The beach we were on was a sort of beach cul-de-sac. It was at the far end of the sea-front. It was small and enclosed by pine trees. The sand was still warm from the scorching day, the sun had long left this side of the earth and the moon sat proudly just above the horizon. It shone like a florescent torch illuminating everything it touched in a silvery grey. Everyone around me was chatting or laughing. I could smell the warm ash from the camp fire and I felt privileged to be there.
Tatiana lent back on her elbows, the tips of her long hair touching the sand and her long legs crossed displaying her high stiletto shoes; she had elongated her body by just a change of pose. I attempted to mimic her but I couldn’t stretch out my legs as I had calf cramp from hiding my flip-flops beneath me.
‘Seriously, little lady, you can come if you want. Carebear says you’re okay and she says she feels really guilty about leaving you, but you were fine as you were with some bloke who looked after you. Are you seeing him? What’s he like? Were you okay?’
Tatiana then redirected her gaze from looking at anyone in the party to looking straight into my eyes. She said, with spite in her voice, ‘Oh my God, what a cow for leaving you though, I’ve not known Carolanne long but I can see it in her eyes that it’s all about her and this just confirms it for me. Don’t you agree? I’d never do that to a friend – ever.’
She then looked back out to the crowd disinterested in my answer. Instead Tatiana bolted up onto her heels and squealed to someone else.
‘OMG. I’m sooo buzzed to see you!’
Without saying goodbye, she walked away from me by awkwardly lifting her feet high above the sand with each step to protect her heels from disappearing into the sand.
The night continued and more people approached me, thus pulling me into their scenery. I began to feel part of the night and I even started flicking my hair from side to side. Close to midnight I had forgotten about the whereabouts of James. I was temporarily no longer the girl who read dive books until 9pm snuggled up with James; instead I was a party girl, dancing on the beach with strangers who professed to being my best mate after knowing me for as long as a wave-break.
Carolanne and Tatiana came over to me again. I hid the tickle of laughter I had in my throat at watching Tatiana walk like a giraffe on sand.
‘So you’re coming with us tomorrow? Aah, Oli, I’m so pleased you’re coming with me.’ Carolanne beamed.
‘Yeah, Oli, we’re all going together, you’ll have such fun, trust me, and don’t worry about swimming with the fishes, you’ll be fine,’ Tatiana said.
Even though Tatiana was talking at me she was still looking past me to everyone around her; it was as though she was surveying her territory and checking all her maids were working well. I smiled and cocked my head in all directions to recapture her gaze, but as I did I caught sight of James and Chris in the far distance coming towards us.
I wasn’t relieved or even pleased to see him. Instead, my throat constricted and my heart beat faster. I grabbed Carolanne and subtly nodded over to their direction. She looked around and unsubtly said, ‘Ah, the nerve of him! I can’t believe he has come here; there is no way I’m talking to him, no way! Olive, you have to protect me,’ Carolanne declared as she flirtatiously shuffled her head from side to side. Thankfully, Tatiana disappeared by the time James and Chris arrived.
‘I’m sorry for the confusion today, Olive, I thought I’d told you I was going out and then I got caught by Chris. We went for a beer and by the time I’d got back you’d gone and I didn’t know where. I’m sorry.’ James glanced a ‘Hi’ to Carolanne then looked back at me with a worried tone in his eyes.
I smiled to reassure him that I didn’t mind his absence then searched the beach as to who might be looking my way. As much as I searched, no one was looking. So, at an opportune moment I tried to prize James from Chris to a secluded corner of the beach. By now Carolanne and Chris were engaged in a quiet but absorbing argument. They were not interested in us, in fact, I don’t recall Chris even saying hello to me, but then I don’t recall saying hello to him; it was mutual ignorance of one another.
I pulled James to a tree log in a dark patch of the party. The waves softened, the grey noise of giggles intermingled with the odd shout for beer or a rhetorical innuendo from someone to somebody.
‘Don’t worry about today, it’s fine. I’m probably going soon anyway. Do you want to come? No? Yes? You won’t like it here. I’m bored, I need to get back,’ I gabbled at James whose face retreated slightly as if I was blowing into his eyes.
‘Er, whatever you want, I promised Chris I’d find Carolanne and that’s done so I can walk you back or buy you a drink somewhere, if anywhere is open, or just keep you company?’
‘Going back,’ I snapped. ‘Sorry, it’s been a long night; I’ll grab my jacket and say good-bye to everyone. You stay there, don’t move.’
I hurried off to the pack of new friends, most of whom still hadn’t seen us as they were engaged with their own interests; either girls giggling, men drinking or men preying on giggling girls. I nodded a ‘bye’ to Carolanne and grabbed my jacket which was precariously close to Tatiana who expertly cornered me when I got close to her:
‘Olive, who’s that?’ her face was tilted into a question mark with her eyes raised in a curve and her mouth open like the full stop.
‘Oh that’s just James, only James, he’s a friend of mine, just a friend that’s all, just a friend,’ I flustered.
‘A good friend?’
‘Oh, not really. He’s the one I spoke about, the one who likes diving and we went diving together.’ My voice raised an octave as I continued, ‘Just a friend, that’s all’.
‘How sweet.’ Tatiana tilted her head back so her eyes were forced to look down on me.
‘Are you more than a friend to him? Come on Olive, you can tell me.’
‘No no!’ I replied, ‘definitely not. I don’t really know him’ I screeched another octave higher than before.
‘I thought so; he doesn’t look your type. Do you think he likes you more than you think? How funny that would be!’ Her voice was now slow and mine was quick to deny James for the third time.
‘No, Tatiana, he’s just a friend who is walking me back that’s all, nothing more and even if there was, which there isn’t, then I’m not interested.’
‘Good I’m pleased. But how sweet a friendship! Always useful to have sweet friends like that; lucky you. Now don’t forget snorkelling, I’ll see you tomorrow, bye for now.’
Tatiana kissed the air around me then turned on her heel and I scuttled back to James who seemed a little disgruntled at being shoved in the corner. I whisked past him and gestured that he follow me back to the hostel.
I slipped into days of either avoiding James when I was with my new friends, to engineering moments we could spend together that appeared to James as a genuine special appointment just for him.
When free of James I followed Tatiana and Carolanne as though they were my nemesis. When my friends were busy, I would recount the previous few hours or day I’d spent with Tatiana and her company to James. He would laugh and I found my strength to rebuke him for his judgement of them. It was a strength I didn’t have with Tatiana but, instead of questioning my capricious nature, I ignored it and merely enjoyed the perceived authority I had from the considered superior beauty passed to me as an employee of Tatiana & Co. But in contrast, I also enjoyed the relaxed ease I felt when I was off duty, with James.
The last part of my stay in Australia was interrupted by a niggling worry that began to surface quietly and stealthily from innocent chats about different careers, to jobs we wouldn’t like to do, to jobs we had lined up. As the menacing final day approached this concern turned to nausea as I knew I had nothing to return to apart from my sister and a house I grew up in. I had never worked, I was twenty-three, with few qualifications, and I had never broached the subj
ect of how to make my own way through life until now. James was comforting and came up with many suggestions but these all involved beginning with studying. This was a prospect I couldn’t face; I feared returning to school as I didn’t want to turn backwards in my life.
Recently, Jason, my dear reader, I learnt about ‘Existential Anxiety’. We are not told how to live our short existence to the greatest, to ensure we don’t waste a drop. We are not told how a fulfilling, fun and frivolous life should look. Instead, we muddle through a collection of possibilities as to what could offer the ‘life best spent’ if we just took this ride or that ride or another ride down life’s river. It’s like a gambling table where the game is our life, the dealers are those around us and the cards are the choices we are thrown. If we gamble well then we get to make the most of our existence but if we take the wrong hand then the table wins and we must live with the consequences of an unfulfilling life.
The night of gambling is short, from dusk till dawn, but it could be even shorter if the decisions we make are particularly poor and we are dealt out of the game before the sun has set. We have only a short time to play and we play without knowing the rules as these are revealed the more we gamble and understand the card game. More often, this expertise comes at a time when dawn is soon to break and the table is to be packed away. Accelerated learning is a consequence of playing a poor hand.
But how do we decipher the best hand to play until after we have played? The night is slipping away and the gambling money pile is getting smaller and smaller. Thus, we live in a permanent state of anxiety that our hand is poor and our decisions are worse. It is part of our innate sense of survival that we migrate towards the wisdom of others, giving us hints as to how we play our hand without losing our chips. It is why we join a queue when queuing is not necessary or why we accept the teachings from a weekly magazine astronomer whom we have never met but who knows all there is to know about us from slipping us into one of twelve bags.
I was a young girl influenced by popularity and beauty and so the only person whom I naively perceived to understand me then was Tatiana and she was the one I chose to throw my chips onto my table. She encouraged me that getting educated was a backward step and it would only serve to add one line on a resumé but getting a job would show more commitment. It also meant I’d have money to start living the way I wanted to live. I knew she was idealistic in her view of the job market but it was easier to listen to her than face the prospect of studying for the next three years.
‘Seriously, no one bothers looking at the section on qualifications, what they want to see is a commitment to the job you choose, so burying your head in books is diverting you away from learning about the job. It shows far more commitment to your career if you’re willing to work than just study. I’m going to work in the city anyway, my cousin has a friend who can get me into Ernst Young soooo…’
Tatiana had a smug smile as her statement trailed off after the word ‘so’, as if that replaced a full stop in conversation.
‘Do you think there are other placements there for me?’ I delicately explored,
‘I doubt it but I’ll ask for you. Don’t get your hopes up as they’re a hard company to get into, so I’m really lucky.’
I didn’t pursue it further as she turned away but then sharply turned back at me with a forceful determined expression. Her lips were straight and thin and her eyes cornered mine so they couldn’t escape without a tug of war.
‘Why do you need to have a career anyway? I don’t want one, I don’t need one. Olive, trust me, there are easier ways to make money in life without working.’
We were sitting on a bench on the promenade above the beach. Tatiana didn’t want to walk on the sand as she claimed it irritated her toes and she wanted to protect the skin on her feet, so we sat on this bench overlooking families playing together in the sand and in the sea. It was late afternoon and the fathers were home from work and these men were out taking their beloved wives and children to the beach for the remainder of the day. Each pocket of people was a family; they were there to share their lives at that moment in the sun with no one else but each other and they were all laughing and building memories to enjoy again whenever they chose; perhaps when their children had grown up and found a family to play on the beach for themselves.
‘Work in the city is fine but you’re there to find a credit card attached to a man. The man works and you get to stay at home doing whatever you want.’
‘I doubt it’s that easy,’ I replied.
‘Yes, it is! and that’s the point of being pretty; don’t waste it on ordinary men or on an ordinary life working at a career that isn’t worth anything to anyone. My sister, Carrie, works every day for a job which requires her to get up at six in the morning to earn money for other people and in all the years she’s been there she’s had only two promotions. She’s a lawyer who is not married, she lives on her own and most Saturdays she’s crying down the phone that she’s lonely. She does nothing about it and time is whooshing past her and taking her looks away with it. She’s thirty-three and doesn’t even have a boyfriend and she doesn’t have the time to even try to find one, so the probability is she’ll end her days alone.’
Tatiana shook her head with pursed thin lips.
‘Carrie is like an old lady in a motorised wheelchair that is stuck in the middle lane of the motorway; she can’t get out, she can’t pull over; she just has to push the button and hope that somehow she’ll speed up and join the fast cars around her and if she can’t, she prays she isn’t run over by a huge truck.’
Tatiana grabbed my arm with her long fingers.
‘Is that what you want? Or maybe you’d rather take the sweet true love approach in life, such as my other sister Louise who married at twenty-four and had two children? They had no money but supposedly she was content with her two-bedroom terraced house and working long hours for a local computer repair shop as their bookkeeper. She bought up his children and forfeited holidays, new clothes and even nights out with her friends to ensure her family were well cared for. Rob, her husband, also worked long hours and even longer hours when he was cheating on my sister. Eventually Louise broke down and got rid of him as she couldn’t face finding out about another affair he’d had. She, like me, had spent her young life learning about affairs as we grew up with a cheating father who eventually left us when I was thirteen years old. All men cheat – all men – and they’re the ones who drive the fast cars pushing the likes of my sisters off the road. There’s no exception to this rule, all men cheat and if they don’t it’s because they didn’t have the opportunity to cheat – but they all aspire to it.’
Tatiana nodded at me and released my eyes from her grip.
‘My dad didn’t cheat I’m sure,’ I said as a defence,
‘How do you really know? Ever asked him?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘So he left without being discovered.’ She swung her head to the sky, ‘Sorry, but all men cheat.’
I tried again but this time with a stronger line for the defence.
‘These men here aren’t cheating; look at the man in the blue trunks hugging the woman with the brown bobbed hair. He kisses her every so often; it’s tender, between two loving people.’
‘He’s about twenty years older than her and clearly she is his mistress. His wife is at home waiting for him to stop kissing this woman and return to her and their humdrum life.’
Her case for the prosecution was strong as, although they were tactile with each other, he was greedy for her affection but she looked as though she was being bruised by the embrace of her fifty year old boss and wondering if her pay rise was really worth it.
I tried again and bought in more witnesses.
‘Okay what about that man there playing Frisbee with his two sons, there’s no mistress in sight there?’
‘There’s also no wife and this means he’s
divorced because he cheated and it’s his afternoon with his kids.’
‘The man over there then, he’s definitely with his wife and kids and having ice-cream with his children.’
‘Again, he’s having ice-cream with his kids but not his wife who is paying attention to her children but is also making a show to ignore her husband. She knows he’s cheating and he knows she knows he’s cheating; the afternoon is a façade for their kids but ultimately he’ll be the same as the previous man and buying ice-cream alone.’
Tatiana rested her case, but I had one last witness to present – if you’d permit, m’lud. ‘James. He’d never cheat on his wife.’
‘First of all, please say you’re not thinking about being his wife or even his girlfriend and secondly, maybe he would be the exception, but if you were his wife, you’d spend your days knitting jumpers to keep out the cold in your wooden cottage whilst he cheated on you with a fishing rod under the pretence that he’s trying to catch dinner; plus he’d cheat you out of having a life.’
My defence crumbled due lack of evidence and so men across the world were found guilty of cheating.
‘So, what’s the alternative for me then?’ I pleaded.
Tatiana once more grabbed my gaze in hers and said slowly and quietly as if she was telling a ghost story and trying to build the tension; ‘You accept men cheat and you marry them anyway but the trade is their credit card. They can cheat all they like with anyone willing to massage their flagging ego, whilst you spend the money that they earn on yourself. Anyway, the only point of men is to have babies and when you do, these babies will grow up and go. You’re on your own either way.’
The Society Game Page 5