After January

by Nick Earls

  If it’s working.

  Yeah. How would you reconnect it?

  Tools. Do you have any tools? Screwdriver? Wrench?

  Not with me, no.

  Anywhere nearby?

  I’m not sure. I live nearby, and there might be tools, but I don’t really know much about engines.

  So when you offered to do something, what did you have in mind?

  I don’t know. A push start maybe. But that probably wouldn’t be much use, would it?

  No.

  Right.

  So I’ll have to call my father. You don’t have any money you could lend me, do you, for the call?

  No, not with me. I was just swimming. You can phone from my house if you like. It’s not far. You can see it from here, the white house through the trees, I say, pointing. The one that backs onto the beach.

  Okay.

  We walk there, across the park where I quietly drop my seventy cents into the long grass. I try to lift my shoulders out of their normal slouch and try to cover most of myself with the towel. She walks beside me and I’m sure the people on the beach are watching us as though we’re together, as though we haven’t just met over a minor mechanical problem and I’m taking her to a phone.

  We cross the beach and step up between the exposed roots of the she-oak trees into the garden.

  Do you live here? she asks.

  It’s a holiday house. My parents own it. So I’m here every summer, and some other times. What about you?

  I live here. Well not exactly here. Little Mountain, just inland. With my family.

  Our feet make soft padded noises across the cool unlit grass and up the front steps, where I share with her the secret of the sandshoe. I half hope my mother will wake now, will come out of her room and find me with the girl I have brought home. But I also hope she will sleep deeply and not take this unlikely moment away.

  I tell the girl that my mother is sleeping in, so she talks quietly on the phone. I shouldn’t listen but I do because I want to hear every word she says. And all the time I’m thinking what do I do now? what do I do now? but I can’t think of anything and this is all passing far too quickly.

  My father will be a while, she whispers. He’s tied up. Something he can’t leave.

  Oh, right.

  So I guess I should get back to the car and wait for him there.

  You can wait here if you want. You can probably see the car from the veranda. You might as well stay and have something to eat rather than just sitting down there.

  She thinks about this and then says, Okay, thanks, with a small smile, but maybe just the smile you give in return for food. I don’t know.

  We’ve got bread and cereal and things, and tea and coffee. What would you like?

  What kind of tea do you have?

  What kind? Well, bags mainly, I think. Will that be okay?

  Yeah. But what kind of tea is in the bags?

  Oh, right.

  At this point I realise I have been less than impressive with the tea issue and I take her to the cupboard to show her the range available. Fortunately my mother is a bit of a tea fan and has teas to suit all tastes and occasions. The girl takes time with her decision, as though the choice is important, and she eventually picks something herbal and drinks it without milk or sugar. I do the same and it’s pretty awful, but I think she thinks I do it all the time.

  We sit on the veranda with our unsweet strange-tasting tea, eating toast with honey from the Caloundra markets and no margarine.

  I know these people, she says, pointing to the honey jar. It’s good honey. Second best in the area.

  And already she makes this place into something different, just with the fragrant tea and second best honey that were here before her.

  This is good bread, she says. Who made it?

  Coles, I think. It’s one of the breads they make there. It’s from the one on the way into town, where you turn off to come here.

  Really? My father makes our bread. Sometimes it’s great. But this is good bread too.

  So how long have you lived at the coast?

  A couple of years. We’ve moved around a bit. It’s good here though, I suppose. We used to be up north. It was okay there too.

  But then you came down here?

  Yeah. A couple of years ago.

  We come here every summer. Every summer that I can remember. I live in Brisbane the rest of the time. Sometimes we come up during the year for weekends or a week maybe, but we’re only here for a long time during summer.

  Oh.

  Do you surf here much?

  No. I surf where the waves are, and they’re not usually good here. They’ve been okay the last couple of days.

  Okay, but not good. It hasn’t been a good summer for waves, not anywhere around here.

  No. Have you got a board?

  No. I’ve got a ski, but I usually bodysurf.

  She just smiles. This was not a good answer. Bodysurfing is not cool. Bodysurfing is not a reasonable thing to do, when seen from the perspective of a board-rider. Geeks rolling round in the shallows, thinking they have some association with the waves.

  Do you want any more toast? I ask her, to divert attention away from being a bodysurfing geek.

  Yeah. Thanks.

  I go into the kitchen and while I’m waiting for the toast I try to work out what to say next. Try to work out what to say that will mean I see her again. The toast pops. She walks in smiling. She’s killing me with this smiling.

  She walks with a pantomime quietness so as not to wake my mother and she says in a loud whisper, Still no father, and shrugs as she takes the toast and covers it with honey. I make more for myself and we go outside.

  So what do you do in Brisbane? she says. School?

  Yeah. Well not any more.

  I don’t believe it. Here I am in the middle of rumbling my way through the enactment of a fantasy and it all gets back to that. The waiting. This is the moment when I should pinch myself and wake, find myself in bed with the light on and the loose sheets of the notes for my poem crushed around me and the clock saying 3:00. This is when the dream gets worse and I look down and I’m not wearing any pants, not wearing anything at all, naked and blue as a smurf, crossing cartoon legs across tiny blue smurf genitalia.

  But today this doesn’t happen. She’s expecting me to elaborate. Looking at me as though there’s more.

  You’ve left school? she says eventually. Or finished?

  Yeah, just finished. Waiting. Waiting to see what I get.

  Your offer?

  Yeah.

  When is that? Soon?

  About sixteen days.

  About sixteen days? She’s smiling again.

  Yes.

  Sixteen days and counting.

  I just happen to know the date.

  You knew it was exactly sixteen days.

  Okay, so I’m waiting.

  What are you waiting for?

  Arts/Law. Queensland Uni.

  And what score did you get? One?

  Two. A not very good two.

  A not very good two. So where does that leave you? Close?

  Yeah.

  Sixteen days to go, hey?

  Sixteen days.

  What made you pick Arts/Law?

  I don’t know. What makes anyone pick anything? I don’t know. I looked around. There were a lot of things I figured I’d hate. That wasn’t one of them. I picked it. It’s only through everyone asking me what I’ve put that I’ve started to grow attached to it.

  She laughs.

  There’s my father, she says. Through the trees. That’s his van just pulled in next to my car. I’d better run. He’ll think I’ve been abducted or something. You kno
w the way fathers are.

  She smiles and she goes. Down the steps and through the trees and off along the beach, leaving only the last corner of toast.

  And I watch her go all the way to her car, before heading inside.

  Inside where it is the same as always, still quiet and cool, my mother still sleeping.

  ten

  The honey is out, and two plates, two chairs by the table through the open door. But the silence is back, the old silence that just minutes ago was talk. Now it’s just me walking about on the seagrass matting, dry grass noises under bare feet, taking two plates to the sink and washing them, rinsing their crumbs away with cold water and wiping them. Old brown plates, old brown chip-edged plates, here all my life. I broke one when I was thirteen, washing up after dinner, dropped one and caught it but it smashed and I still have the scar, the faint white line of the scar on my left index finger.

  Her voice is gone now, even if I try hard to keep it. Gone like a TV turned off.

  I put the plates away, the knife away, the cups away, wipe the board, wipe the bench and the kitchen is clean.

  I take another seventy cents from the Big Pineapple ashtray and I leave the key in the shoe as I go. And this reminds me, just as I drop the key, of Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, but I couldn’t be that lucky. First meeting after first meeting until I get it just right.

  In the long grass I find the fifty from before, but not the twenty.

  Her car has gone and there are other people in the car park now, and on the beach.

  And I know nothing about her, still, really nothing. Not even her name. What does she do? What happens in her life? How do I know none of it? She drives a car, she lives nearby, she has green eyes and a small gold ring in her nose and a voice not quite from here. She makes me think of Angie Hart from Frente!, the ring, the voice that only one person has, the compelling lightness.

  Of course I went through a phase when I was sure there was nothing finer than Angie Hart. That’s part of this now. Part of why the dream suspended at a distance was not shattered by the improbable meeting. She is still elusive, still desirable.

  I’m not sure the Angie Hart phase ever ended. Other things happened, real people came along. Juliet maybe, if all that counts as real, but I still have the Frente! poster on my wall. That girl with the nose ring, my mother said, trying to work it all out. I like the music, I told her, my head nodding to back up the tone of sincerity I was working hard to contrive. You should listen to the music. But Kelly Street, she said, ‘Accidentally Kelly Street’, and that bit about it being a place where people would sometimes meet? There’s more to it than that, I told her, implying it was generational thing, that she was of another age and could never understand. And doing that because I know she hates it. My mother who likes to be in touch with youth, needs to be in touch with youth and treats sick uni students, is blase about condoms and STDs and all the other uni issues. My mother who is happy to tell anyone that she plays touch football, but never mentions it’s in a veterans’ competition. My mother who, I suspect, secretly extends her definition of youth a year with each birthday and who yearns for her son, caught in the trap of his own youth, to be interesting.

  But this is hardly fair. If it was, she would have had her nose pierced to stop her losing touch, she might have experimented with grunge. But she didn’t, and she will still argue with anybody that Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ is one of the Top Ten albums of all time.

  So the girl reminds me, at least in some ways, of Angie Hart, but I don’t know her name, I don’t know how to find her, I don’t know if she’s forgotten me already. The socially disadvantaged nerd with the coat-hanger shoulders who lured her back to his house for toast and honey, who fought his way through a conversation as though each word was sticking to the roof of his mouth. Offering help he obviously couldn’t give, offering tea he didn’t understand, confessing to bodysurfing, exposing himself as a tertiary entrance dickhead. All of this and moments of a strange intimacy, brought upon us by the need for quiet. Sometimes like two old people, nothing to say after all these years, scraping away at their breakfast toast. And all the time I was going crazy, trying to be calm but going crazy. Wanting her to want me, to stay, to take me with her, to touch me. Standing close to her as she whispered, My father will be a while, as though this gave us time. As though it defined a time that was ours. And then of course he came and she was gone, and I’m left with the day, the Courier-Mail that I’m carrying home, my late-sleeping mother, cricket maybe on TV.

  My mother wakes, asks about the paper and I tell her the usual. I read my novel on the veranda, lying in the shade and looking at the page, blurring the words with a long gaze. Len waves from next door, makes the pool signal and we play.

  I don’t know what happens next, or if nothing has happened at all.

  In the house I look for clues, but there is no sign that she was ever here.

  eleven

  In the afternoon I go to the mail box. There are no letters today. There is a medium-sized Vegemite jar containing honey. I open the lid and the honey smells of flowers, small sweet bush flowers.

  There is a note. It says, Thanks for breakfast. F.

  twelve

  F.

  Now she is F.

  Fiona maybe? I try it out and it doesn’t seem like her. But that doesn’t mean anything. If I wrote a note and signed it A, would she work it out? I don’t imagine so. I’ll leave her at F for the moment.

  I don’t read my book, though I sit with it open in the hot windless shade on the veranda. I can see the Moffat Beach car park and through the still trees the beach, the glaring sand, people under umbrellas reading fat holiday novels.

  Later I swim, but she’s not there. It’s back to what I’m used to, the waves and me. I walk round to Dicky Beach when I see she’s not at Moffat, but I still don’t see her so I swim.

  F.

  One encounter, honey, a note. Can I expect to see her again? Is this finished for her, complete with the gift of the honey? Did she meet her father and did he say to her, Someone gave you breakfast? You’ll have to pay them back. Why don’t you drop over some small gift. Maybe some of that honey? Did he tell her to write a note, just something short, because that would be polite. So now she will avoid Moffat, not just for better surf beaches.

  This is all too plausible.

  I look at the note. I stare again into its nineteen letters but not one of them tells me anything about her. There is nothing to tell me if she had more on her mind, more that she wanted to say. Nineteen neat pencil letters on a square of rough recycled paper, folded once. I could take a week to work on such a note and in the end send no more than nineteen letters. I see her going out into the trees for the wild honey, and finding it for me. And I am turning this into such an uncompromising fantasy I can almost hear the music as she dances through the trees in some diaphanous white gown, in slow motion like Picnic at Hanging Rock.

  I should try to re-establish some attachment to reality and resume my life outside the F-note. Reality. Beach holiday. Me, my mother, swimming, books, her sleeping in, etcetera. One day like another, and that’s not such a bad thing.

  We eat pizza for dinner, my mother and I, and she says I’m quiet and I tell her it’s part of relaxing. But I can’t tell her about F. I can’t say there’s this girl. F, I think her name is, there’s maybe more but I know her as F, and she had breakfast here today and she left me honey after, so maybe it was a good day. And I don’t know what happens now, but I can think of a million and one possibilities. You know how it is. But she doesn’t know how it is. She’s far too naively optimistic for me to let her in on the matter of F. We’d both start getting our hopes up. I say nothing.

  I sit with my book, I watch TV. My mother makes tea and talks about beach erosion and not really wanting to go back to work next week.

  And later, in
my room, while she’s falling asleep reading in hers, I find the honey and the note again. I have them in a drawer and I want to check to see that they’re both still there, that they do exist, and they do.

  She didn’t need to give me the honey, she really didn’t.

  I dip my finger in it and suck it, and I go to bed, my mouth full of curious sweet flowers.

  thirteen

  I dream of nothing at all. I wake with scale on my teeth and the last picture of my non-dreaming night hanging like a clean white sheet. It’s warm already, and later than usual.

  I take my towel from the veranda rail and I go down to the beach. Her Moke is not in the car park near the shops, and I don’t see her in the surf. Somewhere between here and the hinterland, maybe off some beach on this long coast, F is doing something this morning, but I don’t know what, I don’t know where. And I don’t know how I might find her if I decided to look.

  F.

  F and her honey. Honey that maybe just repaid the favour of breakfast. Honey I should eat, a jar I should then throw out with the others. A jar that might then be recycled, might end up again in her hands, filled with her honey. To be sold somewhere, given to someone.

  I swim and I watch the cars drive down the hump of Moffat Headland, down Queen of Colonies Parade, some parking in the car park, some driving on.

  When I leave the water I realise I’ve forgotten the seventy cents for the paper. I could go home without the paper and stay. I could go home and have breakfast and not buy the paper today, but my mother would wonder why and ask me. But you always buy the paper, she would say. So I go home and take the money from its usual place and I walk back along the beach to the newsagent.

  And I spend the day waiting, but I’m not entirely sure what for. Waiting for something to happen as though I am powerless to make anything happen.

  My mother goes to Noosa for lunch with a friend, one of her uni friends who is also no longer married. They will take hours over the meal and wander up and down Hastings Street, window-shopping and stopping occasionally for coffee. My mother will be back with an armful of glamorous bags and a badly damaged credit card and she will deal with this by telling me how much Gina spent.