The Bodysurfers Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  the bodysurfers

  Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne and grew up on the West Australian coast. His novels and short stories and his prize-winning memoir The Shark Net have been widely translated, won many national and international awards, and been adapted for film, television, radio and theatre around the world. He lives with his family on the far north coast of New South Wales.

  ALSO BY ROBERT DREWE

  Fiction

  The Savage Crows

  A Cry in the Jungle Bar

  Fortune

  The Bay of Contented Men

  Our Sunshine

  The Drowner

  Grace

  Memoir

  The Shark Net

  Non-Fiction

  Walking Ella

  Plays

  South American Barbecue

  The Bodysurfers: The Play

  As Editor

  The Penguin Book of the Beach (first published

  as The Picador Book of the Beach)

  The Penguin Book of the City

  ROBERT

  DREWE

  the bodysurfers

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada)

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  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd

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  Penguin Ireland

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd

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  Penguin Group (NZ)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by James Fraser Publishing Pty Ltd 1983

  Published by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd 1987

  This edition published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 2001

  Offset from the Picador edition

  Copyright © Robert Drewe 1983

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228345-6

  penguin.com.au

  Just as Samson after being shorn of his hair was left eyeless in Gaza, was this generation, stripped bare of all faith, to be left comfortless on Bondi Beach?

  Manning Clark

  Lying —

  side by side —

  we heard the rising ocean

  to the dying wind replying,

  heard its surge advance with still insistent call

  or subside

  to the night-wind’s dying fall

  Christopher Brennan

  We’ll pick up the bikini girls as soon as they take off their beach wraps, and we’ll have their beach wraps back on them before the boys can let out a single hubba-hubba.

  Bill ‘The Whale’ Willis, the beach inspector

  who arrested the first bikini girl at Bondi

  To Candida

  Contents

  The Manageress and the Mirage

  The Silver Medallist

  Shark Logic

  Baby Oil

  Looking for Malibu

  After Noumea

  The View from the Sandhills

  Sweetlip

  The Bodysurfers

  Eighty Per Cent Humidity

  The Last Explorer

  Stingray

  The Manageress and the Mirage

  My father wasn’t in his element in party hats. His head was too big; the mauve crêpe-paper crown stretched around his wide forehead looked neither festive nor humorous, just faintly ridiculous. Annie and David and I sat embarrassed in silly hats as well. They were compulsory fun, Dad was definite about them. We’d always worn them at home and the normal Christmas dinner routine was being followed wherever possible.

  There was one major difference this Christmas: because our mother had died in July we were having dinner at the Seaview Hotel instead of at home. Consequently we were observing several other minor variations on our traditional dinner — we ate roast turkey instead of the usual chicken and ham, we children were allowed glasses of pink champagne alongside our glasses of lemonade, and the plum pudding contained plastic tokens like Monopoly symbols — obviously poked into the pudding later — rather than real threepences and sixpences cooked into it.

  When Dad suggested that we eat dinner at the hotel we agreed readily enough. Since July we’d had a middle-aged woman, Gladys Barker, housekeeping for us. Dad called her Glad to her face, but to us he sometimes called her Gladly — as in the hymn ‘Gladly My Cross I’d Bear’ — because of her sighs around the house and air of constant martyrdom. We thought this was funny, but at the time we thought he was saying ‘Gladly, My Cross-Eyed Bear’ so we had it wrong for five or six years. Glad’s cooking was unexceptional, a depressing prospect for Christmas dinner, and anyway, without anyone spelling it out, this Christmas we wanted to keep the family unit tight and self-contained.

  I caught Annie’s and David’s eyes from time to time, but they showed only a vague self-consciousness as we sat in the hotel dining room in our party hats and school uniforms, picking at our meals, gingerly sipping pink champagne and pulling crackers. Dad was becoming increasingly amiable, however, even hearty. It was clear to us that he was making an effort. He made jokes and we laughed at them, for him rather than with him, out of mutual support.

  ‘Remember I was travelling the other week to a sales conference down at Albany?’ he said. ‘Well, I stopped overnight at Mount Barker. I went down to dinner in the hotel dining room and on the menu was rabbit casserole. I said to the waitress, “Excuse me, dear, is that with or without myxomatosis?” ’

  ‘ “I wouldn’t know,” she said, very po-faced, “It’s all in the gravy.” ’

  He was trying hard for all our sakes. It had not dawned on me before that I loved him and the realisation was slightly embarrassing.

  Soon he became the dining room’s focus of attention. Selecting a plastic whistle from the cracker debris, he blew it gamely. Other nearby guests, observing us and seeing the lie of the land, smiled encouragingly at us and followed suit. An old fellow gave Annie his cracker toy. A fat man tickled his wife’s nose with a feathered whistle; she balanced a champagne cork on his sunburnt head. Crackers popped and horns tooted. Above these antics a fan slowly revolved.

  Beyond the high expanse of windows the ocean glistened into the west, where atmospheric conditions had magically turned Rottnest Island into three distinct islands. Annie was struck by the mysterious asymmetry of this illusion.

  ‘It’s gone wrong,’ she said loudly, pointing out to sea. The other guests began murmuring about the phenomenon. Annie’s plaits looked irregular; one was thicker than the other; Dad still hadn’t mastered them.
‘The lighthouse has gone,’ she said.

  ‘No, it’s still there,’ Dad said, and tried to explain mirages, mentioning deserts and oases, with emphasis on the Sahara. I knew the horizon was always twelve miles away, but I couldn’t grasp the idea of shifting islands or the creation of non-existent ones. So thirsty people in deserts saw visions of water — why would people bursting with food and drink see visions of land?

  As our plates were being removed our table drew special attention from the hotel manageress. A handsome dark-haired woman in her thirties, she clapped her hands authoritatively for more champagne, and more crackers for us to pull, and joined us for a drink, inquiring about our presents with oddly curious eyes. Dad introduced us.

  She announced to me, ‘You do look like your father, Max.’ She remarked on Annie’s pretty hair and on the importance of David looking after his new watch. Sportively, she donned a blue paper crown and looked at us over the rim of her champagne glass. As the plum pudding was being served she left the table and returned with gifts for us wrapped in gold paper — fountain pens for David and me, a doll for Annie. Surprised, we looked to Dad for confirmation.

  He showed little surprise at the gifts, however, only polite gratitude, entoning several times, ‘Very, very kind of you.’

  ‘Rex, it gave me pleasure,’ the manageress said. ‘They’re a credit to you.’ She called him Rex, not Mr Lang. His eyes were moist at her compliment. He lit a cigar and leaned back in his seat, crown askew, like Old King Cole.

  After the plum pudding (he and the manageress had brandies instead) and another cracker pulling we thanked her again for our presents, on his instructions, and he sent us outside while he paid the bill.

  ‘Get some fresh air, kids,’ he said.

  We trooped out to the car park. Before today the car park had been the only part of the Seaview Hotel familiar to us. Sometimes on Saturday mornings we’d languished there, watching the ocean swells roll in, dying for a swim, squabbling in the Ford’s back seat or desultorily reading Shell road maps from the glovebox while Dad had a drink or two.

  ‘I have to see a chap about something,’ he’d say, bringing us out glasses of raspberry lemonade. A frightening hubbub sounded from the bar, yet he would turn and stride back into this noise and smoke and beer-smell with all the cheer in the world.

  Outside, the mirage persisted. Rottnest was still three oddly attenuated islands which seemed to be sailing south. The afternoon sea breeze was late and the temperature lingered in the nineties. The heat haze smudged the definition of the horizon and the Indian Ocean stretched flat and slick to Mauritius and beyond before curving into the sky.

  David said, ‘Did you smell her perfume?’ and made a face. He loosened his tie and farted from the champagne. Annie poked at her doll’s eyes. ‘I’ve got one like this called Amanda,’ she said. We presumed who had given her the other doll yet by unspoken agreement no one mentioned her. I knew the others were thinking that normally at this time we’d be unwrapping presents from the tree. She would play cheery Christmas records on the radiogram and run from the kitchen bringing us mints and nuts and little mince pies.

  Eyes remained dry as we walked to the car. The car park was almost empty because of the bars being closed for Christmas. Asphalt bubbled, a broken beer glass from Christmas Eve sat on the verandah rail and the smell of stale beer settled over the beer garden. Around the garden’s dusty, worn lawn, red and yellow hibiscuses wilted in the heat. Christmas was running short of breath. One after another, David, Annie and I snatched off our party hats, crumpled them and threw them on the ground.

  The imaginary islands, showing smoky silhouettes of hills and tall trees, kept sailing south. From the car you could see into the manageress’s office. She was combing his hair where his party hat had ruffled it. He came out whistling ‘Jingle Bells’ and the stench of his cigar filled the car.

  The Silver Medallist

  It was possibly lucky my mother didn’t marry her first fiancé because he ended up in Fremantle Prison. For a while as a youth he was a local hero and then his life tailed off and began deteriorating rapidly shortly after I knew him.

  Older sports fans might remember the name Kevin Parnell. Competing with severe influenza, he nevertheless won a silver medal for the 800 metres freestyle at the Berlin Olympics. There were plenty of snapshots of him in the old photograph albums Annie constantly pored over as a girl. In those days, when she was in trouble with Dad — and even after she realised she was thereby negating her own existence — she used to dramatically wish aloud that Mum had married Kevin instead. She would point out airily that he was more handsome than Dad, which was true, and, because the album photographs all showed him frolicking in the water, acrobatically skylarking about as the centre-man in a human pyramid of brown and toothy young beachgoers, or clowning in fancy dress at the surf club ball, obviously more fun than our bad-tempered father as well. (This last assumption was wrong, or must have been in 1940 when Rex Lang appeared on the scene and, with little apparent advantage other than a perceptible twinkle in the eye, swept Joan Crossing out of the ex-Olympian’s muscular arms.)

  When I first met Kevin Parnell he was about forty. He knew I was Joan’s son but he never mentioned her to me, not even to mutter that he was sorry to hear of her death, and I certainly didn’t bring the subject up. He was a top swimming coach at Crawley Baths and he had another business on Cottesloe Beach hiring out rubber surf shooters and selling sun bathers a coating of suntan oil. He was tall and getting fleshy by then, with a thick smooth chest and wavy black hair that put you in mind of those old Charles Atlas advertisements. Twenty years after his competition days he still carried himself with an Olympian’s elan, whether shouting instructions at 6.00 a.m. to his shivering squad of teenage swimmers, of which I was one, or presiding over his beach shelter, and the beach, four hours later.

  It was at the beach, before the general public, that he allowed the ‘character’ side of his personality full sway. On the beach he always wore a straw hat with a red band and a brief pair of leopard print trunks. His red and white striped shelter carried a big sign with a picture of a mutton bird on it and the slogan Kevin Parnell—The World Famous Suntan Champion. On the outside walls hung old press pictures of his swimming victories and others of him spraying Bob Hope’s shoulders with oil, mock-sparring with Rocky Marciano and shaking hands with ex-King Peter of Yugoslavia (in a double-breasted lounge suit), all encased in protective smeary plastic and, in the case of the celebrity shots, all taken more or less where you stood at that moment. The oil he sprayed on his customers was derived from the oil glands of mutton birds hunted in the islands of Bass Strait by the descendants of nineteenth-century sailors and the Tasmanian Aboriginal women they had kidnapped. He had a slightly smaller sign proclaiming himself The Mutton Bird King.

  From us hanging around the beach one summer holiday, Annie became friendly with Parnell’s daughter, Geraldine. I would have liked to — she was pretty, dark-haired and long-limbed, with high, full breasts — but she was distant with me, not exactly standoffish, more as if she saw me only indistinctly. She helped her father with the spraying and shooter hiring, working away in her bikini while we boys admired her even more for her indifference.

  Annie said Geraldine was really a lonely girl. Her mother had died young, too. I thought this may have been link between them, that and Annie’s old curiosity about Kevin Parnell. I’m sure that in a way she saw Geraldine as a permutation of herself — how she might have turned out if Parnell had married our mother; if he had been her father.

  Parnell gave the impression he was king of the beach as well as of the mutton birds. He was what used to be known as ‘a man’s man’, meaning that he was a hearty male chauvinist with a gregarious manner which always attracted a knot of off-duty newspaper reporters, university students, lifesavers and other beach types who flocked into the bar of the local hotel. Each day at twelve he’d set off for a drink, saying, ‘The sun’s over the yardarm!’ and leaving Ger
aldine to look after business. At two o’clock, chuckling, straw hat rakish, stomach gleaming, he’d saunter back to the beach, pausing for a quip or two with some sunbaking woman on the way.

  After his lunchtime beers he usually made a show of having a swim before returning to work. We got to know his routine. He’d skim his hat at a likely looking girl, calling, ‘Look after this, darling,’ hitch up his trunks, rub his hands together so his shoulder muscles moved around, and then race down to the ocean, scattering sand, and dive with a belly-whacking thump into the waves.

  He would rise slowly to the surface snorting like a buffalo, throw his hair back into place, and then strike out for the surf-race marker buoy, three hundred yards out to sea. This performance wasn’t wasted. He still had his old deceptively languid swimming style. We’d notice women’s eyes following him around the buoy, turning towards the beach, sprinting to catch a wave and riding triumphantly in, head down, shoulders hunched, one leg bent up behind him in the Hawaiian manner. Towards the end of the ride, before the wave lost power, he’d somersault out of it and come to an abrupt stop. (I imagined silent cheers in a hundred throats.) He would spring to his feet, clear his nose, bang the water from his ears, smooth back his hair and, smiling benignly, retrieve his hat and stride majestically back to the shelter.

  The Saturday afternoon which seemed to set various events in motion I was lounging self-consciously on a deck chair in the shade of the Parnell’s awning trying to simultaneously develop a conversation with Geraldine as she worked, appear publicly relaxed and surreptitiously covet her body. It was about 2.30, and ninety degrees Fahrenheit. There was a sting in the sun and business was brisk. The air was thick and sweet with oil and her skin gleamed where the mist had settled on her. I noted the white shaved skin of her armpit glistening as she raised the spraygun to squirt her taller clients’ shoulders and I also noticed that most males tried to look down her bikini top when she bent to spray their legs.