Reading Jaws under water.

I can’t - couldn’t then - criticise Jaws, the movie: I never saw it. (Although I doubted a shark could out-fright the feral truck in Spielberg’s first film, Duel. Anyone in the water would disagree, of course.)

But I did read Jaws, the novel, during those strange empty months of winter 1975. I finished it one July afternoon sitting in Centrepoint, a lurid green downstairs bar off Bourke Street. I was waiting for a girlfriend, my fellow back-seat passenger who had escaped uninjured in a car accident a couple of months earlier. She worked in an office building a block away, and I had been in the habit of dropping into Centrepoint before meeting her after work. 

The bar, being downstairs and a shade of green that glowed under artificial light, exuded a weirdly submarine atmosphere. I felt I was swimming through a sea of lime-green nylon carpet, laminex tables and vinyl chairs to get a drink, but maybe that was the book talking. Overhead, a circular drop ceiling simulated an upside down green bandstand. 

I read the last page of Jaws, finished my drink, and ascended the batrachian-hued stairs into a sunlit, very multicoloured 1975. Then I walked up the hill to meet my girlfriend, slightly breathless. I had put that down to a winter cold.