James
These fights typically happened when I came home from working up north in the mines. After a two week stint, I'd arrive home exhausted, in desperate need of some rest and relaxation, just to feel like a human being again. The first couple of days would be fine but then K would start complaining, telling me that she was run off her feet what with the housework and the girls. As far as I could see, the house was usually in fucking disarray with piles of washing everywhere. I'm not saying my wife was lazy but I felt she could have done better. If we could have swapped places, I would have been more than happy to be a stay-at-home-dad. I would have no problems with her doing my job. Anyway, it was left to me to stock the kitchen and to 'give her a break'. I got some women in to give the place a really good clean and make it liveable. I never came out directly and said this but I'd noticed other wives, my friend's wives, managed to keep the domestic show going so why couldn't K? On top of this, K was paranoid about every other woman that I came into contact with, no matter how trivial that contact was. It was draining. She would needle me and invent things in her mind, things about imaginary women. Infidelities. She would get suspicious over the most innocuous, innocent texts on my phone. All I wanted to do was have a few beers and relax with my kids, fit back into family life and chill out. I certainly didn't want to play twenty questions every time I walked through the fucking door.
One hot, hungover Sunday morning, the needling got so bad that I walked out, slamming the screen door behind me. In the process, I stepped on and broke my daughter's plastic Barbie car. This was an accident but it would undoubtedly be added onto the never ending list of my uncaring, vengeful acts. From my perspective, I thought why is it there in the first place? Why can't you organise the house so there aren't plastic toys everywhere? I was actually afraid of what would happen if I stayed there any longer. I do have a temper, okay? I'm not denying that. Anyway, I got in the car, reversed up the driveway, spilt out into the street and took off. That was me, gone.
On a whim, I drove over to Vincent's place in the avenues. Vincent was an old friend, a mate, the kind I probably should have cut loose years ago but never got around to doing so. That's the problem with a small, isolated city like ours: people tend to hang around long after the emotional attachment has ceased. It becomes problematic when your life changes in a significant way but they remain stuck in place. He was home. We sat out in Vincent's back garden and drank the beer I'd picked up on the way over (First thing was first, I needed to get my hangover under control). We talked about old times, music, about women and about life. We remained in the shade, patiently brushing flies off our faces, the day's heat pressing down. Admittedly I did most of the talking while Vincent played DJ, getting up occasionally to hack at a tree with a rusty machete. Like I say, it was hot as hell, the temperature cranking up over 40 degrees. As the alcohol began to loosen me up, I found myself beginning to envy Vincent's life. Almost. He still lived like a student with practically zero responsibilities. He lived alone in this sprawling old house, paying peanuts for rent. I know he had the occasional girlfriend which he trawled from the University campus. From what I gathered, he kept these women at arm's length. He wasn't one of these guys who will cover up his lack of ability or luck with woman, bragging about the need to maintain a bachelor's sovereignty when really they are desperately lonely. Even in his late thirties, Vincent was genuinely happy to spend most of his time alone. It was all about simplicity with old Vincent. Compared to me, with my two mortgages, including the investment property and all the rest of it (the car payments and the holidays), he had practically nothing. Zip. You know these minimalist types? These guys who project that aura of irritating condensation? Who are actually proud they have done nothing and have nothing? Vincent worked when it suited him. He had this bullshit job history and when the topic of money came up, he would dust off his Marxist rhetoric, reminding us poor fools in the mainstream how misguided we were playing the consumer game. In terms of material acquisition, his only weakness was rock and roll memorabilia that he had collected over the years. Admittedly, It was an amazing collection; a museum dedicated to our youth. Framed posters, rare vinyl pressings, that kind of thing. He certainly valued the past. He even drove the same little car he'd had back in uni when we all first met, a little shitbox which ran of the smell of an oily rag and had itself become a collector's item. In fact, everything about Vincent’s life was steeped in the resin of nostalgia. Honestly, I thought it was sad. Vincent prided himself on not forgetting, on doing his best not to change and move with the times. To my way of thinking, life is about change. Evolution is crucial. But here he was, happiest when he was dwelling in the past, even as these memories became idealised and distorted. (Funny, we were so close back then yet we had two very separate perspectives on what our uni years were like. I remember that time as a dull, uneventful period which I wanted to get through as quickly as possible. Vincent relished the entire experience). He still talked about the things that happened twenty years three ago like it was only yesterday.
Anyway, after a few beers, we decided to go for a swim. The coast was only 5 km away. We took my car. At my insistence, we stopped along the way to pick up more beer from an old hotel we'd frequent once or twice as students, a drab place dominated by betting screens and hostile regulars. Then we were at the beach, locking up the car in the empty lot before moving up the path that cut through the dog shit dunes and led the way to the water. After ten minutes of calf taxing dune climbing, the Indian Ocean came into view through the sea grass. We felt like explorers who had just discovered El Dorado. There was no one else around, the beach was ours. We finished off our beers, guzzling down the last dregs. The water was champagne. We waded out, diving under the tumbling walls of advancing white foam, popping up on the other side in time to see the next wave forming, a gelatinous hump, a muscle flexing, before taking shape, curling in on itself. It was fun at first but then things changed. We'd badly misjudged the potential the conditions. The surf was big which wasn't a problem: we’d both grown up on these beaches so we were used to larger waves. The problem was the currents shifting unseen beneath the surface, currents which quickly pulled us down the beach, into deeper water. As far as I could tell, we became stuck between a sandbar and the shore, in a fairly deep trough. Deep enough to drown in. We were both treading water while contending with the incoming rush of whitewash, quickly becoming tired from the exertion. When I looked over, I could see the panic in Vincent's face, in his eyes. I could tell he was trying to stay calm and look like he was in control but he wasn't. Neither of us were. In retrospect, someone should have simply said something, shouted out, acknowledging the situation for what it had become. Dangerous. Life threatening. Maybe we would have both taken the necessary steps earlier on? Anyway, I was exhausted, lost in the roar of the breakers, my arms getting heavier by the minute. I decided that I needed to take action, that I needed to get myself back onto dry land. Otherwise? Well....I was going to drown if I didn't. I swam blindly and as hard as I could against the current. After a few moments of what seemed like swimming in place, a wave scooped me up, tilted the world over on its side before dumping me violently. Then I was under, tumbling in a blizzard of foam and sand, bumping off the bottom, spinning out into the dark. I ran out of breath well before I found the surface but when I did come up, I was in the shallows, my lungs full of seawater, my left shoulder aching. I felt like I'd been thrown out of a moving car. I concentrated on keeping my feet planted as the flow of the ocean changed direction again and attempted to suck me back out. I was determined not to lose ground. I got bowled over by another incoming wave before reaching the shore. This was a blessing in disguise because at least it kept me moving in the right direction.
Once I was back on dry land, I had to double over and puke up seawater. It took me a while to get myself together but when did, I looked up and down the empty beach and my first thought was, Vincent you bloody idiot, you've gone and drowned yourself! And guess what? That's exactly what he had done. I didn't know this while I was still on all fours spewing up half the ocean. I assumed he would show up like me, bedraggled and a little beaten up, that we would both drive home with a story to tell. Remember the time we nearly drowned?
I walked up and down the beach and found nothing. A fresh panic began to set in and maybe five minutes later a jogger appeared. He was an older guy. Right away he could see I was distressed. He tried to take control of the situation because I must have been ranting by then. I don't remember exactly what I said. Predictably, from that point on everything became horribly detached. Things happened and people showed up. These people asked lots of questions which I answered as best I could. It seemed like we were there for hours. I became the passive centre of an unscheduled drama involving rescue vehicles with flashing lights and people wearing high-vis clothing. They were all active, moving ahead, taking the required steps, setting a procedure into motion, whereas I was still struggling to process this new horrible fact: Vincent had drowned. Someone told me (or maybe I imaged someone telling me) that the search went on well after dark. Regardless, I had a clear image of a helicopter spotlight probing the dark ocean even though, by the time darkness fell, I had been driven back to the police station.
I met Vincent's sister at the airport. I drove her to the coroner's office. By then they had recovered the body. Vincent had spent four days out in the ocean before being returned to shore a few kilometres south of where we’d originally gone in. I was told that he wasn't in particularly good shape when they pulled him out. He was bloated and 'a bit chewed up' which is common in these situations. His sister was different to what I remembered. Or maybe she had changed? She had become a hardened and permanently harassed middle-aged woman. She was unhealthily thin and I got the impression that she spent most of her time worrying about money. It was pretty clear to me that her primary concern was how her brother's death would impact on her financially. There was a small ceremony held in Kings Park Botanical Gardens, attended by twenty or so people. Vincent's sister wasn’t interested in the memorabilia. She called it 'junk'. Probably more hassle than it's worth. It's all yours, she said, as if meddling any further in her brother's life was sure to incur more problems. I tried to explain to her that she could probably make a bit of cash from the sale of these items but she wasn't interested. I dropped her at the airport a few days after the funeral. By then Vincent's house had been cleared out and most of his personal effects had either been taken back to Queensland or to the local dump.
I packed up all the memorabilia and, as a temporary measure, stored it in my garage, filling the space floor to ceiling with boxes. About two weeks after all the running around and organisation, I started to have a reaction to what had happened on the beach, something I would later understand was delayed shock. At night, I dreamt it was actually me slipping beneath the surface of the water, my lungs flooding, my eyes still open, as I was stuck dumb by the wonder and final frustration of my own unexpected death, too tired to fight against the inevitable. In the dream, my body gave out its last involuntary convulsions and spasms, at which point, I had no choice but to give in and go under. There was no more fight left. In the dream, the sky above me was full of molten reds and purples but then it was gone as I went deeper, down beneath the waves, the impatient water plugging my ears, flooding into my lungs. And then, I'd wake myself up, shouting at the ceiling, the bedside lights flooding the room, K and the girls freaking, clutching each other. For weeks we were all on edge because of this reoccurring dream and my reaction to it. And each time I looked in the mirror, I saw Vincent, the sanctimonious bastard, smiling and saying, it's all over far too quickly mate, believe me. Far quicker than you think. Vincent laughing, saying, you’ll see mate, you'll see. He wasn't a movie ghost, like a special effect, but he was there nevertheless. The recently deceased residing in my private moments of introspection, in my drifting imagination. In fact, the first dead person I had ever had a regular, ongoing conversation with, a completely ordinary conversation as if we had both come out of the ocean that day unscathed. How are you gonna make it right? Vincent asked me, one morning in the fogged up bathroom mirror. Make what right? I asked. Your fucked up life, he laughed.
He was right.
The next time I flew up north for work, I texted Juliette from the airport, told her that I needed to see her right away. This was not the unusual. As far as Juliette was concerned, my texts had long since lost any kind of urgency. We met at the hotel near the centre of town and I called the whole thing off. Naively, I thought our affair would be done and dusted without any blowback. Unable to maintain eye contact, I told her I was spreading myself too thin, that I'd had something of a revelation, what with Vincent passing on, and that this whole thing, Juliette and myself meeting and fucking in secret was over. I couldn't stomach the lie anymore. After Vincent's death, everything felt different, as if the stakes had become higher. I recognised that I had been pushing my luck up until that point. I had a family, yet somehow that wasn't enough for me. I had been acting like a thirty-five-year adolescent and I had been taking all of it, everything that was important, for granted. It was time to grow up because suddenly it became clear to me that I was putting everything that really mattered in jeopardy. All that posturing that day on the beach with Vincent, all that talk about making something of your life....about taking action and making decisions that mattered. Me telling Vince, just before we went in the water, that he should get his act together and do something with his life. Grow up. Well, I decided that I needed to stop being a hypocrite and start living up to the bullshit I was spouting. It was as simple as that.
Two years prior to this, when Juliette and I first got together, we established that our affair would come to an end one day. This was a fact. We'd agreed that there would be no protests or dragged out scenes. Those were the contractual rules we had established. In this way, our relationship was to remain contained and private. It was ours alone. We would get want we wanted out of each other and then we would part ways. And when that day came, no matter who had instigated the split, we’d both act like adults. Undoubtedly it would be a sad day but when it came, we would both walk away and get on with our lives.
The problem was Juliette's grasp of the rules had changed over the course of that two years. When it came down to it, she wasn't so keen on letting go without a fight and as such, she made a scene. 'I invested two years of my life in….’ etc, etc. Had I missed something? Had I unconsciously promised her more than was on offer? Maybe I had. Those incremental compromises. Those slight deviations from the truth. Mounting inconsistencies that, as time went by, created tiny cracks in our secret narrative which in turn led to a false sense of hope. So yes, there was a scene. A scene that I wasn’t prepared for. Lots of shouting and crying. Threats which I ignored.
The following day I tried to go to work as normal. I thought my problem with Juliette might just fade away overnight. I was wrong. Juliette's uncle was high up in the mine, a manager. I was taken off the roster without an explanation. They called me into the office, sat me down and said they were in the process of 'restructuring' and that I would be notified when they had some more work. When do you think that might that be? I asked. When we need you, one of them said, bringing the conversation to a conclusion. So that was it. I was on a casual contract and since I didn't have any other options up there, including reasonably priced accommodation, I flew back down south. K was immediately suspicious. Why was I home so early, she wanted to know. What had happened? I came up with an excuse but then she found a string of missed calls on my phone from Juliette. K called Juliette’s number and had a conversation with her while I was in the shower. And when I came back into the bedroom, a towel around my waist, K had just gotten off the phone and the shit hit the fan. I was caught on the back foot, trying to process what had just happened, my head spinning. It was a hell of a lot to deal with. Suddenly my wife knew everything and Vincent...well...he was laughing at me in the hallway mirror. Not in a cruel way, no, more like he was saying, see? I told you. I knew you couldn't keep it up forever. Eventually, it all comes out mate, especially for a greedy fucker like you.
This preceded, probably even triggered, my family's financial collapse. First, the debt collectors came for the car and then our investment property down south. Then the fins began circling our house in the city. Funny how easy it is to ignore all the letters and notifications, to stuff them in a drawer and pretend they don't exist. You work so hard to build up a life, to maintain it and then, one day, it's all gone, in what seems like an instant. I was in no condition to deal with the reality of that situation. I spent my all time and energy trying to make amends with K, trying to keep my family together. I deserved everything I got thrown at me for sure but it was still hell on earth. I had to learn how to be humble, how to crawl. Everyday K reminded me that I was fighting a losing battle. Statistically speaking the chances of her forgiving me, of our relationship surviving, let alone of us becoming a cohesive family again, were slim to nil. Anyway, I ignored the statistics. I was determined to make it work. I had to.
Financially, once we'd hit rock bottom, I spent a month selling off all Vincent's memorabilia. I advertised everything online. I netted a fair bit of money from the sales. I kept one or two of the rare posters for myself. (The Who, The Stones) while I watched the rest of it being carefully loaded into vehicles parked on my street as I counted out the cash I received from each sale. These people, these investors and super fans, they wanted this stuff and they were willing to pay for it. Seeing them suppress their excitement as they took possession of these items, again it occurred to me that some people run towards the future while others move in the opposite direction. With the money, I bought a camper van, an older but reliable model. It slept four adults comfortably. The fuel efficiency was for shit but you can't have everything. Anyway, it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. We would go travelling around the country. I felt that we stood a better chance of becoming a functioning family again if I could remove K and the girls from our failing context and gain some perspective.
And selling off the family house meant a fair bit of the financial pressure dissipated. With the sale, we were still in debt but there was hope. As far as the travelling went, I also hoped that by shaking things up a bit, K would let me off the hook for this Juliette thing, or at least begin to entertain the idea. She never did. It would always be hanging over us, souring everything K and I had built together. It was my fault. Of course. I know that. The point was, we had a terrible year on the road. A year of dusty campgrounds and shit kicking seasonal jobs. A year of broken plastic chairs and nomadic drifting. The arguing got so bad that I started sleeping in the swag outside, just to get out of the camper's confined space and give K and girls some space. I became this circling, unwashed figure, always on the peripheral, always coming in from the expanses of sun-drenched nothingness, begging for forgiveness, twigs in my hair. Week after week this went on, my family disintegrating, coming apart at the seams as we continued to move in a clockwise direction around the country.
Finally, when we reached the East Coast, the transmission and the alternator went at the same time. These mechanical failures coinciding with the final emotional breakdown between K and myself. Using the last of our cash, I flew them all back to Perth. I stayed on, trying to find more work, the separation premised on some vague plan that I’d return to the West Coast one day soon, that we’d become a whole family again. From the moment the girls disappeared into the departure terminal, it became easier for me to think of K as my estranged wife, someone who had slipped into the background of my life. It was actually a relief to allow this new classification to form in my mind. Anyway, that's what I told Rachael when I first met her. By then the camper van had become a stationary domicile on the edge of a small New South Wales town, weeds growing up into the wheel wells, already beginning to entwine the axel as if the place itself was laying claim on my life.
The next time I saw my daughters was two years later when I flew back to Perth deal with my brother. By then Rachael, who was eight years younger than me, was pregnant with my third child. The funny thing was K and I never officiated our separation. We just stopped talking. Legally, I guess I am still married to her. We just silently transitioned out of each other's lives. She might have come after me one day but I don't know what she would hope to get. I had no money. Rachel and I now live on a property in the middle of nowhere. We grow our own vegetables. I drive a car that has no doors. A chassis with an engine.
I should have done more for my daughters. I just couldn't figure out to become something more than a peripheral figure in their lives, a family member of no real importance. As the years rolled on, I was shocked each time our paths crossed, shocked at how quickly time had changed them: University. Jobs. Boyfriends. Husbands. Babies. The first signs of middle age. Then middle-age proper.
The idea of Vincent as a ghost or an after image projected forward from that day on the beach when his life was cut short, stayed with me. It became part of me. When I talked to myself, muttering under my breath, it was probably Vincent I was consulting even as I continued to live my life, getting older while he remained fixed in past, incapable of advancing beyond that hot afternoon. I felt that he had brought about unwanted change in my life at an accelerated rate and sometimes this made me resentful. Angry. And of course, these feelings of anger made me feel guilty. It was something I couldn't resolve. It was something that changed me.
I never did go swimming in the Indian Ocean again.
Vincent
James and I sat around in my back garden, in the shade, drinking beer on his insistence. As James was keen to point out, he worked hard and he played even harder. (You often hear this rationale from guys who are basically determined to protect their adolescent drinking tendencies). I always suspected that James would become one of these guys who would burn out by the age of forty. Ordinarily, I don't drink during the day but in that situation, I gave in so James wouldn't be forced to drink alone. And in doing so, the day swerved off in an unexpected direction which I wasn't entirely opposed to. I had planned to do some study, clean up a bit but generally, I was feeling unmotivated. So if I'm being totally honest, James did prove to be a welcome distraction.
Anyway, James started talking, mulling over all the current problems in his life, allocating me to the role of his unpaid therapist. In turn, I listened, alert to those opportunities where I could introduce the idea of his own culpability (I can only listen to someone's pity party for so long). Truthfully? I don’t know what happened to James. He reminded me of Pacman, that old 80's arcade game character, a pixilated circle whose sole purpose is to tear around a maze mechanically eating up everything in its path while being chased by ghosts. Now what or who those ghosts were, I didn't know. I will say that something was bothering him that afternoon, something he kept edging around, alluding to. Or at least that was the impression I got, that beyond the financial pressures, there was something causing tension in his household. I put James at around the seventh or eighth beer mark before he would spill his guts completely, such was his tolerance to alcohol. I think we only got four beer deep while we were still at my place so the real revelation was yet to come. In any case, in terms of personal change, he had become so garishly materialistic, so concerned with the blind acquisition of things and money. I truly think it had taken over his entire life.
It was hot, I mean really hot, so we decided to go down to the beach. We took the old, well-established route along the back streets. In other words, the police free run. After picking up a few more beers, we found parking and walked up through the dunes, our towels slung over our shoulders. I remember the drone of flies and the heat suddenly intensifying because the dunes had effectively sheltered us from the sea breeze. I had a headache from the four beers I'd already drunk and I was feeling a little pissed. What had happened to the afternoon? Somehow we had shifted into this late phase of the day. By the time we came down the final dune and reached the water's edge, the sun was just about ready to balance itself on the horizon, the light turning the water into a dimpled metal surface. I realised that James was still rattling on about money and the various pressures which threatened to derail his life. Again, I got the impression that he was on the verge of telling me something significant, something that he needed to get off his chest. In that moment I wished he would get on with it. I wanted to enjoy the moment but I couldn't because James was still rattling on, trying to give himself permission to tell the truth, judging whether or not I would support him, tiring me out.
We finished our beers, stripped down and went in for a swim. The waves were huge, hammering the shore with a monotonous grace, the ocean repeatedly gathering itself up, slowly sculpting itself in tubes and walls, before tilting over and breaking into white rubble. We went out chest-deep, diving under these monsters, scooping along the bottom to pop up on the other side before repeating the process. This was exhilarating at first, cleansing even. Especially after what seemed like hours of intense conversation about James's problems. But then I began to realise I was caught in a strong current and that, combined with the pummelling waves, we had drifted into a fairly dangerous situation. I caught flashes of James struggling in the surf, just as I was, trying to get back to the shore. I could see he was also fighting against the current and that he was out of his depth, treading water. We had both drifted down the beach quite a distance into a hole, an area between the shallows and a sand bar. It occurred to me that we were both going to run out of energy and drown. Although it seemed counter intuitive, I stopped fighting and swam out, in the other direction, into the surf. I think I may have called out to James but I can't be sure. The last I saw of him he was still fighting to get back in, basically swimming in place.
Once I was beyond the break, I floated for a while to regained my strength. I remember my heart beating in my ears and I remember seeing the sky overhead full of vibrant colours. Reds, purples and gold, all slowly down shifting, the first taint of evening becoming evident on the edges of the horizon. The next time I raised my head and looked back I realised that I was quite far out. It shocked me, seeing the dunes and the hotel down the coast in miniature. At this point I started swimming parallel to the shore, to get free of the current. After a while, my panic under control, I started swimming slowly back in, telling myself that the distance I needed to cover was negligible, nothing at all to worry about, that I could do it easily, one stroke at a time even if it took all night. Eventually, I came ashore on a much calmer section of the beach, well away from where we'd started out. I was exhausted but I was proud of myself, proud that I'd had the presence of mind to do the right thing and get back in safely.
I walked back to our stuff which was about a kilometre along the sand. And I started searching for James. I assumed that he'd made it back in, that eventually he would appear and we would we would gather up our stuff, trek back to the car and drive home, comparing notes on our little hair-raising experience along the way. I envisioned sobering up and getting some dinner together, probably an early night. I assumed James would have swum back in long ago and would be waiting on the sand, ready to take the piss out of me for my elaborate route back to shore. When I arrived back at our stuff (our towels and phones and the remaining warm bottles of beer) there was still no sign of James. All I could see was the empty beach stretched out in three directions and the ocean. This was strange. Unless he had left all our shit and walked back to the car, something was wrong. I started to panic again but this time not for my own safety. In that moment, I had no idea what to do. Instinctively I went for my phone but that was pointless because James's phone was still there.
About five minutes later a jogger appeared, a figure in the far distance who initially I thought might be James. The closer this guy got, the more my panic increased. I remember the jogger’s face very clearly. He was an older guy with sandy hair and deep crows feet, presumably from spending significant amounts of time down on the beach. I remember thinking, thank god, someone with whom I can confirm this new development: that James is missing. Someone who will help me find a reason for his disappearance. I remember the jogger talking to me but I don't remember what he said. I was shaking violently. I felt like I was covered in a layer of cold rubber. My hand, when I raised it to wipe my face, became a blur of fingers. Then the jogger was calling someone on my cell phone. Then, shuttle forward in time, through more garbled and anguished conversation with the jogger, the police arrived and I was standing in the car park, wrapped in a towel, the lights from an emergency vehicle producing stuttering, double shadows on the concrete. Move forward again and I was in the back of a police vehicle, going down the coastal highway, following the corridor of yellow street lights and beach houses, my bathers still damp, sand on my feet and ankles. I wasn't under arrest but I was being treated with a vague kind of contempt. They were drinking. Bloody idiots, I held someone say. Then I was at the cop station, sitting in the waiting area. I have this memory of a police helicopter moving slowly up and down the beach, combing the water for James's body but that couldn't be a real memory because I had already left the beach by that point.
I met K at the police station. I don't know how much time had passed by that point. I tried to say something, to console her but she flinched like she'd been electrocuted when I put my hand on her shoulder. What were you doing out there? She kept asking me. I didn't have an answer for her. The alcohol was worthy of a lecture from the cops but the tragedy of the situation superseded any legal ramifications. I made my statement and then I left. When I arrived home, my house felt completely normal and, just any other night, I moved from room to room, turning on lights, settling in for...in for what? I didn't know what to do. I couldn't imagine eating, couldn't sleep, couldn’t do anything really. I just sat there in the living room, the white noise of the house gathering, building, growing louder and louder, perfectly filling each room, waiting for me to break the spell by turn on some music or the telly. Or picking up my phone. But I didn't do any of these things. I let that noise expand and fill the space until it felt like the walls and roof were straining and windows were about to explode. And I just sat there, encased in that persistent hum, a headache from the alcohol I'd consumed earlier forming behind my eyes.
The next couple of days were strangely uneventful. I called my sister in Queensland just to touch base but as usual, she was consumed with her own petty problems. The funeral was held in Kings Park. In the Botanical Gardens. I stood on the edge of the crowd, at the back, feeling a little bit intrusive and culpable even though the drowning had clearly been an accident. We were all dressed formally and the sun was hot and someone read a poem. His daughters released two balloons which I watched rising up into the atmosphere for what seemed like a long time before they disappeared.
After that, I tried to resume the normal course of my life but I couldn't. I had work to do, plenty of work. I had lectures to prepare and papers to mark but it all seemed so trivial now. I started ignoring my emails. I had a reoccurring dream. In this dream, I was out in the ocean, once again caught in the waves, only this time I was the one who was going under. It was almost a relief. Each time, I’d slip under the surface and begin to sink down into the inky darkness, overwhelmed by the currents. I’d hold my breath for as long as possible but eventually, I would be forced to take my first inhalation of seawater and I would suffocate. My lung flooded, I would be dead but somehow aware of my situation. I'd drift off into the vast ocean, bumping along the bottom, periodically feeling the tug and jerk of being slowly eaten by darting creatures. And four days later, when I found my way back to land, crawling on all fours up out of the ocean, I would try to resume my life but it was embarrassing and impractical because I was ghost inhabiting a rotten sea corpse. Eventually, I would have no choice but to return to the ocean, to walk back in and that was it, the end of the dream. I'd wake up safe in my bed, relaxed, the sheets drenched with sweat.
One night, in search of some sort of answer, I found myself at K’s front door. By that point, it seemed like my life had come to a complete stand still and I was incapable of doing anything productive. K answered the door and we had a long conversation out on the veranda, under a bare, insect assaulted light bulb. I couldn't figure out if K was comforting me or visa verse. I also wondered if I had the right to feel this kind of remorse? James was someone I had recategorised as an 'estranged friend' so what right did I have to feel this kind of debilitating grief? And in relation to what K and the girls must have been going through, what business did I have to come moping around? Regardless, I kept replaying the conversation James and I had that day on the beach, just before we went in the ocean. Our conversation about responsibility and the pitfalls of leading an inconsequential life. His death had severed to underscore this notion. I could how it could all be taken away in an instant. Gone. And what had James left behind? What was his impression? This grieving woman, his two daughters, a group of people whose grief stretched out to affect more connected lives. And if this had happened to me? If I was the one who died that day? I can honestly say there would be nothing. I would have done nothing significant with my life and therefore, in a way, I would have been nothing. In light of James's death, I decided I needed to find a real purpose. Misguidedly, I thought I would simply slot in and fill James's vacancy. This was to be my purpose. As such, I kept showing up at K's place, trying to find ways to help them out, to insinuate myself into their lives, until finally, K confronted me directly. She told me that by hanging around the house, I was making them all very uneasy. Forget about my needs, just being there, my very presence, only served to remind them all that James was gone. No matter how rational or heartfelt I tried to be about my efforts to fill James's shoes, it just didn't work. And the harder I tried, the worse it became. I just couldn't help them. I couldn't fulfil this purpose which had finally been revealed to me. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I persisted. I just wasn't thinking. I was going through this personal crisis of mine, blind to the broader implications of my actions. It all seemed so clear in my mind: K and I had briefly gone out together back when we were at uni so it seemed perfectly reasonable that with some persistence, I could once again become part of her life now that James was gone. As such I started obsessing about K and the girls. I started spending time in her neighbourhood, sitting in my car, out front of her house. I'd go out for a drive and find myself there, on her street. You know what a ghost is, right? Have you ever thought about this? As far as I am concerned, a ghost is simply an ongoing conversation with the past, with a person who isn't there anymore. In other words, it is very much something the living manufacture. Okay. Great! In other words, ghosts are nothing supernatural. I'm telling you about this ghost stuff because I had James's blessing. To move in on K and the Girls. I talked to James on a daily basis after his death. And I know how that sounds but keep in mind what I said about ghosts, that they are simply grief and trauma projected through the human imagination. And I'm my case anger. I did want my life to veer off in this direction. I didn't want to inherit this collection of broken people I was compelled to repair, to make whole again. I was happy before. I really was. I said to James, tell me if I'm doing the right thing brother. Tell me if I should proceed with K and the girls. Go ahead he said. This is your purpose. I am the missing piece. And this is was the basis of my conviction until one night the police knocked on my car window. As I said, I was parked across the street from K's house, most nights of the week, just sitting there, thinking things through. The cops told me to move on, that there had been a complaint, a restraining order. We don’t want to see you around here anymore mate, the older cop said.
After this, after I saw someone, a therapist, and I started working through a few things. I decided to get rid of all the stuff that was cluttering up my life. All of it, including the memorabilia I'd collected, seemed so damn insignificant in light of what happened. I couldn't understand why I'd put so much time and energy into collecting this stuff, how it had become so important to me. It was a distraction, nothing more. I started to advertise online and sell it off. The posters, the albums, all the other rare merchandise. Somehow it felt right to be purging the past, letting it all go. I realised that I had been living in a museum of my own nostalgia, fixated on the lazy allure of youth and freedom. That those tokens of freedom which I valued so highly were simply things manufactured by a company, artefacts, that I had come to place far too much importance on. They held no intrinsic value, not really. Knowing one of these objects was certified as original or a limited addition meant nothing. I felt this misplaced sense of attachment begin to dissipate as soon as the collectors started showing up to hand over their cash for these items. I thought about using the money to travel but I kept delaying buying a ticket. Every two weeks, my therapist would ask me, have you thought any more about travelling? And I would shake my head. No, I hadn't.
One afternoon a woman knocked on my front door. She was interested in a framed setlist of a very famous band's final show in the 1970's. The set list was protected in a sturdy frame and had some notes scrawled in the margins of the soiled page, commenting on the list of songs to be played that night. These two oppositional styles of scripts clearly showed the fractured nature of the band at that time, a division which had resulted from an ongoing argument between the singer and guitarist. I only talked to this woman for a short time, maybe ten minutes. I was drunk that day. The assumption is that alcohol will blot out the past but really it only increases the weight of the mistakes you are forced to live with. Maybe this is what I really mean when I talk about ghosts? An accumulating pressure, a weight slowly added to your conscious, a double exposure, the past leaking into the present. I talked to this woman for longer than the typical collector who dropped by my place during that period. I told her about the set list. Maybe I was horny or lonely? I don't know. After we had concluded our business, we both just stood there, unwilling to end the conversation even though we had no idea where it was heading.
The next time I saw her was at the public swimming pool in Leederville. I was sitting on the concrete steps shaving just completed some laps. I was rapidly drip-drying, thinking about the mechanical exertion and the concluding summersault of each lap, coming out of the spell of repetition while estimating how much time I could afford in the sun when her shadow fell over me. We talked for another twenty minutes or so. She was dressed in a one-piece. I was attracted to her. Sexually. She had a newspaper in her hand, a pair of sunglasses propped up on her head. This meeting, this conversation, led to further meetings at the same pool as the weeks progressed and the hot weather persisted. Which in turn resulted in a planned meeting beyond the chlorine dazzle of the pool, a first date, with more dates to follow when she was back in town from her job up north in the mines. And eventually, this led us into a relationship. Her name was Juliette. And later, when we had established that ours would be a proper, lasting relationship, something beyond physical affection, she told me that she had known James, that they had crossed paths up in the mines once or twice. She never told me to what extent. And it never occurred to me that she and James might have had an affair until years later when I found a photograph of James on her computer. A single image of James standing by the edge of the pit, smiling, yellow vehicles in the far distance like brightly coloured toys, contrasted against the flaming red earth. James's face was creased because he was facing into the sun. Why she would have this particular photograph, I didn't know. Not until later. Sometimes the pieces of the puzzle slide into place so slowly that it takes years to identify the larger picture. By then it didn't seem like such a big deal. Besides, ours is a small town. Lives intersect. She never owned up to anything beyond the most casual of acquaintances with James. We were just friends, she said, laughing it off.
Anyway, this was several years into our future together. Before any of this happened, Juliette helped me out of the rut I was in and we got married. We committed to a five-year plan working up north. We paid off a house before the housing market became grossly over-inflated. Then we came into a bit of extra luck, a few wise investments that paid off, money that made our lives quite comfortable. I saw K from time to time. In the city, in supermarkets and in other public places. I never spoke to her. I had no idea what her life was like. I did keep track of her daughters. The girls grew up, became young women and after a suitable length of time had gone by, I tried to contact them. As far as I could tell, the eldest had drifted into a life of dysfunction. There were indications of drugs and alcohol abuse, rehabilitation, a string of bad partners who helped perpetuate the cycle. She began to transfer this unhappiness and dysfunction directly onto her own children. When I attempted to contact her she wanted no part of me. Unbeknown to my wife Juliette, I did manage to help the youngest daughter out financially. I met up with her, reintroduced myself and I told her what I wanted to do. I make it clear that this was an opportunity with no strings attached, that she needed to understand that it was not every day that you receive this kind of offer, therefore, she should seriously think it over. What do you want from me in return? She asked. Nothing, I said.
After some time had gone by, she contacted me and agreed to take my offer. She was nineteen years old. I put her through university, paying for all of her expenses. Then, after I saw she was making something of her life, I set up a small trust fund in her name. No one except her and I knew about this arrangement. It was possible because emotionally speaking, she was built differently from her sister and her mother. I talked to her once or twice a year. She knew very little about the circumstances surrounding her father's death- as much as a child her age at the time would be exposed to and would retain. Years later, when she asked me about what happened, I told her in detail. I refrained from saying it had all been a stupid mistake which it had been. I put it down to luck. It could have easily been me, I said. Yeah, she said, but then none of this, right? She wasn't referring the car park we were standing in. She was talking about her life now as a thirty-year-old photographer, with her husband and two children. True, I replied, impressed as always by her ability to adapt and move forward.
I never did go swimming in the Indian Ocean again.
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