Ian C Smith

After Dreams

Weather changeable, aces highlighted by a long sunbeam, he wins at cards but loses at chess, razing the board with headlong advancement, then nothing left to lose.  A holiday joker, he says little about his wild youth, the wishes in his heart.  What they made him do.  When he walks the beach alone to Old Man’s Head, spray pitting the sand, he sings full-throated into the wind’s turbulence.  His offspring and friends’ blissful expectancy, their casual privilege, birthrights he never knew, irks considering his first holiday when he was twenty, a week in an old bus on blocks, the camping ground, a long distance from any beach, deserted.

At breakfast his kin had regaled each other with last night’s dreams, a whirligig batch, each presented as trumps: lurid, zany, haunting; absurd feverish versions of life remixed, minds run amok.  Embarrassed, they had heard his nightmare, a gash in the night like a frightened child’s from cards dealt before his life became moored.  He was just thankful he hadn’t pissed himself.  Their dreams, young and old, are a crazy match.  Daydreams are different, private, unshared.

He seeks respite behind a droll mask for the private room of his mind.  An easy mark, challenged at chess again, he accepts with grace, making the most of this chance to be kind, his battered heart a pennant fluttering over a distant field.  When the weather clears to a scrim of cloud they are off again, radiant Camelot skipping in merriment back to the beach where he earlier thought he saw a sea serpent’s head bobbing between waves in lattices of light, realised it was a swimmer’s bathing-capped head.  Left behind, he reaches for his book on film noir.

*****************************

Just the two of them now, the years staring them down, she sleeps in what was a children’s bedroom, nerves ajangle, tossed by angry dreams on a bunk, saying she was afraid of hurting him after he lacerated a finger against a rock wall gesticulating when making a point, and she had driven him to town for stitches.  Her heart pounded whenever she woke, she says, but shall only tell him much later how this flooded her with dread desolation.

Melancholy, he hates jet skis, loves pens, struggles to give up finished things like his favourite holiday shorts now old parchment thin.  For his birthday she bakes a sultana cake, an accomplishment using their shack’s oven.  Careful with words, he praises the cake, remains quiet about his own waking dream in which her rejection had gutted him, turning back to his book about Theroux falling out with Naipaul, the end of the travellers’ friendship, the disappointment.

They both cherish but don’t share this rough beauty.  He fishes to gaze at islands, to see a skimmer of light play on tide-swirled weed, beguiled by the sea’s ancient susurrus.  When he snags a submerged rock a boy snorkelling frees him, giving him an aquatic thumbs-up.  He sees her above them watching this diorama, him, the boy, a ferry balancing on the horizon.  A distant squall heads their way, the air swollen.  She fiddles with her phone, dormant, out of range.  He wonders what they will do when it rains.

****************************************

Ian C Smith's work has been widely published. He writes in the Gippsland Lakes region of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.