At Bronte the beach was closed. There was a sign: DANGEROUS CURRENTS. Did I go in? Well, yes. First I went with my mask, snorkel and flippers into the shallow, rock-corralled water down the steel ladder beside the swimming pool. The gap where I would usually slip under broken waves into the open sea is tricky to re-enter when the sea is wild, due to the rip of water pouring back out. The sea was a foaming mess with an occasional majestic wave on which a lone board rider soared away toward Tamarama. The visibility out there would have been very limited, and indeed the tiny gap was hard to see even underwater, so I did not bother, but zoomed around instead in the shallows where it was remarkably clear. Fish come in here to shelter. Two lovely pale sand whiting, curious but reticent, a school of grey-silver bream, a single clean, powerful blackfish or luderick.
I was able to fly close to them and study their details against the sand: the primeval set of their jaws, the expressionless round lenses of their eyes, the beautiful precision of their scales, all slightly magnified. Moss-like algae seemed to be growing on the sand, but some of it was detached, floating close to the bottom, and some grew from rocks that the sand had largely buried. I studied it in moments when the swell was still. It was like a ling or furze: gingery brown patches on clean white sand. The swell would sweep me away and I would use it to swing me back to the same point, the same moment in time, still and calm beneath the stormy day.
Towards the gap through the rocks it was deep enough to dive and travel rapidly along the bottom. I was suddenly conscious of my ease in this medium and excited by the familiarity of my movements, so ancient and deep. The swell, bulging silver through the gap like a great blob of mercury, lifted the sand at intervals. I had to swerve around rock towers looming through the mist. The bright green cauliper – a fairly recent incursion borne on the hulls of ships – strained out from the top of one of these outcrops, over the darker algae that has long been native and the amber kelp that is universal. There is a mystery in these switches of visibility, in the sudden appearance of a fish close to my face, in the sand itself – its writhing mass and whirling grains.
This is as close to my essence as the heather to the essence of a highland Scot. It is from far back in my past, which is renewed here like a paradise regained. Do the lulls and the surges that propel me and make me swerve like an eel connect me to some Polynesian past before my birth? I could not say. In certain actions – swimming, running, swerving, racing a bike, turning a wing nut and releasing the wheel – we lose individuality and become archetypes, though the use of many things – flippers, the snorkel, the scuba tank – are recent in human history. They are learned and absorbed and become part of us in this life, but reach into eternity, through memories of all the times we have done those things. Yet that paradise regained only ever existed at certain moments, in certain hours and days; for our past is also full of pain, humiliation, stupidity and failure. Yet those interludes, those sensations, those immersions in past and present simultaneously, remove all worry, all fear of poverty or death.
The shallows are not my customary realm, yet they have their own powers. It would be hard for a shark to get in here. In such sheltered places, and even diving in The Sea Of Japan where shark attacks seem unknown, we suddenly realise how constant is our automatic alertness in that regard, however long the odds on an attack.
Later, wearing flippers but leaving mask and snorkel behind, I negotiated the rips and cross currents off the beach, carried out quickly and also drifted sideways, and manage to ride only one wave corner in the chaos.
When I was dressed I realised that I had left my money at home. I had a bus ticket but nothing with which to buy the much-desired pie and ginger beer. Here was a wilful abnegation: forget the pie, forget the ginger beer. Absorb, as an ascetic, an aesthete, the evening world. An older man – older even than I am – stood beside me on the promenade, gazing back at the sea, which had changed our metabolism. He too had been in. Two of very few. Our experience was very obscure, but the tradition of the solitary water pilgrim lives on from long before my birth. It is still part of the kaleidoscope of the beach, quite invisible among the sunbathing, socialising, body displays, the children jumping and squealing in the shore break, the boards angling out the back. ‘It’s pretty good,’ I said, nodding toward the water. ‘It’s bloody good!’ he said, lustily. You have heard old men say that, in that tone. Do you know quite what they mean?
I feel so happy now, riding home on the bus, gazing at the curious architecture of which I never tire, that a pretty brown woman, possibly Philippina, keeps looking across at me as if she feels my joy. I catch her two or three times and we both look away; but when she leaves the bus she gives me a warm direct smile. Yes, I am old enough to be her father at least, but for a moment we like each other to the point of love. Through Randwick and along Oxford Street people are eating at outdoor tables. I would like to join them, but to see them is enough. Furthermore, until I arrive home I cannot afford even a pie of a ginger beer.
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