It's Our Birthday
Every year on December 3rd, I revisit the story I wrote for my friend Daryl (1964 - 1994)
Daryl’s birthday is the day after mine, on the fourth of December. He’s one year older than me.
I don’t remember not knowing Daryl. But I do remember when we became friends.
It’s the summer of 1975, and Mum has won a small battle: after years of holidaying in Cowes at the Baptist campground, where Dad finds inspiration amongst the same people he worships with at home, we head west, instead, to Warrnambool for our first non-church, two-week beach holiday.
Towing the rental caravan behind the Valiant, we turn into the Ocean Beach Caravan Park in Warrnambool. Mum and Dad marvel at the park’s one-way sealed road trimmed with smooth concrete gutters. Manicured buffalo lawn blankets the campsites and rows of slender poplar trees create a privacy fence between the holidaymakers.
With the caravan backed into the site, leveled, and the electricity hooked up, Mum and Dad exhale into their holiday.
At ten years old, I’m on holidays, too. I’m in my fairytale bunk bedroom with two sets of bunks at the front of the caravan. An accordion door enchants the room, creating a cocoon of close-to-the-ceiling beds and compartments with thin, sliding doors for my toys and clothes.
Mum comes into the caravan. “I can’t believe Val and Dick Greenman are here,” she says, filling the electric jug in the tiny sink for a cup of tea. She’s pumping the handle at the back of the tap.
“Aunty Val and Uncle Dick” live in Kerang, thirty minutes drive from our farm. They met as young, just-married couples, Val and Dick moving onto a remote farm up the road from ours — remote, as the only access to their house was via dirt tracks: smooth and powdery in the dry months; impassable when it rained.
The two women became close friends. Children arrived at similar times, welding their friendship. And as the men vanished into the landscape each day — often outworking the sun — the women, when free for a cup of tea, chatted over lamingtons, knitting, and the Woman’s Weekly.
Mum plugs in the electric jug and lines up cups and teabags.
“Val’s a miracle, really. She gave birth to three healthy children — amazing, being that crippled.”
“What happened to Aunty Val, Mum?” I ask.
“She had polio as a child; and spent years on her back in a brace. It left her with one leg shorter than the other. That’s why she wears the built-up shoe. She’s got a terrible limp, the poor girl, but is the loveliest person...never complains, never has a harsh word to say about anyone. And when she talks about the kids, she’s so thankful they have ten fingers and ten toes.”
Three children: Mandy, Wayne, and Daryl. Ten fingers and ten toes each.
Wayne and my brother David were close in age. One May holidays, Wayne came to stay with us at the farm. Uncle Dick brought him over, along with a go-cart they’d made together. The two boys tore around the farm on the go-cart, one driving, low to the ground in the adapted tractor seat, the other perched on the roll bar, hovering over the engine in the rear.
David was driving with Wayne on the back, when the cart’s back wheel dropped into a hole, throwing Wayne off balance. He reached down in reflex and the exposed chain chewed off his little finger.
The boys sprinted to the house. “Aunty Ethel! I’ve cut off my finger,” Wayne said, gripping his crimson hand. Mum wrapped a tea towel around his hand and we all jumped in the Valiant, rushing Wayne and his nine fingers to Kerang.
Just a few years later, Aunty Val would go to call him up for breakfast and find his bedroom door hard to open. Pushing her way in, she’d see Wayne slumped over, a pillow covering his face to muffle the fatal gunshot. Mum said it was over a girl and that no girl is ever worth that.
Aunty Val, Uncle Dick, and Daryl arrive at the caravan. We slide along the vinyl bench seat around the fixed pedestal table. Mum puts out homemade slices, biscuits, and cups of tea.
Several days into the holiday, Mum says, “What I love about Val and Dick being here is we’re not in each other’s pockets.”
Daryl and I, however, are inseparable.
Over the next several years, we spend our holidays together in Warrnambool. Daryl and I go to the milk bar in front of the caravan park. We buy Twisties and Cherry Ripes, play billiards, and listen to Rod Stewart’s new song “Do Ya’ Think I’m Sexy?” on the jukebox.
We go to the park’s in-ground trampolines with ten “tramps” side by side and level with the ground. We get good at doing back-drops and belly flops — even somersaults.
But we spend most of our time at the beach. We wrestle our foam surfboards across the busy main road and through the rustic beach-front caravan park to the open surf. We catch waves on our boards and emerge sandy, tumbled, and disoriented then head back for more.
One year, early in the holiday, Daryl and I go shopping — without our parents. I want to buy my first makeup. I ask the chemist lady for bright green eyeshadow and “black stuff” for my eyelashes. Daryl elbows me. “It’s called mascara,” he says. I spend most of my holiday money on my new two-piece Revlon makeup collection.
One year, Daryl doesn’t come to Warrnambool. At fifteen, I find a new group of friends at the caravan park. We all walk to the theatre one night to see a movie. One of the boys holds my hand while we watch the film.
In the following years, I see Daryl once or twice. He works at Hawthorne’s in Kerang, the big department store. He’s in men’s wear, and we’re awkward as we catch up between tables of folded pants and jumpers. Eventually, he gets a job as the store’s window dresser.
One day Mum says that Daryl has broken off with his girlfriend.
“They were quite serious,” she says. “The poor girl’s heartbroken apparently.”
David tells me later that it’s because “Dagwood,” as he calls Daryl, is gay.
It’s the early nineties. I’m married and living in San Diego, California. On a call with Mum, somewhere between talking about the dry weather and the criminal price of tomatoes at IGA, she tells me Daryl is sick. He has AIDS and his partner won’t let Val take care of him.
They call me one day in 1994. They tell me that Daryl’s gone. As I digest his absence, Dad tells me about going to the funeral in Kerang and how nasty Daryl’s partner was; that “they” all just took over the service.
Mum sends me Daryl’s death notice from the Kerang paper. It includes a grainy newspaper photo of Daryl. He’s thirty, and aside from his handlebar mustache, earring, and slimmer face, he looks the same — he’s funny and knock-kneed when he runs. He loves lollies — a lot — and collecting the clear jellyfish on the Warrnambool shore. People say we look like brother and sister, and Mum warns me not to let Daryl ever kiss me. He teaches me to ride his dirt bike, a feisty Suzuki 125, and we tear around the barren lots in Kerang behind his house — one driving, the other on the back — while Mum and Aunty Val have afternoon tea. We walk to the drive-in theater in Kerang and watch “Towering Inferno” from the kiosk while Dad and Mum are at a prayer meeting at the Kerang Baptist church. On the way back, dogs chase us, and we arrive at the house, delirious and panting.
Then there’s a gap, a misty abyss that settles between us. We walk in opposite directions. And all these years later, my memories of our time together are like the snapshots in the photo albums from our holidays in Warrnambool; some are out of focus and some are chopped off.
But when I celebrate my birthday, the same day as Daryl’s in Australia, I remember him without beginning or end. He’s my forever childhood mate.