Blink twice if you'll never leave me
On Christmas Day, we watched a man almost drown.
Or actually drown. We won’t know.
When you’re “at the scene”, that’s all you are. Act Two is the stretcher being loaded into the ambulance, the hospital, the phone call, changing someone’s relationship to December 25th and casual swims in foreign oceans. That’s not our part. So we won’t know. Being a perfect blue sky summer afternoon, what we did know is that it would be packed at the tourist beaches in our hometown, so we took a left at the beach. Around the corner was where the locals escape the Land Rovers and linen set this time of year – a small but beautiful cove at the mouth of the sea.
It was a small city of DIY tents on the grassy knoll that looked out over the water. Meaty clouds of barbecue smoke and on hot plastic trestle tables buckling under the weight of potato salad, coleslaw, empty beer bottles and bulk bottles of tomato sauce. The beach itself was comparatively quiet. My sister took two steps onto the sand and was immediately greeted by squawks of recognition from fellow locals. While I moved to Melbourne early and left our little town on the coast, she had stayed, and knew everybody and everything. We peeled our towels out of our bags and kneed them onto the sand, trying to avoid the gentle prying of the wind that threatened to mix a gritty layer of sand in with our freshly oiled sunscreen.
After chatting with what seemed like six friends, their mothers, husbands and dogs, my sister announced she was jumping straight into the water. Too bloody hot. While Aurelia and I decided to warm up a bit in the sun before cooling off in the sea, she waded straight in to the gentle tide, waving to more golden bodies laid up on the sand, draped over the rocks or cruising by on low-riders with surfboards balanced on the handlebars.
This is nice.
We’ll have this one day, Aurelia replies. Just not now.
Mmm, I murmur, unconvinced.
This is retirement, baby. We’re too young.
You’re right, you’re riiiiiight, I slur, feeling the slow brandy of the heat loosening my jaw already.
We’re not ready yet.
I know.
The friends we’d camped alongside threw some chops on their camping stove and they hissed like cornered cats.
Shit!
It’s okay, love. A low placating voice tended to the chef’s exclamation, following it with a soft suck and pop of a beer.
No, babe. Look.
A chord of urgency rang through her voice, and Aurelia and I sat bold upright like a pair of B-grade zombies in a horror film.
What’s she doing? I asked nobody in particular, peering under my hand to see my sister swimming up to a jetski, with a school of people following her.
Someone she knows? Aurelia quizzed.
When my sister started to drag the limp body off the back and started side-stroking towards shore, I said I didn’t think so, dumbly. Then, the beach launched into a flurry of action.
Who has a phone? A guy in boardshorts still holding a sausage wheeled around to us.
I went for mine, but somebody already had the ambulance on the line.
Chuck us a towel!
Who’s got a towel?! A voice echoes from further up the beach.
My sister was almost at shore, now with a squad of six or more helping her bring what looked like the body to the shore. People rushed over with the towels as they laid him on the sand, to shield him from the sun. For a moment, that seemed odd to my slowly churning brain as it struggled to dawn on the moment of drowning in front of us. Wouldn’t the sun help? If he’s wet from the inside out, surely what he needs is to be dried out. Doesn’t he need that?
I’m sure he’s grateful, if he’s still capable of feelings, that is, that it was my sister in the water with him, and not me. Within seconds, she had him on his side with her fingers down his throat. He started to throw up onto the sand. Not the kind of projectile 3am bathroom kind I would have recognised. Long strands of bile bulged out of the corner of his mouth and glittered on the sand like gothic tinsel.
Aurelia and I stood a few paces back, giving the first responders space, but alert and ready to bring water, a phone, another towel, whatever was needed. Our ready state meant we were watching the chorus of kneeling bodies with an alertness I’ve only experience once before, when I accidentally walked into the path of a hungry fox one morning on the farm. I stared at the body writhing on the sand, turning slowly pale and trying to orient itself in moments of howling lucidity.
Where’s the ambulance?!
They’re on their way, love. An older woman with sun bleached hair and pink thongs was relaying information to a clinically calm voice on speakerphone.
Yes, he’s awake but his pulse is really faint, love. They brought him in on the skis. There were others, yes. Not sure where they went but they got them out, too. Some of the guys who brought them in are here. Please hurry, love.
There were more? Aurelia says quietly, against pressing into my side.
Sounds like it, I reply, looping a hand around her waist and drawing her closer in.
I’m staring at him, waiting for a flicker of a happy ending, and through a gap between legs and towels and a defibrillator somebody found somewhere that looked like it had expired in 1994, he looks back at me. His eyes glittered, unblinking and awash. With what?
Are you dying? I ask pointedly in the stare I return. Blink twice if yes.
Baby? Aurelia whispers.
One sec, I say, not wanting to break his gaze, so I would know whether he was about to suck in a breath that would change the course of the afternoon for all 20 of us, or if this would be our last swim at this beach.
Someone, Aurelia continued, someone’s…running.
My head instinctively twisted to where her voice was pointing, betraying my own rules of the staring agreement. A group of boys were bolting along the rock wall to where we were crowded on the beach. From the twisted looks on their faces, and how wet their boardshorts were, they were his friends. The others. The ones who got out.
When I looked back to resume the conversation I was having with the man’s eyes on the sand, there was a thick pair of legs and another generous lend of a towel blocking my view. Fuck.
Are you okay?
I’m okay, are you?
Yes.
Do you still want to go for a swim?
With everything that had happened since we had arrived at the cove, I hadn’t realised we hadn’t actually done what we were here for. The thought sent a sick wave from the back of my teeth to my navel.
I think I’m okay.
Yeah. Me too.
The body’s friends were on the sand now, pacing with their hands on their hands, trying to explain what happened but not knowing themselves. They lapped like little useless waves trying to move a boulder.
My sister, meanwhile, was still knelt beside the man, rubbing his back as we drifted forward and back through an invisible curtain nobody else could see. He looked like he had swallowed the ocean and it was trying to capsize him from within, sending great waves of death to thunder against his will.
I signalled to her, are you okay?
She tossed her head up as if to say, classic. I’ve never loved her more.
We were always poles apart as kids. I was sensitive and reclusive, she could always be relied upon to bring exactly what you needed to any occasion – a good story, strong booze or an idea for trouble, or fun, however you see it. I saw it as the former and avoided everything to do with her while I concentrated on getting good grades and doing musical theatre.
Waves of pride surged as I watched her save the day, as she did for me many times in less obvious settings. I’ve spent years waiting until I have the ‘perfect idea’ or ‘complete book’ to make anything of it. She would have had 20 books and at least one accidental best seller in the time it’s taken me to admit that I might be a writer.
I’m a writer! Tali calls from the shore, shaking me from my deeply mistimed daydream. Wha…?
I’m a WRITER! She yells again, now with much more urgency.
Oh! Okay! I offer back.
A LIGHTER!! A frustrated woman with huge eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses starts at me. She’s asking for a lighter, mate!
Oh shit, sorry! Coming!
I source a lighter from the husband of one of the women who’s been a holding a towel in the hot sun for the last 20 minutes. He’s sucking on his fourth beer in that period, and makes me promise to bring the lighter back. I hate him, for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
Here! What’s it for? I enquire, arriving at Tali’s shoulder and handing down the lighter with an Australian flag plastered crudely on its body.
She looks at me darkly. I didn’t want to ask. Then, she taps my leg. I look around to see Aurelia pointing at the boulders leading down to the beach. There are four paramedics in blue slowly making their way to us.
Thank Christ, my sister mutters, half to herself. That wasn’t going to be pretty. I make the decision never to ask her what ‘it’ was going to be.
Automatically, we all clear a path to the scene, forming a human walkway leading to the body on the sand.
They’re walking too slowly, I say through gritted teeth.
Where’s their sense of urgency?
One of them, the slowest walker of the pack, even has Christmas tinsel wrapped around a gaudy pair of antlers.
They’ll see worse than this 50 times today, Aurelia reminds me. Let them have it.
They strut in like the cool kids at a party, but instead of cases of beer, they’re carrying life-saving equipment, oxygen and a stretcher, which they eventually strap him to.
After they lift him off the sand, we agree it’s time to go. Nothing like imminent death accompanied by the smell of cooking meat to put you off your best laid plans. We peel our unused towels off the sand, blow kisses and wave to distant faces scrunched in the distance, carefully avoiding having to debrief on what just happened with the whole beach, and head towards the car.
Well.
Yep.
That was a lot.
Yep.
Tal, you had your FINGERS down his throat.
Yep.
We talk about who thinks he’ll make it, who doesn’t, and why, in the car on the way home. I look out the window in the backseat while Aurelia and Tali talk softly, thinking of how big and unforgettable loss can feel when it’s unexpected. How numb and normal when it’s on the news every night. Screaming from our phones. This was just one man, whose bargaining eyes I’d never once met, but now will never forget. And this was an accident. Far removed from war. The sea is not a gun. Nobody was holding a trigger, or stood above him with an artificial earthquake, or flew above in a darkly pregnant plane. This was one man. And we all cared. All of us. Every single one. How many does it take until we don’t come? We have enough towels. There are plenty of hands. We’ve got jet skiis in the thousands. And there are still people out there. More every day. So, do we use our many hands to push them back in? Or do we carry them while we can?
Fish for dinner? Tali turns to me and grins, almost veering the car into a pole.
Fuck you, I glare back.
They’re both turned around now, grinning like schoolgirls.
I take the glory of them both in, the safety of our lives, this stupid car my sister paid too much for, the wedding Aurelia and I had in a shitty little chapel in Las Vegas with a man in a cheap toupe, the gunless silence.
Blink twice if you’ll never leave me.
-TN