***
A Refusal to Mourn
In later phases of her life, after
her marriage and the births of her two children, after the procurement of a
second mortgage and the death of her parents, Xanthe would look back on that
summer as the summer that she put her childhood definitively behind her. For a summer, she disengaged herself from ordinary reality and hung suspended between
two worlds; for a summer the wheel of time stopped turning. The spring before
had been the catalyst. Her parents had been fighting again, an interval of
backbiting and bitching that would end conclusively in divorce at last; she had
become disillusioned with the art school in Auckland where she was majoring in printmaking; all of her close friends had moved out of the
city. Xanthe decided that she needed a break from her usual routines and made
up her mind that she would go to Raglan for some indefinite duration. There she could live out of her van in the car park, sit every night on the beach with
her guitar and permit her blonde dreadlocks to grow out. It had seemed like a
vision of paradise. Xanthe was just a little more than nineteen years old.
The first day she arrived late,
around eight. When she was settled, she cooked a dinner of baked beans and
bread fried in canola oil on her primus stove and ate it on the beach sitting
on her sleeping bag and watching the scarlet drain out of the Western sky above
the crashing swells. The next day she went into the town to make arrangements
for her stay. She approached the local backpackers and asked if she could use
their laundry every week or so to wash her clothes. She went to the petrol
station and found out the cost of a bag of ice – her plan was to keep her food
in a chilly bin and replenish the ice every couple of days. She familiarized
herself with the location of the supermarket. She visited the library and
borrowed Monkey Grip by Helen Garner and
The Naked Lunch by William
Burroughs. That evening she sat on the beach and played Joan Baez and Bob
Dylan.
Sometimes it seemed to Xanthe that
she all she had ever done her whole life was listen to other people talk – her
parents endlessly exchanging barbed and sarcastic comments, her teachers
droning on monotonously about history and biology and math, her friends with
their chatter about parties and drugs and relationships and boys. For the first
time in her life, Xanthe found herself surrounded, not quite by silence, but by
an ambience that bordered on silence - the continuous wash of breakers falling,
the unintelligible din of distant conversations, the occasional plangent cry of
a gull. Sitting in the evening on her sleeping bag with her book and her
thoughts, she wondered if Buddhist monks felt this way in their monasteries
when they sat cross-legged and meditated on samsara and karma
and suffering. That night, when she crawled into her sleeping bag in her van to
sleep, she found that she had not shaken out all the grains of sand that had
crept into it but, although she expected the itch to bother her and keep her
awake, an unconsciousness nearly as complete as annihilation overtook her
almost instantly.
A couple of days after she first
arrived, Xanthe, while drifting purposelessly along the main street of the
town, saw a ‘help wanted’ sign in the window of a local café. She opened the door,
crossed over to the counter of the café and enquired of the manager serving
about the job. The manager, harried by the mid-morning rush, briskly told
Xanthe to come back at five thirty, closing time. Xanthe crossed over to the
library and filled in the afternoon waiting for the interview by skimming
through New Scientist magazines and googling music blogs on the
Internet. When she returned to the café the manager, who was also the owner,
flipped the sign hanging on the door to ‘closed’ and they sat down opposite
each other at one of the tables in the quiet of the now empty dining room to
discuss the job. The last kitchen hand had abruptly resigned to resume his
travels hitchhiking around the country and Felicity needed someone to clean the
dishes and generally help out out back. Felicity wore a long turquoise dress
and dangling bone earrings; she reminded Xanthe of her godmother Gloria, a
woman with gypsy tendencies who supplemented her regular income by telling fortunes
with tarot cards and selling gemstones at local fairs, and consequently Xanthe
liked Felicity immediately.
“I can’t afford to pay you much,”
said Felicity. “And, if it’s not an problem for you, I’d prefer to pay you
under the table.”
“That’s alright,” said Xanthe
laughing. “If you pay me under the
table, then it won’t interfere with my benefit.”
Xanthe started work at the cafe the
next morning. Felicity employed her six days a week. Xanthe began at seven and
stayed until two, washing dishes and occasionally assisting in the cooking
duties of the chef, an Australian Aboriginal with a wry, deadpan sense of
humour who had come to New Zealand to escape the endemic racism of his home
country. In quieter moments, he would entertain her by telling her stories about
the Rainbow Serpent and the Dreamtime and by performing pitch-perfect whistling
impersonations of Australian birdlife. Not only did Xanthe like the chef, she
found that her first impressions had been correct and that she got on with
Felicity like a house on fire. When Felicity found out about Xanthe’s living
arrangements she offered to put Xanthe up at her house and, when Xanthe turned
down this offer, Felicity compromised by inviting Xanthe around for dinner a
couple of times a week. There Xanthe met Felicity’s husband Russel, who was
absent-minded and bandy legged and who worked for the post office and as a
part-time volunteer for the local Fire Brigade. After dinner, Felicity and
Xanthe would retire to the gazebo where Felicity would sit smoking menthol
cigarettes, drinking brandy-and-cokes and telling Xanthe, to Xanthe’s
embarrassed amusement, long stories about the string of unsuccessful boyfriends
she’d dated prior to meeting Russel.
“Make the most of your youth,”
Felicity would tell Xanthe after she had put away a few drinks. “It’s the best
time of your life. You never know what’s going to happen to you as you get
older.”
Ten years later, Felicity would
suffer a major embolism while driving to Hamilton and die on the side of the
road.
Every afternoon, Xanthe would sit
on her sleeping bag on a dune, reading or watching the other beachgoers.
Because it was summer, and because the weather was fine, the beach was often
crowded with people – backpackers from Europe, families on their summer
holidays, locals wandering along with their dogs on leashes, and, of course,
surfers. It was the summer of 2012 and 2013 and the sea was generous that year.
The surfers fought for territory among the waves. When one caught a good swell,
he would leap to his feet and hold a graceful, balanced posture, arms
outstretched, for at the most thirty seconds before being caught and dumped by
the breaking of the wave. A little down from and to the right of Xanthe, a
group of young surfers had claimed a piece of the beach as their own, and, when
they weren’t in the water chasing the best breakers, they sprawled together in
a circle drinking, smoking, casually hassling each other and presumably chatting about
sport and music or whatever boys talked about when they were together. Occasionally one would dart an inquisitive glance at the girl who sat every
afternoon and evening by herself on a sleeping bag on a dune reading.
After a couple of days, one of them decided to assuage his curiosity by
approaching her and, having apprised his mates of his intention, wandered up
the beach towards her.
“Why
are you here by yourself?” he asked. “Don’t you have any mates?”
“I
didn’t bring any with me,” said Xanthe. “I didn’t want them to spoil my
vacation.”
“So
is anti-sociability a cast-iron policy of yours? Or do you want to come down
and have a beer with us? What do you think?”
“I
suppose I could break my sobriety for a bit,” laughed Xanthe.
“Cool,”
said the boy. “I’m Mark, so you know.”
Xanthe
followed Mark down the beach and the boys made room for her. Mark yanked a
bottle of brown ale from the chilly bin, opened it with his lighter and handed
it to her. The three boys, all about twenty, were wearing loose board shorts
and were possessed of the tanned, athletic bodies of young men who spent a lot
of time in the sun and at the gym. Mark, in particular, had a form that tapered
from wide muscular shoulders down to narrow sexy hips – Xanthe wondered to
herself if he had some Maori blood in him. He was swarthier than other two.
Sitting cross-legged next to him, Xanthe felt both self-conscious and
preternaturally aware of his physical presence beside her. When he lifted his
beer to take a swallow, he revealed that, on his arm, he had, not a Maori
design as she might have guessed, but a tattoo of a snake that coiled around
his bicep and bit its own tail – it made Xanthe think of the Rainbow Serpent
and then the Midgard Serpent from Norse mythology. She asked him if the tattoo
had any significance for him.
“Not
particularly,” said Mark. “I just got it because I thought it looked cool. I
only got it a couple of months ago.”
“Did
it hurt?”
“Shit
yeah. But I’ve wanted one like it for ages.”
The
other two boys were called Alex and Michael. All three had attended school
together in Hamilton but Michael had abandoned Hamilton for Dunedin to study
geography. The summer was the only time during the year when they could all get
together. The three of them, together with Alex’s girlfriend Michelle who had
chosen not to come to the beach that day, were staying in a holiday home that
belonged to Alex’s parents, surfing while the sun shone and partying at night.
In recompense, Xanthe told them a little about her own situation, explaining to
them that she was working as a kitchen hand in the township, living out of her
van for the foreseeable future, and had no idea what she was going to do with
herself the next year. Mark was very attentive, leaning close with questions
and showing genuine interest in her answers. It turned out that Mark himself
was studying Media Studies but that his real passion was the electric guitar.
He had just recently started a garage band with a couple of mates; they hadn’t
done a gig yet but they were working on it; they were still developing a
repertoire. While he was speaking,
Xanthe lifted her knee to her chin and clasped her ankle, displaying her leg in
an unconscious gesture of flirtation, realized that she was doing it and immediately tucked in her leg again. The gesture must not have gone entirely
unnoticed by the others though and provoked an odd reaction. An electric
current passed between the Alex and Michael. They leapt to their feet and stood
facing each other.
“Why
don’t you tell the chick how much you can bench-press, bro?” asked
Alex.
“Why
don’t you go fuck yourself, bro?”
replied Michael. Xanthe burst into laughter.
“Fuck
this shit. I’m going for a swim,” exclaimed Michael, sprinting off towards the
water.
“Do
you want to have a swim?” Mark asked Xanthe, leaning towards her – not lightly,
but with the same earnest, confidential tone he had adopted earlier. It was as
though they were the only two on the beach.
“Sure,”
said Xanthe. “Just let me go get changed.”
Xanthe
set off up the beach toward the car park across the blazingly hot sand. As she
walked, occasionally she giggled to herself – boys of a certain age were all
such retards. It must be something to do with hormones. Back at the van, she
climbed in through the rear door, drew shut the mesh curtains that hung over
the windows and quickly stripped off her denim shorts and yellow blouse. Her
red bikini top was hanging over the steering wheel and the bikini bottoms were
under the mattress for some reason. As she put on the top, she caught a glimpse
of herself in the mirror she kept in the van. Bodies, she thought to herself with amused self-disgust, who
needs them?
Alex had brought a rugby ball with him and when
Xanthe arrived back at the sea’s edge she found the three boys up to their
waists in the water lobbing the ball between them. “Here I am!” Xanthe called
out to them and plunged into the ocean. The water, as it always does on first
contact, felt bracingly cold, especially, as she got deeper in and it reached
first the level of her cunt and then her belly button, but Xanthe knew that
once she got over the first shock she would soon become accustomed to the
chill. Mark threw her the ball and she caught it in both hands.
“We’re
playing a kind of game,” he told her. “Do you want to be involved?”
The
game was a version of Piggy-in-the-Middle. They four of them divided into two
teams: team-mates would throw the ball between them and the opposing two would
attempt to intercept it. Mark and Xanthe were on one team and Alex and Michael
were on the other. Xanthe wasn’t very good at this game but she enjoyed watching
the boys throwing themselves around, stretching supplely when they chucked the
ball or diving dramatically to catch it before it hit the water. They seemed
supremely unaware of their physical fitness and grace. Occasionally, a swell
would roll in from the side, lifting Xanthe off her feet and then, when it
passed, allowing her to settle again on the sea-floor. The time by then was a
little past six and the afternoon was swiftly dwindling. After about half an
hour, the four of them regathered on the beach and the boys pulled on cotton
t-shirts.
“You
know what we should do?” said Michael suddenly. “We should come back here
tonight after dark and build a bonfire.”
“How
can we do that?” asked Alex. “Where would we get the wood?”
“We
can buy a sack of firewood from the service station,” pronounced Mark with an
air of decision. ”And a bottle of lighter fluid. I built a bonfire with my
folks that way in the Coromandel one year.”
Michael
and Alex immediately and enthusiastically endorsed the plan and it was swiftly
decided that they should head off into town to stock up on necessary supplies
right away, although Alex inserted a diffident request that they travel via
home-base in order for him to collect Michelle. Mark turned to Xanthe.
“So
what do you think? Do you want to party on the beach with us tonight?”
“Sure,”
laughed Xanthe. “It’s not like I’m doing anything else.”
After
Xanthe had picked up her woollen jersey from the van, the four of them piled
into Michael’s car and they set off towards the bach where the boys were
staying. They drove with the windows down so that the boys could smoke. On the
way, Michael regaled them with stories about surfing in the icy-cold waters
around Dunedin and the weird wetsuited dudes with grey pony tails he had met
down there. The stories he told were often very funny and Xanthe laughed a lot,
although her laughter was more the result of the edginess a person can feel when finding herself suddenly in a car with three strange surfer dudes from Hamilton
than a reaction to the stories she was hearing. It was a situation she simply
couldn’t have predicted.
The bach, when they arrived at it,
turned out to be less a bach than a stucco cube. Alex went in the front door
and emerged, a couple of minutes later, with Michelle, a petite zaftig
strawberry-blonde wearing red jeans and white singlet and knuckling her eyes.
“I
was asleep,” Michelle said plaintively
as they walked back down the path towards the car. “Why’d you have to wake me
up?”
“I
told you – we’re going to get drunk on the beach tonight.”
“But
I was asleep.” Michelle stopped
abruptly, looking towards the car. “Who’s the hot chick in the back seat?”
“Just
some random girl we picked up on the beach. She’s called Xanthe, I think.
Mark’s got a major hard-on for her.”
“Just
so long as she doesn’t oust me from my position of sexiest bitch in Raglan,”
Michelle declared.
Michelle and Alex climbed in the car and
the five of them set off towards town, Alex and Michael sitting in the front
seats and Xanthe and Mark sitting in the back with Michelle in between them.
Mark continued plying Xanthe with questions about her life and interests,
speaking past Michelle as though Michelle wasn’t there. Xanthe could tell that
he was hitting on her, that he was into her, and it gave her a feeling of keen
delight to parry his enquiries and to play with him.
“What
do your parents do?” he asked.
“My
dad lectures in Economics at the university but he reads a lot of poetry in his
free time. His favourite poet is Dylan Thomas.”
Mark
had no idea how to reply to this.
“I
like your hair. Is it natural?”
“I’m
actually a brunette. I’m planning to let the dreads grow out over the summer.”
“Does
anyone else smell burning?” Michelle piped up. “I smell burning.”
Alex,
who was sitting shotgun, swivelled around to look at her.
“Michelle
– your hair is on fire.”
Michelle
squealed. They pulled over to the side of the road while Michelle anxiously
patted out the small smouldering in her locks. An ember must have blown back from
one the boys’ cigarettes and lodged there. After everyone was reassured that no
real damage had been done, Michelle burst into a gale of relieved giggles.
“It’s
because I’m so hot,” she said. “I’m so hot that sometimes I just spontaneously
combust!”
“It’s
like an auto-da-fe,” said Xanthe smiling
wryly.
In
twenty years time, Michelle would have put on thirty kilograms, be unhappily
married to the assistant manager of an office supplies shop in Huntly and be childless as a consequence of endometriosis.
After
they had purchased wood, lighter fluid and a box of beer, the group decided to
kill some time by going to a local pub for dinner. They ate their meals in the
beer garden and then hung out for a while, drinking, smoking and talking shit.
For the first time since Xanthe had met him, Mark opened up a little about his
own life. He did, in fact, have some Maori blood in him. His tribe was Ngati
Maniatpoto and he’d spent time on the Marae when he was young, although he hadn’t
been back in a long time. Looking around, Xanthe noticed, with a little
misgiving, that everyone was drinking, including Michael the driver, but felt,
uncharacteristically for her, too shy to say anything about it. It had also
occurred to her that there might be some local bylaw prohibiting fires on the
beach but, when she decided to mention this, the others reacted indifferently.
“Time
to go,” Mark announced suddenly. “We need to get this party properly started.”
They
drove back to beach. By this hour, the sun had almost completely set: the sky
was painted deep red and the undersides of the scattered cumulus clouds were
burnished gold. Once they had found a suitable spot, they built a ziggurat of
wood, doused it in lighter fluid and set it alight. It had become dark by now.
Flames were soon stretching into the air, feet planted in the wood and hands
waving and petitioning the empty heavens. Michael hooked up his iPod to a set
of speakers and put on a play-list by the Beatles. Beers were handed round and
drunk. Marshmallows, that they had had the foresight to buy when they were in
town, were skewered on sticks and roasted. After a little while Xanthe was
enjoined to go get her guitar from her van and lend it to Mark. Michael turned
off the iPod and Mark played Bob Marley and Pearl Jam to the group, taking
evident pleasure in being the centre of attention. Watching him, Xanthe
privately concluded that she was probably the better guitar player but judged
this an observation best keep to herself.
At
one point, when the conversation lagged, Xanthe found her eyes drawn to the
fire and to the clouds of sparks that rose from it. In the old days, back when
she was a Christian, Xanthe had believed that a spark rising from a bonfire was
a perfect symbol for the human soul – a point of light borne up out of a
conflagration, twisting and turning, alone and yet in company, until it winked
out of existence… but she guessed that now that she was a Buddhist, she would
have to abandon her belief in souls. Buddhist didn’t believe that people had
souls.
“Have
any of you guys heard of the Fire Sermon?” she asked without thinking.
“Nope,”
said Alex. “What’s that?”
“It’s
one of the central texts in Buddhism. It’s a speech that the Buddha delivered
to a bunch of fire-worshipers about pain and desire and ignorance.
Zorastrians, I think.”
“Buddhism?”
said Michael. He was sitting on the other side of the fire. “Those guys believe
in reincarnation, right? What do you think Alex? Do you believe in
reincarnation?”
“No
way, bro. That stuff’s bullshit. I think that when you die, that’s it, the end,
finito. You only get to live once.”
“What
about Heaven? You don’t believe in Heaven?”
“I
think Heaven is something invented purely to reassure religious wackos.”
In
twenty years time, Alex would have a crippling stroke while cleaning the guttering of his house and, despite serious incapacities
with respect to language and motor skills, would still manage to cling on to
life for another thirty.
After
a little while, Mark came and sat next to Xanthe. She was a little drunk by
this time. The salt from the afternoon’s swim had congealed on her skin and had
started itching. They chatted intimately, Mark complimenting her on the beauty
of her mouth and the blueness of her eyes. They kissed. Mark put his hand up
Xanthe’s jersey and felt her breast. They kissed again. After a moment, Mark
drew back, grinning broadly, and said, “I’m just going to go talk to the boys
for a bit. I’ll be back.”
Mark
crossed to the other side of the fire and stood talking volubly to Michael and
Alex. Xanthe gazed blankly across the fire at him. It was a problem. He was
good-looking - there was no denying that - but there was something wrong about
him. For one thing, he wasn’t as smart as she had hoped when she first met him.
And his strategy of endlessly asking questions and never talking about himself
had grown tired after a while. Unbidden, the memory of her favourite cousin
Andy rose to the surface of her mind. It happened this way sometimes. She and
Andy had been the same age. They had played together, gone roller skating
together, gone to the zoo together, hung out and listened to music together
when they were older. In a way, he had been her first love.
Xanthe
remembered the last time she had seen him. It was in hospital. He was lying in
bed wearing a beanie because the chemotherapy had denuded him of hair and there
were tubes coming out of his nose. Late stage aggressive leukaemia. For the
first time in her life, Xanthe felt uncomfortable to be in the same room as
Andy and wanted to get out of it as fast as possible. Nevertheless she made an
effort to sit next to him, be brave and smile. Andy reached over and put his
hand on hers. There were so many things I wanted to do, he told her. Live for me. I can’t do it for
myself. Andy succumbed not long after. He
was seventeen.
The
sparks spiralled up from the bonfire. Mark came strolling back around it
towards her, the firelight casting a red sheen across the side of his face. It
was as though he was on fire. In his eyes, he had a look disconcertingly like
triumph.
“We’re
going to be going soon. Do you want to come back to our place with me tonight?
What do you think?”
The
sparks soared up from the dying bonfire, twisting and turning, and at last
vanishing into nothingness.
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