George Jeffreys woke up in a sand lagoon

on a Wollongong beach on his back. He had

just relaxed enough to close his eyes, when

a group of holidaymakers grew concerned

above him, debating if he’d died. George

reached warily for a towel and crawled

up onto some rocks to watch his sometime

lover Clare, who sat on a grey shelf.

The foaming lace at her small feet was

the colour of her hair and ghostly skin,

the foaming sea lace like the edge of blood

after a knife goes in.

Clare’s small hands were clasped on

her knees in grey depression, rocking slow

inside the rock’s grey depression. She was

preoccupied with a boarding kennel

in Adelaide that had let the animals die –

by howling dozens, dogs and cats –

in a bushfire, apparently refusing

to evacuate early enough or accept

help in evacuation. She had heard that one

proprietor supposedly heroically on site

was really in America on vacation. George

wanted to warn her that such concern

for animals would completely break her heart, but

knew since she’d killed her siblings in

her childhood that, anyway, her heart

was already completely broken. Instead,

he stumbled over towards her, put his arm

bravely around her shoulders. She was

too polite to show her tension, allowed

again the intrusions of affection. He said,

‘It’s the Holy Holiday again. On the same

principle that Sitwell said that torture

could elicit anything from victims, except

that they hadn’t enjoyed their holidays, people

will do anything if they think that they deserve

a vacation.’ She nodded, “Some owners

of the pets are defending the kennel, because

they left their animals there and don’t

want to admit they took a risk with them.

People do think a holiday is sacred, will

sacrifice anything for it, angrily. Are

you enjoying ours?’ ‘I went to sleep for a second,’

he said, ‘but they thought I was dead. Would

you like to go home?’ He felt such pity

from unpossession that he rephrased the question,

‘Would you like me to take you home?’, but

she continued on the grey subject: ‘Every time

some child dies on a school trip, some

of the other parents defend the school, even

sometimes its parents themselves. Any

institution seems more powerful than

human love or loss.’ George said, ‘But it’s just

what you said: the guilt of careless

delegation. And blurring of ego with

any perpetrator. The remaining children

in Cairns declaring loyalty to Mother.’ ‘Is

your ego’, then she asked him,’still that

badly blurred with mine?’ ‘It never was,’

he answered, ‘or you’d never have accepted.

So if we’re still on holiday, would you like

me to ask Sophie and the baby to come here?’

Sophie was Clare’s friend from Paris, who had

been saved by Clare from a fire and a husband.

The baby was a few years old now, but

would always be The Baby, because

of her infinite mutuality. ‘Yes,of course, but

we’ll all just talk about sieges.’ ‘It seems

a good use for a holiday’, said George.
                            *
Florence on holiday from kindergarten

took everything as seriously as ever, but

had the serious person’s propensity

to shriek with serious joy. George

and her mother Sophie sat on the rocks

– that particularly Wollongong mixture of iron,

sand, anthracite and granite, which Clare

said reminded her of George – while

Florence and Clare ‘wave-danced’, which

meant them holding hands,jumping back

at each roll of a wave, chasing the next

one out while shouting with excited

surprise interspersed with risky

pas de deux worthy of the early

Nureyev and Fonteyn. George watched

and applauded – a function he enjoyed –

thinking the scene had even more beauty

than a lucent Bergman beach, and almost none

of the ominous undercurrents. Sophie

said, ‘So many deaths in Paris and the siege

here, also. I was thinking of you: your quote

from Bevan that the Labour Party has too

much reverence: that you must think the Muslims

have too much reverence, too?’ ‘Reverence,’

agreed George, ‘is a violent emotion. And what

confuses things about Muhammad is that

he was iconoclastic and didn’t want any

portrait of him to be worshipped, but

he also wanted people who disliked him

or his God to be executed.’ Sophie considered,

‘Yes, I suppose if it wasn’t for the latter, one

could say the Charlie Hebdo cartoons would be okay

with him. George affirmed, ‘Yes, because

they aren’t a form of worship.’ Clare was right,

he thought, that Sophie’s face was like

that of Paris Hilton and, he realised

looked therefore like an icon in the Orthodox

Church: the nose slightly curved down, the seemingly

one-dimensional smoothness confident, its depth

suggested by its surface, like a lake. ‘Yes,

like Luther, any prophet might well be afraid

of the power of icons’, said George, ‘as much

as by the power of cartoons, which always seem

too energetic to be sinister.’ Neither Clare

nor the baby looked the slightest bit iconic

as they turned to the rock watchers, faces

as animate as unconditioned kittens. George

knew it had taken Clare three decades

to reach that unconditioning in which

the system one rejects does not dictate

the form of one’s rejection: without this,

that form too often, as she had

told him, was ‘likely to be death.’ All

holidays presuppose too brutal labour, thought

George, and those two faces were too free

consistently to play these mere exceptions,

these holidays for deathly carelessness. Slowly,

and still protesting lack of grace, then he

and Sophie joined them, dancing with the sea.