An April Day in March by Jordon Conway

November 1, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jordon Conway is an Irish/Australian writer who lives on the east coast of Tasmania. He is a professional landscaper with a background in fabrication, construction and waste management. He has a BFA from the University of Tasmania. His stories draw from his experiences growing up in suburban Brisbane and concern the conditions of working-class life in Australia.

An April Day in March

At 30 years old, in an inclement month of 1981, the now old man purchased a small suburban block of land and began building a two-story house of brick and reinforced concrete. The construction was planned and executed in an intuitive and flawed order, the labour of an impatient and impractical mind.

By the eighth year of construction, it became clear that extensive repairs were needed, and each year following the idea settled deeper that there may be no end to the renovating and repairing of his flawed handiwork. No matter how well he tried to time it, plan it, visualize the exploded view, the reverse engineering necessary to not be lightless, stove-less or without heat and water, it was regularly so. Now in his later life, it became necessary to scale back continuous maintenance and except the fate and limited comforts of his imperfect labours.

The house had become the total of everything he’d achieved in his life. His self-worth waned and pitched with the structure and his back bent like an overburdened rafter as he wound down after a lifetime of struggling with insubstantial endeavours.
From habit, he moved through the house and garden cataloguing the things that needed attention, the flaws and degraded underpinnings. To divert his attention from this irredeemable list and to gain a degree of self-assurance he’d seek out small successes. He’d enjoy switching on the lights over the kitchen countertop to study its polished surface. With his coarse hands gently brushing over it he’d decide that a small triumph was made and the fine grain he devotedly drew out in the wood impressed him and filled him with pride. The cement sheet and wood dust had gone. On the surface of his palm was the grey dust of his skin and the tiny dark fibres of his clothes.

Letting go of needing to maintain the house didn’t come naturally but with practice, over time, what he began to feel wasn’t complete indifference or acceptance but short reprieves. He couldn’t entirely allow that part of the wall he neglected to score properly abandon his mind completely. The inadequately keyed mortar allowed the render to fall away in chunks. But It didn’t occupy him quiet so much or fill him with self-loathing as it once did. The absence of a damp course, a thin inexpensive strip of thin plastic that would have stopped the rising damp, didn’t shame and depress him as much. He could somewhat live with the linoleum curling at its edges around the laundry sink and he drew less from that well of anxiety bore from a lifetime of living up to a standard exceeding his ability.

With this new-found capacity he was lately surprised by the moments he found himself moving back and forth across the unevenly polished wood floor lost in daydreaming and remembering and he found himself sleeping more regularly and restfully. His fingers curled up in his lap formed a grip as though around a brick as he dozed or watched the T.V turned low slumped in his worn leather Morris chair. His firebox rumbling and clicking, expanding and contracting in the cool night air. Often, he’d shuffle off to bed just before dawn.

On one such morning, he stopped at his bedroom window and watched a light rain drift across an erratic sunrise. A young boy caught his eye in the neighbouring back yard. The yard has for years been cluttered and overgrown, an eyesore. Long ago landscaped with dreary slate, crushed limestone and Grey Basalt rock. Pine retaining walls twisted by the weight of poor drainage. Spruces haphazard growth among thick clumps of yellowish agapanthus. The gravel walkway had gone to Titch and Arum lilies. There’d been digs on several occasions over a week before, scrapping back the earth with an excavator and making piles, but it had been quiet since then. The machines engine hood had been left open exposing its vulnerable blue grease coloured core to the weather.
The boy dragged a heavy plastic box across the yard to a long-dry cement pond in the corner near the old man’s fence a few meters from where he stood watching. The pond was bordered with a Basalt wall a half meter high. The boy seemed to be working on his own and after crossing the yard again, and spending some time unravelling a tangled extension cord, he opened the box and pulled out a heavy, grey Jackhammer.

The old man himself worked for many years in construction and landscaping and remembered the bittersweet experience of working alone. The freedom to run his own day, to make and fix his mistakes without scrutiny. But that was all tempered by wanting others to see his invisible efforts. A cut made through an impeding rock to expose its mass deep in the ground, then smashed apart with a Jackhammer and reburied was an effort concealed in the earth forever. A broken pipe he’d dug out repaired and buried again was delicate Invisible labour interred unless he told a co-worker about it. But the old man saw a contradiction in his efforts to not care what his co-workers thought while attempting to prove himself to them. To mention his hidden efforts, to diminish self-effacement, would expose to them his secret desire for approval.

As the old man watched the boy, he remembered unfurling tangled power cables every cold morning of winter and teasing out the knots in the stiffened rubber. Moving tediously back and forth through ankle-deep mud, mixing cement with sodden road base day after day. He remembered as those weeks and years progressed reaching lower and deeper to find the strength to keep going until he felt as hollowed and immovable as a tree stump. Every paycheck was sunk into debts and house repairs preventing any opportunity to step away. And all the small failures at work inhibited his labours at home, keeping him firmly rooted on-site as though ceaselessly stuck in that numbing slush of mud, even in his dreams at night. Some weeks he prayed for injury and a long convalescence. He never saw things progressing and every task was equally tedious right up till the last effort of a long and difficult project. At the completion of a project, his co-workers invariably agree it felt like “it would never end”, but to him, there was never an end and each week, month or year was equally spiritually wasted. With the pressures of work the progress he made on the house, drawn-out over weekends and late evenings was also too slow to perceive any triumph. It seemed to grow imperceptibly like a dark cloud appearing in a clear sky.

He watched the boy pissing against a tree and he wondered if he felt he was being observed. The old man was always painfully shy around other men and felt constantly observed. He’d held in his piss all day if he had too. He’d nudge himself into bushes or jump a fence into a neighbouring yard to find trees or shrubs to conceal himself. His co-workers never went to these lengths, they watched curiously his efforts to cover himself. He understood that being devoid of this nervousness was a great privilege.
He’s watched now, with a touch of envy, the boy pissing against a tree in the far corner of the yard not troubling to conceal himself.

~~~

In his kitchen, the cornices, which hid the uneven cut of cement sheet edges, had long, dark hairline cracks where they no longer met the wall. Sometimes those cracks occupied his mind all day. He’d follow them around the well-lit house at night, into every corner where they met. To clear his mind of these fixations he’d carry them down to the end of the street. He’d take them where the street lights end. Where the trees are gold and reach into the pitch-dark bushland. Where the cold galvanized handrails reminded him of the clicking of boot studs where he’d jump the fence and run along the bitumen around the soccer pitch, slipping on the hard-black surface. Where he’d sit on a cold thickly painted wood bench resting and breathing heavily. He’d be reminded of his boot mud drying to dust on the slate entranceway his father laid in a rental house they couldn’t keep. Limping from his painfully blistered feet, the pain of growing out of boots his parents couldn’t afford to replace. The agony of ingrown toenails and groin strain when he quietly wept on his bedroom floor three days a week after training. After home games he’d kicked a ball against the clubhouse wall under a street light, alternating left to right to strengthen his legs evenly. His father drank in the clubhouse and spoke to the other boys’ fathers more than he ever spoke to him. He drove an XC Falcon four-door sedan. One-night driving home he was drunk and quietly furious. The powerful engine reared the front end gradually up as they increased their speed along a long straight stretch of road. A tan Labrador appeared in the headlights on an unsealed shoulder and his father swerved to hit it in a silent rage, the wheels losing traction on the gravel. The dog barrelled under the wheels hitting the firewall under their feet as they mounted the road again. His father’s anger was always internal and silent until it found its expression in violence. It was always a guessing game as to why he was bitter, but its effects were often terrifying. The old man recalled this with some of the same fear, even now after so many years. With memories like these he felt his shallow foundations, his self-worth seemingly always vulnerable to the mysterious unspoken standards his father held him to. In some part of his mind, that dog is still laying on that road slowly dying.

He mimicked his father as a child at school, turning morose and scowling at people for no reason. He wouldn’t talk and sat alone at lunch hoping someone would notice and try to talk to him so he could ignore them. Through mimicry, his father’s sadness and anger were refined in him. He carried it into adulthood until the sudden realization that nothing was tempered by it. The world didn’t stop for a second no matter how much he willed it to. And no amount of sadness or anger prevented any tedious, back-breaking task from needing to be done.

Sitting on a bench one night at the end of his street he looked back down the road towards the gently sloping gardens of newly built estates and remembered a family trip to the botanical gardens. His parents fought, and his mother walked away down a hill and sat under a tree. He and his father circled her as they walked the path around the gardens. He asked his father to let him go to her. But his father kept them walking as tears welled in both their eyes and they both watched her peripherally, motionless and staring at the ground. They passed the duck pond which had been drained for repairs, and he felt empathy for the ducks left wandering without the comfort of water. They passed a group of boys from his school and they saw his father crying. One ran up behind him, tugged his shirt and fled. His father’s hand shaped as though around a brick against his chest hooked his son’s shirt collar and he pulled hard and down. His father seemed to awaken after a moment and looked at him as though he were a stranger. Taking his wrist, his father led him down the hill to his mother and they all sat mutely listening to each other breathing. Under a wet tree waiting in silent rage and sadness, he switched off like a TV. He knew it wouldn’t be ok until he could close his bedroom door behind him. He had to endure the long silent walk to the car, the mute drive home, he had to stop pining for comfort that seemed impossibly far away. A longing that stretches time too painful proportions. It was here that he learnt the malleable contingent distance of the passage to a sanctuary of his own. And he’d prayed for the patience to endure the expanse between him and an unobserved refuge that breathes in his presence, a place that holds its breath till he returned.

He remembers that same feeling of exhalation on recently visiting his childhood home. A cul-de-sac not far off a newly built motorway. He turned the car towards the field he played in as a child as the long pastel-tinged shadows of late evening triggered the memory of tangled bushes you could build tunnels and caves in and the exhaustion of constant movement. He parked before the long thin path leading to the field and felt unable to leave the car. A smell of burnt plastic and exhaust in the air as he wound down the window and the car quietly idled. A discarded crumbling asbestos stucco sheet was leaning against the alleyway wall. A brown leather purse discoloured by the weather discarded under Dicot weeds, everything seemed like it had been there since he was a child, on pause, ageing again in his presence. Like the street had begun to breathe again exhaling the dust of him. He felt his heart sink as he stared at the cement archway to the field. A patch of dirt where the grass died back, where kids had ignored the walkway and taken a short cut to the open field, leaving indentations of boots and the tough grey roots of titch grass exposed. These marked the shortest route to immunity. Where he could be hidden from the street and those apertures into the lives of his parents. He thought about how even old sanctuaries hold their allure as he turned the car around and drove back towards the motorway.

~~~

The boy slams the chisel into the Jack-hammers chuck unaware of the need to release the locking pin. The hammer awkwardly slipped from his hands as he reaches for another chisel from the box, a threaded chisel this time. As the jackhammer silently fell between the rocks in the wall of the pond the old man felt glad the boy was alone and not subject to the scrutiny of his co-workers. The boy threw down the chisel and left the Jackhammer leaning against the rocks, purposefully striding out of view towards the house and returning with a sledgehammer.

The old man examined the seams of his double-glazed windows through the sheer curtain, he pinched the roughly patterned lace and pulled it aside to run his eyes along the edge of the window frame inspecting the rubber. He touches his hand to his face, running it down his cheek, across his chin feeling the uneven surface and the deep hollows of his eyes. With these hands, as an interface with the world permanently thick and dry, everything is course and peeling even the surface of glass. He had long ago felt the smoothness of skin but not with these hands. Burying his face in his lover’s loose dressing gown, his cheeks and lips on the soft skin of her chest. He remembers how she craned her neck to look down at him and stroked his hair as though comforting a child, kissing his forehead as he wrapped his arms around her waist his fingers gripped as though around a brick. A soft, green light enveloped him as he closed his eyes and thought how unjust it is for these memories to be so clear. His hands described a permanent decay in their swollen joints and peeling callouses. So much injurious weight saddled by these fingers between now and the memory of her. But as the things they’ve built had begun to ruin, he’d built monuments in his mind to intangible things. Now undistracted by his labours he’d turned to experiences long forgotten and was tortured by the memory of things hopelessly unreachable.

~~~

He slipped into his boots and despite the deteriorating weather, left the house on the pretence of weeding along the fence line. The job didn’t especially need to be done but he couldn’t resist telling the boy how to use the jackhammer. He just needed a reason to be outside near the fence. He approached the fence and began pulling weeds making small piles every few meters. After a few minutes, he stuck his head over the fence and watched the boy as he struck the rock wall with the sledgehammer sending shards across the yard. “You’re going to break a window doing that, strike the mortar,” said the old man to the boy. His hard, nasal inflection expressed a menacing pitch. As much as he was aware and ashamed by it the old man was unable to prevent himself from sounding superior. It was obvious that when he spoke in a condescending tone, in that thicker drawl reserved for other labouring men, that he wanted to show, but not to share something with the boy.

The boy stopped immediately. he looked anxiously along the fence line before his face sunk in the knowledge he was being watched and now felt obligated to engage in conversation. “You’re not using the Jack Hammer?…… Why not?” the man asked attempting, unsuccessfully, to diel down his condescending tone. The boy looked down to the prostrate hammer among the rocks, about to speak but instead silently gestured towards it. He recognized he’s not being paid to talk to this guy and felt no reason to be polite. He gripped the sledgehammer again and struck the rock. “Wow,” the old man bellowed mockingly as shards of rock hit the fence and slashed through clumps of Freesia’s skirting the pond wall. “You should be able to get through that no worries with the Jack Hammer”, ‘I’ll show you, hang on there,” he said as he began moving towards his side gate.

~~~

Out on the road, the street was lined on both sides by large 4wd utes and trailers. It seemed every house on the street was busy with construction a symptom of the recent boom in house prices. He continued moving over the neighbour’s lawn taking a shortcut across a thinly mulched garden bed and around a slightly leaning faux sandstone letterbox.

In the neighbour’s driveway, the compacted gravel had been scrapped back to re-expose the clay beneath. The rain had pooled in wheel ruts and boot-prints. He reaches the driveway gates and released the latch, the drop bolt had dug a semi-circular cavity deep into the mud making it unnecessary to lift it, he pushed the gate and stepped into the yard. A row of uprooted acacia trees lay on the ground waiting to be mulched. An upright wood-chipper, looking new and practically unused, stood just beyond the gates. A 24-litre air compressor tilted into clay dragged across the yard as far as it could reach without sinking and tipping over into the mud. Scraps of timber we’re piled with empty cement bags, coffee cups, bent star pickets, concrete, mangled Rio bar and chicken wire in a freshly dug hole filling slowly with grey-brown water. The six-ton excavator stood motionlessly bowed at the rim of the hole. It seemed inexplicable how different the yard looked than from his window. The ground had been heaved up chaotically, earth, rock and plants rolled together in messy piles. The clouds had condensed to make the day prematurely dark and added to the scene of desolation and although he could see the boy on the other side of the yard he felt interminably alone. The haunting feeling of being subject to an insentient world came back to him, a place where there’s no use in begging against an unassailable force. A place where your dread is as useless as the squirming of a worm cut by the teeth of a giant excavator, the ground engaging tip of a huge pitiless machine.

The boy knew the man was coming towards him but didn’t look up. He scowled down at the earth. He was excavating around the rock wall with a short-handled flat shovel. “You should be using a spade,” the man said to the boy as he mounted the incline to the pond and watched the boy bending the blade of the shovel to its limits. He noticed the boy had uncovered a sinew of reinforcing bar which ran the length of the rock wall encased in concrete. The man reached for the extension cord and the cable of the jackhammer. Suddenly he heard the sound of a motor starting and a dog began barking over the neighbouring fence. Looking over towards the house he could make out the movements of a figure crouched by a petrol-powered Gurney adjusting the throttle and choke. The stammering motor smoothed out as the man turned to watch the old man take up the jackhammer. It occurred to him now that there were other men who were working on a garden area along the left-hand side of the house which he couldn’t see from his window. A feeling of cold dread washed over him as he approached the rock wall with the jackhammer. The boy leaned his shovel on the fence and after a short pause to look at the old man, he walked towards the house to join the others. He had been wrong about the boy being alone. The boy knew he was watched but had shown no interpretable care whether he was or not. The boy was gifted with that privilege he had envied all his life. The longest stretch of earth yawned before the old man, a volcanic plane of shifting rock and ash of enormous weight. He could feel the men gather together at the end of a low veranda that stretched around the back of the house. Its timbers half trimmed and nailed down, a clean almost dry platform for them to observe him. He couldn’t hear the men over the gurney but in his periphery, he knew they were talking to each other, discussing the situation and smiling as he pressed the tip of the jackhammer into a divot in the mortar and pressed the trigger detonating the hammer into brutal thrashing noise and movement.

Quickly he understood, after the hammer made light work of the mortar and hit solid reinforced concrete underneath, that he’d made another terrible mistake. As his hand gripped around the handle of the hammer and pivoted the heavy machine hopelessly back and forth to find a weakness between the concrete and the rock, a cold sweat of terror began to bead on his upper lip. How had he misinterpreted the situation so completely? The concrete was far too hard for the Jackhammer to be effective and it’d need to be cut into sections with a demolition saw if there was any hope of removing it. His embarrassment at his arrogance made him determined to make an impact on the wall with the Jackhammer, but deep down he knew it was hopeless. His hands gripped tighter around the handle and his thumb joints began to ache under the strain and vibration. He wished he’d stopped to grab gloves, safety glasses, and earmuffs but it was hopeless now as they watched him skip comically across the surface of the concrete with the hammer showering his face with dust and debris. Sweat began to drip down his face and thighs as he attempted to control the direction of the hammer tip. The men stood smiling and shaking their heads gathering closer together to hear each other over the sound of the Gurney motor. The dust began to settle on his face and hands, mixing with his sweat, forming a clay-like layer on his exposed skin. His hands battling the barely restrained vibrations gripped so tight around the handle they felt as though they were fusing to the aluminium frame. The shuddering tore up his arms and through his shoulders and into his head distorting the form of his body hunched over in stiffening agony. His foundations exposed in delicate ruins. The yard seemed to be expanding and he felt as though he was sinking and leaning into the softening ground, his joints hardening as he was weighted downward. He felt his body giving way like a badly built platform for an enormous weight of time. These men watched attentively his final futile posture upwards against gravity as he slated into the mud, first in small parts than larger exposing his unsupported core. He Tilted heavily, as though an overburdened crane without outriggers, stretching out and reaching beyond the limits of his arms. Impatiently finished he decreased in his flawed outer limits while increasing the bore inside. Carving away at the pitted surface of the hammer cylinder in a dizzying circular motion. The stroke of the gurney’s piston worn loose till it noiselessly moved along the polished surface and oil pushes through the gaps in the rings. The pump over-heated and seized no longer able to fight the pressure building in the hose. A dark substance burned in his chest as one rough painful cough of blue smoke dissolved in the air as he blinked through a sheet of rain towards the square-faced profile in the window. The man inspecting the seams on his windows was holding the sheer lace curtain with a clawed hand as though gripping a brick against his chest.

Winding down the Gurney motor shuddered and shifted its weight on the wet surface, clicking as it cooled and completely stopped. Cycling down and ringing in his mind like a tiny bell. Subtle green shadows moved imperceptibly slow across the sky as the hammer dropped awkwardly between the rocks. The clouds continued their formless fusion as the rain continued to gently fall and wash the dust into the topsoil. The delicate labour sinking deeper out of view. As the soft green light enveloped him completely, he thought he heard the heavy footfall of the men approaching from across the yard.

~~~

He remembers the sound of his father’s shoes echoing across the courts, a persistent measured approach which he couldn’t quite tell the distance of. He let his ball roll away off the bitumen and into the dirt. And when he turned to face him there was no one there and he felt abandoned. He dreaded the long silent drive home but equally feared being left there alone. He ran towards the sound of the car starting and idling in the car park.

The Barbeque by Dominic Carew

October 7, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments

Dominic Carew is a lawyer and writer from Sydney. His short stories have won or been shortlisted for several awards, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His first collection of short fiction, No Neat Endings, will be released through MidnightSun in February 2020.

The Barbecue

One spring when I was thirteen, my best mate’s family moved in around the corner. We lived in Manly, with the beach close at hand. My parents had recently landscaped the backyard, put in a new deck and paved part of the lawn. The centre-piece of all this, without question, was Dad’s brand new eight-grill Weber. With the hedges trimmed so neat and the bougainvillea flowering, the Johnsons seemed happy coming over.

“You should open a shop,” Ed’s mum said one time. “The place looks that nice.”

“Mum,” Ed said, rolling his eyes. “What kind of shop?”

“An outdoor one. A BBQ shop. Go and play with Mike, Ed.”

“Have a look at this Weber,” was all Dad said, in Mr Johnson’s direction. “You can wood-fire pizzas with it.” But Mr Johnson said nothing. He just stared at Dad from across the lawn, his eyes narrow and his head held back. I didn’t realise until a few weeks later, when we hosted another barbie, that this gaze had confrontation in it. Militant, was the word I would have used, had I known what it meant when I was thirteen.

Ed and I had been mates since year one. We played soccer together and went to St Pauls High up the road. We looked pretty similar, blonde and gangly and sunburnt half the time, though the biggest thing we had in common was our dads. They weren’t the same people but they had the same hang-ups. Time and distance were two of them. Money was another.

Ed’s Dad was a financial accountant. He worked in the city at an investment manager with its logo on a Sydney-Hobart yacht each year. He was forty-eight. Mine was a surgeon. “Bones and joints,” he’d say when asked what kind. “Things that go crack and pop.” Then he’d laugh at himself until Mum, arms folded, would shake her head at him to stop. He had, for as long I could remember, always laughed at his own jokes.

“Better than never laughing at all,” Ed said to me one time when we discussed it.

“Rick? He’s got a sense of humour, doesn’t he?”

“I’ve never seen him laugh.”

“Bullshit.”

“I haven’t. Once he tried to laugh, when he got promoted, but he couldn’t.”

I looked at Ed. “I never noticed.”

“Hey,” he said, “let’s stop talking about our dads.”

“Deal.”

This year, like last, we didn’t make the semis. Soccer was over until March, which meant we’d have to find new ways to spend our Saturday arvos.  As thirteen year olds, hanging out in my backyard while our dads stood over the barbie, competing about whose steaks were a better cut and who got the best deal on a kilo of sausages, was not on our agenda.

“You boys’d wanna stick around,” Dad said as we made our way to the back gate. “These are gonna be delish.”

“We’ll be back later,” I said, though he wouldn’t have heard me. He’d bent forward already to scrape last weekend’s char from the grill. We could hear the sound of that scraper, like rapid-fire, half a block away.

*

We went to Copenhagen one day, the ice cream joint on the corso. It was cheaper than the place at the wharf. Not as good. Fewer options. But on our pocket money, we really should’ve been getting paddle pops from Coles. With hands around our single scoops to protect against gulls, we walked to the beach and sat on the steps there. It was quiet. The surf was flat and for a moment, despite the crowds of stumbling toddlers, all seemed still.

“This ice cream’s shit,” Ed said.

I agreed with my friend. I would’ve said so too, but was chewing a piece of honeycomb that must’ve been really old. It tasted bitter.

“Know what I saw the other day,” Ed said, staring at his cone sadly, as if it were a person, a father say, who’d let him down. “Dad reuse oil from brekky on dinner that night.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Dad does that too.”

“It’s not the tightness,” Ed said, shaking his head at his ice cream, which was melting down his hand, “it’s that he makes so much money and doesn’t spend it.”

This, I happened to know, was true. The Johnson’s had lived in Dee Why since Ed was born. A cheap suburb by Northern Beaches’ standards, and one Mr Johnson had always refused to leave. Despite his huge income, he’d had no intention of selling what he referred to as “a perfectly adequate home.” Then Ed’s grandad died, leaving them a house in Manly. They moved in as soon as probate cleared. I knew all this cos my parents discussed it one night after the Johnson’s left our place. Something in their tone of voice was mocking. Like they were a little bit better than that.

“Dad spends it,” I said, swallowing the honeycomb at last, “But only on the house. On that stupid barbie.”

“It’s a good barbie but,” Ed said, gazing into the distance. “Fwor, see that bloke on the body board? He just kooked it.”

*

Ed and I had started surfing a year earlier and were still both hopeless. It didn’t bother me so much; I’d have preferred to have been good but wasn’t out to change my fate. By thirteen, I’d developed what I see now as a philosophical system, able to resign myself in the face of my inadequacies. Over the years, it’s been a useful tool. It still is today, probably more than ever, as a father, with two sons of my own.

Ed, though, had a different view. He took his failed attempts to stand up on a board as a personal affront. As if the other surfers, the world, God himself, had all conspired to sleight him.

One arvo, we ate shit for an hour on a shore-break, gave up trying and headed home up the beach. “Fuck this,” Ed kept saying, his leg rope rattling against the hard waxed surface of his board.

“Oi Johnson,” someone yelled from behind us; a girl’s voice, high and teasing. “You looked good out there!”

We turned around and saw it was Emily Miles. She stood on the sand in a pink rashie, her blonde hair wet and knotted, her tanned, freckly face glowing like a dimmer version of the sun. She was in our class at school. Year Seven like us, and already sponsored by Quicksilver.

“I just can’t seem to stick it,” Ed said as we walked up to her.

She put her hand on his shoulder. “Shoreys are the worst to learn on mate. Wait till it’s high tide.”

“Yeah,” Ed said, looking at his feet. He’d gone red and was trying to hide it, I knew. He liked Emily. He hadn’t told me this yet, but I could tell he was keen to pash her.

There was a silence. You could hear those shore-breaks thudding into the sand.

“Well,” she said, “here comes Rach, see you’se.”

We watched her run with her board under her arm to Rachel Sullivan, a Year Nine girl on the junior pro circuit. They were both infinitely better than us. As they jogged up the beach towards Queensie, giggling and nearly stumbling over themselves, I couldn’t help but think they were laughing at our expense.

*

A few weeks later, I was in Coles with Dad, helping him prepare for the barbie. He had a shopping list that ran across three pages, all in landscape, tabulated, with a space in the far right column to record the prices.

“I know it seems pedantic,” he said to me, “but once you’re in the habit, it’s no trouble at all.”

I didn’t really listen to him explain why he did it. Something to do with keeping them honest; who ‘they’ were, I didn’t know. The fifteen year old check-out chicks?

“Ooh, ooh, ice cream special. Neapolitan Mike, three o’clock.”

“Hang on,” I said, “don’t we have some at home?”

“Yes mate. But this is the best price I’ve seen for it. Get three tubs. Then meet me in the meat aisle.”

I got the tubs and carried them, stacked and cold against my chest, across the store. This would make six tubs in total. I wasn’t even sure we had space in the freezer. I knew we had the barbie this Sat, but even so, based on my rough estimation, there’d be enough Neapolitan for the guests to have five bowls each. In the end, I resolved not to question it, the memory of a two-for-one baked bean deal, and the drama that came with it when Dad tried to buy fifty tins, too fresh in my mind for comfort.

When I got to the meat aisle with the tubs, Dad was on his knees with his head and most of his torso inside a fridge.

“Mike,” he said – his voice sounded tinny, and echoed like he was in a cave – “take these as I hand them to you,” and he passed me tray after tray of grey, icy, priced-slashed steaks.

As I unloaded the trolley at the check-out, Dad stood behind me, scribbling into his table. The sound of his pen, the urgent scrawl of it, made me clench my fists.

“Beautiful,” he said, after we’d packed the boot. “That took six minutes less than planned. Mike? Hold onto your seat, mate. Bunnings is still open,” and he laughed full pelt for the next ten seconds.

*

On Saturday, Ed and I helped my parents set up for the barbie. The Johnson’s were invited, as well as the Crawley’s and the Mitchell’s from Mum’s church group and a few other adults I’d not met before that Ed’s dad knew from work. We carried two long tables down from the deck and placed them on the grass, end-to-end. Mum had collected an array of different flowers from around the neighbourhood. Not exactly legal, but this didn’t seem to matter. She had us arrange them in terracotta vases along the table. “Put the wisteria and the birds of paradise together at the ends. No Mike, the wisteria? And the birds of paradise?”

Once we’d finished that, Ed and I pleaded our case to be let off for an hour. We wanted to surf. Ed’s sister, Melanie, was around, helping with the salads, so we got our wish. As we left, I noticed Dad and Mr Johnson standing near the barbie, staring intently at their watches and twisting the dials, like they were synchronising time.

There wasn’t any swell. We sat offshore straddling our boards and talked about girls. Ed said he didn’t want a girlfriend. And I said that was bullshit and he should just ask Emily out. He said if I was so sure why didn’t I ask Beth Simpson out, cos he knew I liked her and hung around her locker every arvo to watch her pack her books. “But her locker’s next to mine,” I said, “where else would I be at final bell?”

“Don’t deny what you know is the truth,” he said, frowning. He held the frown for a moment, then we both cracked up. It was what his dad said whenever they argued. Ed liked to mimic it, though never in front of Mr Johnson.

“Don’t deny, young man,” he went on, swinging his arms and splashing up water, “what you know in your guts is true.”

*

After showering and getting into a clean polo shirt and a pair of pressed shorts, I sat at the table in the yard next to Ed. It was sunset. A peach-coloured sky spread overhead, streaked with golden clouds. The Crawleys, the Mitchells, Mum, Melanie, Mrs Johnson and three other adults were seated, pulling bread apart and buttering it thickly, or pouring hefty splashes of wine or picking grapes from the heaps along the table.

Dad and Mr Johnson stood at the barbie which, by now, was covered in cooked meat. They each held tongs. And a European beer – Dad had bought three cases on special a month earlier. Every now and then he’d take a sip, then say something over his shoulder to the table, laughing.

“The salads look divine,” Mrs Crawley said to Mum, piling her plate with a healthy serve.

“I just think those kinds of short-term fixes are nonsense,” Ed’s mum was saying to a man opposite her, “you can’t expect to tax rich people and promote a healthy economy.”

“Agree entirely,” the man said. He held the stem of his wine glass between his thumb and finger like he was pinching it.

“Who wants rare?” Dad yelled.

“Bloody for me,” Mr Mitchell said.

“And me,” said his wife, throwing back a full flute of sparkling wine. “Would you look at the sky?”

My steak was perfectly cooked, the marinade Dad used so thoroughly soaked-in, you couldn’t even tell it was old. I chomped away. As did Ed and Melanie and everyone else. The sun had slipped behind Dobroyd, leaving Manly in shadow. Up above, fruit bats commenced patrol, their angled wings spread wide, like little stealth bombers.

“Good steak,” Ed said, his mouth full.

“Potato salad’s awesome,” his sister chipped in.

I nodded, my own mouth full, and turned my head in Dad’s direction; he was sitting with Rick at the end of the table. They were entrenched in their own conversation, to the exclusion of the rest of us. I couldn’t make out the words, but the way they moved their hands, their heads wobbling in my periphery, suggested a topic of some severity. Then, as if the last ten minutes had been building to it, Mr Johnson threw down his serviette and yelled in a frantic, high-pitched voice, “Incorrect!”

It was like a car had just smashed into the house. Knives and forks clinked onto plates; all went silent.

“That is incorrect,” Rick said, his voice even higher now, and still very loud, “and you bloody well know it.”

“Rickard,” Mrs Johnson hissed from halfway down the table. But he didn’t seem to hear her.

“It’s not incorrect,” Dad said, squaring back into his seat and pulling a piece of gristle from his mouth. “It’s bang on accurate.”

Now at this moment, we witnessed an event rarely beheld so that, when it happened, no one quite comprehended it. Mr Johnson gripped the edge of the table with both hands and he, well, laughed.

“Rickard?” his wife said.

“Har har har,” her husband went, his mouth contorting into some kind of smile.

“It’s four hundred metres or under, and I’m not kidding you,” Dad said.

“You’ve measured it, have you?” said Rick, whatever imitation of mirth he’d offered, no longer on show.

“Not per se. But I make the walk enough to know, within five metres, how far we live form the sand.”

“If it’s four hundred, I’m the next prime minister.”

“Well,” Dad said, “I hope you’ll have us over to Kirribilli House.”

“What on earth are you two talking about?” said Mum; she had her wine glass up, away from her face, like she was showing it off.

Neither man spoke for a moment. Rick stared at Dad through narrow eyes.

“Why won’t you take my word for it?” Dad said. “We’ve lived here five years. I think I’d know.”

But Rick just kept staring.

At the time, and for a long while after, I thought Dad’s a reasonable question. We had lived there five years. Dad walked to the beach at least once a week. He could guess pretty well about distance. What’s more, Rick was sitting on his lawn, at his table, eating his half-priced steaks. The least he could do was pretend to agree. Over the years though, I have, if not come around, at least come to appreciate Rick’s position. I’m in finance myself now, a controller in a hedge fund, and I’ve learned over the course of my career about men like Rick. Put simply, they can’t help it. Accuracy’s a type of vice. They thrive on and, at times suffer for, it. Of course, in this case, pride was at play too. The Johnsons lived a K from the beach, maybe more. If we lived within four hundred metres, what did that make them, the house that they’d inherited?

“Listen,” Dad said, getting up from his chair, “if you’re so bent on this, let’s go and measure it.”

“Brian, for goodness sake!”

“You’re on,” said Rick, standing up as well, but far too quickly, with rigid shifts in his limbs, so his chair went toppling over.

Dad disappeared inside the house while Rick remained standing at the table, looking around at everyone with pursed lips, his eyes focused, as if we were a corporate board he had to convince of something.

“This won’t take a moment,” he said. While his tone was polite, there was not, as far as I could tell, apology in it.

“Got it!” Dad yelled from up on the deck, waving a cricket ball-sized GPS in his hand. “Let’s go.”

*

At school on Monday, Ed and I avoided each other. When we talked about it later, we both agreed this had nothing to do with our friendship, which, as it turned out, would remain intact for the rest of high school. It was more out of a sense of duty. A mutual interest in keeping our families away from each other, at least until the heat came off. Tread lightly for a day or two while the ceasefire took hold. That kind of thing. When on Tuesday we met at recess, the first thing Ed said from across the quad, before I’d even reached him, was, “I don’t wanna talk about Dad.”

No beef from me. I didn’t want to go there either. We walked over to the table by the bubblers and sat down to eat.

“He’s taken it pretty bad,” Ed said, ignoring his veto of moments ago.

I nodded solemnly. “Well he shouldn’t. One more metre and he’d have been right.”

“He was convinced, convinced, the GPS was wrong.”

“He made that pretty clear,” I said, nibbling on a shape.

There was a silence. Then he said, “How’s Brian’s nose?”

“It’ll be alright,” I said, though by alright I meant the fracture would eventually resolve into a permanent kink.

As we ruminated over this, a little embarrassed, tacitly committed to delicate words, a voice sung out from behind us.

“Oi Johnson,” it said.

We turned around.

“Heard your old boy bashed Mike’s dad on Sat.”

It was Emily again. She was smiling her white Aussie smile. Beth Simpson, to my horror, stood beside her, blowing a bubble with grape chewing gum.

“Rach was down at the beach. Saw the whole thing.”

“They were mucking around,” I said, not sure who should feel more ashamed, me or Ed.

“Not what Rach said.”

“Yeah, well, they were,” I said, feeling my cheeks go hot from Beth’s stare. And from trying to lie.

When they left the house, at a jogger’s pace, we looked at each other around the table then jumped up together and followed suit. The kids, the adults, everyone. Dad and Rick charged ahead, their eyes glued to the GPS. As we trailed them, I noticed how different they looked from behind. Dad, tall and broad-shouldered with a thick wall of silver-specked hair at the back of his head. Rick, short and wiry, his arms moving quickly at his sides. When they got to the sand at North Steyne, they stopped and peered down at the machine. Dad raised a fist to the sky, a great smooth violet arc, scratched here and there with etchings of cirrus.

“Told ya,” Dad yelled, so we all could hear – we’d held back on the promenade. He laughed. First to us, then in Rick’s face. The punch, when it came, was so swift, I had to ask Ed if it actually happened.

“Maybe they should go easy for a while,” Emily said. “Or only hang out when grown-ups are round.”

“That’s a good one,” I said and I kind of meant it.

The girls stood still for a bit, then walked over and sat down opposite us.

“My dad bashed someone once,” Emily said after a pause; she rested her arms on the table.

This got Ed’s attention. “Really?”

“Yep,” she said, leaning forward. “Some bloke tried to sell him a car. Said it’d done fifty thousand,” – she looked at Beth, then back to us – “turned out it was fifty thousand… and four hundred metres.”

We watched them walk across the quad a second later, laughing and pushing each other.

*

As soon as my boys were old enough to walk, I had them in the water. It’s part of growing up in beachside Sydney. By eight, they could both surf. This delighted me, though Dad, seventy by now, thought it chagrined.

“You could never surf. But your kids can. Are you saying that doesn’t annoy ya?”

“It doesn’t,” I said. I meant it.

What annoys me is when they leave for school with their shirts hanging out. I can’t stand it when their shoes are scuffed, their hair’s messy or when they don’t wash their hands. I try to be generous with them. More generous than Dad was with me. And I think I do a good job of that. I make a point of not caring about distance, time, prices, even though I’m paid to count. But when they look like slobs, leave their plates lying around, even for a minute, I let them know I’m not happy. I’ve learned that every father has his own nuanced hang-up, and neatness is mine. I’m not naïve enough to think my kids don’t dislike me for it. But I’m also not about to change. As I’ve said, you resign yourself in the face of your inadequacies. Ed still hasn’t accepted this, and in that respect I guess he’s just like his dad. But look. That’s another story.