Breath

  A farm vehicle eased up behind the wreck and a man got out. The vehicle pulled away again in the direction of Angelus while the newly arrived man dodged scrabbling beasts to crawl up into the underbelly of the truck. Finally the bus driver cranked the door open and went out to help. I watched him go, hunching in the rain, pulling up his collar. There was something about the slack pace of his stride that inflamed me. I got to my feet and plunged down the steps and sprinted past him toward the twisted shambles. The bus driver shouted above the noise of maimed animals. The road was an obstacle course of lurching bodies, dark tongues, and lolling eyes. There was a horrible scrape of hoofs on the tarmac. The air stank of Oxo cubes and shit and spilled diesel.

  When I reached the farmer he was tugging at the car door in his town clothes and all he could say was Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, on and on, over and over. I saw that the driver was dead. The way her head tilted back on her forward-thrust body was all wrong. She was so hard up against the steering column that all my senses recoiled. Beside her, the man in the passenger seat licked his lips in slow motion. His eyes were tarred shut by blood oozing from a gouge in his forehead.

  Then the bus driver came up behind us, saying: The truckie, the truckie’s stuck.

  I climbed the frame of the trailer chassis and groped along the wet, slippery bars of the cattle-cage towards the cab. I didn’t trust the sagging front wheel for a perch, so I bellied out on the door and peered into the window beneath me like a diver looking into a reef hole. Barely a foot away, shivering in an army surplus jumper, and hanging in his seatbelt, was a big bloke with a beard and gold fillings. The window between us fogged up. I called down to him to open it, but he didn’t seem to hear me. He just shook there, slowly obscured beneath the fogging, rain-pelted glass while I yelled until I was hoarse, and then the cops arrived with a rifle, and the fire truck was there, and someone much bigger hauled me down and gave me a steaming mug of Milo that I couldn’t drink for the life of me.

  That same night the old man drove me back into Angelus for the school social. Even though I’d asked Queenie Cookson I really didn’t want to go anymore, but my mother insisted that I show for the girl’s sake, to save her the shame of being stood up. So in I went, scrubbed up in a yellow bodyshirt and flared corduroys, while the old man whiled away the hours fishing for skippy off the town jetty.

  On the drive over, even at the bend with its hail of windscreen glass and crushed vegetation, neither of us said a thing. When we got to the school gym in Angelus I mumbled thanks for the ride and sloped in.

  Inside a band from the city played songs by The Sweet and Status Quo. The dim lights, the music and the sight of all my classmates in their best duds made everything unreal. I felt as though I wasn’t properly there. The cavernous hall was full of competing perfumes. There was so much glitter and lipstick that everybody looked like strangers and it took me ten minutes to find Queenie over by the basement stairs.

  Why didn’t you tell me about this morning? she shouted close to my ear.

  I shrugged.

  I had to get it from Polly Morgan.

  I shrugged again.

  Is it true they both died?

  That’s what they’re sayin on the radio.

  You looked shocking today, she said. Why didn’t you say anything? You should have told me. I don’t get you.

  There was nothing I could think to say in reply so I shrugged once more. She scowled. I put my arm around her and this seemed to placate her somewhat. Later we danced to Sherbet and AC/DC tunes and the conversations we had with others were mostly lip-reading. We wound up in the deep shadows of the basement stairwell, clinching and kissing abstractedly until the lights flickered and it was all over.

  When I got in the car the old man looked haggard.

  You stink of fish, I said.

  And you smell like a girl.

  We drove home in such a silence that I found myself fiddling noisily and pointlessly with the radio knobs. It annoyed the old man, but the agitation kept him from falling asleep at the wheel.

  Back home my mother was still awake in her candlewick dressing gown.

  You look handsome, love, she said.

  I stood away from the sink while the old man wearily cleaned his fish. The stares of all those dead eyes made my gut flutter in a way that was new to me. When he opened their silver bellies I went to my room and did not sleep.

  There were several major swells that year as big lows rode up out of the Roaring Forties, but we spent more time waiting for them, discussing them, imagining them, than riding them. Winter had its many interludes when for weeks on end the wind turned sideshore and brought swell in at hopeless angles, and there were days and days of dark, squally chop when the sea was a misery to behold.

  I watched the weather maps and waited for Sando, perpetually in a state of anguished anticipation. Somehow I’d gotten used to a certain underlying level of fear. When it was gone I missed it. After a huge day at Barney’s or a rare session at Old Smoky I came home charged – the euphoria lasted for days. But when it dissipated I became restless, even anxious. I couldn’t concentrate at school. Whenever I condescended to go fishing on the estuary, the old man complained that I twitched and jiggled like an alky, that I wrecked a good morning out.

  I took to running in the forest. I rode out to the rivermouth and back flat-strap. I did what I could to wear myself out, but at night I still lay awake, turning, sighing, waiting.

  At school Queenie Cookson passed a note, via intermediaries, to outline my many flaws (I was moody, selfish and inattentive) and notify me that I was, forthwith, relieved of my duties as boyfriend. I did my best to take it badly but in truth I was relieved.

  In the troughs between big days, Loonie was infinitely more resourceful than me. Having been addicted to danger all his life he could always find a pulse-raising challenge. That year he drilled a peephole in the pressed-tin wall of the pub’s storeroom and forged an entirely new means of putting himself in peril.

  A woman called Margaret Myers began staying weekends in the pub. Reputedly from Sydney, she was about forty and rather tall. She was dark-haired and curvy, wore kaftans and beads and smoked clove cigarettes. She was all out of sync for Sawyer, but she quickly became a regular. Loonie thought she was the most sociable woman he’d ever met, though this was before he realized that she was making a living upstairs in Room 6. During the hectic hours of the Sunday session, when it seemed that all hell was breaking loose down in the bar, he took to watching through his spyhole as she entertained her guests. He said he’d witnessed things that made his eyes sore, stuff you could barely credit. I took in every lurid detail, but I didn’t really believe him. In this instance the facts didn’t matter to me at all. Margaret Myers was such a fabulous creation and Loonie such a great bullshitter that the telling and the idea were satisfaction enough.

  But Loonie, in his uncanny way, seemed to sense my unbelief. God knows, I never called him a liar – I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for that. I didn’t even press him for the more prosaic details of corroboration, stuff about the spyhole, the angle of view, the convenience of her using the same room each time, yet he called me on it anyway, for just as he had a native genius for manufacturing a physical challenge where there was none, Loonie could find an accusation in any endorsement, and before long, with barely a word on your part, he’d have himself wound into an indignant fury and you’d find you’d somehow dared him to prove himself. In the case of Room 6 there was only one way for Loonie to feel himself vindicated.

  Which is how I came to be in that storeroom one day lifting a grey scab of Juicy Fruit from the pressed-tin wall with Loonie’s breath hot and sour in my ear. I didn’t really want to be there. The entire operation of getting from woodshed to laundry and then making the fraught bolt upstairs hardly seemed worth the risk. The room stank of mops and damp cardboard and my heart beat so hard it made me queasy. I was breathless and sweating and when I first leant against the metal wall my forehead slid off the m
ission-brown paint.

  It turned out that the spyhole was hardly required to prove Loonie’s point. The squeak of the bed next door, the slap of meat and the low growls coming through the wall were evidence enough. But that bit of gum was a provocation. I peeled it off, pressed my eye to the gap and let out a grunt of surprise that must have been audible from the other side of the wall. Because what I saw first, not two feet distant, was a woman’s lipstick-smeared face turned my way. Her green eyes were open but unfocussed. She had big pores and her skin shone damply beneath her jouncing curls. I recoiled so fast that I impaled myself on Loonie’s front teeth. We stumbled about on the bare boards, hissing and wincing, and there was a pause in proceedings in the next room. We froze, waiting for the door to fly open. The back of my head felt punctured.

  After a few very long moments, the chafing bed resumed and a man murmured and beads clacked without rhythm. I stared across at the white eye of the spyhole and when I looked back at Loonie he was laughing silently. I jerked my thumb in the direction of the door but he shook his head. At least half of me was grateful. I gathered my nerve and tiptoed back to the wall.

  I pressed my eye up and saw a woman’s pink rump and a man’s hairy thighs thudding against it. I didn’t breathe. I followed the feline curve of the woman’s spine to the mass of curls on the pillow only an arm’s length away from where I stood, and while I watched, Margaret Myers rose on her elbows in response to some new urgency. Her breasts and beads swung and the golden hoops of her earrings glinted. She tilted her face up and opened her eyes a moment and looked my way. There was a moment – just a flicker – of surprise but I knew she’d seen me. She seemed more interested than outraged. And gradually, with a kind of weary amusement, as the bloke pounded away behind her, she began to smile.

  A hot jet ran down the leg of my jeans, and I made a stupid sound as Loonie pulled me aside to see for himself. Right then the man called out to nobody in particular, like a bloke who’d just dropped something in the street, and I didn’t need to be watching to know whose voice it was. I stood clear, fully expecting Loonie to reel back out of the room at the sound of his old man right there through the wall, but he stayed where he was, lips pursed, head and palms against the tin, as though he’d seen it all before.

  I’m amazed at how long it took me to become properly inquisitive about Sando and Eva. Anybody older might have been more than merely curious about their circumstances. For one thing, they seemed to be free agents. They lived like no other people I’d ever met. It was hardly abnormal in those years for longhairs to avoid all talk of work and money except to condemn them in proper Aquarian terms, but these two never even bothered to bring the subject up. They never spoke about making a living the way locals did; it was as if the concept never occurred to them. They thought and lived and carried themselves differently to other people. There were few townsfolk who lived as comfortably as they did yet I didn’t ask why. I was a mere schoolboy. I wouldn’t say that I was under anyone’s spell exactly, but I did feel that there was something special about Sando and I had no interest in how people paid their bills. Of what importance are the material details of adult life when you’re an adolescent? I didn’t think to ask how he got what he had or even how he got to be what he was. I put all my efforts into trying to be like him. I could take or leave his prickly wife, but I watched Sando; I hung on his every word. I was content to just be with him. There were afternoons out there with Loonie and Eva and him when we swung in hammocks while the weather piled up towards the forest from the broad sweep of the bay, as roos grazed on the grassy slope and the wind chimes stirred around us, that I had a sense I’d been singled out somehow, chosen.

  Then there were those rare days, the times we returned from a session so huge, surf so terrifying as to render us incoherent. Back at the house we ate and drank and lay rocking alongside one another, laughing like stoners. It was hard to find words for the things we’d just seen and done. The events themselves resonated in your limbs. You felt shot full and the sensation burned for hours – for days, sometimes – yet you couldn’t make it real for anybody else. You couldn’t and you weren’t sure you wanted to. But we blathered at each other from sheer excitement and you can imagine the boyish superlatives and the jargon we employed. Eva was impatient with our giggling nonsense. Yet now and then I caught her listening, especially to Sando, in a way that made me wonder about her.

  Sando was good at portraying the moment you found yourself at your limit, when things multiplied around you like an hallucination. He could describe the weird, reptilian thing that happened to you: the cold, supercharged certainty which overtook your usually dithering mind, the rest of the world in a slow-motion blur around you, the tunnel vision, the surrender that confidence finally became. And when he talked about the final rush, the sense of release you felt at the end, skittering out to safety in the beautiful deep channel, Eva sometimes sank back with her eyes closed and her teeth bared, as though she understood only too well.

  It’s like you come pouring back into yourself, said Sando one afternoon. Like you’ve exploded and all the pieces of you are reassembling themselves. You’re new. Shimmering. Alive.

  Yes, she said. Exactly.

  And I watched her, and wondered how she knew.

  Just as I began to find some confidence, all the parameters changed. One rainy afternoon inside by the fire, Sando started talking about a break called the Nautilus. This new wave seemed so far off the scale I thought he was making it up in order to freak us out. It sounded too implausible, too deliberately mysterious. But then he brought out nautical charts and it began to look as though this spot really did exist. Sando had his own detailed sketches of the bombora and its approaches and he drew diagrams to show us the way the swell came onto the reef. He said he’d been studying it for ages, wondering if it could be surfed, certain it was a wave no other surfer had seen, let alone ridden. Despite all the charts and drawings the whole deal still sounded a bit fanciful. This wasn’t a deepwater bommie like Old Smoky. The Nautilus was an oceanic lump of rock, a ship-killer barely beneath the surface. It was easy to imagine vicious whitewater in such a place, but not an evenly breaking wave of the sort we needed.

  Sando watched our faces. My scepticism must have shown. From his shirt pocket he produced a solitary Polaroid. He’d obviously been saving it for last because he flipped the photo onto the table with a flourish and sat back with a smile. Neither Loonie nor I picked that shiny square up for a moment. But there it was, a thick, purple frown of water, the most impossible wave I’d ever seen.

  Oh, man, you’re kidding, I said. You can’t surf that.

  You don’t reckon? he said with a grin.

  I couldn’t believe Sando or anyone else would even consider it. This spot was unlike anything we’d ever heard of, let alone attempted. The Nautilus was three miles out. A sharkpit. It lay seaward of a granite island – a seal colony, no less – and the wave itself broke over a huge rock which actually did look like the upright shell of a nautilus. On the charts it was marked as a navigation hazard with multiple warnings.

  You launch here at the cove, he said, tapping the chart.

  And you’ve done this? I asked.

  Well, yeah, I’ve scoped it. Buzzed out in the dinghy a few times.

  Loonie turned the Polaroid over in his hands. You took this?

  Yep. Needs a lot of west in the swell.

  Fuck, said Loonie. Look at this thing. How big is that?

  Twenty feet, I spose.

  No way!

  And it’s breakin square.

  The reef ’s half outta the water, I said. It’s nuts.

  Yeah, said Sando with a laugh. Horrible, innit?

  Aw, man, said Loonie.

  The next frontier, said Sando.

  I knew he’d surfed some big waves in his time. He spoke of Mexico often enough, of Indonesia and various Pacific atolls, and back here he’d taken on Old Smoky alone, paddled out time and again without a soul to watch or help. He wa
s a pioneer; I couldn’t doubt his experience or his courage. But this was something else. And I didn’t know whether to feel honoured or angry that he might expect us to attempt it with him.

  You think it’s really possible? I asked, trying not to sound feeble. I mean, what do you really think? Honestly.

  Honestly? he said. Mate, I need a shit just looking at it.

  I laughed with him but Loonie turned on us.

  You mean you’re scared of it?

  Sando looked a little taken aback. He shrugged. Well, a man’d be stupid not to be scared. I mean, look at this thing.

  I’m scared talkin about it, I muttered.

  But Loonie only scowled in disapproval.

  Fear’s natural, mate, said Sando. There’s no shame in it.

  Loonie rolled his eyes, but he stopped short of contradicting him.

  Being afraid, said Sando. Proves you’re alive and awake.

  Whatever you reckon, said Loonie, not relishing the prospect of another of Sando’s little seminars.

  Animals react out of instinct, Sando continued. Like they’re always on automatic. We’ve got plenty of that, too. But our minds complicate things, slow us down. We’re always calculating the odds, measuring the consequences. But you can train your mind to live with fear and deal with the anticipation.