. . . Like, um, no.”
“But all my friends will be there.”
This is when it’s hard to be a parent.
I read somewhere that the bits of the brain that understand the concept of consequence finally knit together only in the early twenties. I don’t doubt this at all. So while I want to discourage him by listing the dangers of New Year’s on the beach, the examples I have, each of which demonstrates a likelihood of being killed, maimed or at least mortally embarrassed, will simply sound like fun amplified, like placing an iPod into a powerful docking station. Consider a few snapshots of New Year’s Eve, 1989, twenty-two precious and vanished years ago:
Here’s Warren Greathead getting stoned on something a surfer gave him to smoke, and then losing his car keys in the sand while the surfer’s girlfriend gives him a blowjob;
There’s Kevin Thingummy, doing loud wheelies up and down the road and then forgetting to put his foot down when he stops and ending up with the bike pinning him to the ground. We are too paralytic with laughter to help him up, so he lies there being bottle-fed more Carling by his adoring fans until one or two of us recover sufficiently to pull the bike off him;
Jason Whatshisname generating third-degree burns when he tries to rearrange the logs on the bonfire with his bare hands because he doesn’t like the shape they made;
The unobtainably beautiful Sonya Oelschig – some names you never forget – swallowing most of my tequila only to throw it all up down my back as I hug her a happy New Year, and then crying like a baby that I don’t love her because I won’t take her home with me;
Kirsten Something and her well-endowed friends skinny-dipping while everyone in the parking lot turns on their headlights – onto their headlights, so to speak;
Et cetera, et cetera, and so on and so forth.
I know it’s different now. We drank whatever we could get our hands on, back then, and some of us smoked grass, and while that was pretty much it, we still managed to wreak havoc. Endangered our lives, even though there was no crack or heroin or coke or crystal to be had, no Rohypnol or Ritalin to fall victim to. Today, you’re not allowed to drink on the beach, let alone make bonfires, so you’d have to end up doing other things, things that are far more clandestine, far worse. There are so many more things, stupid things, for kids to get up to on New Year’s Eve with no sense of consequence, because when you’re a kid you’re nothing short of immortal.
Back then.
I sound like an old person.
“Not all your friends will be there. Peter Jones will be with us.”
“He’s not my friend, Dad. He’s just a kid the same age, that’s all, like a dork the same age actually. Please can I not, like, go to the Joneses and go to the beach instead?”
“Er, like, let me think about it for a moment –”
“Stop doing that.” He is beginning to shout; his red-splotched face is tending towards purple.
“Okay. No, you can’t go.”
“Why not?”
Good question, but completely expected.
Because you will meet people who are just the same as I used to be, or worse, as most of my friends were, and those people will be worse still. Because I won’t be there to make sure you’re okay. Because when I was your age, being sixteen meant doing your homework or suffering your father’s headmasterly clothes-brush and drinking Horlicks every night and being in bed by nine and sipping half a glass of wine at Christmas lunch. Because like every other sixteen-year-old you have the discernment, discrimination and decision-making ability of an oyster: viz. none. Because you are living under my roof. Because thou shalt do what I say, not what I do – did. And because I was eighteen before I got to spend my first New Year’s on the beach.
“Because you’re sixteen years old.” I know I have only two or so years left of that argument, but at least it means I have two or so years to concoct a new one. “And I am not hauling you around the Peninsula on New Year’s Eve. It’s not safe.”
“What’s not safe, giving me a lift or me being, like, on the beach?”
“Both, actually. Because I’m not planning to drink Coke all night to play taxi driver. Because even if I do, there will be hundreds of other drivers full of New Year’s cheer. And for God’s sake, please stop saying ‘like’.”
“Well, give me taxi money then,” he says. Dyslexic maybe, but not thick, my Gabriel. He’s missing the point, though.
“Gabe, look into my eyes – look at me. It’s not the sober taxi driver, it’s the drunken other guy. So, no. Not going to happen. Understand?”
Gabe changes tack. He lets his shoulders droop, a coat hanger holding up an over-washed shirt. He hangs his head, takes a deep breath.
I wait for the whine.
“Ah, please Dad!” he whines.
“Gabriel, look at me.” He slowly looks up. His old-young eyes are pleading but he has forgotten to rearrange his mouth and the bits around his nose; they come together to snarl at me in a nasty, lupine kind of way.
“No,” I say.
He lets out a roar, or what would have been a roar if his voice was properly broken, and he stamps his foot and turns and runs up the stairs. I hear him trip on the second step from the top.
“And don’t slam the door,” I shout over his stumble.
He slams the door.
I turn back to my laptop. Select Google’s “Images” option for my Kathy Simons search. And there she is, just the third image along, pretty, still, in her round-faced way. I click on the picture; it takes me to a page with a larger image. I’m horrified to see the dry tributaries at the corners of her eyes, the eyelids that droop and yet have somehow swollen, the rings that encircle her neck, each separated by a centimetre or two. The thickening of her nose, the deep furrow cutting upwards from the inside of her left eyebrow. The hair gone mousey, unsprung, no longer glossy, flicked up. The scrotummy texture of her cheeks shameless on the slick screen of my Mac; not even middle-aged, grandmotherly rather.
The ravages. And so un-long ago.
And then my eyes play tricks: my memory of her superimposes itself onto the screen and I see the younger Kathy emerging, her eyes growing brighter and her skin smoothed out; I manage to hold the illusion only for a moment before the younger woman recedes and the elder returns, weathered and thickened and aged. And with it, the thought that this is exactly how people must see me. When I don’t feel like that at all, when I feel so much like the memory of me.
“Wha’ you doing?” Tracy asks me later. I look up and see that she’s still dabbing blood from her mouth. The red of it matches her lipstick, her nails.
What I’m doing is kneeling on the floor outside Gabe’s room with my weight on my good knee, keeping my balance with the painful end of my stump, attacking the hinges of Gabe’s door with an electric screwdriver.
“I’m taking his door off.”
“Why?”
“Because I told him that if he slams his door one more time, I’m going to take it off.”
Tracy lifts a Botoxed lip, shakes her head, minces off on her Louboutins, descends the stairs like a cautious antelope. Gabe is lying on his unmade bed with his arms crossed, glaring at the ceiling, iPod pummelling those so-fragile, once-perfect membranes in his ears. If you look at the maths of it, 3(½) ≠ us. Somewhere, there’s more, has to be more than the pieces of ourselves which we present to each other.
There was a time when Gabriel was young and malleable, virgin clay in my hands, a soft ball of possibility. It may not have been for a very long time, but while it lasted we’d sit on the carpet in front of the roaring winter fire and I’d teach him how to draw. Proportion: