After January

by Nick Earls

  I’m just not used to it.

  Sure. I am, so I might have another. Then we might get to work and make some yuppie bait. A few more of those elegant tropical plates. He burps and laughs and slaps me on the shoulder when I stand.

  We go inside and he transfers a few beers to the fridge in the workshop, in case I change my mind. With the beer and his other preoccupations he forgets to drop his pants and change into his work singlet. This is a bit of a relief, for while I am now okay with the idea of him working as he does, I would be a little less comfortable actually being there for the process of changing, just me and a middle-aged man in a room in the bush, while he takes his clothes off. Sometimes I feel very hung-up and middle class.

  He drops the clay on the wheel and works.

  So, you like Big, he says.

  Yeah.

  Good. She likes you too.

  Good.

  We all do. I like you. He glances up at me and throws another lump of clay onto the wheel. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say something. I’m not sure what he means. He works the clay, squeezes it and twists it and shapes it. I don’t think she’s ever liked anyone like this before.

  Never anyone like me?

  No, at all. Like this. She’s never been in this position.

  Oh.

  And you know I like you. And this is beginning to sound like a mafia conversation before someone gets killed. But I’m her father you know.

  Yeah.

  And she’s my daughter.

  Yeah.

  And I want to say to him Cliff, it’s okay, I’ve done this already. Gail cleared me yesterday. But I think he has his own struggle to get through.

  And I’m not used to this, this stuff, okay? And he’s pounding the clay with a closed fist and then stroking it firmly upwards, pounding and stroking. I can’t see this becoming a plate. It’s a very large lump of clay now, and it’s tending to the vertical. She’s never had an interest like this before, and it’s great it’s you. I’m glad it’s someone I like. That’s great. You understand that, don’t you? You know what I mean?

  Not completely.

  Okay, okay, okay. He’s very tense about having to spell it out, whatever it is, and the clay is rising into a column, like a thick forearm, with a fist on the end. Not a plate, nothing like a plate. All right, what I mean is, it’s okay. Whatever, whatever. Staring right at me saying whatever as though he’s said it all now, clearly, emphatically. And he’s caressing the fist part of the clay, caressing it and squeezing more clay up from the base, turning the fist into the head of a club, the head of a snake. What I mean is, it’s between the two of you, okay? It’s up to you. I’ve been through all this, I’ve been young, I know, okay? Stopping, looking at me, working the clay. And I like you, I want you to know that I like you. And that whatever happens it’s got to be your choice, and I’m cool, okay? Whatever the two of you decide to do, whatever you want, it’s fine by me. And I think it’s great. And the column of clay is a towering penis, fifty, sixty centimetres tall and perilously unstable, coiling and flexing in his fingers, flailing around like some dangerous weapon of love. Whatever, he says one more time, and he takes his hands from the clay and offers them to me palms up to give me whatever and the frightening phallus collapses, buckles mid-shaft and tumbles into his lap, striking his shorts with enough impact to make him wince.

  Thanks, I say, because I gather gratitude is in order. He seems to have endured some painful dilemma on my behalf, and not just in his shorts.

  But I can’t sit here, I can’t sit here on this box with this frantic clay-trousered man who seems to be talking about me, his daughter and sex. This is all too big, this whole issue, bigger almost than when he makes it in clay, all too much just now. It’s not as though it hasn’t crossed my mind, but I think it’s very different, the way we look at this, Cliff and Fred Brahms and me. And I can’t say to him, every time your daughter touches me I feel incredible, because I don’t think he’d understand. I think he’d make assumptions. I can’t explain it to him, any of it. I can’t explain it to myself.

  Could you show me how to make bread now? I ask him instead.

  Sure, sure. Just be careful, okay. You know? With the other thing? You’ll be careful?

  Yeah.

  His second beer seems to have vanished into him at some point during the discussion, though at the time neither of us noticed, so he takes a third from the fridge when we’re back in the kitchen. He places his hands on the bench, some distance apart, takes a few deep breaths, and thinks about bread.

  The phone rings. He looks at me, fearfully.

  Could you get it, mate?

  I pick it up and it’s Fortuna.

  Everything’s fine, she says. Totally fine. They were really pleased with Mum’s results. It couldn’t have been better.

  Great.

  I turn and grin and nod to Cliff and give him a thumbs up. Fortuna’s still talking.

  How’s Dad?

  Fine. Really good. We’re about to make bread.

  He’s pissed, isn’t he?

  Well, yeah, but he’s fine.

  He hasn’t done anything embarrassing, has he? He’s got an embarrassing mouth when he’s pissed.

  No, no, everything’s fine. He’s just had a couple of beers and we’re making bread.

  Just make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.

  And I’m watching him lean heavily on the bench, his mad grin sliding all over his face. Fortuna says they’ve got a couple of things to do in the city and they’ll be back in two hours or so.

  You’ll still be there, won’t you?

  Yeah.

  She goes, and I tell Cliff everything’s great, couldn’t be better, and he wipes his damp eyes and hugs me.

  Thanks, mate. Let’s make some bread. He opens a cupboard door and removes an alphabetised card file. Thank God Gail’s so organised, or I’d never find my recipes. I’d be useless without her, wouldn’t I? He flicks through the B’s. Here we go. You’ll like this one. It’s from a magazine. I cut it out a year or so ago.

  I say nothing, but this is not how I had imagined the process.

  We follow the recipe almost to the letter and he tells me, There’s an art to dough, and you have to know that from the start. The sifting, the mixing. This consistency is critical, okay?

  He flours up the board and we knead and he shows me just how the hands are supposed to be, takes my hands and shapes them properly.

  This is where you need a bit of judgment, adding the last bit of flour. Again, it’s about consistency. It can’t be too sloppy, it can’t be too dry and floury, and there shouldn’t be any lumps, okay?

  And very soon after we load this perfect dough into the pre-heated moderate oven, Cliff, his fourth bottle of beer only just begun, passes out.

  Thirty to thirty-five minutes, he says, ineffectually. Or until browned.

  And then he’s gone, slumped in a kitchen chair and snoring.

  I watch the bread, and its smell permeates the room. I sit in this quiet tide of snoring with no other sound and I watch the bread brown. It takes forty-two minutes, and then I remove it from the oven to cool.

  I cut the end off and eat it with some hommus from the fridge, and still he sleeps. It’s great bread, and I’ve never eaten anything I’ve made before, not from a recipe. I try to stay awake, but maybe I doze too, sitting on another chair at the kitchen table with the beer dragging me down. Good beer. Strong beer.

  Eventually I hear a car, coming at me from far away, the Moke. I hear it park and Fortuna and Gail walk in. Cliff’s head jerks up from his chest.

  Christ, the bread! he shouts, and we tell him it’s okay.

  Fortuna takes my hand. We walk outside.

  Thanks, she says, for today and yesterday. It made a big difference.
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  And I can’t look at her right now, not easily. Not with this pain in my head and the bright light and the day’s strange conversations. As though at any moment Cliff could loom up at a window and reaffirm his feelings, shout encouragement, make an awful mess of things.

  BREAD

  2½ cups plain flour

  1½ cups rolled oats

  2 cups wholemeal plain flour

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

  1 teaspoon salt

  2 cups buttermilk

  1 large egg

  Sift two cups of plain flour into a mixing bowl. Add one cup of rolled oats, the wholemeal plain flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt, and stir.

  Beat the egg lightly, combine it with the buttermilk and add to the mixture in the mixing bowl. Stir until a dough is formed.

  Knead the dough on a floured board until it is manageable but soft, adding the required amount of the remaining plain flour.

  Divide the dough into two portions, each of which should be sufficient to make a small loaf. Roll each loaf in the remaining rolled oats, place both loaves on a greased baking tray and bake at 180ºC (moderate) in a pre-heated oven for 30 minutes or until browned.

  Remove the loaves from the oven and allow them to cool on a rack.

  thirty

  I’m running low on food, and since all I can make is bread I organise to go shopping at Coles in the morning with Len.

  We take separate trolleys and circulate and I load up with watermelon and soft drink and a selection of peculiar teas in case Fortuna might like any of them. I buy a range of dinners for one, but we don’t have a microwave at the coast so that limits my options.

  Near the top of my list is toilet paper, having lost several rolls with the flooding a couple of days ago. At the time, throwing out sodden unused toilet rolls seemed a trivial part of the events, but with the use of the last roll this morning my need is immediate.

  I browse with my half-loaded trolley and my list in my hand and I push my way up the medicinal aisle and park until I find the Sorbent four-packs with the blue aquatic motif, the choice my mother will expect if she comes up for the weekend.

  I am about to move on when I notice I have parked next to the condoms.

  Saturn, Regular with nonoxynol-9. Saturn, Coloured Assortment (fragrant). Fragrant condoms. Fragrant condoms in Coles? This makes me tense. What’s the fragrance? Is there colour-fragrance matching? Do the green ones smell like apple, the red ones like strawberry? Oh how nice you bought strawberry, my favourite. Love the smell. Or do they do something really perverse and make the blue ones smell of banana? Or are they all musk or alpine or Obsession or pheromones?

  I notice that I’m holding them now, standing in Coles near my melon, my toilet paper, my selection of peculiar teas, not moving on. Holding the condoms, turning them over in my hands, reading the fine print and squishing them around in the packet without meaning to. Fragrant condoms. This doesn’t make me feel good. I can’t quite see the point.

  Reaction – Ribbed. Reaction – Affinity. Ribbed condoms in Coles? Right near vitamin B and Bandaids. I’m not convinced you can feel the ribs through the packet.

  Two years or so ago, at school, we were visited by some family planning people, doctor friends of my mother’s, fearless middle-aged women. They brought all the gear with them. Pill packets set in plastic for use as paper weights, spermicides, IUDs, but mainly condoms. And they passed them out among the class in the dimly lit audiovisual room and said, We’d like to be sure we get the IUDs back. There’s not much you can do with them anyway unless you’ve been trained to use them. And if you could also return the pill packets and the gels and foams and creams, that’d be good too. They knew the condoms wouldn’t be coming back. They stressed lubrication and early application. They said condoms now came in infinite varieties, to suit everyone’s tastes, and putting a condom on didn’t have to kill the mood. It could be part of the fun. Whatever that meant. And whenever they asked questions they asked me, because mine was the only name they knew. So, Alex, can you think of any added advantages the condom might have over other forms of contraception? So, Alex, could you tell us all why you don’t put the condom on until the penis is fully erect? Looking straight at me. Making cold merciless eye contact and making me talk about this as though I practised it at home.

  Mate, I hear Len saying behind me. I’m about ready to go.

  Yeah, me too. I was just here for the toilet rolls.

  Yeah, that’s fine.

  No really.

  Yeah, fine. You’ve got to have toilet paper. I think you should buy anything you might need. It makes sense. You don’t want to take any chances, do you?

  I’ll be fine.

  I flick the Reaction – Ribbed packet back onto the shelf as though it was never in my hand, I straighten the Sorbent four-pack, and I move decisively to the checkout.

  On the way home we talk about the weather.

  thirty-one

  We walk on the beach.

  Fortuna comes over and we walk slowly in the late afternoon when the air is cooler and the breeze is beginning and the light is coming in lower from the west, over the land.

  We go through the shin-deep water where Tooway Creek crosses the sand and runs into the sea and we walk on the rocks of the headland.

  Far out to sea two ships turn away from straight lines, head away from each other, for different parts of the horizon.

  She takes my hand and leads me carefully over the wet mossy contours of the stone as though she is my eyes.

  I am just behind her and watching her fingers around mine, her splashed calves, her bare arms.

  I can see your house, she says, pointing, as though she’s the first person to find it.

  Yeah. From here it looks really close to the beach, doesn’t it? I wonder how long it’ll be there, the way the erosion’s going. We used to have more garden. Every cyclone we have less. They put down rocks and it doesn’t stop it. It might be fine for years though. It’s hard to know. From here it’s even more apparent that it’s only the pandanus trees and the she-oaks gripping hard to the sand that keep us any garden at all.

  But I thought it would always be there, I tell her. I’ve moved in Brisbane, but I thought this house would always be there. Even in years when summer holidays bored me it seemed one of the few inevitable things. This house and Christmas were the only things that meant my mother and my father and I had anything in common. Everything else fell one side of a line long ago.

  What’s that like?

  Parents splitting up? Better than two people who don’t like each other. Two people with strong personalities and loud voices who are never wrong. It takes a while to work out that it’s better though. I don’t know why. But it’s long ago now, and they both worked very hard to make sure that little Alex didn’t blame himself for it. As if I’d blame myself. I heard them arguing. The two of them were ridiculous.

  Do you see much of your father?

  Enough. More than enough. My father’s, well, he’s a bit of a dickhead. Not in a dangerous way, just a dickhead. In my mother’s language he’s not a healthy socialising influence. She says he’s a stereotype, which he is. Management Man, long hours in the office, lots of travel, family fend for themselves. Even now he’s like this weird guy who comes into my life occasionally and asks me bloke questions. Sport, girls, your future. Even superannuation. Once he even started telling me how important superannuation was. What a dickhead. He’s like someone you really don’t like but you bump into at parties and have to be polite to. And he’s such a fascist sometimes. He’s so right-wing. I have to tell myself to shut up, that it’s not worth getting into the debate. It’s terrifying to think that half my genes are his. It’s scary enough to think the other half come from my mother. What chance
have I got?

  My family hasn’t always been the way it is, she says after a while. Not that there were any problems. It was always okay, but I think we all assumed it would always be okay. Then Mum got sick. Maybe we’re through that now, but it makes you think of things differently. You hold on much harder, when you used to just assume. It changes the whole family, how the family works, what it means. It’s strange. We really thought she might die, but she didn’t.

  We walk back along the beach. It’s almost empty now, and narrowed by the incoming tide. People have gone for the day, other than a few walkers. At the edge of the sand there are trees with large dense leaves dipping right to the ground.

  You see those trees? I say. I used to hide under them, years ago. No one can find you in there. No one can see in. And late in the day there’s this incredible emerald light, just before the sun goes down over the hill.

  Show me, she says.

  And she leads me in, crawling between branches into this small hidden room and the light glows through the leaves, just as I told her. And the leaves tap against each other, flap like green pages turning over in the breeze coming in from the sea.

  It’s beautiful, she says quietly, brushing her messed hair away from her face.

  And she moves her hand to my face and she kisses me on the mouth and I’m on my back on the cool sand and I can feel her on top of me, feel her back muscles under my hands, her thigh muscles. She leans on her elbows and touches my cheek with her fingers, and my lips, and bites my neck and then kisses me on the mouth again. And I can see her eyes, her pupils huge in the dimming light, feel her tongue, hear her fast breathing.

  And the sun is gone, the emerald gone, the leaves a dull green-grey.

  We walk back to the house, again holding hands, walking close, nudging into each other.

  Later my mother calls.

  I’ll be up tomorrow evening, she says. For the weekend.