Flugelhorn on the Beach
At night the net-lobbers would go out, shine light in the water, and try to attract fish to their nets. They would operate close to the sandy beach, close enough for them to complain about the volume of my flugelhorn. It scares the fish, that was the general consensus. Further down the beach, Barry would be blowing on his euphonium, and this, too, would provoke a fair amount of anger from the net-lobbers. None of them ever remarked that neither Barry or I could play these damn instruments to save our lives. We were amateurs, at best.
Often, as a joke, Barry and I would jam. Well, not jam especially. But he was over a mile away and sometimes the sound of his euphonium would be carried by the tropical breeze and I’d try to join in where I could, but neither of us were proficient enough for it to amount to actual music and it must have sounded the most ungodly row. And the net-lobbers, oh, they didn’t like it at all.
‘You coming back in?’, Martin would say.
Our cabin was a short distance from the high-tide line. Under the palms.
Martin was an artist and his latest picture had been one more of his series of portraits.
‘Who’s that?’, I’d asked.
‘Jim, the bus driver’.
Jim the bus driver was actually called something else, but neither Martin nor I knew what his actual name was, he just looked like a Jim. There’s something terribly craggy about people with one-syllable names.
‘I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a storm tonight’, I said.
It felt humid enough, and the sky was very overcast, grey, threatening. The stars had all gone. I could feel the sweat forming underneath my t-shirt. The humidity was increasing.
‘What do you think of Jim?’, Martin asked.
‘Jim the bus driver, or Jim, the painting of the bus driver?’
I wanted to tell Martin that I’d been seeing someone else but right now the important thing was the portrait, and it really needed to be said that the portrait looked nothing like the actual Jim.
‘It’s a great likeness’.
‘Thanks’.
‘But he doesn’t have a moustache’.
‘Artistic license’.
The first rumble of thunder dragged across from the horizon. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of my face. Every step I took creaked the floor of the wooden cabin. The cabin was a house of perpetual noise. Cracking, groaning. At nights, nuts and branches from the overhanging palm trees would crash on to the corrugated iron roof. Rain sounded like constant gunfire. Martin snored. I could practice on my flugelhorn and jam with the crazy rhythms of nature if I felt so inclined, but I knew that I’d only upset the net-lobbers again. Tonight, it was just the thunder.
‘Who with?’, Martin said, at last.
Like he’d been reading my thoughts.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Who have you been sleeping with?’
Sleeping wasn’t exactly the phrase. It was impossible to sleep in this climate. And it seemed that everyone snored out here, or had corrugated iron roofs and nuts that fell on them in the night.
‘Do you really want me to tell you?’
There was no anger. We had moved to a place beyond anger. Which was nice, because plenty of people had told us that no matter where we moved in the world, we would still be the exact same people.
‘Not really’.
Martin put down his paintbrush and wiped his hands, he then walked over to the finished portraits lined up against the wall. He bent down and flicked through them, letting each one fall forward at just the right speed for me to see all of the faces. And one by one they fell in front of me, local personalities with an expressionless gaze, a superfluous moustache. Tom, Jane, John, Bill. He kept flicking them forward. Tim, Bev, Mark, Steve. Flick flick flick. Doug.
‘Ah’, I said.
‘Doug?’
He left the painting of Doug to face the both of us. Doug with his work overalls and his moustache.
In the distance we could hear Barry playing the euphonium further along the coast.
‘I’ve told him not to play that thing at night’, I said, as we both straightened.
‘Scares the fishes’, Martin said. ‘Or at least, that’s what the net-lobbers reckon’.
‘It’s not that. I just don’t want him to get struck by lightning’.
Martin picked up his paintbrush again and started work on Jim’s sideburns. The thunder was still rumbling away. Heavy fat raindrops began to clatter on the corrugated iron roof.
Flight of the dragonfly 