TWELVE
The days passed without a word from him. It was looking bleak. I daren’t ring if it was going to be goodbye.
I’d worked out what I was going to say pathetically in my own defence if given half a chance. When Jordan finally telephoned on Friday, he got in first.
‘I’m glad you weren’t one of the baton-change girls, Beth,’ he told me gallantly. ‘It wouldn’t have gelled between us if we’d known each other at school. I was really up myself, and you hung around with dags. Oh, I know you weren’t a dag, but you can forgive me for imagining you that way.’
He must have been rehearsing his lines beforehand. ‘You think I want a runner girlfriend, but you’re wrong. I like you for being a tumble-turner. That’s something I can’t do myself.’
So Jordan was familiar with our old school jargon, was he? The resuscitation of the tumble-turners! It was even more of a joke because a lazy pool swim once a week was the best I could manage these days.
He told me proudly that he couldn’t swim to save himself.
‘Seriously?’
A frank confession followed. As a four-year-old he’d nearly drowned in a backyard pool. After this he’d developed a water phobia; he’d refused to take swimming lessons. Since then he had learned to splash around in pools and to catch baby waves in the sea, but he couldn’t go out of his depth. He had never learned to swim properly. He didn’t even want to.
Jordan wasn’t ashamed of his incapacity, but he didn’t let on about it to many people. Tracy certainly knew, for she hadn’t been able to get him into a wetsuit on Sorrento back beach. Jordan admitted that he had always protected himself by fibbing, ‘I don’t like cold water.’ Or, ‘I’m allergic to chlorine.’
‘But you can dog paddle, can’t you? You could tread water to save yourself?’
Jordan hesitated. ‘I’m not sure I can do that.’
‘Why don’t I teach you then, Jordie?’
He accepted keenly. But of course many people had tried to rid him of his phobia before.
His self-denigrating confession two months ago was strategic. I can see that now. To allay any suggestion that I had humiliated myself by putting my old school frock on, Jordan shared something embarrassing about himself. And there were more peace offerings to come.
‘Let’s go somewhere special on Sunday,’ he suggested as our phone call drew to a close. ‘What’s the most beautiful place you know within driving distance?’
You can guess where this invitation was heading. Tracy’s letter revealed a dimmer narrative at work behind his romantic posturing. Today’s wedding sentence was waiting just around the corner.
I had been sitting on the hard boards of the Portsea pier for more than twenty minutes and my bum was getting sore, so I clambered up and wandered back the way I’d come. Down the shallow end the scouts were crowding around a teenage boy who had found something of interest in the water. It was possibly just a shell. An instructor penetrated the circle. The lad who’d made the discovery nodded respectfully and waded out. On the beach he handed the object to the teenage girl who wasn’t able to use her snorkel.
I descended the wooden steps and began a slow ponderous walk along the beach. Passing close behind the girl, I peered over her shoulder.
‘What’d they find in the water?’ I asked slyly.
She looked around and spoke cheerfully.
‘Oh, just these.’
Her palm revealed bright pink gums and pearly white teeth.
‘Oh my gosh. I hope they’re not real.’
‘No way. Real teeth would be gross, wouldn’t they? Here,’ she teased, ‘want a hold?’
I laughed. ‘No thanks. Maybe you should take them up to the hotel? Hand them in to lost property.’
‘Don’t worry, we will,’ she assured me. Then she went back to watching the water scouts.
I hadn’t gone far when she called me back.
‘Hey, Miss! You going up to the hotel?’
‘Later on, yes.’
‘Could you take ’em for me, please?’ She held out the false teeth.
Obligingly, I returned and wrapped them in a few tissues and put them in my satchel. As a child I’d been familiar with the glass of water on the vanity cabinet with Grandma’s teeth floating in it. Weirdest of all, Grandma cleaned both sets of teeth with a real toothbrush and she used real toothpaste to do this.
‘You won’t forget?’
‘I won’t,’ I promised.
‘There’s a wedding on at the hotel this arvo,’ the girl said archly.
Should I tell her?
‘That old guy picking up broken glass –’ she gestured to a hotel retainer raking the sand a little further along the beach – ‘said the guests would be parading on the beach afters.’
‘Really?’ I visualised our danced-out, shoeless guests spilling onto the sand.
‘I’m the bride,’ I announced with sudden resolve.
The girl’s braces glittered. Teenagers wearing braces tend to speak with their mouths closed. And when they smile it’s a real treat.
‘Get away,’ she replied.
‘I really am the bride. My name’s Beth Shaw. You can check with them up at the hotel if you don’t believe me.’
‘Far out! How does it feel, Beth Shaw?’
Confiding in a perfect stranger shouldn’t matter. It couldn’t hurt to share my troubles with this girl. I shook my head. ‘As a matter of fact, it doesn’t feel too good. I’m thinking of calling it off.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yep.’
‘Why? What’d he do?’
‘Two-timing,’ I said in a blasé fashion, as though such a transgression was almost to be expected.
Her smile was twitchy. Was I spinning her a curly one? Of course I wondered about that too.
‘I haven’t made up my mind about the wedding. Not completely,’ I clarified.
She looked surprised when I said this. Then she jumped up from the sand. ‘Give him heaps, Beth Shaw,’ she said, and kicked her leg out. ‘Give him the boot.’
I was warmed by her intensity.
‘Here’s a Scout salute for you,’ she said, standing at attention.
She was quite fey, this dark-haired girl. And one day she would have perfect teeth.
Clumsily, I saluted back. Then her friend was upon us, wringing out a dripping ponytail.
‘Where’d Mr Nason put our stuff? Did you see my towel, Ruthie?’
‘Shads,’ said Ruthie. ‘Shads, this is the bride for today’s wedding at the hotel.’
Shads looked at me doubtfully, her bottom lip jutting out.
‘Guess what she’s gonna do?’ an excited Ruthie quizzed Shads.
‘Um. Dunno.’
‘She’s gonna split and run.’
Fascination exploded on Shad’s face. ‘Woo hoo,’ she cried, and flapped her arms in appreciation, penguin-like.
Behind Shads more snorkellers were coming out of the water. Now the whole tribe would get to hear my news. They’d be patting me on the back, and saying ‘Good on you!’ What if they told the hotel retainer and word got back to the manager? I probably shouldn’t have made such a bold announcement. If only the solution to my dilemma was as clear-cut as Ruthie made it seem. I felt a bit sick at leaving myself so exposed, so I waved farewell and continued my trek along the foreshore.
Up on the lawns of the hotel someone had recently erected the maypole dais for our wedding. I could see a white pole holding aloft the canopied umbrella beneath which Jordan and I would stand to recite our vows. The maypole ribbons were wriggling in the breeze. One white ribbon had broken free of its peg and was fluttering above the canopy. It appeared to be writing something invisible in the air.
After the recent havoc, my wedding vows were virtually forgotten. I could recite those lines from memory three days ago, at our rehearsal, but now I couldn’t string a single line together.
‘And then I will pronounce you husband and wife,’ the celebrant, Rosa, had announced – throwing her arms out climactically – as our dress rehearsal wound to a close. The dummy run had been conducted in her small Mount Eliza office, with the blinds to the street shut tight to block out the afternoon sun.
‘No, I don’t think so. Do you, Beths?’
I was in full agreement with Jordan. ‘We don’t like those fuddy-duddy names.’
‘Fair enough,’ Rosa responded. But she regarded us more circumspectly afterwards. If we didn’t want to be husband and wife to each other, why were we even bothering? Rosa glanced at my tummy, searching for signs of a pregnancy. She had probably been saddled with shotgun brides in the past, but I wasn’t one of them.
We weren’t freaks or backward conservatives, Jordan and I. That wasn’t why we were getting married when our coupled associates were just living together. Marriage would propel us into a brighter future, wouldn’t it? In marrying a boy who could run fast, I would leave my dispiriting adolescence behind. And as far as Jordan was concerned, he would be attempting to end his lingering yet futile attachment to Tracy Breeze. ‘Attempting’ was the word.
There were contributing family factors. If weddings were the public declaration of a successful relationship, I’d prove to everyone that I hadn’t been injured by my father’s absence and my parents’ failure to work things out. And Jordan, being the child of a contented union, was just copying the tried-andtrue model he knew. His older brother and two sisters had defied current convention by marrying in their mid-twenties. Before announcing our engagement at a family luncheon in Mount Martha, Jordan told his siblings that their example was catching. I don’t believe for one minute Jordan was faking his delight with me. How could he look his own family in the eye and lie? On that day it was the right decision for him.
I drank some warm water from my plastic bottle and splashed some on my face. The sun was blazing down on the crown of my head and my neural circuits were sizzling. What a shame I didn’t bring a hat outside with me. Having almost made it to the end of the cove, I could feel my body melting. My knees gave way and I slid down on my side and lay there on the hot sand, shielding my face from the sun with a raised elbow.
I was definitely languishing in avoidance mode. And that was a very risky place for a young woman called Beth Shaw to find herself in. I could very well go to sleep and let the afternoon drift away from me. Then I might return to the hotel in a dreamy stupor, like a child of three who had just woken from her afternoon nap. That dazed child, with puffy cheeks, could be made to put a shiny gold ring on her finger – could be made to do anything, in fact, that her mother wanted.
A period of inertia followed. I kept dozing off then trying to rouse myself for fear of sunburn. Eventually I hauled my zombie self off the sand and stumbled towards some shade at the back of the beach. I sat on a tuft of grass under a small pine tree and sipped more warm water and chastised myself. Idiot, I thought. Why did you let yourself fall asleep in the early afternoon sun?
I couldn’t afford to slip into denial. The repercussions of doing nothing could be far worse than striking swiftly and selfishly. I had to make up my mind yay or nay, once and for all. Get on with it, Beth! Tackle the gritty issue while you still can.
Try to be objective. Consider what happened between Tracy and Jordan and learn from it.
Their instability went way back. Cherie had been less than tactful in reminding me of Tracy’s misery on the eve of my wedding. ‘The countless heartbreaks with a certain person’. Like Tracy, my mother had left it too late for me to do anything constructive about it.
I’d attached myself to Jordan knowing he would let me down. And part of me did feel resigned to this inevitability. I had known it back in Fourth Form, when Vera Pavlovska arrived on the scene. And there was no glory waiting for Vera after she got into Jordan’s pants. Oh, that Vera! Pushy girls were an amusement, a distraction, a bit of a bother Jordan didn’t mind. Maybe he did have a few uncomfortable moments, but he never really worried too much about what happened to him. He was optimistic, considerate … and fickle.
Memories of schoolboy Jordan came sliding back and I let them flood my tired brain – let them consume me like a favourite movie you’ve seen before but want to see again for the good bits. And while the movie was showing I was, of course, temporarily spared from making a decision. I could only pray that by the time the movie ended I would be less confused about who the essential Jordan Sinclair was, and whether he was the right mate for me to marry or not.