Sunbathing Read online

  First published in 2022

  Copyright © Isobel Beech 2022

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:[email protected]

  Web:www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76106 577 4

  eISBN 978 1 76106 432 6

  Illustration by Lucia Canuto

  Cover photograph by Ella Mittas

  Author photo by Claire Summers

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Content note:

  This book deals with loss and grief in relation to suicide.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY

  This book was written in large part on Koorie Country, on lands that belong to the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, whose cultures are among the oldest living in the world.

  I acknowledge the history and Traditional Owners of the land I live and work on, and extend my respect and gratitude to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, Elders past and present, and Ancestors. I recognise the resistance and strength of your continuing cultures despite the burden for ongoing negotiation with a colonial State.

  I also acknowledge and wholeheartedly support the many campaigns for truth-telling, justice and decolonisation, and believe strongly in the onus for reconciliation, reparations, land back, and Treaty sitting with settlers living, working and learning on stolen land.

  From where I write, it always was and always will be Aboriginal Land.

  To my family

  Back when you lived in the house behind the milk bar, when the cat was at her most sick—years after she’d started weeing on everything and meowing in that harrowing way—she crawled into the attic.

  You held me with one arm and said some animals like to die alone and that’s okay. But it was cold up there, so I asked if we could bring her down. We set up the ladder together and I went first.

  ‘Can you see her?’ you asked me.

  She was the same colour as the timber and the insulation, but her little body, the rising and falling of her side, was visible to me, far away, in the furthest, darkest corner.

  ‘Are you okay to get her?’ you said. ‘I don’t think I’m gonna fit.’

  I pulled myself into the attic and crawled slowly over to the corner where she was curled up in a ball, trying hard not to startle her. She didn’t even look sick. I picked her up in my arms and turned towards the manhole, your head popping up through it, but I needed my arms for the journey back. The roof was too low for me to stand or even crouch. So I put her down in front of me and crawled towards her, and picked her up again, and moved her forward. I did this again and again. Each time I put her down she’d wobble for a minute and fall, and each time I picked her up I said, ‘Sorry, Donna. I’m sorry. Don’t worry, we’re nearly there.’ When we finally got her down the ladder and into the living room, I moved her bed in front of the heater, and we watched her climb into it, and she died.

  Contents

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  40

  THANK YOU

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  Halfway across the country the train stopped. We were now just a floating blue dot on Google Maps, hovering between stations an hour from Rome and an hour from Pescara, the biggest city in Abruzzo. I looked out my window at the wildflowers and reeds that grew in tufts beside the train line, and at the small slope of grass that ran from the tracks down to the highway below.

  Passengers were beginning to stand from their seats and talk among themselves quietly, pointing up at the monitor above the carriage door. I pulled out an earphone. A rigid orange message was ticking across the screen, first in Italian and then in English: This train has been delayed due to human accident. I felt a kind of hum wash over me as I looked out the window again, this time towards the crossing up ahead. I could see that the crowd was thickening.

  On the other side of the highway was a town—another little town whose buildings, old and new, cluttered the firmament. Beautiful crumbling buildings with signs on their tops that I couldn’t understand, apart from a few words here and there that I remembered from last time: AUTO, CENTRO, MUSEO, AZIENDA. Beyond the town were mountains, big and rocky, and grey-blue in the summer sun. When clouds passed overhead, the shadow and light wrinkled over them, over the rock and the trees, and it looked like water. Hold on, hold on, I was thinking. This is a planet? We’re clusters of stuff on an orb in space?

  With my forehead pressed against the window I watched the intersection up ahead. Little people, like figurines, waited in their cars and on their bikes at the crossing. Others craned their heads out of nearby office and apartment windows, and hung over balcony railings in the summer air. I was still thinking of our smallness; of how many we all are, how much everything happens, and how it all keeps on happening. I was thinking, also, of how strange it is that we cope. Then I remembered sometimes we don’t.

  Down on the road people were climbing out of their cars to get a better look, or to talk. Some leaned on bonnets or against the sides of trucks. Others took refuge under the trees on the median strip. They shared cigarettes and talked—I couldn’t hear them, could only see their mouths and hands moving wildly. Meanwhile, the tourists waited in the back seats of taxis headed to and from the airport, watching on like little dogs through the cracks in their windows. I sat in my seat in the air conditioning and stared into flares of light for comfort: the sun’s reflection in mirrors and sunglasses, in hub caps and the handles of car doors. I looked at the mountains again, and at the cane bending in the breeze, then went back to reading my phone.

  I don’t know how long it was until the train started up again, but when it did the passengers clapped and laughed and made jokes while the train crawled past the accident.

  Out my window I saw it, or bits of it, and thought of nothing. Felt nothing. A woman up in front cried out, ‘No, no, aiuto, no!’ and held her soft, brown arms up over her face. I closed my eyes, turned up the volume in my earphones and did my breathing exercises.

  The train crossed the width of the country in three hours. From the accident onwards I kept my music screaming and my head against the glass, squinting at the passing rivers and castles and factories. When we reached Pescara it was getting dark. Though the city was small—when I looked left from the terminal steps I could see the beach, and when I looked right, the highway—it was lou
d and bright with life. And there was a calming sea breeze rippling through the streets that appeared to welcome the passengers as we stepped off the train and onto the platform. I pulled my suitcase behind me with a tired arm past the river and the port where fishing boats rocked gently against the docks. Their mast and deck lights bounced off the water and the smell of seaweed was dense in the air. I found the hotel I’d booked wedged between a GameStop and a small cafe, the California. My room, up three flights of stairs, was not a square inch bigger than was necessary to fit a single bed, a shower, a toilet and a wardrobe for two coats. There were metal bars on the window and the warm wind blew in between them. Under the open window was a black wooden desk, crammed between the bed’s end and the wall.

  To keep my mind busy that night, I walked the streets of Pescara. Back around the port and the boats, which in the dark were just bobbing lights and lapping water. I walked under the bridge, past fabric shops, the Lidl, the church, the piazza and the park. I watched couples sitting close on benches and city cats sleeping on the steps of some government building.

  I watched the teenagers waiting in line for gelato, and other teenagers running from the shore into the sea, as the moon moved up over the city.

  I felt at ease in the warmth, even cheerful, and wondered what it might be like to be around other people when I arrived in the mountains of Altino. Part of me recoiled at the thought, and another part of me could hardly wait until morning to board my bus.

  Back in my little single bed in my elevator-sized room, I listened to the sounds of Saturday night—shrieking and fighting and singing and things smashing. As the streetlight beamed in and made it impossible to sleep, I was settled by those sounds.

  The sun was going down again when I reached Colle Luna, the town before the town before Giulia and Fabrizio’s. I sent the text to say I was one stop away. This bus took us up the last mountain and down again, into the valley where there would be no more buses. No trains, no nothing. From here on out, we were on our own. Ours was the last bus of the day and it teemed with teenage boys coming back from the beach and the city at the end of the weekend. Groups of boys who played Italian trap from a Bluetooth speaker and yelled things I didn’t understand. I only heard them in the breaks between songs, and hardly even then because I was fixated instead on the girl in the seat in front of me. I’d been watching her since we pulled away from the bus stop in front of the mechanic; first just because she was there and I couldn’t help it, but later because I noticed the texts. She was holding her phone tight in her hands and right close up to her face, her whole body twisted away from the boy sitting next to her, who might’ve been her boyfriend, because she’d set a picture of him as her phone’s wallpaper and because his hand had not left her thigh since Pescara. I had decided, from looking over her shoulder, that she was sexting someone else, in secret. She sat low and hunched up in her seat, with her back to the window and her knees towards the aisle. She would check her screen every minute or so, and when I caught glimpses of her messages, which she hid quite well, I saw the chat was freckled with emojis: hearts of all colours, drooling faces and monkeys with their hands over their eyes, but most often (and maybe most horny) the red, sweating emoji with its little tongue out. I could also see, now and then, that the person on the other end was sending voice messages. The girl pushed her earphones deep into her ears with her fingers and crushed herself even smaller in her seat to listen. Watching her, I could almost remember, though very faintly, feeling that way. That aching-for-more-life feeling. And I wondered where that feeling had gone, and if I would get it back.

  The bus came to the end of the line in a village called Casoli, which sat neatly on the top of a pointed hill. People pulled their bags from the netting above us, shoving and squeezing and lightly pushing each other for the doors. It felt good to be shouldered aside and shouted at, maybe because it made me feel more real. I thought about lifting my feet off the floor and letting my body get carried down the aisle and out onto the footpath, like a bit of bark freewheeling on a river, but by the time I finished daydreaming I was already standing in front of the baggage hold.

  I’d been losing chunks of time here and there, missing whole seconds of life before returning to it, waking up to nothing in particular. If I hadn’t been so adrift, these episodes might have worried me, but really it mostly felt like a reprieve. And I was putting it in the bucket of Things Your Body Does to Get You Through.

  Once everyone had gathered their belongings, they scattered. Off down the street or up the hill, or into one of the cars waiting in the car park. The boys from the back of the bus made one final scene, shouting things at the bus driver, at an older woman, at me, at a young girl and the girl with (at least) two boyfriends. Then they shoved each other around and hurried off across the soccer pitch. After everybody was gone, I waited there with my bag in the weird, empty evening light. I thought about sending another text or calling Giulia to see if they were close, but each time I felt for my phone in my jacket pocket, I stopped. I had nowhere urgent to be. And no matter where I was—here on this corner or at the house or standing on the cliff face of life itself—I just was. It felt good to be alone there in the almost-dark.

  Just one tiny sliver of pale yellow light hung between sky and hill, so I found a seat on a concrete bench and watched as it thinned. The lights in the supermarket across the street began going out one by one, like dominoes falling, until only the sign above the door still glowed. I sat there and remembered the girl and her maybe-boyfriend, wondering where they’d gone and whether, one of these nights, they might have some terrible fight about the texts. Just as I was thinking this—as the sky went properly dark and the clouds began to shine silverish—Giulia and Fab came beeping around the roundabout in a little silver car.

  It pulled up in front of me, the two of them talking at once so I couldn’t hear anything except for ‘sorry’ and ‘Martina’. Fab pulled my things into the back seat of the car and Giulia and I held each other in a half-hug, half-‘look at you’. She hadn’t changed except for her hair, which was newly short around her shoulders. Fab was the same as I remembered, though it was hard to tell in that light. I squeezed into the back seat with my bags, and as we drove down the hill in the dark I told them about the bus and the girl and the sexts, but not about the train and the accident.

  2

  Giulia and Fab’s was the last house at the end of a steep, narrow street that wound down to the bottom of a hill, where the ground suddenly fell away from you. Fab parked the car they’d borrowed from Martina outside her house and put the keys under a brick on her windowsill, then the three of us walked the rest of the way down.

  The house was white with brown shutters and it looked out over the valley to the mountains on the other side. I wouldn’t be able to see it properly until morning, Fab said, but the moonlight was bright enough that I could still make out some things. Enough. The rows of vineyards below us. The villages lodged in the sides of the hills, their orange and white lights glowing. I could see the spaces between trees where roads wound away from the village. I could see the gleaming metal of cars and tractors in driveways and fields. And all the shining butter-yellow squares in the landscape which were the windows of houses.

  The front door to Fab and Giulia’s house was so small we had to duck to pass through it, the old beaded curtain that hung in the doorway clattering. The kitchen ceiling was low and rounded and shaped by hand. There was a room set up for me at the top of the stairs, and the stairway was narrow, curving and dark, so we followed Fab up in a precarious line, as if we were climbing into an attic or a belltower or something. Inside the room was a bed, an old wardrobe and a desk. It was lit yellow by a lamp with no lampshade, and the tiles on the floor made a pattern of diamonds and circles. They were cracked in some places in a way that made me feel things. The walls had holes and shelves carved into them like in the kitchen, and the window shutters were open so that the blue night looked just like a painting on the wall.

&
nbsp; ‘It’s the Birthing Room,’ said Fab, as we put my bags at the end of the bed. ‘Women from my family had their children in this room.’

  ‘On this bed?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe yes, but maybe there were different beds. I don’t know because it was a long time ago—years before us.’

  ‘Because there was no hospital, right, Fab?’ said Giulia. She turned to me. ‘Everyone had their babies in a special room in the house.’

  I stood still to see if I could detect a life-giving quality in the room, but I couldn’t. Maybe I was too tired. Or maybe I couldn’t sense things like that. Or maybe it was just a different room now.

  Giulia said, ‘You must be zonked,’ and I said, ‘Kind of,’ even though I wasn’t, so we all said goodnight and they closed the door behind them as they left. I listened as their footsteps got further and further away.

  I sat on the end of the bed for a while, feeling a small pang of regret and a bit of fear, but I pushed it away because it was late and I didn’t feel like feeling worse. After a while, I realised time was passing, so I stood up and got ready for bed. I left the windows open for the breeze and got in under the top sheet. It was green, floral and soft, so soft, from years and years of use. When I stopped moving, and when my heartbeat stopped thumping in my ears, I noticed the medley of night sounds wafting in through the windows, filling up the whole house. Barking dogs, the whirring of crickets or cicadas or both, and the whispering of leaves and pampas grass. And there was a sound that might’ve been frogs, though it could have been geese or ducks. There was a kind of cooing about it, like having your head patted before sleep, and so I closed my eyes and let the mosquitoes mewl around my head.

  I woke early; earlier than I’d been awake in a long time. Since the morning after the phone call, maybe, when I’d spent hours in my lonely kitchen staring into the empty street thinking of you.