One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Read online

  I’m no fool, I kept schtum, but time passed and time always drops your guard. Speaking ill of a best friend’s ex-girlfriend is a magic incantation that makes all your worst fears real. Soon he was back together with her. Soon after that they were engaged to be married.

  My partner recommended I say nothing except congratulations.

  “But she’s bad for him,” I said. “I have to let him know what I think, don’t I? I’m his best buddy.”

  Is it possible, she wondered, that I was only this worked up because he’s my last unmarried male friend? And also that I’m making this unnecessarily about me?

  But she was wrong. I had a moral obligation. It was absolutely the right thing to do, plus I’d thought of a good metaphor, and I have an unreasonable faith in the power of a good metaphor.

  This is a lesson I never stop forgetting: I’m never so likely to be wrong as when I’m utterly convinced I’m right.

  “What you are,” I said to Clarence one day, “is one of those climbers going up Everest, who get to the Death Zone where there’s not enough oxygen. Every minute they stay there they become more confused and disoriented and closer to death. They can’t make good choices any more. Their only chance is to turn around and go back to where there’s air, but they can’t see that and just keep going to the top. If their friends don’t turn them around, they’ll surely die. That’s me. I’m that friend. You’re in the Death Zone, buddy. You’re walking the wrong way.”

  He had looked at me a long time then too, in very much the same way he was looking at me now.

  *

  We found a place in town called The Bamboo Deck. There was a string of coloured bulbs with every fourth bulb missing and a big blackboard with a chalk drawing of an eel in a top hat talking to a couple of streetwise flying fish. One fish was offering the other a suspiciously hand-rolled cigarette. It bothered me. I don’t object to fish using recreational drugs; it’s the practical considerations.

  How do they keep the joint burning underwater? How do they even light it? These are the creative problems to which an artist should apply himself if he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life on the south coast drawing sea creatures on chalkboards.

  I had asked Carla our Italian landlady to recommend an operation that would take us out with the sharks, and she’d insisted on an outfit named Sea Safaris.

  “Shall I call Sea Safaris?” said Clarence now.

  “Dunno.”

  “Carla likes them.”

  “Maybe she likes them too much. What if they’re her cousins in the closure business?”

  “They run shark trips. Why would they also be in the closure business?”

  “You think the closure business couldn’t use a boat that goes out to feed the sharks? If I was in the closure business, a shark boat’s the first thing I’d get.”

  “I think we need to find out what the closure business is.”

  “I think we do.”

  That was when we met Captain Spike the one-eyed shark whisperer. He was sitting at the next table cradling a glass of beer like an old doubloon.

  “You guys want to see sharks?” said Captain Spike the one-eyed shark whisperer.

  It’s a slightly misleading name. He didn’t have one eye – or rather, he did, but he had the other one as well. I call him “Captain Spike the one-eyed shark whisperer” because “Captain Spike the shark whisperer with a missing tooth” lacks a certain something. But the “whisperer” part came from him.

  “A shark whisperer has to know his fish,” said Captain Spike, eyeing our beers like a man slowly circling the block for a parking space. “It’s not just currents and chum, you know.”

  No, sure, that made sense, we nodded. Why would it be only currents and chum? Only a greenhorn would think it’s just currents and chum.

  Captain Spike said we’d be wasting our time with Sea Safaris, because there’s only one shark whisperer and he doesn’t work for Sea Safaris. He finished his beer and looked at the glass with some sorrow, as though it was an old friend who hadn’t come to his wedding.

  “Can we buy you a beer, Captain Spike?” I asked.

  He agreed we could.

  Captain Spike told us he’d take us out, and he’d do it for half the price of Sea Safaris because he does it for the love of the ocean, not the tourist buck.

  “The love of the ocean!” I cried. “Yes! You’re a man who follows his passion, Captain Spike.”

  “Argh,” said Captain Spike modestly.

  “You’re the man for us, Captain Spike,” I said, buying him another beer.

  When Captain Spike was in the bathroom, Clarence questioned whether it’s such a good idea to go to sea with the first guy we meet with a boat and a missing tooth.

  “He looks like Robert Shaw in Jaws,” I said.

  “Robert Shaw gets eaten in Jaws,” said Clarence. “And the boat sinks.” We had watched Jaws the previous week, to prepare.

  “But Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider survived!” I pointed out. “We’re Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider!”

  “I’m not Richard Dreyfuss or Roy Scheider,” said Clarence.

  “Look,” I said, “never mind Captain Spike, we’re going on an adventure.”

  “The adventure part is diving with the sharks. The adventure’s not putting our lives in the hands of an old drunk in a beach bar.”

  “He’s not that drunk.”

  “We should call the proper outfit.”

  “You’re talking like a middle-aged man,” I said.

  “I am a middle-aged man,” said Clarence.

  “Not yet.”

  “And you are too.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You know,” said Clarence, “we’re getting older. It’s not the end of the world. Things change. I’m getting married.”

  “You don’t need to, though,” I said. “There’s lots of time left.” He looked at me steadily. “I’m getting married because I want to,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry if it bothers you—”

  “It doesn’t bother me.”

  “I’m sorry if it frightens you.”

  “It doesn’t—” I stopped and ground my teeth and looked away. It’s a hard thing to say when you’re a grown-up, without sounding like a child: Why do things need to change? Things are always changing. Can’t they just stay the same for a bit, before they have to change again?

  “I think we should go with Captain Spike,” I said.

  “I’m not going to change my mind about getting married, if that’s what you’re waiting for,” said Clarence. “This wedding’s happening, buddy.”

  “Captain Spike’s the guy for us.”

  “Jeez,” said Clarence. “Are you sure you’re not having a midlife crisis?”

  *

  The Indian Ocean

  7 a.m.

  We met Captain Spike at the river-mouth lagoon. He was sitting up in the back of the boat, scratching his head like a man who has just woken up in his boat.

  The light was the colour of magnesium filings, and then cigar smoke. The sun came up through the salt haze like an egg sliding up a windowpane on the other side of a net curtain.

  I wasn’t feeling very poetic. I’d had a few drinks the night before, more than I strictly needed, because I figured that’s what Ernest Hemingway would do if he was swimming with sharks in the morning. He never deliberately swam with sharks so I was about to get one up on Ernest Hemingway, but that didn’t make me feel any better. My belly was full of battery acid, soap powder and poisoned eggs. Someone had removed my eyes and replaced them with pineapples.

  We helped push out the boat.

  Captain Spike wore plastic sunglasses and a cap with “STP oil” on the front, and he was still wearing the clothes from last night. As we climbed in he offered us a sip of his beer.

  “Maybe once the sharks come,” we said.

  “Sharks come when they come! Who can summon the sharks?”

  “I thought you can,” said Clarence.

>   “We must answer the call of the far horizon!”

  I liked Captain Spike, but I was starting to wonder about all the empty cans in the bottom of the boat.

  We went out under the bridge into the small choppy waves where the river meets the sea. The grey light made the water violet, but the sun came up further and in the shadow close to the boat the water was deep blue and when you looked straight down it was almost clear.

  It was fun at first, with the fresh air on our faces and the flat sea, but as we went further out the sea stopped being so flat. I began to feel warm in the temples.

  “Can you, uh, can you go a bit slower?”

  Captain Spike looked back from the wheel.

  “Slower?”

  “Maybe to avoid some of the bumps. The, uh, the ups and the, you know, the downs.”

  “You want me to go slower?”

  “No!” yelled Clarence, grinning like a Labrador out a car window. “This is good!”

  This was a nasty side of him I hadn’t seen before. Herman Melville was right: you learn a lot about men when first you go to sea with them.

  Then I noticed something.

  “Captain Spike,” I called. “Where’s the dive gear?”

  “What dive gear?”

  “The stuff we dive with. Tanks and that.”

  “I’m not a dive-master,” he said. “I’m a shark whisperer.”

  “So what do we do when we get the sharks?”

  “You swim,” he said.

  Clarence and I looked at each other.

  Captain Spike cut the engine and we bobbed on the swell. “Is there a problem?” he said.

  There was a problem.

  “I’m not such a good swimmer,” I said.

  Captain Spike looked at me the way no man ever looked at Ernest Hemingway.

  “You dive, don’t you?”

  I do dive, but the whole point of diving is it’s not swimming. You just kind of hang there with your own air and you don’t even have to keep yourself up. It’s the least active sport in the world, including darts. It’s like darts would be if you could lie down and watch someone else throw for you. Diving is really just recreational breathing. It’s one step above taking a bath.

  Swimming’s something else. I’m afraid of swimming and having to keep myself up over deep water. If I don’t have my own air supply, I need to keep within tippy-toes of something solid.

  I might have explained that but the bobbing was making me feel hot and also cold and then hot again. Everything on the inside of me sloshed from left to right, then sloshed slowly back again.

  “It’s okay,” I muttered. “Let’s just go.”

  “Actually,” said Captain Spike, taking another pull of his beer, “right here’s fine. You guys brought your goggles and fins and stuff, didn’t you?”

  As a matter of fact, we hadn’t. Only Clarence had. Mine were still on the backseat of the car.

  “You’ll have to share,” said Captain Spike, dropping anchor.

  “No, it’s okay, you just use them,” I said generously to Clarence.

  “Nope,” said Clarence. “We’re only here because you thought we should dive with sharks before we turn forty …”

  “No,” I tried weakly, “it’s for your wedding …”

  “… so if I’m going in there, you are too.”

  *

  I didn’t think I would feel like this when I turned forty. I wasn’t sure how it would feel. James Bond is just about forty in the books, but I’m not insane; I knew I wouldn’t feel like James Bond. But I also knew I wouldn’t feel like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, with the fences of suburbia closing around me and my own low, keening moan of despair in my ears. I thought there might be some middle place, some satisfactory sense of being grown up. I think I thought I might feel like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird.

  I don’t know if you’ve seen To Kill a Mockingbird, but it has one of the two scenes in movies that always make me cry. (The other is in Casablanca when the French guys in Rick’s Café sing La Marseillaise to drown out the Nazis. Singing is the one thing the French can do heroically.) Gregory Peck was forty-three when he played Atticus Finch, the small-town lawyer in a white Deep South linen suit who in defiance of his community has been defending Tom Robinson, a black man accused on trumped-up charges of raping a white girl in 1930s Alabama. Spoiler alert, but he loses the case, Tom is sentenced to death, and Atticus sits stunned as the courtroom drains of its crowing white spectators.

  Outwardly impassive, a world going on inside, Atticus packs away his papers. The courtroom is empty except for the upper galleries, the section segregated for the black townsfolk. There, no one has moved. They sit in silence as Atticus snaps shut his satchel, squares his shoulders and walks up the aisle to the exit. Then silently, as one, the gallery stands. Atticus’s young daughter Jean Louise, nicknamed Scout, is sitting in the gallery too and she sits in incomprehension, until the Reverend Sykes puts his hand on her shoulder and murmurs, “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passing.”

  If you can watch that scene without making an ugly Claire Danes cry-face then you’re a stronger man than me, or maybe it’s just that you haven’t yet lost your dad. I always thought I’d feel something like Atticus Finch when I was forty: a kind of ideal father, whether I had kids or not. I wouldn’t necessarily be a hero but I’d be courageous and upright and tough, battered by life yet unbowed by defeat. I’d have substance and responsibility and moral courage and basic competence. I would know where the edges of me end and the world begins. I also thought I’d have a nice white linen suit.

  I don’t feel that way. I feel much as I always felt. I’m like a small boy who has been transplanted Freaky Fridayishly into the body of an almost-forty man. Gregory Peck is a sturdy boat on the water and I feel more like its shadow. If ever I were accused of a crime I didn’t commit in a small town in a lynching state, I don’t think I’m the one I would choose to fight for my life.

  My friend Janet recently had a child and doesn’t feel qualified for adulthood either, so she drew up a list of all the things she knows for sure, that she’ll pass on to her daughter one day. She said she found it quite encouraging, that it showed her she’s gathered more wisdom than she’d realised. It has good material on it, like, “The first half of any task is always the hardest” and “No matter how horrible the flight is, that’s never the thing you remember about the holiday.”

  I tried to think of the things I know for sure:

  Be prepared to pay extra for good sunglasses. Also be prepared to lose them.

  People never find jokes about their children funny, even if they laugh at the time.

  If diets worked, there wouldn’t ever be any new ones.

  It’s rare for a married man’s friendship with his single friend to survive unchanged.

  Hats are better than sunblock.

  What a pitiful list.

  It’s not fair: when you’re young you get to have heroes and role models. Men and women turning forty: who is there to tell us how it’s meant to feel? Gywneth Paltrow? Should I be like Gwyneth Paltrow? For better or for worse, I’m not Gwyneth Paltrow.

  *

  Captain Spike prepared to bait. It took some time because between the various steps he would sway a little from side to side with a preoccupied expression, as though he was considering something very interesting in the field of particle physics.

  First he took out a bottle of something called Shot-for-Shot Anchovy Oil. I can think of no human purpose for Shot-for-Shot Anchovy Oil besides spraying over Syrian cities to pacify the rebels. It is the concentrated essence of every nasty thing anyone has ever said on the internet, dissolved in a black fishy catarrh of wickedness. If you squeezed the tar from Satan’s lungs into a sack made of teenage boys, French crotches and decomposing seals, that might resemble the liquid in a bottle of Shot-for-Shot Anchovy Oil.

  I felt the paleness like clingfilm on my face.

  “I think I’ll just … I’ll
just rest my head a little over here,” I said, sliding down onto the floor. My face was resting in a combination of sea water and diesel and some other liquid that made me suspect Captain Spike hadn’t bothered leaving the boat in the night to take his yardarm to the mainsail, but I didn’t care any more. I didn’t care about anything.

  Captain Spike shook frozen sardines from the sack into the perforated drum from inside a washing machine.

  “Get a whiff of that,” he said jovially, trying to put the sack over my head.

  Seasickness works in stages, like grief. First you feel sick. Then you feel worse. Then you find some shred of a reason – I chose vengeance against Captain Spike – to carry on living. Then the swell picks up and even that’s taken away and you renounce all human plans and beg like a wordless animal for the mercy of the marlinspike.

  Captain Spike ladled some kind of rotting mush of mullet into a perforated plastic bucket. He smacked his lips.

  “Mmmm! Two weeks old. Fruity!”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I groaned, and it wasn’t blasphemy, it was more like surrendering to the eternal mystery.

  “Mmm!” said Clarence nudging me with his toe. “Hey? Mmm!”

  They watched with satisfaction while I threw up over the side. Vomiting was the highlight of my day so far.

  “Hey?” said Clarence cruelly. “How’s it going, Ernest Hemingway?”

  Draped over the pontoon like one of Satan’s squeezed-out lungs, I weakly watched as Captain Spike dropped the bucket and a buoy and the drum over the side, all tied together and tethered to the boat. The drum sank till it was just a pale dull disc, like a Disprin at the bottom of a glass.

  Then it started to rain.

  Actually, the rain wasn’t so bad, because it flattened out the sea and turned it silver and pocked it like a dented car bonnet. I might have a chance if the boat would just stop moving, just, even for a minute, if it would just for half a damn second stop moving …

  “How long do we have to wait?”

  “The shark,” said Captain Spike, settling back and pulling his cap over his eyes, “is like a woman.”