JOHN BAXTER
Nobody has yet written a truly Australian science fiction story, one which employs the symbols of life and nature in the way that Judith Wright and Brett Whiteley do in their own fields, to enlarge and expand one’s experience of the country. Science fiction is ideally suited to this kind of exploration, and it is to be hoped that in the future major writers may make use of science fiction’s techniques to investigate more fully the many basic questions of identity and relationship to nature which only a few creators have yet touched on. “Beach” is a first sketch of what an Australian sf story might be like, though its lack of a conventional plot puts it outside the stream of ordinary science fiction. One hopes, however, that even without an explanation of what these people are doing on the beach, the particular significance of their presence there will make itself clear.
This story has not previously been published.
* * * *
Mark lay in his burrow and waited for the sun to rise.
All over his naked body, down his right arm and leg, on his head, his ear, his neck, the soft sand weighed heavily, heavily. He knew that, if he were to move, the blanket of sand would split and slide, exposing him, and he was careful to remain perfectly still. It was a trick you learned after you had lived for a while on the beach.
From the weight of the sand, and the pressure in particular on the side of his head, he knew that it was damp. Perhaps it had rained last night (rain on the beach at night, drifting gently down in the perpetual silver light of the lamps?); perhaps it was the dew, silent as dead hands, that had dampened the sand, clumping it, making it heavy and chill.
In front of his eyes Mark sensed but did not see the pages of his Book. Folded tent-like over his head it kept the sand out of his eyes and gave him air to breathe. He knew it as an implement now, not a thing which had any meaning in itself, and if the words on the warped and fading pages had ever meant anything, they had long ago ceased to convey it to him. Mark had been on the beach for a year, long enough for the mind quietly to free itself of things like the ability to read. On the beach, one floated, the mind out of gear, disconnected.
Thinking about floating took a long time. When he had finished, there was a triangle of golden light on the sand under his eye, a pointer that tracked slowly across the plain bounded by his cheek, the sand piled around his face and the yellowing pages tented over his eyes. He watched the pointer while it inched for a few centimetres across the rippled sand, then closed his eyes and warily sat up. Sand spilled off him in thick clumps, like crumbling cake, as he stretched, turned and struggled to his knees, facing automatically towards the rising sun.
He was not the first awake. Further down the beach, about a hundred yards away, figures were walking towards the surf. As he watched there was a minor eruption beyond them, and another man reared up out of the sand, shook himself, stretched, stood up. Mark couldn’t place him. Perhaps he was a new man, wandered down from the empty city, or maybe an old one moving closer to the main group. It didn’t matter. Curiosity wasn’t forbidden; just too much trouble.
The sun’s disk was free of the horizon, balanced a little above the unmarred line of sea like some perfect abstract symbol. The water below it was a clean blue, shading to green in the shallows where, at the last few feet, it dissolved into white foam. Rolling in from the ocean in oily hummocks, the waves curled (striated undersides ribbed like muscles stretching), frothed and broke, effortless as were all things to do with the sea. The air, warming, lacquered it all with a shine of newness, polishing, cleaning. Each day was a new day on the beach, a slice of the future laid down clean and virgin with the promise of yet another tomorrow.
Mark dived and swam in the surf for a few minutes, treading water beyond the line of gentle breakers to look back towards the beach and sluice the sand from his hair and body. Under his pedalling feet, white and distorted through the water, he could see the sand falling, flecks of silica glinting back the first sunlight, until it landed on the white sandy floor. The fantasy always recurred at these times that he himself was dissolving, his body flaking away to join the sand of which he was so much a part. Ashes to ashes, sand to sand, until finally nothing remained but a crystal skeleton barbing out of the rippled white? Perhaps . . .
He blinked away the image, ducked his head under and swam back to shore. Mark didn’t understand what came over him at these moments. It was a sort of dreaminess compounded of the sun, the water, the sand, a drunkenness in the grip of which it didn’t matter what happened, or why. Some people got it badly. Waking one morning, they would swim out through the waves and not stop swimming. Occasionally their bodies would be washed up in the evening tide, stirring like sodden driftwood in the slushing froth. Always on their faces was the look of supreme ecstasy, the face of one who has seen God.
Mark went back to his book, the one object that gave him position in the desert of the beach. Everybody had a marker; a towel perhaps, frayed and bleached by the sun; a radio, long since run down but still treasured, wrapped perhaps in a plastic bag to keep out the sand, the bag scratched until it was almost opaque. Further up the beach, one man had—or did have, as far as Mark could remember—a huge beach umbrella, once bright with orange and yellow segments like a huge flower, now a rotted tree, the crooked trunk holding up a rusty framework to which a few shreds of cloth still clung.
There was movement in the surf. Mark shaded his eyes and looked down the shelving sand from which the sun was already blazing. A girl was coming out of the surf, moving steadily out of the waist-deep water, stiffening momentarily as each new wave thrust at her back, but turning the motion into power. She moved like all the beach people moved, as if they were part of the water, working in conjunction with it. Mark leaned on his elbow to watch.
The girl was beautiful. As she walked through the shallows, Mark admired her slim smooth body, browned as was his own until it was a coppered image, so dark that the nipples of her breasts stood out like light pink flowers against the unmarred colour of her skin. Her hair was bleached to a transparent blonde, strawlike on her head, that on her body soft as a nimbus. Only the faint glow over her limbs indicated that it was there at all, and Mark knew that, to the touch, it would be as feathery as the wind.
Knee-deep in the white foam, she shook the water from her body like a surfacing animal and, gathering her long hair in her hands, squeezed the water from it. Still wet, it fell in a smooth rope over her right shoulder, the ends pasted with water like fingers across one breast. Mark recognized her now. She was from the other end of the beach, a mile further up where the curve of the sand tightened and the point that separated this beach from the next thrust out into the ocean. What she was doing here he could not guess. Looking for a new place? Looking for a man? Mark toyed briefly with the idea of taking her, but discarded it. Almost as if she had read his mind, the girl looked towards him, turned, and moved back out through the surf, breasting the waves that now, with the turning tide, were moving in with new strength.
Mark watched her go, his eyes crinkled against the sun, and wondered why he had let her leave. She was beautiful, available. Normally he would not have paused for a moment before taking her, luxuriating in the thrust of her body, the heat of the sun on his back, the squeak of the sand under their weight. Even now, the idea moved him, but he still had no real desire to go through the motions of even so casual and cursory a formality as showing his interest.
Why? The idea irritated him. He stood up and looked out across the surf, wondering if he would see the girl, but her head had disappeared. The missed opportunity smarted now. He saw it in context, as one of many such chances not taken, actions left incomplete and wasted, water running into the sand. As if the idea goaded him into it, he lifted his eyes and looked along the curve of the beach to the house-covered hills that surrounded it. He squinted, looked closer, squinting again.
Houses.
Houses!
Incredible that he had never noticed them before, never looked at them. It was as if his mind was drifting up out of a haze, focusing for the first time in years. He began to see the shapes of the roofs, the glint of glass in the windows, the sharp edges of chimneys against the relentless blue of the sky. They clung, he saw, these houses, like bats to a cave wall, like monkeys crusted on their ledges, birds in a tree, all turned towards the beach, their eyes watching, their faces, impassive as those of the dead, staring down with flat disdain and an inconquerable pride in their status as matter.
We exist, they said. Mark had no answer to them, nor to the other questions that tumbled into his mind. How had they got there? Who had built them? Not the beach people, not them. Somebody else, or something . . . something that had gone, leaving them here alone.
He was seized by an uncontrollable impulse to run. Not to run and hide, not to flee, but to move, assert himself as a person in this suddenly inanimate landscape. He turned and, feet pistoning in the powder-soft hot sand, ran along the beach, skirting the sharp shadow of the concrete retaining wall that marked the beginning of the world. It was black, the shadow, and as his shadow feet flew horizontally towards it across the ruffled sand, he felt it begin to take shape and substance, to become part of the world. His feet touched it, his shadow moved him along the black wall.
The wall itself was crumbling concrete, yellowed by the sun until cracks radiated over its surface like dried veins. The posts set into it were rusting away, eaten through with red blight, cavities and ulcers gaping to let in the cancerous sun. He grabbed one, pulled his hand away as the acid heat of the sun bit into his flesh. But refusing to admit that it had mastered him as it had the others, Mark grabbed again and hauled himself up onto the concrete. Sprawled there on the baking surface, he looked at the world.
Shops—or he supposed they were shops—lined the road opposite. He saw their shattered windows through the bars of the pine trees planted with mathematical precision along the beach front. Under the trees, rotted pine fronds and cones were piled like pyres, waiting only a torch. Along the beach the trees were repeated, a mile of them, set like sentinels against the subtle assault of the wind, indomitable, irrelevant. Through their disarrayed crowns, the houses high on the cliffs looked down, staring.
The streets were not concrete, but asphalt. It had decayed more readily than the harder stuff, so that most of the streets were rivers of tarry slush that clung to the feet and separated into oily puddles under a yielding skin. Only in the shadows was it reasonably firm, and Mark stuck to the edges of the building line as he walked quickly along, paralleling the beach but refusing to look at it. He did not dare look at the beach again—not yet, not.. . yet. ..
From the beach, the hills rose sharply, streets surging up in long curves to breast the first rise, then twisting to zigzag higher. There was no longer an empty open seascape on one side to promise freedom. Houses closed in, fences enclosed, overgrown gardens thrust up ragged patches of vegetation as thick and impenetrable as hedges. Even the concrete footpaths were cracked, overgrown, grass and weeds probing up between the squares and shouldering them aside. Mark half ran, refusing to look at the houses, moving on up the hill to the point where, as the road met the top of the rise, a wedge of blue sky bit into the housescape. From there, he could see out, beyond the beach, to what lay around the curve of the headland.
Then he heard the music.
Mark didn’t know it was music. There was no music on the beach, no false sound, only the natural timbre of the sea and the wind, the cries of birds and, sometimes, in the night, a scream as some beast, perhaps a man, perhaps not, met the dark creature that lay in the shadows, and died. He had never heard a disciplined sound before, and he followed it up the hill to the last house in the street.
Time had beached the house in its place, deserting it on the hilltop like some ancient ark. Decades had left it untouched, as if time, like the sea, will brush a wreck and leave it dry of years, dry but for a rime of age that hangs like salt along the withered walls.
Mark approached it cautiously, wishing, without knowing why, not to touch the fence of wood and wire mesh that separated the overgrown footpath from the slightly more disciplined garden. In the centre of the fence a gate of tubular metal and mesh hung rustily open, though the path beyond it had disappeared beneath the grass that, seeded and self-seeded again, had engulfed the area. Nothing was visible above it except the remains of an ornamental bird-bath surmounted by what must once have been a plaster stork. Weather had worn the bird down to a wire skeleton to which clung a few decaying scraps of plaster and, on top of the metal bones, a beakless head whose single eye fixed Mark with an unblinking stare, one dot of perception in a mindless landscape.
The music went on, a thin continuity of notes hardly audible above the whisper of the grass. Without a sense of movement, Mark went through the gate and to the foot of the steps leading to the house’s veranda. The music was clearer there, a thin, bitter melody that the old dry house seemed itself to be playing on its withered tendons. Time had warped the boards of the veranda floor so that they twisted like ribs, parts of the carcass of the beached house. Mark moved quietly across them to the window. The glass was dirty. A lace curtain, here as a dream, drifted about his face.
Frightened, hearing the music thicken in the air around him, he looked in.
There was a girl. He sensed rather than saw her, a patch of movement on the dark. Slowly his eyes became used to the gloom and he picked her out, sitting directly across the room from him, her back to the window. In front of her was an ancient upright piano on which she played an old, forgotten tune. Mark saw only the movement of pale white arms and shoulders, a watered blue dress, hair so black that is disappeared into the shadows. She might have been a ghost.
The room was incredible. Above the piano and to both sides the one wall Mark could see was massed with pictures, ancient portraits and prints from an era before any he could name. Crazy faces, bearded and opaque, faded ladies in lace collars haloed in a milky oval or framed by a collar of gilt cardboard and an even more ornate plaster moulding, overdressed children staring with blind savagery at the camera ; the inhabitants of a dead age, their faces as rigid as icons, stared down in implacable disdain and rage at the one living person in the room, a pale girl in a blue dress playing some long-forgotten song on an out-of-tune upright piano.
She stopped playing.
Mark froze, watching her shoulders as they turned. He saw her face for the first time, a pale oval in which two eyes as luminous as those of a lemur provided the single evidence of life. Her mouth was pale, thin, bloodless, fixed with a terrible smile. She stood up, and came towards the window.
Scuttling back across the buckling boards, Mark backed down the steps, ran stumbling through the waste of garden to the street. His vision swam with the black dots of unaccustomed light; inside his head, his brain too seemed dazzled, too confused for any thought but a single obsession. Run.
The hill seemed to tilt under his feet as he ran, so that he scuttled like a desperate animal from side to side, the blind house fronts hemming him in, directing him always downwards, away from the sky, towards the beach.
From above, the beach and its encompassing promenade looked small and inconsequential, a meaningless variation in the smooth uniformity of the city that flowed down on it from the hills. He had never thought of the beach in that way before, as something small, grubby, insignificant. And he had never thought before about the houses, or noticed the way they surrounded the beach, totally cutting it off from everything but the sea, a crust of red brick and pine and bleached brown tile, anonymous and obscene in its remembrance of scabs and dried blood.
Under his feet the road was once again sticky, glutinous. He tore himself out of the muck, stumbled to the footpath and ran on. Now he was at the foot of the hill, but though the incline had disappeared he ran on, past the shattered shops, the shedding trees, the empty, echoing streets. The concrete began to crumble more . . . there was a handrail . . . through a blur of exhaustion he grabbed at it and vaulted towards the pale haze that he sensed somewhere below, a haze of gold. The sand, hot, dry, clean, exploded against his body. Panting, he lay face down, feeling under his hand the pristine innocence of silica, accepting like a sacrament the heat and light that glowed beyond his closed eyes.
The dusk woke him. His daze was so close to death that he was aware of no difference. A primal shock had blinded his mind as an explosion blinds the eye. Blinking, he sat up and looked around, the purple gloom lapping him like a tide. Dark ... the dark fell out of the air, rose from the sand, swam from the land and the sea. But the darkness was more than an absence of light. In it was the hidden soul of the sun, lingering on the empty land.
Faintly he heard the roar of the surf, saw the dim light of a fire further down near the water. He could hear voices, laughter, something like a song. Mark walked towards the fire.
Each night, there was a party on the beach. As the dark came on, people huddled together, close against the dark and the cold. Turning inwards, they played and laughed, then, when the fire had died, crept off to lie under the sand and sleep, if they could.
Mark moved through the outer part of the crowd, ignoring the talk, stepping cautiously around the possessions piled up in separate, secret heaps. Books, radios, towels, bottles whose sun-greened depths threw back the firelight. In the same light, skin and flesh looked pale, sickly. His own, he saw, glancing at his arm, was the same, almost like that of the girl he had seen . . . where was it? When? Years ago, he decided, in a distant place.
Close by the fire, a woman danced, the light making the threadbare veils of her beachcoat as transparent as silk. She danced unnoticed and alone. Beyond the fire there was talk, laughter. At Mark’s side another woman was drawing on an ancient swimming costume, so dried and ragged that the cloth was like the skin of a dead shark cast up and left to rot. As she pulled it over her thighs and hips, the cloth crackled.
Mark walked on, in a dream. Past the fire, there was nothing but the light fading slowly out, and the last lip of surf foam sliding up the beach, to retreat as it touched the fireglow. He walked forward, eager to see what it was, wondering what would hide out here, in the dark, in the silence and the cold. The water was around his waist now, surging up his chest as the waves came calmly on. He pushed off and swam, lazily turning over to let them slide under and around him. Then the breakers were past and he was in the smooth sea. Eyelashes heavy with water, he blinked against the weight, not wanting to close his eyes, not wanting to sleep. But as sleep came inexorably on he felt a slow gathering of understanding inside, a certainty he had never had before.
He had been wrong, he saw now, to leave the beach, wrong to seek absolution in the city’s doomed streets. There was nothing there for him, nor for any of the others ... the others that understood. Their flight from the outside world—how clear it all seemed—had been only part of the journey to grace, one step in a hegira but barely begun. On the beach men plucked up the courage necessary to take the next giant step, and most of them failed. Mark was proud to have found in himself the understanding that would let him leave, to enter the first stage of true identity. The ocean lapped his flesh, laving it quietly away in sparkles of phosphorescence while inside him life bloomed like a cold white tree.
Confidently, Mark swam on, not in the air, but down, into the dark, clean sea. His ears roared briefly, then he was in the ocean’s cold blood. Somewhere, below him, he knew his goal lay hidden, its light mantled in green, the sea creatures swirling down into the vast valley where it lay to worship at the unbelievable jewel gifted to them. Without fear, he swam towards the sea mountains, the peaks of which even now he could see gilded beyond the green. There, he knew, he would find his grail, the sunken, brooding sun.