LESBIANS, SURELY?

I finally led the family to a bathing beacon. As an ex-pro, I know about these things. We could hang our towels on the rungs of the beacon to prevent them getting sandy. We did so and then sat in a row beside the beacon, facing the sea. Cool water foamed around our feet. A kind father stood nearbye holding his daughter on his hip. Inrushing water hissed up his shins and she shrieked delightedly. Further down, away from the main crowd, a group of sand-pipers ran back and forth with the ebb and flow of the water. They moved with the rapidity of wind-up toys, stabbing the sand with their beaks in search of sea lice. Yes. In my lucid drunken state I saw all. The shorebreak waves reared up, their faces streaked with foam and churning sand, and collapsed with hollow booming concussions on the yelling throng. Slick arms windmilled from the foamy chaos, heads tumbled, feet pointed skyward.
There were only a few surfers at backline, beyond a wide midbreak of ordlerly rolling foamies. The waves there reared up and turned green for an instant before bowling onto the sandbank with a crisp hollow whump. Beside me the family sat in order of seniority: Pa, Ma, Dawie - yanking on one end of the stick he'd brought, Spud growling on the other end, ploughing up the sand - Stefaan, Lettie, Helga and Willem Jnr. By rights Helga should have been at the end, but she'd managed to outmanouvre Willem. Again. He was scowling, aware of the injustice.

A group of men with Health and Racket chiselled bodies, about twenty of them, were throwing a frisbee back and forth near the water's edge. Their feet slapped the hard wet sand. There were cries of 'Mike!' 'Robert!' 'Over here!' Pa and I entered the shallow water near them and swung Helga and Willem around for a while - not easy with Willem, with his tremlbing white gut. Ma watched us, smiling with a faraway look in her eye. Lydenburg memories. As soon as I got the chance I swam out to the backline for half an hour of crisp thumping barrels, sluicing my crevices, scouring road grime off, tucking into the long revolving chutes translucent with green light. The water here was clean and not gritty with churned sand like the shorebreak. A perfect right came my way and I took off at an angle and dropped down with my right hand extended, my palm cutting into the uprushing wall tight with ribbed tension. My left hand was down by my balls, digging into the face like a little fin, keeping me hanging there. The water drummed against my chest as the revolving tunnel closed up entirely and I was spat out and hung suspended in green silence for the space of a snapshot. Then I was tumbling madly, eyes tightly shut, muscles braced against the bombing concussion of white water. I found the bottom and gripped it with my fingers and toes, resisting the force of the wave which wanted to drag me with it. I oriented myself seawards and waited for the overhead turbulence to pass before thrusting off at an angle and surfacing in smooth water, flicking the salt from my eyes so I could see if another thick lip was sledging towards me.

I returned to the beach a new man, glowing with salty health, frothed up Stout singing in my veins. It took me a while to get my bearings, wiping the water from my eyes, wading through the melee of bathers - this really was a busy beach - but there was Ma beside the beacon, sitting like one of those wooden carvings of fat Bhuddist monks. Except that Ma wasn't smiling. She had the kids standing around her and they were all peering towards the packed beach, shielding their eyes, with a concerned stillness in their bearing. Down by the water's edge the group of frisbee tossers were grouped together in a perplexed knot, staring in the same direction. I looked across at the mob sweltering under the merciless garish spotlight of the sun and there, shambling around horribly amongst the glistening flesh and swivelling heads, the bright towels and the umbrellas, looking rather low rent if I say so myself, were Pa and Dawie and Stefaan. Spud scampered a few feet ahead of them. He had the frisbee clamped in his mouth and he was pocking the thing, his jaws working with frantic joy.
How long had this been going on? Quite a while, if the scowling expressions of the frisbee tossers were anything to go by. Dawie was stalking around Spuds flank, scowling himself with concentration, his arms hanging terribly low at his sides. Spud's eyes twitched, watching him close in. Dawie got within range and lunged at him but Spud merely pranced off, delighted, and planted himself on the other side of a gawking family - his head held low and his arse in the air, tail thrashing, jawing the frisbee, piggy eyes twitching upwards, waiting for the next lumbering charge. From Pa this time.
Trotting briskly up the bank, sober now, onto the level glaring stage to save the day, I passed the knot of pissed-off frisbee throwers. They mulled around, undecided. A few of them played on the wing, they could probably catch the stupid animal if they tried. But you judge a dog by its owner and if this one was anything like the oke with the scars and the mashed nose and the homemade blue tatoo of the saint on his shoulder ... best left alone.

The rest of Sunday was spent in a torpid green dwaal, back in the amniotic security of the tent, writing in my journal. I felt clean and exercised and healthy. My skin glowed pinkly after a hot shower in the yeasty glass cubicle. A white crescent of salt had survived on my forearm. I licked it off. The grotto beyond the tent opening was a viridian twilight world shot with dusty shafts of sunlight. I could see the bright world beating down on the canopy up there, dancing in a thin white haze over the tree tops, repelled, except for these lazy columns twirling with bright specs of dust and the odd meteoric gnat.
Out on the quiet road, hemmed in by tall green thicket, the sunlight was thick and milky now, like I could wade through it. It shone on a run down concrete bunker of a tea-room, the same tired beigy yellow as the ablution block, sitting alone and partially swallowed by the trees and palms. I was hungry after my swim so I left the tent and walked over - Spud shadowing me as always. Inside two shirtless boogie-boarding grommets, shoeless on a grubby maroon concrete floor, with long baggies almost down to their ankles, bonged away on a flashing pinball machine in the corner.
There was very little stock. A single wire shelf on the wall contained a jumble of obscurely flavoured crisps like Biltong and Potroast. On the counter a huge glass jar with a swivel lid held a collection of sticky looking sweets - big pink balls that you suck for hours and then crack a tooth on.
'No man,' the stringy woman behind the counter said. 'The truck only delivers stock once a week and it hasn't come this week.'
Of course not. Laid back beach decrepitude. I bought a packet of chips and a withered Mutton Curry Pie from the glass oven on the counter. Two dead flies lay on top of it, their legs in the air, slightly fried. A ceiling fan blatted down thick wedges of air, causing the legs to stir slightly.
The woman looked at Spud and beamed. 'Ag! such a mooi Varkhoindjie! My husband had one. That dog was crazy! We took him to the beach and every time he dove into the rock pools for the ... what you call it? Ag man,' she fluttered her hand in frustration. 'The anemones! Because they is bright! This dog loved bright things! But the crazy animal wouldn't let go! When he got a thing in his mouth he held on. Until he passed out! Hey!' One of the grommets, clacking the flippers of the pinball machine and heaving it around frantically, had yelled fuck. 'Watch your language! Don't make me call your mothers! And if you break that machine you're going to be in groot kak!' The grommet gave her a surly look and continued playing.
'Where was I,' she said, turning a bright smile on me. 'Ooh ja! The dog used to pass out and my husband had to give him ... how do you call it? Mouth to mouth! Ag!' She beamed down at Spud and I agreed that he wasn't the brightest dog either. 'But he is so handsome. Skat, come and look at this mooi varkhoindjie. He's brown, not like Bruno.'
From behind the counter her daughter gave me a nice smile from where she was sprawled in a white plastic fold out chair. She heaved herself up on the chair's armrests and held herself there, the chair creaking, as she peered over the counter at Spud. Then she collapsed back again. She was slightly younger than the chunky young thing on the beach, about eighteen, with the same suety skin swelling where her faded denim shorts cut into her thighs. Frayed white thread showed where the jeans had been cut to make shorts. She wore a pink bikini beneath a yellow Instinct vest. It had a wide cut so the glabrous white flesh of her full breasts, not quite covered by her bikini, was visible from the side. The sight made my breath snag. She caught me looking but instead of covering up she yawned and stretched languidly, her arms fully extended above her head. My God, the power young girls can weild over a man's idiotic flesh.
In fact they were both so friendly that I thought it was my stout induced charm working. But gradually I saw that they were competing with each other. The mom may have been pretty once, but her sharp brown face was withered now, with a row of vertical wrinkles leading into her top lip. She gabbled on and registered my reactions a little desperately, watching me with alert black eyes beneath a fringe of teased auburn bangs. The daughter sat quietly in the chair, not saying much, smiling, confident in the power of her blossoming breasts.

Back outside I waded across the milky road, back into the dappled green other-world of the grotto. I sat beside the tent and ate the pie with its glutinous blobs of black meat. Spud inspected the piece I gave him with a delicately crinkled nose before gingerly eating it with his front teeth. Not such a stupid dog after all. Then I lay on my back on the cool grass and breathed the dusty smell of sunstruck vegetation filtering down from the canopy. Lambent fragments of blue showed between leaves tinctured along their edges with a chartreuse light. No wind. Then the grass rustled beside my head. It was the two women who lived in a caravan at the far end of the camp. Possible lesbians. Batting their eyes, smiling, in their early forties, with white cellulite-scrolled thighs beneath their matching khaki shorts, they wanted to know if I was interested in buying a canvas tent for R500.
While we were discussing this Pa and Lettie emerged from their tent and began quietly hanging wet costumes and towels on a green wire slung from a corner of their caravan to a nearbye tree. Their tent was quiet. Just the tv droning somnolently. They must be sprawled out in there watching it. Ma must be nursing her aching legs and back.
The two women ignored Pa and Lettie. They even paused in their bright, neighbourly chatter to give them sour looks. When Pa and Lettie finished and went inside there was a ticklish pause: I think they wanted me to complain about the family. Instead I kept quiet, and as the pause lengthened I could see these two trying to work out where my sympathies lay. The camp was divided into two obvious factions: the reclusive overnight campers, with their expensive cars and caravans; and the people who actually lived in the camp - the Inwooners. The overnight campers were shadowy figures, sticking to themselves out of site in the nooks and crannies of the camp, nodding warily on their way to the toilets and showers. They pulled out in the early morning in their 4x4's to go on fishing trips and returned at dusk.
The Inwooners, on the other hand, walked around the camp all day with a relaxed proprietory air, with their animals tailing them, chatting and socialising. This was their turf. But amongst the Inwooners their was a further division between those living rough but comfortable like the lesbians, and those with a tacky air of desperation about them, like the familie. Piet the biker didn't have a desperate air, but Piet was comfortable with hard Lydenburg stories and Piet sommer didn't give a fok if Pa and Dawie came over to shoot the breeze. And there was still the question of Stefaan's soft arse. I still hadn't gotten to the bottom of that one.
Within the camp setting I was harder to place. With my story about the Uno breaking down, and with my lekker fancy tent with Svalsbad Explorer printed in expensive little white letters on the side, I was like an Overnighter who had lost his way and become a comfortable Inwooner. I was seen chatting to the family all the time. I was right there in the pall cast by their grotty tent and caravan.
Now - this was what the pause had been about, with these two looking down at me - was I suffocating in the family's sordidness and aching for a chance to wail about them? Or did I, God forbid, actually enjoy having them at my tent opening all day long? I thought about it - about them following me trustingly across the beach, about Ma sitting beside the beacon with a faraway, enigmatic smile on her lips - and thanked them for their offer. I said I had no real need for a six man tent, but I'd ask around for them.
They smiled sympathetically - I was obviously a man of admirable restraint, not given to gossiping. Then they ambled back towards their caravan, taking their time as Inwooners to pluck a few leaves and glare up at the monkeys and corner a scared ten year old Overnighter scurring back to the safety of his caravan. As they walked their tan khaki shorts rode up their wide arses and their cellulite scrolled in a rapid, complex series of dents and shadows like hieroglyphics. Lesbians, surely?