Breath Read online

  Jesus, we got everything. Seasick, shot at, seen off, spiderbitten, infected, deported. And yeah, honkin waves.

  Haven’t seen Loonie, I said.

  You and me both.

  You mean he’s not back?

  Little prick blew me off. Took a boat to Nias.

  What happened?

  Didn’t wanna come home, I spose.

  Man.

  Wilful little bastard, isn’t he? Fuckin nuts, actually.

  At that moment Fat Bob the mechanic sidled out from the shadows of his workshop. Sando slapped me on the shoulder.

  Hey, keep an eye on the weather. We’ll do Old Smoky, eh?

  Orright.

  Gotta go. Come out sometime.

  Okay, I’ll do that.

  But we never surfed Old Smoky together again. Nor did I visit his place while he was there. I did my best to stay away.

  There are spring days down south when all the acacias are pumping out yellow blooms and heady pollen and the honeyeaters and wattlebirds are manic with their pillaging and the wet ground steams underfoot in the sunshine and you feel fresher and stronger than you are. Yes, the restorative force of nature. I can vouch for its value – right up to the point of complete delusion. I go down sometimes on leave to cut the weeds and burn off the way my father did, to surf the Point and collect my frazzled wits. But I’ve learnt not to surrender to swooning spring. In spring you can really ease off on yourself, and when that happens you’ll believe anything at all. You start feeling safe. And then pretty soon you feel immune. Winters are long in Sawyer. A bit of sunshine and nectar goes straight to your head.

  I saw Eva in the general store. It was October and she was in a long skirt and sandals. She stood in the narrow aisle considering a bin full of mousetraps. She was fuller in the face and her hair was held back with barrettes. At the sight of her pot belly I felt a tiny stab of lust. I wheeled around and heard her say my name as I slipped out of the shop and into the sleepy street.

  In November Frank Loon confronted Sando in the street and took a swing at him but the younger man was too quick. There was a bit of push and shove outside the bank during which Mister Loon uttered threats. From then on it seemed that Sando and Eva did their shopping thirty miles away in Angelus.

  I wasn’t sleeping much. Some nights I got up and slipped out to the old man’s shed to sharpen his tools. One morning my mother found me asleep out there with the axe at my feet. She asked me if I had some troubles but I said that I didn’t. I probably thought I was telling her the truth.

  I rode out to the coast some weekends to surf. Several times I hiked up behind Sando’s place to hide in the peppy scrub and watch the house. I stayed downwind for fear of alerting the dog and though it found me one time it didn’t give me away. I saw Eva pegging out laundry in the sun, saw the shine of her bare belly, saw the bras and undies she was hanging up and felt like a dirty schoolboy for watching. I had an urge to wait a while until no one was about and then creep down to press my face into her damp underthings or slip beneath the house and beat off at the thought of her swollen breasts. But I never did.

  I all but failed that year of school and I was shamed by the haunted look on my mother’s face. The school report recommended that I leave and seek a trade apprenticeship, but I told her I’d stay on and get my act right. Over the Christmas holidays I found every book on next year’s syllabus and read late into the night while the old man snored and stopped, snored and stopped, like a man grinding away with a blade at a whetstone.

  The new year was weeks old when I found myself surfing beside Sando one morning at the Point. Bareback in nothing but his Speedos, he was noseriding an old tanker from the fifties. He looked fit and tanned as he kicked the board out of the wave and settled down beside me.

  Pikelet, he said.

  What’s with the budgie-smugglers? I asked.

  Dog ate the arse out of my boardies. Anyway, what’s wrong with Speedos? Son, they made this nation what it is.

  You’re scarin people.

  Well, he said. They need a little scarin round here.

  We paddled out together and waited for a set.

  How you been? he asked.

  Yeah, good, I lied.

  Startin to think you’re avoidin us.

  Well, I said. School and stuff.

  You heard from Loonie? he asked, kind enough not to point out that we were in the midst of the summer holidays.

  No, I said. Not a word.

  Man, what a disappointment he turned out to be.

  I spose.

  Mate, I thought he was the real deal, y’know? The man not-ordinary.

  Maybe ordinary’s not so bad, I offered.

  Pikelet, you gotta get outta this fuckin town.

  I shrugged.

  Come and see us, you dick.

  I caught a wave in and walked up the hot sand to where Eva lay in the sun with a book. She wore a ragged straw hat and her hair was glossy and her skin was tanned as I’d never seen before. She cut quite a figure in a polka dot bikini. Her breasts were huge and her belly shone. Her distended navel was like a fruit stalk. When she saw me she hoisted herself to her feet. I took in the lavish sway of her back and smiled.

  Gross, huh?

  No, I said, conscious of passing bathers. No, it’s beautiful.

  Jesus.

  No, honest.

  You really are a pervert, she said with unexpected tenderness.

  Takes one to know, I said, grinning sadly.

  We’re leaving, Pikelet. After the baby comes.

  Oh, I said. I should have been relieved but I felt a twist of panic and it must have shown.

  D’you really mind so much?

  I picked wax from the deck of my battered twin-fin.

  Pikelet?

  Can I see you? I asked without looking up.

  Oh, baby. No.

  Just once. Please?

  Pikelet.

  You owe it to me, I said without properly understanding what kind of threat I’d uttered.

  Shit, Pikelet.

  I’ll leave you alone. Just once.

  I never would have blown the whistle on her – I couldn’t have done it – but for her at least this must have been real and present danger.

  Yeah, she said so bitterly that it felt like a blow. For old times’ sake, right?

  On a Thursday while Sando was in Angelus I rode out there and was met by the dog. Eva wouldn’t let me upstairs so we went without preamble into the shadows of the undercroft where the smells of soil and wax and fibreglass were all about us. I knelt and lifted her dress and kissed the hard projection of her belly while she ran her hands abstractedly through my hair. Her breasts were long and heavy and between her legs everything felt fat and wet and ripe.

  Hurry, she said.

  I’m sorry, I murmured.

  Yeah, well, we’re both sorry now.

  She turned and braced against the workbench and we took it slowly and carefully. I held her gorgeous belly and saw the veins stand proud in her neck and the sweat gather on her back and when it was over neither of us pretended to be happy.

  I NEVER SAW THE BABY. In February the old man copped a flying belt at the mill. The initial report made it seem like a let-off – it could easily have been a walking blade or worse, and there were no severed limbs. But when Mum and I got to the hospital in Angelus we saw that half his face was mashed and they told us he’d suffered a major skull fracture from the steel beam he’d been thrown against. Nobody’s fault, just a freak accident.

  He never regained consciousness.

  Eva had her baby in the same hospital while Dad was there. A boy, or so I heard. Eva and the child were long gone by the time the old man died. We buried him in the pioneer cemetery back along the river. His mates from the mill came. Frank Loon was there but the Sandersons stayed away. They may have already left town.

  My father’s death hit me with a force that felt targeted and personal. I felt chastised by it and it really pulled me up. Afterwards,
Mum looked at me fearfully, as though I was a stranger. Now I knew there was no room left in my life for stupid risks. Death was everywhere – waiting, welling, undiminished. It would always be coming for me and for mine and I told myself I could no longer afford the thrill of courting it.

  Driven by loneliness and remorse and a desire to compensate my mother somehow, I put all my energies into study. I didn’t surf much and I kept to myself to the extent of being thought a weirdo. My last two years of school were empty and desperate, but through a regimen that relied more on hard discipline than intellectual curiosity, I dragged myself from the bottom of the class and began to make headway. Eventually my marks were excellent, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  People said the old man’s death was the beginning of the end for the mill and they were only half wrong – it reeled from crisis to crisis for another decade. Mum got a modest payout, which left her free and clear with the house as well as a pension. She saved enough to put me through university and I did my best to be a dutiful son. She never accused me of having forsaken the old man for Bill Sanderson or abandoned her for Eva, though I couldn’t have blamed her if she had. I’d absented myself from their lives so long and the unspoken hurt from it lingered for years.

  We tried to find some closeness, Mum and I. I wrote every week from the city and phoned her every few days. I drove home some weekends and at semester breaks I stayed weeks at a time. I tried to show I loved her but our relationship was a polite, undeclared failure – there was tenderness but no intimacy – and in this regard it could have been a rehearsal for marriage.

  At twenty, after years of barely surfing at all, I went to Bali and finally saw the cave at Uluwatu. I climbed down through it to the sea and surfed the big, winding lefthander for an hour, amped but totally out of condition. I had a bad fall, blew a disc in my back. It took me a week to get home to Perth and when I did I went to pieces. The prolapse sorted itself out soon enough but I had a kind of breakdown. I was only a few weeks from finishing my degree. I never returned to see it through. Instead I holed up in a caravan on a sheep station and put myself back together as best I knew how.

  Grace Andrews loved me. Even after she grew wary, there was that to remember. She taught in the zoology department of the university where I worked as a lab technician. My mother adored her, was overjoyed when we married, and I was euphoric, never happier in my life. We had two daughters, so beautiful I could never stop being anxious for them. And now they’re women, old enough to find me more an amusement than a puzzle.

  When Grace was pregnant she said I was weird about it. Men, she said, were supposed to be turned off by all that fluid, the gross belly, the big backside and puffy ankles. That was normal.

  I laughed. I really thought she was joking.

  So you prefer revulsion to reverence?

  A girl doesn’t mind reverence, she quipped. But reverent lust is another thing.

  What can you mean? I asked, still grinning.

  Well, it’s creepy.

  Ah. Yes. Creepy.

  There was yet a hint of laughter in our voices but I was unnerved by the exchange. Years later, when it shouldn’t have mattered anymore, I made the mistake of returning to this conversation as I dropped the girls home one Sunday afternoon. There’d been a photo of an actress naked and pregnant on the cover of a glamour magazine, which sparked a surprising furore. To my mind it was a rather brave and beautiful image, but I was curious about what Grace might think. She seemed annoyed that I’d even bring it up.

  Grotesque, she said, as the girls hauled their bags up the steps to her door. Now they’re mainstreaming porn.

  Okay, I murmured.

  I leant against the car, conscious of the potential for things to go unhelpfully sour. Perhaps it was stupid of me to mention it. I was no great success as a man but I had been, I thought, a faithful, gentle husband. Never sexually insistent, I steered clear of oddness. I took no interest in pornography. I made myself quite safe and ordinary – a lab bloke, a threat to nobody. And yet.

  I gave a wave and got back in the car.

  Nobody wants to be creepy. I was careful, always backing off. And somehow, somewhere along the track, I went numb. I couldn’t say what it was and didn’t dare try. How do you explain the sense of being made to feel improper? I withdrew into a watchful rectitude, anxious to please, risking nothing. I followed the outline of my life, carefully rehearsing form without conviction, like a bishop who can’t see that his faith has become an act.

  I started, despite myself, to fool with electricity. A couple of times I came to on the tile floor at work, down beneath the sinks and benches where the odours of agar and disinfectant and formaldehyde brewed like some obscene secret, and the return of consciousness brought with it a sad blankness like the lingering melancholy after sex.

  I didn’t understand this behaviour. I had no special interest in electricity. Granted, it’s a potent, tangible presence in a world that’s cast off presences. It was just a moment of righteous sensation, like a blow to the head. It knocked me down. It hurt like hell. But it was something I could feel.

  In a dentist’s waiting room, during a year I can barely recall, I came upon a photo of Bill Sanderson in a travel magazine. It seems he’d come to preside over quite an empire. Snowboards, alpine apparel – all dripping rebel chic. The interview mentioned his wife Eva and their son Joseph – a good Mormon name. There was much talk of risk in the financial sense. Sando was a kind of investment guru, a motivational speaker of some note. Out on the Aspen slopes he looked like a grizzly, sunbleached Kris Kristofferson, a man arrived.

  It was my mother who sent the news clipping about Eva Sanderson. I still don’t know why she did. Until that moment I never gave her sufficient credit to imagine she might take some little pleasure in passing it on. But the chances are she simply thought I’d like to know.

  Without the slightly lurid details and the connection to Utah wealth, Eva’s death might have gone unreported. In any event it earned only two inches of a Reuters column. Eva was found hanging naked from the back of a bathroom door in Portland, Oregon. A Salvadorean hotel employee discovered her with a belt around her neck. The deceased had been the sole occupant of her five-star room, the cause of death cardiac arrest as a result of asphyxiation.

  There was no one I could talk to, least of all my mother. Grace found the clipping and wanted, with good cause, to know what it signified. But I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t risk setting off the rolling mass of trouble inside me. I choked it down. At quite some cost.

  You couldn’t blame Grace for how things went. She just wanted to be happy. She had her career to look to, and she was anxious for the girls. And in the end I wasn’t fit. No question about that.

  Afterwards I had myself put away for a spell. I only signed myself out to go to my mother’s funeral, a day of hard and vivid feeling. I took the burial as a sacrament of my own failure as much as a tribute to my gentle mother’s life. My girls were there. They seemed happy to see me and I couldn’t hold their wariness against them. Grace left her new bloke at home though she needn’t have. I would have behaved. She seemed wistful but determined and it clearly upset her to see me looking the way I did. I had a few scars by then and I was woozy with pills. I felt the hopeless tug of love as she led the girls towards the car. The mourners around me were careful but not afraid. I have never been a violent man. Just a little creepy, it seems.

  I didn’t go back to the hospital. I broke an undertaking. Got in a car and drove east, as far away from the sea and the city as possible.

  When I was on the ward there was a tall, reedy bloke who carried a bible with him all day. He had a habit of fixing on things you said during group work and hitting you later with a few pithy verses to be going on with. He had me down as some kind of compulsive – not miles off the mark – but I wanted to pull his ears off when he told me that a man who even thinks about having his neighbour’s wife is already an adulterer.

  No, Desmond, I told him. Bullshi
t.

  Can’t deny it!

  You get ideas. We all get ideas. Thoughts. And most of them come and go without causing anybody grief.

  Desmond shook his head and I wanted to get him by the hair, squeeze the poison from his head. Wanted to, but didn’t. I told him he was sad and dangerous, that he shouldn’t say such things, especially not to vulnerable people like us. I was well and truly wigged out at the time, but still sane enough to know there’s a world of difference between thinking things and doing them.

  You lack morality, he said mildly enough.

  You call that morality? I said, trying not to shout. Robbing people of the distinction between thoughts and actions?

  Sport, said Desmond, I tell you this out of love. You are a captive of evil.

  Talk like that frightened me because in an unsteady moment you could believe it. I was tired and sad and fucked up but I wasn’t going to give in to bullshit. I’d been prey to false convictions aplenty and I’d had enough. It is possible to believe that as an idea comes into your mind, an act has been born and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s as if thinking something causes it to happen, makes an action inevitable, even necessary. Sometimes it’s good to remind yourself it isn’t so.

  A captive of evil, said Desmond.

  No, I said. I’m a voluntary patient.

  What I didn’t say, because I didn’t trust myself not to clock him one, is that nobody should be a slave to their thoughts – this was captivity, this was evil.

  All about there were others watching Desmond and me, waiting for a blow-up. There were people in our midst who believed that babies had died and cities burnt because of thoughts they’d had.

  Do you lust after your neighbour’s wife? asked the girl with the slashed arms. Really, she said drolly, you can tell us.

  My wife, I said. My wife is now my neighbour’s wife. And my old neighbour’s wife is dead.

  Man, that’s fucked up, said someone.