The Final Prank

“Me ma’s from Darwin. Up there you had to make your own fun.”

That was Reggie’s excuse for every bit of trouble he’d ever got himself into, including the ones where Elaina had found herself mixed up. The last of those, where they’d tried to get old man Lawton’s ’74 Valiant running and move it to the other side of his backyard while he was out of town, had been the last straw for Elaina’s parents. “He’s been getting you in trouble since grade three!” Father had thundered after the cops had delivered her home. “Why do you even want anything to do with him?”

Good question, Elaina admitted now as she lay on the beach at Brighton, gazing up at the clouds. That awful day had been over a year ago. If only she had obeyed Mother and Father then…she forced herself to stop there. The morning’s altercation was over, and Reggie – her first male friend, first boyfriend, first lots-of-things – would get over it. Just as she’d have gotten over losing him last year if she hadn’t kept up the furtive meetings with him.

The biggest cloud in the sky looked like a locomotive. Elaina imagined taking a train to university. A train to Canada – she laughed at the thought, but couldn’t keep the memory of Reggie’s reaction at bay. “Why do you want to study in Canada? You know how cold it is up there? And they’re just as fucked up about guns as we are anymore! The Americans have the right idea, let anybody have one who wants to protect himself.”

“You’ve never fired a gun in your life, Reggie,” Elaina had reminded him as gently as she could.

“My point exactly! If you’ve got to go overseas, go somewhere where I could!”

“Is it you or me who’s going?”

“I could join you!”

Was it power of suggestion, or did the next cloud really look like a tradie’s boot? Reggie was apprenticed to an electrician, and Elaina’s father had taken to joking that he was surprised every morning when he opened the paper and didn’t read about a spate of electrical fires in their suburb. No, she decided, it wasn’t a boot, more like an arrow. Was it pointing to Canada? Not even close, but Elaina reminded herself she wasn’t superstitious.

He did have a point about the cold, Elaina admitted to herself as she sat up and took an indulgent look around the crowded beach and wondered how much snow there was on the ground in Toronto right now. But Elaina had wanted to see the outside world longer than she cared to remember. It was this very strip of beach that had inspired that wanderlust in the first place, she now recalled with a gaze at her favourite of the world-famous bathing boxes – the two-tone purple one – and a memory of when she’d learned they were world-famous.

It was her American pen-pal, Joseph something, who had asked her years ago if they were open to the public. She’d explained in her next letter how, no, they were private property, and enclosed a photograph of herself standing outside that purple box, in a swimsuit for the first time being photographed in one had felt like any big deal. That must have been why she’d been too bashful to ask either of her parents to take the photo.

Reggie had taken it. And naturally he’d encouraged her to “flash a tit at him – at least one!” She hadn’t, of course, but many was the time afterward she’d felt a pleasant tickle knowing somewhere in Indiana there was a picture of her that her parents probably wouldn’t approve of. Reggie had approved, but she hadn’t let him see her out of her swimsuit for another summer or two after that. He was still the only one who had.

Where was that picture now? She hadn’t heard from Joseph in three or four years, but she probably still had his address somewhere. Did he still have it pinned to his wall? Or in a box under his bed with baseball cards and whatever else American boys collected? Giving herself a once-over in her maroon bikini, Elaina wondered just what Joseph looked like in his swimming trunks now, and if he ever thought of her anymore. Indiana was still quite a way from Toronto, but an awful lot closer than it was to Melbourne.

She looked for the locomotive cloud again, and remembered writing to Joseph about how she’d like to come to America and take a train coast to coast. He’d replied with something about how the age of trains was long gone over there, but that beat Reggie’s reaction when she’d told him. “You want to be a hobo? Girls don’t make good hobos, you’d want to stay in a nice hotel in every town, wouldn’t you?”

“Wouldn’t you too?”

“No! I’d want to sleep in a trainyard and eat over a campfire with my buddies and trade war stories, and I’m sorry, babe, but we wouldn’t want you there!”

“I wouldn’t want you making all kinds of trouble anyway, Reg! You’d probably get us kicked back to Australia!”

“So fuckin’ what? Why’d you ever want to go over there anyway? Want to go steal some sodas?”

The last cloud on the horizon over the city looked something like a Coke bottle, only bent over a bit. Elaina chuckled at the resemblance, and reminded herself she really didn’t know if Reggie ever had actually shoplifted anything. He’d bragged about it left or right, but she’d been smart enough never to join him on those particular missions, so she’d never seen him do it. If he had done it, he’d never been caught.

The stories had been such fun to listen to, though, true or not. Was that why she’d never questioned him too much about it? Or did she just not want to know?

Elaina didn’t want to dwell on that. She turned her attention back directly above her, where there was a fluffy number nine – a curved one, not like the carefully straight-line nines Reggie had written in the wet cement outside the bottle shop on the next block over from his house.

“1978-1990” Those enigmatic twelve years were still there, and she’d seen them as recently as last week.

“What happened then?” Elaina had asked him on the night he’d traced the numbers with his fingers when the coast was finally clear. Those years were long before their time, after all.

“Could be anything,” Reggie had said. “That’s what makes it fascinating. Tell me you don’t want to know. A marriage? The life of a child?”

“That’s so morbid, Reg!”

“Exactly! That’s what’ll make people think! All my projects make people think! They have meaning!”

The silly fool had really believed it, too. Just like he had undoubtedly really meant the profanity-laden stream of complaints that morning when she had told him of her plans to go to Canada. All these years she’d known he had no intention of growing up, surely he’d realized she had plans of her own to chase out in the wide world? Well, no, and hadn’t she ought to have seen that all along?

The sun was starting to sink, and Mother and Father would be expecting her home pretty soon. Elaina picked up the lanyard with her car keys and stood up and stretched. She pranced down to the wet sand, reminding herself with every step that it would still be here to visit on holidays. Before frolicking off into the surf, she stooped down in the sand and took a moment to remember what year it was when she and Reggie met. Nine years ago, if she recalled correctly.

She scrawled the two dates, then to now, in the sand, and then splashed off into the waves before she could see them wash the dates away.