After January

by Nick Earls

  I’m glad we’re inside, she says. Last summer we had storms like this just about every day. And they’d always break when I was half-way home from school on my bike.

  We talk about school and I tell her about catching the train, being the prefect on the train, and even as I’m saying it it sounds as though I am describing something that is long ago or far away for both of us, as though it’s another country I’ve seen sometimes in vivid dreams. And this is quite unlike any previous ninth of January in my life, all the other years when the reality of school was merely suspended. This year it’s over. Today it’s over. It’s something outside this rain and in my past. If I ever go back there it will be different, the grass will be different and the red brick buildings, and anything even slightly the same will catch me by surprise.

  Fortuna has never had the same affinity with schools. She tells me about school in various parts of the north and then down here.

  I never fitted in down here, she says. It never really worked out that way. I don’t think they thought I thought the same things were important. If you know what I mean. There was a big surf thing happening, and I like catching waves, but I was never into it the way the others were. I was never part of it. I could have been, maybe, but I don’t know that I ever really wanted to be. I couldn’t see the point. And I had Gail and Cliffie and the twins of course, so I thought I was okay. I always had them, wherever we moved, so that was good. It meant there was always somewhere I fitted in, without having to change a thing. I couldn’t see why I’d have to change into something stupid only to impress people who were stupid, so they’d like me. That’s all pretty dumb I suppose, really.

  No. No it’s good you didn’t let it get to you. And it’s good you didn’t change just because of other people. A lot of people would. I might. I don’t know, but I might. I might change to make people like me. I think I’d have found it hard at school if people hadn’t liked me.

  Did you change to make me like you?

  Change into someone who could fix a car for example? I would have had no idea what to change into. I just saw you, you and your board and your car. And I just told myself I had nothing to lose.

  She laughs, just a small laugh. She likes this, and she knows I didn’t go into it thinking I had nothing to lose.

  She wants me to play the Frente! EP, and we turn it up, above the rain. We lie on a bean bag near the portable CD player and she listens intently. She closes her eyes.

  Play the last two songs again, she says when it finishes.

  So I do, and I lie beside her, on my side quite close beside her, watching her, watching her delicate closed eyes, her breasts lifting just a little with each slow breath, her long bare legs crossed at the ankles.

  She looks incredibly peaceful, here with me, under the thrashing rain.

  I play the songs again, and again, and I don’t know how many times before she opens her eyes.

  She looks me over, as though I’ve just arrived. She rolls to face me, puts her left arm over me, closes her eyes again and we kiss, one long slow kiss until a while after the end of the CD.

  Outside, the rain is fading now and there is a cool silver light slipping through the clouds.

  I’d better go, she says. While the weather’s like this. It could get worse again and I might not be able to get home.

  She looks at me, close up and carefully, as though she is saying much more than observations about weather. As though worse again mightn’t be such a bad thing.

  I walk with her to the door and I watch her run across the drenched grass, kicking water from the wide puddles, her left arm over her head again to keep back the rain.

  Some time later my mother calls, to see how I’m going, to see how the storm was up here.

  I tell her fine, I’m fine, the storm was fine. There are no problems.

  I go to sleep to the sound of rain, the tired storm doing another sweep overhead, blowing itself out in the dark, throwing the last of its rain across our roof, like an old hand now, and able to do no harm.

  STORM POEM

  Just us

  Here

  Behind the storm wall

  This keeps us in

  Keeps them out

  Keeps them a perfect invisible distance away

  Behind the bars

  Of the rain

  twenty-six

  Big reckons you’re going to be a lawyer, Cliff says, as he looks critically over some plates he has just fired, dinner-sized with tropical coastscapes, vivid blues and greens for the sea and sky and rainforested hills, tiny white houses with red roofs.

  Well, not necessarily. I might not get in.

  I’m back sitting on the box, the visitor’s box-seat in Cliff’s workshop. My hair is still a little damp from swimming and Fortuna is elsewhere, stuffing stockings to make Merv heads. Cliff is wearing his working singlet again, and again nothing else, and he shuffles around the workshop with clay dried to powder over his thighs and his arms, leaning over things and looking at them.

  When will you know?

  It’s the twentieth it’s in the paper, so that’s, what, ten days? Late next week.

  Yeah. I went to Queensland Uni you know. Did Big tell you that? Bachelor of Arts. First six months of 1971. Great place.

  You didn’t stay though.

  No. Brisbane in 1971 wasn’t the place for me, so I travelled and I never quite got round to going back. I’m sure it’s a different place now though, Brisbane and the Uni. I’m sure they’re both different. Some of the people I travelled with went back. One of them even did Law.

  Really?

  Yeah. He did something else first, and then he did Law. He came to tell me he was going to. I don’t know if he was looking for me to approve, or what. As if it’d bother me if someone did Law, or didn’t. We were living in northern New South Wales then and he drove down for a week or two and helped us pick avocados, I think. Something like that. It was a while ago. Anyway, the last time I saw him he was wearing sandals and shorts and no shirt and driving an old Jeep and telling me the important things you can do with a law degree. That was ten or fifteen years ago. I wondered how he was going with the important things, and then I saw him on TV a couple of years ago in a pin-stripe suit, defending some white-collar criminal. I think the agenda had changed a bit, and I guess that’s fine, if it’s making him happy, but you’ve got to wonder where he really stood, years ago. He stops and looks at me and gives me a half-smile.

  And that seems to be that.

  I help him put the plates into wooden boxes, resting each one on a bed of dried grass.

  Alex, Fortuna says from the doorway when we’ve almost finished, do you want to help me get lunch?

  I go with her to the kitchen and we wash fruit and put it on the table with honey and bread.

  I think your father thinks I shouldn’t be doing Law, I tell her.

  Really? Why?

  He told me a story about someone. Someone who did a law degree and seemed to change a lot. Into something your father didn’t like.

  Really. I don’t think that means you shouldn’t. I don’t think that’s necessarily him telling you you shouldn’t.

  Do you think I shouldn’t? Do you think it’s a problem, me planning to do Law?

  No, no. Why would it be? Why did you say that? Why would I have a problem with you doing Law? Do you have a problem with me not doing Law?

  No. No not at all.

  Good. Good. Then she looks less serious. Then no one has any problems. And I’m sure that’s not what my father was saying. Did you get those plates boxed?

  Yeah.

  Good. We’ve got an order through for some more. Mum said someone in Noosa just faxed us.

  You have a fax?

  Yeah.

  Your father has a go at people who ow
n pin-stripe suits and he owns a fax?

  Cliffie will never admit to owning a fax, so that’s the important difference. He will never, ever, feel good about owning a fax. So he pretends it doesn’t exist, that it’s my mother’s business. He hates it. He hates the idea that the easiest thing for him to do is to sell to Noosa, to fuddle around here working without any hurry, while my mother receives the faxes that tell him what to make. In his perfect world if someone liked his plate, they would give him a bag of potatoes and two chickens. Here he has to make do with money, and he finds that very uncomfortable.

  This is not easy to work out.

  I never told you it would be easy to work out. Dad likes you. I have no idea what he thinks of your course preferences, but he likes you. Okay?

  The rest of the family turns up for lunch and I meet Fortuna’s mother, Gail, for the first time. She looks older than Cliff, and perhaps she is, and she has hair like all her daughters.

  Finally, she says. The young man I’ve heard so much about.

  Skye laughs.

  There is something about Gail that means lunch seems to happen around her. She takes the first plate and Cliff cuts her two thick slices of bread without saying a thing. He then cuts two for himself and puts the knife down.

  You’ll be working hard, Cliffie, she’s saying, and she uncrumples a sheet of fax paper from her pocket. Lovely Lionel’s after you again.

  Cliff almost groans there and then under the weight of the impending work.

  She turns to me, looks up from the honey she’s spreading across her bread and says, So Alex, tell me about yourself. Tell me the things I don’t know.

  As though I am to present my credentials.

  Right at this moment I feel I don’t have any, and I feel as though I don’t fit in, as though I don’t understand this lunch so I can’t fit in. I feel welcome and strange at the same time.

  After lunch, the others start to clear the table and Gail stops me when I stand up to help.

  There’s really not much to do, she says. Come and have a cup of tea.

  We go outside and sit on the veranda. She holds her tea in both hands and I notice signs of surgery on one arm, a big blood vessel pounding near a long scar. I try hard to look somewhere else.

  Big says it’s just you and your mother.

  Yeah.

  You must be very important to her then.

  Well, I’ve never really thought about it. I suppose we’re important to each other.

  Yeah, I’m sure you are. She stops and laughs. We should make light conversation, shouldn’t we? It’s just that my daughter is very important to me and I think I’m trying to convince myself that you’re a fit and proper person for her to spend time with. And I realise that’s completely unfair. I can’t believe I could even think of becoming that kind of parent. So just reassure me. Tell me that you don’t deal in or take dangerous drugs, that you don’t molest animals and that you won’t knowingly or wilfully do my daughter harm.

  All of the above.

  Well I’m glad that’s out of the way.

  If you want I can provide references from teachers and lifelong family friends.

  Good idea. Get them to fax me. She laughs again. Sorry Alex. I’m such a bloody parent, aren’t I?

  Yeah. So’s my mother. I know the score. Like she says, It’s a dangerous world out there, and you can never be too careful.

  You can never be too careful. It’s crazy isn’t it?

  Sometimes.

  Cliff appears at the door and says, Alex, have you got any plans this afternoon? You’re not doing anything, are you? And he’s saying this quietly, and I can’t imagine why. All I can do is go along with it.

  No. I don’t think so.

  Do you like music?

  Yes.

  Good. Come with me. He turns to Fortuna who is still behind him in the kitchen. Big, mind if I borrow Alex for a bit?

  What do you mean?

  I just thought I’d take him down the back, you know.

  Dad . . . Said in a way that makes it sound like a caution to a pet about to misbehave.

  He said he liked music.

  Has he explained this to you, Alex?

  Not yet.

  We’ve got a bit of a studio down there. I just thought you might like to see it, that’s all.

  You don’t have to go, Alex, Fortuna says.

  No, no. I’d like to.

  Dad, he’s just being polite.

  No, I’d like to go.

  Dad, if you make him go, you have to promise not to tell him any boring stories, okay?

  Cliff’s mind is already down at the studio, so he just says, Yeah yeah, and leads me across a cleared area of bush to a separate building. Inside, the walls are covered with egg cartons and there’s a drum kit already set up, a few guitars, a sax, keyboards. He takes me to an old machine with several knobs and dials.

  Four-track, he says, twiddling a few of the knobs affectionately. Still as honest as the day it was made.

  He picks up an acoustic guitar and records several different versions of ‘Norwegian Wood’, all the time fixing me with a quite fiendish glare while singing lines about once having a girl, or her once having him.

  And then there’s backing vocals of course, he says enthusiastically. Just hang on a tick.

  He comes back with Fortuna, who looks less enthusiastic and says, He’s not doing ‘Norwegian Wood’, is he? Shaking her head and rolling her eyes.

  Yeah.

  It’s the song of the moment. He goes through phases. Sometimes it’s Dylan, sometimes . . .

  Okay Big, Cliff says, ignoring all this, from the usual bit. From ‘She asked me to stay’.

  Yeah. Sorry Alex. I’ll take you home after this, if you want. She puts on the headphones and says, Let me hear it. Cliff asks if the key is okay and she thinks her way through the lines and says, Yeah, yeah. I think I can get there.

  So she sings, she nods in time with the first few lines and she puts one hand on the headphones and the other on her thigh and she takes a breath and sings. And Cliff switches the sound so Fortuna hears the parts already recorded and we hear only her, her voice filling the room all by itself as it makes some strangely absent harmony.

  Cliff grins at me and says, She’s good, isn’t she?

  I don’t need to answer. For me, this is the sort of thing I would like to dream at night, but never seem to.

  By now Cliff will not be stopped. He opens the door and shouts for Gail and the twins.

  Are we going to do a few numbers, Dad? Skye says, grinning at me as she walks in.

  She slings the bass over her shoulder and plugs it in, and Storm blows a few notes on the sax.

  The upright or the Roland? Gail says. What are we starting with?

  Spicks and Specks, Skye says quickly.

  Cliff agrees. Good choice. You know this one, Alex?

  I don’t think so.

  It’s early Bee Gees, but don’t let that put you off. It’s got a great feel.

  Gail sits down at the upright piano, and Fortuna moves behind the drums, smiles unconvincingly, says, Am I on? to her mike. She beats maybe eight times on the same drum, then Skye joins in on bass, then Gail, thumping one chord repeatedly before breaking into the melody, and the song sounds vaguely familiar after all.

  Next, Gail moves to the electronic keyboard and they do ‘Echo Beach’, with Fortuna singing lead while still playing drums. And all this time I sit on a stool, wondering what my life is becoming, wondering how I came to be chosen to be this audience of one. This is just another item on the growing list of things I am unlikely to tell the people I went to school with when I see them next. So what did you do at the coast? Well, one day I sat on a stool in the hinterland and a hippy family played pop son
gs for me.

  The pop songs aren’t over. Cliff starts doing something quite country on guitar, and it becomes Vika and Linda Bull’s ‘When Will You Fall for Me?’. Fortuna sings lead again and Storm and Skye do backing vocals, and when they reach the end they keep singing, chorus after chorus just with their three voices, trying different harmonies, different tempos, like clever old soul singers, finding unexpected resonances. They finally stop, and laugh.

  That was great, Cliff says. What did you think, Alex?

  Yeah. Great, really good.

  So, do you sing?

  Me? No.

  I think you might, Fortuna says. I think you might be about to.

  No, I don’t think so.

  Come over here, Cliff says.

  He walks to the piano, and the others move in a way that seems to herd me over there too.

  Just a few notes, he says. A few notes after I play them. Just lah.

  You want me to go lah after you play a note?

  Yeah.

  I don’t know if I can do that.

  Sure you can.

  He plays the first note. I lah. Good. He plays another. I lah again. If I felt silly sitting on the stool I feel much worse now.

  Alex, you’re fine, Fortuna says. You’re in tune.

  Really?

  Keep going.

  So Cliff plays more notes and I keep lahing.

  Good, he says, and he turns to the others with a knowing smile. This is it. This is our boy.

  And he looks at me and nods, as though I know too. But I don’t. I say nothing, and I think I give him the smile of fear, or at least uncertainty.

  Undeterred, he rummages around in an old cardboard box until he finds a cassette, which he holds up to me like a lost treasure.

  Here it is, he says, and he loads it into a player. This is the Housemartins, doing an a capella version of the song ‘Caravan of Love’. You only got this if you bought the album early and got the bonus EP. We’ve been waiting for the right voice to come along to sing lead. We all know our parts.

  I don’t know if I’m up to these responsibilities, but he’s saying this in a very earnest way, and he plays it, rewinds it and plays it again. And the others do know their parts, and they sing along. Then they start without the tape, all looking at me, ready for me, Fortuna, I think, only just managing not to laugh at my visible struggle with probably the most acutely embarrassing moment of my life.