The beach house was like a long boat beached in a sandy thicket of emerald green pines. The needles filled the soil and poked into our feet as we approached, all of us barefoot after the six and a half hour drive. The pricking needles seemed a bad omen. They spiked our feet all the way across the sand trail that led to the house. There was a letter box, fifty-nine it had on it in white blocky letters, fifty-nine Illana Drive. The drain man had written the address on a scrap of paper and his writing appeared quite florid and learned looking for a plumber, more like a bookkeeper, I thought.
There were only three other houses in the forgotten street, but through the green mash of trees below was the Pacific. From above it appeared static with some dancing white foam on top of the green-blue plate of water, and our longing to cast ourselves into the waves was powerful. We threw some things into the house; one room lined on each side with a row of unmade single beds, then we charged towards the sea. The temperature of the sand rose as we galloped through the scrub towards the beach. Then the undergrowth ran out and the white sand took over and the heat soared and we dashed for the blue water, yelping and squealing. To stand still would have caused our feet to blister. The water was rebirth, baptism and heaven come to earth, and we played like seals for hours, piercing the waves with our bodies, then torpedoing towards the shore, our heads and shoulders figure-heading the waves, steering into the shallows where we fell beached on our sides and allowed the waves to roll us over.
Our mother’s limbs looked gloriously unknotted as she played with us for the first time since Dad’s death. Squeezing with all her strength, she pinched the sides of an old plastic tube of suntan lotion she’d found in the bathroom, sending a jet of the stuff across the sand. In previous weeks this would have sent her into a rant, and we waited for her to begin, but instead she opened her mouth wide and laughed. The silence had been broken, the death was gone between us.
When the sun dropped behind the hill we crouched in the twisted trees that grew between the sea and the house. We spent most of our time in that band of trees. We ate outside, barbecuing everything: sausages, vegetables, even fruit was tossed on to the hot plate, bananas, tomatoes, pineapple, all were blackened on the fire.
It was so spidery in the house we only went inside when we had to. More bugs would come out at night seeking out our reading lamps and smashing into the light shades as they circled wildly. We met Edward from the bus and brought him back to show him all the hiding places we had found in the twisted trees. We watched him experience the scorching sand and the hot Pacific, our unconscious, our reason, our God. If we couldn’t spear the waves there was no point in living. Hours we spent in the stunted scrubs pretending to be soldiers waiting to ambush the enemy. We stayed there until it was dark, only limping home after the scarlet streaks of clouds had turned to grey then black.
The drain man was there one day when we returned, sitting with my mother on the cement step at the front of the house. We formed a bewildered flank before them. It was us and them and we weren’t sure how we all fitted together, neither were they. My mother dithered, talked about feeding us for a long time before she pushed off from the cement step and headed in the direction of the kitchen. The drain man responded by driving three stumps into the prickling sand and handing Edward a cricket bat. We played on into the dark in a flood-lit patch at the front of the house. None of us wanted to enjoy ourselves now because it felt like such cold-blooded betrayal.
That was the first night they spent together under the stars on the beach and I cried because Dad was four hundred and ninety miles away, connected by the same canopy of stars, I knew that, waiting for us to return and oblivious to all of it. His replacement had been so quick and brutal and we evacuated the house the next morning with boxes of cereal and bottles of milk and swore to each other we were going to live in the stunted trees for ever.
We hovered in the trees listening to the squawking of the giant gulls and the waves hissing below, then we heard their voices coming up the path from the beach. We stopped, still not sure what to do. For days we had been waiting to ambush somebody, now that there was someone to ambush we couldn’t do it. Then Gerard called out: ‘Mum!’ And dropped from the tree on to the path behind her. There was wailing and blood. He’d fallen on to a tree root and a gash opened up in the bottom of his foot and the blood seeped out.
The crisis diverted the meaning of the moment and somehow Edward and I ended up on either side of the bloody plot of sand. The others had all gone with Gerard to the bougainvillaea-covered hospital. James wouldn’t stay with us, he needed, he said, to be with Mum, he didn’t say that, but we could feel it. The drain man’s presence had the opposite effect on us. Edward and I wanted so badly not to be anywhere near her. Also we wanted James to go with them to keep them separate. It was a telepathic plot. We’d looked at each other, Edward and I, and known what the other was thinking. If they, our mother and the drain man, just had Gerard, they could pretend he was their child. They needed reminding there was four of us and that we would never be his family.
We crawled back into the trees. ‘He’s the favourite,’ said Edward.
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Gerard. Who else?’
‘I thought James was,’ I said.
He was so unselfish, my mother was always saying. It made me sigh and roll my eyes up to the fluorescent kitchen light.
‘Gerard is,’ Edward repeated. ‘James was Dad’s favourite.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was, wasn’t I?’
‘I dunno, I’m nobody’s favourite.’
‘Yes you are,’ I said. ‘You’re Mum’s favourite.’
‘Who cares anyway,’ he said. ‘Two more years, then I can move out.’
I knew he meant it; how would I ever see him again?
‘Don’t go,’ I said pathetically, as if the wishes of his creepy sister, as he often called me, would make him stay. I was turning a flat rock over and over in my hand wondering what it would take to make him stay. I couldn’t contemplate living at home without Edward, I’d go with him. I couldn’t live with my mother, that man and my other two brothers.
We built a stone wall with the smooth rocks that poked out of the sand like lumps of butterscotch. Our medieval wall extended and curved to enclose some sheep we made with burrs from the eucalyptus bushes. I fantasized it was just us in the world working in the sand creating a scene of early settlement. It soon deteriorated into a more abstract piling of the rocks that was less functional. Our medieval farm in the burning sand had been the starting point for our stone art. The second paddock lost its form and the stone walls began to slide into other shapes, lines that bent and turned in on themselves, coiling into tight circles. It began to incorporate the scrubby trees. We tied grass around the lower branches. We climbed up to get some perspective on the area under construction. It was fragile work, it had the intricacies of a mosaic floor but no chance of that sort of permanence. We left it, eventually, knowing it wouldn’t be there the next day, but we accepted its fate. We had accomplished what we needed to do. We had fertilized this spot together and used the obsessiveness of creation to block out the real world.