SIGMUND FREUD
Sally lies back on the verandah couch, her long brown legs exposed in her Mexican skirt and slides her sunglasses up over her unruly mane of blonde-tipped hair. The last time I saw her, her hair was black. She also has a new tattoo on her ankle. I think it is an Incan temple. This means she has had a South American lover.
Sally got her first tattoo as soon as she turned the legal age, eighteen. The dolphin on her hip is a memento of her First Great Love, a surfer called Marcus. A Balinese god on her lower back is a souvenir of a brief, but intense holiday romance. It is lucky that Sally is picky with which lovers she chooses to commemorate or she would be inked from head to toe. Her criteria for selection is whimsical, shifting and has nothing to do with the length of the relationship. For Sally’s lovers the arrival of the tattoo is a bad sign, not a good one. Tattoos are only procured once the love affair has ended. Sally falls in and out of love with the same frequency and lack of complication which she brings to changing her hairstyle.
Neither love nor hairstyles have ever come easily to me.
I point at her new tattoo and raise an eyebrow.
‘So hot.’ Sally sighs and fans her face.
Sally’s lovers are always hot.
‘Arsehole,’ she says, when I mention Daniel’s name, and, ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ when I try to explain how I don’t blame him because I am, really, a particularly annoying person.
‘You’re not annoying at all, you’re great, you just need to get out more,’ she says.
‘I don’t like getting out.’ And this is the crux of the problem.
Sally and I have been friends since we first shared our lunch in pre-school. She had Vegemite sandwiches and I had zucchini slice — Mum was into green vegetables. We eyed each other’s food and, without a word, swapped when the teacher wasn’t looking — lunch-swapping was prohibited.
From then on, wherever I went, it was Sally and me, me and Sally. On finishing school we went to Sydney University together. While I stayed on to be with Daniel, she took off to see the world. We have emailed constantly while she’s been away, but I’ve still missed her a lot. I’m not sure what it is that makes our friendship work, but it does. Like Starsky and Hutch, Turner and Hooch or Tango and Cash, we are a mismatched buddy pair.
My mate Sal doesn’t have a shred of self-doubt in her body. In that way, perhaps, she is not the most useful friend for me to have.
Sally approves of my research plan. ‘Recognising that you have a problem is the first step to solving it,’ she says. ‘What is required, I think, is a chart. Charts are scientific. People who use charts are copers not mopers.’
An ache inside my chest tells me that I am still a moper.
Sally supervises me while I draw up a chart.
On the first page I write Pain diary. I rule up four columns. The first column I title Day of the week. In this I write, Saturday. The second column is Days since break-up. In this I write 42. The third column I title Pain level 1–10. After some thought, I write 9. This is optimistic, but I think I’ve had worse days.
‘What’s the fourth column for?’ asks Sal.
‘I’m leaving that spare for any further research questions.’
Sally nods. ‘Good. Very scientific.’ She taps the notebook with her finger. ‘You can put tips for improvement in the back. Start a list.’
A list. I decide not to tell Sally that I have already started my list with deer sausages.
‘So, what’s it like being back in Darling Head?’ asks Sal.
‘Fishy. The seagulls seem more obnoxious than they used to be.’
‘That’s progress,’ says Sal. ‘We’re getting a more uppity class of seagull now.’
From where Sally and I sit on the couch, we can see the sea and the chequerboard of houses that make up this place we know so well. Darling Head is a surfer’s town. Every day after school the break in front of the pub is packed with blonde-haired kids flexing their muscles and their attitude. And that’s just the girls. The wetsuit is the look on the street and the clothes shops stock only surf wear. Sand blows into houses and coats the pavement. Brazilians, French, Japanese, Americans and English come here seeking the famed Darling Point break.
‘Do you ever wonder how someone dropped in here from Mongolia would find this town?’ I ask as we look towards the sea.
‘Mmm, can’t you just see them raising their rabbit-fur hat to the bikini girls?’ replies Sal.
‘I think they might feel as out of place as I do.’
‘If this was Ulaanbaatar,’ Sally’s grasp of geography has been improved by her year abroad, ‘your father would be the Mongolian champion bareback horse racer.’
My father is, in fact, a former Australian surf champion. This makes him something of a legend in Darling Head. ‘They’ve just named a lookout after him, you know.’
‘Go Dave.’ Sal raises a fist.
‘I can’t imagine having anything named after me.’ I pull my pen out of my mouth and inspect its gnawed blue end. ‘I now name you, the Edie McElroy Memorial Pen.’
Sally rolls her eyes. ‘Not that again.’ We are venturing into well-trodden ground. ‘It’s hardly unique, this “I am a child failure” thing of yours, you know. Heard of Donald Bradman?’
‘That hitting balls guy?’
‘Excuse me? The Greatest Living Australian, you mean.’
‘Now dead.’
‘Beside the point. He’s got a son. Did you know that?’
I shake my head.
‘You see,’ says Sal. ‘His name’s John, by the way.’
‘I’d like to meet him one day. I think we’d have a lot in common.’
I’m a dreadful disappointment to my father. He had high expectations. While I was named Edie, Dad has always called me Eddie. I think he was hoping for a boy, though he never said so. But the fact that I’m named after Eddie Aikau, a legendary Hawaiian surfer who was lost at sea is a bit of a giveaway. Dad has told me how he picked me up in the hospital and dangled my legs on the bed just after I was born.
‘Look at that, Jenny,’ he said, seeing my right leg stuck out in front. ‘She’s a goofy footer.’ I’ve never heard what my mum’s response to this pronouncement was. I imagine she would have laughed and they probably would have kissed. I imagine they were terribly much in love at that stage.
Despite his bedside prediction I am not a goofy footer or even a regular; I am a no footer. Dad knows the pain of parents whose children don’t inherit their talent.
‘I think you have some unresolved parent issues that we should talk about,’ says Sal. ‘Talking always does you good.’
‘I prefer thinking.’
Sally frowns. ‘You think too much, Edie.’
She is probably right.
‘Freud believes childhood experiences impact greatly on our adult lives,’ says Sal.
I have a feeling that I may be hearing a lot about Freud in the weeks to come. Once Sally gets her teeth into something, she doesn’t let go.
When Sally has gone, I climb back into the hammock and open my notebook again. I am so proud of my scientific chart that I almost ring up Daniel to tell him about it. I breathe slowly until the urge passes. They are very tricksy things, these urges to ring Daniel. Often, just when I think I’ve vanquished them, I find myself dialling his number.
As soon as I am sure the urge has passed, I turn to the back of the notebook and write Tips for self-improvement. Underneath this I write:
Don’t ring Daniel.
I chew my lip and try to think of some more tips but fail. No doubt something will occur to me in time.
My father is leaning on the doorway watching me now, as I swing in the hammock with my notebook on my lap. I know he’s wondering how a blond-haired, brown-skinned down-to-earth Aussie like him ended up with this pale red-haired daughter who’s totally unfit for life in the surfing capital of the north coast.
His sea-washed blue eyes regard me above his drooping moustache as he leans, hands in the pockets of his baggy shorts. My father is worried about me. ‘Take the surfboard out tomorrow, Eddie,’ he says. ‘I’ll come with you.’
This is somewhat less likely than peace in the Gaza Strip. He knows this, but still he persists. Dad wants me to be happy. Surfing makes him happy; therefore surfing will make me happy, he reasons.
Surfing has never made me happy, but Dad is tenacious in his belief that I just need to give it a go and all my worries will disappear. I shake my head, smiling to soften the blow.
His face falls and he goes back inside. A gentle blues rhythm soon drifts from the house. Dad always plays guitar when he’s unsettled. He’s played it a lot since I came home.
Dad’s glory days are in the past, but he’s still a celebrity in our town. I’ve had people tell me surfers give him waves. They say this in the tone you’d usually reserve for kidney donors. I’m glad for my father that he commands respect in the surf and I’m sure he’d like it if I showed more interest in his passion. I try, but he knows I’m faking it.
He’s astute like that, my father. Not many men realise when women are faking it.
Daniel didn’t. Not at first, anyway. Not when I was really trying hard.
I look up from my notebook and push the couch with my foot to make the hammock swing. As I sway back and forth, watching the waves, I wonder if any of the men I’ve been with really liked me. I think maybe they liked the idea of the pale red-headed poet more than the reality. Why wouldn’t you? What’s to like about a bulk-order of insecurities?
Oh yes, I always did my best to hide this side of me. I don’t think any of my lovers ever knew exactly what type of person they were dealing with. They might have guessed, but they didn’t know. To let someone know you and then be rejected — now that would hurt.
Before Daniel, there was Peter. We got together in my first year at Sydney University. He was way too cool for me. Pete used to perform poetry wearing a top hat with a flower in it and an open waistcoat that showed off his slender, tanned torso. For the whole six months we were together I knew he would dump me. Pete had a thing for redheads, but it wasn’t enough in the end. I couldn’t match his erudite arguments about the meaning of poetry. Secretly, I felt that to talk about it sucked the life out of it. But maybe that’s because I couldn’t talk about it, or not very well. I could only write it.
Now, I don’t seem to be able to write it either.
Peter didn’t dump me by text; he just turned up at the Glebe Pub one night with a different redhead and acted like we’d never met. No one was surprised except me. I’ve always been slow on the uptake.
Looking on the positive side, which I do try to do, I have learnt something from all of my lovers. From Peter I learnt how to sound intelligent (but never intelligent enough). From Daniel I learnt how to act confident (but never confident enough). My problem is that I can never walk away from a learning experience — even when it hurts. This is mad, bad and just plain silly and my life would be much calmer if I stopped treating my heart like a guinea pig. I wonder what my next lover will teach me and if I will enjoy the lesson. At the moment this seems far from likely.
Me and men. Men and me. I push off the couch again, sway to and fro and wish they would invent a magic potion to dissolve this achy angst of mine.
Dad and his girlfriend, Rochelle, are plotting something. I can tell by the way they stop talking when I drag myself off the hammock and enter the lounge room.
‘If I was an animal I would be a dolphin,’ says Rochelle as she cooks us up a stir-fry that night.
While this is not original — who doesn’t want to be a dolphin — in her case it fits. She is permanently smiling and if she isn’t wet, she just was or soon will be. Her surfboard is propped up against Dad’s on the verandah. It looks companionable there, about one foot shorter than his board, but otherwise almost identical. This is a metaphor for Rochelle herself.
Dad and Rochelle fit together in a way he and Mum never did. They are both out the door at sunrise with their boards under their arms. They like the same music, mostly blues, and if Dad had ever had a female twin she probably would have looked a lot like Rochelle. Their eyes are the same blue, their hair the same blonde and their skin the exact same shade of suntanned brown. At the moment they are both wearing Billabong T-shirts. I am glad they are different colours or they would look like twins who have been dressed by their mother.
I understand dolphins are highly sexed and suspect Rochelle is too. I deduce this from the punch-drunk look on Dad’s face most mornings. I am way too old to be observing my Dad’s sex life and feel like I’m cramping his style, but what can I do?
We sit down at our triangular dining table. Twenty years ago, my mother painted it with a galaxy of planets, moons and stars. They are now fading but, despite his enthusiasm with a paint brush, this is one job Dad hasn’t tackled.
‘If I was an animal I would be a cuckoo,’ I say.
I am a twenty-three-year-old cuckoo returned to its nest.