across the park but the day’s clamminess seemed to have increased. In the heat, with the river so close, this fierce prickly game looked like madness. Over and over, hysterical, they rolled and climbed.

  Behind the main clump of boys, Anthony, less quick and agile, dizzy and red-faced, grass sticking to his clothes, picked himself up and staggered up the incline once more. His legs were wobbly sticks. As he climbed, he had to avoid the mob of boys tumbling down, and several times he was knocked over. He was no longer in charge of events and the rebellious horde ignored his angry protests and indignant arm-waving. That urgent noise he was making sounded somewhere between shouting and sobbing. Then he got to his feet halfway up the hill, beat his sides with his fists and started to scream.

  *

  Anthony drained his glass, leaned back in his chair, dropped his hands in his lap, breathed deeply – once, twice – as if willing the dangerous glimmer in his eyes to fade and a suitably serene expression to slide down his cheeks.

  ‘See someone? You mean a shrink?’

  ‘Well, a psychologist or counsellor or whatever.’ It sounded lame. He’d lost his father at the age of five. I tended to forget that. I’d been twelve when Mum died and eighteen when Dad did. Being five was probably worse. But at least he still had a mother. ‘You might find it helpful, dealing with old emotional stuff.’

  ‘I have my own spiritual mentors,’ he declared. ‘And I’ve never been more emotionally stable in my life. In fact, I’m so calm I don’t even resent your bloody gratuitous advice.’

  ‘Just because you’re calm doesn’t mean you’re not fucked up and don’t need help.’

  ‘And you’d be competent to judge that. With your background? A fucking painter who didn’t even go to university?’

  ‘Someone with more life experience and common sense than you, brother.’

  He raised an eyebrow. The resemblance was extraordinary. It could have been our father, towards the end. When he was bitter and hitting the bottle late at night and always giving Sally and me strange looks; when he realised he’d remarried too soon, the wrong woman; when he was still mourning my mother Monica.

  ‘Brother? Are you sure?’

  ‘Jesus! Well, half-brother then.’

  He was running a finger around the rim of his wineglass so it made that irritating thin scream. Another bloody circle. ‘You’re sure of that?’ he repeated.

  I could have whacked his smug hippie-lawyer head. ‘What are you getting at?’

  His smile was suddenly prim, as if an old score was finally being settled. ‘You’ve never wondered why you’re short and olive-skinned? How incurious can you be? I hate to be the one to pass on family secrets, but did you know Monica couldn’t have children?’

  For a few seconds I couldn’t see. The glare off the harbour, snowy tablecloths, the swirling white ruckus of the seagulls blinded me. The whole scene was leached of tint and shade. Strangely, I recalled the faint watercolours of Lloyd Rees when his sight was fading at the end of his painting life. If it were me, I’d have chosen brighter and brighter colours. But his were pale, soft yet urgent paintings that paralleled his life force. Paintings needing to be quickly said before time ran out.

  I remembered how stressful my sister always found those get-togethers of the gingery Kennedys. The insouciant ways of the Spritzer Sisters, as she called them, the blithe patronising attitude of Liz’s siblings towards ‘Monica’s kids’ made Sally edgy and self-conscious in their presence, and savagely mocking later. My shy sister always got plenty of sardonic material from family gatherings but they wore her out and in the end she’d given up attending them. My older, smaller sister.

  ‘Very commendable of Monica and Dad in the circumstances to take you both in,’ Anthony said. ‘I guess it must have been spiritually fulfilling in its way to snatch you from the tribe. A tent boxer at the Royal Show, your father. Your mum was a little white fourteen-year-old whose dad ran the Ferris wheel and wasn’t too thrilled with the outcome. Not sure of Sally’s background – much the same, I reckon.’

  Anthony rolled his napkin into a ball. ‘Anyway it was all Monica’s doing, the adoptions, so I’ve been told, and Dad went along with them because of her infertility problems. Complex legal processes involved, health and cultural risks. Made everything easier all round, you two being quite pale, I guess. God knows your community doesn’t give up its waifs too readily.’

  *

  Some of the boys on the hill stopped surging and somersaulting to stare at Anthony and his noise. The sisters glanced up from their spritzers and cigarettes, shook their heads wearily and resumed chatting.

  Anthony bellowed on. Tired of the hubbub, a couple of boys made for the shade, brushed themselves down, drank some Coke and looked around for entertainment. Then they spotted the Slazenger bag, unzipped it, got out the bat and ball, set up the stumps and began quietly playing.

  I joined the game behind the wicket. The bowler bowled properly overarm, using the regulation hard six-stitcher; the batsman struck the ball squarely back to him two, three times. The face of the bat and the panther emblem hit the ball correctly with sharp, efficient cracks.

  Down the hill thundered Anthony. His pallor was gone and his curls were damp and stringy. Muddy tear streaks ran down his cheeks and spit frothed on his lips.

  ‘Give everything to me!’ he yelled. He raced up to the surprised batsman and snatched the bat from him; he took the ball from the bowler. He grabbed up the stumps. From the bitter ferocity of his glare, I could tell he thought I’d betrayed him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  From under the peppermint trees his mother sang out, ‘Ant, play nicely.’

  For a moment he stood there undecided, with the cricket gear clasped possessively to his chest. Then he stacked it back into the Slazenger bag, picked up the bag and marched off across the park. He’d gone maybe twenty metres when something apparently occurred to him and he stopped, returned to the party table, collected all his birthday presents – some gifts still unopened – and crammed them into the bag as well. It was a tight squeeze: the panther was stretched to bursting.

  Very businesslike then, a grim smile on his face, he strode down to the river. I watched him go, just as grimly. The sea breeze had finally arrived, sweeping through the peppermint trees, and snappy little waves began breaking on the shore. I followed him but I wasn’t going to stop him. Surely this tantrum would soon play itself out.

  Indeed, the bag must have become heavy because he had to haul it the last few metres across the sand and on to the jetty. Brushing aside skylarking wet children, curious onlookers, he dragged it the length of the jetty until he came to a pontoon just above the deep water. Then
he heaved the bag into the river.

  All that wood inside it, and the trapped air; it floated easily. A couple of children dived in and set off after it, then gave up. The tide was going out and the Slazenger bag sailed away into the bay and bobbed into the wide river estuary. I reached the pontoon, and sat down along from Anthony, and we watched the bag in silence until it was gone.

  Checking into Varadero’s oldest hotel, the Internacional, Alex and Amanda were mildly surprised to be welcomed in the foyer by three larger-than-life statues of a golden mermaid, a Venus de Milo and a plump naked woman who seemed to be expressing breast milk into a pineapple.

  In a Cuban beachscape of flashy resorts, the Internacional was down to two stars these days, and lucky to have them. But Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner and significant Mafia figures and Caribbean dictators were said to have caroused here. To Alex and Amanda, such a raffish history was definitely worth a couple of stars.

  Enthusiasts of singular and colourful travel destinations, the couple had been impressed by TripAdvisor’s review of the hotel. ‘Admittedly ageing nowadays,’ TripAdvisor declared, ‘Cuba’s first beach-resort hotel, situated between the Bay of Cárdenas and the Florida Straits, on the lushly vegetated Peninsula de Hicacos, was opened to loud fanfare and wild Batista-era revelry in 1950.’

  Despite an abstract interest in old Fidel, still apparently clinging to life in some secret hospice, and Amanda’s wistful nostalgia for dashing young Che, killed more than ten years before she was born but commemorated on her T-shirt, there was something deliciously wicked about the phrase ‘wild Batista-era revelry’, with its connotations of vice, corruption and tyranny. Even sixty-five years later.

  At the reception desk they kept nudging each other. Alex indicated the bosomy woman with the pineapple. ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Lactation?’

  ‘Goddess of the pina colada?’ Amanda wondered.

  The decor! The foyer of overstuffed leather couches and gold-framed mirrors! The walls painted in whirligig patterns of turquoise, pink, green and brown! ‘Mad Men meets Caribbean bordello!’ Amanda said. This was by no means a criticism.

  Check out the framed faded photographs of those early carousers! Yes, there were Frank and Ava. Notice Frank’s askew bow tie and Ava’s tipsy, smoky eyes! Look at the tables and banquettes of despots and mobsters! What with all those cunning, grinning faces smoking cigars and drinking champagne – all the shrewd Mafiosi and gold-toothed presidents ogling hot beauties in strapless gowns – it was impossible to tell oligarch from politician, ruler from racketeer.

  And – the couple was delighted to think – in the racy and spicy Internacional, here we are as well: Alex and Amanda Emerson from Melbourne. They were now actually in rebellious, defiant, glamorous, other-worldly Cuba. Travellers though, rather than tourists. They hated the word, the very idea, of tourist, with its connotations of castles and cathedrals and tour buses full of geriatrics. All the way from inner-city Melbourne to Sydney, to Dallas/Fort Worth. Then, because of the ridiculous US flight restrictions, via a roundabout stopover in Panama City to Havana. And from Havana by local bus to Varadero. They could hardly believe their own adventurous natures.

  Of the Internacional’s three elevators only the narrow service lift behind the kitchen was working. It smelled of lard and rum and stale body odour. It was another trek to their fourth-floor room, along a worn and stained red carpet that squelched underfoot in places and occasionally revealed holes in the cement floor through which they could see the floor below.

  But they smiled as they pointed out to each other the corridor’s more blatant safety risks and structural shortcomings – the gaping floor cavities, bare pipes and exposed electric wires – and made humorous gagging faces at the miasma of mould, rum and pork grease that rose from downstairs to meet the stench of cigars filling the corridor.

  None of this bothered them. On the contrary, they were already plotting an exotic holiday narrative for their more conservative and timid friends, people like Matt Irvine and Sue Millett and the Pepworths, for whom the idea of Cuba was too unsettling to ever consider visiting. People for whom travel meant France and Italy and Spain. And Britain, yet again. At a pinch, Hungary and Croatia.

  Already the Internacional was providing great anecdotal material. That neat hole in the window of their room, for instance. In the retelling, a bullet hole, naturally. And while the whirring and cavernous air conditioner indicated thirty degrees celsius, the temperature was more like thirteen and sent an unchangeable narrow but fierce wind stream directly onto the bed.

  The bed. Already they’d chosen to believe this was Frank and Ava’s room back in 1950. So this must have been Frank and Ava’s bed: an important potential story point, with the image of Frank and Ava cavorting here already dominating the couple’s imaginations.

  The bed was king-size. But the compulsory air blast, the disturbing hospital-style pink rubber sheet on top of the mattress, the two single-bed sheets running horizontally, and the two thin, hard pillows rather negated thoughts of Frank and Ava’s shenanigans. The window had no curtains, but it opened onto the sparkling ocean, as stunning as its publicity, so this lapse was easily forgiven, too.

  Varadero. Alex liked saying the word. Rolling it around his tongue. Varadero retained the Batista-era feel. A Cuban cultural warp: for capitalist countries an inexpensive beach resort, with its own airport offering easy access from Europe and Canada. As it turned out, a place of minimal locals and many overweight, heavy-smoking Europeans in scanty beachwear.

  They couldn’t believe its languid voraciousness. Once you’d checked into the hotel and paid the tariff upfront, all food and drinks were free, twenty-four hours a day. Encouraged to refill their thermoses of mojitos, pina coladas or beer whenever they wanted, drunken guests proliferated: shrieking women and booming men. Germans, English, Spaniards, Canadians, Italians, French, Russians. All of them smoking through their meals, and everywhere else as well. Naturally, the men ostentatiously puffed on Havana cigars.

  On the beach terrace, amplified salsa and son interspersed with vintage sentimental American pop songs began playing at nine a.m. and continued until midnight. A cloud of greasy smoke, thick enough to coat the throat, wafted from the hotel’s free hamburger-and-chips bar and hung over the terrace all day, mingling with the sweet grease of the guests’ suntan lotions.

  The guests. On their first morning, beckoned by the white beach and the serene dreamy sea, Alex and Amanda were almost bowled over by guests scurrying with their drink casks to grab a plastic deckchair that wasn’t broken. Chairless, the couple wandered seawards, past more statues of gods, goddesses and Mesoamerican heroes, most missing a nose or an arm or two, that frowned out across the sea. Maybe towards America.

  Once beach territory was established and the first drinks of the day consumed, a sort of glistening torpor seemed to strike the guests. Males of all ages languidly sunbaked, strolled and blatantly posed, baring shiny, shaved bodies in tight, bulge-enhancing trunks. Regardless of their years and shapes, the women all wore bikinis.

  Rather than submerge their bodies in this dazzling sea, however, men and women alike ventured only knee-deep. Motionless as sentinels, they raised their faces and chests to the sun, chins held high, their heads and torsos and swimsuits carefully kept dry, before returning to the sand to refill their drink flasks, apply more body oil, and fry once more.

  Amanda dived in first and Alex quickly joined her. To their surprise when they surfaced and glanced around the shallows, they were the only guests actually swimming. But how delicious it was after their long journey to stretch out and stroke through this temperate, glassy sea of exotic history.

  To active travellers like these two, who’d previously clambered from inflatables onto Antarctic ice floes, trekked through Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and, most recklessly of all, nightclubbed in Bogotá, to be staying at a scenic foreign beach and not to sample its ocean was incomprehensible – almost a crime. The other non-swimming, sun-obsessed Varadero vacationers were
letting the side down. Like the noisy, overweight and sunburned family nearby, for example, whose lobster-skinned matriarch slammed down her drink flask, hitched up her bikini bottoms and yelled, ‘Shit, I’ve got to pee again!’

  Not the behaviour of a bone fide traveller, someone who appreciated the offerings of their destination. Nor did the swimwear of another beachgoer pass Alex and Amanda’s traveller-test. This thin, melancholy man trudged across the sand before them. He was trussed up in a purple swimsuit that clung to his groin in a genital sling, rose up his bony chest, parted his bony buttocks in the back, and looped around his neck.

  They’d never seen such a bizarre garment. ‘It’s a mankini,’ murmured Amanda.

  They saw the mankini man each day of their stay. Stoop-shouldered and middle-aged, his long hair streaked with blond highlights, he arrived at the beach at noon, always followed by a muscular black Cuban youth walking several paces behind him.

  Each day the two males sat on the same patch of sand, the young man, a sullen chain-smoker, always keeping a distance of several metres between them, and appearing to ignore the other. The downhearted man in the mankini would take a drink or two and, every so often, walk slowly into the sea. He’d stand thigh-deep for ten or fifteen minutes and gaze forlornly at the horizon. Then he’d return to the sand, roll down the top of his extraordinary swimsuit, bare his hollow chest to the sun, and light two cigarettes.

  Passing one to his unenthusiastic companion, he’d nonchalantly, optimistically, lean towards the boy, putting his hand on his knee as he did so. There was no conversation between them. Without speaking, the boy would take the fresh cigarette and move out of reach again.

  *

  The next night Amanda spotted the mankini man and the Cuban boy eating in the hotel restaurant and nudged Alex. Until then another diner, a dangerous-looking Central American woman in a gold bra and shimmering gold hotpants, had claimed their dinnertime attention and a certain mention in their travel narrative.