The Infra-Red Scope of Pointlessness.

What makes a man spend his whole life in disguise? I think I know...

You wake suddenly. There is sunlight streaming across the white ceiling in thin strands, like some benign God is poking his fingers through the curtains to nudge you out of your slumber. Your eyes are heavy, and you feel your hair clumped to the side of your face. In another couple of days, you might be ready to rise, but right now it is patently beyond you. That is, until you remember what day it is.

It takes a lot to throw back your heavy winter covers. You are weak, like all the strength you once had in your arms, your shoulders, has been spent. But you move quickly, almost deftly, across the room to the en suite. Passing by the mirror, you smirk. That cheeky grin that has won so many hearts over, broken the barriers between your shyness and someone's inner-world. Yeah, if you could bottle that grin, it would be nutmeg-peach scented and it would never leave your bag. Aphrodisiac in a bottle, kept close at your side. But that isn't possible, and besides, you haven't any need for it now.

None whatsoever.

You use the toilet, wash your hands, splash a little water on your face. You turn on the shower and watch the steam rise to the ceiling in puffs of visible warmth. You imagine them rising like the clouds before a big tornado strikes, but you don't know enough about cumulonimbus and all those other flashy cloud names; nor what takes them from pretty white shapes in the sky to whirling death dervishes across the ground in mere minutes. You can appreciate the awesome power of it, but it never struck you as something worth getting to know more intimately. Oh, no. Intimacy you know. But intimate knowledge? Well, only a few subjects are so close to your heart.

The shower is bliss on your taut body. The needles of water hit your skin like a cathartic massage. You close your eyes, run your hands through your hair and exhale a deep lungful of air. You wash slowly, singing and humming quietly to yourself, then shut the taps off. You step out into the misty bathroom and reach for a towel.

After drying and dressing you fill your bag with necessities: wallet, ID's, bank cards, cell phone. You are wearing comfortable clothes. You have on an old, familiar pair of skate shoes, loosely fitting blue jeans, a tight fitting green t-shirt and a black- and white-striped hoody. No hat today, despite it being colder outside than you thought it might be when you awoke to the Fingers of God across your bedroom ceiling. There are lots of clouds in the blue sky; high up and not particularly menacing. Your thoughts wander back to thoughts of tornadoes, but you shunt them from your mind and think about a kid you had a huge crush on back when you were at school. Wonder what has happened to that kid, and the many others that make up the kaleidoscope of your love life? All those young lovers, full to bursting with lust, or love, or escape written across their faces. Their flawless young bodies, and soft lips. You feel a surge of pride, mixed strangely with regret as you pan across the faces of all those lovers. You have seen the faces they make when they are most disconnected from a cruel world, and most connected to you. You know their true identities.

You wait at the bus-stop for about 15 minutes. The bus is late. A little old lady sparks up a conversation with you, and you talk politely for ten minutes. She is a darling old thing, and she reminds you of your Grandmother. She asks why you're carrying a backpack and a large duffel bag as well. Are you off on holiday? You explain to her that, no, unfortunately you just have work to do. Nothing so exotic is on the cards. As you step onto the bus, pay your fare and take a seat, you look out the window and wave to the old woman. She smiles and waves back, the dear thing.

No one sits beside you the whole trip. You are glad for once in your life that people are so apathetic about public transport. Your duffel bag takes up the whole empty space beside you anyway, but there are always those strange people who decide to sit right next to you when there are empty seats all over the bus. You wonder what it is about you that draws these people to you. Is it some particular look on your face? Maybe it is the clothes you wear, or the way you keep your eyes on the seat in front of you, or on the floor? Who knows. You guess it is one of life's unsolvable mysteries, and chuckle quietly that such trivial matters are so perplexing.

The trip takes half an hour all up. Elderly folk take an age to enter and exit the bus, and you get slightly frustrated before mollifying yourself. There is plenty of time, after all. You get off the bus at the top of the long gravel driveway. You trudge slowly down the hill, looking around at the many play-spots you spent your youthful days gallivanting around. The earthen banks on the hill in the paddock; the swamp across the boundary fence; the toi-toi grass huts you built with your cousins. You smile as you walk down the drive. You are coming home.

You know for sure no one is home. Everyone is at work or school or wherever it is that they spend their lives these days. Everyone has grown up and moved on, or grown old and faded away. But it is still a happy place here. The lives that have passed over the ground here make it almost sacred, though you're not pretentious enough to go elevating it to Holy-Ground status. This is a place of beauty, youth and happiness. It is your entire history, distilled and kept safe on a few square acres of lakeside land.

You walk past the two houses and down the beach toward the lake. You take your shoes and socks off before the sand so you can walk more easily across it. You put your bags down, walk back up to the house and drag a kayak down to the waters-edge. The sun is out now, the clouds almost completely gone. It is hot in your hoody, and you discard it onto the sand alongside your backpack. You load the duffel bag into the kayak, strip off your jeans and push out onto the water. You walk the first ten metres or so, then jump into the kayak and paddle out hard across the water. It is glassy today, no wind. On days like this, when you were a child, you thought it looked as though the whole surface of the lake was hard enough to walk across. You could imagine yourself running, running, across the lake to the island and back before the wind picked up and broke the illusion and you tumbled into the water fully clothed and your Grandmother gave you a growling for getting everything soaking wet.

You paddle out about 250 metres from the shore. You take a small anchor from out of the duffel bag. It has a long piece of rope attached to it. You tie the free end to the bow of the kayak and drop the anchor into the water so the kayak won't float away if the wind picks up. You feel the dull thud of the anchor as it hits the sand far below and yanks the rope tight. It will hold.

With the small anchor taken care of, you lie back on the kayak and stare up at the sky. You watch small birds floating across the the blue blanket above you, still marvelling at the sheer brilliance of flight. You think to yourself, there are some truly beautiful things in this world, kid. Some things delicate enough to crack the hard-hearts of even the most stoic men. Some things so achingly tender that it is not enough to sum them with petty words. Some things so fleetingly brief that it is a wonder they ever passed through your life at all. You weep and weep and weep.

And then it is time. You open the duffel bag and drag out the heavy anchor inside it. It took all your strength to lug it down the driveway, and you had to stop on several occasions to let your muscles regain some strength to make the journey. The length of rope tied to this anchor is only long enough to wrap twice around your midsection. You wrap it and tie a tight sailor's knot that you learned on an Internet site. It is close to 50 kilograms, so you know it is more than enough.

You look back, just once, toward the shore. No one is home. Someone will notice the kayak moored out here, and discover your backpack, jeans and hoody on the sand. You will not have gone far from the kayak. You turn your head upwards to the sky, your eyes directly at the sun. It burns, harsh, and you utter a painful 'Ah, fuck!' before inhaling deeply, and rolling over the side.

Such a calm day today. But the tornadoes are coming; you feel it as you sink to the sandy bottom, watching the fingers of god refract through the murky green water. Such a calm, calm day today.

Who knew?