It felt wrong to sit at the beach gazing into the bright blue sky beyond the setting sun like I had lost everything. But hadn’t I? Dad had walked out, just like that. I had to feel like it was my fault, at least a little. I’d known that we had our differences, in fact I’d always felt like there were things about me he wanted to adjust. Really, I think he just wanted me to be a better man. How was I meant to be a man at eighteen?
None of us knew whether he was coming back. As the night darkened outside and it became apparent Dad wasn’t coming home, we each had our caricature moments of realisation: Mum with her glassy eyes fixed on the door; Tommy, up past his bedtime, clutching his yellow toy truck.
I looked out at the rolling waves, already counting the thirteen second intervals one by one like a background process, the way Dad taught me. This was the first place he ever took me. And yea, sitting there alone, I felt a little like I had lost everything. The end of an era. No more well-cooked fish smells from the kitchen. No more arguments down the hallway as I fell asleep. No more awkward, grunt-y conversations over morning juice and toast. No more soccer games with Tommy and sausage sizzles and letting him ride up front in Dad’s ute, getting tomato sauce and slivers of onion in inexplicable places.
The waves were building high, cruising down themselves and spurting over the shore. Good surf. But all I wanted to do was sit. Watch. For once, I didn’t feel the call. For so long it had been an urge, a yearning, a need. I still don’t know whether that need was to prove myself or just to feel like I was part of something. Like, if nothing else, I had this. The ocean. My solace. My sphere of understanding. The backdrop that made me make sense. Without dad around part of me had gone silent. Maybe in acknowledgement, maybe in loss. Either way, I watched the ocean and counted.
People walked past, up and down the beach, their silhouettes in the golden light casting shadows that walked over me.
Memories flashed the same way across my mind. Dark and light, flickering like film. The way I cut my hair like Dad’s when I was little because I thought he was so cool. Watching him surf, right here, tall and strong out on the waves, utterly definable against the other men who, in my mind, would never be as good as my dad. I practiced, right here, if not to be as good as he was then to at least surf by his side. I think he enjoyed my company, maybe even wanted me beside him, wanted me to be good.
But then Matt moved in down the street. English-accented, taller than me, sporty, wild and brave like he had no idols to fear or revere. Matt became everything I wanted to be, and he did it so effortlessly that it seemed impossible that I would ever get there. More than that, I had slipped under the radar of my dad’s gaze, beneath the shadow of Matt. It became creepingly apparent to me that not only would I never be Matt, I would never be my dad.
A soft breeze slipped into the air, pushing sand around, dusting water off the tops of the waves as they curled.
When did we last really talk? A ‘realtalk’ consisted of our go-to topics: football and school. We’d go to the pub and watch the games and drink beer. Rarely. It was the first thing we did together after my eighteenth birthday. Yea, it was fun to sit there feeling old enough for once, pretending there was nothing going on with me besides footy-tipping and passing class. But it never lasted long. Back home, when the beer was settling inside me and Dad disappeared into his room it was like waking up from a dream, roused by silence, to remember who I really was.
