Youth

She escaped my thoughts only when I played football or surfed, activities requiring skills that came easily to me, while conversation, the skill I really wanted, resembled scaling Everest.

We were only in one class together at high school, and only for one term. When she first entered that class, an asteroid surprise hit the gold-dust ocean in my head, swirling yellow blurring vision in a tumult of Jupiter-storm proportions.

Before that, nothing could be lost because nothing could be gained. She destroyed that zero-sum laxity by blasting Relevance into Existence.

Just hearing her name–Angela Beaufort–swirled that dust that muted me with amazement.

I fought to board the school bus first to get the seat I needed to see her walking home down a lane that ran behind the primary school beside our high school. I dreaded something unforeseen. Routine kept hope burning.

Walking down that lane, she carried broaches of light upon her honey follicles. My brain-blurring admiration was so debilitating that I couldn’t speak to her. Dominating football matches was far easier. Lacking conversational ability meant I could only crack jokes when we passed each other, too naively conscious of my own feelings to enquire about hers.

Our paths crossed one day unexpectedly in the city centre. Rounding a corner, there she was. Smiling, she told me about her guitar classes, the pupils in her blue eyes ringed by yellow specks, my cheeks twitching, my brain screaming: “Speak, you idiot!”

I couldn’t think of anything, except how beautiful she was, and how could I have told her that?

Love crushes spontaneous imagination or magnifies it, depending upon levels of confidence.

How can you deal with it, however, if your home life hides its secrets? My mother had run off to England before I had started primary school, leaving my father in despair. I had been in an orphanage before moving to my grandmother’s house. My grandmother hated my father because his fleeing from domestic disharmony to pursue love highlighted her life’s emotional poverty. She frowned while talking at the dinner table. She even once said, “I know it’s funny, but don’t laugh.” Her fury towards my father for his apparently irresponsible socialising got lumped onto me. Someone had to suffer because of it. She railed against my father, belching: “I hope he dies before me.”

After school, I crept into the house through the back door. If I made it to the room I shared with my younger brother, I was safe. If she saw me, I would get clobbered. The reason for this: I reminded her of my mother, that woman responsible for me being dumped onto her with a father she hated.

Those were the conditions I faced when I met Angela. You can’t suddenly erect bridges across gorges excavated by lovelessness. My loveless home life induced a numbness only broken by football, daydreams, and surfing. I studied atlases, allured by unknown lands. Elsewhere had to be much better than where I was.

I marked a calendar on days when I had some type of contact with Angela. Sometimes I removed that calendar from its hiding place to study it, hoping it would reveal her interest in me. Time wrecked that calendar. The past, disintegrating like that calendar, leaves fleeting images of beauty and ugliness behind, the leftovers of departed significance.    

The main memory I now have of that day I ran into Angela is of the electro-magnetism that beamed off her face; her precise comments and how we said goodbye have gone, that encounter’s brevity caused by the gold dust swirling in a brain unable to produce coherent thought while facing beauty. She continually occupied my mind without clear thought arising, like an endless coda without a symphony.

The only future, then, was Angela. She really wasn’t even in my present; my time spent daydreaming about romantic fulfilment. I hoped for something that would change all. It almost happened. I went with my older brother to a party at the house of one of his friends. It was at that stage when adolescent muteness was slowly losing ground to volcanic expression.

We arrived armed with beer. Shyness cocooned me. We sat at the kitchen table with the host and had a beer. I could hear conversational rumbling splattered with cackling and cracking coming from the backyard, a sound combination typifying our city. The mournful singing of trees in summer winds also dominated our city’s soundtrack. That mournfulness died by windless nightfall when celestial mother-of-pearl became diamond-encrusted ebony above people’s guffaw-punctured rumbling. Partying meant the possibility of flourishing in green shoots of potential fulfilment.

The beer produced attitude-changing confidence. I felt I could leap as if on a low-gravity planet. The sky’s silkiness seemingly brought joy to the earth. Angela and I laughed under stars that gleamed with the promise of eternal bliss. The charm that had fought so long to arise finally rose. I became what I had dreamt I could be.

Her face sparkled like the sky, her teeth a white zip above her round chin. Her hair spiralled over her bronzed shoulders. I lapped up the honey of her sweetness. Our chuckling cracked through the hot air’s magnified transmission of sound.

Our comments have been swallowed by time, but her surprise at my unexpected wit remains permanently trapped in memory’s vice.

Then the sickness hit. That inopportune reaction to alcohol epitomised savage fate. Trying to negotiate a driveway, I bumped into a fence on one side, then a brick wall on the other, then the fence again, like walking along a spinning barrel.

I vomited in the front yard. I lay beside a hose. I turned on a tap. Water spilled from the hose into my mouth. My veins seemed packed with green mucus. A girl I had been to school with said, “Dave Warner. Typical.” I felt too sick for anger or embarrassment. My party was over. I lay there for hours, sipping water, cackling rumbling coming from the backyard, the moment gone, back to yearning for love. I stayed prostrate for as long as I did because the need to vomit remained strong for hours. I didn’t even think of trying to hide my dilemma. Alcoholic poisoning had crushed social considerations. Back to being boring, old Dave Warner.

After graduating from school, I saw Angela sporadically because I had moved into a house in the same street she lived in, my grandmother having kicked me out because of my wayward comings and goings in that first year of university. Those comings and goings likened me to my father.

Lanes ran parallel to the street that Angela and I lived on. I often walked down the lane on our side of the street to peer through her house’s open back gate to see if I could spot her. One day, I saw her dashing from the bathroom to her bedroom to get ready to go out. Whacking feelings of exclusion struck. Someone else was about to have her company. Alcohol had ruined that for me. I was just plain, old Dave Warner, poor and obscure, obsessed with seducing Angela, but unable to begin a process that could have brought her into my life, restrained by a weighty past that had not contained free-flowing communication. The influence of that weight could only be smashed by freak events of sudden euphoria, as had happened at that party. Spontaneous miracles of felicitous confidence magnify self-perception. I knew such miracles existed. What else could I think? Potential miracles spun the drill of my whining hope. I took potentially embarrassing risks, hoping to perpetuate one of those confidence-giving epiphanies where the coating caused by years of verbal inaction gets split open, unleashing whirlpool thought. Beneath that coating, gems of hilarity brewed in bubbling lava creativity. The problem was how to get those gems to rise.

One day, I ran into Angela on the street, a frightening opportunity right before me. The gold dust smashed against the firm coating. My temples throbbed like strobe lights. Her blue-eyed oceans, engulfing gilt-surrounded, black, circular islands of curiosity, heightened my perception of colour.

She mentioned a band that had burst onto the scene back then in what turned out to be a smash-and-grab act of money-making.

“They only see women as sex objects,” she said.

Hearing her say “sex” made sparks fly under the coating.

I didn’t know if that band’s members only saw women as sex objects or not. I didn’t say anything other than: “I admit I like their music.”

It was amazing that she still spoke to me. My ineptitude had unconsciously done everything to crush that possibility. Escape from love’s threat had been my brain’s modus operandi, its will opposed to mine. Her continued openness emerged from her generosity of spirit that created her incandescent smiles.

She said she had started running at the beach in the mornings. I endured a week of impatience before doing the same. She ran with a woman from school. We would run past each other, approaching from opposite directions, and say: “Hi.” That happened regularly for months. Disdainful arrogance smeared her running partner’s face. Her friend’s haughtiness reached a crescendo one day when the friend looked at Angela and said, “Him! Again!” Angela maintained her polite equilibrium, her sensitive understanding highlighting the spite of the bitch she ran with.

The beach enhanced the freckle archipelago that dotted Angela’s cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Her skin turned light bronze. Her hair produced gilded rivers of silk. Her incendiary smile revealed spotlight teeth amid light chocolate.

She drove her mother’s car. Its licence plate remains branded in my memory: XIP 496. When seeing that plate, usually while waiting for buses on the road that linked our suburb with the beach, dormant, dour, sleepy passageways in my head ignited.

I dreamt about rescuing her from shipwrecks. Night’s multifaceted universes opposed day’s sapping sameness. I lacked a real push towards long-term betterment. I only wanted to turn night’s glamour into day, oblivious that this overcompensation for childhood’s inadequacies wasn’t the solution.

One night, I crept down the side of Angela’s neighbour’s house to peer over the fence into her bedroom window. I knew about the plants in her neighbour’s backyard. I had spotted, through a crack in the lane’s fence, marijuana spouting from green, blue, and red pots, those plants irrelevant as I tiptoed towards Angela’s window, so intent on that window I didn’t even think that someone may have spotted me through her neighbour’s black equivalents. I didn’t even duck as I passed those equivalents. I could only focus on that window ahead, while slithering between a fence and a brick wall, steamed up with a curiosity whose density matched the atmosphere’s summer-night silk.

A woman’s voice! The air’s conductivity chiselled that voice into perfect clarity: “Someone’s trying to steal the plants.”

That woman couldn’t have imagined that my hunt for euphoria was caused by the gorgeous neighbour, not a drug. I raced back to the footpath. I fled to the end of the street. Black figures in front of Angela’s neighbour’s house entered a car. Car doors slammed. I dashed down the lane on the other side of the street that Angela and I lived on. I ran into the backyard of the third house along the lane and hid behind a brick outhouse.

The car stopped. People got out. They had seen me dash down the lane as their car had whipped around the corner. They examined the backyards of the first houses along that lane. I recognised one of their voices. He was a hippy whom I had once spotted stealing money from gloveboxes in a car park. Back then, theft was almost non-existent. People didn’t even bother to lock their cars.

So there I was, between a brick outhouse and a fence, pursued for attempted theft by a thief and not because of unrequited love. My pursuers would not have believed my motives. My hopes had led me to crouching behind a brick outhouse, praying that my pursuers’ search would stop.

My attitude towards brick outhouses had always been positive. The brick outhouse enables one to release shameful methane into the atmosphere rather than in the house.

When they stopped searching, my already great admiration for the brick outhouse soared. I considered writing to the government, calling for a monument to be erected, commemorating the brick outhouse’s inventor.

That experience was a wake-up call. Surreptitious action had to go. I had a head full of thickening irresolution caused by Angela’s sweetness and beauty. That irresolution was weighing me down. Climbing through bedroom windows at four in the morning and saying: “Hi! It’s me!” wasn’t destined to impress. It could have caused a heart attack. Causing someone’s death–especially hers–was untenable. I had a theory (hope’s new manifestation) that sincerity could smash that charm-resisting coating. I rang her. Back then, ringing people was nerve-wracking for one had to face people’s shocked voices, given that the receiver didn’t know who was ringing. My stomach and temples trembled. I had decided to tell her in person what she probably already knew. My stomach became a pit of dread. The sensation of only being a spectator to other people’s contentment is magnified. I felt I was just bringing failure forward, no justification for what I wanted to tell her. But her sweetness gave her deep understanding.

“Hi,” she said, happily, my dread soaked up by relief.

We ended up in a car parked in some quiet place.

“I love you,” I told her. “I’ve loved you ever since I first saw you.”

I said this without hope. It didn’t even dent the coating. She looked through the windscreen, then at me, her face shimmering with appreciation, and said: “That’s really courageous of you.”

My surprise at this view created a stumping silence that she broke by saying: “What you said is really a difficult thing to say. Thanks for saying it.”

I marvelled at this generosity. Some people claim they trust their feelings. Her good-natured sensibility, I should have realised, justified my love.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Someone has asked me to go to a party with them tonight at the University. Now I don’t know what to do.”

Because I couldn’t believe she was inferring I had a chance of going out with her, I wondered what this indecision implied. Hope is one thing, belief another. I have never believed anything. I know or I don’t. I had no idea what her uncertainty meant.

I thanked her for listening to me.

Although I felt I had achieved a communication breakthrough, one that would have looked impressive on that already defunct calendar, stormy irresolution returned. She even concluded our interlude by saying I could visit her whenever I felt it.

That, too, seemed impossible to believe. The past doesn’t recede easily. The long-term confidence I had been hoping for remained elusive. Nothing changed. I was still dreary, old Dave Warner. Her words failed to be interpreted positively. I didn’t even ask anyone else’s opinion of: “I don’t know what to do now.” The past had damaged my analytical ability. Surely, she couldn’t have been suggesting I had a chance? That hadn’t fitted into my grim script. Those days, coloured by awkward attempts to attain confidence, often crushed sincerity, reducing the chance of increasing confidence. Had I been honest about myself to others, I would have improved, but pressure existed to be “smooth.” You often heard: “He’s so smooth,” as if a special gift had been awarded to the beholders of such smoothness.

Everyone dreamt about being “smooth.” Fortunately, I haven’t heard the expression “smooth” for years. Maturity alters vocabulary.

Hunting for this elusive smoothness continued. A better-informed individual would have concentrated on the skills they already had, using them to achieve higher self-appreciation. I could have been playing league football, but I wasn’t interested, ignorant of the lifelong repercussions of what professional sport brings. I was driven by malevolent fate to try to improve a skill that eluded me–that of making desirable people love you, instead of using what I already had to get the same reward.

Pursuing confidence created depression. I ended up drunk in the back seat of Angela’s car. We had run into each other in a pub popular with people in the area where we lived. She was with a woman we knew from school. Attempting to slash the coating with piercing wit, I made comments to Angela’s friend that had the reverse effect.

“Come on, Marie, you know you love me,” I think I said, although I suspect memory has softened my real remarks. Angela looked at Marie and said, referring to me, “How rude.”

Given this was the limit of Angela’s anger (someone else would have thrown me out of the car), I knew I had seriously overstepped the mark.

I found nothing interesting afterwards except Bob Dylan. I wet my pillow with tears, scaled down to a core that clung to Bob. No other barnacle existed to cling to. Angela’s displeasure had taken most things with it. Failing to gain something so important highlighted general irrelevancy. I was just left with beauty’s observation, not a part of it, having rejected a worthwhile sporting skill, whose utilization would have changed my life for the better, rejecting it for the difficult to master, Angela gone.

I haven’t loved anyone else as much since, her long, slow drift out of my thoughts finally resulting in constructive considerations about the future. Now thinking about her leaves a pleasant glow, like a mango sunset on a departed era.