A Month of Sundays Read online

  But perhaps we’d get bored if we spent each day sitting on a rock and jumping in the ocean whenever we got too hot. The old blokes at Bronte didn’t look bored, though.

  The seals reminded me of Shelagh’s cat. Shelagh was Mrs Haines, my fifth form English teacher, who, one hot afternoon as we trudged through Shakespeare, told the class about her cat. The cat, she said, sat on the windowsill in the sun all day, rarely upset, purring happily. Would any of us, she asked, like to swap places with her.

  Sampson’s hand shot up. ‘I would,’ he said.

  ‘Why, Anthony?’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to know what it was like to be female.’

  Sampson often missed the point but he usually got a laugh.

  What she was trying to get us to think about was whether we’d prefer more contentment if it meant less self-awareness. Of course, we were meant to come down on the side of self-awareness and the challenges of being human, but when you see the water explode and a seal shoot up, hang in the hair, squeal with what surely can only be delight and flop back in with a splash, it does make you wonder.

  Particularly when they do it again and the squeal isn’t any less delighted.

  And again.

  And again.

  Next were the sharks. No apparent contentment here. Just menace. It’s their eyes. And the teeth, obviously. But the eyes look mean. Painted-on mean. Even if the teeth could smile the eyes would still be looking at you with contempt. The background music at the shark tank doesn’t do the sharks-aren’t-mean-just-misunderstood lobby any favours either. It’s sinister and dark, making the theme from Jaws sound like the soundtrack to Finding Nemo.

  You can walk down and through their underwater home too, separated from the water by glass on three sides. The sharks cruise along looking for prey, which must be dispiriting because there isn’t any. Here, they look fierce, efficient and deadly for no reason. Maybe that’s why they look so mean, because they’re pissed off that they spent so many millions of years evolving into perfect killing machines and now, in front of a daily paying audience, don’t have any opportunity to show how good they are at it.

  Sharks, however, are not the most dangerous creature in the sea. According to an information billboard the ocean’s deadliest predator is, of course, humans, as a result of all the crap we put in it and all the good stuff we remove from it. So if you ever do bump into a shark outside the aquarium, just remember that you are more deadly than it is—and hope the shark knows.

  Between the big tanks are lots of little ones that try to replicate the natural environment of each water creature, so that there is not only water in each one but bits of log and tree and natural habitat. At the aquarium they pride themselves on making the displays as natural as possible and seem to succeed. For example, at the platypus tank I spent five minutes looking and didn’t see a single one. Just like in nature. How much more realistic can you get?

  The visitors were young and old but there was virtually no one between eighteen and 30, presumably because when you are in that range you associate aquariums with school excursions and family outings, both of which are officially daggy.

  Some visitors were so intent on getting every last thing on video that I doubt they saw a thing. Some even kept the camera to their eye as they made their way to the next display, pointing it to the floor to see where they were going.

  The last display was the best, a Great Barrier Reef re-creation packed with a dazzling array of multi-coloured, shaped and sized tropical fish. This was the icing on the awe-cake. Everyone, babies to oldies, gaped in wonder. The fish looked back, utterly indifferent, which proves that people are far more interested in tropical fish than tropical fish are in people.

  There were a few sharks in this giant tank, too. Cunning ones who had somehow managed to escape the shark tank and get to where the food was good? Yet they didn’t appear interested. Perhaps they had been put in there to try and correct the impression the scary music had made in the shark tank, to show that some sharks really can live with other fish in peace. The fish looked nervous when they cruised past, though.

  At the end of the reef tank there is a 3 metre by 6 metre window onto the reef display with room enough for people to sit and stare, which is what we did for I don’t know how long. The view alone was worth the 24 bucks it cost to get in. It was dazzling.

  Which meant that when we did leave it jarred to have to exit through the gift shop. Everywhere has one. They had one at the Chinese Gardens too, but it was less intrusive. The aquarium gift shop jumps out at you like an escaped shark. The only way out is through it. Of course you can walk straight through and not linger, but the aisles are close together and I kept bumping into teatowels and coffee mugs. It would be far better to emerge directly into the Chinese Gardens to sit and contemplate what you had seen. But they have to have a gift shop so that every time you wash the dishes you can look at your Snub-nosed Dartfish teatowel and remember.

  Past the gift shop is the snack bar. On the menu was fish and chips. It seemed wrong, like having giraffeburgers for sale at the zoo. I saw someone eating some and felt like calling the police.

  After the fish, everything outside seemed grey by comparison. Even bright, colourful, shiny Darling Harbour. And especially work, which was where I was about to go. Before I did, we thought we’d complete the Darling Harbour experience with lunch at one of its eight trillion restaurants. But they all look designed to separate tourists and businessmen with expense accounts from their money, and have that way too expensive way of describing their food. Steak and chips becomes ‘filet mignon in a poached apple sauce anointed with fragments of west Kenyan beetroot wearing a halo of pommes frites’. We gave the food a miss.

  four

  the wild man of manly

  We took the next day off. If you can call lying in bed with food poisoning listening to drills, bobcats, loud radio and not-all-that-witty builder banter where every third word is ‘fuckin’ a day off. We prayed for rain or four o’clock, the only things that would make them stop.

  It was the tuna curry. Good on Sunday, evil on Wednesday. Bibi lay on the bed watching us gradually dehydrate. It was like a scene from Trainspotting—two people vomiting with a baby lying between them.

  By the end of the day the builders had gone home, we had lost all the weight we had to lose and were beginning to feel a bit better. Things were looking up. Bibi was sitting on Lucy, then she looked across at me and smiled. Then she vomited all over us.

  On Saturday we heard voices over the back fence. It was Ivan, his architect and a third man, younger, with a shaved head. They were plotting and planning and pointing at bits of ground and talking about what would be there one day. Conversational fragments about walls and footings and various monetary figures drifted over. Eventually there was a knock on the fence and the third man’s head appeared above it. He had a no-hands mobile phone that looked like the microphone helicopter pilots wear shoved in his ear and wrapping around to his mouth.

  His name was Phil, he said, and he was the builder. He told us they wanted to put a pool in and asked us whether we would prefer it at ground level or halfway up the hill.

  ‘How about halfway up the hill on our side?’ I said.

  He looked at me nonplussed for a moment, then laughed.

  ‘I’ll give you a quote,’ he responded, calling my bluff.

  I told him that if they really were asking our opinion, we’d prefer it on ground level. If we couldn’t see it we’d get less jealous. One ridiculously hot day the previous summer we had visited friends who had just moved to Ryde. They were surrounded by pools they could see and hear but not touch. It was bad. They were having lots of cold showers and desperately trying to make friends with the neighbours.

  ‘Sure,’ Phil said with a smile. ‘Whatever you’d like.’

  Phil had been to builders’ charm school.

  The following Monday we went to Manly. Manly is what tourists think Australia is. One big beautiful beach, surrounded
by just enough shops and places to stay to mean that if you do have to leave the beach for food, drink or shelter you don’t have to go far, but not so many that it takes away from the focus of the place being a beach.

  They know how to do a beach properly in Manly. It’s very different from the eastern suburbs beaches. In the eastern suburbs, beaches always come as a surprise. You’re in the middle of people and cars and houses and shops and wheelie bins and then suddenly you come round a corner and there’s the beach. And next to it a carpark. In Manly you always know you’re at the beach, even if you can’t see it, in the same way you know it when you’re on holiday somewhere small up or down the coast. It’s a taste in the air, a particular shade of blue in the sky. Manly doesn’t feel like a part of Sydney. It’s as if you’ve fallen asleep at the wheel and accidentally driven 300 kilometres further north than you intended and ended up in a rapidly growing coastal town.

  The beach is separated from the road by a pine tree-filled park with just enough picnic tables so that everyone who wants one gets one—and the shopping mall runs perpendicular to, not parallel with, the beach so that, unlike Bondi, the last thing you see as you launch yourself onto a wave isn’t a row of shops.

  At the other end of the mall is Sydney Harbour. Manly is at a point where the land narrows—from ocean beach to harbour is about 400 metres—before widening again to form North Head.

  The first thing we saw when we got out of the car was a busload of Japanese tourists in their suits on the sand. It must be hard to have fun at the beach in a suit, but they were doing their best for the photographs. It wasn’t just them in odd clothing, though. In early spring no one knows how to dress. A couple of warm days con us into thinking summer’s on its way, but then a cold one follows and we’re confused. So in early spring people hedge their bets. Walking along the beach was a man wearing black woollen pants and a tank top, another had on shorts and a jumper, and a woman wore a miniskirt, skivvy and sunhat. There was even a bare-chested bloke in Speedos, with a parka tied around his waist—wearing shoes and socks.

  We loaded Bibi into the backpack and walked south along the beach. Most of the occupants were twenty-somethings with those deep, even tans that speak of months in the sun and yet look as though they somehow don’t fit the persons they are on the outside of, as if it’s the first time ever that their skin has been anything other than sickly pale. They may as well have carried signs saying ‘European backpacker’.

  At the south end, near the flags and the shops, a path has been cut into the base of the cliff, and we followed it. Along it little brass statues pop out of the rock. There is a long-nosed bandicoot, an octopus, even a body surfer. After five minutes we came to an ocean pool and sat on the rocks next to it looking out to sea. Behind us was the path, then a cliff that rose up to houses, and in front of us (to the north-east) 20 metres of rocks leading out to the ocean. If we looked a little further left we could see Manly Beach spreading out in a huge horseshoe north to Queenscliff. I don’t know why looking at a big open view feels like it’s doing you good, but it does. The view of sand and land and sea not only makes you forget you have a mortgage, it makes you forget what a mortgage is.

  A bloke on a surf ski paddled toward us until, 20 metres from the pool, he stopped, stowed his paddle, rolled off the ski and swam over to the pool to do a few laps. The ski obediently waited, like Silver for the Lone Ranger. That’s what I call getting a park.

  We walked on another 15 minutes to tiny Shelley Beach, an oasis of underdevelopment tucked away on the north side of North Head, about 500 metres south of, and facing, Manly Beach. There’s water then beach then park, and beyond is bush on three sides. The beach is calm, protected from waves, and some scuba divers were fully kitted up and ready to go. I suspect it was the first go for most because they kept finding ways to delay. Just when it seemed they were all ready, one would undo his wetsuit and fish around for something. When he’d finished another would realise there was something she had to check.

  A bloke with a couple of dogs arrived and started throwing a tennis ball into the air at the water’s edge. As the larger dog leapt for the ball, the little one, realising it had no hope of competing fairly, simply grabbed the big dog’s tail in its teeth. Again and again the big dog would get itself ready to go flying into the air only to be jerked straight back to earth as soon as it took off. The ball would then hit it on the nose and bounce away. It must have been a Buddhist dog, because it didn’t get angry with the little one—it just waited patiently for its owner (who, like everyone else, was laughing at it) to chuck the ball again so it could have another go.

  When the owner accidentally threw the ball in the water the big dog dived in after it. But the ball had gone a couple of feet beyond the dog’s depth and it obviously wasn’t a swimmer. Lucy heroically hitched up her skirt and marched into the water to retrieve the ball.

  ‘LUCY! YOU STUPID USELESS LUMP! GET IT!’ shouted the dog’s owner. Lucy wheeled round.

  This was out of line. No one speaks to my . . .

  ‘YOU’RE A WASTE OF SPACE LUCY, YOU’RE HOPELESS!’

  ‘Now hang on. She’s just . . .’ I began.

  ‘YOU ARE THE STUPIDEST DOG I HAVE EVER SEEN.’

  Ah. I see.

  ‘Excuse me mate,’ I said. ‘That woman who’s getting the ball for you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Her name’s Lucy, too.’

  ‘Oh . . . sorry.’

  He then went quiet.

  A track led east up into the bush. We walked 100 metres along it and emerged at a cliff looking out to sea. Forty metres below waves crashed onto rocks. No scuba divers there. Turning right we headed south up a steep hill in the direction of North Head. Suddenly we were surrounded by real bush, not the pretend stuff you find in parks, but dense gum trees with branches and bushes and logs extending across the path. Within a minute we could see no evidence, apart from the track, that anyone else existed. It rose sharply, but Bibi was just the right weight in the backpack for the effort of carrying her to be enough to make me feel like I was a man, without being so heavy that it actually hurt.

  I started to breathe deeply with effort. This was what I had been missing, the rejuvenating effects of the bush. The bush had been so accessible when I was growing up in Canberra and, via school trips and my parents’ enthusiasm, I had spent many weekends in it. I was nineteen when I moved to Sydney and for the first few years would take every opportunity to get out to somewhere quieter. But living in the city eventually made it all seem too hard. Instead of a one-hour drive to get to the start of the walk, it was a one-hour drive to get to the edge of town. Gradually I left the city less and less, and the less you leave, the less you remember how good it feels to get out.

  Ten minutes in a little bit of bush at Manly brought all the joy of it back to me. I felt as if I was rediscovering the bush, that every breath was freedom, even if I was only 100 metres from a beach and a café. I wanted to work hard and to see if I was up to it.

  I pushed a branch away. This was what it was all about. When we got home I was going to suggest to Lucy that we sell up and move out of town, away from building sites and bitumen. Yes, she, who had grown up in Sydney and never lived anywhere else but Melbourne would blanch in horror, she would fight the idea, but in a few years when we were totally self-sufficient, and only came into town once a month to buy the latest organic fertilisers and new video games for Bibi, she would thank me.

  I upped my pace. The path was steep, my heart was pounding and I could feel the sweat leaking into my eyes, but it felt good.

  I pushed another bush aside and strode on.

  ‘WAAAAAA.’ It was Bibi.

  I turned around. That didn’t help because she was on my back.

  ‘WAAAAAAAA!’

  ‘You hit her with a branch!’ said Lucy.

  I craned my neck back. Being used to parting branches for one, I had moved one just enough so that when it flicked back it had missed me comfortably but whacked B
ibi a centimetre under her eye. There was a mark that she was trying to wash away by flooding it with tears, and trying to scare away with screams. In an instant my self-image deteriorated from wild bush man to that of horrible, irresponsible parent who’d almost taken his daughter’s eye out with his carelessness.

  We unloaded onto a seat at the top of the hill overlooking the ocean. Bibi made it clear apologies were not being accepted and that the only person she would take any comfort from was Mummy. I sat on the ground, ostracised, as Lucy worked her breast-feeding magic.

  ‘Why don’t you go and see what’s up ahead?’ said Lucy. The way she said it, it seemed what she really meant was that given I was such a bad father that I had nearly blinded our child, I should piss off and leave them alone.

  ‘Fine.’

  I stomped off up the track, into the trees again. Soon I couldn’t hear or see them. It was just the bush and me. I had an overwhelming desire to just keep going, to run away. Behind was responsibility and duty, builders and nappies, pay cheques and bills. Ahead lay freedom, peace, and nature. The solitude of the track felt absolute. I wanted to be alone. I needed to be alone. I knew how Greta Garbo felt. Peace was freedom, and freedom was never having to answer to anyone. Once an only child, always an only child.

  I increased my pace, and soon I was running along the track, sprinting past trees, ducking branches and hurdling logs. I would escape, I would run and run until I was free and then I’d build a tree house and live in it and hunt wild whatever-they-had-up-on-North-Head. Wild mosquito if I had to. I kept running, tore around a corner and ran smack into a stone wall. I bounced back. What was a 3-metre-high stone wall doing in the middle of a bush track on North Head? It ran in both directions for as far as I could see—obviously a message from God, put there to break my momentum and make me think. Did I really want to abandon all my responsibilities and become the mysterious wild man of Manly, living off berries and tourist scraps? Was God’s wall suggesting that I should go back and try to be a good husband, father, employee and citizen? If so, why was there a hole at the bottom that looked just the right size for crawling through?