Auditions for Love.Com. Oliver Cross
you can touch, hold and smell which help you to remember the detail about a person which painfully diminishes too quickly upon their passing. The process of grieving combined with the unwanted news from Belinda’s pregnancy was a surreal and numbing experience.
Upon my return to base I threw myself into the course once more. I sincerely think it was the perfect distraction for me at the time as it kept my mind active and my spirits up. As I had missed three days of diving, my sergeant instructed me to report to the jetty at 2100 hours to conduct a ninety minute night dive to increase my hours underwater due to my recent absence. The course is focused around underwater search, rescue, construction and demolitions. My objective for the dive was clear, I was to descend ten meters and commence an underwater construction task. I suited up and had my helmet fitted. Due to the duration, I was not fitted with cylinders but an umbilical cable which attached to my helmet. This carried my oxygen from the surface down to me. This is why trust and procedures are imperative elements to a soldier’s routine. As I launched into the water my body reacted to the icy temperature, with my breath constricted of air momentarily. The August water took the wind out of me as I rapidly descended under the weight of my suit. Diving at night in clear water is similar in a sense to walking at night. It’s not pitch black under there, but ambient light allows you to visualise your surroundings.
When my boots hit the sea bed I remember lurching slowly toward my task and sitting down. It was the first time I had been alone since dad passed. I had not cried throughout the previous three days, but in that moment when I was alone, when time appeared to stop and I was allowed a moment to ponder everything that had so quickly transpired, I cried. I wept in fact, knowing that no one could hear or see me. It was the time I needed to reconcile the death of my father and my pending responsibility to a woman I didn’t love.
In the ensuing days, the news from Belinda was that she wanted an abortion and wanted me to pay for it. Her decision was an overwhelming relief for me and nineteen. I forwarded her the money, as I was still in Sydney on course. From that moment she completely blocked me out of her life. That was the last I ever spoke with her. Over four years later when I was wrapping up my service with the Australian Defence Force, I met a girl at a friend’s party and we got chatting. After an hour and a few drinks we discovered that we both knew of each other through Belinda. This was the other girl Belinda had tried to hook me up with before I left for the dive course. I felt the guilt of what happened encapsulate me. I had locked the memory away and considered it erased from history. Her response nearly threw me backwards off my chair, “Oh my God Oli, Belinda was never pregnant”. “She just needed some quick cash so she played a few guys”. My relief was immediate. I felt no anger, as I already knew she was not an honest person from the short period of time I shared with her. More than anything, I felt relieved that it was all a fabrication. I hope to never endure another week of raw emotional torture like that again. The death of a parent, the physical exhaustion of the army dive course, and an unwanted pregnancy with a woman you would not want as the mother of your children. Consequently, I felt somewhat bitten by the internet dating beast, and thought it best left alone, for the time being anyway.
Chapter 3
Honourable Discharge
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." ~ Oscar Wilde
It was about 3 am that I awoke to the paramedic shaking me. “Oliver, something’s wrong, someone is being sick out there”. I heard it immediately. It was a low and deep drone of moaning, followed by a strained gag and retch. I jumped up fearing something had happened to mum. I scurried out of my room wearing only my briefs, where I saw mum standing over her friend Megan, who was lurched naked in the bath, vomiting and defecating simultaneously.
I didn’t join the army because I was intensely patriotic or idolised the brutality of war. I joined for two reasons. First, like many eighteen year old men, it appeared to be the ultimate physical challenge. I read books like ‘Bravo Two Zero’ which told the story of British SAS soldiers behind enemy lines, cut off from friendly support and having to fend for themselves. One soldier in particular travelled over three hundred kilometers by foot across the Iraqi desert to safety in Syria. It may seem insanely odd, but this excited me. I had total belief in myself and wanted to embrace the challenge. The second reason I joined the army, was because I was a terrible student in high school and didn’t get the marks to go to university. Life works in mysterious ways, because there is no way on earth I had any idea what I was interested in at eighteen, so choosing a degree, without any particular passions or interests, would no doubt have proven fruitless. Only at twenty five was I close to figuring out my interests, and what a life I would have missed out on had I gone straight into another educational institution. It’s true what they say about the armed forces, you learn to live your life by a certain code. Upon entering army recruit training, the intent is to break you. To break down all of those lazy habits you acquire as a teenager. Then, after you have been humbled, they re-build you into a new person, with purpose, structure and discipline.
Loving the army and all its shiny kit is referred to as being ‘green’. After almost five years of service, I lost my ‘green’. I know it sounds odd, but I was disgruntled because I had not been sent on operation. Iraq and Afghanistan were only just heating up in December 2004, and no one from my regiment had yet been deployed. I was sick of training. The analogy commonly used, is that it’s like training for a game of football, but never actually getting to play. It was never going to be a life long career for me as I knew I wanted to travel and study.
After an adventurous and rewarding five years of service, I walked away with lifelong friendships and rich experiences, well equipped for the next chapter of my life abroad. First though, I was to move back in with mum for two months before flying to Thailand to instruct on diving in Koh Tao. The thought had me mildly concerned, because when I left home, mum was very much the typical mother of a teenage boy, angry, moody and a perpetual nag. Upon my homecoming, I was in complete shock, in fact I think we both were. It was as though we did not recognise each other from our former selves. A lot had happened in those five years for the both of us, but what was best of all, was that mum stopped mothering me, no doubt because I no longer required mothering, and we became friends.
I was twenty three and had more energy than a nuclear reactor, so keeping active in a sleepy beach town with no job and no friends was going to be my greatest challenge. Mum had moved interstate since I joined the army so she was all I had in this new beachside paradise. During the day, however, she would go to work leaving me to entertain myself. I fought the notion for a few days, but the boredom got the better of me. Slowly but surely, I was back online seeking company. To my delight, there was an imbalance of opportunity on the Sunshine Coast, favouring the men. There were multiples of women on ICQ, who were fed up with the man drought on the coast and taking matters into their own hands. Within minutes online I started receiving interest. Before long, my stock was in demand. I had about seven different conversations all going on at once, occasionally confusing the wrong conversation with the wrong person, which was never a good look, and generally punishable by instant dismissal from their contact list.
After lying sexually dormant for many years in the army, I felt there was much training needed to catch me up. Mum and I both had our day jobs during this short term stay. She would be off to her gallery from nine until five, and I would have ‘visitors’ from half nine to four in the afternoon. Some women were on holidays, some were single mothers looking for some midday shenanigans but one lady in particular was a paramedic. As these were only casual relationships, I didn’t expose mum to them. The poor thing held me on such a mantel after soldiering so I thought it best to keep her from learning I was becoming a hedonist.
Mum was still in a fragile state following the recent passing of Dad, a few years back. She would rent out her spare room to women about her own age for company and companionship. The woman who occupied the spare room during my brief tenure was Megan. She was a gentle soul and had become a great friend to mum. Like Mum, she too had had a life of hard knocks, which made her both resilient and vulnerable. Megan had been feeling ill, and would stay in her room for most of the day, occasionally venturing upstairs to warm some soup. She rarely slept too. I would awake in the early hours for the bathroom and notice