What He Did Next

For the Matts.

   A wave lifts, the movement of it, lifting, curling and falling, overweight, barrel-like a motion, that sucks upwards the sands that lie at the very edge of where land meets sea, to create 'sand clouds', as the wave, it crashes into the shore...
   These fell at the bottom of the incline of at the back of the garden fences, the beginning of a steep decline into which had been cut steps into the clay soil that lead to the very water-line, not very far from the curly-haired blonde youth who arrives at the party, and after sitting outside on the front door steps.    Hidden high there in the timber covered, tall staircase front door's entrance, he sat, three short steps from what kept him from whatever it was that sat there behind his quizzed mind, behind the front doorway, sitting there alone on the landing.
   Looking out from the street he'd sat, looking out over the river, filled with as it was that day, a group of yachts with the white canvas of their open sails caught in the strong north-westerly wind that was, that late Summer evening, gusting stronger every now and then, like a little kid was tweaking with the volume on a turn knob TV set, (black and white).
    It is in Tasmania, an island somewhere geographically so close to the point on the Earth where day lasts for six months of the year, and equally does the night, so that, with summer-time's 'daylight savings time' hour advancement of that old registering device of the rise and fall of matter, the clock, with an alteration applied, causing the sub-Antarctic zone situated day to quite very seriously still be 'on' and bright skied at 7.50 pm.
   Oblivious, to all of the sounds that have continued inside, after his initial impression that the lady of the house, (his childhood friend's Mum), was bidding farewell some visitors silhouetted at the inside of the upper window of the square, mottled-glass front door, when he sat down and stopped at the door, figuring that they must have decided to go and sit back down again, or were still standing there talking at the back of the door, politely, he waited. 
   Then, again forgetting all of it, he headed, clunking down the steps to the landing and around to the short steep asphalt garden path through rose bushes of yellow and white blooms in various states of disarray and undress, walking to the white picket front fence.
   Ten minutes later than that, after posing on a fence post and looking at the clear white glow of the sky where later, the stars would turn as they began to appear under a blue-black sky, all this he did before he traveled to the wooden side gate of the house.
 This gate is 'Federation Green'* painted, as he puts his hand through the hole in the timbers to reach into this archaic remnant of a medieval heritage, an architectural feature reminiscent of the agrarian past and common at the time of the building of this old house.
   Door opening practice successful, as he activates a hand movement to take grip of, and control the mechanism on the interior of the backyard side of the sliding bolt gate lock. Positioned close it was to the corner of the back of the side wall of this painted weatherboard house. This home which stood on a slight incline, facing an elm tree lined road and then a precariously steep decline in geographical terms, that started on both the road and then underneath and in the backyards of the houses across the road. A line of ground which fell quickly to the shoreline where long rotten boarded wooden piers ran from the backyards to the water's edge along the muddy banks at every low tide.
   Being admitted at the front door, where, in his overtly large white basketball boots, laced, but with both of the laces untied, he stepped a stumbling fall and landed surprisingly safely, (despite his semi-obvious stupification level of inebriation) and he passed safely between the two admittees; a neat, closely-cropped short-haired man in a shiny black tuxedo and a young woman in a frilly-trimmed, red silk dress. A young woman whose shoulder length blond hair dangled with her head turned sideways. A girl and a boy both playing grown ups, for keeps, both of whom looked into the eyes of one another and broke out into laughter and a giggle, respectively, as the youth passed between them both and then strode forcefully past everyone in the, 'stay-open-at-all-costs', weird-shaped pupil that it is, the googly-eyed interior of the spherical room dwelling party animals amongst virtually all of the champagne/cocaine, ecstasy/acid, cocktail-hour party types of people. All very genteel, perhaps in a conscious response to being known as those that were once were referred to in the 1950's, as, 'lounge- lizards'.
   Blond Curly noted them all in bleary eyed flourish of undetectable eye contact and successfully entered through the freshly unlocked, slid opened and laughed upon, sliding glass door.
This door, of his primary school friend's house, that first he'd walked through as a young boy with his new found school friend, into the kitchen to meet his Mum.
Between each of them, they shared a first name.
The beginnings of an intrinsic bond and a conversation full of mysterious secrets, that only a few others would ever know.
  Normally, he had always known this sliding glass door for it to be unlocked, but tonight he'd discovered that, instead, there were great numbers of unknown people blocking the view to his goal inside.
He knocked, saw they've all drinks in their hands, strong liquor, no beer, it's cocktails of every type only this evening,  all round just as specified on the RSVP.
   He travels through this crowd to where, at arrival at the place where he finds it, the couch, where, after a moment's thoughtful hesitation, he most determinedly, with his eyes, tells everyone to,
 'Get up!'
 With the implied, (but, due to extreme intoxication, only gentrificated), notion of politeness (built into the grain of his face), amongst the received messages via cocktail party mode communication comprehension, these three partiers, they mistakenly assumed an automatically implied, 'Please', somehow, in his suggestion, as they stood and stepped away from the lounge suite where they'd previously been settled. All of them stood quickly and politely, with their exotic mixed drinks unspilt in their hands. What a short cut straw can do!
   The reflected light from surface of the waves upon the mouth of the river estuary mixed with the unadulterated sun light passing round the white curved edges of small, sparsely placed, late summer, 8.25 pm day sky illuminating through white clouds, bathing smooth faces, freshly passed beneath the sharpest of razor blades, faces scented by the latest fashions in colognes, cheekbones enhanced by blushers, right down to the woman without any, and a woman with eyelids like butterflies wings, green eyes, saying, to some man,
 "I believe in the future that using these theoretical technologies any movie made starring Paul Newman, should have instead a digital representation of James Dean placed into the film in Newman's place, but following all of the same movements in expressions as those used by Newman, as an experiment, really, since the actor, Newman came to prominence almost in the place of James Dean, who'd recently been killed at the age of twenty four, with only three movies under his belt, and just one released, at the time of his death. Did you know that James Dean's father lived on for another 60 or so years after the death of his son..?"
   Whilst this hybrid, light illumined, green crushed ice in a cocktail, fluted, straight-edged, concave glass and, by authoritative waggled gesture of extended arm's hand motion, the blond curly haired youth shepherded, kindly, away, a number of cocktail party dwellers, dressed, as they say, to the, 'nines', and all of them were successfully moved across the polished floorboards.
   Across this floor to ceiling bookshelf lined room, with a wooden sculpture in the center of the space that was a tree branch, the timbers of which had been carved into features which caused it to be look like a human hand, holding between its forefinger and index finger an oversized cigarette, lit, and above which, tufts of nylon cushion stuffing were stretched slightly apart to resemble wisps of escaped smoke, then imperceptibly glued to tout lengths of stretched floor-to-ceiling affixed fine-grained fishing line  the illusion created by these small smoke clouds, extended and suspended motionless by their cords, as though they really were the tufted wafts of smoke that might come from a very real death-stick, in a slack-wristed, post-drag, hand with cigarette pose.
   As the blond, curly-haired youth reached for the edge of the cushions and ripped all three of them away, to integrate with the others nearby, (where a hallway door needed to be opened to cope with the overflow from his redirected mass of sixteen people), he yanked at the metal frame of the fold-out bed that rested hidden there, in that innocuous-looking lounge suite, where it became apparent to all cocktail tasting hour occupiers in the room, (unfazed), that there were pillows, a doona, clean sheets... and fresh pillow cases.
   It was all there, ready to go, and as soon as the metal feet had deployed satisfactorily, under gravity, that night, under the moon, he jumbled in and fell, instantaneously soundly asleep, and there he stayed for the rest of the night, as the party went on.
As the party rolled on around him, with people politely resting their derrieres upon the side of the fold out lounge bed in which the quite novel sleeping kid with the blond hair was, at that point in his slumber, currently leaving unoccupied, because he wouldn't know, as he was asleep, and even if awake, it was a party, and he really couldn't complain.
   All the rest of the night, this went on. On a Friday night, in a small, wooden house, distant lights daubed on the other shore below the dark and empty surrounding hills, at the very edge of the vast, deepest of the deep river estuaries, the one that empties into the Antarctic sea, under a moon that rolled the night, likewise, toward another dawn.