The Bodysurfers Read online

  He was too grateful. ‘Oh, thank you very much,’ he gushed, as if it were half a ton of dry mallee roots.

  The cottage’s holiday personality reflected that of its owner. The new widower was a retired surgeon in his seventies. Though clean, the cottage smelled of his pipes. New Yorker magazines lay about the living room and were piled in the wardrobes; other magazines seemed also to have been gathered up from his surgery waiting room over the years: fifteen-year-old copies of Country Life and the Illustrated London News. An old mantel radio sat on a bookshelf with pieces of driftwood, shells and sand-smoothed pebbles. The wide brick fireplace was smoke-stained up to its sandstone mantelpiece.

  Whenever Brian stepped outside the kookaburras lined up optimistically, eight or nine abreast, along the verandah railing. Next in the pecking order came the magpies, then the currawongs, twisting their heads so their yellow set-back eyes caught every movement. He began to sketch the birds in charcoal but tired of it and threw the drawing away. Seen up close the kookaburras had interesting faces, with moist brown eyes like dogs, but sentimental nature-realism was not his area of interest.

  The dead woman’s summer clothes and straw handbags still hung in the cupboards. Her handwriting was on lists on a little bulletin board in the kitchen. ‘Ring Mary Wednesday’ said one note.

  At night the cottage rocked in the wind, expanded and contracted in the temperature changes. Smoke from the occluded chimney hung in the rooms, making his eyes water, but he persevered with a fire each night, for the companionship. In the ceiling there were rattling footsteps, abrupt scamperings — presumably possums. Occasionally, waking with a start at some dark thuddings, Brian childishly suspected ghosts.

  * * *

  On his daily constitutional to the beach Brian began carrying a stick, slapping it on his thigh in a threatening manner as he rounded the bend near the blue heeler’s home. The dog was also a confrontationist, continuing to rush him but keeping nimbly out of range of the stick. Though his heart beat loudly at each confrontation Brian refused to change his route or schedule. He began to think irrationally about the dog. These days he worried deeply about irrational thinking and took steady breaths to adjust his position. In bed, however, he lay considering methods of killing it. He favoured shooting it in the head at close range, in mid-lunge, with a large-bore pistol. Imagining this final collision, his head thudded furiously.

  The nights were cold. Under a heap of blankets he lay listening to the surf booming and the wind sizzling through the eucalypts. His hair and pyjamas smelled of smoke.

  Feeling lonely, Brian once or twice rang friends for conversation. But even while seeking affectionate noises and camaraderie he made tense cryptic remarks on the political situation and the human condition which made the recipients uneasy.

  While on the telephone he doodled on a pad, drawing humorous faces, political likenesses — many aimless drawings. One of the faces he extended, adding limbs and a body. Then he had the figure, representing a right-wing politician he hated, force itself sexually on another celebrity whom he also detested. Brian drew ridiculously exaggerated genitals and a manic gleam in the rapist’s eye. In life this politician was particularly expedient and a great upholder of the old moral values. On the victim’s caricature he drew lush eyelashes and a pouting mouth. In reality this politician was vain and ‘charismatic’. (Once at a party in Brian’s hearing he had told a young woman whose waist he was holding: ‘You could give me the anonymity I crave.’ She took it as a compliment.)

  Becoming more interested in his drawing than his conversation Brian said ‘Mm’ and ‘Nn’ and gradually the conversation lagged and came to an end.

  When his ideas dried up he lay in the sunroom reading the retired surgeon’s old New Yorkers. He pulled the curtains on the kookaburras’ inquiring faces. None of the New Yorker cartoons made him laugh, though they were from his period. They had published five of his cartoons between 1967 and 1969, the best time of his life, when he was energetic, ambitious and game for anything.

  His flushed-faced neighbour was in the habit of hanging around the dividing fence with her terrier. He believed she was prying while pretending to pick freesias and he endeavoured to ignore her. Strangely, she called to him briskly one morning and asked would he prevent his friends from ‘hot-rodding’ up the gravel track in their cars.

  ‘No friends of mine have been here — in cars or otherwise,’ he told her. Nevertheless he knew he looked immediately guilty. She said it turned the road into a quagmire when it rained. She said they weren’t noisy partygivers up at Palm Beach. They liked a quiet life. She treated him with a falsely amiable condescension, as an unspecifiable interloper from the city. He wondered whether she was crazy.

  Smiling fiercely, she then complained that his cat was digging up her garden, the naughty thing. She hoped it wouldn’t destroy the local fauna, mentioning the beauty of the rosellas and the onrushing extinction of furry marsupials. She remembered when koalas clung to these very trees. She stressed upon him the delicate balance of nature.

  A cat? He told her he didn’t have a cat.

  ‘It must be a stray,’ she said with heavy sarcasm, turning and walking inside.

  * * *

  At nights he drank brandy, listened to the retired surgeon’s radio and flipped through his paperbacks. Aimlessly drinking and pottering one night, he found a postcard in the writing desk — a sparkling summer photograph of Palm Beach.

  For some reason he decided to send the postcard to his former lover, Anthea, with whom he was on dubious terms. Theirs had been an emotional, passionate relationship which had begun dramatically, caused pain, stabilised and then petered out. It had offered romance aplenty at the time. Anthea had inherited money and wanted to fulfil his dreams, to buy him a coastal hideaway like this one where he could work and they would swim and lie around scantily clad in the sun. They talked about the sea breeze filtering through net curtains onto their damp, after-love bodies. They made soft romantic plans and stayed in the hard city.

  In truth he had let the offer pass, having then some perverse political set against accepting her largesse as well as an easy coastal life. Time together passed, three years. He could not pin it down but something had gone wrong. It had become an ‘open’ relationship. There had been a tacit understanding that this was the case, but not that it would be more ‘open’ for her than for him.

  But Brian was feeling philosophical. More time had passed. Their first Christmas together he’d given her a book of his cartoons, dedicated to her. The dust jacket showed him sitting at his drawing board grinning ironically, as required of cartoonists, and wearing an Irish fisherman’s sweater. Once she told him she was actually compelled to kiss his cover photograph, so truthfully had the photographer captured his likeness. The photographer, who hadn’t received a credit, had been his wife when the photograph was taken, though not by the time the collection of cartoons was published.

  Now he addressed the postcard to Anthea at the magazine where she worked. He began by selecting his words as carefully as the alcohol would allow, calling her Dear instead of Darling, but striking the right ironic yet affectionate note. He hoped she was well and happy; he mentioned where he was, that he was fit and accomplishing a lot of work. There was no obligation to reply, he added, hoping this little addition would ensure a reply.

  He drew a small caricature of himself lying back on a beach. In his hand he drew a champagne glass and beside him, a magnum in an ice-bucket. In the air above the glass he drew little bubbles. He gave himself a smug grin and a pot belly. (In reality he was the thinnest he’d been.) He considered adding an amusing lewd touch to his bathing suit but decided against it. This time last year it would have struck the right note (‘Thinking of you, as you can see!’) but not now.

  Thinking of her gave him an erection now, brought on anger and changed thought patterns. While considering how to sign off he wondered why he was sending it at all. Hadn’t his last overtures been rebuffed? Trying to remember d
etails of the occasion, how it happened, who had had the emotional upper hand, he was strangely imprecise on the surroundings. Perhaps a restaurant, Italian food, around the lowered tense voices.

  The balance had somehow shifted. Something had tilted when she returned from a fashion assignment in Noumea. She had definitely had the emotional upper hand when last he saw her, he suddenly recalled. She had been alternately distant and sentimental, but an air barrier grew between them, choking him, until he fought clear. His heart began thumping. In the space at the bottom of the postcard he wrote: ‘P.S. Why am I sending this? I must be mad!’ and signed his initials.

  He found a stamp in the desk, stuck it on the postcard and walked down to the mail box on the foreshore. In the dark he swung a cautionary stick but the dog must have been asleep and the wind in the eucalypts smothered his footsteps. He posted the card and returned.

  Brian at once regretted sending Anthea the card. Pouring another brandy, he guessed he would be seen as grovelling to her. His tone had been too wheedling. Presumably she had another lover. He suspected the fashion photographer from the New Caledonia assignment. He could see her meeting him for drinks and laughing over fun times in Noumea. (‘Oh, by the way, look at this strange postcard from Brian.’) She would imply that their relationship had been dull and boring, that she had only been marking time. She would dismiss him.

  Meanwhile, she would gain great emotional satisfaction from receiving the card and imagining the time he had spent thinking of her. Her ego would lap it up. She had always been spoilt. People coddled her too readily. Her politics were too apathetic and conservative. She was all style and no substance. Fashion photographers wore shirts unbuttoned to the waist and tight jeans. Brian felt like tearing out the mail box by the roots and smashing it open with a sledgehammer to retrieve his absurd postcard.

  But now it was too late. Brian drank more brandy and traced its route: the postcard arrived at the post office, was sorted by mail workers, arrived in the magazine company’s mailroom, was delivered by a teenager to Anthea’s department, and finally landed in the in-tray on her desk. Her desk was apple-green. Numerous people besides her would peruse the postcard. There was no privacy in a postcard, he should have realised that. People felt compelled to trespass.

  And his drawing style was recognisable. Until the trouble with management he had been a daily political cartoonist, an abrasive stylist with a faithful following of readers. Forty-six idealistic protesting letters had been sent to the editor when his cartoons abruptly ceased to appear. Most of the letter writers smelled censorship and some of them castigated the newspaper proprietor. All the letter writers were indignant — thirty-two were women. The editor had prevented any of the letters from being published, but when Brian left he had handed them to him with a smile of cynical goodwill.

  ‘You might as well have these,’ he said. ‘Might do yourself some good with some of these pinko sheilas.’

  Bad enough that his style was recognisable, his initials were also on the postcard. Snoopers would put two and two together and gossip about his low state. Media women were great annunciators of failure, especially career or heterosexual romantic failure. (Of homosexual romantic failure they were sweet and non-judgemental.) He was taking things badly, they would advise restaurants and cocktail parties. He would be filleted at Friday lunches and Saturday night dinners. Sending sentimental begging postcards to his former lover — how pathetic! Acquaintances would be momentarily delighted at the news. ‘It’s sad,’ they would say, meaning ‘delicious’, coming on top of his acidic overconfidence and lack of objectivity.

  For several days the postcard kept Brian in a depression. But he also worked out the time she would take to reply, making allowances for delivery delays, postal strikes, weekends. Every morning he watched for the postman; otherwise he kept to his schedule, striding down to the beach each noon for air and exercise. In anticipation of meeting the blue heeler his stomach tightened and his heart beat louder. Strangely, when the dog wasn’t there he felt somehow cheated and tossed his stick into the bushes at the side of the track.

  At the beach he now ran the full shore-length and back, about five kilometres. He persevered when the sand was soft and slushy and the shoreline too steeply inclined. He was anxious to establish mental and physical habits; health and stability seemed very necessary at the moment.

  The table where he worked in the sunroom must have originated in his landlord’s surgery. It was small and made of oak and he imagined it smelled of methylated spirits. He sat on a chair from the surgery waiting room, wondering how many sick and anxious people it had held over the years, how many of the damp-palmed patients clutching its arms were still alive. His pens were set out on his right and a pile of drawing pads on his left. He had a leather case of fine quality artists’ and designers’ pens and an Earl Grey tea tin holding brushes and a cigar box of coloured inks and tubes of paint. Back in his cross-hatching phase he had even favoured an ancient steel-nibbed pen and Indian ink, but for the past few years he had actually used nothing but cheap Japanese nylon-tipped throwaways.

  Brian began a cartoon. Since his crack-up he had finished only four, including the postcard caricature of himself. Before he moved back to town he wanted to complete a folio of at least fifty, to have a solid log of work behind him, to re-establish himself. He was working away without inspiration when the telephone startled him. A woman’s voice, neither young nor old, nasal and imperious, gave Anthea’s name and asked whether she was there.

  ‘Who is this?’ he asked sharply, his pulse racing.

  ‘Oh, this is a private call,’ the woman said, and repeated her question.

  ‘No, there’s no one of that name here,’ he replied.

  The woman then asked, ‘You know her, don’t you?’ Her voice had a drawling but insistent quality.

  ‘We’re acquaintances,’ he said, stammering. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Where can I find her?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ he said. When he hung up his hands were shaking.

  Summer was in the humid beach air. As usual Brian jogged north along the shore. Suddenly he was jogging among nudes; naked men and women sauntered from the ocean, water streaming from their thighs and pubes. They were tanned all over yet until now they hadn’t been there. Where had they come from? Two slender dark girls ran from the water and up the beach, the surface sand crust squeaking under their toes. Carefully Brian avoided their bouncing breasts, looking straight ahead. These people were very relaxed and flashed sociable smiles at one another but their nakedness had an air of potential umbrage about it.

  Back in the sunroom he drew several more cartoons while a red wasp, frantically buzzing, died slowly on the window sill. It curled back on itself in agonies of frustration.

  The postman’s motorbike chugged up the track to the cottage between 9.15 and 9.30 each morning. From the sunroom window Brian watched for him, but when the postman stopped it was only to stuff the letterbox with magazine subscription invitations.

  The blue heeler continued to rush at him with no loss of enthusiasm. He continued to thresh at it with his stick. Neither connected.

  After his beach runs he lay on the sand thinking of Anthea. As the weather warmed, more cars began arriving from distant southern suburbs. He glanced among them for her car. It was easily recognisable: a white Alfetta, usually dented. She was a fast, aimless driver with a long record of traffic offences. The car was elsewhere.

  The warmer evenings brought the mosquitoes out in force. He lowered the mosquito net over his bed and burned coils left by the dead woman. He kept a can of insect spray for tarantulas in the bathroom, funnel-webs in the laundry. Daily he upset the balance of nature. Nevertheless it thrived; bees hovered over the lavender bushes fringing the verandah, and butterflies flapped over the daisies and geraniums. In the fallen gum leaves lizards rustled.

  Each morning at eight his florid neighbour rang a breakfast bell for the kookaburras. She t
hrew them handfuls of chopped meat, assuming a most proprietary air, scolding and crooning. Brian felt she was trying to entice the birds away from his cottage, to keep them from his sinister city presence, to break up domicile patterns. So much for the balance of nature! She rang her little breakfast bell far too smugly for his liking.

  He rose at six one morning. The kookaburras were already waiting patiently in the eucalypts around the cottage for their breakfast bell. He threw them special tasty chop tails, ham fat and bacon rinds until they were full and even the greedy currawongs and magpies had had enough. Through the sunroom window at eight he enjoyed watching them ignoring his neighbour’s offerings. Shaking her head in surprise she went disconsolately inside.

  Brian still had the letters protesting at his cartoons’ departure from the newspaper. He spent a morning re-reading them. He’d regarded the editor’s remarks as typically crass and cynical, but now he sorted the letters into male and female piles. From the female pile he eliminated those signed ‘Mrs’ or in a shaky elderly hand. This left sixteen which appeared to be from women who were in all likelihood idealistic and youngish. To these fans he now replied, writing identical chatty letters:

  ‘Dear …,

  ‘Thank you for your kind and generous support. It was gratifying, coming as it did during a trying time in my personal life and a worrying period in national affairs.

  ‘Since I left the newspaper I have been living and working up at Palm Beach. It’s marvellous what some sea air will do to restore the spirits. My old cottage has become a regular venue for jaded outcasts from the city. Please take this as an invitation to drop in for a drink if you are ever up this way. It would be a great pleasure to meet you.’

  He gave his address and drew a little map showing the position of the cottage in relation to the main road.

  One noon at the beach he saw a woman who may have been Anthea stooping to gather shells. Later, another Anthea was sunbathing nude. In each case his pulse quickened as he moved closer. Of course she could have changed her hairstyle, lost weight, got a suntan. He had to peer at each of them very closely before he realised she was not his lover.