After January

by Nick Earls

  My mother’s excited. I can tell. I think she’s bouncing up and down when we talk. She cries briefly, or at least her voice changes in a way that makes me think she does. She denies it. She says it’s her sinuses playing up. She says my grandparents will want to celebrate this too and how about dinner on Saturday, anywhere I want, she’ll book it today.

  I could come up after work on Friday, she says, and bring you back down on Saturday.

  I could catch the bus down on Saturday.

  Of course, whatever you want, but you will come, won’t you?

  Of course I’ll come.

  My father sounds excited too. This is a sound I’m not used to, so I’m only guessing.

  I was already awake when the paper came over the fence, he says. I’ve been sitting here with it ever since. Isn’t it great? I bet Tessa’s proud of you too. You’ve done well.

  Thanks.

  I want to do something. Can we do something?

  Sure. What sort of thing? I’m going out with Mum on Saturday night.

  Okay, how about Sunday? Could we do something on Sunday?

  Sure.

  Okay, now, I’ve got an idea. It’s up to you, it’s completely up to you and if you don’t like it we’ll do something else, but this is my idea. It’s Ben’s birthday next Thursday, so what I’d like to do, and this is really selfish of me so tell me if it’s a problem, if it’s not what you want to do, but what I’d like to do is to do something for both my sons on Sunday. I’d like to have a party for your result and for Ben turning two. And I’d want your mother to be there, and your grandparents, and anyone else you wanted. Now, if you don’t want that we can have Ben’s birthday next weekend.

  No, it sounds good.

  Really?

  Yeah, really. It sounds good.

  When the call ends I remember a one-sided conversation we had when Ben was born. When my father came to school in the middle of maths in the first week of year eleven and I thought someone must have died. He hadn’t slept all night and he went on and on about the appalling details of the labour since he hadn’t been in the room when I was born and he had no idea of the horror of it, and he took me somewhere near school for lunch and I couldn’t work out why. And he said to me, Alex, I look at you and I know I’ve let you down. I don’t know why, I don’t know how it all happened but I know I’ve let you down. And I want you to know that I know that. And I also want you to know I’ll do better this time. I’ll be there more, I’ll be more involved. I’m learning from my mistakes. I want to be there for you too, if you ever need me.

  And I think I said thanks in the most hollow and contemptuous way that was reasonably possible, and now I think I wish I hadn’t.

  Now when I get into uni he doesn’t know if he should call me. He lies awake waiting for the paper and he sits with it for a couple of hours, proud of me but unable to call, unable to take the risk of telling me. In case I say thanks that way again. Thanks and leave my life alone and you’ll never stop paying for your mistakes.

  I bet Tessa’s proud of you too. That was as close as he could get, that and a desperate idea to get his sons together.

  I think I thought I meant nothing to him.

  forty-four

  But at the end of the day it’s just us.

  At the end of the day the phone calls are over and it’s just us on Moffat Headland at the top of Queen of Colonies Parade. We swam and you chose to come this way back from Kings and we stopped at the crest of the hill. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped here before, even though I’ve spent all my summers close by. I’ve looked up at the headland from beaches, I’ve driven past it, but I’ve never stopped just here.

  And there’s a sandstone pandanus stump carved with the name Queen of the Colonies, and the story in brass of the ship’s boat that was driven onto these rocks in a storm a hundred and thirty-two years ago next April. And the survivors were marooned for fourteen days, it says, living on shellfish and berries until rescued by a search party from Brisbane.

  And all my life Brisbane has been less than an hour by road. There has been no reason to contemplate life and death and shellfish and berries, just a dull drive up a straight road with two lanes each way. Even the name of the boat seems so old. Queen of the Colonies, part of some lost empire.

  I’d never even thought about the name of the street before. It had always just been there.

  The sun will set soon. In the south-west, beyond the next headland the Glasshouse Mountains stand in a hazy blue twilight, like people lost in fog.

  In two days I’ll be gone. The day after tomorrow I’ll be catching the bus and then I’ll be in Brisbane, doing family things, seeing my friends. I’ll be trying to keep every moment of this in my head, and I’ll be planning to come back as soon as I can.

  And you don’t want to talk about this either. So inside me there’s a strange small glow of satisfaction when I think of the paper, telling me what I wanted it to, but there’s also a feeling that I’m being cheated of something.

  I have to go back, I say, more because the words are in my head than because I mean to. But Caloundra’s close.

  Yeah, I know. Make sure you remember that. When you’re a law student and all sorts of other things are happening.

  So we sit on the grass looking south, down over the beaches and across to Bribie. And the cicadas screech in the bushes and cars pass on the road above us.

  I want to stay with you tomorrow night, you say. I have to go home soon, but I want to see you tomorrow and I want to be with you till you leave. Okay?

  Yeah, good. Stay at my house you mean? The two of us.

  Yeah.

  I lie down, with my head on the cool thick grass and I look up at the purpling, darkening sky. There are no stars yet.

  You sit still looking south with the breeze touching the ends of your hair and your legs crossed and your hands playing idly with the taller stems of the grass, working them into plaits and then undoing them again.

  Your lips are moving, and on the breeze I can hear you sing in a whisper, bits of ‘Not Given Lightly’ from my Frente! EP. It’s never been more apparent that it’s a love song, about the choice you make to take your feelings and give them to someone.

  It’s a good song and even in a whisper you do it well.

  forty-five

  On the twenty-first I start the day with a swim, like any other holiday day. Down at the beach early, just me and the waves.

  I’m a law student now, or about to be. I wonder what this means. I wonder how smart they’ll all be, all of them school debating champions with big plans. Or maybe at least some of them like me. People who aren’t really sure what they want, but thought this all seemed like a good idea at the time.

  My mother has already said, You’re in and that’s what matters. Pass and enjoy yourself. This is a time when you’re supposed to have fun. My father of course phoned back to give me his views on the opportunities for Australian corporate lawyers in Asia and the Pacific rim. He has such big hopes for me, but they just aren’t mine. I listened, I think politely. I even tried to show some interest, but I’ll have to be careful not to show too much.

  And you’ve ducked under all this, slipped away from the attentions of QTAC and TEPA and any other tertiary entrance acronyms. You’ve got plans of your own, plans of art and waves and honey. And for you this isn’t brave. It’s quite normal. For me, the bravest I can be is to pick a variant of the safe option, do the law degree and maybe something I like, literature perhaps, with my BA. Something my father would see as useless and my mother as interesting, in a hobby kind of way.

  But the waves don’t know I’m a law student, and I still surf like a nerd king, with high levels of both competence and unattractiveness. What you see in me I still don’t know. I don’t know how we got past that first conversation.

 
And I don’t want to go to Brisbane tomorrow. Just out here, in the water, thinking about it, I feel in some ways like an unjustly condemned man planning his last day.

  I want to cook you dinner tonight, when you come over to stay. I want this night to work. I strip the sheets from the double bed my mother sleeps in alone, and I fit a clean set. All the time thinking that we might spend tonight together in this bed. My body next to your body all night. And I’m changing the pillow slips, turning the sheet down, and every mundane moment excites me. Who sleeps on which side? Who determines these things? I can’t believe I’m just making a bed, and I’m expecting this.

  Len takes me to Coles to buy ingredients. On the way back we stop at the bottle shop and he insists on buying me an expensive bottle of white wine to congratulate me. I don’t put up much of a struggle and he says, It should go well with dinner. And he asks me if I’ve got everything I need. For a moment it concerns me that he’s about to become the second person this week to give me condom money. Then he says, You know, fancy wine glasses, candles maybe, that sort of thing. What do you reckon?

  You come over late morning and you bring a bag with a change of clothes and a toothbrush. You show me the toothbrush and you laugh and say, This seems like a strange thing to bring, a very grown-up thing, but my father said just because I was staying the night here didn’t mean I should forget about my dental hygiene.

  You take it to the bathroom and put it in the spare hole in the toothbrush holder and ask me where you should leave your bag.

  So I tell you, Anywhere you like really.

  You look around and walk into my mother’s room and drop it at the foot of the double bed.

  Do you want to go for a swim?

  We cross the garden and the beach and swim in front of the house. The midday sun gleams on its white-painted fibro walls and dazzles across the tin roof and leaves slabs of black shade under the veranda and the trees. The water is a perfect temperature and we lie around in it just beyond the breaking waves.

  I wish you weren’t going, you say to me.

  I’ll be back. I’ll come back all the time. And you can drive to Brisbane too.

  We get out when our fingertips are well shrivelled and we shower and walk up Seaview Terrace to Moffat Madness, the world’s least appropriately named eating place. There must be some irony in it for someone. Every time I’ve eaten there, usually with my mother, it’s been a place of calm, magazines and board games and very sane food and no sense of hurry.

  We order toasted sandwiches and milkshakes and the tanned white-haired man chats to us in a friendly way that seems far from mad. One day I’ll ask where the name came from. Maybe it’s something to do with the reckless way the tanned white-haired man decided to use his superannuation package, setting up a sandwich bar at Moffat Beach. If so, it’s a very functional kind of madness. I can see him preparing the toasted sandwiches, and he’s even handling the avocado meticulously.

  We sit at the table near the door.

  So what’s happening on the weekend? you ask me.

  Family stuff. Dinner tomorrow night with my mother and my grandparents, her parents, probably at a place called Portofino at St Lucia.

  What’s it like?

  Portofino? My mother likes it. The service isn’t quick so it’s not a great choice if you’re in a hurry. They make possibly the best garlic bread in the world. It’s on a thin crispy pizza base and it’s quite oily and loaded with garlic. Then I’ll probably have the bucatini matriciana. My grandparents will have lasagne or ravioli. They get annoyed with anything you have to wind onto a fork.

  And all the time I’m saying this I’m realising you won’t be there. I want to tell you that I’ll miss you, I want to stop now and tell you how I feel about you. I’m looking into your eyes and telling you about my grandparents eating Italian food, and I think you mean a lot to me.

  My mother? I don’t know what she’ll have. But she’ll be quite excited and toasting my future repeatedly with whatever wine she’s bought. And my grandparents will ask me questions about studying Law, and I won’t be able to answer them because I don’t study Law yet. Then Sunday we’ll all be over at my father’s during the day for the Festival of the Sons. He’s keen to let everyone know we’re both important to him, I think, so Ben’s birthday and my uni offer are going to get equal billing. That, knowing my father as a man of limited style and imagination, will be a barbecue with a table full of salads and bread and him in the back yard talking about the Weber as though it’s a scientific instrument. But I’m going to be nicer to him than usual, even if it’s not easy. After all that I suppose I’ll start to catch up with my friends, people from school. I’ll be going to uni with some of them too.

  What are you going to tell them?

  Tell them?

  About this. About the last few weeks. They’ll ask you what you’ve done these holidays. What are you going to tell them?

  And you’re smiling as though you’re in some way taunting me.

  I don’t know. I really don’t know. I haven’t worked it out. What I’m going to tell them. I think I’d like to tell them nothing. I’d quite like to say that it was just the same as every other year, and then listen to the lies they tell me.

  forty-six

  In the evening you take a long shower while I’m starting to cook and you come out wearing the dress you brought. And today we don’t go to a hilltop to watch the sun set into the hinterland, we don’t go out for any big view. We stand on the back veranda and we see the sky and sea darken, change into their evening colours, merge into blackness. And the moths and Christmas beetles bounce against the kitchen windows trying to get in to the light.

  And there’s a breeze, finally a breeze to begin to end the heat of this day.

  You reach your dark arms out to me and we kiss till the cicadas are quiet and evening is gone.

  My father, you say, you should have seen him. Gripping onto the toothbrush and telling me about dental hygiene and being careful.

  And of course I’ve been through this scene myself, but with a clay penis instead of a toothbrush.

  Being careful seems to be an important topic, I say. For him, for my mother, for Len. They’re all very much in favour of being careful.

  Can we talk about that? All of that?

  Sure.

  You nod, and plan what you’re saying. I want tonight to be really good. I don’t want any added pressures, not that I mean pressures from you. What I mean is the pressure of anything big and different. Anything I have to wonder about when you’re gone. I want to be with you all night. And I don’t want to have to deal with anything else just yet.

  That’s fine. That’s good. That suits me too, really. I’m not in any hurry. This is really good, all of this. I don’t want to make any kind of mess of it. I don’t mind letting it take time.

  But not forever.

  No.

  Soon maybe.

  Soon could be good. As long as we make very sure we’re careful of course.

  Clean our teeth and things.

  Yeah. My mother gave me fifty bucks for things.

  That’s a lot of things. Boxes of twenty-four were nine-fifty in a pharmacy in Bulcock Street earlier in the week.

  Cheaper in Coles.

  She laughs.

  I’m glad you’re staying. That’s what I want. Really. What I don’t want, what I couldn’t stand, would be to spend my last night in this house here by myself, with you so close by. I want to spend every minute with you till I get on that bus. And of course that’s the sort of thing I can’t tell my friends. That’s why I think I’ll tell them nothing.

  What do you mean?

  I can’t tell them what I feel. They’re my friends. They’ll expect any story to have certain predictable parts to it. I can’t tell them how I feel about you. The stories they
like would be more in terms of What did you do to her? How far did you get?

  Good choice of friends. So what will you tell them?

  That I caught waves, watched the cricket. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Tonight none of that matters. That’s a Brisbane problem. I don’t want Brisbane problems tonight. Tonight no pressures, no problems, okay?

  We go inside. The bread will be brown by now, the soup simmered enough.

  And every time I look at you tonight I have a crazy idea that I’ll come up here in a week or two and turn down Sunset Drive and there’ll be only bush, and I’ll never know whether you’re there or not, and I’ll never find you. Pushing deeper and deeper into denser and denser bush, calling your name and not knowing if you’re hiding from me or just not there.

  We eat by the light of beeswax candles. I watch you dipping your spoon down into the thick yellow soup, breaking the steaming bread with your hands.

  This is really nice, really good. I didn’t know you cooked like this. I didn’t know you made things.

  So I watch you eat the things I’ve made for you and when we’ve finished you say, Let’s go down to the beach. And we take the rest of the wine and our glasses and sit on the sand. And there are lights on Moffat Headland, blocks of units and the streetlights of Queen of Colonies Parade, and the sky is full of small stars but the beach is a dull glimmering silver-white and no one can see us here.

  You sit with your arms around your knees and your glass in your hand, looking out at the invisible sea. There is a ship going past, a line of white lights that must mean a ship, far away and moving slowly south. And maybe they’re watching the shore, the lights of Caloundra, but only to keep far enough away. Up and down the east coast doing routine trade, container ships carrying everything a ship can, cars, refrigerators, furniture, and in no danger of coming to grief on these rocks, starving and scared and hoping for rescue. I wonder what this beach was like then, when the boat from the Queen of the Colonies was wrecked here, before the sand had started to creep through the beach-house gardens, all the time still chased by the sea.