by Robert Drewe
On the second night they returned from the pub and for some reason – Kath was propped up on the bed with her sandals off, painting her toenails a chirpy holiday shade – he reached out in a commercial during 60 Minutes and stroked her foot.
What had got into him? He tickled her soles while she protested, squirmed and giggled. He cheekily played with her toes and the spaces between them where she’d packed in cotton balls to separate them. And, ignoring the wet nail polish on the sheets and the Bosnian war on the screen, they made urgent holiday love. The urgent love of their young married lives, but without the bane of those far-off days: the pregnancy anxiety. For the first time in a long while.
Lennox Head was such an amiable, summery shift of climate and scenery from Yarraville, with the sounds of waves rolling on the reefs and fruit bats rustling and squealing in the mango trees outside their room at night, and languid yellow-mopped surfers padding along the street by day, wolfing down pies and smoothies as they passed. A different version of Australia from Melbourne but a quintessential Australia nevertheless, an Australia, as it turned out, where a middle-aged couple could walk the main street unselfconsciously holding hands for the first time in decades.
Kath said all those hungry carbohydrate guzzlers looked like Harpo Marx. Surfers always had done, he remembered, recalling the old VW Kombis of the ’60s with the words ‘Shaggin’ Wagon’ scrawled in the dust of their rear windows, and the signs saying ‘If This Van’s Rockin’, Don’t Come Knockin’.
‘Classy,’ Kath said.
‘Wishful thinking,’ he said.
Shyly exhilarated from the night before’s lovemaking, the repetitive sea sounds easing the tensions of the past month, they walked the pale shore at low tide, theirs the only scuff marks in the hard sand.
How feminine her bare footprints looked, thought her husband of thirty-five years, considering their daintiness perhaps for the first time and being moved by the delicate slanted imprints her painted toes left behind. An angle of about 40 degrees from big to little toe. Compared to her sloping tootsies, his stumpy toes pressed the sand in a horizontal line. His feet were like Donald Duck’s, like shovels.
They didn’t venture into the surf. Even in the subtropics it wasn’t summery, but by the second day their cheeks had a healthy colour and he was no longer looking to the horizon for the rising hint of a tidal wave.
On the 7-mile expanse of shore an occasional marine object loomed ahead long before they reached it, and assumed great import when it did. A squat red-faced man with calves like rocks leaning over the shallows, probing the sand for beach-worm bait. A blue undulating jellyfish the size of a dustbin lid. Cobalt strings of bluebottles. The delicate lacework traceries deposited by transparent sand-sifting crabs. An inflated but eyeless puffer fish. A screeching alpha seagull and his one-legged colleague.
And in the lee of the Lennox Head cliff face a beach funeral was taking place on the sand. At first sight, the coffin, Christian cross and altar, so unpredictably present, so abruptly exposed to the elements and only metres from the lapping waves, shocked them.
The congregation sat on white chairs under an open-sided white tent that flapped in the breeze. The Protestant minister, thin, tanned and silver-haired, with the look of an old Malibu rider, wore crisp white vestments, but somehow the funeral service didn’t seem ‘alternative’ or self-consciously hip.
What struck Mick was how natural it looked, how Australian. How right. No fuss. No Catholic fuss. The women were dressed in white linen, the men wore shorts. The mourners had removed their shoes. After all, this was the beach. In this calm mood it didn’t seem to be trespassing on grief to stop and watch, and to sit.
On this fine spring afternoon the ceremony was a solemn and fitting occasion. Beyond and around the service, Nature and Life went about their business. Water dragons sunbaked on the cliff. In the sharp sky a cloud of crested terns wheeled and dived for baitfish. While toddlers still paddled in the shallows, teenagers surfed the break, old men wormed and fished along the tide line, and couples walked their dogs, he and Kath didn’t feel like interlopers.
Even to his weary Catholic eyes, how relevant it all seemed to the life of the young woman lying in the coffin on the sand. And how tragically connected to her death. The minister pointed out how much ‘Jessica’, a daily swimmer, had loved the beach.
He pulled no punches, this surfer-vicar. He told the congregation,
‘You, her friends, all know this famous point break was the last view she saw in her life, as she stood on that headland. Just as you know she was struggling with life since the death of her beloved parents. And that she stipulated her funeral ceremony should be here.’
A dozen hang-gliders were hovering over the headland from where she’d leapt. Seeking emotional distraction, the mourners couldn’t take their eyes off them. Kath whispered that they looked like angels floating and lingering in the air currents.
He nodded, ‘Sure, Kath,’ though he didn’t think so at all. They looked more like raptors. Sea eagles or ospreys.
They made love again that night, more intimately this time, with champagne he’d secretly bought, produced from the minibar and suavely poured beforehand, and the television turned off. For the second night in a row! After how long? Six months, twelve months? And again the next morning. They were newlyweds again, no longer shy, and astonished at themselves.
And at 8.52 a.m. on the motel room’s digital clock, while Kath dressed and he shaved after their lovemaking and the continental breakfast of local fruits (she’d carefully pushed aside the papaya and rockmelon slices, barely nibbled a piece of toast, saying she felt off-colour), she gave an unfamiliar gurgling sound that he heard from the bathroom, a small groan deep in the throat, and passed away on the bed.
Died there with her new bright toenails. Never had a day’s sickness. Twenty-one years ago. So much to think about. So much coincidence. So much room for guilt and blame and confusion and fond distress. He couldn’t blame seismic disturbances; he’d been betrayed by geography. He hadn’t gone north or west of the Victorian border since. Or to the coast, any coast, any beach. He’d stayed home.
‘Perfect day for it,’ he said to Doug, and clinked wineglasses.
‘Good luck.’ Doug looked faintly surprised at the toast but it was the only way Mick could express today’s complicated melancholy and prideful feeling.
And just now he’d remembered the name of a successful footballer of Chinese descent.
‘Lin Jong of the Western Bulldogs,’ he said to Doug, in an offhand way.
19
Mick had always viewed divorce as Hollywoodish and salacious. Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth and Errol Flynn sprang to mind. But his guess at Doug’s suddenly activated sex life was only partly correct, and no longer current, as was his presumption that since his divorce his cousin was in a sea-changed, tree-changed and generally blissed-out state.
With Mick, the bank thing, the younger-and-fitter male thing, the football-code rivalry and the perennial Melbourne-versus-Sydney thing clearly got in the way of empathy.
Being ‘judgemental’ and ‘controlling’ were sins often and loudly voiced and disparaged by his daughter and daughter-in-law, accusations he considered a bit rich coming from two of the three bossiest women he’d ever known. Sorry, dear Kath. You too. But if he had been less judgemental he might have surmised that Doug, recently retired, transplanted to a new country town, and newly divorced, might be at a lowish emotional ebb.
As a longtime widower, Mick might also have understood how lonely a suddenly solitary older man could be. But of course he didn’t. There was the divorce thing. Despite the Vatican’s hints at relaxing the rules under the new fellow, Francis (a good chap by all accounts, full of fresh ideas, on the ball in many respects), for older Catholics like himself divorce was still a dubious proposition, something only film stars indulged in. To Mick, marriage remained permanent and indissoluble.
Death trumped divorce every time. Death not only conferr
ed sainthood on the deceased, its power also sanctified the one left behind. (Unless they remarried.) The way Mick saw it, compared to suffering a spouse’s death, a divorce was like an invitation to a party. Maybe a party in the wrong side of town, a party packed with leering strangers, suave people whose company you mightn’t fancy, but still a party, with drinks and tasty food and available partners and everything.
It was also undeservedly, well, spicy. Hence something to bitterly envy. Especially with a retirement package like he imagined Doug had.
In fact, when Doug had retired three years earlier from his spot two rungs from the top of the bank’s ladder he’d cashed in his golden handcuffs of $3.5 million, plus 10 000 CBA shares at $81.50 each, amounting to nearly another million in dividends, plus extra super-annuation, another million, and convinced Suzanne of the need for a coastal retirement lifestyle.
When she reluctantly agreed, they’d moved from Pymble, on Sydney’s upper North Shore (the ‘leafy North Shore’ as the media liked to snidely refer to the Pymble corner of the North Shore, leafy being a neat euphemism for stately homes and conservative voters), to Byron Bay, to a cliffside house at Wategos Beach, where acres of glass windows on three levels allowed Doug, with his first morning coffee, to forgo the Financial Review for whitewater views of dolphins at dawn and the distant peaks of the Nightcap Range piercing the purple sea mist.
He was sixty, a ‘young sixty’ in his opinion, optimistic that these days sixty really was the new forty. He believed he and Suzanne deserved these stimulating natural sights and tranquil al fresco experiences.
Nostalgically, he wanted to see his wife bobbing in the ocean again like the young Suzanne. Realistically, maybe not the trim bikinied Suzanne of the early ’80s, the toplessly sunbathing Suzanne, but at least for wet hair, hot sun and sandy feet not to be an impossible trial nowadays.
Once they’d spent summer Sunday mornings bodysurfing at Bilgola, stopping at the Newport Arms beer garden on their way home. Icy beer, the salt drying on their skin, bare thighs nonchalantly touching in the warm air. And through the surrounding eucalypts – those bosomy, buttocked pink angophoras – Pittwater glistened below. All these sensations stirring the expectation of lovemaking the instant they were home.
No matter the fatiguing week they’d had, their bodies were mysteriously recharged by the surf. Was there any better feeling on earth than entering her deep warmth while he was still cool from the ocean? No wonder they referred to the beach as ‘church’. In retirement, his romantic hope was to return them to those days. In some way.
Unfortunately Suzanne had different ideas on self-fulfilment. Nowadays ‘church’ was actually church. And, for the past five or six years (in his view, since menopause), Anglican church. And on the leafy North Shore the Church of England was undeniably leafy, too. Although he hadn’t been to Mass outside Christmas and Easter for many years, this religious switch disconcerted him.
While he took surfboard lessons, bought a kayak to paddle out to the turtles at Julian Rocks, swam the kilometre of ocean from Wategos to Main Beach several mornings a week, and, most adventurously of all, grew a snappy beard, Suzanne closed the plantation shutters against the ‘glare’ off the sea, and stayed indoors watching boxed sets of Downton Abbey and Antiques Roadshow.
Everything here was ‘too casual’, she complained. Clothing. Daily life. Nature. She missed the stately eucalypt leafiness of Pymble. ‘Have you noticed there are no blue gums or coachwoods up here?’ she said accusingly one morning. ‘Only tangled rainforest snakey stuff. There are creatures in it. Spiders.’
‘We had funnel-web spiders at Pymble,’ he reminded her. ‘It was funnel-web central, if you recall. And ticks were not unknown.’
Suzanne snorted. ‘Trees are supposed to have branches, not tendrils.’
She missed her old bridge group, and her book club, and Sunday communion at the 8 a.m. earlier and traditional service at St Swithun’s, and crossing the Harbour Bridge to the Opera House of an evening. Despite moving 800 kilometres north, she’d insisted on renewing her season tickets for the opera and the Sydney Theatre Company. After one attempt, she found all varieties of yoga embarrassing (the Downward Dog!), and thought the Byron Bay fashions too beachy and skimpy for anyone older than thirty, or more than 60 kilos. (She now weighed 75.)
‘Forget yoga. There are plenty of entertaining things to keep you occupied here,’ he said. ‘It’s actually a very female-oriented, secret-women’s-business sort of town.’
He went online to prove it. It always had been, ever since the traditional Arakwal owners regarded the place as a female fertility site. ‘Look, there are classes in painting and Asian cooking, organic vegetable growing, journal writing, candle making, ukulele lessons. . .’ Suzanne’s laughter was shrill and grim. It wasn’t just the fertility business or the ukuleles either. She seemed to be concentrating all her animosity in one direction.
‘Can someone tell me what it is with dentists and dolphins? And estate agents and dolphins? And cafes and hairdressers and dolphins? If I see another painting or photograph of dolphins at dawn or sunset, I’ll puke.’
He’d had no inkling of her dolphin prejudice. Or her other discontents either. They all flooded out one day in their third month there. Extremities tingling pleasantly, he’d just stepped out of the hot shower after his morning swim to face this unexpected onslaught.
‘Look, it takes a while to settle in,’ he said.
‘The same goes for dolphins leaping through a rainbow and over rain clouds, and dolphins rounding the Cape. And bloody frangipani paintings too, while I’m at it. And dolphins framed by frangipanis while jumping under a rainbow at sunset.’
This was more than a slap in the face; in the circumstances it was sacrilege. She knew the pleasure the friendly neighbourhood pod of dolphins gave him, and that he was convinced this meditative enjoyment lowered his blood pressure. He was beginning to recognise and name individual creatures among them. There was Spotty, who had some sort of pale marine growths on his/her flank, and Bendy, whose dorsal fin slanted left.
‘You might have noticed our dolphin bottle-opener is missing,’ she added. This was a different, sneaky Suzanne; a smug, stern, suddenly generation-older-than-him Suzanne. A grandma-looking Suzanne, with two pairs of glasses hanging on strings around her neck. ‘I threw it away. Also the dolphin tea towels and the dolphin calendar in the study.’
This was insane. So was finding himself defending dolphins, crazily, almost to the point of tears. ‘You know I happen to enjoy seeing the dolphins every morning,’ he shouted. ‘People pay millions for the privilege of seeing dolphins from their balcony of a morning!’
‘As we did,’ she reminded him curtly. ‘I think a bloody dolphin could be elected mayor here if they wanted the job.’
In this bright seascape she looked unrecognisably dowdy and savage. ‘Can’t you see you’ve gone overboard? Look at yourself, all whiskery and slovenly. I’m having more trouble than I anticipated seeing a banker turn first into Ernest Hemingway, then into a hippie surfer. Act your age, for God’s sake. What’s the next step? Changing your name to Zeus or Thunder Cloud?’
Her plane ticket back to Sydney was already booked; the taxi to Ballina airport was ordered. ‘I imagine you’ll find yourself a chicky babe called Rainbow Lotus,’ Suzanne said, grinning fiercely as she got into the cab.
It was a strange sensation for Doug to feel lonely in a town where everyone looked serene and cheery: a decidedly youthful place, where pale southerners wandered the streets arm-in-arm in the forced holidaywear and jovial daze of tourists; where the waitresses were cheerily, youthfully Irish, French, German, and untouchably, bralessly pretty; where gap-year Swedish boys, airing their new tans and wispy blond beards, shopped ostentatiously bare-chested in Woolworths with their hired surfboards under their arms.
Doug’s quandary was that he felt here but not of, or from, here. The place felt climatically, mentally, physically correct for him, if only he had the right compan
ion to share it.
After a womanless eighteen months during which he occasionally ventured out self-consciously alone to local pubs that boomed and jarred with the crude music, mating rituals and stand-up comedy routines of the young (a cheerful yell from the stage of ‘Fuck you, dickheads!’ was applauded as a comic gem), he turned to an online dating service, Liaison.
As he scrolled down the Byron Bay Women 40-50 category in this popular facility (given the choice, naturally he’d prefer someone younger than himself!) he was surprised to find a picture-profile of a woman he already knew. She was calling herself ‘ArtLover45’.
He recognised ArtLover45 as Sylvia Hepworth, the local estate agent who’d sold them the Wategos house in 2011. Liaison pictured her leaning proprietorially on the guardrail at the Cape Byron Lighthouse, the Nightcap Range etched in mauve mist-banks behind her and the Pacific Ocean surging below. Her wind-tousled hair attractively carefree, she looked a few years younger than the woman he remembered from their housing transaction.
She was recently divorced, he read, and, yes, allegedly forty-five, blonde, of European heritage, 173 cm, 58 kilos, artistic, tertiary-educated, a Scorpio, Christian, Greens-voting, divorced, nonsmoking, social drinker only, with two adult children (‘So no kids underfoot!’).
ArtLover45 said she enjoyed collecting art, long beach walks, swimming, Asian cooking, photographing nature, the Saturday book pages, movies (‘prefer nothing too violent’), most music (‘especially easy-listening blues with a modern twist’) and, like 90 per cent of the other women on the dating site, ‘My favourite thing of all is to relax of a winter’s evening with the right person beside an open fire with a glass of red wine while surf crashes in the distance.’
Mine, too, thought Doug, of Liaison’s cosy man-trap. She sounded safely, outdoorly, warmly ordinary – almost North Shore normal. Not a Rainbow Lotus type at all. And he already knew she was attractive.
And who was the right man for ArtLover45? She specified someone forty-five to fifty-five, tall (‘must be over 178 cm’), also ‘reasonably fit, outdoors-loving, a nonsmoker, Christian, social drinker, no emotional freight or tattoos, tertiary-educated professional or business executive, of European background. Above all, a sense of humour is essential.’