Safety Beach
Jacob Pilkington (Swinburne)
It was May 2020, and I was sick. Yes, that kind of sick. Covid had spread worldwide, and we were prisoners in our own homes. Compulsory masks, curfews, and sickness paranoia—all blocked us from our regular lives. Everything was put on hold. The struggle to live—the struggle for toilet paper—kept us all weary, kept us listening to the news. What began in those cautious first months of the year as a phenomenon now threatened our humanity. A cloud lay over the horizon of our existence. Fear—of premature death, of spreading disease, of killing family members, kept us in line better than any war or presidential election.
I had worked in one of those Covid explosions, a rest home just north of Hawthorn. The usual daily flags, of incontinence or runaway patients at the airport, even natural death, were preceded by the contagion. Ten patients had died. The rest home was shut down. I found that after the compulsory test, I was Covid-positive. It felt as though the worst that ever could happen did happen. Immediately I was a pariah, condemned to private isolation. I decided I would convalesce, if I would survive, at our family summer home, on Safety Beach, on the Mornington Peninsula.
I drove carefully along the teasing highway, conscious that I was becoming sicker, hoping I would not lose consciousness and die in a car accident, a statistic on the evening news. As the night crept over the grey clouds above the endless road, I was stopped and checked out by a wary police officer. I was condemned. In his eyes, I was part of the disease. He regretfully let me pass. I covered my mouth with a mask receiving my McDonald’s meal. This road that had led me on past the city thrust me into a forgotten world of magic and emptiness, where I found myself at the mercy of a sickness, hoping only to survive. The countryside peeled away, and darkness suffocated the horizon. Once on the peninsula, winding roads led to our great nest on the Marine Drive, that looked out at the theatre of Safety Beach, a narrow track of sand with shallow waters and steppingstone waves. I picked the keys from the letterbox my parents had sent via mail, and pulled into memories of youthful holidays, in the enigma of a summer home in rainy winter.
The days ticked by like miles before the border. I had the local Woollies deliver a hamper of supplies. I had no personal contact. Figures from my memories populated the living room of my existence. Old girlfriends I had wronged, disappointed parents, friends that I had not seen since primary school—visited in rotten memories. They haunted me, brought me back with scourge, jangling chains that sounded more like the techno beats of my adolescence. I somehow managed to pull it all away for FaceTime with family, somehow tried to appear normal and not guilty, grateful and not dying. The edge of Covid slammed into me and days passed without my monitoring. The torture thrust me closer to death.
Two weeks in and I was sure I was going to die. Cloudy hallucinations impinged on my days. Old faces like jester masks spoke to me, arguing their many points, telling me I deserved to die. Two hours a day, I felt cognisant of myself, hypothesising that I would somehow be remembered by humanity. The scales tipped and justice beckoned. Was there enough goodness, enough kind intent in my life to justify the continuance of my existence? In lucid moments, I spoke with my family on my laptop. We squared it all away. I would die soon, that was certain.
Desperate and dying, I shed the barrier of my family’s summer home. In a final act, I thrust myself into the night. The sky glared around me as I exited into a crooked side street. Curfew had swept the streets. Locals hid within winking windows that looked out lazy and forgetful side streets and the vacant main road. I stumbled through somebody’s driveway—and their plants—as though breaking through the fever, only to find the beauteous expanse of the beach, and the stepping-stone waves that felt like an oasis from my putrid sickness.
Ahead and over by cliffs that looked out over the mouth of sea, fires blazed. I was not sure whether I was dead, dying, or hallucinating, or drawn into some mystical coincidence. A dying man, I stumbled toward my calling, that flicked with fireflies of cinders and burned like my heart. The blaze burned throughout time. As I dawned over the bonfire, I found a party. Smoky dancers and occupants sitting around the illegal fire. I knew that nobody was coming to enforce the law. Like in times of plague, it was the party at the end of the world.
I squatted around the homey blaze. I noticed the harridan pixies doing their dances. Surf culture crouched around the fire like tribal leaders, passing bottles and joints. It felt as though I had happened onto a symbol of why humanity must be spared. The goodness of men and women was their propensity to celebrate. I was welcomed in, their gifts passed to and through me. Puppets played their guitars, effusing the surroundings with a gypsy patina, playing songs man had propagated since the beginning of his time here.
From the crowd around the fire, bright blue eyes blazed from the shadow. Dark features framed those eyes. She took a drag from the joint and passed it to me.
‘You’re sick,’ she said.
‘I think I’m dying,’ I said back.
‘I know someone who beat the disease.’ Her pupils pierced my own. ‘Come with me. I will save you.’ In a moment she was standing, her hand beckoning like a nightmare.
Staggering to my feet, my hand linked with hers. I noticed her brown face and magical features, noticed the wry smile that played on her lips.
‘Come.’
She led me above the rocks that cradle the point, that stand as a platform over waters. I felt the strength radiating from her. I felt myself growing stronger in the wind. Like the gypsy songs of love, she took me in her arms. She shared herself, in all pity, popping the veins and feeling them splash over her full lips.
The cliff soon fell away. Yet I was not crumpled and broken on the rocks beneath the cliffs—I was flying! In her arms, I investigated the clouds, open to the night, shedding my fever. Space opened about us and we flew through the contours of the sculptured clouds that effloresced in shimmering night.
Flying through shining blackness, I could no longer keep tabs on the world. Flying! The night opened like a flower, and we entered into its heart. Man and city fell alongside and I experienced the revery of one who has lost all sense and embraced magic, while admitting his own madness. All I could manage was a glimpse of her beautiful dark-skinned features, her wild dreadlocks, and her assuring blue eyes.
The surf slammed into my weak legs. We landed on the shore on unknown territory. I felt the hands embrace me. I staggered my steps through the ensuing surf, hand in hand with my love, my saviour. In her arms I could climb to the moon. A bonfire blaze, mirrored on this shore, drew me home. The wild strings of a violin song from magical players, of times lost in fantasy, and worlds dreamed only by the greatest poet.
We trod towards the fire and I was embraced like that of an old friend, invited into the pyrotechnics and given a bottle of strong wine to drink. The music lulled over me like a hanging rainbow. My love smiled confidently and left me with the denizens of the shadow. They passed a bottle of strong wine. But as I drank, the darkness swept away. I noticed the brilliant features of the boys around me, their moonlit skin, their astral eyes. Each time the wine passed to me, I felt closer to them. Their arms ushered me in, promised a home—opened around me like a carnivorous plant. I fell further into their arms, nestled close to their hearts, falling into the tide of limbs, this pulsating and rigorous orgy. I was part of a machine of pleasure. The moon guided us just as it did the sea, into a freedom of touch, of cloying scents and pleasure. Though I had never in my life counted myself so, I was drawn into the flights of men, boys, lost in youth and beauteousness. The crescendo crashed over me, and I felt the agony ebb through my body. Nowhere on Earth could I remember the sickness that had previously desiccated me.
Along the end of tangling, a cold hand gasped for mine. Like a crane, she drew me forth, evicting me, and again I was grateful to be in her arms. She took me up and I faced the moon, a spotlight above us. I felt the ecstasy of her bite, and the jet of warm liquid that left my vein. Her lips were dark ruby. Her smile promised eons of pleasure. Ivory teeth clenched like gates in the gushing of madness. As they parted and drew again, those teeth flushed with inundations of my blood, some ancient sewer system that led from my body into salient vampire connection. Her smile promised death. Her smile promised life.
She let me go and I staggered through the blue-lit beach and back into the tides. Always the tides. I would feel their sojourn. They greeted me and took me in. Waves gathered like a coterie around me, tackled me and knocked me from my feet. I rose to the burgeoning tide, feeling the thrill of night, the reminiscence of water, the well of truth. Then great arms drew me from the water and I felt the wind settle into my wet clothes, and felt the promise of the night.
The smell of smoke drew my attention. Whisps of dead bonfire teased my nostrils. All about me a stroke of crusty sand. Waves kissed my toes and an air of mystery drew me to my feet. Then memory filled me in on what had occurred the previous night. Old machinery raised me to my feet. I realised that blanket of fever had been pulled away. The great weights had been shed. I rose to a blaze of blue and grey, and sordid promise of storm clouds. The houses on the shoulder of Safety Beach were as crows resting on a wire. The new day had come, and I was no longer sick. The death sentence eschewed—and my conscience clean.
It would be another one and half years before the virus could be quelled. Time to sit alone in redress, to stack up food stores and binge-watch television series. Across Melbourne, the most accidental cough could condemn us to paranoia. Explosions of the virus in rest homes, like the one I worked in, took away the aged in storms. The streets of Melbourne were as empty as seventies Doctor Who sets, deserted, banned by what had started as a freak virus. It loomed in impending threat, until vaccinations opened the door back to humanity. It was like we had lived through some invisible war, that we were refugees struggled to reappropriate the norm. Covid-19 tested our constitution, made us feel impending death. It brought paranoia to our daily routine. Finally, the time came to step into the sun. It was as though these forced years of isolation had made us see our true selves, and we were glad to escape them.
I had been saved. Some freak mechanism of bloodlust cleared my body of the virus. I was not altered in any way; I did not feel the thirst for blood, or the burn of day. I returned to our summer home, washed the sheets and sterilised and aired the house, despite the winter cold. In time the memory of her face parted like smoke. The ideas that vampires dwelt on Safety Beach bit me with a slap of realism. Soon I would doubt all that happened as the processing and exfoliation of the virus. They were necessary hallucinations that occurred as my body broke the fever. Still, there are times in my daily routine, whenever I encounter a wave of natty hair, or dark and beauteous looks, they send be back to the crescendo of a violin concerto. The world opens and I see the gift I was given—of knowledge, of beauty, and saving. My gypsy love winks at me through memory, and I think of things that are not recognised by common folk.
Jacob Pilkington is a PhD student at Swinburne, studying the theory of comics. He has published several short horror stories and a long poem and essay in various student and postgrad journals. His area of specialty is comics. He has written and illustrated the Nightwatcher comic from art school (2009) to present. Jacob has created comics for various MA courses and is now working on a twelve-book artefact and exegesis. He has a penchant for both horror films and Gothic and horror stories, both classical and contemporary. He takes inspiration from pulp writers of the thirties, like Robert E. Howard and eighties authors, like Stephen King. While growing up in Melbourne, he has lived overseas in the US for a time. He currently lives and works in Hawthorn.
