“Remembering Forget” by Sean Macgillicuddy is a coming-of-age story at once heartbreaking and tender, direct and subtle. The afternoon the narrator meets Forget, the new girl in his best friend Michael’s life, he also begins to understand Michael’s mercurial cruelty.
The toilet block was a red-brick bunker tucked into an overgrown shoulder of bush at the far end of the oval. To this day I remember its smell. And the half-lit cool and the smooth hard floor and the drip-drip-drip of the taps.
It was too far away from the beach to be used and a sense of it, almost a haunted-ness to it, that gave it a little to myth. How once upon a time they found a body there, or someone who’d gone missing there, or someone who got hurt. Parents only added to its intrigue by condemning it as dangerous and therefore out of bounds. Needless to say we ignored them and went there in groups or just Michael and I. Or the strange men who went there alone. With pornos rolled up in their fists or in white plastic bags, which sometimes they’d leave. We’d watch them cross the oval from the carpark or the bus stop looking furtive as they headed towards the block, and wait for them to do what they did. Like treasure, they felt, those magazines, both of us watching the block from afar, until Michael decided to go and we’d set off like pirates or thieves through the cover of bush or like hunters descending on prey.
Inside, as the strip light flickered and the sun cast down through the terracotta vents in the wall, the feeling I had was of entering some kind of sanctum or cavernous den. Michael locked the cubicle door. And we squeezed onto the toilet seat and Michael turned the pages, almost delicate, enthralled by them, in awe. For me, I wasn’t so sure. With their parts on display and the way they were staged and their makeup and hair and their teeth, they weren’t really women but dolls, or so many creatures, dark and grotesque. But the fact that Michael liked them and the fear that we’d be caught and the salt from the sea on our skin, when he asked me if I’d mind I said no, yes, really, of course, why not.
The first time he touched me I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or if it was right. I was limp in his hand, I was shy. But then slowly, the more he caressed me, and told me to spit in the palm of his hand, I stopped thinking and let myself feel all the things I was feeling from what Michael did. He said:
“How did it feel?” as he wiped off his hand.
I said, “Good. It felt nice. It felt… yeah.”
“Y’know women don’t have these. God chopped them off.”
“Liar.”
“It’s true!”
And we laughed. We laughed because he told me that I trembled like a fish. We laughed because the moment was taboo.
* * *
Michael’s father was a landscaper and gardener who installed a little courtyard and a fountain near our pool. Michael sometimes joined him to help. Moving rocks and pushing wheelbarrows of dirt. And I watched from my window upstairs. With his shirt round his waist wiping sweat off his brow and his neck as he drank from the hose. I had never seen a boy my age so masculine and physical, so beautiful to look at, so composed. I knew that he knew who I was and he nodded and smiled if our paths ever crossed, but other than that, for me, too shy to engage him and slightly ashamed, we kept to our sides of the fence.
Until one day on his lunch break he was reading a book, and then later at afternoon tea. It was spring-maybe-summer, hot, and when he knocked off and went home he’d forgotten his book on the wrought iron table and chairs. I didn’t really give it a thought, but after lights out that night, it rained. I found it next morning destroyed on the grass with the pages all swollen and wet. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I hadn’t read the book but I knew it and made it my mission to get it replaced. I remember how he took it, like he knew. How he looked at me and smiled and found the point where he’d left off and creased the corner of the page to mark his spot.
“You read it?” he asked.
“No.”
“It’s good. You read?”
“I do.”
“Like what?”
In retrospect, I’m not sure that I knew him at all, or if Michael was someone to know, or if maybe we weren’t really friends but a series of reckless and volumed events. An expectancy to him, a speed. Every Sunday at the beach or at the shops. And the way he was treated, by women and men, playfully cautious and warm. Like the adult world knew he was up to no good but forgave him because of his looks. And by association maybe, the summer we met, the Sundays after Mass at the beach, I felt what his beauty afforded him, all of the grace it provoked, and the fear. The covenant of beauty and fear.
* * *
Unlike Michael I was governed by a strict set of conditions as to where I went, for how long, and with who. Like Mass every Sunday at 10:00. Michael complained that me going to Mass was a lunatic waste of the day. But then he started showing an interest, and asking me questions about it, and God. So I told him about Genesis and miracles and priests, and told him about Adam and Eve. It surprised me how little he knew. And how keen Michael was to know what happened next or when parts of it didn’t make sense. I don’t know how I thought he’d respond but it made me feel literate and slightly exotic to Michael, and valuable to him, a peer, even though I knew—or later found out—that his worldview was a challenge to my own. Instead of Genesis, Michael thought this: That the universe began from a hot dense speck and then, 13 billion years ago, went bang. And after that expanded out at speeds we can’t imagine and the heat of it, the mess of it, the soup. Then everything started to cool. Then chemicals were made, and atoms were made, and photons broke free and formed light, and this over hundreds of millions of years until gas and dust ground into stars. And after that, planets. And after that, moons. And after that Earth, and then Life. Evolution. I’d never heard anything like it. It was all so incredibly magical, almost adventurous, hearing him talk. And for the first time in my life, I had doubts. Or maybe not doubts, but options, a choice. That God wasn’t all that there was. And even if God was a thing, and what Michael told me was made-up or wrong, he exposed me to a different way of thinking and feeling that God didn’t have to be feared. And believing in God could be playful and also irreverent and open and coy. The way he’d wink at me and touch me, wherever we were—a bus-stop, a milk-bar, the beach—and say, “What would God think about this?”
So this was my illicit introduction to sex, and love perhaps, or something in between. An aberrant folly of youth. But it was more than that. I wanted to be like him and be liked by him and also to be owned by him, whatever Michael said.
But then he met Forget and things changed.
* * *
It was Sunday. I’d just been to Mass. I met him, as always, down at the beach. But Michael that day was abuzz with a kind of erratic and turbulent joy. He ruffled my hair and he pushed me and wrestled my body all over the ground. I said, “Hey!”
“Hey what?”
“You’re hurting me.”
“Don’t be so… Sorry,” he said. We got up. He brushed me down and led us to a table and bench in the shade of a Port Jackson fig. We sat there. We looked at the sea.
“I did it,” he said.
“Did what?”
“You know.” And Michael said what, and with who. Forget. He told me the details. The way that she sounded, the things that she did. There was never any mention of us, or me, or that what she’d done I had done too, or what happened now that he’d been with a girl, in the Biblical sense: to know.
But I didn’t feel equipped to make an argument for us because I didn’t really know what we were. And to defend us, I thought, we needed a name, a thing that we were to the world. So:
“What kind of name is Forget?”
“The kind you remember,” he said, and he winked.
I sat on my hands on the bench for a moment, curling my toes in my thongs, and then got up and made for the carpark and then to the bus stop ignoring his calls. I wasn’t sure—then—what I felt. But I wanted to leave. To be somewhere else. To move. To travel. To hide.
“Where you going?” He stood in my way.
“Home,” I replied.
“Why? You only just got here.”
I tried to get past.
“She’s down here from Coffs.”
“On holidays?”
“Yeah. To visit her dad. Don’t go. She wants to meet you,” he said.
“How come?”
“Why do you think?”
“You told her?”
“No way!”
And a part of me smiled with relief. But following him back to the table and chairs where we sat and we talked and killed time, a part of me also felt sad, or kind of rejected a bit, disowned.
* * *
She was older than us but not much although something about her was noble with age. Or something, the way age appears when you’re young, its certainty, what it can do. First, she kissed Michael’s cheek. It was adult, without any sex to it, almost a handshake or wave from a car. I stood to the side with my arms folded tight at my chest and I waited my turn. To be introduced or greeted or named, the way that you meet someone, how things were done. But Forget wasn’t how things were done. How she turned to me slowly and studied me—just for a moment, the blink of an eye, but with so much commitment and kindness and also intelligence, also respect, like she knew who I was and my place in the world and to smile and make small talk, how come?—it struck me, along with her kiss on his cheek and her black hair that fell to her waist, and her white cotton dress and the beads round her wrist and her not wearing sandals or thongs, this was not kids at the beach.
It turned out her dad was a surfer who lived in a house overlooking the bay. He’d gone out that morning to surf at the point, a long right-hand break with a swell, and she wanted to go out and see him and we could come too if we wanted, our choice. We followed her down to the shore. Forget waded into the water, up to her knees, and we kept to the sand. In the distance, approaching from the rock shelf to the point, some girls from Michael’s school began to wave at him and smile dressed in bikini tops and skirt bottoms and shorts. Forget didn’t see them, or saw them, and chose to ignore them, or just didn’t care, and continued down the beach as we stopped. As always, I was ignored. I didn’t really mind. I stood there. Kind of in awe how he talked to the girls. I had cousins. My parents had friends who had girls. There were girls that I knew from the church. But I didn’t know girls on my own, or girls you could talk to like that on the beach. My attentions drifted off to Forget. Her white cotton dress had been wet by the waves and it clung to her legs and her thighs. I compared her to the girls on the beach. The girls Michael knew from his school or the beach were all pack-like, the way they behaved, the way they were grouped and the way they attacked., while Forget seemed alone, or singular, bright, and the way people stared at her, men.
By the time we caught up she was already out on the rock shelf and crouched at a pool.
“Sorry,” I said, for making her wait. She looked at me and smiled and got up. Michael gazed out at the break. He said:
“Why don’t you go to the rock?”
“How come?”
“I’m going out to the point.”
And before I had a chance to object he had already gone, taken off to the point, to an outcrop the surfers jumped in from to bypass the long paddle out from the beach. There were two of them there, in wetsuits, reading the deep in-and-out of the tide. And when Michael approached they both turned, and nodded, and let him file in at their side.
The rock was like some glacial deposit or a giant tooth of bedrock prised from deep within the earth. It was beautiful to look at and climb. Girlfriends and kids who weren’t surfing would go there to watch and to gossip and smoke. Some forty-odd feet in the air. We found a place to sit near the edge and I smiled at some girls that I knew Michael knew. Friends of the girls from the beach. They didn’t smile back but they leered at me, also they whispered, and one of them laughed. Forget screened the sun with her hand.
“Do you see him?” I asked—her father.
“He must have gone in,” she replied. “Gone home.” She turned round to the girls. “They friends of yours?”
“No.”
“Wave widows. Drive me insane. We’ve got them at home.”
“Coffs Harbour.”
“Yeah. You know it?”
“Just as a place. How long are you here?”
“Not long. Came down for a funeral.”
“Sorry.”
“No need. Friend of my dad’s. Michael says you came here from church.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d never been to church before. Or Mass. It’s long. But interesting, too, like a play. With the costumes and prayers and the incense, all of the things that you say, and the songs. Do you know all the things you have to do, like when to stand up, and kneel, and speak?”
I nodded and smiled. I liked how she talked. I didn’t feel threatened or mocked.
“Do you go because you want to or you’re made to?” she asked.
“Both,” I replied. “I think.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have to, but also I question things.”
“Things about what?”
“God. The church. How everything’s made.” I gestured a bit towards the sea. “Do you believe in God?”
“I don’t know. Sure. Or something, I guess. A force. My dad reckons being a surfer is kind of religious and helps him feel God. Or the whatness, he calls it.”
“The whatness?”
“Yeah. He’s funny like that. Do you surf?”
“No. Do you?”
“I can. But no.”
I looked at her and paused and said, “How come?”
She gently peeled the hem up of her dress and down her side and round her belly was a dull cluster of welts. “Bluebottles,” she said. “A pack of them. Almost nearly killed me.” She let her dress fall. And then drew her knees up to her chest and she looked at the ocean, the surfers, the waves, and told me what happened that day. She’d gone out not wearing a leg rope and when she got dumped by a wave lost her board. No drama, she wasn’t far out, but somehow the current picked up or a rip maybe, dragging her south down the beach on her own. She knew what to do and stayed calm but then noticed, first one, then two, then more, these little blue jellyfish dumplings around her, schooling, and that’s when she stopped. And the bluebottle dumplings closed in. And it felt like a razor-sharp net round her legs and her waist to her neck and her arms. Then nothing, she must have passed out. She was rescued by a man she didn’t know. He took her to a house and gave her something for the pain and let her lie down on a couch that had a view. Of the ocean, the beach, the heads. She stayed there for a time and then she left.
We looked out to sea with our legs up and didn’t say anything, everything stilled. And it felt to me—how to explain this?—all of the ocean and surfers and swimmers and beach and the clouds in the sky and then us, the two of us sat on that rock, this powerful absence of God. That me and Forget were enough. And her showing me where she’d been stung was a kind of unveiling of something, her soul. I thought about the man who took her in. What a stranger he was, no details, no name—the reason she no longer surfed?
“What kind of name is Forget?” I asked her.
“A lot of people think that it’s French. Teachers, you know. Receptionists. Seeing it written. They whisper it out. For-jé,” she said, making a tune of it, lifting the ultima up like a note. “It came from my dad. A statement name. One of his safeguards to make me stand out.”
“Safeguards from what?”
“The mainstream. Or something. Growing up like everyone else.”
“So you live with your mum?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Parents.”
“Siblings?”
“No. What about you?”
“Two brothers.”
“Older or younger?”
“Both. They’re cool.”
“Do they surf?”
“Yeah. The older one, Ben. The younger one, George, he’s four.”
When Michael appeared at the base of the rock and said, “Hey! Let’s eat! I’m starved.”
We didn’t shout back but got up and we walked past the girls who stopped talking and looked at me, like they’d exposed me or seen me exposed: that Forget wasn’t mine but his, was Michael’s, and I was just keeping her warm. I don’t know how to render their glee. It felt like a kind of corrosive, the way that it shrivelled me, made me feel small. And a sense that they knew how I felt. And they fed off it. Swilled on it. Pigged. But then, just before we started the steep climb down, with footholds weathered into the rock, Forget turned around and said:
“Cunts.”
* * *
So we headed to the shops for some food. Michael never asked about her father, which I didn’t understand—had he forgotten? didn’t care? And likewise no mention from her. That she’d looked for him and thought that he’d gone home and how they didn’t really talk, Forget and Michael, or hold hands.
We walked back the way we had come and then cut up the beach to the carpark and road. Through the carefully plotted settlements of towels. With beach bags, paperbacks, people, clothes, and half-buried bottles of cream. First him, Forget, then me. And then this: Without breaking her stride, in one smooth move, one elegant, self-possessed scoop, Forget picked up some sunglasses from somebody’s towel, who’d obviously gone for a swim. I couldn’t believe it. It was one towel of two, so a couple, I thought, and looked around to see where they were. I was sick with the fear we’d be caught, and what that would mean, and who might be called.
But nothing. When we got to the verge with the Port Jackson figs and the families and tables and chairs, no one had raised the alarm, and Michael said:
“Where’d you get those?”
“From the beach.”
They were white-framed Ray-Bans and suited her, made her look famous, like some kind of star. She went to a nearby car, and looked in the window that mirrored her face, and we followed her and stood there, framed by the glass, with her in the middle and us. A picture of friendship, of youth. But underneath—the tension of three. I was jealous of Michael and angry that she was too good for him maybe, or lost on him, that he had tricked her somehow or he’d lied. Even though I knew that he had not. Even though I knew that Michael’s beauty had a value, that it bought him things—the girls down on the beach—I didn’t want Forget to be a thing that he had purchased and would one day throw away a bit like me.
At the far end of the oval past the toilet block and carving through the steep ascent of bushland to the shops, was a manmade hillside of boulders and rocks for the stormwater flow off the street. When it rained, it ran like a waterfall into the concrete canal to the sea, but in summer the flow was a creek. We traced the canal to the hill. And shortly, Michael took off. With a cartwheel here, a thing he saw there, jumping in and out of the canal.
“You got a girlfriend?” she asked me.
“No.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know.”—because I’m with him?
He was swinging a stick with both hands through the air and the whoosh of it gave me a start. Which Michael seemed to sense and honed in.
“What are you two saying?”—now approaching: whoosh.
“Nothing,” she told him.
Whoosh. Then he turned the stick into a sword. With the moves that you make, like fencing, all of that parry and lunge and attack. “En garde,” he said, pointing the stick at my chin.
I flicked it away, I felt bored. Or not really bored but disinterested, also destructive, a rival, and brave. I thought about telling her what we both did, and what he liked doing, and felt. Because that was the level of spite in me, also confusion and feeling left out. When a three-legged dog, a kelpie, that must have been trailing us up from the beach, made itself known with a bark.
“Look at that,” Michael said. “A three-legged dog. Can you fetch? Let’s see. Go fetch!”
He’d snapped off a length of his stick and he hurled it as hard as he could towards the beach. The dog didn’t even look back. “Thought so,” he said. He waved at the air. To shoo it. The dog didn’t budge.
Forget had meanwhile headed off on her own past the toilet block onto the hill, and I followed her, Michael still shooing the dog, like a thing that he couldn’t let go. I didn’t really give it much thought, given his antics so far since we met, when the three-legged dog caught us up with its odd little hop-trot and looked at my face. I smiled, kind of in league with it maybe, collaborative: us against him. Then:
“Hey!” Michael cried out. Forget and I turned. The dog turned, too. We stopped. “It’s not coming up to the shops.” Whoosh. He made for the three-legged dog.
“Leave it,” I said, blocking his path.
“Or what?” Intoned like a threat.
“Or nothing. Just don’t.”
“Just don’t,” Michael said, mocking me, making a face.
He stepped around me towards the dog and I reached for his arm and he looked at my hand then my face. I let go. And we stood there for a moment on the lip of that, this challenge to him physically, some brink of he and I. Then Michael let the stick drop and he came at me, fast, this was not mucking around, and pushed me so hard that I staggered back, fell, and he pounced on me, pinning me down, and then hooked me or turned me or something, a kind of manoeuvre, with me on my knees, and put me in a headlock and squeezed, and all of my blood seemed to rush up my neck.
“It’s all over,” Michael said, a commentator’s voice, a voice like you hear on TV, and counting down me held on the ground. “Ten… nine… seven… six…”
I actually thought I might die. With the sting of the grass and the smell of it, struggling to breathe and unable to fight—or not wanting to fight, crying, maybe not caring or wanting to die. When suddenly, Michael said:
“Ow!”
He fell away, like he’d been pushed, and seemed to be checking his head out for blood. Next to him, the white-framed Ray-Bans with one of the temple-arms slightly askew. She’d thrown them. At Michael. Hard.
I wasn’t quite sure where to look and I sat there in shock for a moment, getting my breath, and noticed the three-legged dog. It was sitting nearby on its haunches and looked almost sad at how things had played out. And that’s when I noticed the bells. Fastened to its collar were three coloured bells and a small metal disc for its name.
“Fucking dog,” Michael said. “You still here?”
“Somebody owns it,” I told him.
“So? Idiot dog, it should be put down.” He looked around for something to throw. Then picked up the Ray-Bans and tossed them but missed and the three-legged dog chewed a paw. Forget headed off to the hill.
“Where you going?” Michael asked her.
“The shops. You said you were hungry.”
“Yeah.” He got up. He looked around his feet for the stick but instead found a rock which he tossed between hands. “Go-orn,” he snarled at the three-legged dog. He threw the rock, clipping its haunch. It rose with a start and backed off a bit, kind of confused about what to do now. I said:
“Michael.”
“What?” He picked up his stick. He pointed the stick at the dog. “I’m not going to tell you again.” Then found what appeared like the edge of a brick. A smashed off corner of brick. Again, I said:
“Michael.”
He didn’t reply. I watched as his body took aim—the tension in the muscles down his arm and legs, the cold determination in his face—and then threw it, the brick, which struck the dog’s head, with a sudden and god-awful crack. It staggered. It started to whimper. And then it slumped over. It didn’t look well. Michael said:
“Serves itself right.”
He turned and walked off. He didn’t look back. And I sat there and watched him, and her, now climbing the rocks in her white cotton dress, and Michael in T-shirt and shorts, and both of them brown, so beautifully brown, and whatever passed between us on the rock and how she’d pussy-whipped those bitches and then rescued me from him, the thing I saw in Michael that I envied and adored I saw in her, a kind of swagger, in Forget. The privilege of beauty and fear. That they could do whatever they liked.
The dog started whining in soft, almost deplorable, sorrowful sobs, and I wondered what he wanted me to do. That leaving me like that, alone with the dog: was he forcing me quietly to choose? Between finding help from someone, an adult, and having to tell them what happened or lie, or going with them to the shops. Between the Christian thing to do and… him.
I left the dog and scrambled up the rocks and found them slouched against a car outside a milk bar we called Joe’s. They never asked me once about the dog. Instead they pushed off from the car and we all went inside and I followed them into a booth, with Michael sat next to Forget, and me sitting opposite, back to the street, and Michael said he wanted a burger and also some chips did I have any cash, and then grinned and unraveled a $20 tucked into his board shorts and smacked the note down, and said food was on him and we ate, and left, and when I got home after 5:00, my mother didn’t say I was late or demand where I’d been and to go to my room, but slowly looked up from her wine and she looked a bit wistful or maybe concerned, or confused by me maybe, like who was this boy, and asked me how was my day. I went to the fridge for some milk and I drank from the carton and told her:
“Fine.”
Sean Macgillicuddy is an emerging writer from unceded Ngunnawal land in Australia. His work has appeared in the anthologies Fibs and Fallen Angels, Sugarmouth, and Island magazine.