Sex, Lies and Bonsai Read online

When Sally has gone, I climb back into the hammock and open my notebook again. I am so proud of my scientific chart that I almost ring up Daniel to tell him about it. I breathe slowly until the urge passes. They are very tricksy things, these urges to ring Daniel. Often, just when I think I’ve vanquished them, I find myself dialling his number.

  As soon as I am sure the urge has passed, I turn to the back of the notebook and write Tips for self-improvement. Underneath this I write:

  Don’t ring Daniel.

  I chew my lip and try to think of some more tips but fail. No doubt something will occur to me in time.

  My father is leaning on the doorway watching me now, as I swing in the hammock with my notebook on my lap. I know he’s wondering how a blond-haired, brown-skinned down-to-earth Aussie like him ended up with this pale red-haired daughter who’s totally unfit for life in the surfing capital of the north coast.

  His sea-washed blue eyes regard me above his drooping moustache as he leans, hands in the pockets of his baggy shorts. My father is worried about me. ‘Take the surfboard out tomorrow, Eddie,’ he says. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  This is somewhat less likely than peace in the Gaza Strip. He knows this, but still he persists. Dad wants me to be happy. Surfing makes him happy; therefore surfing will make me happy, he reasons.

  Surfing has never made me happy, but Dad is tenacious in his belief that I just need to give it a go and all my worries will disappear. I shake my head, smiling to soften the blow.

  His face falls and he goes back inside. A gentle blues rhythm soon drifts from the house. Dad always plays guitar when he’s unsettled. He’s played it a lot since I came home.

  Dad’s glory days are in the past, but he’s still a celebrity in our town. I’ve had people tell me surfers give him waves. They say this in the tone you’d usually reserve for kidney donors. I’m glad for my father that he commands respect in the surf and I’m sure he’d like it if I showed more interest in his passion. I try, but he knows I’m faking it.

  He’s astute like that, my father. Not many men realise when women are faking it.

  Daniel didn’t. Not at first, anyway. Not when I was really trying hard.

  I look up from my notebook and push the couch with my foot to make the hammock swing. As I sway back and forth, watching the waves, I wonder if any of the men I’ve been with really liked me. I think maybe they liked the idea of the pale redheaded poet more than the reality. Why wouldn’t you? What’s to like about a bulk-order of insecurities?

  Oh yes, I always did my best to hide this side of me. I don’t think any of my lovers ever knew exactly what type of person they were dealing with. They might have guessed, but they didn’t know. To let someone know you and then be rejected — now that would hurt.

  Before Daniel, there was Peter. We got together in my first year at Sydney University. He was way too cool for me. Pete used to perform poetry wearing a top hat with a flower in it and an open waistcoat that showed off his slender, tanned torso. For the whole six months we were together I knew he would dump me. Pete had a thing for redheads, but it wasn’t enough in the end. I couldn’t match his erudite arguments about the meaning of poetry. Secretly, I felt that to talk about it sucked the life out of it. But maybe that’s because I couldn’t talk about it, or not very well. I could only write it.

  Now, I don’t seem to be able to write it either.

  Peter didn’t dump me by text; he just turned up at the Glebe Pub one night with a different redhead and acted like we’d never met. No one was surprised except me. I’ve always been slow on the uptake.

  Looking on the positive side, which I do try to do, I have learnt something from all of my lovers. From Peter I learnt how to sound intelligent (but never intelligent enough). From Daniel I learnt how to act confident (but never confident enough). My problem is that I can never walk away from a learning experience — even when it hurts. This is mad, bad and just plain silly and my life would be much calmer if I stopped treating my heart like a guinea pig. I wonder what my next lover will teach me and if I will enjoy the lesson. At the moment this seems far from likely.

  Me and men. Men and me. I push off the couch again, sway to and fro and wish they would invent a magic potion to dissolve this achy angst of mine.

  Dad and his girlfriend, Rochelle, are plotting something. I can tell by the way they stop talking when I drag myself off the hammock and enter the lounge room.

  ‘If I was an animal I would be a dolphin,’ says Rochelle as she cooks us up a stir-fry that night.

  While this is not original — who doesn’t want to be a dolphin — in her case it fits. She is permanently smiling and if she isn’t wet, she just was or soon will be. Her surfboard is propped up against Dad’s on the verandah. It looks companionable there, about one foot shorter than his board, but otherwise almost identical. This is a metaphor for Rochelle herself.

  Dad and Rochelle fit together in a way he and Mum never did. They are both out the door at sunrise with their boards under their arms. They like the same music, mostly blues, and if Dad had ever had a female twin she probably would have looked a lot like Rochelle. Their eyes are the same blue, their hair the same blonde and their skin the exact same shade of suntanned brown. At the moment they are both wearing Billabong T-shirts. I am glad they are different colours or they would look like twins who have been dressed by their mother.

  I understand dolphins are highly sexed and suspect Rochelle is too. I deduce this from the punch-drunk look on Dad’s face most mornings. I am way too old to be observing my Dad’s sex life and feel like I’m cramping his style, but what can I do?

  We sit down at our triangular dining table. Twenty years ago, my mother painted it with a galaxy of planets, moons and stars. They are now fading but, despite his enthusiasm with a paint brush, this is one job Dad hasn’t tackled.

  ‘If I was an animal I would be a cuckoo,’ I say.

  I am a twenty-three-year-old cuckoo returned to its nest.

  Chapter Three

  One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

  SIGMUND FREUD

  Sunday: 43 days

  Pain level: 9.5

  Daniel and I used to go out for breakfast on Sundays. After coffee and eggs on toast we would go to the market; or the beach if it was a nice day. Sunday afternoons we almost always ended up in bed, before rising, warm and languid, to see what the evening offered.

  The markets weren’t about shopping. They were more about the passing parade, exotic snacks and buskers. But eight months ago, on Daniel’s birthday, I saw something I couldn’t go past. I had been looking for a present for Daniel for weeks. I needed a gift that would show him I was the urbane, worldly companion he required. I’d spent hours in CD shops, bookshops and clothes shops but these all seemed too risky. Being the right sort of girlfriend for Daniel was hard work.

  And then I saw it — the bonsai. Ropy vines trailed from its branches to the white pebbles below. Bulging roots crept towards the rim of its basin. It was an exact replica of a rainforest giant — exotic, striking and just right for a man with an interest in nature.

  Don’t touch what you can’t afford, it said to me as I picked it up. And while I wasn’t particularly surprised to hear it talk, its grouchy tone was rather off-putting. But it was so beautiful, so perfect, so very, very Daniel. I looked at the price tag, then checked my purse. I could do it, just, if I skimped on lunches for the next few weeks.

  I bought it while Daniel was distracted at the falafel stand and presented it to him with a flourish. He fell in love with it at once. He and the bonsai were soul mates.

  Thinking about the bonsai makes me sad and I know I mustn’t mope, so after breakfast I decide to visit the library. I need to fill in some more tips for self-improvement in the back of my book. Sally might ask to inspect it.

  Darling Head Library is a short walk from our house. It is surprisingly large for such a small town and the self-help section takes up almost ha
lf the space. Self-help is big on the north coast.

  There is so much on offer and so much that I need, it is hard to prioritise. I am tempted to take out twenty books, the maximum allowed, but Sally has told me to deal with one thing at a time. As I trudge up and down the aisles it occurs to me that improving myself is a very big task and one that needs to be approached scientifically.

  Should I:

  Increase my self-esteem,

  Manage my stress,

  Take control of my moods, or

  Improve my relationships?

  Maybe I need to seek and find happiness, improve my time management or learn new sexual techniques? Finally, I make my selection.

  The librarian, a fortyish woman with wispy blonde hair, glances at my book. She looks at me over the top of her glasses and murmurs something that I can’t quite catch.

  ‘Pardon?’

  She raises her voice to a whisper. ‘It’s very good.’

  ‘You’ve read it?’

  She nods and blushes.

  I’m not sure that her endorsement carries much weight, but never mind. I walk out of the library with Conquering Shyness under my arm and a self-satisfied glow. I am taking control of my situation.

  My self-satisfied glow lasts until I stumble on the stairs up to the house, crack my shins and drop the book into the bushes below. Lying down on the wooden platform, I extract it from the jungle’s clutches and continue up through the narrow tunnel overhung by vines and trees.

  Our house is a hippy house. Dad’s parents moved to Darling Head in 1973, when he was six. They came for the Aquarius Festival — ten days of peace, love and dope in nearby Nimbin — and stayed for the surf, cheap land and lifestyle. The pole house my grandparents built is now one of the oldest in Darling Head. It is like a ship: all angles and portholes to the sea. The sea breeze races through it and in strong winds it sways. It is built on a steep slope and surrounded by trees which grow like magic beanstalks in the subtropical climate.

  My grandparents, their hippy days behind them, prefer to live in a unit on the Gold Coast these days. ‘Had enough of those damn stairs,’ says Pop, whenever I ask him if he misses the house. ‘Miss the possums though.’

  I settle in the hammock but have not got very far with Conquering Shyness before I am interrupted.

  ‘Hi Edie,’ a cheerful voice calls up the stairs.

  Rochelle has just got back from the surf. She has white zinc smeared over her nose and her sun-bleached hair hangs in salty threads past her bare brown shoulders. The day being warm, she is wearing only a sleeveless wetsuit top and board shorts. She places her surfboard next to Dad’s.

  Rochelle is originally a Sydney girl. After a marriage break-up she had a brief stint finding herself in Hawaii. As far as I can figure out this required her to work on a taro farm run by a group of men who promoted ancient traditions — such as women being naked in the fields.

  I’m not sure what was in this naked taro farming for Rochelle, but I can imagine what was in it for them. On return to Australia, she moved to the north coast, as people who have found themselves often do.

  I expect that I will never find myself as I am way too cynical.

  ‘Been gettin’ any?’ I ask.

  Darling Head has its own vernacular. When running into an acquaintance here, you don’t ask ‘How ya goin’?’ you ask ‘Been gettin’ any?’ You don’t need to say ‘waves’. It’s understood.

  That’s not what they say to me though. When I run into boys I went to school with they usually go, ‘Hi, um…’

  ‘Edie.’

  ‘Yeah right, yeah.’ They nod eagerly like we’re really getting somewhere now we’ve established who I am. ‘Edie. I knew that.’

  To move things on and put them at ease I usually ask ‘Been gettin’ any?’ No more is needed. They’ll rave on about The Point, The Right-hander, The Bank, The Sets, The Tide, The Swell, The Beach Break, The Left-hander, The Barrel, The Wipeout… All I need to do is nod. And it’s not like I don’t understand. I’m often tempted to tick Non-English-Speaking-Background on the types of forms that ask the question. Surfing is my first language.

  ‘Awesome out the Point,’ says Rochelle. ‘It’s barrelling. Going out again soon. Just had to have something to eat.’ She pulls a block of board wax from the table near the door and rips off the wrapping. Lifting her board onto the railing, she starts to wax up.

  ‘What sort of wax is that?’ I ask.

  ‘Sex Wax.’

  ‘I thought you liked Five Daughters.’

  She shrugs. ‘Sex Wax is better in cool water.’

  Darling Head supermarket sells board wax in three types — Mrs Palmers Five Daughters (extra sticky), Sex Wax (for your stick) and Far King (farking great wax). No one except me seems to think this is in bad taste.

  A water dragon scuttles across the verandah and into the house. Wildlife makes no distinction between the inside of our house and the outside. Possums, water dragons, magpies, bats and a range of other creatures use the facilities at their leisure.

  ‘Feel free.’ I eye the dragon as it disappears into the lounge room. ‘Do you ever worry that the wildlife will all gang up and drive us out?’

  Rochelle gives the matter some consideration. ‘If it hasn’t happened yet I think we’re pretty safe.’ After a quick snack she is gone again, with her board under her arm. Her voice carries up from the street as she greets one of her friends — ‘Been gettin’ any?’

  A speeded-up montage of the day would show me lying in the hammock with the pages of Conquering Shyness turning while surfboards appear and disappear behind me. The sun moves across the sky and finally vanishes behind the hills as I close the book.

  ‘Rochelle’s brother is coming to stay with us,’ Dad announces at dinner. ‘He’s taking a break from Sydney for a bit.’

  Rochelle works nights a few times a week, so she is not here at the moment.

  I look up — a forkful of pasta halfway to my mouth. ‘Why is he coming here?’

  Dad waggles his head. ‘Holiday.’

  The way he says this makes me suspicious. ‘I didn’t know Rochelle had a brother.’ Dad and Rochelle have been living together for almost a year and this is the first I’ve heard of him.

  ‘They don’t see much of each other. He’s a fair bit younger.’

  ‘How long’s he staying for?’ I’m not happy about the idea of a stranger in the house, but I’m a guest here too, so there’s not much I can say.

  Dad shrugs. ‘We’ll see how it goes. Time for the weather.’

  This ends our conversation. The Weather is sacred. It lets Dad and Rochelle know whether they need to get up early for a surf.

  I hear him talking to Rochelle later, when I’ve gone upstairs. ‘…low off the coast; reckon it’ll be good…out the Point, six-thirty.’

  In bed that evening I think about Daniel. Trying not to think about Daniel is hard at any time, but especially in bed. This is not only because I miss his body next to mine, but because of the bonsai.

  Daniel and I shared a unit in Glebe for six months and five days. When I left, all my belongings fitted easily into two boxes. Everything else was his. If Daniel had been there when I moved out, I wouldn’t now be lying here looking at the bonsai, which I stole from him when I left.

  Daniel did love that tree. He was always pruning, watering, attaching wires and otherwise tending it. He bought books on bonsai care and read them assiduously. ‘Bonsai,’ Daniel said, ‘is about discovering the essential spirit of the plant.’

  When it was Daniel’s tree the bonsai was an object of precision and beauty. Six weeks later, it is like a neglected child; hair too long, dirty clothes. I took the tree to remind me of him but now it is only reminding me of myself. The tree reproaches me with its shabby limbs.

  ‘I’m sorry. I should never have taken you away from Daniel,’ I say.

  The tree maintains an icy silence. I wonder how long that’s going to last.

  I decide to check my emails b
efore I go to bed. Decide makes it sound more decisive than it is. In fact, I decide this in the same way that I decide to keep breathing. It just happens. Email and phone checking has become a serious addiction since Daniel and I broke up. While I try my hardest not to ring Daniel, he will never know how often I check my messages, so there is no harm done.

  I hit Send/Receive. Yes, there is an email coming through. My heart accelerates as I watch the black bar inch across my screen. It will be Daniel. I am sure of it. I miss you. Please come back. I am smiling in anticipation as the email hits my inbox.

  It is from eBay. They are offering great kitchen deals tonight. I feel like I’ve been stabbed through the heart with a spatula. Who was it who said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? I disagree. I prefer to think of my obsessive email checking as a triumph of the human spirit. One day there will be something good there, I just know it.

  Climbing into bed, I read more of Conquering Shyness until my eyelids start to droop. As I fall asleep I wonder, again, what it was about It rains a lot in Glenorchy that captured Daniel’s attention. Or was it the sausages? And I wonder if, even mismatched as we were, we might have muddled through if not for the worms.

  Chapter Four

  Love and work…work and love,

  that’s all there is.

  SIGMUND FREUD

  Monday: 44 days

  Pain level: 8.5

  Breaking up with Daniel has not only been hard on my heart, it has also been hard on my pocket. In Sydney there was plenty of work for graphic artists. In Darling Head, my choices are limited. I have had to be creative.

  Professor Brownlow is my new boss. For him I draw crab larvae on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at the university. The job is not very well paid and I need to think of ways to supplement my income. So far I have not succeeded in this endeavour.

  I have been drawing crab larvae in a haphazard way for four weeks, but Professor Brownlow doesn’t seem to have noticed. He has told me to call him Ralph and I do, to his face, but I prefer to think of him as Professor Brownlow.