Misery Beach
The thing about Misery Beach is that it’s beautiful. It’s a beach straight out of guided relaxation exercises and stock photo libraries. So beautiful you almost take it for granted because you’ve seen it before, in your mind, on advertisements, on screen savers. It’s banal, at least at a glance. You know it, even if you don’t.
Five minutes on Misery Beach and my shoulders are already prickling. Twenty minutes, I tell myself. That’s all it takes out here. But still I know I’ll linger, and return burned and branded: someone who didn’t know when to stop, to pull back, to call it a day.
Standing on a warm, flat rock, I pull my phone from my back pocket and take a picture. I send it to you.
‘G’day from Misery Beach.’ Your reply, as always, is instant.
‘It’s beautiful. When are you coming home?’
My home is here, I think. But it’s nice that you assign it elsewhere, orienting it beside your own.
When are you coming home? It’s a familiar question, but one that usually comes from the people here. They ask it whenever I ghost through town for Christmases, birthdays, weddings and the like. They ask it bewildered, arms outstretched, wondering why I’d ever leave such a paradise, as I stand, mute, my return ticket already booked.
Still, even coming from you, the question is hard to answer. I put my phone away, but it buzzes again in my shorts. ‘Why so Miserable?’ you want to know.
As a child, grown men would utter similar words with different motives.
‘What’s your problem, love?’
They’d tell me I’d be more attractive if I smiled. That my frown was ruining my pretty face and what did a little girl have to be miserable about, anyway?
Maybe it was that I knew this was the start of something inevitable. As if there was something about me, coming from me, that made them act the way they did.
My thongs twist beneath my feet as I hop down onto the sand. I kick them off, pick them up and walk on. I won’t let those men ruin this, I won’t let them muddy your words and intentions with theirs.
I focus on what you’re really asking. It’s a good question. When we used to come here in the summers, I would ask my parents how Misery Beach got its name, but they would only shrug. In time, I got used to hearing it and didn’t ask again. It was what it was. Did it really matter, anyway?
Perhaps part of me didn’t want to know. In this country, a name like that could come from many monstrous things. Stinging jellyfish, circling sharks, crushing riptides. A massacre. A prison. A school for stolen children. I walk to the water's edge and pray for jellyfish.
You’d always seemed fascinated by my homeland— all those pretty flowers you cannot touch, the glittering waters you can’t dive into. ‘There’s something almost poetic about it,’ you said. I said the country was just one big prick-tease. I felt weird about saying that afterwards.
I follow the curve of the shoreline towards the lookout, in search of a tourist information board that could answer the question once and for all. But there is no board. There are no tourists.
I tack back up the dunes, through the scrub towards the car park, where a woman in a van is selling fried food and ice-cream. A sandy family sits at a picnic table under a nearby tree, eating chips from a wad of newspaper. I throw my thongs down on the tarmac, slip them on and approach the van, thankful for the shade its canopy offers.
As I pay for my water, I look up at the woman and ask: ‘So why is it called Misery Beach?’ She shrugs and leans down with my change. ‘Dunno, hon.’
‘Kind of ironic though, isn’t it?’ she adds, gesturing with pride at the land like everyone does around here. As if they had something to do with it. As if it belonged to us.
I smile and fish my car keys out of my pocket. My twenty minutes are up. ‘Whaling,’ a voice behind me says.
I turn to see the dad motioning at me with his can of Coke. ‘I’m sorry?’ I say, shielding my eyes with my hand.
‘Whaling,’ he says again, chewing. ‘When the whaling station was in operation, back in the seventies, all the blood and guts would drift down from the station and wash up here. Apparently the whole beach would be bright red and covered in entrails. My old man said the entire fucking town stank like a rotting carcass back then.’
‘Eww’ his kids cry out, squirming in grossed-out delight. Then quieter, behind their fingers: ‘Dad said ‘fuck!’’
‘Right,’ I say, nodding slowly, holding the cool plastic bottle to my cheek. ‘Mystery solved.
Thank you.’
‘No worries,’ he says, saluting me before going back to his chips.
I close my fist around my keys and shuffle back down the dunes, my steps quickening as the momentum pulls me downhill and the sand escapes beneath me. Back on the beach, I watch it turn slick and sticky and crimson. I see pink, pulpy innards thrown callously onto the shore, churning and writhing amid the bloody sea foam.
I’ve always been funny about blood. Or, to be precise, about bleeding. It’s the loss of control that scares me most. Seeing something that should be held inside, that should remain hidden and contained, spilling out for all to see, unstemmed and unstoppable. It frightens me, the idea of your insides betraying you like that, showing the primal, basic reality beneath your so-called pretty face, your learned, forced smile, and all your best intentions. Your life force, once unleashed, becoming your unravelling. Contaminating.
The sun is high and punishing now. My barely-contained blood hammers against its casing, then plunges suddenly away, leaving me blind and buckling as the stench of iron and rot floods my nostrils and a roaring ocean fills my ears. I’m alone on Misery Beach—the only soul who doesn’t know better than to be here at this hour. I reach downwards and crumple slowly onto my knees. I stay like that a while, forehead resting on wet sand, eyes closed, until the world steadies. I cross my legs, drink some water, my eyes still lowered, else I look up and see a bloodbath. With a shaky hand, I take my phone and bury myself in its sedating, virtual world. I open a map and calculate the kilometres between where I am now and where I was just weeks ago, when I inhabited another hemisphere, another season, another life. I imagine a tidal path from there to here, one my criminal ancestors submitted to many years ago. Then I trace it back to London, back to your family home.
I picture her in your living room as you told her. Her face, as the waves we set in motion hit. I wonder if it happened quickly—one destructive swell crashing through the walls. Or if it happened slowly—murky waters seeping under doorways, ruining the carpets, warping the wallpaper, as the flood gently rose around you. I wonder if, even from this distance, the products of my rancid insides—all the things I couldn’t contain—are still staining her shores. And I wonder if you feel tainted too.
‘It’s a long story,’ I type, in response to your question. Then I ask: ‘Are you miserable?’
Again, your reply is instant. ‘Depends. Do you love me?’
And with that, the ocean’s blue again. Slowly, it scrubs the shore. And I know, in time, my wayward tides will retreat, they will gently meet with yours. No longer contaminating, or contained, they will be soothed and soothe alike. And I will remember, that despite all the horror that once washed up on Misery Beach, there lay beneath it something pure. Something that was, and is, and always will be beautiful.
Author: Mia Roberts is an Australian-born, London-based fiction writer and musician. She enjoys writing about distance, control and obsession, sometimes with a satirical slant or a nod to the supernatural. She is currently working on her second novella.
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