Tim Winton (5 page)

Honking away on my old didj, I think about the one I first saw nestled against the boards under that big hippy house. I hardly knew what it was. Now the wind comes through me in circles, like a memory, one breath, without pause, hot and long. It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about. I consider the startled look on the faces of my girls in the moments after each of them was born and suctioned and forced to draw air in for the first time. I've done the job myself on more than one occasion, pulled over on the side of an ill-lit street, improvising in someone's driveway. Always the same puzzled look, the rude shock of respiration, as though the child's drawn in a gutful of fire. Yet within a moment or two the whole procedure is normalized, automatic. In a whole lifetime you might rarely give it another thought. Until you have your first asthma attack or come upon some stranger trying to drag air into himself with such effort that the stuff could be as thick and heavy as honey. Or you may be like me and think about breathing often enough for people to have their doubts about you.

I've been thinking about the enigma of respiration as long as I can remember, since I was old enough to be aware of the old man coming home with his stink of grease and sweat and wood-sap at the end of another day at the mill. Every weekday evening after he washed his face and hands he'd settle at the table and look about with eyes bloodshot from sawdust while Mum whacked the handle of the oven with a length of split karri and drew out whatever she'd been baking or roasting or warming while we waited for him.

Mostly we ate in silence. Afterwards I'd go to my room to do my homework and when I came back later to watch a bit of TV, the old man'd still be there, asleep in his chair, with the wireless on softly.

Mum and I would wash the dishes before she helped him to bed, and I'd sit down for an hour in front of the box.

Long before I even turned in I'd hear him begin to snore, but it was later, in the quiet of the night, when he really got going.

I don't know how my mother endured it, how she ever slept at all, for there were nights when I lay completely and hopelessly awake while he sawed away at the other end of the house. The noise wasn't the worst of it. It was the pauses that really got to me. When he fell silent I'd lie there waiting, forced to listen to my own breathing which was so steady and involuntary. More than once since then I've wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. It's easy for an old man to look back and see the obvious, how wasted youth and health and safety are on the young who spurn such things, to be dismayed by the risks you took, but as a youth you do sense that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others.

Loonie and I acted out the impulse without thinking, for dumb larks. We held our breaths and counted. We timed ourselves in the river and the ocean, in the old man's shed or in the broken autumn light of the forest floor. It takes quite some concentration and willpower to defy the logic of your own body, to take yourself to the shimmering edge. It seems bizarre, looking back, to realize just how hard we worked at this. We were good at it and in our own minds it's what set us apart from everyone else.

Deep diving and breath-holding against the clock seemed a more impressive endeavour than the game played by boys at the Ag School. Loonie told me how one kid would spend a minute or so hyperventilating until he was dizzy and when he was seeing spots a mate would hug him from behind so hard and so suddenly that all the air was crushed from his chest. Often as not, the kid simply blacked out and fell to the ground. Some puked and one even had convulsions, though Loonie suspected faking. Loonie and I tried it a few times. When he flat-out fainted I went into a panic. He came to with a strange moan and a stupid look on his face. Then he did it to me and I went down with a curious tunnel vision and the whole frame of my consciousness seemed to melt at the edges before giving way entirely. Afterwards I puked a little and laughed but I felt like an Ag School idiot and wasn't keen to repeat the experience.

The attraction was plain enough - it was cheap weirdness in the days before we knew about drugs - but only later did I understand the physiology of it.

It was some years before I realized that when the old man paused mid-snore on those nights back in Sawyer and I lay there for long seconds in a mixture of relief and anticipation, he'd done more than simply stop snoring. He'd actually stopped breathing. At the end of those silences he'd let out a kind of braying gasp, like a man who'd just seen a ghost - perhaps the ghost of himself - and this was the sound of his body yanking him back to the surface from the limbo of apnoea, hauling him back to life itself. Mum must have heard dead-halts like this night after night for decades. How did she bear it, lying beside him, abandoned, listening for his return?

Next time we went to the log house, the VW was there in the shade of the marri tree and the red kelpie shot out from beneath the stairs. I was fending the mutt off when a woman came out onto the verandah above us.

You boys take a wrong turn?

Just came to get our boards, said Loon
ie.

Duke! she yelled at the dog. Get down, goddammit.

The dog took one last lick and desisted, and the woman, who looked to be in her twenties, squinted doubtfully at us. She had ropy white plaits and an American accent.

They're under the house, I said.

Are they, now?

Red and green, I said. A Jacko and a Hawke.

Bloke said we could, said Loon
ie.

She sighed and stared at us another moment before coming barefoot down the stairs. She held the handrail as though she might fall.

She wore jeans and a tee-shirt that said freestyun: watch me fly.

You better show me, she said with a tone of weary scepticism.

We followed her into the cave-like undercroft to point out our modest craft beneath the bench, and as we drew them out their dings and welts and browning contusions seemed magnified.

They were sorry bits of junk but they were clearly ours.

He's not here, she said.

Oh? said Loonie in the bright tone he reserved for indulging adults when the mood suited. See, we saw the Vee-dub and thought, well, that he was around.

No. He's away.

Angelus? I asked with the board under my arm, my body already turned for the doorway.

The islands.

What islands? said Loon
ie.

Indonesia.

The woman spoke the word as if it had extra syllables. Indonesia.

Neither of us even knew with any certainty where Indonesia was.

Well, I said. Thanks.

Sure, she said without warmth.

Orright if we drop em back later? asked Loon
ie.
Cause, we didn't ask. Your bloke, he offered.

The woman gave a wan smile and limped out into the light. Her feet were brown and the frayed hems of her Levi's hung back off her heels. She didn't answer. She simply waved us away and pulled herself back up the stairs. We bolted while we had the chance.

The surf at the Point that day was bigger than either of us expected.

The steadily rising swell seemed to match the oily cloud pouring in from the south, and the longer we stayed, the bigger and gloomier it got out there on the water. We sat in the line-up with a few of the Angelus crew, who let us have a smaller wave now and then, but by afternoon we were paddling much more than surfing and the pack was moving further and further seaward to meet the hulking sets. Despite the building swell, the older blokes kept up their constant sledging and bantering, but Loonie and I were silent. My skin seemed to tighten on me. I felt the new mood in the group, tried to read something in every sideways glance and raised eyebrow, and each time somebody began to casually stroke seaward I followed for safety's sake, and found that I was not alone; we all moved out together. It was as though we became one strange beast, like a school offish moving wordlessly in unison. There was always a moment when a fresh conviction came into our stroke.

We put our heads down and paddled for all we were worth, even though more than half of us hadn't yet seen the chains of swell beginning to warp into the bay. Eventually we'd see the set trundling in, looking for all the world as if the whole rolling column might simply grind past the Point toward the misty smudges of the eastern cliffs in the distance, but then the shoaling underwater ridge of the headland snagged those waves one by one, swinging them in like gates hinged upon the land itself until they turned shoreward in our direction.

This wasn't Sawyer Point anymore. This was outside - Outside Sawyer Point, as the older guys called it - and it hadn't broken like this for a year.

I was galvanized by fear. I had no intention of surfing these waves -- they were way out of my range -- but neither did I want to be mown down by them, so I paddled like hell to scrape up and over each in turn before they broke. I felt Loonie nearby doing more or less the same thing, though a tad more coolly, and I remember making it up the spray-torn crest of an absolute smoker just as some goateed hellman dropped blithely down its face. In that instant I turned to see that the tip of the headland was, as I suspected, behind us. We were now beyond the Point, outside the bay. It was only five hundred yards but it truly felt like we were at sea.

Other more experienced riders caught waves around us. They flew past hooting and screaming until in an eerie lull after a long passage of swells I realized that there were only three of us left out there - Loonie and me and a bloke from Angelus called Slipper.

Slipper had a matted ginger Afro and the bloodshot eyes of a stoner.

Two of his front teeth were missing and he wore an old beavertail dive suit that looked like a dingo had been at it. He sat up beside us and smiled as if he was having the time of his life. I, it must be said, was not nearly as sanguine.

Take the next one, kid, he said.

Aw, I dunno, I murmured.

Can't walk home from here, he said with a manic leer. May's well go for it, eh? How bout you, Snowy? You goin? No point bobbin around out here like a bloody teabag.

Orright, said Loonie rising to the bait. I'll go.

The rip that poured seaward from the bay had become a veritable river surging past the rocks of the headland to spew a plume of sand and weed at our backs. We found ourselves forced further and further out by the current. The sea became confused and jumpy. We were in foreign territory now. The coast to the west was a snarl of cliffs and boulders into the murky distance; there was nowhere to land over there. I considered paddling back east across the rip and into the bay to aim for the bar at the rivermouth, but that would put me right in the path of the oncoming sets and I'd be buried in whitewater. I knew that once I lost my board I'd be at the mercy of the current and I didn't like my chances. There was no way around the fact that I was buggered. I was so frightened I genuinely thought I could shit myself at any moment.

Slipper called a heads-up as another set began to bear down on us. It was much further seaward of where we were but it looked ready to break even that far out. In such a depth of water the very idea of this was stupefying.

You're not gunna pike on me, are youse? Slipper bellowed over his shoulder. You won't choke now, willya Snow?

Piss off, said Loonie with a sick grin.

Just remember, I'm givin youse a wave. Don't usually hand out freebies to little snot-nose grommets, but I'm in a good mood, so take it while it's goin.

The first wave of that set was lumpy and malformed but Loonie turned and went anyway as I knew he would. The soles of his feet looked yellow and small, and his elbows stuck out as he paddled.

I sat, rearing a moment, as all that water welled up beneath us.

And then he was gone.

Slipper hooted. But in a moment another wedging peak was upon us.

Cam, kid. No guts no glory.

I don't think so, I said.

It's the only way home now.

I said nothing.

Ya mate'll know you're a sook, a fuckin pussy.

But I didn't go. I just barely made it up the face of that wave and freefell out the back so hard I had the wind knocked out of me. Slipper paddled up close and snarled in my ear.

I take the next one, sport, and you're out here on yer own.

Get it?

By then I was addled and breathless. Loonie's wave was spilling itself across the rivermouth already but there was no sign of him.

The third wave began its slow left turn towards me. It looked as big as the pub and as it began to break the sound rattled my ribs.

With Slipper right up beside me I turned my little stubby Hawke around and paddled. I paddled, I must add, without vigour, and in a moment the wave was upon me, its mass overtaking me so fast that it felt as though I was travelling backwards. All about was seething vapour. I hung right up in the boiling nest of foam at its very peak, suspended in noise and unbelief, before I began to fall out and down in a welter of blinding spray. I only got to my feet from instinct, but there I suddenly was, upright and alive, skittering in front of all that jawing mess with my little board chattering underfoot. It was hard to credit the speed, the way the wave hauled itself upright in my path as it found shallower water. All I could do was squat and aim in hope. Yet for all this mad acceleration there was still something ponderous about the movement of the water.

On TV I'd seen elephants run beside safari jeeps, pounding along at incredible speed while seeming to move in slow motion, and that's exactly how it was: hectic noise, immense force driven up through the feet and knees, all in a kind of stoptime.

For a fatal moment, now that I was unexpectedly on top of things, the whole enterprise seemed too easy. Within three seconds I went from saving myself from certain disaster to believing I was a thirteen-year-old hellman.