Week of Thoughts: Skin

Hallo, I've been doing a bit of non-comedy writing in my spare time, and here is some of it for you lovely subscribers. 

Let me know if it's the kind of thing you'd want more of. If you prefer the comedy style writing, I'm also hoping to do a bit more of that this year - ideally something new every week if inspiration or discipline strikes, and/or maybe the offcuts from Bugle shows. I tend to over-write for the bugle, as we end up getting to only about 2/3 of the stories we intend on addressing any given week.

SKIN

Every year, I would get badly sunburned at the school picnic. My brother, too, but me more. He was more olive and thus more resistant. An unfairness in the distribution of vulnerability even before I knew really what it was to be a girl, rather than just Alice. 

My dad insisted every time, humiliatingly, on covering our faces with white zinc-cream, features erased in the blinding sun. I would run with my white-masked twin into the shallow water at Nielsen Park, also called Shark Beach, its distinctive sand crunching beneath our feet. The sand on Nielsen Park beach is full of half-digested shell fragments; whatever idiosyncrasies of tide and geography play into that shallow bay leaving it a more orange shade of yellow and more thick grained than its neighbours along the Sydney harbour front. Nielsen Park, opening verdantly onto the harbour and a view of the heads, is ringed by thick stakes and the cabled ropes of a shark net; a perfect place to let children swim safely under the killing sun. 

The run from the thick Morton bay figs that ring the harbour’s edge went like this: Cold dirt, tip-toed and spring footed over concrete in the run-up to the hot concrete. Then burning soft staggering sand, dodging towels and families to reach the tectonic safety of wet hard sand, and finally the relief of cool wave-drenched sand-mud, a tempering drenching of our rapidly hardening summer soles. 

We would lunge into the small waves, crystalline salt water running over our zinc-smeared faces; the blue of the sky through the blue of the water; the clean pure sense that any minute now, you would go under and be able to breathe it in.

The annual overdraft on our solar radiation exposure accounts was as inescapable as fate. What, were we to spend an afternoon not washing off our sunscreen and dashing violently back and forth between food and fun, wet and dry, rock and sand and grass and shade and sun? 

The grass behind the Morton Bay Figs, sprawling out in deceptive calm, was a mine-field of caltrops: the bindi-eye seed pods that would burr onto the soles and tender edges of your feet, and accumulate in intolerable pricks. In latin, Soliva Sessilis, it was the nemesis of naked summer freedom. If you sat to brush the prickles off, chances were that you’d sit right in a treacherous patch, so we hopped as we brushed, testing and discarding childhood superstitions about how to run lightly over hazardous ground.

We would swim, and salt encrusted at the end of the day, return home. The car would be hot, and we would be sitting on towels in the car to save the seats, feeling the blushing shame of sunburn rising on our sweat-pricked skin. 

The illicit-feeling of our sanctioned joy came from the knowledge that dad would be disappointed in us for having been burned. It felt like a cruel justice, because we never felt how we could have played more responsibly, with the water right there, sparkling in the sun. Who can remember to reapply responsibly when time tangles itself in waves? 

Dad would look at our red-letter-skin, and shake his head. Put us in a lukewarm shower, refuse to towel us off. We would be slathered, still damp, with the sorbolene cream from the big jar he used for shaving, and plastered into singlets and undies (big bonds cotton white underpants were the uniform undergarment of childhood, back then), and sent to bed. 

The cotton sheets would peel themselves onto to our bodies, still radiating itchy heat, and dad would sit on the edge of one of our beds, and reach across the arm length distance between our single bedframes to pat our faces with gentle patriarchal suppressiveness. He would  tell us how important it was to look after our precious skins. 

The giraffes and elephants of our bedroom curtains looked judgmentally over us,  the solemnity of dad's deep calm voice imbuing everything with the seriousness of his disappointment, and the light from the kitchen made a stripe that would fall down between our beds. 

We didn’t understand, then, but we tried to, because the safety of our bodies to him was his duty, and we could hear the truth in his certainty. 

It’s easier now to think back and know that certainty was also maybe fear. Now, with a little more of the knowing death that comes in pieces later on.

These days, I still forget to wear a hat, and I occasionally get sunburned. Every time, I still get a wash of shame, and the phantom smell of Sorbolene Cream, dad's face and the price of summer mistakes return to me. Worth it, probably.

(as an additional note, this image was taken from Aiden Casey, and the viewpoint is Bottle and Glass, the rock shelf on which my parents were married in 1984)