volume one

                                         



I remember those beach towels, the ones you are lying on. Dad’s is horizontal stripes, bright colours alternating with black. Yours is twice the size of his, a beach ‘blanket’, I think you used to call it. I remember you wrapping it around me when I came out from swimming at the beach, and it would be dragging on the ground. You would tuck it in, or maybe it was Dad, and then I couldn’t move my arms or my legs. I was stuck like a sandy towelling skittle, but of course I didn’t mind. It’s still one of my favourite feelings, to be wrapped up in a warm towel like that.

I think this photo was taken on a trip to Greenmount, in Surfers Paradise. I can’t even imagine how beautiful it would have been then, in the late 1960s before the developers rolled in and cast shadows over the sand. In this photo, it’s so white it almost looks like snow. There are three of you in the picture. Your towels are spaced evenly apart so you have colonised a section of beach that would be unheard of these days, at least in the summer when there’s barely more than a foot’s width between the beach umbrellas on any decent stretch of sand. There’s nobody else in the photograph, not even a shadow, and the white glare of the sand surrounds the three of you like a halo. Like you’re the only people on the face of the earth. The man sitting on the left was always known to me as ‘Uncle Gadge’ and I never asked why. When the knowledge was considered somehow necessary, I found out his real name was Gary. I didn’t think it suited him.

There are lots of photos of this trip you and Dad made with Gadge and his wife Doreen. She was obviously the photographer, though you all had a turn because this page of the photo album has four frames with exactly the same set-up, only different people. I can imagine you all taking turns with the camera, maybe a Box Brownie or something a bit more modern. There’s no group shot of the four of you but there you all are on one page. I just have to imagine the four of you sitting there together. The little square photographs are exactly what the Instagram generation tries to recreate - white borders and super-saturated colour with a yellowed veneer of age. There is #nofilter here, just five decades under self-adhesive film. On the facing page of the album, there are more shots of you all at a wooden table that’s covered in empty beer bottles. You are all laughing.

I remember Gadge was always making people laugh, but now I’m not sure if that’s from experience or from my memories of looking at these photos. My favourite when I was a kid is the one of him with a flash bulb from a camera stuck in his belly button. I don’t remember seeing him that much when I was growing up, even though they didn’t live that far away. He and Doreen were my godparents, which explains how close you were to them in 1972 when I was born. Because I have children of my own now, I can see how that would have changed when my sister and I came along. I can see how life and a mortgage and babies and a job can take over from drinking beer around a kitchen table in Greenmount. But I am glad you had those times.

Your hair is peroxide blonde, almost as white as the sand, and I remember you telling me a story about jumping into a super-chlorinated pool and losing your bleached hair in handfuls. You had to have it cut short, which I think makes you look like a model. Maybe it’s also the oversized sunglasses, or the way you’re lying on your beach blanket, in your glamorous bikini, not a care in the world. Dad is in his natural element, leaning back on one elbow and smiling at the camera. His legs are stretched out past the edge of the towel, feet crossed and covered in sand, and he looks as though he’s been lying there for the better part of a lifetime. Maybe just the best part.

You live near a beach like this now, you and Dad. You both seem to be happiest when you are near the water, and you have passed that on to my sister and I. Your grandchildren have all known the joy of sitting on the sand at the water’s edge with you, building sandcastles, or holding your hand and jumping over and into the waves. So much has changed since this photograph was taken, yet so much is still exactly the same.

This golden life you had, newly married and before children, glows back at me from the pages of a discoloured photo album. It is one fleeting moment, captured like a bug in a drop of amber. I turn it over in my hand and hold it up to the light, looking for things that aren’t there. But it is only one scene in one chapter, the first in this album of stories. There will be daughters born, first days of school, a sea change, a cancer diagnosis and a heartwarming recovery before the pages run out. But it’s only volume one, and life is lived in many volumes.