by Sue Orr
‘Who was it?’ Jack asked.
The bourbon bottle was one-third empty. I’d just had my turn on it; the sweet, sticky liquid stung my throat.
‘I dunno. Liam said he looked at his programme, checked out the timetable, and he couldn’t see this band mentioned anywhere. They went all the way through the schedule, then they started asking people standing around them. Everyone was checking out their programmes … no one could work out how who these guys were.’
‘Doesn’t sound that organised,’ said Jack.
‘Shut up, Jack,’ said Cru.
‘Anyway. There was a crowd gathering, and this band is mucking around with its gear, guitars and mikes and stuff. Tuning up. Or that’s what Liam thought.’
I passed the bourbon to Josh. He stopped talking and drank two big gulps. He didn’t flinch at the burning.
‘The crowd was pretty out of it, heaps of E and shit, you know,’ Josh went on. He leaned in close to the fire, prodding it with a stick. We all moved forward with him.
‘And so the band’s warming up, playing a few chords, doing the old one one, two two into the microphone.’
‘Never worked out why they say that. Why they don’t actually test it by singing.’ Jack again.
‘And then the lead singer says Thanks everybody. And walks off the stage. And the rest of the band puts down their instruments and walks off too. Like, that was it. The warm up was the gig.’
We were all silent. The fire roared.
‘Is that it?’ said Jack. ‘Is that your lame story?’
‘No,’ said Josh. ‘It’s not it. The band came back out. The crowd’s going What the fuck and the lead singer’s standing there in the middle of the stage. Apparently he looked like that old guy our parents listened to, you know, the dude that ate live chickens on stage.’
‘Ozzy Osbourne. Prince of Darkness,’ I said.
‘No, Alice Cooper. The skinny one with the runny black shit under his eyes. And the band starts pissing around with their instruments again, and the singer just speaks into his microphone. He leans right forward, Liam said, and says just one thing. You will never know us; you will never forget us.
‘The band carries on tuning up, and the guy just stares at the crowd. The crowd’s getting really pissed off now, starting to give the guy a hard time. And slowly, the guy looks across the audience, slowly, at every individual face and starts to smile.’
It’s so quiet now. Josh looks around at all of us, shaking his head at what he is about to tell us.
‘Liam’s standing there, and he’s overcome all of a sudden with this need to crap.’
We all crack up, then fall quiet again. Josh is still shaking his head, smiling.
‘It’s like, not just a need. Next thing, he’s totally lost control of his bowels. He’s standing there in the middle of a crowd, and he loses it. He’s in a panic, freaking out, and he looks around.’
Josh stops talking. ‘Give me that bourbon,’ he says, and drinks from the bottle again. I take it off him and drink too.
‘Liam looks around the crowd, and everyone else is in the same situation. Everyone’s holding themselves, walking off towards the toilets, holding their stomachs. The chicks are crying, screaming, rushing away. In the panic, the band disappears off the stage. Gone.
‘Heaps of people didn’t get to the loos. It was pretty ugly. Later on in the day, the word starts to get around. The band had looked like it was warming up, but it was playing the Brown Note.’
‘What the …?’ said Cru.
‘The story goes that if you put out a sound at between five and nine Hertz, it’s only felt by the body. It can’t be heard. But it makes you sick, this note, makes you shit yourself.’
‘Bullshit, man,’ someone said.
‘Nah, it’s true. That’s what happened. It’s been used by Japanese police, and the French military, apparently, according to Liam. When he got home, he Googled it.’
‘So who was the band?’
‘No one knows,’ said Josh. ‘The organisers were going through the crowds, asking everyone questions, trying to find out. They were never on the programme, never part of the official line up for the day. Security was all over it, those guys jumped up on the empty stage, shot out the back, trying to find them. They might not even have been musos. They just got on the stage in between acts, played around with the gear, and disappeared.’
No one said anything. My head was spinning from the beer and the bourbon. I fell back onto the sand and looked at the sky. Then someone said What a load of shit and everyone cracked up.
AT THE END OF the second day, we all agreed that the surf had been the best we’d ever seen at Pukehina. We couldn’t believe it. Massive clean waves, and that nuisance of an afternoon onshore wind hadn’t arrived to chop up the water. No one took a break until about five o’clock, when starvation drove us out of the water and down the road for takeaways.
I’d gone through moments during the day when I’d missed the silence of Ryan’s company. That was the trouble with surfing with so many people — at any given moment, someone would be making a noise. And these guys treated dropping in on each other as a game, not a breach of the surfing code. So you’d wait and wait, and finally take a wave, and then some dick would cut in. Mostly though, the day was great.
That night we stoked up the fire, got the flames roaring. I put on all my clothes to stay warm. The night before, I’d fallen asleep and woken up frozen by the burnt-out fire some time in the early hours. There’d been a couple of the others still there, too, out cold. I stumbled up to the camping ground with a sore head and a raging thirst, finally finding my sleeping bag.
The second day put us all on another high. We’d already cracked into the beer with our burgers, most of it was gone. The spirits came out of the chilly bin, the lids chucked away.
‘Did you ever get such good surf, out here with Ryan?’ Jack clinked bottles with me, cheers, and we took a swig from the whisky bottles at the same time. Jack was looking at me as he swallowed, waiting for an answer.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That was it, today, for sure. The best.’
Jack grinned. ‘Do you hear from him much?’
‘Nah, nothing,’ I said. ‘Pretty freaky guy, looking back.’
It felt like we were getting pissed really quickly that night. Maybe it was the hard-out surfing, we were pretty tired. And, like I said, we were all on a high too. We were mucking around, winding each other up, making a fair racket probably, then I noticed that Jack had gone quiet.
‘What’s up?’ I asked him. I was sitting next to him.
‘I’m just wondering whether I should tell you guys this story,’ he said. He was looking down at his feet, the whisky bottle in his hands, hanging between his knees. He wouldn’t look up at us.
‘Go on,’ I said, and the others agreed. Get on with it, Jack.
He looked around at us all. We were laughing. I prodded him. Jack shook his head, breathed in sharply, as if to begin talking. ‘Nup,’ he said.
That was it. We were all on top of him. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said. He looked around the whole group. At everyone, except for me.
‘You know how the old man sells real estate,’ said Jack. ‘Well, he does rentals too. He actually rented the house out to Carla Mishefski. Ryan’s aunty.’
Everyone was quiet. I looked around, and all eyes were on me, not Jack. I stared into the fire. The guys would have been wondering how I’d handle a story about Ryan, but it was learning her name that had stunned me. Carla. I’d passed on the whisky bottle I’d had earlier, otherwise I would have taken another big drink.
‘So, anyway. One of the things that a real estate agent has to do with rental properties is go and inspect them every now and then, make sure the place isn’t being trashed. You’d be amazed what people do to rentals … like, this one guy —’
‘Focus, Jack. Hurry up,’ someone said.
‘So the old man goes around to this place the Mishefskis are renting, and guess what he fin
ds.’
‘What?’
Everyone’s leaning in, listening. I looked at Josh; he was grinning. He knew already he wouldn’t be drinking the worms. My head was pounding.
‘Dad walks through the house, checking it all out. Clean and tidy, he said, well looked after. All just great.’
Hurry up!
Jack’s grinning the biggest grin you ever saw. He’s looking straight at me.
‘All just great. But there’s only one bed in the place. There’s Mishefski and his aunty living there, in a two-bedroom house, and one of the bedrooms is empty. Not a thing in it. And in the other bedroom there’s a king-sized bed.’
No one said a word for ages, it seemed. Then, Fuck, no way, freak …
I stared into the flames. My face was burning; I couldn’t tell whether it was the fire or the rage coming up in whisky waves from the pit of my stomach. I stood up, unsteady on my feet, and stumbled over to the grassy dunes and threw up.
I went back to the fire. Jack was leaning back against one of the chilly bins, his face smug in the light from the fire.
‘Did you know, Paul?’ someone said. ‘You must have known.’
‘What did Ryan say about it?’
‘Is that, like, incest?’
‘Yeah, I knew,’ I said. ‘Worked it out the first time I went round there.’
I laughed. Stood with my feet apart and my arms folded. The heat from the fire was burning my shins through my jeans. The raging inside my head was giving way to something else. ‘I knew, alright. And guess what,’ I said, grinning round the group. ‘Ryan wasn’t the only one getting it from her.’
And I told them. I told them everything I had done with Carla Mishefski. Every dirty, horny little detail. Including all the things she’d shown me. She was thirty-two, I explained. She’d been around. I told my story calmly, slowly, and no one interrupted.
I LAY ON MY board and watched the dawn. For a few seconds, White Island was black, trimmed with orange fire. As the sun rose, the water changed from grey to blue. A nice set of waves was forming not too far out, so I turned the board to face them.
The best break was always here, on the sandbar at the mouth of the estuary.
I’d woken in the dark, got up quietly and loaded all my gear onto the ute. The others were still out cold. I was going home. I pulled out onto Pukehina Parade, but turned left instead of right. Just a quick look at the estuary. I wasn’t sure when I would next come out for a surf. Or whether I would ever come out again.
There were thoughts crashing around in my head, making a hell of a noise. It was as though someone had grabbed a television remote, and was channel surfing at speed. Carla, Ryan, empty bedrooms, a mother of a king-sized bed with sheets tangled up … a bed I’d never laid eyes on, so how come I remembered it so clearly?
Jack Cleveland’s face, telling his story, the look of triumph. Totally convinced he had the competition nailed, until I stood up and trumped him. Each of us daring the other to make the accusation: liar.
More stuff — vague images from later on — Kyle stumbling around by the fire, shouting that he remembered what happened the night of the accident. He’d remembered all along, he said. He’d told his father, expecting him to pass the information on to the cops. But his father had said it was just best to let some things be.
Kyle stumbling over to where Jack was sitting, throwing himself on top of him, punching him in the head. Jack punching him back: blood, a massive fight.
How had that ended up? I had no idea. The final memory of the night was the furry gagging feel of two mezcal worms catching in my throat.
Noise noise noise.
Set after set of waves rolled in across the bar. They weren’t like the waves that broke on the beach. There was no thump, no crash of white water. They broke silently.
You could sometimes see sharks in the walls of water at this time of the day. Ryan and I used to grin at each other when we spotted one. Sharks meant no swimmers, less surfers. We always made sure we told lots of people about the sharks when we got back to Te Puke.
I looked hard at each breaker, hoping to catch a glimpse of a long grey shadow. It would mean something, to see a shark just then. What, I wasn’t sure. I was hungry for something true. Anyway, there weren’t any.
I let the first wave in the set go; the best one was always the third. I could see it forming out the back, taking its perfect curved shape, dragging me in like a claw, the edge of it white like a woman’s painted fingernail.
SCRATCHY
Edna Carson is in the car, in the fancy-pants driveway of Seabreeze Bed and Breakfast, keeping an eye on Henry. An old girl dozing off in the late afternoon sun, she’s guessing that’s how it looks. But her eyes are open just enough for between-the-lashes surveillance of her husband.
She can smell her hairspray, decades of it embedded in the grubby grey velour of the headrest. Hairspray never stopped her getting bed hair when she fell asleep on car trips — even short ones — but at least it’s her dirt she’s sniffing. Not like poor Coral Dawkins, who brushed her face against her own car seat one evening last winter and caught a whiff of her husband’s harlotry with skinny Molly Devoy.
Forty years of Wella, twenty of them right there under her cheek. You can tell a Wella woman by the way she wears her hair… Edna hums that little tune, knows it’s going to stay with her all night now, drive her crazy when she’s trying to sleep. She should have changed brands somewhere down the line, before her head started taking Wella for granted. Before Wella retaliated with the bed hair.
Over on the doorstep of the B and B, Henry presses the bell again. He looks anxiously towards the car, towards Edna, who stays quite apparently-asleep. That little-boylost expression used to charm her to bits. It startled her out of the grief at losing Graham Burling, all those decades back. Not any more. The neediness of that particular look has become suffocating in recent times. She has resisted comparing Henry with Graham, who had the unfair advantage of dying tragically at twenty-two, at the peak of manly perfection. Nevertheless, annoying things about Henry keep cropping up.
It has, for example, just this minute occurred to her that he doesn’t ever throw anything out. Through eyelash prisms, Edna contemplates his back view. That old plum sweatshirt riding his slumped shoulders. Levi’s jeans — on a sixty-five-year-old, honestly! — sagging in the backside, as though someone has taken a pin, pushed it through the tough blue denim and popped both his buttocks. His beige belt puckering at the loose fabric, drawing it in tight and high around his waist.
Edna finds two things revolting, generally, when it comes to men and their trousers: pants pulled up high — Henry’s are almost under his armpits, does he not realise? — and boys who insist on wearing them so low you can see most of their underwear. Or, God forbid, their backsides. How did that little song go, the one she heard on the telly over summer?
Something about looking stupid when your trousers fall down? Some American talent quest, that particular contestant by rights should have won but it turned out he’d been too old to enter.
Edna herself feels an urge to grab teenagers’ falling-down pants when she sees them, pull them right to the ground. Once, she actually did it. Thinking about that day is something Edna avoids. But now it’s too late; she is thinking about it. Henry was to blame for what happened that day, and thanks to those ridiculous Levi’s jeans it’s all his fault again.
WALKING ALONG MAIN STREET, following Toby, him all skinny hips and big swagger. Unaware she was right behind him. It was the language that sent Edna over the edge, the fs and cs coming out of the mouth of her secretly-the-favourite grandchild.
In a flash, she got it. She’d been duped. By Toby definitely, but the whole family was in on it probably. Two quick steps and two light tugs — that’s all it took, and those saggy jeans were a puddle of blue on the footpath. Toby’s fists flew as he swung round. He gasped when he saw it was her, scrambled to pull up his pants.
‘Watch your language, Toby Carso
n,’ Edna said, stepping around the spectacle. His mates whooped and hollered; one of them tried to high-five her — she ignored him. ‘I’ll buy you a belt for Christmas,’ she added.
She’d marched on, heart thumping. Her face was hot. The reality of it — pulling down someone’s trousers in public, in Main Street — felt like hands around her neck choking her. Never mind the mitigating circumstances, as they said on the crime shows. Never mind that her grandson had been behaving like a gang member. Never mind that her husband, that very morning, had come into the bedroom while she was naked and had casually turned and looked away from her. Edna, reaching for her knickers and slip, glanced at his reflection in the mirror. His mouth was turned down in disgust; his distaste for what he’d just seen was plainly visible on his nice Henry Carson face.
Never mind any of that.
Her feet took her into the bookshop. They did a circuit of the magazines and greeting cards, finishing up at the Lotto counter. Those feet of hers had forgotten she had already bought a Lotto ticket that week.
IF THE SUNLIGHT’S TOO strong, you get funny little black squiggles against pink eyelids: tiny little moving things that remind Edna of some documentary she once saw about bacteria in a Petri dish. You could actually end up distracted by them, watching them squirm around, linking up, breaking apart, until you dozed off. That’d happened a few times before, when she’d been keeping an eye on Henry.
A white net curtain twitches at the B and B’s upstairs window, the one directly above the doorway where Henry’s waiting. A hand pulls the curtain right back, and a face looks down at the car, down at the top of Henry’s balding head.
It’s Irene Falton — call me Irene, please, she’d insisted, when they’d arrived on Friday night — and she’s smiling.
She’ll be relieved we’re still here, Edna thinks. She would have been looking at the clock. Wondering if we’d sneaked away without paying. Irene taps at the window, waving at Henry, and Henry looks up. He smiles, waves back.