All At Sea (10 page)

We’re horrible people, you and me. Just horrible.

Thursday 13
th
March 10.10pm

—Pineapple Pete’s at Coconut Bay Resort—

You’re really not coming out. Are you coming out? Fark! What’s going on???

Thursday 13
th
March 10.16pm

—Pineapple Pete’s at Coconut Bay Resort—

I don’t know what to do. I’m standing out here looking like a fcken fruit loop. You’re not going to come out. I can’t go back in there until I know what’s going on.

Thursday 13
th
March 10.18pm

—Pineapple Pete’s at Coconut Bay Resort—

What’s going on is that I’m with Lachie now. It’s nice being around someone who doesn’t make me want to burst into tears or punch a wall when I look at him.

Thursday 13
th
March 10.35pm

—Pineapple Pete’s at Coconut Bay Resort—

Did you just leave? I saw the shuttle car pull up.

Thursday 13
th
March 10.37pm

—Pineapple Pete’s at Coconut Bay Resort—

You just left!

Thursday 13
th
March 10.40pm

—near North Shore, HI—

Back to hang at the club with the rest of the rich kids. I hear there’s a billiards tourney coming up and I need to sharpen mah skillz.

Thursday 13
th
March 10.42pm

—Pineapple Pete’s at Coconut Bay Resort—

I don’t know who you are. You’re like a different person.

Thursday 13
th
March 10.45pm

—Pineapple Pete’s at Coconut Bay Resort—

It’s after 10:30 and I had to go. It’s not all-ages night and they were about to card everyone who looks young and boot me out the door anyway.

Thursday 13
th
March 11.47pm

—North Shore Hostel—

Fiona’s staying at Coconut Bay and I’ve just come home. It took ages because I had to update Lachie on what’s going on with the guys at home. They wanted to eat. I just pushed food around my plate because I thought I was going to chuck.

I said I was jet lagged, which I am.

And you’re right. Fifi knows something’s up. She knew when I walked in. I said I feel sick, which I do.

Lachie looks happy. He’s all sanguine and content. He’s got a dopey grin.

Lachie is in love with you.

So now I am dumping my fiancée and going after my best friend’s girl.

Is that what I’m doing here?

I’m going to sit down now and read through all the stuff you sent.

Friday 14
th
March 1.12am

—North Shore Hostel—

I just read them. I’m sorry. The night at the party I had been drinking and I didn’t want you to be with Lachie. I’ve been pretty consistent about that. But anyway.

How can I explain it?

OK. It doesn’t happen so much here, because the water is too warm, but at home, sometimes when I would go surfing first thing in the morning, it was really fricken cold, and it would go all the way through to my bones til I couldn’t feel any more.

But then when I got out and sat on the sand and the sun would come up, and I’d go all tingly, and pins and needles. My skin would be tight and gritty and salty. Have you had that?

That’s how I feel after I’ve been with you. Like I was frozen and now every nerve in me is quivering. I know girls like to talk. Talk talk talk, but I don’t need that so much. I don’t want you to think it’s because I don’t want to know more about you. Most of the time I am just buzzing on that sensation all day long without saying anything at all. I don’t want to talk. I just want to sit there and feel like that for as long as it’s going to last.

Eventually it wears off, and then I go looking for you so I can feel that way again.

Does Lachie make you feel like that?

Does he?

Friday 14
th
March 2.06am

—Waikiki Yacht Club—

I don’t know if he makes me feel that way because he’s not gotten a fair shot. All my feelings for him are wrapped up in my feelings for you. You need to break up with Fiona. The next lines I want to read from you are “I told her. It’s over.” If you can’t write that, then don’t write anything.

Friday 14
th
March 2.35am

—North Shore Hostel—

I wasn’t going to send you what I was thinking when I went back home. I was going to delete all the messages I wrote. But I can’t help it.

If you don’t know how I really feel, how can you know what is best to do?

I’m sending them now.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

10
th
March 3.25am

—Private Residence near Belmont, AUS—

I’m on mum’s computer in the study. I’m going to write to you offline for a bit, and I’m not going to send any of them. I’m going to show some restraint for a change. But I still need to write it down, so I’m going to save them all as a draft, and see what happens. If you and Lachie seem happy then I will delete them all, no harm done.

Or, if you decide to take my advice after all and not sleep with Lachie, then I can send them all to you in one big splurge that will blow up your phone. See? Forethought!

And I don’t care if you think I am a dickhead. This is who I am and I’m done with pretending to be cooler/smarter/funner/more sober/wiser so that people will like me more.

Strap yourself in for some Kody uncut.

(Had you been wondering about that? *raises eyebrows suggestively*)

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

10
th
March 3.46am

—Private Residence near Belmont, NSW, AUS—

My dad met me at the airport. He picked up my bag for me, ready to go straight out to the car park, but I asked him to sit in the bar with me just for a minute, and he already knew, as soon as I said that, what I was going to tell him.

We sat in the corner booth and I just cried. I didn’t even say anything.

My dad met my mum at uni. They both did ag science. After he graduated he went to live in France for a bit, by himself, because he majored in viticulture. But he came back and married her. They’re really sweet together. They hold hands in the supermarket.

He’d never told me this before, but in the bar he said that there was someone special in France. An English girl named Kirsten. My mother doesn’t know, although my dad thinks there was someone special before him too. They have both deliberately never asked, he said, because it would be painful, but they both needed to find out for themselves if there was someone else, before they could be sure about each other.

Dad said I need to fall in and out of love a few times. He said marriage might not suit me at all, because even when I was in preschool I had a girl, but I was always looking over her shoulder at the other girls.

My dad and Kirsten have caught up on Facebook, secretly, not an affair or anything, but he wanted to know how it turned out for her. She is living in London, happily married with three grown up children. It made him wonder about a totally different life he would have had.

He said you can’t decide to marry someone just for one reason. He said you have to not be able to imagine being without them. Also he said you should marry them for them, not for yourself. He said you have to know that you’re the one who is going to make them the most happy, the most content, the most stimulated and get the most out of their life. He said things aren’t always great in a marriage for anyone, but if you put the other person first then it can be great most of the time.

Then he said he didn’t think I was ready to put someone else first because I don’t have a solid enough foundation of who I am yet to know what makes me happy let alone know what’s good for someone else.

(You said that too)

Dad said I would feel tied to Fiona. He said it would be like running through life as a three-legged race.

Dad said in a marriage you have to work hard to grow together in the same direction, because it’s very easy to start moving in different directions. When you start moving in your own direction you can forget to put the other person’s needs ahead of your own.

He also said Fiona was great but he didn’t know for sure if she was the one who was going to help me make the most out of my life either. He didn’t say it in so many words, but he said your wife should be the best lay you’ve ever had. So good you can’t imagine ever wanting someone else.

I can imagine being with someone else.

You know that I imagine it all the time.

Anyway, it all made sense and he wasn’t mad at all. But he did say I needed to man-up and tell Fiona. He told me that he loved me and he missed me heaps and I just fckn blubbered. So embarrassing.

My dad is a horticulturalist. He works in the vineyards in the Hunter Valley. I don’t know if you have ever met a horticulturalist, but all the ones I know are like, tranquil in themselves. He laughs at me when I say that because he says horticulture is all sex and violence. They rip limbs from plants, contort them into unnatural shapes and then make them pollinate.

But he knows in his guts about weather. He knows weeks out when there’s going to be a big storm, or rain that just hammers. He can tell by the way birds travel, and the smell of the soil, and the speed of clouds.

He’s laid back, but he’s not lazy. He’s all restraint and forethought and calmness. My dad says to me – has said since I was just a little tacker – ‘the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.’

Then I went home to tell my mum and she yelled and cried and hit me with a tea towel.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

10
th
March 11.56am

—Private Residence near Belmont, NSW, AUS—

Seriously, I get all sentimental about them when I am in Hawaii, but I only have to be here for about ten minutes to remember why I left. They speak to me as though I’m fricken twelve years old.

Here is a sample from the last twenty minutes:

You’re very brown. I hope you’ve been wearing sunscreen.

Don’t eat all those chips, you’ll spoil your lunch.

Lunch is ready. Make sure you wash your hands.

Is that the shirt you’re going to wear?

Elbows off the table.

Then she cut my sandwich into soldiers while I was sitting right there. Soldiers! She didn’t cut Dad’s sandwich into soldiers.

I said, ‘did you just cut my sandwich into fcken soldiers?’

And then Dad said, ‘Oi! Mind your mouth, young man!’

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

10
th
March 1.16pm

—Private Residence near Belmont, NSW, AUS—

After that they sat me down and told me that Fiona is on her way to Hawaii. You might even have met her by now. Apparently she and Lachie have been planning a wedding in secret. They invited just my parents and hers. Mum pretty much ran to the computer to cancel the tickets. She yelled at me about the refunds they have lost, as though it’s my fault.

It is my fault, but not for the reason she is going on about.

I have to tell Fiona’s parents before they go to Hawaii.

I have to go and do it right now. Right this minute. No, wait. Now.

Now.

OK now.

Dad said he will come with, but he’ll wait in the car. I’m scared.

Fiona and I got busted once by her mum. We were fifteen. Her mum gave me a lecture. She didn’t even wait for me to pull my pants all the way up before she started. I distinctly remember trying to zip my fly as the word ‘chlamydia’ came out of her mouth.

Can it be worse than that? Surely not.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

11
th
March 10.23am