A Perfect Blue Morning
by
Steve Wrathall

A Perfect Blue Morning

The memory came to me like this. I was walking on the beach in my yellow sarong. The tide was out and the wet sand was compact with a glossy sheen that reflected the sky. So the sand was tinged with pale blue and the sky was a deeper blue and the sea was a deeper blue still. A perfect blue morning with a yellow sarong.

There were dogs on the beach; three of them converged at the same moment in an excited concentric flurry of noses intent on bums. Then one of them broke away and ran toward me and at that moment my chest constricted and I could have cried out. If it hadn’t been four decades ago I would have sworn it was my dog. Then I thought of Angela.

Now I’m in this ratty sunroom overlooking the cooch grass that I pay someone to mow once a month so that I can see it once a year as and the pencil thin ribbon of blue that the agent referred to as my ‘ocean vista’.
In front of me is my old Remington, (no computer here, that’s half the beauty of the place) a drink in hand and an abalone shell full of broken New Year resolutions. Yes, I’m trying to write, after all this time but you should have guessed that by now.

Then I get that cold feeling that I’ll never write another word and I’m about to take the bottle inside when suddenly I’m back at uni in an airless auditorium on a hung-over Monday morning. At the top of a new page of my lecture pad I enter:

Now I sit me down to write,
I pray for prose so clear and bright,
And if it turns out a crock of shit,
I hope my friends can lie a bit.

When did I give up the idea of writing and devote myself so slavishly to publishing other people? It probably had more than a bit to do with the interview in that dreary little room that seemed to be entirely composed of chrome, shoulder pads and grey suits. It all seemed very exciting at the time. That was where my life bifurcated. Where could the other way have led?  

So I take myself back to the girl in the smelly windcheater who is pretending to listen to a lecture, except she’s probably gone to the caf for a sugar fix or worse still, pissed off home to sit on the couch and pontificate over the bong. From here it’s an easy jump back ten years because those two selves shared a lot in common. They had a bit of emotional honesty.

I was ten, skinny with freckles. The day was hot; that dry sapping heat that renders everything dusty or brittle. It was far enough into the summer holidays for the gloss to have worn off them. I was walking toward a line of poplars, listening to the click of insects. There was a rank smell where the creek was drying up. A crow lamented in a blue and achingly empty sky.

Suddenly my dog darted smoothly through the trees and I heard a peal of bright laughter. I could see a beat up dark green station wagon and beside it a biggish young woman with strands of blonde hair across her face was fending off Bottler’s excited attentions. I was dumbfounded. Bottler didn’t like strangers, he could be vicious and yet he was licking this woman’s face and flailing his tail so that his whole body shook. I was surprised, almost jealous and overcame my habitual reserve. 

‘
“That’s my dog.”
The woman looked up warily but then her broad face broke into a mischievous grin that I immediately liked.
“He’s a nice bog.”
“How come he likes you?”
“Dogs like me and I like dogs, we kind of sniff each other out. I’m Angela, what’s your name?”
“Rosaline.”
Bottler continued his unprecedented display of affection. Finally I plonked myself down in the dust and twirled a wiry stalk of grass around my finger.
“Where do you live?”
Angela gestured toward the station wagon.
“You can’t live in a car.”
She smiled.
“Just watch me.”
‘Where do you put your things?’
“I’ve got a guitar I can’t play, a pile of his smelly clothes and some change on the dashboard. I’m not real pushed for space.”
“Where are you going?” 
Angela shrugged, then pulling at the grubby front of her dress,  
She sniffed it.
“Phew, this dress has had a rough couple of days. I was gunna have a wash in the creek buts its all yucky here.”
“You can have a shower at my place.”
Angela hesitated.
“Who’s home?”
‘No one, Grandad doesn’t get back from the garage until four o’clock.’
“She took my hand.”


After she’d showered I gave her granddads dressing gown and installed her on the old couch on our back veranda. She was drinking coke from my favourite glass and eating chocolate biscuits. I must have decided that her life was devoid of luxuries. Sitting on the back of the couch with my legs dangling between her shoulders, I was fashioning her hair into clumsy plaits. Looking back I’m amazed that I fell to trusting her so quickly.

I adopted the patter of a hairdresser.
“Did you like school?”
She licked chocolate off her fingers.
“Not much, I liked the work O.K but when you’re in a really tiny school and you don’t get on with half a dozen people you’re in big trouble. If you’re fat people think you can’t be clever or cool or worth talking to. I don’t want be dumb and skinny and stay put. I wanna go places.”


I nodded sagely, even though she couldn’t see me. At school I was neat and serious and solitary.

Angela asked me if I wore my hair in a plait and I replied that I used to all the time but Grandad couldn’t do it and neither could I. Then she asked me very softly about my mum and when she turned I realised that my fingers had stopped working in her hair. 

“She died in a level crossing accident,” I said in a tone I reserved for that question. Often in bed at night I would mouth the phrase like an incantation, picking over every nuance of its syllables, as if it held a secret. I had faint memories of her pinkly warm beside me, stories, a sweet smell.

Grandad was lovable and reliable but often laconic to the point of 
monosyllables. Perhaps he grappled with his own loss or somehow felt the subject best left alone. Often after a night of dreams I would feel urgent questions welling in me, only to have them dissolve unuttered in the milk of my cereal bowl.

I was in my twenties when I found out my mother was drunk when she had that accident. It made me unspeakably angry. I raged at the world for weeks. She had been the beatified ghost of my childhood, the implacable and affirming witness to my earliest self. She was allowed no weaknesses but she had been flesh after all.

Angela paused and I waited tensely to be delivered from my short life of longing. I wanted her to say or do some adult thing that would make sense so that everything could begin again.

“I’m sorry,’ she said and touched my hand. I nodded mutely and resigned myself to this also.” 

The next thing I knew she’d hurried to her car and returned with an air rifle. Me eyes nearly popped out of my head. Angela wore that grin again, the one she had when she lifted her head sunlight to regard me for the first time.

“This’ll be fun,’ she assured me.”

The first time I saw a stubby on the tank stand burst into a thousand sun glittering fragments I squealed with excitement. She let me try. As the afternoon progressed the backyard became littered with broken glass and cardboard boxes covered in wonky bull eyes in texta. 

Grandad appeared around the corner in his workaday shorts and singlet and froze in his tracks. The giggling ceased abruptly. Angela had the gun to her shoulder and the dressing gown hung open. Hastily she covered herself. All three of us stood as still as the stubbies on the tank stand.

Grandad twisted a grease- blackened finger in his ear.
“Don’t mean to be rude, I’m just not used to seeing half naked sheilas shoot beer bottles off me back porch.”

“This is Angela, she lives in a car.”

Angela smiled weakly. I grabbed two beers from the outside fridge, hoping this might restore some adult normality to the situation. Grandad sunk into couch and stared woodenly into the middle distance like someone who has returned home to the wrong address. 

“Well, G’day then.”


That night I wriggled in the warm dark and strained to hear the soft voices on the verandah as they traded fragments of each other’s loneliness. I weaved in and out of sleep. She talked of a father who drank with the blowflies, an abject mother who floated through an empty house. I dreamt the house, the dry stubble in the fields, the boredom that lay draped across the fence posts. When I woke up she was talking about someone called Kenny, ‘all mouth and knuckles’ who had come home from the pub with ‘some skinny bitch too pissed to scratch herself’ the night Angela grabbed the keys and took off on her own. I slept finally but the last thing I heard Grandad mumble was that she could stay for a few days and the sentence touched me like a caress.

The green station wagon remained parked behind the poplars for many months and each night Angela retired to it after spending at least part of the day with us. Grandad grew fond of her. He found himself guilty of shy boasts about his youth. As for myself, all the secrets, the playfulness and the longing came spilling out of me. I think Angela was happy too.

One night we asked her to move in. She said she’d think about it but when she’d left us for the lumpy mattress in the car we both felt uneasy. Grandad hugged me. 

“Sometimes I think I don’t look after you very well,” he said miserably.

“Yes you do,” I whispered. “You’re the only one who didn’t go away.”

That night I was woken from a dream in which a freight train was bearing down with indomitable force on a stalled white care at a level crossing. The sound of the engine had woken me and I knew it could not have been made by the doomed white ute in the dream. Sleepily, automatically, I left the house and padded across the midnight road. Beyond the poplars, where the station wagon should have been I lowered my head and quietly, bitterly wept. I wept not only for her but also for the first time, for my mother.

The next day we discovered the dog was missing. Had he been bitten by a snake or had she taken him? What sort of a person steals a little girl’s dog?

I remained solitary at school. Not until university with dope and parties and unexpected admirers did I come out of myself. Even then I formed few real attachments. Because books had always been my companions I began to write but writing involves a degree of trust in others, so I stopped. 

Now I look in the mirror at my hard, uninviting ‘go away face.’ It has lost its youthful suppleness so the message is more starkly written. Whatever that woman did to my dog, I hope she didn’t abandon him as she did me.