Niagara

by Paul Goddard

 

Although I was actually born first, by some four minutes, it was my brother Rich who was always mentioned first. I had accepted long ago that this would be the drill for life. Now in our teens, the majority of guys our age were all too obviously works in progress, all erupting skin and warty knees. Rich, on the other hand, was an inhabitant of another world entirely. He glowed with the kind of glossy, inorganic beauty that department store mannequins rarely achieve. Even the tiny freckles sprinkled either side of his compact, sculpted nose looked like they'd been airbrushed on. He was pretty like a girl, but also handsome thanks to his square jaw and stern, far-away eyes. He was like a young Elvis, or Brando, but this time created with more potent, exotic ingredients.

I wondered how I would appear to a stranger passing by as I sat there in my board shorts on my stupidly big beach towel. A slightly sunburnt nerd, I suspected. I squinted my half-Asian, half-almond-shaped eyes against the afternoon sun and attempted once more to spot Rich on the beach.

That day I had developed a theory. It was that, essentially, all we are as a human being is a set of eyes atop a length of wobbly spine. After all, we devote much more brain space to storing and processing visual sensations, when compared to what we set aside for our other flimsy senses. There's even a whole squiggly bit for memorising a lifetime's worth of faces. As I stretched out on my towel, I wondered if there were other grey bits for storing images of killer tits, or really outstanding teeth.

Of course, owning a set of these magic eye gadgets had a down side. While they let us gorge on the eye candy of creation on a daily basis, they also reminded us, all too exactly, of our rank in this well-lit Eden.

It wasn't just that everybody looked more at Rich, although they did do that, it was the effect that Rich had on his audience that I never got completely used to. Somehow people would become like lucky race-goers who had managed to get close enough to the rail to lock eyes with a champion thoroughbred's twitching, nervous pupil as it passed. When people met Rich, I noticed that they always acted as if they had encountered something, rather than just greeted a stranger.

It was generally agreed that Rich looked 'less Asian' than I did. I would always smile to myself when this remark was made. It was as if these people secretly wanted to thank our Chinese mother for holding back enough on the soy sauce during her pregnancy, for only one of us to come out looking chinky. For some reason, girls loved to tell Rich that they had thought that he was part Spanish, or Italian, as if to be mistaken for anything other than what he actually was, was a huge compliment.

I thought that it was funny that Rich had never once mentioned that he was perhaps a little more blessed in the looks department than I. Rich was far too well mannered to expose such a belief, if he indeed held it. He behaved as if he was the son of an aristocratic European family, rather than the son of a suburban real estate agent.

One weekend, years ago, Dad asked us to wash the family's aging diesel Mercedes station wagon. I was feeling sick and uncooperative that day, so Rich did the job by himself. Dad was astounded by the gleaming results of the soap-up and gave Rich a pile of coins for his good work. When Rich went to give me half, I told him that the money was all his. Rich gave me his most awful look. He put the coins on the ground and blasted them down the drain with a jet of water. At the age of ten he had already decided that money was far too common a concern to ever wrinkle his brow.

While Rich was more likely to sigh than laugh at most situations, this wasn't to say that he was without a sense of humour. Recently we'd been forced to attend our cousin Nathan's birthday party. Nathan's major point of interest was that everybody knew that he was gay, except Nathan himself. Even Mum commented that the 'Venetian Masked Ball' theme was an unusual one for a boy's sixteenth birthday party. We agreed to go, but on one condition: there would be no dressing up.

The guests were, without exception, exceedingly plain girls and awkward, lispy boys. Within twenty minutes we had found a secret spot in the garden for a quick smoke. Rich was only a few puffs in, when one of the female clarinet-player types from inside pushed aside the branch of a shrub, so she could offer him a tray of party food. However, when she saw that Rich was smoking a cigarette, her pupils doubled in size in a quarter of a second and she literally swayed back on her feet. She then did the weirdest, funniest thing. She pretended that she hadn't seen us, walked past and then circled back up toward the house at, more or less, a full sprint.

A long, silent moment passed and then Rich turned to me and looked me in the eye. It was Rich who bent over first as he shrieked the most hysterical yelps of laughter I've ever heard. Within seconds, I was a goner too. When the finale occurred - our startled Uncle Ian trotting out toward us holding a torch - Rich actually fell to the ground and started rolling around on the grass.

My lips curled themselves into a little smile at the thought of all of this. Feeling the sun on my back was like discovering a prayer. I loved coming to the beach house. Rich and I had been brought here every summer since we were two years old. Diablo, the Boxer, was buried out the front and Mao, the Siamese, was buried out the back. It was here one day too, a long time ago, that I sucked some of the skin on my arm into my mouth and decided that I tasted like oranges and salt.

Last summer, Mum told me one afternoon that the first time she had seen Marilyn Monroe was in the film Niagara. She thought that she was the most beautiful woman that she'd ever seen, but she was also glad not to be her. I asked her why she had thought this and Mum just smiled and said that I'd understand one day.

When I looked down at my stomach I noticed that I was beginning to colour. I also couldn't help admiring the trail of black hairs that crept up from beneath my waistband and ended at my neat little navel. That year I had begun sprouting forests of hair and new landscapes of muscles had emerged where once there had only been puppy fat.

I had grown a rat's tail that year too. It had been a dangerous, but highly rewarding activity. Guys at school would take enormous pride in keeping their lengths cleverly disguised. Sticky tape would sometimes be used to keep one's rat's tail firmly behind one's collar. With longer hair, it could be kept hidden with the help of a sister's bobby pin. Naturally, the school sergeant banned them.

Traditionally, the school sergeant was a foul tempered, middle-aged ex-military man, who was engaged by the school to maintain discipline. Inevitably, these men were always known as 'Sarge'. 'Rat hunting' had consumed the current Sarge for the last twelve months. From anywhere, and at any time, he would ambush the unsuspecting. He would then roughly weave his stumpy-fingered old hands through boys' hair to detect any illegal growths. If a rat's tail were discovered, he'd swiftly produce an army knife and cut it out. It would then, quite ridiculously, be displayed on a little pin board in front of his office. Even if nobody else could see it, Sarge knew that illegal hair cultivation was a sure step toward recreational heroin use.

It was Sarge's voice I had heard one afternoon a few months ago, when I walked into the swimming pool change rooms. The Edward Davidson Swimming Centre was the most impressive building the school had ever built. Like swimming pool complexes everywhere, it was designed to make you feel as exposed and vulnerable as possible. Its corridors and doorways were wider and taller than necessary so as to allow for more chilling drafts and louder echoes. If boys from my school forever associate a slightly sick feeling with the smell of chlorine, it is thanks to this Alcatraz-inspired aquatic facility. Being forced to swim in an unheated pool in the middle of winter, and shower together with thirty other variously developed adolescent boys, was clearly an important part of the 'personal growth' ethos that the school so prided itself on.

When I walked into the first of the change rooms I heard Sarge's voice coming from the next change room along. He was telling someone what good condition they were in. As I walked past, I took in a sideways glance through the connecting doorway. I saw a naked boy standing with a towel in his hands. Because of his pubescent state his nakedness was somehow heightened. He had a man's flopping private parts, but a boy's delicate hips. It was a body I recognised.

Suddenly, Sarge looked around. I caught it for a second before it changed into something sterner and more usual, but I registered it none the less. It was the look of someone who had been caught out. Sarge turned his head back, but now lowered his eyes from the naked teenager in front of him. Then I heard Rich thank Sarge for the compliment and laugh in the way he did when he was nervous.

I looked up and scanned the beach one more time, but there was still no sign of Rich. Perhaps he'd decided not to meet me after all.

 

This story is copyright to Paul Goddard. It first appeared in Total Cardboard issue 6, www.totalcardboard.com