by Steve Bisley
Earthbound
I’m on a mission.
I walk from the pilot’s briefing room. My flight helmet is heavy in my hand. The jumpsuit hugs my broad shoulders, my blue eyes like pale crystal in the dawn light. A slash of red on the horizon. The sun’s first rays glint on the sharp edges of the jet. It’s just another day in the defence of our nation. The ground crew busy themselves under the belly of the Mirage. After the walk around I climb the stout ladder and settle myself into the snug cockpit, or what I like to call ‘the office’. Main switch and the systems come to life, needles in the green, the preflight done, the turbine whirring through the ignition sequence and the jet engine screaming to life. The attack dog is straining at the leash.
‘RAAF Mirage Lima Delta is prepared for takeoff.’
‘Roger, Mirage Lima Delta – taxi 36R and hold.’
A short taxi and I hold as a Hercules drops out of the sky to touch and go. I watch him climb and bank to the east through the thin early cloud. I’m cleared to go and rolling.
‘Stephen Bisley!’ Turbulence!
I’m back in the small classroom at the Royal Australian Air Force recruitment centre in George Street, Sydney. I got the early train from Wyong at five-thirty am to be here by nine. I’m here with ten other hopefuls. We’ve finished the aptitude test that will determine our suitability for the Air Force. I had a little problem with the maths component of the test, but I’m fairly certain I’m not colourblind, so all up I’m feeling pretty confident. I’ve got blue eyes that match the uniform. I can almost smell the aviation gas already, and secretly I know I’ve got what it takes.
‘Stephen Bisley?’
‘Roger,’ I blurt out, my head still in the clouds, and then correct myself with the more conventional, ‘Yes?’
There’s a bloke in a uniform and overshined shoes with a sheaf of papers and a clipboard. ‘Follow me, please!’ he snaps.
‘Sir!’ I reply, like I know the drill.
I follow him down a short beige corridor to a small partitioned office. On one wall is a photo of the Roulettes, the Air Force precision-flying team, in tight formation with the Harbour Bridge behind them. They’re flying dangerously close together, just the way us pilots like it: high, fast and deadly. The Queen’s on the other wall; she’s not going anywhere. He points to a chair and drops into another one. He looks at me for the first time and jots something down on a neat form. I think it could be something about my sky-blue eyes. It could also be about the size of my ears, which are a bit large, but I’m growing into them, though it seems to be taking a while.
‘Stephen Bisley. Is that you?’
‘Yes, sir, last time I looked!’
He doesn’t seem to get the joke. Too much on his mind apparently. Weighty decisions to be made. He writes again.
I imagine it’s something like Takes orders well and responds with clarity.
I wait; I always seem to be waiting for something. He scribbles on. I look at him closely. He’s middle-aged with the first tufts of grey at the temples. Probably sat where I am twenty years ago and didn’t make the grade. Must be hard for him, meeting all these future pilots, knowing that his life will be lived out in this office, earthbound, shuffling papers, while the people he met here so briefly soar across the wide canopy of the sky, a mile above where he sits. Must be tough.
‘Okay, Stephen. I’ve just been going through the results of your test and the school reports you brought with you today. Based on the information I have before me, I am pleased to say that we are able to offer you the choice of two positions in our next intake, providing you pass the medical examination. We have vacancies for AFDGs at the moment – would that be something that might interest you?’
AFDG. I run the letters through my head slowly and there’s nothing in their line-up that says ‘pilot’ to me, unless it’s the ‘F’ bit, which could have something to do with flight.
‘Air Field Defence Guard,’ he explains, seeing the vacant, slightly puzzled look on my face.
The only word that means anything to me in the title is the Air bit; the others sound wrong, especially Field and Guard. There’s been a giant mistake or perhaps a simple error.
‘I want to be a pilot,’ I assert, but my voice sounds thin and reedy.
‘A pilot? Stephen, if I had a dollar for every kid who sat where you are now and said they wanted to be a pilot, I’d be a rich man! Let me take you through this: a) We don’t take people of your age into flight school; b) You don’t possess the necessary educational requirements; and c) I don’t give a fuck whether you have blue eyes or not!’
He didn’t actually say the last line, but he might as well have.
He continued. ‘Do you like animals, Stephen? Because if you did decide to enlist as an Air Field Defence Guard, you might have the opportunity of working with a dog – possibly a German shepherd!’
There was no stopping him now.
‘The only other course that would suit your ability would be as a cook, with the possibility of perhaps becoming a chef!’
Seems fitting, because right now I can feel the egg on my face.
‘Lima Delta, we have taken heavy enemy fire and will have to abort the mission!’
‘Lima Delta, out!’
The morning sun is just on the horizon. There’s a small sandy mound in the middle of the Woomera Rocket Range. There is nothing but desert out here. It stretches to the horizon on all sides. If you turn in a circle slowly you can see the rim of the earth the entire way around. There is a sound like distant thunder. A sleek Mirage fighter blisters the azure blue sky; its wings cut the dawn light like bright sabres. It levels out at a bare hundred feet above the spinifex on its deadly strafing run. I’m not in the jet. I’m standing on the small sandy mound with my new best friend, Rex.
One of us is watching the jet. One of us has his tail between his legs, and it’s not the dog.
I left the Air Force Rejection Centre and threw myself under a passing bus.
Just joking. The city was hot in the early afternoon. The crowds surged along George Street and bunched at the intersections. I was country slow at first and it took me two blocks before I found the rhythm and got into my stride. It was two-thirty pm; I had more than three hours before my train left at six. I let the human tide carry me up George Street towards Central Station. No plan in my head, just happy to be on the move. At Park Street, I stepped out of the stream and headed east towards Hyde Park to take a load off and feel some space around me.
I knew the city layout from earlier trips with my family, not well, but the landmarks were in my head: the harbour to the north, south to Central Station, Hyde Park just east of Elizabeth Street. At the park I circled the fountain and headed south to the quiet of the War Memorial, found a patch of dappled sun and stretched out on the grass. I watched the city for a while. Pea-green double-decker buses whining on the downgrade on William Street with their speed washing off as they climbed to Kings Cross. School kids on an excursion to the squat brown museum on College Street. Lovers entwined on the grass, and further along a homeless man, with everything in a cart, fed stale bread to dusty bobbing pigeons. So much to see here. I rolled onto my back for a break from it and let the blue, blue settle and quieten me.
I was never going to be a pilot. It was just a shot at freedom, a chance to make a start at something; a way out, an exit. I lay with my thoughts for a while, the sun winking through the leafy canopy above me and the sounds of the city rising and falling. I was loosening the ties. My parents knew it, I knew it. I would sit the School Certificate towards the end of the year and that would be it. I didn’t know what I would do after school but today was a start.
I shake the park off me and head south for Central Station and the train home. By the time I hit the Haymarket on the edge of Chinatown I know I belong here, in this city. It’s the energy of the place. Everyone going somewhere, moving en masse, to get ahead, to be the first, to be a part of it.
I sit in the cafeteria at Central
with tea and a corned beef and pickle sandwich. I buy the latest Phantom comic from the newsstand. I make my way to the country train platform and board the train to Wyong. I find an empty compartment and settle into the seat beside the window. The sky is darkening as we leave the city and clatter up the northern line. Lights winking on in the houses, kids in the yards in the dusk, a woman at the sink in a bright window, men walking home with rolled papers under their arms and the light from the streetlamps pooling on the footpath.
Out of the city now and through the sandstone walls to cross the Hawkesbury River, the plump oysters sleeping on their wooden beds, the tide washing them clean. Climbing now, an hour to go and I unfurl the comic and lose myself in the inky pages. This one’s all about pirates, and by page four he’s knocked three guys out and he’s working on the fourth. I close the comic with other thoughts in my head. I think I’m done with the Phantom. I think I’m done with a lot of things today.
I sit on the slowing train.
I wish my family had been closer, more loving. I know we were all capable of it, ready for it, wanting it. Dad had put a stop to it. I still don’t know why. He’d killed it off in all of us; in Mum, in Richard, in Kristin and in me.
I just wish we had been better.
The train arrives at Wyong and I get the bus for the last leg of the trip. An hour later I’m walking down Carter’s Road. The moon is high and bright, the paperbarks shining white in the bush, the bright road ahead and the night things moving. I’m leaving this. A small farm at the end of a dusty road. A place of too many secrets.
Mum gave me a poem the next morning at breakfast:
What did she do, the old woman in the shoe,
When all the children left?
Did she feel bereft?
Rather she put back seven chops,
And went less often to the shops.
That’s my mum.
Surf’s up
I am almost over having sex with myself and would like to include another person. It seems such an appalling waste of resources, and I have so much to give! If there is a god, which I have always doubted, I would like a blonde with large breasts. Someone like Marilyn Monroe, the blonde of all blondes. She died in 1962, when I was eleven. I do know that if we had met, I could have made her happy, if only briefly – seconds, perhaps.
I wouldn’t mind brunettes, if it wasn’t for the hair.
You put a blonde of ample proportions in a bikini on a beach with a little smudge of zinc across her lightly freckled nose. Apply a thin film of lotion to her body and you’re fairly close to heaven. I spend a lot of time at the beach – most weekends. It’s not all about the scantily clad girls. I’ve got an eight-and-a-half-foot Gordon Woods three-stringer mal that I bought off a mate. It’s a bit big for me but I can get it to turn if I lie right back on it and really swing my weight through my hips with the nose up. It’s a plank.
The beach was the place to be. If I could get a mate with a car to pick me up and help haul the mal onto the racks, then I was gone for the day. We had a few different spots. Catherine Hill Bay was the closest to my place, about five miles north, and a little further was Caves Beach, just before Swansea. Going south, Norah Head had a point that worked if the nor’easter was pumping.
Catherine Hill Bay was like an Australian version of a Welsh mining village. It had a single doglegged main street that cut through the rows of miners’ cottages and ran downhill to the coal loader that jutted into the bay.
The loader ran out from the southern end of the beach to the deep blue of the ocean way beyond the breakers, deep enough for the coal-carrying ships to load and go. When the offshore winds blew from the west it shaped the sets into long perfect waves that broke to the left from the northern end and ran the entire length of the bay to the south. It took all the strength I had to get the big board moving fast enough, but if you nailed one the ride was sensational. The board accelerating across the face to the left, the nose chattering under your feet as the speed came on. The wave folding and breaking behind and the fizz of the spray off the crest as the wind pushed the face upwards into a perfect curve with the board slicing through like a blade.
When we weren’t in the water we were not far from it. We’d hang out with the local babes on the beach, some we knew, some we wanted to know. There was something about the surf and the sun that mellowed everyone and turned us on. If things heated up too much there was always the privacy of the sand dunes up behind the beach. It was all just innocent fun and the joy of being young.
On days when the surf was really pumping, the guns would arrive, crews from Newcastle and Sydney and beyond – surfers who travelled the coast in search of the action. The word of mouth through the surfing community was incredible. Someone would have heard from someone else that the bay was going off and bang, they’d all be there. These dudes surfed the world. Bali in Indo, California and the legendary Laniakea in Hawaii, where the waves would thunder in, thirty foot high and deadly.
They’d arrive in panel vans with a dozen boards on the racks or VW Kombis with peace signs and dolphin and whale stickers on the windows. They had the best-looking girls on the coast, chicks that hung with the best of the best. Babes they’d met on the beaches of Bali, South Africa, Hawaii. Exotic chicks with skin as black as local coal, their hair in beaded braids. Athletic blondes from Baja who could ride you off any wave they chose.
These guys had bodies like warriors. Scarred torsos from wipeouts that could kill you. Muscled arms like coiled rope, huge calluses below their knees from years of paddling, the sea through them like blood and their eyes the colour of dreams. We were in total awe of them.
We’d leave the water when these guys showed up. It wasn’t an option to stay. They could do things on their boards that just made us look pathetic. So we’d climb to the headland behind the dunes to watch the show and wait to get our beach back.
Other days I’d ride my bike out to the bay. Sometimes there’d be people I knew, sometimes there wasn’t. I was happy to be there either way, happy to be on my own. Sometimes I preferred it. It was a great place to work things out, to think things through. I’d sit up on the headland and just look. If you looked long enough it became a meditation of sorts, with the flow of the waves, the change of the light on the water, the constant movement across the surface and the awesome energy and power of it. It smelt like ozone and salt. Some days, when the big westerlies blew, the sea became dark and troubled. The currents were a confusion of direction, the backwash met the incoming sets and spoilt them before they broke. Always changing, never constant, never reliable, never safe – never.
I was at the bay one Saturday. Lots of families on the beach, plenty of sun, umbrellas on the sand and kids playing on the shore. A light nor’easter rippling the water. We were just lying around as you do, a few mates and some local girls. Towels in the circle, talking and snoozing as the mood took us. Then someone shouting and people pointing, a crowd gathering, bronzed bodies surging through the waves and more heading out through the break line. Panic on the beach. ‘Is it a shark?’
‘No! Someone’s in trouble out the back, there where the board riders are – look, there, see?’
Red and yellow caps arriving fast and more confusion, more bodies diving deep, bronzed feet kick the air at the surface, down and back for air and down again and further down. A sinking man lifted from the clammy deep. A body brought to shore, as still as a churchyard.
‘He’s Japanese,’ says someone in the circling crowd.
‘They’re not used to the water, not great swimmers.’ That’s Merle from the fish shop, who knows everything and more. The lifesavers blow the giving breath into him and pump him for an hour, but he was dead before they found him, floating in the land of shadows. They found his towel after everyone had gone home. At least they presumed it was his. It was the last one on the beach and no one could understand the weird writing on the label, and the neat thongs were different from the local ones.
Just south of Cather
ine Hill Bay was another beach called Frazer Park, north of a rocky outcrop called Snapper Point. I was only six years old and my sister was nine. Dad had taken us for a swim on a mild Sunday morning in early summer. Dad was a keen body surfer and had taught us all to surf.
I was fooling around in the shallows and making crude sandcastles on the beach. Dad had taken Kris out to the surf line and they were catching waves in the moderate swell. There was no one else on the beach. Unbeknown to my father, a rip had formed as the outflow had broken through the sandbar and large volumes of water were surging through the break and pouring out to sea. Kris had caught a wave to the beach and was heading back out to where my father was waiting. I remember looking up and seeing my sister being drawn out to sea, locked in the power of the current in the rip. I could see the look of terror on her face as it swept her further and further from the shore.
She was panicking now and trying to swim against it back to the safety of the beach, one small girl against the power of the sea. The swell was increasing in size and she had now reached the surf line, and the big waves were collapsing on her and driving her down. I saw my father swimming madly through the turbulence to get to her. By the time he reached her, they were right in the strike zone, pummelled by each breaking wave.
Dad managed to get them both within thirty yards of the shore and my sister was able to surf a broken wave to the beach. Dad had used up so much energy in the rescue that he was now being drawn out himself and was weakening by the second. I will never forget how vulnerable and helpless he looked as he was swept further and further away from us.
Then there was the blur of a body beside us and a young surfer hurled himself into the water, settled himself on his board and surged out through the breakers. By now all we could see from the beach was the dot of my father’s black hair far beyond the swell. He must have been close to letting go when the surfer reached him. He hauled Dad onto his board and they sat out there waiting for a break in the swell, then the surfer brought our father back to the shore and to us and to life. I remember Dad collapsing on the sweet sand till the fear had left him.