Breath Read online

  After a week or two, having made an effort to disguise his reluctance, the old boy finally consented to my bringing Loonie out in the boat with us. Loonie was so jovial that first time, so full of larks and noises of appreciation, that he gave us all a headache and even I thought it an act of mercy on the old man’s part to have him back again. I think he saw how dearly Loonie loved it, how eager he was to help, how keen he was to please. Despite their primness I think my parents recognized some greater loneliness in my new friend, and they sensed that for all his derisory swagger he respected and even loved them in his way. He often crouched alongside my father at the smoker while the fish were racked and he was forever seizing a teatowel whenever he found himself in my mother’s kitchen. Early that summer, when we fell in together without discussion, he was at our place most of the day and into the evening. He always overstayed, yet somehow knew to leave before someone finally dropped a hint.

  On Sundays we fished the inlet with the mill men and in late December, when the holidays arrived, we spent weekdays at the river making picnickers nervous. We salvaged junk from the tip so we could augment our bikes with weirdly extended forks and handlebars. We tilted our banana seats and sissy bars until we were virtually riding uphill on any gradient. Out on the highway Loonie played chicken with log trucks while I hid in the bracken at the edge of the forest, willing him to desist and urging him on all at once. We had escape tracks that wound back through the regrowth and spoil ground toward town, so that by the time a rattled truckie pulled over and backed up laboriously, we were long gone. It was a boyhood that now seems so far away I can understand why people doubt such days ever existed. If you tried to talk about it you’d be howled down as some kind of nostalgia freak, called a liar before you even got started. So I don’t discuss it much. In this I suppose I am my father’s son, a bad communicator, a closed book. I’ve bored people in bars and lost a marriage to silence. I don’t want to join anybody’s misery club, to be adopted as a fellow victim of whatever syndrome is doing the rounds this week. I’ll talk if no one’s listening. It’s like blowing the didjeridu, cycling air through and through, doing little more than explaining yourself to your self while you’re still sane enough to do it. I’m not a nostalgic man. I can go for weeks without thinking about my boyhood and Sawyer and Loonie, but in my line of work you’re going to see things like tonight’s asphyxiation and get a cold feeling you’re not likely to explain to some kid in a crisp new uniform, someone who’s already decided that you’re a piece of work.

  AS A BOY IN SAWYER I yearned to swim in the ocean but the old man was firmly against it. If I asked him on fishing days he refused on the grounds that I would need watching and this meant he’d have to leave the boat and his lines and his workmates on his only day off and it was too much to ask of him. I knew deep down he’d have gladly sacrificed an hour for my pleasure if only he’d been able to swim enough to save me if I got into strife, but his impotence was beyond admitting. When I asked if I could just ride out to the rivermouth with Loonie he shook his head. Too rough, too far, no way. But I wanted to swim where I could see the bottom, to be where those long, creaming breakers trundled in from the south so I could dive down and see them pass overhead. I hankered after the sea as I’d never done for anything else before. I’d always been such a compliant, respectful child and until that point I was usually content. But being denied access to the ocean was intolerable. Even without Loonie’s influence, I would probably have defied the old man in time – I figured I was almost a teenager, after all – but that summer I was emboldened by my new friend’s indifference to authority, and though I asked and begged and pleaded beforehand, I eventually set out with Loonie one Saturday and rode to the coast without my father’s blessing. It began with a lie. I said we were headed for the river but as we coasted through town and past the servo we simply doubled back behind the pub.

  You know why it is, Loonie said as we rolled down the turnoff. You know why your old man’s scared, don’t you?

  Yeah, I said after too long a pause. I didn’t want to talk about the fact that my father couldn’t swim. I wasn’t that disloyal yet.

  You’re lyin, Pikelet.

  I stood on my pedals, wary of being seen by someone from the mill.

  Snowy Muir, said Loonie.

  Who’s he?

  Bloke from the mill. Fishin off the Point when they opened the bar. All the snapper was runnin. King wave got him. Just ran up the rock and hauled him in. Found him three days later out at the Holes.

  The stony bitumen made my teeth chatter. Wattlebirds buzzed us from the thicket edges.

  And your old boy was there, Pikelet. He saw him go.

  When was this? I asked, trying to sound sceptical.

  1965.

  How . . . how do you know?

  I live at the pub, you dick. Only thing flows faster’n beer is talk.

  It bothered me not to have known this precious detail about my father. I rode on in silence.

  We freewheeled downhill a mile or so until we came to the long, flat stretch where the estuary meandered into shoals on our left and the boggy horse paddocks opposite rose to steep timbered hills. The sun was on our shoulders and already, over the whirr and clatter of our bikes, you could hear the ocean.

  On the last uphill stretch a flatbed truck wallowed off the saltpan onto the tar ahead of us. Without a word, Loonie put on a spurt and chased it. There were people on the back of the truck who laughed and cheered as he caught up and grabbed onto the tie-rail. The old banger went up through the gears, making speed against the incline. Loonie and his bike drew away and I saw the pink flash of his face as he looked triumphantly back across his shoulder. I doubt the driver even knew Loonie was there, clinging on gamely in the rear, but they surged uphill, leaving me in their wake, until all I could hear was the whining diff and the faint sound of laughter. Eventually speed and onehandedness got the better of Loonie who got the wobbles and let go. He veered wildly onto the gravel edge and was gone through the reeds, a rippling commotion like a blast of wind, and the last thing I saw was the bike shooting riderless from the vegetation before it somersaulted into the shallows.

  By the time I finally ground my way up to the crest of the hill Loonie and his crumpled machine were loaded on the bed of the idling truck and the driver seemed to be waiting for me. When I drew alongside I saw that although his knees were stripped and his shirt was in tatters Loonie looked insanely happy. He mugged and winced for the benefit of a girl who looked sixteen and had flowers painted on her jeans. Beside the pair of them was a stack of surfboards and a three-legged dog. From the cab, three blokes with tumbleweed hair told me to climb up, and so we rode like that to the headland until the bitumen gave way to a dirt track that we bounced down through peppermints and wattles to the hard white beach and the overpowering roar of surf.

  The blokes piled out of the cab, snatched up their boards and were gone before either of us could climb down or thank them, so we thanked the girl instead. She shrugged and wriggled her toes in the sand. The dog plugged around in circles, competing with Loonie for her attention.

  From the granite headland whose rocks were daubed with warnings about the dangerous current, the beach stretched east for miles. We watched the surfers plunge into a churning rip alongside the rocks and from there they shot out toward the break. Waves ground around the headland, line upon line of them, smooth and turquoise, reeling across the bay to spend themselves in a final mauling rush against the bar at the rivermouth. The air seethed with noise and salt; I was giddy with it.

  Loonie had a nice old limp from his prang but it didn’t prevent him from clambering out across the rocks with me and the girl and the three-legged-dog to watch the blokes glide by on their boards. They hooted and swooped and raced across the bay until they were like insects twitching in the distance. The girl, who said she was from Angelus, gave us apples from her woven bag. She talked about Iron Butterfly and plenty of other things I knew as little about and I don’t know ho
w I kept up my end of the conversation because my mind was firmly elsewhere. I couldn’t take my eyes from those plumes of spray, the churning shards of light. Was this what the old man was afraid of? I tried to think of poor dead Snowy Muir but death was hard to imagine when you had these blokes dancing themselves across the bay with smiles on their faces and sun in their hair.

  I couldn’t have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared. In Sawyer, a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers, with one butcher and a rep from the rural bank beside the BP, men did solid, practical things, mostly with their hands. Perhaps a baker might have had a chance to make something as pretty as it was tasty, but our baker was a woman anyway, a person as dour and blunt as any boy’s father and she baked loaves like housebricks. For style we had a couple of local footballers with a nice leap and a tidy torpedo punt, and I would concede that my father rowed a wooden boat as sweetly as I’d seen it done, in a manner that disguised and discounted all effort, but apart from that and those old coves with plastic teeth and necks like turtles who got pissed on Anzac Day and sang sad songs on the verandah of the Riverside before they passed out, there wasn’t much room for beauty in the lives of our men. The only exception was the strange Yuri Orlov who carved lovely, old-world toys from stuff he fossicked up from the forest floor. But he didn’t like to show his work. He was shy or careful and people said he was half mad anyway. When it came to blokes, his was all the useless beauty the town could manage.

  For all those years when Loonie and I surfed together, having caught the bug that first morning at the Point, we never spoke about the business of beauty. We were mates but there were places our conversation simply couldn’t go. There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn’t know what endorphins were but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching. We talked about skill and courage and luck – we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death – but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.

  We sat on the headland with the girl and the dog until the breeze turned and everyone paddled in. We rode into town on the back of their old Bedford, sunburnt and blissed to the gills.

  The old man was furious – he saw the truck, caught sight of Loonie hauling his warped bike home and figured it out for himself – but nothing could touch me, no threat, no expression of disappointment, and certainly no gentle appeal to reason. I was hooked.

  Loonie and I went back and back and back that summer. We hitched and rode and walked, begging boards from the Angelus crew when they paddled in for lunch or at day’s end, and week by week we literally found our feet, wobbling in across the shorebreak, howling and grinning like maniacs. Even now, nearly forty years later, every time I see a kid pop to her feet, arms flailing, all milkteeth and shining skin, I’m there; I know her, and some spark of early promise returns to me like a moment of grace.

  The first boards we got were Coolites, short, boxy styrofoam things which squeaked when you touched them and blew wherever the wind wanted them to go. Because they had no fin they were all but impossible to steer, like a sailboat with neither keel nor rudder, but we thought they were the duck’s nuts. Loonie pestered his stepmother into buying him one and I got mine second-hand from a farm kid who’d just returned from a holiday in Queensland that he’d hated. Those boards certainly made the ride out to the coast a fresh challenge. They were too wide to fit neatly under a boy’s arm and so light that they lurched and twisted as though they were alive and trying to take flight. A good crosswind gust could put you and your bike into the roadside scrub in a moment. Our early efforts with them could hardly be called surfing. We were little more than animated flotsam. Then we shaped crude fins from plywood and set them into our boards with paraffin wax and everything changed; we had control, we could steer. At last, we were surfing.

  That summer Loonie and I surfed until we were suncooked, until our arms gave out and the foam chafed our bellies raw. At night my mother dabbed Flavine on the stippled scabs on my chest and sponged vinegar down my sunburnt back. There was no hiding from her what I was doing but she said nothing about it. Whenever the old man found my Coolite propped on its end in his shed he tossed it out into the weeds without a word. I still helped him pluck poultry and turn dirt for the vegetable garden but we didn’t fish much together anymore and I knew that he felt forsaken. I’d moved on from him, we both knew it, and try as he might he couldn’t hide how much it hurt. He never mentioned the older boys who dropped me at the end of the drive some afternoons. I half expected him to interrogate me about them, but he seemed resigned. He’d always looked old but now he seemed fearful and disappointed. I was only going surfing, but to see his face you’d think I’d left home already.

  In the new year Loonie moved across to the Ag School. It was the only junior high in the district and if you wanted to go on and finish the final two years you had to board in Angelus or take the dawn bus every day. That year, during school hours, Loonie and I began to live in slightly different worlds. By his account Ag School was strange and tough. In those days it was boys only and you learnt about wool and crops and insemination. There were fights out by the machinery shed nearly every Friday, and some evenings when he dropped by Loonie had bruises and scrapes all over him. He never backed away from anything or anyone; that was just how he was. He talked about kids who shaved, who had arms like Christmas hams, older blokes who said his mother was a slut, which was why he fought them. I was still a bit vague about what a slut actually was and I was confused about whether the references were aimed at his mother or his stepmother, so I didn’t press him for clarification. In July, when Mrs Loon packed up and shot through in the middle of the night, Loonie seemed unmoved. I’d hardly known her. I remember a squat little woman with dark, curly hair and a gold tooth. He never spoke about her again.

  Some winter weekends we rode out to the rivermouth with our Coolites, but often as not the swell was so big we never got beyond the thumping shorebreak and over at the Point the rip looked treacherous. Chastened by our failure Loonie and I would towel off and get dressed and scuttle out along the rocks to watch the Angelus crew confront the great, heaving waves that pivoted past the headland to spew into the bay. They sat way outside of where anybody normally surfed, so far off that their silhouettes were only intermittently visible. For long periods nobody did much out there but bob about, scratching seaward every few minutes to avoid the looming sets that threatened to bury them. In such a swell the rocks along the Point were awash so high up that we were forced back into the scrub to stay safe and dry. We hunkered down in our lookout, pulled our coats about ourselves and willed somebody to take off, until eventually one of the Angelus crew would turn and start to paddle. Some of the waves were as high as us in our nest on the headland. Whenever somebody sucked up the courage to go we were beside ourselves; we screamed and hooted for him as he clawed his way over the edge and we groaned and seized our hair when he came unstuck. There’d be a horrible ball of foam, a snarl of limbs, and a board shooting skyward to flip like a tossed penny above the carnage while we searched the water for a head or an upstretched hand. Thrilled and appalled, we could sit there for hours. It was our coliseum.

  One surfer seemed to show up on only the very biggest days. He was quite an old guy and his board was so long and thick that he’d carry the thing on his head down through the peppermint scrub to the beach. Then he’d jog to the water and launch himself into the crunching shorebreak and aim straight for the rip, paddling on his knees, always as casual as you like, whatever the conditions. You’d barely see him for half an hour and then a set would break out wide, like a squall rolling into the bay, and
you’d suddenly pick out the white squirt of a wake on the grey-brown crags of a wave big and ugly enough to make you shiver. There he would be, that tiny figure, strangely upright and nonchalant, rising and swooping until he was close enough to be more than just a silhouette. His skill was extraordinary. There was something special about his insouciance and the princely manner in which he cross-stepped along his long, old-timey board, how he stalled and feinted and then surged in spurts of acceleration across the shoaling banks, barely ahead of the growling beast at his back, and when the wave fattened toward the deep channel in the middle of the bay, he’d stand at the very tip of the board with his spine arched and his head thrown back as if he’d just finished singing an anthem that nobody else could hear.

  Neither of us knew who this man was. We reckoned he must be from the city, but when Loonie piped up to ask the Angelus crew about him, they just grinned and ruffled his taffy hair, which made him so mad I had to drag him away before he started a fight I didn’t want to be in.