After January

by Nick Earls

  I’m glad you stayed, I tell her.

  Yeah, she says. Me too.

  And our faces are close but neither of us moves to make them any closer, to do anything. My mouth tastes like kitty litter and my teeth feel like they’re wearing socks. And she’s looking at me with those green eyes. She touches my cheek with her fingertips and she says, I’ve got to sleep. And she holds my hand again, and her eyes close and I watch her up close till I sleep too.

  forty-one

  In the afternoon Len Boit comes over with half a watermelon, a machete and a few poems.

  Felt a bit rough earlier, he says. Thought there was a chance you might’ve too, so I thought we could all do with some melon. And then I worked out young Fortuna had never heard any of my poetry.

  He sets himself up on the old veranda table and lops off a few semicircles of melon. Fortuna and I settle ourselves into the white plastic chairs as Len readies himself against the rail, straightening his glasses, shuffling his papers, peering through the sheets to find the right poem to start with.

  Here we go, he says. One about having a bit of a headache the morning after. And he’s off.

  Several poems, several different themes, most destined for the Humorous section of his next book. Fortuna and I listen and laugh and discuss when discussion seems the appropriate response. And we sit back spitting seeds far beyond the veranda down onto the carpet-grass lawn.

  Then he says to Fortuna, You might remember your dad and I were talking about Caloundra and what it was like a while back. I’ve got a few about that too, about when I was young.

  And the place might be very different but the poems are still about beaches and surf and fishing and sitting back not doing much. He reads one about the Centaur, the hospital ship torpedoed off Caloundra in 1943 and tells us he was away then serving overseas. It was a time when not many people lived in the area and few came on holidays, and there was a fort at the north end of Bribie Island.

  I must have walked past it, I think. Years ago when I went over on my surf ski and walked through to the coastal side of the island, and there in the dunes and lantana were concrete slabs and broken-down buildings. I never knew it was a fort. I never knew that any war had come this close, that there were soldiers there, and heavy guns, ready for enemy ships at sea that never came. But there were other sides to this, as Len tells us, rhyming his way through ‘Boys of the Eighth Heavy’, a long poem about dances at the fort when the Caloundra girls were shipped over wearing their best to meet the soldiers of the 8th Heavy Artillery, and they burned dried cow dung to keep away mosquitoes. It’s all so different, the music, the clothes, the threat of invasion. Just thinking about it I can’t imagine it happening anywhere near here, and particularly not so recently that people can remember it. Fort Bribie. It’s hard to believe it now.

  From our back veranda the sea does not look like a place for war.

  We finish the melon and Len gets to the end of the poems. He goes home and we swim, not a wave-catching swim, just walking down to the sea behind the house, over the hot sand, into the water. Just us here.

  We hose the salt off each other when we’re back in the garden and we sit on a low tree branch with our towels around us, our wet skin picking up the smallest of breezes and drying cool.

  forty-two

  This is good, you say in a voice no louder than it needs to be.

  There are no noises near us, just the unfolding edge of the quite peaceful sea.

  And right now you’re all that’s on my mind.

  The shade and light fall around us, over your face and shoulders and legs like a mosaic, small shapes of shade and light, the sun passing through all the angles of the she-oak canopy.

  Your lips are cool but your mouth inside is warm and wearing what we are my arms are on your skin, your sea-washed smooth skin. And the sun lights your eyes like deep green seas, and your wet-straw hair. And your skin is against mine, soft against mine.

  We don’t talk.

  We spread our towels between the trees, vivid rectangles of colour on the sparse grass and sand, the swaying tree-shade. We lie on our backs looking up through the branches at the deep blue sky. We curl towards each other, face each other. As though there’s no one else, as though the only place that matters is here, beneath these trees. The tide comes in up the beach. We sleep again, and wake when it’s cooling down. All uncomfortable on the hard ground.

  This is another day ending. It’s the seventeenth. January seventeenth. Time is shortening. Our time. I want to tell you I’ll have to go soon, back to the city, but that’s not the end. That I’ll be back here, with you, on this grass, the first chance I get.

  Again you leave me at the beginning of night. Me with the empty house of the past and the long hours with no one. I walk up and down on the seagrass matting, feeling more hours leaving. Wasting and leaving. The TV plays summer repeats, but I’m not listening.

  On the eighteenth we go to Bribie. We take the surf skis from under the house and load them in your car and set off from Golden Beach, over the drifting sandbars and the oystered outcrops of rock and the deep dark band of the water of the passage. We pull the skis up onto a narrow beach and walk until we find a path.

  I remember walking here years ago, having paddled here the first time on the ski, setting out by myself from the other side of the water. Taking several summers and then weeks to decide I might get to Bribie and back, weeks to find enough confidence. And when I landed it was as though I had reached another country, one that had not been visited for a long time. And I found something in the mud, sticking out of the mud like an old Roman sword, and I walked through the mud to get to it, not taking my eyes off it in case it would disappear, in case I wasn’t seeing it at all. I imagined taking hold of this old blunt blade and drawing the sword from the mud and carrying it back on the ski, taking care of it across the deep engulfing waters of the passage and the sand-bottomed shallows. Walking from the water, the sword in my hand, telling my mother I think the Romans were there, on Bribie.

  And it didn’t disappear and I took it in both hands and the mud gave it to me with a shlock and closed over the hole with ooze and the hilt of the sword was the skull of a pelican, the blade I held its beak. I washed it with care at the edge of the water and took it home anyway, all the time wishing it was something else.

  I found a pelican’s skull just near here once, I tell you. Sticking up out of the mud.

  We follow the track among trees and I wonder if it was cut in 1943. Or if the tracks from the war are long gone and grown over, and people walk new tracks between new trees, and the tracks move like the sandbars in the passage, following lines of least resistance. Closing over with growth, opening up with death again, a bush dying, a tree dying and drying and falling in the harsh salt sand. I can hear the sea ahead of us.

  The path leads us to a concrete slab, and the sand comes over one corner of it in a slow wave. And there are holes like square-cut wounds where metal posts have rusted away, orange stains around the edges, the last of the metal crusting in some of them like scabs. There is glass across the concrete, the smashed glass of stubbies thrown hard against it, brown beer glass scattered across the slab. We stop and look at this, as though something might happen.

  It’s the fort, isn’t it? you say. Part of the fort.

  Probably.

  And the sea sounds close, as though the next rise is the only thing that stops it from sweeping over this outpost. We keep walking and the track takes us through thinning trees and scrub and onto dunes. There is a concrete building at the end of the track, at the edge of the beach. Its doors and windows are just spaces and the warm wind skates off the sea and runs through these spaces like the low noise of breathing, like a long breath out.

  To the south the beach goes as far as we can see. Some distance to the north the island ends and across the water is Caloundra, Bu
lcock Beach, Kings Beach, the headland, covered with red-roofed houses and brick blocks of holiday units.

  I’ve been here once before, at least near here. A few summers ago, with this same view. I remember the Keneallys had cousins visiting from interstate. We came across from Golden Beach in boats. I crossed the island with one of them, north of here maybe, different paths. I think she raced me over here. She challenged me and we raced along a path ahead of the others and I caught up with her among the trees and stayed just ahead all the way to the sea. We walked in the edge of the surf and she splashed me, started chasing around me. And I told her the beach wasn’t safe here, wasn’t safe for swimming, that her uncle had said the sand slips away from you and people have been swept out to sea.

  And she kept saying, The others will be here soon, the others will be here soon, as though something had to happen before they arrived.

  She was twelve, I was fourteen. She had a body only just beginning to be female. She was a child so I thought what’s the hurry, what’s the problem? The others will be here soon. Repeatedly, splashing me with some mad urgency. And now I think I know. She was splashing me and telling me time was short and the next move was up to me.

  I splashed her back. She was twelve. Nothing else occurred to me. I thought she was just splashing. But when I splashed her back it seemed to annoy her.

  The others appeared at the end of the path, and the splashing stopped and we walked with them, up and down this foreign beach with a view of Caloundra like a postcard. I found a piece of wood the size of a fist that had obviously come from a boat and she asked if she could keep it.

  She told her parents we had found it, the two of us when we had been alone on the coastal shore of the island, even though that wasn’t quite true, and I think she took it home to Melbourne with her. She must be fifteen now.

  But I don’t tell you this story. I don’t tell you any of it. It just flicks into my mind briefly and only stays long enough for me to think I’ve worked it out.

  I’m older now. This is our beach. Neither of us needs this story, or anything stolen from another summer. It’s not important enough.

  We’ve got to remember where the path was, you say. We shouldn’t go too far.

  We walk in the sea almost to our knees and the broken waves run past us and up the white sand. I look down at my feet in the clear water, sending up puffs of sand as I walk, and the foam of the breaking surf sucks back to the sea, holds my ankles for a moment and then lets go, swirling away.

  You’re not saying much, you tell me. Is it the uni thing, the offers the day after tomorrow?

  Yeah.

  And maybe it partly is.

  Yeah, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about it.

  I put my arm around you and you swing yours around me. We walk more slowly, less steadily. I kiss your hair and it tastes like salt.

  I want to tell you how you’ve made the uni thing a little less important. How today is manageable, and it might have been much worse. I expected to be back in Brisbane now, festering horribly, being very hard to live with but refusing all the time to talk about it, or admit that it mattered. It matters, I can tell you it matters, even if it’s not the sort of thing that matters to you.

  This is our beach, you say. No one else’s. We could do anything here.

  We turn and keep walking, still at the water’s edge so the beach is still unmarked, as though we’ve just landed here, come out of the sea. We could do anything here.

  We’re facing the town now, walking facing the place where I’ve spent every summer of my life, but looking at it from far away, as though it’s not quite real, an image picked up from somewhere else by a trick of the sun and dropped in front of us like a mirage, a whole silent town left at the end of this beach.

  People arrive, a family with a large esky and a beach umbrella. A football sails up into the blue sky and thumps down onto the sand not far from us. Two boys chase towards it as it rolls to a stop.

  We are back at the concrete ruin, back at the track. You lean against the southern shaded wall of the building and look down at the beach. The concrete is cool where the sun hasn’t touched, never touches. The ball goes into the sky again and this time lands on the water of a receding wave. It wobbles from side to side and another wave takes it, lifts it and pushes it up the beach. One of the boys scoops it up and runs.

  You put your arms around my neck and shrug as though you don’t care about them, as though they can have the beach now, and you say, Oh well, and you kiss me on the mouth. I close my eyes and hold you through your salt-matted hair.

  On the nineteenth you say you’ll keep me busy. You say you can tell I’m more tense. You tell me you’re getting tense for me now and you never thought you’d be tense about tertiary offers.

  But of course there’s more to it than that. The nineteenth puts me a day closer to leaving.

  I talk about school, because I can’t talk about leaving. But I also can’t stop talking about school. I can’t seem to help it, just like the day we met, when you laughed at me for waiting. Waiting for something I’d have to wait sixteen days for. Now it’s tomorrow.

  We go to Kings and the waves aren’t bad but there are too many people. And in one way I want tomorrow to come right now so I can get it over with, in another I don’t want it to come at all. In Brisbane they might already be setting the type for the paper, setting the letters together for my name and whatever outcome I’m entitled to.

  I phone my mother at lunch time when I know she’ll be home. She seems careful with the conversation, as though she doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. So I do most of the talking. I tell her Law isn’t everything, that I don’t have to get into Law to be worthwhile, that I’ll survive, whatever the result. And today I wonder if I believe any of this, or if it’s just words, chanting along beneath the fear of failure and not meaning much. She goes along with it, says it’s all good, but I can tell she doubts that I believe it.

  We go to your house in the late afternoon. Cliff calls me mate a lot, and says I should stay the night. Skye unfolds a table tennis table and insists that I play, as though she’s being nice to me. But of course she plays table tennis the way I imagine Jean Claude van Damme would if he really didn’t like someone. She strikes the ball with a ferocity unlikely for her small arms, and it is clear her main intention is to hit me as many times as she can. When I’m fifteen-twelve ahead she cracks the last ball and we stop. She is visibly annoyed with the flimsiness of table tennis balls, now lying around her like the shells of several smashed eggs.

  We eat dinner and I sleep by your bed, on a mattress on the floor, with you looking down on me from the edge of your pillow.

  It’ll be okay, you tell me, whatever happens, and you reach down to hold my hand.

  You sleep and your hand goes limp and your fingers uncurl passively.

  I don’t sleep. For a while I lie looking up at the ceiling. I can hear almost nothing, no cars, no waves. Just the conversations of insects, the breeze circling through the tops of the trees and your soft breathing. A creak in the next room as someone rolls over in bed. A possum dropping from a branch onto the tin roof, somewhere over the far side of the house.

  I rearrange my pillow and I sit with my back to the wall. I watch the moon on you, coming through the window and falling across the white sheet that covers you, the hills and valleys your body makes in this grey-silver landscape. You lie facing me, your left leg bent and your right leg straight, the sheet dipping between them, rising over both of your thighs, curving up over you and across the high plain of your back, lifting and falling with the rhythm of each breath. And from the top emerge your T-shirted shoulders, your bare arms, the gentle empty face of sleep and your hair catching the moon in a way like fine-spun glass.

  So I hardly think about the paper at all. I watch you. I think about you. I think about th
e two of us in this room, the shape of you under the sheet, moving only slightly to breathe. Only I can see this.

  I wonder what will happen, since we aren’t the same in many ways. What will happen when my result is out, when I have to spend some time in Brisbane again. At this moment, when I’m with you, it’s easy to know what I want.

  I sleep on and off, and I feel good each time I wake. You’re still there.

  You wake when it’s light, and then you wake me. I hear you saying my name, softly as though it’s still part of some great dream. But of course I’m not the sort of person who has great dreams, so I should know better.

  It’s that time, you’re saying to me with your face quite close over me and your hand on my shoulder.

  You say you’ll make me tea but I don’t feel like tea. I need to know.

  The others are still asleep when we drive to the newsagent. It’s probably just after six when we get there and you pay for the paper and I run outside with it, opening it across the bonnet of the Moke, looking frantically for Delaney AP, Delaney AP.

  There are a lot of names, too many names, I have to turn another page for the Ds.

  So, you say beside me, is it there?

  I find the Ds. I find the Delaneys, all ten of them. I find Delaney AP. And course code 708001. Arts/Law, Queensland Uni. I’m in.

  forty-three

  I call my mother, I call my father. It’s early but they’re both up, both with the paper, both wondering when they should call me. I don’t tell them any attempt would have been futile. I can’t face explaining the details of a night spent elsewhere.