It had been a beautiful day for the beach at the Sunshine Coast. The weather had been hot, but not oppressively so, and there had been enough of a breeze to keep the air from growing still and muggy, without making the surf rough or kicking up sand.
I went down to Kings Beach for a swim just after lunch. At sixty-seven years of age and with what could be described as a matronly build, I attracted no one's attention. My dyed auburn hair was tied back and I wore the sort of swimsuit that's designed to lift, compress and constrain. Women of a certain vintage know what I'm talking about.
When I had finished in the water, I went and sat on my towel in the sun for a while. The dark blue water and lighter blue skies stretched as far as the eye could see, offset by the brilliant white sand and the brightly coloured outfits of the beachgoers. It's funny how many words there are for the scraps of lycra we wear into the water. Bathers, swimsuits, swimmers, cossies, togs, we all have our preferences, based on regional linguistics, but as I am a Queenslander born and raised, I tend to call them togs. Or swimsuits. Never a cossie, though, and never a bather.
The UV index is high here, and the youngest of children are often almost entirely covered in pink or blue lycra. By three of four years of age, when individuality trumps even the most dedicated of parents, the togs become almost garish. There are lots of licensed swimsuits and bright colours. One young girl, maybe four or five, had a shimmery green-blue outfit that shone brightly in the sun as she darted about the shallows. Another, a boy of roughly the same age, wore a faded Bob the Builder set, no doubt a hand me down from an older sibling.
By their late teens and early twenties, most swimmers wore togs that left little to the imagination and, if they were a woman who had been roughly dumped by an unexpectedly large wave and had her bikini top half torn off, there was precious little that couldn't be seen. People in this age group were typically at the peak of their tiny togs career.
As marriage and children came along and the years ticked by, bringing with them weight and stretchmarks for the women, and weight and extra hair for the men, the clothing again became less showy. The men shifted back to long board shorts which were often worn with a short or long sleeved lycra shirt and a broad brimmed hat.
Their wives and partners were similarly modest; one piece togs with board shorts and streaks of sunscreen, not quite rubbed in, on their faces and arms. That's the lot of a woman with young children, though, isn't it? Never quite enough time to fully attend to themselves as they oversee a husband and offspring. Still, most seemed happy enough, and when their husbands took their children off to the local gelato store, they took the moment not to fix their sunscreen but to lay in the sun and do absolutely nothing.
My husband would never have been thoughtful enough to take the children to get ice-cream, and if he'd caught me lying in the sun he would have lost his temper. Couldn't be a lazy Susan, could we, haha, he'd laugh. I never hated my name until I married George, and I only married the pompous shit because he'd knocked me up, and in those days women didn't have babies out of wedlock. I'd had three choices; risk an illegal abortion, adopt the baby out, or marry George. In hindsight, I should have chosen either of the first two options, irrespective of how impossible those choices might have seemed at the time.
As I pondered the thought of a childfree adult life, I caught sight of a couple in their mid to late thirties walking down the beach. It was the woman that caught my initial attention. She was beautiful; standing five foot eight or thereabouts, voluptuous but not fat, and dressed in a blue and white check swimsuit. The top half of her togs harked back to the style of the nineteen-fifties, but the lower half was more modern; high cut, and showing off well shaped legs. Around her waist was a short, transparent, sarong and on her face were classic black sunglasses. I craned my neck to see her shoes, and saw she was wearing white slip-on sandals. Her hair was dark, her skin lightly tanned, and the sun glinted off the wedding ring she wore on her left hand. She wore no other jewellery, but she'd taken the unusual path of wearing lipstick to the beach, and the ochre stain only made her stand out even more.
As she and her husband wound their way through the crowd to a quiet patch of sand, several people stared at her. She was by no means the most overtly sexy woman on the beach, but her outfit and posture spoke of class.
Her husband - and he was definitely her husband, they were both too relaxed around each other for him to be anything else - was of the same height as her, and slim, bordering on skinny. Unlike her, he blended into the background, wearing green and white board shorts and a black rash shirt. His hair was dark brown, and his skin was the colour of someone who spent their working days outside. A tradesman, perhaps, or a commercial fisherman or farmer. There are plenty of all three in the area; the fisherman at the shore, the tradesmen in town, the farmers in the surrounding rural areas.
I watched as they laid out towels and applied sunscreen. He rubbed the lotion into her back carefully and with practiced skill, and when he was done he leant forward and kissed the back of her neck. She tilted her head back and said something to him which made him laugh. He kissed her again and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her into a tight hug. Love and lust, innocently and publicly displayed in just a few small gestures.
After a while I grew tired of people watching and returned to my apartment for a nap. I've lived here for five years, since shortly after my divorce. On my sixty-first birthday my husband announced he'd found - online, of course - a nice Cambodian woman he wished to marry, and hence a divorce was imperative. George tried his damnest to get his fiancé an Australian visa, but due to his age and reduced finances following the divorce, he found it quite impossible and he now lives in some Cambodian village with her and her family.
I'm not unhappy about the situation. I feel sorry for the poor woman who didn't end up in living the nice life in Australia, as she'd no doubt imagined she would, but on the other hand, if George is in Cambodia it means he's not in Australia, and I think that's of benefit to our entire island continent. We had him for sixty-five years; it's someone else's turn now.
The remainder of the afternoon and the evening passed in it's usual, uneventful fashion. It was past nine at night before I knew it and I was sitting on my balcony quite alone and quite content.
The streets around Kings Beach are filled with apartment buildings of varying vintage and quality, but they all share one feature; a balcony. And what do we each get to view from our balcony? Well, unless you're a local or you've visited Caloundra before, you won't know, so I'll tell you. We get a glimmer of the ocean, and the montage of hundreds of other apartment perches, almost all hosting an outdoor setting, a drying rack, and brightly coloured beach towels that have been hung out to dry.
The detritus of our lives are left out for all to see, but do you know what you don't see on balconies? People. Very rarely do people seem to sit on their balconies, sunning themselves, reading a book or - to use a ghastly word to describe an even ghastlier event -
entertaining
. The later it is in the day, the less likely you are to spot another human being enjoying sitting outdoors, and by night it is quite dead.
As I sat on mine I scanned the nearby the balconies curiously, searching for signs of human life. It was on my second visual sweep that I saw a sliding door on one of the nearby balconies open and from it walked the woman in the old fashioned togs. She was lit up not only by the apartment's exterior light, but by a brighter, more vibrant light attached to the side of our apartment complex.
The woman was only perhaps twenty metres away from me, but while I could clearly see her and her balcony, she would have had to turn to the right and stare quite intently to catch sight of me as my balcony was swathed in darkness, and I was hidden by my collection of small palms.
The woman leant against the balcony railing and did what I had done just minutes earlier; scan the area for other humans. She was still in her togs and I could smell chlorine in the faint evening breeze. She must've just finished a night swim in the complex pool.
I waited for her to go inside, to shower and change, but instead she remained leaning over the balcony in her blue and white swimsuit. Her husband stepped out of the sliding doors and stood alongside her, surveying the view of the other apartment buildings. He was dressed in nothing but his boardshorts, his rash shirt seemingly dispensed of now there was no need for further protection from the sun.
Unlike his wife, he wasn't interested in the scenery so much as he was in having sex. He brushed her wet hair to the side and kissed the back of her neck in exactly the same manner as he had kissed her neck at the beach.
Everyone has that one, instinctive move that they make when they want to be intimate with their partner, don't they? A touch of the hand, a secret smile, a gentle kiss in a special place, all of it conveys a certain private desire that their partner automatically interprets, considers and then either rejects or accepts.
Observe enough couples and you'll know precisely what I mean. You'll start to hold your breath in anticipation, waiting to see if the advance has been positively received. More often than not, sexual activity follows, but on a reasonable number of occasions the advance is rejected.
Sometimes, I understand why the request has been refused; a child has started crying, the partner is a thoroughly repugnant person, or they are tired and sunburned and just want to go to bed. At other times, I see no basis for the rejection, but know that denial has become a common theme in the relationship because the spurned partner will appear so unsurprised by the refusal that you know that this is not the first, second, or third time that they have been knocked back.
The woman in the swimsuit seemingly neither accepted nor declined the invitation to partake in love-making, but instead leant over and whispered something in her husband's ear. An order? A deferral? Whatever it was, he didn't seem offended. Accepting, perhaps. He turned around and went inside, and came back shortly, carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses.
