Breath

Aw, boys, said Eva coming into the room, where the fire smoked away untended. Now you got him going.

  Every day, said Sando, making an elaborate show of ignoring her. Every day, people face down their own fears. They make calculations, bargains with God, strategic manoeuvres. That’s how we first crossed oceans and learnt to fly and split the atom, how we found the nerve to give up on all the old superstitions. Sando gestured grandly at the books against the wall. That’s mankind for you, he said. Our higher side. We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.

  I cleared my throat uncertainly and he looked at me with unexpected fondness.

  But that doesn’t mean you don’t feel fear, he continued. You can’t lie about that. Denying fear, well, that’s . . . unmanly.

  And if you’re a woman? asked Eva.

  We all looked at her blankly.

  I’m sure you mean unworthy, she said.

  Sando blinked. Yeah, he murmured. Dishonourable. Dishonest. Whatever.

  Husband and wife exchanged glances I couldn’t interpret. I sat there trying to take all this in, only faintly consoled by the knowledge that Sando could look at that Polaroid and be afraid like me.

  Of course, he said mischievously, we don’t have to try it on. We could always go back to riding the Point when it’s two foot and sunny. What d’you reckon?

  He looked at us with a kind of comradely warmth that made me want to not disappoint him.

  No harm lookin, I said. I guess.

  Piece a piss, said Loonie.

  We laughed and poked the fire and threw cushions, but underneath all the smiles and cheers I had a sick feeling. This winter I’d seen and done stuff I never could have imagined previously. Things had borne down so quickly on me that it was brain-shaking. For the past few months I’d been an outrider, a trailblazer, and the excitement and strangeness of it had changed me. There was such an intoxicating power to be had from doing things that no one else dared try. But once we started talking about the Nautilus I got the creeping sense that I’d begun something I didn’t know how to finish.

  Storms continued to come late that winter and into spring, but none big or westerly enough to make it worth our while giving the Nautilus a try. On the mildest October swell Sando took us out to reconnoitre the place, and it was everything he said it was. Even though it only humped up and broke intermittently while we were alongside it made me anxious to watch and I can’t say I was heartbroken to be denied the chance to test myself there that year. But without swell I was overtaken by restlessness and by a boredom from which there seemed to be no relief. At school I was in freefall and at home my new lassitude set the oldies on edge. The old girl tried to broach the subject with me but I cut her dead every time. Everything around me seemed so pointless and puny. The locals in the street looked cowed and weak and ordinary. Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room of sleepers. Little wonder my parents seemed so relieved when it came time for school camp.

  Angelus High sent its students to stay at the old quarantine station in the bush at the harbour entrance. You could make it out a mile across the water from town but it seemed more remote than it was. I went without enthusiasm. I had a cold and I suppose in retrospect I was mildly depressed, so it was a surprise to be as struck as I was by the peculiar atmosphere of the place. The settlement itself was little more than a cluster of Victorian barracks and cottages on a patch of level ground beyond the highwater mark. The decommissioned buildings seemed hunkered down, besieged by sky and sea and landscape. The steep isthmus behind them was choked with thickets of coastal heath from which granite tors stood up at mad angles. Every human element, from the slumping rooftops to the sad little graveyard, seemed older and more forlorn than the ancient country beyond. The scrub might have been low and wizened and the stones badly weathered, but after every shower of rain they all shone; they stood up new and fresh, as though they’d only moments ago heaved themselves from the skin of the earth.

  That week I slipped away at every opportunity from whichever character-building group activity we’d been wrangled into, and made my way to the cemetery or the little beach below it. From there I could gaze across to the distant wharf at Angelus whose cranes and silos looked too small to be real. It was like seeing the familiar world at a twofold remove, from another time as much as another direction, for it felt that I was in an outpost of a different era. It wasn’t only the colonial buildings that gave me such a sense, but also the land they were built on. Each headstone and every gnarled grasstree spoke of a past forever present, ever-pressing, and for the first time in my life I began to feel, plain as gravity, not only was life short, but there had been so much of it.

  Queenie found me feverish one afternoon in the old mortuary room. It was a derelict place full of webs and bird nests and flickering shadows and the eeriness of it distracted us from our awkwardness. We stood looking at the raised slab with its gruesome gutters and drains.

  Creepy, she murmured.

  Yeah, I said honking into my handkerchief. And sad.

  All the waiting around they did. The people stuck here. All that sitting around to be declared clean, or whatever. Just to end up on this, some of them.

  I looked at her. She was sucking thoughtfully on a hank of hair and staring at the morgue slab. I’d forgotten how smart she was, how much I liked her.

  You think there’s ghosts? I asked offhandedly.

  Probably.

  You believe all that stuff? I asked, surprised.

  Yes, actually. Out on the farm, she said. Down on our beach, you hear things at night.

  Yeah? I sniggered. What things?

  Well, people’s voices. And whales. You know, singing.

  Well, that’s not ghosts, obviously.

  I don’t know about that, she said. Whales are more or less extinct on this coast.

  I’ve seen whales around.

  Yeah? Alive? How many?

  I shrugged. In truth I could only think of a single sighting since primary school. It was a miserable thought.

  Whale ghosts.

  Go ahead and laugh, she said.

  I laughed. She thumped my arm. My laugh turned into a horrible cough. I was hot and clammy, but I wanted to keep her talking.

  Kind of childish, don’t you think?

  Really? she said bridling. Maybe we’ll see about that.

  It transpired that I was not, after all, immune to a dare. Queenie and I spent the night in a sleeping bag on the mortuary slab. The joint we passed back and forth was damp and so stale it tasted like smouldering compost, which didn’t exactly help my cough. We told each other ghoulish stories and tried to ignore the impossible chill of the channelled block beneath us. All night the corrugated-iron walls warped and flapped in the southerly and I coughed like a wild dog.

  Queenie’s hair crowded the single pillow we shared and despite my cold we kissed with a desperate cheerfulness. Her mouth had the vegetable taste of pot about it but it was soft and warm and I don’t really know if we kissed with any purpose other than warding off the chill and whatever else lurked in the night around us. I was conscious of her limbs against mine but more aware of the cadaver slab against my back and although I felt one of her notable breasts through her woollen jumper we never quite got into the swing of things. Eventually she fell asleep to leave me suspended in a state of excruciating alertness. The hut sighed and moaned. My heart raced. I tried not to cough for fear of waking her. My skin felt too tight and I began to sweat. It was dark in that hut, black as a dog’s guts, and the night got away from me.

  Queenie and I were sent home from camp.

  Three days later I was in hospital in Angelus with pneumonia.

  I only remember the dream.

  I was deep. The whole sea boiled overhead. White streaks of turbulence drove down like tracer fire and rocket trails, a free-fire zone in dim and shuddering green.

  And I’m plummetin
g, a projectile. When it comes rushing at me, black as death, the reef is shot full of holes and I slam into one, headlong.

  Next, I see myself, from outside my flailing, panicked body. Headfirst. Wedged in the rock. While my lungs turn to sponge and the ocean inside me flickers with cruel light.

  Drowning.

  Drowning.

  Fighting it.

  But drowning.

  There was, for a while, I’m certain, a woman at the bedside. I thought it was Eva Sanderson but it was more likely a nurse or my mother or Queenie Cookson. Whoever it was, she held my hand and spoke for a long time. But her words made no more sense than birdsong. And then she was gone.

  I woke up and my parents were in the room, anxious and exhausted, still bearing on their faces the unmistakeable look of disappointment that I was to see again a few weeks later when my school report came home.

  LOONIE QUIT SCHOOL. He was jack of it; he just wanted to go surfing, but his old man was having none of that and he sent him up to the mill. Loonie hated everything about it. My old man said he wouldn’t last a fortnight, said Loonie wouldn’t work in an iron lung, said the kid was lazy and plain dangerous as a result.

  Those summer holidays I went out to Sando’s nearly every day. Eva had gone to the States for a few weeks and with Loonie in the workforce I had Sando to myself. I did more than seize the opportunity; I drank it up.

  On flat-calm days we dived, and if there was the slightest swell we fooled about at the Point with boards he dug out from the far recesses of the undercroft – logs from the sixties, pig-boards and weird, tear-shaped things with psychedelic sprayjobs. There were days when we just hung out, when he’d sit crosslegged on the verandah carving a piece of cypress and I’d watch in silence. That summer he taught me how to play the didjeridu, to sustain the circular breathing necessary to keep up the low, growling drone you could send down the valley from his front steps. The noise of it made the dog go bush. I liked the way it sucked energy from me and drew hard feelings up the way only a good tantrum could when I was little. I blew till I saw stars, till a puddle of drool appeared on the step below or until Sando took the thing off me.

  Sometimes you didn’t bother to engage Sando in conversation. When he got into a mood I left him to his own thoughts and consoled myself down in the roo paddock alone with the didj. For me, Eva’s absence was a boon, but I could see how agitated it often made him. Still, most afternoons he was mellow, even expansive. When he gave you his full attention you could feel yourself quicken, like a tree finding water.

  It was different having Sando to myself. With only the two of us around, the talk got away from swells and surfspots. Sometimes he launched into raves about the Spartans or Gauguin. He told me about Herman Melville in Tahiti and the death of James Cook. When I told him I’d read Jack London and tried Hemingway, he lit up. From his shelves he took down Men and Sharks by Hans Hass, an old hardcover edition with black and white photos.

  Take it, he said, it’s a present.

  He told me about the dolphin meat that Javanese fishermen had given him, how he ate it to avoid insult. He said he would eat human flesh if necessary, but hoped he’d never need to, and this was all he could think of while he ate the dolphin. We talked about the oil crisis, the prospect of nuclear annihilation. He spoke of the survivalists he’d met in Oregon and, speaking of survival, I told him of Loonie’s conviction that during a wipeout he could sieve oxygen from sea-foam, suck it through his teeth to stay alive. We laughed at the loopiness of this, at Loonie’s lovable denseness.

  I basked in Sando’s attention and treasured these brief moments of esteem. Sometimes he hugged me as I left, but more often he sent me on my way with a good-natured whack on the head.

  We were in the kitchen one day, as Sando ground the spices for his special fish curry, when I saw a photo that I’d never noticed before. It hung in a sheoak frame on the dado beside the stove and its glass was speckled with oil stains. The image was a figure in a red snowsuit, a skier more or less upside down against the whiteness of a mountain. In the background were pointed trees like something from a TV Christmas.

  Hey, I said. What’s this?

  Sando paused a moment with the mortar and pestle. The smells of coriander and cumin and turmeric were not the sort of thing that ever came from my mother’s kitchen. My eyes were already itching from the vapour of crushed chillies.

  That, Pikelet, is my wife.

  You’re shittin me.

  I peered closer. Between goggles and hood there was a tuft of blonde hair. Her whole body was inverted, with her skis in the sky and her face tilted toward the ground somewhere below.

  I shit you not.

  Far out!

  Yeah, I guess that about covers it. Pretty heavy-duty, eh.

  How did she do it?

  Off a jump. Big downhill run and up the ramp. Full 360.

  And lands on her feet.

  Well, that’s the plan.

  She’s done it more than once, then?

  Mate, she’s pretty well known. It’s freestyle. It’s a whole other scene. They’re the bad boys and girls of skiing. That’s Utah in ’71. She’s there now.

  Skiing?

  Jesus, no – not with that knee. Nah, they’re trying another operation.

  Ah, I murmured, beginning to see.

  She’s been out three years now. More.

  I thought about the pills, the limp, those bleak moods.

  She’s had other operations?

  Sando nodded grimly.

  Maybe this time it’ll work.

  Yeah, but it’s a long shot.

  There’s no snow here, I murmured. How can she stand it?

  Sando rammed the pestle against the grist of spices. I rested my chin on the benchtop and I could feel the force of his arms pulsing in the wood.

  I think she prefers it here. I mean, if you couldn’t surf anymore, would you want to live by the sea?

  The ocean’s beautiful. That’d be enough for me.

  Bullshit.

  No, really, I said. It’d be enough just to see it.

  Believe me, you’re talkin shit.

  I stood up, stung by his casual certainty. It seems odd to have remembered it but in later life I had cause to recall the moment. I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have.

  Don’t sulk, he said.

  I’m not, I muttered.

  She’s got guts, that girl.

  Yes, I agreed, seeing that I’d underestimated her. Eva’s photo was on the wall but none of him could be shown. I didn’t get it. They had so much in common. She’d been thwarted, but as far as I could tell he’d pretty much walked away. I wondered which had required most guts.

  You’re not from here, I said.

  Nah, Melbourne originally, he said, ignoring my peevish tone.

  So, why here?

  Forest. Empty beaches. Waves nobody’s ridden. Came here in the sixties for a while. Had a hut up there in the trees. I was after something pure, I guess.

  Pure, I said.

  Yeah, I know. Is anything really that pure?

  I shrugged and there was a kind of detente between us again while he ground the spices and heated the skillet and fried them slowly until the house filled with smells enough to nearly lift the place off its poles.

  Loonie was sacked from the mill before he could quit. In the new year his old man told him to get work in Angelus at the cannery or the meatworks, but it was a thirty-mile drive each way and without a driver’s licence there was only the school bus to get him there, so he wound up washing glasses and sweeping up at the pub. He bought an old trail bike and started riding unlicensed out to Sando’s along the back tracks. Whenever he blasted up the drive in a gust of dirt and two-stroke fumes he changed the atmosphere. He came more and more often those holidays and before long my interlude with Sando was over.

  Sando never said a thing about the trip to Indonesia. He certainly didn’t tell me that he planned to t
ake Loonie with him. I didn’t know Loonie even had a passport or how he’d conned his old man into letting him go. Maybe he had something on him; it was the only way I could see him getting his way. I didn’t know a thing. They were just, quite suddenly, gone.

  The dog was left with only a pink dune of dried food and a water bowl replenished by the tap dripping at the watertank, but Sando must have known I’d keep coming out there to check on it. I sat with the dog several days in bitter silence. One afternoon I went out to find that Eva was back. She was on crutches and as pissed off as I’d ever seen her. I asked her what was going on and she called me fifty kinds of fucking bastard and told me to piss off and never come back.

  It took me a week to work up the nerve to go out and claim my board from beneath the Sandersons’ house. I had hoped that Eva might be away again, but when I pushed my bike up into the clearing she was out on the verandah with the dog which barked and came skittering down to see me. She climbed awkwardly to her feet. She wore cut-off Levi’s. Even from down there I could see the colour of her knee.

  I just came for me twin-fin, I said, still clutching the bike.

  There’s coffee, she said.

  Nah. I’ll just get me board.

  Pikelet, you don’t have to take the goddamn board.

  But I’m gunna.

  Oh, whatever, she said, bracing herself against the verandah rail. Look, I’m sorry I chewed you out. It was a shitty thing to do.

  I stood there.

  Come on, have coffee. Peace.

  I hesitated. The breeze had swung onshore anyway and I didn’t really feel like turning around right now to pedal straight back into town. So I relented and went up.

  The house was in disarray with empty plates and mugs and bottles everywhere. The sink looked like a salvage yard and everything stank of garbage and pot.

  Eva’s limp was so painful to see that I went ahead and got the coffee myself. I came back out onto the verandah to sit at a safe distance.

  The other day, she said. I was pretty bummed out. I apologize.