An Uncomfortably Early Beach Day

Words by Duncan Koop

This article is part of PULPCLIMATE week. CLICK HERE to join the facebook group. University of Sydney Students will be marching from Fischer Library at 10:00 AM on the 20th of September.

“Don’t come in tomorrow. Got council inspection” your boss’s text message reads. You wake up tomorrow. Early. The sun beams like a lover at your window. The thought comes to you first at the stove. When the percolator squeals you put it out of your mind. A tall cup of salvation in your hand you retrieve the book from your room. Your housemate has woken ––noisily, always noisily—so you retreat to the backyard. And would you know it, it’s out here too, your lover. Caressing your shoulders it whispers promises to you. The words in your book are swimming a bit, so you drink coffee and sit to read. Swimming, swim… swim. No. This is a terrific chance to get ahead of your essay. Read everything for next week. Preparation, foresight, getting-ahead. You’ve heard about these phenomena, these alarming hyphenations: while you drank and swam and danced you gave them some thought. And all the while, like a magpie on the road, you gauged the velocity of the approaching assignment. Sometimes down to the minute. Sometimes less. Your plumage has lost a few feathers here and there.

Right, well, ok, that may be –but not this time. Here we go: “No literary genius exists without freedom of mind” you read, “And there is no–CHAMELEO-O-ONNNNN!” What the? PNAU’s masterpiece vibrates the windows of the bathroom. Wreathed in steam, you see your housemate shimmying. Ah Christ. Your eyes narrow on your task; “and there is no free–keeps me a BIT GO-AO-OOOLD!”, block it out, you think, ignore it; “and the IS NO FREEDOM OF MIND IN AMERICA.” Triumphant: it has gone in. You highlight the line for good measure and rock back, satisfied. You sigh, it’s on your face now, hot and humid. Nup, can’t stick around baby. You return to your tome. The page looks awfully big, a bar of yellow highlighter surrounded by masses of text. Unread. Unhighlighted. An ocean of text. An ocean... ocean. You catch a whiff of it. You’ve not been for a while. But as the weather warms, there are rumours. Olfactory propaganda. You can be whatever you want out there. A person makes their own fortune, this marine smell, this cool spray says. You need only go. You force your eyes down again and wade through the text. For its density the page soon resembles some psychedelic prisoner. A drop of sweat falls from your nose into a blue bar. The ink soon suffuses the lines above and below. An expanding salty blue circle. You watch it, slackening in the heat. You press your lips together and nod your head. That does it. Feeling superstitious, you neck your coffee and fling a few things in a bag. Through the suds and dub your housemate hears the front door slam.

It’s up there, and you follow it like a parched nomad through the desert. Up the street they are making road. Smoking tarmac pours out of a hole in the back of a truck. For a moment you expect the grim reaper to appear at this hellish orifice, beckoning skeletally. The people in orange cover up the earth with acrid sealant. Cars honk at the delay. Get a move on! Get it covered! You have heard they are making roads with ground up tires now. Why not leave the tires intact, you think. Why not take the tires off the cars and put them straight into the road: hey-presto, the cars don’t need tires anymore!

The bus pulls up at the stop and there it is in the window, the sun, shimmering and glimmering. It’s been coming out a lot recently. Barely left, this winter. And now it’s back, the socialite, and it’s barely spring. It’s got its best yellow on today, has really dressed up for you. “Oh, I love you,” you tell it, seeing your pallid library face in the reflection, and also, “what?!” a shocked school-kid. Your loved-up, dopey half-smile disappears. ‘No, not you you little creep’ you want to say, but it’s already told its friends. Fuck. You sit at the opposite end of the bus and hope it doesn’t look like you’re trying to be coy.

As the rumbling tube exhumes it’s polluting cadaver into the traffic, your mind finally forethinks. You pull out your slab of paper and dive back in. It’s easy now, in the heat through the window and the thrumming engine. Even the squeaky indignation at the back of the bus is allayed by soon-to-become-litteral waves of carefreeness. I’m going, baby… going to the beach.