The Same as Last Year's...

I just went to the BNZ Literary Awards 2010 page to confirm that I hadn't won the Unpublished Writers Short Story Competition. I hadn't. Which is why I guess nobody felt the need to e-mail me. Thanks, BNZ. At least this fits nicely into my New Year's Resolution to show everybody.

I'll show them!

Admittedly, this is the exact same resolution I make every year, so it's more like carrying it over to the next year. I guess you could say I haven't achieved the goal to my satisfaction. New Year's provides a time to reflect, remember and refocus on my mission. It's kind of like renewing my vows. For vengeance.

Vengeance!

So since the BNZ doesn't want to pay me for my brilliance, I guess the rights for it revert to me. Which means you get it for free! At least someone wins.




A Walk on the Beach

We go for a walk on the beach. The shifting sand makes for hard walking, but Luke has a three-year-old’s desire to run and explore, which more than makes up for the tumbles he takes every once in a while. I am content to move at a slower pace, allowing Luke to rove up and down the beach, occasionally zooming past by way of a check in.

“Dad?”

I look up. I’d been miles away in my head, thinking adult thoughts, worrying about adult things. I welcomed the diversion. “Yeah, matey.”

My son holds out a tiny pink fist. “I found something.” He opens his hand to reveal a cream-and-orange crab claw. “Crab lost his hand,” he explains.

I adopted my fatherly wisdom face. “I expect he just traded it for something else.”

Luke looks dubious. “What like?”

“Maybe a seahorse tail...”

“Why would a crab want a seahorse tail for a hand?”

“Well he wouldn’t use it like a hand. More like a whip. To keep other crabs away from his dinner.”

Luke is clearly intrigued by this idea. He spends the next few minutes of our walk role-playing as The Crab with the Seahorse-Tail Hand. “Wa-pssh! Wa-pssh!” he yells as he flicks his left hand at afternoon joggers while his right hand snaps menacingly at the air. I get some funny looks, but I don’t mind. He isn’t hurting anybody. “Dad, what do crabs eat?” he yelled at me from up the beach.

“Salt and vinegar chips!” I call back.

“Get away from my chips!” he yells at passersby. For some reason he does this in a pirate accent. He scuttles up and down the beach merrily, warming my heart in direct opposition to the bite of the wind.

Eventually Luke tires of this game, and returns to his primary mission of scouring the beach. He retrieves the crab claw from his pocket.

“Dad.”

“Yeah, buddy.”

“So that means this claw belongs to a seahorse.”

“I guess it does.”

“I want to return it to him.”

“You can. If we see him.”

“’’k. Look for the seahorse with no tail.”

“Sure thing.”

Down by the water we add our shoe prints to the record of those who had passed by this day. There were dog prints, foot prints, shoe prints. Some of the prints face the same way as ours. Some of them are reversed. Luke tells me that those footprints are funny. “What’s so funny about them?” I ask him.

“Those people walked the whole way backwards. They’re so silly!” He giggles, and the sound lightens my heart. All of a sudden I was envious of Luke. I wanted to live in his world. The world that I inhabited had let me down one time too many. I gently guide my son around a pile of sand-encrusted dog droppings. The last thing I needed was to clean that out from between his toes.

A wave rushes up the beach, catching the two of us by surprise. I yelp and run for dry sand, but Luke stays, splashing gleefully. As the water abandons us he notices the pipis buried in the sand by his feet, blinking like a thousand staccato eyes.

“Dad, what are they doing?”

I wade back into the water and hoist him up into my arms. “They’re probably helping the seahorse look for his arm.”

But Luke is already over that and onto the next thing. “Why are there so many shells on the beach?”

I stopped to scoop up a handful of sand, and began to pick out the shells buried within. “Oh, there’s not that many. How many do you reckon there are?” I picked out the corner of a chocolate bar wrapper and flicked it away on the wind.

“On the whole beach?”

“Yeah.”

Luke’s face squished up into ‘think mode’. “Um... seven?”

I tried but failed to suppress the grin from my face. “Yeah, probably.”

Luke squirms out of my grip to collect his own handful of shells. Mount Maunganui watches cautiously as we slowly advance down the beach toward it. Legend says that the Mountain made a similar journey a long time ago, all alone. I wonder if it sympathises with me, or whether it thinks I’m being indulgent. The sky is overcast, and I pull my jacket a little bit tighter to fortify me against the cutting wind. Luke seems not to feel it at all as he quests all over the beach in search of mystery and adventure.

“So what are they all for?”

“Hm?”

“The shells, Dad! What are they for?” He holds one up to me.

“Payment,” I say, accepting his payment for fatherly services rendered.

“Pavement?”

“No, payment. Like money. Shells are sea money.”

“Oh. Has someone lost their money?”

“It looks that way.”

“Who? A sailor-man?”

“Well, some sailors get paid in shells, but remember that you can’t use shells to pay for human things, so they can only buy stuff off fish. Most sailors like to get paid in normal money.” I flick the shell over in my hand, studying it with exaggerated seriousness. “Probably all of these shells belonged to a mermaid.”

“What’s a mermaid?” Luke had started collecting shells. He stuffed handfuls of them into the pockets of his hoodie, the pockets of his little pants. When his pockets are bulging he looks at me imploringly.

I sigh as I bend down to do my share of collecting. “A mermaid is a lady who lives in the sea,” I explain. “She has some human bits and some fish bits so she can live happily under the water and swim fast like a fish.”

“Can I be a mermaid?”

“You would be a merman. That’s a boy mermaid.”

“Yup. I’m a boy.”

“I hope so. Otherwise Luke was a bad choice.”

Again my son giggled. “Dad, we have to return all this sea money too.”

Yikes. “How are you going to return it? You’re not a merman yet, mister.”

He bit his bottom lip, brain hard at work. “Maybe we can leave it somewhere the mermaid will find it?”

“Where would you suggest?”

“There.” With a shell-filled hand, he pointed to a rocky outcropping just beyond where the waves break. A thin path of rocks trails out to Moturiki, the blowhole.

I think very carefully about how far I want to take this. In the end, I decide life is too short, especially the period in your life where you believe in the magical and the fantastic. “Sure,” I tell him, “but there are rocks, and water pools at the bottom when the tide changes. You’ll need to hang onto me while we walk over there.”

“Okay, Dad,” he nods. So serious. Whatever it takes to get the job done. Again, I feel a small pang of envy. To Luke the world is still black and white: you find something that belongs to someone else, you try to return it.

I hoist my son up onto my back. “Hang on tight,” I whisper.

“I will, Dad.” His little arms grip around my throat and his legs cling to my hips. We must look like a koala bear family. I put one arm under his backside to hold him up and we’re on our way. As I carefully make my way up the path, Luke calls out items of interest he spots along the way. A beer can. A short length of fishing line. A chip packet. The remnants of a smashed and water-logged cell phone, now no more than raw building materials for the denizens of the rock pools. A nautilus shell, that Luke insists we retrieve. My knees pop loudly as I lean down for him to grab it. I sway unsteadily on my way back up and I realise that I’m nervous. I have my most precious possession clinging to my back and I’m – what? – climbing across sea-slick rocks to deliver a cargo of shells to a fiction.

I must be crazy.

The path is wider than I remember. The sand of the beach gives way to stubby grass. I exhale. My regrets melt away. Here we are alone, just the two of us and our story. Usually the island is host to many tourists, snapping photos and holding hands. The ominous sky must have moved them all on today. Or maybe there just wasn’t room on the island for them and our story, maybe someone somewhere knew that I needed it to be just me and Luke, and generously granted my wish. When Luke was born I promised his mother, her hand clinging weakly to my uselessly strong one, that I would try to instil in him the belief that the world was a special place. That was what she believed, and maybe I would too if she were still here to share it with us. I would hide the truth about this world as long as I was able – though God knew, some days were harder than others - and fulfil her last wish.

We reach the end of the island just as my arms are beginning to tire. The sea dips and swells, it ebbs and flows. The water is an impenetrable blue; I can almost believe myself that a mermaid waits just below the surface, rueing her financial carelessness. On the side furthest from the beach I lower Luke from my back. I indicate to him the point on the rocks where I plan to make our offering.

“Do you think she’ll see them?” he asks me.

“I think so. Mermaids come here most nights to sit and comb their hair.” I knew that the seaward side of Moturiki would be swept clean of shells by the next big wave. If Luke wanted to return to ‘check’ on the shell stash, we would find confirmation that the shells had been claimed. “Should we leave the claw too, buddy? Maybe the mermaid will have a better chance of finding its owner than we will.”

He agrees, and hands it reverently to me. He watches on from the flat grassy area at the north of the island as I clamber down on the rocks to build a rough cairn of shells. A lone seagull stands sentinel, watching me with a tilted head from the northernmost rocks. I crown the pile with the claw and gratefully clamber back up the rocks. I can’t understand how guys can climb down decked out with fishing gear - I was half petrified just carrying a pile of shells.

“Thanks, Dad,” my son says with a big smile.

“You’re welcome.” Although in a way the whole thing had been a ruse, I still felt strangely fulfilled for having made the offering.

As I wrestle Luke back up onto my back for the return trip, he notices some initials carved into the rock. “What’s that for, Dad?”

I couldn’t help the scowl that accompanied my answer. “Graffiti.” Not only the rock was scarred; even the trees had suffered indignations, swear words misspelt on their trunks, love hearts and boasts tattooed on Moturiki’s surfaces.

“What’s grr-feety?”

“It’s something silly that humans do. Come on, mate. Let’s go home.” Again, I cautiously navigate the rocky pathway. We trudge up the beach to the path leading back to the car. The grasses adorning the dunes sway in time to the rhythm conducted by the wind. Some grease-stained newspaper, remnants of a hot lunch, is passed like a netball between clumpy teams of grass. The pohutukawa trees lining the street would soon bloom.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, mate.”

“Why do people leave all this rubbish around the place?”

I look down into my son’s wide, wondering, wonderful eyes and for once I am at a loss for words. “I don’t know, mate. I don’t know.”

Happy New Year, readers. Don't make resolutions. They're stupid.