Watering the Garden

By Steven Wilson

What do you do when you have to stay at home and not go to work? You try and make all your dreams come true! Doesn’t everyone? So Steven Wilson did what he’d always wanted to do and wrote the collection of short, snapshot stories known as “Watering the Garden.”

Set in and around Newcastle, NSW, Australia, and often using an image as the starting point, the stories are an eclectic mix of characters, situations, and unexpected outcomes: meet Sterling from the Urban Flyers running group, a drug courier dog, an old cowboy living on the coast, a worn out journo typing his final story, and any number of men wondering what to do in chance encounters with an umbrella touting young woman, a large cow named Misty, and a backyard invading small brown chicken.

These stories are full of surprises, meditations on life, and hilarious humour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Mar 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781922368461

Steven Wilson

Steven Wilson is a writer and performer from Newcastle, Australia. He loves people watching, snapping photos and crafting stories about seemingly ordinary people in interesting situations. "Watering the Garden" - a collection of short stories - is his first book. Steven recently completed the podcast “Camino Man” about his time in 2019 walking the Camino del Norte, an old pilgrimage route across northern Spain (you can find it on PodBean and Apple podcasts). He is currently house sitting across Newcastle while working on his next creative ventures: an adaptation of “Camino Man” for the stage, and a drama set in an Australian country town, about two disillusioned young parents who find more than they thought possible when their child goes missing.

Book preview

FLOATING

I’m pretty good at floating. I have been my whole life, ever since I was a child. You simply push off into the water and surrender to where it will take you. It’s like the universe and time itself wraps around you, cocooning you in your own little world.

My favourite place to drift is Merewether Ocean Baths. It’s supposed to be the largest ocean baths in the Southern Hemisphere. I don’t know about that for sure. I heard it somewhere. I think. I just know that on a warm day there is nothing better than to park the car in the top car park on Scenic Drive, walk down the stairs of knowledge (that’s where the old men sit and where the younger more athletic and trim men and women test their fitness by making several ascents at any time of the day) and plunge into the pool, to float my cares away. It’s best to go after the Council workers have cleaned the baths on Thursday and even better when there is a fresh ocean current: the crispness of the water, the tanginess of the salt, and the slight chill always reinvigorates me. It gets the blood pumping. Even the pool itself seems alive, especially if a tiny school of even tinier fish have been flung in by the swell. I don’t float in winter. It’s too cold, for me. I’m not one of the Merewether Mackerels, who I hear only start swimming (swimming without wetsuits) when the air temperature dips. No, I hibernate at home in the warmth of my queen size bed and wait there under the doona until the spring sun entices me out. It’s not the same, but I do sleep more.

It’s summer now. Work has finished for the year and I am on unpaid holidays. That’s what I call it. You have to remind people that as a casual or relief teacher there is really no such thing as paid holidays. So you budget and save throughout the year for those times when there is no work. No work, no money. Summer glides in and you count the coming weeks, you number the days, and you calculate if you have enough funds till you work again. Sometimes that means not doing much. The fat that you’ve built up over the good times is slowly stripped away in the cool waters, just like your bank balance.

So, I get to the baths as often as I can. I’ve even got to know a few of the regulars. There is the swarm of retirees who swim at the same time each day, each with face mask and snorkel intent on maintaining their line across the pool irregardless of the swell, of the sometimes murky water, and of other swimmers. Who has the right of way? They do. Of course. That’s if you see them before you crash into each other. There’s Bob. He used to work at BHP and twenty years later rather than worship at the blast furnace to the great god of iron and steel he prostrates himself to the sun god and dives into the cooling waters of the baths. Then there’s Frank who used to run a newsagency. Not much money in that anymore. Shirley once worked for Centrelink, the federal government social service agency that doesn’t seem to serve anyone these days other than the government. And Anastasia and Angela, my European angels, who must have been real beauties in their time. They still are today, but today is different just as Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale are different, but still stunning. There are too many people. Some I still don’t know, but I wave and smile and ask them about everything and anything before I take the plunge. Sometimes there are some students I’ve taught, some I’m still teaching, and sometimes their parents. The students introduce me to their parents after they’ve been questioned by the same parents wondering why they’re talking to the slightly odd looking, middle-aged man hanging out at the ocean baths in his old school Speedos and talking to young people.

It’s just a mess of people: people of all ages and sizes. That’s what I like about the baths, and what I don’t like about the baths. I can be in the middle of this tangle and be a part of it and not be a part of it. I can talk to people, and not really talk with them. It doesn’t matter what I say. In the end, they leave me alone. They have their lives. I have my life. I don’t really have my life.

It started a long time ago. As a teenager I did my best to do what other people wanted of me. I was a good boy as good boys are. I survived, and survival became habit. It was what others wanted. I found the things that I wanted to do, but didn’t really tell people about them. Well, I didn’t express how much they meant to me. At university, it took a while, but I finally stayed later on campus rather than go home when classes finished and found sex (or did it find me), and love finally. But habits die hard especially when something makes you retreat inside and soon I was back living a double life. Working and married. Working at what I didn’t want to do, doing other women, messing things up, and scared to change it. Floating got me nowhere except for a beautiful child and a busted marriage. I started swimming and repaired ties with his mother. Well, we were adults and adults work things out. Don’t they? We did. We did our best. And the best thing she did for me was to marry a beautiful man. After time I realised I was swimming for my son, and not for me. I was swimming his race, not mine. So when he got older and it got to the time when I should let go, I did. I wanted to meet someone, and I did. It was bliss. I was closer to me than I had ever been or ever realised. Change came – work change, life change, time change – and when change gets overwhelming some habits never change. I got a little lost, started floating, and I lost sight of her, and everything she did for me. Habits pull you back into the shallows. We drifted apart and our big fat love affair ended. I was floating, again, on my own. We would meet again if an eddy brought us closer, I thought. If she thought of me.

I did think of swimming to New Zealand, but I found myself swimming nowhere, stroking away from everything to nothing and losing myself in the deal. So, I’m doing something different tomorrow. I’m going to the beach. I’m going to dive in under the waves and deal with the rips and the sweeps and the currents and catch a wave. Body surf. My good mate has been at me to go to the beach with him, to punch through the waves and sit out the back, past the breakers, right off shore, and catch a wave in, and swim out, and do it again and again until I’m exhausted and lying on the beach and unable to do anything but smile. No more floating. Time to ride those waves.

PATSY

The Urban Flyers was an eclectic group