Breath

  You’ve been in a fight, said the old man at breakfast.

  No, I said.

  Look at you. You may’s well tell me.

  It’s nothin, Dad.

  Face like a bird-pecked apple, said the old girl.

  What the hell d’you get up to? he said with more dismay than anger in his voice.

  I fell on the rocks, I murmured.

  Out the coast?

  Yeah.

  How many times have I told you —

  Tell me about Snowy Muir, I said.

  The old man snatched up his hat and his workbag.

  You never told me the story, I said more gently.

  Some of us have got work to do, he said. He kissed my mother, stuffed his hat on his balding head and made for the door.

  Loonie was outside the butcher shop in the drizzle when I got off the school bus. He had the fading remains of a black eye and his lip was split in a whole new way. I didn’t need to ask. I knew it’d be his old man. Loonie had told him he was going away again.

  You went out to Old Smoky on your own, he said.

  I shrugged and hoisted the bag onto my shoulder.

  Fuck, he murmured. He’s pissed off about the board.

  You broke two already yourself, I said. Anyway, who told you?

  She did.

  Eva? She told you?

  Nah. I heard em bluin and bitchin. She sorta blurted it out. Said you went on your own. And the board’s gone, isn’t it?

  Swam in.

  Fuck.

  Did you do Nautilus? I asked despite myself.

  Man, it was bullshit. I got three. Barrelled every time.

  Him?

  He got one. But he’s fuckin scared of it.

  I blinked at this.

  Old, said Loonie.

  There was something pitiless in his smirk.

  And he’s takin you to Java, I said.

  Who told you that?

  Eva, I said with a hot flash of satisfaction.

  He grunted and rolled himself a fag and I realized that we were no longer friends. At the intersection, where the pub loomed over the servo across the road, we each veered in our own direction without even saying goodbye. Neither of us could have known that we’d never meet again.

  Sando pulled up at the school oval one lunch hour while I was kicking a football with a bunch of kids I barely knew. It was the old sound of the VW that caught my attention. I saw him parked over behind the goalposts but didn’t go across right away. By the time I relented there were only a few minutes before the bell went again.

  He sprawled over the wheel like a bus driver. He had a denim jacket on, and a silk shirt of some kind of shimmering green, and his hair and beard and earrings shone in the early winter light. He raised his eyebrows as if surprised to see me. I stood there in my grisly brown uniform.

  You’re off, then.

  Yeah, he said. Tomorrow.

  I nodded and looked out across the rooftops of Angelus.

  Thought you might come out for a send-off. We don’t see you much anymore.

  I glanced back at the kids punting the pill from pack to pack.

  I can’t, I said. The oldies wouldn’t let me.

  He nodded, scratched in his beard pensively.

  Hey, someone found the yellow Brewer.

  Really?

  Tuna fisherman. Twenty-five mile out, he reckons.

  He give it back?

  Sando nodded. I kept the flood of relief and amazement to myself.

  Eva said you looked pretty shabby when you got back.

  It was big, I said. It’s a tough swim.

  Gutsy effort, he said. All of it. You should know that. It’s right up there.

  I shrugged.

  No, I mean it, Pikelet. Hats off.

  I shoved my hands into my pockets in the effort to resist his approval. There was a long, potent silence between us and then the school bell went. Sando cranked up the Kombi.

  Seeya, then.

  Okay, I said.

  When I got home the yellow Brewer was standing up against the shed with its big black fin jutting out like a crow’s wing.

  He said you could have it, said my mother. The gypsy-looking fella. Said you’d earned it.

  I nodded as I took it down and held it under my arm. It was a beautiful thing, made by a master.

  What job were you doing? she asked.

  The usual, I said. Choppin wood.

  Ah, she said. And I could see how badly she needed to believe it.

  A week or so after Sando and Loonie left, I rode out to the coast in a funk. I was sick of the hangdog looks the oldies were giving me. I was bored and angry – as lonely as I’d been in my life.

  The sea was its usual wintry mess, the beach empty. I didn’t particularly want to see Eva. I half thought she’d be gone anyway, as threatened. There was nowhere else to go.

  The Volkswagen was parked under cover. The dog bounced out to meet me as if it’d been starved of company. I squatted with it for a while, ruffling its ears, basking in its adoration. Maybe it’s an old man’s delusion but it occurs to me now that a dog like that might have been good for me as a teenager. As I hunkered there, scratching the dog’s belly, I thought about taking it for a ramble up the paddocks into the forest, to let it dart in and out of the shadows chasing rabbits while I talked a load of shit to it and got things off my chest. And I wish I had. Instead I went on up the stairs.

  Eva was in the livingroom behind the glass doors. I saw her watching me from where she sprawled on the sofa. She wasn’t quite right, the way she lay with her mouth slightly ajar and her hair mussed. I stood in the cold until she motioned me in.

  The house smelled of woodsmoke and fried bacon and hash. Supertramp played quietly on the stereo. Eva wore old track pants and a Yale tee-shirt with bright yellow stains on it.

  Gonna rain again, she murmured.

  Yeah, I said. Wait five minutes. New weather.

  I been waiting five minutes all my life. Only thing changes is the freakin weather.

  I had nothing to say to this. I was already getting set to leave.

  Pikelet, she said. Where can you get ground turkey in this country?

  Ground what?

  Turkey mincemeat. Where do I go?

  Hell, I muttered. How would I know?

  She snorted as if I was a simpleton, but I’d never heard of people eating minced turkey. At our place we didn’t even have turkey at Christmas – it was no better than roadkill.

  Sit down a minute.

  It’s hot in here, I said, perching beside her on the couch.

  So take off your coat.

  I saw that she had hell’s own blaze going in the hearth.

  Come to that, take off your shirt.

  What?

  You heard me.

  You’re stoned, I said.

  But you want to. You’ll do it anyway.

  I thought about what might happen. It was like being in a shed with Loonie and something sharp. My body thrilled to the danger in the room.

  I began to get up. She grabbed a fistful of my tee-shirt and twisted it with a kind of sneer and I looked at her in confused anger before I shrugged her off. I shucked the shirt anyway and held it gormlessly in my lap. The sneer melted from her face then and she looked almost sad. She touched my belly with her knuckles. There was a kind of disinterest in the way she held them against me and ran them slowly up my chest. I was unprepared for the painful force with which she grabbed my nipple, but she kissed my neck so softly my whole scalp flushed with something like gooseflesh. She kissed me on the neck again and again, unbuckling my Levi’s all the while, and when I came she laughed in my ear like someone who’d won a bet.

  I followed her to the loft. She kicked off her clothes, fell onto the unmade bed and smiled at me with something like tenderness. I felt a great force rising behind me, pressing me on.

  Pikelet, you don’t have to.

  Oh, I said with false brightness. Maybe I do. Maybe I will.

/>   Okay, she said. Now where did I leave those instructions?

  I shoved off my damp jeans and clambered onto the bed and kissed her inexpertly. Eva’s hair was unwashed and her mouth tasted of hash and coffee. Her fingers were stained with turmeric. She smelled of sweat and fried coconut. She was heavier than me, stronger. Her back was broad and her arms solid. There was nothing thin and girly about her. She did not close her eyes. She did not wait for me to figure things out for myself.

  In the afternoon, when we’d eaten her curry and smoked the rest of her hash, she saw me standing in the livingroom, looking at all their stuff. I was stoned and emboldened. I felt older, pleased with myself, and for some reason I was noticing for the first time just how new and choice everything was. One day, I told myself, I want gear like this.

  What? she said, cutting up a grapefruit.

  Nothin.

  Bullshit. You’re thinking where does all the money come from.

  No. Not really.

  Jesus, Pikelet. You’re like a book.

  I shrugged. She was wrong but I didn’t want to look any more stupid than I was.

  It’s a trust account thing. My father’s money.

  For Sando too?

  She smiled. Yeah, him too. But they don’t get along, my dad and him.

  But that’s how he can —

  Surf and travel, yeah. How I could be a skier. Sure.

  I was bombed. I didn’t really know what a trust fund was but I felt the distance it put between us; it was bigger than the gap in our nationalities, even our ages. Money just showing up in a bank account. Without work. I said nothing but Eva must have seen it in my face.

  The big, bad world, Pikelet. It is what it is.

  Wow.

  Guess it’s not fair, but so what.

  I spose.

  Nothing’s fair, Pikelet. Some guys get balled at your age, and others – poor ugly bastards – wait till they’re thirty. I guess we could give it all back. You wanna give up getting laid, in the interests of fairness?

  I shook my head, sheepish.

  Just be nice to me, Pikelet.

  Orright. I am. I mean I will.

  Don’t brag about me, okay? Not to Loonie, not to anyone.

  I wouldn’t, I said with my voice breaking. I promise.

  But even while I stood there I saw the pleasure and complacency leaching from her face. She looked down at the grapefruit as though she couldn’t remember what it was.

  Jesus, she said. Maybe you shouldn’t come out again.

  What?

  It’s not right. It’s not fair on you.

  What if I want to? I asked petulantly.

  Listen, Sando will be back soon.

  I stared at her. How soon?

  The rain’s stopped, she said. Go home.

  I was wired night and day for a week. Before this, beyond the desultory appraisal I gave every female I met, I’d had no particular sexual interest in Eva Sanderson. She wasn’t quite the stuff of my erotic imaginings. True, she was blonde and confident in that special American way but there was nothing Playboy or Hollywood about her. My fantasies lurched from Suzi Quatro to Ali McGraw and back in a moment. The rockin chick, the dark waif. But Eva was stocky and blunt. As a blonde she tended toward the agricultural. She lacked rock-and-roll insouciance on one hand, and on the other she failed to give off the faintest aura of fey sensitivity. If anything she was abrupt and suspicious, handsome rather than pretty. Her limbs were shapely enough though tough and scarred. Yet the idea of her had taken hold. The fact of her body overtook me. Eva was suddenly all I could think about.

  I didn’t ride out there. Nor did I call her from the box outside the pub. I tried to remember every moment: her belly against mine, the briny taste of her skin, the low, incendiary growl she made. For days the sharp smell of her lingered on my hands and every time I yanked myself under the blankets it seemed to return with the heat of my body. I thought about Sando and what a turd I was to have done this. He might be home any day. I felt the impossibility of the situation coming down on me. I’d buggered everything now, lost it all. And yet I thought again of the bitter, smarting sense of rejection I’d been left with. Sando didn’t rate me, didn’t give a shit at all. He’d cut me loose. The yellow Brewer was just a consolation prize. He was never my friend. Eva let it slip more than once – we were there to flatter him, to make him feel important. The guru. So the hell with him.

  At school lunchbreaks I stood in the phone booth beside the basketball courts and stared at Eva’s number etched in blue biro inside my wrist. But I didn’t dial it; I didn’t dare. Maybe she was serious about my never going back. She might be stricken with remorse. Maybe she’d just felt sorry for me, the boy left behind, and taking me to bed had been some stoned moment of kindness she regretted already. God knows, I hadn’t been any good at it. And she could get nasty so quick. If she was off me I should be careful because you never knew what she’d say or do. You couldn’t trust her. But it was torment like this, thinking she’d cut me off cold. I wanted her.

  When I looked at girls now I compared them to Eva – the shape of their legs, the skinniness of their arms, the way they sheltered their breasts with their shoulders. Their perfumes smelt sugary as cordial. I hated all their rattly plastic bangles, and the way they plastered their zits with prosthetic-pink goo and chewed their lips when they thought no one was looking. Unless every single one of them was lying, they were all going out with older blokes, guys with cars and jobs, men who liked their peroxided fringes and bought them stuff. They suddenly looked so . . . ordinary.

  One evening when I thought I heard the chatter of the Volkswagen at the end of the drive, I put down my book and lay very still on the bed. I thought first of Sando, though he’d hardly been gone a fortnight. If it was him, what would he want of me at ten o’clock at night? Unless he knew something. I tried not to think of that, of him here and angry and twice as big as me. Eva wouldn’t drive in to try to see me, would she? With my parents asleep in the house? Waiting for me to come out and down the long drive to meet her by the road? The idea was too crazy, too beautiful, too frightening. I snapped off the bed lamp and after a while the engine noise pulled away. I knew well enough what a VW sounded like. Five minutes, it’d been there. It could have been nothing more than a couple of lost Margaret River hippies consulting their map in the mouth of our driveway. Still, I waited to hear it return, barely moved a limb. At the thought of her waiting out in the Kombi my cock began to ache. And then, through the thin wall, the fridge motor kicked in again and I couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t imagined the entire thing.

  I held off for a whole week. But the next Saturday I rode out in the pelting rain. I felt mad, reckless, doomed.

  The dog announced my arrival. Eva came out onto the verandah and didn’t say hello. She unzipped my sodden jeans with a determination that bordered on violence, and she took me in her mouth while the dog and the swollen estuary and the whole teeming sky seemed to look on. I held her hair and shivered and cried from relief.

  It was over in moments. Eva got up, wiped her face, pulled off the rest of my clothes and took them inside. I followed her to the dryer, saw her sling my stuff in. She wore an old pullover and bellbottom jeans with rainbowcoloured toe-socks. When I reached around to hold her I felt her breasts swinging loose under the wool. The dog sidled in to stare at us.

  Thought I told you to stay away, she said.

  I pressed myself against her so that she could feel I was still hard. She turned and kissed me. Her mouth tasted starchy. She ran her hands down my back and held me by the buttocks.

  Well, she said. Now that you’re here.

  And so began a pattern. Eva always seemed more vindicated than pleased to see me. Sex was a hungry, impatient business, more urgent for the looming possibility of Sando’s unscheduled return. The house had no curtains and few partitions so it was hard not to feel insecure. Sando’s dog was a constant and mostly silent witness; it saw me eager, clumsy, exultant, furtive, an
xious. That Saturday, it followed us up to the bedroom and watched from the corner as Eva lowered herself on me. Rain drummed on the roof. I was trembling.

  You’re scared, she said.

  No.

  Bullshit.

  Just cold, I said.

  That’s okay. Being scared is half the fun. You should know that by now.

  But I wasn’t sure what I knew except that she was silky-hot inside, and strong enough to hold me by the muscles of her pelvis and pin my arms to the bed so that I couldn’t have fought her off if I’d wanted to.

  We stayed in bed all day as the rain fell and the dog sighed disconsolately. Some time in the afternoon I woke, startled to have slept at all. Eva was watching me. She held my cock as though it was a small bird. With her free hand she stroked my cheek.

  I love you, I murmured.

  You love getting laid.

  No, I mean it.

  You don’t know what you mean.

  I lay there, smarting.

  I got a postcard from Thailand, she said.

  Thailand? Sando.

  He’s been in Bangkok.

  The thought of him now was like a blow. Aren’t they in Java? I said, trying to seem breezy.

  Something about supplies, she said. Who knows. Now he’s talking about the eastern islands.

  Which islands?

  He didn’t say. Lombok, I guess.

  Could be any eastern islands.

  Yeah, she said with a snort. The Philippines, maybe. Even Hawaii has eastern islands. What an asshole.

  So he won’t be back straight away.

  He’s scared of growing old. That’s what this shit’s about.

  The travelling.

  All of it. Having his little deputy along for the ride. Loonie’s too young and too stupid to be afraid. And Sando loves that, feeds off it. He hates being old.

  How old is he?