DIRTY WATER

A few days later, I’m on an Ansett flight south. Not to Sydney just yet, but on the way to my new mate Bobo’s place further along the coast. This gives me nearly a week at his family spread, where waves spill across the rock shelf at the foot of their block on high tide (and where Bobo collects the oysters he’s promised we’ll be gorging ourselves on). There’s a stairwell winding up from rocks to their breakfast room, where the shimmering sea light transforms the walls into Edward Hopper’s breathtaking painting Rooms by the Sea.

Early on my second day, Bobo and I walk a narrow bitumen path to a nearby ocean pool for some token training. On the pool deck, fifty-year-old surf-club stalwarts, some with spectacularly marbled walrus guts, greet us with strange expressions like, ‘Yerz keepin’ that dirty water off yer chests, boys.’ When I ask Bobo what they meant about the dirty water on our chests, he says it’s an old surf-club way of asking if we’ve had any luck with girls. ‘Right,’ I reply, none the wiser.

When Bobo notices a swell running after training, he lends me one of his surfboards. I could swim thirty kilometres in the ocean if needed, but I’m a little taken aback to find our point of entry is the lighthouse rocks. I’ve never surfed on a board before, let alone entered the ocean with such risk. I watch nervously as Bobo mimics how to time the lazily heaving swells to leap onto your board the moment the spill rakes your ankles, then to paddle like crazy. If you hesitate a moment, according to Bobo, the water’s sudden retreat can leave you ‘paddling with two broken arms on oysters below’. (He’s right, I concede seconds later, as those oysters are exposed when the swell sucks back.) A few surges after Bobo’s entry, I pick my time and paddle out to the dozen or so surfers lolling about in steamers for their next wave. But I sit out conspicuously beyond them, as if these small sets aren’t worth the bother where I come from. After twenty minutes playing community shark bait, I paddle discreetly to shore and walk back to Bobo’s alone.

In the afternoon, we wander up to The Oxford in town for a beer and a game of snooker. Again we’re greeted by cheerful surf-club characters, whom Bobo introduces in quick succession along a line of stools as ‘Wags’, ‘Fats’, ‘Ant’, and ‘Dog’. The pub’s a font of salacious gossip for Bobo. ‘Those two suits at the bar,’ he leans into me and whispers, ‘they’re crooked Ds’ (he never says detectives). ‘Over there, that’s the mayor who lanced a few of my old schoolmates, but he’s never been charged. That dealer at the end of the bar could have us killed, just like that.’

Bobo plays a great trick on my third day. When I wander into his lounge room, he yells ‘Catch’ from behind the door as I spy him from the corner of my eye shaping to pass a football. Only it’s not a footy, but their Persian cat, and when I lift my arms to brace that blur of fur and claw hitting my chest, it rakes its rear legs in panic, mincing my abdomen. This happens a few more times over the next two days, until I discover how to prevent a shredding entirely by accident: it’s when I’m late with my arms and the cat happily bounces off my chest on lightly drumming paws, claws retracted. Once Bobo sees I’ve cottoned on, moggy-tossing’s a thing of the past.

Doomed to return to Sydney to rejoin Talbot within a few days, I’m wondering how I can repay Bobo’s hospitality when I remember Ashley’s sister Edna lives in a unit in Dee Why. This fits in perfectly with Bobo’s Sunday surf carnival at nearby Collaroy, so I suggest we stay Sunday night there, because the following morning we have to meet up with Ming. ‘Is it cool with her?’ Bobo asks.

‘Isn’t she my aunt?’ I shrug. But she’s also an aunt I’ve never met, if you don’t count one or two reported visits when I could barely walk or talk. (I suspect her being sole beneficiary of their widowed mother’s estate might have long ago estranged Ashley and her.) On Sunday afternoon, I ring Edna from a Collaroy phone box to ask if it’s okay for us to crash at her place — ‘The lounge would be fine.’ By her hesitating approval, she’s clearly uncomfortable with the idea, and she sounds even older than I’d anticipated.

When her front door opens two hours later, the impression’s confirmed, but then I remember she’s Ashley’s older sister, and Ashley’s a young-looking sixty-three. A clenched ‘Hello’ barely escapes her lips through Ashley’s crowded upper teeth on a prim falsetto, before a gothic, ‘Do come in.’ It’s soon obvious that a pushing-seventy divorcee and two knockabout teenagers have nothing to talk about except family. I’m rattled, though, to find her opinion of Ashley has none of the restraint of her demeanour, reminding me of my mother’s story of Edna becoming my father’s first management ‘project’ when, at barely twenty, he’d supposedly bullied her into a modelling career she’d only been lukewarm on. When her final word on him is, ‘A very bad man, your father,’ without a crease of irony in sight, I’m tempted to share an awkward glance with Bobo, but lock my gaze on the carpet in case we both lurch into guffaws. I can see it’s been unsettling for her to dredge these impressions of her rascal brother — in fact, the visit has been a terrible mistake — so I offer to make us all a cup of tea, which she declines before standing to sigh, ‘Help yourselves, I’m off to bed.’ When Bobo and I buy milk and cereal from the local grocer the next morning, we bring back a small bunch of flowers and leave them on the kitchen table before heading off.