by Gregory Day
Craig was patient and let her find her own way. He didn’t bother her with his own preoccupations, nor with questions about how she was feeling. He knew something strange was going on but to the kids he just said she was poisoned. And that they should always wear boots when they went for walks in the bush. He talked with Colin Batty at work about what had happened and Colin assured him Liz was bitten by a skipjack. Colin recommended she carry something called an EpiPen with her at all times, especially in the bush. The skipjacks were bastards, Colin said, and the EpiPen was an adrenalin shot that cured any allergic reaction. Apparently a lot of people around Mangowak carried them in their glove boxes. When Craig told his boss that the tests in the hospital had shown Liz wasn’t bitten by skipjacks, Colin Batty just laughed. ‘What the fuck else do you think it was then?’
After another week, Liz was up off the couch again, and after making her way around the house, gingerly at first, she managed to venture out to the general store for supplies. A few days after this she met her friend Carla for coffee and baguettes at the cafe but didn’t even mention the ant bites. It was too weird to talk about, she decided, too embarrassing.
Liz had met Carla during her first few weeks in Mangowak, when Carla had advertised in the local paper for someone to design a flyer for the Italian lessons she planned to conduct up and down the coast. They were both recent arrivals to the area and had got on well. Now, while Liz had been through her ordeal, Carla had been flat out organising a petition to allow dogs on the beaches between six and eight in the mornings and nights after the Brinbeal shire had brought in a blanket ban on dogs only a fortnight earlier.
‘Poor Max,’ Carla was saying. ‘He’s been stuck in the yard all week. It’s not right.’
It crossed Liz’s mind that, given where they lived, the beach was not the only place to walk dogs but as she went to say this to Carla something blanched inside her at the thought of the bush and instead she said: ‘You should ring up Alex Harte and get on the ABC. Remember all the stuff he did on the flying foxes in the Botanical Gardens when people wanted to cull them? I think he’s an animal lover.’
‘That’s a great idea,’ said Carla. ‘If 774 were talking about it the shire couldn’t do anything but agree.’
‘Especially if it was on Alex Harte.’
‘Exactimento!’ Carla exclaimed.
It was late spring now and more cars were around, daytrippers and international tourists enjoying the Ocean Road and its views. From where Liz and Carla sat at the cafe they could see the cars passing by and the black slate roofs and white limestone chimneys of the Meteorological Station in the background, all of which was keeping Liz from giving way to a constant inner flinching that her ordeal seemed to have created in her nervous system. Carla was talking about prospective lovers and that also distracted Liz. She herself told Carla a little bit about Craig, making up a story about how they hadn’t had sex since they fucked in the shower a fortnight ago and Carla told her she’d give her left tit to have had sex so recently.
And then Liz got tense again. It was the contrast between Carla’s unabashed lust for life and the inexplicable terror she’d experienced in the last three weeks. She felt a gloom in her head now, like a cloud over the sun, and an underflurry of panic. She focused her eyes on the shiny slant of the roofs of the Meteorological Station to see if that would help. She didn’t want to talk to Carla about what she was feeling, it was too vague and weird and it would pass, and Carla was looking so vibrant, her black hair glossy like a brochure on the sunlit terrace of the cafe.
Two days later, Liz powerwalked for the first time since the bites. She forced herself to do it. But only on the beach. She drove her car down to the Boat Creek jetty and got out and walked the low tide. She didn’t overdo it. Just a couple of k’s. But it was the only way to go. Get back on the horse. Her foot felt fine. That wasn’t the problem. As she walked she looked up at the she-oaks on the high ridge running parallel with the beach and thought they looked ugly. Hairy and somehow ghoulish. She’d been tempted to bring the headphones but resisted. She hated those idiots who couldn’t go for a walk on the beach without headphones. She wasn’t about to succumb now. No, her dumbbells would do fine.
Out on the waves she could see the gannets flying and diving into the water. Under the cloud cover she worked up quite a sweat and could almost have gone for a swim if she’d brought her bathers. But she was still a little delicate for that. Not like those birds. She marvelled at the gannets’ sheer force.
Approaching Breheny Creek, where she planned to turn around and walk back along the beach the way she’d come, she noticed a large dark rock on the sand in the lip of the tide, directly opposite the tannin-coloured creek. Striding out with her arms tolling the rhythm, she shook her head in mild disbelief that she hadn’t noticed such a big thing right at the mouth of the Breheny Creek before. And just as she was about to spin off into another anxious train of thought about how unsure she had suddenly become in the landscape, she thought she saw the rock move. She moved closer and, yes, it moved again, this time turning around in her direction. That wasn’t a rock. That was a seal, she realised. She halted and dropped her dumbbells to her sides. A seal! I’ve never seen a seal before! she cried inside with excitement.
Liz stood twelve feet away from the dark slickened creature as it was awakened from slumber by her presence. Grumpy at being disturbed, it turned to her and flopped itself towards the waves a fraction. It opened its large mouth and Liz could see its teeth and big whiskers. And then it barked at her. A bark like a deep, gruff ‘NO’. A ‘GO AWAY’. Liz was completely absorbed. She got down on her haunches and stared. She wished she had her camera. The seal barked again. Liz was wide-eyed. It was just like some kind of dog. She couldn’t get over how much like a dog it was.
Because she could tell by its movement that it could never catch her even if it chose to try, she wasn’t scared of the seal at all. Just exhilarated. It was so cute. It turned its head back away from her and flopped forward again, moving further into the water until it was finally afloat and swimming out through the swell. Now it shone like a tyre in the seawater. Liz stood up. She watched as the seal slipped expertly through the water until it was out beyond the last wave. Then just as she was about to turn and start heading back she caught a glimpse of its skin, shining wet in the sun with a big diamond-shaped glitter, riding a wave back towards the shore. It flicked off the wave and began to tumble in the marbled waterslack between the waves.
‘It’s playing!’ Liz said aloud.
The seal flipped and flopped and shone and surfed in the waves and Liz’s smile grew wider and wider. Then, without her noticing quite how, the seal was gone. Her heart began to slow. After standing still and watching to see if it would reappear, she turned and walked at a normal pace back along the beach. She didn’t bother to toll the dumbbells, in fact she was too preoccupied with what she’d seen even to think of it. I’ve never seen a seal before, she kept thinking. Oh, if only Reef had been with me. He would’ve been beside himself.
Liz walked excitedly back towards Boat Creek. With her jaw still open, she gazed up at the high ridge of the land beside her as she went. Without realising it the she-oaks that were so ugly not long before had, for the time being, become beautiful again. Arriving home she went straight to the computer to go online. She sent a group email telling local people she knew about the seal. ‘But if you see it,’ she told them, ‘and you’re walking your dog, stay well back. As cute as he is seals like that can carry distemper so don’t go anywhere near it.’ She signed off, ‘Take care. Liz Wilson.’
FOUR
CHECKING THE SURF
‘. . . we’ve got several people wanting to join the conversation here on 774 ABC Melbourne and ABC Victoria, on the usual numbers . . .’
‘You are so slick at doing that.’
‘Well, I’m doing it a bit often, Trevor, but it’s important that people know who they’re listening to. We get a lot of new listeners . . .’
‘Oh. Absolutely.’
Craig was parked on the Ocean Road at Boat Creek watching the surf. The water was a dark green and the waves were in-between-ish. Kind of messy. He knew he wasn’t going in but he liked to just sit there anyway and watch, while he listened to the radio.
Only a couple of grommets were out in the water, bobbing about to the east of the jetty. He flicked the radio off. What a bunch of sad old bastards, he’d been thinking to himself as Neville Brennan and his guest waxed on about a music mentoring program for baby boomers called Weekend Warriors. It offended Craig the way that guy Bob, the mentor, talked about music as if it was some kind of twelve-step program. For fat old lonely guys. He found it so patronising. When Craig played music it wasn’t for camaraderie or because he was bored, quite the opposite. He played guitar in what he considered to be his better moments, and when he did play, all sense of age and time evaporated into the melody and lyrics.
Craig was in his late thirties, a bit younger than the target age for Weekend Warriors, and just young enough for his skin to crawl at how daggy and unsuspecting those baby boomers were; but he had grown up with two older brothers and an older sister so he knew his James Taylor and his Cream, he could distinguish Melanie from Joni Mitchell, and actually he didn’t mind that sixties music at all. But he reckoned for him it was a choice, not just the generation he’d been born into.
The tide was coming in and the sun was dropping. He wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to play in a band. He pictured himself and a few guys sitting around in the big room under the house on Riverview Drive, bantering amongst amps and leads, sipping stubbies. He imagined singing Crowded House’s ‘Better Be Home Soon’ the way Johnny Cash might’ve, with gravitas, in a kind of underwater slow motion, with a haunting pedal steel guitar in the background. He began to sing it, sitting there behind the salt-laden windscreen of his 4WD. Then he sang ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’ like on the tape he had of a Dylan concert in France. He wrenched his mouth about to get the twang and whine right and he played with Dylan’s phrasing, which was notorious for being so tricky you couldn’t even attempt to sing it exact.
The minutes passed and as the sun kept dropping the waves kept coming, and so did the songs. He sang ‘Losing My Religion’ by REM and ‘Little Wonder’ by Augie March, and then a couple of Neil Young songs, including his favourite, ‘Change Your Mind’. In the sealed cabin it all sounded great and he tapped along with his foot, making a nice thud against the gearbox console. By the time the disc of the sun was half eclipsed by the hills across the water, he had transported himself through a whole jam session and felt totally relaxed. Thawed out after work, with the music in him.
But then he thought about going home, and suddenly, for the first time ever in his life with Liz, he became aware that he was bored at the prospect. He placed his hand on the keys in the ignition and slowly leant forward over the steering wheel. He’d just scared himself.
‘Fuck,’ he whispered, his breath misting the windscreen. He wasn’t so relaxed anymore. Instead of imagining a band in his bottom room now he saw Libby standing at the toaster, scowling, and his wife sitting at the Mambo bench with a calculator, punching in numbers, budgeting for the coming month. And little Reef, sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching The Simpsons. There was no music in that image.
He tried to correct himself. It was all fine, it just wasn’t . . . well, electric. The problem was that it was over two and a half years since they’d got out of the city and Liz and the kids were virtually the only people, outside work and the occasional drink with Colin Batty, that he spent any time with. Apart from visits by old friends from Melbourne. But that’s exactly what those friends were becoming since the move. Old friends. When they came down it was still a case of, ‘Wow, what a great lifestyle you and Liz have got,’ but it felt now that they were always going to be like that, cordoned off by a cliché of half-felt admiration. How admiring were those friends, really? Life on the coast was a fantasy to them but in the end they were still living in the city and after a few days they’d always get a bit itchy to return. And was this coastal life anything to admire, anyway? How long could a guy enjoy surfing on his own and never becoming a hallowed ‘local’?
‘Fuck local,’ Craig suddenly said out loud and kicked the floor of the car.
He’d shocked himself again. This had been building within him and he’d been unaware. Now, by the quickly evaporating blurt of breath on the windscreen, he realised that he was deeply pissed off. He didn’t want to think of his life in categories. He didn’t want to use the terms ‘home life’ and ‘social life’ but if he did he realised now that in his case they both felt bleak. Looking out the window, the dusk seemed bland. And the greyish waves just kept coming into the shore, irrespective of their shape or quality.
Craig was fit from surfing and strong, though prematurely balding, and now he started to sweat a bit, even though the evening temperature was dropping. Out of nowhere he had suddenly plummeted under the surface of things. Everything appeared to be as good as it could be, he couldn’t imagine doing things better, raising a family in a better way, but at heart things had gone dead.
He pursed his lips. He could hardly believe the thoughts passing through his head. He and Liz weren’t blueing or anything, but he felt different about her. Fact was, since the ant bites she was different. She wasn’t as relaxed, she didn’t seem to be particularly enjoying the space all around her like she did when they’d first arrived, she wasn’t walking anywhere near as much, she rolled away from him in bed at night, she was putting on weight. He was unchanged but she was someone else. And he had to go back and forth between Colin Batty at work and her at home. He was carving it up at work but it was like shooting fish in a barrel. He’d become a good real estate agent. Craig Wilson the real estate agent. So what. In truth he preferred working in hospitality like he used to.
Craig knew he was a good man, a warm man with a heart, but the world wouldn’t necessarily look after him. He was a social creature but now it was just him, in the gold 4WD with a mishmash sea and night approaching. The road was empty, everyone tucked away in their houses like creatures in their burrows.
Maybe I should get some recording gear, he thought to himself.
When prospective buyers at the agency asked him what the community was like in the area, he would always say something along the lines of, ‘It’s great, everyone looks out for each other,’ but increasingly he knew that was just lip-service. Maybe when a bush-fire came through everyone looked after each other but what about between times? Initially he would never have guessed it from the easy-going style of the guys around town but now he knew there was something inscrutable about that casual manner of theirs. They’d chat and smile, say, ‘Too easy,’ but scratch any deeper and you’d find a hole. An echo. Like there was some inner sanctum you couldn’t touch, some secret cove you didn’t know about. He heard a different tone in the way they talked to each other in the water between sets. They were a tribe. In the end, even after nearly three years, it was unwelcoming. Of course, the women were different. Liz found it easier on that level. But for Craig, the town was locked up. Laconic to the point of exclusivity.
He had always been open, friendly. That’s why he’d been so good in hospitality and why Colin Batty had picked him out as a potential estate agent. But all his openness and friendliness did for him on the coast was make him money. The irony of that didn’t escape Craig. ‘You can be miserable anywhere,’ an old guy in a youth hostel in Toulouse had told him once, ‘and happiness is the same.’ Craig had understood the logic of that at the time but now he knew, as the old guy had back in Toulouse, the fundamental truth of the remark.
A truck went by too close in the silvery gloom and the Tribute shuddered where it stood beside the road. He got a little fright. The loop of his thoughts was broken. He started the car, flicked on the headlights and chose CD 4 from his six-stacker. He turned it up and took off towards the last vestiges of
light behind the hills. The deep slur of Johnny Cash’s voice filled the vehicle through all four speakers. The old rebel raged through ‘The Mercy Seat’ and Craig put his foot down. The Tribute had a load of grunt. He’d always joked with Liz that it’d be a good car for a heist.
Two big kangaroos were silhouetted on the evening ridge. He sped past the big pines towards Turtle Head and contemplated going all the way to Minapre, to get a drink at The Corniche. Maybe get pissed. But when he got to the makeshift carpark at the top of Turtle Head he took his foot off the pedal, pulled over, and turned the car around. He turned the stereo down, heard the tyres on the gravel. He looked out over the dimming ocean and thought he felt a little better. He changed Johnny Cash to Vika and Linda. He drove home at a legal speed and put his heart behind him.
FIVE
AFTER THE MUPPETS
When he got home, Liz and Libby and Reef were all laughing at an episode of The Muppets on Foxtel. Craig loved the Muppets, it was one of the main reasons why he was prepared to spend the extra money to get the satellite service. He had watched it when he was a kid and, unlike Gilligan’s Island or Hogan’s Heroes, The Muppets was one show that seemed to get funnier as the years went by. If you weren’t laughing at the actual puppets you could always have a good chortle at the bouffants of the real-life celebrity guests when they came on. Billy Joel’s was a doozey, the worst he’d seen. Craig grabbed a stubby from the fridge and sat at the Mambo bench in the kitchen to watch. He took a sip and gathered from the empty plates on the coffee table that he’d missed dinner.