Worst Case Scenario - Life Gets In Your Eyes (Part One)

The latest mouthful of warm saltwater tasted much the same as the previous twenty. I choked and spat it out, personally insulted, as though someone might come over and apologise.

Nobody did. The ocean is famously poor at customer service.

You’d think by mouthful three or four I’d have learnt to keep my mouth shut, but drowning at sea is thirsty work.

———————

Four Hours Earlier

The emergency sirens were wailing overhead, which struck me as an excessive response to a man quietly observing moustaches. I’d only been back in Sydney an hour and was already beginning to feel unwelcome.

I’d been out on the farm long enough to suspect civilisation had evolved without telling me, or at the very least forgotten to circulate updated facial hair regulations. While in the outback I’d attempted a transformation from boy to man and had stopped shaving in the hope of cultivating a five o’clock shadow. The closest I managed was about a quarter to three, and in patches, leaving me looking like a police e-fit sketch produced after a mugging victim described their attacker as “a stressed and overweight werewolf”.

The only part showing any real promise was the moustache. Perhaps the sensible thing was to shave the rest and allow it to continue unchallenged. But for all I knew the moustache had gone back to being fascist chic, or a reliable early warning sign of the pervert next door. It might have been reclaimed by community theatre villains and the ghosts of World War One soldiers for all I knew.

Whatever the moustache now meant, it was rapidly becoming the second most pressing issue in Sydney. The sirens had continued long enough to suggest this wasn’t a test, rehearsal, or particularly ambitious piece of public art. Gradually, those of us standing around pretending not to be worried did what most animals do when something large and invisible threatens them, we looked at each other to determine how afraid we should be. Nobody wants to be the first person to panic, but nobody fancies being the last either.

New York had only been hit seven years earlier, or “the other day” in Australian timekeeping. Which means recent enough to remember, yet distant enough to burp your way through another schooner and rank it against other disasters without lowering your voice.

For thirty seconds or so the herd seemed willing to assume the worst. Then we collectively remembered we were in Sydney, and there was very little here anybody would bother attacking. Anyone with a grievance that serious surely had somewhere closer. And nobody’s ever been radicalised by opera.

I decided not to hang around either way and boarded the first of what would become three incorrect trains to Cronulla, south of Sydney, where my new quarters awaited.

———————

I arrived at the hostel to discover Pete had been overselling me. I was given a royal tour of the incumbent residents, all of whom were visibly underwhelmed by his much discussed cousin. I was repeatedly told there was barely a family resemblance and that I sounded nothing like a ‘Scouzer’. By the end of the tour, enough doubt had been cast over my identity that the first two minutes I had to myself post tour were spent checking my passport to make sure I was who I thought I was.

Any relief at having successfully proved my own identity was short lived, as I was immediately caught in the tailwind of a group heading to the beach. I attempted to decline, but this was a backpackers hostel, where declining an invitation to the beach was treated less as a personal choice and more as an act of aggression against the backpacking community. I may as well have admitted I didn’t really drink, had absolutely no intention of ever going to a Full Moon Party, and that Thailand just seemed like a really humid place to lose your passport. Sensing that refusal could see me outcast for the remainder of my stay, I reluctantly agreed to go.

This presented a problem. Despite having returned to something approaching the dimensions of a fit and able human being since leaving home, and several weeks of hard labour on the farm having done unexpected things to my arms and legs, I remained deeply suspicious of any activity that required me to remove my shirt in front of strangers.

Beaches made me nervous. Particularly beaches populated by young, tanned, attractive people. I was firmly within the Club 18–30 demographic, but spiritually closer to the man who guards everyone’s bags while they went in the sea.

I knew what people my age did on beaches. I’d seen enough badly lit footage from Ibiza on late night television. I’d overheard the stories. You started with a harmless game of volleyball, somebody suggested making things ‘interesting’, and before you knew it a man called Daz had produced a novelty six foot banana and was encouraging you to simulate intercourse with it beside a swimming pool, while a semicircle of drunken strangers booed your technique and laughed while taking photographs.

I’d come to Australia to find myself. I didn’t want the search concluding with a photograph of me mounting a piece of inflatable fruit, which thanks to the advent of social media would have been beamed home while I was still humiliating myself, and before the banana and I had even discussed what this meant for us.

By the time we reached the beach, everyone else seemed to know exactly what they were doing. Clothes came off, bodyboards were picked up and within seconds they were charging towards the water. A couple of the girls from the hostel turned and beckoned me to follow, calling me towards the sea like sirens, apparently unaware that I was considerably more difficult to lure to my death than the average sailor.

I shook my head and mouthed an excuse that hadn’t actually occurred to me yet. A headache. I had a headache. Yes, that’ll do.

And anyway, those bags weren’t going to mind themselves…

————————————

Like talking or a lifelong allegiance to a disappointing football club, surfing needs to be inflicted on you while you’re still too young to object. Everybody wants to be good at it, but it isn’t a hobby particularly welcoming to latecomers. The surfers around here had started so early I assumed most of them went to school by surfboard. The boards themselves cost a fortune, too. Half of them were probably paying theirs off through some kind of surf to work scheme.

Bodyboarding, on the other hand, looked achievable. It was surfing for people who preferred their sporting achievements horizontal. After a thorough assessment of the security situation, I decided the bags could probably look after themselves for ten minutes while I had a go.

Even lying down proved beyond me at first. I’d somehow found a sport whose principal requirement was lying down, something I’d been doing competitively for most of my adult life, and was still struggling with the fundamentals. Waves went underneath me. Boards went over me. Occasionally the board and I went in completely different directions. I began to suspect there were techniques involved in lying down that had previously escaped me.

And then I caught one.

For a few extraordinary seconds, everything aligned. The board lifted, the wave gathered beneath me and suddenly I was moving with it, carried towards the shore by something that had travelled thousands of miles across an ocean before arriving beneath me at precisely that moment.

I’d accidentally stumbled upon some ancient understanding between man and nature. The sea wasn’t something I was fighting anymore. For those few seconds it had accepted me. Man, board and ocean moved together, one and the same. I surrendered myself completely to something infinitely more powerful than me and, for once, it carried me exactly where I wanted to go.

This was how Zeus must have felt.

Assuming Zeus could bodyboard.

The problem with human beings is that we’re never happy with what we’ve got. Electricity, shelter and soap operas, apparently none of it was enough. We had to go on and split the fabric of the universe, have sex with a monkey and see if we could fit our heads through the railings.

Nothing is ever allowed to just be enough. Our cars can go 170mph. But what if they went 749mph and we let a monkey drive? The one we fucked, presumably. We’ll always go a step too far. We know curiosity killed the cat, and soon enough I imagine it’ll send a lion to Jupiter.

The same applied to bodyboarding. A wave that had felt like the hand of God twenty minutes earlier was now barely worth getting wet for. I wanted something bigger.

And further out, where the sky and sea merged, I could see them.

The next wave passed beneath us. Then another. Rather than catching them, me and Pete let each one carry us a little further from shore.

Before long, people became shapes, and shapes became colour. The shouting and music faded with them, until eventually there was nothing left to hear but the water. The beach started to look less like somewhere we’d just been and more like a postcard of somewhere we might like to visit.

Still we kept going.

By the time I wondered if we’d gone too far, my head was already through the railings.

The waves that had spent the previous ten minutes enthusiastically transporting us away from Australia now seemed considerably less interested in returning us. We tried catching them. No luck. We paddled. Even worse. I kicked harder, pulled at the water with both arms and paddled until my shoulders burned. For all the effort, the beach continued to watch on, seemingly unmoved by our predicament.

The postcard was getting smaller.

Eventually Pete decided one of us needed to swim back and get help and, possessing considerably more confidence in his swimming ability than I did in mine, nominated himself. Five minutes later, I turned around and discovered he was further back than I was.

The swell was getting bigger too. I’d rise with it and catch sight of him in the distance, then drop into the trough and lose him completely. Up again and there he was. Down again and he was gone. A few seconds later I’d be lifted high enough to find him somewhere else entirely. It was becoming less a rescue attempt and more a particularly stressful pantomime.

‘He’s behind you!’
‘He’s in front of you!’
‘He’s no longer responding to verbal commands!’
‘He’s fucking drowning!’

The rescue attempt was now in need of its own rescue. Unfortunately, I was a little busy. I added it to the ‘to do’ pile.

Then, finally, by sheer chance - his bastard luck -  Pete caught one.

I watched the wave gather beneath him, lift him up and carry him past me. After spending the best part of half an hour refusing to take either of us anywhere useful, the sea suddenly propelled him towards safety with exactly the same indifference it had shown while carrying us away from it.

Pete had always been better equipped for life than me. He had the looks. He had the charm. And, as he disappeared towards the safety of the beach, it became apparent he also had considerably more of the will to live.

Eventually, I stopped fighting.

There didn’t seem much point wasting what little effort I had left in me trying to get back to shore. I wasn’t getting any closer and, the more I thought about it, wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. Besides, if I was going to drown, I’d need to conserve some energy for that.

I stretched myself across the board and let the sea do whatever it had planned for me.

Without me fighting back, the violence seemed to disappear from it. The same swell that had been throwing me around now lifted and lowered me gently. My breathing slowed. The sun dried my face. Above me was an enormous, uninterrupted blue.

For the first time since I’d entered the water, I wasn’t trying to get anywhere.

Float. Breathe. Float. Breathe. Float. Breathe.

Float. Float. Breathe. Float. Breathe.

Float. Float. Float. Breathe. 

Float. Float. Float.

Float. Float.

Float.

……………somewhere between the last breath and the next, two shapes began to form in the brightness ahead.

They were sitting upright on surfboards, drifting towards me out of the sunlight. From where I was lying, the boards were almost completely hidden beneath the water, making it look as though the two of them were simply sitting on the sea.

As they came closer, I could make out two children. Small and slight, with long curly hair lit up around their heads and androgynous features.

Soon their faces came into focus. They stared down at me with serene, unreadable expressions, neither seeming particularly surprised to find a fully grown man floating around this far from where fully grown men were generally supposed to be.

They looked like angels

- hang on a minute….angels!?!

Oh, for fuck’s sake…..

I’ve died, haven’t I?