Beach Lenses

Words: 1874



“You know what else children don’t know?”

“What?”

“Object permanence. If you take something out of their vision, they think it’s gone. You can do it again and again, and every time they think it’s disappeared.”

“Maybe it has.”

“That’s too vague to be philosophical.”

“I wasn’t trying to be philosophical.”

“You’re always philosophical. You’re the most philosophical of bookish wankers.”

Brigitte looks at me for a second; the green of her eyes is sharp, like pine needles. She turns her head to look at the ocean, and the wind whips her blonde hair this way and that until her eyes are covered by curls and she resembles a kaleidoscope of girlishness.

She’s right, of course. I am a bookish wanker. I try not to be facetious about it, but it’s true, and the fact nestles uncomfortably on my shoulders – or perhaps on the ridge of my glasses, if I’m going to embrace the stereotype. I’m not even bookish in the style of smooth, literary genii that glide around ivy-league universities sprouting wisdom and bubbling prose. I manage to be bookish in the owlish sense: nocturnal, and averse to feather ruffling. As we walk along this deserted beach, Brigitte and I, I wonder when I became a cliché. Perhaps if I’d been born at the turn of the century… maybe I’d earn some kind of recognition in society, rather than being just another stamp on the great passport of life (an insignificant stop-over in a small and dreary airport). Perhaps if my parents had played classical music to me as a baby, like how cabbage grows greener in an enriched environment, I would have grown up with the courage to seize every aspect of myself, squish them between my hands and meld them into a brand-new personality. As it turns out, I haven’t the nerve.

“You look more wistful than usual, big brother.”

“Wistful’s my kind of face. I’m good at wistful. People find wistfulness intriguing.”

“It’s not.”

“Yes it is. Eau de wist.”

“No, you’re thinking of mystery. People find mystery intriguing. You wouldn’t know mystery if it whacked you in the arse.”

“Since when does my sister speak like a pirate?”

“Since always. You’re the bookish one, not me.”

“Huh. I figured you might have inherited some kind of culture from me. Through osmosis, maybe. Don’t they teach you anything at that school?”

“They teach me maths and chemistry and French and lots of other irrelevant things.”

“Huh. Don’t you feel at least a little bit enlightened? Joy of learning and all that.”

“We need to get little blue slips of paper from the teachers before we’re allowed to go to the toilet.”

“Huh.”

I bend to tie my shoelace, kneeling on the wet sand and feeling the dampness perforating the knees of my trousers.  I don’t know why I even bother – there’s sand everywhere, in my eyes, my mouth, the knobbly bit behind my elbow.  Brigitte’s the kind of person who isn’t bothered by a few grains in her eyebrows or between her toes – the sand seems to flow off her like she’s some slippery sea goddess – but it sticks to me, and I’ll find stubborn grains in my eyelashes and under my nails for weeks after going to the beach. Maybe I should write about that: sand-magnetism, and the advantages it brings. Exfoliation. If I could write about anything, that would be a good start. What happened to talent, what happened to – in the words of Mrs Streed, my Year 12 teacher – “a natural knack for creation”?

Birds are on the horizon. A woman’s scream echoes quietly on the water. I realise I’ve stopped walking, and Brigitte is a few metres ahead. She turns to look at me, an expression of faint alarm in her eyes, like when she was a kid and our dad would tell her that the tooth fairy would take away all of her teeth instead of just one, if she wasn’t careful. We shift our attention, in unison, to where we suspect the scream might have come, although the sound itself died so quickly that the beach is ghostly once more, and we only guess at the source.  Our four eyes (mine through lenses) focus on one of the beachside holiday houses that crowd the border of road and sand. It stands what looks to be four levels high, and is just small and poky enough to employ a certain degree of whimsy, as if a decoration on a cake. There’s a flimsy little picket fence around the back garden, and part of it has fallen down, and we notice this because we see a woman, dressed in a million different scarves and sobbing wildly, bursting through the broken fence. The many-coloured scarves twist her body with the sea wind, and as she runs and sobs she looks like she’s performing some strange, bone-breaking dance. She lets loose another savage scream, and this time the water’s ready for it, and doesn’t swallow it so quickly but instead lets it reverberate around the empty beach like the chorus of the song to which she dances. I look at Brigitte, and can’t help but notice the fearless fascination on her face, and maybe it is this that spurs me on.

“Come on,” I say, and we trudge towards the house, where the woman has thrown herself over the section of broken fence on the ground, her whole body heaving with sobs.

As we get closer, I see that what I’d thought to be scarves is only a feature of her clothes. She’s wearing a dress with a floral pattern and fringe that flies madly around her, and although she seems quite skinny – rake-like, I suppose – she is swamped in fabric. We stop in front of her; Brigitte twirls a few strands of her golden hair around her fingers and I nervously push my glasses further up my nose. When the woman raises her head from the voluminous mass of flowery fabric, and gazes at us with horror-movie earnestness, I notice that she’s maybe fifty years old, but looks like she uses a lot of products to look younger. As I predicted, when she speaks, she draws out every syllable, as if, in a desperate search for moisturiser, she had ended up smearing words on her face instead of cream.

“Oh God. He… he’s inside… I don’t know what to do, oh God, I don’t know what to do! He’s just…” She collapses into sobs again.

Then, in a moment of supreme illumination, I walk through the broken fence, and into their home.

I don’t know why I do it. It is not, in any imaginable shape or form, appropriate, necessary or helpful. Brigitte looks at me incredulously, before hurrying along behind me, which must be the first time she’s ever followed my lead. I fully register the obscenity, but, in this moment that somehow transcends reality, I don’t care. Call it morose, compelling curiosity. Call it a writer’s urge.

The house is cute and colonial inside, with French style wicker chairs and coffee table books about flower arranging. I walk through the glass sliding doors from the patio into the hallway, and everything is so silent I think that maybe I’ve gone deaf, or am dreaming. There’s a watercolour painting of a pelican on the wall, and it looks as confused as Brigitte. Past the stairs, there’s a door – the kitchen door – and I push it open and see chequered tiles, and my face (and Brigitte’s) reflected in cheerful pots and pans. Then, I see a slumped figure on the floor.

“Is he… dead?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Brigitte covers her mouth with her hand, and part of me wonders if it’s to hide a fragment of a smile.

“Have you ever seen a dead body before?” she asks.

“No. I’ve always wondered what the big deal is, really. I mean, if you don’t know the body, surely a dead body is just an alive body, without the aliveness… but this man… he really is… gone.”

“Do you think he’s her husband?”

“Looks like it. His eyes are open.”

“So what?”

“I can see myself in them.”

She makes a retching sound and looks around the kitchen instead.

“Bridge.”

“Yes?”

“We should call someone.”

“Must we?”

“We should. That’s what you do when people die.”

“We didn’t know him.”

“I don’t think it matters.” 

The woman appears at the door, fat tears midway through their journey down her cheeks. She peeks around the doorframe like a child, and stains the white wall with her runny mascara. She finally speaks, in a voice that wavers like a spider’s web in the wind.

“He just dropped. He’s had heart troubles, it’s… it’s not suppo-” she blows her nose on a tea towel, “-sed to be a shock, the doctor said, but I… I can’t help but…” More tears drip from her. “Oh, Henry”, she whispers. 

We three sit in silence, watching the man on the floor, who lies still and somehow makes the room colder with his lack of warmth, darker with his lack of light. Brigitte bites her nails. Eventually, I speak.

“Have you got a telephone?”





I watch the tide go out. I’m standing on the edge of the water, and it laps my shoes gently, as if asking my permission to conduct its vast, watery business. I can see the ambulance outside the house; lots of people are running in and out, which seems strange to me, because surely this must happen all the time. Old men who drink too much, who eat steak every night, and who eventually keel over in the chequered-tile kitchen, to the tune of the Saturday radio – it can’t be rare. Yet, somehow, all the people hurrying between the house and the ambulance, or congregating in the back garden (neatly contained behind the boundaries of the ineffective picket fence) seem frantic. Brigitte sits on the sand a bit behind me, her knees pulled up to her chin. She seems like a little girl again, and suddenly I feel like I shouldn’t have taken her inside the house at all, that I should have kept her safe in the sea froth, where the cries of the seagulls sounded pesky, and not mournful.

“Do you think we can go to the funeral?”

“Why would we, Bridge? We barely knew him.”

“We didn’t know him at all.”

“Exactly.”

“Can we go home now, Sam?”

I gaze at the horizon, shielding my face from the sun. I ask myself if I’ll write about this, what better thing to write about? What a fortuitous plotline! What well-established characters! What an expressive setting! Words on a page, that’s all it is, words on a page. Should be easy. It’s all in front of me – fate hath grandly intervened to hand me a beautiful story, wrapped in gold foil and ready to use. Yet, as the seagulls screech or sing, and the wind whips or embraces, and Brigitte – my own little Brigitte – shrieks in grief or laughter, I know that words somehow are not enough. My head is as empty as the great and lonesome sea, and not even a dead man’s hand can press the pen into my own.