How it feels to float, p.4
How It Feels to Float, page 4
You can wish as hard as you want for something to stay,
but it will slip right through you,
drift to the bottom of
you
as you stand, watching,
watery, logged,
bleating bloated blubbering,
doing and holding nothing.
Look at yourself, Biz.
Do you see?
pushandshoveandslap
How useless/stupid/hopeless you are?
Of course the waves should take you.
Yes.
Of course.
They should.
But now here’s Jasper.
° ° ° ° °
Here’s Jasper, in the waves with me.
He has his arm under my chin and armpit and he’s grabbing me back from the sea. He’s dragging me back to shore, his face grim, and the waves are saying, ‘Oi! She’s ours!’ but Jasper isn’t listening.
He pulls me onto the beach and I want to say something but I am full of water.
He leans me on my side and I’m coughing and coughing and the water is seriously pissed off because it was happy inside me.
I heave and choke and the waves are a jumble now, angry words and shouting, but as I lie on the sand, I only hear one line, over and over—the waves saying,
‘Fuck you, Biz. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.’
I take in a ragged breath.
Cough. Breathe. Cough. Sit up.
My hair is tangled. My shirt is ripped. I’ve lost a shoe.
Jasper sits back on his heels. He looks exhausted.
Where did he come from?
I suck in another breath.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
Jasper nods.
None of this could possibly be true.
People only come out of the blue and in the nick of time to save someone’s life in stories. Therefore, I am a story.
And Jasper is a story. And the blazing youth with their tongues in each other’s mouths and their singing and their fire and the clump of them sauntering over and saying ‘What happened?’ is a story.
We try to tell them.
Jasper tries to explain and I try to explain but they take us in—our wetness, my ripped shirt, my lack of shoe—and pin what happened with their eyes. And that is a story.
They think we’ve been groping each other. They think we went for a swim and made out and maybe had sex or tried to, and I breathed in water instead of breathing in Jasper.
They don’t listen to me when I try and tell them about the waves talking.
They don’t hear Jasper when he says, ‘I was just walking and I saw her.’
They see us together in a rumple on the sand and the way we are both red and flushed. ‘Nice work,’ they say to Jasper. Me, they ogle, because they didn’t know I had it in me. And yet, they did, because Evie says it’s ‘just like’ me to open my mouth and take in the sea instead of a boy.
It is just like me.
I look at Jasper, who is being pulled up by someone and invited to have a beer. I look at Evie, who’s yanked me up too and is walking me back to the fire with her arm around my waist, talking about something something something.
I look at the waves. They’re silent now.
I look at Dad, standing by the waves, a gauzy cloud against the water.
He’s silent too.
Dad just saw how useless I am. Or maybe he already knew?
I have nearly died a thousand times.
Okay. Maybe ten.
Okay. Maybe six.
There was the time I fell off the slide when I was five. From the edge of the playground, Dad saw me climb the slide to the top and stand up. Why did I stand? Maybe I was thinking of flying. Maybe I thought I was on a mountain? I don’t remember.
I teetered, and Dad started to run, but no one could run that fast, not even Dad.
You could hear the crack of bone when I hit. My hand flipped all the way back and slapped my arm. Then I screamed.
Dad drove me to the hospital. He kept saying, ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’
I lurched sideways when the car turned corners. I threw up in my booster seat. I remember Dad saying, ‘Why’d you stand up, Biz?’ and, me crying and saying, ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ and Dad saying, ‘You could have died, Biz; if you’d landed on your head you would have died.’
There was the time I came roaring out of Mum in a wave of goo and blood. I was so slippery the midwife could have dropped me, Dad said. It’s a miracle she didn’t.
There was the time before Dad died when he couldn’t sit still. He kept pacing through rooms, out the back verandah, out the front drive, up and down the stairs. Mum said then he was just restless, that his legs were restless.
She said, ‘Go for a run, Stephen,’ and he said, ‘I can’t.’
I showed him how to run with Bump. The dog and I went up the long drive so fast we left Dad behind, and when we got to the road, we almost forgot to stop and a yellow car drove past us so fast it made my body shake. Bump barked and barked. When we came back to the house, Mum said Dad was so tired from watching us run, he’d gone to have a nap.
There was the time I walked into the sea and the sea almost took me, but a boy pulled me out and didn’t speak to me afterwards, not once.
There was the time I was seven and saw my father in that room, in that wooden house on stilts, and I took off down the stairs, onto the back verandah and down the steep slope, tumbling almost over, almost splitting my crown like Jack or Jill.
I bolted over the creek and up the other side, scrambling to the little paddock with the brown horse and the big fig tree, and the tree’s arms lifted me up and up until I was at the top and I wrapped my legs and arms around the big branch and shut my eyes until night came. Then Grandpa stood at the bottom of the tree and called my name.
I could have fallen from that tree. It was tall. I could have flown and fallen. I could have broken my neck. And the last thing I would have seen was the sky with its blinky stars. Or the broad leaves of the fig tree. Or Grandpa’s wrinkly face. Or Dad, with his eyes widewidewide, so sad to see me go.
So it turns out I have almost died somewhere between six and ∞ times.
I am dead in infinite alternate universes. I am mostly and most likely dead. I am dead, now, here. All doors opening, all doors closed.
Jasper has found a group to sit with. He sits with a bunch of guys—surfers, stoners, Suryan, who sent Grace the dick pic, and Tim, who Evie likes and is the school cross-country champion. They’re all quite hot but also stupid.
Jasper hasn’t spoken to me since I died in the waves. Almost died. Died in an alternate universe in the waves.
He hasn’t looked at me once all week, even though I’ve looked at him, pointedly, in class. I’ve also lingered when leaving English and maths but he’s walked right past me like I’m not there. I’ve counted how many times he hasn’t spoken and hasn’t looked. It’s going into the triple digits.
Well, fuck Hero Jasper, who can’t be bothered to say hello to the girl he saved. It’s not like I asked him to do it. I could have swum myself to shore. I am no damsel.
When I pass the stupid boys they look at me with new eyes—they move over my face, arms, boobs, legs, the space between my legs, the space they picture under my dress.
I tell Grace by the lockers. ‘They’re stripping me as I walk, Grace. Arseholes. They think I was doing it with Jasper in the ocean. They think I’m about to have sex with them, which is seriously the most revolting—’
‘I’m sure they’re not thinking that, Biz.’ Grace is digging through her locker, searching for something.
I raise my eyebrows. ‘Seriously?’
Grace’s voice is muffled; she’s got her head deep in the locker now. ‘Biz, they don’t think you were having sex with Jasper in the ocean.’
‘How do you know?’
Grace comes out of the locker, holding up her calculator. ‘Ha! Found it!’
‘How do you know, Grace?’
Grace won’t catch my eye. She crouches over her backpack and tries to cram the calculator in.
‘Grace?’
‘I told Suryan and Suryan told them,’ she says, finally. She zips up her bag. She straightens and looks at me.
‘Suryan. Penis photo guy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re talking to him now? So the thing at the beach was an actual Thing?’
‘Yeah,’ Grace says, and shrugs.
Grace heaves her pack onto her back. Our bags weigh a thousand kilos. I’ve got mine on and I can feel my bones bending. We both have four assignments due next week. We haven’t had a break from homework in months, and I don’t understand why the teachers don’t talk to each other and space all this shit out, or why Grace is talking to Suryan, who sent her a photograph of his wrinkled penis. She’s talking to him and the kiss at the beach wasn’t just a kiss at the beach, and now that I think of it, she wasn’t standing with Evie and the others when I was flopped on the beach, mostly dead.
We walk out of school together. It’s Friday. Every Friday we go to Grace’s house. We swim, study, eat.
‘Grace,’ I say.
‘Mm-hmm?’ says Grace, looking around the car park.
‘Is there any information you want to share with me?’
Grace smiles, and I think she’s smiling at me because she has to be kidding—she must be about to tell me she’s joking—but her smile is directed past me, at someone leaving the car park with his arm out the window. It’s Suryan, Penis Guy. And Jasper’s in the back too, looking the other way, and the boy driving pulls out onto the road with a squeal, which the teacher on car park duty doesn’t like at all.
Turns out Grace and Suryan are the real deal: boyfriend and girlfriend.
Lovers.
Turns out Grace didn’t come and see me die on the beach last weekend because she was having sex with Suryan in the dunes.
‘Did he use a condom?’ I ask her after our swim, over Doritos and dried apricots and guacamole.
‘Of course,’ says Grace, nibbling on a chip.
‘Oh my God, Grace,’ I say. I shove an apricot in my mouth but it tastes wrinkly, which makes me think of penises, and I have to spit it out into the bush next to Grace’s pool deck.
‘Gross, Biz,’ says Grace. ‘And also, a waste of a perfectly good apricot.’
I stare at her. ‘You seem very calm for someone who had sex in a dune.’
‘I was ready,’ Grace says. ‘I wanted to see what it was like.’
‘What was it like?’
‘A bit pinchy. He was kind of awkward, and it was fast. Like, it was over in maybe a minute, so there’s room for improvement.’ Grace smiles, clearly reminiscing.
‘So it hurt?’
‘A bit, but Biz, that’s how it is the first time.’
Already Grace sounds a trillion years older than me. Jesus, I must sound like a child. Did it hurt? Of course it hurts. You’re ripping something open that will never come back together again. All the king’s horses.
‘And now you’re going out with him,’ I say, my voice flat.
‘Yeah, and it turns out he likes anime, Biz, and he likes the same music and he’s even read The Great Gatsby.’
‘Did he like it?’
‘Well—he preferred the movie.’
‘DiCaprio or Redford?’
‘DiCaprio.’
We both make a face, and then we both start laughing because, really?
Grace shoves at my shoulder and I shove her back and for a second we look like an old photograph of us from a month ago, when we were whole and untouchable and nothing at all had changed between us.
I study at Grace’s for about an hour after our swim and then she gets a text from Penis Guy. She looks up at me, already guilty.
‘Biz,’ she says.
But I know where she’s going with this, because she’s been surreptitiously texting him all afternoon and she keeps laughing at the things he’s written but not saying them to me and it makes me feel like I’m floating, like I’m one of those balloons people let go, even though that balloon is going to fall in the ocean and kill a turtle.
‘Yeah?’ I say.
‘It’s Suryan. He doesn’t have to work tonight.’
‘So?’
‘He wants to see me.’
‘Is he taking you to a movie? To dinner? Ooh, nice,’ I say, sarcasm dripping because Suryan is too stupid to think of either of these things.
‘He’s saying we should go down to the beach again. A bunch of people are going. He says he misses me.’
It’s only been three hours since school finished.
‘Aargh,’ I say.
‘You can come. You’re invited.’
I try to arch a single eyebrow, but end up lifting both.
‘Really,’ says Grace. ‘They said to come. And Jasper’s going to be there,’ she adds, as if this changes anything.
‘So much no to that request, Grace,’ I say, and I stand up.
Grace makes more noises to convince me to come, but I am not interested. When I go, I can tell she’s already thinking about Suryan. Her goodbye sounds like someone calling from a train as it leaves.
Mum and Dad met when she was nineteen and he was twenty-one and the first time they made love, she cried. From happiness, she said, but he kept apologising. ‘Did I hurt you? Oh, God, did I?’
Mum had had a bit too much wine when she told me this story. I was eleven years old. I don’t think she remembers telling it.
Dad loved poetry and the Beatles and Escher’s drawings. He always wore patterned socks. He could juggle.
Dad was also a surfer. At least, he was sort of a surfer. He became a sort-of surfer when he moved from the country to the coast. He’d paddle out behind the break but then forget to catch any waves. Mum said he’d float with his feet dangling, considering the universe, the ocean rising and falling like it was breathing.
Once, a shark brushed by his left leg. Just a whale shark, just bumping, he told Mum, but he was rattled. And then after I was born, Dad said he wouldn’t surf again.
Mum and Dad would walk along the beach with newborn me, near their flat in Sydney. Dad would watch the break and Mum said he looked at the sea like it was a woman he couldn’t touch. She cried then and told him to go back in. But every time he went out with his board, he came back a bit more rattled—like a crack you see on a windshield, a split that starts tiny and just keeps growing.
That’s what Mum said, anyway.
This was glass four, the bottle almost empty. Mum never, ever talked like this.
Mum’s boyfriend had just left us three hours before—ditched Mum, the twins, who’d recently turned one, and me. I heard him tell Mum he was done being her bloody shoulder to cry on, so fuck her, fuck your kids (forgetting, I suppose, that two of them were his), and fuck him (meaning of course, Dad, who wasn’t there to defend himself but I’m sure was listening).
The boyfriend had already packed his truck, so all he had to do was say his piece and shove out the door. It slammed behind him, which made Mum flinch and the twins start to cry.
Mum sat on the couch with the wine bottle all evening. I fed the twins, gave them a bath, and got them into bed. Then I went and sat beside her.
What else, Mum?
‘Your father had a softness inside him that went gooey after you were born,’ she said. He looked the same, but parts of him had loosened. You can’t reconstruct a man like him, she said. You can try. He did try.
‘He tried and tried,’ Mum said. She went to pour more wine, but the bottle was empty.
Dad would get up every morning, go to work, come home, and try to keep moving through the world the same as before. But in his dreams, Mum said, he’d look at his hands and see blood. He’d be out past the break and be holding me, and think, why did he have his baby out past the break, when I was so tiny? He’d see sharks swimming, circling. They’d push at his feet. I’d howl in his arms.
In his dreams, he told Mum, he’d stand over my crib and I’d be wailing. He’d lift me, take me to the change table and undo my little clothes to change my nappy. But I would disintegrate in his hands. All he could see was water.
I’m sure Mum doesn’t remember this conversation. If I asked her, she’d say, ‘No. I didn’t say that. That can’t be true.’
Mum only says good things about Dad to me. I’m like the opposite of one of those worry dolls. I’m the one you tell only happy thoughts to.
That one night with the wine is the only time I remember Mum ever talking about a different Dad, one with cracks. And I was tired and I was young, so maybe it wasn’t true?
Maybe I dreamed it?
It’s hard to tell, because I don’t have a recording. All I have is the look on her face, as she said I was the reason Dad turned sad. It printed itself onto me, in the dark as she spoke.
Three weekends later, I’ve succumbed. I’m at the beach with most of the stupid boys and Grace and Evie and the others. We seem to have amalgamated so now we are The Posse Et Al. and I’m so drunk I can barely see.
It’s the end of school holidays and we’re drowning our sorrows with beer and litre bottles of vodka. I’ve hardly seen Grace during break because she’s been having sex all over her house with Suryan while her parents are at a conference. Normally when her parents are away, I sleep over; normally Grace and I stay up all night watching bad ’80s rom-coms. Normally, normally, normally.
The boys are squidges, making sounds like farting bears and wrestling in the sand. They offer me something else to drink and another. I drink everything I’m given. I’m impervious to harm—alcohol poisoning, drownings, grief. Nothing can take me down.
