BRICK
Her husband worked up at the Midland brickworks, which was a fair commute, but she wouldn’t leave the area she’d grown up in. Why would you want to stay, given the horror you’ve been through down here? he’d say. But she wouldn’t budge, and he loved her enough to let it go. Again and again. Sometimes he couldn’t help himself. What’s more, the river down near her childhood home had become filthy and wasn’t a healthy place to swim, let alone teach young ones to swim in. But she’d been doing it since she was eighteen, and she was twenty-five now, and it had set in. Furthermore, she’d done her junior certificate off the river beach and jetty down the road, and it was so etched into her fabric … gulls, fish, sand, silt, jellyfish marooned and looking like moon craters. When he was angry after a few drinks, he’d say, It’s perverse, it’s like you must have liked it, really. Then he fell into despair, and she looked damaged and hurt beyond words, and he felt like drowning himself. He was a scum of a human being.
She worked in tandem with another teacher, a friend, who’d also grown up in the area and who’d also done swimming lessons there. He was gay, so her husband wasn’t bothered, but he made crude remarks in other ways. Water off a duck’s back, her friend said, as she repeated her husband’s bigotries. Her friend was always the only one who’d listened, who’d believed.
The final act required of swimming students in order for them to acquire their junior was a dive off the jetty, into the green-brown waters of the river, down to the silty half-world eight feet below to retrieve a house-brick. She used one that her husband had pilfered from the brickworks. That was his contribution, he’d say – along with his whole life being located in a place he couldn’t stand, and putting up with her obsessions. Just a small gesture.
When she’d dived for the brick as a child, she’d failed at first, getting confused and lost, swallowing river water and getting a stomach infection. But by the time she went for her certificate, she was as sleek and efficient as a mulloway; she grabbed that brick as if her hands were magnetised to it, the murk blocking her in no way at all.
So when she prepared her own students, with all their doubts and insecurities, their six- and seven- and eight-year-old questions for the world, the ineffable, and the infinite, she still felt a kinship and a sureness that they too would have an epiphany and come through. Her fellow teacher called her gifted, a possessor of second sight, able to swim with a child’s eyes and senses but an adult’s confidence and knowledge. High praise. He said, In your swimming is your confidence, and nothing can take that away from you.
When it came time for the first efforts at retrieving the brick, she went over all they’d learned about holding breath underwater, duck diving and treading water. All come into play, she’d say to reassure them. They’d developed the skills. The water was deeper off the end of the jetty, but they could climb down the ladder, wade out, the brick would be lowered on a string (her husband had selected the best three-holed brick the company made, very light and easy for even small hands to grip, its glaze shining in the sun like a wondrous sunblock); then they’d duck dive down to haul it up. There is never failure, she’d add, because, look, I can drag it back up any time I want. Which she’d do. Watch out for the barnacles on the pylons, they’re nasty. If you cut yourself, let me know and we’ll treat them straight away, otherwise they’ll get infected. When she said this, her childhood barnacle scars actually smarted.
She and her friend always ensured the jetty was clear of early-morning fishermen (a city council rule during swimming-lesson season), and then collected punctured and tortured blowfish from the decks, hurling them into deep water to sink slowly into the currents of the river as it spoke with the ocean so many miles south.
It was a hot day, even already at eight o’clock, when the last lesson was underway. They’d started at six-thirty, and this was her third class. She had one young boy who she was sure was going to be a great swimmer. A future Olympian, she told his parents, who only wanted him to swim well because he was always playing along the river and really longed to sail his own small yacht.
The boy lowered himself into the water. The shift from warm to cold made his tread-water strokes flurry, and his body shrivel. She sensed that. She knew that. Everything was sucked in. She spoke to him soothingly from above, on the planks, and lowered the brick. Now do everything I’ve taught you, and see if you can retrieve the brick. It’s not as heavy as it seemed when you tried picking it up on the beach. It will practically feel like it’s floating to the surface and taking you with it!
The boy dived and was an age coming up. So long, her heart went into her mouth and she thought of diving in. But he surfaced, without the brick, as she knew because of the tension on the string (she always worried about the students entangling themselves, but the tension of the string would tell that also, though she was the first to admit it was an outmoded method and it was nostalgia that led her to keep at it), holding something gleaming out in front of him.
I dug deep in the silt! Look what I found. Then it was gone, slipped from his hand. She called for him to come back, but he was down again trying to find it. And again. It was lost, and she shakily and almost angrily called him in and finished the lesson for the day.
I will search for it later, she said, to ward off the boy from returning and trying again. I will find it and hand it to the police.
When the lessons were finished, she confided in her friend. It was my bangle, lost those years ago when I was forced on the jetty, among the dying blowfish, teeth cutting the air, puffing hard to inflate bodies that had been punctured by fishing knives and would never inflate again. I can hear their gasping, feel their slippery, flexible spines. And I can smell his fish breath and his fish skin and him holding my hands down and the bracelet slipping in. Not even a police diver could find it. My husband said I’d been wearing a bracelet, but it was never found. Just that minuscule hole in evidence, as they said. And in broad daylight? They called me an exhibitionist in the paper, a swinger. I didn’t even know what that was.
I will dive down and find it, her friend said. No, no, I want to, I must. And she dived in, a shallow dive, and a few strokes to the spot, and down, combing the bottom of the river, catching her fingers on old hooks and pieces of rusted metal and sharp shells. Up for a breath, then down, dragging the bottom until the murk and her blood mixed, a call to predators. She got lost and swam into a pylon, cutting herself more. She swallowed water and rolled over until the harsh sun filtered through and its barbed rays blinded her.
She’s okay, he said to the husband, who had driven down from Midland, called in by the boss who’d said there’d been a ‘mishap’ with his wife, and he’d better get down there. I pulled her out, she got disorientated.
The husband looked at the bloke – her co-teacher, her friend. In his distress he thought, Well-built. Nice enough. He thanked him.
Later, alone, she told her husband it was time to move inland. Up to the hills maybe, closer to his work. Up to where the river was fed rather than where it ended up, or sat waiting for the ocean to change it. It wasn’t a beginning (such a large catchment extending so far into the country), but at least it was further up away from where it gathered.
You want to give up swimming?
No. Never. I must swim. We can live near a swimming pool. I’ll still teach. But I must be able to see through to the bottom clearly. I must know what makes water water, what light is doing, where things are if they’re taken from you, when they drop from the surface world, pretending they’re lighter than they really are, wavering on their way to and from the bottom. I want to swim where there are no bricks to bring back up. Where every living thing can be seen in the act.
TOUCH
He liked it during the busy times, especially over the summer when the beachfront surged and convulsed with visitors, and the shops were covered with numbers crossed out and crossed out again, showing there were no lower prices to be had than during the holiday season. The shallows could bare
ly be seen from the grass banks, lost beneath the colourful array of flesh and bathing costumes. Even walking along the paths, because he was afraid of sand and sea, he was bumped and jostled and felt part of it all. He went home to his small room in the asbestos boarding house, bruised with living.
Heinrich was a pure mathematician. He no longer had a university. Once considered the finest mathematical mind of his generation, he had disappointed the university with his ‘behaviour’. It was beyond his ability to try another university, and he wore his shame in the form of two changes of baggy tracksuits, in extreme heat and bitter cold alike. He shuffled when he walked, and he frequently smelled enough for people to remark on it. When it wasn’t so busy, people were able to make decisions ahead of time, and part the waters to allow him to pass.
Heinrich no longer read anything other than Hardy’s 1940 work, A Mathematician’s Apology. If he was solving problems in his head, he never said so. He did not own a computer, a mobile phone, or any other gadgets. He had an old television that would soon receive only one channel unless he bought a set-top box. Nige, who lived in the next room and drank cheap plonk, said, Heinrich, if you don’t get a set-top box, we won’t be able to watch the footy or the cricket. Nige didn’t have a television, having long ago hocked his and failed to reclaim it. Nige once showed Heinrich some dirty pictures, peeling apart stuck pages, leaving islands of print and genitals pasted on legs and thin air and backdrops. But Heinrich shook and vomited. Nige saved his hard-working magazine, but only just.
Heinrich loved the long summer twilight. He ate a bean dinner from the can, then spent a good while trying to lick around the sharp bits before rinsing it with water and cautiously drinking the soup. He smacked his lips. It was goo-ood! He felt like pissing but decided to hold off because it would get less as he walked anyway.
The beachfront was only two blocks away. Soon the boarding house would be knocked down to make way for holiday mansions, but that played no part in Heinrich’s day-to-day life. He ambled along the footpath, smiling at the kids playing on their bikes or bowling cricket balls down driveways towards unseen batsmen. He grinned at the guy watering his garden despite water restrictions. All who lived along these roads were familiar with Heinrich, not knowing who or what he was, but having long ago decided he wasn’t really a problem, even when occasionally he made a loud siren-like sound.
He crossed over to the path along the beachfront. It was a southern coastal town, though palms bristled away, and in the heat and with salt and moisture in the air it could have been the tropics. He was inside a picture, a moving picture. He merged with the streaming crowds, still with much to do in the early evening, still extracting all they could from the last light. He shrieked at the seagulls, which shrieked back at him, and the crowds momentarily broke rank and scattered but soon rejoined like mercury when Heinrich moved on.
When Heinrich was eight, his mother had taken him to this very beach at the height of summer and taught him to swim. They stayed in a motel for three weeks and at the end of the three weeks he could swim as well as any kid. He loved the water then. Men whistled at his mother in her two-piece bathers and as he learned to float he bumped against her legs and thought them the Pillars of Hercules. They were at the end of the known world. She had so much time for him, schooling him at home, taking him everywhere. He was to sit his high-school finals in maths when they finished their holiday. She didn’t make him study, only swim.
Away from the jetty and the main swim area where flags marked the safe places, the crowd began to thin. He ambled on and on until there were only a few people on the path, and gentle sandhills began. He could just see over the sandhills to the water’s edge – the sea was lapping at thin cosine graphs of shells, those fragments left after the day’s pillaging and crushing underfoot. Over and over, Heinrich muttered ‘radians’.
Just off the path ahead of him, there was a lady. The light was fading fast but he could clearly see her bending over, doing something on the ground. Maybe rolling up her towel or her picnic blanket. She’d been sunning herself in the dunes. He increased his speed until his amble became a walk, and as he swept past her, he touched her bathers, her bottom. He’d never called it anything else. It was the only word that worked. His mother had referred to her own bottom once when she slipped over. Heinrich, don’t laugh at me falling on my bottom!
He kept his pace up, then glanced back over his shoulder. The woman was looking in his direction. He turned away, staring down at the path ahead, and kept going towards nothingness. He counted down, then looked back again. She was walking away; she was far away. Just a regular kind of walk, going somewhere but in no hurry.
After his success, Heinrich touched many women’s bottoms. Mostly a casual brush with the back of his hands, sometimes in a crowd, occasionally with the tips of his fingers. He never mentioned it to Nige, though Nige did ask him why he had a smile on his dial these days. Once or twice he thought someone exclaimed or yelled at him, but he grew deaf to that, and shrieked at the seagulls, and kept walking, walking and muffling the world with the movement of the ocean. As the season wore on, the crowds vanished and the paths were bare. Women didn’t wander off the beach in their bathing suits anymore, though the beach still held a small clutch of warmth and love. He walked past and watched their bottoms bobbing and weaving, or pressing down on towel and sand, but didn’t dare to tread onto the sand itself.
It should be said that he never thought of his mother in conjunction with his touching. Never. And his dislike of the sea and the sand had nothing to do with his touching his mother’s legs while learning to swim. There was no reason for it that he knew of. He just didn’t like it. He’d only discovered this when he moved into the town. Staring at the non-infinite number of sand particles, and the measurable volume of the sea, he grew disappointed. Sand and sea disappointed him, and that made him afraid. But they kept him in their grasp. His work had been deeply concerned with paradox.
But the urge to touch did take him down onto the beach one autumn day. A woman in a two-piece suit lying alone on her stomach, drawing in what warmth she could find in the lowering sun. Heinrich broke from the path and angled down over the sand, pausing to examine a cuttlefish bone: its sleek smooth side, its porous ‘floating’ side. In a short space of time, he thought a lot about it. His thoughts were technical, specific and conclusive. He shuffled on towards the woman, leaving furrows behind him, his sandshoes filling to their brims; he bent down, and squeezed her bottom.
When Heinrich appeared in court, the magistrate ordered a psychiatric assessment. Heinrich listened to the story of his life and learnt about himself. He’d never known. Never really known. The court considered him low-risk, but had to set an example. He was ordered onto a treatment program, and to take medication. He was to stay away from the beach. A bond was placed on him and he was placed on the ‘register’. The police knew about his ‘predilections’. Eventually he told the story to Nige, who said, You’ll be wanting to borrow my magazine now. Heinrich told him it wasn’t necessary and that it had nothing to do with anything.
MESMERISED
Unsure if it was prayer or performance, the girl was nonetheless mesmerised. It was 1948, and she had just dashed out of the green cooling waters and up to her towel spread out on the sand. It was afternoon – she and her family had only arrived at the beach shack the previous evening after a long, hot, slow drive from the farm. This was the start of the Christmas holidays, and a special holiday this year, because for the first time ever they were down in time to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day itself on the beach! Every year they planned to, but as Mum always said, the best-laid plans … Every year, harvest went on into the new year, and their Chrissy holidays didn’t begin until after Christmas. Her older brother Pete, who was really smart and had only one more year to go before he finished high school, said it was a ‘misnomer’ to call them Chrissy holidays when for this family they actually began long after Christmas. We can call it Chrissy holidays this year,
Pete, she and the others insisted, and he agreed … though she still thought his glasses were an extension of his brain! She – Emmy – was twelve and delighted to be twelve. The moment she paddled into the ocean, the dust and grime of the farm just vanished. She felt good and clean and alive.
The shack was nestled away in the sandhills along with another five shacks built on government land with only a vague sense of permission. Technically, Pete said, they were all squatters. Emmy liked the thought of being squatters – they’d learned about them at school but she wasn’t sure there were really any squatters in wheatbelt Western Australia. One year her dad and her uncles had disappeared for a week, only to return and announce that from next year on, they’d all be holidaying together on the coast. Right next to the ocean! Emmy and Peter and their various cousins swimming and mucking around together.
The shacks weren’t much – corrugated iron, planks of wood, wheat sacks, lino over sandy floors. Old stoves and makeshift chimneys. Plank beds and tables. And the odd individual touch introduced by mums and daughters to give the shacks ‘character’. That character didn’t matter much to Emmy, she just wanted the sea – not to get away from the red dirt of the farm, but to round out her picture of the world as she imagined it and wanted it to be. Red and blue and green. It brought clarity to her image of the farm, to the red dirt, to the golden crops, to the wide blue skies. The sea was the missing part of her picture of the world. She always felt a picture should be complete. The full globe of the world. Land and air and sea.
Not far from where Emmy and her family swam, gun emplacements and a munitions dump – leftovers from the war – glowered and squatted and bristled at the ocean. Barbed wire separated the swimmers from the ordnance, and they rarely thought about any of it. The war hadn’t been that long ago, so it all seemed logical and necessary and almost incidental to them. If they did think about the high explosives and guns it was with a sense of reassurance – such weapons helped, to their minds, to keep the Japs out of Australia. And they’d grown up knowing that everybody else in the world wanted Australia because it was God’s Own Country, and that its small population was not enough on its own to keep others out. If they thought at all about what lay across the barbed wire, they thought ‘vigilance’, but mostly the smell of victory was still in the air, and it made them feel as secure as they did in a good season on the farm. Drought and storms pushed to the back of their minds, they dabbled in the silver waters and ate skippy and garfish they caught at dawn and evening from the jetty that poked out into the sea, just deep enough.
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