Constant - a story about a story told me by a woman called Jenny
Looking out over the ocean you could see the container ships waiting at anchor, their lights glowing in the dark. To see them I had to put my face to the glass and shield my eyes from the light, cupping my hands around my head as if I were a human telescope. No-one seemed to notice me, and I stood for quite some time wondering about the people aboard those ships, and thinking about their lives.
Behind me the Club was full of people playing 2-Up which is illegal for all of the year except the day we commemorate the bloodbath of Australian and New Zealand troops landing in Turkey in 1915. ANZAC day we call it. But I can’t really say I think much about that old war, not with this new one, and for most of us it’s just a holiday and a chance to play 2-Up and gamble legally. In the game you bet on whether two coins will fall as Heads or Tails, and if the coins are split then you can lose your money after a while. I’d already lost all I wanted to, but my boyfriend Nick was still going. I think he said he was ahead, but he might have just been saying that, he doesn’t like losing.
That’s when I came over here to look at the ocean. The ships were a few miles off-shore and there was no swell. They stayed perfectly still on the water. They were constant.
‘Constant’.
It is even hard for me to begin telling you this story. It’s not something that I would ever tell Nick - he’d just walk all over it with his own thoughts and move on to the next thing he had to do. ‘Uh-huh’, he might say, and nod as he walked away. So there wasn’t really any point in telling him, he just wouldn’t understand.
I loved words as a girl. My parents both came from Tonga and they didn’t love words – English words I should add – like I did. At the age of ten or eleven my favourite book was the dictionary. I was an only child so I had heaps of time for myself and I’d spend a lot of it lying on my belly and twisting my feet in the air above me as I read all of these fantastic words. The book was called the Oxford Children’s Dictionary and my all-time favourite word was ‘constant’. I loved the way it lay down - ‘con’ – and then suddenly stood up: ‘stant!’ Blunt and then sharp.
It is hard after all these years to explain why it sounded so romantic, but it did. It certainly did. It was even a bit daunting, like the way that talking to a popular boy was. Anyway, this word ‘constant’ was the word I was in love with. I took it out and turned it over in my mind and it felt like it was made from gold leaf.
My challenge to myself – well, actually it was more of a dream – was to build a story around this word that I loved, but I was intimidated about approaching it with a whole bunch of other words. It took me nearly a year to do it, and I think what frightened me was the thought that if I rounded up a whole lot of unruly words and corralled them together around my ‘constant’ then it might just run away and leave me altogether. So even in all of my practice attempts at writing the story I never involved that word once lest it vanish from me. It would have to be used last, and I would have to be delicate.
Losing this word that I loved was a real fear back then, but not the kind that I could ever explain to Nick now.
Anyway, as I said, it took me most of the year to write that story and I was twelve years old by the time I finally finished it. A lot had already happened in my life while I’d been in love with this word. I had moved between the Primary school and into the High school for example, there had been a lot of arguments at home, and we had moved house a few times. Those kind of things.
I’m sorry that after all of these years I can’t tell you exactly how my story went, but I can tell you that it was about a diver who had been diving all day. That was the key part of it. He had been diving all day from his little boat with only his flags around him for company. In the story he was some distance out to sea and he had only vaguely noticed that the sun had performed a full loop across the sky during the course of his diving to the bottom and coming back up to the surface.
What finally made him realise that the day had lapsed was that he was completely out of energy, he was busted-arse tired. I remember writing that exact expression: ‘busted-arse tired’. Then, with all of his remaining energy the diver lifted himself above the gunwhales of the dinghy and clambered in over the side. He was so tired that he just lay there in exactly the position he had fallen into and did nothing but let the last of the sun warm his skin.
Perhaps you don’t know why I am telling you this story. It doesn’t really matter. No-one seems to be noticing us over here, and it’s a story that I wrote a very long time ago.
It was dark when my story finished.
The diver was still too tired to move. The sun had fallen below the horizon and the night had settled over him. It was very dark and he still hadn’t moved. His body was in the boat, and the boat was in the water being rocked by the gently rocking sea. I don’t know why I am only now telling you that I am speaking of love. I have saved it until now.
The gentle rocking of the sea was constant.
A story for Jenny
