After January

by Nick Earls

  The Home is a place where Len uses his natural gregariousness and yarn-spinning rhyme-turning talents to best effect, at least a couple of times a week. The way he tells it, he gets a few of the old blokes together on the veranda and he hands around a six-pack and they talk about the old days.

  He recites a selection of the Classics, by which he means Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson and maybe even some Steele Rudd, and he throws in a few of his own. He stands with the poem typed on a sheet of paper which he holds a long way out in front of him and he tilts his head a little to look through the right part of his glasses, fiddles with the glasses with his free hand, takes a deep breath and he’s off, with a booming voice that could throw a poem several streets if he wanted it to, but with a soft touch when it counts. And sometimes he works bloody hard for that rhyme, shortening words with apostrophes and imposing a challenging meter, but he makes it. I’ve heard him do it on our front steps and on our veranda, and I bet they love him at the nursing home. He covers all the big topics: love, war (specialising in the Siege of Tobruk), the old days, neighbourhood events.

  Since I won the school poetry competition three years ago, a bundle of Len’s latest poems has been waiting for me when I arrive at the coast each summer. Even though I’ve written little poetry since and entered only the prose section of the competition this year, I think he still views me as a poet at heart, or at least as one of his more discerning listeners. It doesn’t bother him that our styles are very different. He comes over as soon as he sees we’re up here and he says, Now, young Alex, you’ve got a bit of an interest in poetry, and he straightens his pages, sets his glasses at a determined, poetic angle and begins.

  He’s off to the Home today with a new poem he’s pleased with. He read it to me yesterday and he says it’ll go well with ‘The Man from Ironbark’, and he hasn’t done that one for a while. He packs them into his briefcase with a few others, and heads off like a man who knows he’s got a hit on his hands, whistling as he shuts the car door.

  Today there’s no cricket to watch on TV and outside it’s turning into a cruel kind of heat. I can hear people at the beach, the noise of children’s voices over the sound of the breaking waves. I go home and pour myself water.

  I look among the books for something to read, but the bookshelves are just a strange museum for bad paperbacks, local histories, guide books, maps, books that turned up here in summer and stayed. Books from old Anglo-Irish relatives, sent as Christmas presents. ‘1001 Activities for Rainy Days’, designed to alleviate the boredom of English summer holidays. But most of the activities require a ready store of chestnuts or an acorn and six pins or sycamore leaves of several different hues. Or could only marginally be classified as activities. For example, ‘Growing a Mustard and Cress Garden’, which involves moist cotton, the appropriate seed and at least ten days expectant waiting. But I’m not good at waiting.

  six

  I also find my Caloundra Library card.

  After lunch I strap on my bike helmet, tuck the card into my wallet and ride. The bike helmet is red-orange in colour, a choice agreed upon by my parents when it was bought for me, so I can efficiently signal the danger I represent. When it’s on my head I look like a big Redhead match, and whatever I’m signalling, I don’t think it’s danger. Cars pass, blowing hot exhaust at me, and I am beginning to wonder about my enthusiasm for books.

  The library, though, will be air-conditioned, and I can stay there a while. And who knows what might happen there.

  This is the recurring senseless dream of bumping into someone young, female and desirable in any public place. This afternoon, for instance, among the Fiction shelves. Striking up a conversation. Revealing myself to be clever, funny and equally desirable, even though I often forget to take off the bike helmet and manage to look like a cross between a Redhead match and a complete dickhead.

  What happens after this I don’t know. It depends at least partly on her. I don’t know what she has in mind. All I know is she is young, female and desirable, and we like the same books. Or at least authors with alphabetically adjacent names.

  But the library isn’t like this, needless to say. Even when I’m included, the average age of the browsers is over sixty. Over in Fiction no one talks to me, and I talk to no one. This is mutually suitable.

  My bike helmet is outside, chained up with my bike, but with the sweat of the ride my hair has now, I suspect, taken on the internal dimensions of the bike helmet anyway. I do not, at present, feel desirable. I do not think it likely that anyone could provoke me to conversation. So any glorious babe opportunity would slip through my fingers even if it came my way.

  It does not.

  Nor has it on many occasions, not without the aid of a script and thirteen rehearsals and two performances. And I didn’t exactly win that one either, I just re-shaped it into a more appealing fiction. Made just a little more of the eyes, the words than might have been there. Maybe. Took almost nothing and turned it into a range of convoluted, contradictory theories that have her wanting me, forgetting me, rejecting me or waiting for the call that I’m not brave enough to make. She is, after all, my maths teacher’s daughter.

  I have a fantasy that she holidays at Caloundra.

  This is ridiculous. Ridiculous. Unfortunately I think I say this out loud. Ridiculous. So now I am the unspeakable nerd with a head shaped like a bike helmet standing in Fiction talking to himself. This is not good. Sometimes I think I’ve suffered from going to a single-sex school.

  I go to the exit with the couple of books I have already chosen. I check them out and leave. I ride home.

  Ridiculous. No one holidays at Caloundra. No one that desirable, not even if their father is a maths teacher. She’s probably closer to Noosa, if she’s anywhere on the coast. I can see her at Noosa, not out of place there at all.

  I go for a swim because I am hot and because I want to change the shape of my head.

  Afterwards, I sit on the veranda reading one of the books. The sun is behind me and the afternoon becomes evening and I hardly notice.

  At the end of a chapter I look up and out through the pandanus trees, out at the sea. Far off, near the horizon, a long, low, red container ship begins the turn that will lead it into Brisbane. Closer, the girl is surfing again. The girl from this morning. Her body golden in the late light.

  I find my towel and I go down to the beach.

  She has gone.

  THE POEM ABOUT THE WATCHER (notes)

  So I am a watcher now.

  And she a perfect form. She is gold, hot pouring gold pouring down into the sea.

  And she moves with the grace of a dolphin. As though there are no angles, only curves, arcs, circles.

  About this I can write a poem. And show it to no one.

  About the magic light, the cut water, the riven ridden wave.

  This impossible sea creature, who comes and goes. Through the water, through the sun.

  Changing shape, changing, but no closer than art.

  So the poem is about the idea, and the idea is mine.

  Even in the empty sea.

  seven

  My mother says, Let’s go out for dinner. You’ve really been festering today. You need to get out.

  We go to one of the Chinese restaurants in the main street.

  I tell her I’m not festering. That I’ve been doing almost the same things she has, that the only difference in our days was she didn’t get whipped two nothing at pool by Len Boit.

  The only difference, essentially.

  I keep the notes for the poem in my room. Folded and in my underwear drawer. They will be safe here, while I decide whether or not they will become something.

  While I don’t imagine my mother has been drafting poetry and storing it with underwear, I don’t feel inclined to identify this as another differing part of our days.


  We sit next to the tank with the trussed-up lobsters and our spring rolls don’t take long.

  So, good holiday then? my mother says, but in a faintly mocking tone, as though I’m still festering despite her good intentions.

  Yeah, fine. Fine. What about you?

  Great. Perfect. Very relaxing. A long pause to eat the last of her spring roll and lick the dribble of sweet and sour sauce from her thumb. Get any good books out of the library today?

  Yeah, yeah. I’ve only started one, but it’s okay. You’d hate it, but it’s okay. Not a holiday read, really. More suited to the questioning, festering kind of reader. Not a book to crumb a bed up with. Not a book to fall asleep under while you’re reading in bed.

  I don’t fall asleep when I’m reading in bed.

  I’ve seen your light on, very late. Some nights I hear the book hit the floor.

  It’s better if it hits the floor. That way I don’t roll on it in my sleep. They’re not comfortable things to sleep on.

  The Mongolian Lamb arrives, spitting on the thick metal plate.

  Must have been a tough day for you, my mother says. No cricket I mean. Six extra hours to kill. It’s not easy, in a miserable place like this.

  I managed. A few swims, a few sleeps, a bit of a read.

  A perfect lazy day then.

  Perfect.

  Do you want any of your friends to come up? You could have someone up for a couple of days if you wanted.

  I think they’re all doing other things at the moment. On holiday or doing things that mean they’re stuck in Brisbane. We’ll be back there soon anyway.

  That’s right. This all comes to an end, doesn’t it? Back to Brisbane, back to work. What are you going to do when I’m back at work?

  Watch cricket I suppose. So it’ll be exactly the same as here, except the TV’ll be bigger. I’ll hardly notice I’m anywhere different.

  She laughs.

  I’ll catch up with a few people, I tell her. Play some tennis maybe, head into town for a movie or two. I’ll do things. I’ll see everybody soon enough.

  And we both know what that means. We eat the Mongolian Lamb and we don’t talk about the late night vigil at Newspaper House and its implications. This now appears to be a conversation we are both quite determined not to have, so we eat and I think through my day. And if I described it to anyone, if I told them every part of it except the part going on in my head, it would look just right for a lazy summer day. Not a care in the world. But that’s never been me, I suppose.

  Later in my room I look at the poem I have begun. I have not begun a poem for a long time. I did not plan to begin one today. I read it through and when I read it I see it. It’s very visual. It’s a moment. Me trying to catch a moment. I have parts of it perhaps, but it was only ever just a glimpse. I can’t glimpse it now, not quite. And the harder I try the more it’s just words. Words trying to catch the shape they saw for a moment.

  I’ll look at it tomorrow.

  eight

  I dream of exams but I wake to the sound of the sea and the sun of another bright day in my window.

  I take seventy cents from the Big Pineapple ashtray in the kitchen and I leave the key in a shoe as I go.

  There is no one out on the street yet, just the huge shadow of our house. It reaches across the road and onto the house opposite, the Keneallys’. It’s still theirs, I think, but they aren’t up here this summer. Chris and Emma are older than me, at uni now, and somewhere else these holidays, so their parents aren’t at the coast. They’ve rented the house out all year and it’s now lived in by at least six or seven people who are part of the way through the long process of stripping a Torana on the unmown lawn, draining thick old oil from some part of the engine into a pool that creeps onto the concrete driveway and forms an indelible stain, which they ignore.

  Normally Chris and Emma would now be heading across the road to meet me, but not this year. This year there’s just the long still grass and the burnt-orange shell of the Torana over there.

  And next door the empty house of the Brunellos, which should at this moment be tipping out grandchildren to surf in large numbers. But the grandchildren now live in Adelaide and Mr Brunello looks tired whenever he mows the large backyard that used to be our cricket pitch. He’d sit on his back deck while the dinner smells came down in the last of the light and he’d say, Angelo Brunello, you call me AB, and I’m the captain till I’m ready to go. He’d drink red wine and make changes in the field or chant the names of batsmen or bowlers and he’d set himself up as some omnipotent distant square-leg umpire. No one under the age of ten was ever stumped or runout.

  This January the Brunellos have gone to visit their son and his family in Adelaide. They left before Christmas for a month or more and I’ve never seen their grass this long.

  So there’s just me left to surf this season’s unimpressive waves. I walk around the corner of the house, past the washing line and across the sandy garden. The sun is low and coming off the water in a glare as I climb down through the she-oak trees and onto the beach. And there are a couple of cars in the Moffat Beach car park, probably boardriders, but I can’t see anyone in the sea. An old man and woman walk slowly with their small dog. Up at the rocks someone is fishing.

  The water is mine. I leave my towel and money and swim. I have a few half-decent rides and other people start arriving; a man with two young children, a girl and a boy. Perhaps they are at the beginning of these summers, and just beginning to learn the rudiments of bodysurfing and cricket and the appropriate card games. They are slowly encouraged to head out from the shallows, and the man, their father maybe, starts to set them up for waves, to hold them up for the just-breaking waves to catch, their arms waving wildly. But the timing’s all wrong and they flail in the broken water as the wave runs on without them. So they swim back to the man and they stand on his hands and he throws them in the air and they come crashing to the water with that look of fear and excitement, and they struggle to the surface spluttering for breath.

  Mr Keneally taught me how to body-surf. Jim Keneally, Chris and Emma’s father. The mechanics, the timing, the particular shape of the shoulders. He’d done it all his life, but he was a large man who came down the front of a wave like a truck and needed flippers to get started. I can remember I found the timing in a few days, and then distance. Past the others, past Jim Keneally kicking surreptitiously to drive his barrel of a body a little further in the unsupportive water. Green flippers tossing the water up behind him before he rolled over without speaking and turned to face the sea, and walked out for his next wave as I picked myself up where I’d hit the sand.

  More people are arriving now, crowding the water. I go in to the beach, I take my towel, I walk to the showers.

  I wash the salt away and rub the water from my skin. I head towards the newsagent with the towel around my shoulders and my coins in my hand.

  And I see the girl.

  nine

  I stop. I stop as though I’ve hit something. Because I wasn’t expecting her and because she is right in my path.

  She is in the car park with a car, a Moke. Just her and a Moke with the bonnet up and she is giving her engine the look of someone who doesn’t know much about engines, but knows when to be unimpressed.

  I’m not ready for this. It’s early in the day. There are other things in my head. I’m on my way to the newsagent. She’s right in my way. To pass I would have to walk round her. She’s wearing a baggy faded T-shirt with her wet ponytail sending a slow dribble of water down its back. And she reaches into the engine with slender honey-coloured arms, stands on her toes to lean forward.

  I start to walk past, to change my course a little in a way that will allow me to walk past, but I don’t. As I approach she looks only more attractive and I feel more tense. I should leave this moment to another day. And then review i
t and perhaps decide it’s not a moment for me and is safer left unrealised. This is the library moment, the babe encounter, the moment of maximum fear, an instant when fantasies are smashed. And I have left my conversation-of-desirability in another place. I should keep walking. This is a mistake and I am about to make a dickhead of myself.

  I keep walking, but only towards her.

  Um, is there anything I can do? I say to her, in a voice not unlike that of a scared small boy, a voice that will not fill her with uncontrollable desire. A voice that she appears not to hear.

  She keeps rummaging around deep among the unnamed oily parts of the engine. This would be a good time for me to walk away. Do you have a problem? I say, same voice as before. Meaning do you have a problem other than this pathetic nerd currently performing an unnoticed act of significant foolhardiness?

  I think it’s the clutch cable, she says, standing and turning to look at me.

  And already I am entranced by her green eyes, her talking fine lips, the tidy lines of her unmade-up lips talking over her fine white teeth. Her compelling cat’s eyes and her perfect skin and a small gold ring in her nose catching glints of the low sun. And I am saying, Oh, and nodding knowingly and vaguely hearing her saying clutch cable and realising I’ve never heard of that part of a car before and she obviously has so maybe this is a big mistake. And she’s looking at me, interested in my assistance.

  So, I begin to say, what are you going to do?

  Well, I think it’s just disconnected. It’s a new one and my father’s just put it in but I think it might have become disconnected.

  Right.

  So it needs to be reconnected.

  Yeah.