Essay by Ian C. Smith
I remember summer’s end, days like these…
Campground near-deserted, a slight waft of smouldering rubbish hovers like old grief when I wake, my mattress musty, all that shed skin. A coiled, red-bellied black snake as still as a sculpture guards the toilets, so I piss on leaves and sticks, ashes and sand. Beachcombing – a late love – escorted by seagulls, I see Pacific gulls circling, then, as I draw nearer, the body of one, iridescent orange fishing line disappearing down its gullet. As these majestic birds tend their dead a blue boat ploughs its arrogant wake. Here on Bass Strait beaches, life is cheap for creatures. On beaches south of Calais, and elsewhere, where people smugglers rule, human death is just as cheap.
Ozone-drunk, listening to Down by the Salley Gardens, I squint through a dusting of midges. I read somewhere that insect swarms indicate the cleanest air. Wave-wind hums like time’s passage. A pelican pair fish from far-off rocks. The space station orbits continents, islands, ghost wrecks, sailors, my submerged footprints, but those astronauts can’t see my hurt heart, or know this forlorn emotion that wells up, a ravening for the lost raw reek of youthful anticipation. Dozens of minuscule crabs scuttle across my path. Thinking of Prufrock, and my own thin skin, on tiptoe, I navigate their fragile shells.
Days once seemed longer, fuller. Now, though emptier, they bow my shoulders like a penitent’s. A reclusive existence after a tumultuous life is logical. It is mostly free from fresh rancour but memory persists like bloodstains. Believing my life meaningful when part of a family, I hefted a heavy axe splitting harvested fallen timber to stove length, loading it in a wheelbarrow to stack in smoky air, the days shortening. I found a fake bone buried in our dog’s favourite spot, her last gift that left me weak with loss after that wheelbarrow served as her bier. This was beneath the lemon-scented gum that grew ever lankier through family photos. Now I am reminded of one of my favourite book titles: We Don’t Live Here Anymore.
We, then I, walked a circular route, stony farmland, gullies either side where fox spoors triggered various dogs’ gleeful unsuccessful chases. On the track, past a sinkhole that flooded after heavy rain, and wild animals’ lairs, were numerous landmarks I had storybook named. The actions of my vexed cabal-like kin swirled around my mind: wrong assumptions, their umbrage taken embraced to fester. As I trawled what I realised had been their secret cries and whispers, that walk became a retrospective of camouflaged lies and miserable betrayal. Sad-eyed steers, sometimes kookaburras, witnessed my bewildered heartbreaking disappointment, wounded regret I can’t caulk. These faux pilgrimages began or ended with sorrow borne on a step hill below our windswept perch in the Gippsland Hills. Never Let Me Go is another favourite title.
Earlier, together, we travelled, just the two of us out there in the whirling world bunking in unlikely places, fizzing with effrontery. This was pre-social media, even pre-phones, sort of. I think I vaguely imagined my future as movie perfect, death just an abstract drama. In Liverpool, a city the colour of lead then, cracked mosaic tiles and dirty acid-etched side-panelled windows decorating our entrance suggested an elegant past. Beyond lay a wide hallway, a staircase, shadows. We slept behind the first door and presumed others did further along that hallway, their doors closed. A weak electric bulb hung from our high ceiling. Upstairs were more rooms, but we never knew other wraith-like tenants. We also kept to ourselves. We heard TVs, sparrows mounting in the guttering making light of the heart’s longing, soft footfalls, whispered muttering, keys scraping in locks, and water gurgling along pipes seeking its way behind all those closed doors back where we once dreamed.
Returning by light aircraft to my wee cottage in a mainland town I recall exhausting myself reshelving hundreds of books, reaching high, then down on my knees. Walled in by boxes of books, considering an adage, I mind-joked that I was an ageing knight downsized to a cardboard miniature castle. I thought of characters glimpsed again from my intensive reading past like faces framed briefly in a passing train’s windows. Many of those characters lived edgily, doing their best, foundering, heartsore after spiralling bizarre events had forced them to their knees. Their eternal yearning, mistakes, enduring love, touched my heart. In Liverpool I traced a missing aunt who ditched her husband to marry bigamously. Buoyed by possibility, a distant beckoning from unheard voices, their past rites, led me to meeting a dear cousin, and more. Now, still gripped by life but no longer throbbing with it, I peer down at an oil rig, ideas forming. The deceptive sea looks the same. This vast Earth continues to turn.
Photo by Mark Direen
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