Tigers on the Beach

by Doug MacLeod

  ‘That’s not so good,’ I say. ‘I get fat really easily. And I’m trying to get a sixpack that isn’t CGI.’

  ‘You seem in pretty good shape,’ says Sam.

  ‘So do you,’ I say.

  I blush, not that anyone would know. Apart from looking on the internet, I haven’t seen many girls’ bodies. This is surprising when you consider that I am thirteen years, ten months, three weeks, two days and seven-and-a-quarter hours old. My friend Ben Beacham says that I have arrested development. He has a good chin and straight blond hair, though he’s not as handsome as he thinks he is. He’s also a sex maniac, always taking girls on bushwalks and somehow convincing them to go skinny-dipping with him. He says it’s because of his personality, but I suspect witchcraft may be involved.

  Sam and I gaze romantically out of the store window. It’s a perfect sunny day but there is an inversion layer over the sea, due to the oil refinery at Crabb Point and the petroleum waste that they burn there. The sky above is blue, but the horizon is an ugly brown.

  ‘Thanks for the email,’ I say, ‘about the tigers on Bondi Beach.’

  ‘Thanks for your email,’ she says.

  I don’t know from her tone whether Sam thought the email about the exploding toilet was funny or not. I decide it’s best to change the subject.

  ‘I’m glad we met in the queue at the pharmacy,’ I say.

  ‘Me too,’ says Sam.

  We hold hands across the table for a few seconds.

  Three young yachties sit at the next table, waiting for something incredible to happen. But this is Samsara, so they have a long wait ahead. They are joined by Samsara High’s well-known sex maniac, Ben Beacham. Ben sees me with Sam and makes obscene hand gestures behind her back. I try to ignore him, but he is making the other kids laugh.

  I admire Sam’s high cheekbones and her wide-spaced azure eyes. Then I realise that Sam has asked me a question. It is about reducing emissions from cows. While I’m thinking of an intelligent thing to say, something drops into my milkshake. I jump. Wriggling in the sea of caramel milk is a tractor beetle. Sam sees it too and looks up at the ceiling to see if any more tractor beetles are there. The beetle is a bad swimmer. He’ll drown if I don’t rescue him, so I reach into my milkshake and pluck out the flailing creature.

  I place him on the table and he plods along, leaving a little tractor trail of caramel milk. Sam admires me for saving the beetle. But now I don’t know what to do. Should I finish the milkshake even though a bug has taken a bath in it? If I throw away the milkshake will Sam think I’m wasteful, because there are starving children in Africa who would kill for airdropped caramel milkshakes?

  Plop. Another tractor beetle falls in. This one is a little bigger. I notice Sam giving me an odd look.

  ‘It fell out of your hair,’ she says.

  I’m horrified. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I think the first one did too.’

  Sam is eyeing my boring brown hair with concern. I jump to my feet and another tractor beetle falls out.

  ‘This is my brother’s fault,’ I say.

  I realise that I’m experiencing a weird prickling sensation in my brand-new boxer shorts. Somehow, a tractor beetle has made its way there. There may even be two. I can’t just plunge my hand down my pants. This could ruin my chances of ever having Sam as a girlfriend. Not to mention reducing my chance of becoming a respected member of the Hollywood film industry.

  I excuse myself and run to the toilet to remove the trespassing beetles in private. But someone is already in there. When I knock on the door they tell me to please wait, only not as politely as that. By now I’m sure that there are at least three tractor beetles in my boxer shorts. I can no longer wait for the person to finish using the toilet. He seems to be doing a law degree in there. I have to get these beetles out. Checking that no one can see me, I thrust my hand down my pants. I get hold of one of the beetles, but he bites me and I hastily withdraw my hand. I didn’t know that tractor beetles could bite. For all I know, they might be poisonous. Removing the beetles is now a matter of life and death. The general store has three aisles of grocery items for anyone desperate enough to shop there. A tin of soup costs about fifty dollars, marked down from two hundred. If I crouch in one of the aisles I’ll be able to pull down my boxer shorts and remove the beetles without anyone noticing. I just hope no one decides to shop for expensive soup.

  The coast is clear. I whip down my jeans then drop my boxer shorts. This is the first time I’ve ever exposed myself in a general store. There’s sure to be a law against it, but I’ll happily risk jail to get rid of the intruders in my shorts. I find three tractor beetles and flick them away. When I’m convinced that my boxer shorts are beetle-free, I pull them up.

  I return to the table. Sam has moved out of the sunlight, as if she’s trying to hide. At the next table, Ben and the yachties are laughing their heads off. I sit opposite Sam.

  ‘You took off your pants,’ Sam says, in quiet disbelief.

  How does Sam know this? Sam gestures with her eyes. I follow her gaze upwards and see the big convex mirror that reflects everything in the store. It’s brand new, a deterrent to shoplifters.

  ‘We all saw,’ whispers Sam.

  ‘There were tractor beetles in my boxer shorts,’ I explain.

  ‘Oh.’

  Sam looks puzzled, as if trying to work out how she feels about being with someone who drops his shorts in the tinned food department.

  ‘Sam?’ I say. ‘Can this be like one of those moments in a film where the guy who likes the girl does something weird, but because the girl also likes the guy she just laughs about it, so everything is okay?’

  Sam gives me a blank look.

  ‘That means you have to laugh,’ I say.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Well, if it’s going to be one of those moments . . .’

  ‘Adam, I don’t think I can just laugh like that.’

  ‘Pretend. I’d feel better.’

  But Sam doesn’t laugh. There is a loud whooping noise from Ben Beacham and the yachties at the next table. I look up at the convex mirror. One of the yachties is in aisle number two, mooning his mates. Kids are killing themselves laughing.

  ‘I have to go,’ says Sam.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘But we’ll see each other again?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It was a stupid idea to come here. Next time we’ll go somewhere better.’

  We’re so desperate for entertainment in Samsara. We have one general store, a fairly ordinary beach and a large insect population, half of which my brother keeps in boxes in the bedroom.

  Another yachtie moons at the mirror, provoking more gales of laughter from the audience. It seems I’ve created a new sport.

  ‘You see that guy with the blond hair,’ I say to Sam, pointing to Ben Beacham, who is laughing raucously.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘If he ever asks you to go on a bushwalk with him, just say no.’

  Dad is out the front of The Ponderosa, attacking the oxalis weeds with a wheel hoe. There is a small green ball on his back.

  ‘Hello Adam.’ Dad wipes sweat from his brow.

  ‘Hi Dad.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘How did what go?’

  ‘Weren’t you with that red-haired girl from the pharmacy?’

  ‘Sam.’ I nod. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Victor Burns told Monica Baldwin and she told your mother.’

  I hate living in a small town. The fact that I dropped my pants in the general store will probably end up in the local paper.

  BOY DROPS PANTS IN PUBLIC. POLICE TO LOOK IN.

  ‘Dad, did you know you have a wacky ball on your back?’ I ask.

  Dad frowns. He knows who threw it there.

  ‘Could you remove it for me?’ he says.

  Dad turns around and I do the deed. Wacky balls are free toys that were once given away by McDonald’s with their hamburger
s. They are the size of a golf ball, but soft and squishy, with little strips of Velcro. You can throw them at people’s backs and they stick like a burr, without people realising. Xander has dozens of them, all in fluorescent colours.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Dad. ‘I’ll have a word with Xander later.’

  He may be annoyed with Xander, but nowhere near as much as I am.

  I find Xander in our bedroom, arranging his stone collection. The room is dim because the curtains are drawn. Xander prefers it that way. He has emptied all his stones onto the floor and is placing them in size from biggest to smallest.

  ‘Put the stones away,’ I tell him.

  Xander doesn’t look at me when he speaks. He never looks at anyone when he speaks to them.

  ‘I don’t want to put them away,’ he says.

  ‘You have to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I can murder you. You are a haemorrhoid.’

  ‘If you murder me I’ll tell on you.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know why I’m going to murder you?’

  Xander says nothing. He has two stones that look the same size. He’s trying to work out where to put these two stones in the arrangement.

  ‘Your tractor beetles escaped,’ I say.

  Xander remains quiet as he studies the stones. There are a dozen shoeboxes lining the wall next to Xander’s bed. They contain various species of beetle. Our employee Nathan knows the technical name of every species. He keeps telling Xander that he shouldn’t keep beetles in boxes, but it doesn’t stop him. Xander has punched airholes in the lid of each box. Typically, he has made some of the holes too big. Not only do they let the air in, they let the beetles out.

  ‘I found your tractor beetles, Xander. Do you want to know where?’

  By now Xander has found a third stone that seems to be the same size as the other two. I can see this really bothers him.

  ‘They were in my hair,’ I continue. ‘I was at the store with this amazing girl and your beetles fell into my milkshake.’

  At last I get a response from Xander. He chuckles.

  ‘It gets worse,’ I say.

  I tell Xander the terrible story of how I removed the tractor beetles from my pants, and was observed doing so in the security mirror. Xander explodes with laughter.

  ‘That’s why I’m going to murder you,’ I say.

  ‘You won’t murder me,’ says Xander, ‘because I will murder you first.’

  As usual, we start to murder each other. We do this on Xander’s bed, because the floor is covered in stones and if we try to murder each other on the carpet we might hurt ourselves. We wrestle around and put each other in headlocks. I’m stronger than Xander, so I go easy on the headlocks. We are both caught by surprise when Grandma appears in the doorway. She’s been out with Mum.

  ‘What on earth are you boys doing?’ she says.

  We stop murdering each other because we know Grandma doesn’t like that.

  ‘Just mucking around,’ I say.

  ‘Adam is being gay with me,’ says Xander.

  ‘Don’t say such stupid things,’ says Grandma.

  ‘Only if Adam stops being gay.’

  ‘Xander is being a haemorrhoid,’ I say.

  ‘I’m very angry with you, Alexander,’ Grandma snaps. ‘You threw those stupid balls at me, didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ says Xander, innocently.

  Grandma holds out four wacky balls.

  ‘I was walking around with balls on my back, until your mother told me.’

  Xander giggles and Grandma frowns.

  Mum enters behind her. ‘Apologise to Grandma,’ she says.

  Xander looks sullen.

  ‘If you don’t apologise,’ says Mum, ‘we’ll confiscate every single one of your wacky balls.’

  This is a severe threat. Xander knows Mum is serious.

  ‘Sorry, Grandma,’ says Xander, softly, ‘if I upset you.’

  ‘That isn’t a proper apology,’ says Mum.

  ‘Sorry Grandma,’ says Xander.

  Grandma turns to Mum. ‘Georgia, you really need to use a firmer hand with these two. When I was a naughty girl, the teachers caned me.’

  ‘I bet you caned them back,’ says Xander.

  Grandma leaves, but Mum stays behind.

  ‘I don’t want any bad behaviour tonight,’ she says. ‘Grandma will be staying for dinner.’

  ‘Why does she have to come here all the time?’ says Xander.

  ‘Because we love her. And she doesn’t have anyone else in Samsara. And she doesn’t come here all the time. Be nice to her.’

  Mum leaves us.

  ‘Grandpa walked to the shop,’ Xander whispers.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ I tell him.

  ‘Grandpa walked to the shop.’

  Xander knows he is not allowed to utter this phrase. It’s forbidden within our family, liable to cause eruptions of temper and sadness.

  Here is why . . .

  Grandpa’s funeral wasn’t a good one. I shudder at the memory. First thing in the morning, we drove Grandma to the crematorium, which was more than a hundred kilometres away. We had to stop twice for Xander to get out of the car and pee. By the time Xander had yet another toilet emergency, we were running late.

  ‘Could you stop the car, Dad?’

  ‘Hold it in for a few more minutes,’ Mum said. ‘We’re nearly there.’

  ‘But my bladder’s going to explode.’

  ‘Think of something else,’ Dad said.

  ‘I can’t. If we don’t stop soon I’ll have to go in Grandma’s purse.’

  But I knew how to distract him. When I discovered that Xander could do incredible sums in his head, I used to show him off, as if he were some kind of human computer. Kids at school were amazed. They used calculators to check the results. Xander was right every time.

  Mum and Dad didn’t like it when I made Xander do the sums in front of other people. They said that Xander was not a performing monkey, he was a human being and deserved to be treated as one. I was not to treat him like a sideshow attraction. There were exceptions to this rule, however. If it was important to take Xander’s mind off something, I was allowed to ask him difficult sums.

  ‘What do you get if you multiply 137 by 38?’ I asked.

  ‘5206,’ Xander replied.

  ‘And what if you multiply 892 by 63?’

  ‘56,196,’ said Xander.

  I kept asking him difficult questions, which he answered effortlessly.

  ‘His grandfather could do that too,’ said Grandma. ‘It was as if Reginald had a computer in his head.’

  ‘Why did he want to be created?’ Xander asked.

  ‘Cremated,’ Dad corrected.

  ‘We often talked about it,’ Grandma said. ‘Reginald didn’t want to be buried in a coffin in the ground. He wanted his ashes to be spread somewhere special.’

  Grandma dabbed at her eyes but didn’t cry. She was hiding her feelings.

  At the funeral home, sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles and aunts flocked to Mum and Grandma to embrace them and tell them how sorry they were. Xander joined in, overdoing the hugging. He doesn’t know when you’re supposed to let go. He even hugged one of the funeral directors. There were public toilets, but Xander wandered off and peed in the garden, before anyone could stop him. To make matters worse, Xander peed on a special area called ‘the memorial garden’, which probably meant he’d urinated on someone’s grave.

  People glared at Mum and Dad as though they were terrible parents. They gave apologetic looks and Dad fetched Xander. Mum didn’t realise, but she had sat on one of Xander’s wacky balls. A bright green ball stuck to her like a bunny tail. I hastily removed it from her backside before people saw. You shouldn’t attend a funeral with McDonald’s balls stuck to you. People might think of hamburgers and you really don’t want that happening at a cremation.

  Mum, Dad, Xander, Grandma and I sat in the front row of the overcrowded chapel. Mum was ge
tting ready to make a speech about her dad. I could see she was nervous. A fountain tinkled in a little rock garden directly outside the chapel.

  Sad music played. The minister said some gentle words about Grandpa, even though he never knew him. He said a bit from the bible that involved Hittites, an ancient tribe famous for hitting people, and everyone nodded respectfully. Then Grandma stood to speak. She walked to the pulpit, took a deep breath and regarded us all. She didn’t have notes. She assured Mum that she wouldn’t need them and that she would speak from the heart. That was the way she wanted to do it. Grandma started by saying that Grandpa would be sadly missed. The size of the gathering was proof that Reginald was much loved and would never be forgotten. Then Grandma paused, as though she didn’t know what to say next. It wasn’t like Grandma to be lost for words. And Grandpa was such a wonderful man. There was no shortage of things to say.

  ‘Every day, Reginald would go to the shop,’ Grandma said at last. ‘He would wave to people on the way and they would wave back, for he was much loved by the local community.’

  People nodded sadly. Yes, he was much loved by the local community.

  ‘Reginald would have conversations at the shop,’ Grandma continued, ‘because everyone was Reginald’s friend.’

  There were more nods. He was everyone’s friend.

  ‘And then Reginald would buy things at the shop and he would return home. He did this every day of his life and I remember this about him. He walked to the shop. That’s the sort of man he was. Sometimes I walked with him. He would tell me things. Then we would both walk home carrying things from the shop.’

  By now people weren’t nodding quite so much. They wanted to hear something else about Grandpa. But Grandma was lost. She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose loudly. She couldn’t think of another word to say. Mum stood and put her arm around her, then directed Grandma back to her seat. Bravely, Mum faced the audience. She delivered a speech that was moving and sad. She managed to say some of the things that Grandma could not.

  After the funeral, people told Mum what a beautiful speech she had made. But no one mentioned Grandma’s speech. What was there to say? Relatives just hugged her and squeezed her hand. Grandma said nothing. She looked more angry than sad.