Not a homecoming - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
MY BODY WAS STICKY WITH THE ACCUMULATED GRIME OF A LONG DAY'S TRAVEL. I found an old, two-bar electric heater in a hallway closet and set it up to warm the air between my bedroom and the bathroom before I showered and changed my clothes. A faint chemical odour rose from the elements as they reddened.
I studied myself naked in a full-length mirror behind the bedroom door – a brief physical audit of nearly 49 years of self-indulgence and neglect. I was morbidly obese. My skin was still elastic, even where it hung in a fold over my hips, but pale and discoloured with age. My cock was receding into a fattening pubis; I could no longer see it over my stomach, except when it was erect. My ankles and knees were swollen and there were striations of cellulite beneath my buttocks. My hands were misshapen with arthritis. My hair was cropped close to my skull but it had become so grey and patchy that it resembled the mottled flesh of a corpse. The rest of my body was overtaken with hair and benign growths. My teeth were yellowing and there was an aftertaste of decay beneath my tongue. My eyes were bloodshot, a combination of tiredness and high blood pressure, and my sight was failing. I had to wear glasses to read anything smaller than 14 point.
It wasn't pretty, but it was the real me. Like someone with a heart condition who monitored their blood pressure each day, I was disciplined about reality checks. I got a compact camera from my backpack. Still naked, I stood in front of the mirror again and pointed it at my reflection, holding it one-handed just to the right of my chest, my thumb on the shutter release. I exposed three or four frames in the cool, diffused daylight that filled the room.
I printed very few of my photos. I was not a photographer. I started taking photographs several years ago to keep track of where I had been, and with whom. It felt, somehow, more reliable than writing a diary and in some ways, it turned out to be a more accurate reflection of the way in which I assembled memories: not so much as a structured narrative but as a collage, or a series of random snapshots. I proofed each roll of 35mm film on 10 x 8 glossy paper that I stored with the negatives in large ring binders organised by date. I had left the binders at the house in Tulsa.
I showered then dried myself, shivering, in front of the heater. I put on a fresh, black T-shirt and underwear and the same jeans I wore on the plane.
Barefoot, I took the sandstone steps down to the beach.
A surfer was paddling seaward on an outgoing rip at the south end of the beach. Clear of the surf, he turned northwards, paddling parallel to the swell to bigger waves peaking on an offshore sandbank and breaking left. He sat upright on his half-submerged board to gauge an incoming set. A wave rose beneath him and just as it was about to rush past, he turned, pulled his board back between his legs and let buoyancy slingshot its nose down the face. The wave began to hollow and break. The surfer sprang to his feet and with a slight repositioning of his body, drove the board across its throat like a blade. The board slashed through a foaming lip as the wave collapsed. The surfer arched back and kicked the board through an arc of empty air to regain the face. White water tumbled beneath him. It looked like the ride was over, but he rocked the board up and down, pumping it to sustain some momentum until the wave rebuilt over an inshore bank. He rode it to the beach without flourish.
I walked towards the lighthouse, keeping to the damp, compacted sand below the high water mark.
I SAT ATOP THE DUNES AT THE FAR END OF THE BEACH, and watched the transmuting surface of the sea. On calmer days, it heaved and undulated like the body of a prehistoric beast at rest, drawing slow breaths, but now its long, sinewy swells thrashed at the fractured reef and high cliffs below the lighthouse as if it were trying to erode the stubborn solidity of the shore.
"There are places you always come back to," a psychiatrist once told me. "They're like a refuge or a hideout, somewhere you feel safe."
Seventeen years ago, I rented another white weatherboard house above the ocean. It faced northwards towards this same lighthouse, but from a headland sheltering another beach just a couple of kilometres to the south. I lived in it with another wife.
The real estate agent who showed it to us had warned of its notoriety. A year earlier, the previous tenants, a pair of local drug dealers, had been shot dead on the front doorstep. The walls had since been repainted and the carpet repaired – but not replaced – where stray steel loads from a 12-gauge shell had torn up the pile. Otherwise, the house had been left untouched. The exterior paint had begun to peel and the garden was overgrown with lantana.
But there, again, was the view, and the sibilant rushing of the surf against the sandstone ledges below the headland. The patches of decay could be ignored, along with the ghosts of the murdered dealers.
Even then, I had already lived in more houses and apartments than there were years in my life, and that wasn't counting the houses in which I had spent my childhood years with my family, or the distant boarding schools to which I had been consigned before I was a teenager. I had owned three houses, in three countries. I'd rented the rest and each had been as different as the seven or eight countries in which they were located.
I had never thought of any of them as a "home". A few were the loci of disjointed recollections, like the rundown old house on the headland, but my occupation of most of them, including the houses I had owned, had been deliberately transitory and unsentimental. I rested in them. I regrouped, recovered or reinvented myself in them. I worked, slept and ate in them. I used them to store my books and clothes. But I rarely ever lived in them.
I just didn't get the idea of settlement. I didn't get the emotional investment in structures and furnishings and decorations that, together, were supposed to support the idea of "home" with an illusory impression of permanence. For me, all they did was absorb the corrosive residue of the everyday into their surfaces.
I did understand how geography could exert a spiritual hold. It was true: there were places to which I always returned, although not always because they were refuges or hideouts. My migratory patterns were as constant if not quite as predictable or as sacramental as those of a traditional nomad, and because I was uninterested in being a tourist, I might re-map those patterns occasionally, diverting them to add a new waypoint or to eliminate an old one, but I didn't often wander far from them. The slow, unceasing circumnavigation that had occupied most of my life could be plotted with a series of long rhumb lines from one familiar destination to another.Which is not to say I was incurious about the rest of the world. It was just that my experience of it was measured, with each place in my personal atlas having a meaning or purpose even before I found my
way to it.
Ever since I came back to Australia in my adolescent years, and again in my early 20s, I had been trying to figure out the meaning to me of this small part of it, this long, gnarled finger of suburbanised almost subtropical forest, rock and sand stubbed into the sea. When I was younger, when my days were shaped by surfing, and with it a sensitivity to the mutable, wind-driven swells and the semidiurnal ebb and flow of the tide, I would paddle my board out beyond the break, then sit up to survey the shore behind me as the rising sun turned the tangled scrub, tall palms and crooked eucalypts beyond the beach the same orange as the sand. And as I floated there, I imagined that I was tethered to the shore by an improbable length of polyurethane, not unlike my leg-rope, that would pull me back no matter how far I drifted out to sea. I could never make up my mind if the idea consoled or frustrated me.
Either way, there I was again, with faded images of my past replaying in my head like the shaky, overexposed home movies on eight-millimetre Kodachrome that my parents used to project onto a wall.
AN OVERCAST SKY DILUTED A FLEETING TWILIGHT as the black hills inland eclipsed the sun. Watery shadows flooded the house. I considered whether it was too late to phone my wife again. She would probably be irritated and I didn't have the stomach for a fight. I resolved to call her if jet lag roused me in the early hours of the morning. I sat at the computer on the table near the kitchen, the gritty chafe of sand was still on the soles of my feet.
There was an email from a close friend, David, an English telecom marketing savant who sold his company for several million in cash to an overconfident internet services group at the apex of the dot.com frenzy. When he retired a year later, in his late 30s, his first impulse was to free himself of every obligation and become a gypsy; I had grown used to receiving his sporadic, rambling notes from Nairobi or Dar es Salaam or Barcelona. In recent months, the rootlessness and random incidents of self-revelation had gotten to him; depressed, he had flown to London to reboot. His latest note was subdued and contemplative:
"With regard to the idea of returning home, I found that coming back to England was the right thing for me to do and the past 18 months have been about recharging and re-examination. It can be good just to get back to the familiar, to slow everything down a bit, and to leave the high-adrenaline lifestyle alone for a while. Part of the process for me (and I think I detect some of this in you) has been to let go of my own expectations of myself, as well as the ‘I shoulds' – those insidious bits of self-perception that lead to a lot of unhappiness because they are, typically, someone else's perspective or belief which you have imposed upon yourself."
How could I explain to him that I could not let go of anything? Not while I picked among the debris of this psychic crash site, looking for hard facts from which to reconstruct a life.
MASSIVE CLAWS OF COLD, GREY WATER ROLLED IN FROM THE SOUTH-EAST to tear at the beach, air blasting from the crumbling surf to hang as a sticky, saline haze above the sand. The house was cold and the rooms had a whiff of briny dampness that clung to the skin.
This was not a homecoming. However, it was a return to the beginning. Whatever I thought I knew or understood about myself was moot – too many irresolvable fragments and jagged shards of half-remembered incident – except this: by the simplest definition, my life started here, on this narrow peninsula, even if it continued (and parts of it were abandoned or lost) somewhere else.
This, at least, was reassuring to me. ♦