Sitting on the deck this morning, gazing out over the flat water, it is a relief to be afforded a calm break after several days of gusty southerlies. I can feel warm dampness on my back from a towel that has not dried overnight. Nothing will dry in this humidity; nothing will refresh. Ava has commented several times over the past few days that she feels ‘de-pepped’, as if we have been submerged in a body of warm water with our clothes on. The only thing spared from this humidity is the inside of the fridge, which I keep opening and collecting flavour from. All my favourite items are in there, which, with so much day available, so much consecutive emptiness, I find quite overwhelming.
It’s when I pull the corner from a baguette and drag it through the tub of pink dip that I hear it again and stop chewing to decipher its location. Another phantom phone ring. All day they’ve been happening and it’s disconcerting. I recognise they are likely symptomatic of the anticipation I am harbouring. I have been struggling to concentrate on anything with my head so full of The Man. Hopefully come Sunday when he pays me a visit, I will be permitted some mental room. Until then I will not check my phone, I tell myself. Unless it is Mum or Em phoning, I reason, as they are fundamental. Ava and her partner Paul are still asleep, it’s 10.30 am. I collect the still-damp towel from the back of a chair and make for the beach.
On the shore, there is a scattered line of boys and men. The boys and men all grip sturdy rods, which collect little more than wraths of seaweed, wraths of seaweed, wraths of seaweed. The boys are all excited, nonetheless. Some men carry with them cylindrical apparatus’ reminiscent of water guns. Except, instead of shooting water, they are pulling, extracting something -crabs I think, buried deep in the sand. I attempt to imagine what this must feel like for the crabs to be vacuumed up by some powerful force exterior to them, to anything they’ve ever known. The only simile I arrive at is a tornado, though I’ve never experienced one myself, I imagine it might come close.
I walk to the next cove, to Alison Lester’s Magic Beach, where seven nights ago today I ascended a tricky rock formation in order to ask a fisherman for a cigarette to calm this body. Never have I sucked so hard and never have I felt its pacifying effect so explicitly as on that evening thinking about The Man who I would be seeing the very next morning. In the long days and increasingly unruly nights of sleep leading up to our meeting, I imagined how I must have looked to Ava. The obvious way my tension and outright wanting manifested in my body, in my language but most of all in my gaze, which was increasingly absent as the days pulled closer. Isn’t it wild -humbling really- the capacity for things to change, we said to one another, just like that?
The water in the magic section of the beach gently thumps the sand and I remember a line from a piece of writing that never saw the light of day. The water sort of exalts a sigh on the shoreline this morning as I dodge birds and fish whose stomachs, I read this morning, have burst from all the ash. The line belongs to a piece I wrote in response to the time we found ourselves stuck in the Sapphire Coast bush fires on the turn of the New Year in 2019/20. Today, on this beach, there are rumours of sausages and onions turning translucent on a grill. My stomach bends at the thought of white bread, hot meat, sweet sauce -the Masterfoods kind full of all sorts of illicit preservatives. Then I think of Paul, who is a vegetarian. At dinner time when I hand him his plate, I feel as though it is incomplete, and it bugs me I cannot make it right. It would be such a cold experience, the vegetarian one, stodgy too. But in these moments, I must remind myself that each is to their own, even if their own is one I struggle to realise.
Recalling the line just now, I experience mild and unique distress. It appeared in a piece I worked really very hard on though still, it couldn’t find the legs. It seems the piece did in fact resonate with the editorial team as it is the most personal rejection letter I have received to date. But it still didn’t resonate enough, and I must wonder if any of my words ever will. I can feel myself becoming disillusioned with the whole business of writing, though I acknowledge this disillusion I speak of is not a product of disinterest or a deafening of my infatuation. Rather, it is a defence mechanism that reflects the idea one cannot fail if one does not try. It is an aphorism that, while effectively foolproof, leaves in its wake a substantial burden of guilt and dissonance, which I have come to realise is more uncomfortable than failure itself. It became a small part of the reason I ended it with The Man, I think. I equated the dormancy of my writing life with his arrival and ongoing presence. Happily, I shifted the blame on him. Then deluded myself in thinking his absence would restore my writing healthy and generative as it had been. But been when? I began to ask myself in his absence when nothing changed.
This past week in and around the shack above The Magic Beach, I have been reading Charlotte Wood’s The Luminous Solution. It is an essay collection on craft and practice -hers and the greats. Wood cites a famous quote from the late Joan Didion, which is that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Wood says The Writer is especially guilty of this. I thought the book would help me collect myself, though eight essays in, and I still feel unsure how to proceed. Wood stresses the madness, the perpetual doubt, the years of rejection, and various states of agony that is characteristic of The Writer. She also stresses the value of a community for The Writer made up of other writers –something I’ve never had or known where to look for. I’m not entirely sure where to step from here: I still have several essays to read, and I have asked The Man to please take me back. And I suppose, for now, I will continue to take notes on all that arrests me. Though, when I attempted to translate The Magic Beach this morning, I find no words appropriate, no words good enough.
Several weeks later, far away from The Magic Beach, I prepare Daisy a Campari and soda. I am housesitting Anne’s house, which means Daisy and I are neighbours for two weeks. This is the second time she has been around in two days for a post-day, pre-evening, drink. I entertain this will be what it’s like when we are older and settled. In the dream house -a constantly evolving place at the back of my mind- I add a new pre-requisite, one concerning its location, which is that it must be near Daisy’s house so we can have these Aperitivo moments full of meaty olives, colourful dips, and all the topics. Anyhow, I am slicing the orange into thin round sheets when Daisy asks me “when the hell are you going to write your novel, Harriet”. She says it like an accusation as if my not having put out a novel yet is a deliberate offense against her. Without meeting her gaze, I tell her this feels very out of the blue, then I drop a slice of orange into her glass and, using the knife, stir the liquid around the glass until it’s all combined.
This question is something I have been turning over for several years. In the weeks between The Magic Beach and the present moment, I learned there is a second part to the aphorism you cannot fail if you do not try, which is that it is better to have failed than never tried. I was also surprised to learn this quote belongs to Chloe Thurlow who is an erotic novelist I’ve never heard of. Standing behind Anne’s kitchen bench, I think of the 56,000 words I wrote two years ago. They are sitting in a writing program in The Cloud, which I can’t bear to revisit but continue to pay for. Then I think of Eve (Babitz), who once complained she couldn’t get a thread to go through to the end and make a straightforward novel. She said she couldn’t keep everything in her lap or stop rising flurries of sudden blind meaning. Though Eve reasoned maybe if the details are all put together, a certain pulse and sense of place would emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape would be understood at leisure and in full.
In Anne’s front garden, I change the subject and ask Daisy about her evening beyond Aperitivo hour. She says she’s having dinner with her younger brother and his girlfriend who is different from the girlfriend he had last time I asked after him. Daisy says he is very much in love, she thinks, more in love than the last one and the idea of romance as a shopping spree becomes very explicit to me in this moment. My parents are at a dinner party, she says. I nod, how adult the dinner party sounds off the tongue, I say. Daisy says she cannot wait to graduate to this stage of her life, the dinner party stage. I think about the fact that The Man is attending a dinner party tonight. We always have dinner parties, I say. This comes out defensively as Daisy’s reflection consequentially involves me. No, she says, like the kind where I cook all three courses for ten-plus people, courses like oysters and duck and I can offer people a range of drinks and not ask them to transfer me afterward. I nod, it’s true, we are not there yet. I reason I could probably do it now but only for three people and they’d have to be three people I really value, not just anyone. We laugh so as to acknowledge our own impatience and both reach for something to place in our mouth. Daisy goes for a chip while I pluck an olive from one of Anne’s perfect ramekins. When my teeth break down the skin, I am reminded briefly of all the good olive oils I’ve been through in my life. But would I write about? I ask.
Yellow Days 