PALLARENDA

For details of what this is, check the note.

PALLARENDA

I think Lacey was born in the sour house across the road. That would have been him. Its noises of hurling objects and shouting traded time with a silence thicker than the dust of the road shoulder. My yard was bound by a thick crimson hedge which didn’t let anything but sound in. By day and hour that house by its sounds came into my yard, leapt, sprang or wafted over the leaves and landed there where I was. But no sound ever left. The garden, rich and fruited, couldn’t bear the loss of a single raspberry.

Lacey and I both liked the beach at Pallarenda. It was big, wide and empty. The sea was always quiet there. The beach’s bank was high and barred all sight of the nearby houses just as well as if you held a hand up to your eyes against them. Pallarenda’s bright sand was blown by a wind that could clean the worst of things. And the sea had a whisper. It told me that I never had to make a sound when I was there. Lacey was happy enough with the space. It put a little zap in his eyes. There was nothing fat about him on the beach, this beach so far from town. Across the water, Magnetic Island hulked big and blueblack. And at the end of the long thin curve of bay shimmered a little Townsville, season in season out, bright and tiny, far away.

But it wasn’t just the whisper of the sea. And it wasn’t just the space. We could’ve dreamed those up in a laundry. There was more. Something that you would never dream up. Something you would never think to want.

We called him the Watcher.

He must’ve lived around there or Rowes Bay. He was always there when we were there. Not old. Not young. Forty or so. His clothes were wrinkled and brown, same as his face. His hair was long and stringy and went crazy when the wind blew. Black fire.

We called him the Watcher because that’s what he did. He watched. He sat on the sand and gazed out to sea. He was always alone and didn't move. If you didn’t know him he could have been dead. you could look and think that but then suddenly he would move. Just changing position,  and only very tinily but he’d move, sudden as a snake.

Lacey and I would go to the beach at Pallarenda every three or so days and he was always there. Mum would take us after school. Mum liked Pallarenda as much as we did. She had her own reasons. Two we all had were the facts that almost no one else was ever there on a week day and that the fish shop’s chips were perfect. And the flake was always crumbed and juicy. And prawns, huge king prawns that smelt and tasted of the cold and salty deep. We always took something, toting hot paper parcels big with dripping prawns, and a beading bottle of sars and go and sit by the sea. Mostly, we went down to the old swimming baths, a huge semicircle of rusting iron girders that rose from the shallows and flaked, brown, back into the sea and gurgled with the good fresh stink of seaweed. It was good for shells and coins. And palm sized lozenges of beerbottle glass that the sea had tongued smooth. You held them to the light and saw amber.

But the beach is no place for swimming. It is a feeding ground. Someone put a shark in the baths once. It sliced through the water in circles, a big, silent gloom that lived and moved. And there they all were at the edge of the water, gawping or going to push someone in. I stared at it, same as them, another meaty bit that hadn’t yet been thrown in. And all the time the thing went round and round, whipping and slashing when a rock or a fish was thrown at it. Who did that? Who did that? That’s how you learn about the sea. We didn’t swim. We ate. We’d eat our fish and chips, ploughing the sand with our heels. Or we’d take our shoes off and run to the far end where the pink rock hill was and where the Watcher was.

I can’t remember when we first saw him but it was at a distance. And we were hooked, even at a distance, by the way he stared, head forward, never leaning back. Alone. Concentrating. Reading the sea. Or waiting, maybe. Lacey said it must’ve been someone he knew who had drowned and he was just waiting for the ghost. Would the ghost have owed him money, maybe? But Lacey didn’t laugh. He went and kicked some sand in the air and, when it came back in his face, looked away. What about a pirate, then? A pirate? A pirate, a pirate, a pirate? Where was his sash, if he was such a pirate? And his earring? How about a sword for a little pirate? If he was a pirate where was his ship? Marooned. Marooned? What’s the point of that? A marooned pirate may as well be a marooned roll monitor for all the good it was going to do him there. Besides I’d seen him smile once and he had all his teeth.

I said he could’ve been waiting for the end of the world like that doomsday lot. It happened when I was four. I’d read about it. Everyone had. Everyone knew about it. They stood on the beaches of the world and waited for the end. And when they saw it wasn’t going to happen, when they all went home to dinner and took back all the things they’d given away, there were some who suddenly wished it had blown to smithereens. Maybe they went back to the beach. Maybe the Watcher had never left. Perhaps he had more hope.

Whatever, that’s how it was. You only had to look at him. He was Hitler at Calais, the Island for Britain. He was a wizard calling to the spirit of the sharks whose spells were not for the ears of anyone else. As an ancient king he waited for his ally’s boats whose load of armoured soldiers were ready to die for the return of his crown. As General MacArthur he squinted into a world of water that touched the Japanese fleet. Moses and the Devil. All you had to do was look and see.

I said I saw him smile once and that’s true. I was up on the pink rock hill at the end of the beach and spying on him, hiding like a commando. Just one move and... He turned. He was looking straight at me. I crouched even lower. He was grinning when I looked back up. And then back down. I couldn’t look at him. He’d never done that before. He grinned, wide as the bay. Never once before. But I had seen, and I had spied with my little eye that there were all his teeth.

And one time...Well...

Lacey and me were making sand sculptures.

Sand sculptures. Sand sculptures sand sculptures. I have never seen a sand castle outside of a TV screen. But sand sculptures? We made the things of the world from sand. We were normally there late afternoon but there was no reason why it couldn’t have been the dawn. Remember Hitler, the waiting king and General Mack? Pallarenda was all of history. The best thing to do in that situation, for my money, is to begin as close to the start as you can and work from there. All history may well begin with gases bashing into each other but it wasn’t gases I was interested in making out there with the stuff to make anything of my choice. It was the animal kingdom. Fat cane toads, coiled snakes, the sides of horses sunken into the sand. Mostly it was people. Here, with the stuff of creation itself we could make the people we wanted. A sand castle will only ever be a toy you can’t keep.

But people? People are meant to waste away. That’s what ours did. We’d make them near the edge of the surf close enough to see them go. And they went, staring stiff at the sky as they were eaten by the sea. All history could be done this way. Lacey? Lacey thought it was fun and wanted to stick to toads and tigers. And then I persuaded him about the people. I told him we were at the beginning of all time. Where we stood, I said, was new. There had been no wars, no gods, no cars, sharks or record players. It was up to us and us alone to begin all the goodies of the world to come, here and now.

We made things of many different kinds. And then a man. Lacey was happy enough to keep on doing this, he even wanted to make soldiers. That stopped me for a moment from saying what I wanted. But when I did there was no more talk of soldiers. There was just one mission. That was my doing. Pallarenda on a weekday afternoon was where I was everything. In any case we made a lot of things down there at the water. Down where the water wasn’t blue at all but clear and filmed with biting froth.

The last time we ever made sand sculptures was on a chilly Wednesday after school. For practice we’d already made a range of things. A robot, a lion, a shark, and our principal’s head. It was cold with the winter seawind on our backs, dry and smelling of saltshakers. The first robot, the first lion, the first shark, the first principal’s head. All that had been taken care of. All that had been done. Now the work had grown special. Secret, careful, concentrated, serious as a cat.

Not without error. That’s only to be expected. Many of our prototypes lay around us, drying, lumpish failures. Proportions. The sizes of things. Trial and error. Nevertheless our labour was divided. Lacey worked the legs which I left to him. He never really whinged when I changed what he’d done, especially since I had it over him. My skill with the face had me at the top every time. That’s what I was doing. And then noticed he was squinting at it. I let him squint.

“Muller,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s gotta be long hair.”

“Doesn’t.”

“Yes it duuuuhs.”

“Lacey...whose car did we come in?”

“Maaahrk.”

“Whose car?”

“It’s gotta be long.”

“Lacey...”

He went back to his legs. I made it short. There were plenty of girls at school with short hair. And plenty in the world. In any case he was the one who kept making one leg longer than the other, a lot longer. And now he was starting on the thing. Mum was out of range so it didn’t matter. But, of course, it did.

“Watch how you do that,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just is.”

Then his face shadowed over. And he was looking up with a big gawp, his mouth open and his big groper’s eyes made bigger. And I had to twist my head to see. And I saw.

He was tall and looked a long way down. He had a smell of old, a smell of clothes kept in wardrobes, a smell of stale biscuits. Strings of black hair trailed down around his eyes and, windblown, curled and swung in dark wormy threads. And his eyes were as blue as the bay, strong and steady in tanned and wrinkled pouches. He was smiling.

“Good morning, boys,” he said. It was late afternoon.

I smiled a fushy grin for a second and tried to answer but my throat was dry and only let a small rasp out into the wind. His voice did not fit. It was deep and rich as chocolate cake, and though made flat by the wind, it came through big and strong. And there were his teeth, chipped and sharp and brown as dull brass.

“Uh...Mohr...” nothinged Lacey. He wasn’t looking at Lacey.

“What have we got here?” he asked me.

“Girl, “ I said.

“A girl,” he said. He drew the word out long like bubblegum. Gurrrrrrrrlll.

He looked at our sandgirl longways and sideways. And laughed quietly.

“No no no,” he said. “Like this.”

He went to the legs, edging Lacey quietly aside, and crouched over our sandgirl, letting out a big breath. And with a bony finger drew a thick furrow there between them.

I was red with shame.

The Watcher stood again with a cracking in his knees, and rose up to full length. And, winking at the sky, he smiled. And then he looked back down.

We stared up at him and he stared back down at us for some long, fat seconds. My eyes were bulging. Did I look like a fish? Lacey did. And then Lacey croaked half a word and the Watcher smiled. I looked at Lacey. He looked back at me. I mumbled that Mum would be getting worried. The Watcher looked back down, not smiling. Lacey and I rose slowly and stepped back. And more. And more until we were walking backwards. The Watcher watched. We turned and walked fast as we could without running. And then we ran.

And when I turned to look back Lacey went on running. And when I looked back I saw the Watcher dancing. But when I looked harder I saw he wasn’t dancing. He was kicking.

And our sandgirl broke in easy pieces under the force of his feet, sods that leapt away like frogs or sprays that flashed golden in the air, were slapped by the wind, fanned for tiny seconds and then fell.

I turned and caught up to Lacey.

“You left that out, you scum,” I hissed at him.

“What?”

“That detail, scum! The thing!...Scum.”

Lacey gawped at the sand.

I stopped Lacey saying a word to Mum by singing whenever he spoke. Mum stopped me and that stopped Lacey. Why waste something like that on your parents? I’ve seen the fuss of grown ups over kids crossing roads or playing with plastic bags. It’s a lot of noise. It’s a lot of ignorance and forgetfulness. It is something I do not like the world for. At that time I was not going to loose any more stupidity into the world.

Mum didn’t know about the Watcher because I kept Lacey quiet on the spot, right there on the beach, right there where the wind blew all the time and smelled of fish and chips. And there he kept quiet, quieter than the engine of Mum’s car. But the quad at school had no breeze and it smelled of sausage rolls and day old milk splatted on to the bitumen by the milk boys who liked doing things like that. This was where Lacey lived. He didn’t live at home. There was nothing there but form guides, mess and ashtrays. It was school. That’s where he lived. And he was good at it. Better than me.

And so when I heard with the rest of them for the first time how I’d run faster than I ever done at school, half a mile past where Mum was,   from the weirdo on the beach, I leaned back against a post and smiled and looked into the air. I knew that even if, as on that day, he put the flat jokes of all the boys in the class between us so that my loudest bark would not get through, Lacey knew that he was going to get a pie somehow. Some things have to be put up with. He could do all that and know I wouldn’t even whisper. He would play his part, do what he was told, do what a fat boy’s godda do, play his cards right and play ‘em to the end, and ride out into the setting sun on his trusty pie. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I stared into the air and let him get on with it, that living of his, his stardom, and kept my mouth shut.

And then it was Sunday.

It was Sunday morning. Early Sunday morning. The whole beach was pink under an orange sky. Dad took us fishing a Pallarenda on Sunday mornings. If Lacey was up and around my place early enough he’d come, too. He was always up early and around my place. Mum went to mass on Sunday.

But Sunday morning. No matter what time of year it was the beach on early Sunday morning was frisky fresh. The seawind slapped you awake, and if that didn’t work it dug its fingernails into your cheeks until you opened your eyes properly.

But then you were awake and had to look. Sundays at Pallarenda didn’t leave you alone. There was the thing, the scene. All along the line of the shore were kids and dads, dads dads dads - and uncles, I don’t doubt - lined up at the water’s edge. At the edge of the surf where the sea’s salty tongue licked long the north-hard feet that felt it not nor knew it. With rods and nets they spread out in writhing messes, or stalked straight up or bent back on their own and lowered and lifted bending rods which they played with at their bellies, making clicky, tearing whinges with the reels.                                                                                                                                                                        

As usual Dad had brought his yabby pump along and was showing off with it, sucking yabbies from the sand. Other kids liked watching this but I didn’t care for it too much. Dad said that yabbies were great bait but I couldn’t stand them. The sight of them -  greenish black midget lobsters, monsters that bit. I hated them. But bait, of course, is, after all, just between ourselves, all things considered, bait. There, there’s an end to the matter!

Sunday morning’s breakfast was never fish for anybody except sharks. We had pastries and coffee at nine or so when we came back from the beach and Mum came back from Mass.

But even with the rest of them there Pallarenda was good. The beach was pink and the sky was orange. Magnetic Island came up out of the sea in a black Loch Ness hump. It ignored the little jigglers across the bay and waited for its own breakfast of pleasure boats and the ferry, and all that lay in the bellies of those things. A big breakfast day, Sunday.

And Dad mined yabbies with a big brass pump, surrounded by little rubbernecks. And the pump sucked big sludgy cores that splurted out sluggish, wet, yabbyless piles that spread and rolled into wet, sluggish sleep on the sand.

So I never fished.

Lacey and me left Dad and the pump and ran to the pink rock hill.

We stopped at a small crowd to see. And saw. It was a stingray. Someone had caught it in a net and left it there. It had almost finished moving, only flapping the tips of its useless wings, and had begun to stink. It twitched on the sand, maybe hearing the voices that came from above, saying what a bewdy never seen one big as that will you look at that sting dangerous bastards those....

Lacey tugged my shoulder and sniggered, pointing. A boy a bit older than us, probably a grade sixer, was touching the ray’s wings with a rod and getting a little spasm from them. A girl, younger than us, with a beach hat on and a big gob of yellow hair falling from it over most of her eyes, giggled fittishly with each stingray twitch. Her father squeezed her shoulder. She punched his hand. All she could do. They watched the poking boy. The rest watched and watched, hands on hips or fiddling with reels or fishingline or car keys, silent. They began to look the same when I looked around the circle. Same noses, eyes, hair, same dripping gawp. They were a family. This was their Sunday. Lacey looked at me full on and grinned. A card.

I walked off and he followed. “Don’t be a scum,” I told him. He gazed into the sand as we walked on. But then we remembered where we’d been headed and we began to run. I didn’t have to tell him to run.

We ran further down the beach towards the pink rock hill. It was a good way off but the wind was dry and chilly and made you want to run. It felt good on the skin and made you want more. We got more, too much, enough for a Sunday. We ran on and on. And then we found the Watcher.

He could only been seen up close, snug behind a dune. And this time, even though we came up to him and not the other way round he said nothing.

He wasn’t watching. He was covered in blood and his clothes were torn and you could actually see where the knife had gone in and there were spots and splats of brownish red on the sand where his blood had been spilled and he was dead.

He lay face up. His arms and legs were straight as though someone had set them there like that, tidied up. His face was plain and calm. When he’d stood that time I’d seen ridges in his skin around his mouth that cracked into wrinkles when he smiled. Now his skin was plain and draped from his face to his neck where it gathered in a full, smooth curve. And his mouth was closed and his lips were pressed together over his teeth, pulled into a flat, unsmiling line. And his eyes were closed, resting blue behind their tightened pouches. Resting and resting and resting. And a small string of hair ran across his forehead, raising up its wormy pointed head and shivering when the wind teased it. That wasn’t resting.

I looked back to the circle around the stingray. They were tiny and far away.

Lacey and me stared at the Watcher and let the wind blow sand in our hair. The sea smelled strong.

“Dare you to touch him,” Lacey said.

“Dare you ,” I said.

“Go on...touch him.”

“No,” I said.

The sea smelled strong.

I walked around the Watcher very carefully, almost on tiptoe, and went on the last few yards to the pink rock hill. And I began to climb. It was hard to do at first, my hands weren’t gripping too well. But when I heard Lacey’s huge feet pounding the sand towards me my grip came back like Lassie. I had almost cleared my own height when he reached the spot.

“Hey,” he hissed. “Hey...dare you to touch him.”

I kept climbing.

He grabbed my ankle, following me up. Then I had to turn. He was a good climber, I’ll have to give him that. He was almost where I was.  I nudged his head with my foot. No? I kicked his shoulder. One hard shoving kick. And then he fell. There! King of the castle!

“Go and tell the others or something,” I murmured to him and sat at the top. “Go on, find some pies or something...somewhere else.”

He gawped for a moment and stood still. A few seconds there. Pure silence, sight and sound. But then he grinned and swung around and ran towards the stingray family.

I watched him for a while but then turned and looked at the sea. And I thought of seaweed and sharks, stingers, stonefish, starfish, coral, reefs, sandbars, froth and drowning. I even thought of dragging the Watcher into the water and letting the things he knew about, and who would’ve known him well enough, take him somewhere better than where he was now. But Lacey, pudge regardless, was running like the wind. Pies and fish and chips and burgers galore from the family Nose. He was racing. They would all come back much faster. Fairly distant but impossible not to see was a  fourwheel drive, needlessly huge, parked with its big thick jaw duhring over the edge of the bank. That would come in handy, surely. Rrm rrm rrm, here I am, now all of you stand back, I am blonde and bronze. Dare ya dare ya dare ya.

So I looked away. I looked into the sea. The sea smelled strong.

Sunday. The day had begun to lose its pink. Sunday. It was Sunday and I thought about breakfast. Fresh crusty rolls with butter melting in their innards. Cakes, omelettes, coffee, cream and pumpkin scones. And jam. Strawberry, cherry, marmalade. Dare you to touch him. Dare ya dare ya dare ya.

From now on Sunday morning would be quiet. I’d read or something. I would look forward to something like that. Omelettes, pastries, whatnot. My mother had blue eyes. My father’s were brown. I’d have to look at them looking at me. Why should a pair of eyes make icing sugar and jam taste like pencil rubbers? For the moment the sea glittered, winked a thousand times at once, smelling good and strong. I watched it. I opened and closed my eyes and saw it winking. Mother eyes, father eyes. I would have to talk. Dare ya dare ya dare ya. The time had come for me to talk.

Peter Jetnikoff