You Can’t Go Home Again
Four generations of my family at the beach house.
It’s dark when we arrive. Getting out of the car into the winter air, I can hear the low roar of the ocean, away past the scrub. I go through the familial routine, turning on the water supply near the gate, and turning on the water heater from the fuse box. I’m always anxious about bringing the right key. My girlfriend hands me bags from the boot, and I ferry them up the stairs, marveling at how warm the house always feels. It’s hard not to think about how many visits I have left. My grandmother might pass away soon, and when she does, my mum and her sisters won’t be able to afford to keep the place.
I wrap a blanket around my shoulders and head out onto the balcony, breath misting in the air. The roar is stronger up here.
The pale light from the house stretches across the yard. There is a video of the first time I came to the beach house, at three years old. My grandfather loved to film the family with his clunky old camera. I’m there with my little eighties stripey shirt on and some kind of plastic trike, pootling around on the grass. The colours are washed out, almost sepia. It cuts to me kicking a soccer ball, my first of many average performances as a sportsman.
As I got older the house was my family’s sole vacation spot. We couldn’t afford anything else.
I hear cars in the driveway. My brothers and their families arrive with mum. The sound of their voices carries over to me before they know I’m on the balcony, like a secret window into their lives. The door slams and the house fills up with the sound of kids, excited at the adventure.
The next morning we all walk down the path that winds from the backyard through fifty metres of scrub to the beach. My brothers walk slowly ahead of me, laughing at some private joke, holding the hands of my nephews. My niece bolts for the beach, a free spirit. I think about my grandfather, who beat the path to the beach into existence like some colonial pioneer. I imagine him in a flannel, swinging a machete around his head, the trees grovelling before him. I don’t even know if this story is true, but if it’s not, it’s become a part of my mythos. I never thought to try to disconfirm it.
I could walk that path with my eyes closed — every turn, every dip and rise is familiar. It’s changed over the years, the plants continuing to grow, the weather warping the landscape, but I don’t try to notice them, preferring the thirty-year-old image I have in my mind. I look harder. A tree fell, and someone cleared away a bush or two. The thinning canopy is hard to ignore now that I’m taller. Every change feels like a small wound in the past, in the hole my grandfather opened up in the world.
The beach arrives too quickly. When I walked the path as a kid, it felt so much longer. It was a magical forest. There was something to play with under every tree, small things, fodder for my imagination. I would run around by myself, falling over, picking stuff up and throwing it at other stuff, climbing. No one told me to treasure it, that those dreams don’t last. Or maybe they did tell me, and I was too happy to listen.
There’s a book, Puff the Magic Dragon, about a kid who has a jolly time with an imaginary dragon until he realises he has to get a job. After that, he can’t fit the dragon into his workweek. Memory is unreliable, but I feel like I can chart reality’s intrusion as the years have passed, into the forest, onto the beach.
We find a good spot for our towels, and the kids start hooning around. After ten minutes of sandcastles and seashells, I walk away a bit to sit on the dunes.
I sit and look, watching the waves come and go. My brothers are throwing a frisbee back and forth, mum standing at the shoreline with my niece, pointing out to sea. They all live in the hills, where we grew up, but I live in the city. I miss being in their orbit, the way their peaceful routines loop around the mountain.
I turn away from the familial scene to stare at the river, which ends in a tepid pool ten metres from the waves. The river finds the ocean about every second time I’m down here, washing its murk into the bay. When it connects, it’s cleaner and fresh. The ghost of my childhood is down there at the river, back when they were always connected, kicking furrows in the slope of the dune, hauling sand from the riverbed to build a sandbar.
When I was very young I was enraptured by the weird clumps of matter that made up the beach and the forest. Jellyfish and seaweed, cuttlefish and mother-of-pearl. Pinecones, acorns, animal poo, clumping burrows. Dark places away from the paths, brush so dense that you could hide forever.
When I was a little older, I played socially there, tiggy in the forest or hide and seek in the long grass on the dunes, competitive long jump over the thinner bits of the river, using the environment but still a part of it.
Then came puberty, and I used the beach to play at being a man, even as I saw less, and felt less. The hidden places became bolt-holes for smoking weed and drinking.
I felt alive in risk, in the craziness of the things I could get away with without injuring myself. Jumping off cliffs, beer bonging. I invented a game called ‘diveminton’, which was like the two-dollar badminton we had always played with the now-ancient set of racquets and shuttlecocks, except you always had to be in the air when you swung the racquet. Injuries ensued.
Now I’m an adult, and I relax here, imitating fun. I can see the visual beauty of the beach more clearly again, but not through the lens of adventure or physicality. Now, it’s a sort of wistful glancing, a function of relaxation.
A particularly chill wind comes along, and I shiver, thinking longingly of my regular spot on the couch, with my blanket, back at the house. I remember the last time my grandfather was here with us. When we got to the beach, he only waited a minute before pulling the clothes off his greying body and stalking down to the ocean. He did a slow breaststroke, daring the cold to pull at his age, to weaken his athleticism and force him back to shore.
But it couldn’t. Maybe it knew it was his last time here. It deferred to him like the bush did when he made us a way to get here, so long ago, unless it was just a story.
He led the walk back along his path, bright and bold, sure of his place in the world.
When we got to the house, he couldn’t remember where he’d left his clothes. He sat on a chair in the lounge room in his speedos, eyes downcast, as his wife, my mother, and my aunts, rushed in and out of the room to tut over him, to pry at the memory of his clothes, and each time they walked away shaking their heads he fell a little further inward, the power in his eyes draining away. Sitting on the couch watching him, I didn’t know what to say, how to make him himself again. A comforting word or a hand on his back would have shamed the proud elder who had pushed back the tide only half an hour ago. I said nothing.
My girlfriend returns from her walk, glowing with discovery, pulling me back from the past. We chat about our books and our shows, about our relationship, about our dreams and the ways we’ve compromised for or against them.
I walk into the water, as my grandfather did, but not with his pride or determination. I float in the cold until my feet get heavy and numb, just to stave off the passage of time for a while.
On the way back, my niece and nephew are our pace-setters, toddling along, only stopping to look back at us, to make sure we’re still following them, that they’re not alone.
The feeling of a first time is in the novelty of it, and each stage of my life has been spent trying to recapture the feeling of those that came before it. You can’t go home again, but you can watch kids have the same small joys and fears that you had, and maybe that’s a kind of home.
The bush falls away and the house looms before us. Everyone else is looking down, but I’m looking up, afraid to let it out of my sight. Maybe this will be the last time we’re here at the house, or maybe it won’t. It’s hard to say goodbye when you don’t know when the end will be.
The last time I saw my grandfather alive, he was in the hospital, confused and upset. He didn’t know where he was, or who I was. He kept calling for his wife. We explained where she was, but once he forgot he would call for her again. Was that the last? I don’t know. I remember him in his coffin, cold and heavy. I kissed his forehead. I can still feel the cold of his skin on my lips.
When we get back to the house, we take turns washing our feet at the garden tap. Another family routine, to stop sand from getting on the carpet. My grandfather always cared the most about that. I settle on the couch, warm under my blanket, my family vibrant and loud around me, and I think about my grandfather’s path and all the life crowding over it, pushing against his memory until I can’t come to this house anymore.
My favourite of the other submissions so far is Deb Groves Harman’s evocative piece. Reflecting on early experiences of sexuality can be a bittersweet exercise, but Deb balances nostalgia and meaning effectively, gently leading us through her memories and our own.
